Sophonax was as sleek and healthy and beautiful as Farder Coram was ravaged and weak. He might have been ill, or he might have suffered a crippling blow, but the result was that
he could not walk without leaning on two sticks, and he trembled constantly like an aspen leaf. His mind was sharp and clear and powerful, though, and soon Lyra came to love him for his knowledge and for the firm way he directed her.
“What's that hourglass mean, Farder Coram?” she asked, over the alethiometer, one sunny morning in his boat. “It keeps coming back to that.”
“There's often a clue there if you look more close. What's that little old thing on top of it?”
She screwed up her eyes and peered.
“That's a skull!”
“So what d'you think that might mean?”
“Death…Is that death?”
“That's right. So in the hourglass range of meanings you get death. In fact, after time, which is the first one, death is the second one.”
“D'you know what I noticed, Farder Coram? The needle stops there on the second go-round! On the first round it kind of twitches, and on the second it stops. Is that saying it's the second meaning, then?”
“Probably. What are you asking it, Lyra?”
“I'm a thinking—” she stopped, surprised to find that she'd actually been asking a question without realizing it. “I just put three pictures together because…! was thinking about Mr. de Ruyter, see….And I put together the serpent and the crucible and the beehive, to ask how he's a getting on with his spying, and—”
“Why them three symbols?”
“Because I thought the serpent was cunning, like a spy ought to be, and the crucible could mean like knowledge, what you kind of distill, and the beehive was hard work, like bees are always working hard; so out of the hard work and the cunning comes the knowledge, see, and that's the spy's job; and I pointed to them and I thought the question in my mind, and the needle stopped at death….D'you think that could be really working, Farder Coram?”
“It's working all right, Lyra. What we don't know is whether we're reading it right. That's a subtle art. I wonder if—”
Before he could finish his sentence, there was an urgent knock at the door, and a young gyptian man came in.
“Beg pardon, Farder Coram, there's Jacob Huismans just come back, and he's sore wounded.”
“He was with Benjamin de Ruyter,” said Farder Coram. “What's happened?”
“He won't speak,” said the young man. “You better come, Farder Coram, 'cause he won't last long, he's a bleeding inside.”
Farder Coram and Lyra exchanged a look of alarm and wonderment, but only for a second, and then Farder Coram was hobbling out on his sticks as fast as he could manage, with his daemon padding ahead of him. Lyra came too, hopping with impatience.
The young man led them to a boat tied up at the sugar-beet jetty, where a woman in a red flannel apron held open the door for them. Seeing her suspicious glance at Lyra, Farder Coram said, “It's important the girl hears what Jacob's got to say, mistress.”
So the woman let them in and stood back, with her squirrel daemon perched silent on the wooden clock. On a bunk under a patchwork coverlet lay a man whose white face was damp with sweat and whose eyes were glazed.
“I've sent for the physician, Farder Coram,” said the woman shakily. “Please don't agitate him. He's in an agony of pain. He come in off Peter Hawker's boat just a few minutes ago.”
“Where's Peter now?”
“He's a tying up. It was him said I had to send for you.”
“Quite right. Now, Jacob, can ye hear me?”
Jacob's eyes rolled to look at Farder Coram sitting on the opposite bunk, a foot or two away.
“Hello, Farder Coram,” he murmured.
Lyra looked at his daemon. She was a ferret, and she lay very still beside his head, curled up but not asleep, for her eyes were open and glazed like his.
“What happened?” said Farder Coram.
“Benjamin's dead,” came the answer. “He's dead, and Gerard's captured.”
His voice was hoarse and his breath was shallow. When he stopped speaking, his daemon uncurled painfully and licked his cheek, and taking strength from that he went on:
“We was breaking into the Ministry of Theology, because Benjamin had heard from one of the Gobblers we caught that the headquarters was there, that's where all the orders was coming from….”
He stopped again.
“You captured some Gobblers?” said Farder Coram.
Jacob nodded, and cast his eyes at his daemon. It was unusual for daemons to speak to humans other than their own, but it happened sometimes, and she spoke now.
“We caught three Gobblers in Clerkenwell and made them tell us who they were working for and where the orders came from and so on. They didn't know where the kids were being taken, except it was north to Lapland….”
She had to stop and pant briefly, her little chest fluttering, before she could go on.
“And so them Gobblers told us about the Ministry of Theology and Lord Boreal. Benjamin said him and Gerard Hook should break into the Ministry and Frans Broekman and Tom Mendham should go and find out about Lord Boreal.”
“Did they do that?”
“We don't know. They never came back. Farder Coram, it were like everything we did, they knew about before we did it, and for all we know Frans and Tom were swallowed alive as soon as they got near Lord Boreal.”
“Come back to Benjamin,” said Farder Coram, hearing Jacob's breathing getting harsher and seeing his eyes close in pain.