Chapter Thirty-One Merchant People #2
Pan had seen enough. He wanted to find Cariad, and he wanted to talk to Strauss, and he wanted to think about what he’d seen and heard; and most of all he wanted to talk to Lyra.
No, not just that: he wanted to press himself against her, to feel her heart beating, to cherish the warmth of her blood beneath her skin.
Above all, he feared seeing her like the woman with the cardigan, completely indifferent to her daemon, to him.
How could he bear it? How could she? He wanted to warn her. Something was wrong here.
He crept away from the lighted room. Cariad was nowhere to be seen. Pan was too disturbed to look for her; all he wanted to do was hide. He curled up to sleep under a staircase.
—
Pan woke up to the thunder of banging on doors and of stamping feet. His hiding place under the stairs was safe for the moment, but probably not for long; he crept as far as he could into the shadows and watched as the feet came closer.
Soldiers’ feet, in boots, sand-colored camouflage uniforms. Shouts in French and German, and in Tajik, and in English too: “Come out! Show yourselves! Armed military!”
A door opened cautiously. From where Pan was crouching he could see a woman who might have been the cleaner Dilyara looking out, full of fear; then she withdrew and closed the door silently.
He cursed: if he’d had his wits about him, he would have darted in.
Cariad must be in there with her and Strauss.
They could have discussed what to do. Now the soldiers were moving along the corridor, banging on all the doors with the butts of their rifles and shouting.
Another of the doors opened, but not cautiously, nor in anger. The woman who came out was the older of the two women he’d heard talking during the night, the one who’d picked up her daemon so casually. She was dressed in a khaki shirt and slacks, and her hair was neatly styled.
“Who are you?” she said in French to the soldier who’d been about to slam his rifle into her door.
“Magisterium. Come out.”
“No, I don’t want to. I shall stay here till I’m ready. Who is your commanding officer?”
“Not your business. Do as we tell you.”
Pan was impressed by her calm confidence. The soldiers seemed unable to speak in less than a shout; her voice was just as it had been in the coffee room, the tone conversational, the manner formal.
“No. I need an explanation of who you are and why you’re here. But you are a sergeant, and I want to speak to an officer.”
She stood with arms folded and without a flicker of doubt in her expression. The sergeant had been joined by two others, who were clearly expecting him to dominate her, and now seemed a little disconcerted to find that he couldn’t. One of them looked at him inquiringly.
“I’m not going to stand here arguing with you,” the sergeant said in a tone that tried to be menacing.
“Good. As soon as you move out of the way I can go about my work.”
“What work?”
“Business. Development banking.”
He was disconcerted. “Where’s your boss?” he demanded, after a pause that was a little too long.
“I’m the boss.”
“Go and report to Captain Schalken. He’s the officer in charge.”
“Report to him? I think he will report to me.”
The sergeant’s daemon, a terrier with docked ears and tail, had been growling almost silently, crouching behind his legs; now she uttered a short angry bark.
The sergeant put down a hand to calm her.
The woman took no notice, but continued to look him directly in the eyes.
Pan thought of her daemon, limp in the bag she held over her shoulder, perhaps asleep, or paralyzed, or dead…
No, this woman was afraid of nothing, and the sergeant knew it.
He moved aside without a word, and let her pass calmly down the corridor.
He turned to the other two soldiers and snapped, “Come on, get on with it.”
They moved stolidly along the corridor, knocking on doors, shouting for their occupants to come out and identify themselves. No one did, and soon the soldiers had gone around the corner and out of sight.
Pan ran from the shelter of the stairs and scratched hard at Dilyara’s door. He heard voices, and after a moment the door opened cautiously. He darted through before the woman could shut it.
“Cariad?” he said softly.
“No! Go away!” came her reply.
Dilyara stood holding the door, puzzled.
Cariad lay on the heap of blankets in the corner, next to a man who seemed almost dead from exhaustion and hunger.
Cariad was clinging to his neck. Dilyara shut the door and came to stand next to the man protectively.
Her own daemon was sitting by her ankles, trembling.
“Cariad,” whispered the man. “Don’t be frightened, now.”
“Who is this daemon?” said Dilyara.
“My name is Pan,” he said, keeping his voice as calm and quiet as he could. “My person is on her way here. Cariad, tell them what I told you last night. I want to know what’s inside the red building.”
