The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (39 page)

Agrippa stood calmly, book in hand, as if waiting for Lyra to ask a question.

“Why?” she said. “Why do it like this? Why sacrifice two lives? Couldn’t you build a fire in the normal way?”

“This is not a normal fire.”

“Tell me
why,
” Lyra said again.

“This is not a normal engine. Not a normal fire. Not normal steam.”

“That’s all they were? Just a different kind of
steam
? Steam is steam.”

“Nothing is only itself.”

“That’s not true. Nothing is any more than what it is,” Lyra said, quoting Gottfried Brande, feeling uneasy as she did.

“You’ve fallen for that lie, have you?”

“You think it’s a lie?”

“One of the biggest lies ever told. I thought you would have more imagination than to believe it.”

That took her aback. “What do you know about me?” she said.

“As much as I need to.”

“Will I ever find my dæmon?”

“Yes, but not in the way you think.”

“What does that mean?”

“Everything is connected.”

Lyra thought about that. “What is
my
connection with this?” she said.

“It has brought you to the one man who can tell you whether to go east or south on the next stage of your journey.”

Then she felt dizzy. This was all impossible, and it was all happening. “Well?” she said. “Which way should I go?”

“Look in your
clavicula.
” He gestured towards her notebook.

She turned to the page with the added lines in pencil, and found under his name and address something she’d missed before: the words
Tell her to go south.

“Who wrote this?” she said.

“The same man who wrote my name and address: Master Sebastian Makepeace.”

Lyra had to grasp the side of the stone tank. “But how did he—”

“You’ll find that out in due course. There’s no point in my telling you now. You would not understand.”

She felt a light touch on her arm and looked around to see Kubi
č
ek, looking pale and nervous.

“In a minute,” said Lyra, and to Agrippa she said, “Tell me about Dust. You know what I mean by Dust?”

“I have heard of Dust, of the Rusakov field, of course I have. You think I still live in the seventeenth century? I read all the scientific journals. Some of them are very funny. Let me tell you something else. You have an alethiometer, do you not?”

“Yes.”

“The alethiometer is not the only way to read Dust, not even the best way.”

“What other ways are there?”

“I will tell you one, that is all. A pack of cards.”

“You mean the tarot?”

“No, I do not. That is an egregious modern fraud designed to extract money from gullible romantics. I mean a pack of cards with pictures on them. Simple pictures. You will know it when you see one.”

“What can you tell me about something called the secret commonwealth?”

“That is a name for the world I deal with, the world of hidden things and hidden relationships. It is the reason that nothing is only itself.”

“Two more questions. I want to find a place called the Blue Hotel, al-Khan al-Azraq, to look for my dæmon. Have you heard of that?”

“Yes. It has another name: it’s sometimes called Madinat al-Qamar, the City of the Moon.”

“And where is it?”

“Between Seleukeia and Aleppo. You can reach it from either of those cities. But you will not find your dæmon without great pain and difficulty, and he will not be able to leave with you unless you make a great sacrifice. Are you ready for that?”

“Yes. And my second question: what does the word
akterrakeh
mean?

“Where have you heard that expression?”

“In connection with a place called Karamakan. It’s a way of traveling, or something like that. When you have to go
akterrakeh.
”

“It’s Latin.”

“What? Really?”

“Aqua terraque.”

“Water and land…”

“By water and by land.”

“Oh. So that means—what?”

“There are some special places where you can only go if you and your dæmon travel separately. One must go by water, the other by land.”

“But this place is in the middle of a desert! There isn’t any water.”

“Not so. The place you mean is between the desert and the wandering lake. The salt marshes and shallow streams of Lop Nor, where the watercourses shift and move about unpredictably.”

“Ah! I see,” she said.

What Strauss wrote on those tattered pages she’d found in Hassall’s rucksack had suddenly become clear. So much became clear! The men had had to separate from their dæmons to travel to the red building, and Strauss’s dæmon had arrived successfully, so he and she could enter; but Hassall’s dæmon hadn’t made it, though they must have found each other later. So that was how it worked; and she’d only be able to go there herself if Pan agreed to go through Lop Nor while she went through the desert; and then she’d be able to go into the red building. And as the clarification spread through her mind, blowing away all the mist and doubt, she remembered the feeling she’d had when she first read Strauss’s journal: she was certain that she knew what was in the building. The knowledge flickered with promise like a mirage, but it still trembled just out of her reach.

She stood in the smoky cellar, with the steady, confident beat of the pistons and the connecting rods and the valves above her testifying to the unity at last of Cornelis and Dinessa, and tried to bring her attention back to Agrippa.

