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Chapter Text

It was the opinion of Dr. Ruíz, of Jordan College, Oxford, that the angels, in whatever manner they apparently existed, were taking the monastic vow of poverty a little too far.
It was midnight in Oxford. Soft shadows meandered around the naphtha lanterns lining the streets outside his little study. For the past few hours, since dinner in fact, he had been reading and making notes on a pad of paper with a fine steel pen that the Master of Jordan College had given him after he had finished defending his doctoral thesis the previous spring.
The angels never changed from their white shifts. They prayed, and fought, and delivered prophecies or great destinies, and sang hosannas at the foot of the Authority all in their uniform of white shifts, sometimes ragged and sometimes fine but always identical. He imagined that once the Blessed Virgin ascended in her black and blue scarves she must have stood out quite a bit among the angels in their white robes and the souls of the benevolent dead in their cloaks or angelic castoffs.
Perhaps that was it, perhaps the angels always wore new clothes and sent them secondhand to souls of dead men.
And they never ate, did they? The souls might feast, but the angels just stood and sang like nuns at morning vespers, but never looking forward to breaking their fast.
If you touched an angel, it must be a terribly cold thing, like a statue or a vampire.
“You always verge closer to the heretical when we’re tired,” said his dæmon. She was a cliff swallow, a black-crowned little bird with the feathers on the scruff of her neck as red as holly berries.
“It’s so much easier to remember things if they get a little scandalous, though,” protested Ruíz. He yawned humongously. “I won’t teach it to the boys that way. It did help us when we were preparing for final exams.”
“It did, indeed.” The cliff swallow hopped up onto Ruíz’s notes and scratched idly at the spots where Ruíz’s writing had outstripped the pace of his organized formatting and the text was spaced apart at angles. “Remember the mnemonic that Under-Scholar taught us when we were learning the bones of the hand?”
Ruíz laughed. “Some-lovers-try-positions-that-they-can’t-handle! It stuck better than any of the ones about eating your vegetables or Germans eating hops.”
“Yes. But do you remember any of them, now?”
“Uh…well. Pisiform.” He racked his mind. “…that’s it, though. Wait—hamate? Carpal is just the kind of bones those are, right? Not a specific bone…”
He turned to the panel in the wall. It had once been a cupboard, which he had learned since his move to Brytain meant an enclosed space set into the wall large enough to fit at least one entire skeleton, rather than an attached box where one put one’s spice collection. Now the space had been mostly boarded up, but over time some of the wood glue had disintegrated enough that one could pry the panel enough to slip things behind it. Including not-technically-contraband but frowned-upon books of human anatomy and physiology—usually the unsavory prerogative of physicians and surgeons only.
“It’s gonna bother me for the next twenty-four hours if I don’t find out now,” he muttered.
Something that sounded enormous thunk’ed against the window, rattling the glass in its pane. Ruíz startled and dropped the anatomy book he had just slipped out of its convenient crevice. The cliff swallow dæmon called out alarm in a rolling squawk. Ruíz stuffed the anatomy book back into the former cupboard and heard it drop to the floor before he pushed the panel back in place. He hurried to the window, fumbled with the latch, and finally opened it.
On the slanting roof some ten or so feet below his window sat a strange shape, perhaps the size of a roast turkey. It wobbled and then stretched itself up. The reflected light of the naphtha laps flickered in two bright dark eyes.
It was a dæmon, unmistakably. Ruíz knew it as soon as he looked at those eyes, though he couldn’t make out exactly what sort of shape it was. He could feel his dæmon sense it, too. Ruíz scanned the street and the rooftops around him for a person, but saw no one. He craned his head further out the window.
“Hello?” he ventured. “Can I help you?”
“Is this Jordan College?” said the dæmon. She had a soft, piping voice.
“Yes, it is,” Ruíz called back. “Are you lost?”
“No,” said the dæmon defensively. “Just looking.”
“Are you a witch’s dæmon?” asked Ruíz.
The strange dæmon shot out two short wings. She flapped and took off into the night sky, still flapping over the rooftops of Jordan fanning out in stately competition with the other belfries and parapets of Oxford. When the naphtha light hit her from below, Ruíz saw that she was a duck.
“Do you know what that could be about?” he asked his dæmon.
She ruffled her feathers. He supposed it was a silly question to ask. But then she spoke.
“If there’s an odd stranger at Jordan, it’s probably about Miss Belacqua,” she said. “It tends to be.”

