The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials 3)

In the evening they shared the meal with Mary and Atal, saying little, and because the air was hot they thought they’d walk down to the sea, where there might be a cool breeze. They wandered along the river until they came to the wide beach, bright under the moon, where the low tide was turning.

They lay down in the soft sand at the foot of the dunes, and then they heard the first bird calling.

They both turned their heads at once, because it was a bird that sounded like no creature that belonged to the world they were in. From somewhere above in the dark came a delicate trilling song, and then another answered it from a different direction. Delighted, Will and Lyra jumped up and tried to see the singers, but all they could make out was a pair of dark skimming shapes that flew low and then darted up again, all the time singing and singing in rich, liquid bell tones an endlessly varied song.

And then, with a flutter of wings that threw up a little fountain of sand in front of him, the first bird landed a few yards away.

Lyra said, “Pan . . . ?”

He was formed like a dove, but his color was dark and hard to tell in the moonlight; at any rate, he showed up clearly on the white sand. The other bird still circled overhead, still singing, and then she flew down to join him: another dove, but pearl white, and with a crest of dark red feathers.

And Will knew what it was to see his dæmon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra’s fingers putting the fruit between his lips under the gold-and-silver trees; her warm mouth pressing against his; his dæmon being torn from his unsuspecting breast as they entered the world of the dead; and the sweet rightfulness of her coming back to him at the edge of the moonlit dunes.

Lyra made to move toward them, but Pantalaimon spoke.

“Lyra,” he said, “Serafina Pekkala came to us last night. She told us all kinds of things. She’s gone back to guide the gyptians here. Farder Coram’s coming, and Lord Faa, and they’ll be here—”

“Pan,” she said, distressed, “oh, Pan, you’re not happy—what is it? What is it?”

Then he changed, and flowed over the sand to her as a snow-white ermine. The other dæmon changed, too—Will felt it happen, like a little grip at his heart—and became a cat.

Before she moved to him, she spoke. She said, “The witch gave me a name. I had no need of one before. She called me Kirjava. But listen, listen to us now . . .”

“Yes, you must listen,” said Pantalaimon. “This is hard to explain.”

Between them, the dæmons managed to tell them everything Serafina had told them, beginning with the revelation about the children’s own natures: about how, without intending it, they had become like witches in their power to separate and yet still be one being.

“But that’s not all,” Kirjava said.

And Pantalaimon said, “Oh, Lyra, forgive us, but we have to tell you what we found out . . .”

Lyra was bewildered. When had Pan ever needed forgiving? She looked at Will, and saw his puzzlement as clear as her own.

“Tell us,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

“It’s about Dust,” said the cat dæmon, and Will marveled to hear part of his own nature telling him something he didn’t know. “It was all flowing away, all the Dust there was, down into the abyss that you saw. Something’s stopped it flowing down there, but—”

“Will, it was that golden light!” Lyra said. “The light that all flowed into the abyss and vanished . . . And that was Dust? Was it really?”

“Yes. But there’s more leaking out all the time,” Pantalaimon went on. “And it mustn’t. It mustn’t all leak away. It’s got to stay in the world and not vanish, because otherwise everything good will fade away and die.”

“But where’s the rest leaving from?” said Lyra.

Both dæmons looked at Will, and at the knife.

“Every time we made an opening,” said Kirjava—and again Will felt that little thrill: She’s me, and I’m her—“every time anyone made an opening between the worlds, us or the old Guild men, anyone, the knife cut into the emptiness outside. The same emptiness there is down in the abyss. We never knew. No one knew, because the edge was too fine to see. But it was quite big enough for Dust to leak out of. If they closed it up again at once, there wasn’t time for much to leak out, but there were thousands that they never closed up. So all this time, Dust has been leaking out of the worlds and into nothingness.”

The understanding was beginning to dawn on Will and Lyra. They fought it, they pushed it away, but it was just like the gray light that seeps into the sky and extinguishes the stars: it crept past every barrier they could put up and under every blind and around the edges of every curtain they could draw against it.

“Every opening,” Lyra said in a whisper.

“Every single one—they must all be closed?” said Will.

“Every single one,” said Pantalaimon, whispering like Lyra.

“Oh, no,” said Lyra. “No, it can’t be true—”

“And so we must leave our world to stay in Lyra’s,” said Kirjava, “or Pan and Lyra must leave theirs and come to stay in ours. There’s no other choice.”

Then the full bleak daylight struck in.

And Lyra cried aloud. Pantalaimon’s owl cry the night before had frightened every small creature that heard it, but it was nothing to the passionate wail that Lyra uttered now. The dæmons were shocked, and Will, seeing their reaction, understood why: they didn’t know the rest of the truth; they didn’t know what Will and Lyra themselves had learned.

Lyra was shaking with anger and grief, striding up and down with clenched fists and turning her tear-streaming face this way and that as if looking for an answer. Will jumped up and seized her shoulders, and felt her tense and trembling.

“Listen,” he said, “Lyra, listen: what did my father say?”

“Oh,” she cried, tossing her head this way and that, “he said—you know what he said—you were there, Will, you listened, too!”

He thought she would die of her grief there and then. She flung herself into his arms and sobbed, clinging passionately to his shoulders, pressing her nails into his back and her face into his neck, and all he could hear was, “No—no—no . . .”

“Listen,” he said again, “Lyra, let’s try and remember it exactly. There might be a way through. There might be a loophole.”

He disengaged her arms gently and made her sit down. At once Pantalaimon, frightened, flowed up onto her lap, and the cat dæmon tentatively came close to Will. They hadn’t touched yet, but now he put out a hand to her, and she moved her cat face against his fingers and then stepped delicately onto his lap.

“He said—” Lyra began, gulping, “he said that people could spend a little time in other worlds without being affected. They could. And we have, haven’t we? Apart from what we had to do to go into the world of the dead, we’re still healthy, aren’t we?”

“They can spend a little time, but not a long time,” Will said. “My father had been away from his world, my world, for ten years. And he was nearly dying when I found him. Ten years, that’s all.”

“But what about Lord Boreal? Sir Charles? He was healthy enough, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, but remember, he could go back to his own world whenever he liked and get healthy again. That’s where you saw him first, after all, in your world. He must have found some secret window that no one else knew about.”

“Well, we could do that!”

“We could, except that . . .”

“All the windows must be closed,” said Pantalaimon. “All of them.”

“But how do you know?” demanded Lyra.

“An angel told us,” said Kirjava. “We met an angel. She told us all about that, and other things as well. It’s true, Lyra.”

“She?” said Lyra passionately, suspicious.

“It was a female angel,” said Kirjava.

“I’ve never heard of one of them. Maybe she was lying.”

Will was thinking through another possibility. “Suppose they closed all the other windows,” he said, “and we just made one when we needed to, and went through as quickly as we could and closed it up immediately—that would be safe, surely? If we didn’t leave much time for Dust to go out?”