Chapter Thirty-Two The Pieces Gather on the Board #2
Olivier Bonneville was not used to horses; he had been taught to ride during his military service, but hadn’t taken to it.
The horse he stole from the camp above Tashbulak, however, was docile and willing, and he remembered enough about harnessing it to get the saddle on the right way and loosen and tighten the right straps.
With his wounded daemon safely inside his coat, he mounted, after three attempts, and urged the horse to move forward and out onto the grassy slopes of the foothills.
The bulk of the army was some way off to the east, under the command of one of Delamare’s senior officers, and guided by Abdel Ionides.
Delamare remained with a small body of guards and engineers, led by Colonel Schreiber; they would move straight towards the red building once they had a signal that Lop Nor had been successfully crossed.
So no one saw Olivier Bonneville set off on his stolen horse.
No one, that is, except Pantalaimon, together with Dilyara and her daemon.
They had gathered on the roof of the storage area, around the canvas chair from which Dilyara had seen Brynmor Strauss emerge from the desert some days before.
Strauss was asleep down below, with Cariad close at hand; Dilyara wasn’t sure if they’d ever wake up.
Pan had come to like her very much, for her quick intelligence and solid kindness, and he joined her on the roof to watch the sunrise, and just to talk.
He was telling her about Lyra and his search. She listened carefully, asking questions only occasionally if she didn’t understand. He found himself imitating the way Lyra would explain something, getting things in the best order, leaving out everything irrelevant.
She was watching him as he stood on the rim of a skylight, but after a few minutes he noticed a very slight movement on the horizon behind her.
It was so small and so far away that at first he didn’t think anything of it, but then he found himself trying to focus on it, and losing concentration on his story.
“Dilyara, can you see something moving over there? On the horizon?”
She turned, shading her eyes against the rising sun. “Little thing,” she said. She reached down for the binoculars she kept under the chair. “Ah,” she said. “Horse. I think it was camel but no, it is horse. Young man riding.”
She held the binoculars for Pan to look through.
He put his face close to one of the eyepieces and tried, but the focus wasn’t right, and then he lost his balance on the skylight, and then they tried again, this time with Pan standing on the wooden arm of her chair; and finally the image swam into clarity.
“Bonneville!” he said, startling himself.
“What you say?”
“I know him. He’s the man who’s hunting Lyra! He must be going towards the red building—the place Dr. Strauss came back from…I can’t let him get too far ahead. Dilyara, I’ve got to follow him. Thank you—thank you for everything—”
“You going now?”
“Yes. I must go after him.”
“I want to hear the end of story.”
“When I come back. Promise. I swear. Thank you! But I’ve got to go after him…”
He ran to the edge of the roof, checked again that the little silhouette was still there on the horizon, and leapt down and scrambled after it over the sand.
—
Lyra lay awake, wrapped in Malcolm’s coat.
He murmured occasionally in his sleep: names mostly, including hers, but nothing coherent.
Gulya’s tireless flight lulled them both at first, but Lyra hadn’t slept for long.
She was wide awake, and her eyes were wide too, gazing past Malcolm out to the gryphon’s wing, steadily beating, and past that to the stars beyond.
Her heart was yearning as never before—yearning for Pan, for that lost rebellious part of her, that woodland-smelling self who’d set off in anger to find the priceless thing she’d lost so carelessly.
She was also yearning for something simpler: for human contact.
She was pressed close against Malcolm, but he was asleep, and anyway…
Would that ever work? Oh, it was too hard to think about.
She made herself think of other things. The Rusakov field, and how it related to Dust, or if it was Dust. The rose oil made Dust visible, but only rose oil from the other world would do.
No doubt something in its chemical composition resembled the wheel-tree oil that Mary Malone used in her amber spyglass; perhaps there was something in every world that had a similar property.
She remembered the moment in the Jordan College Retiring Room when Lord Asriel, telling the scholars about the special emulsion he’d used (which of course, she saw now, must have been based on the rose oil) to make the lantern slides he was showing them, and saying of the picture on the screen: “But it isn’t light.
It’s Dust.” And the sudden silence that fell.
She thought of herself now, explaining to him everything they’d found out since, and where she was going, on the back of a gryphon, and she thought of his eyes when he smiled, as he did so rarely—but he would smile now, he’d smile at her now.
