The Rose Field, page 50
His skin bristled. A little shape was creeping out of an open window. It might have been a monkey, but it was moving too slowly; or a reptile, but there was something simian about it; but the main point was simpler than either of those. It was a dæmon. It was impossible to mistake.
Alone too. So a separated dæmon, whose person might be anyone, anywhere.
The dæmon stayed for a moment, silhouetted against the light from the room behind, and Pan saw that she (no doubt about that either) was a lemur, and small, and emaciated. She looked unwell.
Moving very carefully, she climbed down a drainpipe to the ground, and at once almost disappeared into the shadows. But Pan could see her movements as she crept along the base of the wall, her claws not well adapted to walking on the ground, and began to follow her. She was intent on something, and he was intent on finding out what it was.
He slipped out from under the truck. There was a luminous quality in the air already, as well as the light from the building. He padded swiftly across the sandy ground and stopped under the shadow of a large metal tank. He could still see her a little way ahead, but then she reached the corner of the building and turned out of sight.
He darted forward, hoping the voices from the open window would cover the slight sound of his feet. Two men talking freely now, in Chinese, possibly; not arguing, but discussing something energetically. A glass clinked on a bottle. Pan slowed down as he reached the corner, and stopped, and listened hard.
No sound of dæmon feet on sand, and he’d see nothing unless he looked around the corner; so he very carefully did.
Instantly something slashed at his face. He sprang back and found his balance, and then darted out past the corner and turned to see her. She hissed and snarled and leapt at him, furious and terrified, and in a moment they were tumbling over, biting, shaking, scratching, but he was stronger than she was; and in little more than a moment he had her pinned beneath him with his teeth in her throat. They both fell still.
She was thin, as he’d seen, and not strong, and her fur was threadbare like an old carpet; but she wasn’t old. She lay trembling and silent. Little by little he loosened his jaw, but as soon as she felt that, she began to struggle again. He gripped her throat with his paws, and she tried to speak, and couldn’t; so he whispered, “English? You speak English?”
There was no reason why she should, of course; any one of a hundred different Asian languages would have been more likely. But she nodded faintly, and he went on, “I won’t hurt you. My name is Pan. I’m separated, like you, and my person is on her way here. What’s your name?”
He loosened his grip a little, and she murmured, “My name is Cariad.”
“I’m going to let go. But don’t run away. I want to talk to you.”
Another slight nod. He let go of her throat and sat back to let her roll over and sit up.
“Where’s your person?” he said.
“He is asleep in there.”
“You don’t sleep when he does?”
“Not since we were separated.”
“How did that happen?”
She suddenly writhed away, and tried to run, but he was too quick for her, and caught her before she reached the corner of the building.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “I’ll always catch you. I want to know things, and only you can tell me. What’s his name, your person?”
She was trembling. He thought she was trying not to sob.
“I won’t hurt you,” he insisted. “Promise. But you must tell me these things. What’s your person called?”
“Brynmor Strauss.”
“Strauss…” Something plucked at his memory. A rucksack…violence, the murder by the river…pages of handwriting on cheap lined paper…
This was the dæmon of the man who’d written the journal he and Lyra had found in the dead man’s rucksack.
“Cariad,” he repeated unbelievingly. “Your person wrote a diary, about your journey to the red building in the desert—and his colleague Dr. Hassall brought it back to England with him—”
“What happened? How do you know that?”
He told her briefly some of what had happened: the murder of Hassall, the discovery of the diary, his parting from Lyra, and the journey to Tashbulak.
“You left her? Why?” She was astonished.
“I thought it was the right thing to do, but I was wrong.”
“But why come here?”
“We both think there’s something we want and it’s in the red building in the desert. But you went into that building, didn’t you? You and Dr. Strauss?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you find?”
“No, no, no…Terrible things.”
He still held her firmly, though every part of her was straining to get away.
“What d’you mean? What sort of terrible things?”
“It’s abominable…No, no. The worst thing…”
“Why can’t you tell me?”
“It…I can’t find the words…You should speak to Brynmor. Or Dilyara. She knows some of it.”
“Who’s Dilyara?”
“A cleaner. She helped Brynmor.”
“All right, I will. But give me some idea.”
She struggled again, and then fell limp as if she’d fainted; but he knew she hadn’t, and kept his hold on her.
“Tell me,” he said again. “What did you find in the red building?”
“Come with me, then. I’ll show you.”
She sounded resigned, and sullen, but very frightened. He followed her inside.
* * *
—
Some miles to the north, Olivier Bonneville was trying to sleep in a tent on frozen ground on the eastern flank of a spur of the Tien Shan mountains. He had been traveling as a semi-prisoner, semi-indentured laborer of the Magisterial army, his labor consisting of attending every meeting called by Marcel Delamare and writing detailed minutes, as well as obeying every order, however trivial, of the President himself. He cursed the job. He cursed the cold. He cursed his luck, he cursed Delamare, he cursed Lyra, he cursed the series of absurdities and blunders that had placed him in this situation, and he cursed the fact that the alethiometer was in the hands of that tortoise-witted reactionary Lacroix.
