“She gave him a drug,” said one bear, “which he fed secretly to Hjalmur Hjalmurson, and made him forget himself.”
Hjalmur Hjalmurson, Lyra gathered, was the bear whom lorek had killed, and whose death had brought about his exile. So Mrs. Coulter was behind that! And there was more.
“There are human laws that prevent certain things that she was planning to do, but human laws don't apply on Svalbard. She wanted to set up another station here like Bolvangar, only worse, and lofur was going to allow her to do it, against all the custom of the bears; because humans have visited, or been imprisoned, but never lived and worked here. Little by little she was going to increase her power over lofur Raknison, and his over us, until we were her creatures running back and forth at her bidding, and our only duty to guard the abomination she was going to create….”
That was an old bear speaking. His name was S0ren Eisarson, and he was a counselor, one who had suffered under lofur Raknison.
“What is she doing now, Lyra?” said lorek Byrnison. “Once she hears of lofur's death, what will her plans be?”
Lyra took out the alethiometer. There was not much light to see it by, and lorek commanded that a torch be brought.
“What happened to Mr. Scoresby?” Lyra said while they were waiting. “And the witches?”
“The witches were attacked by another witch clan. I don't know if the others were allied to the child cutters, but they were patrolling our skies in vast numbers, and they attacked in the storm. I didn't see what happened to Serafina Pekkala. As for Lee Scoresby, the balloon soared up again after I fell out with the boy, taking him with it. But your symbol reader will tell you what their fate is.”
A bear pulled up a sledge on which a cauldron of charcoal was smoldering, and thrust a resinous branch into the heart of it. The branch caught at once, and in its glare Lyra turned the hands of the alethiometer and asked about Lee Scoresby.
It turned out that he was still aloft, borne by the winds toward Nova Zembla, and that he had been unharmed by the cliff-ghasts and had fought off the other witch clan.
Lyra told lorek, and he nodded, satisfied.
“If he is in the air, he will be safe,” he said. “What of Mrs. Coulter?”
The answer was complicated, with the needle swinging from symbol to symbol in a sequence that made Lyra puzzle for a long time. The bears were curious, but restrained by their respect for lorek Byrnison, and his for Lyra, and she put them out of her mind and sank again into the alethiometric trance.
The play of symbols, once she had discovered the pattern of it, was dismaying.
“It says she's…She's heard about us flying this way, and she's got a transport zeppelin that's armed with machine guns—I think that's it—and they're a flying to Svalbard right now. She don't know yet about lofur Raknison being beaten, of course, but she will soon because…Oh yes, because some witches will tell her, and they'll learn it from the cliff-ghasts. So I reckon there are spies in the air all around, lorek. She was coming to…to pretend to help lofur Raknison, but really she was going to take over power from him, with a regiment of Tartars that's a coming by sea, and they'll be here in a couple of days.
“And as soon as she can, she's going to where Lord Asriel is kept prisoner, and she's intending to have him killed. Because …It's coming clear now: something I never understood before, lorek! It's why she wants to kill Lord Asriel: it's because she knows what he's going to do, and she fears it, and she wants to do it herself and gain control before he does….It must be the city in the sky, it must be! She's trying to get to it first! And now it's telling me something else….”
She bent over the instrument, concentrating furiously as the needle darted this way and that. It moved almost too fast to follow; Roger, looking over her shoulder, couldn't even see it stop, and was conscious only of a swift nickering dialogue between Lyra's fingers turning the hands and the needle answering, as bewilderingly unlike language as the Aurora was.
“Yes,” she said finally, putting the instrument down in her lap and blinking and sighing as she woke out of her profound concentration. “Yes, I see what it says. She's after me again.
She wants something I've got, because Lord Asriel wants it too. They need it for this…for this experiment, whatever it is…”
She stopped there, to take a deep breath. Something was troubling her, and she didn't know what it was. She was sure that this something that was so important was the alethiome-ter itself, because after all, Mrs. Coulter had wanted it, and what else could it be? And yet it wasn't, because the alethiometer had a different way of referring to itself, and this wasn't it.
“I suppose it's the alethiometer,” she said unhappily. “It's what I thought all along. I've got to take it to Lord Asriel before she gets it. If she gets it, we'll all die.”
As she said that, she felt so tired, so bone-deep weary and sad, that to die would have been a relief. But the example of lorek kept her from admitting it. She put the alethiometer away and sat up straight.
“How far away is she ?” said lorek.
“Just a few hours. I suppose I ought to take the alethiometer to Lord Asriel as soon as I can.”
“I will go with you,” said lorek.
She didn't argue. While lorek gave commands and organized an armed squad to accompany them on the final part of their journey north, Lyra sat still, conserving her energy. She felt that something had gone out of her during that last reading. She closed her eyes and slept, and presently they woke her and set off.
Twenty-One
Lord Asriel's Welcome
Lyra rode a strong young bear, and Roger rode another, while lorek paced tirelessly ahead and a squad armed with a fire hurler followed guarding the rear.
The way was long and hard. The interior of Svalbard was mountainous, with jumbled peaks and sharp ridges deeply cut by ravines and steep-sided valleys, and the cold was intense. Lyra thought back to the smooth-running sledges of the gyp-tians on the way to Bolvangar; how swift and comfortable that progress now seemed to have been! The air here was more penetratingly chill than any she had experienced before; or it might have been that the bear she was riding wasn't as lightfooted as lorek; or it might have been that she was tired to her very soul. At all events, it was desperately hard going.
She knew little of where they were bound, or how far it was. All she knew was what the older bear S0ren Eisarson had told her while they were preparing the fire hurler. He had been involved in negotiating with Lord Asriel about the terms of his imprisonment, and he remembered it well.
At first, he'd said, the Svalbard bears regarded Lord Asriel as being no different from any of the other politicians, kings, or troublemakers who had been exiled to their bleak island. The prisoners were important, or they would have been killed outright by their own people; they might be valuable to the bears one day, if their political fortunes changed and they returned to rule in their own countries; so it might pay the bears not to treat them with cruelty or disrespect.
So Lord Asriel had found conditions on Svalbard no better and no worse than hundreds of other exiles had done. But certain things had made his jailers more wary of him than of other prisoners they'd had. There was the air of mystery and spiritual peril surrounding anything that had to do with Dust; there was the clear panic on the part of those who'd brought him there; and there were Mrs. Coulter's private communications with lofur Raknison.
Besides, the bears had never met anything quite like Lord Asriel's own haughty and imperious nature. He dominated even lofur Raknison, arguing forcefully and eloquently, and persuaded the bear-king to let him choose his own dwelling place.
The first one he was allotted was too low down, he said. He needed a high spot, above the smoke and stir of the fire mines and the smithies. He gave the bears a design of the accommodation he wanted, and told them where it should be; and he bribed them with gold, and he flattered and bullied lofur Raknison, and with a bemused willingness the bears set to work. Before long a house had arisen on a headland facing north: a wide and solid place with fireplaces that burned great blocks of coal mined and hauled by bears, and with large windows of real glass. There he dwelt, a prisoner acting like a king.
And then he set about assembling the materials for a laboratory.
With furious concentration he sent for books, instruments, chemicals, all manner of tools and equipment. And somehow it had come, from this source or that; some openly, some smuggled in by the visitors he insisted he was entitled to have. By land, sea, and air, Lord Asriel assembled his materials, and within six months of his committal, he had all the equipment he wanted.