“Will, it was that golden light!” Lyra said. “The light that all flowed into the abyss and vanished… And that was Dust? Was it really?”
“Yes. But there’s more leaking out all the time,” Pantalaimon went on. “And it mustn’t. It mustn’t all leak away. It’s got to stay in the world and not vanish, because otherwise everything good will fade away and die.”
“But where’s the rest leaving from?” said Lyra.
Both daemons looked at Will, and at the knife.
“Every time we made an opening,” said Kirjava – and again Will felt that little thrilclass="underline" She’s me, and I’m her – ”every time anyone made an opening between the worlds, us or the old Guild men, anyone, the knife cut into the emptiness outside. The same emptiness there is down in the abyss. We never knew. No one knew, because the edge was too fine to see. But it was quite big enough for Dust to leak out of. If they closed it up again at once, there wasn’t time for much to leak out, but there were thousands that they never closed up. So all this time, Dust has been leaking out of the worlds and into nothingness.”
The understanding was beginning to dawn on Will and Lyra. They fought it, they pushed it away, but it was just like the gray light that seeps into the sky and extinguishes the stars: it crept past every barrier they could put up and under every blind and around the edges of every curtain they could draw against it.
“Every opening,” Lyra said in a whisper.
“Every single one – they must all be closed?” said Will.
“Every single one,” said Pantalaimon, whispering like Lyra.
“Oh, no,” said Lyra. “No, it can’t be true – ”
“And so we must leave our world to stay in Lyra’s,” said Kirjava, “or Pan and Lyra must leave theirs and come to stay in ours. There’s no other choice.”
Then the full bleak daylight struck in.
And Lyra cried aloud. Pantalaimon’s owl cry the night before had frightened every small creature that heard it, but it was nothing to the passionate wail that Lyra uttered now. The daemons were shocked, and Will, seeing their reaction, understood why: they didn’t know the rest of the truth; they didn’t know what Will and Lyra themselves had learned.
Lyra was shaking with anger and grief, striding up and down with clenched fists and turning her tear‑streaming face this way and that as if looking for an answer. Will jumped up and seized her shoulders, and felt her tense and trembling.
“Listen,” he said, “Lyra, listen: what did my father say?”
“Oh,” she cried, tossing her head this way and that, “he said – you know what he said – you were there, Will, you listened, too!”
He thought she would die of her grief there and then. She flung herself into his arms and sobbed, clinging passionately to his shoulders, pressing her nails into his back and her face into his neck, and all he could hear was, “No – no – no – ”
“Listen,” he said again, “Lyra, let’s try and remember it exactly. There might be a way through. There might be a loophole.”
He disengaged her arms gently and made her sit down. At once Pantalaimon, frightened, flowed up onto her lap, and the cat daemon tentatively came close to Will. They hadn’t touched yet, but now he put out a hand to her, and she moved her cat face against his fingers and then stepped delicately onto his lap.
“He said – ” Lyra began, gulping, “he said that people could spend a little time in other worlds without being affected. They could. And we have, haven’t we? Apart from what we had to do to go into the world of the dead, we’re still healthy, aren’t we?”
“They can spend a little time, but not a long time,” Will said. “My father had been away from his world, my world, for ten years. And he was nearly dying when I found him. Ten years, that’s all.”
“But what about Lord Boreal? Sir Charles? He was healthy enough, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, but remember, he could go back to his own world whenever he liked and get healthy again. That’s where you saw him first, after all, in your world. He must have found some secret window that no one else knew about.”
“Well, we could do that!”
“We could, except that…”
“All the windows must be closed,” said Pantalaimon. “All of them.”
“But how do you know ?” demanded Lyra.
“An angel told us,” said Kirjava. “We met an angel. She told us all about that, and other things as well. It’s true, Lyra.”
“She?” said Lyra passionately, suspicious.
“It was a female angel,” said Kirjava.
“I’ve never heard of one of them. Maybe she was lying.”
Will was thinking through another possibility. “Suppose they closed all the other windows,” he said, “and we just made one when we needed to, and went through as quickly as we could and closed it up immediately – that would be safe, surely? If we didn’t leave much time for Dust to go out?”
“Yes!”
“We’d make it where no one could ever find it,” he went on, “and only us two would know…”
“Oh, it would work! I’m sure it would!” she said.
“And we could go from one to the other, and stay healthy – ”
But the daemons were distressed, and Kirjava was murmuring, “No, no.”
And Pantalaimon said, “The Specters… She told us about the Specters, too.”
“The Specters?” said Will. “We saw them during the battle, for the first time. What about them?”
“Well, we found out where they come from,” said Kirjava. “And this is the worst thing: they’re like the children of the abyss. Every time we open a window with the knife, it makes a Specter. It’s like a little bit of the abyss that floats out and enters the world. That’s why the Cittаgazze world was so full of them, because of all the windows they left open there.”
“And they grow by feeding on Dust,” said Pantalaimon. “And on daemons. Because Dust and daemons are sort of similar; grown‑up daemons anyway. And the Specters get bigger and stronger as they do…”
Will felt a dull horror at his heart, and Kirjava pressed herself against his breast, feeling it, too, and trying to comfort him.
“So every time I’ve used the knife,” he said, “every single time, I’ve made another Specter come to life?”
He remembered Iorek Byrnison, in the cave where he’d forged the knife again, saying, “What you don’t know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions, too.”
Lyra’s eyes were watching him, wide with anguish.
“Oh, we can’t , Will!” she said. “We can’t do that to people – not let other Specters out, not now we’ve seen what they do!”
“All right,” he said, getting to his feet, holding his daemon close to his breast. “Then we’ll have to – one of us will have to – I’ll come to your world and…”
She knew what he was going to say, and she saw him holding the beautiful, healthy daemon he hadn’t even begun to know; and she thought of his mother, and she knew that he was thinking of her, too. To abandon her and live with Lyra, even for the few years they’d have together – could he do that? He might be living with Lyra, but she knew he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.
“No,” she cried, jumping up beside him, and Kirjava joined Pantalaimon on the sand as boy and girl clung together desperately. “I’ll do it, Will! We’ll come to your world and live there! It doesn’t matter if we get ill, me and Pan – we’re strong, I bet we last a good long time – and there are probably good doctors in your world – Dr. Malone would know! Oh, let’s do that!”
He was shaking his head, and she saw the brilliance of tears on his cheeks.
“D’you think I could bear that, Lyra?” he said. “D’you think I could live happily watching you get sick and ill and fade away and then die, while I was getting stronger and more grown‑up day by day? Ten years… That’s nothing. It’d pass in a flash. We’d be in our twenties. It’s not that far ahead. Think of that, Lyra, you and me grown up, just preparing to do all the things we want to do – and then… it all comes to an end. Do you think I could bear to live on after you died? Oh, Lyra, I’d follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours. No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good, long, busy lives, and if we can’t spend them together, we… we’ll have to spend them apart.”