At one point they came to a little lake, a patch of intense blue scarcely thirty yards across among the red rocks. They stopped there to drink and refill their flasks, and to soak their aching feet in the icy water. They stayed a few minutes and moved on, and soon afterward, when the sun was at its highest and hottest, Serafina Pekkala darted down to speak to them. She was agitated.
«I must leave you for a while,» she said. «Lee Scoresby needs me. I don't know why. But he wouldn't call if he didn't need my help. Keep going, and I'll find you.»
«Mr. Scoresby?» said Lyra, excited and anxious. «But where —»
But Serafina was gone, speeding out of sight before Lyra could finish the question. Lyra reached automatically for the alethiometer to ask what had happened to Lee Scoresby, but she let her hand drop, because she'd promised to do no more than guide Will.
She looked across to him. He was sitting nearby, his hand held loosely on his knee and still slowly dripping blood, his face scorched by the sun and pale under the burning.
«Will,» she said, «d'you know why you have to find your father?»
«It's what I've always known. My mother said I'd take up my father's mantle. That's all I know.»
«What does that mean, taking up his mantle? What's a mantle?»
«A task, I suppose. Whatever he's been doing, I've got to carry on. It makes as much sense as anything else.»
He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his right hand. What he couldn't say was that he longed for his father as a lost child yearns for home. That comparison wouldn't have occurred to him, because home was the place he kept safe for his mother, not the place others kept safe for him. But it had been five years now since that Saturday morning in the supermarket when the pretend game of hiding from the enemies became desperately real, such a long time in his life, and his heart craved to hear the words «Well done, well done, my child; no one on earth could have done better; I'm proud of you. Come and rest now….»
Will longed for that so much that he hardly knew he did. It was just part of what everything felt like. So he couldn't express that to Lyra now, though she could see it in his eyes, and that was new for her, too, to be quite so perceptive. The fact was that where Will was concerned, she was developing a new kind of sense, as if he were simply more in focus than anyone she'd known before. Everything about him was clear and close and immediate.
And she might have said that to him, but at that moment a witch flew down.
«I can see people behind us,» she said. «They're a long way back, but they're moving quickly. Shall I go closer and look?»
«Yes, do,» said Lyra, «but fly low, and hide, and don't let them see you.»
Will and Lyra got painfully to their feet again and clambered on.
«I been cold plenty of times,» Lyra said, to take her mind off the pursuers, «but I en't been this hot, ever. Is it this hot in your world?»
«Not where I used to live. Not normally. But the climate's been changing. The summers are hotter than they used to be. They say that people have been interfering with the atmosphere by putting chemicals in it, and the weather's going out of control.»
«Yeah, well, they have,» said Lyra, «and it is. And we're here in the middle of it.»
He was too hot and thirsty to reply, and they climbed on breathlessly in the throbbing air. Pantalaimon was a cricket now, and sat on Lyra's shoulder, too tired to leap or fly. From time to time the witches would see a spring high up, too high to climb to, and fly up to fill the children's flasks. They would soon have died without water, and there was none where they were; any spring that made its way into the air was soon swallowed again among the rocks.
And so they moved on, toward evening.
The witch who flew back to spy was called Lena Feldt. She flew low, from crag to crag, and as the sun was setting and drawing a wild blood-red out of the rocks, she came to the little blue lake and found a troop of soldiers making camp.
But her first glimpse of them told her more than she wanted to know; these soldiers had no daemons. And they weren't from Will's world, or the world of Cittagazze, where people's daemons were inside them, and where they still looked alive; these men were from her own world, and to see them without daemons was a gross and sickening horror.
Then out of a tent by the lakeside came the explanation. Lena Feldt saw a woman, a short-life, graceful in her khaki hunting clothes and as full of life as the golden monkey who capered along the water's edge beside her.
Lena Feldt hid among the rocks above and watched as Mrs. Coulter spoke to the officer in charge, and as his men put up tents, made fires, boiled water.
The witch had been among Serafma Pekkala's troop who rescued the children at Bolvangar, and she longed to shoot Mrs. Coulter on the spot; but some fortune was protecting the woman, for it was just too far for a bowshot from where she was, and the witch could get no closer without making herself invisible. So she began to make the spell. It took ten minutes of deep concentration.
Confident at last, Lena Feldt went down the rocky slope toward the lake, and as she walked through the camp, one or two blank-eyed soldiers glanced up briefly, but found what they saw too hard to remember, and looked away again. The witch stopped outside the tent Mrs. Coulter had gone into, and fitted an arrow to her bowstring.
She listened to the low voice through the canvas and then moved carefully to the open flap that overlooked the lake.
Inside the tent Mrs. Coulter was talking to a man Lena Feldt hadn't seen before: an older man, gray-haired and powerful, with a serpent daemon twined around his wrist. He was sitting in a canvas chair beside hers, and she was leaning toward him, speaking softly.
«Of course, Carlo,» she was saying, «I'll tell you anything you like. What do you want to know?»
«How do you command the Specters?» the man said. «I didn't think it possible, but you have them following you like dogs…. Are they afraid of your bodyguard? What is it?»
«Simple,» she said. «They know I can give them more nourishment if they let me live than if they consume me. I can lead them to all the victims their phantom hearts desire. As soon as you described them to me, I knew I could dominate them, and so it turns out. And a whole world trembles in the power of these pallid things! But, Carlo,» she whispered, «I can please you, too, you know. Would you like me to please you even more?»
«Marisa,» he murmured, «it's enough of a pleasure to be close to you….»
«No, it isn't, Carlo; you know it isn't. You know I can please you more than this.»
Her daemon's little black horny hands were stroking the serpent daemon. Little by little the serpent loosened herself and began to flow along the man's arm toward the monkey. Both the man and the woman were holding glasses of golden wine, and she sipped hers and leaned a little closer to him.
«Ah,» said the man as the daemon slipped slowly off his arm and let her weight into the golden monkey's hands. The monkey raised her slowly to his face and ran his cheek softly along her emerald skin. Her tongue flicked blackly this way and that, and the man sighed.
«Carlo, tell me why you're pursuing the boy,» Mrs. Coulter whispered, and her voice was as soft as the monkey's caress. «Why do you need to find him?»