The Subtle Knife: His Dark Materials Read online

  Thus she stood, bow in hand, indifferent, dead in life.

  So Lena Feldt failed to see or to care about what Mrs. Coulter did next. Ignoring the gray-haired man slumped unconscious in the canvas chair and his dull-skinned dæmon coiled in the dust, the woman called the captain of the soldiers and ordered them to get ready for a night march up the mountain.

  Then she went to the edge of the water and called to the Specters.

  They came at her command, gliding like pillars of mist across the water. She raised her arms and made them forget they were earthbound, so that one by one they rose into the air and floated free like malignant thistledown, drifting up into the night and borne by the air currents toward Will and Lyra and the other witches; but Lena Feldt saw nothing of it.

  The temperature dropped quickly after dark, and when Will and Lyra had eaten the last of their dry bread, they lay down under an overhanging rock to keep warm and try to sleep. At least Lyra didn’t have to try; she was unconscious in less than a minute, curled tightly around Pantalaimon, but Will couldn’t find sleep, no matter how long he lay there. It was partly his hand, which was now throbbing right up to the elbow and uncomfortably swollen, and partly the hard ground, and partly the cold, and partly utter exhaustion, and partly his longing for his mother.

  He was afraid for her, of course, and he knew she’d be safer if he was there to look after her; but he wanted her to look after him, too, as she’d done when he was very small. He wanted her to bandage him and tuck him into bed and sing to him and take away all the trouble and surround him with all the warmth and softness and mother-kindness he needed so badly; and it was never going to happen. Part of him was only a little boy still. So he cried, but he lay very still as he did, not wanting to wake Lyra.

  But he still wasn’t asleep. He was more awake than ever. Finally he uncurled his stiff limbs and got up quietly, shivering; and with the knife at his waist he set off higher up the mountain, to calm his restlessness.

  Behind him the sentry witch’s robin dæmon cocked his head, and she turned from the watch she was keeping to see Will clambering up the rocks. She reached for her pine branch and silently took to the air, not to disturb him but to see that he came to no harm.

  He didn’t notice. He felt such a need to move and keep moving that he hardly noticed the pain in his hand anymore. He felt as if he should walk all night, all day, forever, because nothing else would calm this fever in his breast. And as if in sympathy with him, a wind was rising. There were no leaves to stir in this wilderness, but the air buffeted his body and made his hair stream away from his face; it was wild outside him and wild within.

  He climbed higher and higher, hardly once thinking of how he might find his way back down to Lyra, until he came out on a little plateau almost at the top of the world, it seemed. All around him, on every horizon, the mountains reached no higher. In the brilliant glare of the moon the only colors were stark black and dead white, and every edge was jagged and every surface bare.

  The wild wind must have been bringing clouds overhead, because suddenly the moon was covered, and darkness swept over the whole landscape—thick clouds, too, for no gleam of moonlight shone through them. In less than a minute Will found himself in nearly total darkness.

  And at the same moment Will felt a grip on his right arm.

  He cried out with shock and twisted away at once, but the grip was tenacious. And Will was savage now. He felt he was at the very end of everything; and if it was the end of his life, too, he was going to fight and fight till he fell.

  So he twisted and kicked and twisted again, but that hand wouldn’t let go; and since it was his right arm being held, he couldn’t get at the knife. He tried with his left, but he was being jerked around so much, and his hand was so painful and swollen, that he couldn’t reach; he had to fight with one bare, wounded hand against a grown man.

  He sank his teeth into the hand on his forearm, but all that happened was that the man landed a dizzying blow on the back of his head. Then Will kicked again and again, and some of the kicks connected and some didn’t, and all the time he was pulling, jerking, twisting, shoving, and still the grip held him fast.

  Dimly he heard his own panting and the man’s grunts and harsh breathing; and then by chance he got his leg behind the man’s and hurled himself against his chest, and the man fell with Will on top of him, heavily. But never for a moment did that grip slacken, and Will, rolling around violently on the stony ground, felt a heavy fear tighten around his heart: this man would never let him go, and even if he killed him, his corpse would still be holding fast.

  But Will was weakening, and now he was crying, too, sobbing bitterly as he kicked and tugged and beat at the man with his head and feet, and he knew his muscles would give up soon. And then he noticed that the man had fallen still, though his hand still gripped as tight as ever. He was lying there letting Will batter at him with knees and head; and as soon as Will saw that, the last of his strength left him, and he fell helpless beside his opponent, every nerve in his body ringing and dizzy and throbbing.

  Will hauled himself up painfully, peered through the deep darkness, and made out a blur of white on the ground beside the man. It was the white breast and head of a great bird, an osprey, a dæmon, and it was lying still. Will tried to pull away, and his feeble tug woke a response from the man, whose hand hadn’t loosened.

  But he was moving. He was feeling Will’s right hand carefully with his free one. Will’s hair stood on end.

  Then the man said, “Give me your other hand.”

  “Be careful,” said Will.

