The Amber Spyglass (Page 141)

“Yes, you must listen,” said Pantalaimon. “This is hard to explain.”

Between them, the dæmons managed to tell them everything Serafina had told them, beginning with the revelation about the children’s own natures: about how, without intending it, they had become like witches in their power to separate and yet still be one being.

“But that’s not all,” Kirjava said.

And Pantalaimon said, “Oh, Lyra, forgive us, but we have to tell you what we found out . . .”

Lyra was bewildered. When had Pan ever needed forgiving? She looked at Will, and saw his puzzlement as clear as her own.

“Tell us,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

“It’s about Dust,” said the cat dæmon, and Will marveled to hear part of his own nature telling him something he didn’t know. “It was all flowing away, all the Dust there was, down into the abyss that you saw. Something’s stopped it flowing down there, but—”

“Will, it was that golden light!” Lyra said. “The light that all flowed into the abyss and vanished . . . And that was Dust? Was it really?”

“Yes. But there’s more leaking out all the time,” Pantalaimon went on. “And it mustn’t. It mustn’t all leak away. It’s got to stay in the world and not vanish, because otherwise everything good will fade away and die.”

“But where’s the rest leaving from?” said Lyra.

Both dæmons looked at Will, and at the knife.

“Every time we made an opening,” said Kirjava—and again Will felt that little thrill: She’s me, and I’m her—“every time anyone made an opening between the worlds, us or the old Guild men, anyone, the knife cut into the emptiness outside. The same emptiness there is down in the abyss. We never knew. No one knew, because the edge was too fine to see. But it was quite big enough for Dust to leak out of. If they closed it up again at once, there wasn’t time for much to leak out, but there were thousands that they never closed up. So all this time, Dust has been leaking out of the worlds and into nothingness.”

The understanding was beginning to dawn on Will and Lyra. They fought it, they pushed it away, but it was just like the gray light that seeps into the sky and extinguishes the stars: it crept past every barrier they could put up and under every blind and around the edges of every curtain they could draw against it.

“Every opening,” Lyra said in a whisper.

“Every single one—they must all be closed?” said Will.

“Every single one,” said Pantalaimon, whispering like Lyra.

“Oh, no,” said Lyra. “No, it can’t be true—”

“And so we must leave our world to stay in Lyra’s,” said Kirjava, “or Pan and Lyra must leave theirs and come to stay in ours. There’s no other choice.”

Then the full bleak daylight struck in.

And Lyra cried aloud. Pantalaimon’s owl cry the night before had frightened every small creature that heard it, but it was nothing to the passionate wail that Lyra uttered now. The dæmons were shocked, and Will, seeing their reaction, understood why: they didn’t know the rest of the truth; they didn’t know what Will and Lyra themselves had learned.

Lyra was shaking with anger and grief, striding up and down with clenched fists and turning her tear-streaming face this way and that as if looking for an answer. Will jumped up and seized her shoulders, and felt her tense and trembling.

“Listen,” he said, “Lyra, listen: what did my father say?”

“Oh,” she cried, tossing her head this way and that, “he said—you know what he said—you were there, Will, you listened, too!”

He thought she would die of her grief there and then. She flung herself into his arms and sobbed, clinging passionately to his shoulders, pressing her nails into his back and her face into his neck, and all he could hear was, “No—no—no . . .”

“Listen,” he said again, “Lyra, let’s try and remember it exactly. There might be a way through. There might be a loophole.”

He disengaged her arms gently and made her sit down. At once Pantalaimon, frightened, flowed up onto her lap, and the cat dæmon tentatively came close to Will. They hadn’t touched yet, but now he put out a hand to her, and she moved her cat face against his fingers and then stepped delicately onto his lap.

“He said—” Lyra began, gulping, “he said that people could spend a little time in other worlds without being affected. They could. And we have, haven’t we? Apart from what we had to do to go into the world of the dead, we’re still healthy, aren’t we?”

“They can spend a little time, but not a long time,” Will said. “My father had been away from his world, my world, for ten years. And he was nearly dying when I found him. Ten years, that’s all.”

“But what about Lord Boreal? Sir Charles? He was healthy enough, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, but remember, he could go back to his own world whenever he liked and get healthy again. That’s where you saw him first, after all, in your world. He must have found some secret window that no one else knew about.”

“Well, we could do that!”

“We could, except that . . .”

“All the windows must be closed,” said Pantalaimon. “All of them.”

“But how do you know?” demanded Lyra.

“An angel told us,” said Kirjava. “We met an angel. She told us all about that, and other things as well. It’s true, Lyra.”