Biting her lip, she watched him as he walked up and down in his distracted anguish.
He stopped and turned, and went on: “D’you remember another thing he said, my father? He said we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are. He said that for us there isn’t any elsewhere. That’s what he meant, I can see now. Oh, it’s too bitter. I thought he just meant Lord Asriel and his new world, but he meant us, he meant you and me. We have to live in our own worlds…”
“I’m going to ask the alethiometer,” Lyra said. “That’ll know! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
She sat down, wiping her cheeks with the palm of one hand and reaching for the rucksack with the other. She carried it everywhere; when Will thought of her in later years, it was often with that little bag over her shoulder. She tucked the hair behind her ears in the swift movement he loved and took out the black velvet bundle.
“Can you see?” he said, for although the moon was bright, the symbols around the face were very small.
“I know where they all are,” she said, “I got it off by heart. Hush now…”
She crossed her legs, pulling the skirt over them to make a lap. Will lay on one elbow and watched. The bright moonlight, reflected off the white sand, lit up her face with a radiance that seemed to draw out some other radiance from inside her; her eyes glittered, and her expression was so serious and absorbed that Will could have fallen in love with her again if love didn’t already possess every fiber of his being.
Lyra took a deep breath and began to turn the wheels. But after only a few moments, she stopped and turned the instrument around.
“Wrong place,” she said briefly, and tried again.
Will, watching, saw her beloved face clearly. And because he knew it so well, and he’d studied her expression in happiness and despair and hope and sorrow, he could tell that something was wrong; for there was no sign of the clear concentration she used to sink into so quickly. Instead, an unhappy bewilderment spread gradually over her: she bit her lower lip, she blinked more and more, and her eyes moved slowly from symbol to symbol, almost at random, instead of darting swiftly and certainly.
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head, “I don’t know what’s happening… I know it so well, but I can’t seem to see what it means…”
She took a deep, shuddering breath and turned the instrument around. It looked strange and awkward in her hands. Pantalaimon, mouse‑formed, crept into her lap and rested his black paws on the crystal, peering at one symbol after another. Lyra turned one wheel, turned another, turned the whole thing around, and then looked up at Will, stricken.
“Oh, Will,” she cried, “I can’t do it! It’s left me!”
“Hush,” he said, “don’t fret. It’s still there inside you, all that knowledge. Just be calm and let yourself find it. Don’t force it. Just sort of float down to touch it…”
She gulped and nodded and angrily brushed her wrist across her eyes, and took several deep breaths; but he could see she was too tense, and he put his hands on her shoulders and then felt her trembling and hugged her tight. She pulled back and tried again. Once more she gazed at the symbols, once more she turned the wheels, but those invisible ladders of meaning down which she’d stepped with such ease and confidence weren’t there. She just didn’t know what any of the symbols meant.
She turned away and clung to Will and said desperately:
“It’s no good – I can tell – it’s gone forever – it just came when I needed it, for all the things I had to do, for rescuing Roger, and then for us two, and now that it’s over, now that everything’s finished, it’s just left me… It’s gone, Will! I’ve lost it! It’ll never come back!”
She sobbed with desperate abandon. All he could do was hold her. He didn’t know how to comfort her, because it was plain that she was right.
Then both the daemons bristled and looked up. Will and Lyra sensed it, too, and followed their eyes to the sky. A light was moving toward them: a light with wings.
“It’s the angel we saw,” said Pantalaimon, guessing.
He guessed correctly. As the boy and the girl and the two daemons watched her approach, Xaphania spread her wings wider and glided down to the sand. Will, for all the time he’d spent in the company of Balthamos, wasn’t prepared for the strangeness of this encounter. He and Lyra held each other’s hands tightly as the angel came toward them, with the light of another world shining on her. She was unclothed, but that meant nothing. What clothes could an angel wear anyway? Lyra thought. It was impossible to tell if she was old or young, but her expression was austere and compassionate, and both Will and Lyra felt as if she knew them to their hearts.
“Will,” she said, “I have come to ask your help.”
“My help? How can I help you?”
“I want you to show me how to close the openings that the knife makes.”
Will swallowed. “I’ll show you,” he said, “and in return, can you help us?”
“Not in the way you want. I can see what you’ve been talking about. Your sorrow has left traces in the air. This is no comfort, but believe me, every single being who knows of your dilemma wishes things could be otherwise; but there are fates that even the most powerful have to submit to. There is nothing I can do to help you change the way things are.”
“Why – ” Lyra began, and found her voice weak and trembling – ”why can’t I read the alethiometer anymore? Why can’t I even do that? That was the one thing I could do really well, and it’s just not there anymore – it just vanished as if it had never come…”
“You read it by grace,” said Xaphania, looking at her, “and you can regain it by work.”
“How long will that take?”
“A lifetime.”
“That long…”
“But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you.”
“You mean a full lifetime, don’t you?” Lyra whispered. “A whole long life? Not… not just… a few years…”
“Yes, I do,” said the angel.
“And must all the windows be closed?” said Will. “Every single one?”
“Understand this,” said Xaphania: “Dust is not a constant. There’s not a fixed quantity that has always been the same. Conscious beings make Dust – they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on.
“And if you help everyone else in your worlds to do that, by helping them to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious… Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost through one window. So there could be one left open.”
Will trembled with excitement, and his mind leapt to a single point: to a new window in the air between his world and Lyra’s. And it would be their secret, and they could go through whenever they chose, and live for a while in each other’s worlds, not living fully in either, so their daemons would keep their health; and they could grow up together and maybe, much later on, they might have children, who would be secret citizens of two worlds; and they could bring all the learning of one world into the other, they could do all kinds of good –