The Rose Field (The Book of Dust #3)

Prologue

At the end of the previous book, The Secret Commonwealth, Lyra reaches the deserted city, al-Khan al-Azraq, in her search for her daemon, Pan.

Under the moon, she goes alone into the ruins.

She turned to avoid a broken mass of gleaming marble that had once been a temple. There she found herself at one end of a colonnade, which cast black bars of shadow across the snow-white stone of the path.

And there was a girl sitting on a fallen piece of masonry, a girl of sixteen or so, of North African appearance and shabby dress.

She wasn’t a phantom: she cast a shadow, as Lyra herself did, and like her, she had no daemon.

She stood up as soon as she saw Lyra. In the moonlight she looked tense and full of fear.

“You are Miss Silvertongue,” she said.

“Yes,” said Lyra, astonished. “Who are you?”

“Nur Huda el-Wahabi. Come on, come quickly. We have been waiting for you.”

“We? Who—? You don’t mean…?”

But Nur Huda tugged urgently at Lyra’s right hand, and they hurried together along the colonnade, towards the heart of the ruins.

—

And now the final part begins.