Three
Towards Aleppo
When Lyra woke up under the sheepskins, it was to find the sun not yet risen, the stars not quite all absorbed back into the sky. The air was very cold. From where she lay she could see the sleeping form of Abdel Ionides, and the camels slumbering on their folded legs, and the outline of the ruins of Madinat al-Qamar stark and still against the horizon.
She’d have liked nothing more than to lie there half-asleep, clutching the dream of Pan to her breast, but there were private things she wanted to attend to before Ionides awoke. The cold was piercing, and her hand throbbed unmercifully, but she felt clean and empty and calm, and she knew the secret of the red building.
She wrapped herself up again and watched the dawn take over the sky.
There were no birds to sing in that wilderness; the only sounds that came to her were a subdued occasional snuffle from one of the camels and the quiet breathing of Ionides. The air was still, so there was not even the whisper of sand grains shifting over one another.
She thought again about what had happened in the moon-washed forum, and then deep in the treasury, and afterwards when she spoke to Nur Huda beside the fountain. It felt now as if everything she’d done and said in the City of the Moon had taken place in a state of delirium. She sent her blessings to Nur Huda and her little jerboa dæmon, to guard her and wish her well on her journey home, and although she felt a helpless little sob from part of herself, knowing that the alethiometer was gone forever, there was also a curious relief…A sob from part of herself? How many parts did she have? Was Pan aware of what she’d done? He was a part of herself too, or she was a part of him. Perhaps he wasn’t far away. Perhaps he was waiting in the desert near Aleppo. She, or part of herself, was also feeling a distinct excitement, a tingle of expectation and hope. And there was that dream…And the warning, if it was a warning, about something called the alkahest…There were so many things to find out!
Dawn was coming, and it came quickly: unlike the gradual reluctant sunrise of the high latitudes, it seemed to arrive between two blinks of an eye. The camels were shifting. Ionides must have heard them, because he turned over and sat up smoothly. Lyra saw his dæmon scamper up the rock beside him and stretch herself in the first rays of the sun.
“You awake, Miss Silver,” he said, not as a question. “You beat me to it. How was your visit to Madinat al-Qamar? Did you find news of your dæmon, I venture to ask?”
As he spoke, he rose to his feet and flicked out his blankets, laying them over the rock, brushing them free of sand. His voice was as clear as that of an actor on a stage: not loud, just brightly audible.
“No,” she said.
“Ah.”
While he went behind the rock, presumably to empty his bladder, Lyra took off the shirt she’d been wearing and changed it for another, carefully transferring the alethiometer needle from one pocket to the other. Then she tried to tidy her hair. She was aware of how wild she must look, not that she was concerned very much about that; but something had lightened in her. She longed for a shower.
She crouched by the fire, which Ionides had banked against the night, and began to move pieces of wood around, hoping to rouse it into flame.
“Miss Silver! What you doing? This is my job. You employ me to make fires, to cook, all that, not to sit like a pasha watching while you put this one out!”
He bustled her aside and bent to correct her clumsy efforts.
“Look, see this, the flame want to go this way. You draw it, you give it energy, you help it. See this wood?” It was a gnarled and prickly twig with drops of resin oozing through the bark. “This is your friend. This is your best servant. Like a shepherd has a dog—you have the redthorn. You save two, three pieces at night, you keep them close to hand, you watch till the little baby flames flicker up the height of one fingernail, and then…”
Like a candy-seller pulling sugar out of the air, he twined and twisted the redthorn in the little flames, and soon he was able to pull them upwards, stretching them, twisting them like yarn, and touching them down on another stick. Before long the fire was blazing securely. Ionides thrust the end of the redthorn in the sand to put it out, and handed it to her before settling the pot on the fire to boil for coffee. Lyra put the charred twig into her pocket.
“When you come back last night,” he said, squatting back on his heels, “you tell me you see a gigantic bird like a lion, or a lion like a bird. Naturally I think you are briefly out of your mind.”
“You’ve never seen anything like that?”
“Never. Such things are said to exist, but if at all, only in the mountains of the Elburz.”
“They’re not the birds you told me about before? The oghâb-gorgs?”
“No, no. Those are mere savages. The kind you describe is very noble, very proud. Some people say they are spirits, some people don’t believe in them at all, other people say they do exist, but only in stories. I don’t know English word for them. In French they are called griffon.”
“Gryphon,” said Lyra. “Same word in English, almost. I wonder what he was doing in al-Khan al-Azraq.”
“Looking for gold, maybe. They love gold. If anyone steal their gold, they chase them to the end of the earth.”
So the one-eyed man had been taken up into the sky for the sake of the gold of the alethiometer in his hand. But he hadn’t had it for more than a few seconds; the gryphon can’t have been pursuing him for that. Perhaps he had more gold in his pockets.
“You see any dæmons in there?” Ionides went on.