Chapter Text

In her room in the eaves of Jordan, Lyra was also up late. Pantalaimon was fetching her pencils and pastels, rolling them in front of his paws like a tiny footballer. Lyra scribbled furiously on a large drawing of a mound of small objects arranged on the desk. A rodent skull, a piece of old brick crumbled from the mill the college owned, apples and walnuts, a plaster bust of some forgotten Patriarch—the still life was due tomorrow morning. Lyra usually stretched what she could find around Jordan and St. Sophia’s with imagined objects—contorted vases she had seen, fine candlesticks, once a root of ginger although the Scholars never bothered to buy the stuff—but this time she had started the project too late to embellish it. The rodent skull she had already used in a different assignment, but she doubted the professor who taught drawing would cross-reference her other submissions.
She had closed the windows to keep the breeze from scattering her papers, but the streetlight gave such a romantic under-light, as her classmates more enthusiastic about the class might say, to the still life, that she had kept the curtains open. A loud THWAP disturbed her focus on the drawing and her pastel skidded across the paper, leaving a great yellow ochre streak across the shoulder of the Patriarch. Lyra cursed. Pan ran to the window.
A duck was sitting on the old slate roof of Jordan that Lyra so loved to climb atop. It was ruffling its wing feathers, or rather she, since in the light of the branch of candles Lyra could see that the duck outside her window was a female mallard.
The duck stared at Pan. Pan yawned, showing his small, sharp teeth. The duck did not move from her spot. Instead, she slapped the glass again with one wing, producing the THWAP that had startled Lyra.
“It’s a dæmon,” said Pan.
Perhaps if neither of them was so sleepy, nor so intent on the drawing, they would have realized it before. Lyra unlatched the window and opened it a crack.
“Hullo?”
From some distant pond, she heard frogs chirring.
The duck waddled closer to the window and said, “Are you Lyra Silvertongue?”
“No,” said Lyra Silvertongue. “Why?”
The duck cocked her head. “Do you know where Lyra Silvertongue is?”
“No. I ‘spect she’s asleep, whoever she is,” said Lyra. “It’s past midnight.”
“Hmm,” said the duck. “Is it really? I’m fairly certain it’s noon.”
Pantalaimon reached forward toward the duck and sniffed her. The duck did not flinch.
“How come you’re out here on your own?” asked Lyra. “Where’s your person?”
“I’m a witch’s dæmon. We can separate, you know. Or you would know, if you were Lyra Silvertongue. Which you aren’t. Obviously.”
“Where’s your witch, then?”
“Can I come inside?”
Lyra and Pan stared at one another. “I s’pose,” said Lyra.
The duck flapped up and over the windowsill, landing on Lyra’s desk. Her wings scattered the carefully placed walnuts and slapped the Patriarch in the face.
“Watch it!” said Lyra. She picked the walnuts up off the ground and placed them back on the desk.
“Sorry,” said the duck. “Can we stop pretending you’re not Lyra Silvertongue, please?”
“I’m not—”
“You’ve just got the same dæmon and live in the same men’s college?”
The duck had a point.
“Please,” she continued. “It’s important. It’s about the war.”
“The war?” said Lyra blankly.
“Lord Asriel’s war.”
“All right, fine. And who are you from? Who’s your witch?”
“We’re from a clan that was allied with Lord Asriel,” said the duck. “And allied with Lake Enara and Queen Serafina Pekkala. She told us—she told us you had something that could tell the truth. Any truth, no matter how impossible to know, or how far away the answer, or how strange the question.”
“Maybe I do,” said Lyra, “but that was a long time ago. It’s a lot harder for me to know things like that, now.”
“But you do still? You can still find out things?” said the duck.
“What do you want to know? And why can’t the witches find out? Is it a secret from other witches?”
“No, it’s not. You can ask Serafina Pekkala, if you like. But…it’s not about a witch. And none of the witches we’ve asked have any idea. We’ve been trying for years, but…” The duck ruffled its feathers again and bobbed its head.
“What can I find out that witches can’t?” asked Lyra again.
“Things about—about other worlds,” said the duck. “About people.”
“And hang on a minute—if you’re a witch’s dæmon,” said Lyra with rising alarm, “how come you’re a girl duck? You’re a mallard, aren’t you? The male ducks have green heads, don’t they?”
The duck waddled away from Lyra and back toward the window. “I’m—well. I am a witch’s dæmon, I promise. But my witch—he’s a man, see.”
“They en’t got male witches in this world,” said Lyra. “Serafina Pekkala told me, if you’re born male, you en’t a witch.”
“Not usually, we don’t have male witches,” stuttered the duck. “But—well. When we were born, they thought we were one of those people who were the same sex as their dæmons. But…my witch. He’s a man. He knew he wasn’t a girl.”
“Oh,” said Lyra. “I don’t—I don’t know if I get it, exactly.”
“It’s not…really your business,” said the duck. “But I’m not lying.”
“I could always ask the alethiometer—the way I can find out anything.”
“Be my guest,” said the duck.

