Without another word he went inside and put the letters under the pillow in the room he’d slept in. Then, if he were caught, they’d never have them.
Lyra was waiting on the terrace, with Pantalaimon perched on her shoulder as a sparrow. She was looking more cheerful.
“We’re going to get it back all right,” she said. “I can feel it.”
He said nothing. They set off for the window.
It took an hour and a half to walk to Headington. Lyra led the way, avoiding the city center, and Will kept watch all around, saying nothing. It was much harder for Lyra now than it had been even in the Arctic, on the way to Bolvangar, for then she’d had the gyptians and Iorek Byrnison with her, and even if the tundra was full of danger, you knew the danger when you saw it. Here, in the city that was both hers and not hers, danger could look friendly, and treachery smiled and smelled sweet; and even if they weren’t going to kill her or part her from Pantalaimon, they had robbed her of her only guide. Without the alethiometer, she was … just a little girl, lost.
Limefield House was the color of warm honey, and half of its front was covered in Virginia creeper. It stood in a large, well-tended garden, with shrubbery at one side and a gravel drive sweeping up to the front door. The Rolls-Royce was parked in front of a double garage to the left. Everything Will could see spoke of wealth and power, the sort of informal settled superiority that some upper-class English people still took for granted. There was something about it that made him grit his teeth, and he didn’t know why, until suddenly he remembered an occasion when he was very young. His mother had taken him to a house not unlike this; they’d dressed in their best clothes and he’d had to be on his best behavior, and an old man and woman had made his mother cry, and they’d left the house and she was still crying.…
Lyra saw him breathing fast and clenching his fists, and was sensible enough not to ask why; it was something to do with him, not with her. Presently he took a deep breath.
“Well,” he said, “might as well try.”
He walked up the drive, and Lyra followed close behind. They felt very exposed.
The door had an old-fashioned bell pull, like those in Lyra’s world, and Will didn’t know where to find it till Lyra showed him. When they pulled it, the bell jangled a long way off inside the house.
The man who opened the door was the servant who’d been driving the car, only now he didn’t have his cap on. He looked at Will first, and then at Lyra, and his expression changed a little.
“We want to see Sir Charles Latrom,” Will said.
His jaw was jutting as it had done last night facing the stone-throwing children by the tower. The servant nodded.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll tell Sir Charles.”
He closed the door. It was solid oak, with two heavy locks, and bolts top and bottom, though Will thought that no sensible burglar would try the front door anyway. And there was a burglar alarm prominently fixed to the front of the house, and a large spotlight at each corner; they’d never be able to get near it, let alone break in.
Steady footsteps came to the door, and then it opened again. Will looked up at the face of this man who had so much that he wanted even more, and found him disconcertingly smooth and calm and powerful, not in the least guilty or ashamed.
Sensing Lyra beside him impatient and angry, Will said quickly, “Excuse me, but Lyra thinks that when she had a lift in your car earlier on, she left something in it by mistake.”
“Lyra? I don’t know a Lyra. What an unusual name. I know a child called Lizzie. And who are you?”
Cursing himself for forgetting, Will said, “I’m her brother. Mark.”
“I see. Hello, Lizzie, or Lyra. You’d better come in.”
He stood aside. Neither Will nor Lyra was quite expecting this, and they stepped inside uncertainly. The hall was dim and smelled of beeswax and flowers. Every surface was polished and clean, and a mahogany cabinet against the wall contained dainty porcelain figures. Will saw the servant standing in the background, as if he were waiting to be called.
“Come into my study,” said Sir Charles, and held open another door off the hall.
He was being courteous, even welcoming, but there was an edge to his manner that put Will on guard. The study was large and comfortable in a cigar-smoke-and-leather-armchair sort of way, and seemed to be full of bookshelves, pictures, hunting trophies. There were three or four glass-fronted cabinets containing antique scientific instruments—brass microscopes, telescopes covered in green leather, sextants, compasses; it was clear why he wanted the alethiometer.
