They met at the seventh of their appointed meeting places, among the roots of a plane tree in a shabby little square, and exchanged their news. The Lady Salmakia’s contact in the Society had told her that earlier that evening they had received a friendly invitation from the President of the Consistorial Court to come and discuss matters of mutual interest.
“Quick work,” said the Chevalier. “A hundred to one he doesn’t tell them about his assassin, though.”
He told her about the plan to kill Lyra. She was not surprised.
“It’s the logical thing to do,” she said. “Very logical people. Tialys, do you think we shall ever see this child?”
“I don’t know, but I should like to. Go well, Salmakia. Tomorrow at the fountain.”
Unsaid behind that brief exchange was the one thing they never spoke of: the shortness of their lives compared with those of humans. Gallivespians lived to nine years or ten, rarely more, and Tialys and Salmakia were both in their eighth year. They didn’t fear old age – their people died in the full strength and vigor of their prime, suddenly, and their childhoods were very brief – but compared with their lives, the life of a child like Lyra would extend as far into the future as the lives of the witches extended past Lyra’s own.
The Chevalier returned to the College of St. Jerome and began to compose the message he would send to Lord Roke on the lodestone resonator.
But while Tialys was at the rendezvous talking to Salmakia, the President sent for Father Gomez. In his study they prayed together for an hour, and then Father MacPhail granted the young priest the preemptive absolution that would make his murder of Lyra no murder at all. Father Gomez seemed transfigured; the certainty that ran through his veins seemed to make his very eyes incandescent.
They discussed practical arrangements, money, and so forth; and then the President said, “Once you leave here, Father Gomez, you will be completely cut off, forever, from any help we can give. You can never come back; you will never hear from us. I can’t offer you any better advice than this: don’t look for the child. That would give you away. Instead, look for the tempter. Follow the tempter, and she will lead you to the child.”
“She?” said Father Gomez, shocked.
“Yes, she ,” said Father MacPhail. “We have learned that much from the alethiometer. The world the tempter comes from is a strange one. You will see many things that will shock and startle you, Father Gomez. Don’t let yourself be distracted by their oddness from the sacred task you have to do. I have faith,” he added kindly, “in the power of your faith. This woman is traveling, guided by the powers of evil, to a place where she may, eventually, meet the child in time to tempt her. That is, of course, if we do not succeed in removing the girl from her present location. That remains our first plan. You, Father Gomez, are our ultimate guarantee that if that falls through, the infernal powers will still not prevail.”
Father Gomez nodded. His daemon, a large and iridescent green‑backed beetle, clicked her wing cases.
The President opened a drawer and handed the young priest a folded packet of papers.
“Here is all we know about the woman,” he said, “and the world she comes from, and the place she was last seen. Read it well, my dear Luis, and go with my blessing.”
He had never used the priest’s given name before. Father Gomez felt tears of joy prick his eyes as he kissed the President farewell.
you’re Lyra.”
Then she realized what that meant. She felt dizzy, even in her dream; she felt a great burden settle on her shoulders. And to make it even heavier, sleep was closing in again, and Roger’s face was receding into shadow.
“Well, I… I know…There’s all kinds of people on our side, like Dr. Malone… You know there’s another Oxford, Roger, just like ours. Well, she… I found her in…She’d help… But there’s only one person really who…”
It was almost impossible now to see the little boy, and her thoughts were spreading out and wandering away like sheep in a field.
“But we can trust him, Roger, I swear,” she said with a final effort,
Chapter 7. Mary, Alone
Almost at the same time, the tempter whom Father Gomez was setting out to follow was being tempted herself.
“Thank you, no, no, that’s all I need, no more, honestly, thank you,” said Dr. Mary Malone to the old couple in the olive grove as they tried to give her more food than she could carry.
They lived here isolated and childless, and they had been afraid of the Specters they’d seen among the silver‑gray trees; but when Mary Malone came up the road with her rucksack, the Specters had taken fright and drifted away. The old couple had welcomed Mary into their little vine‑sheltered farmhouse, had plied her with wine and cheese and bread and olives, and now didn’t want to let her go.
“I must go on,” said Mary again, “thank you, you’ve been very kind – I can’t carry – oh, all right, another little cheese – thank you – ”
They evidently saw her as a talisman against the Specters. She wished she could be. In her week in the world of Cittаgazze, she had seen enough devastation, enough Specter‑eaten adults and wild, scavenging children, to have a horror of those ethereal vampires. All she knew was that they did drift away when she approached; but she couldn’t stay with everyone who wanted her to, because she had to move on.
She found room for the last little goat’s cheese wrapped in its vine leaf, smiled and bowed again, and took a last drink from the spring that bubbled up among the gray rocks. Then she clapped her hands gently together as the old couple were doing, and turned firmly away and left.
She looked more decisive than she felt. The last communication with those entities she called shadow particles, and Lyra called Dust, had been on the screen of her computer, and at their instruction she had destroyed that. Now she was at a loss. They’d told her to go through the opening in the Oxford she had lived in, the Oxford of Will’s world, which she’d done – to find herself dizzy and quaking with wonder in this extraordinary other world. Beyond that, her only task was to find the boy and the girl, and then play the serpent, whatever that meant.
So she’d walked and explored and inquired, and found nothing. But now, she thought, as she turned up the little track away from the olive grove, she would have to look for guidance.
Once she was far enough away from the little farmstead to be sure she wouldn’t be disturbed, she sat under the pine trees and opened her rucksack. At the bottom, wrapped in a silk scarf, was a book she’d had for twenty years: a commentary on the Chinese method of divination, the I Ching.
She had taken it with her for two reasons. One was sentimentaclass="underline" her grandfather had given it to her, and she had used it a lot as a schoolgirl. The other was that when Lyra had first found her way to Mary’s laboratory, she had asked: “What’s that?” and pointed to the poster on the door that showed the symbols from the I Ching; and shortly afterward, in her spectacular reading of the computer, Lyra had learned (she claimed) that Dust had many other ways of speaking to human beings, and one of them was the method from China that used those symbols.
So in her swift packing to leave her own world, Mary Malone had taken with her the Book of Changes , as it was called, and the little yarrow stalks with which she read it. And now the time had come to use them.