The Amber Spyglass (Page 49)

“As many as there are,” said Will. “No one would ever have time to find out.”

He swung his rucksack up and led the way along the forest path. The dragonflies relished the fresh, moist air and darted like needles through the shafts of sunlight. The movement of the trees above was less violent, and the air was cool and tranquil; so it was all the more shocking to see the twisted wreckage of a gyropter suspended among the branches, with the body of its African pilot, tangled in his seat belt, half out of the door, and to find the charred remains of the zeppelin a little farther up—soot-black strips of cloth, blackened struts and pipe work, broken glass, and then the bodies: three men burned to cinders, their limbs contorted and drawn up as if they were still threatening to fight.

And they were only the ones who had fallen near the path. There were other bodies and more wreckage on the cliff above and among the trees farther down. Shocked and silenced, the two children moved through the carnage, while the spies on their dragonflies looked around more coolly, accustomed to battle, noting how it had gone and who had lost most.

When they reached the top of the valley, where the trees thinned out and the rainbow-waterfalls began, they stopped to drink deeply of the ice-cold water.

“I hope that little girl’s all right,” said Will. “We’d never have got you away if she hadn’t woken you up. She went to a holy man to get that powder specially.”

“She is all right,” said Lyra, “ ’cause I asked the alethiometer, last night. She thinks we’re devils, though. She’s afraid of us. She probably wishes she’d never got mixed up in it, but she’s safe all right.”

They climbed up beside the waterfalls and refilled Will’s canteen before striking off across the plateau toward the ridge where the alethiometer told Lyra that Iorek had gone.

And then there came a day of long, hard walking: no trouble for Will, but a torment to Lyra, whose limbs were weakened and softened after her long sleep. But she would sooner have her tongue torn out than confess how bad she felt; limping, tight-lipped, trembling, she kept pace with Will and said nothing. Only when they sat down at noon did she allow herself so much as a whimper, and then only when Will had gone apart to relieve himself.

The Lady Salmakia said, “Rest. There is no disgrace in being weary.”

“But I don’t want to let Will down! I don’t want him to think I’m weak and holding him back.”

“That’s the last thing he thinks.”

“You don’t know,” said Lyra rudely. “You don’t know him any more than you know me.”

“I know impertinence when I hear it,” said the Lady calmly. “Do as I tell you now and rest. Save your energy for the walking.”

Lyra felt mutinous, but the Lady’s glittering spurs were very clear in the sunlight, so she said nothing.

The Lady’s companion, the Chevalier, was opening the case of the lodestone resonator, and, curiosity overcoming resentment, Lyra watched to see what he did. The instrument looked like a short length of pencil made of dull gray-black stone, resting on a stand of wood, and the Chevalier swept a tiny bow like a violinist’s across the end while he pressed his fingers at various points along the surface. The places weren’t marked, so he seemed to be touching it at random, but from the intensity of his expression and the certain fluency of his movements, Lyra knew it was as skillful and demanding a process as her own reading of the alethiometer.

After several minutes the spy put the bow away and took up a pair of headphones, the earpieces no larger than Lyra’s little fingernail, and wrapped one end of the wire tightly around a peg in the end of the stone, leading the rest along to another peg at the other end and wrapping it around that. By manipulating the two pegs and the tension on the wire between them, he could obviously hear a response to his own message.

“How does that work?” she said when he’d finished.

Tialys looked at her as if to judge whether she was genuinely interested, and then said, “Your scientists, what do you call them, experimental theologians, would know of something called quantum entanglement. It means that two particles can exist that only have properties in common, so that whatever happens to one happens to the other at the same moment, no matter how far apart they are. Well, in our world there is a way of taking a common lodestone and entangling all its particles, and then splitting it in two so that both parts resonate together. The counterpart to this is with Lord Roke, our commander. When I play on this one with my bow, the other one reproduces the sounds exactly, and so we communicate.”

He put everything away and said something to the Lady. She joined him and they went a little apart, talking too quietly for Lyra to hear, though Pantalaimon became an owl and turned his great ears in their direction.

Presently Will came back and then they moved on, more slowly as the day went by and the track got steeper and the snow line nearer. They rested once more at the head of a rocky valley, because even Will could tell that Lyra was nearly finished: she was limping badly and her face was gray.

“Let me see your feet,” he said to her, “because if they’re blistered, I’ll put some ointment on.”

They were, badly, and she let him rub in the bloodmoss salve, closing her eyes and gritting her teeth.

Meanwhile, the Chevalier was busy, and after a few minutes he put his lodestone away and said, “I have told Lord Roke of our position, and they are sending a gyropter to bring us away as soon as you have spoken to your friend.”

Will nodded. Lyra took no notice. Presently she sat up wearily and pulled on her socks and shoes, and they set off once more.