The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (53 page)

A warm handshake, and Schlesinger nodded towards the door.

“Not safe?” said Malcolm quietly as they walked along the street.

“Listening wires everywhere. How are you, Mal?”

“Fine. But you look a wreck. What’s been happening?”

“The apartment was firebombed.”

“No! Is Anita all right?”

“Got out just in time. But she lost a lot of work, and—well, there’s not much left. You found Lyra yet?”

“Have you seen her?”

Schlesinger told him how he’d first seen Lyra in the café, and recognized her from the photogram.

“Anita helped her change her appearance a little. But…she went out before the place was bombed, and we never saw her again. I say
we
never did, but I’ve asked around, and it seems she went to a nearby café and read a letter, which would have been the one from you that I passed on, and then went to the railroad station and caught a train towards the east, but not the fast Aleppo train. One that stops everywhere and crawls to…I think Seleukeia is the final stop, near the border. That’s the last I’ve managed to find out.”

“And she still hadn’t found her dæmon?”

“No. She had this idea he was in one of the dead towns outside Aleppo. But listen, Malcolm, something else has just come up. This is urgent. I’m going to take you to see a man called Ted Cartwright. Just up here.” Malcolm was aware that Bud was checking in all directions, and he did the same, seeing no one. Schlesinger turned into an alley and unlocked a shabby green door. When they were inside, he locked it again, and said, “He’s in poor shape, and I don’t think he’s got long. Up the stairs.”

As Malcolm followed, he tried to place the name Ted Cartwright. He knew he’d heard it before: someone had spoken it, in a Swedish accent, and there’d been a penciled scrawl on tattered paper….Then he had it.

“Tashbulak?” he said. “The director of the research station?”

“Yup. He arrived yesterday, after God knows what sort of journey. This is a safe house, and we’ve arranged a nurse and a stenographer…but you need to hear it from his own lips. Here we are.”

Another door, another lock, and they were inside a small, neat studio flat. A young woman in a dark blue uniform was taking the temperature of a man lying on the single bed. He was covered in nothing but a sheet. His eyes were closed, and he was sweating, and emaciated, and his face was blistered with sunburn. His thrush dæmon clung to the padded headboard, dusty and weary. Asta jumped up beside her, and they whispered together.

“Is he any better?” asked Bud quietly.

The nurse shook her head.

“Dr. Cartwright?” said Malcolm.

The man opened his eyes, which were red-rimmed and bloodshot. They flickered constantly without focusing on anything, and Malcolm wasn’t sure if Cartwright could see him at all.

The nurse put her thermometer away, made a note on a chart, and stood up to let Malcolm have her chair. She went across to a table where boxes of pills and other medical supplies were neatly stacked. Malcolm sat down and said, “Dr. Cartwright, I’m a friend of your colleague Lucy Arnold, in Oxford. My name is Malcolm Polstead. Can you hear me clearly?”

“Yes,” came in a hoarse whisper. “Can’t see much, though.”

“You’re the director of the research station at Tashbulak?”

“Was. Destroyed now. Had to escape.”

“Can you tell me about your colleagues Dr. Strauss and Roderick Hassall?”

A deep sigh, ending in a shuddering moan. Then Cartwright took another breath and said, “Did he get back? Hassall?”

“Yes. With his notes. They were immensely helpful. What was this place they were investigating? The red building?”

“No idea. It was where the roses came from. They insisted on going into the desert. I shouldn’t have let them. But they were desperate; we were all desperate. The men from the mountains…Shortly after I sent Hassall home…Simurgh…”

His voice faded. From behind him Schlesinger whispered to Malcolm, “What was that last word?”

“Tell you in a minute….Dr. Cartwright? Are you still awake?”

“The men from the mountains…they had modern arms.”

“What sort of arms?”

“Up-to-date machine guns, pickup trucks, all new and plentiful.”

“Who was funding them? Do you know?”

Cartwright tried to cough, but couldn’t summon the strength to clear his throat fully. Malcolm could see how it hurt him, and said, “Take your time.”

He was aware that behind him Bud had turned to talk to the nurse, but his attention was focused on Cartwright, who was gesturing, asking for help to sit up. Malcolm put his arm around the man’s back to lift him up, feeling how hot he was, and how light, and again Cartwright tried to cough, racked with wheezing, hacking efforts that seemed to strain his very skeleton.

