Chapter One Beings of Another Kind #2
She heard it clearly, and it was impossible to understand. “What d’you mean? What about this alkahest? What is it?”
…destroy everything…
Lyra was bewildered. It was too much. She dragged herself back to the present task. “Where is Nur Huda’s daemon? Where is Jamal?”
…in the treasury…
“And where’s that?”
…behind you…
Lyra turned to look. The building that had stood there was now a jumbled heap of stones, with a few dry shrubs growing through them.
She said, “Who is keeping him prisoner?”
…a man who is asleep…
Her eyes had become used to the moonlight; it was almost as clear as day, and she stepped easily over the stones and looked more closely at the place called the treasury.
It was the sort of place where snakes might easily hide, and scorpions, and venomous spiders.
Oh, there were so many things to be afraid of.
She took a deep breath and pressed her hand to her heart to slow the beating.
It didn’t work, of course, and she needed both hands to help her clamber over the shattered masonry, so she let her heart do what it wanted and moved on, hand over hand, foot carefully placed before foot.
Inside her she carried the new knowledge about the red building in the desert of Karamakan like a precious vessel full to the brim with rare oil. Don’t tremble, don’t trip…
When she’d gone a little way into the rubble she saw a gap ahead, and realized it was the shaft of a great staircase leading down deep into the ground.
In a treasury, where would you put the most valuable thing?
In the vaults under the ground. There must be some kind of strong room down there…
And how was she going to open it? In the dark? With no tools?
She shrugged. It might not even be possible to reach it.
But the steps that led down were not too cluttered with fallen masonry, and the moon was at just the right angle to light the way, so she had no excuse.
Right hand on the wall, left held out for balance, she made her way carefully downwards, aware all the time of the danger of slipping, twisting an ankle, or worse.
Down, and further down, and still the moonlight lit her way. At the foot of the stairway, she had to stop: the passage that led away into the dark was entirely blocked.
But there at the side, out of the shaft of moonlight, was a man lying on his back, asleep.
At first she thought he was dead, he was so still, and her veins flooded with ice water; but he was snoring quietly, and there was his daemon, a small desert mammal of some inconspicuous kind, clinging to his shoulder in her sleep.
His face had been battered and torn in what must have been a furious attack, and his left eye was missing: the socket lay empty and blood-clotted.
His right arm was resting on something at his side, and when she looked more closely she could see what it was: a crudely made cage about the size of a shoebox, nailed together from rough boards, with a heavy steel mesh front.
Inside the cage was a daemon, Nur Huda’s daemon, a little animal like a mouse with large ears and long back legs like those of a kangaroo.
He was crouching in the darkest corner, shivering.
“Are you Jamal?” Lyra whispered.
“Yes—where is Nur Huda?” came the reply, so quiet she could hardly hear it.
“She’s waiting for us. I’m going to take you back to her. Who is this man?”
“He caught me and nailed this cage up and I can’t get out—he was hiding from a big bird—like an eagle—it was going to take me and he fought to get me away from it and then he put me in this cage—I’m frightened. Who are you?”
“Shhh. My name’s Lyra. Keep still and don’t talk. I don’t want to wake him up.”
She had to reach across the man’s body to touch the cage, and he stirred and groaned loudly, startling her.
She kept as still as she could till he was snoring again, and then moved her hand to the cage, feeling to see if she could lift it away from his grasp.
But it wasn’t going to be possible unless she knelt on his chest: there was nowhere else to lean on, and unless she supported her weight somehow, she’d overbalance and wake him up anyway.
And her left hand was still painful after her fight with the soldiers on the train from Smyrna just two days ago.
She felt as far as she could around the cage. The wood was very dry and splintery, and the steel mesh was far too strong to bend, and stapled deeply into the wood all the way around.
She sat back to think about it.
Jamal whispered, “Please, can you open it?”
“Shhh.”
She was aware of the moon moving across the sky: the shaft of light was moving too, and unless she got the daemon out soon she’d have to work in the dark. If only Will…If only the subtle knife…It would cut through the mesh in a moment.