“Yes. But not mine.”
“You want to try again?”
“No. My dæmon’s not there. He was there, but he left.”
“So you had some news, anyway. Where did he go?”
“East. Further east.”
“You know where?”
She said, “Yes,” but she hesitated, and then wished she hadn’t.
He was too acute to miss it.
“If you know where, you will want to follow him, no?”
“I know where in general terms. Not exactly. East is a big place.”
“East is a big place,” he repeated, uttering the words without any mockery, but she could see the enjoyment in his eyes.
He adjusted the pot on the fire and passed Lyra a bag of dates. She ate one; it was intensely sweet.
“Aleppo is east,” said Ionides.
“He won’t be in Aleppo.”
“We shall be there tomorrow morning. What will you do then?”
“I shall go to Marletto’s Café.”
That surprised him. “You know Marletto’s? How you know that place?”
“I know more than you think,” she said, and put another date in her mouth; they’d be nourishing, at least.
“Who you going to see at Marletto’s?”
“Depends who’s there.”
“And then what?”
He poured some boiling water into the coffeepot and stirred the dark drink briskly with a twig whose end had been split several times to make a rough brush. When the froth reached the rim of the vessel, he added a pinch of something he took from a screw of paper.
“What’s that?” Lyra asked.
He held it out. It looked like salt. She took a small pinch and found that it was.
“You didn’t notice when I put salt in before?” he said.
“I wasn’t capable of noticing anything very much.”
“And now you are?”
“Yes. Why do you put salt in coffee? Most people put sugar.”
“Make the coffee taste better. Plenty sugar in the dates. You want me to make some bread? Very quick. Very nice.”
“No, thank you. The dates and the coffee are fine.”
“Full of nourishment. When you ready, we go. We leave this melancholy place. What kind of dæmons you see in there?”
As he packed everything on the camels’ backs she told him a lot of lies about what she’d seen and done in the Blue Hotel. She didn’t mention Nur Huda. It felt strange to be lying again, or storytelling, at least; the endless facility she’d had as a child was a marvel to her now. Making it up wasn’t hard, but making it convincing was. If Pan were with her, he could have helped by supplying details, prompting, pretending to qualify or correct…She wondered, as she spoke, whether that was what he’d meant by imagination.
Ionides listened with close attention. He seemed to find her nonsense both illuminating and probable; but when she was securely on her camel and he on his, he said, “Miss Silver, you are being satirical.”
“Oh, you don’t believe me?”
“Not one word. But your story is very good.”
“Mr. Ionides, what is the alkahest?”
“The what?”
She said it again. “Something told me about it. Have you ever heard the word before?”
“No. Never.”
“It sounds sort of Arabic…What do you think the imagination is?”
“Why you ask me?”
“Because you’re here. But what do you think the imagination is?”
“You don’t think I tell the truth?”
“Not all the time.”
He laughed, and she found herself joining in. Then she said, “You haven’t answered the question.”
“Ah, is very difficult.”
“We have plenty of time.”
“Plenty of time for such a question? How many years you think people talk about this? And you want me to tell just like that, flash bang?”
They had joined the rough road along which they’d come the night before. Ionides turned his camel’s head eastwards, and Lyra’s followed.
“Well, you could tell me what you think,” she said, “and I could consider it and then tell you what I think about your answer, and we could keep ourselves amused for hours.”
The morning air was pleasant in her lungs; the sun was warm but not yet hot. The movement of the camel under her felt steadier than it had done at first, so she must have been getting used to it. The aches and pains of various kinds were still there, but subdued, and even her broken hand was a little less swollen, a little more mobile. Ionides had noticed.
“You look different, Miss Silver,” he said. They were riding side by side, and it was easy to talk.
“I feel different.”
“Something happen in Madinat al-Qamar, no?”
“That’s right.”
“Something real, not imagination?”
“Well, you see, that’s interesting already. You mean, if it’s imagined, it can’t be real? What about the other way round: If it’s real, it can’t be imagined? They’re complete opposites. Is that what you mean?”
“This is your game, Miss Silver, not mine. I am a simple man. I don’t know the rules. If something look real, is it real?”
“It depends on—”
“No, it doesn’t depend. If it look real in every way, is it real?”
“Yes. I suppose it is. Until you find out it isn’t.”
“No, you won’t find that. It look real, it taste real, it smell real, the right weight, the right size, everything you can see or feel about it is just like what it should be. Is that real?”
“Yes, then. It must be.”
“Then if somebody say to you, this is not real. You think it’s real, it look and feel and weigh like everything it should be, but it’s not real. What would you say to that person?”
“I’d want to know why they thought that.”
“You wouldn’t believe them ever?”
