The Subtle Knife (15 page)

Still, she was unashamed of what she was, and she returned their gaze with head held high.

“So you are angels,” she said, “or Watchers, or
bene elim.
Where are you going?”

“We are following a call,” said one.

She was not sure which one had spoken. It might have been any or all of them at once.

“Whose call?” she said.

“A man’s.”

“Lord Asriel’s?”

“It may be.”

“Why are you following his call?”

“Because we are willing to,” came the reply.

“Then wherever he is, you can guide me to him as well,” she ordered them.

Ruta Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.

But they expected nothing else: she was very young.

At once they beat their wings and surged forward, and she darted with them, surfing on the turbulence their pinions caused in the air and relishing the speed and power it added to her flight.

They flew throughout the night. The stars wheeled around them, and faded and vanished as the dawn seeped up from the east. The world burst into brilliance as the sun’s rim appeared, and then they were flying through blue sky and clear air, fresh and sweet and moist.

In the daylight the angels were less visible, though to any eye their strangeness was clear. The light Ruta Skadi saw them by was still not that of the sun now climbing the sky, but some other light from somewhere else.

Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat dæmon, and in the earth below her and the lives of every creature, plant and animal both; and she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her. And she rejoiced, too, that she was going to see Lord Asriel again.

Another night came, and still the angels flew on. And at some point the quality of the air changed, not for the worse or the better, but changed nonetheless, and Ruta Skadi knew that they’d passed out of that world and into another. How it had happened she couldn’t guess.

“Angels!” she called as she sensed the change. “How have we left the world I found you in? Where was the boundary?”

“There are invisible places in the air,” came the answer. “Gateways into other worlds. We can see them, but you cannot.”

Ruta Skadi couldn’t see the invisible gateway, but she didn’t need to: witches could navigate better than birds. As soon as the angel spoke, she fixed her attention on three jagged peaks below her and memorized their configuration exactly. Now she could find it again, if she needed to, despite what the angels might think.

They flew on farther, and presently she heard an angel voice: “Lord Asriel is in this world, and there is the fortress he’s building . . . . ”

They had slowed, and were circling like eagles in the middle airs. Ruta Skadi looked where one angel was pointing. The first faint glimmer of light was tinting the east, though all the stars above shone as brilliantly as ever against the profound velvet black of the high heavens. And on the very rim of the world, where the light was increasing moment by moment, a great mountain range reared its peaks—jagged spears of black rock, mighty broken slabs, and sawtooth ridges piled in confusion like the wreckage of a universal catastrophe. But on the highest point, which as she looked was touched by the first rays of the morning sun and outlined in brilliance, stood a regular structure: a huge fortress whose battlements were formed of single slabs of basalt half a hill in height, and whose extent was to be measured in flying time.

Beneath this colossal fortress, fires glared and furnaces smoked in the darkness of early dawn, and from many miles away Ruta Skadi heard the clang of hammers and the pounding of great mills. And from every direction, she could see more flights of angels winging toward it, and not only angels, but machines too: steel-winged craft gliding like albatrosses, glass cabins under flickering dragonfly wings, droning zeppelins like huge bumblebees—all making for the fortress that Lord Asriel was building on the mountains at the edge of the world.

“And is Lord Asriel there?” she said.

“Yes, he is there,” the angels replied.

“Then let’s fly there to meet him. And you must be my guard of honor.”

Obediently they spread their wings and set their course toward the gold-rimmed fortress, with the eager witch flying before them.

SEVEN

THE ROLLS-ROYCE

Lyra woke early to find the morning quiet and warm, as if the city never had any other weather than this calm summer. She slipped out of bed and downstairs, and hearing some children’s voices out on the water, went to see what they were doing.

