Sabriel (The Abhorsen Trilogy) 精彩片段：
chapter xxiii
Touchstone could see the Dead now, and had no difficulty hearing them. They were chanting and clapping, decayed hands meeting together in a steady, slow rhythm that put all the hair on the back of his head on edge.
A ghastly noise, hard sounds of bone on bone, or the liquid thumpings of decomposed, jellying flesh. The chanting was even worse, for very few of them had functioning mouths.
Touchstone had never seen or heard a shipwreck— now he knew the sound of a thousand sailors drowning, all at once, in a quiet sea.
The lines of the Dead had marched out close to where Touchstone stood, forming a great mass of shifting shadow, spread like a choking fungus around the columns. Touchstone couldn’t make out what they were doing, till Mogget, with his night-sight, explained.
“They’re forming up into two lines, to make a corridor,” the little cat whispered, though the need for silence was long gone. “A corridor of Dead Hands, reaching from the northern stair to us.”
“Can you see the doorway of the stair?”
Touchstone asked. He was no longer afraid, now he could see and smell the putrescent, stinking corpses lined up in mockery of a parade. I should have died in this reservoir long ago, he thought.
There has just been a delay of two hundred years . . .
“Yes, I can,” continued Mogget, his eyes green with sparkling fire. “A tall beast has come, its flesh boiling with dirty flames. A Mordicant. It’s crouching in the water, looking back and up like a dog to its master. Fog is rolling down the stairs behind it—a Free Magic trick, that one. I wonder why he has such an urge to impress?”
“Rogir always was flamboyant,” Touchstone stated, as if he might be commenting on someone at a dinner party. “He liked everyone to be looking at him. He’s no different as Kerrigor, no different Dead.”
“Oh, but he is,” said Mogget. “Very different.
He knows you’re here, and the fog’s for vanity.
He must have been terribly rushed making the body he wears now. A vain man—even a Dead one—would not like this body looked at.”
Touchstone swallowed, trying not to think about that. He wondered if he could charge out of the diamond, flèche with his swords into that fog, a mad attack—but even if he got there, would his swords, Charter-spelled though they were, have any effect on the magical flesh Kerrigor now wore? Something moved in the water, at the limits of his vision, and the Hands increased the tempo of their drumming, the frenzied gurgle-chanting rising in volume.