“Sit down,” said Sir Charles, and indicated a leather sofa. He sat at the chair behind his desk, and went on. “Well? What have you got to say?”
“You stole—” began Lyra hotly, but Will looked at her, and she stopped.
“Lyra thinks she left something in your car,” he said again. “We’ve come to get it back.”
“Is this the object you mean?” he said, and took a velvet cloth from a drawer in the desk. Lyra stood up. He ignored her and unfolded the cloth, disclosing the golden splendor of the alethiometer resting in his palm.
“Yes!” Lyra burst out, and reached for it.
But he closed his hand. The desk was wide, and she couldn’t reach; and before she could do anything else, he swung around and placed the alethiometer in a glass-fronted cabinet before locking it and dropping the key in his waistcoat pocket.
“But it isn’t yours, Lizzie,” he said. “Or Lyra, if that’s your name.”
“It is mine! It’s my alethiometer!”
He shook his head, sadly and heavily, as if he were reproaching her and it was a sorrow to him, but he was doing it for her own good. “I think at the very least there’s considerable doubt about the matter,” he said.
“But it is hers!” said Will. “Honestly! She’s shown it to me! I know it’s hers!”
“You see, I think you’d have to prove that,” he said. “I don’t have to prove anything, because it’s in my possession. It’s assumed to be mine. Like all the other items in my collection. I must say, Lyra, I’m surprised to find you so dishonest—”
“I en’t dishonest!” Lyra cried.
“Oh, but you are. You told me your name was Lizzie. Now I learn it’s something else. Frankly, you haven’t got a hope of convincing anyone that a precious piece like this belongs to you. I tell you what. Let’s call the police.”
He turned his head to call for the servant.
“No, wait—” said Will, before Sir Charles could speak, but Lyra ran around the desk, and from nowhere Pantalaimon was in her arms, a snarling wildcat baring his teeth and hissing at the old man. Sir Charles blinked at the sudden appearance of the dæmon, but hardly flinched.
“You don’t even know what it is you stole,” Lyra stormed. “You seen me using it and you thought you’d steal it, and you did. But you—you—you’re worse than my mother. At least she knows it’s important! You’re just going to put it in a case and do nothing with it! You ought to die! If I can, I’ll make someone kill you. You’re not worth leaving alive. You’re—”
She couldn’t speak. All she could do was spit full in his face, so she did, with all her might.
Will sat still, watching, looking around, memorizing where everything was.
Sir Charles calmly shook out a silk handkerchief and mopped himself.
“Have you any control over yourself?” he said. “Go and sit down, you filthy brat.”
Lyra felt tears shaken out of her eyes by the trembling of her body, and threw herself onto the sofa. Pantalaimon, his thick cat’s tail erect, stood on her lap with his blazing eyes fixed on the old man.
Will sat silent and puzzled. Sir Charles could have thrown them out long before this. What was he playing at?
And then he saw something so bizarre he thought he had imagined it. Out of the sleeve of Sir Charles’s linen jacket, past the snowy white shirt cuff, came the emerald head of a snake. Its black tongue flicked this
way, that way, and its mailed head with its gold-rimmed black eyes moved from Lyra to Will and back again. She was too angry to see it at all, and Will saw it only for a moment before it retreated again up the old man’s sleeve, but it made his eyes widen with shock.
Sir Charles moved to the window seat and calmly sat down, arranging the crease in his trousers.
“I think you’d better listen to me instead of behaving in this uncontrolled way,” he said. “You really haven’t any choice. The instrument is in my possession and will stay there. I want it. I’m a collector. You can spit and stamp and scream all you like, but by the time you’ve persuaded anyone else to listen to you, I shall have plenty of documents to prove that I bought it. I can do that very easily. And then you’ll never get it back.”
They were both silent now. He hadn’t finished. A great puzzlement was slowing Lyra’s heartbeat and making the room very still.