“How do you know about that?” she said. “Have you made the journey yourself?”

“No more questions. Be on your way.”

Kubi
č
ek pulled at her sleeve, and she went with him to the staircase. She looked back at the cellar, where everything was alive, and where great hidden purposes were at work. Agrippa was already reaching for a box of herbs, clearing a space on a workbench, taking down a set of scales. The steam engine had settled down into a quiet, powerful rhythm, and then Lyra saw the magician reach out a hand and take a small box that had seemingly floated to him by itself. Little lights glowed over a number of different jars, bottles, boxes around the shelves, and beside two drawers in a great mahogany cabinet. The sorcerer took something from every container lit in this way, and as he did so, the spirit (Lyra could find no other word) responsible for the light flew across the cellar and joined its fellow on the bench. Everything in his cellar seemed alive and full of purpose, and Agrippa was perfectly busy, perfectly calm and in charge of what he was doing, completely fulfilled, and eager for the next stage in his work.

She followed Kubi
č
ek up the stairs and out into the empty waste ground. The men had gone, and the brazier was burning low. The cold air flooded into her grateful lungs and connected her with the night sky, as if it was a wind from the millions of stars.

“Well, it’s clear that I need the train for the south,” she said. “Will I make it to the station on time?”

A bell in the nearby cathedral struck two.

“If we go there at once,” said Kubi
č
ek.

She went with him through the old city to the river and across the bridge. Lights glowed in some of the boats on the water; a cargo barge went past, moving on the current with a load of great pine logs towards the Elbe, and Hamburg, and the German Ocean; a tram trundled along the rails at the far end of the bridge, with three late travelers in its lighted interior.

Neither of them spoke till they reached the station. Then Kubi
č
ek said, “I’ll help you buy your ticket. But first, let me see your
clavicula.
”

He flicked through the little notebook.

“Ah,” he said with satisfaction.

“What are you looking for?”

“To see if it had the name and address of someone in Smyrna. There is no one like us in Constantinople, but if you go on to Smyrna, you will find this lady helpful.”

She put the little notebook away and shook his hand, forgetting till it was too late that her own had been painfully scorched.

“You had a strange evening in Prague,” said Kubi
č
ek as they went towards the one lighted window in the booking office.

“But valuable. Thank you for your help.”

Five minutes later she was inside a sleeper cabin, alone, exhausted, in some pain from her burned hand, but alive and exultant, with a destination and a clear purpose at last. And five minutes after that the train began to move, and she was fast asleep.

Marcel Delamare was seldom angry. His disapproval took the form of a quiet, cold, precisely measured punishment administered to those who had annoyed him. It was done so subtly that those who suffered it were at first flattered to think they had attracted his attention, until they realized its unpleasant consequences.

But what Olivier Bonneville had done was more than annoying. It was direct and flagrant disobedience, and the punishment it deserved was exemplary. The Consistorial Court of Discipline was the body best able to deal with offenses of that kind, and Delamare made sure they had every detail necessary to find Bonneville, arrest and interrogate him, including some facts about his background that Bonneville himself didn’t know.

The young man was not as cunning as he thought he was, and his trail wasn’t hard to follow. The ticket he’d bought in Dresden would allow him to travel all the way downriver to Hamburg, so the CCD agents at various cities along the Elbe kept watch at all the stopping points; and as soon as Bonneville disembarked at the quay in Wittenberg, he was seen and followed by the single agent there, who promptly sent a message to Magdeburg, only a few hours downstream, asking for help.

Their quarry himself wasn’t aware that he was being followed. He was an amateur, and his tracker was a professional, after all, who watched Bonneville check into a shabby little guesthouse, and then sat in the café opposite waiting for his colleagues to arrive from Magdeburg. They had hired a fast engine-boat; they wouldn’t be long.

Bonneville had spent much of the day with the alethiometer, hunched over his lap in the airless cabin, watching Pantalaimon’s movements through the city, from his conversation with the girl at the school for the blind to the rooftop journey and his second conversation with a young girl, who was rather prettier than the first one. But the nausea was too much for Bonneville at that point, and he had to sit out on deck to clear his head of it, and by the time he’d recovered, Lyra’s dæmon was talking to some old man about philosophy. It was so difficult: looking made him sick, but hearing told him nothing about where the dæmon was. He had to look occasionally, or know nothing.

His room at the guesthouse was no less stuffy than his cabin on the boat, the only difference being the smell of cabbage rather than the smell of oil; so, rather than bring on another bout of nausea, he decided to go for a walk in the evening streets and clear his head. If he kept his eyes open, he might see the creature anyway.

