One
Beings of Another Kind
“But who?” said Lyra. “Who is waiting?”
“Me,” said Nur Huda, “and my dæmon, Jamal, but they won’t—”
“Is he here? Is your dæmon here?”
“Yes, but they won’t let him—won’t let me…”
Lyra stopped. The moonlight shone full in the younger girl’s face, glistening on the lip she was biting and on the unshed tears in her eyes. All around them were tumbled columns of marble, statues of long-forgotten queens or gods, some still intact, and walls and arches and colonnades, gleaming brilliantly white where the moon touched them, among jagged shadows of fathomless black where it did not.
“But who are they?” said Lyra.
“Just voices. I don’t know! It’s like a war in here. They fight, and I don’t know why, I don’t know who they are, and I can’t see them. I’m so frightened. Just voices. I can’t see them.”
“And they won’t let you do what? Take your dæmon away, is that it? They’re keeping him prisoner?”
Nur Huda nodded. The movement shook a tear from one eye and she wiped it away with the heel of her hand.
“And how did you know my name?”
“Your dæmon told me. Pan. He said you were coming.”
“Pan? You’ve seen Pan? Where? Is he here?”
Lyra’s eagerness was so sudden and passionate that she didn’t even notice that she’d seized the girl’s arm. Nur Huda pulled away, her eyes wide with alarm.
Lyra let go. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you…Only, I’ve been following him all this way, trying to find him, and if he’s not here…”
But she’d spoken too quickly, too impatiently. The girl was hungry, and tired, and horribly alone.
She was going to cry, so Lyra hugged her and said, “Let’s sit down. We’re both exhausted and frightened. Just tell me everything that happened to you. I won’t interrupt, I promise.”
They sat on a crumbled shelf of stone surrounding a basin where a fountain had once played. A trickle of water fell from the time-smudged mask of a satyr; it must have gushed from his mouth when it was built, and the spring that supplied it was still flowing. Nur Huda turned and scooped up a handful of water and sipped it. Lyra did the same. It was ice-cold and clean, and she drank some more. She had no idea she was so thirsty.
“Where have you come from?” Lyra asked.
“From Baghdad with my family. But we were in a boat and it sank, and when I swam to the shore I found Jamal was gone. I thought he was dead and that meant I was too, and I was very afraid. I was alone for a while. I didn’t know what to do. But then Pan found me asleep on a hill and he guarded me and when I woke up he told me about you and we thought Jamal might have come to this place so we came here. Pan was with me so it didn’t look as if…you know.”
“Jamal is your dæmon?”
“Yes.”
“What did Pan say?”
“He said he was looking for something you’d lost.”
“Did he tell you what that was?”
Nur Huda shook her head. “He said he was going ahead of you to find it and keep it safe. To the east, where the roses come from, that’s what he said. But he told me you would come here soon and I would know you because you had no dæmon, like me…” Her voice was unsteady.
“And…is Jamal here?”
“No. I don’t think so. Something happened. A man came out of the desert and was hiding from a giant bird, and then he saw that Jamal was close by, and snatched him before I could reach him.”
“A man? Was he one of the voices?”
“No. Only a man. He looked like a Scythian, I don’t know, maybe Chorasmian—”
Lyra blinked with surprise.
Nur Huda noticed, and went on. “I don’t know. He might not be real anyway. He’s only got one eye…The bird was hunting him. It was so big, when it flew overhead it darkened the whole sky. I thought maybe the man took Jamal to give him to the bird as a—as a, you know, when you throw something to a wolf to distract it…”
“A decoy?”
“I didn’t know that word. Yes, that. I don’t know, I’m sorry! I’m so frightened…”
“And you said it’s like a war here…What did you mean? Dæmons fighting other dæmons, something like that?”
“I can’t tell. Only that sometimes the air is full of screams and anger and crying. Probably not dæmons. There are not many dæmons here, really. Only the voices…”
“What do they say? What language do they speak?”
“Many languages. They whisper. Sometimes you think it’s insects, maybe crickets, cicadas, and then you hear them say real words…”
“When do they speak?”
“You can hear them now.”
