The Subtle Knife (17 page)

“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll tell Sir Charles.”

He closed the door. It was solid oak, with two heavy locks, and bolts top and bottom, though Will thought that no sensible burglar would try the front door anyway. And there was a burglar alarm prominently fixed to the front of the house, and a large spotlight at each corner; they’d never be able to get near it, let alone break in.

Steady footsteps came to the door, and then it opened again. Will looked up at the face of this man who had so much that he wanted even more, and found him disconcertingly smooth and calm and powerful, not in the least guilty or ashamed.

Sensing Lyra beside him impatient and angry, Will said quickly, “Excuse me, but Lyra thinks that when she had a lift in your car earlier on, she left something in it by mistake.”

“Lyra? I don’t know a Lyra. What an unusual name. I know a child called Lizzie. And who are you?”

Cursing himself for forgetting, Will said, “I’m her brother. Mark.”

“I see. Hello, Lizzie, or Lyra. You’d better come in.”

He stood aside. Neither Will nor Lyra was quite expecting this, and they stepped inside uncertainly. The hall was dim and smelled of beeswax and flowers. Every surface was polished and clean, and a mahogany cabinet against the wall contained dainty porcelain figures. Will saw the servant standing in the background, as if he were waiting to be called.

“Come into my study,” said Sir Charles, and held open another door off the hall.

He was being courteous, even welcoming, but there was an edge to his manner that put Will on guard. The study was large and comfortable in a cigar-smoke-and-leather-armchair sort of way, and seemed to be full of bookshelves, pictures, hunting trophies. There were three or four glass-fronted cabinets containing antique scientific instruments—brass microscopes, telescopes covered in green leather, sextants, compasses; it was clear why he wanted the alethiometer.

“Sit down,” said Sir Charles, and indicated a leather sofa. He sat at the chair behind his desk, and went on. “Well? What have you got to say?”

“You stole—” began Lyra hotly, but Will looked at her, and she stopped.

“Lyra thinks she left something in your car,” he said again. “We’ve come to get it back.”

“Is this the object you mean?” he said, and took a velvet cloth from a drawer in the desk. Lyra stood up. He ignored her and unfolded the cloth, disclosing the golden splendor of the alethiometer resting in his palm.

“Yes!” Lyra burst out, and reached for it.

But he closed his hand. The desk was wide, and she couldn’t reach; and before she could do anything else, he swung around and placed the alethiometer in a glass-fronted cabinet before locking it and dropping the key in his waistcoat pocket.

“But it isn’t yours, Lizzie,” he said. “Or Lyra, if that’s your name.”

“It
is
mine! It’s my alethiometer!”

He shook his head, sadly and heavily, as if he were reproaching her and it was a sorrow to him, but he was doing it for her own good. “I think at the very least there’s considerable doubt about the matter,” he said.

“But it
is
hers!” said Will. “Honestly! She’s shown it to me! I know it’s hers!”

“You see, I think you’d have to prove that,” he said. “I don’t have to prove anything, because it’s in my possession. It’s assumed to be mine. Like all the other items in my collection. I must say, Lyra, I’m surprised to find you so dishonest—”

“I en’t dishonest!” Lyra cried.

“Oh, but you are. You told me your name was Lizzie. Now I learn it’s something else. Frankly, you haven’t got a hope of convincing anyone that a precious piece like this belongs to you. I tell you what. Let’s call the police.”

He turned his head to call for the servant.

“No, wait—” said Will, before Sir Charles could speak, but Lyra ran around the desk, and from nowhere Pantalaimon was in her arms, a snarling wildcat baring his teeth and hissing at the old man. Sir Charles blinked at the sudden appearance of the dæmon, but hardly flinched.

“You don’t even know what it is you stole,” Lyra stormed. “You seen me using it and you thought you’d steal it, and you did. But you—you—you’re worse than my mother. At least she knows it’s important! You’re just going to put it in a case and do nothing with it! You ought to
die!
If I can, I’ll make someone kill you. You’re not worth leaving alive. You’re—”

She couldn’t speak. All she could do was spit full in his face, so she did, with all her might.

