The flood was at its height by this time. All across southern England houses and villages were devastated, large buildings were swept away, farm animals were drowned, and as for people, the number of missing or dead was, for the time being, uncountable. The authorities both local and national had to spend every penny in their treasuries and every second of time in the sole task of dealing with the chaos.
Among all the other activities, desperate and urgent as they all were, the two sides that were searching for Malcolm and Lyra made their way steadily downstream towards the capital city. They followed rumors, of which there were many; they ignored every cry for help from the beleaguered people on all sides; they had eyes and minds only for a boy and a girl in a canoe, with a baby, and for a man with a three-legged hyena dæmon.
Like Lord Nugent, George Papadimitriou had experienced the sense of strangeness and unreality that the flood produced. The gyptian owner of the boat he was traveling on told him that in gyptian lore, extreme weather had its own states of mind, just as calm weather did.
“How can the weather have a state of mind?” said Papadimitriou.
The gyptian said, “You think the weather is only out there? It’s in here too,” and tapped his head.
“So do you mean that the weather’s state of mind is just our state of mind?”
“Nothing is just anything,” the gyptian replied, and would say no more.
They moved on with the flood, speaking to anyone they could find, asking about the canoe and the boy and the girl. Yes, they’d been seen the day before, but no, it wasn’t a canoe, it was a dinghy with an outboard engine. Yes, some people had seen them, but they were dead in their boat, or they were water-ghasts, or they were armed with guns. And over and over again: they were spirits, it was bad luck to talk to them, they came from the fairy world. Papadimitriou accepted all this nonsense with serious attention. The CCD in their search would be hearing the same rumors: the problem was not to judge their truthfulness, but to assess the likely reaction of the other side. Nugent and Schlesinger would be faced with just the same problem.
And every hour they came closer to London.
The morning light, as cold and merciless as it could be, woke Malcolm up far earlier than he liked. Aching in every muscle, and aching in his mind when images of the night came back to him, he struggled to sit up and assemble his senses.
Alice was asleep, and so was the child, still and warm in his arms. He wished he hadn’t woken; he knew he’d have to wake them, and he wished he could let them sleep. He looked out from under the canopy. The graveyard looked even worse than it had during the night, when the moonlight had at least given it a silvery coherence. In the cruel light of the morning, it looked squalid, neglected, overgrown, and there was something worse: the steps of the little mausoleum were stained with blood, a great deal of it.
For a moment Malcolm felt sick, and closed his eyes and held himself steady. Then the feeling passed. Moving very slowly so as not to waken Lyra, he laid her down among the blankets and climbed out of the canoe, to stand shivering on the sodden grass, taking Asta in his arms. With her now so close, he felt more shaken, sadder, more guilty, much older. She pressed her cat face into his neck. She had been hurt too when they pulled apart; one day, perhaps, they’d be able to talk about it; but for now he felt full of sorrow and regret that he’d hurt her. If it was like his, the pain she was feeling was so deep that it seemed to inhabit every atom of her.
“We couldn’t do anything else,” she whispered.
“We had to.”
“It’s true. We did.”
Could he wash the blood away? Would the steps ever be clean again? His body quailed.
“Mal? Where are you?”
Alice’s voice was faint. He lifted the canopy and saw her face blurred with sleep and still bloody from the night. He reached into the boat and took one of the crumpled towels and dragged it through the grass to moisten it. She took it silently and dabbed her eyes and cheeks.
Then she climbed out too, very painfully, shivering and teeth chattering, and reached in for Lyra.
The child badly needed a change of nappy. She was drowsy; instead of her usual lively chatter, she grizzled unhappily, and Pantalaimon lay limply as a mouse against her neck.
“Her cheeks are red,” Malcolm said.
“Prob’ly caught a cold. And we only got one nappy left. I don’t think we can go on much longer.”
“Well…”
“We got to have a fire, Mal. We got to clean her, and we got to feed her.”
“I’ll get some more wood.”
He reached in for the paddle, intending first to wash the blood off it, and found a catastrophe.
“Oh, God!”
“What is it?”
The paddle was broken. What he’d done in the night had snapped the shaft. The blade and the handle still held together, but only just; any strain, the slightest push against the water, would break it off entirely. Malcolm turned it over in his hands, dismayed beyond expression.
