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?

But there was only hazy glitter where the blue of the sky paled at the edge of the sea, and the sea took up the pallor and made it sparkle through the shimmering air. But when the earth shook and the fog and the floods came, everything changed, and then the great river flowed south for a week or more before it turned again and went north. The world is turned upside down. Where were you when the great convulsion came? I have never known anything so dangerous. It would have been infinitely better if it had never been made. Is there anything you need in the way of furnishing, for example? Do you prefer to write at a table or a desk? Would you like a typewriting machine? Perhaps you would rather dictate to a stenographer? Your great task is to recall, and if necessary to rediscover, what he knew. Once you know what instruments you require, you shall have those as well. You are blessed to be entrusted with it! It was flying low, very low, from the fortress. It skimmed overhead, no higher than a rooftop above them, and then moved away into the heart of the storm. Now go your ways, hunt, feed, and live. Do not make war. We are not here for war. Then he took the knife and cut the smallest possible window he could see through, no larger than the circle he could make with thumb and forefinger. Lyra took a deep breath and began to turn the wheels. But after only a few moments, she stopped and turned the instrument around. Are you all alone here? What you coming along here for? Metatron is gone forever. They looked tense and driven with purpose. The whole night did. But unlike her, the clouds seemed to know what they were doing and why, and the wind knew, and the grass knew. The entire world was alive and conscious. Coulter herself intervened and took the child to her own quarters. She led him past a pool with a fountain under a widespreading tree, and then struck off to the left between beds of plants toward a huge manytrunked pine. There was a massive stone wall with a doorway in it, and in the farther part of the garden, the trees were younger and the planting less formal. Lyra led him almost to the end of the garden, over a little bridge, to a wooden seat under a spreading, lowbranched tree. And so it might have been, if a certain cliffghast, busy feasting on a halfdead warrior, had not looked up just as a random searchlight caught the side of the crystal litter. Then he cut a window, and it was the sweetest thing they had ever seen. One of them wheeled to the edge of the road and raised its trunk to utter a trumpeting call. The herd of grazers all looked up as one and began to trot toward them. When they arrived, they stood patiently at the verge and let the wheeled creatures move slowly through them, checking, touching, counting. Who is the other child? The golden monkey was right. Basilides tells us that their bomb not only opened an abyss below the worlds, but also fractured the structure of things so profoundly that there are fissures and cracks everywhere. Somewhere nearby there must be a way down to the edge of that abyss.

They approached, but seemed to become even more obscure. They went up to it carefully, keeping an eye on the grove in case another one should fall. In the calm morning, with only a faint breeze stirring the leaves, it seemed impossible that a mighty thing like this should ever topple, but here it was. What does it do? And then a faster dripping, a trickle, a running of water. A short, stubby key with black tape wound around it. A vicious, probing curiosity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion or sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage. You are a cesspit of moral filth. There is no world of the dead. He knew exactly where it was, and how to open the chamber, but the brilliant light and the glittering surfaces in the laboratory, not to mention the constant coming and going of technicians, made it impossible for him to do anything about it there. You will not know until you are on the water, and then it will be too late. But you all have to leave that part of yourselves here. There is no passage to the land of the dead for such as him. He came along much later. He was very different. The great ribbed belly of the zeppelin bulked over the bomb, straining at its cables in the wind, its silver sides running with moisture. And then the first great drops of rain came down. And as a token, we have been granted a responsibility. We would like to show you what this means. I mean a swim. If you saw one of em in your world, would you know he was a ghost? Instead, he contemplates deeper mysteries. You must stay the night in my house and we will talk and eat together. The mulefa loved them, but it was hard for them to move on the sand and gather them. They were hammering at it with fists and rocks, shrieking and yelling. Then he stepped off the threshold and stood still, almost at a loss. But the blade would be just as sharp, and it would work. Will took his notebook and copied it exactly. It showed a glacier with a curious serpentine shape, flowing down between three almost identical mountain peaks. He spread his pale hands and shook his head. He felt her tremble, and then under his hands the delicate bones of her back began to rise and fall, and he heard her sob quietly. He stroked her warm hair, her tender shoulders, and then he kissed her face again and again, and presently she gave a deep, shuddering sigh and fell still. Then, their clumsy movement on land giving them a swaggering strut, the birds went back to the water and sailed away downstream toward the sea. She took a coil long enough to reach over one of the branches of a high tree and back down to the ground, and strong enough to bear several times her weight. They nodded and murmured and stroked her with their trunks as she stepped down. She was daunted by what she had agreed to do. The same kind of edge.