The CCD man watched from the café as Bonneville sauntered out, with his dæmon, some kind of hawk, on his shoulder. He was carrying a small bag, but he’d left his suitcase in the guesthouse, so presumably he’d be returning. The agent left a few coins on the table and followed.

As for Pantalaimon, he was in the garden at St. Lucia’s School for the Blind, curled up in the tree where he’d hidden that morning. He wasn’t asleep; he was watching all the evening activity through the lighted windows, and hoping that the girl Anna would come out to visit her book again. But, of course, she wouldn’t: it was cold and damp, and she’d be eating supper with her friends in the warmth. Pan could hear their voices across the dark lawn.

He thought about Gottfried Brande and Sabine. Perhaps they were still there, still quarreling, in that tall house with the barren attic. Pan reproached himself: he should have questioned Brande differently. He should have tried to speak to that mysterious dæmon Cosima. He should have been more patient with the girl, above all. She was so like Lyra in some ways—and the thought brought an almost physical pang of longing. He supposed that Lyra was at the Trout still, and he imagined her talking to Malcolm, and Asta, the beautiful gold-red cat, joining in. He imagined Lyra tentatively reaching out to touch her, knowing everything about what that gesture would mean. But no: impossible. He banished that thought at once.

But he couldn’t go back to her without what he’d come to seek. He was restless. For the first time he wondered what he’d meant when he spoke of Lyra’s imagination. He didn’t know, but he knew he wouldn’t go back without it.

It was no good: he’d never go to sleep. He was too irritated with himself. He stood up and stretched, and leapt onto the wall and left the garden for the darkness of the streets.

Bonneville strolled towards the Stadtkirche, looking into every doorway, every alley, and up to every roof. In order not to attract attention, he tried to seem like a tourist, or a student of architecture. He wondered whether it would help to have a sketch pad and pencil, but mist was gathering, and no one would be out sketching in conditions like this.

In the bag he carried, as well as the alethiometer, was a coal-silk net, extremely strong and light, in which he intended to catch the girl’s dæmon before taking him somewhere private and interrogating him. He could see that happening in his mind’s eye, because he’d practiced it many times; and he was so quick with the net, so skillful, that he thought it was a great pity that no one would see him in action with it.

He stopped at a café in the main square and drank a glass of beer, looking all around, listening to the conversations nearby, talking quietly with his dæmon.

“That old man,” he said. “The old man in the attic.”

“We’ve heard those kinds of arguments before. The things he said. He’s probably famous.”

“I’m just trying to place him.”

“You think the dæmon’ll still be with him?”

“No. They weren’t being friendly. The dæmon was accusing him of something.”

“Something to do with
her.
”

“Yes…”

“You think he’ll go back there?”

“Maybe. If we knew where the house was, perhaps.”

“We could talk to him.”

“I don’t know, though,” he said. “If the dæmon’s gone, the old man won’t necessarily know where. They weren’t on those kind of terms.”

“The other girl might know something,” said his dæmon. “She might be his daughter.”

Bonneville found that suggestion more appealing. He was good with girls too. But he shook his head, and said, “It’s all too speculative. We need to focus on
him.
I’m going to try something….”

He reached into his bag. The hawk dæmon, who suffered from the nausea just as he did, said hurriedly, “No, no, not now.”

“I won’t look. Just listen.”

She shook her head and turned away. There were half a dozen customers in the café, mostly middle-aged men who seemed to be settled for the evening, talking and smoking or playing cards. None of them were interested in the young man at the corner table.

He held the alethiometer on his lap, with both hands around it. His dæmon fluttered from the back of his chair to the table. He closed his eyes and thought about Pantalaimon, and at first he could only summon up images of what he looked like, and the hawk dæmon murmured, “No. No.”

Bonneville breathed deeply and tried again. He kept his eyes open this time, looking at his half-empty glass, and listened for the scratch of claws on cobbles, the noise of traffic, busy city streets; but all he heard was the mournful blast of a foghorn.

Then he realized that he was hearing it in real life, because he saw two of the men at the other tables turn their heads in the direction of the river and speak to each other, nodding. There was the sound again, but coming into Bonneville’s mind from another place altogether was that scratch of claws, men’s voices, the splash of water, a deep thud as something large and heavy bumped into something large and immobile, the creak of rope on damp wood. A steamer tying up at the quay?

So Lyra’s dæmon was on the move again.

“That’s it,” Bonneville said, standing up and packing the alethiometer into his bag. “If we go there right now, we might see him get aboard, and then we’ll have him.”