“Mal? What’s the matter?” and then: “Oh, God, what’s happened?”
“The paddle’s broken. If I use it, it’ll just snap. I wish I…I wish I’d…If only I’d…”
He was nearly in tears.
“Can you mend it?”
“I could mend it, if I had a workshop and tools.”
She was looking around. “First things first,” she said. “We got to have a fire.”
“I could burn this,” he said bitterly.
“No. Don’t do that. Get some wood. Try to light a fire, Mal. It’s really important.”
He looked at the listless little child in her arms, the unhappy dæmon pressed so close against her neck, her eyes half closed; she looked ill and weak.
He put the paddle carefully in the canoe.
“Don’t touch that,” he said. “If it comes apart altogether, it’ll be harder to mend. I’ll find summing to burn.”
He went with slow, reluctant steps up the slope to the mausoleum, avoiding the still-damp blood, and opened the door. He looked respectfully at the coffin he’d opened the night before and murmured, “Good morning, and sorry again, ladies and gentlemen. I’m only doing this because we really need to.”
Another fence post, another coffin lid, another skeleton to apologize to, another fire to build. A few minutes later the saucepan was heating almost the last of their clean water, and he went to search among the heap of fence posts for something to mend the paddle with.
The problem was not finding something to bind it to; it was finding something to bind it with—twine, string, any kind of cord. But there was nothing of that sort anywhere. The best thing he could find was a length of rusty wire.
He dragged it out of the heap of fence posts, hauling it loose from the ones it was stapled to, and began to work on the paddle. The wire was stiff and stubborn, and he couldn’t wrap it very tightly, but there it was: it was all he had. And there was enough of it to go around several times, so even if the blade broke away completely, it would still be held in a cage of wire.
His hands were cut and scraped and covered in blood-red rust. He rinsed them in the floodwater and noticed that the canoe wasn’t floating anymore, but resting on the grass beneath.
“The water’s going down,” he said.
“About bloody time,” said Alice.
He was impatient to be going, and so was she; they got back in the canoe, settled Alice and the child as comfortably as they could, and pushed off once more onto the flood.
The rest of that day was dull going, under a cold gray sky, but they made a fair distance, by Malcolm’s reckoning. And the water was going down, and the land they were passing through was more and more urban; there were houses to left and right, roads and shops, and even some people moving about, wading along the streets.
The paddle felt loose and weak, but he didn’t have to push against the current, after all. He used it mainly to steer, and he kept as close in to the bank as he could without danger. He and Alice looked intently at the places they passed, because they were both aware, without saying anything about it, of the state Lyra was in.
“Go down there!” said Alice suddenly, pointing to a street of little shops at right angles to the current. It was a struggle to get the canoe to turn and go back, with every nerve in Malcolm’s arms aware of exactly how much strain it was putting on the paddle; but finally he had them safely in the backwater that had been a street, and moving laboriously up along the shopfronts.
“There,” said Alice, pointing to a pharmacy.
It was closed and dark, of course, but there was someone moving about inside. Malcolm hoped it wasn’t a looter. He brought the canoe up next to the door and tapped on the glass.
“Hold her up so he can see,” he said to Alice.
The man inside came to the door and looked out. Not an unfriendly face, Malcolm thought, but anxious and preoccupied.
“We need some medicine!” he shouted, pointing at Lyra, who lolled pale in Alice’s arms.
The man peered at her and nodded. He gestured: Come round to the back. An alleyway between his shop and the next led to an open door, and the water inside the shop was just as high as it was outside, up to Malcolm’s thighs, in fact, as he found when he stepped out and tied the canoe to a drainpipe. It was so cold it shook his heart.
“You better come,” he said to Alice. “You can explain what we need.”
He took Lyra while Alice got out, gasping at the shock of the cold. He held on to the child as they made their way into the shop.
“I hope the stuff we need en’t on the low shelves,” he said.
The man met them inside a little kitchenette.
“What is it?” he said, not unkindly.
“It’s our little sister,” Malcolm said. “She’s ill. We got swept down in the flood and we been trying to look after her. But…”
The man pulled back Lyra’s blanket to look at her face, and put the back of his fingers against her forehead.
“How old is she?” he said.
“Eight months,” said Alice. “We just run out of milk powder, and we got nothing else to give her. And we need more nappies, the throwaway ones. Anything babies need, really. And medicine.”