“However,” he went on, “there’s something I want even more. And I can’t get it myself, so I’m prepared to make a deal with you. You fetch the object I want, and I’ll give you back the—what did you call it?”
“Alethiometer,” said Lyra hoarsely.
“Alethiometer. How interesting. Alethia, truth—those emblems—yes, I see.”
“What’s this thing you want?” said Will. “And where is it?”
“It’s somewhere I can’t go, but you can. I’m perfectly well aware that you’ve found a doorway somewhere. I guess it’s not too far from Summertown, where I dropped Lizzie, or Lyra, this morning. And that through the doorway is another world, one with no grownups in it. Right so far? Well, you see, the man who made that doorway has got a knife. He’s hiding in that other world right now, and he’s extremely afraid. He has reason to be. If he’s where I think he is, he’s in an old stone tower with angels carved around the doorway. The Torre degli Angeli.
“So that’s where you have to go, and I don’t care how you do it, but I want that knife. Bring it to me, and you can have the alethiometer. I shall be sorry to lose it, but I’m a man of my word. That’s what you have to do: bring me the knife.”
8
THE TOWER Of THE ANGELS
Will said, “Who is this man who’s got the knife?”
They were in the Rolls-Royce, driving up through Oxford. Sir Charles sat in the front, half-turned around, and Will and Lyra sat in the back, with Pantalaimon a mouse now, soothed in Lyra’s hands. “Someone who has no more right to the knife than I have to the alethiometer,” said Sir Charles. “Unfortunately for all of us, the alethiometer is in my possession, and the knife is in his.”
“How do you know about that other world anyway?”
“I know many things that you don’t. What else would you expect? I am a good deal older and considerably better informed. There are a number of doorways between this world and that; those who know where they are can easily pass back and forth. In Cittàgazze there’s a Guild of learned men, so called, who used to do so all the time.”
“You en’t from this world at all!” said Lyra suddenly. “You’re from there, en’t you?”
And again came that strange nudge at her memory. She was almost certain she’d seen him before.
“No, I’m not,” he said.
Will said, “If we’ve got to get the knife from that man, we need to know more about him. He’s not going to just give it to us, is he?”
“Certainly not. It’s the one thing keeping the Specters away. It’s not going to be easy by any means.”
“The Specters are afraid of the knife?”
“Very much so.”
“Why do they attack only grownups?”
“You don’t need to know that now. It doesn’t matter. Lyra,” Sir Charles said, turning to her, “tell me about your remarkable friend.”
He meant Pantalaimon. And as soon as he said it, Will realized that the snake he’d seen concealed in the man’s sleeve was a dæmon too, and that Sir Charles must come from Lyra’s world. He was asking about Pantalaimon to put them off the track: so he didn’t realize that Will had seen his own dæmon.
Lyra lifted Pantalaimon close to her breast, and he became a black rat, whipping his tail around and around her wrist and glaring at Sir Charles with red eyes.
“You weren’t supposed to see him,” she said. “He’s my dæmon. You think you en’t got dæmons in this world, but you have. Yours’d be a dung beetle.”
“If the Pharaohs of Egypt were content to be represented by a scarab, so am I,” he said. “Well, you’re from yet another world. How interesting. Is that where the alethiometer comes from, or did you steal it on your travels?”
“I was given it,” said Lyra furiously. “The Master of Jordan College in my Oxford gave it to me. It’s mine by right. And you wouldn’t know what to do with it, you stupid, stinky old man; you’d never read it in a hundred years. It’s just a toy to you. But I need it, and so does Will. We’ll get it back, don’t worry.”
“We’ll see,” said Sir Charles. “This is where I dropped you before. Shall we let you out here?”
“No,” said Will, because he could see a police car farther down the road. “You can’t come into Ci’gazze because of the Specters, so it doesn’t matter if you know where the window is. Take us farther up toward the ring road.”
“As you wish,” said Sir Charles, and the car moved on. “When, or if, you get the knife, call my number and Allan will come to pick you up.”
