Twenty-Four

The Death of Sorush

Malcolm rode on the back of Prince Keshvād, with Gulya flying on his right and a witch called Tuuli Latvala on his left, a close companion of Tilda Vasara. With her came seven other witches, and Malcolm had spoken to them all before they began the journey.

What he planned to do was land in the mountains to the north of Sorush’s cavern, and then approach it under cover of darkness. He had learned everything the gryphons could tell him about the sorcerer, and he had with him all the items he’d borrowed from Khuroshvili the goldsmith. According to Tuuli Latvala, the moon would be full when they reached the sorcerer’s cave.

As they flew north along the sea, the witch flew back and forth conferring with her companions, and sometimes soared high above or scouted the air to the horizons east and west. Eventually she flew close to Prince Keshvād, and called out to Malcolm.

“The sky is full of spirits,” she said.

He heard her clearly. “Spirits of what kind?”

“Many kinds. Some I know and some we have never seen before.”

“I can see nothing but the sky.”

“Then you must believe me. I think they are friendly, or at least neutral. I have spoken to some of them. They know this sorcerer you plan to find.”

“What do they say about him?”

“He is greedy and cunning. Most of these spirits are afraid of him.”

“Are there more spirits than normal in this part of the sky?”

“They’ve come from elsewhere. From further east. I think they are apsaras.”

“I don’t know that word. Would they fight for us, if it came to battle?”

“I don’t know. This is like no campaign we have fought before. You want to kill this sorcerer, fine, we do that, or the gryphon will do it, that is not difficult. But what then? Back to the mountain?”

“No. Further east, to the desert south of the Tien Shan mountains.”

“And then?”

“Find a red building, and enter it.”

“Just that?”

“Not without Lyra,” he said.

“I have heard of this Lyra. I loved Serafina Pekkala. Where is she now?”

“Somewhere below us,” said Malcolm, “on the sea, a little north of Baku. Let me read what she says.”

He had been exchanging lodestone messages with Lyra, but the light was failing as the sun sank behind the mountains to their left. It was getting harder to make out the penciled words.

She wrote: We are fleeing from riots in Baku. Fishing boat. Heading north. Where are you?

High above, Malcolm wrote in reply. Can’t see you yet. We can see the lights of Baku, though. We are flying to a cave in the mountains north of the city.

What will you do there?

Kill a sorcerer. Then find you and fly to desert.

Where cave? How far north?

Not sure. Not there yet.

We are maybe a mile from shore. Level with a lighthouse. Three flashes then one.

Malcolm called to Tuuli Latvala, “Look for a lighthouse a little way north of here. Three flashes and then one. Tell us as soon as you can see it.”

The witch swept up into the night and called to her sisters, and they all streamed away towards the north.

Malcolm was conscious of the smell of burning pitch—just occasional drifts of it in the wind. From various points on the ground outside the city, columns of smoke broke out only to be twisted and torn away by the turbulent air, replaced at once by more smoke and occasionally little sparks of fire, and the smell of other fires too—and the glow from buildings on fire, four, five of them, half a dozen or more. The lights of the city were being left behind them, and a different darkness beyond showed the vast mass of the Caucasus Mountains.

The moon was rising, and soon, no doubt, the sea below and the country beyond the city would be drenched in a colder light than fire. Malcolm couldn’t estimate how high they were, but it wasn’t easy to look past Prince Keshvād’s wings; and all he could see when he tried to look down at the sea was a turbid darkness, with occasional streaks of white where waves were breaking. The smell of burning pitch still whirled past, little ghosts of a smell.

Gulya shouted, “Great fire below!”

A cluster of industrial buildings was blazing near a wide harbor where a number of ships sat at anchor, and thick smoke billowed up, torn and flung away by the winds. Malcolm could see vessels spraying water and foam through high-pressure hoses, but as he watched, one of the refinery buildings exploded into a fountain of flame, and the sound followed it up through the air: a colossal boom, as long and deep as thunder, reverberating from the mountains and setting the ships rocking on the water.

Prince Keshvād’s great voice roared, and Gulya darted forward to speak to him. Malcolm could feel the mighty lungs rumbling below him, and kept very still. Gulya swept up high, swung round, and skimmed down towards him, and landed on Prince Keshvād’s back beside him.

“The witches are coming back,” she said, almost breathless. “Round the headland. And rain is coming too.”

