Free Abhorsen by Garth Nix

were scorched around the edges, the steel rings and the leather underneath blackened as if by fire.
    Lirael carefully returned Saraneth to its pouch and walked over to take a closer look at the body and the strange wounds. She tried not to breathe as she got closer, but a few paces away she suddenly stopped and gasped. With that gasp the awful stench entered her nose and lungs. It was too much, and she began to gag and had to turn away and throw up. As soon as she did, Sam immediately followed suit, and they both emptied their stomachs of rabbit and bread.
    “Sorry,” said Sam. “Can’t stand other people being sick. Are you all right?”
    “I knew him,” said Lirael, glancing back at the guardsman. Her voice trembled until she took a deep breath.
    “I knew him. He came to the Glacier years ago, and he talked to me in the Lower Refectory. His hauberk didn’t fit him then.”
    She took the bottle Sam offered her, poured some water into her hands, and rinsed out her mouth.
    “His name was . . . I can’t quite remember. Larrow, or Harrow. Something like that. He asked me my name, and I never answered—”
    She hesitated, about to say more, but stopped as Sam suddenly whipped around.
    “What was that?”
    “What?”
    “A noise, somewhere over there,” replied Sam, pointing to a dead mule that was lying on the lip of a shallow erosion gully that led down to the cliffs. Its head hung over the gully and was out of sight.
    As they watched, the mule shifted slightly; then with a jerk, it slid over the edge and into the gully. They could still see its hindquarters, but most of it was hidden. Then the mule’s rump and back legs began to shake and shiver.
    “Something’s eating it!” exclaimed Lirael in disgust. She could see drag marks on the ground now, all leading to the gully. There had been more bodies of mules and men. Someone . . . or something had dragged them to the narrow ditch.
    “I can’t sense anything Dead,” said Sam anxiously. “Can you?”
    Lirael shook her head. She slipped off her pack and took up her bow, strung it, and nocked an arrow. Sam drew his sword again.
    They advanced slowly on the gully while more and more of the mule disappeared from sight. Closer, they could hear a dry gulping noise, rather like the sound of someone shoveling sand. Every now and then it would be accompanied by a more liquid gurgle.
    But they still couldn’t see anything. The gully was deep and only three or four feet wide, and whatever was in it lay directly under the mule. Lirael still couldn’t sense anything Dead, but there was a faint tang of something in the air.
    Both of them recognized what it was at the same time. The acrid, metallic odor characteristic of Free Magic. But it was very faint, and it was impossible to tell where it was coming from. Perhaps the gully, or possibly blowing in on the faint breeze.
    When they were only a few paces from the edge of the gully, the rear legs of the mule disappeared with a final shake, its hooves flying in a grim parody of life. The same liquid gurgle accompanied the disappearance.
    Lirael stopped at the edge and looked down, her bow drawn, a Charter-spelled arrow ready to fly. But there was nothing to shoot. Just a long streak of dark mud at the bottom of the gully, with a single hoof sinking under the surface. The smell of Free Magic was stronger, but it was not the corrosive stench she had encountered from the Stilken or other lesser Free Magic elementals.
    “What is it?” whispered Sam. His left hand was crooked in a spell-casting gesture, and a slim golden flame burned at the end of each finger, ready to be thrown.
    “I don’t know,” said Lirael. “A Free Magic thing of some kind. Not anything I’ve ever read about. I wonder how—”
    As she spoke, the mud bubbled and peeled back, to reveal a deep maw that was neither earth nor flesh but pure darkness, lit by a long, forked tongue of silver fire. With the open maw came a rolling stench of Free Magic