She told me many things. She said that all the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. She gave me many examples from my world. It was a long way, and hard to navigate, but by watching the patterns of movement, they finally found her. But he had to be ruthless. We hope you will be able to help us. The tualapi will kill us all. There are more of them than there ever were, and their numbers are increasing every year. Something has gone wrong with the world. For most of the thirtythree thousand years that there have been mulefa, we have taken care of the earth. The trees prospered, the grazers were healthy, and even if once in a while the tualapi came, our numbers and theirs remained constant. Will you live long enough to see the world again, before you die and come back as a ghost? They walked on side by side, suddenly shy with each other. If you wanted to divert a mighty river into a different course, and all you had was a single pebble, you could do it, as long as you put the pebble in the right place to send the first trickle of water that way instead of this. Something like that happened yesterday. They saw each other differently, or something. Their dragonflies were skimming over the rocks, snapping up moths. The man was massaging the shoulder of the woman, and both of them looked at the children sternly. He sat on the back of the bench with his forepaws resting on her shoulder. But not too much. While he has the knife, he has the initiative, so if he opens another world and takes the girl into it, let him do so, and follow them through. Stay by their side at all times. Will marveled at the deftness in those huge black hooks. Was it his own fur? Whatever it was, it blew away at once in the dark. He explained what had happened and gave her the envelope. Coulter had hardly time to understand that almost instantaneous sequence of light and sound before the battle was under way. I would like to know how to make spells and enchantments. Can you teach me? Next evening she hurried to the valley as soon as she could, carrying some sweet rice wrapped in a heartfruit leaf. She was bursting to tell the woman what she had done, and to give her the medicine and receive her praise and thanks, and eager most of all for the enchanted sleeper to wake and talk to her. They could be friends! Yes, we have daemons, whatever they are. You should have stayed in your own world and waited to die before you came down to disturb us! When you die, your daemon just goes out like a candle flame. I seen it happen. But as she stumbled forward, a voice spoke just beside her, a familiar voice. Their ears were filled with the roar of thousands of tons of rock tumbling and rolling down with them. They never entered the water themselves, and only fished from the bank, taking care to keep their feet and wheels dry. Mary felt she had done something useful for them at last. Before he left him, there was something he had to say. Coulter must have killed him.

I lived with someone, not Alfredo, someone else. I lived with him for four years, nearly. My family was scandalized. But then we decided we'd be happier not living together. So I'm on my own. The man I lived with used to like mountain climbing, and he taught me to climb, and I walk in the mountains and... And I've got my work. Well, I had my work. So I'm solitary but happy, if you see what I mean." "This is a bitter message, a sad and cruel joke. Can't you see the truth? This is not a child. This is an agent of the Evil One himself! The world we lived in was a vale of corruption and tears. Nothing there could satisfy us. But the Almighty has granted us this blessed place for all eternity, this paradise, which to the fallen soul seems bleak and barren, but which the eyes of faith see as it is, overflowing with milk and honey and resounding with the sweet hymns of the angels. This is Heaven, truly! What this evil girl promises is nothing but lies. She wants to lead you to Hell! Go with her at your peril. My companions and I of the true faith will remain here in our blessed paradise, and spend eternity singing the praises of the Almighty, who has given us the judgment to tell the false from the true." She found room for the last little goat's cheese wrapped in its vine leaf, smiled and bowed again, and took a last drink from the spring that bubbled up among the gray rocks. Then she clapped her hands gently together as the old couple were doing, and turned firmly away and left. "Yes," she said, "I am sorry, Tialys, but if you hadn't got angry, we'd never have found this gentleman to guide us. So I'm glad you were here, you and the Lady, I'm really grateful to you for being with us." "Where is Baruch?" he said. "Can he communicate with you?" Lord Roke moved silently along the skirting board toward the door. The sun was newly risen, and the rocks and the lichens and mosses on them shone crisp and brilliant in the morning light, but nowhere could he see a figure. Lord Asriel passed a hand over his forehead. Right, he thought. I can deal with you. "And the hair? What do you do with that?" The white dog changed into a sparrow and flew to Will's shoulder. No one blinked an eye at this: each of the men had a daemon, Will saw, dogs, most of them, and that was how things happened in this world. On his shoulder, Balthamos whispered: "Keep moving. Don't look them in the eye. Keep your head down. That is the respectful thing to do." "I will only show it to a bear I can trust. There is one bear I've heard of who's trustworthy. He is