She had to think about that. What would Gottfried Brande say? The only thing that counted for him was hard evidence that could be expressed in numbers. He’d have no truck with the idea that something unreal could be real. Simon Talbot, on the other hand, thought that the distinction between real and unreal was a cultural construct, entirely dependent on the social and political context, with no permanent validity.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I was talking about the difference between real and imagined. You made it into the difference between real and unreal. What happened to the imagination? Where did that go? Do you think that ‘imagined’ means the same as ‘unreal’?”
“I am only a humble guide, Miss Silver. Your questions have a philosophical depth far beyond my ability to understand. Again I say, why you ask me?”
“Because I don’t think you’re a humble guide at all. I think you’re a very clever man, who conceals most of himself from sight. I think you could easily answer those questions, and I really would like to know what you think.”
“Of course you are right,” he said cheerfully. “I know everything, but is not good for business to say so. I give to a customer my business card, if I had such a thing, it would not say ‘Abdel Ionides, he know everything.’ They would look at me and say, ‘If you know everything, why you dress like a beggar?’ Not easy to explain that, Miss Silver.”
“You’ve done it again.”
“What I do again?”
“Avoided the question. If something is imagined, does that mean it’s untrue?”
“All right. You drive me into a corner. You hunt me down like a cat with a mouse, and there is no escape for me. Here you are. This is what I know: without imagination you never see the truth about anything. Without imagination you think you see more truth, but in fact you see less. You know who tell me that?”
“No. Who was it?”
“A holy man from India. He was in prison with me in Baghdad. Very holy man, but not very clever, so he get caught.”
“You were in prison?”
“Many times.”
“What for?”
“In some places, Miss Silver, they put you in prison with no reason. No crime, no trial, no sentence. They don’t like your face, in you go. Say you arrive in a city you don’t know. You need some money. There is a marketplace. You offer to play a game, backgammon, chess, cards, whatever they like, and you sit down and start playing with some honest citizens, like yourself, but pffft! Along come a policeman. ‘What you do?’ he says. I explain, simple game for innocent amusement with my friends. He doesn’t listen, he say is against the law, I have to go before the judge. The judge say give me some money or I send you to prison. Well, I got no money, and prison is not so bad. Somewhere dry to sleep, something to eat, interesting company. Like the Indian holy man. He tell me that piece of wisdom, so in exchange I show him little game with three cards, so he can get some money to buy food when they let him out, and so we pass the time till they let me out.”
“Did they let him out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I see him again. Maybe not.”
And so they rode on towards Aleppo.
The prison governor at Küçüklü had still not managed to transfer the English archaeologist to the civilian hospital. They didn’t want him; they had no beds—the transport situation was difficult—there was a shortage of blood in the transfusion unit—they could not allow the transfer of prisoners without adequate security staff (which was the precise opposite of their objection on a previous occasion), and so on.
So Dr. Martin Peters, whose dæmon had vanished, still lay in the grubby and ill-lit prison infirmary, looked after by the same idle and superstitious orderly. When a case of dysentery turned up elsewhere in the prison, and then another, the governor became seriously alarmed.
“The patient Dr. Peters,” he said to the orderly. “He can’t stay in there if we have two patients with dysentery.”
“Prisoners.”
“What? What?”
“They en’t patients. They’re prisoners. So’s he.”
“Take him out of the infirmary and put him in a clean cell, and then—”
“Put him in a what?”
“A cell that you have thoroughly disinfected. Put him there, and then move the two infected prisoners to the infirmary.”
“Not allowed to do that, sir. Only military staff can move prisoners.”
“If I tell you to do it, you’re not only allowed to do it, you’re required to. Don’t waste any more time. Get one of the day guards to help you. And do it now, not—”
A peremptory knock, a stamp of boots on the wooden floor, a loud parade-ground voice. “Sir! Visitor, sir. To see you now, sir.”
The guard who stood there, saluting smartly, was the most soldier-like of all the prison officers, which was why the governor had given him the duty of greeting visitors.
“Well, who is it? Where’s he from?”
“Colonel Grigorian, sir. Intelligence Corps. Urgent, sir.”
“Ah. Yes. Well, show him up. And go on, go on, man,” he snapped at the orderly. “See to that cell at once.”
Rolling his eyes, the orderly followed the guard out, leaving the governor more agitated than he’d been for days. Intelligence Corps? Was he in trouble? Should he have reported the English archaeologist to someone?
The visitor arrived quickly, and saluted the governor, who fumbled a salute in response and cursed himself.
“Colonel Grigorian, ah—welcome,” he said. “Please do sit down.”
The officer was slim, in his fifties, with very dark eyes and a hawk dæmon. He wore a khaki uniform with an astrakhan cap, a Sam Browne belt, and a holstered pistol. The governor didn’t recognize his insignia.
“I won’t take very long,” said Grigorian. “The prisoner Peters. Dr. Martin Peters. How long has he been here?”
