Altogether it was a bad time to work, which was why the bar of the Samirsky Hotel was full.
"As soon as this damn fog clears well see right into it," the seal hunter told them confidently.
"What happened to him?" said Lee Scoresby.
"Right, you damn fool," he said. "What did you try that for? Cant you see were all in the same trouble now this things happened to the sky?"
"The fact that others are looking for him. It confirms what we thought. And that others know of Dust. You are an enemy of the Church, Lee Scoresby. By their fruits shall ye know them. By their questions shall ye see the serpent gnawing at their heart...."
"Well, how about that," said Lee Scoresby. "Let me buy you a drink, my friend. Im looking for news of this man. What tribe was it he joined?"
"How?" said one of the Muscovites.
"What do they say about it?"
sky is thin there, behind the northern lights."
"Its too late," said the Skraeling.
Damn it, Lee, he wanted to die. These people are insane."
"What happened to him? Is he dead?"
They saw that the little band contained children as well, some riding in the carts, some walking beside them. And it was clear that the children couldnt see the Specters, and the Specters werent interested in them; they made instead for the adults. One old woman seated on a cart
"Behind you, Lee," Hester said, and he whipped around, diving, as an arrow hissed over his shoulder.
"But I agree, he was certainly a member of the Berlin Academy. He was a geologist—"
"She was an osprey," said the barman, listening in. "Youre talking about Stan Grumman? His daemon was an osprey. A fish eagle."
"Then die if you want to. Just tell me this—"
"I heard they beheaded him," said Lee Scoresby.
Lee, who carried his compass everywhere, had realized already that the earths magnetic field was as disturbed as everything else.
"Yes, I heard that," said the seal hunter. "He didnt have it himself, but he knew where it was.
"Oh, sure," said the driver. "Everybody know Dr. Grumman."
"You dont say," said Lee Scoresby, tipping more vodka into Sams glass. His daemon, Hester, crouched at his elbow on the bar, eyes half-closed as usual, ears flat along her back.
"Surely not," said his deputy. "He was a member of the Imperial German Academy. I met him in Berlin. I was sure he was German."
"How can he be neither dead nor alive?"
The driver didnt rely on a compass, or he would have found it impossible. He navigated by other signs—his Arctic fox daemon for one, who sat at the front of the sledge keenly scenting the way.
"Aint never seen a fog like this," grumbled Sam Cansino. "Reckon its set in for a month, maybe more. But youre out of luck if you want money from Stanislaus Grumman, Lee; the mans dead."
Hester clicked her tongue.
"He owes me some money," said Lee Scoresby.
"Oh, he had some complex theory. The point was, any evidence there might have been for very early civilizations was long since buried under the ice. He claimed to have some pho-tograms of
"Whats going to happen, Umaq?"
"What the hell for? We aint thieves, are we?"
"No!" said the Skraeling harshly. "I am glad to die! I shall have the martyrs palm! You will not deprive me of that!"
"His daemon, now," said Sam Cansino, "that was curious. She was an eagle, a black eagle with a white head and breast, of a kind Id never set eyes on, and I didnt know how she might be called."
"I know who could tell you more," said the seal hunter. "Up the mountain they have an observatory belonging to the Imperial Muscovite Academy. Theyd be able to tell you. I know he went up there more than once."
"Same thing as before. Make all same again. But only after big trouble, big war. Spirit war."
"What, the sky opening? That happened before?"
This explanation was so satisfying that it stopped their curiosity at once. The conversation turned to the topic on everyones lips: the catastrophic changes taking place around them, which no one could see.
The Skraeling said, "Where did you hear mention of this subject, Mr. Scoresby?"
There was a man who tried to make him tell, but Grumman killed him."
"Are they alive, do you think, Serafina Pekkala?" said Ruta Skadi as the witches circled high above a group of the things that stood motionless at the edge of a tract of forest.
It happened at a river crossing, where a dusty road went over a low stone bridge beside a stand of trees. The late afternoon sun slanted across the grassland, drawing an intense green out of the ground and a dusty gold out of the air, and in that rich oblique light the witches saw a band of travelers making for the bridge, some on foot, some in horse-drawn carts, two of them riding horses. Serafina caught her breath: these people had no daemons, and yet they seemed alive. She was about to fly down and look more closely when she heard a cry of alarm.
