Sunlight struck in, and the heavy hinges creaked. He took a step or two inside, and seeing no one, went in farther. Lyra followed close behind. The floor was made of flagstones worn smooth over centuries, and the air inside was cool. Will looked at a flight of steps going downward, and went far enough down to see that it opened into a wide, low-ceilinged room with an immense coal furnace at one end, where the plaster walls were black with soot; but there was no one there, and he went up to the entrance hall again, where he found Lyra with her finger to her lips, looking up.
"No," said Will, because he could see a police car farther down the road. "You cant come into Cigazze because of the Specters, so it doesnt matter if you know where the window is. Take us farther up toward the ring road."
He moved as if to turn, and Will withdrew. He put a finger to his lips and beckoned to Lyra, and led her to the stairs and up to the next floor.
"What did he look like?"
"Hes downstairs," said Will. "We came up past him. He didnt see us. He was waving it about in the air."
"Seeing its your fault, you got to do as I say."
"Moving to and fro, waving his hand about. Or as if he was fighting something invisible... I just saw him through an open door. Not clearly."
Lyra lifted Pantalaimon close to her breast, and he became a black rat, whipping his tail around and around her wrist and glaring at Sir Charles with red eyes.
"If the Pharaohs of Egypt were content to be represented by a scarab, so am I," he said. "Well, youre from yet another world. How interesting. Is that where the alethiometer comes from, or did you steal it on your travels?"
But Will wasnt harmless either.
Will said, "Who is this man whos got the knife?"
He pulled his leg back inside the parapet and scrambled to his feet. The man had reached his knife again, but he didnt have time to pull it out of the lead before Lyra leaped onto his back, scratching, kicking, biting like a wildcat. But she missed the hold on his hair that she was trying for, and he threw her off. And when he got up, he had the knife in his hand.
Will twisted his fingers into the young mans thick, damp hair and wrenched back as hard as he could. The man grunted and flung himself sideways, but Will hung on even tighter, and his opponent roared with pain and anger. He pushed up and then threw himself backward, crushing Will between himself and the parapet, and that was too much; all the breath left Wills body, and in the shock his hands loosened. The man pulled free.
"As you wish," said Sir Charles, and the car moved on. "When, or if, you get the knife, call my number and Allan will come to pick you up."
"You dont need to know that now. It doesnt matter. Lyra," Sir Charles said, turning to her, "tell me about your remarkable friend."
"Whats he doing?" she whispered.
He was ... dancing."
"Well see," said Sir Charles. "This is where I dropped you before. Shall we let you out here?"
Will tiptoed to it and pushed it open another few inches so he could see.
"Certainly not. Its the one thing keeping the Specters away. Its not going to be easy by any means."
At the moment when the man was off balance, he threw himself at him, crashing as hard as he could into the mans midriff. The man fell backward into the glass, which shattered at once, and the flimsy wooden frame went too. He sprawled among the wreckage half over the stairwell, and grabbed the doorframe, but it had nothing to support it anymore, and it gave way. He fell downward, and more glass fell all around him.
"No, Im not," he said.
"I can hear him," she whispered. "Hes talking to himself, I reckon."
Will listened hard, and heard it too: a low crooning murmur interrupted occasionally by a harsh laugh or a short cry of anger. It sounded like the voice of a madman.
"Unfortunately for all of us, the alethiometer is in my possession, and the knife is in his."
in the empty air.
She didnt question, but let him lead them up another staircase to the top story. It was much lighter up there, because a white-painted flight of steps led up to the roof—or, rather, to a woodand- glass structure like a little greenhouse. Even at the foot of the steps they could feel the heat it was absorbing.
His head swam. Blood was pulsing strongly from the stumps where his fingers had been, and his jeans and shoes were sodden already. He had to lie back and close his eyes for a moment. The pain wasnt that great, and a part of his mind registered that with a dull surprise. It was like a persistent, deep hammer thud more than the bright, sharp clarity when you cut yourself superficially.
Will said, "If weve got to get the knife from that man, we need to know more about him. Hes not going to just give it to us, is he?"
And the car pulled away. Will was speechless.
He described it as well as he could.
"Dancing?"
"You ent from this world at all!" said Lyra suddenly. "Youre from there, ent you?"
