The Subtle Knife: His Dark Materials Read online

  “So I left his chamber invisibly and found my cloud-pine and flew away. But before I’d flown far, a great wind came up and hurled me high into the mountains, and I had to take refuge on a clifftop. Knowing the sort of creatures who live on cliffs, I made myself invisible again, and in the darkness I heard voices.

  “It seemed that I’d stumbled on the nesting place of the oldest of all cliff-ghasts. He was blind, and they were bringing him food: some stinking carrion from far below. And they were asking him for guidance.

  “ ‘Grandfather,’ they said, ‘how far back does your memory go?’

  “ ‘Way, way back. Back long before humans,’ he said, and his voice was soft and cracked and frail.

  “ ‘Is it true that the greatest battle ever known is coming soon, Grandfather?’

  “ ‘Yes, children,’ he said. ‘A greater battle than the last one, even. Fine feasting for all of us. These will be days of pleasure and plenty for every ghast in every world.’

  “ ‘And who’s going to win, Grandfather? Is Lord Asriel going to defeat the Authority?’

  “ ‘Lord Asriel’s army numbers millions,’ the old cliff-ghast told them, ‘assembled from every world. It’s a greater army than the one that fought the Authority before, and it’s better led. As for the forces of the Authority, why, they number a hundred times as many. But the Authority is age-old, far older even than me, children, and His troops are frightened, and complacent where they’re not frightened. It would be a close fight, but Lord Asriel would win, because he is passionate and daring and he believes his cause is just. Except for one thing, children. He hasn’t got Æsahættr. Without Æsahættr, he and all his forces will go down to defeat. And then we shall feast for years, my children!’

  “And he laughed and gnawed the stinking old bone they’d brought to him, and the others all shrieked with glee.

  “Now, you can imagine how I listened hard to hear more about this Æsahættr, but all I could hear over the howling of the wind was a young ghast asking, ‘If Lord Asriel needs Æsahættr, why doesn’t he call him?’

  “And the old ghast said, ‘Lord Asriel knows no more about Æsahættr than you do, child! That is the joke! Laugh long and loud—’

  “But as I tried to get closer to the foul things to learn more, my power failed, sisters, I couldn’t hold myself invisible any longer. The younger ones saw me and shrieked out, and I had to flee, back into this world through the invisible gateway in the air. A flock of them came after me, and those are the last of them, dead over there.

  “But it’s clear that Lord Asriel needs us, sisters. Whoever this Æsahættr is, Lord Asriel needs us! I wish I could go back to Lord Asriel now and say, ‘Don’t be anxious—we’re coming—we the witches of the north, and we shall help you win.’ … Let’s agree now, Serafina Pekkala, and call a great council of all the witches, every single clan, and make war!”

  Serafina Pekkala looked at Will, and it seemed to him that she was asking his permission for something. But he could give no guidance, and she looked back at Ruta Skadi.

  “Not us,” she said. “Our task now is to help Lyra, and her task is to guide Will to his father. You should fly back, agreed, but we must stay with Lyra.”

  Ruta Skadi tossed her head impatiently. “Well, if you must,” she said.

  Will lay down, because his wound was hurting him—much more now than when it was fresh. His whole hand was swollen. Lyra too lay down, with Pantalaimon curled at her neck, and watched the fire through half-closed lids, and listened sleepily to the murmur of the witches.

  Ruta Skadi walked a little way upstream, and Serafina Pekkala went with her.

  “Ah, Serafina Pekkala, you should see Lord Asriel,” said the Latvian queen quietly. “He is the greatest commander there ever was. Every detail of his forces is clear in his mind. Imagine the daring of it, to make war on the Creator! But who do you think this Æsahættr can be? How have we not heard of him? And how can we urge him to join Lord Asriel?”

  “Maybe it’s not a him, sister. We know as little as the young cliff-ghast. Maybe the old grandfather was laughing at his ignorance. The word sounds as if it means ‘god destroyer.’ Did you know that?”

