She awoke in a narrow bed, with that comforting engine rumble deep below. She sat up, banged her head, cursed, felt around, and got up more carefully. A thin gray light showed her three other bunks, each empty and neatly made, one below hers and the other two across the tiny cabin. She swung over the side to find herself in her underclothes, and saw the dress and the wolfskin coat folded at the end of her bunk together with her shopping bag. The alethiometer was still there.
“Sleep well?” she said, reaching for a frying pan. “Now sit down out the way and Ill make ye some breakfast. Dont stand about; there ent room.”
“All right, dont talk now. Just keep quiet. Jaxer, move them bodies into the shadow. Kerim, look around.”
Ma Costa left the cabin and went out to the cockpit. Tony waited till the door was shut, and cut in:
“Better come along with us,” he said. “You alone?”
He poured some coffee into a tin cup and sat down. He was a powerful, dark-faced man, and now that she could see him in daylight, Lyra saw a sad grimness in his expression.
“On the Grand Junction Canal. You keep out of sight, child. I dont want to see you topside. Theres trouble.”
Lyra considered these horrors with awe.
Ma Costa was setting a saucepan of milk on the iron stove and riddling the grate to stir the fire up.
“I dunno what youre a doing here, but you look wore out. You can have Billys crib, soons Ive got a hot drink in you. Set you down there, child.”
“And then last night at this cocktail party I found out what they were really doing. Mrs. Coulter was one of the Gobblers herself, and she was going to use me to help her catch more kids. And what they do is—”
He led her over a little wooden bridge into the heart of the canal basin. The other two men were padding silently after them. Tony turned along the waterfront and out onto a wooden jetty, from which he stepped on board a narrowboat and swung open the door to the cabin.
“The North Tartars snap open their ribs and pull out their lungs. Theres an art to it. They do it without killing em, but their lungs cant work anymore without their daemons pumping em by hand, so the result is theyre halfway between breath and no breath, life and death, half-killed, you see. And their daemons got to pump and pump all day and night, or else perish with em. You come across a whole platoon of Breathless Ones in the forest sometimes, Ive heard. And then theres the panserbj0rne—you heard of them? That means armored bears. Theyre great white bears, and—”
Lyra did so, patting her bag (which she had never let go of, even in the net) to make sure the alethiometer was still there. In the long narrow cabin, by the light of a lantern on a hook, she saw a stout powerful woman with gray hair, sitting at a table with a paper. Lyra recognized her as Billys mother.
Lyra said, “No. Not even with Mrs. Coulter. What are they?”
“Quiet, gal. Theres enough trouble awake without stirring more. Well talk on the boat.”
Before she could go out on deck, the outer door opened and Ma Costa came down, swathed in an old tweed coat on which the damp had settled like a thousand tiny pearls.
“They do. Theres plenty of other things to be told, and all. You ever heard of the Nalkainens?”
Lyra stood up shakily, holding the wildcat Pantalaimon to her breast. He was twisting to look at something, and she followed his gaze, understanding and suddenly curious too: what had happened to the dead mens daemons? They were fading, that was the answer; fading and drifting away like atoms of smoke, for all that they tried to cling to their men. Pantalaimon hid his eyes, and Lyra hurried blindly after Tony Costa.
“They never!” said Lyra.
“Well, he wont get out if the armored bears are guarding him. Theyre like mercenaries, you know what I mean by that? They sell their strength to whoever pays. They got hands like men, and they learned the trick of working iron way back, meteoric iron mostly, and they make great sheets and plates of it to cover theirselves with. They been raiding the Skraelings for centuries. Theyre vicious killers, absolutely pitiless. But they keep their word. If you make a bargain with a panserbj0m, you can rely on it.”
“Ask first, tell after.”
Lyra clumsily collected her story and shook it into order as if she were settling a pack of cards ready for dealing. She told them everything, except about the alethiometer.
“Ma dont like to hear about the North,” Tony said after a few moments, “because of what mightve happened to Billy. We know they took him up north, see.”
There was no one there. Through the windows she saw a gray swirl of fog on each side, with occasional dark shapes that might have been buildings or trees.
“Whos Roger?”
Presently Tony Costa swung down into the cabin. Like his mother, he was pearled with damp, and he shook his woollen hat over the stove to make the drops jump and spit.
She sliced a couple of rashers of bacon into the frying pan, and cracked an egg to go with them.
She dressed quickly and went through the door at the end to find herself in the cabin with the stove, where it was warm.
“Where we going?” Lyra asked.
