THIRTY - THE CLOUDED MOUNTAIN
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The iion craft was being piloted by Mrs. Coulter. She and her daemon were alone in the cockpit.The barometric altimeter was little use iorm, but she could judge her altitude roughly by watg the fires on the ground that blazed where angels fell; despite the hurtling rain, they were still flaring high. As for the course, that wasnt difficult, either: the lightning that flickered around the Mountain served as a brilliant bea. But she had to avoid the various flying beings who were still fighting in the air, and keep clear of the rising land below.
She didnt use the lights, because she wao get close and find somewhere to land before they saw her and shot her down. As she flew closer, the updrafts became more violent, the gusts more sudden and brutal. A gyropter would have had no ce: the savage air would have slammed it to the ground like a fly. Iention craft she could move lightly with the wind, adjusting her balance like a wave rider in the Peaceable O.
Cautiously she began to climb, peering forward, ign the instruments and flying by sight and by instinct. Her daemo from one side of the little glass to the other, looking ahead, above, to the left and right, and calling to her stantly. The lightning, great sheets and lances of brilliance, flared and cracked above and around the mae. Through it all she flew itle aircraft, gaini little by little, and always moving on toward the cloud-hung palace.
And as Mrs. Coulter approached, she foutention dazzled and bewildered by the nature of the Mountain itself.
It reminded her of a certain abominable heresy, whose author was now deservedly languishing in the dungeons of the sistorial Court. He had suggested that there were more spatial dimensions thahree familiar ohat on a very small scale, there were up to seven ht other dimensions, but that they were impossible to examine directly. He had even structed a model to show how they might work, and Mrs. Coulter had seen the object before it was exorcised and burned. Folds within folds, ers and edges both taining and being tained: its inside was everywhere and its outside was everywhere else. The Clouded Mountain affected her in a similar way: it was less like a rock than like a force field, manipulating space itself to enfold and stretd layer it into galleries and terraces, chambers and nades and watchtowers of air and light and vapor.
She felt a straation welling slowly in her breast, and she saw at the same time how t the aircraft safely up to the clouded terra the southern flank. The little craft lurched and strained iurbid air, but she held the course firm, and her daemon guided her down to land oerrace.
The light shed seen by till now had e from the lightning, the occasional gashes in the cloud where the sun struck through, the fires from the burning angels, the beams of an-baric searchlights; but the light here was different. It came from the substance of the Mountain itself, which glowed and faded in a slow breathlike rhythm, with a mother-of-pearl radiance.
Woman and daemon got down from the craft and looked around to see which way they should go.
She had the feeling that other beings were moving rapidly above and below, speeding through the substance of the Mountain itself with messages, orders, information. She couldhem; all she could see was fusing, infolded perspectives of aircase, terrace, and facade.
Before she could make up her mind which way to go, she heard voices and withdrew behind a n. The voices were singing a psalm and ing closer, and then she sarocession of angels carrying a litter.
As they he place where she was hiding, they saw the iion craft and stopped. The singing faltered, and some of the bearers looked around in doubt and fear.
Mrs. Coulter was close enough to see the being iter: an angel, she thought, and indescribably aged. He wasnt easy to see, because the litter was enclosed all around with crystal that glittered and threw back the enveloping light of the Mountain, but she had the impression of terrifying decrepitude, of a face sunken in wrinkles, of trembling hands, and of a mumbling mouth and rheumy eyes.
The aged beiured shakily at the iion craft, and cackled and muttered to himself, plug incessantly at his beard, and then threw back his head and uttered a howl of suguish that Mrs. Coulter had to cover her ears.
But evidently the bearers had a task to do, for they gathered themselves and moved farther along the terrace, ign the cries and mumbles from ihe litter. When they reached an open space, they spread their wings wide, and at a word from their leader they began to fly, carrying the litter between them, until they were lost to Mrs. Coulters sight in the swirling vapors.
