His Dark Materials 02 - The Subtle Knife

by Philip Pullman

  Lyra looked out the window, furious. “They must’ve seen us last night,” she said. “I bet they was too cowardly to attack us on their own, so they rounded up all them others . . . . I should have killed her yesterday! She’s as bad as her brother. I’d like to—”

  “Stop talking and come on,” said Will.

  He checked that the knife was strapped to his belt, and Lyra put on her little rucksack with the alethiometer and the letters from Will’s father. They ran through the echoing hall, along the corridor and into the kitchen, through the scullery, and into a cobbled court beyond it. A gate in the wall led out into a kitchen garden, where beds of vegetables and herbs lay baking under the morning sun.

  The edge of the woods was a few hundred yards away, up a slope of grass that was horribly exposed. On a knoll to the left, closer than the trees, stood a little building, a circular templelike structure with columns all the way around and an upper story open like a balcony from which to view the city.

  “Let’s run,” said Will, though he felt less like running than like lying down and closing his eyes.

  With Pantalaimon flying above to keep watch, they set off across the grass. But it was tussocky and ankle-high, and Will couldn’t run more than a few steps before he felt too dizzy to carry on. He slowed to a walk.

  Lyra looked back. The children hadn’t seen them yet; they were still at the front of the house. Maybe they’d take a while to look through all the rooms . . . .

  But Pantalaimon chirruped in alarm. There was a boy standing at an open window on the second floor of the villa, pointing at them. They heard a shout.

  “Come on, Will,” Lyra said.

  She tugged at his good arm, helping him, lifting him. He tried to respond, but he didn’t have the strength. He could only walk.

  “All right,” he said, “we can’t get to the trees. Too far away. So we’ll go to that temple place. If we shut the door, maybe we can hold them out for long enough to cut through after all.”

  Pantalaimon darted ahead, and Lyra gasped and called to him breathlessly, making him pause. Will could almost see the bond between them, the dæmon tugging and the girl responding. He stumbled through the thick grass with Lyra running ahead to see, and then back to help, and then ahead again, until they reached the stone pavement around the temple.

  The door under the little portico was unlocked, and they ran inside to find themselves in a bare circular room with several statues of goddesses in niches around the wall. In the very center a spiral staircase of wrought iron led up through an opening to the floor above. There was no key to lock the door, so they clambered up the staircase and onto the floorboards of an upper level that was really a viewing place, where people could come to take the air and look out over the city; for there were no windows or walls, simply a series of open arches all the way around supporting the roof. In each archway a windowsill at waist height was broad enough to lean on, and below them the pantiled roof ran down in a gentle slope all around to the gutter.

  As they looked out, they could see the forest behind, tantalizingly close; and the villa below them, and beyond that the open park, and then the red-brown roofs of the city, with the tower rising to the left. There were carrion crows wheeling in the air above the gray battlements, and Will felt a jolt of sickness as he realized what had drawn them there.

  But there was no time to take in the view; first they had to deal with the children, who were racing up toward the temple, screaming with rage and excitement. The leading boy slowed down and held up his pistol and fired two or three wild shots toward the temple. Then they came on again, yelling:

  “Thiefs!”

  “Murderers!”

  “We gonna kill you!”

  “You got our knife!”

  “You don’ come from here!”

  “You gonna die!”

  Will took no notice. He had the knife out already, and swiftly cut a small window to see where they were—only to recoil at once. Lyra looked too, and fell back in disappointment. They were fifty feet or so in the air, high above a main road busy with traffic.

  “Of course,” Will said bitterly, “we came up a slope . . . . Well, we’re stuck. We’ll have to hold them off, that’s all.”

  Another few seconds and the first children were crowding in through the door. The sound of their yelling echoed in the temple and reinforced their wildness; and then came a gunshot, enormously loud, and another, and the screaming took another tone, and then the stairs began to shake as the first ones climbed up.

