Twenty-Five
High Mountain Cradle
The army of the Magisterium had met the first obstacle that seriously held them back. The desert of Karamakan, and the only-just-reachable red building inside it, lay to the south and east of the high range of mountains known as the Tien Shan, or Celestial Mountains, which extended many hundreds of miles to the east before descending to the level sands where the wandering lake of Lop Nor lay restlessly, protecting the desert from that side.
Delamare and his advisers had considered ordering his army to take the route through the Kazakh steppe north of the mountains, and approach the desert from the Lop Nor side, but decided against it. It would be too long a march, hard to supply, and vulnerable to attack from the unpredictable monarchies of Mongolia and Chingizia, not to mention the Golden Empire of Cathay itself.
The other main route from the west involved using one of the passes through the Hindu Kush, the mountains between the western end of the Tien Shan and the start of the great Himmaleh range, and Marcel Delamare was perfectly conscious of the parallel from ancient history: Alexander of Macedon had conquered everything between Greece and the Hindu Kush, but had never gone further and into Karamakan.
Delamare had moved his headquarters east from Constantinople, moving with his main force across the steppes towards Samarqand, and spent hours at his campaign desk looking at a globe and unfolding his maps of the region and folding them again and re-unfolding them, but whenever he looked at them, nothing had changed: the mountains were still there.
For the first time he began to wonder whether his army might be a little overextended. There was a reason Alexander had had to turn back; geography was implacable.
Alexander had no flying machines, of course, and the Magisterium had every kind of dirigible and gyrocopter at its disposal. Aircraft made short work of mountains. An airlift—a dirigible, say, moving a large body of troops through one of the high passes that marked the limit of Alexander’s reach—could put the Magisterium’s army down at the edge of the Karamakan desert in no time, and from there the red building was only a few days’ march away.
Except for the oghâb-gorgs.
These ferocious and abominable birds haunted the entire range of the Tien Shan, as well as the western part of the Himmaleh. They were fearless lovers of war, man-sized eaters of carrion and makers of it too; nor were they limited to the mountains, but, as Pan had seen, they sometimes ventured a long way west and north, attracted by the scent of shed blood, or the prospect of it. They were cannibals, of course; they were killers and eaters of anything that lived and could move, or had died and moved no more. Biology was implacable too.
In short, the Tien Shan was more or less impassable. A few early travelers had managed to come out alive, but it was only the high prices chargeable in the west for things like silk and spice and rose oil that made the travel worth the risk.
Again and again his advisers said, “Avoid the mountains,” and again and again he pored over his maps, and read further reports from travelers and geographers and even plain storytellers.
“No aircraft has ever crossed the Tien Shan,” Delamare’s owl dæmon reminded him. “The birds mob them and bear them to the ground. They are fearless, fanatical, deadly. And then there are the gryphons.”
“Gryphons!” Delamare, who rarely showed any sign of irritation or impatience, swept the map in front of him off the desk and pushed his chair back hard.
“Marcel,” his dæmon warned, “you’ll bring that officious young man in. Move quietly.”
The officious young man was Felix Murad, the assistant secretary Delamare had brought with him from Constantinople. He was competent and efficient, and Delamare liked him, though he did anticipate things a little too eagerly.
“Yes,” Delamare said shortly. “I know. Perhaps we should send him to the gryphons as an emissary. They have a king, do they? Remind me. Some kind of hereditary ruler?”
“A queen, at the moment. Why not send for Murad in any case? He will know things we don’t.”
Delamare nodded reluctantly and rang the little brass bell on his desk.
“I wonder,” he said to his dæmon before the young man came in. “Gryphons…”
A knock at the tent post, and Felix Murad came in, his sparrow dæmon alert and bright-eyed.
“Mr. President,” he said, inclining his head respectfully.
“Come and sit down, Felix. I want some advice.”
He took a chair and Murad sat upright on the bench nearby. “Anything I can tell you, sir.”