But when they returned to the station, Lee went at once to the docks and looked for a ship that could give him passage to the mouth of the Yenisei.
"Reckon my bullet must have hit an artery," he said. "Let go my sleeve and Ill make a tourniquet."
"No, no, youre wrong," said someone else. "He did look at the earth, but not as a geologist. I had a long talk with him once. I suppose youd call him a paleo-archaeologist."
unusual rock formations."
"Shoulda reckoned hed send a message," she said. Take his ring."
A few minutes after he arrived, Lee was talking to a group of astronomers eager to learn what news he could bring them, for there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog. He told them about everything hed seen, and once that topic had been thoroughly dealt with, he asked about Stanislaus Grumman The astronomers hadnt had a visitor in weeks, and they were keen to talk.
And with the vast changes they sensed in the world around them, it was natural for people to gather and talk. With every day that passed came more news: the river Yenisei was free of ice, and at this time of year, too; part of the ocean had drained away, exposing strange regular formations of stone on the seabed; a squid a hundred feet long had snatched three fishermen out of their boat and torn them apart....
"He made a name for himself a year or two before that, with his paper on the variations in the magnetic pole," said the Yoruba. "But he came out of nowhere. I mean, no one had known him as a student or seen any of his previous work...." They talked on for a while, contributing reminiscences and offering suggestions as to what might have become of Grumman, though most of them thought he was probably dead. While the Pole went to brew some more coffee, Lees hare daemon, Hester, said to him quietly: "Check out the Skraeling, Lee."
"Observatory up there. You walk now. Path too crooked for sledge. You want go back, I wait here."
And the fog continued to roll in from the north, dense and cold and occasionally drenched with the strangest imaginable light, in which great forms could be vaguely seen, and mysterious voices heard.
held two little children on her lap, and Ruta Skadi was angered by her cowardice: because she tried to hide behind them, and thrust them out toward the Specter that approached her, as if offering them up to save her own life.
Fascinated and stunned, Serafina Pekkala flew down even closer. There was a father with his child who had tried to ford the river to get away, but a Specter had caught up with them, and as the child clung to the fathers back, crying, the man slowed down and stood waist-deep in the water, arrested and helpless.
Sam Cansino, an old acquaintance and a Texan like Lee Scoresby, sat in the naphtha-laden, smoky bar of the Samirsky Hotel and tossed back a shot glass of bitingly cold vodka. He nudged the plate of pickled fish and black bread toward Lee, who took a mouthful and nodded for Sam to tell him more.
"No, youre both wrong," said the barman, "and I know, because I heard it from an limit who was
"Nonsense!" said the Director. "Utter nonsense! The man was pulling your leg. Civilizations thirty thousand years old? Ha! Where is the evidence?"
"No sense in thinking that," said Hester. "He didnt give us a choice, and we didnt shoot to kill.
"Oh, he got mixed up in the Skraeling wars over to Bering-land. Last I heard hed been shot," said the seal hunter. "Killed outright."
with him. Seems that they were camped out on Sakhalin somewhere and there was an avalanche.
But he never had the chance to complete his question, because with a bleak little shiver the owl daemon disappeared. The Skraelings soul was gone. Lee had once seen a painting in which a saint of the Church was shown being attacked by assassins. While they bludgeoned his dying body, the saints daemon was borne upward by cherubs and offered a spray of palm, the badge of a martyr.
"Is that so?" said Lee, thinking of the beauty of Serafina Pekkala.
They were sitting, five of them, around a table in the room that served as their common room, living and dining room, bar, recreation room, and more or less everything else. Two of them were Muscovites, one was a Pole, one a Yoruba, and one a Skraeling. Lee Scoresby sensed that the little community was glad to have a visitor, if only because he introduced a change of conversation. The Pole had been the last to speak, and then the Yoruba interrupted:
"Hed walked into a trap that fool Yakovlev laid," the fur trader went on, "and cut his leg open to the bone. Instead of using regular medicines, he insisted on using the stuff the bears use— bloodmoss—some kind of lichen, it aint a true moss. Anyway, he was lying on a sledge alternately roaring with pain and calling out instructions to his men—they were taking star sights, and they had to get the measurements right or hed lash them with his tongue, and boy, he had a tongue like barbed wire. A lean man, tough, powerful, curious about everything. You know he was a Tartar, by initiation?"