The city was behind them now, and the headland rose sharp and dark out of the sea ahead. Prince Keshvād beat his wings harder and they rose high above, sweeping around the cliffs and out to sea a little way before tilting to the left and following the shoreline.

“There’s the lighthouse!” said Gulya, and through the clouds and the first lashings of rain and the swirling smoke there it was at the point of the headland, a light flashing one-two-three and then one, one-two-three and then one.

Immediately Malcolm turned to look to the sea directly out from the lighthouse. But if there was a light on the fishing boat it must have been very small, or else they’d dowsed it for safety. Malcolm craned to look for the quick-darting black-garbed fliers.

“Tuuli!” he cried. “Here, here!”

Watching them wheel and soar before swooping down close to the great gryphon, he felt his heart gripped, for a moment, by fear. They were so few, and he and Gulya so small, and the task they were facing was so difficult…

“Malcolm! Malcolm!”

It was another witch, not Tuuli Latvala, calling to him. “I can hear you,” he called back. “Did you find the lighthouse?”

“Yes. And the boat. Tuuli Latvala has gone to speak to Lyra.”

Malcolm imagined the little boat swaying and lurching on the rough sea with Lyra on the deck holding tight to the rail, and the witch landing lightly beside her, and Lyra’s astonishment.

“Gulya!” he called. “Gulya, could you ask Prince Keshvād to fly lower?”

Gulya beat her wings and sped to the great gryphon’s eagle head. He turned to listen to her, and said something in return, and Gulya wheeled and came back to report.

“We can land on the ground, but not on the sea. With waves and wind like this, the prince can’t risk going low enough to speak to the boat.”

“I understand,” said Malcolm. “Has the witch spoken to them yet?”

He looked at the lodestone again. He had only the flickering fire from below to read it by, and he peered closer, conscious that the stone was slippery with rain and that his hands were cold, and held it close to his eyes.

Taking on water, he read. Can’t stay out. Making for shore north side of lighthouse.

See you soon, then, he wrote in response.

“Gulya!” he called, and the little gryphon swooped down to listen. “Where is the forge of Sorush?”

“It’s the cavern that’s—” she began, but then cried out with shock.

Malcolm caught his breath.

The entire mass of the mountain range, looming high above the waves crashing on the rocky shore, had suddenly burst into flame. From a thousand and one openings, caves, crevices, cracks, gorges, clefts, caverns, and grottoes, a thousand and one orange-red tongues lashed out, licking the stony walls and cliffs above them, flaring this way and that in the tempestuous air buffeting the shore. Malcolm and the gryphons and the witches on their cloud-pine branches could hear the roar of fire even above the howling of the wind. Great swags and banners of flame, sheets and flags of it, tore loose from their caverns and hollows and flew on the wind like blazing vultures eager for flesh to consume.

“Which one is the forge?” Malcolm shouted.

Gulya cried aloud, but her words were lost. Malcolm felt as if a madness had seized him. There was no way back from this now; Sorush would die, or he and Gulya would. As for Lyra—

She was writing again. Now it was the light from the blazing mountain that showed Malcolm what Lyra was saying. He wiped the rain off the stone and held it up so it shone a flaring, glistening orange and yellow. The words came through:

Making for jetty now—white posts—

That was all.

Malcolm read it aloud, shouting the words as clearly as he could. He leaned out and looked down, holding tightly to the great feathers of Prince Keshvād’s back. The gryphon was wheeling in the gusty air and scanning the shore below with great sweeps of his head. As for Gulya, she could make no headway against the wind; it was all she could do to stay close.

Then the prince spread his wings wide and plunged downwards in a sickening dive straight towards the little jetty with the white posts. Malcolm’s hands were shaking with the effort to hold on, because he had no other purchase than his grip on the thick-shafted feathers. He could hear the roar of the fiery caverns even above the rush of wind, but only for a moment, because Prince Keshvād was beating his wings inwards, swinging himself up and back, reaching down with his lion feet and making ready to land.

But he had only the narrow jetty to aim for. A sheer cliff rose straight up beyond it.

Malcolm could see the boat now, low in the water, still some way out. Then came another mighty sweep of the gryphon’s wings, and another, and they hung for a moment suspended in the air before gravity took them the last little way down to the rotting boards and swaying posts of the jetty.

The prince landed securely, and in a moment Malcolm had leapt down from his back. He looked up to speak to the gryphon.