“Gryphons. I know nothing about them, but they seem to have some kind of authority in the mountains. Firstly, do they exist at all? Or are they travelers’ tales?”
“Yes, they do exist, sir, but they have very little to do with human beings. They have their own realms of influence, which hardly overlap with ours. That is why they are often thought of as being entirely mythical.”
“So they are only partly mythical, is that it?”
“Mr. President, that sort of distinction is too subtle for a secretary of my rank to understand.”
Part of Delamare’s mind automatically sifted out the insolence in the young man’s tone, and forgave it; another part admitted the truth of his words. Really, Murad was quite like Olivier Bonneville, in his way.
“When the late beloved St. Simeon was alive, did the Patriarchy have any dealings with these creatures?” Delamare asked.
“Not in a full diplomatic sense, Mr. President. There was a mutual recognition, at a subconsular level, and occasional exchanges over matters of trade, especially where gold was concerned.”
“Gold?”
“The gryphons are apparently obsessed with it. It’s almost a religious thing with them. So if there was a dispute involving ownership, for example, of a sum of gold, the Patriarchy recognized the importance of some kind of diplomatic channel in order to minimize the…You understand what I mean.”
“Of course. I would expect nothing else.” Delamare tapped the desk with his fingers, left to right, right to left. Then he looked up and said, “Schreiber. Where is he now, do we know?”
“With General Bentinck’s force in Khorasan, sir. Making adjustments to the tonnerre double.”
“Send to him and order him to join me at once, with all his men and their equipment.”
“Ah. Of course. At once, Monsieur le Président.”
And Murad left, with the slightest possible inclination of the head, and the slightest possible smile in his eyes. He was thinking that the sounds made by Delamare’s fingers tapping on the desk were not the same as they usually were, and as he closed the door he saw why: all the President’s fingernails were bitten to the quick.
Delamare himself had forgotten Murad already, and was thinking about Bonneville. Where was that boy, anyway?
At that moment, Olivier Bonneville was lying sleeplessly on a hard bunk in a filthy rural prison somewhere in the Lesser Caucasus. He was cold and hungry and frightened. His captors hadn’t been able to explain why they had arrested him, but it was clear that they expected to make something out of it; if not loot, then a reward.
They had his rucksack, which worried him most of all. The alethiometer…Why hadn’t he thought of some way of hiding it, a long time before this?
Well, he had to get it back. And then resume his search, and find the girl, and claim the reward from Delamare. He knew he was on her trail. He didn’t know much more than that, because his readings had been scrambled and confusing, and more than usually nauseating, but then he hadn’t had somewhere quiet to work in and time to ease his way back into the experience.
And now it was in the hands of these bandits…It was intolerable. He said so to his dæmon, who perched painfully on the end of the bunk.
Finally he slept.
He woke up to a bitter morning and the sound of heavy rain outside his cell, which had no window, of course, just bars across an opening too small to crawl through even without the bars.
The hideous glare of a light directly over his eyes, the clattering of a key in the lock, a voice shouting at him in some barbarous tongue spoken by hogs with their throats cut, and a solid kick to his right leg.
“All right! All right! I hear you! Yes, I’ll get up! Don’t kick me again, you bastards! Oh, God, this is too much…”
He struggled up, fending off another kick, and tried to make sense of what was happening.
“Yes—yes—I’m awake—all right, all right! Yes! I’m sorry I did whatever I did to make you arrest me! I won’t do it again! Sorry, you lumps of shit! I apologize! What is this? What do you want?”
The guard held out a tin mug, which turned out to be too hot for Bonneville to hold. He put it on the floor quickly. Then the guard threw him a lump of stale bread, and barked a word or two, and left.
Bonneville pulled the blanket up around his shoulders. It was horribly cold, and his head ached abominably, and he was bursting to piss. He stumbled up and made his way to the bucket in the corner, but it hadn’t been emptied and the contents had frozen solid, so his urine splashed out over his stockinged feet. His shoes, he remembered too late, had been confiscated.