But there wasnt time to think about that. She and the golden monkey moved on quickly, climbing great staircases, crossing bridges, always moving upward. The higher they went, the more they felt that sense of invisible activity all around them, until finally they turned a er into a wide space like a mist-hung piazza, and found themselves fronted by an angel with a spear.
"Who are you? What is your business?" he said.
Mrs. Coulter looked at him curiously. These were the beings who had fallen in love with human women, with the daughters of men, so long ago.
"No, no," she said gently, "please dont waste time. Take me to the Regent at once. Hes waiting for me."
Discert them, she thought, keep them off balance; and this angel did not know what he should do, so he did as she told him. She followed him for some mihrough those fusing perspectives of light, until they came to an antechamber. How they had entered, she didnt know, but there they were, and after a brief pause, something in front of her opened like a door.
Her daemons sharp nails were pressing into the flesh of her upper arms, and she gripped his fur for reassurance. Fag them was a being made of light. He was man-shaped, man-sized, she thought, but she was too dazzled to see. The golden monkey hid his fa her shoulder, and she threw up an arm to hide her eyes.
Metatron said, "Where is she? Where is your daughter?"
"Ive e to tell you, my Lent," she said.
"If she was in your power, you would have brought her."
"She is not, but her daemon is."
"How that be?"
"I swear, Metatron, her daemon is in my power. Please, great Regent, hide yourself a little, my eyes are dazzled..."
He drew a veil of cloud in front of himself. Now it was like looking at the sun through smoked glass, and her eyes coul<var>?９9lｉb?</var>d see him more clearly, though she still preteo be dazzled by his face. He was exactly like a man in early middle age, tall, powerful, and anding. Was he clothed? Did he have wings? She couldnt tell because of the force of his eyes. She could look at nothing else.
"Please, Metatron, hear me. I have just e from Lord Asrie<cite></cite>l. He has the childs daemon, and he knows that the child will soon e to search for him."
"What does he want with the child?"
"To keep her from you until she es of age. He doesnt know where Ive gone, and I must go ba soon. Im telling you the truth. Look at me, great Regent, as I t easily look at you. Look at me clearly, and tell me what you see."
The prince of the angels looked at her. It was the most searg examination Marisa Coulter had ever undergone. Every scrap of shelter a was stripped away, and she stood naked, body and ghost and daemon together, uhe ferocity of Metatrons gaze.
And she khat her nature would have to answer for her, and she was terrified that what he saw in her would be insuffit. Lyra had lied to Iofur Raknison with her words; her mother was lying with her whole life.
"Yes, I see," said Metatron.
"What do you see?"
"Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and ess. A vicious, probing curiosity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of passion or sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage. You have tortured and killed withret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cesspit of moral filth."
That voice, delivering that judgment, shook Mrs. Coulter profoundly. She k was ing, and she dreaded it; a she hoped for it, too, and now that it had been said, she felt a little gush of triumph.
She moved closer to him.
"So you see," she said, "I betray him easily. I lead you to where hes taking my daughters daemon, and you destroy Asriel, and the child will walk unsuspeg into your hands."
She felt the movement of vapor about her, and her senses became fused. His words pierced her flesh like darts of sted ice.
"When I was a man," he said, "I had wives iy, but none was as lovely as you."
"When you were a man?"
"When I was a man, I was known as Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son of Kenan, the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam. I lived oh for sixty-five years, and thehority took me to his Kingdom."
"And you had many wives."
"I loved their flesh. And I uood it when the sons of Heaven fell ibbr></abbr>n love with the daughters of earth, and I pleaded their cause with the Authority. But his heart was fixed against them, and he made me prophesy their doom."
"And you have not known a wife for thousands of years..."
"I have bee of the Kingdom."
"And is it not time you had a sort?"
That was the moment she felt most exposed and in most danger. But she trusted to her flesh, and to the straruth shed learned about angels, perhaps especially those angels who had once been human: lag flesh, they coveted it and longed for tact with it. Aron was close now, close enough to smell the perfume of her hair and to gaze at the texture of her skin, close enough to touch her with scalding hands.
There was a strange sound, like the murmur and crackle you hear before you realize that what youre hearing is your house on fire.
