His Dark Materials Omnibus (47 page)

She stood perfectly still. Pantalaimon was crouched, leopard-formed, ready to leap down and reach for her.

The bridge held. She took another step, then another, and then she felt something settling down below her feet and leaped for the far side with all her strength. She landed belly-down in the snow as the entire length of the bridge fell into the crevasse with a soft
whoosh
behind her.

Pantalaimon’s claws were in her furs, holding tight.

After a minute she opened her eyes and crawled up away from the edge. There was no way back. She stood and raised her hand to the watching bear. Iorek Byrnison stood on his hind legs to acknowledge her, and then turned and made off down the mountain in a swift run to help his subjects in the battle with Mrs. Coulter and the soldiers from the zeppelin.

Lyra was alone.

Once Iorek Byrnison was out of sight, Lyra felt a great weakness coming over her, and she turned blindly and felt for Pantalaimon.

“Oh, Pan, dear, I can’t go on! I’m so frightened—and so tired—all this way, and I’m scared to death! I wish it was someone else instead of me, I do honestly!” Her dæmon nuzzled at her neck in his cat form, warm and comforting.

“I just don’t know what we got to do,” Lyra sobbed. “It’s too much for us, Pan, we can’t …”

She clung to him blindly, rocking back and forth and letting the sobs cry out wildly over the bare snow.

“And even if—if Mrs. Coulter got to Roger first, there’d be no saving him, because she’d take him back to Bolvangar, or worse, and they’d kill me out of vengeance.… Why do they
do
these things to children, Pan? Do they all hate children so much, that they want to tear them apart like this? Why
do
they do it?”

But Pantalaimon had no answer; all he could do was hug her close. Little by little, as the storm of fear subsided, she came to a sense of herself again. She was Lyra, cold and frightened by all means, but herself.

“I wish …” she said, and stopped. There was nothing that could be gained by wishing for it. A final deep shaky breath, and she was ready to go on.

The moon had set by now, and the sky to the south was profoundly dark, though the billions of stars lay on it like diamonds on velvet. They were outshone, though, by the Aurora, outshone a hundred times. Never had Lyra seen it so brilliant and dramatic; with every twitch and shiver, new miracles of light danced across the sky. And behind the ever-changing gauze of light, that other world, that sunlit city, was clear and solid.

The higher they climbed, the more the bleak land spread out below them. To the north lay the frozen sea, compacted here and there into ridges where two sheets of ice had pressed together, but otherwise flat and white and endless,
reaching to the Pole itself and far beyond, featureless, lifeless, colorless, and bleak beyond Lyra’s imagination. To the east and west were more mountains, great jagged peaks thrusting sharply upward, their scarps piled high with snow and raked by the wind into bladelike edges as sharp as scimitars. To the south lay the way they had come, and Lyra looked most longingly back, to see if she could spy her dear friend Iorek Byrnison and his troops; but nothing stirred on the wide plain. She was not even sure if she could see the burned wreckage of the zeppelin, or the crimson-stained snow around the corpses of the warriors.

Pantalaimon flew high, and swooped back to her wrist in his owl form.

“They’re just beyond the peak!” he said. “Lord Asriel’s laid out all his instruments, and Roger can’t get away—”

And as he said that, the Aurora flickered and dimmed, like an anbaric bulb at the end of its life, and then
went out
altogether. In the gloom, though, Lyra sensed the presence of the Dust, for the air seemed to be full of dark intentions, like the forms of thoughts not yet born.

In the enfolding dark she heard a cry:

“Lyra! Lyra!”

“I’m coming!” she cried back, and stumbled upward, clambering, sprawling, struggling, at the end of her strength; but hauling herself on and further on through the ghostly-gleaming snow.

“Lyra! Lyra!”

“I’m nearly there,” she gasped. “Nearly there, Roger!”

Pantalaimon was changing rapidly, in his agitation: lion, ermine, eagle, wildcat, hare, salamander, owl, leopard, every form he’d ever taken, a kaleidoscope of forms among the Dust—

“
Lyra!
”

Then she reached the summit, and saw what was happening.