“Prince,” he shouted above the roar of the fires and the howling wind, “I owe you a great debt. The boat just making for the jetty holds some friends of mine. Please let them ashore.”

Prince Keshvād bent his great eagle head low to say something in response, and Malcolm heard the words, “If you let Gulya die, I will kill you and all your friends.”

Malcolm looked him in the eye and nodded. The little gryphon had managed to land on the jetty, but she was a scrap of paper in the wind compared to the power and size of the prince. Her claws were scrabbling for purchase on the slippery boards. Malcolm bent to scoop her up, and for a moment she fought, twisting to look past his shoulder and up at the prince, but then she fell still, and Malcolm saw something pass between the two gryphons like a charge of anbaric power, and understood at once. She loved Keshvād, but could expect nothing in return; and the prince loved Gulya, but would never be able to express it. It was only the fraction of a single heartbeat, and he saw it all at once. He set her down among the rocks where the wind couldn’t catch her.

The remains of a little harbor surrounded the jetty: a fragment of stone wall, a shattered wooden building or two, a path that seemed to lead up towards the mountain in one direction, and across to the lighthouse in the other. Malcolm looked up: flames everywhere, scorching his face.

Then he heard a cry from the sea: “Malcolm! Malcolm!”

Malcolm turned to see the little boat, low in the water, wallowing clumsily as the engine battled to keep the screw turning. They were only a hundred yards or so from the jetty, and in the light of the flaring mountain behind him Malcolm ran to the end of the shaky platform and clung to the furthest white post, holding on fiercely and calling Lyra’s name through the buffeting wind.

Every time the boat thudded down into a trough between the waves, it seemed less able to rise up again. Malcolm could hear the straining engine, and thought they should ease back on the throttle, or risk burning it out; but if they lost headway in the swirling mass of water they’d be swept away from the jetty in a moment. They had to keep going forward, no matter that for half the time the propeller was screaming into the empty air.

Malcolm ran from post to post, shaking them all, feeling for one that was a little more steady than the rest, and peering wide-eyed through the rain and wind. Everything on the sea was lit up by the fires from the mountains; in their lurid glare he could see Lyra, and Asta too; his dæmon was close to her, clinging tightly to the rail and reaching forward for the jetty, but still too far off—and then a man moved her aside and held up a coil of rope, and Malcolm nodded and stood ready to receive it.

The man with the rope was Ionides. He saw Malcolm, and nodded too.

They both knew there’d be only one chance. The boat was tossing and swaying, lurching and falling, and there was no pattern, nothing to guide them except the sense of the right moment; and it came, and Ionides swung his arm hard and the rope flew to Malcolm’s hand and he gathered it in.

A few swift movements without the intervention of thought, and a clove hitch secured the boat to the post. Now it wouldn’t drift away, and they could work at moving it alongside the jetty and securing the stern.

More screaming from the engine, more thrashing from the propeller, and little by little the boat swung round, battling every heave and surge from the waves. Ionides ran to the stern and took up another rope, and they waited, both of them, watching and judging, while Lyra clung to the rail and someone in the wheelhouse controlled the engine and the rudder.

Then the lurching sea paused again, and up swung the coil, and this time Malcolm braced his feet and hauled on the rope as soon as it was in his hands, straining to pull all the weight of the boat round and bring the side against the jetty. Little by little he got it closer, and then slung the rope over the nearest post and hitched it tight.

The jetty was more or less level with the deck of the boat, but the pitching and plunging made it a hazardous jump. First to try it was Asta, and Malcolm snatched her out of the air and set her down on the slippery planks. “Go to the rocks,” he said, and she darted away.

Lyra was adjusting the rucksack on her back, trying to find her balance, and then she was ready.

“Ready…Now!” he shouted, and Lyra sprang with all her strength across the gap. He would have caught her if she’d fallen ten thousand feet; into his arms, as light as a wraith, strong and frail both at once. She clung to him, and he pressed her to his heart and kissed her head without thinking, and then said, “Run to the shore.”

She ran after Asta. Next came a woman Malcolm didn’t know: his own age, it seemed, slender, athletic, possibly Persian or Kurdish; Ionides had to urge her to the rail before she was willing to jump, but she readied herself and made the leap without difficulty.

