TWO - BALTHAMOS AND BARUCH-1
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It was just after Lyra had been taken, just after Will had e down from the mountaintop, just after the witch had killed his father. Will lit the little tin lanteraken from his fathers pack, using the dry matches that hed found with it, and crouched in the lee of the rock to open Lyras rucksack.He felt ih his good hand and found the heavy velvet-ed alethiometer. It glittered in the lantern light, and he held it out to the two shapes that stood beside him, the shapes who called themselves angels.
" you read this?" he said.
"No," said a voice. "e with us. You must e. e now to Lord Asriel."
"Who made you follow my father? You said he didnt know you were following him. But he did," Will said fiercely. "He told me to expect you. He knew more than you thought. Who sent you?"
"No o us. Ourselves only," came the voice. "We want to serve Lord Asriel. And the dead man, what did he want you to do with the knife?"
Will had to hesitate.
"He said I should take it to Lord Asriel," he said.
"Then e with us."
"No. Not till Ive found Lyra."
He folded the velvet over the alethiometer and put it into his rucksack. Seg it, he swung his fathers heavy cloak around him against the rain and crouched where he was, looking steadily at the two shadows.
"Do you tell the truth?" he said.
"Yes."
"Then are you strohan human beings, or weaker?"
"Weaker. You have true flesh, we have not. Still, you must e with us."
"No. If Im stronger, you have to obey me. Besides, I have the knife. So I and you: help me find Lyra. I dont care how long it takes, Ill find her first and then Ill go to Lord Asriel."
The two figures were silent for several seds. Then they drifted away and spoke together, though
Will could hear nothing of what they said.
Finally they came close again, and he heard:
"Very well. You are making a mistake, though you give us no choice. We shall help you find this child."
Will tried to pierce the darkness ahem more clearly, but the rain filled his eyes.
"e closer so I see you," he said.
They approached, but seemed to bee even more obscure.
"Shall I see you better in daylight?"
"No, worse. We are not of a high order among angels."
"Well, if I t see you, no one else will, either, so you stay hidden. Go and see if you find where Lyras gone. She surely t be far away. There was a woman, shell be with her, the woman took her. Go and search, and e bad tell me what you see."
The angels rose up into the stormy air and vanished. Will felt a great sullen heaviness settle over him; hed had little strength left before the fight with his father, and now he was nearly finished. All he wao do was close his eyes, which were so heavy and so sore with weeping.
He tugged the cloak over his head, clutched the rucksack to his breast, and fell asleep in a moment.
"Nowhere," said a voice.
Will heard it in the depths of sleep and struggled to wake. Eventually (and it took most of a minute, because he was so profoundly unscious) he mao open his eyes to the bright m in front of him.
"Where are you?" he said.
"Beside you," said the angel. "This way."
The sun was newly risen, and the rocks and the lis and mosses on them shone crisp and brilliant in the m light, but nowhere could he see a figure.
"I said we would be harder to see in daylight," the voice went on. "You will see us best at half-light, at dusk or daw best in darkness; least of all in the sunshine. My panion and I searched farther down the mountain, and fouher woman nor child. But there is a lake of blue water where she must have camped. There is a dead man there, and a witch eaten by a Specter."
"A dead man? What does he look like?"
"He was in late middle age. Fleshy and smooth-skinned. Silver-gray hair. Dressed in expensive clothes, and with traces of a heavy st around him."
"Sir Charles," said Will. "Thats who it is. Mrs. Coulter must have killed him. Well, thats something good, at least."
"She left traces. My panion has followed them, and he will return when hes found out where she went. I shall stay with you."
Will got to his feet and looked around. The storm had cleared the air, and the m was fresh and , whily made the se around him more distressing; for nearby lay the bodies of several of the witches who had escorted him and Lyra toward the meeting with his father. Already a brutal-beaked carrion crow was tearing at the face of one of them, and Will could see a bigger bird cirg above, as if choosing the richest feast.
Will looked at each of the bodies in turn, but none of them was Serafina Pekkala, the queen of the witch , Lyras particular friend. Then he remembered: hadnt she left suddenly on another errand, not long before the evening?
So she might still be alive. The thought cheered him, and he sed the horizon for any sign of her, but found nothing but the blue air and the sharp ro every dire he looked.
"Where are you?" he said to the angel.
"Beside you," came the voice, "as always."
