The sailors took no notice, but ran to lower a gangplank. Will felt electric with fear. He was shaking his head, and she saw the brilliance of tears on his cheeks. Will reached the corner of the street and looked along the waterfront. When the smoke and dust cleared a little, he saw one rusting vessel standing offshore, keeping its place against the flow of the river, and on the wharf a mob of people armed with rifles or pistols surrounding a great gun, which, as he watched, boomed again. A flash of fire, a lurching recoil, and near the vessel, a mighty splash. Tialys said nothing, but it was clear that he felt it would be anything but a comfort. The deaths stood politely along the wall, and it was strange to see how little space they took up, and to find how little notice they attracted. You could help look for a good spot. I can hear a stream, see if you can find it. Lyra thought his outline was lost almost at once against the pallor of the snowcovered ground, but it might have been that her eyes were full of tears. The two spies were already at the farmhouse door, which was ajar. It means that two particles can exist that only have properties in common, so that whatever happens to one happens to the other at the same moment, no matter how far apart they are. Well, in our world there is a way of taking a common lodestone and entangling all its particles, and then splitting it in two so that both parts resonate together. Can you take any other shape? She would face the remorse later. What is this world, and why has he come here? She heard all right, because she looked up briefly, but she soon turned back to her herbs and the boiling water. She poured the decoction into a beaker and let it stand, and only then turned her full attention to the waking girl. But she examined this one in detail, touching the edge, moving around to see how it became invisible from the other side, noting the absolute difference between this and that, and found her mind almost bursting with excitement that such things could be. Again, why was that? Every separate hair on her flesh stirred. It must be the enemy. Where did he go? What is your business? Tomorrow at the fountain. His words made her shiver. She gathered herself and sat up. It was a woman, or a female wise one, like us, like my people. But very old and yet not old at all. From far off across the great cavern, echoes answered, and his voice bounded from cliff to cliff, doubling and diminishing and causing those distant ghosts to pause in their endless procession and look up. It weighed much less now that it was dry. She moved on and found herself getting closer to a herd of those grazing creatures she had seen the previous evening, whose movement had puzzled her without her knowing why. They were about the size of deer or antelopes, and similarly colored, but what made her stop still and rub her eyes was the arrangement of their legs. Mary longed to examine a skeleton and see how the structure worked. Past them swooped the blue hawk, gliding down and down into the gloom, with each flaring light making his feathers flicker as he passed it, until he was merely a tiny spark, and then nothing. What are your plans now?