Slowly, as if they were moving themselves in her mind, things joined up.
Will and Lyra had said that the subtle knife was three hundred years old at least. So the old man in the tower had told them.
The mulefa had told her that the sraf , which had nurtured their lives and their world for thirty‑three thousand years, had begun to fail just over three hundred years ago.
According to Will, the Guild of the Torre degli Angeli, the owners of the subtle knife, had been careless; they hadn’t always closed the windows they opened. Well, Mary had found one, after all, and there must be many others.
Suppose that all this time, little by little, Dust had been leaking out of the wounds the subtle knife had made in nature…
She felt dizzy, and it wasn’t only the swaying and rising and falling of the branches she was wedged among. She put the spyglass carefully in her pocket and hooked her arms over the branch in front, gazing at the sky, the moon, the scudding clouds.
The subtle knife was responsible for the small‑scale, low‑level leakage. It was damaging, and the universe was suffering because of it, and she must talk to Will and Lyra and find a way to stop it.
But the vast flood in the sky was another matter entirely. That was new, and it was catastrophic. And if it wasn’t stopped, all conscious life would come to an end. As the mulefa had shown her, Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves; but it needed some feedback system to reinforce it and make it safe, as the mulefa had their wheels and the oil from the trees. Without something like that, it would all vanish. Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly.
Mary felt the burden of it keenly. It felt like age. She felt eighty years old, worn out and weary and longing to die.
She climbed heavily out of the branches of the great fallen tree, and with the wind still wild in the leaves and the grass and her hair, set off back to the village.
At the summit of the slope she looked for the last time at the Dust stream, with the clouds and the wind blowing across it and the moon standing firm in the middle.
And then she saw what they were doing, at last: she saw what that great urgent purpose was.
They were trying to hold back the Dust flood. They were striving to put some barriers up against the terrible stream: wind, moon, clouds, leaves, grass, all those lovely things were crying out and hurling themselves into the struggle to keep the shadow particles in this universe, which they so enriched.
Matter loved Dust. It didn’t want to see it go. That was the meaning of this night, and it was Mary’s meaning, too.
Had she thought there was no meaning in life, no purpose, when God had gone? Yes, she had thought that.
“Well, there is now,” she said aloud, and again, louder: “There is now!”
As she looked again at the clouds and the moon in the Dust flow, they looked as frail and doomed as a dam of little twigs and tiny pebbles trying to hold back the Mississippi. But they were trying, all the same. They’d go on trying till the end of everything.
How long she stayed out, Mary didn’t know. When the intensity of her feeling began to subside, and exhaustion took its place, she made her way slowly down the hill toward the village.
And when she was halfway down, near a little grove of knot‑wood bushes, she saw something strange out on the mudflats. There was a glow of white, a steady movement: something coming up with the tide.
She stood still, gazing intently. It couldn’t be the tualapi , because they always moved in a flock, and this was on its own. But everything about it was the same – the sail‑like wings, the long neck – it was one of the birds, no doubt about it. She had never heard of their moving about alone, and she hesitated before running down to warn the villagers, because the thing had stopped, in any case. It was floating on the water close to the path.
And it was coming apart… No, something was getting off its back.
The something was a man.
She could see him quite clearly, even at that distance; the moonlight was brilliant, and her eyes were adjusted to it. She looked through the spyglass, and put the matter beyond doubt: it was a human figure, radiating Dust.
He was carrying something: a long stick of some kind. He came along the path quickly and easily, not running, but moving like an athlete or a hunter. He was dressed in simple dark clothes that would normally conceal him well; but through the spyglass he showed up as if he were under a spotlight.
And as he came closer to the village, she realized what that stick was. He was carrying a rifle.
She felt as if someone had poured icy water over her heart. Every separate hair on her flesh stirred.
She was too far away to do anything: even if she’d shouted, he wouldn’t have heard. She had to watch as he stepped into the village, looking to the left and right, stopping every so often to listen, moving from house to house.
Mary’s mind felt like the moon and the clouds trying to hold back the Dust as she cried out silently: Don’t look under the tree – go away from the tree –
But he moved closer and closer to it, finally stopping outside her own house. She couldn’t bear it; she put the spyglass in her pocket and began to run down the slope. She was about to call out, anything, a wild cry, but just in time she realized that it might wake Will or Lyra and make them reveal themselves, and she choked it back.
Then, because she couldn’t bear not knowing what the man was doing, she stopped and fumbled for the spyglass again, and had to stand still while she looked through it.
He was opening the door of her house. He was going inside it. He vanished from sight, although there was a stir in the Dust he left behind, like smoke when a hand is passed through it. Mary waited for an endless minute, and then he appeared again.
He stood in her doorway, looking around slowly from left to right, and his gaze swept past the tree.
Then he stepped off the threshold and stood still, almost at a loss. Mary was suddenly conscious of how exposed she was on the bare hillside, an easy rifle shot away, but he was only interested in the village; and when another minute or so had gone by, he turned and walked quietly away.
She watched every step he took down the river path, and saw quite clearly how he stepped onto the bird’s back and sat cross‑legged as it turned to glide away. Five minutes later they were lost to sight.
Chapter 35. Over The Hills And Far Away
“Dr. Malone,” said Lyra in the morning, “Will and me have got to look for our daemons. When we’ve found them, we’ll know what to do. But we can’t be without them for much longer. So we just want to go and look.”
“Where will you go?” said Mary, heavy‑eyed and headachy after her disturbed night. She and Lyra were on the riverbank, Lyra to wash, and Mary to look, surreptitiously, for the man’s footprints. So far she hadn’t found any.
“Don’t know,” said Lyra. “But they’re out there somewhere. As soon as we came through from the battle, they ran away as if they didn’t trust us anymore. Can’t say I blame them, either. But we know they’re in this world, and we thought we saw them a couple of times, so maybe we can find them.”
“Listen,” Mary said reluctantly, and told Lyra about the man she’d seen the night before.
As she spoke, Will came to join them, and both he and Lyra listened, wide‑eyed and serious.