The driver wouldnt tell him any more, and soon they moved on, tracking slowly over undulations and hollows and past outcrops of dim rock, dark through the pallid fog, until the old man said:
"Alive or dead, theyre full of malice," Serafina replied. "I can feel that from here. And unless I knew what weapon could harm them, I wouldnt want to go closer than this."
The old driver said, as they stopped to brew coffee, "This happen before, this thing."
"He might have had a reason," said Lee. "If he had any sense, it will have been a good one." "He was headstrong," said Sam Cansino. "Maybe faithful to another woman," Lee guessed. "I heard something else about him; I heard he knew the whereabouts of some magic object, I dont know what it might be, that could protect anyone who held it. Did you ever hear that story?"
"Tell me, Umaq," Lee said as they set off back to the fish-packing station, "you ever hear of a man called Grumman?"
The children pulled free of the old woman and jumped down from the cart, and now, like the other children around them, ran to and fro in fright, or stood and clung together weeping as the Specters attacked the adults. The old woman in the cart was soon enveloped in a transparent shimmer that moved busily, working and feeding in some invisible way that made Ruta Skadi sick to watch. The same fate befell every adult in the party apart from the two who had fled on their horses.
"In spirit world. Maybe he in spirit world. Already I say too much. Say no more now."
"Yes. You better ask them. Maybe he not dead, maybe he is. Maybe neither dead nor alive."
"How long had you known Grumman, gentlemen?" Lee Scoresby asked.
He fired at once. The Skraeling fell, grunting, as the bullet thudded into his leg. A moment later the owl daemon swooped with a clumsy fainting movement to his side, and half lay on the snow, struggling to fold her wings.
"Did you say Grumman?" said the man sitting just along the bar, an elderly man in seal hunters rig, whose lemming daemon looked out solemnly from his pocket. "He was a Tartar all right. I was there when he joined that tribe. I saw him having his skull drilled. He had another name, too—a Tartar name; Ill think of it in a minute."
"Jopari? Thats no kind of name Ive ever heard of," said Lee. "Might be Nipponese, I suppose. Well, if I want my money, maybe I can chase up his heirs and assigns. Or maybe the Berlin Academy can square the debt. Ill go ask at the observatory, see if they have an address I can apply to."
"You ask me that, I have to say I dont know. So you never know the truth from me."
"They were measuring the starlight. And the aurora. He had a passion for the aurora. I think his main interest was in ruins, though. Ancient things."
The people scattered. Serafina was shocked to see the leading rider turn tail at once and gallop away, without staying to help his comrades, and the second rider did the same, escaping as fast as he could in another direction.
"He was a shaman," said the old seal hunter. "I think the tribe recognized him as a shaman before they adopted him. Some business, that drilling. It goes on for two nights and a day. They use a bow drill, like for lighting a fire."
"As you say, a celestial phenomenon," said the Skraeling. "It has no practical significance."
It came from the rider on the leading horse. He was pointing at the trees, and as the witches looked down, they saw a stream of those spectral forms pouring across the grass, seeming to flow with no effort toward the people, their prey.
"Under the ice," said the Pole. "Thats the point. According to Grumman, the earths magnetic field changed dramatically at various times in the past, and the earths axis actually moved, too, so that temperate areas became ice-bound."
"His field of study went back much further than youd expect, thats all. He was looking for remains of civilizations from twenty, thirty thousand years ago," the Pole replied.
"The Yenisei Pakhtars. At the foot of the Semyonov Range. Near a fork of the Yenisei and the—I forget what its called— a river that comes down from the hills. Theres a rock the size of a house at the landing stage."
"He shouldnt have done that," said the seal hunter. "A witch offers you her love, you should take it. If you dont, its your own fault if bad things happen to you. Its like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing you cant do is choose neither."
"No, I think youll find he was English. His command of that language was immaculate, anyway,"
Grumman was buried under a hundred tons of rock. This Inuit saw it happen."
"Im only reporting, Im not defending him," said the Pole.