  “Then it might mean us after all, Serafina Pekkala! And if it does, then how much stronger his forces will be when we join them. Ah, I long for my arrows to kill those fiends from Bolvangar, and every Bolvangar in every world! Sister, why do they do it? In every world, the agents of the Authority are sacrificing children to their cruel god! Why? Why?”

  “They are afraid of Dust,” said Serafina Pekkala, “though what that is, I don’t know.”

  “And this boy you’ve found. Who is he? What world does he come from?”

  Serafina Pekkala told her all she knew about Will. “I don’t know why he’s important,” she finished, “but we serve Lyra. And her instrument tells her that that is her task. And, sister, we tried to heal his wound, but we failed. We tried the holding spell, but it didn’t work. Maybe the herbs in this world are less potent than ours. It’s too hot here for bloodmoss to grow.”

  “He’s strange,” said Ruta Skadi. “He is the same kind as Lord Asriel. Have you looked into his eyes?”

  “To tell the truth,” said Serafina Pekkala, “I haven’t dared.”

  The two queens sat quietly by the stream. Time went past; stars set, and other stars rose; a little cry came from the sleepers, but it was only Lyra dreaming. The witches heard the rumbling of a storm, and they saw the lightning play over the sea and the foothills, but it was a long way off.

  Later Ruta Skadi said, “The girl Lyra. What of the part she was supposed to play? Is this it? She’s important because she can lead the boy to his father? It was more than that, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s what she has to do now. But as for later, yes, far more than that. What we witches have said about the child is that she would put an end to destiny. Well, we know the name that would make her meaningful to Mrs. Coulter, and we know that the woman doesn’t know it. The witch she was torturing on the ship near Svalbard nearly gave it away, but Yambe-Akka came to her in time.

  “But I’m thinking now that Lyra might be what you heard those ghasts speak of—this Æsahættr. Not the witches, not those angel-beings, but that sleeping child: the final weapon in the war against the Authority. Why else would Mrs. Coulter be so anxious to find her?”

  “Mrs. Coulter was a lover of Lord Asriel’s,” said Ruta Skadi.

  “Of course, and Lyra is their child.… Serafina Pekkala, if I had borne his child, what a witch she would be! A queen of queens!”

  “Hush, sister,” said Serafina. “Listen … and what’s that light?”

  They stood, alarmed that something had slipped past their guard, and saw a gleam of light from the camping place; not firelight, though, nothing remotely like firelight.

  They ran back on silent feet, arrows already nocked to their bowstrings, and stopped suddenly.

  All the witches were asleep on the grass, and so were Will and Lyra. But surrounding the two children were a dozen or more angels, gazing down at them.

  And then Serafina understood something for which the witches had no word: it was the idea of pilgrimage. She understood why these beings would wait for thousands of years and travel vast distances in order to be close to something important, and how they would feel differently for the rest of time, having been briefly in its presence. That was how these creatures looked now, these beautiful pilgrims of rarefied light, standing around the girl with the dirty face and the tartan skirt and the boy with the wounded hand who was frowning in his sleep.

  There was a stir at Lyra’s neck. Pantalaimon, a snow-white ermine, opened his black eyes sleepily and gazed around unafraid. Later, Lyra would remember it as a dream. Pantalaimon seemed to accept the attention as Lyra’s due, and presently he curled up again and closed his eyes.

  Finally one of the creatures spread his wings wide. The others, as close as they were, did so too, and their wings interpenetrated with
no resistance, sweeping through one another like light through light, until there was a circle of radiance around the sleepers on the grass.

  Then the watchers took to the air, one after another, rising like flames into the sky and increasing in size as they did so, until they were immense; but already they were far away, moving like shooting stars toward the north.

  Serafina and Ruta Skadi sprang to their pine branches and followed them upward, but they were left far behind.

  “Were they like the creatures you saw, Ruta Skadi?” said Serafina as they slowed down in the middle airs, watching the bright flames diminish toward the horizon.