"Tell me what Lord Asriel is doing, and where he is," he said.
"I take you to him now," she said.
The angels carrying the litter left the Clouded Mountain and flew south. Metatrons orders had been to take the Authority to a place of safety away from the battlefield, because he wanted him kept alive for a while yet; but rather than give him a bodyguard of many regiments, which would only attract the enemys attention, he had trusted to the obscurity of the storm, calculating that in these circumstances, a small party would be safer than a large one.
And so it might have been, if a certain cliff-ghast, busy feasting on a half-dead warrior, had not looked up just as a random searchlight caught the side of the crystal litter.
Something stirred in the cliff-ghasts memory. He paused, one hand on the warm liver, and as his brother knocked him aside, the recolle of a babbling Arctic fox came to his mind.
At once he spread his leathery wings and bounded upward, and a moment later the rest of the troop followed.
Xaphania and her angels had searched diligently all the night and some of the m, and finally they had found a minute cra the mountaio the south of the fortress, which had not beehe day before. They had explored it and enlarged it, and now Lord Asriel was climbing down into a series of caverns and tunnels extending a long way below the fortress.
It wasnt totally dark, as hed thought. There was a faint source of illumination, like a stream of billions of tiny particles, faintly glowing. They flowed steadily dowunnel like a river of light.
"Dust," he said to his daemon.
He had never seen it with the naked eye, but then he had never seen so much Dust together. He moved on, until quite suddenly the tunnel opened out, and he found himself at the top of a vast cavern: a vault
immense enough to tain a dozen cathedrals. There was no floor; the sides sloped vertiginously down toward the edge of a great pit hundreds of feet below, and darker than darkness itself, and into the pit streamed the endless Dust fall, p ceaselessly down. Its billions of particles were like the stars of every galaxy in the sky, and every one of them was a little fragment of scious thought. It was a melancholy light to see by.
He climbed with his daemon down toward the abyss, and as they went, they gradually began to see what was happening along the far side of the gulf, hundreds of yards away in the gloom. He had thought there was a movement there, and the farther down he climbed, the more clearly it resolved itself: a procession of dim, pale figures pig their way along the perilous slope, men, women, children, beings of every kind he had seen and many he had not. I on keeping their balahey ignored him altogether, and Lord Asriel felt the hair stir at the back of his neck when he realized that they were ghosts.
"Lyra came here," he said quietly to the snow leopard.
"Tread carefully," was all she said in reply.
Will and Lyra were soaked through, shivering, racked with pain, and stumbling blindly through mud and over rocks and into little gullies where storm-fed streams ran red with blood. Lyra was afraid that the Lady Salmakia was dying: she hadnt utt藏书网ered a word for several minutes, and she lay faint and limp in Lyras hand.
As they sheltered in one riverbed where the water was white, at least, and scooped up handfuls to their thirsty mouths, Will felt Tialys rouse himself and say:
"Will, I hear horses ing, Lord Asriel has no cavalry. It must be the enemy. Get across the stream and hide, I saw some bushes that way..."
"e on," said Will to Lyra, and they splashed through the icy, bone-ag water and scrambled up the far side of the gully just in time. The riders who came over the slope and clattered down to drink didnt look like cavalry: they seemed to be of the same kind of close-haired flesh as their horses, and they had her clothes nor harness. They carried ons, though: tridents, s, and scimitars.
Will and Lyra didnt stop to look; they stumbled over the rough ground at a crouch, i only oing away unseen.
But they had to keep their heads low to see where they were treading and avoid twisting an ankle, or worse, and thunder exploded overhead as they ran, so they couldhe screeg and snarling of the cliff-ghasts until they were upon them.
The creatures were surrounding something that lay glittering in the mud: something slightly taller than they were, which lay on its side, a large cage, perhaps, with walls of crystal. bbr>?</abbr>They were hammering at it with fists and rocks, shrieking and yelling.
And before Will and Lyra could stop and ruher way, they had stumbled right into the middle of the troop.
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