the king of the bears, a good friend of the girl I'm going to the mountains to find. Her name is Lyra Silvertongue. The bear is called Iorek Byrnison." "You been talking to Lord Asriel?" "When was he alive, then?" He heard the others cry and shriek in hatred as they fled, and he knew that Lyra was unhurt beside him; but he threw himself down in the mud with only one thing in his mind. She watched with great unease as he set off along the path. Surely he didn't believe what she had just told him about the monkey daemon, or he wouldn't walk so recklessly up to the cave. There were a dozen or so. They were roughly the same size as the grazing creatures, but leaner and gray-colored, with horned heads and short trunks like elephants'. They had the same diamond-shaped structure as the grazers, but somehow they had evolved, on their front and rear single legs, a wheel. He had to stop for a moment to breathe in the smoke of the herbs, which seemed to steady him. He continued: "With the Regent at the reins. He's concealed himself well, this Metatron. They speak of him in the apocryphal scriptures: he was a man once, a man called Enoch, the son of Jared, six generations away from Adam. And now he rules the Kingdom. And he's intending to do more than that, if that angel they found by the sulphur lake was correct, the one who entered the Clouded Mountain to spy. If he wins this battle, he intends to intervene directly in human life. Imagine that, Ogunwe, a permanent Inquisition, worse than anything the Consistorial Court of Discipline could dream up, staffed by spies and traitors in every world and directed personally by the intelligence that's keeping that mountain aloft. The old Authority at least had the grace to withdraw; the dirty work of burning heretics and hanging witches was left to his priests. This new one will be far, far worse." And at the word alone, Will felt a great wave of rage and despair moving outward from a place deep within him, as if his mind were an ocean that some profound convulsion had disturbed. All his life he'd been alone, and now he must be alone again, and this infinitely precious blessing that had come to him must be taken away almost at once. He felt the wave build higher and steeper to darken the sky, he felt the crest tremble

To the armory," Lord Asriel said shortly, and turned away to talk quietly with the angel. They shifted on the branches, muttering and raising their wings. But a moment later Salmakia leapt up to join the Chevalier, and called out: She had the golden instrument out in a moment and moved into the moonlight so she could see the dial clearly. Looping back the hair behind her ears, just as Will had seen her mother do, she began to turn the wheels in the old familiar way, and Pantalaimon, mouse-formed now, sat on her knee. He and Lyra stayed with the wolves for a while, and then moved to Oxford to work in the kitchens of Jordan College. There they met Roger, and when Jordan was attacked by the brickburners who lived in the clay beds, they had to escape in a hurry; so she and Will and Roger captured a gyptian narrow boat and sailed it all the way down the Thames, nearly getting caught at Abingdon Lock, and then they'd been sunk by the Wapping pirates and had to swim for safety to a three-masted clipper just setting off for Hang Chow in Cathay to trade for tea. "Where are we now?" said Will to the captain, whose English was limited. "Yeah, because I was tired, I think. Well, we'll see. Just follow the knife?" Lyra was following this closely, and seeing Iorek still unwilling, she said: THIRTY-SIX - THE BROKEN ARROW "Asriel," she called innocently, "may I see how the machine works?" Will had the girl pressed against his chest, with his shoulder curved over to protect her, and he felt her shaking and sobbing against him; but then he thrust the knife into the rotten wood of the door and cut out the lock with a quick slash of the blade. "Good. Thank you, King; your force did well. My Lord Roke, what have you heard?" "But how do people become angels?" "Doesn't it scare you, having your death close by all the time?" said Lyra. Surely it couldn't be her tree? "Are all his people with you, or are they divided as humans are?" "I stole a gyropter. It ran out of fuel and I had to abandon it in the countryside not far from here. The rest of the way I walked." "I can think of many from mine." "Yes," said Lyra, lying earnestly, "oh yes, we'll do that then all right." She looked wildly around and met Lord Roke's eyes for a fraction of a second, glittering in the darkness near the ceiling. He caught her expression at once and understood exactly what she meant him to do. "What is your plan?" The death stood very close, smiling kindly, his face exactly like those of all the others she'd seen; but this was hers, her very own death, and Pantalaimon at her breast howled and shivered, and his ermine shape flowed up around her neck and tried to push her away from the death. But by doing that, he only pushed himself closer, and realizing it, he shrank back toward her again, to her warm throat and the strong pulse of her heart. "Mr. Basilides, good evening to you," said Lord Asriel. "This is our problem, and I would like you to put everything else aside while you deal with it. Tialys? Salmakia?" said Will shakily. "I have no knife," said Father Gomez. "But I have a sacred task. Maybe that is protecting me against these, Specters." "What world do you come from?" said Lyra. "I never seen people like you before.Look," he said, "over there.

