“Woman?” said Serafina. There was no response. “Can you hear me? Can you see me?”
She shook her shoulder. With an immense effort the woman looked up. She scarcely seemed to notice. Her eyes were vacant, and when Serafina pinched the skin of her forearm, she merely looked down slowly and then away again.
The other witches were moving through the scattered wagons, looking at the victims in dismay. The children, meanwhile, were gathering on a little knoll some way off, staring at the witches and whispering together fearfully.
“The horseman’s watching,” said a witch.
She pointed up to where the road led through a gap in the hills. The rider who’d fled had reined in his horse and turned around to look back, shading his eyes to see what was going on.
“We’ll speak to him,” said Serafina, and sprang into the air.
However the man had behaved when faced with the Specters, he was no coward. As he saw the witches approach, he unslung the rifle from his back and kicked the horse forward onto the grass, where he could wheel and fire and face them in the open; but Serafina Pekkala alighted slowly and held her bow out before laying it on the ground in front of her.
Whether or not they had that gesture here, its meaning was unmistakable. The man lowered the rifle from his shoulder and waited, looking from Serafina to the other witches, and up to their dæmons too, who circled in the skies above. Women, young and ferocious, dressed in scraps of black silk and riding pine branches through the sky—there was nothing like that in his world, but he faced them with calm wariness. Serafina, coming closer, saw sorrow in his face as well, and strength. It was hard to reconcile with the memory of his turning tail and running while his companions perished.
“Who are you?” he said.
“My name is Serafina Pekkala. I am the queen of the witches of Lake Enara, which is in another world. What is your name?”
“Joachim Lorenz. Witches, you say? Do you treat with the devil, then?”
“If we did, would that make us your enemy?”
He thought for a few moments, and settled his rifle across his thighs. “It might have done, once,” he said, “but times have changed. Why have you come to this world?”
“Because the times have changed. What are those creatures who attacked your party?”
“Well, the Specters . . . ” he said, shrugging, half-astonished. “Don’t you know the Specters?”
“We’ve never seen them in our world. We saw you making your escape, and we didn’t know what to think. Now I understand.”
“There’s no defense against them,” said Joachim Lorenz. “Only the children are untouched. Every party of travelers has to include a man and a woman on horseback, by law, and they have to do what we did, or else the children will have no one to look after them. But times are bad now; the cities are thronged with Specters, and there used to be no more than a dozen or so in each place.”
Ruta Skadi was looking around. She noticed the other rider moving back toward the wagons, and saw that it was, indeed, a woman. The children were running to meet her.
“But tell me what you’re looking for,” Joachim Lorenz went on. “You didn’t answer me before. You wouldn’t have come here for nothing. Answer me now.”
“We’re looking for a child,” said Serafina, “a young girl from our world. Her name is Lyra Belacqua, called Lyra Silvertongue. But where she might be, in a whole world, we can’t guess. You haven’t seen a strange child, on her own?”
“No. But we saw angels the other night, making for the Pole.”
“Angels?”
“Troops of them in the air, armed and shining. They haven’t been so common in the last years, though in my grandfather’s time they passed through this world often, or so he used to say.”
He shaded his eyes and gazed down toward the scattered wagons, the halted travelers. The other rider had dismounted now and was comforting some of the children.
Serafina followed his gaze and said, “If we camp with you tonight and keep guard against the Specters, will you tell us more about this world, and these angels you saw?”
“Certainly I will. Come with me.”
The witches helped to move the wagons farther along the road, over the bridge and away from the trees where the Specters had come from. The stricken adults had to stay where they were, though it was painful to see the little children clinging to a mother who no longer responded to them, or tugging the sleeve of a father who said nothing and gazed into nothing and had nothing in his eyes. The younger children couldn’t understand why they had to leave their parents. The older ones, some of whom had already lost parents of their own and who had seen it before, simply looked bleak and stayed dumb. Serafina picked up the little boy who’d fallen in the river, and who was crying out for his daddy, reaching back over Serafina’s shoulder to the silent figure still standing in the water, indifferent. Serafina felt his tears on her bare skin.
The horsewoman, who wore rough canvas breeches and rode like a man, said nothing to the witches. Her face was grim. She moved the children on, speaking sternly, ignoring their tears. The evening sun suffused the air with a golden light in which every detail was clear and nothing was dazzling, and the faces of the children and the man and woman too seemed immortal and strong and beautiful.
Later, as the embers of a fire glowed in a circle of ashy rocks and the great hills lay calm under the moon, Joachim Lorenz told Serafina and Ruta Skadi about the history of his world.
It had once been a happy one, he explained. The cities were spacious and elegant, the fields well tilled and fertile. Merchant ships plied to and fro on the blue oceans, and fishermen hauled in brimming nets of cod and tunny, bass and mullet; the forests ran with game, and no children went hungry. In the courts and squares of the great cities ambassadors from Brasil and Benin, from Eireland and Corea mingled with tabaco sellers, with commedia players from Bergamo, with dealers in fortune bonds. At night masked lovers met under the rose-hung colonnades or in the lamplit gardens, and the air stirred with the scent of jasmine and throbbed to the music of the wire-strung mandarone.
The witches listened wide-eyed to this tale of a world so like theirs and yet so different.
“But it went wrong,” he said. “Three hundred years ago, it all went wrong. Some people reckon the philosophers’ Guild of the Torre degli Angeli, the Tower of the Angels, in the city we have just left, they’re the ones to blame. Others say it was a judgment on us for some great sin, though I never heard any agreement about what that sin was. But suddenly out of nowhere there came the Specters, and we’ve been haunted ever since. You’ve seen what they do. Now imagine what it is to live in a world with Specters in it. How can we prosper, when we can’t rely on anything continuing as it is? At any moment a father might be taken, or a mother, and the family fall apart; a merchant might be taken, and his enterprise fail, and all his clerks and factors lose their employment; and how can lovers trust their vows? All the trust and all the virtue fell out of our world when the Specters came.”
“Who are these philosophers?” said Serafina. “And where is this tower you speak of?”
“In the city we left—Cittàgazze. The city of magpies. You know why it’s called that? Because magpies steal, and that’s all we can do now. We create nothing, we have built nothing for hundreds of years, all we can do is steal from other worlds. Oh, yes, we know about other worlds. Those philosophers in the Torre degli Angeli discovered all we need to know about that subject. They have a spell which, if you say it, lets you walk through a door that isn’t there, and find yourself in another world. Some say it’s not a spell but a key that can open even where there isn’t a lock. Who knows? Whatever it is, it let the Specters in. And the philosophers use it still, I understand. They pass into other worlds and steal from them and bring back what they find. Gold and jewels, of course, but other things too, like ideas, or sacks of corn, or pencils. They are the source of all our wealth,” he said bitterly, “that Guild of thieves.”
“Why don’t the Specters harm children?” asked Ruta Skadi.
“That is the greatest mystery of all. In the innocence of children there’s some power that repels the Specters of Indifference. But it’s more than that. Children simply don’t see them, though we can’t understand why. We never have. But Specter-orphans are common, as you can imagine—children whose parents have been taken; they gather in bands and roam the country, and sometimes they hire themselves out to adults to look for food and supplies in a Specter-ridden area, and sometimes they simply drift about and scavenge.