The Golden Compass

Eighteen Fog And Ice

Lee Scoresby arranged some furs over Lyra. She curled up close to Roger and they lay together asleep as the balloon swept on toward the Pole. The aeronaut checked his instruments from time to time, chewed on the cigar he would never light with the inflammable hydrogen so close, and huddled deeper into his own furs.

«This little girl's pretty important, huh?» he said after several minutes.

«More than she will know,» Serafina Pekkala said.

«Does that mean there's gonna be much in the way of armed pursuit? You understand, I'm speaking as a practical man with a living to earn. I can't afford to get busted up or shot to pieces without some kind of compensation agreed to in advance. I ain't trying to lower the tone of this expedition, believe me, ma'am. But John Faa and the gyptians paid me a fee that's enough to cover my time and skill and the normal wear and tear on the balloon, and that's all. It didn't include acts-of-war insurance. And let me tell you, ma'am, when we land lorek Byrnison on Svalbard, that will count as an act of war.»

He spat a piece of smokeleaf delicately overboard.

«So I'd like to know what we can expect in the way of mayhem and ructions,» he finished.

«There may be fighting,» said Serafina Pekkala. «But you have fought before.»

«Sure, when I'm paid. But the fact is, I thought this was a straightforward transportation contract, and I charged according. And I'm a wondering now, after that little dust-up down there, I'm a wondering how far my transportation responsibility extends. Whether I'm bound to risk my life and my equipment in a war among the bears, for example. Or whether this little child has enemies on Svalbard as hot-tempered as the ones back at Bolvangar. I merely mention all this by way of making conversation.»

«Mr. Scoresby,» said the witch, «I wish I could answer your question. All I can say is that all of us, humans, witches, bears, are engaged in a war already, although not all of us know it. Whether you find danger on Svalbard or whether you fly off unharmed, you are a recruit, under arms, a soldier.»

«Well, that seems kinda precipitate. Seems to me a man should have a choice whether to take up arms or not.»

«We have no more choice in that than in whether or not to be born.»

«Oh, I like choice, though,» he said. «I like choosing the jobs I take and the places I go and the food I eat and the companions I sit and yarn with. Don't you wish for a choice once in a while ?»

Serafina Pekkala considered, and then said, «Perhaps we don't mean the same thing by choice, Mr. Scoresby. Witches own nothing, so we're not interested in preserving value or making profits, and as for the choice between one thing and another, when you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. We have different needs. You have to repair your balloon and keep it in good condition, and that takes time and trouble, I see that; but for us to fly, all we have to do is tear off a branch of cloud-pine; any will do, and there are plenty more. We don't feel cold, so we need no warm clothes. We have no means of exchange apart from mutual aid. If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is a war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor, as bears do, for instance. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us… inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?»

«Well, I'm kinda with you on that. Sticks and stones, I'll break yer bones, but names ain't worth a quarrel. But ma'am, you see my dilemma, I hope. I'm a simple aeronaut, and I'd like to end my days in comfort. Buy a little farm, a few head of cattle, some horses…Nothing grand, you notice. No palace or slaves or heaps of gold. Just the evening wind over the sage, and a ceegar, and a glass of bourbon whiskey. Now the trouble is, that costs money. So I do my flying in exchange for cash, and after every job I send some gold back to the Wells Fargo Bank, and when I've got enough, ma'am, I'm gonna sell this balloon and book me a passage on a steamer to Port Galveston, and I'll never leave the ground again.»

«There's another difference between us, Mr. Scoresby. A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves.»

«I see that, ma'am, and I envy you; but I ain't got your sources of satisfaction. Flying is just a job to me, and I'm just a technician. I might as well be adjusting valves in a gas engine or wiring up anbaric circuits. But I chose it, you see. It was my own free choice. Which is why I find this notion of a war I ain't been told nothing about kinda troubling.»

«lorek Byrnison's quarrel with his king is part of it too,» said the witch. «This child is destined to play a part in that.»

«You speak of destiny,» he said, «as if it was fixed. And I ain't sure I like that any more than a war I'm enlisted in without knowing about it. Where's my free will, if you please? And this child seems to me to have more free will than anyone I ever met. Are you telling me that she's just some kind of clockwork toy wound up and set going on a course she can't change?»

«We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not,» said the witch, «or die of despair. There is a curious prophecy about this child: she is destined to bring about the end of destiny. But she must do so without knowing what she is doing, as if it were her nature and not her destiny to do it. If she's told what she must do, it will all fail; death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life…»

They looked down at Lyra, whose sleeping face (what little of it they could see inside her hood) wore a stubborn little frown.

«I guess part of her knows that,» said the aeronaut. «Looks prepared for it, anyways. How about the little boy? You know she came all this way to save him from those fiends back there? They were playmates, back in Oxford or somewhere. Did you know that?»

«Yes, I did know that. Lyra is carrying something of immense value, and it seems that the fates are using her as a messenger to take it to her father. So she came all this way to find her friend, not knowing that her friend was brought to the North by the fates, in order that she might follow and bring something to her father.»

«That's how you read it, huh?»

For the first time the witch seemed unsure.

«That is how it seems….But we can't read the darkness, Mr. Scoresby. It is more than possible that I might be wrong.»

«And what brought you into all this, if I can ask?»

«Whatever they were doing at Bolvangar, we felt it was wrong with all our hearts. Lyra is their enemy; so we are her friends. We don't see more clearly than that. But also there is my clan's friendship for the gyptian people, which goes back to the time when Farder Coram saved my life. We are doing this at their bidding. And they have ties of obligation with Lord Asriel.»

«I see. So you're towing the balloon to Svalbard for the gyptians' sake. And does that friendship extend to towing us back again? Or will I have to wait for a kindly wind, and depend on the indulgence of the bears in the meantime? Once again, ma'am, I'm asking merely in a spirit of friendly enquiry.»

«If we can help you back to Trollesund, Mr. Scoresby, we shall do so. But we don't know what we shall meet on Svalbard. The bears' new king has made many changes; the old ways are out of favor; it might be a difficult landing. And I don't know how Lyra will find her way to her father. Nor do I know what lorek Byrnison has it in mind to do, except that his fate is involved with hers.»

«I don't know either, ma'am. I think he's attached himself to the little girl as a kind of protector. She helped him get his armor back, you see. Who knows what bears feel? But if a bear ever loved a human being, he loves her. As for landing on Svalbard, it's never been easy. Still, if I can call on you for a tug in the right direction, I'll feel kinda easier in my mind; and if there's anything I can do for you in return, you only have to say. But just so as I know, would you mind telling me whose side I'm on in this invisible war?»

«We are both on Lyra's side.»

«Oh, no doubt about that.»

They flew on. Because of the clouds below there was no way of telling how fast they were going. Normally, of course, a balloon remained still with respect to the wind, floating at whatever speed the air itself was moving; but now, pulled by the witches, the balloon was moving through the air instead of with it, and resisting the movement, too, because the unwieldy gas bag had none of the streamlined smoothness of a zeppelin. As a result, the basket swung this way and that, rocking and bumping much more than on a normal flight.

Lee Scoresby wasn't concerned for his comfort so much as for his instruments, and he spent some time making sure they were securely lashed to the main struts. According to the altimeter, they were nearly ten thousand feet up. The temperature was minus 20 degrees. He had been colder than this, but not much, and he didn't want to get any colder now; so he unrolled the canvas sheet he used as an emergency bivouac, and spread it in front of the sleeping children to keep off the wind, before lying down back to back with his old comrade in arms, lorek Byrnison, and falling asleep.

When Lyra woke up, the moon was high in the sky, and everything in sight was silver-plated, from the roiling surface of the clouds below to the frost spears and icicles on the rigging of the balloon.

Roger was sleeping, and so were Lee Scoresby and the bear. Beside the basket, however, the witch queen was flying steadily.

«How far are we from Svalbard?» Lyra said.

«If we meet no winds, we shall be over Svalbard in twelve hours or so.»

«Where are we going to land?»

«It depends on the weather. We'll try to avoid the cliffs, though. There are creatures living there who prey on anything that moves. If we can, we'll set you down in the interior, away from lofur Raknison's palace.»

«What's going to happen when I find Lord Asriel? Will he want to come back to Oxford, or what? I don't know if I ought to tell him I know he's my father, neither. He might want to pretend he's still my uncle. I don't hardly know him at all.»

«He won't want to go back to Oxford, Lyra. It seems that there is something to be done in another world, and Lord Asriel is the only one who can bridge the gulf between that world and this. But he needs something to help him.»

«The alethiometer!» Lyra said. «The Master of Jordan gave it to me and I thought there was something he wanted to say about Lord Asriel, except he never had the chance. I knew he didn't really want to poison him. Is he going to read it and see how to make the bridge? I bet I could help him. I can probably read it as good as anyone now.»

«I don't know,» said Serafina Pekkala. «How he'll do it, and what his task will be, we can't tell. There are powers who speak to us, and there are powers above them; and there are secrets even from the most high.»

«The alethiometer would tell me! I could read it now….»

But it was too cold; she would never have managed to hold it. She bundled herself up and pulled the hood tight against the chill of the wind, leaving only a slit to look through. Far ahead, and a little below, the long rope extended from the suspension ring of the balloon, pulled by six or seven witches sitting on their cloud-pine branches. The stars shone as bright and cold and hard as diamonds.

«Why en't you cold, Serafina Pekkala?»

«We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the Aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that.» «Could I feel them?»

«No. You would die if you took your furs off. Stay wrapped up.»

«How long do witches live, Serafina Pekkala? Farder Coram says hundreds of years. But you don't look old at all.»

«I am three hundred years or more. Our oldest witch mother is nearly a thousand. One day, Yambe-Akka will come for her. One day she'll come for me. She is the goddess of the dead. She comes to you smiling and kindly, and you know it is time to die.»

«Are there men witches? Or only women?»

«There are men who serve us, like the consul at Trollesund. And there are men we take for lovers or husbands. You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us.»

«Did you love Farder Coram?»

«Yes. Does he know that?»

«I don't know, but I know he loves you.»

«When he rescued me, he was young and strong and full of pride and beauty. I loved him at once. I would have changed my nature, I would have forsaken the star-tingle and the music of the Aurora; I would never have flown again—I would have given all that up in a moment, without a thought, to be a gyptian boat wife and cook for him and share his bed and bear his children. But you cannot change what you are, only what you do. I am a witch. He is a human. I stayed with him for long enough to bear him a child….»

«He never said! Was it a girl? A witch?»

«No. A boy, and he died in the great epidemic of forty years ago, the sickness that came out of the East. Poor little child; he flickered into life and out of it like a mayfly. And it tore pieces out of my heart, as it always does. It broke Coram's. And then the call came for me to return to my own people, because Yambe-Akka had taken my mother, and I was clan queen. So I left, as I had to.»

«Did you never see Farder Coram again?»

«Never. I heard of his deeds; I heard how he was wounded by the Skraelings, with a poisoned arrow, and I sent herbs and spells to help him recover, but I wasn't strong enough to see him. I heard how broken he was after that, and how his wisdom grew, how much he studied and read, and I was proud of him and his goodness. But I stayed away, for they were dangerous times for my clan, and witch wars were threatening, and besides, I thought he would forget me and find a human wife….»

«He never would,» said Lyra stoutly. «You oughter go and see him. He still loves you, I know he does.»

«But he would be ashamed of his own age, and I wouldn't want to make him feel that.»

«Perhaps he would. But you ought to send a message to him, at least. That's what I think.»

Serafina Pekkala said nothing for a long time. Pantalaimon became a tern and flew to her branch for a second, to acknowledge that perhaps they had been insolent.

Then Lyra said, «Why do people have daemons, Serafina Pekkala?»

«Everyone asks that, and no one knows the answer. As long as there have been human beings, they have had daemons. It's what makes us different from animals.»

«Yeah! We're different from them all right….Like bears. They're strange, en't they, bears? You think they're like a person, and then suddenly they do something so strange or ferocious you think you'll never understand them….But you know what lorek said to me, he said that his armor for him was like what a daemon is for a person. It's his soul, he said. But that's where they're different again, because he made this armor his-self. They took his first armor away when they sent him into exile, and he found some sky iron and made some new armor, like making a new soul. We can't make our daemons. Then the people at Trollesund, they got him drunk on spirits and stole it away, and I found out where it was and he got it back….But what I wonder is, why's he coming to Svalbard? They'll fight him. They might kill him….I love lorek. I love him so much I wish he wasn't coming.»

«Has he told you who he is?»

«Only his name. And it was the consul at Trollesund who told us that.»

«He is highborn. He is a prince. In fact, if he had not committed a great crime, he would be the king of the bears by now.»

«He told me their king was called lofur Raknison.»

«lofur Raknison became king when lorek Byrnison was exiled. lofur is a prince, of course, or he wouldn't be allowed to rule; but he is clever in a human way; he makes alliances and treaties; he lives not as bears do, in ice forts, but in a new-built palace; he talks of exchanging ambassadors with human nations and developing the fire mines with the help of human engineers….He is very skillful and subtle. Some say that he provoked lorek into the deed for which he was exiled, and others say that even if he didn't, he encourages them to think he did, because it adds to his reputation for craft and subtlety.»

«What did lorek do? See, one reason I love lorek, it's because of my father doing what he did and being punished. Seems to me they're like each other. lorek told me he'd killed another bear, but he never said how it came about.»

«The fight was over a she-bear. The male whom lorek killed would not display the usual signals of surrender when it was clear that lorek was stronger. For all their pride, bears never fail to recognize superior force in another bear and surrender to it, but for some reason this bear didn't do it. Some say that lofur Raknison worked on his mind, or gave him confusing herbs to eat. At any rate, the young bear persisted, and lorek Byrnison allowed his temper to master him. The case was not hard to judge; he should have wounded, not killed.»

«So otherwise he'd be king,» Lyra said. «And I heard something about lofur Raknison from the Palmerian Professor at Jordan, 'cause he'd been to the North and met him. He said… I wish I could remember what it was….I think he'd tricked his way on to the throne or something….But you know, lorek said to me once that bears couldn't be tricked, and showed me that I couldn't trick him. It sounds as if they was both tricked, him and the other bear. Maybe only bears can trick bears, maybe people can't. Except…The people at Trollesund, they tricked him, didn't they? When they got him drunk and stole his armor?»

«When bears act like people, perhaps they can be tricked,» said Serafina Pekkala. «When bears act like bears, perhaps they can't. No bear would normally drink spirits. lorek Byrnison drank to forget the shame of exile, and it was only that which let the Trollesund people trick him.»

«Ah, yes,» said Lyra, nodding. She was satisfied with that idea. She admired lorek almost without limit, and she was glad to find confirmation of his nobility. «That's clever of you,» she said. «I wouldn't have known that if you hadn't told me. I think you're probably cleverer than Mrs. Coulter.»

They flew on. Lyra chewed some of the seal meat she found in her pocket.

«Serafina Pekkala,» she said after some time, «what's Dust? 'Cause it seems to me that all this trouble's about Dust, only no one's told me what it is.»

«I don't know,» Serafina Pekkala told her. «Witches have never worried about Dust. All I can tell you is that where there are priests, there is fear of Dust. Mrs. Coulter is not a priest, of course, but she is a powerful agent of the Magisterium, and it was she who set up the Oblation Board and persuaded the Church to pay for Bolvangar, because of her interest in Dust. We can't understand her feelings about it. But there are many things we have never understood. We see the Tartars making holes in their skulls, and we can only wonder at the strangeness of it. So Dust may be strange, and we wonder at it, but we don't fret and tear things apart to examine it. Leave that to the Church.»

