The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)

by Philip Pullman

“You have got a dæmon,” she said decisively. “Inside you.”

The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer. When she saw the answer, she relaxed at once. He could find food, and show her how to reach Oxford, and those were powers that were useful, but he might still have been untrustworthy or cowardly. A murderer was a worthy companion. She felt as safe with him as she’d felt with Iorek Byrnison, the armored bear.

The witch was sobbing. “She is the one who came before, and you have hated and feared her ever since! Well, now she has come again, and you failed to find her . . . . She was there on Svalbard—she was with Lord Asriel, and you lost her. She escaped, and she will be—”

“They say that the Magisterium is assembling the greatest army ever known,

Lord Asriel’s been nursing a rebellion in his heart for as long as I’ve served him, that’s one thing I do know.”

No, it’s my belief he turned away from a rebellion against the Church not because the Church was too strong, but because it was too weak to be worth the fighting.”

“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.

He’s a-going to find the Authority and kill Him.”

I know whom we must fight. It is the Magisterium, the Church. For all its history—and that’s not long by our lives, but it’s many, many of theirs—it’s tried to suppress and control every natural impulse. And when it can’t control them, it cuts them out.

That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.

There might be a Simon Parslow in this world. Perhaps there was a Lyra.

Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?

“Hippies, you know, people like that. Actually, you’re far too young to remember hippies. They say it’s more effective than taking drugs.”

Lyra was sure the alethiometer had more to say: she was beginning to sense now that it had moods, like a person, and to know when it wanted to tell her more.

They’re conscious. That’s right. Shadows are particles of consciousness.

you can’t see them unless you expect to. Unless you put your mind in a certain state. You have to be confident and relaxed at the same time. You have to be capable—

“ ‘ . . . Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

They knew what these objects were. Anything that was associated with human workmanship and human thought was surrounded by Shadows . . . .

There was a cutoff point about thirty, forty thousand years ago. Before that, no Shadows. After that, plenty. And that’s about the time, apparently, that modern human beings first appeared. I mean, you know, our remote ancestors, but people no different from us, really . . . . ”

And with the vast changes they sensed in the world around them, it was natural for people to gather and talk. With every day that passed came more news: the river Yenisei was free of ice, and at this time of year, too; part of the ocean had drained away, exposing strange regular formations of stone on the seabed; a squid a hundred feet long had snatched three fishermen out of their boat and torn them apart . . . . And the fog continued to roll in from the north, dense and cold and occasionally drenched with the strangest imaginable light, in which great forms could be vaguely seen, and mysterious voices heard.

“This happen before, this thing.” “What, the sky opening? That happened before?” “Many thousand generation. My people remember. All long time ago, many thousand generation.” “What do they say about it?” “Sky fall open, and spirits move between this world and that world. All the lands move. The ice melt, then freeze again. The spirits close up the hole after a while. Seal it up. But witches say the sky is thin there, behind the northern lights.” “What’s going to happen, Umaq?” “Same thing as before. Make all same again. But only after big trouble, big war. Spirit war.”

Damn it, Lee, he wanted to die. These people are insane.”

“How can he be neither dead nor alive?” “In spirit world. Maybe he in spirit world.

“No. But we saw angels the other night, making for the Pole.” “Angels?” “Troops of them in the air, armed and shining. They haven’t been so common in the last years, though in my grandfather’s time they passed through this world often, or so he used to say.”

All the trust and all the virtue fell out of our world when the Specters came.”

I told you, we saw them the other night, way high aloft among the stars, making for the Pole, like a fleet of mighty ships under sail . . . . Something is happening, and we don’t know down here what it may be. There could be a war breaking out. There was a war in heaven once, oh, thousands of years ago, immense ages back, but I don’t know what the outcome was. It wouldn’t be impossible if there was another. But the devastation would be enormous, and the consequences for us . . . I can’t imagine it.

Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.

“It is! This is what happened, all right: this Guild man hundreds of years ago was taking some metal apart. Lead. He was going to make it into gold. And he cut it and cut it smaller and smaller till he came to the smallest piece he could get. There ain’ nothing smaller than that. So small you couldn’ see it, even. But he cut that, too, and inside the smallest little bit there was all the Specters packed in, twisted over and folded up so tight they took up no space at all. But once he cut it, bam! They whooshed out, and they been here ever since. That’s what my papa said.”

He was desolate. But then he felt the strangest thing, and brushed the back of his right wrist across his eyes to find Pantalaimon’s head on his knee.

Her dæmon had done it on his own initiative,

Finally Mrs. Coulter said, “Very well, I’ll tell you. Lord Asriel is gathering an army, with the purpose of completing the war that was fought in heaven eons ago.”

“It is one of millions. There are openings between them, but they’re not easily found. I know a dozen or so, but the places they open into have shifted, and that must be due to what Asriel’s done. It seems that we can now pass directly from this world into our own, and probably into many others too. When I looked through one of the doorways earlier today, you can imagine how surprised I was to find it opening into our world, and what’s more, to find you nearby. Providence, dear lady! The change meant that I could bring you here directly, without the risk of going through Cittàgazze.”