He paid the bill quickly, and they left.

Pantalaimon was watching from the shadows at the side of the ticket office. According to the notice on the wall, this boat was going all the way upstream to Prague. That would do.

The quay was well lit, though, and the numbers of people coming down the gangway or going up made it quite impossible for him to get on board that way, even in the fog that was blurring the edges of everything visible.

But there was always the water. Without stopping to think, he raced out from beside the ticket office and made for the edge of the quay. But he hadn’t got halfway across when something fell over him—a net—

He was snatched to a halt and tumbled over and dragged along the flagstones, struggling, twisting, snapping, tearing, biting; but the net was too strong, and the young man holding it was merciless. Pan felt himself swung into the air, caught a glimpse of his captor’s face, dark-eyed, vicious, of astonished passengers watching, unable to move, and then several other things happened at once. He heard the roar of a smaller engine-boat thrown into reverse gear as it pulled up to the quay, exclamations from the passengers, a violent curse from the young man swinging the net, and then the sound of running feet over the stones, and a deep man’s voice saying, “Olivier Bonneville, you’re under arrest.”

The net fell to the ground, with Pan struggling harder than ever, and only getting more entangled.

He didn’t stop tearing at it to watch, but he was aware of the men running from the engine-boat, of the young man (Bonneville!
Bonneville!
) loudly protesting, of the word
dæmon
coming from different voices in tones of shock and fear, and then of the hideous touch of an unknown human hand around his neck. It lifted him up and held him close to a man’s face, to a smell of beer and smokeleaf and cheap cologne, and to bloodshot eyes that bulged horribly.

The net was still tangled around him. He tried to bite through it, but that hand around his neck was tightening like an iron band. Dimly he heard the young man’s voice saying angrily, “I have to say my employer, Marcel Delamare of
La Maison Juste,
will not be at all pleased by this. Take me somewhere quiet, and I shall explain—”

That was the last Pan heard before he fainted.

Mignonne
promised to be as light and graceful as Malcolm’s boyhood canoe,
La Belle Sauvage,
had been, but the sail that he found and tried to hoist was frail and rotting. That was clear even in the darkness: it came apart in his hands.

“Oars it is, then,” said Malcolm, who knew that a boat that sailed well might be a brute to row. But there was no choice, and in any case, the sail was white, or had been, and would show up far too well on a dark night.

In the light of a match he saw that the boathouse gates were fastened with another padlock, and found it harder to shift than the one on the door had been. He finally wrenched it free, and there was the lake in front of them.

“Ready, monsieur?” he said, holding the little boat steady against the landing stage as the other man got in.

“Ready, yes. If God wills.”

Malcolm pushed off and let the boat drift away from the shore until there was room to set the oars and start rowing. The boathouse stood in a small bay under the shelter of a rocky headland, and he expected the water to be more or less calm just there, and choppy outside the bay; but to his surprise, once they were out on the open water, with the whole length of the great lake curving away in front of them, the surface was as flat as glass.

The air felt heavy to move through, and clammy; everything was uncannily still. Malcolm enjoyed the sensation of using his muscles again, after days of traveling, but it was almost like being indoors. When he spoke to Karimov, he found himself lowering his voice.

“You said that you had some dealings with Marcel Delamare,” he said. “What was his business with you?”

“He commissioned me to bring him some rose oil from the desert of Karamakan, but he has not yet paid me, and I feared he was holding back the money in order to keep me in Geneva because he wants to do me harm. I would have left before now, but I am penniless.”

“Tell me about this oil.”

Karimov told him everything he’d told Delamare, and then added, “But there was something curious. When I told him of the destruction of the research station at Tashbulak, he seemed not to be surprised, though he pretended to be. Then he asked me questions about the men from the mountains who attacked the station, and I answered truthfully, but again I felt that he knew what he expected to hear. So I held back one thing.”

“What was the thing you didn’t tell him?”

“The men from the mountains did not destroy the place entirely. They were forced to flee by— And this is where it becomes hard to believe, monsieur, because they were forced to flee by a monstrous bird.”

“The Simurgh?”

“How do you know that? I was not going to say that name, but—”

“I read about it in a poem.”

That was true: it was a great bird that guided Jahan and Rukhsana to the rose garden in the Tajik poem. But it wasn’t the whole truth: Malcolm also remembered it from the diary of Dr. Strauss, which the murdered Hassall had brought back from Tashbulak. The camel herder Chen had told them that the mirages they saw in the desert were aspects of the Simurgh.