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

by Philip Pullman

  A brisk kiss, and she led Aisha away. The child didn’t look back. Her dæmon was a little bird now, of a kind that Lyra didn’t recognize, and he’d probably already forgotten what he’d done in the night, though Lyra knew that she never would.

  She sat down in the wicker chair. In the warmth of the Aegean morning, she soon fell asleep.

  Malcolm and Mehrzad Karimov spent the night in their dry cave, and woke to a warm, sunny morning. By staying in the forest, they managed to cross the border without being discovered. They could see, from their path among the trees higher up the mountain, the long queues of traffic that had built up on either side of the frontier post, and exchanged a silent glance of relief. From that point on, the journey was untroubled. Malcolm paid for Karimov’s ticket as far as Constantinople, and they arrived two days after the assassination of the Patriarch.

  They found the city in a state of feverish anxiety. Their travel documents were examined three times before they could manage to leave the railway station, and Malcolm’s cover identity as a scholar traveling to study various documents in the libraries of that city was thoroughly ransacked. It stood up because it was genuine, and the details of his contacts and sponsors and hosts had all been rigorously checked before he left London; but the manner of the soldiers who examined it was hostile and suspicious.

  He said goodbye to Karimov, whom he’d come to like a great deal. He had told Malcolm everything he knew about Tashbulak and the work of the scientists there, and about the desert of Karamakan, and about the poem Jahan and Rukhsana, long passages of which Karimov knew by heart. He was going to pick up some business in Constantinople, he said, and join a caravan further along on the Silk Road.

  “Malcolm, thank you for your companionship on this journey,” he said as they shook hands outside the railway station. “May God keep you safe.”

  “I hope he’ll do the same for you, my friend,” said Malcolm. “Go well.”

  After finding a cheap hotel, he set out to call on an old acquaintance of his, an inspector in the Turkish police who was an unofficial friend of Oakley Street. But on his way to the police headquarters, he realized that he was being followed.

  It wasn’t hard to see, in shop windows and the glass doors of banks and office buildings, the young man who was on his trail. The only way of following someone with real success, without being detected, was to have a team of three people doing it, all trained and experienced; but this young man was on his own and had to stay close. Without looking at him directly, Malcolm had plenty of time to examine him: his dark good looks, his slender build, and his nervous, sudden movements and pauses were clearly visible in the wealth of reflections Malcolm saw around him. He didn’t look Turkish; he might have been Italian; in fact, he might have been English. He was wearing a green shirt, dark trousers, and a pale linen jacket. His dæmon was a small hawk. His face was badly bruised, and there was a plaster across the bridge of his nose.

  Malcolm moved gradually towards the more crowded streets, where his follower would need to come nearer. He wondered whether the young man was familiar with the city: at a guess, he thought not. They were in the neighborhood of the Grand Bazaar, and Malcolm meant to lead him into the crowded alleys of the bazaar itself, where he’d have to come even closer.

  He came to the great stone archway that led into the bazaar and paused to look up at it, giving his follower time to see where he was going, and strolled inside.

  Immediately, before the young man could see, he stepped into a little shop selling rugs and textiles. There were over sixty different lanes in the bazaar, and hundreds of shops. It wouldn’t be hard to escape from his follower, but Malcolm wanted to do something different: to turn the tables and follow him.

  A few seconds later, the young man hurried in at the great gate and looked around, craning to peer along the crowded alley, looking quickly to left and right—too quickly to see anything clearly. He was agitated. Malcolm, among the hanging rugs, was facing away from the alley, but was watching in the back of his wristwatch, which consisted of a mirror. The rug seller was busy attending to a customer and gave Malcolm no more than a quick glance.

  The young man began to hurry along the alley, and Malcolm stepped out to follow him. He had a linen cap in his pocket, and he put it on now to hide his red hair. The lane they were in was one of the wider ones, but shops and stalls crowded close on both sides, and the whole alley was hung thickly with clothes, shoes, carpets, brushes, brooms, suitcases, lamps, copper cooking vessels, and a thousand other things.

  Malcolm moved unobtrusively through it all, following the young man without ever looking at him directly, in case he suddenly looked around. His nervousness surrounded him like a vapor. His hawk dæmon sat on his shoulder, her head twitching this way and that, occasionally seeming to face backwards like an owl, and Malcolm saw every movement and moved closer and closer.

  Then the boy—he was hardly a man—said something to his dæmon, and Malcolm saw his face more clearly. And that raised an apparition in his mind, no more than the ghost of a memory of another face, and he was back in his parents’ inn on a winter evening as Gerard Bonneville sat by the fire with his hyena dæmon and gave Malcolm such a warm smile of complicity that—

  Bonneville!

  This was his son. This was the Magisterium’s celebrated alethiometrist.

  “Asta,” Malcolm whispered, and his dæmon leapt up into his arms and climbed to his shoulder. “It is, isn’t it?” he murmured.

  “Yes. No doubt about it.”

