His Dark Materials Omnibus (13 page)

She opened the door a crack and he crawled out, dark against the warm pink light in the corridor.

Meanwhile, she hastily flung on the warmest clothes she had and stuffed some more into one of the coal-silk bags from the fashionable shop they’d visited that very afternoon. Mrs. Coulter had given her money like sweets, and although she had spent it lavishly, there were still several sovereigns left, which she put in the pocket of the dark wolfskin coat before tiptoeing to the door.

Last of all she packed the alethiometer in its black velvet cloth. Had that
abominable monkey found it? He must have done; he must have told her; oh, if she’d only hidden it better!

She tiptoed to the door. Her room opened into the end of the corridor nearest the hall, luckily, and most of the guests were in the two big rooms further along. There was the sound of voices talking loudly, laughter, the quiet flushing of a lavatory, the tinkle of glasses; and then a tiny moth voice at her ear said:

“Now! Quick!”

She slipped through the door and into the hall, and in less than three seconds she was opening the front door of the flat. A moment after that she was through and pulling it quietly shut, and with Pantalaimon a goldfinch again, she ran for the stairs and fled.

She walked quickly away from the river, because the embankment was wide and well lit. There was a tangle of narrow streets between there and the Royal Arctic Institute, which was the only place Lyra was sure of being able to find, and into that dark maze she hurried now.

If only she knew London as well as she knew Oxford! Then she would have known which streets to avoid; or where she could scrounge some food; or, best of all, which doors to knock on and find shelter. In that cold night, the dark alleys all around were alive with movement and secret life, and she knew none of it.

Pantalaimon became a wildcat and scanned the dark all around with his night-piercing eyes. Every so often he’d stop, bristling, and she would turn aside from the entrance she’d been about to go down. The night was full of noises: bursts of drunken laughter, two raucous voices raised in song, the clatter and whine of some badly oiled machine in a basement. Lyra walked delicately through it all, her senses magnified and mingled with Pantalaimon’s, keeping to the shadows and the narrow alleys.

From time to time she had to cross a wider, well-lit street, where the tram-cars hummed and sparked under their anbaric wires. There were rules for crossing London streets, but she took no notice, and when anyone shouted, she fled.

It was a fine thing to be free again. She knew that Pantalaimon, padding on wildcat paws beside her, felt the same joy as she did to be in the open air, even if it was murky London air laden with fumes and soot and clangorous with noise. Sometime soon they’d have to think over the meaning of what they’d heard in Mrs. Coulter’s flat, but not yet. And sometime eventually they’d have to find a place to sleep.

At a crossroads near the corner of a big department store whose windows shone brilliantly over the wet pavement, there was a coffee stall: a little hut on wheels with a counter under the wooden flap that swung up like an
awning. Yellow light glowed inside, and the fragrance of coffee drifted out. The white-coated owner was leaning on the counter talking to the two or three customers.

It was tempting. Lyra had been walking for an hour now, and it was cold and damp. With Pantalaimon a sparrow, she went up to the counter and reached up to gain the owner’s attention.

“Cup of coffee and a ham sandwich, please,” she said.

“You’re out late, my dear,” said a gentleman in a top hat and white silk muffler.

“Yeah,” she said, turning away from him to scan the busy intersection. A theater nearby was just emptying, and crowds milled around the lighted foyer, calling for cabs, wrapping coats around their shoulders. In the other direction was the entrance of a Chthonic Railway station, with more crowds pouring up and down the steps.

“Here you are, love,” said the coffee stall man. “Two shillings.”

“Let me pay for this,” said the man in the top hat.

Lyra thought, why not? I can run faster than him, and I might need all my money later. The top-hatted man dropped a coin on the counter and smiled down at her. His dæmon was a lemur. It clung to his lapel, staring round-eyed at Lyra.

She bit into her sandwich and kept her eyes on the busy street. She had no idea where she was, because she had never seen a map of London, and she didn’t even know how big it was or how far she’d have to walk to find the country.