«The Church?» said Lyra. Something had come back to her: she remembered talking with Pantalaimon, in the fens, about what it might be that was moving the needle of the alethiometer, and they had thought of the photomill on the high altar at Gabriel College, and how elementary particles pushed the little vanes around. The Intercessor there was clear about the link between elementary particles and religion. «Could be,» she said, nodding. «Most Church things, they keep secret, after all. But most Church things are old, and Dust en't old, as far as I know. I wonder if Lord Asriel might tell me….»

She yawned.

«I better lie down,» she said to Serafina Pekkala, «else I'll probably freeze. I been cold down on the ground, but I never been this cold. I think I might die if I get any colder.»

«Then lie down and wrap yourself in the furs.»

«Yeah, I will. If I was going to die, I'd rather die up here than down there, any day. I thought when they put us under that blade thing, I thought that was it….We both did. Oh, that was cruel. But we'll lie down now. Wake us up when we get there,» she said, and got down on the pile of furs, clumsy and aching in every part of her with the profound intensity of the cold, and lay as close as she could to the sleeping Roger.

And so the four travelers sailed on, sleeping in the ice-encrusted balloon, toward the rocks and glaciers, the fire mines and the ice forts of Svalbard.

Serafina Pekkala called to the aeronaut, and he woke at once, groggy with cold, but aware from the movement of the basket that something was wrong. It was swinging wildly as strong winds buffeted the gas bag, and the witches pulling the rope were barely managing to hold it. If they let go, the balloon would be swept off course at once, and to judge by his glance at the compass, would be swept toward Nova Zembla at nearly a hundred miles an hour.

«Where are we?» Lyra heard him call. She was half-waking herself, uneasy because of the motion, and so cold that every part of her body was numb.

She couldn't hear the witch's reply, but through her half-closed hood she saw, in the light of an anbaric lantern, Lee Scoresby hold on to a strut and pull at a rope leading up into the gas bag itself. He gave a sharp tug as if against some obstruction, and looked up into the buffeting dark before looping the rope around a cleat on the suspension ring.

«I'm letting out some gas!» he shouted to Serafina Pekkala. «We'll go down. We're way too high.»

The witch called something in return, but again Lyra couldn't hear it. Roger was waking too; the creaking of the basket was enough to wake the deepest sleeper, never mind the rocking and bumping. Roger's daemon and Pantalaimon clung together like marmosets, and Lyra concentrated on lying still and not leaping up in fear.

'«S all right,» Roger said, sounding much more cheerful than she was. «Soon's we get down we can make a fire and get warm. I got some matches in me pocket. I pinched 'em out the kitchen at Bolvangar.»

The balloon was certainly descending, because they were enveloped a second later in thick freezing cloud. Scraps and wisps of it flew through the basket, and then everything was obscured, all at once. It was like the thickest fog Lyra had ever known. After a moment or two there came another cry from Serafina Pekkala, and the aeronaut unlooped the rope from the cleat and let go. It sprang upward through his hands, and even over the creak and the buffeting and the howl of wind through the rigging Lyra heard or felt a mighty thump from somewhere far above.

Lee Scoresby saw her wide eyes.

«That's the gas valve!» he shouted. «It works on a spring to hold the gas in. When I pull it down, some gas escapes outta the top, and we lose buoyancy and go down.»

«Are we nearly—»

She didn't finish, because something hideous happened. A creature half the size of a man, with leathery wings and hooked claws, was crawling over the side of the basket toward Lee Scoresby. It had a flat head, with bulging eyes and a wide frog mouth, and from it came wafts of abominable stink. Lyra had no time to scream, even, before lorek Byrnison reached up and cuffed it away. It fell out of the basket and vanished with a shriek.

«Cliff-ghast,» said lorek briefly.

The next moment Serafina Pekkala appeared, and clung to the side of the basket, speaking urgently.

«The cliff-ghasts are attacking. We'll bring the balloon to the ground, and then we must defend ourselves. They're—»

But Lyra didn't hear the rest of what she said, because there was a rending, ripping sound, and everything tilted sideways. Then a terrific blow hurled the three humans against the side of the balloon where lorek Byrnison's armor was stacked, lorek put out a great paw to hold them in, because the basket was jolting so violently. Serafina Pekkala had vanished. The noise was appalling: over every other sound there came the shrieking of the cliff-ghasts, and Lyra saw them hurtling past, and smelled their foul stench.

Then there came another jerk, so sudden that it threw them all to the floor again, and the basket began to sink with frightening speed, spinning all the while. It felt as if they had torn loose from the balloon, and were dropping unchecked by anything; and then came another series of jerks and crashes, the basket being tossed rapidly from side to side as if they were bouncing between rock walls.

The last thing Lyra saw was Lee Scoresby firing his long-barreled pistol directly in the face of a cliff-ghast; and then she shut her eyes tight, and clung to lorek Byrnison's fur with passionate fear. Howls, shrieks, the lash and whistle of the wind, the creak of the basket like a tormented animal, all filled the wild air with hideous noise.

Then came the biggest jolt of all, and she found herself hurled out altogether. Her grip was torn loose, and all the breath was knocked out of her lungs as she landed in such a tangle that she couldn't tell which way was up; and her face in the tight-pulled hood was full of powder, dry, cold, crystals—

It was snow; she had landed in a snowdrift. She was so battered that she could hardly think. She lay quite still for several seconds before feebly spitting out the snow in her mouth, and then she blew just as feebly until there was a little space to breathe in.

Nothing seemed to be hurting in particular; she just felt utterly breathless. Cautiously she tried to move hands, feet, arms, legs, and to raise her head.

She could see very little, because her hood was still filled with snow. With an effort, as if her hands weighed a ton each, she brushed it off and peered out. She saw a world of gray, of pale grays and dark grays and blacks, where fog drifts wandered like wraiths.

The only sounds she could hear were the distant cries of the cliff-ghasts, high above, and the crash of waves on rocks, some way off.

«lorek!» she cried. Her voice was faint and shaky, and she tried again, but no one answered. «Roger!» she called, with the same result.

She might have been alone in the world, but of course she never was, and Pantalaimon crept out of her anorak as a mouse to keep her company.

«I've checked the alethiometer,» he said, «and it's all right. Nothing's broken.»

«We're lost, Pan!» she said. «Did you see those cliff-ghasts? And Mr. Scoresby shooting 'em? God help us if they come down here….»

«We better try and find the basket,» he said, «maybe.»

«We better not call out,» she said. «I did just now, but maybe I better not in case they hear us. I wish I knew where we were.»

«We might not like it if we did,» he pointed out. «We might be at the bottom of a cliff with no way up, and the cliff-ghasts at the top to see us when the fog clears.»

She felt around, once she had rested a few more minutes, and found that she had landed in a gap between two ice-covered rocks. Freezing fog covered everything; to one side there was the crash of waves about fifty yards off, by the sound of it, and from high above there still came the shrieking of the cliff-ghasts, though that seemed to be abating a little. She could see no more than two or three yards in the murk, and even Pantalaimon's owl eyes were helpless.

She made her way painfully, slipping and sliding on the rough rocks, away from the waves and up the beach a little, and found nothing but rock and snow, and no sign of the balloon or any of the occupants.

«They can't have all just vanished,» she whispered.

Pantalaimon prowled, cat-formed, a little farther afield, and came across four heavy sandbags broken open, with the scattered sand already freezing hard.

«Ballast,» Lyra said. «He must've slung 'em off to fly up again….»

She swallowed hard to subdue the lump in her throat, or the fear in her breast, or both.

«Oh, God, I'm frightened,» she said. «I hope they're safe.»

He came to her arms and then, mouse-formed, crept into her hood where he couldn't be seen. She heard a noise, something scraping on rock, and turned to see what it was.

«lorek!»

But she choked the word back unfinished, for it wasn't lorek Byrnison at all. It was a strange bear, clad in polished armor with the dew on it frozen into frost, and with a plume in his helmet.

He stood still, about six feet away, and she thought she really was finished.

The bear opened his mouth and roared. An echo came back from the cliffs and stirred more shrieking from far above. Out of the fog came another bear, and another. Lyra stood still, clenching her little human fists.

The bears didn't move until the first one said, «Your name?»

«Lyra.»

«Where have you come from?»

«The sky.»

«In a balloon?»

«Yes.»

«Come with us. You are a prisoner. Move, now. Quickly.»

Weary and scared, Lyra began to stumble over the harsh and slippery rocks, following the bear, wondering how she could talk her way out of this.

Nineteen Captivity

The bears took Lyra up a gully in the cliffs, where the fog lay even more thickly than on the shore. The cries of the cliff-ghasts and the crash of the waves grew fainter as they climbed, and presently the only sound was the ceaseless crying of seabirds. They clambered in silence over rocks and snowdrifts, and although Lyra peered wide-eyed into the enfolding grayness, and strained her ears for the sound of her friends, she might have been the only human on Svalbard; and lorek might have been dead.

The bear sergeant said nothing to her until they were on level ground. There they stopped. From the sound of the waves, Lyra judged them to have reached the top of the cliffs, and she dared not run away in case she fell over the edge.

«Look up,» said the bear, as a waft of breeze moved aside the heavy curtain of the fog.

There was little daylight in any case, but Lyra did look, and found herself standing in front of a vast building of stone. It was as tall at least as the highest part of Jordan College, but much more massive, and carved all over with representations of warfare, showing bears victorious and Skraelings surrendering, showing Tartars chained and slaving in the fire mines, showing zeppelins flying from all parts of the world bearing gifts and tributes to the king of the bears, lofur Raknison.

At least, that was what the bear sergeant told her the carvings showed. She had to take his word for it, because every projection and ledge on the deeply sculpted facade was occu-pied by gannets and skuas, which cawed and shrieked and wheeled constantly around overhead, and whose droppings had coated every part of the building with thick smears of dirty white.

The bears seemed not to see the mess, however, and they led the way in through the huge arch, over the icy ground that was filthy with the spatter of the birds. There was a courtyard, and high steps, and gateways, and at every point bears in armor challenged the incomers and were given a password. Their armor was polished and gleaming, and they all wore plumes in their helmets. Lyra couldn't help comparing every bear she saw with lorek Byrnison, and always to his advantage; he was more powerful, more graceful, and his armor was real armor, rust-colored, bloodstained, dented with combat, not elegant, enameled, and decorative like most of what she saw around her now.

As they went further in, the temperature rose, and so did something else. The smell in lofur's palace was repulsive: rancid seal fat, dung, blood, refuse of every sort. Lyra pushed back her hood to be cooler, but she couldn't help wrinkling her nose. She hoped bears couldn't read human expressions. There were iron brackets every few yards, holding blubber lamps, and in their flaring shadows it wasn't always easy to see where she was treading, either.

Finally they stopped outside a heavy door of iron. A guard bear pulled back a massive bolt, and the sergeant suddenly swung his paw at Lyra, knocking her head over heels through the doorway. Before she could scramble up, she heard the door being bolted behind her.

It was profoundly dark, but Pantalaimon became a firefly, and shed a tiny glow around them. They were in a narrow cell where the walls dripped with damp, and there was one stone bench for furniture. In the farthest corner there was a heap of rags she took for bedding, and that was all she could see.

Lyra sat down, with Pantalaimon on her shoulder, and felt in her clothes for the alethiometer.

«It's certainly had a lot of banging about, Pan,» she whispered. «I hope it still works.»

Pantalaimon flew down to her wrist, and sat there glowing while Lyra composed her mind. With a part of her, she found it remarkable that she could sit here in terrible danger and yet sink into the calm she needed to read the alethiometer; and yet it was so much a part of her now that the most complicated questions sorted themselves out into their constituent symbols as naturally as her muscles moved her limbs: she hardly had to think about them.

She turned the hands and thought the question: «Where is lorek?»

The answer came at once: «A day's journey away, carried there by the balloon after your crash; but hurrying this way.»

«And Roger?»

«With lorek.»

«What will lorek do?»

«He intends to break into the palace and rescue you, in the face of all the difficulties.»

She put the alethiometer away, even more anxious than before.

«They won't let him, will they?» she said to Pantalaimon. «There's too many of 'em. I wish I was a witch, Pan, then you could go off and find him and take messages and all, and we could make a proper plan….»

Then she had the fright of her life.

A man's voice spoke in the darkness a few feet away, and said, «Who are you?»

She leaped up with a cry of alarm. Pantalaimon became a bat at once, shrieking, and flew around her head as she backed against the wall.

«Eh? Eh?» said the man again. «Who is that? Speak up! Speak up!»

«Be a firefly again, Pan,» she said shakily. «But don't go too close.»

The little wavering point of light danced through the air and fluttered around the head of the speaker. And it hadn't been a heap of rags after all; it was a gray-bearded man, chained to the wall, whose eyes glittered in Pantalaimon's luminance, and whose tattered hair hung over his shoulders. His daemon, a weary-looking serpent, lay in his lap, flicking out her tongue occasionally as Pantalaimon flew near.

«What's your name?» she said.

«Jotham Santelia,» he replied. «I am the Regius Professor of Cosmology at the University of Gloucester. Who are you?»

«Lyra Belacqua. What have they locked you up for?»

«Malice and jealousy…Where do you come from? Eh?»

«From Jordan College,» she said.

«What? Oxford?»

«Yes.»

«Is that scoundrel Trelawney still there? Eh?»

«The Palmerian Professor? Yes,» she said.

«Is he, by God! Eh? They should have forced his resignation long ago. Duplicitous plagiarist! Coxcomb!»

Lyra made a neutral sound.

«Has he published his paper on gamma-ray photons yet?» the Professor said, thrusting his face up toward Lyra's.

She moved back.

«I don't know,» she said, and then, making it up out of pure habit, «no,» she went on. «I remember now. He said he still needed to check some figures. And…He said he was going to write about Dust as well. That's it.»

«Scoundrel! Thief! Blackguard! Rogue!» shouted the old man, and he shook so violently that Lyra was afraid he'd have a fit. His daemon slithered lethargically off his lap as the Professor beat his fists against his shanks. Drops of saliva flew out of his mouth.

«Yeah,» said Lyra, «I always thought he was a thief. And a rogue and all that.»

If it was unlikely for a scruffy little girl to turn up in his cell knowing the very man who figured in his obsessions, the Regius Professor didn't notice. He was mad, and no wonder, poor old man; but he might have some scraps of information that Lyra could use.

She sat carefully near him, not near enough for him to touch, but near enough for Pantalaimon's tiny light to show him clearly.

«One thing Professor Trelawney used to boast about,» she said, «was how well he knew the king of the bears—»

«Boast! Eh? Eh? I should say he boasts! He's nothing but a popinjay! And a pirate! Not a scrap of original research to his name! Everything filched from better men!»

«Yeah, that's right,» said Lyra earnestly. «And when he does do something of his own, he gets it wrong.»

«Yes! Yes! Absolutely! No talent, no imagination, a fraud from top to bottom!»

«I mean, for example,» said Lyra, «I bet you know more about the bears than he does, for a start.»

«Bears,» said the old man, «ha! I could write a treatise on them! That's why they shut me away, you know.»

«Why's that?»

«I know too much about them, and they daren't kill me. They daren't do it, much as they'd like to. I know, you see. I have friends. Yes! Powerful friends.»

«Yeah,» said Lyra. «And I bet you'd be a wonderful teacher,» she went on. «Being as you got so much knowledge and experience.»

Even in the depths of his madness a little common sense still flickered, and he looked at her sharply, almost as if he suspected her of sarcasm. But she had been dealing with suspicious and cranky Scholars all her life, and she gazed back with such bland admiration that he was soothed.

«Teacher,» he said, «teacher…Yes, I could teach. Give me the right pupil, and I will light a fire in his mind!»

«Because your knowledge ought not to just vanish,» Lyra said encouragingly. «It ought to be passed on so people remember you.»

«Yes,» he said, nodding seriously. «That's very perceptive of you, child. What is your name?»

«Lyra,» she told him again. «Could you teach me about the bears?»

«The bears…» he said doubtfully.

«I'd really like to know about cosmology and Dust and all, but I'm not clever enough for that. You need really clever students for that. But I could learn about the bears. You could teach me about them all right. And we could sort of practice on that and work up to Dust, maybe.»

He nodded again.

«Yes,» he said, «yes, I believe you're right. There is a correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm! The stars are alive, child. Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purposes abroad! The universe is full of intentions, you know. Everything happens for a purpose. Your purpose is to remind me of that. Good, good—in my despair I had forgotten. Good! Excellent, my child!»

«So, have you seen the king? lofur Raknison?»

«Yes. Oh, yes. I came here at his invitation, you know. He intended to set up a university. He was going to make me Vice-Chancellor. That would be one in the eye for the Royal Arctic Institute, eh! Eh? And that scoundrel Trelawney! Ha!»

«What happened?»

«I was betrayed by lesser men. Trelawney among them, of course. He was here, you know. On Svalbard. Spread lies and calumny about my qualifications. Calumny! Slander! Who was it discovered the final proof of the Barnard-Stokes hypothesis, eh? Eh? Yes, Santelia, that's who. Trelawney couldn't take it. Lied through his teeth. lofur Raknison had me thrown in here. I'll be out one day, you'll see. I'll be Vice-Chancellor, oh yes. Let Trelawney come to me then begging for mercy! Let the Publications Committee of the Royal Arctic Institute spurn my contributions then! Ha! I'll expose them all! «

«I expect lorek Byrnison will believe you, when he comes back,» Lyra said.

«lorek Byrnison? No good waiting for that. He'll never come back.»

«He's on his way now.»

«Then they'll kill him. He's not a bear, you see. He's an outcast. Like me. Degraded, you see. Not entitled to any of the privileges of a bear.»

«Supposing lorek Byrnison did come back, though,» Lyra said. «Supposing he challenged lofur Raknison to a fight…»

«Oh, they wouldn't allow it,» said the Professor decisively, «lofur would never lower himself to acknowledge lorek Byrnison's right to fight him. Hasn't got a right. lorek might as well be a seal now, or a walrus, not a bear. Or worse: Tartar or Skraeling. They wouldn't fight him honorably like a bear; they'd kill him with fire hurlers before he got near. Not a hope. No mercy.»

«Oh,» said Lyra, with a heavy despair in her breast. «And what about the bears' other prisoners? Do you know where they keep them?»

«Other prisoners?»

«Like.-.Lord Asriel.»

Suddenly the Professor's manner changed altogether. He cringed and shrank back against the wall, and shook his head warningly.

«Shh! Quiet! They'll hear you!» he whispered.

«Why mustn't we mention Lord Asriel?»

«Forbidden! Very dangerous! lofur Raknison will not allow him to be mentioned!»

«Why?» Lyra said, coming closer and whispering herself so as not to alarm him.

«Keeping Lord Asriel prisoner is a special charge laid on lofur by the Oblation Board,» the old man whispered back. «Mrs. Coulter herself came here to see lofur and offered him all kinds of rewards to keep Lord Asriel out of the way. I know about it, you see, because at the time I was in lofur's favor myself. I met Mrs. Coulter! Yes. Had a long conversation with her. lofur was besotted with her. Couldn't stop talking about her. Would do anything for her. If she wants Lord Asriel kept a hundred miles away, that's what will happen. Anything for Mrs. Coulter, anything. He's going to name his capital city after her, did you know that?»

«So he wouldn't let anyone go and see Lord Asriel?»

«No! Never! But he's afraid of Lord Asriel too, you know, lofur's playing a difficult game. But he's clever. He's done what they both want. He's kept Lord Asriel isolated, to please Mrs. Coulter; and he's let Lord Asriel have all the equipment he wants, to please him. Can't last, this equilibrium. Unstable. Pleasing both sides. Eh? The wave function of this situation is going to collapse quite soon. I have it on good authority.»

«Really?» said Lyra, her mind elsewhere, furiously thinking about what he'd just said.

«Yes. My daemon's tongue can taste probability, you know.»

«Yeah. Mine too. When do they feed us, Professor?»

«Feed us?»

«They must put some food in sometime, else we'd starve. And there's bones on the floor. I expect they're seal bones, aren't they?»

«Seal…I don't know. It might be.»

Lyra got up and felt her way to the door. There was no handle, naturally, and no keyhole, and it fitted so closely at top and bottom that no light showed. She pressed her ear to it, but heard nothing. Behind her the old man was muttering to himself. She heard his chain rattle as he turned over wearily and lay the other way, and presently he began to snore.

She felt her way back to the bench. Pantalaimon, tired of putting out light, had become a bat, which was all very well for him; he fluttered around squeaking quietly while Lyra sat and chewed a fingernail.

Quite suddenly, with no warning at all, she remembered what it was that she'd heard the Palmerian Professor saying in the Retiring Room all that time ago. Something had been nagging at her ever since lorek Byrnison had first mentioned lofur's name, and now it came back: what lofur Raknison wanted more than anything else, Professor Trelawney had said, was a daemon.

Of course, she hadn't understood what he meant; he'd spoken of panserbj0rne instead of using the English word, so she didn't know he was talking about bears, and she had no idea that lofur Raknison wasn't a man. And a man would have had a daemon anyway, so it hadn't made sense.

But now it was plain. Everything she'd heard about the bear-king added up: the mighty lofur Raknison wanted nothing more than to be a human being, with a daemon of his own.

And as she thought that, a plan came to her: a way of making lofur Raknison do what he would normally never have done; a way of restoring lorek Byrnison to his rightful throne; a way, finally, of getting to the place where they had put Lord Asriel, and taking him the alethiometer.

The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

She was nearly asleep when the bolts clattered and the door opened. Light spilled in, and she was on her feet at once, with Pantalaimon hidden swiftly in her pocket.

As soon as the bear guard bent his head to lift the haunch of seal meat and throw it in, she was at his side, saying:

«Take me to lofur Raknison. You'll be in trouble if you don't. It's very urgent.»

He dropped the meat from his jaws and looked up. It wasn't easy to read bears' expressions, but he looked angry.

«It's about lorek Byrnison,» she said quickly. «I know something about him, and the king needs to know.»

«Tell me what it is, and I'll pass the message on,» said the bear.

«That wouldn't be right, not for someone else to know before the king does,» she said. «I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but you see, it's the rule that the king has to know things first.»

Perhaps he was slow-witted. At any rate, he paused, and then threw the meat into the cell before saying, «Very well. You come with me.»

He led her out into the open air, for which she was grateful. The fog had lifted and there were stars glittering above the high-walled courtyard. The guard conferred with another bear, who came to speak to her.

«You cannot see lofur Raknison when you please,» he said. «You have to wait till he wants to see you.»

«But this is urgent, what I've got to tell him,» she said. «It's about lorek Byrnison. I'm sure His Majesty would want to know it, but all the same I can't tell it to anyone else, don't you see? It wouldn't be polite. He'd be ever so cross if he knew we hadn't been polite.»

That seemed to carry some weight, or else to mystify the bear sufficiently to make him pause. Lyra was sure her interpretation of things was right: lofur Raknison was introducing so many new ways that none of the bears was certain yet how to behave, and she could exploit this uncertainty in order to get to lofur.

So that bear retreated to consult the bear above him, and before long Lyra was ushered inside the palace again, but into the state quarters this time. It was no cleaner here, and in fact the air was even harder to breathe than in the cell, because all the natural stinks had been overlaid by a heavy layer of cloying perfume. She was made to wait in a corridor, then in an anteroom, then outside a large door, while bears discussed and argued and scurried back and forth, and she had time to look around at the preposterous decoration: the walls were rich with gilt plasterwork, some of which was already peeling off or crumbling with damp, and the florid carpets were trodden with filth.

Finally the large door was opened from the inside. A blaze of light from half a dozen chandeliers, a crimson carpet, and more of that thick perfume hanging in the air; and the faces of a dozen or more bears, all gazing at her, none in armor but each with some kind of decoration: a golden necklace, a headdress of purple feathers, a crimson sash. Curiously, the room was also occupied by birds; terns and skuas perched on the plaster cornice, and swooped low to snatch at bits of fish that had fallen out of one another's nests in the chandeliers.

And on a dais at the far end of the room, a mighty throne reared up high. It was made of granite for strength and mas-siveness, but like so many other things in lofur's palace, it was decorated with overelaborate swags and festoons of gilt that looked like tinsel on a mountainside.

Sitting on the throne was the biggest bear she had ever seen. lofur Raknison was even taller and bulkier than lorek, and his face was much more mobile and expressive, with a kind of humanness in it which she had never seen in lorek's. When lofur looked at her, she seemed to see a man looking out of his eyes, the sort of man she had met at Mrs. Coulter's, a subtle politician used to power. He was wearing a heavy gold chain around his neck, with a gaudy jewel hanging from it, and his claws—a good six inches long—were each covered in gold leaf. The effect was one of enormous strength and energy and craft; he was quite big enough to carry the absurd overdecoration; on him it didn't look preposterous, it looked barbaric and magnificent.

She quailed. Suddenly her idea seemed too feeble for words.

But she moved a little closer, because she had to, and then she saw that lofur was holding something on his knee, as a human might let a cat sit there—or a daemon.

It was a big stuffed doll, a manikin with a vacant stupid human face. It was dressed as Mrs. Coulter would dress, and it had a sort of rough resemblance to her. He was pretending he had a daemon. Then she knew she was safe.

She moved up close to the throne and bowed very low, with Pantalaimon keeping quiet and still in her pocket.

«Our greetings to you, great King,» she said quietly. «Or I mean my greetings, not his.»

«Not whose?» he said, and his voice was lighter than she had thought it would be, but full of expressive tones and subtleties. When he spoke, he waved a paw in front of his mouth to dislodge the flies that clustered there.

«lorek Byrnison's, Your Majesty,» she said. «I've got something very important and secret to tell you, and I think I ought to tell you in private, really.»

«Something about lorek Byrnison?»

She came close to him, stepping carefully over the bird-spattered floor, and brushed away the flies buzzing at her face.

«Something about daemons,» she said, so that only he could hear.

His expression changed. She couldn't read what it was saying, but there was no doubt that he was powerfully interested. Suddenly he lumbered forward off the throne, making her skip aside, and roared an order to the other bears. They all bowed their heads and backed out toward the door. The birds, which had risen in a flurry at his roar, squawked and swooped around overhead before settling again on their nests.

When the throne room was empty but for lofur Raknison and Lyra, he turned to her eagerly.

«Well?» he said. «Tell me who you are. What is this about daemons?»

«I am a daemon, Your Majesty,» she said.

He stopped still.

«Whose?» he said.

«lorek Byrnison's,» was her answer.

It was the most dangerous thing she had ever said. She could see quite clearly that only his astonishment prevented him from killing her at once. She went on:

«Please, Your Majesty, let me tell you all about it first before you harm me. I've come here at my own risk, as you can see, and there's nothing I've got that could hurt you. In fact, I want to help you, that's why I've come. lorek Byrnison was the first bear to get a daemon, but it should have been you. I would much rather be your daemon than his, that's why I came.»

«How?» he said, breathlessly. «How has a bear got a daemon? And why him? And how are you so far from him?» The flies left his mouth like tiny words. «That's easy. I can go far from him because I'm like a witch's daemon. You know how they can go hundreds of miles from their humans? It's like that. And as for how he got me, it was at Bolvangar. You've heard of Bolvangar, because Mrs. Coulter must have told you about it, but she probably didn't tell you everything they were doing there.» «Cutting…» he said.

«Yes, cutting, that's part of it, intercision. But they're doing all kinds of other things too, like making artificial daemons. And experimenting on animals. When lorek Byrnison heard about it, he offered himself for an experiment to see if they could make a daemon for him, and they did. It was me. My name is Lyra. Just like when people have daemons, they're animal-formed, so when a bear has a daemon, it'll be human. And I'm his daemon. I can see into his mind and know exactly what he's doing and where he is and—» «Where is he now?»

«On Svalbard. He's coming this way as fast as he can.» «Why? What does he want? He must be mad! We'll tear him to pieces!»

«He wants me. He's coming to get me back. But I don't want to be his daemon, lofur Raknison, I want to be yours. Because once they saw how powerful a bear was with a daemon, the people at Bolvangar decided not to do that experiment ever again. lorek Byrnison was going to be the only bear who ever had a daemon. And with me helping him, he could lead all the bears against you. That's what he's come to Svalbard for.»

The bear-king roared his anger. He roared so loudly that the crystal in the chandeliers tinkled, and every bird in the great room shrieked, and Lyra's ears rang.

But she was equal to it.

«That's why I love you best,» she said to lofur Raknison, «because you're passionate and strong as well as clever. And I just had to leave him and come and tell you, because I don't want him ruling the bears. It ought to be you. And there is a way of taking me away from him and making me your daemon, but you wouldn't know what it was unless I told you, and you might do the usual thing about fighting bears like him that've been outcast; I mean, not fight him properly, but kill him with fire hurlers or something. And if you did that, I'd just go out like a light and die with him.»

«But you—how can—»

«I can become your daemon,» she said, «but only if you defeat lorek Byrnison in single combat. Then his strength will flow into you, and my mind will flow into yours, and we'll be like one person, thinking each other's thoughts; and you can send me miles away to spy for you, or keep me here by your side, whichever you like. And I'd help you lead the bears to capture Bolvangar, if you like, and make them create more daemons for your favorite bears; or if you'd rather be the only bear with a daemon, we could destroy Bolvangar forever. We could do anything, lofur Raknison, you and me together!»

All the time she was holding Pantalaimon in her pocket with a trembling hand, and he was keeping as still as he could, in the smallest mouse form he had ever assumed.

lofur Raknison was pacing up and down with an air of explosive excitement.

«Single combat?» he was saying. «Me? I must fight lorek Byrnison? Impossible! He is outcast! How can that be? How can I fight him? Is that the only way?»

«It's the only way,» said Lyra, wishing it were not, because lofur Raknison seemed bigger and more fierce every minute. Dearly as she loved lorek, and strong as her faith was in him, she couldn't really believe that he would ever beat this giant among giant bears. But it was the only hope they had. Being mown down from a distance by fire hurlers was no hope at all. Suddenly lofur Raknison turned. «Prove it!» he said. «Prove that you are a daemon!» «All right,» she said. «I can do that, easy. I can find out anything that you know and no one else does, something that only a daemon would be able to find out.»

«Then tell me what was the first creature I killed.» «I'll have to go into a room by myself to do this,» she said. «When I'm your daemon, you'll be able to see how I do it, but until then it's got to be private.»

«There is an anteroom behind this one. Go into that, and come out when you know the answer.»

Lyra opened the door and found herself in a room lit by one torch, and empty but for a cabinet of mahogany containing some tarnished silver ornaments. She took out the alethiome-ter and asked: «Where is lorek now?»

«Four hours away, and hurrying ever faster.» «How can I tell him what I've done?» «You must trust him.»

She thought anxiously of how tired he would be. But then she reflected that she was not doing what the alethiometer had just told her to do: she wasn't trusting him.

She put that thought aside and asked the question lofur Raknison wanted. What was the first creature he had killed? The answer came: lofur's own father.

She asked further, and learned that lofur had been alone on the ice as a young bear, on his first hunting expedition, and had come across a solitary bear. They had quarreled and fought, and lofur had killed him. This in itself would have been a crime, but it was worse than simple murder, for lofur learned later that the other bear was his own father. Bears were brought up by their mothers, and seldom saw their fathers. Naturally lofur concealed the truth of what he had done; no one knew about it but lofur himself, and now Lyra knew as well.

She put the alethiometer away, and wondered how to tell him about it.

«Flatter him!» whispered Pantalaimon. «That's all he wants.»

So Lyra opened the door and found lofur Raknison waiting for her, with an expression of triumph, slyness, apprehension, and greed.

«Well?»

She knelt down in front of him and bowed her head to touch his left forepaw, the stronger, for bears were left-handed.

«I beg your pardon, lofur Raknison!» she said. «I didn't know you were so strong and great!»

«What's this? Answer my question!»

«The first creature you killed was your own father. I think you're a new god, lofur Raknison. That's what you must be. Only a god would have the strength to do that.»

«You know! You can see!»

«Yes, because I am a daemon, like I said.»

«Tell me one thing more. What did the Lady Coulter promise me when she was here?»

Once again Lyra went into the empty room and consulted the alethiometer before returning with the answer.

«She promised you that she'd get the Magisterium in Geneva to agree that you could be baptized as a Christian, even though you hadn't got a daemon then. Well, I'm afraid that she hasn't done that, lofur Raknison, and quite honestly I don't think they'd ever agree to that if you didn't have a daemon. I think she knew that, and she wasn't telling you the truth. But in any case when you've got me as your daemon, you could be baptized if you wanted to, because no one could argue then. You could demand it and they wouldn't be able to turn you down.»

«Yes…True. That's what she said. True, every word. And she has deceived me? I trusted her, and she deceived me?»

«Yes, she did. But she doesn't matter anymore. Excuse me, lofur Raknison, I hope you won't mind me telling you, but lorek Byrnison's only four hours away now, and maybe you better tell your guard bears not to attack him as they normally would. If you're going to fight him for me, he'll have to be allowed to come to the palace.»

«Yes…»

«And maybe when he comes I better pretend I still belong to him, and say I got lost or something. He won't know. I'll pretend. Are you going to tell the other bears about me being lorek's daemon and then belonging to you when you beat him?»

«I don't know….What should I do?»

«I don't think you better mention it yet. Once we're together, you and me, we can think what's best to do and decide then. What you need to do now is explain to all the other bears why you're going to let lorek fight you like a proper bear, even though he's an outcast. Because they won't understand, and we got to find a reason for that. I mean, they'll do what you tell them anyway, but if they see the reason for it, they'll admire you even more.»

«Yes. What should we tell them?»

«Tell them.. .tell them that to make your kingdom com-pletely secure, you've called lorek Byrnison here yourself to fight him, and the winner will rule over the bears forever. See, if you make it look like your idea that he's coming, and not his, they'll be really impressed. They'll think you're able to call him here from far away. They'll think you can do anything.»

«Yes…»

The great bear was helpless. Lyra found her power over him almost intoxicating, and if Pantalaimon hadn't nipped her hand sharply to remind her of the danger they were all in, she might have lost all her sense of proportion.

But she came to herself and stepped modestly back to watch and wait as the bears, under lofur's excited direction, prepared the combat ground for lorek Byrnison; and meanwhile lorek, knowing nothing about it, was hurrying ever closer toward what she wished she could tell him was a fight for his life.

Twenty Mortal Combat

Fights between bears were common, and the subject of much ritual. For a bear to kill another was rare, though, and when that happened it was usually by accident, or when one bear mistook the signals from another, as in the case of lorek Byrnison. Cases of straightforward murder, like lofur's killing of his own father, were rarer still.

But occasionally there came circumstances in which the only way of settling a dispute was a fight to the death. And for that, a whole ceremonial was prescribed.

As soon as lofur announced that lorek Byrnison was on his way, and a combat would take place, the combat ground was swept and smoothed, and armorers came up from the fire mines to check lofur's armor. Every rivet was examined, every link tested, and the plates were burnished with the finest sand. Just as much attention was paid to his claws. The gold leaf was rubbed off, and each separate six-inch hook was sharpened and filed to a deadly point. Lyra watched with a growing sickness in the pit of her stomach, for lorek Byrnison wouldn't be having this attention; he had been marching over the ice for nearly twenty-four hours already without rest or food; he might have been injured in the crash. And she had let him in for this fight without his knowledge. At one point, after lofur Raknison had tested the sharpness of his claws on a fresh-killed walrus, slicing its skin open like paper, and the power of his crashing blows on the walrus's skull (two blows, and it was cracked like an egg), Lyra had to make an excuse to lofur and go away by herself to weep with fear.

Even Pantalaimon, who could normally cheer her up, had little to say that was hopeful. All she could do was consult the alethiometer: he is an hour away, it told her, and again, she must trust him; and (this was harder to read) she even thought it was rebuking her for asking the same question twice.

By this time, word had spread among the bears, and every part of the combat ground was crowded. Bears of high rank had the best places, and there was a special enclosure for the she-bears, including, of course, lofur's wives. Lyra was profoundly curious about she-bears, because she knew so little about them, but this was no time to wander about asking questions. Instead she stayed close to lofur Raknison and watched the courtiers around him assert their rank over the common bears from outside, and tried to guess the meaning of the various plumes and badges and tokens they all seemed to wear. Some of the highest-ranking, she saw, carried little manikins like lofur's rag-doll daemon, trying to curry favor, perhaps, by imitating the fashion he'd begun. She was sardonically pleased to notice that when they saw that lofur had discarded his, they didn't know what to do with theirs. Should they throw them away? Were they out of favor now? How should they behave?

Because that was the prevailing mood in his court, she was beginning to see. They weren't sure what they were. They weren't like lorek Byrnison, pure and certain and absolute; there was a constant pall of uncertainty hanging over them, as they watched one another and watched lofur.

And they watched her, with open curiosity. She remained modestly close to lofur and said nothing, lowering her eyes whenever a bear looked at her.

The fog had lifted by this time, and the air was clear; and as chance would have it, the brief lifting of darkness toward noon coincided with the time Lyra thought lorek was going to arrive. As she stood shivering on a little rise of dense-packed snow at the edge of the combat ground, she looked up toward the faint lightness in the sky, and longed with all her heart to see a flight of ragged elegant black shapes descending to bear her away; or to see the Aurora's hidden city, where she would be able to walk safely along those broad boulevards in the sunlight; or to see Ma Costa's broad arms, to smell the friendly smells of flesh and cooking that enfolded you in her presence….

She found herself crying, with tears that froze almost as soon as they formed, and which she had to brush away painfully. She was so frightened. Bears, who didn't cry, couldn't understand what was happening to her; it was some human process, meaningless. And of course Pantalaimon couldn't comfort her as he normally would, though she kept her hand in her pocket firmly around his warm little mouse-form, and he nuzzled at her fingers.

Beside her, the smiths were making the final adjustments to lofur Raknison's armor. He reared like a great metal tower, shining in polished steel, the smooth plates inlaid with wires of gold; his helmet enclosed the upper part of his head in a glistening carapace of silver-gray, with deep eye slits; and the underside of his body was protected by a close-fitting sark of chain mail. It was when she saw this that Lyra realized that she had betrayed lorek Byrnison, for lorek had nothing like it. His armor protected only his back and sides. She looked at lofur Raknison, so sleek and powerful, and felt a deep sickness in her, like guilt and fear combined.

She said «Excuse me, Your Majesty, if you remember what I said to you before…»

Her shaking voice felt thin and weak in the air. lofur Raknison turned his mighty head, distracted from the target three bears were holding up in front for him to slash at with his perfect claws.

«Yes? Yes?»

«Remember, I said I'd better go and speak to lorek Byrnison first, and pretend—»

But before she could even finish her sentence, there was a roar from the bears on the watchtower. The others all knew what it meant and took it up with a triumphant excitement. They had seen lorek.

«Please?» Lyra said urgently. «I'll fool him, you'll see.»

«Yes. Yes. Go now. Go and encourage him!»

lofur Raknison was hardly able to speak for rage and excitement.

Lyra left his side and walked across the combat ground, bare and clear as it was, leaving her little footprints in the snow, and the bears on the far side parted to let her through. As their great bodies lumbered aside, the horizon opened, gloomy in the pallor of the light. Where was lorek Byrnison? She could see nothing; but then, the watchtower was high, and they could see what was still hidden from her. All she could do was walk forward in the snow.

He saw her before she saw him. There was a bounding and a heavy clank of metal, and in a flurry of snow lorek Byrnison stood beside her.

«Oh, lorek! I've done a terrible thing! My dear, you're going to have to fight lofur Raknison, and you en't ready— you're tired and hungry, and your armor's—»

«What terrible thing?»

«I told him you was coming, because I read it on the symbol reader; and he's desperate to be like a person and have a daemon, just desperate. So I tricked him into thinking that I was your daemon, and I was going to desert you and be his instead, but he had to fight you to make it happen. Because otherwise, lorek, dear, they'd never let you fight, they were going to just burn you up before you got close—»

«You tricked lofur Raknison?»

«Yes. I made him agree that he'd fight you instead of just killing you straight off like an outcast, and the winner would be king of the bears. I had to do that, because—»

«Belacqua? No. You are Lyra Silvertongue,» he said. «To fight him is all I want. Come, little daemon.»

She looked at lorek Byrnison in his battered armor, lean and ferocious, and felt as if her heart would burst with pride.

They walked together toward the massive hulk of lofur's palace, where the combat ground lay flat and open at the foot of the walls. Bears clustered at the battlements, white faces filled every window, and their heavy forms stood like a dense wall of misty white ahead, marked with the black dots of eyes and noses. The nearest ones moved aside, making two lines for lorek Byrnison and his daemon to walk between. Every bear's eyes were fixed on them.

lorek halted across the combat ground from lofur Raknison. The king came down from the rise of trodden snow, and the two bears faced each other several yards apart.

Lyra was so close to lorek that she could feel a trembling in him like a great dynamo, generating mighty anbaric forces. She touched him briefly on the neck at the edge of his helmet and said, «Fight well, lorek my dear. You're the real king, and he en't. He's nothing.»

Then she stood back.

«Bears!» lorek Byrnison roared. An echo rang back from the palace walls and startled birds out of their nests. He went on: «The terms of this combat are these. If lofur Raknison kills me, then he will be king forever, safe from challenge or

dispute. If I kill lofur Raknison, I shall be your king. My first order to you all will be to tear down that palace, that perfumed house of mockery and tinsel, and hurl the gold and marble into the sea. Iron is bear-metal. Gold is not. lofur Raknison has polluted Svalbard. I have come to cleanse it. lofur Raknison, I challenge you.»

Then lofur bounded forward a step or two, as if he could hardly hold himself back.

«Bears!» he roared in his turn. «lorek Byrnison has come back at my invitation. I drew him here. It is for me to make the terms of this combat, and they are these: if I kill lorek Byrnison, his flesh shall be torn apart and scattered to the cliff-ghasts. His head shall be displayed above my palace. His memory shall be obliterated. It shall be a capital crime to speak his name….»

He continued, and then each bear spoke again. It was a formula, a ritual faithfully followed. Lyra looked at the two of them, so utterly different: lofur so glossy and powerful, immense in his strength and health, splendidly armored, proud and kinglike; and lorek smaller, though she had never thought he would look small, and poorly equipped, his armor rusty and dented. But his armor was his soul. He had made it and it fitted him. They were one. lofur was not content with his armor; he wanted another soul as well. He was restless while lorek was still.

And she was aware that all the other bears were making the comparison too. But lorek and lofur were more than just two bears. There were two kinds of beardom opposed here, two futures, two destinies. lofur had begun to take them in one direction, and lorek would take them in another, and in the same moment, one future would close forever as the other began to unfold.

As their ritual combat moved toward the second phase, the two bears began to prowl restlessly on the snow, edging forward, swinging their heads. There was not a flicker of movement from the spectators: but all eyes followed them.

Finally the warriors were still and silent, watching each other face to face across the width of the combat ground.

Then with a roar and a blur of snow both bears moved at the same moment. Like two great masses of rock balanced on adjoining peaks and shaken loose by an earthquake, which bound down the mountainsides gathering speed, leaping over crevasses and knocking trees into splinters, until they crash into each other so hard that both are smashed to powder and flying chips of stone: that was how the two bears came together. The crash as they met resounded in the still air and echoed back from the palace wall. But they weren't destroyed, as rock would have been. They both fell aside, and the first to rise was lorek. He twisted up in a lithe spring and grappled with lofur, whose armor had been damaged by the collision and who couldn't easily raise his head. lorek made at once for the vulnerable gap at his neck. He raked the white fur, and then hooked his claws beneath the edge of lofur's helmet and wrenched it forward.

Sensing the danger, lofur snarled and shook himself as Lyra had seen lorek shake himself at the water's edge, sending sheets of water flying high into the air. And lorek fell away, dislodged, and with a screech of twisting metal lofur stood up tall, straightening the steel of his back plates by sheer strength. Then like an avalanche he hurled himself down on lorek, who was still trying to rise.

Lyra felt her own breath knocked out of her by the force of that crashing fall. Certainly the very ground shook beneath her. How could lorek survive that? He was struggling to twist himself and gain a purchase on the ground, but his feet were uppermost, and lofur had fixed his teeth somewhere near lorek's throat. Drops of hot blood were flying through the air: one landed on Lyra's furs, and she pressed her hand to it like a token of love.

Then lorek's rear claws dug into the links of lofur's chain-mail sark and ripped downward. The whole front came away, and lofur lurched sideways to look at the damage, leaving lorek to scramble upright again.

For a moment the two bears stood apart, getting their breath back. lofur was hampered now by that chain mail, because from a protection it had changed all at once into a hindrance: it was still fastened at the bottom, and trailed around his rear legs. However, lorek was worse off. He was bleeding freely from a wound at his neck, and panting heavily.

But he leaped at lofur before the king could disentangle himself from the clinging chain mail, and knocked him head over heels, following up with a lunge at the bare part of lofur's neck, where the edge of the helmet was bent. lofur threw him off, and then the two bears were at each other again, throwing up fountains of snow that sprayed in all directions and sometimes made it hard to see who had the advantage.

Lyra watched, hardly daring to breathe, and squeezing her hands together so tight it hurt. She thought she saw lofur tearing at a wound in lorek's belly, but that couldn't be right, because a moment later, after another convulsive explosion of snow, both bears were standing upright like boxers, and lorek was slashing with mighty claws at lofur's face, with lofur hitting back just as savagely.

Lyra trembled at the weight of those blows. As if a giant were swinging a sledgehammer, and that hammer were armed with five steel spikes…

Iron clanged on iron, teeth crashed on teeth, breath roared harshly, feet thundered on the hard-packed ground. The snow around was splashed with red and trodden down for yards into a crimson mud.

lofur's armor was in a pitiful state by this time, the plates torn and distorted, the gold inlay torn out or smeared thickly with blood, and his helmet gone altogether. lorek's was in much better condition, for all its ugliness: dented, but intact, standing up far better to the great sledgehammer blows of the bear-king, and turning aside those brutal six-inch claws.

But against that, lofur was bigger and stronger than lorek, and lorek was weary and hungry, and had lost more blood. He was wounded in the belly, on both arms, and at the neck, whereas lofur was bleeding only from his lower jaw. Lyra longed to help her dear friend, but what could she do?

