He had strange and powerful dreams. At one point he was convinced he had awoken to see the shaman sitting cross-legged, wreathed in flames, and the flames were rapidly consuming his flesh to leave only a white skeleton behind, still seated in a mound of glowing ash. Lee looked for Hester in alarm, and found her sleeping, which never happened, for when he was awake, so was she. So when he found her asleep, his laconic, whip-tongued daemon looking so gentle and vulnerable, he was moved by the strangeness of it, and he lay down uneasily beside her, awake in his dream, but really asleep, and he dreamed he lay awake for a long time.
The balloon was drifting lower, and the ground was rising. A square stone tower rose directly in their path, and Lee didnt seem to have noticed.
Grumman? Im only an ignorant aeronaut. Im so damn ignorant I believed it when I was told that shamans had the gift of flight, for example. Yet heres a shaman who hasnt."
"There cant be a doubt. Im uncertain whether to lose ballast and go higher, to catch the quicker wind, or stay low and be less conspicuous. And Im thankful that things not a zeppelin; they could overhaul us in a few hours. No, damn it, Dr. Grumman, Im going higher, because if I was in that balloon Id have seen this one already; and Ill bet they have keen eyesight."
"How dyou make that out?"
"On the contrary. Both the Oblation Board and the Specters of Indifference are bewitched by this truth about human beings: that innocence is different from experience. The Oblation Board fears and hates Dust, and the Specters feast on it, but its Dust both of them are obsessed by."
"Im going to throw out a rope and climb down," he shouted. "As soon as our feet touch the ground, we can make the next plan."
"Better keep still for a minute till we see the situation clearly," said Lee, for they were wildly swaying in the wind, and he could feel the basket settling with little jerks against whatever was holding them up.
"It will protect all of us."
The shaman reached the ground.
"Yes. Going higher, into the mountains, I think. Congratulations on landing us safely, Mr. Scoresby."
"Zeppelins," he said. "Well, theres no hiding out here."
Grumman sat impassively, moving a magical token of feathers and beads from one hand to the other in a pattern that Lee could see had some purposeful meaning. His eagle daemons eyes never left the pursuing zeppelins.
And a minute later he knew for certain theyd been sighted, for there was a stir of movement in the haze, which resolved itself into a line of smoke streaking up and away at an angle from the other balloon; and when it was some distance up, it burst into a flare. It blazed deep red for a moment and then dwindled into a patch of gray smoke, but it was a signal as clear as a tocsin in the night.
"The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them."
Grumman held up his hand. Lee listened, and sure enough, there was that engine sound, easier to make out now that the rain had eased a little.
"Hes growing up. Theyll attack him soon, and then his life will become a blank, indifferent misery. Hes doomed."
The sky was now colored like a tiger; bands of gold alternated with patches and stripes of deepest brown-black, and the pattern changed by the minute, for the gold was fading rapidly as the brownblack engulfed it. The sea behind was a patchwork of black water and phosphorescent foam, and the last of the burning zeppelins flames were dwindling into nothing as it sank.
"Mr. Scoresby, that is the way this world works. And if you want to put an end to cruelty and injustice, you must take me farther on. I have a job to do."
The basket tilted at once and a second later was crashing into the treetops, and amid the lashing of wet leaves and the snapping of twigs and the creak of tormented branches it jolted to a precarious halt.
He was perfectly aware of the peril they were in, but he held back from implying that the aeronaut wasnt. And in perfect time, Lee Scoresby leaned over the side of the basket and pulled the cord on one of the bags of ballast. The sand flowed out, and the balloon lifted gently to clear the tower by six feet or so. A dozen crows, disturbed, rose cawing around them.
Another dream focused on Grumman, too. Lee seemed to see the shaman shaking a feathertrimmed rattle and commanding something to obey him. The something, Lee saw with a touch of nausea, was a Specter, like the ones theyd seen from the balloon. It was tall and nearly invisible, and it invoked such a gut-churning revulsion in Lee that he nearly woke in terror. But Grumman was directing it fearlessly, and coming to no harm either, because the thing listened closely to him and then drifted upward like a soap bubble until it was lost in the canopy.