Is Lord Asriel actively searching for the girl and the boy?" "Thank you, no, no, that's all I need, no more, honestly, thank you," said Dr. Mary Malone to the old couple in the olive grove as they tried to give her more food than she could carry. Wide golden light, and an endless prairie or savanna, like nothing she had ever seen in her own world. To begin with, although most of it was covered in short grass in an infinite variety of buff-brown-green-ocher-yellow-golden shades, and undulating very gently in a way that the long evening light showed up clearly, the prairie seemed to be laced through and through with what looked like rivers of rock with a light gray surface. They told the witch more of what they'd seen, and they were trying to distract her, and she knew it; but she let them talk, because of the love each one had for the other's voice. The little ghost nodded. And so, in a shocked silence, the column of the dead began their journey along the edge of the abyss. How long it took, neither Lyra nor Will could guess; how fearful and dangerous it was, they were never able to forget. The darkness below was so profound that it seemed to pull the eyesight down into it, and a ghastly dizziness swam over their minds when they looked. Whenever they could, they looked ahead of them fixedly, on this rock, that foothold, this projection, that loose slope of gravel, and kept their eyes from the gulf; but it pulled, it tempted, and they couldn't help glancing into it, only to feel their balance tilting and their eyesight swimming and a dreadful nausea gripping their throats. Almost at the same time, the tempter whom Father Gomez was setting out to follow was being tempted herself. She took out the golden instrument. The answer came at once. She put it away and stood up. NINE - UPRIVER TWENTY-SIX - THE ABYSS The angel came at his command, helpless. Shivering inside his cloak, in the hitter cold gloom of the tundra, the boy said to him, "You must try to keep quiet now. You know there are things out there that'll attack if they hear a noise. I can protect you with the knife if you're nearby, but if they attack you up there, I won't be able to help. And if you die, too, that'll be the end for me. Balthamos, I need you to help guide me to Lyra. Please don't forget that. Baruch was strong, be strong, too. Be like him for me." Mrs. Coulter heard no more of what he was saying, because he was already halfway down the stairs. When his running footsteps had faded, too, the only sounds were the gentle hiss of the naphtha lamp and the moan of the wild wind outside. I don't know, Mary said. I suppose sometime soon. I don't know when it happens to us. Pantalaimon was a hawk as he said that, and his eyes were keener than hers. The darkness of the sky was turning minute by minute into the palest ethereal blue, and as she looked across the sand, the first edge of the sun just cleared the rim of the sea, dazzling her. Because she was on the slope of the dune, the light reached her a few seconds before it touched the beach, and she watched it flow around her and along toward Will; and then she saw the hand-high figure of the Chevalier Tialys, standing by Will's head, clear and wide awake and watching them. Not yet, said the harpy. "Farther to go yet. This is a bad place to open. Better place higher up." However, she clenched her teeth and tried to hold her chin high. We got here, she thought, that's part of it anyway. "Well, we're not coming to Lord Asriel anyway," said Will. "We've got something else to do first.Death? said Will. "We're not bringing any death." Mary managed to avoid asking any questions. These two had passed through an experience that had marked them deeply; they didn't want to talk about it yet. "Shall I fly ahead now and see where we are? The witch herself was still just alive, and her mouth moved shudderingly, saying, "Something coming, something else… coming&hellip So that was how I stopped being a nun," she said. "You don't know," she cried, "you just don't know what I got in my head or my heart, do you? I don't know if you people ever have children, maybe you lay eggs or something, I wouldn't be surprised, because you're not kind, you're not generous, you're not considerate, you're not cruel, even, that would be better, if you were cruel, because it'd mean you took us serious, you didn't just go along with us when it suited you. Oh, I can't trust you at all now! You said you'd help and we'd do it together, and now you want to stop us, you're the dishonest one, Tialys!" "Must I have these handcuffs on?" she said. "Bear! You must agree. If you give way to me, the fighting has to stop, and you can buy fuel and go peacefully up the river." "I'll stay with you. I'll have to hide under your coat." Because the creatures were getting louder and flying

