The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials 3)

“Yes!”

“We’d make it where no one could ever find it,” he went on, “and only us two would know—”

“Oh, it would work! I’m sure it would!” she said.

“And we could go from one to the other, and stay healthy—”

But the dæmons were distressed, and Kirjava was murmuring, “No, no.”

And Pantalaimon said, “The Specters . . . She told us about the Specters, too.”

“The Specters?” said Will. “We saw them during the battle, for the first time. What about them?”

“Well, we found out where they come from,” said Kirjava. “And this is the worst thing: they’re like the children of the abyss. Every time we open a window with the knife, it makes a Specter. It’s like a little bit of the abyss that floats out and enters the world. That’s why the Cittàgazze world was so full of them, because of all the windows they left open there.”

“And they grow by feeding on Dust,” said Pantalaimon. “And on dæmons. Because Dust and dæmons are sort of similar; grown-up dæmons anyway. And the Specters get bigger and stronger as they do . . .”

Will felt a dull horror at his heart, and Kirjava pressed herself against his breast, feeling it, too, and trying to comfort him.

“So every time I’ve used the knife,” he said, “every single time, I’ve made another Specter come to life?”

He remembered Iorek Byrnison, in the cave where he’d forged the knife again, saying, “What you don’t know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions, too.”

Lyra’s eyes were watching him, wide with anguish.

“Oh, we can’t, Will!” she said. “We can’t do that to people—not let other Specters out, not now we’ve seen what they do!”

“All right,” he said, getting to his feet, holding his dæmon close to his breast. “Then we’ll have to—one of us will have to—I’ll come to your world and . . .”

She knew what he was going to say, and she saw him holding the beautiful, healthy dæmon he hadn’t even begun to know; and she thought of his mother, and she knew that he was thinking of her, too. To abandon her and live with Lyra, even for the few years they’d have together—could he do that? He might be living with Lyra, but she knew he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

“No,” she cried, jumping up beside him, and Kirjava joined Pantalaimon on the sand as boy and girl clung together desperately. “I’ll do it, Will! We’ll come to your world and live there! It doesn’t matter if we get ill, me and Pan—we’re strong, I bet we last a good long time—and there are probably good doctors in your world—Dr. Malone would know! Oh, let’s do that!”

He was shaking his head, and she saw the brilliance of tears on his cheeks.

“D’you think I could bear that, Lyra?” he said. “D’you think I could live happily watching you get sick and ill and fade away and then die, while I was getting stronger and more grown-up day by day? Ten years . . . That’s nothing. It’d pass in a flash. We’d be in our twenties. It’s not that far ahead. Think of that, Lyra, you and me grown up, just preparing to do all the things we want to do—and then . . . it all comes to an end. Do you think I could bear to live on after you died? Oh, Lyra, I’d follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours. No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good, long, busy lives, and if we can’t spend them together, we . . . we’ll have to spend them apart.”

Biting her lip, she watched him as he walked up and down in his distracted anguish.

He stopped and turned, and went on: “D’you remember another thing he said, my father? He said we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are. He said that for us there isn’t any elsewhere. That’s what he meant, I can see now. Oh, it’s too bitter. I thought he just meant Lord Asriel and his new world, but he meant us, he meant you and me. We have to live in our own worlds . . .”

“I’m going to ask the alethiometer,” Lyra said. “That’ll know! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

She sat down, wiping her cheeks with the palm of one hand and reaching for the rucksack with the other. She carried it everywhere; when Will thought of her in later years, it was often with that little bag over her shoulder. She tucked the hair behind her ears in the swift movement he loved and took out the black velvet bundle.

“Can you see?” he said, for although the moon was bright, the symbols around the face were very small.

“I know where they all are,” she said, “I got it off by heart. Hush now . . .”

She crossed her legs, pulling the skirt over them to make a lap. Will lay on one elbow and watched. The bright moonlight, reflected off the white sand, lit up her face with a radiance that seemed to draw out some other radiance from inside her; her eyes glittered, and her expression was so serious and absorbed that Will could have fallen in love with her again if love didn’t already possess every fiber of his being.

Lyra took a deep breath and began to turn the wheels. But after only a few moments, she stopped and turned the instrument around.

“Wrong place,” she said briefly, and tried again.

Will, watching, saw her beloved face clearly. And because he knew it so well, and he’d studied her expression in happiness and despair and hope and sorrow, he could tell that something was wrong; for there was no sign of the clear concentration she used to sink into so quickly. Instead, an unhappy bewilderment spread gradually over her: she bit her lower lip, she blinked more and more, and her eyes moved slowly from symbol to symbol, almost at random, instead of darting swiftly and certainly.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head, “I don’t know what’s happening . . . I know it so well, but I can’t seem to see what it means . . .”

She took a deep, shuddering breath and turned the instrument around. It looked strange and awkward in her hands. Pantalaimon, mouse-formed, crept into her lap and rested his black paws on the crystal, peering at one symbol after another. Lyra turned one wheel, turned another, turned the whole thing around, and then looked up at Will, stricken.

“Oh, Will,” she cried, “I can’t do it! It’s left me!”

“Hush,” he said, “don’t fret. It’s still there inside you, all that knowledge. Just be calm and let yourself find it. Don’t force it. Just sort of float down to touch it . . .”

She gulped and nodded and angrily brushed her wrist across her eyes, and took several deep breaths; but he could see she was too tense, and he put his hands on her shoulders and then felt her trembling and hugged her tight. She pulled back and tried again. Once more she gazed at the symbols, once more she turned the wheels, but those invisible ladders of meaning down which she’d stepped with such ease and confidence weren’t there. She just didn’t know what any of the symbols meant.

She turned away and clung to Will and said desperately:

“It’s no good—I can tell—it’s gone forever—it just came when I needed it, for all the things I had to do—for rescuing Roger, and then for us two—and now that it’s over, now that everything’s finished, it’s just left me . . . It’s gone, Will! I’ve lost it! It’ll never come back!”

She sobbed with desperate abandon. All he could do was hold her. He didn’t know how to comfort her, because it was plain that she was right.

Then both the dæmons bristled and looked up. Will and Lyra sensed it, too, and followed their eyes to the sky. A light was moving toward them: a light with wings.

“It’s the angel we saw,” said Pantalaimon, guessing.

He guessed correctly. As the boy and the girl and the two dæmons watched her approach, Xaphania spread her wings wider and glided down to the sand. Will, for all the time he’d spent in the company of Balthamos, wasn’t prepared for the strangeness of this encounter. He and Lyra held each other’s hands tightly as the angel came toward them, with the light of another world shining on her. She was unclothed, but that meant nothing. What clothes could an angel wear anyway? Lyra thought. It was impossible to tell if she was old or young, but her expression was austere and compassionate, and both Will and Lyra felt as if she knew them to their hearts.