Will sat still, watching, looking around, memorizing where everything was.

Sir Charles calmly shook out a silk handkerchief and mopped himself.

“Have you
any
control over yourself?” he said. “Go and sit down, you filthy brat.”

Lyra felt tears shaken out of her eyes by the trembling of her body, and threw herself onto the sofa. Pantalaimon, his thick cat’s tail erect, stood on her lap with his blazing eyes fixed on the old man.

Will sat silent and puzzled. Sir Charles could have thrown them out long before this. What was he playing at?

And then he saw something so bizarre he thought he had imagined it. Out of the sleeve of Sir Charles’s linen jacket, past the snowy white shirt cuff, came the emerald head of a snake. Its black tongue flicked this way, that way, and its mailed head with its gold-rimmed black eyes moved from Lyra to Will and back again. She was too angry to see it at all, and Will saw it only for a moment before it retreated again up the old man’s sleeve, but it made his eyes widen with shock.

Sir Charles moved to the window seat and calmly sat down, arranging the crease in his trousers.

“I think you’d better listen to me instead of behaving in this uncontrolled way,” he said. “You really haven’t any choice. The instrument is in my possession and will stay there. I want it. I’m a collector. You can spit and stamp and scream all you like, but by the time you’ve persuaded anyone else to listen to you, I shall have plenty of documents to prove that I bought it. I can do that very easily. And then you’ll never get it back.”

They were both silent now. He hadn’t finished. A great puzzlement was slowing Lyra’s heartbeat and making the room very still.

“However,” he went on, “there’s something I want even more. And I can’t get it myself, so I’m prepared to make a deal with you. You fetch the object I want, and I’ll give you back the—what did you call it?”

“Alethiometer,” said Lyra hoarsely.

“Alethiometer. How interesting. Alethia, truth—those emblems—yes, I see.”

“What’s this thing you want?” said Will. “And where is it?”

“It’s somewhere I can’t go, but you can. I’m perfectly well aware that you’ve found a doorway somewhere. I guess it’s not too far from Summertown, where I dropped Lizzie, or Lyra, this morning. And that through the doorway is another world, one with no grownups in it. Right so far? Well, you see, the man who made that doorway has got a knife. He’s hiding in that other world right now, and he’s extremely afraid. He has reason to be. If he’s where I think he is, he’s in an old stone tower with angels carved around the doorway. The Torre degli Angeli.

“So that’s where you have to go, and I don’t care how you do it, but I want that knife. Bring it to me, and you can have the alethiometer. I shall be sorry to lose it, but I’m a man of my word. That’s what you have to do: bring me the knife.”

EIGHT

THE TOWER OF THE ANGELS

Will said, “Who is this man who’s got the knife?”

They were in the Rolls-Royce, driving up through Oxford. Sir Charles sat in the front, half-turned around, and Will and Lyra sat in the back, with Pantalaimon a mouse now, soothed in Lyra’s hands.

“Someone who has no more right to the knife than I have to the alethiometer,” said Sir Charles. “Unfortunately for all of us, the alethiometer is in my possession, and the knife is in his.”

“How do you know about that other world anyway?”

“I know many things that you don’t. What else would you expect? I am a good deal older and considerably better informed. There are a number of doorways between this world and that; those who know where they are can easily pass back and forth. In Cittàgazze there’s a Guild of learned men, so called, who used to do so all the time.”

“You en’t from this world at all!” said Lyra suddenly. “You’re from there, en’t you?”

And again came that strange nudge at her memory. She was almost certain she’d seen him before.

“No, I’m not,” he said.

Will said, “If we’ve got to get the knife from that man, we need to know more about him. He’s not going to just give it to us, is he?”

“Certainly not. It’s the one thing keeping the Specters away. It’s not going to be easy by any means.”

“The Specters are afraid of the knife?”

“Very much so.”

“Why do they attack only grownups?”

“You don’t need to know that now. It doesn’t matter. Lyra,” Sir Charles said, turning to her, “tell me about your remarkable friend.”