Then the last two: first a man who came out of the wheelhouse, a burly fisherman by the look of him, balancing well on the lurching deck, and grasping Malcolm’s hand across the gap; and finally Ionides. Malcolm could see that he was not convinced, and in truth the boat was wallowing lower and more sluggishly, and the water was sweeping across the deck. Another few moments and it would be too low for him to reach the jetty.

“Jump, man!” Malcolm roared, and up he sprang, and Malcolm seized his arm and dragged him off the sinking vessel and over the edge of the jetty.

Seeing that Ionides was safe, Malcolm ran back to the rocks. Asta crouched tensely and, as soon as he was close enough, hurtled up into his arms, pressing herself hard against his beating heart. Lyra stood close by, soaking wet, shivering, but her face was lively with joy. The fisherman was looking after his own dæmon, a small white bird, and the woman sat calmly, watching everything.

“I’m Malcolm Polstead,” Malcolm said. “Who are you?”

“Leila Pervani,” she said.

“You a friend of Ionides?”

“Yes. And of Lyra.”

“Good. And you?” he said to the sailor.

“Yusif,” he said uncertainly, looking at the woman. Seeing her nod, he said it again.

The sailor had seen the great form of Prince Keshvād a little further up the rocks, crouching impassively in the light of the flaring mountain, and was clearly apprehensive.

Malcolm looked up. The blazing caverns gave off not only light but sound and heat. A roar blasted their ears that was part subterranean and part tempest, both air and fire, while the heat scorched their faces when they gazed upwards.

He was aware of someone beside him, and turned to see Ionides.

“That gryphon your friend?” he said. “The big one.”

“For the moment. He is Prince Keshvād. The little one is Gulya. Now we have to find the cave of a sorcerer, but…”

“Up there? Which one?”

“Hard to tell.”

“Miss Silver will know.”

His expression, vivid in the glare, was full of mischief and confidence. Malcolm remembered the morning they’d met, under the orange tree at the embassy house in Aleppo, and the impression Ionides had made on him then.

“You came all this way with Lyra?”

“Every step. She save my life, I save hers when necessary.”

“And the woman?”

“You want to find the right cave or not?”

Malcolm smiled briefly. He turned to Lyra. She had gone to sit on a rock, clutching her rucksack. As she looked up at him, Malcolm found he could barely stand for the beating of his heart. He felt that the two of them might have been the only focus of consciousness in the world, so fiercely were they intent on each other.

He crouched down beside her. “Lyra, I have to go with the little gryphon to the cave of a sorcerer, who put a spell on her years ago. She will fight him, and she means to kill him. But he’s concealed his cave by setting the whole mountain aflame. Ionides says—”

“Whatever he says, it’s true. Mostly. He said I’ll know the right cave?”

“Yes. Is that true?”

“It’s true,” said Asta, who’d been listening close by.

Lyra was feeling in her battered rucksack. “That alethiometer,” she said, “the one you were mending—it was mine, and here’s the glass.”

She passed it to him, making sure his hand was securely around it before letting it go. It wasn’t easy to see; the rain was still dashing against his eyes, and the glare of the fires showed him only a disc of glass running with water and glistening with inconstant yellow and orange and red and white flares of brilliance.

“But—” he said.

“There’s something special about it, I don’t know, the shape or the kind of glass, something. Try to…”

He held it up to his eye, unconvinced, and tried to look through it at the mountain. All he saw at first was a blur of flame. He wiped the rain from his eyes and looked again, and saw the flank of the mountain more clearly. He didn’t know what he was looking for: the cave and the forge of the sorcerer, of course, but how would he recognize that?

He scanned up and down, left and right, and took the lens away from his eye to look without it: Was there any difference?

“I can’t—” he began to say, and then all the other things his body was feeling began to remind him of themselves: the bitter cold, the unsteady rocks underfoot, the drenching rain.

He held the glass to his eye again.

Something was different about that patch, just below the southern flank—

Yes. It was.

“Seen it?” Lyra said.

Alone among the crevices gushing flame, this one glowed with a steady light. A figure—male—stood in the entrance, looking down—

And at that moment every flame went out, except that one. A few last scraps of fire flew away on the wind, scattering sparks, but otherwise—total darkness.

He had to think: Don’t drop the glass. In his astonishment he might have let go, and it would have smashed on the rocks at his feet, but he held it securely.

The others were all struck silent. They stood or sat still, looking upwards at the vast bulk of the mountain against the lowering sky. Not a speck of light or flame anywhere on it; a great hand seemed to have swept across and put them all out at once.