  Lyra was crouching paralyzed against the wall, but Will still had the knife in his hand. He scrambled over to the opening in the floor and reached down and sliced through the iron of the top step as if it were paper. With nothing to hold it up, the staircase began to bend under the weight of the children crowding on it, and then it swung down and fell with a huge crash. More screams, more confusion; and again the gun went off, but this time by accident, it seemed. Someone had been hit, and the scream was of pain this time, and Will looked down to see a tangle of writhing bodies covered in plaster and dust and blood.

  They weren’t individual children: they were a single mass, like a tide. They surged below him and leaped up in fury, snatching, threatening, screaming, spitting, but they couldn’t reach.

  Then someone called, and they looked to the door, and those who could move surged toward it, leaving several pinned beneath the iron stairs or dazed and struggling to get up from the rubble-strewn floor.

  Will soon realized why they’d run out. There was a scrabbling sound from the roof outside the arches, and he ran to the windowsill to see the first pair of hands grasping the edge of the pantiles and pulling up. Someone was pushing from behind, and then came another head and another pair of hands, as they clambered over the shoulders and backs of those below and swarmed up onto the roof like ants.

  But the pantiled ridges were hard to walk on, and the first ones scrambled up on hands and knees, their wild eyes never leaving Will’s face. Lyra had joined him, and Pantalaimon was snarling as a leopard, paws on the sill, making the first children hesitate. But still they came on, more and more of them.

  Someone was shouting “Kill! Kill! Kill!” and then others joined in, louder and louder, and those on the roof began to stamp and thump the tiles in rhythm, but they didn’t quite dare come closer, faced by the snarling dæmon. Then a tile broke, and the boy standing on it slipped and fell, but the one beside him picked up the broken piece and hurled it at Lyra.

  She ducked, and it shattered on the column beside her, showering her with broken pieces. Will had noticed the rail around the edge of the opening in the floor, and cut two sword-length pieces of it, and he handed one to Lyra now; and she swung it around as hard as she could and into the side of the first boy’s head. He fell at once, but then came another, and it was Angelica, red-haired, white-faced, crazy-eyed. She scrambled up onto the sill, but Lyra jabbed the length of rail at her fiercely, and she fell back again.

  Will was doing the same. The knife was in its sheath at his waist, and he struck and swung and jabbed with the iron rail, and while several children fell back, others kept replacing them, and more and more were clambering up onto the roof from below.

  Then the boy in the striped T-shirt appeared, but he’d lost the pistol, or perhaps it was empty. However, his eyes and Will’s locked together, and each of them knew what was going to happen: they were going to fight, and it was going to be brutal and deadly.

  “Come on,” said Will, passionate for the battle. “Come on, then . . . ”

  Another second, and they would have fought.

  But then the strangest thing appeared: a great white snow goose swooping low, his wings spread wide, calling and calling so loudly that even the children on the roof heard through their savagery and turned to see.

  “Kaisa!” cried Lyra joyfully, for it was Serafina Pekkala’s dæmon.

  The snow goose called again, a piercing whoop that filled the sky, and then wheeled and turned an
inch away from the boy in the striped T-shirt. The boy fell back in fear and slid down and over the edge, and then others began to cry in alarm too, because there was something else in the sky. As Lyra saw the little black shapes sweeping out of the blue, she cheered and shouted with glee.

  “Serafina Pekkala! Here! Help us! Here we are! In the temple—”

  And with a hiss and rush of air, a dozen arrows, and then another dozen swiftly after, and then another dozen—loosed so quickly that they were all in the air at once—shot at the temple roof above the gallery and landed with a thunder of hammer blows. Astonished and bewildered, the children on the roof felt all the aggression leave them in a moment, and horrible fear rushed in to take its place. What were these black-garbed women rushing at them in the air? How could it happen? Were they ghosts? Were they a new kind of Specter?