So he turned from side to side, he tried sleeping on his front, on his back, on his side again, and he seemed to be getting colder and colder. He pulled the rough blankets up around his neck, and then his feet got cold; he pulled his knees up so as to cover his feet, and then he got a cramp and had to straighten them again; there was a separate draft from every direction; the camp bed was rickety and creaked whenever he moved; the guard stamping up and down outside had a habit of groaning under his breath.
So when he finally did fall asleep, he was not pleased to feel a hand on his shoulder almost at once, and to hear a whispered voice saying, “Olivier, wake up. Wake up!”
He tried to sweep the visitor aside with an arm flung outwards, but his wrist was caught at once and the voice said again, “Olivier, wake up. Look and see who I am.”
There was something familiar…Was he still dreaming? The voice…
He blinked hard and peered up. The faint light of an anbaric torch lit a face he’d seen before, outside the city of ruins, the city of lost dæmons, where this man had persuaded him not to shoot…
“You!” he said.
The visitor pressed a finger to his lips, and shut off the torch.
“Not so loud,” he whispered. “Yes, Olivier, it’s me, your old friend Abdel Ionides, come to help you.”
“Last time your help was no good.”
“It was very useful, my boy, and I will help you more now. But first listen carefully. I come with a message for your leader, Marcel Delamare, the President himself. I can’t go to him directly, because I would be shot before I reached him.”
Bonneville blinked again and tried to shake the sleep out of his head. “But why—”
“I’ll tell you if you listen. I represent the group known to some people as the men from the mountains. For various reasons, we want to reach that red building before the Silvertongue girl does. You understand me?”
“Yes. So what? I knew that already.”
“I want you to go to Delamare and tell him we are ready to discuss a joint campaign. We want to avoid being caught up in needless distractions, such as fighting one another. Tell him we shall meet whenever he is ready, and he can send a signal with that new bomb he has, the tonnerre double. Yes, we know about that. He must combine the charge with graphite to make black smoke, and fire it into the sky.”
“He won’t believe me. D’you think I’m a fool? D’you think he’s a fool?”
“Give him this. Tell him you stole it from me.”
Ionides felt inside his fur-lined cloak and handed something to Bonneville: a small slim document with a stiff cover.
“What is it?”
Ionides switched on his torch again, long enough for Bonneville to see that he was holding something like a passport, and that it belonged to Leila Pervani.
“Her?”
“Shh.”
“I thought she was part of the…” Bonneville thought he couldn’t be awake yet. He wasn’t thinking clearly. But there was her photogram, her unmistakably, the beautiful bitch. “But why give it to him?”
“Go to him now, and tell him I came to you. He is a skeptical man. Give him this document. Let him examine it closely. It is perfectly genuine.”
The faint light shining up from the torch gave Ionides’s face the air of a painted devil in a puppet play.
Bonneville said uncertainly, “I could have stolen it…”
“No, you could not. She is more cunning than that. It will carry conviction, which your words alone, my dear Olivier, will not. She made a powerful impression on Monsieur Delamare when they met. Give him the message: we can join forces. We are very close.”
“I don’t believe you. How could you be close without alerting the sentries?”
“There was a sentry right outside this tent, Olivier, and yet here I am.”
“Did you kill him?”
“He is unable to take any further part in the campaign. Go now, Olivier. Wake up Monsieur Delamare, and don’t forget the signal. We shall be watching.”
With a warm smile and a friendly pat on the shoulder, Ionides stood up silently and switched off the torch.
“Oh,” he said. “One more thing. All this time, you track Miss Silver to exact some revenge for your father. But dig deeper, my friend. Ask your alethiometer who sent your father to prison. Ask why. There is much you don’t know.”
He dropped something into Bonneville’s lap. It was small and heavy…He felt it: a clasp knife.
“Hide it carefully. It is very sharp,” said Ionides, and he vanished into the dark.
The icy draft made Bonneville shudder. He longed to be asleep again, but the perfect face of the woman and the devilish face of Ionides gave him no choice. He found himself uttering a little sob, and swallowed it at once. No choice.
* * *
—
The wording of the message Hannah Relf had given Alice to pass on to the young man in Battersea concealed the key to a set of complex instructions that led, after several days, to a knock on Hannah’s door.
Rain was falling in the darkness. The figure who stood on the doorstep was wrapped in a hooded cloak, and carrying a heavy bundle. Hannah hastened to let her in, and looked both ways along the quiet road of terraced houses before closing the door.
“Glenys!” she said, but quietly.
Glenys Godwin threw back the hood and then put her bundle down before shaking the rain off her cloak and all over the carpet and the walls. “Sorry,” she said.
Her bundle spoke in a ghostlike whisper. “Can you let me out?” it said.
“Sorry, Meurig.”