“Where are you going?”
“Since we got swept away in the flood, we en’t been able to go back home, which is Oxford,” Malcolm explained, “so we’re trying to get to Chelsea, where her father lives.”
“She’s your sister?”
“Yes. She’s Ellie, and I’m Richard, and this is Sandra.”
“Whereabouts in Chelsea?”
The man seemed twitchy, as if he was trying to listen for something else as well as Malcolm’s answer.
“March Road,” Alice said before Malcolm could speak. “But can you give us some of the things she needs? We en’t got any money to pay. Please. We’re ever so worried about her.”
The man was about the age of Malcolm’s father. He looked as if he might be a father himself.
“Let’s go and see what we can find,” he said loudly, with a false cheerfulness.
They splashed their way through into the front of the shop, where they found a chaos of floating bottles, tubes, cardboard packets gone soggy.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever recover from this,” he said. “The amount of stock that’s ruined…Now, first of all, give her a spoonful of this.”
He reached up to a top shelf and took down a box containing a little bottle of medicine and a spoon.
“What is it?” said Malcolm.
“It’ll make her feel better. A spoonful every couple of hours. How’s her teeth? She started teething yet?”
“She’s got a couple,” said Alice. “And I think her gums are sore. Maybe there’s more coming.”
“Let her chew one of these,” said the pharmacist, taking a box of hard biscuits from a shelf just above where the water had reached. “What else was it?”
“Milk powder.”
“Oh, yes. Lucky about that too. Here y’are.”
“This is a different sort from the one we had. Are they made up the same?”
“They’re all made up the same. How d’you heat the water?”
“We make a fire. We got a saucepan. That’s how we heat her washing water too.”
“Very resourceful. I’m impressed. Anything else?”
“Nappies?”
“Oh, yes. They’re on the bottom shelf, so none of these’ll do. I’ll see if there’s any out the back.”
Malcolm was pouring some of the medicine into the spoon.
“Can you hold her up?” he said, and then whispered, “There’s someone else here. He’s gone out to talk to ’em.”
“I hope it’s nice, else she’ll spit it out,” said Alice, and then whispered, “I seen her. She’s keeping out of sight.”
“Come on, Lyra,” said Malcolm. “Sit up now. Come on, love. Open your mouth.”
He put a drop of the pink liquid on her lips. Lyra woke up and began to complain, and then tasted something strange and smacked her lips.
“Taste nice? Here’s another drop,” said Malcolm.
Alice was looking intently at the reflections in the glass of a medicine cabinet.
“I can see ’em. He’s whispering to her…and she’s going out,” she muttered. “Bastards. We better move off quick.”
The shopkeeper came back. “Here you are,” he said. “I thought I had a few packets left. Anything else you need?”
“Can I take one of these rolls of adhesive tape?” Malcolm asked.
“You’d be better off with individual bandages, wouldn’t you?”
“I need it to mend something.”
“Go on, then.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir. Thank you very much.”
“What are you going to eat?”
“We got some biscuits and things,” Malcolm said, as impatient to be away as Alice was.
“Let me go next door—see if I can find you something from the grocer’s—I’m sure he won’t mind. You wait here a minute. Tell you what. Go upstairs—get out of the water, warm up a bit.”
“Thank you very much, but we got to move on,” said Alice.
“Oh, no, keep the little one out of the cold for a while. You all look as if you could do with a rest.”
“No, thank you,” said Malcolm. “We’ll go. Thank you very much for these things. We don’t want to wait.”
The shopkeeper kept insisting, but they moved out and got back into the canoe, cold and wet as they were, and pushed off straightaway.
“He was trying to keep us there while his wife went for the police,” said Alice quietly, watching him over Malcolm’s shoulder as he paddled them down to the main stream. “Or the CCD.”
As soon as they were clear, Malcolm pulled off the rusty wire and wrapped the roll of adhesive tape as tightly as he could around the paddle. It felt better than the wire, but it had little strength, and it wouldn’t last very long; but perhaps they didn’t have much further to go. He said so to Alice.
“We’ll see,” she said.
