Chapter Thirty-Four The Alkahest at Work #2
“That most of all! What’s the closest bond there is?
It’s between people and their daemons. 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 daemon 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 daemons 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 daemon, 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 daemon 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 daemon ignored that and made straight for the figure with the rucksack, as he ran fast and straight, reaching towards the handle; but then the daemon 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 daemon’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 daemon 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 daemon to fly freely, and she had swooped unheard and plucked Pan up into the air. He could feel her claws in his ribs.