The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2)

by Philip Pullman

  Lyra turned back to Van Dongen and said, “Do you know how the alethiometer works? How I use it?”

  He looked bewildered. He spread his hands, and at once a flame broke out in the center of each palm. He beat them on the ground to put them out.

  “Alethi—” He shook his head. “I don’t know that word. What is that?”

  “I thought that’s what you wanted me to use. The alethiometer. It tells the truth, but it’s very hard to read. Isn’t that what you meant?”

  He shook his head. Little tears ran down his cheeks like lava. “I don’t know! I don’t know!” he cried. “But you will know! You will know!”

  “But that’s all I’ve got….No, wait. There’s this too.”

  It was the battered notebook that Pan had left with his cruel note, the one carried all the way from Central Asia by the murdered man, Hassall. She realized that that was where she’d seen Kubiček’s name before, and why she’d felt that flicker in her memory. She tugged the notebook out of her rucksack and flicked through it urgently to find the entry for Prague.

  It was too dark to read, so she had to kneel beside the furnace man and use the fierce light from his eyes to see it by. And yes, there was Kubiček, with his address in the Malá Strana. There were five names with Prague addresses, including Kubiček’s, each written in a different hand with a different pen. But there was also one more, written sideways to fit on the page, and in pencil, and there it was: Dr. Johannes Agrippa.

  “Got it!” said Lyra, and tried to look more closely, but the light from Van Dongen’s eyes was too hot to bear. She scrambled up and said, “Mr. Kubiček, can you read it? I can’t quite make out the address.”

  Van Dongen got to his feet too, eager to see. He was beating his hands together, striking sparks out of himself that whirled in the air like tiny Catherine wheels. One of them flew all the way to Lyra’s hand and stung like a needle thrust. She gasped and slapped it out, and stepped away hastily.

  “Oh—sorry—sorry…,” the Dutchman said. “Just read it. Read it.”

  “Please, not so loud!” said Kubiček. “I beg you, Van Dongen, keep your voice down! The address is…Ah. I see.”

  “What is it? Where does he live?” came in a subdued roar of flame from Van Dongen’s throat.

  “Starý železniční most forty-three. That is not far away. It’s a place where…I suppose a sort of area of workshops. Under an old railway bridge. I would not have expected—”

  “Take me there!” said Van Dongen. “We’ll go now.”

  “If I told you where it was—if I gave you a map—”

  “No! Impossible. You must help. You, miss, you will come too. He will respect you, at least.”

  Lyra doubted that, but she would have to go with them if she wanted Kubiček to guide her to the railway station afterwards. She nodded. In any case, she was curious, and relieved to have been spared a session with the new method.

  Kubiček said, “Please, Van Dongen, walk quietly and say little. We are just three people walking home, nothing more than that.”

  “Yes, yes. Come on.”

  Kubiček led the way through the house and outside, the Dutchman walking with the greatest care between the piles of books, and Lyra keeping her distance from him as she followed.

  The dark lanes and crooked streets of the Malá Strana were mostly empty, with only a cat or two prowling or a rat scuttling into an alley. They saw no human beings until they came out to a rough patch of ground beside a high factory wall. There was a group of men gathered around a brazier, sitting on boxes or piles of sacks, smoking and staring at them as they passed. Kubiček murmured a polite greeting, which the men ignored, and Lyra felt the force of their interest as their heads turned to follow her as she stumbled over the uneven ground, trying to avoid the potholes and the oil-tinted puddles. Van Dongen didn’t even appear to see the men, and they didn’t seem interested in him; he was intent only on the stone arches of the old railway bridge towards which they were moving.

  “Is that the place? Is that it?” he said, and a jet of flame gushed out and ballooned above him before fading. Lyra heard a grunt of alarm from the men around the brazier.

