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 forward anymore, they were turning back in confusion, terrified by the monstrous shape hurtling toward them from the dark beyond the avenue of lights.
“lorek 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, daemons, 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 daemon 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 lorek's mighty bulk hurtled toward them. A moment later they were dead.
lorek 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 daemon—the man died as if someone whipped his heart out, just like that!”
“I never knew daemons 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 daemon. But on the way here, we found this boy on his own without any daemon. 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 daemon away,” said Lyra, knowing how it would affect them. “And a little bit after we found him, he died. And all the daemons 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 daemons 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—