And it was going badly for lorek now. He was limping; every time he put his left forepaw on the ground, they could see that it hardly bore his weight. He never used it to strike with, and the blows from his right hand were feebler, too, almost little pats compared with the mighty crushing buffets he'd delivered only a few minutes before.

lofur had noticed. He began to taunt lorek, calling him broken-hand, whimpering cub, rust-eaten, soon-to-die, and other names, all the while swinging blows at him from right and left which lorek could no longer parry. lorek had to move backward, a step at a time, and to crouch low under the rain of blows from the jeering bear-king.

Lyra was in tears. Her dear, her brave one, her fearless defender, was going to die, and she would not do him the treachery of looking away, for if he looked at her he must see her shining eyes and their love and belief, not a face hidden in cowardice or a shoulder fearfully turned away.

So she looked, but her tears kept her from seeing what was really happening, and perhaps it would not have been visible to her anyway. It certainly was not seen by lofur.

Because lorek was moving backward only to find clean dry footing and a firm rock to leap up from, and the useless left arm was really fresh and strong. You could not trick a bear, but, as Lyra had shown him, lofur did not want to be a bear, he wanted to be a man; and lorek was tricking him.

At last he found what he wanted: a firm rock deep-anchored in the permafrost. He backed against it, tensing his legs and choosing his moment.

It came when lofur reared high above, bellowing his triumph, and turning his head tauntingly toward lorek's apparently weak left side.

That was when lorek moved. Like a wave that has been building its strength over a thousand miles of ocean, and which makes little stir in the deep water, but which when it reaches the shallows rears itself up high into the sky, terrifying the shore dwellers, before crashing down on the land with irresistible power—so lorek Byrnison rose up against lofur, exploding upward from his firm footing on the dry rock and slashing with a ferocious left hand at the exposed jaw of lofur Raknison.

It was a horrifying blow. It tore the lower part of his jaw clean off, so that it flew through the air scattering blood drops in the snow many yards away.

lofur's red tongue lolled down, dripping over his open throat. The bear-king was suddenly voiceless, biteless, helpless, lorek needed nothing more. He lunged, and then his teeth were in lofur's throat, and he shook and shook this way, that way, lifting the huge body off the ground and battering it down as if lofur were no more than a seal at the water's edge.

Then he ripped upward, and lofur Raknison's life came away in his teeth.

There was one ritual yet to perform. lorek sliced open the dead king's unprotected chest, peeling the fur back to expose the narrow white and red ribs like the timbers of an upturned boat. Into the rib cage lorek reached, and he plucked out lofur's heart, red and steaming, and ate it there in front of lofur's subjects.

Then there was acclamation, pandemonium, a crush of bears surging forward to pay homage to lofur's conqueror.

lorek Byrnison's voice rose above the clamor.

«Bears! Who is your king?»

And the cry came back, in a roar like that of all the sea-smooth pebbles in the world in an ocean-battering storm:

«lorek Byrnison!»

The bears knew what they must do. Every single badge and sash and coronet was thrown off at once and trampled contemptuously underfoot, to be forgotten in a moment. They were lorek's bears now, and true bears, not uncertain semi-humans conscious only of a torturing inferiority. They swarmed to the palace and began to hurl great blocks of marble from the topmost towers, rocking the battlemented walls with their mighty fists until the stones came loose, and then hurling them over the cliffs to crash on the jetty hundreds of feet below.

lorek ignored them and unhooked his armor to attend to his wounds, but before he could begin, Lyra was beside him, stamping her foot on the frozen scarlet snow and shouting to the bears to stop smashing the palace, because there were prisoners inside. They didn't hear, but lorek did, and when he roared they stopped at once.

«Human prisoners?» lorek said.

«Yes—lofur Raknison put them in the dungeons—they ought to come out first and get shelter somewhere, else they'll be killed with all the falling rocks—»

lorek gave swift orders, and some bears hurried into the palace to release the prisoners. Lyra turned to lorek.

«Let me help you—I want to make sure you en't too badly hurt, lorek dear—oh, I wish there was some bandages or something! That's an awful cut on your belly—»

A bear laid a mouthful of some stiff green stuff, thickly frosted, on the ground at lorek's feet.

«Bloodmoss,» said lorek. «Press it in the wounds for me, Lyra. Fold the flesh over it and then hold some snow there till it freezes.»

He wouldn't let any bears attend to him, despite their eagerness. Besides, Lyra's hands were deft, and she was desperate to help; so the small human bent over the great bear-king, packing in the bloodmoss and freezing the raw flesh till it stopped bleeding. When she had finished, her mittens were sodden with lorek's blood, but his wounds were stanched.

And by that time the prisoners—a dozen or so men, shivering and blinking and huddling together—had come out. There was no point in talking to the professor, Lyra decided, because the poor man was mad; and she would have liked to know who the other men were, but there were many other urgent things to do. And she didn't want to distract lorek, who was giving rapid orders and sending bears scurrying this way and that, but she was anxious about Roger, and about Lee Scoresby and the witches, and she was hungry and tired…. She thought the best thing she could do just then was to keep out of the way.

So she curled up in a quiet corner of the combat ground with Pantalaimon as a wolverine to keep her warm, and piled snow over herself as a bear would do, and went to sleep.

Something nudged her foot, and a strange bear voice said, «Lyra Silvertongue, the king wants you.»

She woke up nearly dead with cold, and couldn't open her eyes, for they had frozen shut; but Pantalaimon licked them to melt the ice on her eyelashes, and soon she was able to see the young bear speaking to her in the moonlight.

She tried to stand, but fell over twice.

The bear said, «Ride on me,» and crouched to offer his broad back, and half-clinging, half-falling, she managed to stay on while he took her to a steep hollow, where many bears were assembled.

And among them was a small figure who ran toward her, and whose daemon leaped up to greet Pantalaimon.

«Roger!» she said.

«lorek Byrnison made me stay out there in the snow while he came to fetch you away—we fell out the balloon, Lyra! After you fell out, we got carried miles and miles, and then Mr. Scoresby let some more gas out and we crashed into a mountain, and we fell down such a slope like you never seen! And I don't know where Mr. Scoresby is now, nor the witches. There was just me and lorek Byrnison. He come straight back this way to look for you. And they told me about his fight….»

Lyra looked around. Under the direction of an older bear, the human prisoners were building a shelter out of driftwood and scraps of canvas. They seemed pleased to have some work to do. One of them was striking a flint to light a fire.

«There is food,» said the young bear who had woken Lyra.

A fresh seal lay on the snow. The bear sliced it open with a claw and showed Lyra where to find the kidneys. She ate one raw: it was warm and soft and delicious beyond imagining.

«Eat the blubber too,» said the bear, and tore off a piece for her. It tasted of cream flavored with hazelnuts. Roger hesitated, but followed her example. They ate greedily, and within a very few minutes Lyra was fully awake and beginning to be warm.

Wiping her mouth, she looked around, but lorek was not in sight.

«lorek Byrnison is speaking with his counselors,» said the young bear. «He wants to see you when you have eaten. Follow me.»

He led them over a rise in the snow to a spot where bears were beginning to build a wall of ice blocks. lorek sat at the center of a group of older bears, and he rose to greet her.

«Lyra Silvertongue,» he said. «Come and hear what I am being told.»

He didn't explain her presence to the other bears, or perhaps they had learned about her already; but they made room for her and treated her with immense courtesy, as if she were a queen. She felt proud beyond measure to sit beside her friend lorek Byrnison under the Aurora as it flickered gracefully in the polar sky, and join the conversation of the bears.

It turned out that lofur Raknison's dominance over them had been like a spell. Some of them put it down to the influence of Mrs. Coulter, who had visited him before lorek's exile, though lorek had not known about it, and given lofur various presents.

«She gave him a drug,» said one bear, «which he fed secretly to Hjalmur Hjalmurson, and made him forget himself.»

Hjalmur Hjalmurson, Lyra gathered, was the bear whom lorek had killed, and whose death had brought about his exile. So Mrs. Coulter was behind that! And there was more.

«There are human laws that prevent certain things that she was planning to do, but human laws don't apply on Svalbard. She wanted to set up another station here like Bolvangar, only worse, and lofur was going to allow her to do it, against all the custom of the bears; because humans have visited, or been imprisoned, but never lived and worked here. Little by little she was going to increase her power over lofur Raknison, and his over us, until we were her creatures running back and forth at her bidding, and our only duty to guard the abomination she was going to create….»

That was an old bear speaking. His name was S0ren Eisarson, and he was a counselor, one who had suffered under lofur Raknison.

«What is she doing now, Lyra?» said lorek Byrnison. «Once she hears of lofur's death, what will her plans be?»

Lyra took out the alethiometer. There was not much light to see it by, and lorek commanded that a torch be brought.

«What happened to Mr. Scoresby?» Lyra said while they were waiting. «And the witches?»

«The witches were attacked by another witch clan. I don't know if the others were allied to the child cutters, but they were patrolling our skies in vast numbers, and they attacked in the storm. I didn't see what happened to Serafina Pekkala. As for Lee Scoresby, the balloon soared up again after I fell out with the boy, taking him with it. But your symbol reader will tell you what their fate is.»

A bear pulled up a sledge on which a cauldron of charcoal was smoldering, and thrust a resinous branch into the heart of it. The branch caught at once, and in its glare Lyra turned the hands of the alethiometer and asked about Lee Scoresby.

It turned out that he was still aloft, borne by the winds toward Nova Zembla, and that he had been unharmed by the cliff-ghasts and had fought off the other witch clan.

Lyra told lorek, and he nodded, satisfied.

«If he is in the air, he will be safe,» he said. «What of Mrs. Coulter?»

The answer was complicated, with the needle swinging from symbol to symbol in a sequence that made Lyra puzzle for a long time. The bears were curious, but restrained by their respect for lorek Byrnison, and his for Lyra, and she put them out of her mind and sank again into the alethiometric trance.

The play of symbols, once she had discovered the pattern of it, was dismaying.

«It says she's…She's heard about us flying this way, and she's got a transport zeppelin that's armed with machine guns—I think that's it—and they're a flying to Svalbard right now. She don't know yet about lofur Raknison being beaten, of course, but she will soon because…Oh yes, because some witches will tell her, and they'll learn it from the cliff-ghasts. So I reckon there are spies in the air all around, lorek. She was coming to…to pretend to help lofur Raknison, but really she was going to take over power from him, with a regiment of Tartars that's a coming by sea, and they'll be here in a couple of days.

«And as soon as she can, she's going to where Lord Asriel is kept prisoner, and she's intending to have him killed. Because …It's coming clear now: something I never understood before, lorek! It's why she wants to kill Lord Asriel: it's because she knows what he's going to do, and she fears it, and she wants to do it herself and gain control before he does….It must be the city in the sky, it must be! She's trying to get to it first! And now it's telling me something else….»

She bent over the instrument, concentrating furiously as the needle darted this way and that. It moved almost too fast to follow; Roger, looking over her shoulder, couldn't even see it stop, and was conscious only of a swift nickering dialogue between Lyra's fingers turning the hands and the needle answering, as bewilderingly unlike language as the Aurora was.

«Yes,» she said finally, putting the instrument down in her lap and blinking and sighing as she woke out of her profound concentration. «Yes, I see what it says. She's after me again.

She wants something I've got, because Lord Asriel wants it too. They need it for this…for this experiment, whatever it is…»

She stopped there, to take a deep breath. Something was troubling her, and she didn't know what it was. She was sure that this something that was so important was the alethiome-ter itself, because after all, Mrs. Coulter had wanted it, and what else could it be? And yet it wasn't, because the alethiometer had a different way of referring to itself, and this wasn't it.

«I suppose it's the alethiometer,» she said unhappily. «It's what I thought all along. I've got to take it to Lord Asriel before she gets it. If she gets it, we'll all die.»

As she said that, she felt so tired, so bone-deep weary and sad, that to die would have been a relief. But the example of lorek kept her from admitting it. She put the alethiometer away and sat up straight.

«How far away is she ?» said lorek.

«Just a few hours. I suppose I ought to take the alethiometer to Lord Asriel as soon as I can.»

«I will go with you,» said lorek.

She didn't argue. While lorek gave commands and organized an armed squad to accompany them on the final part of their journey north, Lyra sat still, conserving her energy. She felt that something had gone out of her during that last reading. She closed her eyes and slept, and presently they woke her and set off.

Twenty-One Lord Asriel's Welcome

Lyra rode a strong young bear, and Roger rode another, while lorek paced tirelessly ahead and a squad armed with a fire hurler followed guarding the rear.

The way was long and hard. The interior of Svalbard was mountainous, with jumbled peaks and sharp ridges deeply cut by ravines and steep-sided valleys, and the cold was intense. Lyra thought back to the smooth-running sledges of the gyp-tians on the way to Bolvangar; how swift and comfortable that progress now seemed to have been! The air here was more penetratingly chill than any she had experienced before; or it might have been that the bear she was riding wasn't as lightfooted as lorek; or it might have been that she was tired to her very soul. At all events, it was desperately hard going.

She knew little of where they were bound, or how far it was. All she knew was what the older bear S0ren Eisarson had told her while they were preparing the fire hurler. He had been involved in negotiating with Lord Asriel about the terms of his imprisonment, and he remembered it well.

At first, he'd said, the Svalbard bears regarded Lord Asriel as being no different from any of the other politicians, kings, or troublemakers who had been exiled to their bleak island. The prisoners were important, or they would have been killed outright by their own people; they might be valuable to the bears one day, if their political fortunes changed and they returned to rule in their own countries; so it might pay the bears not to treat them with cruelty or disrespect.

So Lord Asriel had found conditions on Svalbard no better and no worse than hundreds of other exiles had done. But certain things had made his jailers more wary of him than of other prisoners they'd had. There was the air of mystery and spiritual peril surrounding anything that had to do with Dust; there was the clear panic on the part of those who'd brought him there; and there were Mrs. Coulter's private communications with lofur Raknison.

Besides, the bears had never met anything quite like Lord Asriel's own haughty and imperious nature. He dominated even lofur Raknison, arguing forcefully and eloquently, and persuaded the bear-king to let him choose his own dwelling place.

The first one he was allotted was too low down, he said. He needed a high spot, above the smoke and stir of the fire mines and the smithies. He gave the bears a design of the accommodation he wanted, and told them where it should be; and he bribed them with gold, and he flattered and bullied lofur Raknison, and with a bemused willingness the bears set to work. Before long a house had arisen on a headland facing north: a wide and solid place with fireplaces that burned great blocks of coal mined and hauled by bears, and with large windows of real glass. There he dwelt, a prisoner acting like a king.

And then he set about assembling the materials for a laboratory.

With furious concentration he sent for books, instruments, chemicals, all manner of tools and equipment. And somehow it had come, from this source or that; some openly, some smuggled in by the visitors he insisted he was entitled to have. By land, sea, and air, Lord Asriel assembled his materials, and within six months of his committal, he had all the equipment he wanted.

And so he worked, thinking and planning and calculating, waiting for the one thing he needed to complete the task that so terrified the Oblation Board. It was drawing closer every minute.

Lyra's first glimpse of her father's prison came when lorek Byrnison stopped at the foot of a ridge for the children to move and stretch themselves, because they had been getting dangerously cold and stiff.

«Look up there,» he said.

A wide broken slope of tumbled rocks and ice, where a track had been laboriously cleared, led up to a crag outlined against the sky. There was no Aurora, but the stars were brilliant. The crag stood black and gaunt, but at its summit was a spacious building from which light spilled lavishly in all directions: not the smoky inconstant gleam of blubber lamps, nor the harsh white of anbaric spotlights, but the warm creamy glow of naphtha.

The windows from which the light emerged also showed Lord Asriel's formidable power. Glass was expensive, and large sheets of it were prodigal of heat in these fierce latitudes; so to see them here was evidence of wealth and influence far greater than lofur Raknison's vulgar palace.

