It was almost impossible now to see the little boy, and her thoughts were spreading out and wandering away like sheep in a field. Why were they there? "Don't alarm yourself, Doctor. Fra Pavel has told me that the child is in another world. Please go on. The force of the bomb is directed by means of the hair?" "Yes, that's true," she said, and they moved up the slope, t, Will carrying his rucksack and Lyra happily carrying the little bag she kept the alethiometer in. Out of the corner of his eye, Will saw the two small spies following, but they kept their distance and made no threat. He was quiet for a long time. She knew he was thinking, though. The people in the shack were still staring, but Lyra's words eased the atmosphere a little, and the woman invited them to sit at the table, drawing out a bench. Will and Lyra lifted the sleeping dragonflies up to a shelf in a dark corner, where Tialys said they would rest till daylight, and then the Gallivespians joined them on the table. "Here," he said, pointing with a dirty fingernail at a spot in central Siberia, a long way east of the Urals. The river nearby flowed, as the priest had said, from the northern part of the mountains in Tibet all the way to the Arctic. He looked closely at the Himalaya, but he could see nothing like the map Baruch had sketched. "Well," he said, "it will mean that when we join battle, we shall have a new objective. My daughter and this boy have become separated from their daemons, somehow, and managed to survive; and their daemons are somewhere in this world, correct me if I'm summarizing wrongly, Mr. Basilides, their daemons are in this world, and Metatron is intent on capturing them. If he captures their daemons, the children will have to follow; and if he can control those two children, the future is his, forever. Our task is clear: we have to find the daemons before he does, and keep them safe till the girl and the boy rejoin them." And they were only the ones who had fallen near the path. There were other bodies and more wreckage on the cliff above and among the trees farther down. Shocked and silenced, the two children moved through the carnage, while the spies on their dragonflies looked around more coolly, accustomed to battle, noting how it had gone and who had lost most. Then the Chevalier Tialys said: "This is the world of Lord Asriel's Republic?" "Go in and look around," she whispered, and the daemon dropped through into the dark. The wide golden prairie that Lee Scoresby's ghost had seen briefly through the window was lying quiet under the first sun of morning. At first Balthamos didn't speak, but then he said, "Yes. Yes, of course I must. Sleep now, Will, and I shall stand guard, I shan't fail you." "Witches," said Paolo. "No time. Go. Go!" "What is that?" Mrs. Coulter said to the African king, and he replied: "I don't know." Baruch said, "We are sorry. I shall go on my own to Lord Asriel and give him our information, and ask him to send you help to find his daughter. It will be two days' flying time, if I navigate truly." "Nowhere," said a voice. "Well?" said Lyra, seeing Tialys raise his eyebrows. "You should always pay for what you take." In went the knife, along, down, back. Lee Scoresby's ghost looked through and saw a wide, quiet prairie under a brilliant moon, so very like his own homeland that he thought he'd been blessed. "We're not going to abandon you." Darting from rock to rock, the golden monkey reached Lord Roke. "Witches, and we couldn' fight them. They took them away, the girl and boy. We don' know where they went. But the woman, she came later. We thought maybe she got some kind of knife, to keep the Specters away, all right. And maybe you have, too," she added, lifting her chin to stare at him boldly. "Balthamos?" "About... I suppose about our age, or a bit older. Maybe more sometimes. We used to talk about Pan settling, him and me. We used to wonder what he'd be...” Will was too angry to speak. He got up and walked twenty steps away through the soft, deep sand, and then stopped, for the heat and humidity were stunning. Presently the leader trumpeted softly and the grazers moved away. The mulefa were preparing to leave. She felt joy that they had welcomed her, and sadness that they were leaving; but then she felt surprise as well. Part of it was physical. It felt as if an iron hand had gripped his heart and was pulling it out between his ribs, so that he pressed his hands to the place and vainly tried to hold it in. It was far deeper and far worse than the pain of losing his fingers. But it was mental, too: something secret and private was being dragged into the open, where it had no wish to be, and Will was nearly overcome by a mixture of pain and shame and fear and self-reproach, because he himself had caused it. "Stop!" he shouted. "Stop fighting. Let me speak to the bear!" It wasn't totally dark, as he'd thought. There was a faint source of illumination, like a stream of billions of tiny particles, faintly glowing. They flowed steadily down the tunnel like a river of light. It was hard for Atal to imagine speech without the trunk movements that clarified and defined it. She'd stopped in the middle of a row of beans and faced Mary with fascinated curiosity. Actually, Will felt very nervous. All his senses seemed to be clarified, so that he was aware of the tiniest insects drifting in the sun shafts and the rustle of every leaf and the movement of the clouds above, even though his eyes never left the cave mouth. "Well, he has. And so have you." Atal was soothed, and so was Mary, by this contact. Her friend was young and unmarried, and there were no young males in this group, so she would have to marry a zalif from outside; but contact wasn't easy, and sometimes Mary thought that Atal was anxious about her future. So she didn't begrudge the time she spent with her, and now she was happy to clean the wheel holes of all the dust and grime that accumulated there, and smooth the fragrant oil gently over her friend's claws while Atal's trunk lifted and straightened her hair. Lyra looked into Will's brilliant, strong eyes and smiled. Will tugged at Lyra's hand, and they both tried to run toward the door, but the harpy launched herself at them in a fury and only pulled up from the dive when Will turned, thrusting Lyra behind him and holding up the knife. "And I took the crucifix from around my neck and I threw it in the sea. That was it. All over. Gone. To her left the slope fell away into the dark, and far below was a glimmer of white and a thunder of water from the cataract of Saint-Jean-les-Eaux. Roger's face was different. His expression was the only one that contained hope. "It was only a light sting," said Tialys. "A full dose would have killed her, yes, but a small scratch will make her weak and drowsy for half a day or so." But he could whisper, and his voice said, "Lyra, I never thought I'd ever see you again, I thought even if you did come down here when you was dead, you'd be much older, you'd be a grownup, and you wouldn't want to speak to me...” Once she was sure it had settled, and that the roof was solid enough to support it, she took off the helmet and climbed down. Only when the last white wing had vanished in the afternoon haze did the mulefa ride down the highway again. They were full of sorrow and anger, but mainly they were powerfully anxious about the seedpod store. And she pushed him away, so that he crouched bitter and cold and frightened on the muddy ground. Lord Roke heard booted feet moving away over rock, and then she whispered: "You heard about the keys?" Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath.