“And as soon as she can, shes going to where Lord Asriel is kept prisoner, and shes intending to have him killed. Because ...Its coming clear now: something I never understood before, lorek! Its why she wants to kill Lord Asriel: its because she knows what hes going to do, and she fears it, and she wants to do it herself and gain control before he does....It must be the city in the sky, it must be! Shes trying to get to it first! And now its telling me something else....”
Lyra told lorek, and he nodded, satisfied.
Lyra looked around. Under the direction of an older bear, the human prisoners were building a shelter out of driftwood and scraps of canvas. They seemed pleased to have some work to do. One of them was striking a flint to light a fire.
So she curled up in a quiet corner of the combat ground with Pantalaimon as a wolverine to keep her warm, and piled snow over herself as a bear would do, and went to sleep.
It was a horrifying blow. It tore the lower part of his jaw clean off, so that it flew through the air scattering blood drops in the snow many yards away.
She didnt argue. While lorek gave commands and organized an armed squad to accompany them on the final part of their journey north, Lyra sat still, conserving her energy. She felt that something had gone out of her during that last reading. She closed her eyes and slept, and presently they woke her and set off.
A bear laid a mouthful of some stiff green stuff, thickly frosted, on the ground at loreks feet.
lofurs red tongue lolled down, dripping over his open throat. The bear-king was suddenly voiceless, biteless, helpless, lorek needed nothing more. He lunged, and then his teeth were in lofurs throat, and he shook and shook this way, that way, lifting the huge body off the ground and battering it down as if lofur were no more than a seal at the waters edge.
A fresh seal lay on the snow. The bear sliced it open with a claw and showed Lyra where to find the kidneys. She ate one raw: it was warm and soft and delicious beyond imagining.
There was one ritual yet to perform. lorek sliced open the dead kings unprotected chest, peeling the fur back to expose the narrow white and red ribs like the timbers of an upturned boat. Into the rib cage lorek reached, and he plucked out lofurs heart, red and steaming, and ate it there in front of lofurs subjects.
“Yes—lofur Raknison put them in the dungeons—they ought to come out first and get shelter somewhere, else theyll be killed with all the falling rocks—”
“There are human laws that prevent certain things that she was planning to do, but human laws dont apply on Svalbard. She wanted to set up another station here like Bolvangar, only worse, and lofur was going to allow her to do it, against all the custom of the bears; because humans have visited, or been imprisoned, but never lived and worked here. Little by little she was going to increase her power over lofur Raknison, and his over us, until we were her creatures running back and forth at her bidding, and our only duty to guard the abomination she was going to create....”
“Eat the blubber too,” said the bear, and tore off a piece for her. It tasted of cream flavored with hazelnuts. Roger hesitated, but followed her example. They ate greedily, and within a very few minutes Lyra was fully awake and beginning to be warm.
It turned out that lofur Raknisons dominance over them had been like a spell.
“Just a few hours. I suppose I ought to take the alethiometer to Lord Asriel as soon as I can.”
And among them was a small figure who ran toward her, and whose daemon leaped up to greet Pantalaimon.
“What happened to Mr. Scoresby?” Lyra said while they were waiting. “And the witches?”
“How far away is she ?” said lorek.
“Human prisoners?” lorek said.
Wiping her mouth, she looked around, but lorek was not in sight.
And the cry came back, in a roar like that of all the sea-smooth pebbles in the world in an ocean-battering storm:
lorek gave swift orders, and some bears hurried into the palace to release the prisoners. Lyra turned to lorek.
Some of them put it down to the influence of Mrs. Coulter, who had visited him before loreks exile, though lorek had not known about it, and given lofur various presents.
“The witches were attacked by another witch clan. I dont know if the others were allied to the child cutters, but they were patrolling our skies in vast numbers, and they attacked in the storm. I didnt see what happened to Serafina Pekkala. As for Lee Scoresby, the balloon soared up again after I fell out with the boy, taking him with it. But your symbol reader will tell you what their fate is.”
He didnt explain her presence to the other bears, or perhaps they had learned about her already; but they made room for her and treated her with immense courtesy, as if she were a queen. She felt proud beyond measure to sit beside her friend lorek Byrnison under the Aurora as it flickered gracefully in the polar sky, and join the conversation of the bears.
