His Dark Materials Omnibus

by Philip Pullman

  Lyra didn’t hesitate. Pantalaimon sprang for the door and she was after him at once, and she tore it open and raced away faster than she had ever run in her life.

  “Fire alarm!” Pantalaimon shrieked, as he flew ahead of her.

  She saw a button on the next corner, and smashed the glass with her desperate fist. She ran on, heading toward the dormitories, smashed another alarm and another, and then people began to come out into the corridor, looking up and down for the fire.

  By this time she was near the kitchen, and Pantalaimon flashed a thought into her mind, and she darted in. A moment later she had turned on all the gas taps and flung a match at the nearest burner. Then she dragged a bag of flour from a shelf and hurled it at the edge of a table so it burst and filled the air with white, because she had heard that flour will explode if it’s treated like that near a flame.

  Then she ran out and on as fast as she could toward her own dormitory. The corridors were full now: children running this way and that, vivid with excitement, for the word escape had got around. The oldest were making for the storerooms where the clothing was kept, and herding the younger ones with them. Adults were trying to control it all, and none of them knew what was happening. Shouting, pushing, crying, jostling people were everywhere.

  Through it all Lyra and Pantalaimon darted like fish, making always for the dormitory, and just as they reached it, there was a dull explosion from behind that shook the building.

  The other girls had fled: the room was empty. Lyra dragged the locker to the corner, jumped up, hauled the furs out of the ceiling, felt for the alethiometer. It was still there. She tugged the furs on quickly, pulling the hood forward, and then Pantalaimon, a sparrow at the door, called:

  “Now!”

  She ran out. By luck a group of children who’d already found some cold-weather clothing were racing down the corridor toward the main entrance, and she joined them, sweating, her heart thumping, knowing that she had to escape or die.

  The way was blocked. The fire in the kitchen had taken quickly, and whether it was the flour or the gas, something had brought down part of the roof. People were clambering over twisted struts and girders to get up to the bitter cold air. The smell of gas was strong. Then came another explosion, louder than the first and closer. The blast knocked several people over, and cries of fear and pain filled the air.

  Lyra struggled up, and with Pantalaimon calling, “This way! This way!” among the other dæmon-cries and flutterings, she hauled herself over the rubble. The air she was breathing was frozen, and she hoped that the children had managed to find their outdoor clothing; it would be a fine thing to escape from the station only to die of cold.

  There really was a blaze now. When she got out onto the roof under the night sky, she could see flames licking at the edges of a great hole in the side of the building. There was a throng of children and adults by the main entrance, but this time the adults were more agitated and the children more fearful: much more fearful.

  “Roger! Roger!” Lyra called, and Pantalaimon, keen-eyed as an owl, hooted that he’d seen him.

  A moment later they found each other.

  “Tell ’em all to come with me!” Lyra shouted into his ear.

  “They won’t—they’re all panicky—”

  “Tell ’em what they do to the kids that vanish! They cut their dæmons off with a big knife! Tell ’em what you saw this afternoon—all them dæmons we let out! Tell ’em that’s going to happen to them too unless they get away!”

  Roger gaped, horrified, but then collected his wits and ran to the nearest group of hesitating children. Lyra did the same, and as the message passed along, some children cried out and clutched their dæmons in fear.

  “Come with me!” Lyra shouted. “There’s a rescue a coming! We got to get out of the compound! Come on, run!”

  The children heard her and followed, streaming across the enclosure toward the avenue of lights, their boots pattering and creaking in the hard-packed snow.

  Behind them, adults were shouting, and there was a rumble and crash as another part of the building fell in. Sparks gushed into the air, and flames billowed out with a sound like tearing cloth; but cutting through this came another sound, dreadfully close and violent. Lyra had never heard it before, but she knew it at once: it was the howl of the Tartar guards’ wolf dæmons. She felt weak from head to foot, and many children turned in fear and stumbled to a stop, for there running at a low swift tireless lope came the first of the Tartar guards, rifle at the ready, with the mighty leaping grayness of his dæmon beside him.