  The man’s free hand felt down Will’s left arm, and his fingertips moved gently over the wrist and on to the swollen palm and with the utmost delicacy on to the stumps of Will’s two lost fingers.

  His other hand let go at once, and he sat up.

  “You’ve got the knife,” he said. “You’re the knife bearer.”

  His voice was resonant, harsh, but breathless. Will sensed that he was badly hurt. Had he wounded this dark opponent?

  Will was still lying on the stones, utterly spent. All he could see was the man’s shape, crouching above him, but he couldn’t see his face. The man was reaching sideways for something, and after a few moments a marvelous soothing coolness spread into his hand from the stumps of his fingers as the man massaged a salve into his skin.

  “What are you doing?” Will said.

  “Curing your wound. Keep still.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the only man who knows what the knife is for. Hold your hand up like that. Don’t move.”

  The wind was beating more wildly than ever, and a drop or two of rain splashed onto Will’s face. He was trembling violently, but he propped up his left hand with his right while the man spread more ointment over the stumps and wound a strip of linen tightly around the hand.

  And as soon as the dressing was secure, the man slumped sideways and lay down himself. Will, still bemused by the blessed cool numbness in his hand, tried to sit up and look at him. But it was darker than ever. He felt forward with his right hand and found himself touching the man’s chest, where the heart was beating like a bird against the bars of a cage.

  “Yes,” the man said hoarsely. “Try and cure that, go on.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “I’ll be better soon. You have the knife, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know how to use it?”

  “Yes, yes. But are you from this world? How do you know about it?”

  “Listen,” said the man, sitting up with a struggle. “Don’t interrupt. If you’re the bearer of the knife, you have a task that’s greater than you can imagine. A child … How could they let it happen? Well, so it must be.… There is a war coming, boy. The greatest war there ever was. Something like it happened before, and this time the right side must win. We’ve had nothing but lies and propaganda and cruelty and deceit for all the thousands of years of human history. It’s time we
started again, but properly this time.…”

  He stopped to take in several rattling breaths.

  “The knife,” he went on after a minute. “They never knew what they were making, those old philosophers. They invented a device that could split open the very smallest particles of matter, and they used it to steal candy. They had no idea that they’d made the one weapon in all the universes that could defeat the tyrant. The Authority. God. The rebel angels fell because they didn’t have anything like the knife; but now …”

  “I didn’t want it! I don’t want it now!” Will cried. “If you want it, you can have it! I hate it, and I hate what it does—”

  “Too late. You haven’t any choice: you’re the bearer. It’s picked you out. And, what’s more, they know you’ve got it; and if you don’t use it against them, they’ll tear it from your hands and use it against the rest of us, forever and ever.”

  “But why should I fight them? I’ve been fighting too much; I can’t go on fighting. I want to—”

  “Have you won your fights?”

  Will was silent. Then he said, “Yes, I suppose.”

  “You fought for the knife?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then you’re a warrior. That’s what you are. Argue with anything else, but don’t argue with your own nature.”

  Will knew that the man was speaking the truth. But it wasn’t a welcome truth. It was heavy and painful. The man seemed to know that, because he let Will bow his head before he spoke again.

  “There are two great powers,” the man said, “and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.

  “And now those two powers are lining up for battle. And each of them wants that knife of yours more than anything else. You have to choose, boy. We’ve been guided here, both of us—you with the knife, and me to tell you about it.”

  “No! You’re wrong!” cried Will. “I wasn’t looking for anything like that! That’s not what I was looking for at all!”

  “You might not think so, but that’s what you’ve found,” said the man in the darkness.

  “But what must I do?”

  And then Stanislaus Grumman, Jopari, John Parry hesitated.

  He was painfully aware of the oath he’d sworn to Lee Scoresby, and he hesitated before he broke it; but break it he did.

  “You must go to Lord Asriel,” he said, “and tell him that Stanislaus Grumman sent you, and that you have the one weapon he needs above all others. Like it or not, boy, you have a job to do. Ignore everything else, no matter how important it seems, and go and do this. Someone will appear to guide you; the night is full of angels. Your wound will heal now—Wait. Before you go, I want to look at you properly.”

  He felt for the pack he’d been carrying and took something out, unfolding layers of oilskin and then striking a match to light a little tin lantern. In its light, through the rain-dashed windy air, the two looked at each other.

  Will saw blazing blue eyes in a haggard face with several days’ growth of beard on the stubborn jaw, gray-haired, drawn with pain, a thin body hunched in a heavy cloak trimmed with feathers.

  The shaman saw a boy even younger than he’d thought, his slim body shivering in a torn linen shirt and his expression exhausted and savage and wary, but alight with a wild curiosity, his eyes wide under the straight black brows, so like his mother’s.…

  And there came just the first flicker of something else to both of them.

  But in that same moment, as the lantern light flared over John Parry’s face, something shot down from the turbid sky, and he fell back dead before he could say a word, an arrow in his failing heart. The osprey dæmon vanished in a moment.

  Will could only sit stupefied.

