The Rose Field, page 41
Nothing there at all. But Malcolm was prepared, and so was Lyra. She held up the flask, and he took it and flung the water at the nothing. Then he thrust the spout of the bellows into the bag of ground pumice that Lyra was now holding open, and spread the handles wide, sucking up the dust.
Then he pointed the bellows at the nothing and worked the handles so that the dust blew out and stuck to the soaked magician and revealed him standing there, a small man twitching and furtive and naked, and seemingly made of pumice.
And at the same moment the light changed. The glow of the flames seemed to withdraw, just a little way, and into the cave from the night sky above came a ray of moonlight. The witches had moved the clouds aside, and the full moon blazed in the bare sky.
The sorcerer cried out in fear, and tried to cover himself with pieces of the broken mirror, holding up shards of the shattered glass in front of his face, his genitals, his belly.
Gulya had better move quickly, Lyra thought, and so she did: she darted between her and Malcolm and swung her head to fling something out of her beak, and it glittered in the moonlight as it fell at the sorcerer’s feet: the silver amulet.
Sorush screamed, and stumbled back. The ground pumice was falling away as the water dried on his body: already only parts of him were visible.
Hurry, Lyra thought, he’ll disappear again—
And Gulya half leapt, half flew against the sorcerer, claws out, and tore at him and bore him to the ground.
Immediately the pair of them were covered in a cloud of burning, scorching sparks: the koruskati, swarming to the defense of their master. Through the flickering confusion Lyra could see them stinging the little gryphon, plunging through her fur and her feathers, and she shook them off again and again—until they seemed to decide all at once to make for her eyes, and she had to pull away and shake her head, but still they clung and burrowed.
Lyra couldn’t help it: she ran to her and knocked the little sparks away, stamping them into the rock, never minding how they burned her feet.
Sorush was beginning to scramble away, and Malcolm saw it and sucked the last of the pumice into the bellows before blasting it straight at the sorcerer’s face. Lyra heard cries from somewhere further inside the cavern, eagle screams, and then Sorush was on his feet again and Gulya launched herself at him once more.
This strange contest had rules, Malcolm knew; he could help, but not fight, or the curse on Gulya would never be lifted. Only she could kill Sorush, and only killing him would work.
But Lyra and Malcolm had been joined now by Tuuli Latvala. The witch’s companions remained in the sky, holding the clouds back and clearing the way for the moon to shine, but the witch herself was standing beside Malcolm and watching intently as the fight went on.
Sorush was trying to draw Gulya further back into the cavern, and again the little gryphon was surrounded by a cloud of the blazing koruskati, biting and stinging and piercing her fur and scorching her feathers. If they did too much damage she’d never fly again, and Asta longed with all her being to plunge in beside her and tear at the sorcerer’s flesh with her own claws.
Then Sorush screamed, and in response came a lick of huge flame from inside the cave, breaking against the rocky roof and spreading out and downwards before disappearing. Tuuli Latvala beat at it with her cloud-pine, but Lyra, thinking of the fire-loving pitch in the vessels of the wood, thought, Don’t, don’t…
And indeed the cloud-pine caught, and Tuuli Latvala had to attend to that, or lose her own power of flight.
Meanwhile, Malcolm too had to hold himself back, because like Lyra he was fearing for Gulya’s life now, and they both felt she’d taken on too much, they’d gone too far. Another mighty banner of flame swept out from the depths and enveloped both combatants in its folds.
But there was Lyra.
Malcolm blinked and shook his head, but yes, it was her, standing in the entrance to the cave, and she was holding up the glass from the alethiometer and focusing the moonlight—
Against the incandescent glare of the forge and the angry sparkling of the myriad koruskati, the little beam of moonlight was all but invisible. Nevertheless it fell on Sorush’s arm, and he twisted away in shock, and Gulya saw her chance and flung herself up again, with wings and claws that must be exhausted, Malcolm thought, and gripped the sorcerer’s head in her jaws.