Over the centuries, the engineers and builders of the Corporation of London had learned to make the outward flow of the river and the inward surge of the tide come together more or less smoothly. All the way upriver as far as Teddington, the water level rose when the tide came in and fell when it went out again, and only the skippers and barge owners whose vessels crowded the water and used the city docks took much notice.
But the flood had changed everything. Twice a day, as the tide came in up the estuary, the great weight of the floodwater leaned its might against the sea and tried to force it back; and until the tide turned and went out again, the two vast masses of contending water roiled and seethed in a wild confusion.
All kinds of boating except the most urgent had ceased for the time being. Some barges and lighters held hard to their moorings, though in many cases they were torn loose and swept up or down the river to slam into the embankments, into the wharves and quays or the piers of the great bridges, or to capsize in the surge, or to be carried out to sea and lost.
A number of bridges were shaken badly. Only Castle Bridge and Westminster Bridge held fast entirely. Black Friars, Battersea, and Southwark collapsed, their debris adding to the churning turmoil as the waters met. In the small powerboat he’d hired, Bud Schlesinger rode the wild water, scouring the chaos all around with his eyes, and trying to calm the fears of the owner.
“There’s too much debris in the water!” the man shouted. “It’s dangerous! It could smash open the hull!”
“Where’s Chelsea?” Schlesinger called back from the bow, where he was leaning out and trying to keep the rain out of his eyes.
“Further on,” the owner shouted. “We got to pull in and tie up! This is crazy.”
“Not yet. Is Chelsea on the left bank or the right?”
The owner shouted back, “Left!” followed by a string of curses. The boat plunged on. The embankments on both sides, as far as Schlesinger could see, were under several feet of water, and on the right a large submerged park spread out beyond a line of great bare trees, whereas on the left a succession of imposing houses and stately apartment buildings stood silent and deserted.
“Slow down a little,” Bud called, and made his way to the cockpit at the stern. “You ever heard of October House?”
“Big white place further down— What the hell’s that fool doing?”
A powerful boat with a navy-blue-and-ocher hull had surged up close, crowding them on the starboard side. A deckhand with a boat hook leaned out and tried to hit Schlesinger, but he swayed back and let it pass in front of him. The man nearly overbalanced, but held on to the rail and swung the boat hook round in another attempt. Schlesinger drew his pistol and fired above the boat, and by sheer luck hit the boat hook, knocking it out of the man’s hand.
“You can’t do that!” wailed the owner of Bud’s boat, throttling back hard. The bigger boat lunged ahead, but then met some obstruction in the water and reared up suddenly. Bud could see the helmsman wrestling with the wheel, trying to get the vessel to turn to starboard, but clearly there was something impeding the propeller. The engine screamed and the boat lost way, and in a few seconds was wallowing helplessly behind them.
“What the bloody hell!” Bud’s helmsman was almost incoherent. “Didn’t you see the colors? You know what they were?”
“CCD,” said Bud. “We gotta get to October House before they do.”
“Insane!”
The man’s dog dæmon was crouching beside his legs, shivering. The owner shook his head but pushed the throttle forward a notch. Bud wiped the rain from his eyes and looked all around: in the spray and the confusion there were many shapes on the water, and it was impossible to tell which of them might be a canoe with a boy and a girl and a baby.
Half a mile downstream, Lord Nugent’s boat slammed into the landing at the foot of a great lawn leading up to a white building in the classical style. The landing stage was under the surface, of course, and it was only the hull of the boat that made contact with it, and there was nowhere to tie up; but Nugent was over the side in a moment, waist-deep in the freezing water, and wading, trying to hold his balance in the strong current, up towards what looked like a massive boathouse at the left of the lawn, whose front, open to the surging river, glowed with anbaric light. There were sounds from inside that came clearly even over the storm and the rage of the water: hammering, drilling, a turbinelike whine.
Nugent made it, still knee-deep, and grasped the handle of a door on the landward side. He hauled it open and went in. Under the glare of floodlights, no doubt powered by the generator that was thudding just outside the door, half a dozen men were working on a long, slender boat. Nugent couldn’t see what they were doing: he had eyes only for the man who was crouching on the foredeck, using a welding torch.
“Asriel!” he called, and hurried forward along the temporary decking towards the boat.
Lord Asriel pushed up the mask that covered his face and stood, astonished.
“Nugent? Is that you? What are you doing here?”
“Is this boat ready to go out on the water?”