  “Bigger, I think, but the same kind. They have no flesh, did you see that? All they are is light. Their senses must be so different from ours.… Serafina Pekkala, I’m leaving you now, to call all the witches of our north together. When we meet again, it will be wartime. Go well, my dear …”

  They embraced in midair, and Ruta Skadi turned and sped southward.

  Serafina watched her go, and then turned to see the last of the gleaming angels disappear far away. She felt nothing but compassion for those great watchers. How much they must miss, never to feel the earth beneath their feet, or the wind in their hair, or the tingle of the starlight on their bare skin! And she snapped a little twig off the pine branch she flew with, and sniffed the sharp resin smell with greedy pleasure, before flying slowly down to join the sleepers on the grass.

  FOURTEEN

  ALAMO GULCH

  Lee Scoresby looked down at the placid ocean to his left and the green shore to his right, and shaded his eyes to search for human life. It was a day and a night since they had left the Yenisei.

  “And this is a new world?” he said.

  “New to those not born in it,” said Stanislaus Grumman. “As old as yours or mine, otherwise. What Asriel’s done has shaken everything up, Mr. Scoresby, shaken it more profoundly than it’s ever been shaken before. These doorways and windows that I spoke of—they open in unexpected places now. It’s hard to navigate, but this wind is a fair one.”

  “New or old, that’s a strange world down there,” said Lee.

  “Yes,” said Stanislaus Grumman. “It is a strange world, though no doubt some feel at home there.”

  “It looks empty,” said Lee.

  “Not so. Beyond that headland you’ll find a city that was once powerful and wealthy. And it’s still inhabited by the descendants of the merchants and nobles who built it, though it’s fallen on hard times in the past three hundred years.”

  A few minutes later, as the balloon drifted on, Lee saw first a lighthouse, then the curve of a stone breakwater, then the towers and domes and red-brown roofs of a beautiful city around a harbor, with a sumptuous building like an opera house in lush gardens, and wide boulevards with elegant hotels, and little streets where blossom-bearing trees hung over shaded balconies.

  And Grumman was right; there were people there. But as the balloon drifted closer, Lee was surprised to see that they were children. There was not an adult in sight. And he was even more surprised to see the children had no dæmons—yet they were playing on the beach, or running in and out of cafés, or eating and drinking, or gathering bags full of goods from houses and shops. And there was a group of boys who were fighting, and a red-haired girl urging them on, and a little boy throwing stones to smash all the windows of a nearby building. It was like a playground the size of a city, with not a teacher in sight; it was a world of children.

  But they weren’t the only presences there. Lee had to rub his eyes when he saw them first, but there was no doubt about it: columns of mist—or something more tenuous than mist—a thickening of the air.… Whatever they were, the city was full of them; they drifted along the boulevards, they entered houses, they clustered in the squares and courtyards. The children moved among them unseeing.

  But not unseen. The farther they drifted over the city, the more Lee could observe the behavior of these forms. And it was clear that some of the children were of interest to them, and that they followed certain children around: the older children, those who (as far as Lee could see through his telescope) were on the verge of adolescence. There was one boy, a tall thin youth with a shock of black hair, who was so thickly surrounded by the transparent beings that his very outline seemed to shimmer in the air. They were like flies around meat. And the boy had no idea of it, though from time to time he would brush his eyes, or shake his head as if to clear his vision.

  “What the hell are those things?” said Lee.

  “The people call them Specters.”

  “What do they do, exactly?”

  “You’ve heard of vampires?”

  “Oh, in tales.”

  “The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.”

  “They’re the opposite of those devils at Bolvangar, then.”

  “On the contrary. Both the Oblation Board and the Specters of Indifference are bewitched by this truth about human beings: that innocence is different from experience. The Oblation Board fears and hates Dust, and the Specters feast on it, but it’s Dust both of them are obsessed by.”

  “They’re clustered around that kid down there.”

  “He’s growing up. They’ll attack him soon, and then his life will become a blank, indifferent misery. He’s doomed.”