“Oh, er—let me see—I can find out in a moment…” The governor started fumbling among his papers, fully aware of how unmilitary he must seem next to this smartly turned-out, fierce, unblinking soldier.
“All right,” said Grigorian, “never mind now. I’m in a hurry. I want all the papers you have relating to this man. Every single one. You understand?”
“Every single one,” said the governor, nodding.
“Now arrange for him to be taken down to my car. I understand he’s wounded. Is that correct? Can he walk?”
“No—shot in the top of the thigh—he’ll have to be stretchered, I’m afraid. He—”
“See to it, then, at once. And send whatever possessions he arrived with.”
“Of course. Yes. He’s—umm…I expect you’re aware of post-traumatic cytokinesis?”
“Of course. It’s hardly surprising. I shall wait outside with my car.”
He saluted again. The governor knocked some papers onto the floor in his haste to respond, and rang his bell for the orderly. Would the wretched brute have cleaned the stretcher since bringing Peters into the infirmary on it? Perhaps this Grigorian wouldn’t notice. And now there’d be no conversations about archaeology. It was all so difficult.
They had to wake Malcolm to get him into his clothes and onto the stretcher, and he was deep in a morphine dream. In the course of the uncomfortable journey down the stairs and into the car, he woke up enough to see what was happening, and when the car began to move away and the yellow light from a streetlamp fell across the face of his captor, he understood a little more; but the morphine claimed him back before he could speak. He didn’t even notice when Asta leapt up from the floor of the passenger compartment and lay purring on his chest.
Marcel Delamare, the President of the High Council of the Magisterium, had recently returned from a successful and productive visit to London. “Successful” meant that he had had his way over every item on the agenda, and “productive” meant that the memorandum of understanding signed by the two sides had a sequestered annex that was not mentioned in the press release.
Officials were going to clarify the details later, and from what Delamare had seen of the Brytish delegation, there would be little difficulty from them. It had been understood by both sides, and loudly proclaimed in the press, that the discussions expressed the profound and enduring friendship between the kingdom and the Magisterium. To mark the occasion, the President of the High Council was made a Knight of the Order of St. Stephen and St. Paul, which entitled him to wear a flamboyant gold cross set with pearls and rubies. Having been officially photogrammed doing so, Delamare decided privately to put the ridiculous thing away and never look at it again.
The sequestered annex, which no one was to know about, said that the two sides had agreed to the deployment of Brytish troops and armaments in the Magisterium’s Central Asian venture. Brytish soldiers and Brytish guns would soon be sent (inconspicuously, which meant that stern reporting restrictions applied) to cross the Channel by night and entrain (the War Office loved that sort of jargon) at Calais for Constantinople, where…well, where something else was going to happen.
The only people to know about the sequestered annex were the President and his Private Secretary on the Magisterium side, and the First Minister, the Secretary of State for War, and the Chief of the General Staff on the Brytish side. Normally, the information in the annex would be conveyed to the King at the Private Council, but King Edward the Twelfth was in his late eighties, and no longer had a firm grip of the details of statecraft. It was felt better to spare him the burden of knowing what was being planned in his name; he would not have had a very clear idea of it even in his prime, and these days he was amiably willing to sign any document placed in front of him. His penmanship was shaky, his memory was tenuous, but his courtesy was unfailing.
Meanwhile, the Magisterial diplomatic corps was busy researching the causes of the war its forces would soon be called on to fight. Researching, of course, meant inventing. In this task Monsieur Delamare’s officials were greatly helped by the Corporate Relations department of Thuringia Potash, or TP; a private company can hide almost anything under a bland title. What TP meant by Corporate Relations was, basically, arranging wars and then winning them, but doing so under a different name. TP Corporate Relations could start a war for you, fight it, win it, and all without troubling the courts or interesting the press. It would cost you a fortune.
The chief executive of TPCR, Dr. Emil Sundberg, a social scientist by training, joined Monsieur Delamare in his office before the official talks began. The morning sun glowed richly on the mahogany desk, the snowy blotter, and the President’s deep-black fountain pen.
“A very good morning to you,” said Sundberg, whose chameleon dæmon was taking her time to replicate the precise maroon of the leather armchair he was about to sit in. “And many congratulations on your knighthood.”
“I’m deeply honored, of course,” said Delamare, taking the other armchair.
“Do they give you something to wear? A ribbon, or something?”
“The protocol wouldn’t let it be worn in Geneva in any case.”
“No, of course. And were your talks in London productive?”
“Indeed they were. I shall give you a full summary when we meet with our officials later. For the moment I want to hear an outline of what your company proposes.”
“By all means. We strongly suggest that any action we take should be characterized in press releases, briefings, and the like, not as war, but as police action, humanitarian in purpose. We have extensive contacts among governments and press agencies, with whom we have developed a powerful culture of discretion and control, and we have an unparalleled record of news curation, widely recognized for its effectiveness. We can plan and execute a swift—”
“Yes, I’ve read your brochure. I want to hear what it doesn’t say.”
