Chapter Twenty-Four The Death of Sorush #4
She did. The flask was made of some kind of metal, with a top that screwed open in the normal way.
She’d need two hands for that. The bag of dust was about the size of Malcolm’s two fists together, and held shut with two leather cords.
She’d need both hands for that too. She then felt for the stone.
It was rough and round, and no bigger than a small apple.
“He’s hiding behind a mirror,” Malcolm said.
“When you look into it, you’ll see yourself, but yourself as he wants to see you.
Take no notice of it, and be ready to hand me the flask—take the top off first—and then the bellows, and then open the bag of dust and hold that up too. The stone I’ll take now.”
She put it in his hand. And the purpose of all this, she reminded herself, was to get her one step nearer Karamakan and the building in the desert, and to find Pan and the secret of her imagination. That truth lay like a diamond in her heart.
And then they moved around the buttress, and there it was: the cavern, the forge, the stronghold of Sorush. A cleft in the mountainside, and in it a blaze of light and fire, and the sorcerer himself standing in the entrance—invisible behind his mirror.
Lyra had to stop and shake her head. Her eyes were dazzled, not just by the glare of the fires but by the splintering confusion of the images in the mirror.
Malcolm was beside her, and she saw him in the mirror: it showed a strutting popinjay, vain, conceited, but self-pitying, mewling, sneering.
She saw herself in the mirror too: a simpering courtesan, painted and half-naked, but diseased, with great sores leaking slime and pus.
Her form and Malcolm’s were iridescent with the light from the forge, glittering like poison beetles.
Asta felt sick at the sight of them both.
“Don’t look at him,” said Malcolm, and crouched to open his bag. “Look here instead, and get ready to hand me the flask.”
As Lyra unscrewed the top of the flask, Malcolm stood up and flung the stone directly at his own reflection in Sorush’s looking glass. The mirror shattered and fell to the floor of the cave, and all the reflections vanished. There was nothing behind it.
Nothing there at all. But Malcolm was prepared, and so was Lyra. She held up the flask, and he took it and flung the water at the nothing. Then he thrust the spout of the bellows into the bag of ground pumice that Lyra was now holding open, and spread the handles wide, sucking up the dust.
Then he pointed the bellows at the nothing and worked the handles so that the dust blew out and stuck to the soaked magician and revealed him standing there, a small man twitching and furtive and naked, and seemingly made of pumice.
And at the same moment the light changed. The glow of the flames seemed to withdraw, just a little way, and into the cave from the night sky above came a ray of moonlight. The witches had moved the clouds aside, and the full moon blazed in the bare sky.
The sorcerer cried out in fear, and tried to cover himself with pieces of the broken mirror, holding up shards of the shattered glass in front of his face, his genitals, his belly.
Gulya had better move quickly, Lyra thought, and so she did: she darted between her and Malcolm and swung her head to fling something out of her beak, and it glittered in the moonlight as it fell at the sorcerer’s feet: the silver amulet.
Sorush screamed, and stumbled back. The ground pumice was falling away as the water dried on his body: already only parts of him were visible.
Hurry, Lyra thought, he’ll disappear again—
And Gulya half leapt, half flew against the sorcerer, claws out, and tore at him and bore him to the ground.
Immediately the pair of them were covered in a cloud of burning, scorching sparks: the koruskati, swarming to the defense of their master.
Through the flickering confusion Lyra could see them stinging the little gryphon, plunging through her fur and her feathers, and she shook them off again and again—until they seemed to decide all at once to make for her eyes, and she had to pull away and shake her head, but still they clung and burrowed.
Lyra couldn’t help it: she ran to her and knocked the little sparks away, stamping them into the rock, never minding how they burned her feet.
Sorush was beginning to scramble away, and Malcolm saw it and sucked the last of the pumice into the bellows before blasting it straight at the sorcerer’s face.
Lyra heard cries from somewhere further inside the cavern, eagle screams, and then Sorush was on his feet again and Gulya launched herself at him once more.
This strange contest had rules, Malcolm knew; he could help, but not fight, or the curse on Gulya would never be lifted. Only she could kill Sorush, and only killing him would work.
But Lyra and Malcolm had been joined now by Tuuli Latvala. The witch’s companions remained in the sky, holding the clouds back and clearing the way for the moon to shine, but the witch herself was standing beside Malcolm and watching intently as the fight went on.
Sorush was trying to draw Gulya further back into the cavern, and again the little gryphon was surrounded by a cloud of the blazing koruskati, biting and stinging and piercing her fur and scorching her feathers.
If they did too much damage she’d never fly again, and Asta longed with all her being to plunge in beside her and tear at the sorcerer’s flesh with her own claws.
Then Sorush screamed, and in response came a lick of huge flame from inside the cave, breaking against the rocky roof and spreading out and downwards before disappearing.