  And whimpering and crying, they jumped off the roof, some of them falling clumsily and dragging themselves away limping and others rolling down the slope and dashing for safety, but a mob no longer—just a lot of frightened, shame-faced children. A minute after the snow goose had appeared, the last of the children left the temple, and the only sound was the rush of air in the branches of the circling witches above.

  Will looked up in wonder, too amazed to speak, but Lyra was leaping and calling with delight, “Serafina Pekkala! How did you find us? Thank you, thank you! They was going to kill us! Come down and land.”

  But Serafina and the others shook their heads and flew up again, to circle high above. The snow goose dæmon wheeled and flew down toward the roof, beating his great wings inward to help him slow down, and landed with a clatter on the pantiles below the sill.

  “Greetings, Lyra,” he said. “Serafina Pekkala can’t come to the ground, nor can the others. The place is full of Specters—a hundred or more surrounding the building, and more drifting up over the grass. Can’t you see them?”

  “No! We can’t see ’em at all!”

  “Already we’ve lost one witch. We can’t risk any more. Can you get down from this building?”

  “If we jump off the roof like they done. But how did you find us? And where—”

  “Enough now. There’s more trouble coming, and bigger. Get down as best you can and then make for the trees.”

  They climbed over the sill and moved sideways down through the broken tiles to the gutter. It wasn’t high, and below it was grass, with a gentle slope away from the building. First Lyra jumped and then Will followed, rolling over and trying to protect his hand, which was bleeding freely again and hurting badly. His sling had come loose and trailed behind him, and as he tried to roll it up, the snow goose landed on the grass at his side.

  “Lyra, who is this?” Kaisa said.

  “It’s Will. He’s coming with us—”

  “Why are the Specters avoiding you?” The goose dæmon was speaking directly to Will.

  By this time Will was hardly surprised by anything, and he said, “I don’t know. We can’t see them. No, wait!” And he stood up, struck by a thought. “Where are they now?” he said. “Where’s the nearest one?”

  “Ten paces away, down the slope,” said the dæmon. “They don’t want to come any closer, that’s obvious.”

  Will took out the knife and looked in that direction, and he heard the dæmon hiss with surprise.

  But Will couldn’t do what he intended, because at the same moment a witch landed her branch on the grass beside him. He was taken aback not so much by her flying as by her astounding gracefulness, the fierce, cold, lovely clarity of her gaze, and by the pale bare limbs, so youthful, and yet so far from being young.

  “Your name is Will?” she said.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Why are the Specters afraid of you?”

  “Because of the knife. Where’s the nearest one? Tell me! I want to kill it!”

  But Lyra came running before the witch could answer.

  “Serafina Pekkala!” she cried, and she threw her arms around the witch and hugged her so tightly that the witch laughed out loud, and kissed the top of her head. “Oh, Serafina, where did you come from like that? We were—those kids—they were kids, and they were going to kill us—did you see them? We thought we were going to die and—oh, I’m so glad you came! I thought I’d never see you again!”

  Serafina Pekkala looked over Lyra’s head to where the Specters were obviously clustering a little way off, and then looked at Will.

  “Now listen,” she said. “There’s a cave in these woods not far away. Head up the slope and then along the ridge to the left. The Specters won’t follow—they don’t see us while we’re in the air, and they’re afraid of you. We’ll meet you there. It’s a half-hour’s walk.”

  And she leaped into the air again. Will shaded his eyes to watch her and the other ragged, elegant figures wheel in the air and dart up over the trees.

  “Oh, Will, we’ll be safe now! It’ll be all right now that Serafina Pekkala’s here!” said Lyra. “I never thought I’d see her again. She came just at the right time, didn’t she? Just like before, at Bolvangar . . . . ”

  Chattering happily, as if she’d already forgotten the fight, she led the way up the slope toward the forest. Will followed in silence. His hand was throbbing badly, and with each throb a little more blood was leaving him. He held it up across his chest and tried not to think about it.