Did it say what would happen if we didn't?" he asked. He moved his fingers experimentally. True, the wounds still hurt, but with a different quality of pain: not the deep life-sapping ache of the day before, but a smaller, duller sensation. It felt as if it were healing. His father had done that. The witches' spell had failed, but his father had healed him. "You don't mean, I thought you might help us," she said quite calmly, not pleading but questioning. "With the knife. I saw what you did at Sir Charles's house. You could make it safe for us, couldn't you? You could help us get away?" Will lay curled up fast asleep, with his head on the rucksack to protect the knife. The cloak had fallen off his shoulder, and she tucked it around him, pretending that she was taking care to avoid his daemon, and that she had the form of a cat, curled up just as he was. She must be here somewhere, Lyra thought. The village was a shabby place: a huddle of wooden buildings, with paddocks containing reindeer, and dogs that barked as he approached. Smoke crept out of the tin chimneys and hung low over the shingled roofs. The ground was heavy and dragged at his feet, and there had obviously been a recent flood: walls were marked with mud to halfway up the doors, and broken beams of wood and loose-hanging sheets of corrugated iron showed where sheds and verandas and outbuildings had been swept away. "Well," said the guard, "I'm sure you won't, ma'am, but I can't do what I en't been ordered to do. You see that, I'm sure. Please stand up, ma'am, and if you stumble, I'll catch hold of your arm." He disengaged her arms gently and made her sit down. At once Pantalaimon, frightened, flowed up onto her lap, and the cat daemon tentatively came close to Will. They hadn't touched yet, but now he put out a hand to her, and she moved her cat face against his fingers and then stepped delicately onto his lap. Will said quietly, "The knife's broken. I don't know how it happened. Mrs. Coulter did something, or said something, and I thought of my mother and that made the knife twist, or catch, or, I don't know what happened. But we're stuck till we can get it mended. I didn't want those two little people to know, because while they think I can still use it, I've got the upper hand. I thought you could ask the alethiometer, maybe, and...” "So what were you going to do?" said the President. Lyra sat up, excited at hearing the names of her old friends. But Iorek hadn't finished. He went on: Out of the little grove, away from the baffled Specters, out of the valley, past the mighty form of his old companion the armor-clad bear, the last little scrap of the consciousness that had been the aeronaut Lee Scoresby floated upward, just as his great balloon had done so many times. Untroubled by the flares and the bursting shells, deaf to the explosions and the shouts and cries of anger and warning and pain, conscious only of his movement upward, the last of Lee Scoresby passed through the heavy clouds and came out under the brilliant stars, where the atoms of his beloved daemon, Hester, were waiting for him. The mulefa had no term for climb, so Mary had to do a lot of gesturing and roundabout explaining. Atal was horrified. "But it's not fair on you to have to do that." "Good-bye, Mr. Scoresby!" Lyra cried, looking around for him. "I wish, oh, thank you, thank you, good-bye!" "Yes. To each of the hairs from which these ones were cut. That's right." But the poor girl was embarrassed and ashamed: she'd forgotten. She turned away, hiding her face, and a boy said: There was a light breeze, which lifted a faint scent out of the flowers and rustled the stiff leaves, and Mary imagined a huge, dim benevolence holding her up, like a pair of giant hands. As she lay in the fork of the great branches, she felt a kind of bliss she had only felt once before; and that was not when she made her vows as a nun. "But where are we going?" the child said. "I don't want to be dead, Mama!" TWENTY-ONE - THE HARPIES Mary watched Serafina Pekkala with a mixture of wariness and admiration: she had never seen a human form so slender and graceful. She seemed younger than Mary herself, though Lyra had said she was hundreds of years old; the only hint of age came in her expression, which was full of a complicated sadness. However, his arms encircled the angel's wings, cramping them to his side. And a moment later, Mrs. Coulter had leapt up between those pinioned wings and seized Metatron's hair. His strength was enormous: it was like holding the mane of a bolting horse. As he shook his head furiously, she was flung this way and that, and she felt the power in the great folded wings as they strained and heaved at the man's arms locked so tightly around them. "No," he said.

