With a secret glee, Lyra hurried there behind the nurse and retrieved her proper furs and leggings and boots, and pulled them on quickly while the nurse dressed herself in coal silk.
Lyra said to them, “Listen, you better go and keep watch, right. Billy, you go that way, and Roger, watch out the way we just come. We ent got long.”
Lyra worked quickly, and within a few minutes every daemon was free. Some were trying to speak, and they clustered around her feet and even tried to pluck at her leggings, though the taboo held them back. She could tell why, poor things; they missed the heavy solid warmth of their humans bodies; just as Pantalaimon would have done, they longed to press themselves against a heartbeat.
Billy nodded, and Roger said, “Whats the signal?”
“Greetings, Lyra,” he said. “I followed you here, though you didnt see me. I have been waiting for you to come out into the open. What is happening?”
“The fire alarm,” said the doctor, sighing. “Very well. Lizzie, follow Sister Betty.”
She ran, and Roger, who was watching wide-eyed as the pale daemons drifted out of the building, waded toward her through the thick snow.
“When I came yesterday,” Lyra said helpfully, “Sister Clara put my other clothes in a cupboard in that first room where she looked at me. The one next door. I could wear them.”
In the middle of one of the tests, a loud bell began to ring and kept ringing.
“Could they pull a balloon?”
The two boys were staring in fear at the goose daemon and at Lyras familiar manner with him, because of course theyd never seen a daemon without his human before, and they knew little about witches.
“What we looking for?” said Billy.
She heard the sound as everyone else did. Heads began to turn and scan the dark sky for the zeppelin, whose gas engine was throbbing clearly in the still air.
As soon as her eyes had adjusted to the light, Lyra saw why.
She told him quickly.
Roger was tugging at Lyras arm.
“Yes, hush. Dont tell Billy, though. Dont tell anyone yet. Come on back.”
Lyra looked, and there was no mistake. Pantalaimon clutched at her, became a wildcat, hissed in hatred, because looking out with curiosity was the beautiful dark-haired head of Mrs. Coulter, with her golden daemon in her lap.
“Will Serafina Pekkala be coming?”
“Now, quick,” said the goose. “Lyra, you must run back and mingle with the other children. Be brave, child. The gyptians are coming as fast as they can. I must help these poor daemons to find their people....” He came closer and said quietly, “But theyll never be one again. Theyre sundered forever. This is the most wicked thing I have ever seen....Leave the footprints youve made; Ill cover them up. Hurry now....”
“See?” one adult was saying. “Its worth doing this to find out what chaos wed be in with a real fire.”
But it may be that whats happening here is part of all thats happening elsewhere. Lyra, youre needed inside. Run, run!”
Someone was blowing a whistle and waving his arms, but no one was taking much notice. Lyra saw Roger and beckoned. Roger tugged Billy Costas arm and soon all three of them were together in a maelstrom of running children.
They stumbled away to join Billy, who was beckoning from the corner of the main building. The children were tired now, or else the adults had regained some authority, because people were lining up raggedly by the main door, with much jostling and pushing. Lyra and the other two slipped out from the corner and mingled with them, but before they did, Lyra said:
“What does she look like?”
In a series of glass cases on shelves around the walls were all the daemons of the severed children: ghostlike forms of cats, or birds, or rats, or other creatures, each bewildered and frightened and as pale as smoke.
“I forget. I think she had sort of brown hair...light brown, maybe...! dunno.”
“Theyre—its like the crypt in Jordan—theyre daemons!”
The goose beat his great wings, raising a flurry of snow as he landed.
They waited till most of the grownups were looking the other way, and then Lyra scooped up some snow and rammed it into a loose powdery snowball, and hurled it at random into the crowd. In a moment all the children were doing it, and the air was full of flying snow. Screams of laughter covered completely the shouts of the adults trying to regain control, and then the three children were around the corner and out of sight.
“Cause you take people out one by one and they never come back. And some people reckon you just kill em, and other people say different, and this girl told me you cut—”
Lyra set her hand on it to try, but before she could turn the handle, Roger said:
And she looked around for something to do it with, but the place was bare. The goose daemon said, “Wait.”