He climbed up into the sun. The light in the glass structure was blinding. It was as hot as a greenhouse, too, and Will could neither see nor breathe easily. He found a door handle and turned it and stepped out quickly, holding his hand up to keep the sun out of his eyes.
antagonist had to squint and blink. Even better, the glass structure threw brilliant reflections into his eyes, and Will could see that for a moment he was almost blinded.
"Why do they attack only grownups?"
"Its hard," she explained, "when your daemon goes away from you. It hurts."
Will blew out his cheeks and set off to climb the staircase. It was made of blackened oak, immense and broad, with steps as worn as the flagstones: far too solid to creak underfoot. The light diminished as they climbed, because the only illumination was the small deep-set window on each landing. They climbed up one floor, stopped and listened, climbed the next, and the sound of the mans voice was now mixed with that of halting, rhythmic footsteps. It came from a room across the landing, whose door stood ajar.
"Mmm," he said, looking up. "Maybe."
"I know many things that you dont. What else would you expect? I am a good deal older and considerably better informed. There are a number of doorways between this world and that; those who know where they are can easily pass back and forth. In Cittagazze theres a Guild of learned men, so called, who used to do so all the time."
"Young, with curly hair. Not old at all. But I saw him for only a moment, at the very top, over those battlements. I thought he might be... You remember Angelica and Paolo, and Paolo said they had an older brother, and hed come into the city as well, and she made Paolo stop telling us, as if it was a secret? Well, I thought it might be him. He might be after this knife as well. And I reckon all the kids know about it. I think thats the real reason why they come back in the first place."
He leaped to the mans left, away from the knife, holding his left hand high, and kicked hard at the mans knee. Hed taken care to aim, and his foot connected well. The man went down with a loud grunt and twisted away awkwardly.
This time the man fell more heavily, and his right hand with the knife in it came down on the lead at Wills feet. Will stamped on it at once, hard, crushing the mans fingers between the hilt and the lead, and then wrapped the rope more tightly around his hand and stamped a second time.
Hed never felt so weak. He supposed he had gone to sleep for a moment. Lyra was doing something to his arm. He sat up to look at the damage, and felt sick. The old man was somewhere close by, but Will couldnt see what he was doing, and meanwhile Lyra was talking to him.
He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.
Trying to cut through. He wont succeed. When he—" "Watch out," Lyra said.
"Hush," she whispered back, "there ent any choice, Pan. Its our fault. We got to make it right, and
Immediately Pantalaimon became a bear and reared up on his hind legs. Only Lyra knew that he wouldnt be able to touch the other man, and certainly the other blinked and stared for a second, but Will saw that he hadnt really registered it. The man was crazy. His curly red hair was matted, his chin was flecked with spit, and the whites of his eyes showed all around the pupils.
"I ought to go first," she whispered back, "seeing its my fault."
That young man stole it from me. There are always fools who take risks like that for the sake of the knife. But this one is desperate. He is going to kill me."
Lyra was scrambling toward the man from behind, with the loose rope in her hand. Will darted forward suddenly, just as hed done to the man in his house, and with the same effect: his antagonist tumbled backward unexpectedly, falling over Lyra to crash onto the lead. It was all happening too quickly for Will to be frightened. But he did have time to see the knife fly from the mans hand and sink at once into the lead some feet away, point first, with no more resistance than if it had fallen into butter. It plunged as far as the hilt and stopped suddenly.
Hed seized the rope when Lyra dropped it, and now he wrapped it around his left hand for protection against the knife. He moved sideways between the young man and the sun, so that his
"Very much so."
They said no more till the chauffeur drew the car to a halt.
"You werent supposed to see him," she said. "Hes my daemon. You think you ent got daemons in this world, but you have. Yoursd be a dung beetle."
"The Specters are afraid of the knife?"
"Sorry. Did you see anything?" he said. "Stairs," said Pantalaimon. "Stairs and dark rooms. There were swords hung on the wall, and spears and shields, like a museum. And I saw the young man.
Lying on the lead, in the full sun, was an old man with white hair. His face was bruised and battered, and one eye was closed, and as they saw when they got closer, his hands were tied behind him.
His little finger and the finger next to it fell away with the rope.
