“So if you don’t know whether you’re dead or not, and the little girl swears blind she’ll come out again to the living, I say nothing to contradict you. What you are, you’ll know soon enough.”
All the time he had been steadily rowing along the shore, and now he shipped the oars, slipping the handles down inside the boat and reaching out to his right for the first wooden post that rose out of the lake.
He pulled the boat alongside the narrow wharf and held it still for them. Lyra didn’t want to get out: as long as she was near the boat, then Pantalaimon would be able to think of her properly, because that was how he last saw her, but when she moved away from it, he wouldn’t know how to picture her anymore. So she hesitated, but the dragonflies flew up, and Will got out, pale and clutching his chest; so she had to as well.
“Thank you,” she said to the boatman. “When you go back, if you see my dæmon, tell him I love him the best of everything in the land of the living or the dead, and I swear I’ll come back to him, even if no one’s ever done it before, I swear I will.”
“Yes, I’ll tell him that,” said the old boatman.
He pushed off, and the sound of his slow oar strokes faded away in the mist.
The Gallivespians flew back, having gone a little way, and perched on the children’s shoulders as before, she on Lyra, he on Will. So they stood, the travelers, at the edge of the land of the dead. Ahead of them there was nothing but mist, though they could see from the darkening of it that a great wall rose in front of them.
Lyra shivered. She felt as if her skin had turned into lace and the damp and bitter air could flow in and out of her ribs, scaldingly cold on the raw wound where Pantalaimon had been. Still, she thought, Roger must have felt like that as he plunged down the mountainside, trying to cling to her desperate fingers.
They stood still and listened. The only sound was an endless drip-drip-drip of water from the leaves, and as they looked up, they felt one or two drops splash coldly on their cheeks.
“Can’t stay here,” said Lyra.
They moved off the wharf, keeping close together, and made their way to the wall. Gigantic stone blocks, green with ancient slime, rose higher into the mist than they could see. And now that they were closer, they could hear the sound of cries behind it, though whether they were human voices crying was impossible to tell: high, mournful shrieks and wails that hung in the air like the drifting filaments of a jellyfish, causing pain wherever they touched.
“There’s a door,” said Will in a hoarse, strained voice.
It was a battered wooden postern under a slab of stone. Before Will could lift his hand and open it, one of those high, harsh cries sounded very close by, jarring their ears and frightening them horribly.
Immediately the Gallivespians darted into the air, the dragonflies like little warhorses eager for battle. But the thing that flew down swept them aside with a brutal blow from her wing, and then settled heavily on a ledge just above the children’s heads. Tialys and Salmakia gathered themselves and soothed their shaken mounts.
The thing was a great bird the size of a vulture, with the face and breasts of a woman. Will had seen pictures of creatures like her, and the word harpy came to mind as soon as he saw her clearly. Her face was smooth and unwrinkled, but aged beyond even the age of the witches: she had seen thousands of years pass, and the cruelty and misery of all of them had formed the hateful expression on her features. But as the travelers saw her more clearly, she became even more repulsive. Her eye sockets were clotted with filthy slime, and the redness of her lips was caked and crusted as if she had vomited ancient blood again and again. Her matted, filthy black hair hung down to her shoulders; her jagged claws gripped the stone fiercely; her powerful dark wings were folded along her back; and a drift of putrescent stink wafted from her every time she moved.
Will and Lyra, both of them sick and full of pain, tried to stand upright and face her.
“But you are alive!” the harpy said, her harsh voice mocking them.
Will found himself hating and fearing her more than any human being he had ever known.
“Who are you?” said Lyra, who was just as repelled as Will.
For answer the harpy screamed. She opened her mouth and directed a jet of noise right in their faces, so that their heads rang and they nearly fell backward. Will clutched at Lyra and they both clung together as the scream turned into wild, mocking peals of laughter, which were answered by other harpy voices in the fog along the shore. The jeering, hate-filled sound reminded Will of the merciless cruelty of children in a playground, but there were no teachers here to regulate things, no one to appeal to, nowhere to hide.
He set his hand on the knife at his belt and looked her in the eyes, though his head was ringing and the sheer power of her scream had made him dizzy.
“If you’re trying to stop us,” he said, “then you’d better be ready to fight as well as scream. Because we’re going through that door.”
The harpy’s sickening red mouth moved again, but this time it was to purse her lips into a mock kiss.
Then she said, “Your mother is alone. We shall send her nightmares. We shall scream at her in her sleep!”
Will didn’t move, because out of the corner of his eye, he could see the Lady Salmakia moving delicately along the branch where the harpy was perching. Her dragonfly, wings quivering, was being held by Tialys on the ground, and then two things happened: the Lady leapt at the harpy and spun around to dig her spur deep into the creature’s scaly leg, and Tialys launched the dragonfly upward. In less than a second Salmakia had spun away and leapt off the branch, directly onto the back of her electric blue steed and up into the air.