“I wouldn’t want anyone to think,” Sundberg said, having planned and executed a swift change of approach, “that news curation is our major activity. We have extensive experience in the field of controlled, focused, and robust paramilitary action. And all of it will be carried out with total discretion. It will appear from nowhere and vanish back to nowhere.”
“Is that what you did during the raid on the Tashbulak station?”
A tiny quiver shook Sundberg’s eyelids. “Precisely,” he said. “The ‘men from the mountains,’ as we succeeded in naming them, attacked suddenly with speed and power, and withdrew into silence. There is nothing to suggest any connection whatever with Thuringia Potash, or with the Magisterium.”
“Then how do you account for these photograms?”
Delamare reached across to the desk and handed the other man a large envelope. As Sundberg took out the pictures inside, his dæmon crawled up to his shoulder and began to turn the silver-gray of his suit. The photograms had been taken through a telescopic lens, and the quality was not high, but they showed with perfect clarity a group of white-robed horsemen riding away from the camera, accompanied by three pickup trucks with more white-robed men sitting or standing in the back. The rear panel of the nearest truck bore the well-known brandmark of TP.
Delamare said, “These were taken nearby, immediately afterwards.”
“They have been forged, of course,” said Sundberg.
“Let us suppose they haven’t. How are you going to explain them?”
“Where have they been seen?”
“In this building. So far, nowhere else. Before long they will appear in newspapers in every country involved in the Tashbulak research, and it will make some difference to the terms of the contract we are going to discuss this morning.”
“I can assure—” Sundberg began, but Delamare cut in with a voice that sliced like a piano wire.
“I repeat: How are you going to answer the charge that Thuringia Potash was involved in the attack?”
“By ignoring it. It’s a contemptible amateur attempt to smear the name of a company known throughout the world for its philanthropy as well as its leading pharmaceutical research, which has benefited people with all kinds of medical conditions. It’s not worth considering.”
“You and your colleagues had better consider it very carefully before we meet later this morning. Save your meaningless corporate-speak for curating the news, and have a serious answer ready. I do not want to see a picture like this again, do you understand?”
“I completely agree, Monsieur le Président. We shall do exactly that.”
Sundberg was finding it hard to look at Delamare’s face. He had never seen eyes quite so intimidating, although the rest of the President’s expression was mild and even kindly. His bearing spoke of a comfortable life among luxurious surroundings and agreeable work; his body was solid and slightly plump; his perfectly manicured hands were clasped across his belly; his lightly pomaded dark hair was graying at the temples; his suit of fine dark gray English worsted, his shirt of snowy cotton, his tie of a quietly patterned silk, all proclaimed the successful bureaucrat, the embodiment of worldly experience and power. Only his eyes seemed to belong to a different character altogether, possibly not even to a human being.
“The men from the mountains, for instance,” Delamare went on. “I want to know who commands them, how you contact them, what you will do when they start acting for themselves.”
“The answer to the last question is that we will dispose of them robustly. They are a rabble, and they have a collective leadership, so they claim, but their most prominent spokesman is called Zafar Sayadov. He is said to come from Azerbaijan, but no one is certain of that. There is also a woman…”
“A woman? In charge?”
“Her position is not clear to us, but she is clearly important. She is called Leila Pervani. She was an academic at the University of Alexandria, an experimental theologian of some kind, until she became involved in this movement.”
Delamare made a note. “How do you contact them?”
“We do that through a network of tradesmen, merchants, camel-drivers, never the same people twice. They are very ingenious, and at times surprisingly disciplined, but fundamentally a rabble, as I say.”
Surprisingly disciplined…Delamare’s view was that no one in Sundberg’s position should find anything surprising. The President let two small chains of thought begin to unreel in his mind: one concerned the need to establish his own contacts with the men from the mountains, and the other examined various ways of detaching Thuringia Potash from the coming conflict, when the time was right. They were simply not big enough; their ambitions were limited.
“Thank you,” he said. “I look forward to meeting your colleagues in an hour or so.”
Delamare stood up and extended his hand, with an expression that was almost genial. Sundberg shook it and left, feeling that he had handled the interview with great skill.
Colonel Schreiber, who had been ordered to arrest and “disappear” the guide Hugo Beamish, was making a second visit to Les Diablerets, to see what effect explosives had on the opening in the air. He thought it was a mistake to get rid of the guide, who could still have been useful, but after all they had his detailed notes, and the colonel never questioned his orders.
