Chapter Two The Infirmary #3
Delamare’s white owl daemon watched him go, and then turned her head back to the President. He was watching her with a complex expression she knew well, and both loved and feared.
“Well?” she said.
“I’m beginning to see what we have to do.”
“Apart from murdering innocent geographers?”
He dismissed that with a wave of his hand.
“Things are coming together,” he said.
—
Lyra was dreaming of her daemon, but in the waking world Pantalaimon could smell a river.
Or maybe hear it: his senses were extremely sharp, but not necessarily distinct from one another.
He existed normally in and out of a state of synesthesia, which he was quite happy about, especially when he heard a river.
Or smelled the reeds and the mud and the fresh water.
He had come a night’s journey away from the dead city.
He had no idea what this river might be called or where it would lead, but it was moving east, as he was, and when he slipped through the reeds on the bank and saw the slow-flowing water under the stars, no wider than the Thames at Westminster, his heart lifted.
The guilty sorrow that had come with him as he left Nur Huda at Madinat al-Qamar seemed to fall off like a suit of clothes, and he left it behind on the bank and slipped easily into the stream.
He floated without effort past the poplars on the bank, past a little fishing village with its three or four boats tied up at a jetty, and the fires where people were cooking their evening meal, and their voices that carried quietly over the water.
He floated on. Perhaps this river would flow into a great lake, or even into the Caspian Sea.
At some point between where he was and the distant desert of Karamakan there would be mountains, and perhaps he’d perish there, an unmeasurable distance away from that part of himself called Lyra, and she would perish in the same instant.
Luxuriating in this tragic vision, he was startled by a bird that came out of the dark and swept low over his head.
He heard the beat of wings and a strangely muffled call, and twisted in the water to look up, but it was gone.
It couldn’t have been an owl, because he wouldn’t have heard the sound of its wings; he had the impression of a creature that might have been young, almost clumsy, and full of fear.
And maybe not even a bird: the wrong shape, the wrong sort of cry—
And again it swept low above him, and Pan heard something almost human in its call.
He turned towards the bank, swimming quickly, and then from higher above there came a scream—then another—intensely wild, almost unearthly.
The first creature flew low again, and there seemed to be a sob in its voice, more urgent, closer, directed to him.
A warning? A cry for help?
And then more screams from high above, a volley of them, harsh and full of hate—and then something big and heavy hurtled into the first creature and drove it down into the water close by.
Pan’s senses flared with confusion, but some things were clear: the second creature was a bird, a massive thing, and it stank of rotten flesh, and the first creature would be drowned if he didn’t save it.
The struggle threw up the water in all directions, and the raucous gurgling shriek from the huge bird was sickening, so close—
Then a moment when he saw clearly: the bird had seized the smaller creature in its claws, and was trying to snap at it and tear at its head.
But it wasn’t in its own element. The vast wings were getting waterlogged, while its beak snapped and snapped in the empty air or the water as the creature writhed and twisted to get away.
If once that beak closed on it, the victim would be dead.
Pan knew about beaks. The muscles that opened them were much weaker than those that held them shut. If he could get close enough to sink his own teeth into that beak, he might be able to hold the bird underwater long enough to drown it. If he was lucky.
The bird hadn’t seen him yet, but if he didn’t move at once, he’d lose any surprise he might have.
He twisted in a convulsion, driving himself forward.
One more twist with all his strength and he was under the water, right in among the turbulence, close enough to feel the thrashing terror of the first creature as it struggled to reach the surface and breathe.
Pan felt his face smash against the scaly leg of the huge bird, and snapped his teeth shut on it. At once the bird screamed and let go of the first creature, who wriggled up and out of its grip.
Pan coiled away in a tight full turn and then hurled himself directly into the bird’s face and tore at it with claws and teeth.
Then he writhed away, feinting sideways; the bird turned to follow; and Pan drove forward again, lashing his tail, whipping his spine like a snake, and seized its beak in his own powerful jaws.
