His Dark Materials Omnibus (69 page)

“Dancing?”

“Moving to and fro, waving his hand about. Or as if he was fighting something invisible … I just saw him through an open door. Not clearly.”

“Fighting a Specter?” Lyra guessed.

But they couldn’t guess any better, so they moved on. Behind the tower a high stone wall, topped with broken glass, enclosed a small garden with formal beds of herbs around a fountain (once again Pantalaimon flew up to look); and then there was an alley on the other side, bringing them back to the square. The windows around the tower were small and deeply set, like frowning eyes.

“We’ll have to go in the front, then,” said Will.

He climbed the steps and pushed the door wide. Sunlight struck in, and the heavy hinges creaked. He took a step or two inside, and seeing no one, went in farther. Lyra followed close behind. The floor was made of flagstones worn smooth over centuries, and the air inside was cool.

Will looked at a flight of steps going downward, and went far enough down to see that it opened into a wide, low-ceilinged room with an immense cold furnace at one end, where the plaster walls were black with soot; but there was no one there, and he went up to the entrance hall again, where he found Lyra with her finger to her lips, looking up.

“I can hear him,” she whispered. “He’s talking to himself, I reckon.”

Will listened hard, and heard it too: a low crooning murmur interrupted occasionally by a harsh laugh or a short cry of anger. It sounded like the voice of a madman.

Will blew out his cheeks and set off to climb the staircase. It was made of blackened oak, immense and broad, with steps as worn as the flagstones: far too solid to creak underfoot. The light diminished as they climbed, because the only illumination was the small deep-set window on each landing. They climbed up one floor, stopped and listened, climbed the next, and the sound of the man’s voice was now mixed with that of halting, rhythmic footsteps. It came from a room across the landing, whose door stood ajar.

Will tiptoed to it and pushed it open another few inches so he could see.

It was a large room with cobwebs thickly clustered on the ceiling. The walls were lined with bookshelves containing badly preserved volumes with the bindings crumbling and flaking, or distorted with damp. Several of them lay thrown off the shelves, open on the floor or the wide dusty tables, and others had been thrust back higgledy-piggledy.

In the center of the room, a young man was—dancing. Pantalaimon was right: it looked exactly like that. He had his back to the door, and he’d shuffle to one side, then to the other, and all the time his right hand moved in front of him as if he were clearing a way through some invisible obstacles. In that hand was a knife, not a special-looking knife, just a dull blade about eight
inches long, and he’d thrust it forward, slice it sideways, feel forward with it, jab up and down, all in the empty air.

He moved as if to turn, and Will withdrew. He put a finger to his lips and beckoned to Lyra, and led her to the stairs and up to the next floor.

“What’s he doing?” she whispered.

He described it as well as he could.

“He sounds mad,” said Lyra. “Is he thin, with curly hair?”

“Yes. Red hair, like Angelica’s. He certainly looks mad. I don’t know—I think this is odder than Sir Charles said. Let’s look farther up before we speak to him.”

She didn’t question, but let him lead them up another staircase to the top story. It was much lighter up there, because a white-painted flight of steps led up to the roof—or, rather, to a wood-and-glass structure like a little greenhouse. Even at the foot of the steps they could feel the heat it was absorbing.

And as they stood there they heard a groan from above.

They jumped. They’d been sure there was only one man in the tower. Pantalaimon was so startled that he changed at once from a cat to a bird and flew to Lyra’s breast. Will and Lyra realized as he did so that they’d seized each other’s hand, and let go slowly.

“Better go and see,” Will whispered. “I’ll go first.”

“I ought to go first,” she whispered back, “seeing it’s my fault.”

“Seeing it’s your fault, you got to do as I say.”

She twisted her lip but fell in behind him.

He climbed up into the sun. The light in the glass structure was blinding. It was as hot as a greenhouse, too, and Will could neither see nor breathe easily. He found a door handle and turned it and stepped out quickly, holding his hand up to keep the sun out of his eyes.

He found himself on a roof of lead, enclosed by the battlemented parapet. The glass structure was set in the center, and the lead sloped slightly downward all around toward a gutter inside the parapet, with square drainage holes in the stone for rainwater.