“What’s your name?” said the man.

“Alice.”

“That’s a pretty name. Let me put a drop of this into your coffee … warm you up …”

He was unscrewing the top of a silver flask.

“I don’t like that,” said Lyra. “I just like coffee.”

“I bet you’ve never had brandy like this before.”

“I have. I was sick all over the place. I had a whole bottle, or nearly.”

“Just as you like,” said the man, tilting the flask into his own cup. “Where are you going, all alone like this?”

“Going to meet my father.”

“And who’s he?”

“He’s a murderer.”

“He’s what?”

“I told you, he’s a murderer. It’s his profession. He’s doing a job tonight. I got his clean clothes in here, ’cause he’s usually all covered in blood when he’s finished a job.”

“Ah! You’re joking.”

“I en’t.”

The lemur uttered a soft mewing sound and clambered slowly up behind the man’s head, to peer out at her. She drank her coffee stolidly and ate the last of her sandwich.

“Goodnight,” she said. “I can see my father coming now. He looks a bit angry.”

The top-hat man glanced around, and Lyra set off toward the theater crowd. Much as she would have liked to see the Chthonic Railway (Mrs. Coulter had said it was not really intended for people of their class), she was wary of being trapped underground; better to be out in the open, where she could run, if she had to.

On and on she walked, and the streets became darker and emptier. It was drizzling, but even if there’d been no clouds the city sky was too tainted with light to show the stars. Pantalaimon thought they were going north, but who could tell?

Endless streets of little identical brick houses, with gardens only big enough for a dustbin; great gaunt factories behind wire fences, with one anbaric light glowing bleakly high up on a wall and a night watchman snoozing by his brazier; occasionally a dismal oratory, only distinguished from a warehouse by the crucifix outside. Once she tried the door of one of these places, only to hear a groan from the bench a foot away in the darkness. She realized that the porch was full of sleeping figures, and fled.

“Where we going to sleep, Pan?” she said as they trudged down a street of closed and shuttered shops.

“A doorway somewhere.”

“Don’t want to be seen though. They’re all so open.”

“There’s a canal down there.…”

He was looking down a side road to the left. Sure enough, a patch of dark glimmer showed open water, and when they cautiously went to look, they found a canal basin where a dozen or so barges were tied up at the wharves, some high in the water, some low and laden under the gallows-like cranes. A dim light shone in one window of a wooden hut, and a thread of smoke rose from the metal chimney; otherwise the only lights were high up on the wall of the warehouse or the gantry of a crane, leaving the ground in gloom. The
wharves were piled with barrels of coal spirit, with stacks of great round logs, with rolls of cauchuc-covered cable.

Lyra tiptoed up to the hut and peeped in at the window. An old man was laboriously reading a picture-story paper and smoking a pipe, with his spaniel dæmon curled up asleep on the table. As she looked, the man got up and brought a blackened kettle from the iron stove and poured some hot water into a cracked mug before settling back with his paper.

“Should we ask him to let us in, Pan?” she whispered, but he was distracted; he was a bat, an owl, a wildcat again; she looked all round, catching his panic, and then saw them at the same time as he did: two men running at her, one from each side, the nearer holding a throwing net.

Pantalaimon uttered a harsh scream and launched himself as a leopard at the closer man’s dæmon, a savage-looking fox, bowling her backward and tangling with the man’s legs. The man cursed and dodged aside, and Lyra darted past him toward the open spaces of the wharf. What she mustn’t do was get boxed in a corner.

Pantalaimon, an eagle now, swooped at her and cried, “Left! Left!”

She swerved that way and saw a gap between the coalspirit barrels and the end of a corrugated iron shed, and darted for it like a bullet.

But those throwing nets!

She heard a hiss in the air, and past her cheek something lashed and sharply stung, and loathsome tarred strings whipped across her face, her arms, her hands, and tangled and held her, and she fell, snarling and tearing and struggling in vain.