  It took not half an hour but an hour and three quarters, because Will had to stop and rest several times. When they reached the cave, they found a fire, a rabbit roasting, and Serafina Pekkala stirring something in a small iron pot.

  “Let me see your wound” was the first thing she said to Will, and he dumbly held out his hand.

  Pantalaimon, cat-formed, watched curiously, but Will looked away. He didn’t like the sight of his mutilated fingers.

  The witches spoke softly to each other, and then Serafina Pekkala said, “What weapon made this wound?”

  Will reached for the knife and handed it to her silently. Her companions looked at it with wonder and suspicion, for they had never seen such a blade before, with such an edge on it.

  “This will need more than herbs to heal. It will need a spell,” said Serafina Pekkala. “Very well, we’ll prepare one. It will be ready when the moon rises. In the meantime, you shall sleep.”

  She gave him a little horn cup containing a hot potion whose bitterness was moderated by honey, and presently he lay back and fell deeply asleep. The witch covered him with leaves and turned to Lyra, who was still gnawing the rabbit.

  “Now, Lyra,” she said. “Tell me who this boy is, and what you know about this world, and about this knife of his.”

  So Lyra took a deep breath and began.

  TWELVE

  SCREEN LANGUAGE

  “Tell me again,” said Dr. Oliver Payne, in the little laboratory overlooking the park. “Either I didn’t hear you, or you’re talking nonsense. A child from another world?”

  “That’s what she said. All right, it’s nonsense, but listen to it, Oliver, will you?” said Dr. Mary Malone. “She knew about Shadows. She calls them—it—she calls it Dust, but it’s the same thing. It’s our shadow particles. And I’m telling you, when she was wearing the electrodes linking her to the Cave, there was the most extraordinary display on the screen: pictures, symbols . . . . She had an instrument too, a sort of compass thing made of gold, with different symbols all around the rim. And she said she could read that in the same way, and she knew about the state of mind, too—she knew it intimately.”

  It was midmorning. Lyra’s Scholar, Dr. Malone, was red-eyed from lack of sleep, and her colleague, who’d just returned from Geneva, was impatient to hear more, and skeptical, and preoccupied.

  “And the point was, Oliver, she was communicating with them. They are conscious. And they can respond. And you remember your skulls? Well, she told me about some skulls in the Pitt-Rivers Museum. She’d found out with her compass thing that they were much older than the museum said, and there were Shadow
s—”

  “Wait a minute. Give me some sort of structure here. What are you saying? You saying she’s confirmed what we know already, or that she’s telling us something new?”

  “Both. I don’t know. But suppose something happened thirty, forty thousand years ago. There were shadow particles around before then, obviously—they’ve been around since the Big Bang—but there was no physical way of amplifying their effects at our level, the anthropic level. The level of human beings. And then something happened, I can’t imagine what, but it involved evolution. Hence your skulls—remember? No Shadows before that time, lots afterward? And the skulls the child found in the museum, that she tested with her compass thing. She told me the same thing. What I’m saying is that around that time, the human brain became the ideal vehicle for this amplification process. Suddenly we became conscious.”

  Dr. Payne tilted his plastic mug and drank the last of his coffee.

  “Why should it happen particularly at that time?” he said. “Why suddenly thirty-five thousand years ago?”

  “Oh, who can say? We’re not paleontologists. I don’t know, Oliver, I’m just speculating. Don’t you think it’s at least possible?”

  “And this policeman. Tell me about him.”

  Dr. Malone rubbed her eyes. “His name is Walters,” she said. “He said he was from the Special Branch. I thought that was politics or something?”

  “Terrorism, subversion, intelligence . . . all that. Go on. What did he want? Why did he come here?”

  “Because of the girl. He said he was looking for a boy of about the same age—he didn’t tell me why—and this boy had been seen in the company of the girl who came here. But he had something else in mind as well, Oliver. He knew about the research. He even asked—”