Fifty yards away in the starlight Lord Asriel was twisting together two wires that led to his upturned sledge, on which stood a row of batteries and jars and pieces of apparatus, already frosted with crystals of cold. He was dressed in heavy furs, his face illuminated by the flame of a naphtha lamp. Crouching like the Sphinx beside him was his dæmon, her beautiful spotted coat glossy with power, her tail moving lazily in the snow.

In her mouth she held Roger’s dæmon.

The little creature was struggling, flapping, fighting, one moment a bird, the next a dog, then a cat, a rat, a bird again, and calling every moment to Roger himself, who was a few yards off, straining, trying to pull away against the
heart-deep tug, and crying out with the pain and the cold. He was calling his dæmon’s name, and calling Lyra; he ran to Lord Asriel and plucked his arm, and Lord Asriel brushed him aside. He tried again, crying and pleading, begging, sobbing, and Lord Asriel took no notice except to knock him to the ground.

They were on the edge of a cliff. Beyond them was nothing but a huge illimitable dark. They were a thousand feet or more above the frozen sea.

All this Lyra saw by starlight alone; but then, as Lord Asriel connected his wires, the Aurora blazed all of a sudden into brilliant life. Like the long finger of blinding power that plays between two terminals, except that this was a thousand miles high and ten thousand miles long: dipping, soaring, undulating, glowing, a cataract of glory.

He was
controlling
it …

Or leading power down from it; for there was a wire running off a huge reel on the sledge, a wire that ran directly upward to the sky. Down from the dark swooped a raven, and Lyra knew it for a witch dæmon. A witch was helping Lord Asriel, and she had flown that wire into the heights.

And the Aurora was blazing again.

He was nearly ready.

He turned to Roger and beckoned, and Roger helplessly came, shaking his head, begging, crying, but helplessly going forward.

“No! Run!” Lyra cried, and hurled herself down the slope at him.

Pantalaimon leaped at the snow leopard and snatched Roger’s dæmon from her jaws. In a moment the snow leopard had leaped after him, and Pantalaimon let the other dæmon go, and both young dæmons, changing flick-flick-flick, turned and battled with the great spotted beast.

She slashed left-right with needle-filled paws, and her snarling roar drowned even Lyra’s cries. Both children were fighting her, too; or fighting the forms in the turbid air, those dark intentions, that came thick and crowding down the streams of Dust—

And the Aurora swayed above, its continual surging flicker picking out now this building, now that lake, now that row of palm trees, so close you’d think that you could step from this world to that.

Lyra leaped up and seized Roger’s hand.

She pulled hard, and then they tore away from Lord Asriel and ran, hand in hand, but Roger cried and twisted, because his dæmon was caught again, held fast in the snow leopard’s jaws, and Lord Asriel himself was reaching down toward her with a wire; and Lyra knew the heart-convulsing pain of separation, and tried to stop—

But they couldn’t stop.

The cliff was sliding away beneath them.

An entire shelf of snow, sliding inexorably down—

The frozen sea, a thousand feet below—

“LYRA!”

Her heartbeats, leaping in anguish with Roger’s—

Tight-clutching hands—

His body, suddenly limp in hers; and high above, the greatest wonder.

At the moment he fell still, the vault of heaven, star-studded, profound, was pierced as if by a spear.

A jet of light, a jet of pure energy released like an arrow from a great bow, shot upward from the spot where Lord Asriel had joined the wire to Roger’s dæmon. The sheets of light and color that were the Aurora tore apart; a great rending, grinding, crunching, tearing sound reached from one end of the universe to the other; there was dry land in the sky—

Sunlight!