“Pan! Pan!”

But the fox dæmon tore at the cat Pantalaimon, and Lyra felt the pain in her own flesh, and sobbed a great cry as he fell. One man was swiftly lashing cords around her, around her limbs, her throat, body, head, bundling her over and over on the wet ground. She was helpless, exactly like a fly being trussed by a spider. Poor hurt Pan was dragging himself toward her, with the fox dæmon worrying his back, and he had no strength left to change, even; and the other man was lying in a puddle, with an arrow through his neck—

The whole world grew still as the man tying the net saw it too.

Pantalaimon sat up and blinked, and then there was a soft thud, and the net man fell choking and gasping right across Lyra, who cried out in horror: that was
blood
gushing out of him!

Running feet, and someone hauled the man away and bent over him; then other hands lifted Lyra, a knife snicked and pulled and the net strings fell
away one by one, and she tore them off, spitting, and hurled herself down to cuddle Pantalaimon.

Kneeling, she twisted to look up at the newcomers. Three dark men, one armed with a bow, the others with knives; and as she turned, the bowman caught his breath.

“That en’t Lyra?”

A familiar voice, but she couldn’t place it till he stepped forward and the nearest light fell on his face and the hawk dæmon on his shoulder. Then she had it. A gyptian! A real Oxford gyptian!

“Tony Costa,” he said. “Remember? You used to play with my little brother Billy off the boats in Jericho, afore the Gobblers got him.”

“Oh, God, Pan, we’re safe!” she sobbed, but then a thought rushed into her mind: it was the Costas’ boat she’d hijacked that day. Suppose he remembered?

“Better come along with us,” he said. “You alone?”

“Yeah. I was running away.…”

“All right, don’t talk now. Just keep quiet. Jaxer, move them bodies into the shadow. Kerim, look around.”

Lyra stood up shakily, holding the wildcat Pantalaimon to her breast. He was twisting to look at something, and she followed his gaze, understanding and suddenly curious too: what had happened to the dead men’s dæmons? They were fading, that was the answer; fading and drifting away like atoms of smoke, for all that they tried to cling to their men. Pantalaimon hid his eyes, and Lyra hurried blindly after Tony Costa.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“Quiet, gal. There’s enough trouble awake without stirring more. We’ll talk on the boat.”

He led her over a little wooden bridge into the heart of the canal basin. The other two men were padding silently after them. Tony turned along the waterfront and out onto a wooden jetty, from which he stepped on board a narrowboat and swung open the door to the cabin.

“Get in,” he said. “Quick now.”

Lyra did so, patting her bag (which she had never let go of, even in the net) to make sure the alethiometer was still there. In the long narrow cabin, by the light of a lantern on a hook, she saw a stout powerful woman with gray hair, sitting at a table with a paper. Lyra recognized her as Billy’s mother.

“Who’s this?” the woman said. “That’s never Lyra?”

“That’s right. Ma, we got to move. We killed two men out in the basin. We thought they was Gobblers, but I reckon they were Turk traders. They’d caught Lyra. Never mind talk—we’ll do that on the move.”

“Come here, child,” said Ma Costa.

Lyra obeyed, half happy, half apprehensive, for Ma Costa had hands like bludgeons, and now she was sure: it was their boat she had captured with Roger and the other collegers. But the boat mother set her hands on either side of Lyra’s face, and her dæmon, a hawk, bent gently to lick Pantalaimon’s wildcat head. Then Ma Costa folded her great arms around Lyra and pressed her to her breast.

“I dunno what you’re a doing here, but you look wore out. You can have Billy’s crib, soon’s I’ve got a hot drink in you. Set you down there, child.”

It looked as if her piracy was forgiven, or at least forgotten. Lyra slid onto the cushioned bench behind a well-scrubbed pine table top as the low rumble of the gas engine shook the boat.

“Where we going?” Lyra asked.