“Yes, but—”
“If you want to save your daughter, take it out right now. I’ll come with you and explain. Don’t waste a second.”
As La Belle Sauvage floated more and more swiftly down into London, the tide was nearing its height, and the consequences for the little canoe were serious. Slammed this way and that, battered by lurching waves and crosscurrents, she kept her course as well as Malcolm could manage, but every time she twisted on the rough water, he heard a creak, as if part of her framework was giving way. If only they could stop…
But they couldn’t stop. They couldn’t stop anywhere. As if the tide wasn’t enough, a wind had begun to blow, and was lashing the water into white-topped waves and whipping off the spray; and the sky above, gray and cold and dull all day, had been invaded by hefty rain-bearing thunderclouds. Malcolm kept turning this way and that to look for a place to put ashore, so as to attend to that horrible creak that he could hear now even above the wind, and he could feel it too, a sickening twist that began as the merest suspicion of structural looseness but soon became bigger with every lurch, every sideways rise and fall.
“Mal—” Alice called.
“I know. Hold on.”
They were swept onwards past a great palace set so far back in its garden that he could hardly see it through the rain, past streets of elegant brick houses, past a pretty oratory; and whenever he thought he could see shelter, he dug the paddle deep and tried to turn towards it, but it was hopeless; and now the blade was coming loose again, to make everything worse.
Through the murk ahead, he could just see four huge chimneys on the southern bank, rising from each corner of a great clifflike building. Were they near Chelsea? And if they were, how could he stop?
Alice was holding Lyra tight. He felt a surge of love for them both, of love and of infinite regret that he’d brought them into this; but he couldn’t dwell on that because there was a new sound now, piercing the noise of the wind and the battering rain: a siren—an alarm—shrieking behind them, its cry like a seabird tossed and flung this way and that in the buffeting air. Alice was straining to see over his shoulder, clutching Lyra to her chest, hand up to keep the rain out of her eyes—and at the same time Malcolm heard a clangor of bells from directly ahead.
And other sounds came to them on the pummeling wind—the roaring beat of an engine, the creak and howl of great masses of wood being crushed together, human cries. Malcolm could focus on none of them. La Belle Sauvage was worrying him to madness—was she breaking apart?
Suddenly there came a massive blow from something behind: a powerboat—Malcolm could hear the engine screaming as the propeller rose out of the water, and hear Alice scream over that, and then feel the thrust and shudder as the propeller plunged into the water again and forced the boat against the little canoe. What were they doing? Alice was shouting—her words were snatched away like a piece of paper—another crash as the navy-blue-and-ocher hull of the powerboat shouldered the canoe sideways in the water, and La Belle Sauvage leaned over and shipped a heavy wave before swinging upright again. Malcolm was fighting now with every little fraction of his strength, digging the paddle deep, leaning into the stroke, heaving hard—and nursing the broken thing, which was finally coming apart. He snatched off the useless blade and flung it backwards spinning through the air. Was there a crash of broken glass? A shout of anger?
Impossible to hear because now another powerboat, the higher note of a different engine, screamed in from the right and smashed into the first—Malcolm could see nothing: the lashing rain drenched his eyeballs, and the wild confusion of sound and the lurching, smashing, pitching, plunging movements of the canoe were his only guide.
And then a gunshot—two more—four more from a different gun—a sudden immense shock, and immediately the freezing water began to gush in, and nothing would ever stop it now.
Another smash against the wounded canoe, this time from the right. A powerful deep voice roaring, “Pass her up to me!”
Lord Asriel…
Malcolm wiped his right hand across his eyes and saw Alice trying to hold Lyra away from the hands that reached down, and he screamed, “Alice! It’s all right! Pass her up!”
One wild look from her, and he nodded as hard as he could—“Pass her up!” again in that harsh, deep shout—and Alice thrust the child up, and Lyra was screaming, and those hands snatched her, thrust her backwards, and then, before Alice could move, seized one of her wrists and hoisted her instantly up too, as if she weighed no more than the baby. Ben, as a little monkey, was clinging to her waist.
The first boat had swung back. Now it smashed into the canoe again, a deathblow, and the brave little boat was broken open like an egg. Both Malcolm and Asta cried out with love.
“Now you, boy!” That huge voice again.