Lyra listened. The silence was vast. It was the sort of night when you might hear the planets moving among the stars. She found herself comparing it with the silence in the world of the dead, but that was a closed silence, where nothing was alive, and that world was stale and stuffy, for all its immensity. But the silence in al-Khan al-Azraq was open, and not quite silence either. There were little scratches, little susurrations and clicks and rasps, none of them louder than a pinch of sand dropped on the skin of a snare drum, and they all meant…nothing. She remembered a night some years before, in Oxford, when she had thought that everything had a meaning, and had seen how she might understand it. But that was before she’d read Gottfried Brande and Simon Talbot, at a time when Pan was still happy with her.
“You can’t hear them?” said Nur Huda.
She spoke tentatively, anxious that Lyra should believe her, and Lyra saw how young the girl was, and how much she’d suffered, and felt how tightly Nur Huda was still gripping her arm.
“Yes, I can a bit, but I don’t know what they’re saying. Is this the best place to listen to them?”
“It’s better in the marketplace. This way.”
They had to clamber over the fallen stones and make their way around the broken walls of a basilica before they came to an open area that did look like a marketplace, a public space to hold meetings: a forum.
The sand underfoot was so fine and white that it might have been newly milled flour. In the center of the forum there was a plinth where a statue had once stood. The statue itself lay in three pieces beside it, toppled by an earthquake, perhaps: a bearded god whose sightless eyes glared up at the moon. Lyra and Nur Huda sat on his muscular chest. There was nothing moving in the forum, not a sign of life anywhere, and everything around was drenched in moonlight and frozen in stillness.
Lyra gradually became more aware of the scratchy little susurrus, the scraping of insect claws, the clicks and rustlings like dry leaves in a porcelain bowl being stirred by a breeze. The girl’s arm pressing against hers, her flesh warm in the cold air, made Lyra realize a little of what their dæmons must be feeling, so bare and vulnerable away from the solid comfort of a human body.
She gathered her breath to say something, but Nur Huda whispered, “Shhh…”
Lyra could hear no difference in the tiny scratchings and scrapes. She strained to hear better, and tried to focus her ears on whatever was there, and then remembered Giorgio Brabandt telling her how to see the secret commonwealth: You got to look at it sideways, he’d said. Out the corner of your eye. So you gotta think about it out the corner of your mind. It’s there and it en’t, both at the same time.
Of course. She shouldn’t strain at it. She should listen as if she was reading the alethiometer in the old way, as if it didn’t mean anything, and as if it did. She relaxed her mind and her eyes and her ears, and let the night flow in and out of her body. A nimbus of perception spread out around her as if her senses themselves were slowly merging with the City of the Moon.
And in the clicks and rasps and scratches she began to hear words:
…you alone…we want you to hear…this is not for the girl…send her to the fountain…this is your task, not hers…
Nur Huda heard them as well. She gripped Lyra’s arm more tightly and began to say something, but Lyra hushed her and she fell silent. The voices were scratching softly at the silence.
…girl…Nur Huda…you must leave us…go to the fountain…wait there…you will know when we have finished…
Nur Huda whispered, “Should I go?”
“Yes,” Lyra whispered in return. “Go there now and wait. I’ll come and find you soon.”
The girl rose unsteadily and walked away, looking back every few steps as if to make sure Lyra was still there. The floury sand rose up like mist around her feet as she made her way out of the forum, and then settled back infinitely slowly.
Lyra waited until everything was still. Then she said into the dark, “Who are you? Are you angels?”
…we are beings of another kind…
“Are you part of the secret commonwealth?”
…deeper by far than that…we come from the gulfs between the good numbers…
“The gulfs between…Did I hear you properly?”
No reply.
“Then tell me something else,” she said. “Tell me what’s in the red building in the desert of Karamakan. The building the roses come from.”
…an opening into another world…
Lyra was silent for a moment. The stars wheeled overhead.
“An opening—d’you mean the sort of thing Will used to call a window?”
…a doorway into another world…that is why they guard it so fiercely…
“The world where the roses come from?”
…they could come from nowhere else…
As simple as that, and she hadn’t thought of it. A knife-bearer from Cittàgazze, long ago, must have cut that window in his travels from world to world, and left it open. Her grasp on things was loosening, and she felt giddy, as if she’d lost her sense of up and of down, of now and of then, of here and of everywhere.