Tuuli Latvala beat at it with her cloud-pine, but Lyra, thinking of the fire-loving pitch in the vessels of the wood, thought, Don’t, don’t…
And indeed the cloud-pine caught, and Tuuli Latvala had to attend to that, or lose her own power of flight.
Meanwhile, Malcolm too had to hold himself back, because like Lyra he was fearing for Gulya’s life now, and they both felt she’d taken on too much, they’d gone too far. Another mighty banner of flame swept out from the depths and enveloped both combatants in its folds.
But there was Lyra.
Malcolm blinked and shook his head, but yes, it was her, standing in the entrance to the cave, and she was holding up the glass from the alethiometer and focusing the moonlight—
Against the incandescent glare of the forge and the angry sparkling of the myriad koruskati, the little beam of moonlight was all but invisible.
Nevertheless it fell on Sorush’s arm, and he twisted away in shock, and Gulya saw her chance and flung herself up again, with wings and claws that must be exhausted, Malcolm thought, and gripped the sorcerer’s head in her jaws.
The flames from the forge tried to surge out again, as if they were obeying Sorush’s will, but they didn’t reach as far as they had a few moments before. The volcanic roaring was weaker now, and the thudding of the great hammers was slowing down and sounding uncertain.
Malcolm, and Lyra too, and Tuuli Latvala for that matter, could all see something that had been invisible till then: the cords of djinn-fire binding the body of Gulya tight.
She was fighting to loosen them as well as defeat the sorcerer, and Malcolm thought that unless she got them loose, she would never beat him.
But unless she beat him, she would never get them loose, he thought at the same time; and he wanted with a passion to leap at the combatants and hold the sorcerer back while Lyra tore at the spell-bindings and freed her.
More and more parts of Sorush were becoming hard to see as the pumice dust dried and fell away from his flesh, but there was no more water and no more dust, and as for the moonlight, the sorcerer had moved little by little towards the side of the cave, away from the entrance, where the moonlight lay—the only place where Lyra’s glass could work.
Sorush was scrabbling, grabbing, reaching out to get hold of one of Gulya’s wings and break it.
And she was writhing and twisting away from his deadly hands, and then she managed to snap her beak shut on his right wrist and wrench it back and forth, working at the bones till they cracked, twisting the tendons, ripping open the arteries till her face and the whole of the sorcerer’s arm were covered in his blood.
He was screaming and tearing with his left hand at her wings, her neck, her lion feet, at whatever he could grasp, but he was weakening, and—Malcolm had to say it to himself before he could believe it—Gulya was stronger; she had shaken off the binding spell-cords.
The clouds of sparking, stinging koruskati were falling away too, and then Gulya dug her lion feet into the sorcerer’s belly and surged upwards to his throat, and despite every effort he could make with his one working hand, she plunged her beak in just under his jaw and tore and tore away at the flesh till the koruskati were scattered by the blood spray, till the whole cavern was echoing with the hideous rasping of breath through his open throat, till Sorush fell twisting, writhing, kicking, twitching, flailing, and helpless as the life drained out of him.
Finally Gulya struggled to get up and off his body and away, and lay panting and wounded on the rocky floor.
Lyra ran to the little gryphon, caressing her head, cleaning away the sorcerer’s blood, whispering words of praise and encouragement.
And Tuuli Latvala was kneeling beside her and opening a little horn box of bloodmoss ointment, and Malcolm and Asta were making their way deeper into the cave, where they smashed down the crystal walls holding back the imprisoned gryphons, slaves no more but flightless and wounded still, who came hobbling and limping and crawling out to see the wonder of their delivery, to marvel at the body of Sorush, entirely visible now, ragged and filthy and torn asunder.
“Outside,” said Gulya, and her voice was deeper now, assured and commanding. She was growing larger as they looked: commanding, majestic.
Asta said quietly to Lyra, “And all that time she was young against her will!”
Tuuli Latvala gave her little box of bloodmoss ointment to Malcolm for safekeeping, and with a long witch-scream of triumph she flew up to join her companions, still holding back the clouds.
The whole mountainside was bathed in moonlight; the twisted rocky path, the great buttress hiding the cavern, all the way down to the shoreline, where the waves still crashed against the jetty and the landing place.
Lyra could see the little group of figures all the way down there, all standing and peering up, it seemed, though she couldn’t distinguish one from another; and then the great form of the gryphon prince moved away from them and raised his head, and she was astonished at the immensity of him, the sail-broad extent of his wings as they beat again and again so that he soared up and over the lighthouse and still upwards, towards the cavern of the dead sorcerer and the gryphon, small no longer, whom he loved.
But while the others were watching Prince Keshvād, Malcolm saw another boat, a little way out still, but making directly for the jetty and the landing place.