Chapter Text

“Lyra,” Pantalaimon whispered, “if we get out the alethiometer, do you think she’d try to steal it?”
“I dunno. Best stay close,” Lyra whispered back. She settled her hands flat on the table. “This thing you want to know, about someone who en’t a witch. Is it going to hurt them?”
“No!” said the duck. “We don’t want to hurt them. We’re worried about them. See….” The duck shifted from paddle-foot to paddle-foot and sunk down into a loaf like a cat. “See, they fought with us in Asriel’s war. For Asriel’s side, against the Church. But they went missing. They were on a mission out to spy on a man called Boreal.”
Pantalaimon stiffened. Lyra tapped the table with one finger and remembered a living room in the other Oxford and running after Will. “Boreal’s dead,” she said.
“Maybe now. I don’t know what happened. But they went to spy on Boreal and they never came back. I just want to know…we want to know if Boreal…if they’re still alive. Or if they’re in the Church’s hands, or…I don’t know. Will you look, for me? My witch and I…we’ll be in your debt.”
“Yes,” blurted Lyra. “I’ll look.”
“Thank you,” said the duck.
“What’s your friend’s name? And they’re a witch, you said?”
“No, they’re not a witch. Maybe if they were a witch the witches could find her, or would care more? But no, they’re like you.”
“Human?”
“British.”
Lyra giggled. She stood up from her chair and started clearing away the pastels and paper. More or less done, she thought. But then she wondered—this wasn’t exactly the first procrastinated assignment she had turned in. Or not turned in at all. What if the scholars at St. Sophia’s decided she wasn’t sufficiently dedicated to her studies to learn the alethiometer? Worse, what if they decided that someone else could use the alethiometer, somebody smarter or wiser or with a better work ethic? Somebody who had connections or rich parents to argue their case, not like Lyra who was all alone….
“I can ask the alethiometer,” said Lyra, “but I can’t do it tonight. It’ll take a few days, maybe. Especially since I don’t know your friend myself. But can you leave their name with me? And do you know what shape their daemon takes?”
“Of course,” said the duck, “I am sure you are busy. I…thank you so much for taking on this case. And their name is Tamsin McCoy. Their daemon settled as an opossum.”
“A—a what?” said Lyra, who had never heard of such a thing.
“It’s a creature from the Americas, around New Denmark,” said the duck. “Looks sort of like…if a rat and a squirrel mated. But also like a tiny badger.”
“Wh—okay,” said Lyra. She would have to ask a Scholar about that. “How can I let you know what I’ve found out once I’ve found them?” she asked.
“We’re staying in a wood several miles from here, but you can meet us any noontime for the next few days in the park outside the University museum. Or put something in your window?”
“All right,” said Lyra. “I’ll go the museum, then. But you’d better not keep coming to my window. I have to sleep. I’m a student.”
“Sorry,” said the duck. “I’ll go. But thank you. We didn’t know who else…well, if the witches couldn’t do it….”
“I get it,” said Lyra. “It’s hard missing someone, not knowing…not knowing how they are.”
“Yes,” said the duck. She ruffled her feathers and stood. Pantalaimon came up to her at last and sniffed her. She watched him with glimmering black eyes. When he stepped back, his upturned little marten’s nose twitching, she wobbled to the window, unfurled her wings, and slid out into the night as if skating across ice.
“Do we trust her?” asked Pantalaimon.
“It was a bit forward, asking us in the middle of the night at my window.”
“Not just that. You don’t think this witch could be another like Yelena Pazhets?”
Lyra shuddered. The dead witch’s face in Sebastian Makepeace’s basement, eyes mad with the need to kill her, would not be an image that she would easily lose.
“If he figured out where we lived, in the middle of the night, wouldn’t we already be dead?” she asked.
“I don’t think a witch would try to kill someone in Jordan College, with all the Scholars in,” said Pan.
“They’re too smart for that,” Lyra agreed. “Are we smart enough not to get tricked again? But we trust the witches, usually.”
“We trust Serafina,” Pan corrected. “But we haven’t heard from her for years, now. Maybe she’s forgotten us.”
“She’d not forget us, would she?”
“We’re blips to her, pro’ly,” said Pan. “She’ll live so much longer than us.”
“We en’t blips to her,” said Lyra. “You know how I know? Because she’ll live a long time, yeah, loads longer than us, but we’ll live for decades longer than the Gallivespians did, and we’ll never forget the Lady Salmaria or Tialys or any of ‘em, never.”
Pan curled into a ball on the desk. “I hope not,” he said. “We owe them that much. Even if they tried to boss us around.”
It was nearly two in the morning, but Lyra could not bring herself to fall asleep. She took out the alethiometer and fiddled with the three dials. How should she ask about someone she didn’t even know? She knew she could find things with the alethiometer, and presumably people even more easily, since they were all the things that Dust loved to search for anyway—energy, life, complexity, ambition. But someone she had never seen before, and only knew of as a spy for Asriel—how should she begin?
A spy. She looked at the chameleon. But was that too obvious? And the chameleon wasn’t just hiding, in plain sight or otherwise. That would be the griffin, maybe, for hidden treasure. But the chameleon for patience, for acquisition of knowledge or people. Or the angel, for messages? The moon, for mysteries or secrets? The globe or perhaps the compass for location?
She would have to look in the books tomorrow.
That night, as on many nights, Lyra dreamt of a spinning, glittering needle.