The voices said something else, but she didn’t understand it.
…the alkahest…
“The…alphabet? Is that what you said?”
…the alkahest…
“Alkahest? What’s that?”
…the destroyer of bonds…
She heard it clearly, and it was impossible to understand. “What d’you mean? What about this alkahest? What is it?”
…destroy everything…
Lyra was bewildered. It was too much. She dragged herself back to the present task. “Where is Nur Huda’s dæmon? Where is Jamal?”
…in the treasury…
“And where’s that?”
…behind you…
Lyra turned to look. The building that had stood there was now a jumbled heap of stones, with a few dry shrubs growing through them.
She said, “Who is keeping him prisoner?”
…a man who is asleep…
Her eyes had become used to the moonlight; it was almost as clear as day, and she stepped easily over the stones and looked more closely at the place called the treasury. It was the sort of place where snakes might easily hide, and scorpions, and venomous spiders. Oh, there were so many things to be afraid of.
She took a deep breath and pressed her hand to her heart to slow the beating. It didn’t work, of course, and she needed both hands to help her clamber over the shattered masonry, so she let her heart do what it wanted and moved on, hand over hand, foot carefully placed before foot. Inside her she carried the new knowledge about the red building in the desert of Karamakan like a precious vessel full to the brim with rare oil. Don’t tremble, don’t trip…
When she’d gone a little way into the rubble she saw a gap ahead, and realized it was the shaft of a great staircase leading down deep into the ground. In a treasury, where would you put the most valuable thing? In the vaults under the ground. There must be some kind of strong room down there…And how was she going to open it? In the dark? With no tools?
She shrugged. It might not even be possible to reach it. But the steps that led down were not too cluttered with fallen masonry, and the moon was at just the right angle to light the way, so she had no excuse. Right hand on the wall, left held out for balance, she made her way carefully downwards, aware all the time of the danger of slipping, twisting an ankle, or worse.
Down, and further down, and still the moonlight lit her way. At the foot of the stairway, she had to stop: the passage that led away into the dark was entirely blocked.
But there at the side, out of the shaft of moonlight, was a man lying on his back, asleep. At first she thought he was dead, he was so still, and her veins flooded with ice water; but he was snoring quietly, and there was his dæmon, a small desert mammal of some inconspicuous kind, clinging to his shoulder in her sleep. His face had been battered and torn in what must have been a furious attack, and his left eye was missing: the socket lay empty and blood-clotted.
His right arm was resting on something at his side, and when she looked more closely she could see what it was: a crudely made cage about the size of a shoebox, nailed together from rough boards, with a heavy steel mesh front. Inside the cage was a dæmon, Nur Huda’s dæmon, a little animal like a mouse with large ears and long back legs like those of a kangaroo. He was crouching in the darkest corner, shivering.
“Are you Jamal?” Lyra whispered.
“Yes—where is Nur Huda?” came the reply, so quiet she could hardly hear it.
“She’s waiting for us. I’m going to take you back to her. Who is this man?”
“He caught me and nailed this cage up and I can’t get out—he was hiding from a big bird—like an eagle—it was going to take me and he fought to get me away from it and then he put me in this cage—I’m frightened. Who are you?”
“Shhh. My name’s Lyra. Keep still and don’t talk. I don’t want to wake him up.”
She had to reach across the man’s body to touch the cage, and he stirred and groaned loudly, startling her. She kept as still as she could till he was snoring again, and then moved her hand to the cage, feeling to see if she could lift it away from his grasp. But it wasn’t going to be possible unless she knelt on his chest: there was nowhere else to lean on, and unless she supported her weight somehow, she’d overbalance and wake him up anyway. And her left hand was still painful after her fight with the soldiers on the train from Smyrna just two days ago.
She felt as far as she could around the cage. The wood was very dry and splintery, and the steel mesh was far too strong to bend, and stapled deeply into the wood all the way around.
She sat back to think about it.
Jamal whispered, “Please, can you open it?”
“Shhh.”
She was aware of the moon moving across the sky: the shaft of light was moving too, and unless she got the dæmon out soon she’d have to work in the dark. If only Will…If only the subtle knife…It would cut through the mesh in a moment.