  Then came another, and another. They were all in padded mail, and they had no eyes—or at least you couldn’t see any eyes behind the snow slits of their helmets. The only eyes you could see were the round black ends of the rifle barrels and the blazing yellow eyes of the wolf dæmons above the slaver dripping from their jaws.

  Lyra faltered. She hadn’t dreamed of how frightening those wolves were. And now that she knew how casually people at Bolvangar broke the great taboo, she shrank from the thought of those dripping teeth.…

  The Tartars ran to stand in a line across the entrance to the avenue of lights, their dæmons beside them as disciplined and drilled as they were. In another minute there’d be a second line, because more were coming, and more behind them. Lyra thought with despair: children can’t fight soldiers. It wasn’t like the battles in the Oxford claybeds, hurling lumps of mud at the brickburners’ children.

  Or perhaps it was! She remembered hurling a handful of clay in the broad face of a brickburner boy bearing down on her. He’d stopped to claw the stuff out of his eyes, and then the townies leaped on him.

  She’d been standing in the mud. She was standing in the snow.

  Just as she’d done that afternoon, but in deadly earnest now, she scooped a handful together and hurled it at the nearest soldier.

  “Get ’em in the eyes!” she yelled, and threw another.

  Other children joined in, and then someone’s dæmon had the notion of flying as a swift beside the snowball and nudging it directly at the eye slits of the target—and then they all joined in, and in a few moments the Tartars were stumbling about, spitting and cursing and trying to brush the packed snow out of the narrow gap in front of their eyes.

  “Come on!” Lyra screamed, and flung herself at the gate into the avenue of lights.

  The children streamed after her, every one, dodging the snapping jaws of the wolves and racing as hard as they could down the avenue toward the beckoning open dark beyond.

  A harsh scream came from behind as an officer shouted an order, and then a score of rifle bolts worked at once, and then there was another scream and a tense silence, with only the fleeing children’s pounding feet and gasping breath to be heard.

  They were taking aim. They wouldn’t miss.

  But before they could fire, a choking gasp came from one of the Tartars, and a cry of surprise from another.

  Lyra stopped and turned to see a man lying on the snow, with a gray-feathered arrow in his back. He was writhing and twitching and coughing out blood, and the other soldiers were looking around to left and right for whoever had fired it, but the archer was nowhere to be seen.

  And then an arrow came flying straight down from the sky, and struck another man behind the head. He fell at once. A shout from the officer, and everyone looked up at the dark sky.

  “Witches!” said Pantalaimon.

  And so they were: ragged elegant black shapes sweeping past high above, with a hiss and swish of air through the needles of the cloud-pine branches they flew on. As Lyra watched, one swooped low and loosed an arrow: another man fell.

  And then all the Tartars turned their rifles up and blazed into the dark, firing at nothing, at shadows, at clouds, and more and more arrows rained down on them.

  But the officer in charge, seeing the children almost away, ordered a squad to race after them. Some children screamed. And then more screamed, and they weren’t moving forwar
d anymore, they were turning back in confusion, terrified by the monstrous shape hurtling toward them from the dark beyond the avenue of lights.

  “Iorek Byrnison!” cried Lyra, her chest nearly bursting with joy.

  The armored bear at the charge seemed to be conscious of no weight except what gave him momentum. He bounded past Lyra almost in a blur and crashed into the Tartars, scattering soldiers, dæmons, rifles to all sides. Then he stopped and whirled round, with a lithe athletic power, and struck two massive blows, one to each side, at the guards closest to him.

  A wolf dæmon leaped at him: he slashed at her in midair, and bright fire spilled out of her as she fell to the snow, where she hissed and howled before vanishing. Her human died at once.

  The Tartar officer, faced with this double attack, didn’t hesitate. A long high scream of orders, and the force divided itself into two: one to keep off the witches, the bigger part to overcome the bear. His troops were magnificently brave. They dropped to one knee in groups of four and fired their rifles as if they were on the practice range, not budging an inch as Iorek’s mighty bulk hurtled toward them. A moment later they were dead.

