Chapter Twenty-Four The Death of Sorush #2
The prince landed securely, and in a moment Malcolm had leapt down from his back. He looked up to speak to the gryphon.
“Prince,” he shouted above the roar of the fires and the howling wind, “I owe you a great debt. The boat just making for the jetty holds some friends of mine. Please let them ashore.”
Prince Keshvād bent his great eagle head low to say something in response, and Malcolm heard the words, “If you let Gulya die, I will kill you and all your friends.”
Malcolm looked him in the eye and nodded.
The little gryphon had managed to land on the jetty, but she was a scrap of paper in the wind compared to the power and size of the prince.
Her claws were scrabbling for purchase on the slippery boards.
Malcolm bent to scoop her up, and for a moment she fought, twisting to look past his shoulder and up at the prince, but then she fell still, and Malcolm saw something pass between the two gryphons like a charge of anbaric power, and understood at once.
She loved Keshvād, but could expect nothing in return; and the prince loved Gulya, but would never be able to express it.
It was only the fraction of a single heartbeat, and he saw it all at once.
He set her down among the rocks where the wind couldn’t catch her.
The remains of a little harbor surrounded the jetty: a fragment of stone wall, a shattered wooden building or two, a path that seemed to lead up towards the mountain in one direction, and across to the lighthouse in the other. Malcolm looked up: flames everywhere, scorching his face.
Then he heard a cry from the sea: “Malcolm! Malcolm!”
Malcolm turned to see the little boat, low in the water, wallowing clumsily as the engine battled to keep the screw turning.
They were only a hundred yards or so from the jetty, and in the light of the flaring mountain behind him Malcolm ran to the end of the shaky platform and clung to the furthest white post, holding on fiercely and calling Lyra’s name through the buffeting wind.
Every time the boat thudded down into a trough between the waves, it seemed less able to rise up again.
Malcolm could hear the straining engine, and thought they should ease back on the throttle, or risk burning it out; but if they lost headway in the swirling mass of water they’d be swept away from the jetty in a moment.
They had to keep going forward, no matter that for half the time the propeller was screaming into the empty air.
Malcolm ran from post to post, shaking them all, feeling for one that was a little more steady than the rest, and peering wide-eyed through the rain and wind.
Everything on the sea was lit up by the fires from the mountains; in their lurid glare he could see Lyra, and Asta too; his daemon was close to her, clinging tightly to the rail and reaching forward for the jetty, but still too far off—and then a man moved her aside and held up a coil of rope, and Malcolm nodded and stood ready to receive it.
The man with the rope was Ionides. He saw Malcolm, and nodded too.
They both knew there’d be only one chance. The boat was tossing and swaying, lurching and falling, and there was no pattern, nothing to guide them except the sense of the right moment; and it came, and Ionides swung his arm hard and the rope flew to Malcolm’s hand and he gathered it in.
A few swift movements without the intervention of thought, and a clove hitch secured the boat to the post. Now it wouldn’t drift away, and they could work at moving it alongside the jetty and securing the stern.
More screaming from the engine, more thrashing from the propeller, and little by little the boat swung round, battling every heave and surge from the waves.
Ionides ran to the stern and took up another rope, and they waited, both of them, watching and judging, while Lyra clung to the rail and someone in the wheelhouse controlled the engine and the rudder.
Then the lurching sea paused again, and up swung the coil, and this time Malcolm braced his feet and hauled on the rope as soon as it was in his hands, straining to pull all the weight of the boat round and bring the side against the jetty.
Little by little he got it closer, and then slung the rope over the nearest post and hitched it tight.
The jetty was more or less level with the deck of the boat, but the pitching and plunging made it a hazardous jump. First to try it was Asta, and Malcolm snatched her out of the air and set her down on the slippery planks. “Go to the rocks,” he said, and she darted away.
Lyra was adjusting the rucksack on her back, trying to find her balance, and then she was ready.
“Ready…Now!” he shouted, and Lyra sprang with all her strength across the gap.
He would have caught her if she’d fallen ten thousand feet; into his arms, as light as a wraith, strong and frail both at once.
She clung to him, and he pressed her to his heart and kissed her head without thinking, and then said, “Run to the shore.”
