Thirty-Four
The Alkahest at Work
After a day’s travel over sand and gravel, Pan was following Olivier Bonneville and his horse through some rough grassland that led gradually down towards the trees where the red building stood. He could see the distant scarlet roof quite clearly, and whenever he passed a shrub or a small tree he scrambled up to get a better view, but the roof was still the only part he could see.
A path through the grass was gradually becoming easier to follow. People and animals had trodden this way, maybe for many years, maybe for centuries. Bonneville seemed easier in his mind now that their goal was visible, or so it seemed to Pan; he even tried to encourage the horse into a trot, though the horse would have nothing to do with it. When they stopped for a drink, just before the trees really began, Pan decided to make himself known.
He ran through the branches to the tree nearest to where Bonneville had stopped, and called out, “Hey! You! Bonneville! I want to talk to you.”
Bonneville started with surprise and looked all around.
“Up here,” said Pan.
“You!”
“Yes, it is.”
“You fucking polecat. Where is she?”
“No idea. If she’s ahead, she’ll have gone into the building. If she’s behind us, she won’t. That’s all I can tell you.”
“What do you want?”
“Well, I want to stop you killing her, for one thing.”
“I’m not going to kill her,” Bonneville muttered.
“Speak up!”
“I said I’m not going to kill her. But Delamare might, and he’s not far behind us.”
“The Magisterium man. Your uncle.”
Bonneville’s head snapped up again. His face was pale and angry. “Better not get close to me,” he said.
“Oh, I won’t hurt you.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that.”
He shook the reins, and the horse trudged on. Pan followed through the branches. The trees were close enough now to make that easy enough.
“What does Delamare want?” he called to Bonneville.
“He wants to kill her, and he wants to blow something up. Both at the same time would suit him very well.”
“And if you don’t want to kill Lyra, what do you want?”
“She’s got my father’s alethiometer. I want it back. Then I’ll leave her alone and forget about her.”
“No, you won’t. She’s your sister.”
Bonneville slumped a little in the saddle. “How do you know that?” he said quietly.
“I thought it was common knowledge. What I’d like to know is how you heard of it.”
Bonneville rode on, saying nothing for over a minute. Then he said, “What’s in the red building?”
“I don’t know. I think Lyra might think…”
“What? What might she think?”
“It’s a doorway to another world. We’ve seen them before.”
He scoffed. “Think I’m stupid?”
“Well, no, but you do stupid things. Impulsive things. You should stop and consider. Didn’t you read your uncle’s sermon? I don’t suppose you were there to hear it. He certainly believes in doorways to other worlds. He thinks they’re the way evil comes into this one.”
“Well, you weren’t there either. How d’you know that?”
“Must have read it in some newspaper.”
Bonneville rode on. The horse was finding the going harder now; branches hung low over the path, and Bonneville sometimes had to lift them out of the way before they could pass.
After a minute or so he said, “Common knowledge, is it? About Lyra?”
“No. She certainly doesn’t know. If you want the truth, I heard it from your dæmon when you were asleep.”
“Bastard.”
His dæmon was perching as still as stone behind him.
“Do you remember your mother? Mrs. Coulter?” Pan said.
“No. She was probably in it with her brother. Inventing lies…”
Pan, whose memories of the woman were bright and terrifying still, was tempted to tell Bonneville everything he knew, but he held back.
The horse stopped suddenly. Bonneville, who wasn’t expecting that, almost fell from the saddle. “Can you hear that?” he said.
Pan turned his head one way and then the other to locate whatever sound Bonneville had heard. There was a light wind rustling the leaves, and some sort of small bird was singing not far away, but it was a different sound that Bonneville had heard, and after a few moments Pan heard it too.
“An engine,” he said. “From back there, the way we came.”
“Delamare and his bomb. Fuck. Can you see the red roof? How far is it?”
Pan leapt higher up the willow tree and called down, “Close. Another few minutes, no more.”
“Right. We’ll push on as quick as we can. That engine’s laboring—he’s finding it hard going. We’ll get there before he does.”
He shook the reins. The horse slouched forward.
Bonneville was urging it hard, but the horse was stubbornly unwilling to be urged. Pan leapt from tree to tree—easy now that they were closer—and thought of telling Bonneville to leave the horse and go forward on foot, because they were only a matter of minutes away from the building. The trees grew too thickly for them to see anything below the scarlet roof, but Pan had the impression of immensity, and of silence too, a silence in which the air-cooled engine of whatever sort of truck or armored car was following them kept snarling closer and closer.
Finally he leapt down as the horse passed below, and clung to Bonneville’s jacket for safety.
“What are you doing?” cried Bonneville, squirming in the saddle.
“Shut up and get down. Leave the horse to block the path and do the rest on foot. We’re nearly there.”
