Chapter Twenty-Three No, Impossible #2
She poured some oil into a wok and held it over the fire, rolling it round and round to spread the oil before settling it between two logs on the stovetop. She swept the chopped cabbage and onion off the cutting board and into the wok so that it hissed and flared.
“The thing you were making in the lab,” he said.
“Lab?”
“Where you made that, with the tank and…”
“With other things.”
“What were you making?”
At first he thought she hadn’t heard him. But their two daemons, the lemur and the desert fox, were crouching close by with their heads nearly touching. They weren’t talking, but they seemed to be communicating somehow. Cariad would tell him later.
Dilyara said, “I make telvision.”
“Telvision?”
“One time I saw telvision in a rich man house. Big box with glass front, and pictures. Like that.”
“Did your telvision work?”
She looked at him with disappointed contempt, and then turned back to the cooking.
She tossed the wok so that the vegetables jumped up and fell back, hissing, several times.
Then she pinched up some salt from a box and threw it over the food, and tossed it again once or twice, added some sauce from a bottle, and then tipped it out into two chipped enamel bowls.
She took chopsticks from a drawer and gave them to Strauss with one of the bowls, and then sat down herself, her shoulder turned away from him.
“Thank you,” he said. “Dilyara, I didn’t mean to make fun of you. I know it wasn’t a real television you were making. I just—”
She spoke swiftly, telling him that she was not a fool, that neither was she a barbarian to put things together without understanding them, that she had tried many times to attract lights and images to her tank, and not without success, after she had found the flasks of hard steam in the cold room, but she would say no more.
“Hard steam?” he said.
“Very cold.”
He tried to find the words for “dry ice,” but they wouldn’t come.
“Hard steam” would do. Was she making a cloud chamber?
He stole a glance at her as he ate. She was no doubt right to be offended by his silly question, but really he had half meant it: What had she seen? Lights and images, she’d said.
“Will you show me?” he said, after a minute.
“Not now. Maybe later.”
“Of course.”
“You stay here?”
“Not for long. Have all the staff gone?”
“Some dead. Others gone.”
“Who died?”
“I don’t know names. Chen know.”
He finished the little meal and drank more water.
“Thank you,” he said.
She made no response. He looked at her stocky frame, her hunched shoulders. She finished eating and rose to her feet, taking her bowl and his to the sink. He stood up and did the same.
“No more food,” she said.
“It was very good. Did you grow the vegetables here?”
“Some. Some from village.”
“Is there still a regular bus from the village?”
“Where you want to go?”
“Alma-Ata. Or Urumqi. A big city, anyway.”
“No. Buses all finish. Only camel.”
“I have to get to…” he said. He spread his hands helplessly.
She could see that he felt it was impossible.
“Why?” she said.
“I learned some things in the red building, and it’s very important that I tell the world.”
“Tell whole world?”
Now she was mocking him in payment for his silly question about her television. He nodded; he recognized that.
“Tell as many people as possible.”
“You could tell me,” she said.
That was a test, and he failed it. His expression immediately showed his doubt, and hers in reaction showed her disappointment.
Dilyara saw herself with his eyes: an ignorant peasant woman playing with equipment she would never understand, probably illiterate, fooling herself that she was learned and clever like the men and women who had worked here before the wind of God swept them away, whereas in truth she would never be like that no matter how long she lived. Thus, she believed, he saw her.
“I am part of world,” she said.
But her voice was quiet, because some strength had gone out of it.
He took a deep breath, and felt dizzy, and had to lean on the bench for a few moments till his balance returned.
“Dilyara, forgive me. I am more tired than I have ever been. I have seen things I could not have imagined, and I need days, weeks, to think about them and understand what they mean. But I have no time. As soon as possible I must find a way to go back to the people who sent me here, back to Brytain, and tell them what I have seen, and what they must do, what we must all do, as a result. It is desperately important. I thank you for sheltering me, and for giving me food and drink. I am full of gratitude to you, and of wonder at what you have done here at the station, and I would like to talk to you about everything, and to listen as you tell me what you have discovered. But I must sleep before everything else, and then I must go. I apologize for my failure of courtesy. Again, please forgive me.”
That was what he would have liked to say, but he was not sure, as he finished speaking, whether he had really said it. His command of Chen’s language was nothing like so extensive. He said as much as he could manage.
But Dilyara was moved by the sincerity of his tone as well as his desperate exhaustion. She stood and bowed, and then beckoned to him to follow her into a small room where there were cushions and blankets, and where he could be private as he probably wanted to. He lay down to sleep at once.
—
Lyra said, “No, impossible. No.”
She sat on the hatch cover of the little fishing boat as it bobbed and swayed its way over the water.