Sunlight shining on the fur of a golden monkey.…

For the fall of the snow shelf had halted; perhaps an unseen ledge had broken its fall; and Lyra could see, over the trampled snow of the summit, the golden monkey spring out of the air to the side of the leopard, and she saw the two dæmons bristle, wary and powerful. The monkey’s tail was erect, the snow leopard’s swept powerfully from side to side. Then the monkey reached out a tentative paw, the leopard lowered her head with a graceful sensual acknowledgment, they touched—

And when Lyra looked up from them, Mrs. Coulter herself stood there, clasped in Lord Asriel’s arms. Light played around them like sparks and beams of intense anbaric power. Lyra, helpless, could only imagine what had happened: somehow Mrs. Coulter must have crossed that chasm, and followed her up here.…

Her own parents, together!

And embracing so passionately: an undreamed-of thing.

Her eyes were wide. Roger’s body lay in her arms, still, quiet, at rest. She heard her parents talking:

Her mother said, “They’ll never allow it—”

Her father said, “Allow it? We’ve gone beyond being
allowed
, as if we were children. I’ve made it possible for anyone to cross, if they wish.”

“They’ll forbid it! They’ll seal it off and excommunicate anyone who tries!”

“Too many people will want to. They won’t be able to prevent them. This
will mean the end of the Church, Marisa, the end of the Magisterium, the end of all those centuries of darkness! Look at that light up there: that’s the sun of another world! Feel the warmth of it on your skin, now!”

“They are stronger than anyone, Asriel! You don’t know—”

“I don’t know? I? No one in the world knows better than I how strong the Church is! But it isn’t strong enough for this. The Dust will change everything, anyway. There’s no stopping it now.”

“Is that what you wanted? To choke us and kill us all with sin and darkness?”

“I wanted to break out, Marisa! And I have. Look, look at the palm trees waving on the shore! Can you feel that wind? A wind from another world! Feel it on your hair, on your face.…”

Lord Asriel pushed back Mrs. Coulter’s hood and turned her head to the sky, running his hands through her hair. Lyra watched breathless, not daring to move a muscle.

The woman clung to Lord Asriel as if she were dizzy, and shook her head, distressed.

“No—no—they’re coming, Asriel—they know where I’ve gone—”

“Then come with me, away and out of this world!”

“I daren’t—”

“You?
Dare
not? Your child would come. Your child would dare anything, and shame her mother.”

“Then take her and welcome. She’s more yours than mine, Asriel.”

“Not so. You took her in; you tried to mold her. You wanted her then.”

“She was too coarse, too stubborn. I’d left it too late.… But where is she now? I followed her footsteps up.…”

“You want her, still? Twice you’ve tried to hold her, and twice she’s got away. If I were her, I’d run, and keep on running, sooner than give you a third chance.”

His hands, still clasping her head, tensed suddenly and drew her toward him in a passionate kiss. Lyra thought it seemed more like cruelty than love, and looked at their dæmons, to see a strange sight: the snow leopard tense, crouching with her claws just pressing in the golden monkey’s flesh, and the monkey relaxed, blissful, swooning on the snow.

Mrs. Coulter pulled fiercely back from the kiss and said, “No, Asriel—my place is in this world, not that—”

“Come with me!” he said, urgent, powerful. “Come and work with me!”

“We couldn’t work together, you and I.”

“No? You and I could take the universe to pieces and put it together again,
Marisa! We could find the source of Dust and stifle it forever! And you’d like to be part of that great work; don’t lie to me about it. Lie about everything else, lie about the Oblation Board, lie about your lovers—yes, I know about Boreal, and I care nothing—lie about the Church, lie about the child, even, but don’t lie about what you truly want.…”

And their mouths were fastened together with a powerful greed. Their dæmons were playing fiercely; the snow leopard rolled over on her back, and the monkey raked his claws in the soft fur of her neck, and she growled a deep rumble of pleasure.

“If I don’t come, you’ll try and destroy me,” said Mrs. Coulter, breaking away.

“Why should I want to destroy you?” he said, laughing, with the light of the other world shining around his head. “Come with me, work with me, and I’ll care whether you live or die. Stay here, and you lose my interest at once. Don’t flatter yourself that I’d give you a second’s thought. Now stay and work your mischief in this world, or come with me.”