Will looked to his left, where the voice was, but saw nothing.
"So no one see you. Could anyone else hear you as well as me?"
"Not if I whisper," said the aartly.
"What is your name? Do you have names?"
"Yes, we do. My name is Balthamos. My panion is Baruch."
Will sidered what to do. When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you dont take are snuffed out like dles, as if theyd never existed. At the moment all Wills choices existed at once. But to keep them all ience meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.
"Well go back down the mountain," he said. "Well go to that lake. There might be something there I use. And Im getting thirsty anyway. Ill take the way I think it is and you guide me if I g."
It was only when hed been walking for several minutes dowhless, rocky slope that Will realized his hand wasnt hurting. In fact, he hadnt thought of his wound since he woke up.
He stopped and looked at the rough cloth that his father had bound around it after their fight. It was greasy with the oi hed spread on it, but there was not a sign of blood; and after the incessant bleeding hed undergone sihe fingers had been lost, this was so wele that he felt his heart leap almost with joy.
He moved his fingers experimentally. True, the wounds still hurt, but with a different quality of pain: not the deep life-sapping ache of the day before, but a smaller, duller sensation. It felt as if it were healing. His father had dohat. The witches spell had failed, but his father had healed him.
He moved on down the slope, cheered.
It took three hours, and several words of guidance, before he came to the little blue lake. By the time he reached it, he arched with thirst, and in the baking sun the cloak was heavy and hot, though wheook it off, he missed its cover, for his bare arms and neck were soon burning. He dropped cloak and rucksad ran the last few yards to the water, to fall on his fad swallow mouthful after freezing mouthful. It was so cold that it made his teeth and skull ache.
Once hed slaked the thirst, he sat up and looked around. Hed been in no dition to notice things the day before, but now he saw more clearly the intense color of the water, and heard the strident i noises from all around.
"Balthamos?"
"Always here."
"Where is the dead man?"
"Beyond the high ro yht."
"Are there any Specters around?"
"No, none. I dont have anything the Specters want, and nor have you."
Will took up his rucksad cloak and made his way along the edge of the lake and up onto the rock Balthamos had pointed out.
Beyond it a little camp had bee up, with five or six tents and the remains of cooking fires. Will moved down warily in case there was someoill alive and hiding.
But the silence rofound, with the i scrapings only scratg at the surface of it. The tents were still, the water lacid, with the ripples still drifting slowly out from where hed been drinking. A flicker of green movement near his foot made him start briefly, but it was only a tiny lizard.
The tents were made of camouflage material, whily made them stand out more among the dull red
rocks. He looked in the first and found it empty. So was the sed, but ihird he found something valuable: a mess tin and a box of matches. There was also a strip of some dark substance as long and as thick as his forearm. At first he thought it was leather, but in the sunlight he saw it clearly to be dried meat.
Well, he had a knife, after all. He cut a thin sliver and found it chewy and very slightly salty, but full of good flavor. He put the meat and the matches together with the mess tin into his rucksad searched the other tents, but found them empty.
He left the largest till last.
"Is that where the dead man is?" he said to the air.
"Yes," said Balthamos. "He has been poisoned."
Will walked carefully around to the entrance, which faced the lake. Sprawled beside aurned vas chair was the body of the man known in Wills world as Sir Charles Latrom, and in Lyras as Lord Boreal, the man who stole her alethiometer, which theft in turn led Will to the subtle kself. Sir Charles had been smooth, disho, and powerful, and now he was dead. His face was distorted unpleasantly, and Will didnt want to look at it, but a glanside the tent showed that there were plenty of things to steal, so he stepped over the body to look more closely.
His father, the soldier, the explorer, would have knowly what to take. Will had to guess. He took a small magnifying glass in a steel case, because he could use it to light fires and save his matches; a reel of tough twine; an alloy teen for water, much lighter than the goatskin flask he had been carrying, and a small tin cup; a small pair of binoculars; a roll of gold s the size of a mans thumb, ed in paper; a first-aid kit; water-purifying tablets; a packet of coffee; three packs of pressed dried fruit; a bag of oatmeal biscuits; six bars of Kendal Mint Cake; a packet of fishhooks and nylon line; and finally, a notebook and a couple of pencils, and a small electric torch.
He packed it all in his rucksack, cut another sliver of meat, filled his belly and then his teen from the lake, and said to Balthamos:
"Do you think I need anything else?"