Malcolm half turned round to ask Bud or the nurse to bring another pillow or a cushion.

There was no one there.

“Bud?” he said.

Then he realized that Bud was there, on the floor, unconscious, his owl dæmon lying on his chest. The nurse had vanished.

He let Cartwright down gently and darted to Bud, and saw a syringe next to him on the carpet. An empty vial lay on the table.

Malcolm flung open the door and ran to the stairs. The nurse was already at the bottom, and she turned to look up at him, and there was a pistol in her hand. He hadn’t noticed how young she was.

“Mal—” began Asta, but she fired.

Malcolm felt a crippling blow, but couldn’t tell where he’d been hit, and he fell at once and slid tumbling down the stairs to lie half-stunned at the foot, where the nurse had been standing a moment before. He pushed himself up and then saw what she was doing.

“No! Don’t do it!” he cried, and tried to scramble over to her.

She was standing inside the front door, holding the pistol under her chin. Her nightingale dæmon was shrieking with fear and fluttering at her face, but her eyes were clear and wide and blazing with righteousness. Then she pulled the trigger. Blood, bone, and brain exploded against the door, the wall, the ceiling.

Malcolm sank to the floor. A crowd of sensations was gathering around him, among which he could smell yesterday’s cooking, and see sunlight glowing on the blood against the faded green paint of the door, and hear a ringing in his ears from the gunshot and the distant howling of wild dogs and a liquid trickle from the nurse’s blood as the last pulsing of her heart forced it out of her shattered head, and the soft voice of his dæmon whispering next to him.

And pain. There it was. A throb of it, then another and another, and then one long, deep, focused, and brutal assault on his right hip.

He felt it, and found his hand wet with blood. It was soon going to hurt a lot more, but there was Bud to see to. Could he get back up the stairs?

He didn’t try to stand, but hauled himself across the wooden floor and then up, step by step, with his arms and his left leg.

“Mal, don’t force it,” said Asta faintly. “You’re bleeding a lot.”

“See if Bud’s all right. That’s all.”

He managed to stand up on the landing and made it into the sickroom. Bud was still lying unconscious, but he was breathing clearly. Malcolm turned to Cartwright, and had to sit down on the edge of the bed. His leg was rapidly stiffening.

“Help me up,” Cartwright whispered, and Malcolm tried to pull him upright, with some difficulty, and leant him against the headboard. His dæmon fell clumsily on to his shoulder.

“The nurse—” Malcolm began, but Cartwright shook his head, which set off another bout of coughing.

“Too late,” he managed to say. “She’s paid by them too. She’s been giving me drugs. Making me talk. And just now, poison…”

“Being paid—you mean, by the men from the mountains?” Malcolm was baffled.

“No, no. No. Them too. All part of the big medical—” More coughing, and retching too. A dribble of bile left his lips and fell from his chin.

Malcolm mopped it with the sheet and said quietly, urgently, “The big medical…?”

“TP.”

It meant nothing to Malcolm. “TP?” he repeated.

“Pharmaceut…funding. TP. Company lettering on their trucks…”

Cartwright’s eyes closed. His chest heaved, the breath rattling in his throat. Then his entire body clenched and relaxed, and he was dead. His dæmon drifted into invisible particles and melted into the air.

Malcolm felt the strength drain out of his body as the pain in his hip grew more insistent. He should look at the wound; he should attend to Schlesinger; he should report to Oakley Street. He had never felt the desire to go to sleep so powerful and urgent.

“Asta, keep me awake,” he said.

“Malcolm? Is that you?” came a blurred voice from the floor.

“Bud! You OK?”

“What happened?”

Schlesinger’s dæmon was standing groggily and stretching her wings as Bud struggled to sit up.

“The nurse drugged you. Cartwright’s dead. She was drugging him.”

“What the hell!…Malcolm, you’re bleeding. Stay there, don’t move.”

“She injected you with something while I had my back turned. Then she ran downstairs and I ran after her, like a fool, and she shot me before killing herself.”

Bud was holding on to the end of the bed. Whatever drug the nurse had injected into him was short-acting, because Malcolm could see the clarity returning to his friend’s face second by second. He was looking at Malcolm’s blood-soaked trouser leg.