Balancing knee-deep in the surging water, Malcolm swung the rucksack up. It was hard to lift with one hand, and those hands from above pushed it aside. “You—you fool!”
“Take this first!” Malcolm screamed, and Alice was shouting too: “Take it, take it!”
Out of his grasp it sprang upwards and vanished, and then he stood in the sinking canoe with Asta as a snake coiled tightly around his leg, and an iron-hard hand closed around his right arm and swung him up, and then he fell on a wooden deck with a crash that knocked every scrap of air out of his lungs, and he stared down with rain-lashed, tear-filled eyes as the little Belle Sauvage, smashed to matchwood, died and was borne away forever.
Nothing then but noise and the plunging, thumping, swinging of the powerboat on the wild water. Malcolm scrambled across to Alice, dragging the rucksack, and they sat clinging together with the child between them, all their dæmons clinging together too, as suddenly the movement stilled, the engine fell silent, and they were inside a great shed with anbaric lights blazing down at them.
Malcolm felt a wave of exhaustion move slowly through him from feet to head.
Asriel was shouting, “What the hell do you think you were playing at?”
Malcolm gathered his strength to sit up and answer, but he had none left. Alice leapt to her feet instead, and stood with fists clenched, facing Lord Asriel, and Ben, her dæmon, bristling with defiance as a wolf, bared his teeth beside her. Her voice was like a whip.
“Playing? You think we were playing? This was Mal’s idea. He said we’d bring Lyra to you to keep her safe, because by God there was nowhere else she’d be safe. I was against it because I thought it was impossible, but he was stronger than me, and if he says he’ll do something, he’ll bloody do it. You don’t know nothing about him to ask a stupid question like that. Playing! You dare even think that. If I told you half of what he’s done to keep us alive and safe, well, you wouldn’t imagine it could be true. You couldn’t dream of it. Whatever Mal says, I believe. So take that fucking smile off your face, you.”
Malcolm was barely conscious now. He thought he was dreaming. But the expression on Lord Asriel’s face, warm with amusement and admiration for Alice, was too real to be imagined. He dragged himself to his feet and said hoarsely, “Scholastic sanctuary. We tried to get her to Jordan College, but the flood was too strong, and anyway, I don’t know the words. The Latin words. So we thought you might…”
And he held out with trembling fingers the little white card that he’d found in the canoe.
Lyra was crying passionately. Once again Malcolm tried to hold himself steady, but it was too hard altogether. Just before he fainted, he heard someone say, “The boy’s bleeding—he’s been shot….”
When he came to, it was in a different space, small, hot, close to the drumming of a gyropter engine, lit by the glow of an instrument panel. His left arm was ablaze with pain. Where had that come from?
Someone squeezed his right hand. It was Alice.
“Where’s Lyra?” he managed to say.
She pointed to the floor. Lyra lay wrapped up as tightly as a mummy, fast asleep, and Pan lay coiled around her neck as a little green snake.
Asta was lying, cat-shaped, on Malcolm’s lap. He tried to stroke her with his left hand, but that made his arm throb with even more pain. She stood up and rubbed her face against his.
“Where are we?” he whispered.
“In a gyropter. He’s flying it.”
“Where are we going?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Where’s the rucksack?”
“Behind your legs.”
He felt for it with his right hand: there it was, safe. He felt his left arm delicately, and found a rough bandage covering the forearm.
“What happened?” he said.
“You got shot,” said Alice.
The gyropter was shaking and swaying, but Alice was calm enough, so Malcolm decided not to be anxious. The engine was so loud and so close that it was difficult to hear each other anyway. He leaned back in the hard seat and fell asleep.
Alice adjusted the way he was lying so he wouldn’t wake up with a stiff neck. Over the thudding of the engine, she heard Asriel shout something and thought she heard her name. She leaned forward and shouted back, “What? I can’t hear you.”
There was another man in the copilot’s seat, some sort of servant. He twisted around and handed her earphones, and showed her how to put them on and bring the microphone round in front of her mouth. Suddenly Lord Asriel’s voice was loud and clear.
“Listen carefully, and don’t interrupt. I’m going away, and I won’t be back for some time. I want to find the child safe when I come back, and the best way to ensure that is to keep yourself and Malcolm quiet and inconspicuous. You understand what I mean?”
“You think I’m stupid?”