  In front of them the old bridge reared high above the waste ground. Under each of the arches was a door, some of wood, some of rusted steel, some of little more than cardboard. Most were padlocked. Two of them were open, with naphtha lamps throwing a yellow pool of light on the ground outside. In one, a mechanic was assembling an engine, his monkey dæmon handing him the parts, and in the other, an elderly woman was selling a small packet of herbs to a ravaged-looking younger woman, who might have been pregnant.

  Van Dongen was striding up and down the row of doors, looking for number 43.

  “It’s not here!” he said. “There’s no forty-three!”

  Gouts of flame coughed out with his words. The mechanic stopped with a carburetor in his hand and looked out at them.

  “Van Dongen,” pleaded Kubiček, and the Dutchman shut his mouth. He was breathing heavily. His eyes glowed like searchlights.

  “The numbers aren’t in order,” Lyra said.

  “In Prague, houses are numbered in the order in which they were built,” Kubiček whispered. “It is the same with these workshops. You have to check every one.”

  He kept looking back at the men around the brazier. Lyra glanced as well, and saw that two of them were now standing up and watching. Van Dongen was hurrying from door to door along the whole length of the waste ground, looking quickly at each one, leaving a trail of cinders and burnt grass. Lyra went along behind him, checking more closely, and found some of the numbers easy to read, painted roughly in white or scrawled in chalk, but others faded and peeling and nearly impossible to make out.

  But then she saw a door more solidly built than most, of dark oak with heavy iron hinges. A bronze lion mask was fastened beside it to the bricks of the arch itself. The number 43 was scratched, as if with a nail, in the center of the door.

  She stepped back and called softly, “Mr. Kubiček! Mr. Van Dongen! This is the one!”

  They both came at once, Kubiček treading delicately through the puddles, Van Dongen at a rush. Lyra was somehow in charge now, though she didn’t know why. She knocked firmly on the door.

  A voice spoke instantly from the bronze lion. “Who are you?” it said.

  “Travelers,” Lyra answered. “We have heard of the wisdom of the great master Dr. Johannes Agrippa, and we want to ask for his guidance.”

  Only then did she realize that the voice had spoken in English, and that she had automatically responded in the same language.

  “The master is busy,” said the lion mask. “Come back next week.”

  “No, because we shall be long gone by then. We need to see him now. And…I have a message from the Dutch Republic.”

  Kubiček was clutching Lyra’s arm, and Van Dongen was wiping away the little flames breaking out all around his mouth. They waited for a short while, and then the mask spoke again: “Master Agrippa will grant you five minutes. Enter and wait.”

  The door opened by itself, and a gust of smoky air, laden with dusty odors of herbs and spices and minerals, wafted out to surround them. Van Dongen immediately tried to push past Lyra, but she put out her hand and held him back—at once regretting it: her palm and fingers felt as if she’d tried to pick up a piece of red-hot iron.

  She clutched the hand to her breast, trying not to cry out, and went into the workshop ahead of the other two. The door closed behind them at once. The brick walls and the concrete floor were lit very dimly by a single pearl hanging by a thread from the ceiling, its glow brightening and fading with a rhythm like breathing. In its light they saw—nothing. The place was empty.

  “Where should we go?” Lyra said.

  “Down,” came in a whisper from the air.

  Van Dongen p
ointed to the corner. “There!” A great billow of flame came out of his mouth and spread across the ceiling before vanishing.

  In the light from his voice they saw a trapdoor. Van Dongen hastened to pull up the iron ring at one end, but Lyra said, “No! Don’t you touch anything. In fact, don’t you come down at all. You stay up here till I tell you. Mr. Kubiček, make sure he does.”

  “Soon, soon,” said Kubiček to the Dutchman, and they both retreated to the far corner as Lyra lifted up the trapdoor.