Lyra and Roger mounted their bears for the last time, and lorek led the way up the slope toward the house. There was a courtyard that lay deep under snow, surrounded by a low wall, and as lorek pushed open the gate they heard a bell ring somewhere in the building.

Lyra got down. She could hardly stand. She helped Roger down too, and, supporting each other, the children stumbled through the thigh-deep snow toward the steps up to the door.

Oh, the warmth there would be inside that house! Oh, the peaceful rest!

She reached for the handle of the bell, but before she could reach it, the door opened. There was a small dimly lit vestibule to keep the warm air in, and standing under the lamp was a figure she recognized: Lord Asriel's manservant Thorold, with his pinscher daemon Anfang.

Lyra wearily pushed back her hood.

«Who…» Thorold began, and then saw who it was, and went on: «Not Lyra? Little Lyra? Am I dreaming?»

He reached behind him to open the inner door.

A hall, with a coal fire blazing in a stone grate; warm naphtha light glowing on carpets, leather chairs, polished wood… It was like nothing Lyra had seen since leaving Jordan College, and it brought a choking gasp to her throat.

Lord Asriel's snow-leopard daemon growled.

Lyra's father stood there, his powerful dark-eyed face at first fierce, triumphant, and eager; and then the color faded from it; his eyes widened, in horror, as he recognized his daughter.

«No! No!»

He staggered back and clutched at the mantelpiece. Lyra couldn't move.

«Get out!» Lord Asriel cried. «Turn around, get out, go! I did not send for you!»

She couldn't speak. She opened her mouth twice, three times, and then managed to say:

«No, no, I came because—»

He seemed appalled; he kept shaking his head, he held up his hands as if to ward her off; she couldn't believe his distress.

She moved a step closer to reassure him, and Roger came to stand with her, anxious. Their daemons fluttered out into the warmth, and after a moment Lord Asriel passed a hand across his brow and recovered slightly. The color began to return to his cheeks as he looked down at the two.

«Lyra,» he said. «That is Lyra?»

«Yes, Uncle Asriel,» she said, thinking that this wasn't the time to go into their true relationship. «I came to bring you the alethiometer from the Master of Jordan.»

«Yes, of course you did,» he said. «Who is this?»

«It's Roger Parslow,» she said. «He's the kitchen boy from Jordan College. But—»

«How did you get here?»

«I was just going to say, there's lorek Byrnison outside, he's brought us here. He came with me all the way from Trollesund, and we tricked lofur—»

«Who's lorek Byrnison?»

«An armored bear. He brought us here.»

«Thorold,» he called, «run a hot bath for these children, and prepare them some food. Then they will need to sleep. Their clothes are filthy; find them something to wear. Do it now, while I talk to this bear.»

Lyra felt her head swim. Perhaps it was the heat, or perhaps it was relief. She watched the servant bow and leave the hall, and Lord Asriel go into the vestibule and close the door behind, and then she half-fell into the nearest chair.

Only a moment later, it seemed, Thorold was speaking to her.

«Follow me, miss,» he was saying, and she hauled herself up and went with Roger to a warm bathroom, where soft towels hung on a heated rail, and where a tub of water steamed in the naphtha light.

«You go first,» said Lyra. «I'll sit outside and we'll talk.»

So Roger, wincing and gasping at the heat, got in and washed. They had swum naked together often enough, frolicking in the Isis or the Cherwell with other children, but this was different.

«I'm afraid of your uncle,» said Roger through the open door. «I mean your father.»

«Better keep calling him my uncle. I'm afraid of him too, sometimes.»

«When we first come in, he never saw me at all. He only saw you. And he was horrified, till he saw me. Then he calmed down all at once.»

«He was just shocked,» said Lyra. «Anyone would be, to see someone they didn't expect. He last saw me after that time in the Retiring Room. It's bound to be a shock.»

«No,» said Roger, «it's more than that. He was looking at me like a wolf, or summing.»

«You're imagining it.»

«I en't. I'm more scared of him than I was of Mrs. Coulter, and that's the truth.»

He splashed himself. Lyra took out the alethiometer.

«D'you want me to ask the symbol reader about it?» Lyra said.

«Well, I dunno. There's things I'd rather not know. Seems to me everything I heard of since the Gobblers come to Oxford, everything's been bad. There en't been nothing good more than about five minutes ahead. Like I can see now, this bath's nice, and there's a nice warm towel there, about five minutes away. And once I'm dry, maybe I'll think of summing nice to eat, but no further ahead than that. And when I've eaten, maybe I'll look forward to a kip in a comfortable bed. But after that, I dunno, Lyra. There's been terrible things we seen, en't there? And more a coming, more'n likely. So I think I'd rather not know what's in the future. I'll stick to the present.»

«Yeah,» said Lyra wearily. «There's times I feel like that too.»

So although she held the alethiometer in her hands for a little longer, it was only for comfort; she didn't turn the wheels, and the swinging of the needle passed her by. Pantalaimon watched it in silence.

After they'd both washed, and eaten some bread and cheese and drunk some wine and hot water, the servant Thorold said, «The boy is to go to bed. I'll show him where to go. His Lordship asks if you'd join him in the library, Miss Lyra.»

Lyra found Lord Asriel in a room whose wide windows overlooked the frozen sea far below. There was a coal fire under a wide chimneypiece, and a naphtha lamp turned down low, so there was little in the way of distracting reflections between the occupants of the room and the bleak starlit panorama outside. Lord Asriel, reclining in a large armchair on one side of the fire, beckoned her to come and sit in the other chair facing him.

«Your friend lorek Byrnison is resting outside,» he said. «He prefers the cold.»

«Did he tell you about his fight with lofur Raknison?»

«Not in detail. But I understand that he is now the king of Svalbard. Is that true?»

«Of course it's true. lorek never lies.»

«He seems to have appointed himself your guardian.»

«No. John Faa told him to look after me, and he's doing it because of that. He's following John Faa's orders.»

«How does John Faa come into this?»

«I'll tell you if you tell me something,» she said. «You're my father, en't you?»

«Yes. So what?»

«So you should have told me before, that's what. You shouldn't hide things like that from people, because they feel stupid when they find out, and that's cruel. What difference would it make if I knew I was your daughter? You could have said it years ago. You could've told me and asked me to keep it secret, and I would, no matter how young I was, I'd have done that if you asked me. I'd have been so proud nothing would've torn it out of me, if you asked me to keep it secret. But you never. You let other people know, but you never told me.»

«Who did tell you?»

«John Faa.»

«Did he tell you about your mother?»

«Yes.»

«Then there's not much left for me to tell. I don't think I want to be interrogated and condemned by an insolent child. I want to hear what you've seen and done on the way here.»

«I brought you the bloody alethiometer, didn't I?» Lyra burst out. She was very near to tears. «I looked after it all the way from Jordan, I hid it and I treasured it, all through what's happened to us, and I learned about using it, and I carried it all this bloody way when I could've just given up and been safe, and you en't even said thank you, nor showed any sign that you're glad to see me. I don't know why I ever done it. But I did, and I kept on going, even in lofur Raknison's stinking palace with all them bears around me I kept on going, all on me own, and I tricked him into fighting with lorek so's I could come on here for your sake….And when you did see me, you like to fainted, as if I was some horrible thing you never wanted to see again. You en't human, Lord Asriel. You en't my father. My father wouldn't treat me like that. Fathers are supposed to love their daughters, en't they? You don't love me, and I don't love you, and that's a fact. I love Farder Coram, and I love lorek Byrnison; I love an armored bear more'n I love my father. And I bet lorek Byrnison loves me more'n you do.»

«You told me yourself he's only following John Faa's orders.

If you're going to be sentimental, I shan't waste time talking to you.»

«Take your bloody alethiometer, then, and I'm going back with lorek.»

«Where?»

«Back to the palace. He can fight with Mrs. Coulter and the Oblation Board, when they turn up. If he loses, then I'll die too, I don't care. If he wins, we'll send for Lee Scoresby and I'll sail away in his balloon and—»

«Who's Lee Scoresby?»

«An aeronaut. He brought us here and then we crashed. Here you are, here's the alethiometer. It's all in good order.»

He made no move to take it, and she laid it on the brass fender around the hearth.

«And I suppose I ought to tell you that Mrs. Coulter's on her way to Svalbard, and as soon as she hears what's happened to lofur Raknison, she'll be on her way here. In a zeppelin, with a whole lot of soldiers, and they're going to kill us all, by order of the Magisterium.»

«They'll never reach us,» he said calmly.

He was so quiet and relaxed that some of her ferocity dwindled.

«You don't know,» she said uncertainly.

«Yes I do.»

«Have you got another alethiometer, then?»

«I don't need an alethiometer for that. Now I want to hear about your journey here, Lyra. Start from the beginning. Tell me everything.»

So she did. She began with her hiding in the Retiring Room, and went on to the Gobblers' taking Roger, and her time with Mrs. Coulter, and everything else that had happened.

It was a long tale, and when she finished it she said, «So there's one thing I want to know, and I reckon I've got the right to know it, like I had the right to know who I really was. And if you didn't tell me that, you've got to tell me this, in recompense. So: what's Dust? And why's everyone so afraid of it?»

He looked at her as if trying to guess whether she would understand what he was about to say. He had never looked at her seriously before, she thought; until now he had always been like an adult indulging a child in a pretty trick. But he seemed to think she was ready.

«Dust is what makes the alethiometer work,» he said. «Ah…I thought it might! But what else? How did they find out about it?»

«In one way, the Church has always been aware of it. They've been preaching about Dust for centuries, only they didn't call it by that name.

«But some years ago a Muscovite called Boris Mikhailovitch Rusakov discovered a new kind of elementary particle. You've heard of electrons, photons, neutrinos, and the rest? They're called elementary particles because you can't break them down any further: there's nothing inside them but themselves. Well, this new kind of particle was elementary all right, but it was very hard to measure because it didn't react in any of the usual ways. The hardest thing for Rusakov to understand was why the new particle seemed to cluster where human beings were, as if it were attracted to us. And especially to adults. Children too, but not nearly so much until their daemons have taken a fixed form. During the years of puberty they begin to attract Dust more strongly, and it settles on them as it settles on adults.

«Now all discoveries of this sort, because they have a bearing on the doctrines of the Church, have to be announced through the Magisterium in Geneva. And this discovery of Rusakov's was so unlikely and strange that the inspector from the Consistorial Court of Discipline suspected Rusakov of diabolic possession. He performed an exorcism in the laboratory, he interrogated Rusakov under the rules of the Inquisition, but finally they had to accept the fact that Rusakov wasn't lying or deceiving them: Dust really existed.

«That left them with the problem of deciding what it was. And given the Church's nature, there was only one thing they could have chosen. The Magisterium decided that Dust was the physical evidence for original sin. Do you know what original sin is?»

She twisted her lips. It was like being back at Jordan, being quizzed on something she'd been half-taught. «Sort of,» she said.

«No, you don't. Go to the shelf beside the desk and bring me the Bible.»

Lyra did so, and handed the big black book to her father.

«You do remember the story of Adam and Eve?»

'«Course,» she said. «She wasn't supposed to eat the fruit and the serpent tempted her, and she did.»

«And what happened then?»

«Umm…They were thrown out. God threw them out of the garden.»

«God had told them not to eat the fruit, because they would die. Remember, they were naked in the garden, they were like children, their daemons took on any form they desired. But this is what happened.»

He turned to Chapter Three of Genesis, and read:

He closed the book.

«And that was how sin came into the world,» he said, «sin and shame and death. It came the moment their daemons became fixed.»

«But…» Lyra struggled to find the words she wanted: «but it en't true, is it? Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn't really an Adam and Eve? The Cassington Scholar told me it was just a kind of fairy tale.»

«The Cassington Scholarship is traditionally given to a freethinker; it's his function to challenge the faith of the Scholars. Naturally he'd say that. But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

«Anyway, it's what the Church has taught for thousands of years. And when Rusakov discovered Dust, at last there was a physical proof that something happened when innocence changed into experience.

«Incidentally, the Bible gave us the name Dust as well. At first they were called Rusakov Particles, but soon someone pointed out a curious verse toward the end of the Third Chapter of Genesis, where God's cursing Adam for eating the fruit.»

He opened the Bible again and pointed it out to Lyra. She read:

Lord Asriel said, «Church scholars have always puzzled over the translation of that verse. Some say it should read not 'unto dust shalt thou return' but 'thou shalt be subject to dust,' and others say the whole verse is a kind of pun on the words 'ground' and 'dust,' and it really means that God's admitting his own nature to be partly sinful. No one agrees. No one can, because the text is corrupt. But it was too good a word to waste, and that's why the particles became known as Dust.»

«And what about the Gobblers?» Lyra said.

«The General Oblation Board…Your mother's gang. Clever of her to spot the chance of setting up her own power base, but she's a clever woman, as I dare say you've noticed. It suits the Magisterium to allow all kinds of different agencies to flourish. They can play them off against one another; if one succeeds, they can pretend to have been supporting it all along, and if it fails, they can pretend it was a renegade outfit which had never been properly licensed.

«You see, your mother's always been ambitious for power. At first she tried to get it in the normal way, through marriage, but that didn't work, as I think you've heard. So she had to turn to the Church. Naturally she couldn't take the route a man could have taken—priesthood and so on—it had to be unorthodox; she had to set up her own order, her own channels of influence, and work through that. It was a good move to specialize in Dust. Everyone was frightened of it; no one knew what to do; and when she offered to direct an investigation, the Magisterium was so relieved that they backed her with money and resources of all kinds.»

«But they were cutting—» Lyra couldn't bring herself to say it; the words choked in her mouth. «You know what they were doing! Why did the Church let them do anything like that?»

«There was a precedent. Something like it had happened before. Do you know what the word castration means? It means removing the sexual organs of a boy so that he never develops the characteristics of a man. A castrate keeps his high treble voice all his life, which is why the Church allowed it: so useful in Church music. Some castrati became great singers, wonderful artists. Many just became fat spoiled half-men. Some died from the effects of the operation. But the Church wouldn't flinch at the idea of a little cut, you see. There was a precedent. And this would be so much more hygienic than the old methods, when they didn't have anesthetics or sterile bandages or proper nursing care. It would be gentle by comparison.»

«It isn't!» Lyra said fiercely. «It isn't!»

«No. Of course not. That's why they had to hide away in the far North, in darkness and obscurity. And why the Church was glad to have someone like your mother in charge. Who could doubt someone so charming, so well-connected, so sweet and reasonable? But because it was an obscure and unofficial kind of operation, she was someone the Magisterium could deny if they needed to, as well.»

«But whose idea was it to do that cutting in the first place?»

«It was hers. She guessed that the two things that happen at adolescence might be connected: the change in one's daemon and the fact that Dust began to settle. Perhaps if the daemon were separated from the body, we might never be subject to Dust—to original sin. The question was whether it was possible to separate daemon and body without killing the person. But she's traveled in many places, and seen all kinds of things. She's traveled in Africa, for instance.The Africans have a way of making a slave called a zombi. It has no will of its own; it will work day and night without ever running away or complaining. It looks like a corpse….»

«It's a person without their daemon!»

«Exactly. So she found out that it was possible to separate them.»

«And…Tony Costa told me about the horrible phantoms they have in the northern forests. I suppose they might be the same kind of thing.»

«That's right. Anyway, the General Oblation Board grew out of ideas like that, and out of the Church's obsession with original sin.»

Lord Asriel's daemon twitched her ears, and he laid his hand on her beautiful head.

«There was something else that happened when they made the cut,» he went on. «And they didn't see it. The energy that links body and daemon is immensely powerful. When the cut is made, all that energy dissipates in a fraction of a second. They didn't notice, because they mistook it for shock, or disgust, or moral outrage, and they trained themselves to feel numb towards it. So they missed what it could do, and they never thought of harnessing it….»

