Chapter Three Towards Aleppo #4
“The essence of the task, though,” his porcupine daemon had said when they were thinking about it, “is not so much destroying it altogether as making it impossible to go through it. Something that melts the air at the edge and crushes it together—that would work, wouldn’t it?”
“ ‘Melts the air,’ ” the colonel scoffed.
“Well, you know what I mean. Thermobaric sort of thing.”
“The trouble is there’s only one thing to test it on. That’s the real problem.”
There were more problems than that, though.
Would it be better to place an explosive charge on this side, in this world, or on the other?
That was one question. Would an explosion merely enlarge the opening instead of closing it?
Or would the noise and the smoke attract the attention of the authorities in that other world, who might investigate and demand reparation, or worse?
Or might there be some simple method of closing the damn thing that he had never thought of?
His daemon suggested the analogy of a primitive or savage finding a coat, and wearing it, but having to leave it open because he had never heard of a zipper, and thought the rows of little metal teeth were merely decorative.
“Something like that, anyway,” she said.
The colonel had little taste for analogy; that was what daemons were for, after all, and they rarely said anything useful.
Thermobaric, though: there might be something there.
An explosion in two stages, the first filling the air with a flammable mist or vapor, and the second igniting that—the very process Lyra had used with a bag of flour when she’d rescued the children from Bolvangar all that time ago, but of course Colonel Schreiber knew nothing about that.
He was thinking of a device known as the tonnerre double, prohibited in warfare between civilized nations because of its abominable effects on the victims—or indeed any nearby creature with lungs.
“Prohibited” merely meant that the armaments manufacturers couldn’t sell it openly, but of course research and development continued, and Schreiber’s special connections made it easy for him to obtain two examples of the latest and most conveniently sized tonnerre double grenades.
He took the squat little canisters out of his rucksack and connected them to a timer that would ensure both detonated at the same moment, and placed one on his side of the opening, tucked down firmly next to it, and the other in a corresponding position in…the other world.
“How long?” said his daemon.
“Ten minutes. Plenty of time to get to that big rock with the tree growing out of it.”
The daemon remembered that rock, and scuttled ahead over the mossy stones and the tangled roots, tugging as hard as she could at the invisible bond between her and Schreiber so as to make him hurry.
They got to the rock with five minutes to spare, and settled down on the side away from the opening.
“What do you think will happen?” she said.
But as she spoke, she heard someone coming.
There was no path, as such, so he—it was a man, whistling—had to do as they’d done, and clamber over the mossy stones as best he could.
The daemon couldn’t help it: her quills shook, and the soft rattle they made sounded to her and to Schreiber unhelpfully loud in the still air.
The whistling stopped, and so did the sound of movement.
They could picture the man looking around, puzzled. He said something to his daemon, and her dove-voice responded.
After a few moments the man started to move again.
They could hear slow footsteps creaking in the patches of snow, the rustle of undergrowth, the little metal click of his steel-tipped alpenstock on stone.
Schreiber laid his hand on his daemon’s back, pressing her quills gently down towards her tail.
If the man continued in the same direction at the same pace, he would be very close to the explosive at the moment it went off.
And unless they could remove what would be left of his body, it would be found by anyone coming this way, perhaps to look for him, and that in turn would draw their attention to the opening in the air.
It was the last thing Delamare would have wanted.
But to warn the man would reveal it as well, and leave him alive, which might be even worse.
The porcupine daemon shared every quiver of the colonel’s thoughts. It was all grotesquely unfortunate.
Then the timer did exactly what it was designed to do, and detonated both grenades.
The first explosion made a small noise, not much louder than the sound of hands clapping once.
The sounds that came a fraction of a second later were much louder, and included (the daemon thought) a cry of surprise from the man, itself cut off by the ignition of the cloud of naphtha vapor.
Schreiber and the daemon waited for the various fragments of rock and tree and human being to fall to the ground, and for the air to clear a little, and then moved cautiously out of the shelter of the big rock and back to where the opening had been.
