Chapter Twenty-One The Clean Wind of God #2
Lyra stood away, soaking the shirt under the tap again and wiping it across her mouth and eyes and nose.
The first panic, when she felt she couldn’t breathe at all, was subsiding.
Her throat was still tight and sore, and the sounds from the street reminded her of everything going on outside the neat little room.
Another volley of gunshots sounded very loud in the narrow street, and made her ears ring.
She thought of Ionides. “Oh, I hope—” she found herself croaking, but Asta interrupted hoarsely: “He’ll be safe.”
She knows what I’m thinking was what flashed into Lyra’s mind, with an odd little flare of warmth.
“It’s dangerous, though. Those police—guns—they’re just shooting at anyone.”
“He’ll know that as well as we do. And he’ll be better at dealing with it.”
“Yes. I suppose you’re right. Oh, that gas…”
“Still hurting?”
Lyra felt as if her eyelids had been burned away. Her throat was raw; she knew her voice was thin and harsh and entirely un-Lyra-like. Perhaps it would never recover.
Before she could reply, there was a knock on the door. She stood up and turned around at once. Asta too was standing ready to challenge, ready to defend their space.
“Who is it?” said Lyra in her new voice, but it came out too quietly, so she tried again, as loud as she could bear: “Who’s there?”
“Personal sorcerer. I come in?”
“Oh yes—yes!”
She hurried to unlock the door. Ionides was alone in the corridor, but he looked to left and right before entering the room.
“Better lock it again,” he said.
“Yes—I will…”
He sniffed and looked at the window.
“Yes—the tear gas got in, a bit…”
“Your eyes all right? Throat?” He was looking serious.
“It’s better now I’ve closed the window. But—”
He held up his hands. “Sit down, Miss Silver. I got some bad news. This confusion out there—you know why they are all breaking windows and shooting? Sit down,” he said again.
“Why? Tell me!”
“Mustafa Bey. Someone kill him.”
She sat down on the bed, and he took the chair.
“No…No!” she said, breathless. “When?”
“Three days, two days—no one knows. Doesn’t matter. Important thing, only thing, is he is not there.”
“My letter…”
“Of course your letter. Suddenly, not so useful. Keep it hidden anyway. See how things go.”
“But why are people…He wasn’t a ruler, a popular king, or something, so why are they rioting? And is it happening in other places, or just here in Baku?”
“All along the Silk Roads, so I hear. All the contracts, all the thousand agreements he make. With big companies, with every kind of merchant, large and small, with camel-herders, with factory owners, with shipping lines, every kind of commercial activity—all depending on his memory. All relying on him. This is catastrophe, Miss Silver. There is nothing to take his place. Because of Mustafa Bey, everyone who make business for ten thousand miles know they can rely on money and law and contracts. But now…I am surprised they only breaking windows. They will do worse, very soon.”
“He was very kind,” Lyra said.
“He was great man. Not many people I admire, Miss Silver, but Mustafa Bey…”
“He would have liked to work with you. He told me.”
“I was honored to see him even for short while.”
Lyra had never seen him so somber.
“What’s the best thing to do in a riot?” she said.
“Keep still. Don’t be visible, don’t make noise. This will pass. Then we move away from the city.”
“Yes. I suppose that would be best. What do you think will happen to Mustafa Bey’s enterprises?”
“People will fight over them. Strong men, maybe soldiers, maybe politicians, will take them over and steal money out of them and run them badly and then let them collapse.”
“The Magisterium? What about them?”
“You mean, did they kill him?”
“Yes. I think that’s what I mean.”
“That is interesting, Miss Silver. Yes, I think maybe they did. They can say, ‘Look at all this chaos—people need law and order. Governments have failed all over Europe and beyond. The world needs a strong power to govern everything and restore public safety, blah blah. Only the Magisterium, et cetera, et cetera…’ They have the power. Rumors about this big army gathering to invade Central Asia, maybe they gathered it together for exactly this, and yes, they kill him. It make no difference now, but it might make big difference later.”
She sat back. Her eyes were still streaming; she closed them and held the wet handkerchief there.
“Asta? How are your eyes?” she said.
“Painful. Mr. Ionides, did you avoid the gas?”