"Not Tartar. You mean Jopari? Not Tartar."
"Grumman? Yes, Ill tell you something about him," said the Director. "He was an Englishman, in spite of his name. I remember—"
The Skraelings face now bore the same expression as the saints in the picture: an ecstatic straining toward oblivion. Lee dropped him in distaste.
Lee Scoresby cocked his pistol and held it to the mans head.
Lee saw the sense, and took the ring off the dead mans finger. Peering into the gloom, he saw that the path was edged by a steep drop into rocky darkness, and he rolled the Skraelings body over. It fell for a long time before he heard any impact. Lee had never enjoyed violence, and he hated killing, although hed had to do it three times before.
The observatory was some distance to the north, and Lee Scoresby hired a dog sledge and driver.
"What do you mean, a paleo-archaeologist? Archaeologists already study whats old; why do you need to put another word meaning old in front of it?"
"Sky fall open, and spirits move between this world and that world. All the lands move. The ice melt, then freeze again. The spirits close up the hole after a while. Seal it up. But witches say the
"I guess youre right," he said, and put the pistol away.
"Ah, that accounts for the way his team was obeying him," said Sam Cansino. "They were the roughest bunch of scoundrels I ever saw, but they ran around doing his bidding likenervous children. I thought it was his cursing that did it. If they thought he was a shaman, itd make even more sense. But you know, that mans curiosity was as powerful as a wolfs jaws; he would not let go. He made me tell him every scrap I knew about the land thereabouts, and the habits of wolverines and foxes. And he was in some pain from that damn trap of Yakovlevs; leg laid open, and he was writing the results of that bloodmoss, taking his temperature, watching the scar form, making notes on every damn thing.... A strange man. There was a witch who wanted him for a lover, but he turned her down."
And he did not.
So, realizing this, and remembering something hed heard Lyra say, Lee asked: Tell me, gentlemen —do you happen to know if Grumman ever looked into the question of Dust?"
"Well, let me see," said the Director. "It was seven years ago I met him for the first time."
The owl was making soft hooting sounds and raising and dropping her wings fitfully. Her bright orange eyes were filming over with pain. There was a gathering red stain in the snow around the Skraeling; even in the fog-thick dimness, Lee could see that the man was going to die.
"When it first happened, I was out in my kayak and looking north, just by chance. Ill never forget what I saw. Instead of the earth curving down over the horizon, it went straight on. I could see forever, and as far as I could see, there was land and shoreline, mountains, harbors, green trees, and fields of corn, forever into the sky. I tell you, friends, that was something worth toiling fifty years to see, a sight like that. I would have paddled up the sky into that calm sea without a backward glance; but then came the fog...."
And instantly a silence fell in the stuffy little room, and everyones attention focused on the Skraeling, though no one looked at him directly. Lee knew that Hester would remain inscrutable, with her eyes half-closed and her ears flat along her back, and he put on a cheerful innocence as he looked from face to face.
"You better ask his tribe. Better go to Yenisei, ask them."
"Too late for what?"
"What about him?"
"Yeah, I want to go back when Ive finished, Umaq. You make yourself a fire, my friend, and sit and rest a spell. Ill be three, four hours maybe."
The Skraeling had spoken very little. Lee had thought he was naturally taciturn, but prompted by Hester, he casually glanced across during the next break in the conversation to see the mans daemon, a snowy owl, glaring at him with bright orange eyes. Well, that was what owls looked like, and they did stare; but Hester was right, and there was a hostility and suspicion in the daemon that the mans face showed nothing of.
"His tribe ... you mean the people who initiated him? Who drilled his skull?"
Hester could fight; her claws were sharp, too, and she was tough and brave. Lee knew that the Skraeling himself must be close by, and reached for the revolver at his belt.
said the Director.
Finally he settled on the Skraeling, and said, "I beg your pardon. Have I asked about something its forbidden to know?"
But Hester sensed her coming and flattened herself in time, and the owls claws just missed.
Lee had arrived that afternoon, borne to Nova Zembla by the wind the witches had called up, and once hed stowed his equipment hed made straight for the Samirsky Hotel, near the fish-packing station. This was a place where many Arctic drifters stopped to exchange news or look for employment or leave messages for one another, and Lee Scoresby had spent several days there in the past, waiting for a contract or a passenger or a fair wind, so there was nothing unusual in his conduct now.
