Chapter Twelve Resonating Lodestone #2
“No. Something different—an alloy of some kind…Sort of gray, I think. It moved by itself. You can point the hands where you want, to ask the question, but the needle was the part that gave you the answer.”
Malcolm gently tried to turn one of the three wheels around the edge. It resisted, and he didn’t force it. He tried another, and the hand it controlled moved stiffly around the broken dial until it came to one of the bent hands, which stopped it. The third wheel was stuck like the first.
“You’ve never seen the mechanism, then?” he said.
“No. Can you get the back off?”
“Not without…Let me see.”
Malcolm never went anywhere without his boyhood Swiss Army knife, and he opened the long blade now and felt with the tip around the edge of the case.
“I don’t think the back unscrews. I think it just clips into place…
There, you see, if it wasn’t crushed I’d just twist here with the knifepoint and it would come open.
But it’s twisted, and that makes it harder to prize it open.
At least I know what tools would help now.
Let’s see if Gulya’s craftsman-prisoner has got some I can borrow. ”
—
The human servants who came and went and worked so silently in the chambers and the stony corridors of Damāvand were not slaves but indentured prisoners, Malcolm learned; not that it seemed to make much difference to them.
The man Darius, who had been appointed to look after him and Pantalaimon, had been a minor criminal in Isfahan, tempted like many of the other servants by the thought of the immense riches in the treasury of the gryphons, and (like them) failing miserably to steal some gold and get away with it.
The tongue removal was a standard punishment; the captivity and the labor were to last seven years, of which Darius had served four.
The gryphons kept their word: when a captive’s time was served, he (almost all were he) was flown down to the plains and set free. But silent.
They worked at various tasks. As Malcolm had guessed, the architecture, the carpentry, and the creation of the fire-channels in the walls, all the various services that the Queen and her court and her ministers demanded, were the work of human hands, under gryphon supervision.
All this Malcolm learned in the course of several hours’ talk with Darius, Malcolm’s rusty Persian combining with the servant’s nods and shrugs and grunts and gestures to reach a narrow plateau of understanding.
Pan and the servant’s desert-rodent daemon might have done better, except that the daemon didn’t speak at all, and was terrified of everything, especially Gulya.
The little gryphon would sit on the table while Malcolm and Pan discussed what Darius had told them, and contributed her knowledge to fill the gaps left by Darius’s ignorance or their mutual bafflement.
She was most helpful when it came to the things Malcolm needed.
“Paper and pencils,” he said. “Not ink and pens—pencils. Then tools. I shall need some small screwdrivers…”
And at that point, as at others, he had to explain what he meant.
The world of tools and craftsmanship and handiwork was alien to Gulya not only because she didn’t have hands, but also because they were human things, and thus degrading for a gryphon to be concerned with.
Finally they decided that Malcolm would make a list of the tools he needed, and Gulya would take him to one of the craftsmen-prisoners who might be able to supply them.
OS to MP
Delamare has sent out parties to find and destroy the openings on Beamish’s list. Schreiber in overall command.
Beamish himself is dead, on the orders of Delamare.
A great pity. But clearly Delamare considers these things to be important enough for him to divert resources from his Central Asian project.
That project is now becoming a preparation for war. Apparently he will soon make a “major speech” on the subject. Word from inside HMG says he’s been guaranteed our “enthusiastic and unbounded” support. Troops already moving.
No one here or in HMG has any idea why he is blowing up these openings. OS has appointed a small team to investigate the nearest openings we know about, but it will take time.
Meanwhile, I’ve been asking about this Queen Shahrnavāz…Gryphons? Really?
Explain.
Godwin
MP to OS
Some realms overlap but don’t connect. For example, neutrinos: they take no notice of us, nor we of them.
The witches of the north are another. They have their preoccupations, their wars and alliances and interests, but they rarely involve short-lived men and women like us.
So it is with the gryphons. Human beings have nothing they want, except gold, for which they have a passion, and manual labor.
They consider themselves absolute rulers of two kingdoms: an outer one, which comprises most of Asia and Muscovy, and an inner one [sic], whose limits lie beyond the edge of the visible universe.