Three boys and a girl were splashing across the sunlit harbor in a couple of pedal boats, racing toward the steps. As they saw Lyra, they slowed for a moment, but then the race took hold of them again. The winners crashed into the steps so hard that one of them fell into the water, and then he tried to climb into the other craft and tipped that over, too, and then they all splashed about together as if the fear of the night before had never happened. They were younger than most of the children by the tower, Lyra thought, and she joined them in the water, with Pantalaimon as a little silver fish glittering beside her. She never found it hard to talk to other children, and soon they were gathered around her, sitting in pools of water on the warm stone, their shirts drying quickly in the sun. Poor Pantalaimon had to creep into her pocket again, frog-shaped in the cool damp cotton.

“What you going to do with that cat?”

“Can you really take the bad luck away?”

“Where you come from?”

“Your friend, he ain’ afraid of Specters?”

“Will en’t afraid of anything,” Lyra said. “Nor’m I. What you scared of cats for?”

“You don’t know about cats?” the oldest boy said incredulously. “Cats, they got the devil in them, all right. You got to kill every cat you see. They bite you and put the devil in you too. And what was you doing with that big pard?”

She realized he meant Pantalaimon in his leopard shape, and shook her head innocently.

“You must have been dreaming,” she said. “There’s all kinds of things look different in the moonlight. But me and Will, we don’t have Specters where we come from, so we don’t know much about ’em.”

“If you can’t see ’em, you’re safe,” said a boy. “You see ’em, you know they can get you. That’s what my pa said, then they got him.”

“And they’re here, all around us now?”

“Yeah,” said the girl. She reached out a hand and grabbed a fistful of air, crowing, “I got one now!”

“They can’t hurt you,” one of the boys said. “So we can’t hurt them, all right.”

“And there’s always been Specters in this world?” said Lyra.

“Yeah,” said one boy, but another said, “No, they came a long time ago. Hundreds of years.”

“They came because of the Guild,” said the third.

“The what?” said Lyra.

“They never!” said the girl. “My granny said they came because people were bad, and God sent them to punish us.”

“Your granny don’ know nothing,” said a boy. “She got a beard, your granny. She’s a goat, all right.”

“What’s the Guild?” Lyra persisted.

“You know the Torre degli Angeli,” said a boy. “The stone tower, right. Well it belongs to the Guild, and there’s a secret place in there. The Guild, they’re men who know all kind of things. Philosophy, alchemy, all kind of things they know. And they were the ones who let the Specters in.”

“That ain’ true,” said another boy. “They came from the stars.”

“It
is!
This is what happened, all right: this Guild man hundreds of years ago was taking some metal apart. Lead. He was going to make it into gold. And he cut it and cut it smaller and smaller till he came to the smallest piece he could get. There ain’ nothing smaller than that. So small you couldn’ see it, even. But he cut that, too, and inside the smallest little bit there was all the Specters packed in, twisted over and folded up so tight they took up no space at all. But once he cut it, bam! They whooshed out, and they been here ever since. That’s what my papa said.”

“Is there any Guild men in the tower now?” said Lyra.

“No! They run away like everyone else,” said the girl.

“There ain’ no one in the tower. That’s haunted, that place,” said a boy. “That’s why the cat came from there. We ain’ gonna go in there, all right. Ain’ no kids gonna go in there. That’s scary.”

“The Guild men ain’ afraid to go in there,” said another.

“They got special magic, or something. They’re greedy, they live off the poor people,” said the girl. “The poor people do all the work, and the Guild men just live there for nothing.”

“But there en’t anyone in the tower now?” Lyra said. “No grownups?”

“No grownups in the city at all!”

“They wouldn’ dare, all right.”

But she had seen a young man up there. She was convinced of it. And there was something in the way these children spoke; as a practiced liar, she knew liars when she met them, and they were lying about something.

And suddenly she remembered: little Paolo had mentioned that he and Angelica had an elder brother, Tullio, who was in the city too, and Angelica had hushed him . . . . Could the young man she’d seen have been their brother?

She left them to rescue their boats and pedal back to the beach, and went inside to make some coffee and see if Will was awake. But he was still asleep, with the cat curled up at his feet, and Lyra was impatient to see her Scholar again. So she wrote a note and left it on the floor by his bedside, and took her rucksack and went off to look for the window.

