The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)

by Philip Pullman

Everything was there. Everything was going to plan, really. Except that he’d killed someone.

the witch called in anguish: “Yambe-Akka! Come to me, come to me!” No one but Serafina Pekkala understood. Yambe-Akka was the goddess who came to a witch when she was about to die. And Serafina was ready. She became visible at once, and stepped forward smiling happily, because Yambe-Akka was merry and light-hearted and her visits were gifts of joy. The witch saw her and turned up her tear-stained face, and Serafina bent to kiss it, and slid her knife gently into the witch’s heart.

But there was one thing she knew for certain: there was an arrow in her quiver that would find its mark in Mrs Coulter’s throat.

“You don’t think he told me, do you, Serafina Pekkala? I’m his manservant, that’s all. I clean his clothes and cook his meals and keep his house tidy. I may have learned a thing or two in the years I been with his lordship, but only by picking ’em up accidental. He wouldn’t confide in me any more than in his shaving-mug.”

Now this might sound strange to you, Serafina Pekkala, but I know the man better than any wife could know him, better than a mother. He’s been my master and my study for nigh on forty years. I can’t follow him to the height of his thought any more than I can fly, but I can see where he’s a-heading even if I can’t go after him.

“I think he’s a-waging a higher war than that. I think he’s aiming a rebellion against the highest power of all. He’s gone a-searching for the dwelling place of the Authority Himself, and he’s a-going to destroy Him. That’s what I think. It shakes my heart to voice it, ma’am. I hardly dare think of it. But I can’t put together any other story that makes sense of what he’s doing.”

“Lord Asriel’s life has been filled with things that were impossible. I wouldn’t like to say there was anything he couldn’t do. But on the face of it, Serafina Pekkala, yes, he’s stark mad. If angels couldn’t do it, how can a man dare to think about it?”

She felt fear for them, but fear for herself too, for she was having to change; these were human affairs she was inquiring into, this was a human matter; Lord Asriel’s god was not hers. Was she becoming human? Was she losing her witch-hood?

Sisters, you know only the north: I have travelled in the south lands. There are churches there, believe me, that cut their children too, as the people of Bolvangar did – not in the same way, but just as horribly – they cut their sexual organs, yes, both boys and girls – they cut them with knives so that they shan’t feel. That is what the church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling. So if a war comes, and the church is on one side of it, we must be on the other, no matter what strange allies we find ourselves bound to.

When morning came she asked the alethiometer what the dream meant, but all it said was It was a dream about a head.

Instead she went down to the kitchen and tried to make an omelette, and twenty minutes later she sat down at a table on the pavement and ate the blackened, gritty thing with great pride while the sparrow-Pantalaimon pecked at the bits of shell.

“If you start behaving like a grown-up, the Spectres’ll get you,” she said, but she didn’t know whether she could tease him yet, or whether she should be afraid of him.

He wasn’t prepared for Lyra’s wide-eyed helplessness. He couldn’t know how much of her childhood had been spent running about streets almost identical with these, and how proud she’d been of belonging to Jordan College, whose scholars were the cleverest, whose coffers the richest, whose beauty the most splendid of all; and now it simply wasn’t there, and she wasn’t Lyra of Jordan any more; she was a lost little girl in a strange world, belonging nowhere.

Wearily Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.

“But you see, you can’t say this sort of thing in a funding application if you want to be taken seriously. It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It’s impossible, and if it isn’t impossible it’s irrelevant, and if it isn’t either of those things it’s embarrassing.”

“Everything about this is embarrassing,” she said. “D’you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.”

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 he’d lash them with his tongue, and boy, he had a tongue like barbed wire.

“He didn’t give us a choice, and we didn’t shoot to kill. Damn it, Lee, he wanted to die. These people are insane.”

“The poor people do all the work, and the Guild men just live there for nothing.”

Here, in the city that was both hers and not hers, danger could look friendly, and treachery smiled and smelt sweet; and even if they weren’t going to kill her or part her from Pantalaimon, they had robbed her of her only guide. Without the alethiometer, she was … just a little girl, lost.

“I want to know where you got the alethiometer.” “Why?” “Because Lyra had it, and I want to find her.” “I can’t imagine why you would. She is a repellent brat.” “I’ll remind you that she’s my daughter.” “Then she is even more repellent, because she must have resisted your charming influence on purpose. No one could do it by accident.”

“Pan, am I going to die?” “The witches won’t let you die. Nor will Lyra.” “But the spell didn’t work. I keep losing blood. I can’t have much left to lose. And it’s bleeding again, and it won’t stop. I’m frightened …” “Lyra doesn’t think you are.” “Doesn’t she?” “She thinks you’re the bravest fighter she ever saw, as brave as Iorek Byrnison.” “I suppose I better try not to seem frightened, then,” Will said. He was quiet for a minute or so, and then he said, “I think Lyra’s braver than me. I think she’s the best friend I ever had.” “She thinks that about you as well,” whispered the dæmon.

Lyra returned her gaze stolidly, though she felt a quickening of her heart, for Ruta Skadi lived so brilliantly in her nerves that she set up a responding thrill in the nerves of anyone close by.

“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.”

From now on he was an aëronaut no more, unless by some miracle he escaped with his life and found enough money to buy another balloon. Now he had to move like an insect, along the surface of the earth.

“For a human being, nothing comes naturally,” said Grumman.

“Because, Dr Grumman, or John Parry, or whatever name you take up in whatever world you end in, you be aware of this. I love that little child like a daughter. If I’d had a child of my own, I couldn’t love her more. And if you break the oath, whatever remains of me will pursue whatever remains of you, and you’ll spend the rest of eternity wishing you never existed. That’s how important that oath is.”

As he reloaded he felt something so rare his heart nearly failed; he felt Hester’s face pressed to his own, and it was wet with tears.

“Hester, don’t you go before I do,” Lee whispered. “Lee, I couldn’t abide to be anywhere away from you for a single second,” she whispered back.

She said, “We held ’em off. We held out. We’re a-helping Lyra.” Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.

What he couldn’t say was that he longed for his father as a lost child yearns for home. That comparison wouldn’t have occurred to him, because home was the place he kept safe for his mother, not the place others kept safe for him; but it had been five years now since that Saturday morning in the supermarket when the pretend game of hiding from the enemies became desperately real, such a long time in his life, and his heart craved to hear the words, “Well done, well done, my child; no one on earth could have done better; I’m proud of you. Come and rest now …” Will longed for that so much that he hardly knew he did. It was just part of what everything felt like.

The fact was that where Will was concerned, she was developing a new kind of sense, as if he were simply more in focus than anyone she’d known before. Everything about him was clear and close and immediate.

He was afraid for her, of course, and he knew she’d be safer if he was there to look after her; but he wanted her to look after him, too, as she’d done when he was very small; he wanted her to bandage him and tuck him into bed and sing to him and take away all the trouble and surround him with all the warmth and softness and mother-kindness he needed so badly; and it was never going to happen. Part of him was only a little boy still. So he cried, but he lay very still as he did, not wanting to wake Lyra.

And at the same moment Will felt a grip on his right arm. He cried out with shock and twisted away at once, but the grip was tenacious. And Will was savage now. He felt he was at the very end of everything, and if it was the end of his life too, he was going to fight and fight till he fell.

“Then you’re a warrior. That’s what you are. Argue with anything else, but don’t argue with your own nature.” Will knew that the man was speaking the truth. But it wasn’t a welcome truth. It was heavy and painful. The man seemed to know that, because he let Will bow his head before he spoke again.

“There are two great powers,” the man said, “and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.