  A flight of wooden steps led down almost immediately inside the entrance towards a cellar lit by a lurid flare. Lyra made her way down and halted at the foot to look in at the room. It had a vaulted ceiling, black with the smoke of centuries. A large furnace stood in the very center, under a copper hood that went up through the ceiling as a chimney. Around the walls, hanging from the ceiling, or standing on the floor were a thousand different objects: retorts and crucibles; earthenware jars; open-topped boxes containing salt, or pigment, or dried herbs; books of every size and age, some lying open, some crammed into shelves; philosophical instruments, compasses, a photo-mill, a camera lucida, a rack of Leyden jars, a Van de Graaff generator; a jumble of bones, some of which might have been human; various plants under dusty glass domes; and an immensity of other objects. Lyra thought: Makepeace! It reminded her powerfully of the Oxford alchemist’s laboratory.

  And standing by the furnace, in the red glare from the burning coals, was a man in rough workman’s clothing, stirring a cauldron in which something pungent was boiling. He was reciting what might have been a spell in what might have been Hebrew. What she could see of his face showed him to be of middle years, proud, impatient, and strong, the master of considerable intellectual force. He didn’t seem to have seen her.

  For a moment she was reminded of her own father, but she moved away from that thought at once, and looked at the other large object in the cellar, which was a tank of stone some ten feet long and six wide, with sides as high as her waist.

  And the tank was full of water, and in the water, twisting, speeding from end to end and back again, twining herself like honeysuckle growing up a branch, never still, never less than perfectly graceful and lovely, was the mermaid-formed dæmon of Cornelis van Dongen: Dinessa, the water sprite.

  She was beautiful, and naked, and her black hair streamed out behind her like fronds of the most delicate seaweed. As she turned at the far end of the tank, she caught sight of Lyra and, like the quickest fish, darted towards her.

  Before she could break the surface, Lyra put her finger to her lips and pointed to the magician deep in his spell. The water sprite understood and fell still, looking up through the surface at Lyra with eyes that implored. Lyra nodded and tried to smile, and then noticed what stood over the tank: a vast complexity of iron pistons, valves, connecting rods, wheels, crankshafts, and other parts whose names she didn’t know and whose function was unguessable.

  Lyra heard a cry from behind her, and a gust of flame singed her hair. She turned to see Van Dongen halfway down the steps, with Kubiček trying to hold him back but flinching from the pain. Lyra’s scorched palm throbbed in sympathy.

  And then they were at the bottom, on the cellar floor—

  At once a tumult broke out. The stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling twisted in its chains, and writhed and lashed its tail and roared; a row of dusty glass bottles, gallon-sized or larger, containing strange specimens, fetuses, homunculi, cephalopods, glowed with light as the dead creatures inside beat their fists on the glass or sobbed with fury or hurled themselves from side to side; a metal bird in a dusty cage sang raucously; the water in Dinessa’s tank shrank away from Van Dongen and rose up in a great wave to stand suspended and trembling in the air, with the water dæmon inside, like an insect trapped in amber, though she saw her man and reached both arms out of the water and into the air, calling, “Cornelis! Cornelis!”

  It was all happening too quickly for anyone to stop. Van Dongen, crying “Dinessa!” hurled himself at the standing wave, and Dinessa burst out of it and into his arms.

  They came together in an explosion of steam and flame. For a second Lyra could see their faces, lurid, enraptured, pressing themselves together in a final embrace. Then they were gone, and something was happening among the machinery above the tank. Jets of superheated steam were forcing their way into the cylinders and slamming the pistons to and fro, making the connecting rods swing backwards and forwards as they turned a gigantic wheel, everything moving with the smooth ticking of lubricated machinery.

  Lyra and Kubiček could only stand back in shock. Then she turned to the sorcerer, who was shutting his book with the air of having completed a long and arduous task.

  “What have you done?” she found herself saying.

  “Started my engine,” he said.

  “But how? Where are they, the man and his dæmon?”

  “They are both fulfilling the destiny they were created for.”

  “They weren’t created for this!”