“Where have you come from?” said the man. His voice was dry and faint.
“Brytain. Oxford. Cariad will tell you. You’ve been inside the red building, and I want to know what you found there.”
Dilyara sat down on the floor and helped the man to sit up a little. She took his hand and he clung to her tightly.
“Don’t go there,” he said. “It’s a terrible place. There’s a sickness there, a plague of some kind. Everyone who goes there gets infected. We shall die soon. I came out so I could tell the world about it. But now I think I shall never leave Tashbulak.”
“It wasn’t always like that, was it, that other world?” said Pan.
“Didn’t know then. Just know now. It’s a different place from anything I…Tell your person she must never go there and she must tell this world, here, our world, about the plague. The only safe thing is to stay away.”
“The plague—is it just in the red building, or everywhere?”
“You wouldn’t under—”
His voice gave out, and he started to cough, a dry rasping cough that seemed to tear the surface from his lungs. Cariad was weeping. Dilyara brushed the damp hair away from his face.
“Don’t strain…” Pan said helplessly. He felt there was nothing he could do; the woman’s little fox daemon was already comforting Cariad. “But anything you can tell me…”
Dilyara said, “Dr. Bryn too tired. You leave him now.”
“How long has Dr…. Bryn been here? When did he come back?”
“Three days.”
She turned to Strauss, whose cough had diminished into a shallow scraping breath, and stroked his forehead. His eyes were closed. She murmured something in her own language, and he managed to nod.
Pan said, “Cariad…Can I speak to you?”
The daemon said, “Leave us! Go away! It’s not good, it’s not good at all—you’re making everything worse—please just go away!”
“I want to protect my person. She’s coming to meet me. If she goes into the red building—”
“Don’t let her!”
“What will happen?”
“She will be like Brynmor.”
“So the disease—whatever it is—affects people but not daemons?”
“Both. Differently, maybe. You think I’m not affected?”
“No,” he said, “no, no—I’m just confused. I’m sorry. I beg your pardon, all of you. I’m just trying to understand. But I’ll leave you now.”
Cariad went to Strauss’s head and began to stroke his damp hair, glaring at Pan all the time.
Dilyara watched him inscrutably. Then she said, “You. Daemon. What your name?”
“Pan.”
“Pan, you come with me. I show you true thing.”
Brynmor nodded faintly. Cariad was as surprised as Pan, but then Dilyara got to her feet. There was a steady kind of dignity in all her movements, and Pan found himself admiring her as he followed out of the room and along a corridor.
She ran a little way, on the balls of her feet, in total silence, listening when she came to a corner.
Pan darted after her and, along with Dilyara’s fox daemon, slipped through the door she opened into a room with heavy blinds on all the windows.
When she shut the door, they were almost in total darkness.
Dilyara struck a match. This was clearly one of the ruined laboratories, but he could see in the little flame that the benches had been cleared, and some kind of apparatus stood under a sheet. She pulled the sheet off and he leapt up to see better.
“No speak,” she said. “I show you true thing.”
She removed a tray of some substance from a thickly insulated cupboard, working quickly and silently. She adjusted the position of various stands and sheets of glass and then switched on a small anbaric torch before beckoning him to come close.
He crouched in front of it and saw the little darts of light she’d discovered.
“What are—” he whispered, but she shook her head fiercely.
“Dr. Bryn say this cloud chamber. But these little spirits. They come out of space. Now look. Be strong now.”
She reached over to the next bench and picked up something about the length of her thumb, wrapped in a torn curtain.
Uncovering it, she showed Pan something that made him shrink back and feel sick: the body of a creature a bit like a guinea pig.
He knew at once it was a daemon. A daemon’s body?
How could there be such a thing? It was impossible.
But there it was, and she was holding it with care, almost with reverence, he thought; certainly with respect.
He was about to speak, but held his tongue.
She placed the dead daemon next to the cloud chamber, and at once the little sparks, which had been moving in every direction either in straight lines or in smooth curves, suddenly swerved away and careered back across the glass, as if reacting to the dead daemon with fear or revulsion.
New sparks shot into the space and immediately seemed to rebound or even make a conscious choice not to go near that side of the tray.
“What does that mean?” he whispered.
Dilyara moved the daemon, and little by little, as if cautiously, the sparks resumed their random crisscrossing.
“Whose…” Pan said, indicating the daemon’s body.