He’d been told to “destroy” the opening, and the first problem was what Delamare had meant by that. If Schreiber had been going to destroy a thing, an object (a wooden case, say) a little less than a meter wide and two meters high, it would take a specific amount of explosive, which could be calculated with the help of various tables of figures from the schools of mining or military ordnance training departments. The colonel had learned all about the process at military college. He could have blown up a thing very competently: a wooden thing, a metal thing, a solid thing, a hollow thing; there would be a bang and some smoke, and the thing would be reduced to a mass of smaller pieces in no time.
But a nothing was a different problem. You could blow up everything around it, but when the smoke cleared away the nothing might still be there, unaltered.
“The essence of the task, though,” his porcupine dæmon had said when they were thinking about it, “is not so much destroying it altogether as making it impossible to go through it. Something that melts the air at the edge and crushes it together—that would work, wouldn’t it?”
“ ‘Melts the air,’ ” the colonel scoffed.
“Well, you know what I mean. Thermobaric sort of thing.”
“The trouble is there’s only one thing to test it on. That’s the real problem.”
There were more problems than that, though. Would it be better to place an explosive charge on this side, in this world, or on the other? That was one question. Would an explosion merely enlarge the opening instead of closing it? Or would the noise and the smoke attract the attention of the authorities in that other world, who might investigate and demand reparation, or worse? Or might there be some simple method of closing the damn thing that he had never thought of? His dæmon suggested the analogy of a primitive or savage finding a coat, and wearing it, but having to leave it open because he had never heard of a zipper, and thought the rows of little metal teeth were merely decorative.
“Something like that, anyway,” she said.
The colonel had little taste for analogy; that was what dæmons were for, after all, and they rarely said anything useful. Thermobaric, though: there might be something there. An explosion in two stages, the first filling the air with a flammable mist or vapor, and the second igniting that—the very process Lyra had used with a bag of flour when she’d rescued the children from Bolvangar all that time ago, but of course Colonel Schreiber knew nothing about that. He was thinking of a device known as the tonnerre double, prohibited in warfare between civilized nations because of its abominable effects on the victims—or indeed any nearby creature with lungs. “Prohibited” merely meant that the armaments manufacturers couldn’t sell it openly, but of course research and development continued, and Schreiber’s special connections made it easy for him to obtain two examples of the latest and most conveniently sized tonnerre double grenades.
He took the squat little canisters out of his rucksack and connected them to a timer that would ensure both detonated at the same moment, and placed one on his side of the opening, tucked down firmly next to it, and the other in a corresponding position in…the other world.
“How long?” said his dæmon.
“Ten minutes. Plenty of time to get to that big rock with the tree growing out of it.”
The dæmon remembered that rock, and scuttled ahead over the mossy stones and the tangled roots, tugging as hard as she could at the invisible bond between her and Schreiber so as to make him hurry.
They got to the rock with five minutes to spare, and settled down on the side away from the opening.
“What do you think will happen?” she said.
But as she spoke, she heard someone coming. There was no path, as such, so he—it was a man, whistling—had to do as they’d done, and clamber over the mossy stones as best he could. The dæmon couldn’t help it: her quills shook, and the soft rattle they made sounded to her and to Schreiber unhelpfully loud in the still air.
The whistling stopped, and so did the sound of movement.
They could picture the man looking around, puzzled. He said something to his dæmon, and her dove-voice responded.
After a few moments the man started to move again. They could hear slow footsteps creaking in the patches of snow, the rustle of undergrowth, the little metal click of his steel-tipped alpenstock on stone. Schreiber laid his hand on his dæmon’s back, pressing her quills gently down towards her tail.
If the man continued in the same direction at the same pace, he would be very close to the explosive at the moment it went off. And unless they could remove what would be left of his body, it would be found by anyone coming this way, perhaps to look for him, and that in turn would draw their attention to the opening in the air. It was the last thing Delamare would have wanted. But to warn the man would reveal it as well, and leave him alive, which might be even worse.
The porcupine dæmon shared every quiver of the colonel’s thoughts. It was all grotesquely unfortunate.
Then the timer did exactly what it was designed to do, and detonated both grenades. The first explosion made a small noise, not much louder than the sound of hands clapping once. The sounds that came a fraction of a second later were much louder, and included (the dæmon thought) a cry of surprise from the man, itself cut off by the ignition of the cloud of naphtha vapor.
Schreiber and the dæmon waited for the various fragments of rock and tree and human being to fall to the ground, and for the air to clear a little, and then moved cautiously out of the shelter of the big rock and back to where the opening had been.
There was very little left of the man, but the colonel was familiar with that kind of thing. More interesting was what had happened to the opening. In the place where it had been, the smoke from the explosion was twisting in the air, and drifting or seeping out into small shreds of vacancy, twenty or thirty of them, some as big as his hand, others like the holes in a pepper pot.
The porcupine dæmon sneezed. Smoke was coming through from the other side too. “When it’s cleared,” she said, and sneezed again, “there won’t be anything to show it was there.”