“I suppose its the alethiometer,” she said unhappily. “Its what I thought all along. Ive got to take it to Lord Asriel before she gets it. If she gets it, well all die.”
She bent over the instrument, concentrating furiously as the needle darted this way and that. It moved almost too fast to follow; Roger, looking over her shoulder, couldnt even see it stop, and was conscious only of a swift nickering dialogue between Lyras fingers turning the hands and the needle answering, as bewilderingly unlike language as the Aurora was.
lorek Byrnisons voice rose above the clamor.
At last he found what he wanted: a firm rock deep-anchored in the permafrost. He backed against it, tensing his legs and choosing his moment.
He wouldnt let any bears attend to him, despite their eagerness. Besides, Lyras hands were deft, and she was desperate to help; so the small human bent over the great bear-king, packing in the bloodmoss and freezing the raw flesh till it stopped bleeding. When she had finished, her mittens were sodden with loreks blood, but his wounds were stanched.
“Lyra Silvertongue,” he said. “Come and hear what I am being told.”
lorek ignored them and unhooked his armor to attend to his wounds, but before he could begin, Lyra was beside him, stamping her foot on the frozen scarlet snow and shouting to the bears to stop smashing the palace, because there were prisoners inside. They didnt hear, but lorek did, and when he roared they stopped at once.
“She gave him a drug,” said one bear, “which he fed secretly to Hjalmur Hjalmurson, and made him forget himself.”
“What is she doing now, Lyra?” said lorek Byrnison. “Once she hears of lofurs death, what will her plans be?”
As she said that, she felt so tired, so bone-deep weary and sad, that to die would have been a relief. But the example of lorek kept her from admitting it.
It turned out that he was still aloft, borne by the winds toward Nova Zembla, and that he had been unharmed by the cliff-ghasts and had fought off the other witch clan.
It came when lofur reared high above, bellowing his triumph, and turning his head tauntingly toward loreks apparently weak left side.
She tried to stand, but fell over twice.
Then he ripped upward, and lofur Raknisons life came away in his teeth.
That was when lorekmoved. Like a wave that has been building its strength over a thousand miles of ocean, and which makes little stir in the deep water, but which when it reaches the shallows rears itself up high into the sky, terrifying the shore dwellers, before crashing down on the land with irresistible power—so lorek Byrnison rose up against lofur, exploding upward from his firm footing on the dry rock and slashing with a ferocious left hand at the exposed jaw of lofur Raknison.
Hjalmur Hjalmurson, Lyra gathered, was the bear whom lorek had killed, and whose death had brought about his exile. So Mrs. Coulter was behind that! And there was more.
Then there was acclamation, pandemonium, a crush of bears surging forward to pay homage to lofurs conqueror.
He led them over a rise in the snow to a spot where bears were beginning to build a wall of ice blocks. lorek sat at the center of a group of older bears, and he rose to greet her.
Lyra took out the alethiometer. There was not much light to see it by, and lorek commanded that a torch be brought.
“It says shes...Shes heard about us flying this way, and shes got a transport zeppelin thats armed with machine guns—I think thats it—and theyre a flying to Svalbard right now. She dont know yet about lofur Raknison being beaten, of course, but she will soon because...Oh yes, because some witches will tell her, and theyll learn it from the cliff-ghasts. So I reckon there are spies in the air all around, lorek. She was coming to...to pretend to help lofur Raknison, but really she was going to take over power from him, with a regiment of Tartars thats a coming by sea, and theyll be here in a couple of days.
“Bears! Who is your king?”
“lorek Byrnison!”
“Roger!” she said.
“lorek Byrnison made me stay out there in the snow while he came to fetch you away—we fell out the balloon, Lyra! After you fell out, we got carried miles and miles, and then Mr. Scoresby let some more gas out and we crashed into a mountain, and we fell down such a slope like you never seen! And I dont know where Mr. Scoresby is now, nor the witches. There was just me and lorek Byrnison. He come straight back this way to look for you. And they told me about his fight....”
