The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials 2)

“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.