Lyra couldn't sit still. She got up and walked to the window, and stared over the wide bleak darkness with unseeing eyes. They were too cruel. No matter how important it was to find out about original sin, it was too cruel to do what they'd done to Tony Makarios and all the others. Nothing justified that.

«And what were you doing?» she said. «Did you do any of that cutting?»

«I'm interested in something quite different. I don't think the Oblation Board goes far enough. I want to go to the source of Dust itself.»

«The source? Where's it come from, then?»

«From the other universe we can see through the Aurora.»

Lyra turned around again. Her father was lying back in his chair, lazy and powerful, his eyes as fierce as his daemon's. She didn't love him, she couldn't trust him, but she had to admire him, and the extravagant luxury he'd assembled in this desolate wasteland, and the power of his ambition.

«What is that other universe?» she said.

«One of uncountable billions of parallel worlds. The witches have known about them for centuries, but the first theologians to prove their existence mathematically were excommunicated fifty or more years ago. However, it's true; there's no possible way of denying it.

«But no one thought it would ever be possible to cross from one universe to another. That would violate fundamental laws, we thought. Well, we were wrong; we learned to see the world up there. If light can cross, so can we. And we had to learn to see it, Lyra, just as you learned to use the alethiometer.

«Now that world, and every other universe, came about as a result of possibility. Take the example of tossing a coin: it can come down heads or tails, and we don't know before it lands which way it's going to fall. If it comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.

«But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart. I'm using the example of tossing a coin to make it clearer. In fact, these possibility collapses happen at the level of elementary particles, but they happen in just the same way: one moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which they did happen.

«And I'm going to that world beyond the Aurora,» he said, «because I think that's where all the Dust in this universe comes from. You saw those slides I showed the Scholars in the retiring room. You saw Dust pouring into this world from the Aurora. You've seen that city yourself. If light can cross the barrier between the universes, if Dust can, if we can see that city, then we can build a bridge and cross. It needs a phenomenal burst of energy. But I can do it. Somewhere out there is the origin of all the Dust, all the death, the sin, the misery, the destructiveness in the world. Human beings can't see anything without wanting to destroy it, Lyra. That's original sin. And I'm going to destroy it. Death is going to die.»

«Is that why they put you here?»

«Yes. They are terrified. And with good reason.»

He stood up, and so did his daemon, proud and beautiful and deadly. Lyra sat still. She was afraid of her father, and she admired him profoundly, and she thought he was stark mad; but who was she to judge?

«Go to bed,» he said. «Thorold will show you where to sleep.»

He turned to go.

«You've left the alethiometer,» she said.

«Ah, yes; I don't actually need that now,» he said. «It would be no use to me without the books anyway. D'you know, I think the Master of Jordan was giving it to you. Did he actually ask you to bring it to me?»

«Well, yes!» she said. But then she thought again, and realized that in fact the Master never had asked her to do that; she had assumed it all the time, because why else would he have given it to her? «No,» she said. «I don't know. I thought—»

«Well, I don't want it. It's yours, Lyra.»

«But—»

«Goodnight, child.»

Speechless, too bewildered by this to voice any of the dozen urgent questions that pressed at her mind, she sat by the fire and watched him leave the room.

Twenty-Two Betrayal

She woke to find a stranger shaking her arm, and then as Pantalaimon sprang awake and growled, she recognized Thorold. He was holding a naphtha lamp, and his hand was trembling.

«Miss—miss—get up quickly. I don't know what to do. He's left no orders. I think he's mad, miss.»

«What? What's happening?»

«Lord Asriel, miss. He's been almost in a delirium since you went to bed. I've never seen him so wild. He packed a lot of instruments and batteries in a sledge and he harnessed up the dogs and left. But he's got the boy, miss!»

«Roger? He's taken Roger?»

«He told me to wake him and dress him, and I didn't think to argue—I never have—the boy kept on asking for you, miss—but Lord Asriel wanted him alone—you know when you first came to the door, miss? And he saw you and couldn't believe his eyes, and wanted you gone?»

Lyra's head was in such a whirl of weariness and fear that she could hardly think, but «Yes? Yes?» she said.

«It was because he needed a child to finish his experiment, miss! And Lord Asriel has a way special to himself of bringing about what he wants, he just has to call for something and—»

Now Lyra's head was full of a roar, as if she were trying to stifle some knowledge from her own consciousness.

She had got out of bed, and was reaching for her clothes, and then she suddenly collapsed, and a fierce cry of despair enveloped her. She was uttering it, but it was bigger than she was; it felt as if the despair were uttering her. For she remembered his words: the energy that links body and daemon is immensely powerful; and to bridge the gap between worlds needed a phenomenal burst of energy….

She had just realized what she'd done.

She had struggled all this way to bring something to Lord Asriel, thinking she knew what he wanted; and it wasn't the alethiometer at all. What he wanted was a child.

She had brought him Roger.

That was why he'd cried out, «I did not send for you!» when he saw her; he had sent for a child, and the fates had brought him his own daughter. Or so he'd thought, until she'd stepped aside and shown him Roger.

Oh, the bitter anguish! She had thought she was saving Roger, and all the time she'd been diligently working to betray him….

Lyra shook and sobbed in a frenzy of emotion. It couldn't be true.

Thorold tried to comfort her, but he didn't know the reason for her extremity of grief, and could only pat her shoulder nervously.

«lorek—» she sobbed, pushing the servant aside. «Where's lorek Byrnison? The bear? Is he still outside?»

The old man shrugged helplessly.

«Help me!» she said, trembling all over with weakness and fear. «Help me dress. I got to go. Now.1 Do it quick!»

He put the lamp down and did as she told him. When she commanded, in that imperious way, she was very like her father, for all that her face was wet with tears and her lips trembling. While Pantalaimon paced the floor lashing his tail, his fur almost sparking, Thorold hastened to bring her stiff, reeking furs and help her into them. As soon as all the buttons were done up and all the flaps secured, she made for the door, and felt the cold strike her throat like a sword and freeze the tears at once on her cheeks.

«lorek!» she called. «lorek Byrnison! Come, because I need you!»

There was a shake of snow, a clank of metal, and the bear was there. He had been sleeping calmly under the falling snow. In the light spilling from the lamp Thorold was holding at the window, Lyra saw the long faceless head, the narrow eye slits, the gleam of white fur below red-black metal, and wanted to embrace him and seek some comfort from his iron helmet, his ice-tipped fur.

«Well?» he said.

«We got to catch Lord Asriel. He's taken Roger and he's a going to—I daren't think—oh, lorek, I beg you, go quick, my dear!»

«Come then,» he said, and she leaped on his back.

There was no need to ask which way to go: the tracks of the sledge led straight out from the courtyard and over the plain, and lorek leaped forward to follow them. His motion was now so much a part of Lyra's being that to sit balanced was entirely automatic. He ran over the thick snowy mantle on the rocky ground faster than he'd ever done, and the armor plates shifted under her in a regular swinging rhythm.

Behind them, the other bears paced easily, pulling the fire hurler with them. The way was clear, for the moon was high and the light it cast over the snowbound world was as bright as it had been in the balloon: a world of bright silver and profound black. The tracks of Lord Asriel's sledge ran straight toward a range of jagged hills, strange stark pointed shapes jutting up into a sky as black as the alethiometer's velvet cloth. There was no sign of the sledge itself—or was there a feather touch of movement on the flank of the highest peak? Lyra peered ahead, straining her eyes, and Pantalaimon flew as high as he could and looked with an owl's clear vision.

«Yes,» he said, on her wrist a moment later; «it's Lord Asriel, and he's lashing his dogs on furiously, and there's a boy in the back….»

Lyra felt lorek Byrnison change pace. Something had caught his attention. He was slowing and lifting his head to cast left and right.

«What is it?» Lyra said.

He didn't say. He was listening intently, but she could hear nothing. Then she did hear something: a mysterious, vastly distant rustling and crackling. It was a sound she had heard before: the sound of the Aurora. Out of nowhere a veil of radiance had fallen to hang shimmering in the northern sky. All those unseen billions and trillions of charged particles, and possibly, she thought, of Dust, conjured a radiating glow out of the upper atmosphere. This was going to be a display more brilliant and extraordinary than any Lyra had yet seen, as if the Aurora knew the drama that was taking place below, and wanted to light it with the most awe-inspiring effects.

But none of the bears were looking up: their attention was all on the earth. It wasn't the Aurora, after all, that had caught lorek's attention. He was standing stock-still now, and Lyra slipped off his back, knowing that his senses needed to cast around freely. Something was troubling him.

Lyra looked around, back across the vast open plain leading to Lord Asriel's house, back toward the tumbled mountains they'd crossed earlier, and saw nothing. The Aurora grew more intense. The first veils trembled and raced to one side, and jagged curtains folded and unfolded above, increasing in size and brilliance every minute; arcs and loops swirled across from horizon to horizon, and touched the very zenith with bows of radiance. She could hear more clearly than ever the immense singing hiss and swish of vast intangible forces.

«Witches!» came a cry in a bear voice, and Lyra turned in joy and relief.

But a heavy muzzle knocked her forward, and with no breath left to gasp she could only pant and shudder, for there in the place where she had been standing was the plume of a green-feathered arrow. The head and the shaft were buried in the snow.

Impossible.! she thought weakly, but it was true, for another arrow clattered off the armor of lorek, standing above her. These were not Serafina Pekkala's witches; they were from another clan. They circled above, a dozen of them or more, swooping down to shoot and soaring up again, and Lyra swore with every word she knew.

lorek Byrnison gave swift orders. It was clear that the bears were practiced at witch fighting, for they had moved at once into a defensive formation, and the witches moved just as smoothly into attack. They could only shoot accurately from close range, and in order not to waste arrows they would swoop down, fire at the lowest part of their dive, and turn upward at once. But when they reached the lowest point, and their hands were busy with bow and arrow, they were vulnerable, and the bears would explode upward with raking paws to drag them down. More than one fell, and was quickly dispatched.

Lyra crouched low beside a rock, watching for a witch dive. A few shot at her, but the arrows fell wide; and then Lyra, looking up at the sky, saw the greater part of the witch flight peel off and turn back.

If she was relieved by that, her relief didn't last more than a few moments. Because from the direction in which they'd flown, she saw many others coming to join them; and in midair with them there was a group of gleaming lights; and across the broad expanse of the Svalbard plain, under the radiance of the Aurora, she heard a sound she dreaded. It was the harsh throb of a gas engine. The zeppelin, with Mrs. Coulter and her troops on board, was catching up.

lorek growled an order and the bears moved at once into another formation. In the lurid flicker from the sky Lyra watched as they swiftly unloaded their fire hurler. The advance guard of the witch flight had seen them too, and began to swoop downward and rain arrows on them, but for the most part the bears trusted to their armor and worked swiftly to erect the apparatus: a long arm extending upward at an angle, a cup or bowl a yard across, and a great iron tank wreathed in smoke and steam.

As she watched, a bright flame gushed out, and a team of bears swung into practiced action. Two of them hauled the long arm of the fire thrower down, another scooped shovelfuls of fire into the bowl, and at an order they released it, to hurl the flaming sulfur high into the dark sky.

The witches were swooping so thickly above them that three fell in flames at the first shot alone, but it was soon clear that the real target was the zeppelin. The pilot either had never seen a fire hurler before, or was underestimating its power, for he flew straight on toward the bears without climbing or turning a fraction to either side.

Then it became clear that they had a powerful weapon in the zeppelin too: a machine rifle mounted on the nose of the gondola. Lyra saw sparks flying up from some of the bears' armor, and saw them huddle over beneath its protection, before she heard the rattle of the bullets. She cried out in fear.

«They're safe,» said lorek Byrnison. «Can't pierce armor with little bullets.»

The fire thrower worked again: this time a mass of blazing sulfur hurtled directly upward to strike the gondola and burst in a cascade of flaming fragments on all sides. The zeppelin banked to the left, and roared away in a wide arc before making again for the group of bears working swiftly beside the apparatus. As it neared, the arm of the fire thrower creaked downward; the machine rifle coughed and spat, and two bears fell, to a low growl from lorek Byrnison; and when the aircraft was nearly overhead, a bear shouted an order, and the spring-loaded arm shot upward again.

This time the sulfur hurtled against the envelope of the zeppelin's gas bag. The rigid frame held a skin of oiled silk in place to contain the hydrogen, and although this was tough enough to withstand minor scratches, a hundredweight of blazing rock was too much for it. The silk ripped straight through, and sulfur and hydrogen leaped to meet each other in a catastrophe of flame.

At once the silk became transparent; the entire skeleton of the zeppelin was visible, dark against an inferno of orange and red and yellow, hanging in the air for what seemed like an impossibly long time before drifting to the ground almost reluctantly. Little figures black against the snow and the fire came tottering or running from it, and witches flew down to help drag them away from the flames. Within a minute of the zeppelin's hitting the ground it was a mass of twisted metal, a pall of smoke, and a few scraps of fluttering fire.

But the soldiers on board, and the others too (though Lyra was too far away by now to spot Mrs. Coulter, she knew she was there), wasted no time. With the help of the witches they dragged the machine gun out and set it up, and began to fight in earnest on the ground.

«On,» said lorek. «They will hold out for a long time.»

He roared, and a group of bears peeled away from the main group and attacked the Tartars' right flank. Lyra could feel his desire to be there among them, but all the time her nerves were screaming: On! On! and her mind was filled with pictures of Roger and Lord Asriel; and lorek Byrnison knew, and turned up the mountain and away from the fight, leaving his bears to hold back the Tartars.

On they climbed. Lyra strained her eyes to look ahead, but not even Pantalaimon's owl eyes could see any movement on the flank of the mountain they were climbing. Lord Asriel's sledge tracks were clear, however, and lorek followed them swiftly, loping through the snow and kicking it high behind them as he ran. Whatever happened behind now was simply that: behind. Lyra had left it. She felt she was leaving the world altogether, so remote and intent she was, so high they were climbing, so strange and uncanny was the light that bathed them.

«lorek,» she said, «will you find Lee Scoresby?»

«Alive or dead, I will find him.»

«And if you see Serafina Pekkala…»

«I will tell her what you did.»

«Thank you, lorek,» she said.

They spoke no more for some time. Lyra felt herself moving into a kind of trance beyond sleep and waking: a state of conscious dreaming, almost, in which she was dreaming that she was being carried by bears to a city in the stars.

She was going to say something about it to lorek Byrnison, when he slowed down and came to a halt.

«The tracks go on,» said lorek Byrnison. «But I cannot.»

Lyra jumped down and stood beside him to look. He was standing at the edge of a chasm. Whether it was a crevasse in the ice or a fissure in the rock was hard to say, and made little difference in any case; all that mattered was that it plunged downward into unfathomable gloom.

And the tracks of Lord Asriel's sledge ran to the brink… and on, across a bridge of compacted snow.

This bridge had clearly felt the strain of the sledge's weight, for a crack ran across it close to the other edge of the chasm, and the surface on the near side of the crack had settled down a foot or so. It might support the weight of a child: it would certainly not stand under the weight of an armored bear.

And Lord Asriel's tracks ran on beyond the bridge and further up the mountain. If she went on, it would have to be by herself.

Lyra turned to lorek Byrnison.

«I got to go across,» she said. «Thank you for all you done. I don't know what's going to happen when I get to him. We might all die, whether I get to him or not. But if I come back, I'll come and see you to thank you properly, King lorek Byrnison.»

She laid a hand on his head. He let it lie there and nodded gently.

