Chapter Thirty He Is Younger than You Are #2
The point had broken. Malcolm offered her his knife.
“Can you do it?” she said.
He took it and she watched his deft movements as the shavings of cedarwood and grains of graphite fell away. The pencil was perfectly sharp in seconds.
“Don’t you like using a knife?” he said.
“My hand hurts. Thank you.”
She began to write:
Dear Mr. Ionides, thank you for this message. I think you are very dishonest for stealing the lodestone, but I’m glad you did. You don’t say where you are now. We are on the southern edge—she checked with Malcolm—of the Tien Shan mountains. Where are you? How are you traveling?
We want to know more about this other enemy. Who are they? What do they want? Tell us all you know.
She stopped there. She wanted to tell him about that other thing, the alkahest, the universal solvent: Was that the third enemy, in some way? But it was hard to sum up. Instead, she went on:
Today we survived an attack from the ogabgorgs—don’t know how to spell it—the witches tricked them into destroying themselves. The main army of the Magisterium is further north. We are safe but need more information now.
With my greetings, Tatiana R
She thought that was how queens signed themselves.
“Tatiana?” said Malcolm.
“I was Tatiana Iorekova, the queen of…I forget where. Novaya Zemlya, that’s it. He was my personal magician, my sorcier particulier. That was to get the audience with Mustafa Bey.”
“Perhaps it was this third enemy who killed Bey,” said Asta. “Have you heard of a third enemy before?”
“No. They’ve come out of nowhere.”
“Ionides thinks they might already be in control of the research station,” said Malcolm. “But look, Gulya’s coming. Perhaps it’s time to leave.”
The gryphon landed close by. The beating of her wings set up powerful eddies in the air and blew Lyra’s hair across her face as well as ruffling Asta’s fur. Gulya was still not used to managing her new size and power, but she clearly delighted in it.
“If we leave now,” she said, “we could arrive at the Tashbulak station by sunset.”
An idea occurred to Lyra. It came out of nowhere, but it had been generated by the report from Tilda as well as the message from Ionides.
“Gulya,” she said, “you know that my daemon, Pan, went ahead with Tilda Vasara?”
“Indeed. And she has come back without him.”
“Well, I want to do the same thing. Go ahead. But I want to go directly to the red building.”
“Lyra, why?” said Malcolm. It sounded like a genuine inquiry, not like the beginning of a reproof.
“Because Pan’s in danger. I don’t want him to go into the red building before I do. Just a feeling I have. Will you fly us there, Gulya?”
“Yes. But only if Prince Keshvād agrees.”
“Of course.”
Without hesitation Gulya stretched out her wings and sprang into the air, wheeling high and then gliding down swiftly towards the prince.
“Lyra,” said Malcolm again. “Why?”
“This third enemy. I’m frightened by what he says—Ionides, I mean. Frightened for Pan, and frightened for all of us. You will come, won’t you?”
“As if I’d ever do anything else.”
She looked at him. His eyes were clear again and as blue as the sky, and he seemed to be made of sky things altogether: air and sunlight.
She felt a little burst of joyful laughter, to think that someone like this was on her side, and then she saw Gulya spring up from the ground and sweep through the air back towards them.
Malcolm stood and gathered his coat and rucksack, and Lyra stood beside him.
Gulya landed with such a beating of her wings that Lyra was nearly buffeted off balance, and knocked into Malcolm. He caught her deftly.
“Gulya,” Lyra said, “who are the enemies the gryphons think are the most dangerous?”
Gulya said, “We fear no enemies.”
“I know you are fearless. But which enemy could do the most damage to the world?”
“One we can’t even see. One we don’t suspect for a moment. One we ignore. I can’t tell you who they are, because it’s in their nature to be invisible and unsuspected.”
“Do gryphons have stories about the end of the world?”
“We have stories about everything, but not that.”
Lyra nodded and put back the things she’d taken out of her rucksack, with the lodestone on top. Malcolm put on his big coat, and with Asta on his shoulders, he climbed up on Gulya’s back and helped Lyra up after him.
“Ready?” said the gryphon, and raised her wings. A few moments later they were in the air on the last leg of the journey to the red building.