Lying on the lead, in the full sun, was an old man with white hair. His face was bruised and battered, and one eye was closed, and as they saw when they got closer, his hands were tied behind him.

He heard them coming and groaned again, and tried to turn over to shield himself.

“It’s all right,” said Will quietly. “We aren’t going to hurt you. Did the man with the knife do this?”

“Mmm,” the old man grunted.

“Let’s undo the rope. He hasn’t tied it very well.…”

It was clumsily and hastily knotted, and it fell away quickly once Will had seen how to work it. They helped the old man to get up and took him over to the shade of the parapet.

“Who are you?” Will said. “We didn’t think there were two people here. We thought there was only one.”

“Giacomo Paradisi,” the old man muttered through broken teeth. “I am the bearer. No one else. That young man stole it from me. There are always fools who take risks like that for the sake of the knife. But this one is desperate. He is going to kill me.”

“No, he en’t,” Lyra said. “What’s the bearer? What’s that mean?”

“I hold the subtle knife on behalf of the Guild. Where has he gone?”

“He’s downstairs,” said Will. “We came up past him. He didn’t see us. He was waving it about in the air.”

“Trying to cut through. He won’t succeed. When he—”

“Watch out,” Lyra said.

Will turned. The young man was climbing up into the little wooden shelter. He hadn’t seen them yet, but there was nowhere to hide, and as they stood up he saw the movement and whipped around to face them.

Immediately Pantalaimon became a bear and reared up on his hind legs. Only Lyra knew that he wouldn’t be able to touch the other man, and certainly the other blinked and stared for a second, but Will saw that he hadn’t really registered it. The man was crazy. His curly red hair was matted, his chin was flecked with spit, and the whites of his eyes showed all around the pupils.

And he had the knife, and they had no weapons at all.

Will stepped up the lead, away from the old man, crouching, ready to jump or fight or leap out of the way.

The young man sprang forward and slashed at him with the knife—left, right, left, coming closer and closer, making Will back away till he was trapped in the angle where two sides of the tower met.

Lyra was scrambling toward the man from behind, with the loose rope in her hand. Will darted forward suddenly, just as he’d done to the man in his house, and with the same effect: his antagonist tumbled backward unexpectedly, falling over Lyra to crash onto the lead. It was all happening too quickly for Will to be frightened. But he did have time to see the knife fly from the man’s hand and sink at once into the lead some feet away, point first, with no more resistance than if it had fallen into butter. It plunged as far as the hilt and stopped suddenly.

And the young man twisted over and reached for it at once, but Will flung himself on his back and seized his hair. He had learned to fight at school; there had been plenty of occasion for it, once the other children had sensed that there was something the matter with his mother. And he’d learned that the object of a school fight was not to gain points for style but to force your enemy to give in, which meant hurting him more than he was hurting you. He knew that you had to be willing to hurt someone else, too, and he’d found out that not many people were, when it came to it; but he knew that he was.

So this wasn’t unfamiliar to him, but he hadn’t fought against a nearly grown man armed with a knife before, and at all costs he must keep the man from picking it up now that he’d dropped it.

Will twisted his fingers into the young man’s thick, damp hair and wrenched back as hard as he could. The man grunted and flung himself sideways, but Will hung on even tighter, and his opponent roared with pain and anger. He pushed up and then threw himself backward, crushing Will between himself and the parapet, and that was too much; all the breath left Will’s body, and in the shock his hands loosened. The man pulled free.

Will dropped to his knees in the gutter, winded badly, but he couldn’t stay there. He tried to stand—and in doing so, he thrust his foot through one of the drainage holes. His fingers scraped desperately on the warm lead, and for a horrible second he thought he would slide off the roof to the ground. But nothing happened. His left leg was thrust out into empty space; the rest of him was safe.

He pulled his leg back inside the parapet and scrambled to his feet. The man had reached his knife again, but he didn’t have time to pull it out of the lead before Lyra leaped onto his back, scratching, kicking, biting like a wildcat. But she missed the hold on his hair that she was trying for, and he threw her off. And when he got up, he had the knife in his hand.