But he only had the tip of it. The bird flung itself this way and that, and Pan held on, knowing he had to let go in order to seize it more firmly, and feeling all the strength of the creature in the slamming beat of its great wings.
He could sense every pulse of its movement, and just as it raised its wings, just for that fraction of a second when it had no momentum, he let go and surged forward and closed his needle-sharp teeth further up the beak. This time he’d have to keep them there.
But it could still beat its mighty wings, waterlogged though they were, and scrape with its filthy claws, rank with the rotten flesh it had been tearing apart all its life. In its wild thrashing it nearly had Pan under the water, where it could drown him in a minute or less.
But his claws were sharp too. With all his weight hanging from its beak, he tore with his claws at every part of the bird he could reach, breast, wings, throat, eyes, and still the creature went on making that obscene gurgling shriek, shaking its head trying to dislodge him, flinging itself—and him—this way and that, half in and half out of the water, on the riverbank and back in the water again, splashing, flapping, twisting.
Pan’s jaw was aching with the effort, and he was gagging from the putrid stink of the bird’s head so close to his lips and nose, and he’d taken several brutal blows from wings and feet.
He was nearly at the end of his strength; and then he felt the bird’s power leave it all at once, and its body sagged away and drooped down into the water.
He had to tug and twist hard to pull his teeth out of the keratin-covered beak, and feared that he’d be drowned by the enemy he’d killed; but finally the beak came apart in his mouth, and he fell back in the water, sore and shaken, watching the body float away into the darkness, and thought: Surely Lyra must have felt this happening.
There was a flutter of smaller wings, and the first creature landed on the bank nearby. With an immense effort Pan pulled himself out of the water and lay panting on the grass.
The moonlight showed him something he’d never seen before.
She had wings, but was not a bird; and four legs and claws, like a lion, but was not a lion.
She was as big as a domestic cat; her eagle head and breast and wings were covered in feathers, the rest in fur; and like Pan, she was wounded.
A deep scratch had raked along her flanks, and she was bleeding.
“I owe you my life,” she whispered.
English? She was speaking English?
“Get back in the water,” said Pan as soon as he saw her wound. “Straightaway. You need to get that clean as soon as possible.”
“You too, then,” she said. “But you’re at home in water and I’m not. You’ll have to help.”
Her voice was rich and low, her English lightly tinged with an accent that might have been Persian.
Between them they managed to flush her wound free of blood and of whatever foulness the bird had left in it, and then Pan did the same for himself.
The birds were still there high above, shrieking, but the noise was diminishing, as if they were moving away.
“What are they?” he said.
“Oghab-gorgs from the Tien Shan mountains.”
“But that must be two thousand miles away…What are they doing here?”
“Looking for war. My name is Gulya. What is yours? And you are a daemon. Why are you solitary?”
“I am Pantalaimon, the daemon of Lyra Silvertongue. I am going to the desert of Karamakan to look for something she has lost. What did you say about those birds?”
“The oghab-gorgs have come to find a war. Possibly they sense a war coming towards them. They can smell flowing blood across five thousand leagues of steppe and desert.”
“I can still hear them. Are they fighting one another?”
“No. My kin are fighting them off. We do not allow such filth anywhere near us.”
Pan lay still and listened to the distant commotion high above. The most raucous cries were quieter now, and the center of the fight was moving away.
He said, “Who are your kin? What kind of creature are you?”
“A gryphon. I am no bigger than this because I am under a curse. I am seventy years old, but until I kill the sorcerer who cursed me, I shall never grow to full size.”
“How long do gryphons live?”
“Several hundred years.”
“And how big is full size?”
“Bigger than the largest horse in the world.”
“How do you come to speak English?”
“I speak every language.”
“And your kingdom…This is your kingdom, here?”
“Our kingdom extends from the Black Sea to Kamchatka, from Himmaleh to Taymyr. That is the outer kingdom. The inner kingdom is even greater, and includes the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars.”
“The inner is bigger than the outer?”
“That is the way of all things.”
Pan thought about that. He could see how that might be true.
“Listen,” said Gulya. “They have fled.”