"Oh, but I have."
"Im goingto take us down, Dr. Grumman," Lee shouted above the wind. "You should stand and be ready to jump clear. Hold the ring and swing yourself up when I call."
"Theyre the opposite of those devils at Bolvangar, then."
"Best put out the fire, Dr. Grumman," he said, "sorry as I am to do without it. I think that canopys thick, but you never know. Im going to sleep now, wet through or not."
They dont starve. It looks as if a multitude of Specters have invaded this city, and the adults have gone to safety. You notice how few boats there are in the harbor? The children will come to no harm."
He scooped up Hester and tucked her securely into his breast, buttoning the canvas coat up close to keep her in. Grumman sat steady and quiet; his daemon, wind-torn, clung firmly with her talons deep in the basket rim and her feathers blown erect.
And whether it was the result of gaining height or whether it was the shamans spell, a breath did stir the air on Lees face. He looked up to check the gasbag and saw it sway a degree or two, leaning toward the hills.
Grumman nodded.
But the breeze that moved them more swiftly was working on the other balloon, too. It was no closer, but neither had they left it behind. And as Lee turned the telescope on it again, he saw darker, smaller shapes behind it in the shimmering distance. They were grouped purposefully, and becoming clearer and more solid every minute.
A moment later came the most jolting shock of all as the grapnel found a branch that held it fast.
Lee Scoresby looked down at the placid ocean to his left and the green shore to his right, and shaded his eyes to search for human life. It was a day and a night since they had left the Yenisei.
The shaman nodded.
"New or old, thats a strange world down there," said Lee.
"She can go that far?" he said, surprised, but put that out of his mind and made the rope secure, first to the suspension ring and then to the branch, so that even if the basket did fall, it wouldnt fall far.
"What do they do, exactly?"
"New to those not born in it," said Stanislaus Grumman. "As old as yours or mine, otherwise. What Asriels done has shaken everything up, Mr. Scoresby, shaken it more profoundly than its ever been shaken before. These doorways and windows that I spoke of—they open in unexpected places now.
The basket was tossing and lurching so violently it was hard to tell if they were going down, and the gusts were so sudden and wayward that they might easily have been blown high into the sky without knowing; but after a minute or so Lee felt a sudden snag and knew the grapnel had caught on a branch. It was only a temporary check, so the branch had broken, but it showed how close they were.
"Did you bring that storm?" said Lee.
"Theyve been over twice now," said Grumman. "They dont know where we are, but they know were here somewhere."
"It looks empty," said Lee.
He sat back in a corner of the basket while his daemon perched on the suspension ring, her claws dug deep in the leather binding.
"Here we go!" he shouted. "You cooked up a fine storm, Mr. Shaman."
Tell me again what your purpose is. Youre going to find the bearer of this subtle knife, and what then?"
He pulled at the gas-valve line and lashed it around a cleat to keep it open. As the gas streamed out of the top, invisible far above, the lower curve of the gasbag withdrew into itself, and a fold, and then another, appeared where there had been a bulging sphere only a minute before.
Grumman had seen it too.
"Except for the older ones. Like that poor kid down there."
"Now, you understand what Im saying. Im going to take us up into those hills and then land, because anything else is certain death. Theyll have made a connection now between this ring I showed them and the Skraeling I killed on Nova Zembla, and they aint chasing us this hard to say we left our wallet on the counter.
"Theyre clustered around that kid down there."
Then came another snag, more violent, and the two men were thrown hard against the rim of the basket. Lee was used to it and found his balance at once, but the force took Grumman by surprise.
But when he made his regular scan of the horizon, he felt a little check at his heart. Hester felt it too, and flicked up her ears, and turned her head so that one gold-hazel eye rested on his face.
"The greatest wisdom I know."
The wind was still beating the treetops back and forth, but the worst of the rain had passed by the time he decided he could do no more. He clambered down and found that the shaman had not only pitched the tent but had conjured a fire into being, and was brewing some coffee.
And there was a group of boys who were fighting, and a red-haired girl urging them on, and a little boy throwing stones to smash all the windows of a nearby building. It was like a playground the size of a city, with not a teacher in sight; it was a world of children.
