steam.
Wake! the salamander chimed.
“You need to wake up.”
The comet blinked. His eyes flashed with a brief silver light. I could feel the warmth of the sun on the back of my neck. His long-nailed hand flashed up.
“No!” I cried. “Don’t kill!”
He blinked again, but he lowered his hand. “Who am I?” the comet said, wonderingly.
“You are a comet. You are close to a world—to my world. Wake up!”
I glanced up and saw the moon. It hung in the astral heavens, a glowing silver ball, and not far away the Earth itself was turning, all green and blue and white. I could see the dim lights at their cores, the signs of their aliveness, for this was not the true solar system in the physical world, but the world beyond.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You are a sungrazer. In the real world, not this world of your dream, you will pass this red world above us—there is a faint chance that it will draw you in, but very faint. You will pass the Earth, and if you choose, you can meet your own end there. But it will be the end of that world.”
“I do not wish to kill a world,” the comet said, with a trace of alarm.
“Then wake up! Your dreaming self is dangerous—it brings the cold of deep space with it, and we can’t withstand that. And you might become confused and leave your path. Listen—can’t you hear the sun calling to you?”
He blinked again. His pale skin was flushing with gold.
Wake up, the salamander said encouragingly.
“Wake. And we’ll all live.”
And the comet’s eyes were bright as fire. He raised his hand again, in a gesture, and the salamander and I found ourselves standing in space as the growing tail of the comet whisked by. Then there was the sparkle of stars, Akiyama-Maki was waking up and streaking sunward, between Earth and the moon, and we were slowly falling.
It was with regret as an astronomer that the astral solar system faded around me and the castle of the Behenian stars took its place. The stars themselves were waiting for us, still in their semicircle. Spica seized my arm.
“You are safe. The comet?”
“He’s awake.”
The salamander flicked away. As one, the Behenian stars bowed and faded, returning, I presumed, to their places in the constellations. But Spica remained. She walked back with me, over the causeway, and across the fields. As we drew closer to the house, I could see a bonfire in the orchard, surrounded by moving figures. The bare branches of the trees reached for the moon. The air smelled of woodsmoke and frost. Overhead, in the clear heavens, a silver smudge was visible over Arcturus, blazing over the apple trees. Faintly, I could hear Stella’s familiar voice.
“Look! It’s the comet! Look, mum!”
“And you,” I asked the star, “your sisters? Will we see you again?”
“Oh,” she said. “We are always here.” She pointed upward, and I followed her hand to where the fixed stars span on their never-ending wheel in the shining winter sky.
Garth Nix
Here we investigate a supernatural mystery in company with a village wizard with a dark past and many secrets of his own to hide, although, as he’s about to discover, none of them even remotely as dangerous and deadly as the enigma he’s trying to unravel …
Garth Nix has been a full-time writer since 2001, but has also worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve.
Garth’s books include the YA fantasy Old Kingdom series, including Sabriel, Lirael; Abhorsen, Clariel, and Goldenhand; SF novels Shade’s Children and A Confusion of Princes; and a Regency romance with magic, Newt’s Emerald. His fantasy novels for children include The Ragwitch; the six books of the Seventh Tower sequence; the Keys to the Kingdom series, and others. He has co-written several books with Sean Williams, including the Troubletwisters series; Spirit Animals: Book Three: Blood Ties, and Have Sword, Will Travel.
More than five million copies of his books have been sold around the world. They have appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today, and his work has been translated into forty-two languages. His most recent book is Frogkisser!, now being developed as a film by Twentieth Century Fox/Blue Sky Studios.
Garth lives with his family in Sydney, Australia.
The low, dry stone walls that delineated the three angled commons belonging to the villages of Gamel, Thrake, and Seyam met at an ancient obelisk known to everyone simply as “the Corner Post.” Feuds between villagers would be settled at the Corner Post, by wrestling and challenges of skill, or the more serious in a formal conclave of elders from all three villages. Twice in the last hundred years the obelisk had been the site of full-scale battles between Gamel and Thrake against Seyam, and then Gamel and Seyam against Thrake.
Every spring, the ploughs would stop well short of the Corner Post, for fear of disturbing the bones of some bygone relative or enemy. In consequence, a small copse of undistinguished trees and shrubs grew around the obelisk, dominated by a single, tall rowan tree, often remarked on, for there were no other rowans for leagues around, and no one living knew how it had come to be planted there.
Small children played under the rowan in the early morning, evading their chores, and lovers met there for trysts in the early evening. No one went near stone and copse by dead of night, because of the bones, and the stories that were told of what might rise there, or perhaps be drawn there, come midnight.
So it was three children under five who discovered a curious change in the stone, just after the sun had risen high enough to glance off the bronze ferrule on the foot of a staff, and there was sufficient light to see that the rest of the dark bog-oak length was impossibly embedded in the stone.
The visible end of the staff was high above the reach of the tallest child, which was just as well, for they were too young to be properly afraid of such a thing. In fact, after attempting to stand on each other’s shoulders in a vain effort to reach it, they forgot all about the staff until the very youngest was bringing water to the sweating harvest-time reapers working toward the narrowest point of the Thrake common. Seeing the Corner Post again, the little girl wondered aloud why there was a big black stick stuck in it, like a skewer through a cooking rabbit.
Her father went to look, and came back even sweatier and more out of breath than he had been from his work. The word spread quickly from field to barn to village, and no more than an hour later, made its way to the cool, green-lit forest home of the nearest approximation to a wizard for fifty leagues or more, since the woman purported to be one in the nearest town of Sandrem had been unmasked as a charlatan several months before.
The forest house had once been a minor royal hunting