"Theres a new world?" said Lee.
"Grumman?" said the black-bearded fur trader. "From the Berlin Academy? Reckless. I met him five years back over at the northern end of the Urals. I thought he was dead."
Meanwhile, the witches were searching too. The Latvian queen, Ruta Skadi, flew with Serafina Pekkalas company for many days and nights, through fog and whirlwind, over regions devastated by flood or landslide. It was certain that they were in a world none of them had known before, with strange winds, strange scents in the air, great unknown birds that attacked them on sight and had to be driven off with volleys of arrows; and when they found land to reston, the very plants were strange.
"Fly lower and watch, sisters," Serafina told her companions. "But dont interfere till I command."
"No, were renegades," she said. "Not by our choice, but by his malice. Once the Church learns about this, were done for anyway. Take every advantage we can in the meantime. Go on, take the ring and stow it away, and mebbe we can use it."
"From a passenger I flew across the sea a while back," Lee said easily. "They never said what it was, but from the way it was mentioned it seemed like the kind of thing Dr. Grumman might have inquired into. I took it to be some kind of celestial thing, like the aurora. But it puzzled me, because as an aeronaut I know the skies pretty well, and Id never come across this stuff. What is it, anyhow?"
Too late to stop. I have already sent a messenger bird. The Magisterium will know of your inquiries, and they will be glad to know about Grumman—"
"The fishermen," said the seal hunter, "they say you can sail right up into that new world."
The Specters seemed to be earthbound, without the power of flight, luckily for the witches. Later that day, they saw what the Specters could do.
"I see. So who can I ask?"
"What dyou want to know for, anyway, Lee?" said Sam Cansino.
Still, some of those plants were edible, and they found rabbits that made a tasty meal, and there was no shortage of water. It might have been a good land to live in, but for the spectral forms that drifted like mist over the grasslands and congregated near streams and low-lying water. In some lights they were hardly there at all, just visible as a drifting quality in the light, a rhythmic evanescence, like veils of transparency turning before a mirror. The witches had never seen anything like them before, and mistrusted them at once.
"Ah! I got his Tartar name!" said the seal hunter. "I just remembered what they called him during the drilling. It sounded like Jopari."
"Did you know he had a Tartar name?"
Presently Lee decided it was time to leave; he had learned no more, and he didnt want to keep Umaq waiting. He left the astronomers to their fogbound observatory and set off down the track, feeling his way along by following his daemon, whose eyes were closer to the ground.
And then Lee saw something else: the Skraeling was wearing a ring with the Churchs symbol engraved on it. Suddenly he realized the reason for the mans silence. Every philosophical research establishment, so hed heard, had to include on its staff a representative of the Magisterium, to act as a censor and suppress the news of any heretical discoveries.
"What I cant understand," said Lee Scoresby, offering the bottle around, "is what the man was doing. Was he prospecting for rock oil, maybe? Or was he a military man? Or was it something philosophical? You said something about measurements, Sam. What would that be?"
And when they were only ten minutes down the path, something swept past his head in the fog and dived at Hester. It was the Skraelings owl daemon.
"Ah, sure," said Lee. "I remember it now. Ive flown over it. And Grumman had his skull drilled, you say? Why was that?"
Lee Scoresby set off, with Hester tucked into the breast of his coat, and after half an hours stiff climb found a clump of buildings suddenly above him as if theyd just been placed there by a giant hand. But the effect was only due to a momentary lifting of the fog, and after a minute it closed in again. He saw the great dome of the main observatory, a smaller one a little way off, and between them a group of administration buildings and domestic quarters. No lights showed, because the windows were blacked out permanently so as not to spoil the darkness for their telescopes.
"Many thousand generation. My people remember. All long time ago, many thousand generation."
It wasnt easy to find someone willing to risk the journey in the fog, but Lee was persuasive, or his money was; and eventually an old Tartar from the Ob region agreed to take him there, after a lengthy bout of haggling.
"Ha! Is that all?" said the Director.
At the foot of the path they found the driver, with the dogs harnessed and ready to move.