  A flicker crossed the corner of his vision, and his right hand darted up at once, and he found he was clutching a robin, a dæmon, red-breasted, panicking.

  “No! No!” cried the witch Juta Kamainen, and fell down after him, clutching at her own heart, crashing clumsily into the rocky ground and struggling up again.

  But Will was there before she could find her feet, and the subtle knife was at her throat.

  “Why did you do that?” he shouted. “Why did you kill him?”

  “Because I loved him and he scorned me! I am a witch! I don’t forgive!”

  And because she was a witch she wouldn’t have been afraid of a boy, normally. But she was afraid of Will. This young wounded figure held more force and danger than she’d ever met in a human before, and she quailed. She fell backward, and he followed and gripped her hair with his left hand, feeling no pain, feeling only an immense and shattering despair.

  “You don’t know who he was,” he cried. “He was my father!”

  She shook her head and whispered, “No. No! That can’t be true. Impossible!”

  “You think things have to be possible? Things have to be true! He was my father, and neither of us knew it till the second you killed him! Witch, I wait all my life and come all this way and I find him at last, and you kill him.…”

  And he shook her head like a rag and threw her back against the ground, half-stunning her. Her astonishment was almost greater than her fear of him, which was real enough, and she pulled herself up, dazed, and seized his shirt in supplication. He knocked her hand away.

  “What did he ever do that you needed to kill him?” he cried. “Tell me that, if you can!”

  And she looked at the dead man. Then she looked back at Will and shook her head sadly.

  “No, I can’t explain,” she said. “You’re too young. It wouldn’t make sense to you. I loved him. That’s all. That’s enough.”

  And before Will could stop her, she fell softly sideways, her hand on the hilt of the knife she had just taken from her own belt and pushed between her ribs.

  Will felt no horror, only desolation and bafflement.

  He stood up slowly and looked down at the dead witch, at her rich black hair, her flushed cheeks, her smooth pale limbs wet with rain, her lips parted like a lover’s.

  “I don’t understand,” he said aloud. “It’s too strange.”

  Will turned back to the dead man, his father.

  A thousand things jostled at his throat, and only the dashing rain cooled the hotness in his eyes. The little lantern still flickered and flared as the draft through the ill-fitting window licked around the flame, and by its light Will knelt and put his hands on the man’s body, touching his face, his shoulders, his chest, closing his eyes, pushing the wet gray hair off his forehead, pressing his hands to the rough cheeks, closing his father’s mouth, squeezing his hands.

  “Father,” he said, “Dad, Daddy … Father … I don’t understand why she did that. It’s too strange for me. But whatever you wanted me to do, I promise, I swear I’ll do it. I’ll fight. I’ll be a warrior. I will. This knife, I’ll take it to Lord Asriel, wherever he is, and I’ll help him fight that enemy. I’ll do it. You can rest now. It’s all right. You can sleep now.”

  Beside the dead man lay his deerskin pack with the oilskin and the lantern and the little horn box of bloodmoss ointment. Will picked them up, and then he noticed his father’s feather-trimmed cloak trailing behind his body on the ground, heavy and sodden but warm. His father had no more use for it, and Will was shaking with cold. He unfastened the bronze buckle at the dead man’s throat and swung the canvas pack over his shoulder before wrapping the cloak around himself.

  He blew out the lantern and looked back at the dim shapes of his father, of the witch, of his father again before turning to go down the mountain.

  The stormy air was electric with whispers, and in the tearing of the wind Will could hear other sounds, too: confused echoes of cries and chanting, the clash of met
al on metal, pounding wingbeats that one moment sounded so close they might actually be inside his head, and the next so far away they might have been on another planet. The rocks underfoot were slippery and loose, and it was much harder going down than it had been climbing up; but he didn’t falter.

  And as he turned down the last little gully before the place where he’d left Lyra sleeping, he stopped suddenly. He could see two figures simply standing there, in the dark, waiting. Will put his hand on the knife.

  Then one of the figures spoke.

  “You’re the boy with the knife?” he said, and his voice had the strange quality of those wingbeats. Whoever he was, he wasn’t a human being.

  “Who are you?” Will said. “Are you men, or—”

  “Not men, no. We are Watchers. Bene elim. In your language, angels.”

  Will was silent. The speaker went on: “Other angels have other functions, and other powers. Our task is simple: We need you. We have been following the shaman every inch of his way, hoping he would lead us to you, and so he has. And now we have come to guide you in turn to Lord Asriel.”

  “You were with my father all the time?”

  “Every moment.”

  “Did he know?”

  “He had no idea.”

  “Why didn’t you stop the witch, then? Why did you let her kill him?”

  “We would have done, earlier. But his task was over once he’d led us to you.”

  Will said nothing. His head was ringing; this was no less difficult to understand than anything else.

  “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll come with you. But first I must wake Lyra.”

  They stood aside to let him pass, and he felt a tingle in the air as he went close to them, but he ignored it and concentrated on getting down the slope toward the little shelter where Lyra was sleeping.

  But something made him stop.