They said no more till the chauffeur drew the car to a halt. As they got out, Sir Charles lowered his window and said to Will, “By the way, if you can’t get the knife, don’t bother to return. Come to my house without it and I’ll call the police. I imagine they’ll be there at once when I tell them your real name. It is William Parry, isn’t it? Yes, I thought so. There’s a very good photo of you in today’s paper.”
And the car pulled away. Will was speechless.
Lyra was shaking his arm. “It’s all right,” she said, “he won’t tell anyone else. He would have done it already if he was going to. Come on.”
Ten minutes later they stood in the little square at the foot of the Tower of the Angels. Will had told her about the snake dæmon, and she had stopped still in the street, tormented again by that half-memory. Who was the old man? Where had she seen him? It was no good; the memory wouldn’t come clear.
“I didn’t want to tell him,” Lyra said quietly, “but I saw a man up there last night. He looked down when the kids were making all that noise.…”
“What did he look like?”
“Young, with curly hair. Not old at all. But I saw him for only a moment, at the very top, over those battlements. I thought he might be … You remember Angelica and Paolo, and Paolo said they had an older brother, and he’d come into the city as well, and she made Paolo stop telling us, as if it was a secret? Well, I thought it might be him. He might be after this knife as well. And I reckon all the kids know about it. I think that’s the real reason why they come back in the first place.”
“Mmm,” he said, looking up. “Maybe.”
She remembered the children talking earlier that morning. No children would go in the tower, they’d said; there were scary things in there. And she remembered her own feeling of unease as she and Pantalaimon had looked through the open door before leaving the city. Maybe that was why they needed a grown man to go in there. Her dæmon was fluttering around her head now, moth-formed in the bright sunlight, whispering anxiously.
“Hush,” she whispered back, “there en’t any choice, Pan. It’s our fault. We got to make it right, and this is the only way.”
Will walked off to the right, following the wall of the tower. At the corner a narrow cobbled alley led between it and the next building, and Will went down there too, looking up, getting the measure of the place. Lyra followed. Will stopped under a window at the second-story level and said to Pantalaimon, “Can you fly up there? Can you look in?”
He became a sparrow at once and set off. He could only just re
ach it. Lyra gasped and gave a little cry when he was at the windowsill, and he perched there for a second or two before diving down again. She sighed and took deep breaths like someone rescued from drowning. Will frowned, puzzled.
“It’s hard,” she explained, “when your dæmon goes away from you. It hurts.”
“Sorry. Did you see anything?” he said.
“Stairs,” said Pantalaimon. “Stairs and dark rooms. There were swords hung on the wall, and spears and shields, like a museum. And I saw the young man. He was … dancing.”
“Dancing?”
“Moving to and fro, waving his hand about. Or as if he was fighting something invisible … I just saw him through an open door. Not clearly.”
“Fighting a Specter?” Lyra guessed.
But they couldn’t guess any better, so they moved on. Behind the tower a high stone wall, topped with broken glass, enclosed a small garden with formal beds of herbs around a fountain (once again Pantalaimon flew up to look); and then there was an alley on the other side, bringing them back to the square. The windows around the tower were small and deeply set, like frowning eyes.
“We’ll have to go in the front, then,” said Will.
He climbed the steps and pushed the door wide. Sunlight struck in, and the heavy hinges creaked. He took a step or two inside, and seeing no one, went in farther. Lyra followed close behind. The floor was made of flagstones worn smooth over centuries, and the air inside was cool.
Will looked at a flight of steps going downward, and went far enough down to see that it opened into a wide, low-ceilinged room with an immense cold furnace at one end, where the plaster walls were black with soot; but there was no one there, and he went up to the entrance hall again, where he found Lyra with her finger to her lips, looking up.
“I can hear him,” she whispered. “He’s talking to himself, I reckon.”
Will listened hard, and heard it too: a low crooning murmur interrupted occasionally by a harsh laugh or a short cry of anger. It sounded like the voice of a madman.
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