“Yes! I have heard of them! One of the men last night, he said that my uncle, Lord Asriel, hes being imprisoned in a fortress guarded by the armored bears.”
They bake children and eat “em.”
“Where are we?” said Lyra.
“I was living with this lady, right...”
“And youre really going to rescue the kids? What about Roger?”
“Oh, God, Pan, were safe!” she sobbed, but then a thought rushed into her mind:
And she wouldnt say any more till Lyra had eaten. The boat slowed at one point, and something banged against the side, and she heard mens voices raised in anger; but then someones joke made them laugh, and the voices drew away and the boat moved on.
“Exploring. But the way the man was talking I dont think my uncles on the same side as the Gobblers. I think they were glad he was in prison.”
“Come here, child,” said Ma Costa.
Them kids is taken up north, far out the way, and they do experiments on em. At first we reckoned they tried out different diseases and medicines, but thered be no reason to start that all of a sudden two or three years back. Then we thought about the Tartars, maybe theres some secret deal theyre making up Siberia way; because the Tartars want to move north just as much as the rest, for the coal spirit and the fire mines, and theres been rumors of war for even longer than the Gobblers been going. And we reckoned the Gobblers were buying off the Tartar chiefs by giving em kids, cause the Tartars eat em, dont they?
“Away from here. No talking now. Well talk in the morning.”
“Who are they?”
And Uncle Asriel, she thought; but she didnt mention that.
“Warriors half-killed. Being alive is one thing, and being deads another, but being half-killed is worse than either. They just cant die, and living is altogether beyond em. They wander about forever. Theyre called the Breathless Ones because of whats been done to em.”
“Is he, now? And what was he doing up there?”
“What we going to tell her, Ma?”
“Right,” he said. “Now you tell us what you was doing in London, Lyra. We had you down as being took by the Gobblers.”
“Get in,” he said. “Quick now.”
“What are you doing here?” she said.
It looked as if her piracy was forgiven, or at least forgotten. Lyra slid onto the cushioned bench behind a well-scrubbed pine table top as the low rumble of the gas engine shook the boat.
“How dyou know that?”
“Thats right. Ma, we got to move. We killed two men out in the basin. We thought they was Gobblers, but I reckon they were Turk traders. Theyd caught Lyra. Never mind talk—well do that on the move.”
And she said no more, handing Lyra a cup of milk when it was ready, swinging herself up on deck when the boat began to move, exchanging occasional whispers with the men. Lyra sipped the milk and lifted a corner of the blind to watch the dark wharves move past. A minute or two later she was sound asleep.
“We know what they do. Least, we know part of it. We know they dont come back.
“The king of the gyptians.”
“Yeah. I was running away....”
“Thats a kind of ghost they have up there in those forests. Same size as a child, and they got no heads. They feel their way about at night and if youre a sleeping out in the forest they get ahold of you and wont nothing make em let go. Nalkainens, thats a northern word. And the Windsuckers, theyre dangerous too. They drift about in the air. You come across clumps of em floated together sometimes, or caught snagged on a bramble. As soon as they touch you, all the strength goes out of you. You cant see em except as a kind of shimmer in the air. And the Breathless Ones...”
“The Jordan College kitchen boy. He was took same as Billy the day before I come away with Mrs. Coulter. I bet if I was took, hed come and rescue me. If youre going to rescue Billy, I want to come too and rescue Roger.”
“We caught one of the Gobblers, and made him talk. Thats how we know a little about what theyre doing. Them two last night werent Gobblers; they were too clumsy. If theyd been Gobblers wedve took em alive. See, the gyptian people, we been hit worse than most by these Gobblers, and were a coming together to decide what to do about it. Thats what we was doing in the basin last night, taking on stores, cause were going to a big muster up in the fens, what we call a roping. And what I reckon is were a going to send out a rescue party, when we heard what all the other gyptians know, when we put our knowledge together. Thats what Id do, if I was John Faa.”
“Whos John Faa?”
“Whos this?” the woman said. “Thats never Lyra?”
“What sort of trouble?”
“And whats that?” said Lyra, wide-eyed.
it was the Costas boat shed hijacked that day. Suppose he remembered?
“Nothing we cant cope with, if you stay out the way.”
Lyra obeyed, half happy, half apprehensive, for Ma Costa had hands like bludgeons, and now she was sure: it was their boat she had captured with Roger and the other collegers. But the boat mother set her hands on either side of Lyras face, and her daemon, a hawk, bent gently to lick Pantalaimons wildcat head. Then Ma Costa folded her great arms around Lyra and pressed her to her breast.