A thousand things distracted her. The smell of the sleeping man: not just a dirty body and unwashed clothes, but something worse, like gangrene. She saw that his leg was injured as well as his eye; he’d probably die soon. The sound of something much deeper underground, the faintest possible rumble, like rocks grinding together. The stillness of the air, the closeness and clamminess down here in the vault.
A thought struck her like an arrow.
The alethiometer—
The metal of the needle—
The Welsh miners on the North Sea ferry had noticed it. So had Will, a long time before. It was the same color, the same material, as the subtle knife.
She moved away a little further, back into the shaft of moonlight, and felt in her rucksack for the alethiometer. Its familiar weight sat in her hand so rightly, and she raised it to her cheek and held it there for a few seconds, loving it.
She’d never opened it, never tried to prize it apart, but there must be a way of doing so. The mechanism had been made by a human being, and then put in its gold case, and then the glass had been pressed shut. She could almost hear the click as she thought about it. Or else they’d screwed it down. If it had been closed, it could be opened.
Malcolm, the skilled mechanic, would know how to do it. What would he do? She held the body of the instrument in her aching left hand and tried to unscrew the glass as if she was unscrewing the lid of a jar. She’d watched a clockmaker in the Covered Market in Oxford unscrewing a watch glass, gently, firmly, just like that. She tried, but without success. Either it was stuck after centuries of not being moved, or it wasn’t screwed at all.
And then came another memory-arrow: it was thinking of Malcolm that brought this one. He’d found a wooden acorn with a message in it, and couldn’t open it till he tried unscrewing the wrong way, clockwise.
So she tried that.
And it worked.
The glass turned smoothly, as if it had been made the day before, and after three revolutions it came away in her hand. The dial of the alethiometer, with its thirty-six tiny pictures, lay open to the moonlight. Its three black hands were pointing to the camel, the angel, and the walled garden, but the symbols didn’t matter for now; it was the silver-gray needle that was important, slender, infinitely sharp, quivering in the air of Madinat al-Qamar as the air of Prague drifted away from it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the heavy golden instrument, so beautiful, her companion for ten years or more, the guide that had led her safely into other worlds and into the world of the dead and then home again.
And with all the delicacy her pain-filled bones and exhausted muscles could manage, she lifted out the needle.
It came away easily from its shaft. There was so little of it—it could have weighed only a little more than a hair—that she was immediately terrified of dropping it. If that happened, she’d never find it again. She held it between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, and they were damp with sweat and fear, so she laid it carefully on the open palm of her left and wiped her right hand on the fabric of her blouse, though that was wet too. So she rubbed her fingers instead into the dust of the floor, which did work, and then took the needle again.
“Stay at the back and keep still,” she whispered to Jamal.
The little dæmon, who’d been peering through the mesh, darted into the shadow at the back of the cage.
Lyra thought: I don’t know if this will work. But it’s all there is.
Whatever she did would depend on her left hand not giving way. She had to lean on it a little, or not reach the cage at all, but it hurt so much. She leaned over the sleeping man, put her left hand on the top of the cage, and very slowly let it take her weight as she reached over with her right.
Gripping the needle as firmly as she could, she pressed the side of it, just behind the point, to the steel mesh at one edge. The wire was thick and heavy, and it would have needed a bolt cutter and a strong wrist to make any impression on it; but it parted like a cobweb.
Lyra wanted to shout with triumph, but she’d hardly started. One by one, keeping her mind on everything about the task, she cut through each of the strands of wire until the entire front fell away loose.
“Wait,” she whispered urgently, because Jamal had come to the front of the cage and looked as if he wanted to leap out.
But the sleeping man was stirring. He must have felt the cage shift under his hand when the front fell away. He groaned and lifted his arm—and touched Lyra’s—and woke at once.
He shouted in fear and seized her wrist. His one eye glittered, open wide.
“Jamal! Run!” Lyra called, and the little dæmon sprang over them both and darted up the staircase like a spark along a fuse.
The man was struggling to sit up, because Lyra had fallen across his body, fighting against horrible pain as she tried to tug her wrist loose from his grip. Without thinking about it, she realized she still had the needle in her right hand, and thrust it hard into his arm.