“Aaacchh—filthy bandits—bastard swine—dogs—tapeworms—dung eaters—oh, look at this—oh, this is intolerable…”
He hung his wet socks on the window bars, mopped his feet with the blanket, and slouched back to the bunk. He thought he might as well take a little warmth from the mug of whatever it was, discovered it tasted even worse than the bitter drench he’d had at the priest’s house, and simply held it between his palms for the warmth as he gnawed a small mouthful of gritty bread.
When the bread was all gone, he lay down and felt sorry for himself. He could do that at the same time as wondering how to get out, and wondering most of all whether these barbarians would steal the alethiometer or just smash it to pieces. But it was too cold to lie still for long, and presently he got up and inspected the door.
It was just a heavy cell door made of some much-scratched and graffitied dark wood. There was no handle on the inside, naturally, but no keyhole either. The open window was too high to look through, and the iron legs of the bed were set directly into the concrete floor.
Bonneville badly wanted the initiative back. He took the tin cup and bashed on the door with it, as hard as he could, over and over.
“Messieurs!” he called. “Soldats! Gentilhommes de la garde! Venez, s’il vous plaît! Au secours!”
He spoke in French, because everybody understood it. The guards understood the bashing on the door even better, and after a minute or so they opened it suddenly, snatched away the cup, hit Bonneville smartly on the head with it, and went out again.
“Oh, mais non—messieurs! Venez! Venez! C’est important! Je suis ambassadeur de Genève! Diplomate! Immunité diplomatique!”
He heard heavy footsteps going away, and distant laughter. He kept on shouting, with no result at all except a sore throat to match his sore head.
Eventually he lay down and slept from pure disgust.
Prince Keshvād and Gulya met joyfully halfway up the mountain path, while Malcolm and Lyra and Asta hurried on towards the jetty. Sometimes a turn in the path would let them see down to the shore, sometimes that view was hidden from them, but finally they came to a place that gave them a clear view of the jetty and the rocky shore, and there was no doubt about it: a boat, some kind of motor yacht a little larger than the fishing boat that had sunk, arrived from the sea and tied up to the jetty. They could see it happen, but they were much too far away to shout and be heard. Ionides and Leila were making their way towards it.
“What are they doing?” said Lyra.
“They’re leaving the boatman. Yusif. Look, he’s asking to be taken as well, and they’re saying no, you can’t come, you have to stay.”
“But…this is horrible. I can’t understand what’s happening.”
“Maybe Yusif can tell us.”
“Where are the witches?” Lyra scanned the sky, but saw no sign of them.
“Flown back towards Damāvand to tell them about Gulya killing Sorush. Probably. Though they might be watching the boat, I suppose.”
“I don’t think they’d feel that had much to do with them.”
“You’re probably right. I don’t know witches very well.”
Lyra felt as if her fear and doubt had physical form, like a bruise caused by a stone flung at her heart. She pressed on down the path, with Malcolm watching to see she didn’t stumble, because her every limb seemed to be trembling, and soon they found the little rocky cove, with the jetty intact, and the mast of Yusif’s sunken boat still protruding from the water nearby.
The boatman was pacing up and down, clearly distraught. He saw them coming and hurried to speak.
Malcolm listened, and then calmly held up his hand. The boatman was speaking in a language Lyra didn’t recognize, and he was agitated, gesticulating passionately.
Malcolm said something in reply, and the boatman took a deep breath and rubbed his hands over his head.
Malcolm said something else, in a different language, Lyra thought, and the boatman nodded and replied.
“He says that Ionides and the woman went willingly,” Malcolm explained. “As if they knew the boat was coming.”
Yusif spoke again, and Malcolm gestured to say, “More slowly.”
Yusif nodded and said some more, and Malcolm listened closely, holding up his hand from time to time to clarify something, or to ask the boatman to slow down.