Or rather than the field making the Dust visible…
suppose it was the other way round. Maybe it was Dust that made the field visible.
Could it work like that? Maybe Ionides would know.
She hoped very much that he was safe, that he was nearby, that he and Leila Pervani could continue their work…
She thought of them together, a duet so ill-sorted and so perfectly harmonious.
Working together at something important; Lyra thought now that that must be the most perfect endeavor for two individuals.
She felt a kind of gratitude to them, for showing her that possibility.
The stars were fading. From somewhere to her left a faint light was diffusing into the sky. It brought cold with it, as if she hadn’t been cold enough already. She pulled Malcolm’s coat more tightly around her, and he stirred.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Not asleep.”
“Yes, you were! You were snoring.”
“I don’t snore. It was Asta purring.”
“You snore,” said Asta sleepily.
“All right, I give in. Why did you wake me up?”
“I want to know about the alkahest.”
“The what?”
He sat up, startling her, but it was only to stretch and yawn.
“The alkahest. Something to do with alchemy,” she said.
“Why are you asking about that? Where did you hear the term before?”
“In the dead city. Why do you ask?”
“The Director of Oakley Street referred to it on the lodestone resonator. Who spoke about it in the dead city?”
“I heard some voices…They sounded as if they were warning me. The alkahest, the destroyer of bonds…But I couldn’t hear any more, and I’ve been asking people if they know about it, and no one does except a French teacher in Baku, who looked it up in his encyclopedia. The universal solvent, apparently.”
“Hmm…A universal solvent. Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Well, what would you put it in?”
“A…I don’t know. A crucible, whatever that is. An alembic? One of those round flasks with a long spout pointing down.”
“A retort. But that wouldn’t work, you see. Nothing would work. If it dissolves everything, nothing could contain it. Here’s a jar of alkahest—oh dear, it’s gone. And now there’s a hole in the floor. The alkahest in a jar is a paradox. Like a square circle.”
“The destroyer of bonds…”
“They said that too, did they?”
“Yes, they did. The French teacher thought it might mean atomic bonds. The forces that hold them together.”
“It would be a universal solvent, if it could do that,” Malcolm said. “Did the other things your voices said make sense?”
“Yes. I think I could trust them. As if they came from the secret commonwealth.”
“And they were—” Malcolm pulled himself up a little. “They were warning you?”
“A mixture of things. Warnings, and…I can’t remember them all.”
“Who first told you about the secret commonwealth?”
“A gyptian man who helped me to get to the Fens when I first set off after Pan. I told Asta about it. It’s a way of seeing things, really.”
“I want to know more about it.”
“Mr. Ionides had the idea that it could be a field.”
“Ah. Yes, I see. That’s good.”
“Like the Rusakov field. It might be the Rusakov field.”
“What’s Dust, then?” he said. “How are they connected? Or are they the same thing?”
He wasn’t testing her on her knowledge: it was a genuine question, asked by someone who genuinely wanted to know.
“It’s…I don’t know. It’s the Rusakov particle, isn’t it? The particle associated with the field? Somehow?”
“What does that mean, though? What’s happening when we see it? What’s physically going on?”
“Maybe Dust has to be there because…Maybe like with a rainbow, the atmosphere has to be saturated with water vapor, doesn’t it? We don’t see rainbows on dry days. Maybe we can’t see this without Dust.”
The first tiny part of the sun’s disc emerged from behind a mountaintop. It was like a trumpet call; the whole sky seemed to ring with it, and the world was still waiting for an answer to a question neither Lyra nor Malcolm had quite articulated, which hung like an overtone in the intense azure.
“Anyway, it wasn’t actually Rusakov who discovered it,” Malcolm said.
“Really?”
“He wasn’t a true scientist—he was a lackey for the Muscovite government. It was discovered by a colleague of his, and Rusakov claimed the credit.”
“Cheat! Then he shouldn’t have a field named after him. It should be called the Rose Field.”
“All right, the Rose Field it is. From now on.”
“But we still need to know about Dust.”
“What did your Ionides say about it?”
She shifted her position and sat up. “He’s not my Ionides. He’s a scholar as well as a servant and a vagabond. He’ll have his own answer…I can’t guess what it would be, but it would clarify things a bit. Like he did with the field idea for the secret commonwealth.”