«Goodbye, Lyra Silvertongue,» he said.

Her heart thumping painfully with love, she turned away and set her foot on the bridge. The snow creaked under her, and Pantalaimon flew up and over the bridge, to settle in the snow on the far side and encourage her onward. Step after step she took, and wondered with every step whether it would be better to run swiftly and leap for the other side, or go slowly as she was doing and tread as lightly as possible. Halfway across there came another loud creak from the snow; a piece fell off near her feet and tumbled into the abyss, and the bridge settled down another few inches against the crack.

She stood perfectly still. Pantalaimon was crouched, leopard-formed, ready to leap down and reach for her.

The bridge held. She took another step, then another, and then she felt something settling down below her feet and leaped for the far side with all her strength. She landed belly-down in the snow as the entire length of the bridge fell into the crevasse with a soft whoosh behind her.

Pantalaimon's claws were in her furs, holding tight.

After a minute she opened her eyes and crawled up away from the edge. There was no way back. She stood and raised her hand to the watching bear. lorek Byrnison stood on his hind legs to acknowledge her, and then turned and made off down the mountain in a swift run to help his subjects in the battle with Mrs. Coulter and the soldiers from the zeppelin.

Lyra was alone.

Twenty-Three The Bridge To The Stars

Once lorek Byrnison was out of sight, Lyra felt a great weakness coming over her, and she turned blindly and felt for Pantalaimon, «Oh, Pan, dear, I can't go on! I'm so frightened—and so tired—all this way, and I'm scared to death! I wish it was someone else instead of me, I do honestly!»

Her daemon nuzzled at her neck in his cat form, warm and comforting.

«I just don't know what we got to do,» Lyra sobbed. «It's too much for us, Pan, we can't…»

She clung to him blindly, rocking back and forth and letting the sobs cry out wildly over the bare snow.

«And even if—if Mrs. Coulter got to Roger first, there'd be no saving him, because she'd take him back to Bolvangar, or worse, and they'd kill me out of vengeance….Why do they do these things to children, Pan? Do they all hate children so much, that they want to tear them apart like this? Why do they do it?»

But Pantalaimon had no answer; all he could do was hug her close. Little by little, as the storm of fear subsided, she came to a sense of herself again. She was Lyra, cold and frightened by all means, but herself.

«I wish…» she said, and stopped. There was nothing that could be gained by wishing for it. A final deep shaky breath, and she was ready to go on.

The moon had set by now, and the sky to the south was profoundly dark, though the billions of stars lay on it like diamonds on velvet. They were outshone, though, by the Aurora, outshone a hundred times. Never had Lyra seen it so brilliant and dramatic; with every twitch and shiver, new miracles of light danced across the sky. And behind the ever-changing gauze of light, that other world, that sunlit city, was clear and solid.

The higher they climbed, the more the bleak land spread out below them. To the north lay the frozen sea, compacted here and there into ridges where two sheets of ice had pressed together, but otherwise flat and white and endless, reaching to the Pole itself and far beyond, featureless, lifeless, colorless, and bleak beyond Lyra's imagination. To the east and west were more mountains, great jagged peaks thrusting sharply upward, their scarps piled high with snow and raked by the wind into bladelike edges as sharp as scimitars. To the south lay the way they had come, and Lyra looked most longingly back, to see if she could spy her dear friend lorek Byrnison and his troops; but nothing stirred on the wide plain. She was not even sure if she could see the burned wreckage of the zeppelin, or the crimson-stained snow around the corpses of the warriors.

Pantalaimon flew high, and swooped back to her wrist in his owl form.

«They're just beyond the peak!» he said. «Lord Asriel's laid out all his instruments, and Roger can't get away—»

And as he said that, the Aurora nickered and dimmed, like an anbaric bulb at the end of its life, and then went out altogether. In the gloom, though, Lyra sensed the presence of the Dust, for the air seemed to be full of dark intentions, like the forms of thoughts not yet born.

In the enfolding dark she heard a cry:

«Lyra! Lyra!»

«I'm coming!» she cried back, and stumbled upward, clambering, sprawling, struggling, at the end of her strength; but hauling herself on and further on through the ghostly-gleaming snow.

«Lyra! Lyra!»

«I'm nearly there,» she gasped. «Nearly there, Roger!»

Pantalaimon was changing rapidly, in his agitation: lion, ermine, eagle, wildcat, hare, salamander, owl, leopard, every form he'd ever taken, a kaleidoscope of forms among the Dust—

«Lyra!»

Then she reached the summit, and saw what was happening.

Fifty yards away in the starlight Lord Asriel was twisting together two wires that led to his upturned sledge, on which stood a row of batteries and jars and pieces of apparatus, already frosted with crystals of cold. He was dressed in heavy furs, his face illuminated by the flame of a naphtha lamp. Crouching like the Sphinx beside him was his daemon, her beautiful spotted coat glossy with power, her tail moving lazily in the snow.

In her mouth she held Roger's daemon.

The little creature was struggling, flapping, fighting, one moment a bird, the next a dog, then a cat, a rat, a bird again, and calling every moment to Roger himself, who was a few yards off, straining, trying to pull away against the heart-deep tug, and crying out with the pain and the cold. He was calling his daemon's name, and calling Lyra; he ran to Lord Asriel and plucked his arm, and Lord Asriel brushed him aside. He tried again, crying and pleading, begging, sobbing, and Lord Asriel took no notice except to knock him to the ground.

They were on the edge of a cliff. Beyond them was nothing but a huge illimitable dark. They were a thousand feet or more above the frozen sea.

All this Lyra saw by starlight alone; but then, as Lord Asriel connected his wires, the Aurora blazed all of a sudden into brilliant life. Like the long finger of blinding power that plays between two terminals, except that this was a thousand miles high and ten thousand miles long: dipping, soaring, undulating, glowing, a cataract of glory.

He was controlling it…

Or leading power down from it; for there was a wire running off a huge reel on the sledge, a wire that ran directly upward to the sky. Down from the dark swooped a raven, and Lyra knew it for a witch daemon. A witch was helping Lord Asriel, and she had flown that wire into the heights.

And the Aurora was blazing again.

He was nearly ready.

He turned to Roger and beckoned, and Roger helplessly came, shaking his head, begging, crying, but helplessly going forward.

«No! Run!» Lyra cried, and hurled herself down the slope at him.

Pantalaimon leaped at the snow leopard and snatched Roger's daemon from her jaws. In a moment the snow leopard had leaped after him, and Pantalaimon let the other daemon go, and both young daemons, changing flick-flick-flick, turned and battled with the great spotted beast.

She slashed left-right with needle-filled paws, and her snarling roar drowned even Lyra's cries. Both children were fighting her, too; or fighting the forms in the turbid air, those dark intentions, that came thick and crowding down the streams of Dust—

And the Aurora swayed above, its continual surging flicker picking out now this building, now that lake, now that row of palm trees, so close you'd think that you could step from this world to that.

Lyra leaped up and seized Roger's hand.

She pulled hard, and then they tore away from Lord Asriel and ran, hand in hand, but Roger cried and twisted, because his daemon was caught again, held fast in the snow leopard's jaws, and Lord Asriel himself was reaching down toward her with a wire; and Lyra knew the heart-convulsing pain of separation, and tried to stop—

But they couldn't stop.

The cliff was sliding away beneath them.

An entire shelf of snow, sliding inexorably down—

The frozen sea, a thousand feet below—

«LYRA!»

Her heartbeats, leaping in anguish with Roger's—

Tight-clutching hands—

His body, suddenly limp in hers; and high above, the greatest wonder.

At the moment he fell still, the vault of heaven, star-studded, profound, was pierced as if by a spear.

A jet of light, a jet of pure energy released like an arrow from a great bow, shot upward from the spot where Lord Asriel had joined the wire to Roger's daemon. The sheets of light and color that were the Aurora tore apart; a great rending, grinding, crunching, tearing sound reached from one end of the universe to the other; there was dry land in the sky—

Sunlight!

Sunlight shining on the fur of a golden monkey….

For the fall of the snow shelf had halted; perhaps an unseen ledge had broken its fall; and Lyra could see, over the trampled snow of the summit, the golden monkey spring out of the air to the side of the leopard, and she saw the two daemons bristle, wary and powerful. The monkey's tail was erect, the snow leopard's swept powerfully from side to side. Then the monkey reached out a tentative paw, the leopard lowered her head with a graceful sensual acknowledgment, they touched—

And when Lyra looked up from them, Mrs. Coulter herself stood there, clasped in Lord Asriel's arms. Light played around them like sparks and beams of intense anbaric power. Lyra, helpless, could only imagine what had happened: somehow Mrs. Coulter must have crossed that chasm, and followed her up here….

Her own parents, together!

And embracing so passionately: an undreamed-of thing.

Her eyes were wide. Roger's body lay in her arms, still, quiet, at rest. She heard her parents talking:

Her mother said, «They'll never allow it—»

Her father said, «Allow it? We've gone beyond being allowed, as if we were children. I've made it possible for anyone to cross, if they wish.»

«They'll forbid it! They'll seal it off and excommunicate anyone who tries!»

«Too many people will want to. They won't be able to prevent them. This will mean the end of the Church, Marisa, the end of the Magisterium, the end of all those centuries of darkness! Look at that light up there: that's the sun of another world! Feel the warmth of it on your skin, now!»

«They are stronger than anyone, Asriel! You don't know—»

«I don't know? I? No one in the world knows better than I how strong the Church is! But it isn't strong enough for this. The Dust will change everything, anyway. There's no stopping it now.»

«Is that what you wanted? To choke us and kill us all with sin and darkness?»

«I wanted to break out, Marisa! And I have. Look, look at the palm trees waving on the shore! Can you feel that wind? A wind from another world! Feel it on your hair, on your face….»

Lord Asriel pushed back Mrs. Coulter's hood and turned her head to the sky, running his hands through her hair. Lyra watched breathless, not daring to move a muscle.

The woman clung to Lord Asriel as if she were dizzy, and shook her head, distressed.

«No—no—they're coming, Asriel—they know where I've gone-»

«Then come with me, away and out of this world!»

«I daren't—»

«You? Dare not? Your child would come. Your child would dare anything, and shame her mother.»

«Then take her and welcome. She's more yours than mine, Asriel.»

«Not so. You took her in; you tried to mold her. You wanted her then.»

«She was too coarse, too stubborn. I'd left it too late….But where is she now? I followed her footsteps up….»

«You want her, still? Twice you've tried to hold her, and twice she's got away. If I were her, I'd run, and keep on running, sooner than give you a third chance.»

His hands, still clasping her head, tensed suddenly and drew her toward him in a passionate kiss. Lyra thought it seemed more like cruelty than love, and looked at their daemons, to see a strange sight: the snow leopard tense, crouching with her claws just pressing in the golden monkey's flesh, and the monkey relaxed, blissful, swooning on the snow.

Mrs. Coulter pulled fiercely back from the kiss and said, «No, Asriel—my place is in this world, not that—»

«Come with me!» he said, urgent, powerful. «Come and work with me!»

«We couldn't work together, you and I.»

«No? You and I could take the universe to pieces and put it together again, Marisa! We could find the source of Dust and stifle it forever! And you'd like to be part of that great work; don't lie to me about it. Lie about everything else, lie about the Oblation Board, lie about your lovers—yes, I know about Boreal, and I care nothing—lie about the Church, lie about the child, even, but don't lie about what you truly want….»

And their mouths were fastened together with a powerful greed. Their daemons were playing fiercely; the snow leopard rolled over on her back, and the monkey raked his claws in the soft fur of her neck, and she growled a deep rumble of pleasure.

«If I don't come, you'll try and destroy me,» said Mrs. Coulter, breaking away.

«Why should I want to destroy you?» he said, laughing, with the light of the other world shining around his head. «Come with me, work with me, and I'll care whether you live or die. Stay here, and you lose my interest at once. Don't flatter yourself that I'd give you a second's thought. Now stay and work your mischief in this world, or come with me.»

Mrs. Coulter hesitated; her eyes closed, she seemed to sway as if she were fainting; but she kept her balance and opened her eyes again, with an infinite beautiful sadness in them.

«No,» she said. «No.»

Their daemons were apart again. Lord Asriel reached down and curled his strong fingers into the snow leopard's fur. Then he turned his back and walked away without another word. The golden monkey leaped into Mrs. Coulter's arms, making little sounds of distress, reaching out to the snow leopard as she paced away, and Mrs. Coulter's face was a mask of tears. Lyra could see them glinting; they were real.

Then her mother turned, shaking with silent sobs, and moved down the mountain and out of Lyra's sight.

Lyra watched her coldly, and then looked up toward the sky.

Such a vault of wonders she had never seen.

The city hanging there so empty and silent looked new-made, waiting to be occupied; or asleep, waiting to be woken. The sun of that world was shining into this, making Lyra's hands golden, melting the ice on Roger's wolfskin hood, making his pale cheeks transparent, glistening in his open sightless eyes.

She felt wrenched apart with unhappiness. And with anger, too; she could have killed her father; if she could have torn out his heart, she would have done so there and then, for what he'd done to Roger. And to her: tricking her: how dare he?

She was still holding Roger's body. Pantalaimon was saying something, but her mind was ablaze, and she didn't hear until he pressed his wildcat claws into the back of her hand to make her. She blinked.

«What? What?»

«Dust!» he said.

«What are you talking about?»

«Dust. He's going to find the source of Dust and destroy it, isn't he?»

«That's what he said.»

«And the Oblation Board and the Church and Bolvangar and Mrs. Coulter and all, they want to destroy it too, don't they?»

«Yeah…Or stop it affecting people…Why?»

«Because if they all think Dust is bad, it must be good.»

She didn't speak. A little hiccup of excitement leaped in her chest.

Pantalaimon went on:

«We've heard them all talk about Dust, and they're so afraid of it, and you know what? We believed them, even though we could see that what they were doing was wicked and evil and wrong….We thought Dust must be bad too, because they were grown up and they said so. But what if it isn't? What if it's—»

She said breathlessly, «Yeah! What if it's really good…»

She looked at him and saw his green wildcat eyes ablaze with her own excitement. She felt dizzy, as if the whole world were turning beneath her.

If Dust were a good thing…If it were to be sought and welcomed and cherished…

«We could look for it too, Pan!» she said.

That was what he wanted to hear.

«We could get to it before he does,» he went on, «and….»

The enormousness of the task silenced them. Lyra looked up at the blazing sky. She was aware of how small they were, she and her daemon, in comparison with the majesty and vastness of the universe; and of how little they knew, in comparison with the profound mysteries above them.

«We could,» Pantalaimon insisted. «We came all this way, didn't we? We could do it.»

«We got it wrong, though, Pan. We got it all wrong about Roger. We thought we were helping him….» She choked, and kissed Roger's still face clumsily, several times. «We got it wrong,» she said.

«Next time we'll check everything and ask all the questions we can think of, then. We'll do better next time.»

«And we'd be alone. lorek Byrnison couldn't follow us and help. Nor could Farder Coram or Serafina Pekkala, or Lee Scoresby or no one.»

«Just us, then. Don't matter. We're not alone, anyway; not like….»

She knew he meant not like Tony Makarios; not like those poor lost daemons at Bolvangar; we're still one being; both of us are one.

«And we've got the alethiometer,» she said. «Yeah. I reckon we've got to do it, Pan. We'll go up there and we'll search for Dust, and when we've found it we'll know what to do.»

Roger's body lay still in her arms. She let him down gently.

«And we'll do it,» she said.

She turned away. Behind them lay pain and death and fear; ahead of them lay doubt, and danger, and fathomless mysteries. But they weren't alone.

So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.

END OF BOOK ONE