The way she took led her through the little square they’d come to the night before. But it was empty now, and the sunlight dusted the front of the ancient tower and showed up the blurred carvings beside the doorway: humanlike figures with folded wings, their features eroded by centuries of weather, but somehow in their stillness expressing power and compassion and intellectual force.

“Angels,” said Pantalaimon, now a cricket on Lyra’s shoulder.

“Maybe Specters,” Lyra said.

“No! They said this was something
angeli
,” he insisted. “Bet that’s angels.”

“Shall we go in?”

They looked up at the great oak door on its ornate black hinges. The half-dozen steps up to it were deeply worn, and the door itself stood slightly open. There was nothing to stop Lyra from going in except her own fear.

She tiptoed to the top of the steps and looked through the opening. A dark stone-flagged hall was all she could see, and not much of that; but Pantalaimon was fluttering anxiously on her shoulder, just as he had when they’d played the trick on the skulls in the crypt at Jordan College, and she was a little wiser now. This was a bad place. She ran down the steps and out of the square, making for the bright sunlight of the palm tree boulevard. And as soon as she was sure there was no one looking, she went straight across to the window and through into Will’s Oxford.

Forty minutes later she was inside the physics building once more, arguing with the porter; but this time she had a trump card.

“You just ask Dr. Malone,” she said sweetly. “That’s all you got to do, ask her. She’ll tell you.”

The porter turned to his telephone, and Lyra watched pityingly as he pressed the buttons and spoke into it. They didn’t even give him a proper lodge to sit in, like a real Oxford college, just a big wooden counter, as if it was a shop.

“All right,” said the porter, turning back. “She says go on up. Mind you don’t go anywhere else.”

“No, I won’t,” she said demurely, a good little girl doing what she was told.

At the top of the stairs, though, she had a surprise, because just as she passed a door with a symbol indicating
woman
on it, it opened and there was Dr. Malone silently beckoning her in.

She entered, puzzled. This wasn’t the laboratory, it was a washroom, and Dr. Malone was agitated.

She said, “Lyra, there’s someone else in the lab—police officers or something. They know you came to see me yesterday—I don’t know what they’re after, but I don’t like it. What’s going on?”

“How do they know I came to see you?”

“I don’t know! They didn’t know your name, but I knew who they meant—”

“Oh. Well, I can lie to them. That’s easy.”

“But
what is going on?
”

A woman’s voice spoke from the corridor outside: “Dr. Malone? Have you seen the child?”

“Yes,” Dr. Malone called. “I was just showing her where the washroom is . . . ”

There was no need for her to be so anxious, thought Lyra, but perhaps she wasn’t used to danger.

The woman in the corridor was young and dressed very smartly, and she tried to smile when Lyra came out, but her eyes remained hard and suspicious.

“Hello,” she said. “You’re Lyra, are you?”

“Yeah. What’s your name?”

“I’m Sergeant Clifford. Come along in.”

Lyra thought this young woman had a nerve, acting as if it were her own laboratory, but she nodded meekly. That was the moment when she first felt a twinge of regret. She knew she shouldn’t be here; she knew what the alethiometer wanted her to do, and it was not this. She stood doubtfully in the doorway.

In the room already there was a tall powerful man with white eyebrows. Lyra knew what Scholars looked like, and neither of these two was a Scholar.

“Come in, Lyra,” said Sergeant Clifford again. “It’s all right. This is Inspector Walters.”

“Hello, Lyra,” said the man. “I’ve been hearing all about you from Dr. Malone here. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”

“What sort of questions?” she said.

“Nothing difficult,” he said, smiling. “Come and sit down, Lyra.”

He pushed a chair toward her. Lyra sat down carefully, and heard the door close itself. Dr. Malone was standing nearby. Pantalaimon, cricket-formed in Lyra’s breast pocket, was agitated; she could feel him against her breast, and hoped the tremor didn’t show. She thought to him to keep still.

