She felt a strange exultation welling slowly in her breast, and she saw at the same time how to bring the aircraft safely up to the clouded terrace on the southern flank. The little craft lurched and strained in the turbid air, but she held the course firm, and her dæmon guided her down to land on the terrace.
The light she’d seen by till now had come from the lightning, the occasional gashes in the cloud where the sun struck through, the fires from the burning angels, the beams of anbaric searchlights; but the light here was different. It came from the substance of the Mountain itself, which glowed and faded in a slow breathlike rhythm, with a mother-of-pearl radiance.
Woman and dæmon got down from the craft and looked around to see which way they should go.
She had the feeling that other beings were moving rapidly above and below, speeding through the substance of the Mountain itself with messages, orders, information. She couldn’t see them; all she could see was confusing, infolded perspectives of colonnade, staircase, terrace, and facade.
Before she could make up her mind which way to go, she heard voices and withdrew behind a column. The voices were singing a psalm and coming closer, and then she saw a procession of angels carrying a litter.
As they neared the place where she was hiding, they saw the intention craft and stopped. The singing faltered, and some of the bearers looked around in doubt and fear.
Mrs. Coulter was close enough to see the being in the litter: an angel, she thought, and indescribably aged. He wasn’t easy to see, because the litter was enclosed all around with crystal that glittered and threw back the enveloping light of the Mountain, but she had the impression of terrifying decrepitude, of a face sunken in wrinkles, of trembling hands, and of a mumbling mouth and rheumy eyes.
The aged being gestured shakily at the intention craft, and cackled and muttered to himself, plucking incessantly at his beard, and then threw back his head and uttered a howl of such anguish that Mrs. Coulter had to cover her ears.
But evidently the bearers had a task to do, for they gathered themselves and moved farther along the terrace, ignoring the cries and mumbles from inside the litter. When they reached an open space, they spread their wings wide, and at a word from their leader they began to fly, carrying the litter between them, until they were lost to Mrs. Coulter’s sight in the swirling vapors.
But there wasn’t time to think about that. She and the golden monkey moved on quickly, climbing great staircases, crossing bridges, always moving upward. The higher they went, the more they felt that sense of invisible activity all around them, until finally they turned a corner into a wide space like a mist-hung piazza, and found themselves confronted by an angel with a spear.
“Who are you? What is your business?” he said.
Mrs. Coulter looked at him curiously. These were the beings who had fallen in love with human women, with the daughters of men, so long ago.
“No, no,” she said gently, “please don’t waste time. Take me to the Regent at once. He’s waiting for me.”
Disconcert them, she thought, keep them off balance; and this angel did not know what he should do, so he did as she told him. She followed him for some minutes, through those confusing perspectives of light, until they came to an antechamber. How they had entered, she didn’t know, but there they were, and after a brief pause, something in front of her opened like a door.
Her dæmon’s sharp nails were pressing into the flesh of her upper arms, and she gripped his fur for reassurance. Facing them was a being made of light. He was man-shaped, man-sized, she thought, but she was too dazzled to see. The golden monkey hid his face in her shoulder, and she threw up an arm to hide her eyes.
Metatron said, “Where is she? Where is your daughter?”
“I’ve come to tell you, my Lord Regent,” she said.
“If she was in your power, you would have brought her.”
“She is not, but her dæmon is.”
“How can that be?”
“I swear, Metatron, her dæmon is in my power. Please, great Regent, hide yourself a little—my eyes are dazzled . . .”
He drew a veil of cloud in front of himself. Now it was like looking at the sun through smoked glass, and her eyes could see him more clearly, though she still pretended to be dazzled by his face. He was exactly like a man in early middle age, tall, powerful, and commanding. Was he clothed? Did he have wings? She couldn’t tell because of the force of his eyes. She could look at nothing else.
“Please, Metatron, hear me. I have just come from Lord Asriel. He has the child’s dæmon, and he knows that the child will soon come to search for him.”
“What does he want with the child?”
“To keep her from you until she comes of age. He doesn’t know where I’ve gone, and I must go back to him soon. I’m telling you the truth. Look at me, great Regent, as I can’t easily look at you. Look at me clearly, and tell me what you see.”
The prince of the angels looked at her. It was the most searching examination Marisa Coulter had ever undergone. Every scrap of shelter and deceit was stripped away, and she stood naked, body and ghost and dæmon together, under the ferocity of Metatron’s gaze.
And she knew that her nature would have to answer for her, and she was terrified that what he saw in her would be insufficient. Lyra had lied to Iofur Raknison with her words; her mother was lying with her whole life.
“Yes, I see,” said Metatron.
“What do you see?”
“Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious, probing curiosity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion or sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage. You have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cesspit of moral filth.”
That voice, delivering that judgment, shook Mrs. Coulter profoundly. She knew it was coming, and she dreaded it; and yet she hoped for it, too, and now that it had been said, she felt a little gush of triumph.
She moved closer to him.
