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Lyra turned to Will.
“All right,” he said, “I’m ready.”
He took out the knife and looked into the eyes of his father’s ghost, who stood close by. They wouldn’t know each other for much longer, and Will thought how glad he would have been to see his mother beside them as well, all three together—
“Will,” said Lyra, alarmed.
He stopped. The knife was stuck in the air. He took his hand away, and there it hung, fastened in the substance of an invisible world. He let out a deep breath.
“I nearly . . .”
“I could see,” she said. “Look at me, Will.”
In the ghost light he saw her bright hair, her firm-set mouth, her candid eyes; he felt the warmth of her breath; he caught the friendly scent of her flesh.
The knife came loose.
“I’ll try again,” he said.
He turned away. Focusing hard, he let his mind flow down to the knife tip, touching, withdrawing, searching, and then he found it. In, along, down, and back. The ghosts crowded so close that Will’s body and Lyra’s felt little jolts of cold along every nerve.
And he made the final cut.
The first thing they sensed was noise. The light that struck in was dazzling, and they had to cover their eyes, ghosts and living alike, so they could see nothing for several seconds; but the pounding, the explosions, the rattle of gunfire, the shouts and screams were all instantly clear, and horribly frightening.
John Parry’s ghost and the ghost of Lee Scoresby recovered their senses first. Because both had been soldiers, experienced in battle, they weren’t so disoriented by the noise. Will and Lyra simply watched in fear and amazement.
Explosive rockets were bursting in the air above, showering fragments of rock and metal over the slopes of the mountain, which they saw a little way off; and in the skies angels were fighting angels, and witches, too, swooped and soared screaming their clan cries as they shot arrows at their enemies. They saw a Gallivespian, mounted on a dragonfly, diving to attack a flying machine whose human pilot tried to fight him off hand to hand. While the dragonfly darted and skimmed above, its rider leapt off to clamp his spurs deep in the pilot’s neck; and then the insect returned, swooping low to let its rider leap on the brilliant green back as the flying machine droned straight into the rocks at the foot of the fortress.
“Open it wider,” said Lee Scoresby. “Let us out!”
“Wait, Lee,” said John Parry. “Something’s happening—look over there.”
Will cut another small window in the direction he indicated, and as they looked out, they could all see a change in the pattern of the fighting. The attacking force began to withdraw. A group of armed vehicles stopped moving forward, and under covering fire, turned laboriously and moved back. A squadron of flying machines, which had been getting the better of a ragged battle with Lord Asriel’s gyropters, wheeled in the sky and made off to the west. The Kingdom’s forces on the ground—columns of riflemen, troops equipped with flamethrowers, with poison-spraying cannons, with weapons such as none of the watchers had ever seen—began to disengage and pull back.
“What’s going on?” said Lee. “They’re leaving the field—but why?”
There seemed to be no reason for it: Lord Asriel’s allies were outnumbered, their weapons were less potent, and many more of them were lying wounded.
Then Will felt a sudden movement among the ghosts. They were pointing out at something drifting in the air.
“Specters!” said John Parry. “That’s the reason.”
And for the first time, Will and Lyra thought they could see those things, like veils of shimmering gauze, falling from the sky like thistledown. But they were very faint, and when they reached the ground, they were much harder to see.
“What are they doing?” said Lyra.
“They’re making for that platoon of Asriel’s riflemen—”
And Will and Lyra knew what would happen, and they both called out in fear: “Run! Get away!”
Some of the soldiers, hearing children’s voices crying out from close by, looked around startled. Others, seeing a Specter making for them, so strange and blank and greedy, raised their guns and fired, but of course with no effect. And then it struck the first man it came to.
He was a soldier from Lyra’s own world, an African. His dæmon was a long-legged tawny cat spotted with black, and she drew back her teeth and prepared to spring.
They all saw the man aiming his rifle, fearless, not giving an inch—and then they saw the dæmon in the toils of an invisible net, snarling, howling, helpless, and the man trying to reach to her, dropping his rifle, crying her name, and sinking and fainting himself with pain and brutal nausea.
“Right, Will,” said John Parry. “Let us out now; we can fight those things.”
So Will opened the window wide and ran out at the head of the army of ghosts; and then began the strangest battle he could imagine.
The ghosts clambered out of the earth, pale forms paler still in the midday light. They had nothing to fear anymore, and they threw themselves against the invisible Specters, grappling and wrestling and tearing at things Will and Lyra couldn’t see at all.
The riflemen and the other living allies were bemused: they could make nothing of this ghostly, spectral combat. Will made his way through the middle of it, brandishing the knife, remembering how the Specters had fled from it before.
Wherever he went, Lyra went, too, wishing she had something to fight with as Will was doing, but looking around, watching more widely. She thought she could see the Specters from time to time, in an oily glistening of the air; and it was Lyra who felt the first shiver of danger.
With Salmakia on her shoulder, she found herself on a slight rise, just a bank of earth surmounted by hawthorn bushes, from which she could see the great sweep of country the invaders were laying waste.
The sun was above her. Ahead, on the western horizon, clouds lay heaped and brilliant, riven with chasms of darkness, their tops drawn out in the high-altitude winds. That way, too, on the plain, the enemy’s ground forces waited: machines glinting brightly, flags astir with color, regiments drawn up, waiting.
Behind, and to her left, was the ridge of jagged hills leading up to the fortress. They shone bright gray in the lurid pre-storm light, and on the distant ramparts of black basalt, she could even see little figures moving about, repairing the damaged battlements, bringing more weapons to bear, or simply watching.
And it was about then that Lyra felt the first distant lurch of nausea, pain, and fear that was the unmistakable touch of the Specters.
She knew what it was at once, though she’d never felt it before. And it told her two things: first, that she must have grown up enough now to become vulnerable to the Specters, and secondly, that Pan must be somewhere close by.
“Will—Will—” she cried.
He heard her and turned, knife in hand and eyes ablaze.
But before he could speak, he gave a gasp, made a choking lurch, and clutched his breast, and she knew the same thing was happening to him.
“Pan! Pan!” she cried, standing on tiptoe to look all around.
Will was bending over, trying not to be sick. After a few moments the feeling passed away, as if their dæmons had escaped; but they were no nearer to finding them, and all around the air was full of gunshots, cries, voices crying in pain or terror, the distant yowk-yowk-yowk of cliff-ghasts circling overhead, the occasional whiz and thock of arrows, and then a new sound: the rising of the wind.
Lyra felt it first on her cheeks, and then she saw the grass bending under it, and then she heard it in the hawthorns. The sky ahead was huge with storm: all the whiteness had gone from the thunderheads, and they rolled and swirled with sulphur yellow, sea green, smoke gray, oil black, a queasy churning miles high and as wide as the horizon.
Behind her the sun was still shining, so that every grove and every single tree between her and the storm blazed ardent and vivid, little frail things defying the dark with leaf and twig and fruit and flower.
And through it all went the two no-longer-quite-children, seeing the Specters almost clearly now. The wind was snapping at Will’s eyes and lashing Lyra’s hair across her face, and it should have been able to blow the Specters away; but the things drifted straight down through it toward the ground. Boy and girl, hand in hand, picked their way over the dead and the wounded, Lyra calling for her dæmon, Will alert in every sense for his.