He cried out in anger and shock and flung her off. The stink of the gangrene, if it was that, enveloped her and made her gag—but she kept hold of the needle and pulled it away as the man rolled over and struggled to his feet. He saw the open cage and cried out, and kicked Lyra in the ribs before staggering and almost losing his balance—and then he saw the gold of the alethiometer gleaming in the last shaft of moonlight, and snatched it up and scrambled away up the steps too fast for her to follow.
She lay half-stunned, dizzy with pain and exhaustion, winded from the kick to her chest, but with the needle still clenched in her fingers.
The curved glass she’d taken out of the alethiometer reflected a little image of the moon up at her. She scooped it up, seized her rucksack, and scrambled for the stairs, trembling in every limb, tripping, skidding on the sand that had blown down from above, trying not to cry aloud with pain and fear, dizzy with weakness, and came out into the full moonlight of the silent forum.
There was no sign of Nur Huda’s dæmon. But there was the man, the Scythian, the Chorasmian, whatever he was, clutching the alethiometer to his chest as he stumbled away—
And then without any warning, in total silence, an immense shadow swept across the forum and submerged the man in darkness. As Lyra clung to the wall, unbelieving, the creature that threw the shadow swooped down on him, snatched him up in giant claws, and in a swirl of dust thrown up by its vast wings, carried him into the sky. It had taken no more than a couple of seconds.
It was half lion, half eagle, immense and savage, and as its shape passed across the full moon Lyra saw the man struggling in its claws and heard his distant screaming. With him went the alethiometer.
But she had the glass, and the needle, though she could barely hold them. With trembling care she dropped the needle into her breast pocket and the glass into her rucksack.
Nur Huda was sitting with Jamal in her hands, talking softly and urgently, raising him to her lips and her cheeks and her ears, stroking his back, kissing him, cuddling him close.
She jumped up when she saw Lyra. Her face was brilliant with happiness.
“This is Jamal! He’s safe!” she said, and Lyra wanted to embrace her and absorb some of that joy; and then Nur Huda, clutching her dæmon close to her heart, threw her other arm around Lyra’s neck and kissed her.
In doing so she crushed Lyra’s left hand against her. Lyra couldn’t help flinching, and Nur Huda drew away in alarm.
“You’re hurt! What happened?”
“I…I don’t know. I can’t remember. How will you find your way home?”
“Jamal will find the way. No need to worry about that! With Jamal, I’m always safe. Anyway, my home is where my family is. We’ll look for them and that’s how we’ll find a home. Like you with Pan.”
“Yes…”
“When you find him, will you go home?”
“I don’t think I’ve got a home…I don’t know. Maybe we could look for one.”
“Yes! Look for a home. That’s a good idea. But the most important thing is when you find him, you must kiss him and kiss him.”
“Will I find him?”
“Of course!”
“And…will he find the thing he’s looking for?”
“Of course he will. He’s very good at looking. He’ll find it and everything will be all right. Then you will find a home and marry someone nice. Thank you, Lyra! Thank you!”
And she turned away and began the long walk home, with her little dæmon skipping and leaping beside her. Lyra could hear their voices chattering and laughing together for some time after they vanished from sight beyond the moon-drenched colonnade.
Abdel Ionides, her guide into the desert, was sleeping when Lyra returned to their camp at the edge of the city. Quietly though she moved, he heard her and sat up.
“Miss Silver! Your dæmon was not there?”
“He was there, but he’s gone. And there were voices—they spoke about something called the alkahest…Have you heard of the alkahest?”
“No. Who said that, anyway?”
“I couldn’t see them. Just voices.”
He shrugged and peered at her more closely and said, “You hurt? What happen?”
“I saw a gigantic bird, like a lion…”
“Bird like a lion? What you mean? I think you too tired to speak any sense. Come on, lie down, go to sleep till morning. It will be very cold soon.” He shook out a blanket and laid it on a pile of several others.
She had to. There was no alternative. She felt him gently arranging the blankets over her, and then she was asleep.
She dreamed that Pan came back to her, without a word, at the darkest point of the night, and slipped under the sheepskins and found his old place around her neck.
“It’s a window, Pan!” she murmured. “Like the ones we used to go through with Will! In the red building—a window into another world! The world where the roses come from! That’s what it is!”
She heard the dream-Pan whisper, but what he said was a mystery, and in her dream itself, she fell asleep.