She ran after Asta. Next came a woman Malcolm didn’t know: his own age, it seemed, slender, athletic, possibly Persian or Kurdish; Ionides had to urge her to the rail before she was willing to jump, but she readied herself and made the leap without difficulty.
Then the last two: first a man who came out of the wheelhouse, a burly fisherman by the look of him, balancing well on the lurching deck, and grasping Malcolm’s hand across the gap; and finally Ionides.
Malcolm could see that he was not convinced, and in truth the boat was wallowing lower and more sluggishly, and the water was sweeping across the deck.
Another few moments and it would be too low for him to reach the jetty.
“Jump, man!” Malcolm roared, and up he sprang, and Malcolm seized his arm and dragged him off the sinking vessel and over the edge of the jetty.
Seeing that Ionides was safe, Malcolm ran back to the rocks.
Asta crouched tensely and, as soon as he was close enough, hurtled up into his arms, pressing herself hard against his beating heart.
Lyra stood close by, soaking wet, shivering, but her face was lively with joy.
The fisherman was looking after his own daemon, a small white bird, and the woman sat calmly, watching everything.
“I’m Malcolm Polstead,” Malcolm said. “Who are you?”
“Leila Pervani,” she said.
“You a friend of Ionides?”
“Yes. And of Lyra.”
“Good. And you?” he said to the sailor.
“Yusif,” he said uncertainly, looking at the woman. Seeing her nod, he said it again.
The sailor had seen the great form of Prince Keshvād a little further up the rocks, crouching impassively in the light of the flaring mountain, and was clearly apprehensive.
Malcolm looked up. The blazing caverns gave off not only light but sound and heat. A roar blasted their ears that was part subterranean and part tempest, both air and fire, while the heat scorched their faces when they gazed upwards.
He was aware of someone beside him, and turned to see Ionides.
“That gryphon your friend?” he said. “The big one.”
“For the moment. He is Prince Keshvād. The little one is Gulya. Now we have to find the cave of a sorcerer, but…”
“Up there? Which one?”
“Hard to tell.”
“Miss Silver will know.”
His expression, vivid in the glare, was full of mischief and confidence. Malcolm remembered the morning they’d met, under the orange tree at the embassy house in Aleppo, and the impression Ionides had made on him then.
“You came all this way with Lyra?”
“Every step. She save my life, I save hers when necessary.”
“And the woman?”
“You want to find the right cave or not?”
Malcolm smiled briefly. He turned to Lyra.
She had gone to sit on a rock, clutching her rucksack.
As she looked up at him, Malcolm found he could barely stand for the beating of his heart.
He felt that the two of them might have been the only focus of consciousness in the world, so fiercely were they intent on each other.
He crouched down beside her. “Lyra, I have to go with the little gryphon to the cave of a sorcerer, who put a spell on her years ago. She will fight him, and she means to kill him. But he’s concealed his cave by setting the whole mountain aflame. Ionides says—”
“Whatever he says, it’s true. Mostly. He said I’ll know the right cave?”
“Yes. Is that true?”
“It’s true,” said Asta, who’d been listening close by.
Lyra was feeling in her battered rucksack. “That alethiometer,” she said, “the one you were mending—it was mine, and here’s the glass.”
She passed it to him, making sure his hand was securely around it before letting it go.
It wasn’t easy to see; the rain was still dashing against his eyes, and the glare of the fires showed him only a disc of glass running with water and glistening with inconstant yellow and orange and red and white flares of brilliance.
“But—” he said.
“There’s something special about it, I don’t know, the shape or the kind of glass, something. Try to…”
He held it up to his eye, unconvinced, and tried to look through it at the mountain.
All he saw at first was a blur of flame.
He wiped the rain from his eyes and looked again, and saw the flank of the mountain more clearly.
He didn’t know what he was looking for: the cave and the forge of the sorcerer, of course, but how would he recognize that?
He scanned up and down, left and right, and took the lens away from his eye to look without it: Was there any difference?
“I can’t—” he began to say, and then all the other things his body was feeling began to remind him of themselves: the bitter cold, the unsteady rocks underfoot, the drenching rain.
He held the glass to his eye again.
Something was different about that patch, just below the southern flank—
Yes. It was.
“Seen it?” Lyra said.
Alone among the crevices gushing flame, this one glowed with a steady light. A figure—male—stood in the entrance, looking down—