His Dark Materials Omnibus (87 page)

“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 metal 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.

In the dimness, he could see the witches who had been guarding Lyra all sitting or standing still. They looked like statues, except that they were
breathing, but they were scarcely alive. There were several black-silk-clad bodies on the ground, too, and as he gazed in horror from one to another of them, Will saw what must have happened: they had been attacked in midair by the Specters, and had fallen to their deaths, indifferently.

But—

“Where’s Lyra?” he cried aloud.

The hollow under the rock was empty. Lyra was gone.

There was something under the overhang where she’d been lying. It was Lyra’s little canvas rucksack, and from the weight of it he knew without looking that the alethiometer was still inside it.

Will was shaking his head. It couldn’t be true, but it was: Lyra was gone, Lyra was captured, Lyra was lost.

The two dark figures of the
bene elim
had not moved. But they spoke: “You must come with us now. Lord Asriel needs you at once. The enemy’s power is growing every minute. The shaman has told you what your task is. Follow us and help us win. Come with us. Come this way. Come now.”

And Will looked from them to Lyra’s rucksack and back again, and he didn’t hear a word they said.

John Parry and the turquoise ring: how did he get hold of it? You could tell a story about the ring, and everything that had happened to it since it left Lee Scoresby’s mother’s finger; and you could tell a story about Lee himself, and recount his entire history from boyhood to the moment he sat beside the little hut on the flooded banks of the Yenisei, and saw the shaman’s fist open to disclose the well-loved thing that he’d turned and turned round and round his mother’s finger so long ago. The story lines diverge, and move a very long way apart, and come together, and something happens when they touch. That something would lead Lee to his death, but what happened to the ring? It must still be around, somewhere.

A dæmon is not an animal, of course; a dæmon is a person. A real cat, face to face with a dæmon in cat form, would not be puzzled for a moment. She would see a human being.

All the time in Cittàgazze, the sense of how different a place this could have been if it hadn’t been corrupted; how easy it would have been
not
to make the knife, if they’d seen the consequences. A world of teeming plenty, of beautiful seas and temperate weather, of prosperity and peace—and still they wanted more.

Will and his mother, visiting an elderly-seeming couple in a large house and getting a cold welcome. He was puzzled: he was too young to understand the conversation, the murmuring voices, his mother’s tears. Later, all he remembered was the contempt on the older woman’s face, the feeling that these two regarded his beloved mother as dirt, and his savage resolution never to let her be exposed to that brutality again. He was six. He would have killed them if he could. Very much later, he realized they were his father’s parents.

Lyra lying awake on the cold rocks, pretending to be asleep, while Will whispered to her dæmon. How often did she think of that in the days that followed!

The window in Alaska. Natural that the people of the area, if they knew about it at all, would regard it as a doorway to the spirit world; and natural that the other windows into our world should be hard to find, and often neglected. People don’t like the uncanny, and rather than look fully at something disturbing, they’ll avoid it altogether. That house that no one seems to
live in for long, that corner of a field that the farmer never quite manages to plow, that broken wall that’s always going to be repaired, but never is … There is such a place on Cader Idris in north Wales, and another in a hotel bedroom in Glasgow.

Sir Charles Latrom every morning applying two drops of a floral oil to the center of a large silk handkerchief, which he then bundled and tucked into his top pocket in a meticulous imitation of carefree elegance. He couldn’t have named the oil: he’d stolen it from a bazaar in Damascus, but the Damascus of another world, where the flowers were bred for the fleshlike exuberance of their scent. As it developed through the day, the fragrance of the oil rotted like a medlar; Sir Charles would lean his head to the left and sniff appreciatively, perhaps too frankly for the comfort of most companions.