The sunlight, splintered into a thousand shards, dashed itself against her eyes.
Ionides leaned on the rail nearby, and Leila Pervani sat close to her; it wasn’t a very large hatch.
Lyra could smell her perfume, something rich and faint and subtle.
“Lyra, it’s true,” said Leila. “You are the girl he preached about, the renegade. Marcel Delamare is your uncle.”
Lyra looked desperately at Asta, but the daemon said, “I’m sorry, Lyra. It’s true. Malcolm and I heard it from Olivier Bonneville.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“It never occurred to either of us that you wouldn’t know already.”
“It is true, Miss Silver,” said Ionides.
“You never met him? You never heard of him?” said Leila.
“Never in my life,” said Lyra as firmly as she could manage. “I thought at one time that my mother had relatives, maybe even a brother, but I was taken away when I was too young to remember anything. And now you tell me he’s the…The what? President of something?”
“President of the Magisterial High Council. The first single leader the Magisterium has had for several centuries. He is a very clever political operator. I met him once. A man willing to do anything, cheat and lie and betray, and continue to seem mild and courteous and beyond suspicion. Exceptionally dangerous.”
“And this speech…”
“A sermon in the cathedral at Geneva. His declaration of war. Everyone knew that was coming, but no one expected the revelation about a family and a niece who is now a terrorist and a fugitive from justice. There are pictures of you in every newspaper in the world.”
“Where did they get those from?”
“Probably they made them up. They don’t look like you, not very much.”
“And there is a reward,” said Ionides.
“How much am I worth?”
“Half a million dollars.”
“Only half,” she said shakily. “Hardly worth the trouble.”
“But the other thing he spoke about—” said Leila. “You know anything about that?”
“Tell me again. Remember, I haven’t been able to follow the news very closely.”
“These holes in the world. Something like that. Openings into other places.”
“Well, I do know a little about those…But how did he come to know about them?”
“Didn’t say,” said Leila. “But he’s found the perfect thing to scare people with. Secret openings that enemies can come through—or disease, or contamination, or evil spirits, any nonsense. It’s ideal for him.”
“Miss Silver, what you know about these things?” said Ionides.
“Well, I’ll tell you, but you’ll have to believe me. It sounds implausible. No, it sounds impossible. But it’s true…”
The little boat chugged on, out onto the wide Caspian Sea, and Lyra told them everything she knew about the windows between the worlds.
It took longer than she thought it would, and partway through she had to ask for some water, because her throat was dry; and the sun was hotter on her head now, because a lot of time had gone by and it was higher in the sky.
Leila and Ionides listened to everything in silence.
“Well, there it is,” she said at last after telling them how Will had closed the last window in the Botanic Garden in Oxford, and with it the way between them forever.
She had to stop then and swallow hard. Besides, her eyes were brimming over. No doubt it was the sun.
“Anyway,” she said softly.
Leila leaned across and embraced her, and Lyra wept on her shoulder without holding back.
Asta too had been listening closely. It was the first time she had heard all this, and Lyra knew the daemon would tell it all to Malcolm when they were together again, so she had a sense that Malcolm himself was there with them, invisibly, and what she said was partly for him.
Ionides went to the wheelhouse and spoke to the other man. After a moment or two Lyra felt the movement of the boat change as the sailor turned the wheel to port. She pulled away from the woman’s embrace and mopped her eyes, breathing deeply, looking around.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“A little further along the coast. It was time to leave Baku, before the riots became organized and word began to spread about the search for you. Best if we stay out of big towns.”
“Yes, I understand, but I want to cross the sea and get to the Karamakan desert. It’s urgent…
Oh, my head is so full of…” She pressed her hands to her temples.
“I’ve got to get to that building in the desert because I think there’s one of those openings there.
A window to another world, where they grow the special roses that help people see Dust. It’s guarded by warriors…
It’s in a red building. And all the time this man, this Delamare—oh!
I’ve just seen how it might be true after all, him being my uncle. ”
“Why?”
“Because my mother’s name, her maiden name, before she married Edward Coulter, was Van Zee. Or Van der Zee. Same thing as de la mer.”
“So it is.”
“All these things to know, all these facts lying around me, and I knew none of them. I feel so stupid sometimes.”
“But now you know that fact about him. He is your uncle.”
“And he wants to kill me.”
“He doesn’t say that. From what he says, he wants to find you and protect you.”
“You believe that, do you?”
“Of course not. He would kill you at once if he could. But he doesn’t say that. His talk is all of saving you, rescuing you from the evil powers. But listen, Lyra: What will you do when you find this place in the desert, this opening to the world of the roses?”
“Defend it,” Lyra said. “Die defending it.”