The bears knew what they must do. Every single badge and sash and coronet was thrown off at once and trampled contemptuously underfoot, to be forgotten in a moment. They were loreks bears now, and true bears, not uncertain semi-humans conscious only of a torturing inferiority. They swarmed to the palace and began to hurl great blocks of marble from the topmost towers, rocking the battlemented walls with their mighty fists until the stones came loose, and then hurling them over the cliffs to crash on the jetty hundreds of feet below.
The play of symbols, once she had discovered the pattern of it, was dismaying.
She woke up nearly dead with cold, and couldnt open her eyes, for they had frozen shut; but Pantalaimon licked them to melt the ice on her eyelashes, and soon she was able to see the young bear speaking to her in the moonlight.
She stopped there, to take a deep breath. Something was troubling her, and she didnt know what it was. She was sure that this something that was so important was the alethiome-ter itself, because after all, Mrs. Coulter had wanted it, and what else could it be? And yet it wasnt, because the alethiometer had a different way of referring to itself, and this wasnt it.
Shes after me again.
The bear said, “Ride on me,” and crouched to offer his broad back, and half-clinging, half-falling, she managed to stay on while he took her to a steep hollow, where many bears were assembled.
She wants something Ive got, because Lord Asriel wants it too. They need it for this...for this experiment, whatever it is...”
The answer was complicated, with the needle swinging from symbol to symbol in a sequence that made Lyra puzzle for a long time. The bears were curious, but restrained by their respect for lorek Byrnison, and his for Lyra, and she put them out of her mind and sank again into the alethiometric trance.
A bear pulled up a sledge on which a cauldron of charcoal was smoldering, and thrust a resinous branch into the heart of it. The branch caught at once, and in its glare Lyra turned the hands of the alethiometer and asked about Lee Scoresby.
“Let me help you—I want to make sure you ent too badly hurt, lorek dear—oh, I wish there was some bandages or something! Thats an awful cut on your belly—”
Because lorek was moving backward only to find clean dry footing and a firm rock to leap up from, and the useless left arm was really fresh and strong. You could not trick a bear, but, as Lyra had shown him, lofur did not want to be a bear, he wanted to be a man; and lorek was tricking him.
She put the alethiometer away and sat up straight.
Something nudged her foot, and a strange bear voice said, “Lyra Silvertongue, the king wants you.”
“There is food,” said the young bear who had woken Lyra.
“Yes,” she said finally, putting the instrument down in her lap and blinking and sighing as she woke out of her profound concentration. “Yes, I see what it says.
Lyra was in tears. Her dear, her brave one, her fearless defender, was going to die, and she would not do him the treachery of looking away, for if he looked at her he must see her shining eyes and their love and belief, not a face hidden in cowardice or a shoulder fearfully turned away.
That was an old bear speaking. His name was S0ren Eisarson, and he was a counselor, one who had suffered under lofur Raknison.
“Bloodmoss,” said lorek. “Press it in the wounds for me, Lyra. Fold the flesh over it and then hold some snow there till it freezes.”
“I will go with you,” said lorek.
And by that time the prisoners—a dozen or so men, shivering and blinking and huddling together—had come out. There was no point in talking to the professor, Lyra decided, because the poor man was mad; and she would have liked to know who the other men were, but there were many other urgent things to do. And she didnt want to distract lorek, who was giving rapid orders and sending bears scurrying this way and that, but she was anxious about Roger, and about Lee Scoresby and the witches, and she was hungry and tired.... She thought the best thing she could do just then was to keep out of the way.
“lorek Byrnison is speaking with his counselors,” said the young bear. “He wants to see you when you have eaten. Follow me.”
So she looked, but her tears kept her from seeing what was really happening, and perhaps it would not have been visible to her anyway. It certainly was not seen by lofur.
lofur had noticed. He began to taunt lorek, calling him broken-hand, whimpering cub, rust-eaten, soon-to-die, and other names, all the while swinging blows at him from right and left which lorek couldno longer parry. lorek had to move backward, a step at a time, and to crouch low under the rain of blows from the jeering bear-king.
“If he is in the air, he will be safe,” he said. “What of Mrs. Coulter?”