Lyra had fallen to one side, with Pantalaimon a wildcat now, fur raised, teeth bared, beside her. Will faced the man directly and saw him clearly for the first time. There was no doubt: he was Angelica’s brother, all right, and he was vicious. All his mind was focused on Will, and the knife was in his hand.

But Will wasn’t harmless either.

He’d seized the rope when Lyra dropped it, and now he wrapped it around his left hand for protection against the knife. He moved sideways between the young man and the sun, so that his antagonist had to squint and blink. Even better, the glass structure threw brilliant reflections into his eyes, and Will could see that for a moment he was almost blinded.

He leaped to the man’s left, away from the knife, holding his left hand high, and kicked hard at the man’s knee. He’d taken care to aim, and his foot connected well. The man went down with a loud grunt and twisted away awkwardly.

Will leaped after him, kicking again and again, kicking whatever parts he could reach, driving the man back and back toward the glass house. If he could get him to the top of the stairs …

This time the man fell more heavily, and his right hand with the knife in it came down on the lead at Will’s feet. Will stamped on it at once, hard, crushing the man’s fingers between the hilt and the lead, and then wrapped the rope more tightly around his hand and stamped a second time. The man yelled and let go of the knife. At once Will kicked it away, his shoe connecting with the hilt, luckily for him, and it spun across the lead and came to rest in the gutter just beside a drainage hole. The rope had come loose around his hand once more, and there seemed to be a surprising amount of blood from somewhere sprinkled on the lead and on his own shoes. The man was pulling himself up—

“Look out!” shouted Lyra, but Will was ready.

At the moment when the man was off balance, he threw himself at him, crashing as hard as he could into the man’s midriff. The man fell backward into the glass, which shattered at once, and the flimsy wooden frame went too. He sprawled among the wreckage half over the stairwell, and grabbed the doorframe, but it had nothing to support it anymore, and it gave way. He fell downward, and more glass fell all around him.

And Will darted back to the gutter, and picked up the knife, and the fight was over. The young man, cut and battered, clambered up the step, and saw Will standing above him holding the knife; he stared with a sickly anger and then turned and fled.

“Ah,” said Will, sitting down. “Ah.”

Something was badly wrong, and he hadn’t noticed it. He dropped the knife and hugged his left hand to himself. The tangle of rope was sodden with blood, and when he pulled it away—

“Your fingers!” Lyra breathed. “Oh, Will—”

His little finger and the finger next to it fell away with the rope.

His head swam. Blood was pulsing strongly from the stumps where his fingers had been, and his jeans and shoes were sodden already. He had to lie back and close his eyes for a moment. The pain wasn’t that great, and a part of his mind registered that with a dull surprise. It was like a persistent, deep
hammer thud more than the bright, sharp clarity when you cut yourself superficially.

He’d never felt so weak. He supposed he had gone to sleep for a moment. Lyra was doing something to his arm. He sat up to look at the damage, and felt sick. The old man was somewhere close by, but Will couldn’t see what he was doing, and meanwhile Lyra was talking to him.

“If only we had some bloodmoss,” she was saying, “what the bears use, I could make it better, Will, I could. Look, I’m going to tie this bit of rope around your arm, to stop the bleeding, cause I can’t tie it around where your fingers were, there’s nothing to tie it to. Hold still.”

He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.

“Hey,” she said, “stop that. Get up now. Mr. Paradisi’s got some medicine, some salve, I dunno what it is. You got to come downstairs. That other man’s gone—we seen him run out the door. He’s gone now. You beat him. Come on, Will—come on—”

Nagging and cajoling, she urged him down the steps, and they picked their way through the shattered glass and splintered wood and into a small, cool room off the landing. The walls were lined with shelves of bottles, jars, pots, pestles and mortars, and chemists’ balances. Under the dirty window was a stone sink, where the old man was pouring something with a shaky hand from a large bottle into a smaller one.

“Sit down and drink this,” he said, and filled a small glass with a dark golden liquid.