The Rose Field, page 40
The jetty was more or less level with the deck of the boat, but the pitching and plunging made it a hazardous jump. First to try it was Asta, and Malcolm snatched her out of the air and set her down on the slippery planks. “Go to the rocks,” he said, and she darted away.
Lyra was adjusting the rucksack on her back, trying to find her balance, and then she was ready.
“Ready…Now!” he shouted, and Lyra sprang with all her strength across the gap. He would have caught her if she’d fallen ten thousand feet; into his arms, as light as a wraith, strong and frail both at once. She clung to him, and he pressed her to his heart and kissed her head without thinking, and then said, “Run to the shore.”
She ran after Asta. Next came a woman Malcolm didn’t know: his own age, it seemed, slender, athletic, possibly Persian or Kurdish; Ionides had to urge her to the rail before she was willing to jump, but she readied herself and made the leap without difficulty.
Then the last two: first a man who came out of the wheelhouse, a burly fisherman by the look of him, balancing well on the lurching deck, and grasping Malcolm’s hand across the gap; and finally Ionides. Malcolm could see that he was not convinced, and in truth the boat was wallowing lower and more sluggishly, and the water was sweeping across the deck. Another few moments and it would be too low for him to reach the jetty.
“Jump, man!” Malcolm roared, and up he sprang, and Malcolm seized his arm and dragged him off the sinking vessel and over the edge of the jetty.
Seeing that Ionides was safe, Malcolm ran back to the rocks. Asta crouched tensely and, as soon as he was close enough, hurtled up into his arms, pressing herself hard against his beating heart. Lyra stood close by, soaking wet, shivering, but her face was lively with joy. The fisherman was looking after his own dæmon, a small white bird, and the woman sat calmly, watching everything.
“I’m Malcolm Polstead,” Malcolm said. “Who are you?”
“Leila Pervani,” she said.
“You a friend of Ionides?”
“Yes. And of Lyra.”
“Good. And you?” he said to the sailor.
“Yusif,” he said uncertainly, looking at the woman. Seeing her nod, he said it again.
The sailor had seen the great form of Prince Keshvād a little further up the rocks, crouching impassively in the light of the flaring mountain, and was clearly apprehensive.
Malcolm looked up. The blazing caverns gave off not only light but sound and heat. A roar blasted their ears that was part subterranean and part tempest, both air and fire, while the heat scorched their faces when they gazed upwards.
He was aware of someone beside him, and turned to see Ionides.
“That gryphon your friend?” he said. “The big one.”
“For the moment. He is Prince Keshvād. The little one is Gulya. Now we have to find the cave of a sorcerer, but…”
“Up there? Which one?”
“Hard to tell.”
“Miss Silver will know.”
His expression, vivid in the glare, was full of mischief and confidence. Malcolm remembered the morning they’d met, under the orange tree at the embassy house in Aleppo, and the impression Ionides had made on him then.
“You came all this way with Lyra?”
“Every step. She save my life, I save hers when necessary.”
“And the woman?”
“You want to find the right cave or not?”
Malcolm smiled briefly. He turned to Lyra. She had gone to sit on a rock, clutching her rucksack. As she looked up at him, Malcolm found he could barely stand for the beating of his heart. He felt that the two of them might have been the only focus of consciousness in the world, so fiercely were they intent on each other.
He crouched down beside her. “Lyra, I have to go with the little gryphon to the cave of a sorcerer, who put a spell on her years ago. She will fight him, and she means to kill him. But he’s concealed his cave by setting the whole mountain aflame. Ionides says—”
“Whatever he says, it’s true. Mostly. He said I’ll know the right cave?”
“Yes. Is that true?”
“It’s true,” said Asta, who’d been listening close by.
Lyra was feeling in her battered rucksack. “That alethiometer,” she said, “the one you were mending—it was mine, and here’s the glass.”
She passed it to him, making sure his hand was securely around it before letting it go. It wasn’t easy to see; the rain was still dashing against his eyes, and the glare of the fires showed him only a disc of glass running with water and glistening with inconstant yellow and orange and red and white flares of brilliance.
“But—” he said.
“There’s something special about it, I don’t know, the shape or the kind of glass, something. Try to…”
He held it up to his eye, unconvinced, and tried to look through it at the mountain. All he saw at first was a blur of flame. He wiped the rain from his eyes and looked again, and saw the flank of the mountain more clearly. He didn’t know what he was looking for: the cave and the forge of the sorcerer, of course, but how would he recognize that?
He scanned up and down, left and right, and took the lens away from his eye to look without it: Was there any difference?
“I can’t—” he began to say, and then all the other things his body was feeling began to remind him of themselves: the bitter cold, the unsteady rocks underfoot, the drenching rain.
He held the glass to his eye again.
Something was different about that patch, just below the southern flank—
Yes. It was.
“Seen it?” Lyra said.
Alone among the crevices gushing flame, this one glowed with a steady light. A figure—male—stood in the entrance, looking down—
And at that moment every flame went out, except that one. A few last scraps of fire flew away on the wind, scattering sparks, but otherwise—total darkness.
