His Dark Materials Omnibus (108 page)

“Ah, but suppose I don’t want to go to my father? Suppose I don’t trust him?”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, “but those are our orders: to take you to him.”

Lyra couldn’t help it: she laughed out loud at the notion of these tiny people making her do anything. But it was a mistake. Moving suddenly, the woman seized Pantalaimon, and holding his mouse body in a fierce grip, she touched the tip of a spur to his leg. Lyra gasped: it was like the shock when the men at Bolvangar had seized him. No one should touch someone else’s dæmon—it was a violation.

But then she saw that Will had swept up the man in his right hand, holding him tightly around the legs so he couldn’t use his spurs, and was holding him high.

“Stalemate again,” said the Lady calmly. “Put the Chevalier down, boy.”

“Let go of Lyra’s dæmon first,” said Will. “I’m not in the mood to argue.”

Lyra saw with a cold thrill that Will was perfectly ready to dash the Gallivespian’s head against the rock. And both little people knew it.

Salmakia lifted her foot away from Pantalaimon’s leg, and at once he fought free of her grasp and changed into a wildcat, hissing ferociously, fur on end, tail lashing. His bared teeth were a hand’s breadth from the Lady’s face, and she gazed at him with perfect composure. After a moment he turned and fled to Lyra’s breast, ermine-shaped, and Will carefully placed Tialys back on the rock beside his partner.

“You should show some respect,” the Chevalier said to Lyra. “You are a thoughtless, insolent child, and several brave men have died this evening in order to make you safe. You’d do better to act politely.”

“Yes,” she said humbly, “I’m sorry, I will. Honest.”

“As for you—” he went on, turning to Will.

But Will interrupted: “As for me, I’m not going to be spoken to like that, so don’t try. Respect goes two ways. Now listen carefully. You are not in charge here; we are. If you want to stay and help, then you do as we say. Otherwise, go back to Lord Asriel now. There’s no arguing about it.”

Lyra could see the pair of them bristling, but Tialys was looking at Will’s hand, which was on the sheath at his belt, and she knew he was thinking that while Will had the knife, he was stronger than they were. At all costs they mustn’t know it was broken, then.

“Very well,” said the Chevalier. “We shall help you, because that’s the task we’ve been given. But you must let us know what you intend to do.”

“That’s fair,” said Will. “I’ll tell you. We’re going back into Lyra’s world as soon as we’ve rested, and we’re going to find a friend of ours, a bear. He’s not far away.”

“The bear with the armor? Very well,” said Salmakia. “We saw him fight. We’ll help you do that. But then you must come with us to Lord Asriel.”

“Yes,” said Lyra, lying earnestly, “oh yes, we’ll do that then all right.”

Pantalaimon was calmer now, and curious, so she let him climb to her shoulder and change. He became a dragonfly, as big as the two that were skimming through the air as they spoke, and darted up to join them.

“That poison,” Lyra said, turning back to the Gallivespians, “in your spurs, I mean, is it deadly? Because you stung my mother, Mrs. Coulter, didn’t you? Will she die?”

“It was only a light sting,” said Tialys. “A full dose would have killed her, yes, but a small scratch will make her weak and drowsy for half a day or so.”

And full of maddening pain, he knew, but he didn’t tell her that.

“I need to talk to Lyra in private,” said Will. “We’re just going to move away for a minute.”

“With that knife,” said the Chevalier, “you can cut through from one world to another, isn’t that so?”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“No.”

“All right, I’ll leave it here, then. If I haven’t got it, I can’t use it.”

He unbuckled the sheath and laid it on the rock, and then he and Lyra walked away and sat where they could see the Gallivespians. Tialys was looking closely at the knife handle, but he wasn’t touching it.

“We’ll just have to put up with them,” Will said. “As soon as the knife’s mended, we’ll escape.”

“They’re so
quick
, Will,” she said. “And they wouldn’t care, they’d kill you.”

“I just hope Iorek can mend it. I hadn’t realized how much we need it.”

“He will,” she said confidently.

She was watching Pantalaimon as he skimmed and darted through the air, snapping up tiny moths like the other dragonflies. He couldn’t go as far as they could, but he was just as fast, and even more brightly patterned. She raised her hand and he settled on it, his long, transparent wings vibrating.

“Do you think we can trust them while we sleep?” Will said.

“Yes. They’re fierce, but I think they’re honest.”

They went back to the rock, and Will said to the Gallivespians, “I’m going to sleep now. We’ll move on in the morning.”

The Chevalier nodded, and Will curled up at once and fell asleep.

Lyra sat down beside him, with Pantalaimon cat-formed and warm in her lap. How lucky Will was that she was awake now to look after him! He was truly fearless, and she admired that beyond measure; but he wasn’t good at lying and betraying and cheating, which all came to her as naturally as breathing. When she thought of that, she felt warm and virtuous, because she did it for Will, never for herself.

She had intended to look at the alethiometer again, but to her deep surprise she found herself as weary as if she’d been awake all that time instead of unconscious, and she lay down close by and closed her eyes, just for a brief nap, as she assured herself before she fell asleep.

Will and Lyra slept through the night and woke up when the sun struck their eyelids. They actually awoke within seconds of each other, with the same thought; but when they looked around, the Chevalier Tialys was calmly on guard close by.

“The force of the Consistorial Court has retreated,” he told them. “Mrs. Coulter is in the hands of King Ogunwe, and on her way to Lord Asriel.”

“How do you know?” said Will, sitting up stiffly. “Have you been back through the window?”

