Philip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass

He disengaged her arms gently and made her sit down. At once Pantalaimon, frightened, flowed up onto her lap, and the cat daemon tentatively came close to Will. They hadn’t touched yet, but now he put out a hand to her, and she moved her cat face against his fingers and then stepped delicately onto his lap.

“He said – ” Lyra began, gulping, “he said that people could spend a little time in other worlds without being affected. They could. And we have, haven’t we? Apart from what we had to do to go into the world of the dead, we’re still healthy, aren’t we?”

“They can spend a little time, but not a long time,” Will said. “My father had been away from his world, my world, for ten years. And he was nearly dying when I found him. Ten years, that’s all.”

“But what about Lord Boreal? Sir Charles? He was healthy enough, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, but remember, he could go back to his own world whenever he liked and get healthy again. That’s where you saw him first, after all, in your world. He must have found some secret window that no one else knew about.”

“Well, we could do that!”

“We could, except that…”

“All the windows must be closed,” said Pantalaimon. “All of them.”

“But how do you know ?” demanded Lyra.

“An angel told us,” said Kirjava. “We met an angel. She told us all about that, and other things as well. It’s true, Lyra.”

“She?” said Lyra passionately, suspicious.

“It was a female angel,” said Kirjava.

“I’ve never heard of one of them. Maybe she was lying.”

Will was thinking through another possibility. “Suppose they closed all the other windows,” he said, “and we just made one when we needed to, and went through as quickly as we could and closed it up immediately – that would be safe, surely? If we didn’t leave much time for Dust to go out?”

“Yes!”

“We’d make it where no one could ever find it,” he went on, “and only us two would know…”

“Oh, it would work! I’m sure it would!” she said.

“And we could go from one to the other, and stay healthy – ”

But the daemons were distressed, and Kirjava was murmuring, “No, no.”

And Pantalaimon said, “The Specters… She told us about the Specters, too.”

“The Specters?” said Will. “We saw them during the battle, for the first time. What about them?”

“Well, we found out where they come from,” said Kirjava. “And this is the worst thing: they’re like the children of the abyss. Every time we open a window with the knife, it makes a Specter. It’s like a little bit of the abyss that floats out and enters the world. That’s why the Cittаgazze world was so full of them, because of all the windows they left open there.”

“And they grow by feeding on Dust,” said Pantalaimon. “And on daemons. Because Dust and daemons are sort of similar; grown‑up daemons anyway. And the Specters get bigger and stronger as they do…”

Will felt a dull horror at his heart, and Kirjava pressed herself against his breast, feeling it, too, and trying to comfort him.

“So every time I’ve used the knife,” he said, “every single time, I’ve made another Specter come to life?”

He remembered Iorek Byrnison, in the cave where he’d forged the knife again, saying, “What you don’t know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions, too.”

Lyra’s eyes were watching him, wide with anguish.

“Oh, we can’t , Will!” she said. “We can’t do that to people – not let other Specters out, not now we’ve seen what they do!”

“All right,” he said, getting to his feet, holding his daemon close to his breast. “Then we’ll have to – one of us will have to – I’ll come to your world and…”

She knew what he was going to say, and she saw him holding the beautiful, healthy daemon he hadn’t even begun to know; and she thought of his mother, and she knew that he was thinking of her, too. To abandon her and live with Lyra, even for the few years they’d have together – could he do that? He might be living with Lyra, but she knew he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

“No,” she cried, jumping up beside him, and Kirjava joined Pantalaimon on the sand as boy and girl clung together desperately. “ I’ll do it, Will! We’ll come to your world and live there! It doesn’t matter if we get ill, me and Pan – we’re strong, I bet we last a good long time – and there are probably good doctors in your world – Dr. Malone would know! Oh, let’s do that!”

He was shaking his head, and she saw the brilliance of tears on his cheeks.

“D’you think I could bear that, Lyra?” he said. “D’you think I could live happily watching you get sick and ill and fade away and then die, while I was getting stronger and more grown‑up day by day? Ten years… That’s nothing. It’d pass in a flash. We’d be in our twenties. It’s not that far ahead. Think of that, Lyra, you and me grown up, just preparing to do all the things we want to do – and then… it all comes to an end. Do you think I could bear to live on after you died? Oh, Lyra, I’d follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours. No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good, long, busy lives, and if we can’t spend them together, we… we’ll have to spend them apart.”

Biting her lip, she watched him as he walked up and down in his distracted anguish.

He stopped and turned, and went on: “D’you remember another thing he said, my father? He said we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are. He said that for us there isn’t any elsewhere. That’s what he meant, I can see now. Oh, it’s too bitter. I thought he just meant Lord Asriel and his new world, but he meant us, he meant you and me. We have to live in our own worlds…”

“I’m going to ask the alethiometer,” Lyra said. “That’ll know! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

She sat down, wiping her cheeks with the palm of one hand and reaching for the rucksack with the other. She carried it everywhere; when Will thought of her in later years, it was often with that little bag over her shoulder. She tucked the hair behind her ears in the swift movement he loved and took out the black velvet bundle.

“Can you see?” he said, for although the moon was bright, the symbols around the face were very small.

“I know where they all are,” she said, “I got it off by heart. Hush now…”

She crossed her legs, pulling the skirt over them to make a lap. Will lay on one elbow and watched. The bright moonlight, reflected off the white sand, lit up her face with a radiance that seemed to draw out some other radiance from inside her; her eyes glittered, and her expression was so serious and absorbed that Will could have fallen in love with her again if love didn’t already possess every fiber of his being.

Lyra took a deep breath and began to turn the wheels. But after only a few moments, she stopped and turned the instrument around.

“Wrong place,” she said briefly, and tried again.

Will, watching, saw her beloved face clearly. And because he knew it so well, and he’d studied her expression in happiness and despair and hope and sorrow, he could tell that something was wrong; for there was no sign of the clear concentration she used to sink into so quickly. Instead, an unhappy bewilderment spread gradually over her: she bit her lower lip, she blinked more and more, and her eyes moved slowly from symbol to symbol, almost at random, instead of darting swiftly and certainly.