Chapter Text

During a long break between classes, Lyra sat in a carrel the grand library of Jordan College, the books of alethiometry spread before her. She had scanned the vast index for the words “spy” or “missing” and come up with a convoluted set of possibilities.
Ever since Pan had settled and she had come back from the world of the dead, she had lost the easy thrill with which she once read the alethiometer. Her teachers said that her understanding would be deeper now, and that was the attitude she tried to keep in her head. But it was sometimes hard not to wish for her old ease in place of this slow grace.
She thought of the year when she first got the alethiometer from the Master of Jordan, and the long voyage north, and the gyptian boats, and Mrs. Coulter.
Then she thought of the spy fly. What if the Gallivespians had been around when the spy fly had been chasing her? Could they have fought it, or would it have killed them? —and suddenly she knew just how to ask the alethiometer.
She pointed the three dials to the globe, the angel, and the ant. The needle spun this way and that, and over and over again. Pan, perched on the desk in front of her with his back claws braced against one of the books, stared incredulously at the alethiometer as it pointed out what Lyra should have guessed.
“The witch’s friend…they’re in another world,” said Lyra.
“They’re in Will’s world,” Pan breathed.
“And—” Lyra’s heart sank— “We sealed all the doorways. Me and Will. To kill the Specters….”
“We should’ve known someone would get left behind,” said Pan.
“We couldn’t have, could we?”
“But all those soldiers, all Asriel’s forces…”
“What have we done, Pan?”
“We have to call Serafina,” said Pan.
“But you heard the dæmon,” said Lyra, “the witches don’t care…” she sniffled. “Oh, Pan….”
Pantalaimon crawled up her shoulder and nestled in her hair, sticking his small marten’s nose behind her ear.
“We only left the one window,” said Lyra. “In the land of the dead, so the spirits could go out. So the harpies could guide them along, and they could dissolve, Lee Scoresby and Will’s father and them. Do you think, somehow maybe, they could go out that way?”
“They’d have to separate, like we did,” said Pan. “And find each other again, like Kirjava and I did with you and Will. If they’re not a witch they wouldn’t already be able to separate, probably. They’d have to go along that stone path and past the harpies and into the world, but maybe they could do it.”
“But we had to cut through all those worlds to get to the world of the dead,” said Lyra. “We had to get to that world where the spirits were walking, after that world where they had their deaths with them like daemons. And we had to cut through all them worlds again to get back to ours…”
“So how can they…? And they’ll be sick by now, remember Latrom—Lord Boreal?”
Lyra remembered how that strange hulk of a man had withered as the effects of spending time in an alien world had afflicted him.
Lyra checked the time on the library clock and hastily packed up the alethiometry books. “We’ll be late for natural philosophy, again,” she muttered.
The next day was a Friday, a half-day of classes for Lyra, and so when her last class broke for lunch, she went to the dining hall at St. Sophia’s and grabbed a bundle of little sandwiches and cold cuts off the sideboard. She did not have many friends, not in those years, so she didn’t have any excuses to make as she slipped out of the hall and out the doors that led to the university parks.
The trees were alive with small birds calling lustfully to one another—in both senses. Two dragonflies zipped past Lyra’s head and nearly clipped her ear with their furiously spinning wings. In class at St. Sophia’s she had once seen a phénakisticope that took photograms of a dragonfly to create the illusion of a moving image. When the phénakisticope spun the dragonfly buzzed forward and backward over the surface of a pond. When the professor stopped the device, she could see it was a circular thing of paper that showed each image of the dragonfly arranged in a wheel. Each wing of the dragonfly seemed to spin independently of the other four, turning like a spit in a fire and taking the insect any direction it could think to go. Lyra had marveled at it and at how the Gallivespians could tame such a creature into bearing them through battle.
The Museum stood proudly on the other side of the park near Mansfield Road and the little ponds that sprung up in any open space in Oxford. According to the wristwatch that the Scholars of Jordan had given Lyra for her fourteenth birthday, it was a quarter to twelve.
Lyra sat in the grass outside the Museum and munched sandwiches. Pan chased beetles and large ants in the grass, careful not to stray too far from Lyra. Even if they could separate, it did them no harm not to let anyone walking in the park or gazing out the high Gothic Museum windows know.
The bells tolled twelve and Lyra watched the front of the museum from under her tree. Pan piped up from the grass where he had been holding a staring contest with a butterfly.
“There’s something moving in the trees by the corner of the museum,” he said.
Around the stone corner came a figure whose face was bleached by the high noon sun. As it walked closer it revealed itself to have a loping, half-hopping gait, like a deer or a tall dog. It was a young—or young-looking, Lyra supposed, since this must be the witch—man dressed in fluttering black clothes—a billowing black shirt and jacket and tight black pants ragged about the knees and ankles. It was the same silk scraps as all the witches Lyra had met wore, but on a man with the wisp of what might someday be beard along his jaw. He was carrying a duck in the crook of one elbow and holding a bough of cloud-pine in the other hand.
“You must be Lyra Silvertongue,” he said in a low voice.
“I am,” said Lyra. She stood and Pan ran up her shoulder. “And what, since your dæmon did not see fit to say, is your name?”
“My name’s Jaakko Liepins,” he said. “And this is Ilmatar,” he said, raising his arm a little so the duck daemon bobbed up and stretched its neck tall, “whom you’ve met.”
“I’ve done what you asked,” said Lyra, “I asked about your friend.”
The self-contained air that witches held vanished from the lines of Jaakko’s body. He took a small step closer to Lyra but held himself out of her space and reach. “Have you—I can’t thank you enough—have you found anything?”
“Yes,” said Lyra, “they’re alive—”
He inhaled—
“But it’s a little complicated. Do you mind if we speak in the museum?”
Jaakko looked at Lyra and Pan and then around at the students and young couples walking around the park, at where and then up at the sky where a plump silver zeppelin was cruising like an oven pretending to be a cloud. “Wouldn’t mind at all,” he said.