Bonneville’s dæmon raised her one useful wing in protest, but said nothing as she clung to his shoulder. He clambered down awkwardly, the horse moving a step or two as he set his foot on the ground, but he recovered and lurched forward, hitching his rucksack over his shoulder. The horse had already discovered some palatable grass beside the path and didn’t seem inclined to move away from it; Bonneville gave it a pat on the neck as he followed Pan towards the red glow through the trees ahead.
Less than a minute later they came to the flagstone area in front of the flight of steps up to the portico. Pan had had the idea that there would be guards, but his memory of Strauss’s journal was hazy, and there was no one there now.
Again they stopped to listen for Delamare’s engine.
“It’s closer,” said Bonneville.
“Hurry up, then. Open the door.”
Pan sprang to the top of the steps and looked at the twin columns, whose red paint was peeling, and at the edge of the tiled roof above as Bonneville ran up after him. The sound of the engine came clearly through the trees now: Pan expected to see it at any moment. Bonneville turned the handle, and was as surprised as Malcolm had been when it turned so easily.
“Quick,” he said, and Pan darted past his legs and into the great hall.
They closed the door at once and looked around. Pan was searching for a way out: Bonneville was just amazed. Pan saw the door at the other end of the great dim hall and ran towards it, the scratching of his claws on the wooden floor loud in the enormous silence. Halfway across, he stopped and turned. Bonneville hadn’t moved; he stood staring all around and above as if struck by a revelation. There was a painting of some sort on the walls, and perhaps Bonneville was looking at that.
“Come on!” Pan said, as loud as he dared. The vehicle following them had arrived on the flagstone forecourt: the driver gave a little burst of the throttle, and then the engine cut out and fell silent. Bonneville came to his senses and began to run, following Pan towards the other door.
And when Pan was nearly there, with Bonneville close behind, the door opened behind them. Light fell in, and the figure of Marcel Delamare stood silhouetted in the entrance.
Lyra and Malcolm stood and watched as the old couple came out of the front door. Malcolm was eager to fight in their defense—she could tell by the tension in his stance—but she squeezed his hand and knew he wouldn’t be foolish; he’d be cut down in a moment.
Old Mr. Butler leaned towards her and said quietly, “You will tell them, won’t you?”
“Everything,” she said. “Everything we’ve seen.”
Mrs. Butler smiled nervously and clutched her bag of knitting as they left. They couldn’t march, so the soldiers had to adapt themselves to their pace as they moved away from the lakeshore and out of sight around a corner.
Malcolm was looking at Lyra. “What next?” he said.
“I don’t want to go too far away from the doorway. You know, the opening. If Pan had come through, I know he’d wait for me somewhere nearby. I just don’t want to be somewhere else when he does come.”
“Good idea. Let’s go back. And what were you going to say about the alkahest? You’d just seen what it was?”
“Yes! It is the universal solvent, just as it says in the encyclopedia. The destroyer of bonds. Look at what’s happening here—all the old ways and habits that brought people together, like bartering and trading—just dissolved. Wiped away by new ways people don’t fully understand. The new roads that go who knows where but just tear up the rose gardens and knock down perfectly good houses. And—”
“What about the dæmon sickness? Is it responsible for that too?”
“That most of all! What’s the closest bond there is? It’s between people and their dæmons. Somehow when you’re separated, like we are, the bond is still there, but this isn’t the same at all. With the sickness here, people just seem indifferent. They’re not interested anymore. But it’s not just happening here. It’s every kind of bond, in our world as well. Like the new Master of Jordan, breaking the old connection between me and the college, because I was costing them too much. It sounded so reasonable when he said it. Money. They had to save money, because…Everything about the alkahest is reasonable. It’s reasonable to make money, to save money…It’s so powerful. Why have I never seen it before? It gets everywhere. Didn’t you tell me something about Thuringia Potash—they had a branch or a laboratory or something in Aleppo?”
“That’s right. They’d just abandoned it because it was losing money. And that meant that all the things that depended on it had to go too. Jobs, businesses…There was a café where the TP staff used to eat. Going bankrupt.”
“All being dissolved. The more I see, the more obvious it seems…I really think I’m beginning to understand at last. Everything having to give way to money.”
“How does Mustafa Bey fit into this idea? You trusted him, didn’t you? But he was a trader above everything else. And he was building a new road, wasn’t he? And running buses on it?”
Lyra rubbed her head. It was true, and it was a fine and comfortable bus, and no doubt various carriers and small traders and couriers and camel-train owners would go out of business because of it. It wasn’t simple.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Yes, it’s true, of course it is. And of course people have always knocked things down and built other things in their place. But money’s different somehow. It swallows everything…Even the Magisterium, and the men from the mountains, even the people who wanted to destroy the roses took them seriously. They were wrong about them, but they felt they were important in themselves. But Thuringia Potash and all these other companies are only interested in the rose oil as a unit of value. If an acre of roses makes money, fine, but because the roses and the oil themselves aren’t important, they’ll tear them up in a moment. All those fields being dug up: it isn’t because the developers hate the roses, it’s because they can make more per acre by growing peanuts, or by building a factory.”