No one spoke. Malcolm looked again for the little patch where he’d seen the forge—looked with the naked eye, unsuccessfully, and then with the glass.

“What is happening?” asked the woman, Leila Pervani.

“Can you see it?” said Gulya.

“Yes, I can,” he said, and gave the glass back to Lyra. “Well, Gulya. We have to climb up to it, but I can see where it is.”

“Is it a long way?” said Lyra.

“Yes, and hard. But you’re not coming.”

“Yes, I bloody am.”

He ran his hands over his head, trying to clear the rain out of his eyes. “Well, to tell the truth, I shall need some help. Not with the fighting—Gulya has to do that herself—but with the preparation. Handing me various things when I call for them.”

“I can do that!”

“Maybe better with me,” said Ionides. “Only perhaps. Maybe not, in fact.”

“Thank you, but no.”

“Stay here and guard my rucksack,” said Lyra.

“This Miss Silver or Queen Tatiana?”

“What do you think?”

He nodded cheerfully.

Malcolm turned to him and said, “When Lyra and I and the gryphon—the little one—come down the mountain, things will have changed. Somewhere in the sky there are witches, under the command of Tuuli Latvala. Remember that name, and watch out for them. They will help us, but I don’t know how at the moment.”

“Otherwise we stay here?”

“You stay here till we come down.”

Leila Pervani was looking at him. In the newly fallen dark he could hardly see her, but he had a vivid sense of her expression as he remembered it: fearless, appraising, wary. Ionides stood beside her, his hand on her shoulder. Yusif the boatman sat nearby, stroking his seabird dæmon.

Malcolm took out the little bag containing the things he needed in order to deal with the sorcerer, and set his rucksack down next to Lyra’s and called to Gulya. Prince Keshvād remained where he was, couchant, still, silent. He looked Malcolm straight in the eye, and nodded slowly, once.

“When the fires were blazing, I could see a path. We’ll aim for that and try to stay on it,” Malcolm said, and set off.

Gulya flew a little, stalked a little, flew again. Asta ran ahead a short way, stopped to look back, moved further on. Malcolm walked steadily: there was a long climb ahead of them.

---

In the middle airs above the flank of the mountain and below the thickest clouds, Tuuli Latvala and her companions sped to and fro, south to north and back again, weaving a complex pattern that was invisible even to themselves; the weft was their trajectories, and the warp was their knowledge of the behavior of clouds. This was a curious storm, no doubt about it, but they had seen others like it, and they had its measure.

What they had to do was impose an intention on the mass of clouds directly alongside the mountain and over the sea. Everything had an intention, in the thought-world of the witches, but most things didn’t know it, or had intentions that were feeble or contradictory. This storm had been summoned and formed by someone whose knowledge and skycraft were almost as full as theirs, but who seemed to have a limited mastery of self-contradiction. Tuuli Latvala was able to express this state of things in words, if she needed to, but her companions didn’t need words to understand it. They darted back and forth, tightening a thought here, lengthening a thread of influence there, tying together three currents in one greater one, and little by little persuading the clouds to part along a line parallel to the slope of the mountainside.

The flames that had engulfed the mountain so suddenly, and then vanished without warning, had perturbed the witches briefly, but they continued their work unnoticed by the people below; and before very long the vast, unwieldy clumsiness of moisture-saturated air found itself wanting to move this way, or that way, and to leave a gulf in the center of the mass, as if that had been its intention from the beginning.

Tuuli Latvala turned away from the work between the cloud base and the sea and soared up into the chasm that had been opening above them. The quality of the light up here was quite different from the inky blue-black darkness clinging to the mountain and the rocky shore, because the higher she flew, the thinner were the clouds above her. There was a silveriness that suffused the air, and with it one of the most joyous sensations for a witch, the promise of moonlight on her skin.

Satisfied with their progress, the witch looked back at the mountain. It was completely dark; no moonlight yet came that far through the clouds. Tuuli Latvala flew down to the water’s edge, where the waves smashed themselves against the rocks and shook the jetty and moved the wrecked fishing boat this way and that as it lay half-submerged. She looked at the rocks where Ionides and the others were waiting, and greeted them briefly before flying up again.