  The alleys were crowded, and Bonneville uncertain; he seemed so young, so inexperienced. Malcolm followed the boy into the heart of the bazaar, closer, closer, little by little, moving through the crowds like a ghost, unseen, unsuspected, unfelt, subduing his own personality, watching without looking and seeing without staring. Bonneville was becoming despondent, to judge by his bearing; he’d lost his quarry; he wasn’t sure of anything.

  They came to a sort of crossroads, where an ornate fountain stood under the high arched roof. Malcolm guessed that Bonneville would stop there and look all around, and he did, Malcolm seeing it in the back of his watch, with his head turned away.

  “He’s drinking,” said Asta.

  Malcolm moved quickly, and while the boy’s head was still bent down to the water, he came to stand right behind him. The hawk dæmon was looking to left and right, and then, as Malcolm knew she would, she turned and saw him only an arm’s length away.

  It gave Bonneville a great shock. He jerked back and up from the water, whirled around—and there was a knife in his right hand.

  At once Asta sprang at the boy’s dæmon and bore her down into the stone trough where the water ran. Malcolm reacted in the same moment, just as the razor-sharp blade sliced through the left arm of his jacket and the skin beneath. Bonneville had swung his hand so hard that he was off balance for a fraction of a second, and in that moment Malcolm slammed his right fist with all his strength into the boy’s solar plexus, the kind of blow that would have ended a boxing match at once; and Bonneville, all breath and power gone, slumped back over the trough and dropped the knife.

  Malcolm kicked it away and picked the boy up with one hand gripping his shirtfront.

  “My knife,” Bonneville gasped in French.

  “It’s gone. You’re going to come with me and talk,” said Malcolm in the same language.

  “Like hell.”

  Asta’s claws were firmly fixed in the hawk dæmon’s throat. She gripped harder, and the hawk screamed. Both dæmons were soaking wet, and Bonneville was wet through himself, and both frightened and defiant.

  “You’ve got no choice,” said Malcolm. “You’re going to come and sit down and drink some coffee with me and talk. There’s a café just around the corner. If I’d wanted to kill you, I could have done it anytime during the last fifteen minutes. I’m in charge. You do as I say.”
<
br />   Bonneville was winded and trembling, and hunched over as if his ribs were broken, which they might very well have been. He was in no condition to argue. He did try to shake off Malcolm’s grip on his arm, without the slightest success. It had all happened so quickly that hardly anyone had noticed. Malcolm took him to the café and made him sit in the corner, his back to a wall hung with photograms of wrestlers and film stars.

  Malcolm ordered coffee for them both. Bonneville sat hunched forward, caressing his dæmon with trembling fingers, stroking the water off her feathers.

  “Fuck you, man,” he muttered. “You’ve broken something. A rib or, I don’t know, something in my chest. Bastard.”

  “You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you? How did you get that broken nose?”

  “Piss off.”

  “What do you know about the murder of the Patriarch?” said Malcolm. “Did Monsieur Delamare send you here to see it done successfully?”

  Bonneville tried to conceal his surprise. “How do you know—” he began, but stopped.

  “I ask the questions. Where’s your alethiometer now? You haven’t got it on you, or I’d know.”

  “You’ll never have it.”

  “No, because Delamare will. You took it without permission, didn’t you?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I thought so.”

  “You’re not as clever as you think.”

  “I daresay you’re right, but I’m cleverer than you think. For example, I know the names and addresses of Delamare’s agents in Constantinople, and now that you realize I can follow you, you’ll know that I’ll very soon find out where you’re staying. Ten minutes after that, they’ll know.”

  “What are their names, then?”

  “Aurelio Menotti. Jacques Pascal. Hamid Saltan.”

  Bonneville gnawed his lower lip and looked at Malcolm with hatred. The waiter came with their coffee, and couldn’t help looking at the boy’s wet shirt and bandaged nose and at the blood now seeping through the cut in Malcolm’s sleeve.

  “What do you want?” said Bonneville when the waiter had gone.

  Malcolm ignored the question and sipped the scalding coffee. “I’ll say nothing to Menotti and the others,” he said, “if you tell me the truth now.”

  Bonneville shrugged. “You wouldn’t know if it was the truth or not,” he said.

  “Why did you come to Constantinople?”

  “Nothing to do with you.”

  “Why were you following me?”

  “My business.”

  “Not after you pulled a knife on me. It’s mine too.”

  Another shrug.

  “Where’s Lyra now?” Malcolm said.

  Bonneville blinked. He opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, tried to sip his coffee, burned his mouth, put the cup down.

  “So you don’t know?” the boy said eventually.

  “Oh, I know exactly where she is. I know why you’re following her. I know what you want from her. I know the way you use the alethiometer. Know how I know that? It leaves a trail, did you realize?”

  Bonneville looked at him, narrow-eyed.

  “She discovered that straightaway,” Malcolm went on. “You’ve been leaving a trail all through Europe, and they’re following you, and eventually they’ll pick you up.”

  The boy’s eyes flickered for a moment in what would have been a smile if he’d let it. He knows something, thought Asta to Malcolm.

  “Shows how much you know,” Bonneville said. “Anyway, what’s this trail? What do you mean by that?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. What does Delamare want?”