He did, and little by little the account became clearer. Lyra understood that the boat had come straight in, as if those aboard knew exactly where to land; that it was larger and more powerful than his own boat, which now lay on the seabed; and that those on board, four men, he said, seemed to know the woman, who greeted them warmly and went on board without hesitation. Furthermore, he said that Ionides didn’t seem to be known by them, but that they’d welcomed him as a companion of the woman, and that they all spoke easily together.
Finally, Yusif said that in his own opinion, the crew had some kind of official authority. They wore uniforms, and their boat flew a flag with the emblem of a lamp on it. He told Malcolm that they had pointed their guns at him, Yusif, but that the woman had spoken and persuaded them not to kill him. Then they turned the boat around and made out to sea at full speed. The whole account strained at the edges of Malcolm’s linguistic ability, and it took some time before they learned all Yusif could tell them.
“Well,” said Lyra, “I’m going to give him a bit of money. It wasn’t his fault, and now he’s lost his boat as well.”
She had nearly come to the end of Farder Coram’s store of coins, and the one she gave Yusif might have been more than his boat was worth, or less, she couldn’t tell; but he thanked her, and bowed to them both, and set off to walk towards the lighthouse, where, he said, he could stay for the night.
For Lyra, the sight of Ionides calmly leaving with the forces of the Magisterium hit her like a heavy punch to her heart. Leila…she hardly knew Leila; but he was a friend. At least he hadn’t taken their rucksacks; hers and Malcolm’s were still where they’d been put. Lyra felt dizzy, uncertain about her footing on these slippery rocks where the waves were still dashing their spray, uncertain about everything.
And then Gulya glided down to land on the shore. She explained that Prince Keshvād had set off for the south, to tell the Queen and the rest of the gryphons the news that Sorush was dead and his captives were freed, and that untold quantities of gold were waiting to be taken. Meanwhile, Gulya herself would fly Malcolm and Lyra and Asta to a safe place further along the coast, where she could guard them while they slept.
So they climbed on her back, and she took to the air with no effort at all, it seemed; and on a grassy headland a little further north, with the sea below them, and a grove of trees some way inland, and the vast snow-capped range of the Caucasus behind, Lyra and Malcolm climbed down again. Gulya took to the air again, to enjoy the power of her new size, they thought.
Lyra stood and looked at everything. Her head was as full as her heart. The night was not cold, and the storm had blown itself out; the moon shone clearly over the headland, and laid a silver path on the sea. And there was Malcolm, taking off his coat.
“Lie down on this,” he said. “It’ll get cold later on.”
He spread it on the grass near some bushes in the moon-shadow of a rock the size of the fishing boat.
“What about you?”
“It’s a big coat.”
Asta had already taken possession of the middle.
“In a minute,” Lyra said, and wandered to the edge of the cliff, and scanned the sea; but there was no sign of the boat, or of the witches.
Her mind was full, and she was overpoweringly tired. She lay down on Malcolm’s coat and fell asleep at once.
Olivier Bonneville was dreaming about Leila Pervani, and she was flirting with him, and he was treating her scornfully, which his waking mind approved of; though he enjoyed it when she trailed her fingertips across his head. Half awake, he tried to reawaken the feeling, and encountered the lump where the guard had rapped him with the tin mug.
He winced and sat up carefully. Oh, it was cold.
He draped the single blanket around his shoulders and stood up, careful where he put his feet.
“Alethiometer,” said his dæmon, her wounded wing held awkwardly.
“I know, I know. I’m thinking of the best way…”
“Use it to tell their fortunes.”
He looked at her. It wasn’t a bad idea, at that. “And tell them…”
“Don’t think it out in detail,” she said. “Improvise when you get to it.”
“How’s that wing?”
“Bad still.”
“Bitch had some sort of weapon…”
“She had a small stick.”
“She kicked me in the kidneys.”
“No, she wasn’t fighting fairly at all.”