He had to think: Don’t drop the glass. In his astonishment he might have let go, and it would have smashed on the rocks at his feet, but he held it securely.
The others were all struck silent. They stood or sat still, looking upwards at the vast bulk of the mountain against the lowering sky. Not a speck of light or flame anywhere on it; a great hand seemed to have swept across and put them all out at once.
No one spoke. Malcolm looked again for the little patch where he’d seen the forge—looked with the naked eye, unsuccessfully, and then with the glass.
“What is happening?” asked the woman, Leila Pervani.
“Can you see it?” said Gulya.
“Yes, I can,” he said, and gave the glass back to Lyra. “Well, Gulya. We have to climb up to it, but I can see where it is.”
“Is it a long way?” said Lyra.
“Yes, and hard. But you’re not coming.”
“Yes, I bloody am.”
He ran his hands over his head, trying to clear the rain out of his eyes. “Well, to tell the truth, I shall need some help. Not with the fighting—Gulya has to do that herself—but with the preparation. Handing me various things when I call for them.”
“I can do that!”
“Maybe better with me,” said Ionides. “Only perhaps. Maybe not, in fact.”
“Thank you, but no.”
“Stay here and guard my rucksack,” said Lyra.
“This Miss Silver or Queen Tatiana?”
“What do you think?”
He nodded cheerfully.
Malcolm turned to him and said, “When Lyra and I and the gryphon—the little one—come down the mountain, things will have changed. Somewhere in the sky there are witches, under the command of Tuuli Latvala. Remember that name, and watch out for them. They will help us, but I don’t know how at the moment.”
“Otherwise we stay here?”
“You stay here till we come down.”
Leila Pervani was looking at him. In the newly fallen dark he could hardly see her, but he had a vivid sense of her expression as he remembered it: fearless, appraising, wary. Ionides stood beside her, his hand on her shoulder. Yusif the boatman sat nearby, stroking his seabird dæmon.
Malcolm took out the little bag containing the things he needed in order to deal with the sorcerer, and set his rucksack down next to Lyra’s and called to Gulya. Prince Keshvād remained where he was, couchant, still, silent. He looked Malcolm straight in the eye, and nodded slowly, once.
“When the fires were blazing, I could see a path. We’ll aim for that and try to stay on it,” Malcolm said, and set off.
Gulya flew a little, stalked a little, flew again. Asta ran ahead a short way, stopped to look back, moved further on. Malcolm walked steadily: there was a long climb ahead of them.
* * *
—
In the middle airs above the flank of the mountain and below the thickest clouds, Tuuli Latvala and her companions sped to and fro, south to north and back again, weaving a complex pattern that was invisible even to themselves; the weft was their trajectories, and the warp was their knowledge of the behavior of clouds. This was a curious storm, no doubt about it, but they had seen others like it, and they had its measure.
What they had to do was impose an intention on the mass of clouds directly alongside the mountain and over the sea. Everything had an intention, in the thought-world of the witches, but most things didn’t know it, or had intentions that were feeble or contradictory. This storm had been summoned and formed by someone whose knowledge and skycraft were almost as full as theirs, but who seemed to have a limited mastery of self-contradiction. Tuuli Latvala was able to express this state of things in words, if she needed to, but her companions didn’t need words to understand it. They darted back and forth, tightening a thought here, lengthening a thread of influence there, tying together three currents in one greater one, and little by little persuading the clouds to part along a line parallel to the slope of the mountainside.
The flames that had engulfed the mountain so suddenly, and then vanished without warning, had perturbed the witches briefly, but they continued their work unnoticed by the people below; and before very long the vast, unwieldy clumsiness of moisture-saturated air found itself wanting to move this way, or that way, and to leave a gulf in the center of the mass, as if that had been its intention from the beginning.
Tuuli Latvala turned away from the work between the cloud base and the sea and soared up into the chasm that had been opening above them. The quality of the light up here was quite different from the inky blue-black darkness clinging to the mountain and the rocky shore, because the higher she flew, the thinner were the clouds above her. There was a silveriness that suffused the air, and with it one of the most joyous sensations for a witch, the promise of moonlight on her skin.
Satisfied with their progress, the witch looked back at the mountain. It was completely dark; no moonlight yet came that far through the clouds. Tuuli Latvala flew down to the water’s edge, where the waves smashed themselves against the rocks and shook the jetty and moved the wrecked fishing boat this way and that as it lay half-submerged. She looked at the rocks where Ionides and the others were waiting, and greeted them briefly before flying up again.
Lyra didn’t ask why they had to defeat the sorcerer, though she badly wanted to know. She was content to stumble up the mountain path peering through the dark at Malcolm picking his way faultlessly after Gulya over the rough stones, and feeling all around her a warning heat from the rock itself, as if it could burst into flames again at any second.
Malcolm said nothing; they needed all their breath for the climb and what would follow it. They helped each other when they stumbled, steadied each other when the ascent grew steeper, and climbed more slowly when they needed both hands to move safely. He went ahead and took care to go no faster or slower than she could, always moving forward, always into the darkness, always a little higher with each step.