  Iorek struck again, twisting to one side, slashing, snarling, crushing, while bullets flew about him like wasps or flies, doing no harm at all. Lyra urged the children on and out into the darkness beyond the lights. They must get away, because dangerous as the Tartars were, far more dangerous were the adults of Bolvangar.

  So she called and beckoned and pushed to get the children moving. As the lights behind them threw long shadows on the snow, Lyra found her heart moving out toward the deep dark of the arctic night and the clean coldness, leaping forward to love it as Pantalaimon was doing, a hare now delighting in his own propulsion.

  “Where we going?” someone said.

  “There’s nothing out here but snow!”

  “There’s a rescue party coming,” Lyra told them. “There’s fifty gyptians or more. I bet there’s some relations of yours, too. All the gyptian families that lost a kid, they all sent someone.”

  “I en’t a gyptian,” a boy said.

  “Don’t matter. They’ll take you anyway.”

  “Where?” someone said querulously.

  “Home,” said Lyra. “That’s what I come here for, to rescue you, and I brung the gyptians here to take you home again. We just got to go on a bit further and then we’ll find ’em. The bear was with ’em, so they can’t be far off.”

  “D’you see that bear!” one boy was saying. “When he slashed open that dæmon—the man died as if someone whipped his heart out, just like that!”

  “I never knew dæmons could be killed,” someone else said.

  They were all talking now; the excitement and relief had loosened everyone’s tongue. As long as they kept moving, it didn’t matter if they talked.

  “Is that true,” said a girl, “about what they do back there?”

  “Yeah,” Lyra said. “I never thought I’d ever see anyone without their dæmon. But on the way here, we found this boy on his own without any dæmon. He kept asking for her, where she was, would she ever find him. He was called Tony Makarios.”

  “I know him!” said someone, and others joined in: “Yeah, they took him away about a week back.…”

  “Well, they cut his dæmon away,” said Lyra, knowing how it would affect them. “And a little bit after we found him, he died. And all the dæmons they cut away, they kept them in cages in a square building back there.”

  “It’s true,” said Roger. “And Lyra let ’em out during the fire drill.”

  “Yeah, I seen ’em!” said Billy Costa. “I didn’t know what they was at first, but I seen ’em fly away with that goose.”

  “But why do they do it?” demanded one boy. “Why do they cut people’s dæmons away? That’s torture! Why do they do it?”

  “Dust,” suggested someone doubtfully.

  But the boy laughed in scorn. “Dust!” he said. “There en’t no such thing! They just made that up! I don’t believe in it.”

  “Here,” said someone else, “look what’s happening to the zeppelin!”

  They all looked back. Beyond the dazzle of lights, where the fight was still continuing, the great length of the airship was not floating freely at the mooring mast any longer; the free end was drooping downward, and beyond it was rising a globe of—

  “Lee Scoresby’s balloon!” Lyra cried, and clapped her mittened hands with delight.

  The other children were baffled. Lyra herded them onward, wondering how the aeronaut had got his balloon that far. It was clear what he was doing, and what a good idea, to fill his balloon with the gas out of theirs, to escape by the same means that crippled their pursuit!

  “Come on, keep moving, else you’ll freeze,” she said, for some of the children were shivering and moaning from the cold, and their dæmons were crying too in high thin voices.

  Pantalaimon found this irritating, and as a wolverine he snapped at one girl’s squirrel dæmon who was just lying across her shoulder whimpering faintly.

  “Get in her coat! Make yourself big and warm her up!” he snarled, and the girl’s dæmon, frightened, crept inside her coal-silk anorak at once.

  The trouble was that coal silk wasn’t as warm as proper fur, no matter how much it was padded out with hollow coal-silk fibers. Some of the children looked like walking puffballs, they were so bulky, but their gear had been made in factories and laboratories far away from the cold, and it couldn’t really cope. Lyra’s furs looked ragged and they stank, but they kept the warmth in.

  “If we don’t find the gyptians soon, they en’t going to last,” she whispered to Pantalaimon.