Will leaped after him, kicking again and again, kicking whatever parts he could reach, driving the man back and back toward the glass house. If he could get him to the top of the stairs...
And the young man twisted over and reached for it at once, but Will flung himself on his back and seized his hair. He had learned to fight at school; there had been plenty of occasion for it, once the other children had sensed that there was something the matter with his mother. And hed learned that the object of a school fight was not to gain points for style but to force your enemy to give in, which meant hurting him more than he was hurting you. He knew that you had to be willing to hurt someone else, too, and hed found out that not many people were, when it came to it; but he knew that he was.
As they got out, Sir Charles lowered his window and said to Will, "By the way, if you cant get the knife, dont bother to return. Come to my house without it and Ill call the police. I imagine theyll be there at once when I tell them your real name. It is William Parry, isnt it? Yes, I thought so.
Ten minutes later they stood in the little square at the foot of the Tower of the Angels. Will had told her about the snake daemon, and she had stopped still in the street, tormented again by that half-memory. Who was the old man? Where had she seen him? It was no good; the memory wouldnt come clear.
Theres a very good photo of you in todays paper."
around to face them.
They were in the Rolls-Royce, driving up through Oxford. Sir Charles sat in the front, half-turned around, and Will and Lyra sat in the back, with Pantalaimon a mouse now, soothed in Lyras hands.
"Yes. Red hair, like Angelicas. He certainly looks mad. I dont know—I think this is odder than Sir Charles said. Lets look farther up before we speak to him."
And he had the knife, and they had no weapons at all. Will stepped up the lead, away from the old man, crouching, ready to jump or fight or leap out of the way.
"Ah," said Will, sitting down. "Ah."
He heard them coining and groaned again, and tried to turn over to shield himself.
And as they stood there they heard a groan from above.
He became a sparrow at once and set off. He could only just reach it. Lyra gasped and gave a little cry when he was at the windowsill, and he perched there for a second or two before diving down again. She sighed and took deep breaths like someone rescued from drowning. Will frowned, puzzled.
The man yelled and let go of the knife. At once Will kicked it away, his shoe connecting with the hilt, luckily for him, and it spun across the lead and came to rest in the gutter just beside a drainage hole. The rope had come loose around his hand once more, and there seemed to be a surprising amount of blood from somewhere sprinkled on the lead and on his own shoes. The man was pulling himself up— "Look out!" shouted Lyra, but Will was ready.
He meant Pantalaimon. And as soon as he said it, Will realized that the snake hed seen concealed in the mans sleeve was a daemon too, and that Sir Charles must come from Lyras world. He was asking about Pantalaimon to put them off the track: so he didnt realize that Will had seen his own daemon.
And again came that strange nudge at her memory. She was almost certain shed seen him before.
In the center of the room, a young man was—dancing. Pantalaimon was right: it looked exactly like that. He had his back to the door, and hed shuffle to one side, then to the other, and all the time his right hand moved in front of him as if he were clearing a way through some invisible obstacles. In that hand was a knife, not a special-looking knife, just a dull blade about eight inches long, and hed thrust it forward, slice it sideways, feel forward with it, jab up and down, all
Something was badly wrong, and he hadnt noticed it. He dropped the knife and hugged his left hand to himself. The tangle of rope was sodden with blood, and when he pulled it away— "Your fingers!" Lyra breathed. "Oh, Will—"
And Will darted back to the gutter, and picked up the knife, and the fight was over. The young man, cut and battered, clambered up the step, and saw Will standing above him holding the knife; he stared with a sickly anger and then turned and fled.
It was a large room with cobwebs thickly clustered on the ceiling. The walls were lined with bookshelves containing badly preserved volumes with the bindings crumbling and flaking, or distorted with damp. Several of them lay thrown off the shelves, open on the floor or the wide dusty tables, and others had been thrust back higgledy-piggledy.
this is the only way." Will walked off to the right, following the wall of the tower. At the corner a narrow cobbled alley led between it and the next building, and Will went down there too, looking up, getting the measure of the place. Lyra followed. Will stopped under a window at the secondstory level and said to Panta-laimon, "Can you fly up there? Can you look in?"