The flames from the forge tried to surge out again, as if they were obeying Sorush’s will, but they didn’t reach as far as they had a few moments before. The volcanic roaring was weaker now, and the thudding of the great hammers was slowing down and sounding uncertain.
Malcolm, and Lyra too, and Tuuli Latvala for that matter, could all see something that had been invisible till then: the cords of djinn-fire binding the body of Gulya tight. She was fighting to loosen them as well as defeat the sorcerer, and Malcolm thought that unless she got them loose, she would never beat him. But unless she beat him, she would never get them loose, he thought at the same time; and he wanted with a passion to leap at the combatants and hold the sorcerer back while Lyra tore at the spell-bindings and freed her.
More and more parts of Sorush were becoming hard to see as the pumice dust dried and fell away from his flesh, but there was no more water and no more dust, and as for the moonlight, the sorcerer had moved little by little towards the side of the cave, away from the entrance, where the moonlight lay—the only place where Lyra’s glass could work.
Sorush was scrabbling, grabbing, reaching out to get hold of one of Gulya’s wings and break it. And she was writhing and twisting away from his deadly hands, and then she managed to snap her beak shut on his right wrist and wrench it back and forth, working at the bones till they cracked, twisting the tendons, ripping open the arteries till her face and the whole of the sorcerer’s arm were covered in his blood.
He was screaming and tearing with his left hand at her wings, her neck, her lion feet, at whatever he could grasp, but he was weakening, and—Malcolm had to say it to himself before he could believe it—Gulya was stronger; she had shaken off the binding spell-cords. The clouds of sparking, stinging koruskati were falling away too, and then Gulya dug her lion feet into the sorcerer’s belly and surged upwards to his throat, and despite every effort he could make with his one working hand, she plunged her beak in just under his jaw and tore and tore away at the flesh till the koruskati were scattered by the blood spray, till the whole cavern was echoing with the hideous rasping of breath through his open throat, till Sorush fell twisting, writhing, kicking, twitching, flailing, and helpless as the life drained out of him.
Finally Gulya struggled to get up and off his body and away, and lay panting and wounded on the rocky floor.
Lyra ran to the little gryphon, caressing her head, cleaning away the sorcerer’s blood, whispering words of praise and encouragement. And Tuuli Latvala was kneeling beside her and opening a little horn box of bloodmoss ointment, and Malcolm and Asta were making their way deeper into the cave, where they smashed down the crystal walls holding back the imprisoned gryphons, slaves no more but flightless and wounded still, who came hobbling and limping and crawling out to see the wonder of their delivery, to marvel at the body of Sorush, entirely visible now, ragged and filthy and torn asunder.
“Outside,” said Gulya, and her voice was deeper now, assured and commanding. She was growing larger as they looked: commanding, majestic.
Asta said quietly to Lyra, “And all that time she was young against her will!”
Tuuli Latvala gave her little box of bloodmoss ointment to Malcolm for safekeeping, and with a long witch-scream of triumph she flew up to join her companions, still holding back the clouds. The whole mountainside was bathed in moonlight; the twisted rocky path, the great buttress hiding the cavern, all the way down to the shoreline, where the waves still crashed against the jetty and the landing place.
Lyra could see the little group of figures all the way down there, all standing and peering up, it seemed, though she couldn’t distinguish one from another; and then the great form of the gryphon prince moved away from them and raised his head, and she was astonished at the immensity of him, the sail-broad extent of his wings as they beat again and again so that he soared up and over the lighthouse and still upwards, towards the cavern of the dead sorcerer and the gryphon, small no longer, whom he loved.
But while the others were watching Prince Keshvād, Malcolm saw another boat, a little way out still, but making directly for the jetty and the landing place.
