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when Kalliel disappeared, and he inherited his grandsire’s bells and title. I do not wish to share Kalliel’s doom. Particularly down a well.”
    Lirael twitched as she suddenly felt some shift out in the fog. The brooding presence that had been lurking farther back was moving. She could sense it, a being far more powerful than the Shadow Hands who were beginning to flicker in and out of the edge of the fog.
    Chlorr was coming closer, almost down to the riverbank. Or if not Chlorr, someone of equal or greater power. Perhaps it was even the necromancer she had encountered in Death.
    Hedge. The same necromancer who had burned Sam. Lirael could still see the scars on Sam’s wrists, through the slits in the sleeves of his surcoat.
    That surcoat was another mystery—for another day, Lirael thought wearily. A surcoat that quartered the royal towers with a device that had not been seen for millennia. The trowel of the Wallmakers.
    Sam caught her glance and picked at the heavy golden thread where the Wallmakers’ symbol was woven through the linen. It was only slowly entering his head that the sendings hadn’t made a mistake with the surcoat. For a start, it was new made, not some old thing they’d dragged out of a musty cupboard or centuries-old laundry basket. So he probably was entitled to wear it for some reason. He was a Wallmaker as well as a royal Prince. But what did that mean? The Wallmakers had disappeared millennia ago, putting themselves into the creation of the Wall and the Great Charter Stones. Quite literally, as far as Sam knew.
    For a moment, he wondered if that would be his destiny too. Would he have to make something that would end his life, at least as a living, breathing man? For the Wallmakers weren’t exactly dead, Sam thought, remembering the Great Charter Stones and the Wall. They were more transformed or transfigured.
    Not that he fancied that, either. In any case, he was far more likely to simply get killed, he thought, as he looked out to the fog and felt the cold presence of the Dead within it.
    Sam touched the gold thread on his chest again and took comfort from it, his fear of the Dead receding. He had never wanted to be an Abhorsen. A Wallmaker was much more interesting, even if he didn’t know what it meant to be one. It would have the added benefit of driving his sister, Ellimere, crazy, since she would never believe he didn’t know and couldn’t, rather than wouldn’t, explain what it was to be a Wallmaker.
    Presuming he ever saw Ellimere again . . .
    “We’d best be moving,” said the Dog, startling both Lirael and Sam. Lirael had been staring out into the fog again too, lost in her own thoughts.
    “Yes,” said Lirael, tearing her gaze away. Not for the first time, she wished she were back in the Great Library of the Clayr. But that, like her lifelong wish to wear the white robes and the silver-and-moonstone crown of a fully fledged Daughter of the Clayr, had to be pushed away and buried deep. She was an Abhorsen now, and there was a great and momentous task ahead of her.
    “Yes,” she repeated. “We’d best be moving. We will go by way of the well.”

Chapter Two

Into the Deep
    IT TOOK LITTLE more than an hour to prepare for their departure, once the decision had been made. Lirael found herself wearing armor for the first time since her Fighting Arts lessons many years before—but the coat the sendings brought her was much lighter than the mail hauberks the Clayr kept in their schoolroom armory. It was made of tiny overlapping scales or plates of some material Lirael didn’t recognize, and despite its length to her knees and its long, swallow-tailed sleeves, it was quite light and comfortable. It also didn’t have the characteristic odor of well-oiled steel, for which Lirael was grateful.
    The Disreputable Dog told her the scales were a ceramic called “gethre,” made with Charter Magic but not magic in itself, though it was stronger and lighter than any metal. The