  “Keep ’em moving then,” he whispered back. “If they lie down, they’re finished. You know what Farder Coram said.…”

  Farder Coram had told her many tales of his own journeys in the North, and so had Mrs. Coulter—always supposing that hers were true. But they were both quite clear about one point, which was that you must keep going.

  “How far we gotta go?” said a little boy.

  “She’s just making us walk out here to kill us,” said a girl.

  “Rather be out here than back there,” someone said.

  “I wouldn’t! It’s warm back in the station. There’s food and hot drinks and everything.”

  “But it’s all on fire!”

  “What we going to do out here? I bet we starve to death.…”

  Lyra’s mind was full of dark questions that flew around like witches, swift and untouchable, and somewhere, just beyond where she could reach, there was a glory and a thrill which she didn’t understand at all.

  But it gave her a surge of strength, and she hauled one girl up out of a snowdrift, and shoved at a boy who was dawdling, and called to them all: “Keep going! Follow the bear’s tracks! He come up with the gyptians, so the tracks’ll lead us to where they are! Just keep walking!”

  Big flakes of snow were beginning to fall. Soon it would have covered Iorek Byrnison’s tracks altogether. Now that they were out of sight of the lights of Bolvangar, and the blaze of the fire was only a faint glow, the only light came from the faint radiance of the snow-covered ground. Thick clouds obscured the sky, so there was neither moon nor Northern Lights; but by peering closely, the children could make out the deep trail Iorek Byrnison had plowed in the snow. Lyra encouraged, bullied, hit, half-carried, swore at, pushed, dragged, lifted tenderly, wherever it was needed, and Pantalaimon (by the state of each child’s dæmon) told her what was needed in each case.

  I’ll get them there, she kept saying to herself. I come here to get ’em and I’ll bloody get ’em.

  Roger was following her example, and Billy Costa was leading the way, being sharper-eyed than most. Soon the snow was falling so thickly that they had to cling on to one another to keep from getting lost, and Lyra thought, perhaps if we all lie close and keep warm like that … Dig holes in the snow …

  She was hearing things. There was the snarl of an engine
somewhere, not the heavy thump of a zeppelin but something higher like the drone of a hornet. It drifted in and out of hearing.

  And howling … Dogs? Sledge dogs? That too was distant and hard to be sure of, blanketed by millions of snowflakes and blown this way and that by little puffing gusts of wind. It might have been the gyptians’ sledge dogs, or it might have been wild spirits of the tundra, or even those freed dæmons crying for their lost children.

  She was seeing things.… There weren’t any lights in the snow, were there? They must be ghosts as well.… Unless they’d come round in a circle, and were stumbling back into Bolvangar.

  But these were little yellow lantern beams, not the white glare of anbaric lights. And they were moving, and the howling was nearer, and before she knew for certain whether she’d fallen asleep, Lyra was wandering among familiar figures, and men in furs were holding her up: John Faa’s mighty arm lifted her clear of the ground, and Farder Coram was laughing with pleasure; and as far through the blizzard as she could see, gyptians were lifting children into sledges, covering them with furs, giving them seal meat to chew. And Tony Costa was there, hugging Billy and then punching him softly only to hug him again and shake him for joy. And Roger …

  “Roger’s coming with us,” she said to Farder Coram. “It was him I meant to get in the first place. We’ll go back to Jordan in the end. What’s that noise—”

  It was that snarl again, that engine, like a crazed spy-fly ten thousand times the size.

  Suddenly there came a blow that sent her sprawling, and Pantalaimon couldn’t defend her, because the golden monkey—

  Mrs. Coulter—

  The golden monkey was wrestling, biting, scratching at Pantalaimon, who was flickering through so many changes of form it was hard to see him, and fighting back: stinging, lashing, tearing. Mrs. Coulter, meanwhile, her face in its furs a frozen glare of intense feeling, was dragging Lyra to the back of a motorized sledge, and Lyra struggled as hard as her dæmon. The snow was so thick that they seemed to be isolated in a little blizzard of their own, and the anbaric headlights of the sledge only showed up the thick swirling flakes a few inches ahead.