Twenty-Five
High Mountain Cradle
The army of the Magisterium had met the first obstacle that seriously held them back. The desert of Karamakan, and the only-just-reachable red building inside it, lay to the south and east of the high range of mountains known as the Tien Shan, or Celestial Mountains, which extended many hundreds of miles to the east before descending to the level sands where the wandering lake of Lop Nor lay restlessly, protecting the desert from that side.
Delamare and his advisers had considered ordering his army to take the route through the Kazakh steppe north of the mountains, and approach the desert from the Lop Nor side, but decided against it. It would be too long a march, hard to supply, and vulnerable to attack from the unpredictable monarchies of Mongolia and Chingizia, not to mention the Golden Empire of Cathay itself.
The other main route from the west involved using one of the passes through the Hindu Kush, the mountains between the western end of the Tien Shan and the start of the great Himmaleh range, and Marcel Delamare was perfectly conscious of the parallel from ancient history: Alexander of Macedon had conquered everything between Greece and the Hindu Kush, but had never gone further and into Karamakan.
Delamare had moved his headquarters east from Constantinople, moving with his main force across the steppes towards Samarqand, and spent hours at his campaign desk looking at a globe and unfolding his maps of the region and folding them again and re-unfolding them, but whenever he looked at them, nothing had changed: the mountains were still there.
For the first time he began to wonder whether his army might be a little overextended. There was a reason Alexander had had to turn back; geography was implacable.
Alexander had no flying machines, of course, and the Magisterium had every kind of dirigible and gyrocopter at its disposal. Aircraft made short work of mountains. An airlift—a dirigible, say, moving a large body of troops through one of the high passes that marked the limit of Alexander’s reach—could put the Magisterium’s army down at the edge of the Karamakan desert in no time, and from there the red building was only a few days’ march away.
Except for the oghâb-gorgs.
These ferocious and abominable birds haunted the entire range of the Tien Shan, as well as the western part of the Himmaleh. They were fearless lovers of war, man-sized eaters of carrion and makers of it too; nor were they limited to the mountains, but, as Pan had seen, they sometimes ventured a long way west and north, attracted by the scent of shed blood, or the prospect of it. They were cannibals, of course; they were killers and eaters of anything that lived and could move, or had died and moved no more. Biology was implacable too.
In short, the Tien Shan was more or less impassable. A few early travelers had managed to come out alive, but it was only the high prices chargeable in the west for things like silk and spice and rose oil that made the travel worth the risk.
Again and again his advisers said, “Avoid the mountains,” and again and again he pored over his maps, and read further reports from travelers and geographers and even plain storytellers.
“No aircraft has ever crossed the Tien Shan,” Delamare’s owl dæmon reminded him. “The birds mob them and bear them to the ground. They are fearless, fanatical, deadly. And then there are the gryphons.”
“Gryphons!” Delamare, who rarely showed any sign of irritation or impatience, swept the map in front of him off the desk and pushed his chair back hard.
“Marcel,” his dæmon warned, “you’ll bring that officious young man in. Move quietly.”
The officious young man was Felix Murad, the assistant secretary Delamare had brought with him from Constantinople. He was competent and efficient, and Delamare liked him, though he did anticipate things a little too eagerly.
“Yes,” Delamare said shortly. “I know. Perhaps we should send him to the gryphons as an emissary. They have a king, do they? Remind me. Some kind of hereditary ruler?”
“A queen, at the moment. Why not send for Murad in any case? He will know things we don’t.”
Delamare nodded reluctantly and rang the little brass bell on his desk.
“I wonder,” he said to his dæmon before the young man came in. “Gryphons…”
A knock at the tent post, and Felix Murad came in, his sparrow dæmon alert and bright-eyed.
“Mr. President,” he said, inclining his head respectfully.
“Come and sit down, Felix. I want some advice.”
He took a chair and Murad sat upright on the bench nearby. “Anything I can tell you, sir.”
“Gryphons. I know nothing about them, but they seem to have some kind of authority in the mountains. Firstly, do they exist at all? Or are they travelers’ tales?”