"You could do with some sense," came the reply. "Some faculty to enable you tnize wisdom and ine you to resped obey it."
"Are you wise?"
"Much more so than you."
"Well, you see, I t tell. Are you a man? You sound like a man."
"Baruch was a man. I was not. Now he is angelic."
"So...” Will stopped what he was doing, which was arranging his rucksack so the heaviest objects were itom, and tried to see the ahere was nothing there to see. "So he was a man," he went on, "and then... Do people bee angels when they die? Is that what happens?"
"Not always. Not in the vast majority of cases...Very rarely."
"When was he alive, then?"
"Four thousand years ago, more or less. I am much older."
"And did he live in my world? Or Lyras? Or this one?"
"In yours. But there are myriads of worlds. You know that."
"But how do people bee angels?"
"What is the point of this metaphysical speculation?"
"I just want to know."
"Better to stick to your task. You have pluhis dead mans property, you have all the toys you o keep you alive; now may we move on?"
"When I know which way to go."
"Whichever way we go, Baruch will find us."
"Then hell still find us if we stay here. Ive got a couple more things to do."
Will sat down where he couldnt see Sir Charless body and ate three squares of the Kendal Mint Cake. It was wonderful how refreshed and strengthened he felt as the food began to nourish him. Then he looked at the alethiometer again. The thirty-six little pictures painted on ivory were each perfectly clear: there was no doubt that this was a baby, that a puppet, this a loaf of bread, and so on. It was what they meant that was obscure.
"How did Lyra read this?" he said to Balthamos.
"Quite possibly she made it up. Those who use these instruments have studied for many years, and evehey only uand them with the help of many books of reference."
"She wasnt making it up. She read it truly. She told me things she could never have known otherwise."
"Then it is as much of a mystery to me, I assure you," said the angel.
Looking at the alethiometer, Will remembered something Lyra had said about reading it: something about the state of mind she had to be in to make it work. It had helped him, in turn, to feel the subtleties of the silver blade.
Feeling curious, he took out the knife and cut a small window in front of where he was sitting. Through it he saw nothing but blue air, but below, far below, was a landscape of trees and fields: his own world, without a doubt.
So mountains in this world didnt correspond to mountains in his. He closed the window, using his left hand for the first time. The joy of being able to use it again!
Then an idea came to him so suddenly it felt like aric shock.
If there were myriads of worlds, why did the knife only open windows between this one and his own?
Surely it should cut into any of them.
He held it up agaiing his mind flow along to the very tip of the blade as Giao Paradisi had told him, until his sciousness led among the atoms themselves and he felt every tiny snag and ripple in the air.
Instead of cutting as soon as he felt the first little halt, as he usually did, he let the knife move on to another and another. It was like trag a row of stitches while pressing so softly that none of them was harmed.
"What are you doing?" said the voice from the air, bringing him back.
"Expl," said Will. "Be quiet and keep out of the way. If you e his youll get cut, and if I t see you, I t avoid you."
Balthamos made a sound of muted distent. Will held out the knife again a for those tiny halts aations.
There were far more of them thahought. And as he felt them without the o cut through at once, he found that they each had a different quality: this one was hard and defihat one cloudy; a third was slippery, a fourth brittle and frail...
But among them all there were some he felt more easily than others, and, already knowing the answer, he cut ohrough to be sure: his own world again.
He closed it up a with the kip for a snag with a different quality. He found ohat was elastid resistant, ahe knife feel its way through.
Ahe world he saw through that window was not his own: the ground was closer here, and the landscape was not green fields and hedges but a desert of rolling dunes.
He closed it and opened ahe smoke-laden air over an industrial city, with a line of ed and
sullen workers trudging into a factory.
He closed that ooo, and came baself. He felt a little dizzy. For the first time he uood some of the true power of the knife, and laid it very carefully on the ro front of him.
"Are you going to stay here all day?" said Balthamos.
"Im thinking. You only move easily from one world to another if the grounds in the same place. And maybe there are places where it is, and maybe thats where a lo藏书网t of cutting-through happens... And youd have to know what your own world felt like with the point or you might never get back. Youd be lost forever."
"Indeed. But may we...”
"And youd have to know which world had the ground in the same place, or there wouldnt be any point in opening it," said Will, as muself as to the angel. "So its not as easy as I thought. We were just lucky in Oxford and Cittagazze, maybe. But Ill just..."