A thousand things distracted her. The smell of the sleeping man: not just a dirty body and unwashed clothes, but something worse, like gangrene.
She saw that his leg was injured as well as his eye; he’d probably die soon.
The sound of something much deeper underground, the faintest possible rumble, like rocks grinding together.
The stillness of the air, the closeness and clamminess down here in the vault.
A thought struck her like an arrow.
The alethiometer—
The metal of the needle—
The Welsh miners on the North Sea ferry had noticed it. So had Will, a long time before. It was the same color, the same material, as the subtle knife.
She moved away a little further, back into the shaft of moonlight, and felt in her rucksack for the alethiometer. Its familiar weight sat in her hand so rightly, and she raised it to her cheek and held it there for a few seconds, loving it.
She’d never opened it, never tried to prize it apart, but there must be a way of doing so.
The mechanism had been made by a human being, and then put in its gold case, and then the glass had been pressed shut.
She could almost hear the click as she thought about it.
Or else they’d screwed it down. If it had been closed, it could be opened.
Malcolm, the skilled mechanic, would know how to do it.
What would he do? She held the body of the instrument in her aching left hand and tried to unscrew the glass as if she was unscrewing the lid of a jar.
She’d watched a clockmaker in the Covered Market in Oxford unscrewing a watch glass, gently, firmly, just like that.
She tried, but without success. Either it was stuck after centuries of not being moved, or it wasn’t screwed at all.
And then came another memory-arrow: it was thinking of Malcolm that brought this one. He’d found a wooden acorn with a message in it, and couldn’t open it till he tried unscrewing the wrong way, clockwise.
So she tried that.
And it worked.
The glass turned smoothly, as if it had been made the day before, and after three revolutions it came away in her hand.
The dial of the alethiometer, with its thirty-six tiny pictures, lay open to the moonlight.
Its three black hands were pointing to the camel, the angel, and the walled garden, but the symbols didn’t matter for now; it was the silver-gray needle that was important, slender, infinitely sharp, quivering in the air of Madinat al-Qamar as the air of Prague drifted away from it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the heavy golden instrument, so beautiful, her companion for ten years or more, the guide that had led her safely into other worlds and into the world of the dead and then home again.
And with all the delicacy her pain-filled bones and exhausted muscles could manage, she lifted out the needle.
It came away easily from its shaft. There was so little of it—it could have weighed only a little more than a hair—that she was immediately terrified of dropping it.
If that happened, she’d never find it again.
She held it between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, and they were damp with sweat and fear, so she laid it carefully on the open palm of her left and wiped her right hand on the fabric of her blouse, though that was wet too.
So she rubbed her fingers instead into the dust of the floor, which did work, and then took the needle again.
“Stay at the back and keep still,” she whispered to Jamal.
The little daemon, who’d been peering through the mesh, darted into the shadow at the back of the cage.
Lyra thought: I don’t know if this will work. But it’s all there is.
Whatever she did would depend on her left hand not giving way. She had to lean on it a little, or not reach the cage at all, but it hurt so much. She leaned over the sleeping man, put her left hand on the top of the cage, and very slowly let it take her weight as she reached over with her right.
Gripping the needle as firmly as she could, she pressed the side of it, just behind the point, to the steel mesh at one edge. The wire was thick and heavy, and it would have needed a bolt cutter and a strong wrist to make any impression on it; but it parted like a cobweb.
Lyra wanted to shout with triumph, but she’d hardly started. One by one, keeping her mind on everything about the task, she cut through each of the strands of wire until the entire front fell away loose.
“Wait,” she whispered urgently, because Jamal had come to the front of the cage and looked as if he wanted to leap out.
But the sleeping man was stirring. He must have felt the cage shift under his hand when the front fell away. He groaned and lifted his arm—and touched Lyra’s—and woke at once.
He shouted in fear and seized her wrist. His one eye glittered, open wide.
“Jamal! Run!” Lyra called, and the little daemon sprang over them both and darted up the staircase like a spark along a fuse.