  “He wants the girl.”

  “Apart from that. What does he want to do with this new High Council?”

  Why did Delamare want Lyra? was the one question Malcolm wanted to ask, but he knew he’d never get the answer by asking it.

  “He’s always wanted power,” said Bonneville. “That’s all. Now he’s got it.”

  “Tell me about the business with the roses.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Yes, you do. Tell me what you know.”

  “I’m not interested in it, so I took no notice.”

  “You’re interested in anything that gives you any power, so I know you’ll have heard about the rose business. Tell me what Delamare knows.”

  “It’s no advantage to me to tell you anything.”

  “That’s just what I mean. You’re shortsighted. Raise your eyes to the horizon. It would be a great advantage to you not to have me against you. Tell me what Delamare knows about the rose business.”

  “What will I get in return?”

  “I won’t break your neck.”

  “I want to know about this trail.”

  “You can work that out for yourself. Come on—roses.”

  Bonneville sipped his coffee again. His hand was steadier now. “A man came to see him a few weeks ago,” he said. “A Greek, or a Syrian, I don’t know. Maybe from further east. He had a sample of rose oil from a place way out in Kazakhstan or somewhere. Lop Nor. They mentioned Lop Nor. Delamare had the sample analyzed.”

  “Well?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “It’s all I know!”

  “What about the business in Oxford that went wrong?”

  “That was nothing to do with me.”

  “So you know about it. That’s useful. Delamare was behind that as well, obviously.”

  Bonneville shrugged. He was beginning to regain his confidence. It was time to shake it again.

  “Did your mother know how your father died?” Malcolm said.

  The boy blinked and opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, shook his head, picked up his coffee cup, but put it down again almost at once, seeing his own hand tremble.

  “What do you know about my father?”

  “More than you, obviously.”

  The hawk dæmon shook herself away from Bonneville’s hand and sprang to the tabletop, her claws gripping the tablecloth and pulling it into ridges. Her fierce eyes were fixed on Malcolm’s, and Asta stood up on the chair next to his, watching her.

  “I know you killed him,” Bonneville said. “You killed my father.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I was only ten, eleven, something like that.”

  “I know your name. I know you killed him.”

  “What is my name, then?”

  “Matthew Polstead,” said Bonneville with contempt.

  Malcolm took out his passport, his genuine one, and showed the boy his name. “Malcolm, see? Not Matthew. And look at my date of birth. It was only eleven years before your father died. There was a great flood, and he drowned. As for Matthew, he’s my older brother. He found your father’s body in the Thames, near Oxford. He had nothing to do with killing him.”

  He took back his passport. The boy looked both rebellious and disconcerted.

  “If he discovered the body, he must have stolen my father’s alethiometer,” he said sullenly. “I want it back.”

  “I heard about an alethiometer. I heard about what your father did to his dæmon too. Did you know about that? I thought it might run in the family.”

  Bonneville’s hand moved to his dæmon’s neck, to stroke it or hold her steady, but she shook her wings impatiently and moved away, further onto the table. Asta put her front paws on the table and stood up, watching intently.

  “What?” said Bonneville. “Tell me.”

  “You tell me what I want to know first. Roses. Oxford. The alethiometer. The girl. The death of the Patriarch. Everything. Then I’ll tell you about your father.”

  The boy’s eyes were glaring like his dæmon’s. He sat tensely on the edge of his chair, both ha
nds on the table, and Malcolm stared implacably back. After several seconds Bonneville’s eyes dropped, and he sat back and began to chew at a fingernail.

  Malcolm waited.

  “What d’you want first?” said Bonneville.

  “The alethiometer.”

  “What about it?”

  “How you came to read it.”

  “When I was a kid, my mother told me about how my father had been given his by these monks in Bohemia or somewhere. They had it for centuries, but they recognized that he was a genius at reading it and they saw he had to have it. When I heard that, I knew it would be mine one day, so I started reading all about the symbols and how to interpret them. And when I first touched the one the Magisterium has, I found I could read it easily. So they began to rely on me. I could read it more quickly and better, more accurately, than anyone they’d ever seen. So I became their chief reader. I used it to ask what had happened to my father, how he died, where his alethiometer was now, a lot of questions like that. They led me to that girl. That bitch has got it. They murdered him, and she stole it.”

  “Who murdered him?”

  “The Oxford people. Maybe your brother.”

  “He drowned.”

  “The fuck you know about it, if you were only ten years old.”

  “Tell me about this new method.”

  “I just found it out.”

  “How?”

  Bonneville was vain enough to respond. “You wouldn’t understand. No one would unless they had a thorough classical training. Then you have to rebel against it and find something new, like I did. At first, it made me throw up and I saw nothing and felt nauseated. But I stuck to it. I tried again and again. I wasn’t going to let it beat me. And in spite of being nauseated, I could make connections much more quickly. It became famous, my new method. The other readers tried it. But they could only do it weakly, uncertainly; they couldn’t handle it. It was talked about all over Europe. But no one can do it properly except me.”