“No. We talk through the lodestone resonator. I reported our conversation,” Tialys said to Lyra, “to my commander, Lord Roke, and he has agreed that we should go with you to the bear, and that once you have seen him, you will come with us. So we are allies, and we shall help you as much as we can.”

“Good,” said Will. “Then let’s eat together. Do you eat our food?”

“Thank you, yes,” said the Lady.

Will took out his last few dried peaches and the stale flat loaf of rye bread, which was all he had left, and shared it among them, though of course the spies did not take much.

“As for water, there doesn’t seem to be any around here on this world,” Will said. “We’ll have to wait till we go back through before we can have a drink.”

“Then we better do that soon,” said Lyra.

First, though, she took out the alethiometer and asked if there was still any danger in the valley. No, came the answer, all the soldiers have gone, and the villagers are in their homes; so they prepared to leave.

The window looked strange in the dazzling air of the desert, giving onto the deep-shaded bush, a square of thick green vegetation hanging in the air like a painting. The Gallivespians wanted to look at it, and were astounded to see how it was just not there from the back, and how it only sprang into being when you came round from the side.

“I’ll have to close it once we’re through,” Will said.

Lyra tried to pinch the edges together after they went through, but her fingers couldn’t find it at all; nor could the spies, despite the fineness of their hands. Only Will could feel exactly where the edges were, and he did it cleanly and quickly.

“How many worlds can you enter with the knife?” said Tialys.

“As many as there are,” said Will. “No one would ever have time to find out.”

He swung his rucksack up and led the way along the forest path. The dragonflies relished the fresh, moist air and darted like needles through the shafts of sunlight. The movement of the trees above was less violent, and the air was cool and tranquil; so it was all the more shocking to see the twisted wreckage of a gyropter suspended among the branches, with the body of its African pilot, tangled in his seat belt, half out of the door, and to find the charred remains of the zeppelin a little farther up—soot-black strips of cloth, blackened struts and pipe work, broken glass, and then the bodies: three men burned to cinders, their limbs contorted and drawn up as if they were still threatening to fight.

And they were only the ones who had fallen near the path. There were other bodies and more wreckage on the cliff above and among the trees farther down. Shocked and silenced, the two children moved through the carnage, while the spies on their dragonflies looked around more coolly, accustomed to battle, noting how it had gone and who had lost most.

When they reached the top of the valley, where the trees thinned out and the rainbow-waterfalls began, they stopped to drink deeply of the ice-cold water.

“I hope that little girl’s all right,” said Will. “We’d never have got you away if she hadn’t woken you up. She went to a holy man to get that powder specially.”

“She is all right,” said Lyra, “ ’cause I asked the alethiometer, last night. She thinks we’re devils, though. She’s afraid of us. She probably wishes she’d never got mixed up in it, but she’s safe all right.”

They climbed up beside the waterfalls and refilled Will’s canteen before striking off across the plateau toward the ridge where the alethiometer told Lyra that Iorek had gone.

And then there came a day of long, hard walking: no trouble for Will, but a torment to Lyra, whose limbs were weakened and softened after her long sleep. But she would sooner have her tongue torn out than confess how bad she felt; limping, tight-lipped, trembling, she kept pace with Will and said nothing.
Only when they sat down at noon did she allow herself so much as a whimper, and then only when Will had gone apart to relieve himself.

The Lady Salmakia said, “Rest. There is no disgrace in being weary.”

“But I don’t want to let Will down! I don’t want him to think I’m weak and holding him back.”

“That’s the last thing he thinks.”

“You don’t know,” said Lyra rudely. “You don’t know him any more than you know me.”

“I know impertinence when I hear it,” said the Lady calmly. “Do as I tell you now and rest. Save your energy for the walking.”

Lyra felt mutinous, but the Lady’s glittering spurs were very clear in the sunlight, so she said nothing.

The Lady’s companion, the Chevalier, was opening the case of the lodestone resonator, and, curiosity overcoming resentment, Lyra watched to see what he did. The instrument looked like a short length of pencil made of dull gray-black stone, resting on a stand of wood, and the Chevalier swept a tiny bow like a violinist’s across the end while he pressed his fingers at various points along the surface. The places weren’t marked, so he seemed to be touching it at random, but from the intensity of his expression and the certain fluency of his movements, Lyra knew it was as skillful and demanding a process as her own reading of the alethiometer.

After several minutes the spy put the bow away and took up a pair of headphones, the earpieces no larger than Lyra’s little fingernail, and wrapped one end of the wire tightly around a peg in the end of the stone, leading the rest along to another peg at the other end and wrapping it around that. By manipulating the two pegs and the tension on the wire between them, he could obviously hear a response to his own message.

“How does that work?” she said when he’d finished.

Tialys looked at her as if to judge whether she was genuinely interested, and then said, “Your scientists, what do you call them, experimental theologians, would know of something called quantum entanglement. It means that two particles can exist that only have properties in common, so that whatever happens to one happens to the other at the same moment, no matter how far apart they are. Well, in our world there is a way of taking a common lodestone and entangling all its particles, and then splitting it in two so that both parts resonate together. The counterpart to this is with Lord Roke, our commander. When I play on this one with my bow, the other one reproduces the sounds exactly, and so we communicate.”

He put everything away and said something to the Lady. She joined him and they went a little apart, talking too quietly for Lyra to hear, though Pantalaimon became an owl and turned his great ears in their direction.

Presently Will came back and then they moved on, more slowly as the day went by and the track got steeper and the snow line nearer. They rested once more at the head of a rocky valley, because even Will could tell that Lyra was nearly finished: she was limping badly and her face was gray.

“Let me see your feet,” he said to her, “because if they’re blistered, I’ll put some ointment on.”