“Quick,” he said, “theyre nearly ready.”
The doctor went to speak quietly to the nurse. As the two of them conferred, Lyra watched their daemons. This nurses was a pretty bird, just as neat and incurious as Sister Claras dog, and the doctors was a large heavy moth.
“Look! A bird! Or—”
He was annoyed at having his experiments interrupted, and snapped his fingers in irritation.
“I only come here yesterday, I dont know anyones name.”
The snow was so thick that they couldnt move quickly, but it didnt seem to matter; no one was following. Lyra and the others scrambled over the curved roof of one of the tunnels, and found themselves in a strange moonscape of regular hummocks and hollows, all swathed in white under the black sky and lit by reflections from the lights around the arena.
“But all their outdoor clothes are down in the dormitory building, Doctor. She cant go outside like this. Should we go there first, do you think?”
“I want to let these poor things go!” she said fiercely. “Im going to smash the glass and let em out—”
There was no window, but there was a door. A notice above it said ENTRY STRICTLY FORBIDDEN in red letters.
“Pass the word around among all the kids—they got to be ready to escape. They got to know where the outdoor clothes are and be ready to get them and run out as soon as we give the signal. And they got to keep this a deadly secret, understand?”
“This girl, I dunno her name. She said you cut peoples daemons away.”
Lyra explained fearfully about her encounter with little Tony Makarios, and looked over her shoulder at the poor caged daemons, who were clustering forward pressing their pale faces to the glass. Lyra could hear faint cries of pain and misery. In the dim light from a low-powered anbaric bulb she could see a name on a card at the front of each case, and yes, there was an empty one with Tony Makarios on it. There were four or five other empty ones with names on them, too.
“Good idea!” said the nurse. “Quick, then.”
“The fire bell,” said Lyra. “When the time comes, Ill set it off.”
He was agitated, though. She went on:
Neither moved. They were awake, for the birds eyes were bright and the moths feelers waved languidly, but they werent animated, as she would have expected them to be. Perhaps they werent really anxious or curious at all.
“Dunno. Just looking,” said Lyra, and led the way to a squat, square building a little apart from the rest, with a low-powered anbaric light at the corner.
“Undoubtedly, but—”
“Most of them are safe. John Faa is wounded, though not severely. The men who took you were hunters and raiders who often prey on parties of travelers, and alone they can travel more quickly than a large party. The gyptians are still a days journey away.”
“Yes, child; why?”
Lyra pulled open the door against the snow and slipped inside. The goose daemon came with her. Pantalaimon was agitated and fearful, but he didnt want the witchs daemon to see his fear, so he had flown to Lyras breast and taken sanctuary inside her furs.
“What? Whos been talking to you about that?”
The witchs daemon gave a cry of anger, and Lyra clutched Pantalaimon to her and said, “Dont look! Dont look!”
“I suppose this is just the sort of thing the practice is meant to show up,” he said. “What a nuisance.”
They ran off to do as she said, and then Lyra turned back to the door.
Then they hurried out. In the wide arena in front of the main group of buildings, ahundred or so people, adults and children, were milling about: some in excitement, some in irritation, many just bewildered.
“Oh, please! Before you go! Witches...They do fly, dont they? I wasnt dreaming when I saw them flying the other night?”
“Why are you trying to get in there?” said the goose daemon.
“Where are the children of these daemons?” said the goose daemon, shaking with rage.
Behind them, the goose was beating his wings powerfully, throwing snow over the tracks theyd made; and near him, the lost daemons were clustering or drifting away, crying little bleak cries of loss and longing. When the footprints were covered, the goose turned to herd the pale daemons together. He spoke, and one by one they changed, though you could see the effort it cost them, until they were all birds; and like fledglings they followed the witchs daemon, fluttering and falling and running through the snow after him, and finally, with great difficulty, taking off. They rose in a ragged line, pale and spectral against the deep black sky, and slowly gained height, feeble and erratic though some of them were, and though others lost their will and fluttered downward; but the great gray goose wheeled round and nudged them back, herding them gently on until they were lost against the profound dark.