Lyra didn’t ask why they had to defeat the sorcerer, though she badly wanted to know. She was content to stumble up the mountain path peering through the dark at Malcolm picking his way faultlessly after Gulya over the rough stones, and feeling all around her a warning heat from the rock itself, as if it could burst into flames again at any second.

Malcolm said nothing; they needed all their breath for the climb and what would follow it. They helped each other when they stumbled, steadied each other when the ascent grew steeper, and climbed more slowly when they needed both hands to move safely. He went ahead and took care to go no faster or slower than she could, always moving forward, always into the darkness, always a little higher with each step.

The rocks underfoot and under their hands were hotter and hotter the higher they climbed. The rain that still fell turned into steam, so they seemed to be climbing among clouds, and Lyra began to fear that they’d lose their way; but the little gryphon Gulya seemed to be sure of the path, and her lion claws were unaffected by the heat from below.

Asta found it harder to manage, and eventually sprang up with relief to Malcolm’s shoulder.

“What’s going to happen when we get there?” Lyra managed to say.

“Gulya is going to kill the sorcerer. He put a spell on her, so she never grew.”

“And if she doesn’t kill him?”

“She’ll have to. And she will.”

They fell silent, occasionally whispering a warning about a loose rock or a crevice beside the path.

Not long after that, the rain stopped.

While it was falling, difficult though it made their progress, it had at least kept them cool against the heat of the rocks. Now, although the air was saturated with moisture and steam still rose around them as they struggled upwards, there was nothing to moderate the ferocity of the heat underfoot.

Malcolm was wearing strong boots, but Lyra wasn’t. She said nothing, but he could see how painful it was for her, and called to Gulya.

“Where is the forge?” he said.

“Really very close. You can hear the machinery from here. One more effort, and then I shall kill him.”

“You will only kill him if you do exactly as I say.”

“I will, of course I will.”

“But will you remember?”

“You had no fears about my memory before.”

“I know what happens in the middle of a fight. We should have taken time to practice, to train. Me as well as you.”

“I shall kill him, never fear.”

“As you say,” said Malcolm, and then listened. “I can hear it.”

He stood still, motioning to Lyra to do the same, and they listened.

The sounds came from below their feet as well as from ahead on the path—hammering, grinding, thudding, smashing sounds, deep in the heart of the mountain, making the rocks shudder all around them, shaking the moisture loose from their surfaces.

“What is it?” said Lyra.

“The forge of Sorush,” said Malcolm. “He’s mining for precious metals and minerals. Harvesting rubies that grow there. Refining the ores. He loves gold as much as the gryphons do.”

“But he loves it for its power,” said Gulya. “We love it for what it is in itself.”

“I think I see,” said Lyra. “Is he alone? Does he have any helpers?”

“The koruskati, and other beings we don’t know about. Malcolm knows how to defeat him. And we shall do it, and I shall kill him, and then you will see my true aspect, at last.”

Something was happening above them. Tuuli Latvala and her witch-companions had gathered in much of the cloud rack above, and the light that filtered through what was left had a different tone altogether from the black steamy hideous night that had enveloped Lyra and the others as they climbed. The sky was not quite clear above them yet, but it was clearing.

“Let’s go on,” said Malcolm. “He’ll see this soon himself, and be alarmed.”

With burning feet they stumbled further on. And soon they came to a buttress in the mountain that obstructed the path. They would have to walk around it with great care, because a fall of several hundred feet lay below.

They stopped behind the buttress and Malcolm beckoned Lyra close, slipping the string of his small bag off his shoulder.

“This is what you have to do,” he said quietly. “In here there’s a flask of water, a bag of dust, a small pair of bellows, and a stone. Put your hand in there now and learn the feel of them.”

She did. The flask was made of some kind of metal, with a top that screwed open in the normal way. She’d need two hands for that. The bag of dust was about the size of Malcolm’s two fists together, and held shut with two leather cords. She’d need both hands for that too. She then felt for the stone. It was rough and round, and no bigger than a small apple.

“He’s hiding behind a mirror,” Malcolm said. “When you look into it, you’ll see yourself, but yourself as he wants to see you. Take no notice of it, and be ready to hand me the flask—take the top off first—and then the bellows, and then open the bag of dust and hold that up too. The stone I’ll take now.”

She put it in his hand. And the purpose of all this, she reminded herself, was to get her one step nearer Karamakan and the building in the desert, and to find Pan and the secret of her imagination. That truth lay like a diamond in her heart.