But the monkey's grip never slackened; and then Pantalaimon became a porcupine. Such an age had gone past since Lyra had seen these dear men! They'd last spoken together in the snows of the Arctic, on their way to rescue the children from the Gobblers. She was almost shy, and she offered her hand to shake, uncertainly; but John Faa caught her up in a tight embrace and kissed both her cheeks, and Farder Coram did the same, gazing at her before folding her tight to his chest. "Well, where is God," said Mrs. Coulter, "if he's alive? And why doesn't he speak anymore? At the beginning of the world, God walked in the Garden and spoke with Adam and Eve. Then he began to withdraw, and he forbade Moses to look at his face. Later, in the time of Daniel, he was aged, he was the Ancient of Days. Where is he now? Is he still alive, at some inconceivable age, decrepit and demented, unable to think or act or speak and unable to die, a rotten hulk? And if that is his condition, wouldn't it be the most merciful thing, the truest proof of our love for God, to seek him out and give him the gift of death?" But Will kept his head: instead of slashing wildly and getting in more of a tangle, he watched the flow of the net and cut it through in a matter of moments. The second net fell useless to the ground, and then Will leapt at Iorek, feeling with his left hand, cutting with his right. The great bear stood motionless as the boy darted here and there over his vast body, cutting, freeing, clearing the way. A little groan broke from Dirk Jansen's throat, as if there were no denying it anymore. The dragonflies darted out of the door and skimmed over the ground and then shot up high, faster than birds. The man was looking around helplessly, raising his hands, lowering them again, uttering little cries. Lyra looked down at her, anguished; but then she stepped over her mother's body and loosened Mrs. Coulter's feeble clutch from her ankle. The woman was sobbing now; Will saw the tears glistening on her cheeks. He was shading his eyes and pointing. She followed his gaze and saw a distant tremor of movement, quite different from the shimmer of the heat haze. Out of nowhere a seagull flew down with a wild cry and seized the Gallivespian in his claw. It was the witch's daemon. Lord Roke fought hard, but the bird had him too tightly, and then the witch tore herself from Mrs. Coulter's grasp, snatched the tattered pine branch, and leapt into the air to join her daemon. She had to guess. The mention of "openings" recalled the mysterious window in the air through which she had entered this world; and the first words seemed to say that she should go upward. "Thank you, sir," she said, turning back to the reader. "I'm very grateful. Please would you let me know if you discover anything more about her, or where she is, or what she's doing? The true stories, yes," she said,  the true stories the harpies want to hear in exchange. Yes. So if people live their whole lives and they've got nothing to tell about it when they've finished, then they'll never leave the world of the dead. We've got to tell them that, Will.She told them the story of how she and Roger had climbed over Jordan College roof and found the rook with the broken leg, and how they had looked after it until it was ready to fly again; and how they had explored the wine cellars, all thick with dust and cobwebs, and drunk some canary, or it might have been Tokay, she couldn't tell, and how drunk they had been. And Roger's ghost listened, proud and desperate, nodding and whispering, Yes, yes! That's just what happened, that's true all right!" Mary tried to take in all the implications of what Serafina had told her, but it was too hard. Four pairs of eyes in different parts of the sky all saw the brief movement, and at once four pairs of wings beat hard against the smoke-fouled air, hurling the watchers forward to the cloud. "King bear go south?" "Not him." I need to make more observations. I need to find out whether the wind goes always in that direction or whether it alters like the air currents during the day and the night. So I need to spend more time in the treetops, and sleep up there and observe at night. I will need your help to build a platform of some kind so I can sleep safely. But we do need more observations. Will said, "This place where the dead are. Is it a world like this one, like mine or yours or any of the others? Is it a world I could get to with the knife? You can still decide differently," said Salmakia. "A man who told me what I should do with the knife. Then he died. He had some ointment in a horn box, and it cured my wound. The witches tried, but their spell didn't work." "South?" "Go, then," he said, "go south, Will Ivanovitch.