“Why do you cut peoples daemons away?”
“We must make these people think someone forgot to lock the place and shut the cages,” he explained. “If they see broken glass and footprints in the snow, how long do you think your disguise will last? And it must hold out till the gyptians come. Now do exactly as I say: take a handful of snow, and when I tell you, blow a little of it against each cage in turn.”
“No onell notice if we take a look around,” said Lyra. “Itll take em ages to count everyone, and we can say we just followed someone else and got lost.”
He was a witchs daemon, and much older than she was, and stronger. She had to do as he said.
“Because of what they do here. They cut—” she lowered her voice, “they cut peoples daemons away. Childrens. And I think maybe they do it in here. At least, theres something here, and I was going to look. But its locked....”
The one lucky thing was that it was coming from the direction opposite to the one in which the gray goose had flown. But that was the only comfort. Very soon it was visible, and a murmur of excitement went around the crowd. Its fat sleek silver form drifted over the avenue of lights, and its own lights blazed downward from the nose and the cabin slung beneath the body.
The hubbub from behind was as loud as ever, but more distant. Clearly the children were making the most of their freedom, and Lyra hoped theyd keep it up for as long as they could. She moved around the edge of the square building, looking for a window. The roof was only seven feet or so off the ground, and unlike the other buildings, it had no roofed tunnel to connect it with the rest of the station.
Lyra watched and noticed. They werent very good at this at all. They were slack in a lot of ways, these people; they grumbled about fire drills, they didnt know where the outdoor clothes should be kept, they couldnt get children to stand in line properly; and their slackness might be to her advantage.
She ran outside. Roger and Billy were still on guard, and there was still a noise of shrieking and laughter from the arena, because only a minute or so had gone by.
Presently the doctor came back and they went on with the examination, weighing her and Pantalaimon separately, looking at her from behind a special screen, measuring her heartbeat, placing her under a little nozzle that hissed and gave off a smell like fresh air.
“Go in carefully,” said the daemon.
“Nonsense...”
When she had unlocked them all, she lifted the front of the first one, and the pale form of a sparrow fluttered out, but fell to the ground before she could fly. The goose tenderly bent and nudged her upright with his beak, and the sparrow became a mouse, staggering and confused. Pantalaimon leaped down to comfort her.
They had almost finished when there came another distraction, though, and from Lyras point of view, it was the worst possible.
His or was an exclamation of doubt, because the creature swooping down from the black sky was no bird at all: it was someone Lyra had seen before.
“Where are the gyptians?” she said. “Is John Faa safe? Did they fight off the Samoyeds?”
They waited to be counted off. If anyone in the Oblation Board had had anything to do with a school, they would have arranged this better; because they had no regular group to go to, each child had to be ticked off against the complete list, and of course they werent in alphabetical order; and none of the adults was used to keeping control. So there was a good deal of confusion, despite the fact that no one was running around anymore.
She grabbed a big double handful of the light powdery snow, and then came back to do as the goose daemon said. As she blew a little snow on each cage, the goose made a clicking sound in his throat, and the catch at the front of the cage came open.
“There isnt time to explain the politics of witch nations. There are vast powers involved here, and Serafina Pekkala must guard the interests of her clan.
Lyra realized what the stout mast was for: of course, it was a mooring mast. As the adults ushered the children inside, with everyone staring back and pointing, the ground crew clambered up the ladders in the mast and prepared to attach the mooring cables. The engines were roaring, and snow was swirling up from the ground, and the faces of passengers showed in the cabin windows.
“The witchs daemon!”
“Its not true at all. When we take children out, its because its time for them to move on to another place. Theyre growing up. Im afraid your friend is alarming herself. Nothing of the sort! Dont even think about it. Who is your friend?”
The pilot cut the speed and began the complex business of adjusting the height.
“I can open it,” said the goose, and beat his wings once or twice, throwing snow up against the door; and as he did, Lyra heard something turn in the lock.
