The Amber Spyglass (Page 62)

And behind them, in close pursuit, came a motley collection of fliers. It was not easy to make out what they were, but Mrs. Coulter saw a heavy gyropter of a strange kind, two straight-winged aircraft, one great bird that glided with effortless speed carrying two armed riders, and three or four angels.

“A raiding party,” said King Ogunwe.

They were closing on the gyropters. Then a line of light blazed from one of the straight-winged aircraft, followed a second or two later by a sound, a deep crack. But the shell never reached its target, the crippled gyropter, because in the same instant as they saw the light, and before they heard the crack, the watchers on the mountain saw a flash from the intention craft, and a shell exploded in midair.

Mrs. Coulter had hardly time to understand that almost instantaneous sequence of light and sound before the battle was under way. Nor was it at all easy to follow, because the sky was so dark and the movement of every flier so quick; but a series of nearly silent flashes lit the mountainside, accompanied by short hisses like the escape of steam. Each flash struck somehow at a different raider: the aircraft caught fire or exploded; the giant bird uttered a scream like the tearing of a mountain-high curtain and plummeted onto the rocks far below; and as for the angels, each of them simply vanished in a drift of glowing air, a myriad particles twinkling and glowing dimmer until they flickered out like a dying firework.

Then there was silence. The wind carried away the sound of the decoy gyropters, which had now disappeared around the flank of the mountain, and no one watching spoke. Flames far below glared on the underside of the intention craft, still somehow hovering in the air and now turning slowly as if to look around. The destruction of the raiding party was so complete that Mrs. Coulter, who had seen many things to be shocked by, was nevertheless shocked by this. As she looked up at the intention craft, it seemed to shimmer or dislodge itself, and then there it was, solidly on the ground again.

King Ogunwe hurried forward, as did the other commanders and the engineers, who had thrown open the doors and let the light flood out over the proving ground. Mrs. Coulter stayed where she was, puzzling over the workings of the intention craft.

“Why is he showing it to us?” her dæmon said quietly.

“Surely he can’t have read our mind,” she replied in the same tone.

They were thinking of the moment in the adamant tower when that sparklike idea had flashed between them. They had thought of making Lord Asriel a proposition: of offering to go to the Consistorial Court of Discipline and spying for him. She knew every lever of power; she could manipulate them all. It would be hard at first to convince them of her good faith, but she could do it. And now that the Gallivespian spies had left to go with Will and Lyra, surely Asriel couldn’t resist an offer like that.

But now, as they looked at that strange flying machine, another idea struck even more forcibly, and she hugged the golden monkey with glee.

“Asriel,” she called innocently, “may I see how the machine works?”

He looked down, his expression distracted and impatient, but full of excited satisfaction, too. He was delighted with the intention craft; she knew he wouldn’t be able to resist showing it off.

King Ogunwe stood aside, and Lord Asriel reached down and pulled her up into the cockpit. He helped her into the seat and watched as she looked around the controls.

“How does it work? What powers it?” she said.

“Your intentions,” he said. “Hence the name. If you intend to go forward, it will go forward.”

“That’s no answer. Come on, tell me. What sort of engine is it? How does it fly? I couldn’t see anything aerodynamic at all. But these controls . . . from inside, it’s almost like a gyropter.”

He was finding it hard not to tell her; and since she was in his power, he did. He held out a cable at the end of which was a leather grip, deeply marked by his dæmon’s teeth.

“Your dæmon,” he explained, “has to hold this handle—whether in teeth, or hands, it doesn’t matter. And you have to wear that helmet. There’s a current flowing between them, and a capacitor amplifies it—oh, it’s more complicated than that, but the thing’s simple to fly. We put in controls like a gyropter for the sake of familiarity, but eventually we won’t need controls at all. Of course, only a human with a dæmon can fly it.”

“I see,” she said.

And she pushed him hard, so that he fell out of the machine.

In the same moment she slipped the helmet on her head, and the golden monkey snatched up the leather handle. She reached for the control that in a gyropter would tilt the airfoil, and pushed the throttle forward, and at once the intention craft leapt into the air.

But she didn’t quite have the measure of it yet. The craft hung still for some moments, slightly tilted, before she found the controls to move it forward, and in those few seconds, Lord Asriel did three things. He leapt to his feet; he put up his hand to stop King Ogunwe from ordering the soldiers to fire on the intention craft; and he said, “Lord Roke, go with her, if you would be so kind.”

The Gallivespian urged his blue hawk upward at once, and the bird flew straight to the still-open cabin door. The watchers below could see the woman’s head looking this way and that, and the golden monkey, likewise, and they could see that neither of them noticed the little figure of Lord Roke leaping from his hawk into the cabin behind them.

A moment later, the intention craft began to move, and the hawk wheeled away to skim down to Lord Asriel’s wrist. No more than two seconds later, the aircraft was already vanishing from sight in the damp and starry air.