“No, I think you’re young. Go back to the Trout. I know you work there; I saw you. Go back there and take up your life again. Tell no one about any of this. Oh, you can talk to Malcolm, of course, but not a word to anyone else except the Master of Jordan College. He’s a good man; you can trust him. But there are all kinds of dangers ready to pounce when the flood goes down.”
“What, the CCD, you mean? Why do they want her?”
“I haven’t got time to explain. But they’ll be watching you, and they’ll be watching Malcolm, so stay away from her for a while. I’d take her with me into the far north, where the dangers are open and obvious, except for one thing.”
“What?”
“She seems to have found some good guardians already. She must be lucky.”
He said no more. Alice took off the earphones. She bent down to touch Lyra’s forehead, but the child was fast asleep, with no fever. Greyhound Ben licked Pantalaimon’s emerald serpent head, and Alice took Malcolm’s right hand and closed her eyes.
And almost at once, it seemed, they were descending. Malcolm felt a lurch in his stomach and clenched his muscles against it; but it only lasted a few moments, and then the aircraft settled on the ground. The engine noise changed, becoming quieter, and then stopped altogether. Malcolm’s ears were ringing, but he did hear the hammering of rain against the body of the gyropter, and heard Lord Asriel’s voice above it: “Thorold, stay here and guard the machine. I’ll be ten minutes.”
Then he turned and said over his shoulder, “Get out and follow me. Bring the child, and bring your bloody rucksack.”
Alice found a door on her side and scooped up Lyra before scrambling out. Malcolm hauled the rucksack along and got out the same side, into the bitter wind and the teeming rain.
“This way,” said Lord Asriel, and hurried off.
A flash of lightning showed Malcolm a great domed building, walls of stone, towers, and treetops.
“Is this…,” said Alice.
“Oxford, yes. This is Radcliffe Square, I think—”
Lord Asriel was waiting at the entrance to a narrow lane lit by a flickering gaslamp. The rain made every surface shiny. His black hair glinted like stone.
He set off down the lane, and after a hundred yards or so, he took a key from his pocket and opened a door in the wall on the right.
They followed him into a large garden, overlooked by buildings on two sides. In one of them, large Gothic windows were lit, showing shelves of ancient books. Lord Asriel made straight for a corner of the garden under a high stone wall and went along a narrow passage that was lit, like the lane outside, by a flickering yellow light on the wall.
“Let me take the child,” he said.
Alice handed her over carefully. Lord Asriel’s dæmon, the powerful snow leopard, wanted to see her, and Lord Asriel crouched down to let her put her face next to the sleeping child. Malcolm shifted the rucksack awkwardly, and an idea came to him. He’d never managed to give Lyra the little toy he’d made, but perhaps…
“Is this Jordan College?” he said.
“As you suggested. Come on. We must be here and gone for this to work.”
He stopped by a large door set between two elegant bay windows, and knocked loudly. Malcolm, ignoring the awful pain in his left arm, rummaged at the bottom of the rucksack for the alethiometer in its black velvet cloth. The cloth fell open as he brought it out, and the gold glittered in the dim light.
“What’s that?” said Lord Asriel.
“It’s a present for her,” said Malcolm, and thrust it in among Lyra’s blankets.
They heard the sound of a key turning and bolts sliding back, and as thunder crashed overhead, the door opened to show a distinguished-looking man holding a lamp. He peered out at them in astonishment.
“Asriel? Can that be you?” he said. “Come inside, quickly.”
“Put your lamp down, Master. On the table—that’ll do.”
“What in the world—”
When the Master turned back, Lord Asriel put the child in his arms before he could protest.
“Secundum legem de refugio scholasticorum, protectionem tegimentumque huius collegii pro filia mea Lyra nomine reposco,” Asriel said. “Look after her.”
“Scholastic sanctuary? For this child?”
“For my daughter, Lyra, as I said.”
“She’s not a scholar!”
“You’ll have to make her into one, then, won’t you?”
“And what about these two?”
Asriel turned to look at Malcolm and Alice, sodden, shivering, filthy, exhausted, bloody.
“Treasure them,” he said.
Then he left.
It was no good; Malcolm couldn’t stand up any longer. Alice caught him and laid him on the Turkish carpet. The Master shut the door. In the sudden silence, Lyra began to cry.