The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials 2)

He propped the rifle on the dead and useless arm that had been so full of life a minute ago, and sighted with stolid concentration: one shot . . . two . . . three, and each found its man.

“How we doing?” he muttered.

“Good shooting,” she whispered back, very close to his cheek. “Don’t stop. Over by that black boulder—”

He looked, aimed, shot. The figure fell.

“Damn, these are men like me,” he said.

“Makes no sense,” she said. “Do it anyway.”

“Do you believe him? Grumman?”

“Sure. Plumb ahead, Lee.”

Crack: another man fell, and his dæmon went out like a candle.

Then there was a long silence. Lee fumbled in his pocket and found some more bullets. As he reloaded, he felt something so rare his heart nearly failed; he felt Hester’s face pressed to his own, and it was wet with tears.

“Lee, this is my fault,” she said.

“Why?”

“The Skraeling. I told you to take his ring. Without that we’d never be in this trouble.”

“You think I ever did what you told me? I took it because the witch—”

He didn’t finish, because another bullet found him. This time it smashed into his left leg, and before he could even blink, a third one clipped his head again, like a red-hot poker laid along his skull.

“Not long now, Hester,” he muttered, trying to hold still.

“The witch, Lee! You said the witch! Remember?”

Poor Hester, she was lying now, not crouching tense and watchful as she’d done all his adult life. And her beautiful gold-brown eyes were growing dull.

“Still beautiful,” he said. “Oh, Hester, yeah, the witch. She gave me . . . ”

“Sure she did. The flower.”

“In my breast pocket. Fetch it, Hester, I cain’t move.”

It was a hard struggle, but she tugged out the little scarlet flower with her strong teeth and laid it by his right hand. With a great effort he closed it in his fist and said, “Serafina Pekkala! Help me, I beg . . . ”

A movement below: he let go of the flower, sighted, fired. The movement died.

Hester was failing.

“Hester, don’t you go before I do,” Lee whispered.

“Lee, I couldn’t abide to be anywhere away from you for a single second,” she whispered back.

“You think the witch will come?”

“Sure she will. We should have called her before.”

“We should have done a lot of things.”

“Maybe so . . . ”

Another crack, and this time the bullet went deep somewhere inside, seeking out the center of his life. He thought: It won’t find it there. Hester’s my center. And he saw a blue flicker down below, and strained to bring the barrel over to it.

“He’s the one,” Hester breathed.

Lee found it hard to pull the trigger. Everything was hard. He had to try three times, and finally he got it. The blue uniform tumbled away down the slope.

Another long silence. The pain nearby was losing its fear of him. It was like a pack of jackals, circling, sniffing, treading closer, and he knew they wouldn’t leave him now till they’d eaten him bare.

“There’s one man left,” Hester muttered. “He’s a-making for the zeppelin.”

And Lee saw him mistily, one soldier of the Imperial Guard creeping away from his company’s defeat.

“I cain’t shoot a man in the back,” Lee said.

“Shame to die with one bullet left, though.”

So he took aim with his last bullet at the zeppelin itself, still roaring and straining to rise with its one engine, and the bullet must have been red-hot, or maybe a burning brand from the forest below was wafted to the airship on an updraft; for the gas suddenly billowed into an orange fireball, and the envelope and the metal skeleton rose a little way and then tumbled down very slowly, gently, but full of a fiery death.

And the man creeping away and the six or seven others who were the only remnant of the Guard, and who hadn’t dared come closer to the man holding the ravine, were engulfed by the fire that fell on them.

Lee saw the fireball and heard through the roar in his ears Hester saying, “That’s all of ’em, Lee.”

He said, or thought, “Those poor men didn’t have to come to this, nor did we.”

She said, “We held ’em off. We held out. We’re a-helping Lyra.”

Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.

FIFTEEN

BLOODMOSS

On, said the alethiometer. Farther, higher.

So on they climbed. The witches flew above to spy out the best routes, because the hilly land soon gave way to steeper slopes and rocky footing, and as the sun rose toward noon, the travelers found themselves in a tangled land of dry gullies, cliffs, and boulder-strewn valleys where not a single green leaf grew, and where the stridulation of insects was the only sound.

They moved on, stopping only for sips of water from their goatskin flasks, and talking little. Pantalaimon flew above Lyra’s head for a while until he tired of that, and then he became a little sure-footed mountain sheep, vain of his horns, leaping among rocks while Lyra scrambled laboriously alongside. Will moved on grimly, screwing up his eyes against the glare, ignoring the worsening pain from his hand, and finally reaching a state in which movement alone was good and stillness bad, so that he suffered more from resting than from toiling on. And since the failure of the witches’ spell to stop his bleeding, he thought they were regarding him with fear, too, as if he was marked by some curse greater than their own powers.

At one point they came to a little lake, a patch of intense blue scarcely thirty yards across among the red rocks. They stopped there to drink and refill their flasks, and to soak their aching feet in the icy water. They stayed a few minutes and moved on, and soon afterward, when the sun was at its highest and hottest, Serafina Pekkala darted down to speak to them. She was agitated.

“I must leave you for a while,” she said. “Lee Scoresby needs me. I don’t know why. But he wouldn’t call if he didn’t need my help. Keep going, and I’ll find you.”

“Mr. Scoresby?” said Lyra, excited and anxious. “But where—”

But Serafina was gone, speeding out of sight before Lyra could finish the question. Lyra reached automatically for the alethiometer to ask what had happened to Lee Scoresby, but she let her hand drop, because she’d promised to do no more than guide Will.

She looked across to him. He was sitting nearby, his hand held loosely on his knee and still slowly dripping blood, his face scorched by the sun and pale under the burning.

“Will,” she said, “d’you know why you have to find your father?”

“It’s what I’ve always known. My mother said I’d take up my father’s mantle. That’s all I know.”

“What does that mean, taking up his mantle? What’s a mantle?”

“A task, I suppose. Whatever he’s been doing, I’ve got to carry on. It makes as much sense as anything else.”

He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his right hand. What he couldn’t say was that he longed for his father as a lost child yearns for home. That comparison wouldn’t have occurred to him, because home was the place he kept safe for his mother, not the place others kept safe for him. But it had been five years now since that Saturday morning in the supermarket when the pretend game of hiding from the enemies became desperately real, such a long time in his life, and his heart craved to hear the words “Well done, well done, my child; no one on earth could have done better; I’m proud of you. Come and rest now . . . . ”

Will longed for that so much that he hardly knew he did. It was just part of what everything felt like. So he couldn’t express that to Lyra now, though she could see it in his eyes, and that was new for her, too, to be quite so perceptive. The fact was that where Will was concerned, she was developing a new kind of sense, as if he were simply more in focus than anyone she’d known before. Everything about him was clear and close and immediate.

And she might have said that to him, but at that moment a witch flew down.

“I can see people behind us,” she said. “They’re a long way back, but they’re moving quickly. Shall I go closer and look?”