“I guessed it was coming, so I do like you.” He held up a cotton scarf, wet and dripping. “I stole it from market. Drop it in a jug of water on café table. The world is full of convenient things, Miss Asta.”
“The siren’s stopped,” Lyra said.
There were still a few voices shouting, but the main source of the noise had either moved away or simply calmed down.
“So now we wait,” said Asta.
Lyra was already composing the first sentence of the message she was planning to send on the lodestone, as soon as she could see again.
—
Malcolm and Gulya were waiting in the carpeted hall for Queen Shahrnavāz.
A chair had been set out ready for him; guards waited at the corridor entrance through which the Queen would appear.
The vizier stood by, solemn and inscrutable, though Malcolm thought he could detect a suppressed irritation in his manner.
Gulya was more nervous than Malcolm had ever seen her.
He wished that Pan hadn’t gone; he and Gulya had seemed to reassure each other.
In his hands Malcolm held the gold circlet and the confusion of wheels and rods that had been the movement of the alethiometer, and as the guards by the entrance stiffened to their equivalent of attention, and the vizier turned his head to bow to the Queen, Malcolm stood up and gathered the pieces together in his hands.
He took care to stand in the full sunlight.
And then Shahrnavāz was in front of them, in all the splendor of her form.
Malcolm stood, but didn’t bow; he inclined his head a very little way, like a great leader greeting an equal.
Then, to Gulya’s near terror, he said, “Queen Shahrnavāz, you and I shall talk alone. His Excellency the Vizier and your bodyguards may leave us. Only Gulya will remain.”
The guards shivered with astonishment, and the vizier slowly turned his head from Malcolm to the Queen, and to Gulya, and back to Malcolm.
The old courtier must have been affronted, but between the silence of the Queen and the calm certainty of Malcolm he seemed at first uncertain and then stiff with anger and then resigned, for he bowed to the Queen and withdrew, followed by the guards.
Malcolm and the Queen stood facing each other. Gulya withdrew a little way. Queen Shahrnavāz indicated the chair, and Malcolm sat down again.
“Your Majesty,” he began, spinning a yarn as Lyra would have done, “I have discovered many things about the broken instrument you asked me to repair. The first thing concerns the case, the only gold in it. Gold has a memory, as you know. As soon as I laid hands on it, the metal began to speak to me of the shape it had uncountable centuries ago, when it was torn from the ground and forged into the pure metal. It was made into a circlet for the head of a princess, and only later was it formed into a case for the broken instrument.”
“What became of the princess?” said the Queen. They were the first words she had spoken.
“She is alive now, and waiting for me to join her in the search for something even more valuable than gold.”
Shahrnavāz drew back her head a little, which seemed to signify incredulity, although her expression couldn’t change.
“This is the shape the gold remembered,” Malcolm went on, holding out the circlet. “I restored it according to the desires of the atoms it’s made of. Now, in this form, it’s almost satisfied, and all it desires is to encircle the head of the princess.”
“I have never heard of the memory of gold.”
“With respect, great Queen, you have heard of it now. It’s audible in the wavelengths of the musical tones it emits, and it’s visible in the penumbra between the darkness of pure shadow and the brilliance of reflected sunlight.”
“These things are not known to us.”
“When I first spoke to Prince Keshvād, outside Aleppo, I told him and his companions that I was not only gold of flesh but gold of knowledge. I’ve told you about the memory of gold: that is knowledge you did not have, and now you do. Gold also speaks to those who know how to hear.”
“What does it say?”
“You will learn to hear it, Queen Shahrnavāz, if you persevere. This gold tells me that there is more not very far away, uncountable quantities of gold, simply waiting for you to claim it; and it tells me that that gold wants more than anything else to adorn you and your palace.”
“Where is that gold? Who has it now?”
“A sorcerer called Sorush.”
And suddenly Queen Shahrnavāz threw back her head and screamed more loudly than he thought possible: Malcolm’s head rang, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Gulya stagger and flutter her wings in panic.
From where he was standing he could see the darkness of the corridor beyond the entrance to the audience hall, and in it eyes and eyes and more eyes, gryphons pressed together in fear and waiting for a signal to flee or to attack Malcolm and tear him to shreds.