The rocks underfoot and under their hands were hotter and hotter the higher they climbed. The rain that still fell turned into steam, so they seemed to be climbing among clouds, and Lyra began to fear that they’d lose their way; but the little gryphon Gulya seemed to be sure of the path, and her lion claws were unaffected by the heat from below.
Asta found it harder to manage, and eventually sprang up with relief to Malcolm’s shoulder.
“What’s going to happen when we get there?” Lyra managed to say.
“Gulya is going to kill the sorcerer. He put a spell on her, so she never grew.”
“And if she doesn’t kill him?”
“She’ll have to. And she will.”
They fell silent, occasionally whispering a warning about a loose rock or a crevice beside the path.
Not long after that, the rain stopped.
While it was falling, difficult though it made their progress, it had at least kept them cool against the heat of the rocks. Now, although the air was saturated with moisture and steam still rose around them as they struggled upwards, there was nothing to moderate the ferocity of the heat underfoot.
Malcolm was wearing strong boots, but Lyra wasn’t. She said nothing, but he could see how painful it was for her, and called to Gulya.
“Where is the forge?” he said.
“Really very close. You can hear the machinery from here. One more effort, and then I shall kill him.”
“You will only kill him if you do exactly as I say.”
“I will, of course I will.”
“But will you remember?”
“You had no fears about my memory before.”
“I know what happens in the middle of a fight. We should have taken time to practice, to train. Me as well as you.”
“I shall kill him, never fear.”
“As you say,” said Malcolm, and then listened. “I can hear it.”
He stood still, motioning to Lyra to do the same, and they listened.
The sounds came from below their feet as well as from ahead on the path—hammering, grinding, thudding, smashing sounds, deep in the heart of the mountain, making the rocks shudder all around them, shaking the moisture loose from their surfaces.
“What is it?” said Lyra.
“The forge of Sorush,” said Malcolm. “He’s mining for precious metals and minerals. Harvesting rubies that grow there. Refining the ores. He loves gold as much as the gryphons do.”
“But he loves it for its power,” said Gulya. “We love it for what it is in itself.”
“I think I see,” said Lyra. “Is he alone? Does he have any helpers?”
“The koruskati, and other beings we don’t know about. Malcolm knows how to defeat him. And we shall do it, and I shall kill him, and then you will see my true aspect, at last.”
Something was happening above them. Tuuli Latvala and her witch-companions had gathered in much of the cloud rack above, and the light that filtered through what was left had a different tone altogether from the black steamy hideous night that had enveloped Lyra and the others as they climbed. The sky was not quite clear above them yet, but it was clearing.
“Let’s go on,” said Malcolm. “He’ll see this soon himself, and be alarmed.”
With burning feet they stumbled further on. And soon they came to a buttress in the mountain that obstructed the path. They would have to walk around it with great care, because a fall of several hundred feet lay below.
They stopped behind the buttress and Malcolm beckoned Lyra close, slipping the string of his small bag off his shoulder.
“This is what you have to do,” he said quietly. “In here there’s a flask of water, a bag of dust, a small pair of bellows, and a stone. Put your hand in there now and learn the feel of them.”
She did. The flask was made of some kind of metal, with a top that screwed open in the normal way. She’d need two hands for that. The bag of dust was about the size of Malcolm’s two fists together, and held shut with two leather cords. She’d need both hands for that too. She then felt for the stone. It was rough and round, and no bigger than a small apple.
“He’s hiding behind a mirror,” Malcolm said. “When you look into it, you’ll see yourself, but yourself as he wants to see you. Take no notice of it, and be ready to hand me the flask—take the top off first—and then the bellows, and then open the bag of dust and hold that up too. The stone I’ll take now.”
She put it in his hand. And the purpose of all this, she reminded herself, was to get her one step nearer Karamakan and the building in the desert, and to find Pan and the secret of her imagination. That truth lay like a diamond in her heart.
And then they moved around the buttress, and there it was: the cavern, the forge, the stronghold of Sorush. A cleft in the mountainside, and in it a blaze of light and fire, and the sorcerer himself standing in the entrance—invisible behind his mirror.
Lyra had to stop and shake her head. Her eyes were dazzled, not just by the glare of the fires but by the splintering confusion of the images in the mirror.
Malcolm was beside her, and she saw him in the mirror: it showed a strutting popinjay, vain, conceited, but self-pitying, mewling, sneering. She saw herself in the mirror too: a simpering courtesan, painted and half-naked, but diseased, with great sores leaking slime and pus. Her form and Malcolm’s were iridescent with the light from the forge, glittering like poison beetles. Asta felt sick at the sight of them both.
“Don’t look at him,” said Malcolm, and crouched to open his bag. “Look here instead, and get ready to hand me the flask.”
As Lyra unscrewed the top of the flask, Malcolm stood up and flung the stone directly at his own reflection in Sorush’s looking glass. The mirror shattered and fell to the floor of the cave, and all the reflections vanished. There was nothing behind it.