“So you see,” she said, “I can betray him easily. I can lead you to where he’s taking my daughter’s dæmon, and you can destroy Asriel, and the child will walk unsuspecting into your hands.”
She felt the movement of vapor about her, and her senses became confused. His next words pierced her flesh like darts of scented ice.
“When I was a man,” he said, “I had wives in plenty, but none was as lovely as you.”
“When you were a man?”
“When I was a man, I was known as Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son of Kenan, the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam. I lived on earth for sixty-five years, and then the Authority took me to his Kingdom.”
“And you had many wives.”
“I loved their flesh. And I understood it when the sons of Heaven fell in love with the daughters of earth, and I pleaded their cause with the Authority. But his heart was fixed against them, and he made me prophesy their doom.”
“And you have not known a wife for thousands of years . . .”
“I have been Regent of the Kingdom.”
“And is it not time you had a consort?”
That was the moment she felt most exposed and in most danger. But she trusted to her flesh, and to the strange truth she’d learned about angels, perhaps especially those angels who had once been human: lacking flesh, they coveted it and longed for contact with it. And Metatron was close now, close enough to smell the perfume of her hair and to gaze at the texture of her skin, close enough to touch her with scalding hands.
There was a strange sound, like the murmur and crackle you hear before you realize that what you’re hearing is your house on fire.
“Tell me what Lord Asriel is doing, and where he is,” he said.
“I can take you to him now,” she said.
The angels carrying the litter left the Clouded Moun
tain and flew south. Metatron’s orders had been to take the Authority to a place of safety away from the battlefield, because he wanted him kept alive for a while yet; but rather than give him a bodyguard of many regiments, which would only attract the enemy’s attention, he had trusted to the obscurity of the storm, calculating that in these circumstances, a small party would be safer than a large one.
And so it might have been, if a certain cliff-ghast, busy feasting on a half-dead warrior, had not looked up just as a random searchlight caught the side of the crystal litter.
Something stirred in the cliff-ghast’s memory. He paused, one hand on the warm liver, and as his brother knocked him aside, the recollection of a babbling Arctic fox came to his mind.
At once he spread his leathery wings and bounded upward, and a moment later the rest of the troop followed.
Xaphania and her angels had searched diligently all the night and some of the morning, and finally they had found a minute crack in the mountainside to the south of the fortress, which had not been there the day before. They had explored it and enlarged it, and now Lord Asriel was climbing down into a series of caverns and tunnels extending a long way below the fortress.
It wasn’t totally dark, as he’d thought. There was a faint source of illumination, like a stream of billions of tiny particles, faintly glowing. They flowed steadily down the tunnel like a river of light.
“Dust,” he said to his dæmon.
He had never seen it with the naked eye, but then he had never seen so much Dust together. He moved on, until quite suddenly the tunnel opened out, and he found himself at the top of a vast cavern: a vault immense enough to contain a dozen cathedrals. There was no floor; the sides sloped vertiginously down toward the edge of a great pit hundreds of feet below, and darker than darkness itself, and into the pit streamed the endless Dust fall, pouring ceaselessly down. Its billions of particles were like the stars of every galaxy in the sky, and every one of them was a little fragment of conscious thought. It was a melancholy light to see by.
He climbed with his dæmon down toward the abyss, and as they went, they gradually began to see what was happening along the far side of the gulf, hundreds of yards away in the gloom. He had thought there was a movement there, and the farther down he climbed, the more clearly it resolved itself: a procession of dim, pale figures picking their way along the perilous slope, men, women, children, beings of every kind he had seen and many he had not. Intent on keeping their balance, they ignored him altogether, and Lord Asriel felt the hair stir at the back of his neck when he realized that they were ghosts.
“Lyra came here,” he said quietly to the snow leopard.
“Tread carefully,” was all she said in reply.
Will and Lyra were soaked through, shivering, racked with pain, and stumbling blindly through mud and over rocks and into little gullies where storm-fed streams ran red with blood. Lyra was afraid that the Lady Salmakia was dying: she hadn’t uttered a word for several minutes, and she lay faint and limp in Lyra’s hand.
As they sheltered in one riverbed where the water was white, at least, and scooped up handfuls to their thirsty mouths, Will felt Tialys rouse himself and say:
“Will—I can hear horses coming—Lord Asriel has no cavalry. It must be the enemy. Get across the stream and hide—I saw some bushes that way . . .”
“Come on,” said Will to Lyra, and they splashed through the icy, bone-aching water and scrambled up the far side of the gully just in time. The riders who came over the slope and clattered down to drink didn’t look like cavalry: they seemed to be of the same kind of close-haired flesh as their horses, and they had neither clothes nor harness. They carried weapons, though: tridents, nets, and scimitars.
Will and Lyra didn’t stop to look; they stumbled over the rough ground at a crouch, intent only on getting away unseen.
But they had to keep their heads low to see where they were treading and avoid twisting an ankle, or worse, and thunder exploded overhead as they ran, so they couldn’t hear the screeching and snarling of the cliff-ghasts until they were upon them.