Bonneville gave her a sour look, and sat down again. “What we need to know,” he said, “is what angle these police or whatever they are—”
“Listen. They’re coming back.”
He heard voices from the corridor outside, but he couldn’t tell what they were saying, or even what language they were speaking. An older man and a younger one, that was all; and then a key rattled in the lock.
He stood up. “Que voulez-vous?” he said as they came in, and then, just in case, “What do you want?”
“We want to give you something to eat and drink, Mr. Bonneville,” said the older man, in English.
They were both in uniform, but the older man’s was smarter. The younger man was the one who had knocked him on the head with the tin cup. He was only a thug, and Bonneville would have kicked him in the balls at once, if he’d had any shoes, but the older man needed careful handling. Bonneville could manage that too, he told himself.
“May I know why I have been arrested?” he said, in English so as to exclude the younger man from any exchange.
“Of course. You may be aware that an emergency situation has arisen, and the authorities have suspended the civil law for the time being. Our main task is to make sure that the general population is safe. You understand the necessity for that.”
“I don’t present any danger to the general population. I am an envoy from the President of the Magisterial Council in Geneva, and as such I have the immunity of any diplomat. I insist that you set me free at once.”
“Let’s go somewhere a little more comfortable, and discuss the matter,” said the older man, and held out Bonneville’s shoes. “You might like to put these on first.”
Bonneville took them without a word and sat down to put them on. His socks were still hanging from the window bars, sopping wet. The older man saw them and said, “I think we can find you a clean pair, Mr. Bonneville.”
“I have been scandalously mistreated.”
“These are difficult times,” said the officer, and his soothing voice made Bonneville think that his own tone was peevish and feeble. He resolved to speak more firmly.
“I need my rucksack, and everything that was in it,” he said.
“We shall discuss it all. Follow me, please.”
He lifted his dæmon from the bunk, and the officer led him along the cold corridor to an office that probably wasn’t his, because he had to wait for the other guard to unlock the door for him.
The first thing Bonneville saw was the alethiometer, undamaged, in the middle of the blotter on the desk. His other property was nearby, his clothes folded neatly. Everything that should be there was there. There was also an anbaric heater glowing in the fireplace, and he sat on the chair in front of the desk and held out his hands to the warmth.
The officer dismissed the guard and sat down behind the desk.
“You claimed to be an envoy of the Presidential Council of the Magisterium. It did not take long to discover that was a lie. You absconded from the custody of the nuncio in Aleppo, and before that, you stole this instrument and two of these books from the Palais de Justice in Geneva. You are urgently sought by agents acting directly for Monsieur Marcel Delamare, the President of the General Assembly of the Magisterium. What have you got to say to that?”
“Firstly, that I feel reassured, Colonel, to have fallen into the hands of someone who clearly understands the importance of my mission—”
“I am not a colonel. Address me as Brigadier.”
“I beg your pardon. And I understand the purpose of your question, which was to test whether I was truly who I claimed to be. The Magisterial Council is not called the Presidential Council, nor is it called the General Assembly of the Magisterium; and the building in Geneva is not the Palais de Justice but La Maison Juste. Have I passed the test?”
As soon as he said that, Bonneville imagined a crevasse opening under his feet. Perhaps, since he’d left, they had made all these changes, and he’d fallen into a horrible trap.
But the brigadier merely smiled and nodded. “Good,” he said, and the ground closed up again. “Now tell me about this instrument.”
“It is an alethiometer—”
“I know that much. What is it doing in your possession?”
“I am the Magisterium’s appointed reader. It’s in my care, not in my possession. I am traveling east, using it as a guide, in order to find a certain young woman, who has stolen another instrument like this, intending to use it to find a great treasure, which rightfully belongs to the Magisterium.”
“ ‘A certain young woman’? The same one mentioned recently by the President?”
“Of course the same one.”
“Can you prove that the instrument was given into your care? That you are the authorized reader?”
“The proof is that it is in my care.”
“You might have stolen it.”
