“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 Mountain 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 . . .”