The fall in fact made concealing the gasbag easier, since the lower part of it had been pulled down through the canopy; and working by flashes of lightning, tugging and wrenching and hacking, Lee managed to drag the whole body of the balloon down among the lower branches and out of sight.
You can git that set up while I see what I can do up there to hide the balloon."
But they werent the only presences there. Lee had to rub his eyes when he saw them first, but there was no doubt about it: columns of mist—or something more tenuous than mist—a thickening of the air.... Whatever they were, the city was full of them; they drifted along the boulevards, they entered houses, they clustered in the squares and courtyards. The children moved among them unseeing.
However, he didnt lose his grip on the suspension ring, and Lee could see him safely poised, ready to swing himself clear.
"So sometime tonight, Dr. Grumman, this flights gonna be over. You ever landed in a balloon?"
"And meanwhile the suns going down. We have about three hours to sunset, by my calculation.
They labored for a long time, and in peril at one point, when the branch that had been supporting the basket finally broke and pitched Lee down with it; but he didnt fall far, since the gasbag still trailed among the treetops and held the basket suspended.
Pinioned in his dream, Lee could neither move nor cry out, and he suffered the terror of the pilot as the man became aware of what was happening to him.
He peered intently through the stormy air and made out the great bulk of the hills, dark against the dark sky. From below there came a roaring, rushing sound, like the crash of surf on a stony beach, but he knew it was the wind tearing through the leaves on the trees. So far, already! They were moving faster than hed thought.
"So I want to reach those hills and make a landing. I can see some forest now; we can hide among the trees for a spell, maybe a long time.
They flew on, and soon the city was out of sight behind them.
The wind was blowing them hard now, and the great gasbag swelled and billowed in the gusts. The ropes creaked and strained, but Lee had no fear of their giving way. He let go some more ballast and watched the altimeter closely. In a storm, when the air pressure sank, you had to offset that drop against the altimetric reading, and very often it was a crude rule-of-thumb calculation. Lee ran through the figures, double-checked them, and then released the last of his ballast. The only control he had now was the gas valve. He couldnt go higher; he could only descend.
But not unseen. The farther they drifted over the city, the more Lee could observe the behavior of these forms. And it was clear that some of the children were of interest to them, and that they followed certain children around: the older children, those who (as far as Lee could see through his telescope) were on the verge of adolescence. There was one boy, a tall thin youth with a shock of black hair, who was so thickly surrounded by the transparent beings that his very outline seemed to shimmer in the air. They were like flies around meat. And the boy had no idea of it, though from time to time he would brush his eyes, or shake his head as if to clear his vision.
"All right. Im going back upthe rope, and Ill lower some things down to you. One of thems a tent.
"You heard those zeppelins again?"
"I needed to fly," said Grumman, "so I summoned you, and here I am, flying."
"Those children are Specter-orphans. There are many gangs of them in this world. They wander about living on what they can find when the adults flee. And theres plenty to find, as you can see.
And its hard to say, but I think those zeppelins will have closed on us halfway by that time, and we should have gotten to the far shore of this bay.
An hour went by, and another. Lee chewed an unlit cigar and sipped cold coffee from a tin flask.
Grumman obeyed. Lee gazed down, ahead, down, ahead, checking each dim glimpse against the next, and blinking the rain out of his eyes; for a sudden squall had brought heavy drops at them like handfuls of gravel, and the drumming they made on the gasbag added to the winds howl and the lash of the leaves below until Lee could hardly even hear the thunder.
When they were still a few minutes from making the shore at the foot of the hills, Lee noticed something new in the sky behind the zeppelins. A bank of clouds had been building, and a massive thunderhead reared thousands of feet up into the still-bright upper sky. How had he failed to notice? If a storm was coming, the sooner they landed the better.
He picked her up, tucked her in the breast of his coat, and opened the telescope again.
Lee checked his instruments. The compass was still gyrating loosely, but the altimeter was functioning accurately, as far as he could judge, and showed them to be floating about a thousand feet above the seashore and parallel with it. Some way ahead a line of high green hills rose into the haze, and Lee was glad hed provided plenty of ballast.