She was thinking this out as she said it, and she remembered Silvina Policastro, and her dæmon laying his weary head on her shoulder.
“The thing that troubles me most,” she went on, “or one of the things…I’m so tired, Malcolm, I can’t think straight…It’s something like this. In making rose oil, each part of the process is an end in itself. The roses are beautiful as they grow. Distilling the rosewater and making the oil are crafts worth knowing, things worth doing in themselves, things you can get better at and take pride in. So people who did them used to have a connection with the soil and the seasons and the light and the weather, and they felt the sun and the wind and the rain on their skins—the alkahest will change all that. They’ll soon be sitting in offices under artificial light, entering figures into ledgers and account books, and their dæmons will be dying beside them, and no one will care, and no one will know why.”
They were walking through the town as she spoke. Malcolm said little, but they both knew that if he did, he’d say that she was being absurdly romantic, that tending plants was hard physical work, that ledgers and account books had to be attended to as closely as rose gardens if civilization was to work at all. Lyra felt a wide, still melancholy, not anguish, not misery, but the endless gray light of a day on a motionless sea, as she thought about what she was saying and saw more implications. It was like watching the sand darken slowly as a tide came in, along the whole length of the shore, as far as she could see, the water seeping through, under everything there was, dissolving every bond.
They moved on through the town and out along the road towards the little wooden building that led to the rose exchange. Work was continuing all around; the noise of engines, of the grinding of metal on stone, of heavy soil falling into a line of trucks was constant and pervasive.
Then Malcolm stopped and said, “Your circlet…You were wearing it in their parlor, and you took it off as you left the room to go to the front door…You didn’t leave it there, did you?”
After a couple of steps Lyra stopped too. She had her back to him, so Malcolm couldn’t see the range of expressions that crossed her face.
“I put it in her bag of knitting,” she said after what felt like a long minute. He didn’t move. “They had nothing,” she went on. “I couldn’t do anything else.”
Malcolm walked up and embraced her and kissed her forehead. It felt to them both as if he wanted to speak, but couldn’t find the words.
In fact he had all the words he needed, but now he knew he’d never say them.
Finally he lowered his arms and they stood away. She looked up to see how much further they still had to go, and settled her rucksack more comfortably, and took another step. He walked beside her.
They would be there in about five minutes, she thought.
Delamare’s dæmon, the white owl, spread her wings and plunged forward off his shoulder and swept silently up into the dim open space of the great hall. Naturally she would see better than he would, and naturally both Pan and Bonneville froze in fear.
She circled high above the floor, disturbing the dust particles in the beams coming through the high windows, and Pan thought that if he tucked himself into the very corner of the hall, she wouldn’t be able to reach him. Bonneville, meanwhile, knew that she was already at the limit of the distance she could reach from Delamare, and would have to return to him soon; and as she turned in a wide circle she glided lower and lower towards the man as he strode in through the doorway and out onto the empty floor.
Bonneville turned and ran as hard as he could for the far door, the one to the rose world. Pan watched the soldiers begin to drag their bomb on its wheeled sled up the last steps and through the entrance. It was too wide to come in, but under the direction of a gray-haired officer with a Franz Joseph beard, the men took out some crowbars and an axe and began to hack and tear at the doorframe.
The white owl dæmon was back with Delamare, but she looked all around, her head turning in a moment from this way to that, her wide eyes gleaming in the dimness. When she looked at Bonneville, who had almost reached the door, Pan darted away from his corner and after him across the wide stretch of floorboards between them. Even as he ran he could see the owl’s head turn again, back to him, and then with a high scream she launched herself into the air, but not high this time: she kept low over the floor, her wings beating the dusty air in complete silence.
Could he turn on the floor more quickly than she could in the air? That appalling silence meant that he had to keep watching her even as he ran. Bonneville had almost made it to the door. There was some sort of curious architectural decoration there—a folly, a copper roof—but the owl dæmon ignored that and made straight for the figure with the rucksack, as he ran fast and straight, reaching towards the handle; but then the dæmon uttered a strangled cry and brought herself up sharply as she came to the furthest extent she could separate from Delamare.
Pan heard a coughing shout from behind him: Delamare himself, reacting to the dæmon’s pain with his own. As the owl fluttered helplessly away from the door and back towards him, Delamare stumbled towards her, urging the soldiers to follow. Colonel Schreiber was uttering commands, hard and loud and clipped, and the men dragged their sled across the floor and into position against the door, between the columns—and where was Bonneville?
Pan hadn’t seen him go through. Delamare was yelling in fury—because suddenly, out of the darkness at the edge of the hall, there was Bonneville.
Pan gasped and stopped still. Bonneville was fumbling with something—his rucksack lay on the floor, and his sparrowhawk dæmon perched on it, her injured wing hanging low. Pan was mesmerized—and then he nearly died with fear; because Delamare had come close enough for his dæmon to fly freely, and she had swooped unheard and plucked Pan up into the air. He could feel her claws in his ribs.