“Much less, anyway,” said the colonel.
A few little patches of oddness, scraps and tears in the air; nothing like the door-sized weirdness that had been there before. As for the unfortunate passerby, there was no shortage of scavenging birds or mammals in these forests. In a week or so there would be nothing left to find. There was nothing to worry about after all.
Schreiber gathered up every scrap he could find of the tonnerre double, and lifted his rucksack onto his shoulder.
The dæmon said, “Of course, he might have come out of the other world, that man. He might have been going back to it.”
“Serve him right for trespassing, then,” said the colonel.
They set off back to Geneva.
“Post-traumatic psycho—what?” said Colonel Grigorian.
“Cyto. Cytokinesis. It’s the term for what happens when the living cell splits in two. As if your dæmon vanished for a bit after a traumatic shock. The best I could think of on the spur of the moment,” said Malcolm.
“Well, it’s not bad. You seem a bit more lively now. How are you feeling?”
“Painful and weak, but clearheaded. Where are we going, Timur?”
They had been traveling for an hour or so—Malcolm was vague about that—since leaving the prison hospital. As the morphine daze evaporated, he realized firstly that Asta was in the car with them, and secondly that the Colonel Something in the astrakhan cap and the gold shoulder-flash was a man he’d last seen in the offices of the Botanic Garden in Oxford: the historian Timur Ghazarian.
“We’re going to Aleppo. I have a friend at the consulate there. At some point we’ll have to abandon this car, which I stole. What is your wound?”
“Gunshot in the hip. I think it got worse because I moved too much. I’ll have to hope it isn’t infected.”
“Who shot you?”
Malcolm told him about the dying director of the research station, about the false nurse, about how he got away from Smyrna.
“But you, Timur…Where is Oakley Street?”
They went through the catechism that let one agent recognize another. Ghazarian was word-perfect.
“I was hibernating,” he explained. It was an Oakley Street term for the position of an agent who had retired from active duty, but who was still on a reserve list. “I don’t know how much you’ve heard, but we’re working on Christabel terms now. Oakley Street has been officially disrecognized. You know that expression?”
“It’s new to me, but I can guess where it comes from. Christabel, eh?”
Christabel was the name of a series of highly secret measures that were to come into operation when Oakley Street was under serious threat. Glenys Godwin must have moved quickly.
“They sent me here to look for you,” Ghazarian said. “Glenys didn’t know you were wounded when she sent me to find you, or she probably wouldn’t have done.”
“Then don’t tell her.”
Malcolm leaned back in the seat because the pain was becoming difficult again. He closed his eyes. Ghazarian noticed, and eased off the accelerator a little. The desert road was empty as far as the horizon, and the moon was bright, so he turned off the lights and drove on without them.
Asta lay along Malcolm’s shoulder, and they half whispered, half thought together.
“You went to look for him?” Malcolm murmured to her. “But how did you know he was nearby?”
“I just thought he might be,” said his dæmon.
“Hmm.”
“And what can we do in Aleppo?”
“Look for Lyra.”
“But why would she be there?”
“I just thought she might be.”
“Hmm.”
“Besides,” he said, “any traveler going further east would have to go through Aleppo.”
“It won’t be easy to find her.”
“There are people to talk to. Mustafa Bey, for example. He’s a man of business. If we give him something in exchange, he’ll deal with us fairly.”
“Then we’ll just have to discover something valuable for him.”
She felt something happening in his awareness. “What is it?” she said.
“Here comes the spangled ring again.”
It might have been a star, or the glimmer of a house light among the distant hills, or a glowing bulb on the car’s dashboard, but something had set off the reaction in Malcolm’s vision that happened from time to time. The little golden thing shimmered and twisted minutely in the darkness and compelled his attention, just as it always did, no bigger than a point at first but growing steadily, as if it was moving towards him.
“I can feel it,” Asta whispered. “Like something tightening in my head.”
“But not see anything?”
“No. What does it mean this time?”
“Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything.”
Ghazarian must have heard them murmuring. He said, “All right?”
“Yes, thanks, Timur. Just something in my eye.”
“Do you need a handkerchief or something?”
“No, actually, it’s a scintillating scotoma, if you know what that is.”
“Sort of migraine?”
“Yes. Just a visual thing. It lasts about twenty minutes and then fades away.”
“Do you get it often?”
“Half a dozen times a year, I suppose. I’ll just sleep for a bit and let it run its course.”
But he was wide awake, and so was Asta. After a minute or so she whispered, “You should tell Lyra about it.”
“Why?”
“She’d be interested.”
“D’you think we’ll ever find her?”
“Bound to. It’s not very big, Central Asia. Not many places to hide.”
He grunted. The spangled ring was becoming obstreperous now; this was the central stage, when it took up most of his visual field and made reading, for instance, impossible. He lay back with his eyes closed, the scotoma shimmering snake-like in the dark, Asta tense beside his head.