Chapter Text

In the Museum lobby a group of schoolchildren were staring at a scale model of Stonehenge. Lyra had wondered for years if, had she access to her father’s special emulsion for taking photograms of Dust, if Stonehenge would light up gold like a crown or a group of angels.
Lyra presented her college’s student card and was given free entrance. Jaakko did the witch’s trick of blending into the crowd and slipped under the ropes. Lyra, who knew what he was doing well enough to still see him, watched him evade the ticket-taker’s gaze with a kind of nostalgic agony.
They walked into a room full of taxidermy flightless birds. The moa stood in one corner, towering over both of them. Three penguins were posed on a large rock slab as if poised to dive into the floor.
Jaakko dropped the near-invisibility and paced around the room with his former loping step.
“So where is Tamsin?” he asked.
“They’re in a different world,” said Lyra. “The one that Lord Boreal went to.”
“They must have gotten stuck following him,” said Jaakko numbly. He stopped and stood in place, staring at the penguins. He muttered something unintelligible under his breath; it sounded like a more rasping language than any Lyra knew.
“After the war,” Lyra said, trying to soften her voice, “the windows to the other worlds closed. I had—I had a friend, who was from a different world. He had to go back to his world. Boreal got very sick, when he was in the other world.”
“Can you tell—can you tell what kind of world it is that Tamsin’s stuck in? What kind of world did Boreal go to, anyway?” Jaakko asked.
“He went to a world that’s a lot like ours, but people don’t have dæmons.”
“They don’t have dæmons? They’ve been Specter-eaten?”
“No, not like that. They have dæmons, but their dæmons are inside them. It’s like…like how when a witch separates, and they still have a dæmon, you just can’t see it. It’s not around, around. I thought something was wrong with my friend, when I first met him.” Lyra realized what he’d said. “You know Specters?”
“We—the witches had to pass through the world of the Specters at one time. When the storm between worlds blew through, and then to get to other worlds. It was horrible.” Jaakko shuddered. “We had to stay high in the clouds whenever we could just so they wouldn’t eat us. But sometimes…sometimes even if we were high up, and there were no other adults around on the ground, we could see them standing on the ground. A little knot of Specters, staring up at us, not moving. Just—watching. Have—oh, damn it all—do they have Specters in the world Tamsin is?”
“No, they don’t,” said Lyra, and Jaakko sighed in relief. “They have a lot of weird things—big machines that go incredibly fast, weird skinny zeppelins, but not Specters. They even have an Oxford in that world.”
“Really?” Jaakko laughed. “Do they have a university museum, too?” He looked around, sobered. “You mean—in that other world Tamsin could be standing right here, right where we are, right now, and we wouldn’t even know it?”
Lyra thought of her bench. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve been to the museum, there. It’s got different things in it. Things like hunters in the North use, old skulls, lots of odd stuff. And they don’t have the same colleges, exactly. But so much of it—it’s the same.”
Jaakko glanced at the penguins and back at her. “Are you lying, again?” he asked mildly.
“No,” said Lyra. “I don’t—I don’t do that as much, anymore.”