—
As twilight fell, Pan ventured down the hillside towards the village and the research station beyond it, moving quickly, keeping close to the ground. Twilight was better than full darkness for hiding in, but the trouble was that it didn’t last.
He stopped several times to listen and to smell the air.
He heard all the sounds he would have expected from a small village at dusk; voices, the crackle of flames, goat bells ringing occasionally as the animals moved around in their enclosure.
Someone was intoning a prayer inside one of the houses; children were squabbling; men were laughing.
He caught the smells of wood smoke, of grilling meat, of dung, of grass, and beyond them all, the bare and empty scent of the desert.
A dog barked, and another took it up. Pan knew they had smelled him, but he ignored them and kept on through the tough grass towards the ruined station.
The moon would help when it rose, but it was now almost fully dark. Pan’s night-vision was good, though, and the shattered buildings and broken windows of the station lay fully open and clear.
He explored all around the buildings, noticing every slight glow from inside, counting the seven vehicles parked behind it, listening to every faint sound that reached him.
From the village side there was little sign of occupation, but from the desert side half a dozen windows—or the spaces where windows had been—were lit, and three or four people were moving about inside the place.
The vehicles parked outside were mainly the kind used for cargo or building materials. One had the brandmark of Thuringia Potash on the side; the others had different symbols, and names in languages that Pan didn’t recognize. They were all covered in the dust of hundreds of miles’ travel.
Oh, Lyra, he thought. I can’t go much longer without you to talk to. And to fall asleep with. I’m weaker than I used to be and this is all frightening and I’m so tired of being alone…
He couldn’t even think much more than that.
He stood still under one of the trucks and listened.
If he concentrated, he could hear the sound of small burrowing creatures under the sand; and some kind of insect like a cricket was scraping away monotonously nearby; and there was the sound of an anbaric generator, no doubt the one that was powering the lights in the building, running on a naphtha engine; and the human voices that came from the nearest rooms in the building as people went past the broken windows.
A woman, or two women, and maybe three or four men.
They spoke in different languages, but also in English, as if that was the one they had in common.
He couldn’t hear enough of that to be sure what they were talking about, though he recognized some words like generator, logistics, hydrocarbon.
These people must be experts from somewhere, planning to restore the research station, but that wasn’t hard to guess. Lyra could have imagined that herself.
He caught himself thinking that, and felt a pang of guilt. He’d set off full of self-importance to find the imagination he said she lacked, and now here he was, remarking to himself that she—
His skin bristled. A little shape was creeping out of an open window. It might have been a monkey, but it was moving too slowly; or a reptile, but there was something simian about it; but the main point was simpler than either of those. It was a daemon. It was impossible to mistake.
Alone too. So a separated daemon, whose person might be anyone, anywhere.
The daemon stayed for a moment, silhouetted against the light from the room behind, and Pan saw that she (no doubt about that either) was a lemur, and small, and emaciated. She looked unwell.
Moving very carefully, she climbed down a drainpipe to the ground, and at once almost disappeared into the shadows.
But Pan could see her movements as she crept along the base of the wall, her claws not well adapted to walking on the ground, and began to follow her.
She was intent on something, and he was intent on finding out what it was.
He slipped out from under the truck. There was a luminous quality in the air already, as well as the light from the building.
He padded swiftly across the sandy ground and stopped under the shadow of a large metal tank.
He could still see her a little way ahead, but then she reached the corner of the building and turned out of sight.
He darted forward, hoping the voices from the open window would cover the slight sound of his feet.
Two men talking freely now, in Chinese, possibly; not arguing, but discussing something energetically.
A glass clinked on a bottle. Pan slowed down as he reached the corner, and stopped, and listened hard.
No sound of daemon feet on sand, and he’d see nothing unless he looked around the corner; so he very carefully did.
Instantly something slashed at his face.
He sprang back and found his balance, and then darted out past the corner and turned to see her.
She hissed and snarled and leapt at him, furious and terrified, and in a moment they were tumbling over, biting, shaking, scratching, but he was stronger than she was; and in little more than a moment he had her pinned beneath him with his teeth in her throat. They both fell still.