“Where d’you come from, Lyra?” said Inspector Walters.

If she said Oxford, they’d easily be able to check. But she couldn’t say another world, either. These people were dangerous; they’d want to know more at once. She thought of the only other name she knew of in this world: the place Will had come from.

“Winchester,” she said.

“You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you, Lyra?” said the inspector. “How did you get those bruises? There’s a bruise on your cheek, and another on your leg—has someone been knocking you about?”

“No,” said Lyra.

“Do you go to school, Lyra?”

“Yeah. Sometimes,” she added.

“Shouldn’t you be at school today?”

She said nothing. She was feeling more and more uneasy. She looked at Dr. Malone, whose face was tight and unhappy.

“I just came here to see Dr. Malone,” Lyra said.

“Are you staying in Oxford, Lyra? Where are you staying?”

“With some people,” she said. “Just friends.”

“What’s their address?”

“I don’t know exactly what it’s called. I can find it easy, but I can’t remember the name of the street.”

“Who are these people?”

“Just friends of my father,” she said.

“Oh, I see. How did you find Dr. Malone?”

“ ’Cause my father’s a physicist, and he knows her.”

It was going more easily now, she thought. She began to relax into it and lie more fluently.

“And she showed you what she was working on, did she?”

“Yeah. The engine with the screen . . . Yes, all that.”

“You’re interested in that sort of thing, are you? Science, and so on?”

“Yeah. Physics, especially.”

“You going to be a scientist when you grow up?”

That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got. He wasn’t disconcerted. His pale eyes looked briefly at the young woman, and then back to Lyra.

“And were you surprised at what Dr. Malone showed you?”

“Well, sort of, but I knew what to expect.”

“Because of your father?”

“Yeah. ’Cause he’s doing the same kind of work.”

“Yes, quite. Do you understand it?”

“Some of it.”

“Your father’s looking into dark matter, then?”

“Yes.”

“Has he got as far as Dr. Malone?”

“Not in the same way. He can do some things better, but that engine with the words on the screen—he hasn’t got one of those.”

“Is Will staying with your friends as well?”

“Yes, he—”

And she stopped. She knew at once she’d made a horrible mistake.

So did they, and they were on their feet in a moment to stop her from running out, but somehow Dr. Malone was in the way, and the sergeant tripped and fell, blocking the way of the inspector. It gave Lyra time to dart out, slam the door shut behind her, and run full tilt for the stairs.

Two men in white coats came out of a door, and she bumped into them. Suddenly Pantalaimon was a crow, shrieking and flapping, and he startled them so much they fell back and she pulled free of their hands and raced down the last flight of stairs into the lobby just as the porter put the phone down and lumbered along behind his counter calling out, “Oy! Stop there! You!”

But the flap he had to lift was at the other end, and she got to the revolving door before he could come out and catch her.

And behind her, the lift doors were opening, and the pale-haired man was running out, so fast, so strong—

And the door wouldn’t turn! Pantalaimon shrieked at her: they were pushing the wrong side!

She cried out in fear and turned herself around, hurling her little weight against the heavy glass, willing it to turn, and got it to move just in time to avoid the grasp of the porter, who then got in the way of the pale-haired man, so Lyra could dash out and away before they got through.

Across the road, ignoring the cars, the brakes, the squeal of tires; into this gap between tall buildings, and then another road, with cars from both directions. But she was quick, dodging bicycles, always with the pale-haired man just behind her—oh, he was frightening!

Into a garden, over a fence, through some bushes—Pantalaimon skimming overhead, a swift, calling to her which way to go; crouching down behind a coal bunker as the pale man’s footsteps came racing past, and she couldn’t hear him panting, he was so fast, and so fit; and Pantalaimon said, “Back now! Go back to the road—”

So she crept out of her hiding place and ran back across the grass, out through the garden gate, into the open spaces of the Banbury Road again; and once again she dodged across, and once again tires squealed on the road; and then she was running up Norham Gardens, a quiet tree-lined road of tall Victorian houses near the park.