“Men, that’s all. But . . . they’ve undergone intercision. They have no dæmons, so they have no fear and no imagination and no free will, and they’ll fight till they’re torn apart.”

And at that moment the tabby cat sprang out of the shrubbery and onto the grass, and hissed.

“You know what I thought? I thought for a second she was your dæmon. She done what a good dæmon would have done, anyway. We rescued her and she rescued us.

for worlds differ greatly, and in this world I saw my dæmon for the first time. Yes, I hadn’t known of Sayan Kötör here till I entered yours. People here cannot conceive of worlds where dæmons are a silent voice in the mind and no more. Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, and beautiful?

“I know a great deal about this world now, Mr. Scoresby. I know, for example, about Dust. I see from your expression that you have heard the term. It is frightening your theologians to death, but they are the ones who frighten me. I know what Lord Asriel is doing, and I know why, and that’s why I summoned you here. I am going to help him, you see, because the task he’s undertaken is the greatest in human history. The greatest in thirty-five thousand years of human history, Mr. Scoresby.

“This is the craziest damn idea I ever heard in my life,” said Lee.

“So this is my price for taking you into the other world, Dr. Grumman: not gold, but that subtle knife. And I don’t want it for myself; I want it for Lyra. You have to swear you’ll get her under the protection of that object, and then I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

“Swear by whatever it was made you turn down the love of the witch. I guess that’s the most important thing you know.”

“D’you know where they’re going?” “North,” said the boatman. “There’s a war going to be fought, by all accounts, the greatest war ever known.” “North, into that new world?”

“Because . . . I think maybe they come from my world after all, the Specters. If they make people behave like that, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they came from my world. And when the Guild men opened their first window, if it was into my world, the Specters could have gone through then.” “But you don’t have Specters in your world! You never heard of them, did you?” “Maybe they’re not called Specters. Maybe we call them something else.”

“Both. I don’t know. But suppose something happened thirty, forty thousand years ago. There were shadow particles around before then, obviously—they’ve been around since the Big Bang—but there was no physical way of amplifying their effects at our level, the anthropic level. The level of human beings. And then something happened, I can’t imagine what, but it involved evolution. Hence your skulls—remember? No Shadows before that time, lots afterward? And the skulls the child found in the museum, that she tested with her compass thing. She told me the same thing. What I’m saying is that around that time, the human brain became the ideal vehicle for this amplification process. Suddenly we became conscious.”

St. Augustine had said, “Angel is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is spirit; if you seek the name of their office, it is angel; from what they are, spirit, from what they do, angel.”

And did you intervene in human evolution? YES. Why? VENGEANCE. Vengeance for--oh! Rebel angels! After the war in Heaven--Satan and the Garden of Eden--but it isn’t true, is it? Is that what you FIND THE GIRL AND THE BOY. WASTE NO MORE TIME. But why? YOU MUST PLAY THE SERPENT.

“You might not be . . . . Hey, Pan, when I change, you’ll stop changing. What’re you going to be?” “A flea, I hope.” “No, but don’t you get any feelings about what you might be?” “No. I don’t want to, either.” “You’re sulking because I won’t do what you want.”

Both of them sat silent on the moss-covered rock in the slant of sunlight through the old pines and thought how many tiny chances had conspired to bring them to this place. Each of those chances might have gone a different way. Perhaps in another world, another Will had not seen the window in Sunderland Avenue, and had wandered on tired and lost toward the Midlands until he was caught. And in another world another Pantalaimon had persuaded another Lyra not to stay in the retiring room, and another Lord Asriel had been poisoned, and another Roger had survived to play with that Lyra forever on the roofs and in the alleys of another unchanging Oxford.

hideous cruelties dealt out in the Authority’s name—of how they capture witches, in some worlds, and burn them alive, sisters. Yes, witches like ourselves . . . “He opened my eyes. He showed me things I had never seen, cruelties and horrors all committed in the name of the Authority, all designed to destroy the joys and the truthfulness of life.

“ ‘And who’s going to win, Grandfather? Is Lord Asriel going to defeat the Authority?’ “ ‘Lord Asriel’s army numbers millions,’ the old cliff-ghast told them, ‘assembled from every world. It’s a greater army than the one that fought the Authority before, and it’s better led. As for the forces of the Authority, why, they number a hundred times as many. But the Authority is age-old, far older even than me, children, and His troops are frightened, and complacent where they’re not frightened. It would be a close fight, but Lord Asriel would win, because he is passionate and daring and he believes his cause is just. Except for one thing, children. He hasn’t got Æsahættr. Without Æsahættr, he and all his forces will go down to defeat. And then we shall feast for years, my children!’

“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.” “They’re the opposite of those devils at Bolvangar, then.” “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 it’s Dust both of them are obsessed by.”