  “For Pete’s sake! Can’t we rescue him?”

  “No. The Specters would seize us at once. They can’t touch us up here; all we can do is watch and fly on.”

  “But where are the adults? You don’t tell me the whole world is full of children alone?”

  “Those children are Specter-orphans. There are many gangs of them in this world. They wander about living on what they can find when the adults flee. And there’s plenty to find, as you can see. They don’t starve. It looks as if a multitude of Specters have invaded this city, and the adults have gone to safety. You notice how few boats there are in the harbor? The children will come to no harm.”

  “Except for the older ones. Like that poor kid down there.”

  “Mr. Scoresby, that is the way this world works. And if you want to put an end to cruelty and injustice, you must take me farther on. I have a job to do.”

  “Seems to me—” Lee said, feeling for the words, “seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed. Or is that wrong, Dr. Grumman? I’m only an ignorant aeronaut. I’m so damn ignorant I believed it when I was told that shamans had the gift of flight, for example. Yet here’s a shaman who hasn’t.”

  “Oh, but I have.”

  “How d’you make that out?”

  The balloon was drifting lower, and the ground was rising. A square stone tower rose directly in their path, and Lee didn’t seem to have noticed.

  “I needed to fly,” said Grumman, “so I summoned you, and here I am, flying.”

  He was perfectly aware of the peril they were in, but he held back from implying that the aeronaut wasn’t. And in perfect time, Lee Scoresby leaned over the side of the basket and pulled the cord on one of the bags of ballast. The sand flowed out, and the balloon lifted gently to clear the tower by six feet or so. A dozen crows, disturbed, rose cawing around them.

  “I guess you are,” said Lee. “You have a strange way about you, Dr. Grumman. You ever spend any time among the witches?”

  “Yes,” said Grumman. “And among academicians, and among spirits. I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same.”

  “And this journey we’re on? Is that folly or wisdom?”

  “The greatest wisdom I know.”

  “Tell me again what your purpose is. You’re going to find the bearer of this subtle knife, and what then?”

 
“Tell him what his task is.”

  “And that’s a task that includes protecting Lyra,” the aeronaut reminded him.

  “It will protect all of us.”

  They flew on, and soon the city was out of sight behind them.

  Lee checked his instruments. The compass was still gyrating loosely, but the altimeter was functioning accurately, as far as he could judge, and showed them to be floating about a thousand feet above the seashore and parallel with it. Some way ahead a line of high green hills rose into the haze, and Lee was glad he’d provided plenty of ballast.

  But when he made his regular scan of the horizon, he felt a little check at his heart. Hester felt it too, and flicked up her ears, and turned her head so that one gold-hazel eye rested on his face. He picked her up, tucked her in the breast of his coat, and opened the telescope again.

  No, he wasn’t mistaken. Far to the south (if south it was, the direction they’d come from) another balloon was floating in the haze. The heat shimmer and the distance made it impossible to see any details, but the other balloon was larger, and flying higher.

  Grumman had seen it too.

  “Enemies, Mr. Scoresby?” he said, shading his eyes to peer into the pearly light.

  “There can’t be a doubt. I’m uncertain whether to lose ballast and go higher, to catch the quicker wind, or stay low and be less conspicuous. And I’m thankful that thing’s not a zeppelin; they could overhaul us in a few hours. No, damn it, Dr. Grumman, I’m going higher, because if I was in that balloon I’d have seen this one already; and I’ll bet they have keen eyesight.”

  He set Hester down again and leaned out to jettison three bags of ballast. The balloon rose at once, and Lee kept the telescope to his eye.

  And a minute later he knew for certain they’d been sighted, for there was a stir of movement in the haze, which resolved itself into a line of smoke streaking up and away at an angle from the other balloon; and when it was some distance up, it burst into a flare. It blazed deep red for a moment and then dwindled into a patch of gray smoke, but it was a signal as clear as a tocsin in the night.