“Another proof is that I can read it, and no one else can.”
“Go on, then. Read me what you judge to be the truth about the desert of Karamakan, and about that young woman. Where she is now, for instance?”
“I can’t do that here. I need a room away from noise and disturbance. I need something palatable to eat and drink, a table and a comfortable chair, pencils and paper, and access to a bathroom. I also need enough time to formulate the questions and interpret the answers, and the assurance that I shall be free to leave when I’ve done that, taking with me everything I brought here, including the alethiometer.”
“You may have most of that, except the bathroom. Do you think this is a first-class hotel? And you have my assurance that whether your answer is true or not, if it fails to convince me in any detail, I shall hand you over to the civil police. Without the alethiometer, and without shoes.”
“Very well,” said Bonneville, who knew he had no choice.
They locked him in a room with only one window, with frosted glass, and time went by. It was days since he’d engaged with the alethiometer and the new method, and the usual difficulties occurred; but he persevered. This room was noisier than the cell he’d been in, and the sounds of stamping and the slamming of doors and shouted orders might have distracted a less-accomplished reader. At one point a gyropter flew down and landed not far away, followed by more shouting, more stamping; he ignored it all.
Sometime later the brigadier threw open the door and said, “Well?”
Bonneville lifted his eyes languidly and said, “I haven’t finished.”
“You’ve had an hour.”
“I need longer.”
“That should be long enough.”
“You have no idea of the complexity—”
The brigadier slammed the door hard, staying in the room. Bonneville flinched.
“I’m not interested in your complexities,” the brigadier snapped. “You claim to be an expert. What have you discovered?”
Bonneville sighed with sympathy, but without contempt. He was pleased with his ability to do that so accurately, but then the brigadier kicked his chair away and sent him sprawling.
“Come on! Get up! You’re wasting my time and yours. Tell me what you’ve found out about Karamakan.”
Luckily, Bonneville had not been holding the alethiometer, or it might have fallen and smashed. He got up carefully and sat down, trembling only slightly. His face, the brigadier noticed, was very pale, and he looked nauseous.
“The research station is occupied again,” Bonneville said as steadily as he could.
“Who by?”
“I haven’t had time to see. As far as I can make out, one of the former investigators has returned. There is no way of telling his name. He, or they, have been experimenting. That’s all I can find out.”
“And the girl? The renegade?”
“She is not far away. I don’t know where we are, mind you. Where are we?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“It would help.”
The brigadier opened the frosted-glass window, which only disclosed a brick wall an arm’s length away. He breathed deeply and turned back.
“Tell me where she is,” he said. “You can tell that, because you’ve said she’s not far away. Tell me more.”
“As far as I can make out, she’s at the edge of—I suppose it’s the Caspian Sea. A coast, anyway, in mountainous country. She’s not alone.”
“Who else, then?”
“Well, that’s what I need more time for.”
The brigadier said, “Are you feeling unwell?”
“Yes. As I tried to tell you, this process is physically and intellectually demanding in the highest degree. It can’t be rushed. There are physical…costs.”
“You should have asked to use the bathroom.”
“I completely agree. I asked you about a bathroom, if you remember. Your attitude made it clear that you didn’t care whether I used a bathroom or not. As a result, I had to vomit into that wastepaper bin at your feet.”
The brigadier moved away. “You have to be sick every time you use it?”
“Not always. In cases of exceptional difficulty, I have to cope with nausea.”
The brigadier strode to the door and opened it. “The bathroom is to the left, along the corridor. Dispose of…” He indicated the wastepaper bin. “That. Then come to my office, and bring the instrument and your notes.”
He left. After a minute Bonneville followed him. He left the wastepaper bin where it was.
He found the brigadier standing outside his door, waiting for him; and as soon as Bonneville was in the room, the brigadier came in and locked the door behind him.
Bonneville couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. In the chair behind the desk, watching him with an expression of calm indulgence, was Marcel Delamare.