  “You know nothing about it. I arranged for their birth, I brought the dæmon here for this work, but her boy escaped. No matter. I arranged for you to find him and bring him here. Now your part is over, and you can leave.”

  “Their father betrayed them, and you did this to them!”

  “I am their father.”

  Lyra was dazed. The machinery was working faster now. She could feel the whole cellar trembling with the force of it. The crocodile had fallen still, apart from the slow swing of its tail; the homunculi in their bottle had stopped screaming and banging on the glass and were floating contentedly in the fluid that contained them, which was now glowing a faint and steady red; the metal bird in its cage, its golden feathers now gleaming with rich enamels and precious stones, was singing as sweetly as a nightingale.

  Agrippa stood calmly, book in hand, as if waiting for Lyra to ask a question.

  “Why?” she said. “Why do it like this? Why sacrifice two lives? Couldn’t you build a fire in the normal way?”

  “This is not a normal fire.”

  “Tell me why,” Lyra said again.

  “This is not a normal engine. Not a normal fire. Not normal steam.”

  “That’s all they were? Just a different kind of steam? Steam is steam.”

  “Nothing is only itself.”

  “That’s not true. Nothing is any more than what it is,” Lyra said, quoting Gottfried Brande, feeling uneasy as she did.

  “You’ve fallen for that lie, have you?”

  “You think it’s a lie?”

  “One of the biggest lies ever told. I thought you would have more imagination than to believe it.”

  That took her aback. “What do you know about me?” she said.

  “As much as I need to.”

  “Will I ever find my dæmon?”

  “Yes, but not in the way you think.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Everything is connected.”

  Lyra thought about that. “What is my connection with this?” she said.

  “It has brought you to the one man who can tell you whether to go east or south on the next stage of your journey.”

  Then she felt dizzy. This was all impossible, and it was all happening. “Well?” she said. “Which way should I go?”

  “Look in your clavicula.” He gestured towards her notebook.

  She turned to the page with the added lines in pencil, and found under his name and address something she’d missed before: the words Tell her to go south.

  “Who wrote this?” she said.

  “The same man who wrote my name and address: Master Sebastian Makepeace.”

  Lyra had to grasp the side of the stone tank. “But how did he—”

  “You’ll find that out in due course. There’s no point in my telling you now. You would not
understand.”

  She felt a light touch on her arm and looked around to see Kubiček, looking pale and nervous.

  “In a minute,” said Lyra, and to Agrippa she said, “Tell me about Dust. You know what I mean by Dust?”

  “I have heard of Dust, of the Rusakov field, of course I have. You think I still live in the seventeenth century? I read all the scientific journals. Some of them are very funny. Let me tell you something else. You have an alethiometer, do you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “The alethiometer is not the only way to read Dust, not even the best way.”

  “What other ways are there?”

  “I will tell you one, that is all. A pack of cards.”

  “You mean the tarot?”

  “No, I do not. That is an egregious modern fraud designed to extract money from gullible romantics. I mean a pack of cards with pictures on them. Simple pictures. You will know it when you see one.”

  “What can you tell me about something called the secret commonwealth?”

  “That is a name for the world I deal with, the world of hidden things and hidden relationships. It is the reason that nothing is only itself.”

  “Two more questions. I want to find a place called the Blue Hotel, al-Khan al-Azraq, to look for my dæmon. Have you heard of that?”

  “Yes. It has another name: it’s sometimes called Madinat al-Qamar, the City of the Moon.”

  “And where is it?”

  “Between Seleukeia and Aleppo. You can reach it from either of those cities. But you will not find your dæmon without great pain and difficulty, and he will not be able to leave with you unless you make a great sacrifice. Are you ready for that?”

  “Yes. And my second question: what does the word akterrakeh mean?

  “Where have you heard that expression?”

  “In connection with a place called Karamakan. It’s a way of traveling, or something like that. When you have to go akterrakeh.”

  “It’s Latin.”

  “What? Really?”