And then they moved around the buttress, and there it was: the cavern, the forge, the stronghold of Sorush. A cleft in the mountainside, and in it a blaze of light and fire, and the sorcerer himself standing in the entrance—invisible behind his mirror.

Lyra had to stop and shake her head. Her eyes were dazzled, not just by the glare of the fires but by the splintering confusion of the images in the mirror.

Malcolm was beside her, and she saw him in the mirror: it showed a strutting popinjay, vain, conceited, but self-pitying, mewling, sneering. She saw herself in the mirror too: a simpering courtesan, painted and half-naked, but diseased, with great sores leaking slime and pus. Her form and Malcolm’s were iridescent with the light from the forge, glittering like poison beetles. Asta felt sick at the sight of them both.

“Don’t look at him,” said Malcolm, and crouched to open his bag. “Look here instead, and get ready to hand me the flask.”

As Lyra unscrewed the top of the flask, Malcolm stood up and flung the stone directly at his own reflection in Sorush’s looking glass. The mirror shattered and fell to the floor of the cave, and all the reflections vanished. There was nothing behind it.

Nothing there at all. But Malcolm was prepared, and so was Lyra. She held up the flask, and he took it and flung the water at the nothing. Then he thrust the spout of the bellows into the bag of ground pumice that Lyra was now holding open, and spread the handles wide, sucking up the dust.

Then he pointed the bellows at the nothing and worked the handles so that the dust blew out and stuck to the soaked magician and revealed him standing there, a small man twitching and furtive and naked, and seemingly made of pumice.

And at the same moment the light changed. The glow of the flames seemed to withdraw, just a little way, and into the cave from the night sky above came a ray of moonlight. The witches had moved the clouds aside, and the full moon blazed in the bare sky.

The sorcerer cried out in fear, and tried to cover himself with pieces of the broken mirror, holding up shards of the shattered glass in front of his face, his genitals, his belly.

Gulya had better move quickly, Lyra thought, and so she did: she darted between her and Malcolm and swung her head to fling something out of her beak, and it glittered in the moonlight as it fell at the sorcerer’s feet: the silver amulet.

Sorush screamed, and stumbled back. The ground pumice was falling away as the water dried on his body: already only parts of him were visible.

Hurry, Lyra thought, he’ll disappear again—

And Gulya half leapt, half flew against the sorcerer, claws out, and tore at him and bore him to the ground.

Immediately the pair of them were covered in a cloud of burning, scorching sparks: the koruskati, swarming to the defense of their master. Through the flickering confusion Lyra could see them stinging the little gryphon, plunging through her fur and her feathers, and she shook them off again and again—until they seemed to decide all at once to make for her eyes, and she had to pull away and shake her head, but still they clung and burrowed.

Lyra couldn’t help it: she ran to her and knocked the little sparks away, stamping them into the rock, never minding how they burned her feet.

Sorush was beginning to scramble away, and Malcolm saw it and sucked the last of the pumice into the bellows before blasting it straight at the sorcerer’s face. Lyra heard cries from somewhere further inside the cavern, eagle screams, and then Sorush was on his feet again and Gulya launched herself at him once more.

This strange contest had rules, Malcolm knew; he could help, but not fight, or the curse on Gulya would never be lifted. Only she could kill Sorush, and only killing him would work.

But Lyra and Malcolm had been joined now by Tuuli Latvala. The witch’s companions remained in the sky, holding the clouds back and clearing the way for the moon to shine, but the witch herself was standing beside Malcolm and watching intently as the fight went on.

Sorush was trying to draw Gulya further back into the cavern, and again the little gryphon was surrounded by a cloud of the blazing koruskati, biting and stinging and piercing her fur and scorching her feathers. If they did too much damage she’d never fly again, and Asta longed with all her being to plunge in beside her and tear at the sorcerer’s flesh with her own claws.

Then Sorush screamed, and in response came a lick of huge flame from inside the cave, breaking against the rocky roof and spreading out and downwards before disappearing. Tuuli Latvala beat at it with her cloud-pine, but Lyra, thinking of the fire-loving pitch in the vessels of the wood, thought, Don’t, don’t…

And indeed the cloud-pine caught, and Tuuli Latvala had to attend to that, or lose her own power of flight.