Apart from our ability to mine and work gold, we humans are just not interesting to them.
What I discover about them, however, may be of use to OS when I return. I should say, if I return.
The alethiometer they want me to repair is the one that used to belong to Lyra Silvertongue, and it’s badly damaged. If you have any information about her, I would be glad to hear it.
MP
OS to MP
FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Pan said, “What does she mean by that?”
“One of the reasons she sent me out here is that money’s going bad, and no one knows why.
Not just things like inflation, which we kind of understand, but something more fundamental.
I’m supposed to be investigating it. And here I am in a place where gold is king, and money means nothing.
Well, we have to do what we must do where we are, because we certainly can’t do it where we aren’t. On with this now for the moment.”
“It might all be connected anyway.”
“It might, yes. Let’s hope this craftsman has some decent tools.”
—
The craftsman-prisoner whom Gulya found was a morose Georgian jeweler called Tamaz Khuroshvili.
His principal occupation consisted of prizing precious stones, for which the gryphons cared nothing, out of their settings in stolen necklaces and bracelets and so on, and then melting down and refining those settings to purify the gold, for which the gryphons cared everything.
Malcolm had to talk to him through Gulya, and since the jeweler couldn’t speak, Malcolm had to put much of what he asked into a form that permitted a yes-no answer.
When Khuroshvili realized that Malcolm wanted to borrow some tools, he became agitated, and his magpie daemon flew around his head in a frenzy.
Pan tried to calm her down, but that was difficult too, because the magpie and the jeweler could both see very well that Pan wasn’t Malcolm’s daemon, and that itself was something to be afraid of.
Eventually a sort of fatalism took over. The man shrugged and put his head in his hands and uttered a high hoarse wail, and spread his hands wide, and shook his head, and shrugged again.
“Tell him I am a craftsman too,” said Malcolm. “I shall look after his tools as if they were mine. And I don’t want his job. As soon as I’ve finished, he can have them back, with my compliments and gratitude.”
Gulya explained as much of that as Khuroshvili was willing to understand. With heavy resignation he beckoned to Malcolm to follow him to the bench where he worked, and spread his hands wide over everything there, inviting Malcolm to take his pick.
Malcolm chose a pair of needle-nose pliers, a heavier pair of pliers with flat jaws, a small but heavy hammer with one flat face and one rounded one, one ordinary screwdriver and another very small one with a swivel head, and a fine-cut file.
He also picked out a flat plate of steel about the size of his hand, as a surface to work on.
It was very heavy. Khuroshvili sighed helplessly.
Malcolm looked up to the shelves behind the bench and noticed half a dozen small bottles with cork stoppers, and gestured towards them.
The jeweler nodded. Malcolm sniffed them all, more out of interest than anything else, and then held one up interrogatively.
Khuroshvili shrugged and nodded, as if to say “What does it matter?” and Malcolm put the bottle carefully in his shirt pocket before pressing his hands together and inclining his head, to say thanks.
Gulya said, “Is there anything else you need?”
“Not just now. If I find there is, I’ll ask you again. Please reassure him that his tools will be looked after.”
She took them back to their apartment and left them.
Pan said, “What’s in the bottle?”
“Linseed oil.”
“What do you need that for?”
“It’s just generally useful…I think I’ll be able to get the back off now. Then we can see what’s inside it. I’d like to have taken his vice, but it was too heavy to move.”
“Look, there’s more writing coming through.”
OS to MP
Visited the site in North Wales on Beamish’s list. Immensely hard to find; almost impossible to see; uncanny.
What’s on the other side is definitely not this world.
Reminded me of Annwn in the Mabinogi; an underworld, a different realm altogether.
Tell me everything you know about these things, and do it now.
Godwin
“Well, those are the orders,” said Malcolm. “While I take this thing to pieces, you do what she says. Tell me everything you and Lyra discovered about places like that, these openings.”
“Everything…? All right. The old man Will met in the Tower of the Angels, in Cittàgazze, said that—”
“Chronologically.”
“Yes. Of course. Well, the first time…”
OS to MP
Your information about openings is intriguing but unhelpful. The only thing that can make them is in the hands of a young man in another world? Better focus on this one, then.