He shifted slightly to ease the stiffness in his leg. Ghazarian noticed and said, “I’m going to stop for a minute. I need to empty my bladder.”
He pulled the car to the side of the road and got out and urinated onto the sand before lighting a cigarette. Malcolm got out too, into the darkness and the wide silence. He held on to the car door and tried leaning to his left and right, and then a little forwards and backwards, and found that every movement hurt.
“What did they give you in the way of medication?” said Ghazarian. His voice was quiet in the open night.
“Morphine. I think I remember an injection. Also a small bottle of tablets made by Thuringia Potash. That company’s one of the forces leading into this.”
“You know the new Master of Jordan College is an executive of TP?”
“Really? I knew he was in pharmaceuticals, but that’s interesting. Listen…”
There was a sound in the sky, or that was where it seemed to be; distant, very high up, and savage: a wild animal screaming. Or more than one.
“What’s that?” said Ghazarian.
They both looked up. Against the starry sky there might have been a little flicker of movement—something dark, pulsating or struggling—very small and far off; but that was where the sounds were coming from. The remains of the spangled ring were trembling at the edges of Malcolm’s vision, but the central part was clear enough to make out the combat going on high above. It looked like one scrap of darkness fighting another.
“Birds?” Ghazarian said.
“Bigger, I think. Hard to tell. But—”
“They’re falling…”
The struggle—it was impossible to make out individual birds, if they were birds—was definitely sinking through the sky, almost directly for the two men, it seemed; and the screams of anger and pain were louder.
“They’re not birds…or are they?” said Malcolm.
“Can’t tell. Enormous, though. They’re tearing each other to pieces.”
The creatures, whatever they were, scrambled over and over in midair, struggling to stay aloft as well as fight, and half succeeding at both. It would have been hard to make out what was happening even in daylight, so quick and so savage were their movements, and all the time they were tumbling lower and soaring up again, tearing and snapping and slashing at each other, and screaming, roaring.
Finally one of the creatures tore itself away and soared up high, or so it seemed; the men couldn’t see it anymore, and the other creature uttered a howl of triumph or anger and spread its wings wide to glide away, letting the silence return to the sky and the desert.
“Let’s move,” said Ghazarian.
Awkwardly, Malcolm got back into the car and lay back panting with the effort and pain. Ghazarian started the engine and pulled away.
Malcolm opened the window and listened as the car gathered speed. Apart from the engine and the tires on the road, there was nothing to hear but the faint brush of the wind against the sand.
“Timur,” said Malcolm after a mile or so, “did you ever come across a student called Lyra Silvertongue? A member of St. Sophia’s.”
“I don’t remember the name. And it’s not very forgettable. What about her?”
“She used to live at Jordan. She was orphaned and the old Master sort of adopted her. I taught her for a while…I think she’s traveling to Karamakan and Tashbulak, but I’ve no idea where she might be now. For that matter, where are we?”
“You see that faint light in the sky ahead?”
The moon had set, and dawn was some way off. Malcolm looked where Ghazarian was pointing. “What is it?”
“It’s the lights of Gaziantep. The Syrian border’s not far beyond. Somewhere soon—a couple of miles—we’ll turn off the main road. Now I think we should move on.”
Malcolm could feel a different freshness in the air that came into the car through the not-quite-shut window.
“I’m surprised there’s so little traffic,” he said.
“If we’d come by the other route we’d have faced at least two roadblocks. Gaziantep is normally a busy commercial center, but the authorities are very nervous right now. They don’t want anything to hold up the troop trains and convoys.”
“Which forces exactly?”
“Under the command of the Magisterium, nominally, but the alliance includes a number of Brytish troops.”
“What?”
“When were you last in touch with Oakley Street?”
“Before that particular deal was announced.”
“It never was announced. It was a secret arrangement between the War Office and Marcel Delamare.”
Malcolm was silent. The world was changing so fast and so thoroughly that he almost felt dizzy until he realized that his head was still affected by the spangled ring.
“This is going to make traitors of us,” he said after a minute.
“I wonder, though. Since the arrangement hasn’t been made public, and probably won’t be, it might be a defense in law to say that we had no way of knowing who the enemy was, and no reason to expect it would be our own troops.”
“It won’t come to court,” said Malcolm. “The law would be irrelevant. We’d be outlaws, to be shot on sight.”
Ghazarian reached into his jacket and handed Malcolm a smooth flat stone a little smaller than the palm of his hand.
“I nearly forgot,” he said. “Glenys wanted me to give you this.”
“What is it?”
“I have no idea. You can use it to keep in touch with her. Don’t ask me how.”
“Well,” said Malcolm. “Thanks, I think.”
Sleep was overwhelming him again. He put the stone into an inside pocket and closed his eyes.