Meanwhile, Malcolm too had to hold himself back, because like Lyra he was fearing for Gulya’s life now, and they both felt she’d taken on too much, they’d gone too far. Another mighty banner of flame swept out from the depths and enveloped both combatants in its folds.

But there was Lyra.

Malcolm blinked and shook his head, but yes, it was her, standing in the entrance to the cave, and she was holding up the glass from the alethiometer and focusing the moonlight—

Against the incandescent glare of the forge and the angry sparkling of the myriad koruskati, the little beam of moonlight was all but invisible. Nevertheless it fell on Sorush’s arm, and he twisted away in shock, and Gulya saw her chance and flung herself up again, with wings and claws that must be exhausted, Malcolm thought, and gripped the sorcerer’s head in her jaws.

The flames from the forge tried to surge out again, as if they were obeying Sorush’s will, but they didn’t reach as far as they had a few moments before. The volcanic roaring was weaker now, and the thudding of the great hammers was slowing down and sounding uncertain.

Malcolm, and Lyra too, and Tuuli Latvala for that matter, could all see something that had been invisible till then: the cords of djinn-fire binding the body of Gulya tight. She was fighting to loosen them as well as defeat the sorcerer, and Malcolm thought that unless she got them loose, she would never beat him. But unless she beat him, she would never get them loose, he thought at the same time; and he wanted with a passion to leap at the combatants and hold the sorcerer back while Lyra tore at the spell-bindings and freed her.

More and more parts of Sorush were becoming hard to see as the pumice dust dried and fell away from his flesh, but there was no more water and no more dust, and as for the moonlight, the sorcerer had moved little by little towards the side of the cave, away from the entrance, where the moonlight lay—the only place where Lyra’s glass could work.

Sorush was scrabbling, grabbing, reaching out to get hold of one of Gulya’s wings and break it. And she was writhing and twisting away from his deadly hands, and then she managed to snap her beak shut on his right wrist and wrench it back and forth, working at the bones till they cracked, twisting the tendons, ripping open the arteries till her face and the whole of the sorcerer’s arm were covered in his blood.

He was screaming and tearing with his left hand at her wings, her neck, her lion feet, at whatever he could grasp, but he was weakening, and—Malcolm had to say it to himself before he could believe it—Gulya was stronger; she had shaken off the binding spell-cords. The clouds of sparking, stinging koruskati were falling away too, and then Gulya dug her lion feet into the sorcerer’s belly and surged upwards to his throat, and despite every effort he could make with his one working hand, she plunged her beak in just under his jaw and tore and tore away at the flesh till the koruskati were scattered by the blood spray, till the whole cavern was echoing with the hideous rasping of breath through his open throat, till Sorush fell twisting, writhing, kicking, twitching, flailing, and helpless as the life drained out of him.

Finally Gulya struggled to get up and off his body and away, and lay panting and wounded on the rocky floor.

Lyra ran to the little gryphon, caressing her head, cleaning away the sorcerer’s blood, whispering words of praise and encouragement. And Tuuli Latvala was kneeling beside her and opening a little horn box of bloodmoss ointment, and Malcolm and Asta were making their way deeper into the cave, where they smashed down the crystal walls holding back the imprisoned gryphons, slaves no more but flightless and wounded still, who came hobbling and limping and crawling out to see the wonder of their delivery, to marvel at the body of Sorush, entirely visible now, ragged and filthy and torn asunder.

“Outside,” said Gulya, and her voice was deeper now, assured and commanding. She was growing larger as they looked: commanding, majestic.

Asta said quietly to Lyra, “And all that time she was young against her will!”

Tuuli Latvala gave her little box of bloodmoss ointment to Malcolm for safekeeping, and with a long witch-scream of triumph she flew up to join her companions, still holding back the clouds. The whole mountainside was bathed in moonlight; the twisted rocky path, the great buttress hiding the cavern, all the way down to the shoreline, where the waves still crashed against the jetty and the landing place.

Lyra could see the little group of figures all the way down there, all standing and peering up, it seemed, though she couldn’t distinguish one from another; and then the great form of the gryphon prince moved away from them and raised his head, and she was astonished at the immensity of him, the sail-broad extent of his wings as they beat again and again so that he soared up and over the lighthouse and still upwards, towards the cavern of the dead sorcerer and the gryphon, small no longer, whom he loved.

But while the others were watching Prince Keshvād, Malcolm saw another boat, a little way out still, but making directly for the jetty and the landing place.