King Iorek Byrnison," she said, "please may I speak with you? I lay my weapons down." She directed her words mainly at King Ogunwe, without seeming to, and Lord Asriel saw that, too. Not only was the king her chief accuser, he was also human, unlike the angel or Lord Roke, and she knew how to play on him. He was finding it hard not to tell her; and since she was in his power, he did. He held out a cable at the end of which was a leather grip, deeply marked by his daemon's teeth. The spy thought it best not to trouble Mrs. Coulter with that, though; she was exhausted. Let her sleep, he decided, and he moved silently about the room, listening at the door, watching out of the window, awake and alert. Unsaid behind that brief exchange was the one thing they never spoke of: the shortness of their lives compared with those of humans. Gallivespians lived to nine years or ten, rarely more, and Tialys and Salmakia were both in their eighth year. They didn't fear old age, their people died in the full strength and vigor of their prime, suddenly, and their childhoods were very brief, but compared with their lives, the life of a child like Lyra would extend as far into the future as the lives of the witches extended past Lyra's own. "We know," he said shortly. He raised his trunk and imitated her words: "Pan, darling, I'm here...” And it was connected to what the Shadows had said to her on the computer screen just before she'd left her own world: whatever it was, this question, it had to do with the great change in human history symbolized in the story of Adam and Eve; with the Temptation, the Fall, Original Sin. In his investigations among fossil skulls, her colleague Oliver Payne had discovered that around thirty thousand years ago a great increase had taken place in the number of shadow particles associated with human remains. Something had happened then, some development in evolution, to make the human brain an ideal channel for amplifying their effects. "I have been the worst mother in the world. I let my only child be taken away from me when she was a tiny infant, because I didn't care about her; I was concerned only with my own advancement. I didn't think of her for years, and if I did, it was only to regret the embarrassment of her birth. He had never really understood that. He explained what she'd told him before she killed herself: she had loved John Parry, and he had scorned her. "It was a female angel," said Kirjava. She had seen forges, ironworks, manufactories in her own world; the biggest seemed like a village smithy beside this. Hammers the size of houses were lifted in a moment to the distant ceiling and then hurled downward to flatten balks of iron the size of tree trunks, pounding them flat in a fraction of a second with a blow that made the very mountain tremble; from a vent in the rocky wall, a river of sulphurous molten metal flowed until it was cut off by an adamant gate, and the brilliant seething flood rushed through channels and sluices and over weirs into row upon row of molds, to settle and cool in a cloud of evil smoke; gigantic slicing machines and rollers cut and folded and pressed sheets of inch-thick iron as if it were tissue paper, and then those monstrous hammers pounded it flat again, layering metal upon metal with such force that the different layers became one tougher one, over and over again. "And is it like the alethiometer?" said Will. "Does it take a whole lifetime to learn?" "Suppose they thought he wouldn't, though," she said, "suppose they thought he was so coldhearted he'd just watch us die. Maybe he better make 'em think that, if he can." The scientist took the little envelope containing Lyra's hair and bowed nervously as he left. Lord Roke left with him, making no more noise than a shadow. From us, and from the oil, was Atal's reply, and Mary knew she meant the oil in the great seedpod wheels. Her hands were resting on his glossy fur. Somewhere in the garden a nightingale was singing, and a little breeze touched her hair and stirred the leaves overhead. All the different bells of the city chimed, once each, this one high, that one low, some close by, others farther off, one cracked and peevish, another grave and sonorous, but agreeing in all their different voices on what the time was, even if some of them got to it a little more slowly than others. In that other Oxford where she and Will had kissed good-bye, the bells would be chiming, too, and a nightingale would be singing, and a little breeze would be stirring the leaves in the Botanic Garden. "Metatron? Who's he? Why did he attack? And don't lie to me.

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