The creatures were surrounding something that lay glittering in the mud: something slightly taller than they were, which lay on its side, a large cage, perhaps, with walls of crystal. They were hammering at it with fists and rocks, shrieking and yelling.
And before Will and Lyra could stop and run the other way, they had stumbled right into the middle of the troop.
THIRTY-ONE
AUTHORITY’S END
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease.
• WILLIAM BLAKE •
Mrs. Coulter whispered to the shadow beside her:
“Look how he hides, Metatron! He creeps through the dark like a rat . . .”
They stood on a ledge high up in the great cavern, watching Lord Asriel and the snow leopard make their careful way down, a long way below.
“I could strike him now,” the shadow whispered.
“Yes, of course you could,” she whispered back, leaning close; “but I want to see his face, dear Metatron; I want him to know I’ve betrayed him. Come, let’s follow and catch him . . .”
The Dust fall shone like a great pillar of faint light as it descended smoothly and never-endingly into the gulf. Mrs. Coulter had no attention to spare for it, because the shadow beside her was trembling with desire, and she had to keep him by her side, under what control she could manage.
They moved down, silent, following Lord Asriel. The farther down they climbed, the more she felt a great weariness fall over her.
“What? What?” whispered the shadow, feeling her emotions, and suspicious at once.
“I was thinking,” she said with a sweet malice, “how glad I am that the child will never grow up to love and be loved. I thought I loved her when she was a baby; but now—”
“There was regret,” the shadow said, “in your heart there was regret that you will not see her grow up.”
“Oh, Metatron, how long it is since you were a man! Can you really not tell what it is I’m regretting? It’s not her coming of age, but mine. How bitterly I regret that I didn’t know of you in my own girlhood; how passionately I would have devoted myself to you . . .”
She leaned toward the shadow, as if she couldn’t control the impulses of her own body, and the shadow hungrily sniffed and seemed to gulp at the scent of her flesh.
They were moving laboriously over the tumbled and broken rocks toward the foot of the slope. The farther down they went, the more the Dust light gave everything a nimbus of golden mist. Mrs. Coulter kept reaching for where his hand might have been if the shadow had been a human companion, and then seemed to recollect herself, and whispered:
“Keep behind me, Metatron—wait here—Asriel is suspicious—let me lull him first. When he’s off guard, I’ll call you. But come as a shadow, in this small form, so he doesn’t see you—otherwise, he’ll just let the child’s dæmon fly away.”
The Regent was a being whose profound intellect had had thousands of years to deepen and strengthen itself, and whose knowledge extended over a million universes. Nevertheless, at that moment he was blinded by his twin obsessions: to destroy Lyra and to possess her mother. He nodded and stayed where he was, while the woman and the monkey moved forward as quietly as they could.
Lord Asriel was waiting behind a great block of granite, out of sight of the Regent. The snow leopard heard them coming, and Lord Asriel stood up as Mrs. Coulter came around the corner. Everything, every surface, every cubic centimeter of air, was permeated by the falling Dust, which gave a soft clarity to every tiny detail; and in the Dust light Lord Asriel saw that her face was wet with tears, and that she was gritting her teeth so as not to sob.
He took her in his arms, and the golden monkey embraced the snow leopard’s neck and buried his black face in her fur.
“Is Lyra safe? Has she found her dæmon?” she whispered.
“The ghost of the boy’s father is protecting both of them.”
“Dust is beautiful . . . I never knew.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I lied and lied, Asriel . . . Let’s not wait too long, I can’t bear it . . . We won’t live, will we? We won’t survive like the ghosts?”
“Not if we fall into the abyss. We came here to give Lyra time to find her dæmon, and then time to live and grow up. If we take Metatron to extinction, Marisa, she’ll have that time, and if we go with him, it doesn’t matter.”
“And Lyra will be safe?”
“Yes, yes,” he said gently.
He kissed her. She felt as soft and light in his arms as she had when Lyra was conceived thirteen years before.
She was sobbing quietly. When she could speak, she whispered:
“I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he’d see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I’d ever done . . . I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn’t. There is none. But I love Lyra. Where did this love come from? I don’t know; it came to me like a thief in the night, and now I love her so much my heart is bursting with it. All I could hope was that my crimes were so monstrous that the love was no bigger than a mustard seed in the shadow of them, and I wished I’d committed even greater ones to hide it more deeply still . . . But the mustard seed had taken root and was growing, and the little green shoot was splitting my heart wide open, and I was so afraid he’d see . . .”
She had to stop to gather herself. He stroked her shining hair, all set about with golden Dust, and waited.
“Any moment now he’ll lose patience,” she whispered. “I told him to make himself small. But he’s only an angel, after all, even if he was once a man. And we can wrestle with him and bring him to the edge of the gulf, and we’ll both go down with him . . .”
The Amber Spyglass: His Dark Materials Page 37