“All right,” he said. “First thing we do is get you out of here and call a doctor. We’ll go out the back way through the bazaar. Can you walk at all?”

“Stiffly and slowly. You’ll have to help me.”

Bud stood up and shook his head to clear it. “Come on, then,” he said. “Oh, here, put this on. It’ll hide the blood.”

He opened a wardrobe and took out a long raincoat, and helped Malcolm put it on.

“Ready when you are,” Malcolm said.

A couple of hours later, after a doctor Bud trusted had examined and dressed Malcolm’s wound, they sat with Anita, drinking tea in the consulate, where they were staying while their apartment was being rebuilt.

“What did the doctor say?” said Anita.

“The bullet clipped the hip bone but didn’t break it. Could have been much worse.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes, a lot. But he gave me some painkillers. Now tell me about Lyra.”

“I’m not sure you’d recognize her now. She’s got short dark hair and glasses.”

Malcolm tried to imagine this dark-haired girl wearing glasses, without success. “Could anyone have followed her to your apartment?” he said.

“You mean, was that why they bombed it?” said Bud. “Because they thought she was there? I doubt it. In the first place, we weren’t followed when we left the café. In the second place, they know where I live anyway: there’s no secret about that. For the most part the agencies leave each other alone, apart from the usual secret-service attentions. Bombing, arson—they’re not the local style. I’m worried about what happened to her after she took the train to Seleukeia.”

“What was she going to do there? Did she tell you?”

“Well, she had a strange idea….It’s the kind of thing anyone might think was crazy, but somehow as she spoke about it…In the desert between Aleppo and Seleukeia there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of empty towns and villages. Dead towns, that’s what they call them. Nothing there but stones and lizards and snakes.

“And in one of those dead cities, well: this is what they say. Dæmons live there. Just dæmons. Lyra heard a story about it, oh, way back, in England, from some old guy on a boat. And she met an old woman here in Smyrna called Princess Cantacuzino, who told her about it as well. And Lyra was going to go there and look for her dæmon.”

“You don’t sound as if you believe it.”

Schlesinger drank some of his tea and then said, “Well, I had no idea. But the princess is an interesting woman; there was a huge scandal about her years ago. If she ever writes her memoirs, there’s a bestseller in it. Anyway, her dæmon had left her, like Lyra’s had. If Lyra gets as far as Seleukeia—”

“What do you mean,
if
she gets that far?”

“I mean, these are bad times, Mal. You’ve seen the numbers of people fleeing from the trouble further east? The Turks have been mobilizing their army in response. They expect trouble, and so do I. That young woman’s moving right into the thick of it. And as I say, if she makes it to Seleukeia, she’ll still have to travel on somehow to this Blue Hotel. What’ll you do when you find her?”

“Travel together. We’re going further east, to where the roses come from.”

“On behalf of Oakley Street?”

“Well, yes. Of course.”

“Don’t try and tell us that’s all it is,” said Anita. “You’re in love with her.”

Malcolm felt a great weariness oppress his heart. It must have shown in his expression, because she went on, “Sorry. Ignore that. None of my business.”

“One day I’ll write
my
memoirs. But listen: before he died, Cartwright said something about the men from the mountains who attacked the research station. He said they were funded by something called TP. Ever heard of that?”

Bud blew out his cheeks. “Thuringia Petroleum,” he said. “Bad guys.”

“Potash,” said Anita. “Not Petroleum.”

“Damn, that’s right: Potash. Anita wrote a piece about them.”

“It wasn’t published,” Anita continued. “The editor was nervous about it. It’s a very old company. They’ve been digging up potash in Thuringia for centuries. They used to supply companies that made fertilizer, explosives, chemical stuff, generally. But about twenty years ago TP began to diversify into manufacturing as well, because that’s where the profit was. Arms and pharmaceuticals, mainly. They’re enormous, Malcolm, and they used to loathe publicity, but markets don’t work like that, and they’re having to adapt to new ways of doing things. They had a big success with a painkiller called treptizam, made a lot of money, and put it all into research. They’re privately owned, no shareholders demanding dividends. And they’ve got good scientists. What are you looking at?”

Malcolm had reached uncomfortably into his pocket to take out a little bottle of pills. “Treptizam,” he read.