He meant Pantalaimon. And as soon as he said it, Will realized that the snake he’d seen concealed in the man’s sleeve was a dæmon too, and that Sir Charles must come from Lyra’s world. He was asking about Pantalaimon to put them off the track: so he didn’t realize that Will had seen his own dæmon.

Lyra lifted Pantalaimon close to her breast, and he became a black rat, whipping his tail around and around her wrist and glaring at Sir Charles with red eyes.

“You weren’t supposed to see him,” she said. “He’s my dæmon. You think you en’t got dæmons in this world, but you have. Yours’d be a dung beetle.”

“If the Pharaohs of Egypt were content to be represented by a scarab, so am I,” he said. “Well, you’re from yet another world. How interesting. Is that where the alethiometer comes from, or did you steal it on your travels?”

“I was given it,” said Lyra furiously. “The Master of Jordan College in my Oxford gave it to me. It’s mine by right. And you wouldn’t know what to do with it, you stupid, stinky old man; you’d never read it in a hundred years. It’s just a toy to you. But I need it, and so does Will. We’ll get it back, don’t worry.”

“We’ll see,” said Sir Charles. “This is where I dropped you before. Shall we let you out here?”

“No,” said Will, because he could see a police car farther down the road. “You can’t come into Ci’gazze because of the Specters, so it doesn’t matter if you know where the window is. Take us farther up toward the ring road.”

“As you wish,” said Sir Charles, and the car moved on. “When, or if, you get the knife, call my number and Allan will come to pick you up.”

They said no more till the chauffeur drew the car to a halt. As they got out, Sir Charles lowered his window and said to Will, “By the way, if you can’t get the knife, don’t bother to return. Come to my house without it and I’ll call the police. I imagine they’ll be there at once when I tell them your real name. It is William Parry, isn’t it? Yes, I thought so. There’s a very good photo of you in today’s paper.”

And the car pulled away. Will was speechless.

Lyra was shaking his arm. “It’s all right,” she said, “he won’t tell anyone else. He would have done it already if he was going to. Come on.”

Ten minutes later they stood in the little square at the foot of the Tower of the Angels. Will had told her about the snake dæmon, and she had stopped still in the street, tormented again by that half-memory. Who was the old man? Where had she seen him? It was no good; the memory wouldn’t come clear.

“I didn’t want to tell
him,
” Lyra said quietly, “but I saw a man up there last night. He looked down when the kids were making all that noise . . . . ”

“What did he look like?”

“Young, with curly hair. Not old at all. But I saw him for only a moment, at the very top, over those battlements. I thought he might be . . . You remember Angelica and Paolo, and Paolo said they had an older brother, and he’d come into the city as well, and she made Paolo stop telling us, as if it was a secret? Well, I thought it might be him. He might be after this knife as well. And I reckon all the kids know about it. I think that’s the real reason why they come back in the first place.”

“Mmm,” he said, looking up. “Maybe.”

She remembered the children talking earlier that morning. No children would go in the tower, they’d said; there were scary things in there. And she remembered her own feeling of unease as she and Pantalaimon had looked through the open door before leaving the city. Maybe that was why they needed a grown man to go in there. Her dæmon was fluttering around her head now, moth-formed in the bright sunlight, whispering anxiously.

“Hush,” she whispered back, “there en’t any choice, Pan. It’s our fault. We got to make it right, and this is the only way.”

Will walked off to the right, following the wall of the tower. At the corner a narrow cobbled alley led between it and the next building, and Will went down there too, looking up, getting the measure of the place. Lyra followed. Will stopped under a window at the second-story level and said to Pantalaimon, “Can you fly up there? Can you look in?”

He became a sparrow at once and set off. He could only just reach it. Lyra gasped and gave a little cry when he was at the windowsill, and he perched there for a second or two before diving down again. She sighed and took deep breaths like someone rescued from drowning. Will frowned, puzzled.

“It’s hard,” she explained, “when your dæmon goes away from you. It hurts.”

“Sorry. Did you see anything?” he said.

“Stairs,” said Pantalaimon. “Stairs and dark rooms. There were swords hung on the wall, and spears and shields, like a museum. And I saw the young man. He was . . . dancing.”

“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.