Then his exhausting night took another turn, for he was in the cockpit of a zeppelin, watching the pilot. In fact, he was sitting in the copilots seat, and they were cruising over the forest, looking down at the wildly tossing treetops, a wild sea of leaf and branch. Then that Specter was in the cabin with them.
"Ill follow you, Mr. Scoresby," said Grumman. "My daemon tells me the ground is forty feet down."
There came another lightning flash, and a second later the thunder crashed. The storm was nearly overhead. The glare showed Lee an oak trunk, with a great white scar where a branch had been torn away, but torn only partially, for the basket was resting on it near the point where it was still attached to the trunk.
"Did you hear it?" said Lee.
"Yes," said Stanislaus Grumman. "It is a strange world, though no doubt some feel at home there."
"Enemies, Mr. Scoresby?" he said, shading his eyes to peer into the pearly light.
"I trust you, Mr. Scoresby," said the shaman.
He set Hester down again and leaned out to jettison three bags of ballast. The balloon rose at once, and Lee kept the telescope to his eye.
"For Petes sake! Cant we rescue him?"
Tell me what to do."
"No," said the shaman. "But I trust your skill." "Ill try and get as high up that range as I can. Its a question of balance, because the farther we go, the closer theyll be behind us. If I land when theyre too close behind, theyll be able to see where we go, but if I take us down too early, we wont find the shelter of those trees. Either way, theres going to be some shooting before long."
"And thats a task that includes protecting Lyra," the aeronaut reminded him.
And a minute later a flickering glow came from somewhere in the direction the zeppelin had flown. It was less bright than lightning, but it was persistent, and Lee knew it for a flare.
"And this is a new world?" he said.
And then a dark green curtain of rain drifted down and hung from the clouds, and the storm seemed to be chasing the zeppelins as they were chasing Lees balloon, for the rain swept along toward them from the sea, and as the sun finally vanished, a mighty flash came from the clouds, and several seconds later a crash of thunder so loud it shook the very fabric of Lees balloon, and echoed back for a long time from the mountains.
And behind them, almost lost hi the sunset glare, the little dots of the zeppelins grew larger and firmer. They had already overtaken the other balloon and could now be easily seen with the naked eye: four of them in line abreast. And across the wide silence of the bay came the sound of their engines, tiny but clear, an insistent mosquito whine.
And he shouldnt leave it too long before he brought them down. Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate; his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically. But he couldnt help a flicker of despair now, when the one thing he should do—namely, fly before the storm and let it blow itself out—was the one thing guaranteed to get them shot down.
"Can you summon a stiffer breeze, Dr. Grumman?" said Lee. "Id like to make those hills by nightfall."
"The situations like this, Dr. Grumman," he said. "I do not want to be caught aloft by those zeppelins. There aint no defense; theyd have us down in a minute. Nor do I want to land in the water, by free choice or not; we could float for a while, but they could pick us off with grenades as easy as fishing.
"We aint finished yet. I want to git that gasbag under the canopy before daybreak, or itll show up our position from miles away. You up to some manual labor, Dr. Grumman?"
"Still there, Dr. Grumman?" Lee called, for it was impossible to see anything.
"Oh, in tales."
Was there another sound in the tumult? He listened hard. Yes, the engine of a zeppelin, maybe more than one, some way above. It was impossible to tell how high, or in which direction it was flying; but the sound was there for a minute or so, and then it was gone.
Lee let out the breath hed been holding. Grumman was standing beside him, one hand on the suspension ring, with lines of exhaustion deep in his face.
"You will be dry by the morning," said the shaman.
He turned to Grumman, but found him deep in a trance. The shamans eyes were closed, and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead as he rocked gently back and forth. A low rhythmic moaning came from his throat, and his daemon gripped the edge of the basket, equally entranced.
Then, with Hester secure in his breast, he threw the rest of the rope over and clambered down till he felt solid ground beneath his feet. The branches grew thick around the trunk; this was a massive tree, a giant of an oak, and Lee muttered a thank-you to it as he tugged on the rope to signal to Grumman that he could descend.
"Tell him what his task is."