"Hey," she said, "stop that. Get up now. Mr. Paradisis got some medicine, some salve, I dunno what it is. You got to come downstairs. That other mans gone—we seen him run out the door. Hes gone now. You beat him. Come on, Will— come on—"
"Well have to go in the front, then," said Will. He climbed the steps and pushed the door wide.
"How do you know about that other world anyway?"
"Mmm," the oldman grunted. "Lets undo the rope. He hasnt tied it very well...." It was clumsily and hastily knotted, and it fell away quickly once Will had seen how to work it. They helped the old man to get up and took him over to the shade of the parapet "Who are you?" Will said. "We didnt think there were two people here. We thought there was only one."
"No, he ent," Lyra said. "Whats the bearer? Whats that mean?"
"Better go and see," Will whispered. "Ill go first."
"I didnt want to tell him" Lyra said quietly, "but I saw a man up there last night. He looked down when the kids were making all that noise...."
"Someone who has no more right to the knife than I have to the alethiometer," said Sir Charles.
Will dropped to his knees in the gutter, winded badly, but he couldnt stay there. He tried to stand —and in doing so, he thrust his foot through one of the drainage holes. His fingers scraped desperately on the warm lead, and for a horrible second he thought he would slide off the roof to the ground. But nothing happened. His left leg was thrust out into empty space; the rest of him was safe.
Will faced the man directly and saw him clearly for the first time. There was no doubt: he was Angelicas brother, all right, and he was vicious. All his mind was focused on Will, and the knife was in his hand.
"Fighting a Specter?" Lyra guessed. But they couldnt guess any better, so they moved on. Behind the tower a high stone wall, topped with broken glass, enclosed a small garden with formal beds of herbs around a fountain (once again Pantalaimon flew up to look); and then there was an alley on the other side, bringing them back to the square. The windows around the tower were small and deeply set, like frowning eyes.
She twisted her lip but fell in behind him.
She remembered the children talking earlier that morning. No children would go in the tower, theyd said; there were scary things in there. And she remembered her own feeling of unease as she and Pantalaimon had looked through the open door before leaving the city. Maybe that was why they needed a grown man to go in there. Her daemon was fluttering around her head now, moth-formed in the bright sunlight, whispering anxiously.
"Its all right," said Will quietly. "We arent going to hurt you. Did the man with the knife do this?"
He found himself on a roof of lead, enclosed by the battle-mented parapet. The glass structure was set in the center, and the lead sloped slightly downward all around toward a gutter inside the parapet, with square drainage holes in the stone for rainwater.
The young man sprang forward and slashed at him with the knife—left, right, left, coming closer and closer, making Will back away till he was trapped in the angle where two sides of the tower met.
"I hold the subtle knife on behalf of the Guild. Where has he gone?"
"I was given it," said Lyra furiously. "The Master of Jordan College in my Oxford gave it to me. Its mine by right. And you wouldnt know what to do with it, you stupid, stinky old man; youd never read it in a hundred years. Its just a toy to you. But I need it, and so does Will. Well get it back, dont worry."
"He sounds mad," said Lyra. "Is he thin, with curly hair?"
Lyra had fallen to one side, with Pantalaimon a wildcat now, fur raised, teeth bared, beside her.
Will turned. The young man was climbing up into the little wooden shelter. He hadnt seen them yet, but there was nowhere to hide, and as they stood up he saw the movement and whipped
They jumped. Theyd been sure there was only one man in the tower. Pantalaimon was so startled that he changed at once from a cat to a bird and flew to Lyras breast. Will and Lyra realized as he did so that theyd seized each others hand, and let go slowly.
"Giacomo Paradisi," the old man muttered through broken teeth. "I am the bearer. No one else.
"If only we had some bloodmoss," she was saying, "what the bears use, I could make it better, Will, I could. Look, Im going to tie this bit of rope around your arm, to stop the bleeding, cause I cant tie it around where your fingers were, theres nothing to tie it to. Hold still."
So this wasnt unfamiliar to him, but he hadnt fought against a nearly grown man armed with a knife before, and at all costs he must keep the man from picking it up now that hed dropped it.
Lyra was shaking his arm. "Its all right," she said, "he wont tell anyone else. He would have done it already if he was going to. Come on."
