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“Tread carefully,” was all she said in reply.
Will and Lyra were soaked through, shivering, racked with pain, and stumbling blindly through mud and over rocks and into little gullies where storm-fed streams ran red with blood. Lyra was afraid that the Lady Salmakia was dying: she hadn’t uttered a word for several minutes, and she lay faint and limp in Lyra’s hand.
As they sheltered in one riverbed where the water was white, at least, and scooped up handfuls to their thirsty mouths, Will felt Tialys rouse himself and say:
“Will—I can hear horses coming—Lord Asriel has no cavalry. It must be the enemy. Get across the stream and hide—I saw some bushes that way . . .”
“Come on,” said Will to Lyra, and they splashed through the icy, bone-aching water and scrambled up the far side of the gully just in time. The riders who came over the slope and clattered down to drink didn’t look like cavalry: they seemed to be of the same kind of close-haired flesh as their horses, and they had neither clothes nor harness. They carried weapons, though: tridents, nets, and scimitars.
Will and Lyra didn’t stop to look; they stumbled over the rough ground at a crouch, intent only on getting away unseen.
But they had to keep their heads low to see where they were treading and avoid twisting an ankle, or worse, and thunder exploded overhead as they ran, so they couldn’t hear the screeching and snarling of the cliff-ghasts until they were upon them.
The creatures were surrounding something that lay glittering in the mud: something slightly taller than they were, which lay on its side, a large cage, perhaps, with walls of crystal. They were hammering at it with fists and rocks, shrieking and yelling.
And before Will and Lyra could stop and run the other way, they had stumbled right into the middle of the troop.
THIRTY-ONE
AUTHORITY’S END
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease.
• WILLIAM BLAKE •
Mrs. Coulter whispered to the shadow beside her:
“Look how he hides, Metatron! He creeps through the dark like a rat . . .”
They stood on a ledge high up in the great cavern, watching Lord Asriel and the snow leopard make their careful way down, a long way below.
“I could strike him now,” the shadow whispered.
“Yes, of course you could,” she whispered back, leaning close; “but I want to see his face, dear Metatron; I want him to know I’ve betrayed him. Come, let’s follow and catch him . . .”
The Dust fall shone like a great pillar of faint light as it descended smoothly and never-endingly into the gulf. Mrs. Coulter had no attention to spare for it, because the shadow beside her was trembling with desire, and she had to keep him by her side, under what control she could manage.
They moved down, silent, following Lord Asriel. The farther down they climbed, the more she felt a great weariness fall over her.
“What? What?” whispered the shadow, feeling her emotions, and suspicious at once.
“I was thinking,” she said with a sweet malice, “how glad I am that the child will never grow up to love and be loved. I thought I loved her when she was a baby; but now—”
“There was regret,” the shadow said, “in your heart there was regret that you will not see her grow up.”
“Oh, Metatron, how long it is since you were a man! Can you really not tell what it is I’m regretting? It’s not her coming of age, but mine. How bitterly I regret that I didn’t know of you in my own girlhood; how passionately I would have devoted myself to you . . .”
She leaned toward the shadow, as if she couldn’t control the impulses of her own body, and the shadow hungrily sniffed and seemed to gulp at the scent of her flesh.
They were moving laboriously over the tumbled and broken rocks toward the foot of the slope. The farther down they went, the more the Dust light gave everything a nimbus of golden mist. Mrs. Coulter kept reaching for where his hand might have been if the shadow had been a human companion, and then seemed to recollect herself, and whispered:
“Keep behind me, Metatron—wait here—Asriel is suspicious—let me lull him first. When he’s off guard, I’ll call you. But come as a shadow, in this small form, so he doesn’t see you—otherwise, he’ll just let the child’s dæmon fly away.”
The Regent was a being whose profound intellect had had thousands of years to deepen and strengthen itself, and whose knowledge extended over a million universes. Nevertheless, at that moment he was blinded by his twin obsessions: to destroy Lyra and to possess her mother. He nodded and stayed where he was, while the woman and the monkey moved forward as quietly as they could.
Lord Asriel was waiting behind a great block of granite, out of sight of the Regent. The snow leopard heard them coming, and Lord Asriel stood up as Mrs. Coulter came around the corner. Everything, every surface, every cubic centimeter of air, was permeated by the falling Dust, which gave a soft clarity to every tiny detail; and in the Dust light Lord Asriel saw that her face was wet with tears, and that she was gritting her teeth so as not to sob.
He took her in his arms, and the golden monkey embraced the snow leopard’s neck and buried his black face in her fur.
“Is Lyra safe? Has she found her dæmon?” she whispered.
“The ghost of the boy’s father is protecting both of them.”
“Dust is beautiful . . . I never knew.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I lied and lied, Asriel . . . Let’s not wait too long, I can’t bear it . . . We won’t live, will we? We won’t survive like the ghosts?”
“Not if we fall into the abyss. We came here to give Lyra time to find her dæmon, and then time to live and grow up. If we take Metatron to extinction, Marisa, she’ll have that time, and if we go with him, it doesn’t matter.”
“And Lyra will be safe?”
“Yes, yes,” he said gently.
He kissed her. She felt as soft and light in his arms as she had when Lyra was conceived thirteen years before.
She was sobbing quietly. When she could speak, she whispered:
“I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he’d see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I’d ever done . . . I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn’t. There is none. But I love Lyra. Where did this love come from? I don’t know; it came to me like a thief in the night, and now I love her so much my heart is bursting with it. All I could hope was that my crimes were so monstrous that the love was no bigger than a mustard seed in the shadow of them, and I wished I’d committed even greater ones to hide it more deeply still . . . But the mustard seed had taken root and was growing, and the little green shoot was splitting my heart wide open, and I was so afraid he’d see . . .”
She had to stop to gather herself. He stroked her shining hair, all set about with golden Dust, and waited.
“Any moment now he’ll lose patience,” she whispered. “I told him to make himself small. But he’s only an angel, after all, even if he was once a man. And we can wrestle with him and bring him to the edge of the gulf, and we’ll both go down with him . . .”
He kissed her, saying, “Yes. Lyra will be safe, and the Kingdom will be powerless against her. Call him now, Marisa, my love.”
She took a deep breath and let it out in a long, shuddering sigh. Then she smoothed her skirt down over her thighs and tucked the hair back behind her ears.
“Metatron,” she called softly. “It’s time.”
Metatron’s shadow-cloaked form appeared out of the golden air and took in at once what was happening: the two dæmons, crouching and watchful, the woman with the nimbus of Dust, and Lord Asriel—
Who leapt at him at once, seizing him around the waist, and tried to hurl him to the ground. The angel’s arms were free, though, and with fists, palms, elbows, knuckles, forearms, he battered Lord Asriel’s head and body: great pummeling blows that forced the breath from his lungs and rebounded from his ribs, that cracked against his skull and shook his senses.
However, his arms encircled the angel’s wings, cramping them to his side. And a moment later, Mrs. Coulter had leapt up between those pinioned wings and seized Metatron’s hair. His strength was enormous: it was like holding the mane of a bolting horse. As he shook his head furiously, she was flung this way and that, and she felt the power in the great folded wings as they strained and heaved at the man’s arms locked so tightly around them.
