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“Ah, it's a different sort of dust. You can't see it with your ordinary eyesight. It's a special dust. Now clench your fist— that's right. Good. Now if you feel around in there, you'll find a sort of handle thing—got that? Take hold of that, there's a good girl. Now can you put your other hand over this way— rest it on this brass globe. Good. Fine. Now you'll feel a slight tingling, nothing to worry about, it's just a slight anbaric current….”
Pantalaimon, in his most tense and wary wildcat form, prowled with lightning-eyed suspicion around the apparatus, continually returning to rub himself against Lyra.
She was sure by now that they weren't going to perform the operation on her yet, and sure too that her disguise as Lizzie Brooks was secure; so she risked a question.
“Why do you cut people's daemons away?”
“What? Who's been talking to you about that?”
“This girl, I dunno her name. She said you cut people's daemons away.”
“Nonsense…”
He was agitated, though. She went on:
'“Cause you take people out one by one and they never come back. And some people reckon you just kill 'em, and other people say different, and this girl told me you cut—”
“It's not true at all. When we take children out, it's because it's time for them to move on to another place. They're growing up. I'm afraid your friend is alarming herself. Nothing of the sort! Don't even think about it. Who is your friend?”
“I only come here yesterday, I don't know anyone's name.”
“What does she look like?”
“I forget. I think she had sort of brown hair…light brown, maybe…! dunno.”
The doctor went to speak quietly to the nurse. As the two of them conferred, Lyra watched their daemons. This nurse's was a pretty bird, just as neat and incurious as Sister Clara's dog, and the doctor's was a large heavy moth. Neither moved. They were awake, for the bird's eyes were bright and the moth's feelers waved languidly, but they weren't animated, as she would have expected them to be. Perhaps they weren't really anxious or curious at all.
Presently the doctor came back and they went on with the examination, weighing her and Pantalaimon separately, looking at her from behind a special screen, measuring her heartbeat, placing her under a little nozzle that hissed and gave off a smell like fresh air.
In the middle of one of the tests, a loud bell began to ring and kept ringing.
“The fire alarm,” said the doctor, sighing. “Very well. Lizzie, follow Sister Betty.”
“But all their outdoor clothes are down in the dormitory building, Doctor. She can't go outside like this. Should we go there first, do you think?”
He was annoyed at having his experiments interrupted, and snapped his fingers in irritation.
“I suppose this is just the sort of thing the practice is meant to show up,” he said. “What a nuisance.”
“When I came yesterday,” Lyra said helpfully, “Sister Clara put my other clothes in a cupboard in that first room where she looked at me. The one next door. I could wear them.”
“Good idea!” said the nurse. “Quick, then.”
With a secret glee, Lyra hurried there behind the nurse and retrieved her proper furs and leggings and boots, and pulled them on quickly while the nurse dressed herself in coal silk.
Then they hurried out. In the wide arena in front of the main group of buildings, a hundred or so people, adults and children, were milling about: some in excitement, some in irritation, many just bewildered.
“See?” one adult was saying. “It's worth doing this to find out what chaos we'd be in with a real fire.”
Someone was blowing a whistle and waving his arms, but no one was taking much notice. Lyra saw Roger and beckoned. Roger tugged Billy Costa's arm and soon all three of them were together in a maelstrom of running children.
“No one'll notice if we take a look around,” said Lyra. “It'll take 'em ages to count everyone, and we can say we just followed someone else and got lost.”
They waited till most of the grownups were looking the other way, and then Lyra scooped up some snow and rammed it into a loose powdery snowball, and hurled it at random into the crowd. In a moment all the children were doing it, and the air was full of flying snow. Screams of laughter covered completely the shouts of the adults trying to regain control, and then the three children were around the corner and out of sight.
The snow was so thick that they couldn't move quickly, but it didn't seem to matter; no one was following. Lyra and the others scrambled over the curved roof of one of the tunnels, and found themselves in a strange moonscape of regular hummocks and hollows, all swathed in white under the black sky and lit by reflections from the lights around the arena.
“What we looking for?” said Billy.
“Dunno. Just looking,” said Lyra, and led the way to a squat, square building a little apart from the rest, with a low-powered anbaric light at the corner.
The hubbub from behind was as loud as ever, but more distant. Clearly the children were making the most of their freedom, and Lyra hoped they'd keep it up for as long as they could. She moved around the edge of the square building, looking for a window. The roof was only seven feet or so off the ground, and unlike the other buildings, it had no roofed tunnel to connect it with the rest of the station.
There was no window, but there was a door. A notice above it said ENTRY STRICTLY FORBIDDEN in red letters.
Lyra set her hand on it to try, but before she could turn the handle, Roger said:
“Look! A bird! Or—”
His or was an exclamation of doubt, because the creature swooping down from the black sky was no bird at all: it was someone Lyra had seen before.
“The witch's daemon!”
The goose beat his great wings, raising a flurry of snow as he landed.
“Greetings, Lyra,” he said. “I followed you here, though you didn't see me. I have been waiting for you to come out into the open. What is happening?”
She told him quickly.
“Where are the gyptians?” she said. “Is John Faa safe? Did they fight off the Samoyeds?”
“Most of them are safe. John Faa is wounded, though not severely. The men who took you were hunters and raiders who often prey on parties of travelers, and alone they can travel more quickly than a large party. The gyptians are still a day's journey away.”
The two boys were staring in fear at the goose daemon and at Lyra's familiar manner with him, because of course they'd never seen a daemon without his human before, and they knew little about witches.
Lyra said to them, “Listen, you better go and keep watch, right. Billy, you go that way, and Roger, watch out the way we just come. We en't got long.”
They ran off to do as she said, and then Lyra turned back to the door.
“Why are you trying to get in there?” said the goose daemon.
“Because of what they do here. They cut—” she lowered her voice, “they cut people's daemons away. Children's. And I think maybe they do it in here. At least, there's something here, and I was going to look. But it's locked….”
“I can open it,” said the goose, and beat his wings once or twice, throwing snow up against the door; and as he did, Lyra heard something turn in the lock.
“Go in carefully,” said the daemon.
Lyra pulled open the door against the snow and slipped inside. The goose daemon came with her. Pantalaimon was agitated and fearful, but he didn't want the witch's daemon to see his fear, so he had flown to Lyra's breast and taken sanctuary inside her furs.
As soon as her eyes had adjusted to the light, Lyra saw why.
In a series of glass cases on shelves around the walls were all the daemons of the severed children: ghostlike forms of cats, or birds, or rats, or other creatures, each bewildered and frightened and as pale as smoke.
The witch's daemon gave a cry of anger, and Lyra clutched Pantalaimon to her and said, “Don't look! Don't look!”
“Where are the children of these daemons?” said the goose daemon, shaking with rage.
Lyra explained fearfully about her encounter with little Tony Makarios, and looked over her shoulder at the poor caged daemons, who were clustering forward pressing their pale faces to the glass. Lyra could hear faint cries of pain and misery. In the dim light from a low-powered anbaric bulb she could see a name on a card at the front of each case, and yes, there was an empty one with Tony Makarios on it. There were four or five other empty ones with names on them, too.