There was very little left of the man, but the colonel was familiar with that kind of thing.
More interesting was what had happened to the opening.
In the place where it had been, the smoke from the explosion was twisting in the air, and drifting or seeping out into small shreds of vacancy, twenty or thirty of them, some as big as his hand, others like the holes in a pepper pot.
The porcupine daemon sneezed. Smoke was coming through from the other side too. “When it’s cleared,” she said, and sneezed again, “there won’t be anything to show it was there.”
“Much less, anyway,” said the colonel.
A few little patches of oddness, scraps and tears in the air; nothing like the door-sized weirdness that had been there before.
As for the unfortunate passerby, there was no shortage of scavenging birds or mammals in these forests.
In a week or so there would be nothing left to find.
There was nothing to worry about after all.
Schreiber gathered up every scrap he could find of the tonnerre double, and lifted his rucksack onto his shoulder.
The daemon said, “Of course, he might have come out of the other world, that man. He might have been going back to it.”
“Serve him right for trespassing, then,” said the colonel.
They set off back to Geneva.
—
“Post-traumatic psycho—what?” said Colonel Grigorian.
“Cyto. Cytokinesis. It’s the term for what happens when the living cell splits in two. As if your daemon vanished for a bit after a traumatic shock. The best I could think of on the spur of the moment,” said Malcolm.
“Well, it’s not bad. You seem a bit more lively now. How are you feeling?”
“Painful and weak, but clearheaded. Where are we going, Timur?”
They had been traveling for an hour or so—Malcolm was vague about that—since leaving the prison hospital.
As the morphine daze evaporated, he realized firstly that Asta was in the car with them, and secondly that the Colonel Something in the astrakhan cap and the gold shoulder-flash was a man he’d last seen in the offices of the Botanic Garden in Oxford: the historian Timur Ghazarian.
“We’re going to Aleppo. I have a friend at the consulate there. At some point we’ll have to abandon this car, which I stole. What is your wound?”
“Gunshot in the hip. I think it got worse because I moved too much. I’ll have to hope it isn’t infected.”
“Who shot you?”
Malcolm told him about the dying director of the research station, about the false nurse, about how he got away from Smyrna.
“But you, Timur…Where is Oakley Street?”
They went through the catechism that let one agent recognize another. Ghazarian was word-perfect.
“I was hibernating,” he explained. It was an Oakley Street term for the position of an agent who had retired from active duty, but who was still on a reserve list. “I don’t know how much you’ve heard, but we’re working on Christabel terms now.
Oakley Street has been officially disrecognized. You know that expression?”
“It’s new to me, but I can guess where it comes from. Christabel, eh?”
Christabel was the name of a series of highly secret measures that were to come into operation when Oakley Street was under serious threat. Glenys Godwin must have moved quickly.
“They sent me here to look for you,” Ghazarian said. “Glenys didn’t know you were wounded when she sent me to find you, or she probably wouldn’t have done.”
“Then don’t tell her.”
Malcolm leaned back in the seat because the pain was becoming difficult again. He closed his eyes. Ghazarian noticed, and eased off the accelerator a little. The desert road was empty as far as the horizon, and the moon was bright, so he turned off the lights and drove on without them.
Asta lay along Malcolm’s shoulder, and they half whispered, half thought together.
“You went to look for him?” Malcolm murmured to her. “But how did you know he was nearby?”
“I just thought he might be,” said his daemon.
“Hmm.”
“And what can we do in Aleppo?”
“Look for Lyra.”
“But why would she be there?”
“I just thought she might be.”
“Hmm.”
“Besides,” he said, “any traveler going further east would have to go through Aleppo.”
“It won’t be easy to find her.”
“There are people to talk to. Mustafa Bey, for example. He’s a man of business. If we give him something in exchange, he’ll deal with us fairly.”
“Then we’ll just have to discover something valuable for him.”
She felt something happening in his awareness. “What is it?” she said.
“Here comes the spangled ring again.”