But those eyes could see Malcolm’s eyes too. He didn’t frown, or narrow them or open them wide, or draw his brows together, but something happened to fill them with a terrifying force.
As they saw him look at them like that, the gryphons in the corridor, those eyes, turned away and vanished into the darkness.
The Queen shook her wings and moved her head from side to side, from high to low.
She was breathing deeply, but not in order to scream again.
She looked at Malcolm, drew her head back, and nodded slowly.
“That gold,” she said, “is out of reach. The sorcerer whose name you mentioned is beyond our power.”
“But not beyond mine,” said Malcolm. “The lady Gulya, who has become a stalwart friend to me, has her own reasons for wanting to deal with him, and I intend to help her. We are going to the forge of Sorush, in the Caucasus Mountains, where we shall make him lift the curse from Gulya, and transfer all his gold to you. I shall take this circlet to Princess Lyra, and then Gulya will fly us to the desert of Karamakan, where Princess Lyra’s imagination lies bound. ”
“And where is your companion, the daemon?”
“He has flown with Queen Tilda Vasara to Karamakan, to prepare the way for us.”
The Queen said nothing for several seconds. As before, she turned her head this way and that, looking into every corner of the great chamber and out over the terrace beyond to the snow-capped mountains and the serene blue sky.
“That seems to me impossible,” she said finally.
“Not to me,” Malcolm replied.
“What power do you have, that you know you can defeat Sorush?”
“I am an artificer from the realms of gold. You should not need to ask what power I have. I summoned the witch-queen Tilda Vasara—”
“She came because you summoned her? You did not say that.”
“Master Ruzbeh, I am sure, will know how we communicate with witches. I can tell you that her sisters are flying here as we speak, and will be here before very long. I have restored the true shape of the gold you asked me to work on, so that its form now expresses its nature, instead of being bound against it. I killed the thief and murderer Gerard Bonneville; I carried Princess Lyra safely through the great flood that ravaged our land; I arranged for the jeweler Tamaz Khuroshvili to be one of your servants, because I knew that his skill would be valuable in the struggle we are all engaged in. I have caused all these things to happen, and now I am going to defeat Sorush, with the help of my friend and your devoted subject, Gulya.”
“You know what he does? You know of his prisoners?”
“I have heard that he captured young gryphons and removed their wings so as to make them work as slaves. For that alone he deserves to die.”
“We cannot find a way to kill him,” said Shahrnavāz very quietly. “As I say, he is beyond our power.”
“But not beyond mine. I am going to make it possible for Gulya to kill him, and release herself from the spell, and free his captives. And in return for that, I want you to give me the gold circlet I made from the broken instrument, and an escort of gryphons to fly me and my companions to the desert of Karamakan.”
The Queen lowered her head in thought. Or perhaps, he thought, in sorrow.
But before she could respond there was a stir from the corridors beyond the audience hall, and murmurs of surprise and alarm. The vizier, trembling, thrust his way past the guards and hurried in to bow to the Queen.
She looked at him impatiently and snapped something in the language of the gryphons, and the vizier tried to reply, but it was Gulya who spoke first.
“Witches! Look! Here they are! Hundreds of them. And more and more—look—clouds of them…”
Gulya had flown out to the terrace, and Malcolm and the Queen moved there too, as did the vizier: no one, gryphon or human, could resist a sight like this.
Little gliding specks of black against the blue, each with a sort of flutter inside the glide, but all too far away yet to be seen individually; a swarm of bees, a murmuration of starlings—their presence commanded the sky, and more of them appeared every second from the north, making for the mountain palace of Damāvand, like a current in a great ocean.
And gryphon guards, seemingly caught by surprise, were hastening out to confront them—or escort them; cries and screams and shouts of challenge came from eagle throats and women’s throats alike, and might have signaled the start of a bloody war in the air; except that the leading gryphons were drawing themselves up into ranks almost like a guard of honor, vast wings beating to hold themselves stationary in the sky, while the first witches streamed towards them and confidently among them and between them, making for the terrace or parade ground where Malcolm and Pan had first set foot on Mount Damāvand.
“You have changed the nature of things,” the Queen said.
“Not changed it,” Malcolm replied, “but seen it differently.”
“Let us go and meet our visitors, then.”