Sabriel Chapter 22 Summary

  • Sabriel leaves the Third Gate and passes through the Fourth. At the waterfall that marks the Fourth Gate, she feels an urge to turn and walk alongside it rather than go through it.
  • Touchstone and Mogget continue to brace themselves for the arrival of Kerrigor.
  • Sabriel finally finds her father, imprisoned in the waterfall of the Gate itself. A Dead creature is guarding him, but Sabriel drives him back with her bells; then she uses a bell to make the creature speak, and when it does, it speaks with her father's voice. Her father tells her to ring two bells together, Mosrael and Kibeth, in order to temporarily free him.
  • Even though Sabriel can free him, she realizes it will only be brief: "Subconsciously, she had always been aware that Abhorsen's spirit had been too long from his body, and too deep in the realm of Death. He could never truly live again" (22.43). Sad face.
  • As Sabriel and her father hurry back to Life, she asks him why she was brought up outside the Old Kingdom. He answers that it wasn't only to keep her safe, but that Charter beings called the Clayr, who have Great Charter bloodlines (like the Abhorsen), suspected that Kerrigor's body was in Ancelstierre rather than the Old Kingdom.
  • Sabriel's father reveals that he'd left the "surviving royal prince" (22.65) in a suspended state—the person he's talking about must be Touchstone. Touchstone is the bastard son of the former prince of the kingdom, which means that maybe it wasn't a great idea to free him and bring him along, since his royal blood will give Kerrigor a way to break the Great Charter if Kerrigor discovers him in the reservoir. Oops.
  • Continuing this flood of information, Sabriel's father says that Mogget is "the Wallmaker relict, or their last creation, or their child—no one knows, possibly not even him" (22.74). Sabriel's father knew him as an "albino dwarf-boy" (22.74) rather than a cat.
  • Sabriel and her father embrace before leaving Death, and he says he can only stay for "a hundred hundred heartbeats" (22.77) before he has to return to Death.