“Yes, they do exist, sir, but they have very little to do with human beings. They have their own realms of influence, which hardly overlap with ours. That is why they are often thought of as being entirely mythical.”
“So they are only partly mythical, is that it?”
“Mr. President, that sort of distinction is too subtle for a secretary of my rank to understand.”
Part of Delamare’s mind automatically sifted out the insolence in the young man’s tone, and forgave it; another part admitted the truth of his words. Really, Murad was quite like Olivier Bonneville, in his way.
“When the late beloved St. Simeon was alive, did the Patriarchy have any dealings with these creatures?” Delamare asked.
“Not in a full diplomatic sense, Mr. President. There was a mutual recognition, at a subconsular level, and occasional exchanges over matters of trade, especially where gold was concerned.”
“Gold?”
“The gryphons are apparently obsessed with it. It’s almost a religious thing with them. So if there was a dispute involving ownership, for example, of a sum of gold, the Patriarchy recognized the importance of some kind of diplomatic channel in order to minimize the…You understand what I mean.”
“Of course. I would expect nothing else.” Delamare tapped the desk with his fingers, left to right, right to left. Then he looked up and said, “Schreiber. Where is he now, do we know?”
“With General Bentinck’s force in Khorasan, sir. Making adjustments to the tonnerre double.”
“Send to him and order him to join me at once, with all his men and their equipment.”
“Ah. Of course. At once, Monsieur le Président.”
And Murad left, with the slightest possible inclination of the head, and the slightest possible smile in his eyes. He was thinking that the sounds made by Delamare’s fingers tapping on the desk were not the same as they usually were, and as he closed the door he saw why: all the President’s fingernails were bitten to the quick.
Delamare himself had forgotten Murad already, and was thinking about Bonneville. Where was that boy, anyway?
* * *
—
At that moment, Olivier Bonneville was lying sleeplessly on a hard bunk in a filthy rural prison somewhere in the Lesser Caucasus. He was cold and hungry and frightened. His captors hadn’t been able to explain why they had arrested him, but it was clear that they expected to make something out of it; if not loot, then a reward.
They had his rucksack, which worried him most of all. The alethiometer…Why hadn’t he thought of some way of hiding it, a long time before this?
Well, he had to get it back. And then resume his search, and find the girl, and claim the reward from Delamare. He knew he was on her trail. He didn’t know much more than that, because his readings had been scrambled and confusing, and more than usually nauseating, but then he hadn’t had somewhere quiet to work in and time to ease his way back into the experience.
And now it was in the hands of these bandits…It was intolerable. He said so to his dæmon, who perched painfully on the end of the bunk.
Finally he slept.
He woke up to a bitter morning and the sound of heavy rain outside his cell, which had no window, of course, just bars across an opening too small to crawl through even without the bars.
The hideous glare of a light directly over his eyes, the clattering of a key in the lock, a voice shouting at him in some barbarous tongue spoken by hogs with their throats cut, and a solid kick to his right leg.
“All right! All right! I hear you! Yes, I’ll get up! Don’t kick me again, you bastards! Oh, God, this is too much…”
He struggled up, fending off another kick, and tried to make sense of what was happening.
“Yes—yes—I’m awake—all right, all right! Yes! I’m sorry I did whatever I did to make you arrest me! I won’t do it again! Sorry, you lumps of shit! I apologize! What is this? What do you want?”
The guard held out a tin mug, which turned out to be too hot for Bonneville to hold. He put it on the floor quickly. Then the guard threw him a lump of stale bread, and barked a word or two, and left.
Bonneville pulled the blanket up around his shoulders. It was horribly cold, and his head ached abominably, and he was bursting to piss. He stumbled up and made his way to the bucket in the corner, but it hadn’t been emptied and the contents had frozen solid, so his urine splashed out over his stockinged feet. His shoes, he remembered too late, had been confiscated.