"This done by magic?" said Lee, soaked and stiff, easing himself down into the tent and taking the mug Grumman handed him.
Then came another flash of lightning, and this time the jagged fork struck down direct from the thunderhead at one of the zeppelins. In a moment the gas was alight. A bright flower of flame blossomed against the braise-dark clouds, and the craft drifted down slowly, ablaze like a beacon, and floated, still blazing, on the water.
There was still a strong sideways pull from the gasbag, which was now nearly empty, but which as a result was catching the wind like a sail. It crossed Lees mind to cut it loose, but if it didnt fly away altogether, it would hang in the treetops like abanner and give their position away; much better to take it in, if they could.
"Yes," said Grumman. "And among academicians, and among spirits. I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same."
"Still here, Mr. Scoresby."
"No, you can thank the Boy Scouts for this," said Grumman. "Do they have Boy Scouts in your world? Be prepared. Of all the ways of starting a fire, the best is dry matches. I never travel without them. We could do worse than this as a campsite, Mr. Scoresby."
For they were leaving the shoreline now, and their course was taking them out over a wide bay thirty or forty miles across. A range of hills rose on the far side, and now that hed gained some height, Lee saw that they might more truthfully be called mountains.
The sun settled lower in the sky behind them, and Lee could see the long shade of evening creep along the shore of the bay and up the lower flanks of the hills ahead while the balloon itself, and the mountaintops, were bathed in gold.
"What the hell are those things?" said Lee.
"No. The Specters would seize us at once. They cant touch us up here; all we can do is watch and fly on."
"Right, Dr. Grumman," he said. "Im going to ignore those zeppelins for now and concentrate on getting us safe into the mountains and on the ground. What I want you to do is sit tight and hold on, and be prepared to jump when I tell you. Ill give you warning, and Ill try to make it as gentle as I can, but landing in these conditions is a matter of luck as much as skill."
"But where are the adults? You dont tell me the whole world is full of children alone?"
And Grumman was right; there were people there. But as the balloon drifted closer, Lee was surprised to see that they were children. There was not an adult in sight. And he was even more surprised to see the children had no daemons—yet they were playing on the beach, or running in and out of cafes, or eating and drinking, or gathering bags full of goods from houses and shops.
"I guess you are," said Lee. "You have a strange way about you, Dr. Grumman. You ever spend any time among the witches?"
No, he wasnt mistaken. Far to the south (if south it was, the direction theyd come from) another balloon was floating in the haze. The heat shimmer and the distance made it impossible to see any details, but the other balloon was larger, and flying higher.
"Seems to me—" Lee said, feeling for the words, "seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed. Or is that wrong, Dr.
"And this journey were on? Is that folly or wisdom?"
The remaining three, however, were flying on, buffeted hard but keeping to their course. More lightning flashed around them, and as the storm came closer, Lee began to fear for the gas in his own balloon. One strike could have it tumbling to earth in flames, and he didnt suppose the shaman could control the storm so finely as to avoid that.
He took a handful of wet earth and pressed it down over the flames, and Lee struggled to lie down in the little tent and closed his eyes.
A few minutes later, as the balloon drifted on, Lee saw first a lighthouse, then the curve of a stone breakwater, then the towers and domes and red-brown roofs of a beautiful city around a harbor, with a sumptuous building like an opera house in lush gardens, and wide boulevards with elegant hotels, and little streets where blossom-bearing trees hung over shaded balconies.
And Lee was aware of a powerful flutter of wingbeats as the eagle daemon settled again on the basket rim.
Its hard to navigate, but this wind is a fair one."
He shouted, "Fifty feet above the trees—"
"Not so. Beyond that headland youll find a city that was once powerful and wealthy. And its still inhabited by the descendants of the merchants and nobles who built it, though its fallen on hard times in the past three hundred years."
Grumman sat resting in a corner of the basket while his daemon groomed her feathers. His eyes were closed, but Lee knew he was awake.
He tried to make an estimate of their distance, and a similar calculation about the hills toward which they were flying. Their speed had certainly picked up now, and the breeze was flicking white tips off the waves far below.
"Youve heard of vampires?"
The people call them Specters."