He picked up the knife again. As well as the clear and obvious feeli wheouched a point that would open to his own world, there had been another kind of sensatioouched more than once: a quality of resonance, like the feeling of striking a heavy w藏书网ooden drum, except of course that it came, like every other one, ii movement through the empty air.
There it was. He moved away a somewhere else: there it was again.
He cut through and found that his guess was right. The resonance meant that the ground in the world hed opened was in the same place as this one. He found himself looking at a grassy upland meadow under an overcast sky, in which a herd of placid beasts was grazing, animals such as hed never seen before, creatures the size of bison, with wide horns and shaggy blue fur an<mark>?</mark>d a crest of stiff hair along their backs.
He stepped through. The animal looked up incuriously and then turned back to the grass. Leaving the window open, Will, iher-world meadow, felt with the knifepoint for the familiar snags and tried them.
Yes, he could open his own world from this one, and he was still high above the farms and hedges; and yes, he could easily find the solid resohat meant the Cittagazze-world hed jus<samp>.99ｌib.</samp>t left.
With a deep sense of relief, Will went back to the camp by the lake, closing everything behind him. Now he could find his way home; now he would not get lost; now he could hide when he o, and move about safely.
With every increase in his knowledge came a gain in strength. He sheathed the k his waist and swung the rucksack over his shoulder.
"Well, are you ready now?" said that sarcastic voice.
"Yes. Ill explain if you like, but you dont seem very ied."
"Oh, I find whatever you do a source of perpetual fasation. But never mind me. What are you going to say to these people who are ing?"
Will looked around, startled. Farther dowrail, a long way down, there was a line of travelers with packhorses, making their way steadily up toward the lake. They hadnt seen him yet, but if he stayed where he was, they would soon.
Will gathered up his fathers cloak, which hed laid over a ro the sun. It weighed much less now that it was dry. He looked around: there was nothing else he could carry.
"Lets go farther on," he said.
He would have liked to retie the bandage, but it could wait. He set off along the edge of the lake, away from the travelers, and the angel followed him, invisible in the bright air.
Much later that day they came down from the bare mountains onto a spur covered in grass and dwarf rhododendrons. Will was ag for rest, and soon, he decided, hed stop.
Hed heard little from the angel. From time to time Balthamos had said, "Not that way," or "There is an easier path to the left," and hed accepted the advice; but really he was moving for the sake of moving, and to keep away from those travelers, because until the el came back with more news, he might as well have stayed where they were.
Now the sun was setting, he thought he could see his strange panion. The outline of a man seemed to quiver in the light, and the air was thicker i.
"Balthamos?" he said. "I want to find a stream. Is there one nearby ?"
"There is a spring halfway down the slope," said the angel, "just above those trees."
"Thank you," said Will.
He found the spring and drank deeply, filling his teen. But before he could go on down to the little wood, there came an exclamation from Balthamos, and Will turo see his outline dart across the slope toward, what? The angel was visible only as a flicker of movement, and Will could see him better when he didnt look at him directly; but he seemed to pause, and listen, and then launch himself into the air to skim back swiftly to Will.
"Here!" he said, and his voice was free of disapproval and sarcasm for once. "Baruch came this way! And there is one of those windows, almost invisible. e, e. e now."
Will followed eagerly, his weariness fotten. The window, he saw when he reached it, opened onto a dim, tundra-like landscape that was flatter than the mountains itagazze world, and colder, with an overcast sky. He went through, and Balthamos followed him at once.
"Which world is this?" Will said.
"The girls own world. This is where they came through. Baruch has gone ahead to follow them."
"How do you know? Do you read his mind?"
"Of course I read his mind. Wherever he goes, my heart goes with him; we feel as ohough we are two."
Will looked around. There was no sign of human life, and the chill in the air was increasing by the min<cite></cite>ute as the light failed.
"I dont want to sleep here," he said. "Well stay itagazze world for the night and e through in the m. At least theres wood back there, and I make a fire. And now I know what her world feels like, I find it with the knife...Oh, Balthamos? you take any other shape?"
"Why would I wish to do that?"
"In this world human beings have daemons, and if I go about without oheyll be suspicious. Lyra was frightened of me at first because of that. So if were going to travel in her world, youll have to pretend to be my daemon, and take the shape of some animal. A bird, maybe. Then you could fly, at least."
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