Philip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass

At the moment, however, they were a long way apart – as far as Lyra had had to travel from her Oxford to Cittаgazze. Will’s Oxford was here now, just a knife cut away. It was evening when they arrived, and as the anchor splashed into the water, the late sun lay warmly on the green hills, the terracotta roofs, that elegant and crumbling waterfront, and Will and Lyra’s little cafe. A long search through the captain’s telescope had shown no signs of life whatsoever, but John Faa planned to take half a dozen armed men ashore just in case.

They wouldn’t get in the way, but they were there if they were needed.

They ate a last meal together, watching the darkness fall. Will said goodbye to the captain and his officers, and to John Faa and Farder Coram. He had hardly seemed to be aware of them, and they saw him more clearly than he saw them: they saw someone young, but very strong, and deeply stricken.

Finally Will and Lyra and their daemons, and Mary and Serafina Pekkala, set off through the empty city. And it was empty; the only footfalls and the only shadows were their own. Lyra and Will went ahead, hand in hand, to the place where they had to part, and the women stayed some way behind, talking like sisters.

“Lyra wants to come a little way into my Oxford,” Mary said. “She’s got something in mind. She’ll come straight back afterwards.”

“What will you do, Mary?”

“Me – go with Will, of course. We’ll go to my flat – my house – tonight, and then tomorrow we’ll go and find out where his mother is, and see what we can do to help her get better. There are so many rules and regulations in my world, Serafina; you have to satisfy the authorities and answer a thousand questions; I’ll help him with all the legal side of things and the social services and housing and all that, and let him concentrate on his mother. He’s a strong boy… But I’ll help him. Besides, I need him. I haven’t got a job anymore, and not much money in the bank, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the police are after me… He’ll be the only person in my whole world that I can talk to about all this.”

They walked on through the silent streets, past a square tower with a doorway opening into darkness, past a little cafe where tables stood on the pavement, and out onto a broad boulevard with a line of palm trees in the center.

“This is where I came through,” said Mary.

The window Will had first seen in the quiet suburban road in Oxford opened here, and on the Oxford side it was guarded by police – or had been when Mary tricked them into letting her through. She saw Will reach the spot and move his hands deftly in the air, and the window vanished.

“That’ll surprise them next time they look,” she said.

It was Lyra’s intention to go into Will and Mary’s Oxford and show Will something before returning with Serafina, and obviously they had to be careful where they cut through; so the women followed on behind, through the moonlit streets of Cittаgazze. On their right a wide and graceful parkland led up to a great house with a classical portico as brilliant as icing sugar under the moon.

“When you told me the shape of my daemon,” Mary said, “you said you could teach me how to see him, if we had time… I wish we had.”

“Well, we have had time,” Serafina said, “and haven’t we been talking? I’ve taught you some witch‑lore, which would be forbidden under the old ways in my world. But you are going back to your world, and the old ways have changed. And I, too, have learned much from you. Now then: when you spoke to the Shadows on your computer, you had to hold a special state of mind, didn’t you?”

“Yes… just as Lyra did with the alethiometer. Do you mean if I try that?”

“Not only that, but ordinary seeing at the same time. Try it now.”

In Mary’s world they had a kind of picture that looked at first like random dots of color but that, when you looked at it in a certain way, seemed to advance into three dimensions: and there in front of the paper would be a tree, or a face, or something else surprisingly solid that simply wasn’t there before.

What Serafina taught Mary to do now was similar to that. She had to hold on to her normal way of looking while simultaneously slipping into the trancelike open dreaming in which she could see the Shadows. But now she had to hold both ways together, the everyday and the trance, just as you have to look in two directions at once to see the 3‑D pictures among the dots.

And just as it happens with the dot pictures, she suddenly got it.

“Ah!” she cried, and reached for Serafina’s arm to steady herself, for there on the iron fence around the parkland sat a bird: glossy black, with red legs and a curved yellow bill: an Alpine chough, just as Serafina had described. It – he – was only a foot or two away, watching her with his head slightly cocked, for all the world as though he was amused.

But she was so surprised that her concentration slipped, and he vanished.

“You’ve done it once, and next time it will be easier,” Serafina said. “When you are in your world, you will learn to see the daemons of other people, too, in the same way. They won’t see yours or Will’s, though, unless you teach them as I’ve taught you.”

“Yes… Oh, this is extraordinary. Yes!”

Mary thought: Lyra talked to her daemon, didn’t she? Would she hear this bird as well as see him? She walked on, glowing with anticipation.

Ahead of them Will was cutting a window, and he and Lyra waited for the women to pass through so that he could close it again.

“D’you know where we are?” Will said.

Mary looked around. The road they were in now, in her world, was quiet and tree‑lined, with big Victorian houses in shrub‑filled gardens.

“Somewhere in north Oxford,” Mary said. “Not far from my flat, as a matter of fact, though I don’t know exactly which road this is.”

“I want to go to the Botanic Garden,” Lyra said.

“All right. I suppose that’s about fifteen minutes’ walk. This way…”

Mary tried the double‑seeing again. She found it easier this time, and there was the chough, with her in her own world, perching on a branch that hung low over the pavement. To see what would happen, she held out her hand, and he stepped onto it without hesitation. She felt the slight weight, the tight grip of the claws on her finger, and gently moved him onto her shoulder. He settled into place as if he’d been there all her life.

Well, he has, she thought, and moved on.

There was not much traffic in the High Street, and when they turned down the steps opposite Magdalen College toward the gate of the Botanic Garden, they were completely alone. There was an ornate gateway, with stone seats inside it, and while Mary and Serafina sat there, Will and Lyra climbed over the iron fence into the garden itself. Their daemons slipped through the bars and flowed ahead of them into the garden.

“It’s this way,” said Lyra, tugging at Will’s hand.

She led him past a pool with a fountain under a wide‑spreading tree, and then struck off to the left between beds of plants toward a huge many‑trunked pine. There was a massive stone wall with a doorway in it, and in the farther part of the garden, the trees were younger and the planting less formal. Lyra led him almost to the end of the garden, over a little bridge, to a wooden seat under a spreading, low‑branched tree.

“Yes!” she said. “I hoped so much, and here it is, just the same… Will, I used to come here in my Oxford and sit on this exact same bench whenever I wanted to be alone, just me and Pan. What I thought was that if you – maybe just once a year – if we could come here at the same time, just for an hour or something, then we could pretend we were close again – because we would be close, if you sat here and I sat just here in my world…”