Glenys unwrapped the bundle and lifted out her dæmon, the paralyzed civet cat.
“Never mind the rain,” said Hannah, taking the cloak and putting it on a hanger on the hat stand. “Come in, come in. Are you cold?”
“Yes. Cold and tired and hungry.”
“I’ll make you some coffee and scrambled eggs. Sit by the fire and get warm. Then I want to know everything. Oh, there’s some whisky on the sideboard.”
She looks ill, Hannah thought as she beat some eggs in a saucepan. Her own dæmon sat beside Glenys’s as he lay on the hearthrug, and they murmured together. The kitchen opened directly into the sitting room, so the women weren’t far from their dæmons; Glenys brought the whisky bottle and her glass and came to talk as Hannah put on the kettle.
“Did you come on the train?”
“No. I think they’re watching all the stations. I took the autocoach to Basingstoke and then another coach from there.”
“Long journey.”
“Nevertheless. Thank you for Kilkenny. My Battersea man was impressed by your messenger.”
“She’s a bright young woman. She escaped from a transit camp, if that’s what they call it, somewhere in the Thames Valley.”
“Why did they put her there?”
“It was the general roundup in the first flurry of suspicion, remember? Lots of people were swept up quite unnecessarily. She managed to get away, came back to her home in Oxford, and then thought she’d be safer in London. She was probably right. She’s working as a chambermaid at the Savoy.”
“Anyway, she did well. Going to use her again?”
“Oh, I think so. How do you like your eggs?”
“Not very dry.”
“They’re ready, then. Could you put the water in the coffee?”
They sat down at the little kitchen table. They’d known each other for a long time, but hadn’t been close friends; their different fields of activity meant that they seldom saw each other.
“I didn’t hear any news in prison, and I’ve only seen one paper since they let me out. What’s happening?” Glenys said.
Hannah gave her a summary of political events since her arrest. As she went through the changes of government, the reorganization of the civil service, the assumption of emergency powers, the violent crushing of strikes and protests, Hannah realized herself the extent of the turbulence that had overtaken the country.
“The monetization—” she said, but Glenys interrupted at once:
“The what?”
“The way some of the poorer colleges have already started making approaches to corporations of one sort or another. They’re even talking about naming rights, like football teams.”
“What, the Anglo-Oil Balliol?”
“Not quite that yet, but it’ll come. Just a creeping corruption.”
“That’s one of the things I sent Polstead out to look at.”
“But the worst thing,” Hannah said, “is just the failure of every kind of newspaper, magazine, regular gazette…We hear rumors, and we can’t check them; we hear thirdhand about riots in big cities, but no one knows why or what they’re about; we don’t even know whether the government is still in place. There was a rumor only yesterday that the whole Cabinet had resigned and appointed a Protector, and that the King was under arrest, but I’ve heard nothing since then. What did your newspaper say?”
“Absolutely nothing worthwhile or true. Nothing but guessing games with big prizes and lottery news and pictures of celebrated actresses. Certainly nothing about the Cabinet resigning.”
“How did they treat you in prison?”
“Did you know they had special suites reserved for those who could pay?”
“Certainly not! How long’s that been going on?”
“Not very long. You get a two-cell apartment, with decent food and comfortable furniture and privileged access to visitors and mail.”
“Did they offer one to you?”
“No. I came in a different category. Enemy of the state, that’s what they call it. We had to share cells with prisoners guilty of violent offenses. Thank God for combat training. Now, I haven’t been able to talk to anyone, obviously, and I need to know everything you’ve heard about what the Magisterium army is doing in Central Asia. I know some intelligence services abroad are still active and effective. Does anyone in Oxford hear what’s going on outside Europe?”
“Yes, but slowly and partially. Most of the usual traffic has been stalled and disrupted—there was an assassination, a Syrian merchant, I believe, who sat at the middle of a very big network of intelligence as well as commercial business. That made everything shrink back a bit. The last I heard of Delamare and his expedition to conquer the East—”
“Is that how people talk about it?”
“Historians are more taken with that phrase than political analysts. Anyway, the last I heard, he’d led his army out of the Tien Shan mountains and south towards Lop Nor.”
“Right through the famous wandering lake. Asinine! What the hell’s he playing at?”
“Don’t know. But the main news from Central Asia is the extraordinary speed of the development plans from Cathay and elsewhere. Muscovy’s involved—so are corporations from Europe and New Denmark. The man I talk to is an economist. He says it’s the most important thing that’s happening anywhere; Delamare and his ten thousand men are nothing in comparison.”
Hannah refilled her glass and another for Glenys. “That is interesting,” she said. “I remember picking up traces of that before I was arrested. What exactly are they developing?”
“Roads, canals, railway lines, landing grounds for air travel…And my economist friend believes they have some form of instantaneous long-range communication.”
“Bugger,” said Glenys. “I could be doing something about this if I wasn’t in danger of arrest. Have you heard anything from Polstead, or the young woman?”