“Huh.”
“When your dæmon came through the window, I thought—well, Pan and me, there was a witch who tried to kill us a few years ago. We thought maybe…”
“You thought maybe other witches might want you dead, too?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry. It’s more a fifty/fifty split than all of us,” said Jaakko, cracking a sharp half-grin.
Out of the corner of her eye, Lyra saw movement in the doorway to the next room, the hall of mammals. A flicker of dark blue fabric. Then nothing.
“Jaakko…Mr. Liepins…”
“Jaakko’s fine.”
“What did you do, during the war?”
“I did a lot of reconnaissance,” he said. “Flying’s useful for that. And some other spying…I impersonated quite a few witch consuls to get to the Churchmen who were winning over the witch clans.”
“I never really understood why some of the witches allied with the Church. They hate witches,” said Lyra.
“Yes, they do. But they also pay well. Some of the witch queens thought maybe people would respect us if we allied with the church. Our clan saw straight through that pretty lie, not that our queen even thought of fighting against Asriel, anyway. She favored him.”
“But witches don’t do pay, I thought,” said Lyra. “You don’t have…I don’t know. Schools and property and you don’t buy things.”
“Not generally. And if we absolutely need something we can’t get for ourselves, we can trade for things. Fabric, metal, tea, other occasional sundries. But ever since Asriel opened up the sky to walk through worlds, things have changed. The panserbjørne moved to the mountains because so much of their ice melted. They haven’t left the Arctic in thousands of years. Some of the herbs and herds we relied on, ones that have been in a certain place every summer for a thousand years, they’ve vanished. Some of the witch clans thought, well, Asriel betrayed the whole world, every part of it. Why shouldn’t we bring him down? But our clan would never side with the Church. Not for money, not for revenge. What they do is evil.”
That flicker of blue again. Two men in lockstep walked through the door bearing dark truncheons in their hands. Both of them wore at their throats a necktie striped with blue and gold. Lyra gasped. Jaakko turned around as one of the men flared his nostrils and said:
“Witch-boy, you are under arrest by order of the Consistorial Court of Discipline.”

Chapter Text

Lyra realized at once why she never seemed to see a witch in an enclosed space. Unlike Ruta Skadi and Serafina Pekkala, Jaakko had no bow on him. The men of the Consistorial Court of Discipline strode toward him, one tapping his truncheon in his palm while the other pulled a set of small wicked-looking manacles from his coat pocket.
“Turn around and put your hands behind your head,” said the CCD man with the manacles. “Miss, that goes for you as well, even though we’re not arresting you today.”
Jaakko turned around and slowly brought his hands up, facing Lyra.
Lyra breathed in very deeply, and said, “Oh but sir, what are you arresting him for? He was just showing me around the museum and these lovely birds!”
“We are arresting him on Magisterium business,” said the man with the truncheon. “I’d advise you to choose better company next time you visit a museum, rather than a filthy witch,” he said, prodding Jaakko in the back with the truncheon for emphasis.
Lyra’s face screwed up in bewilderment. “This man? A witch? Have you ever heard of such a ridiculous thing as a man being a witch?” she spluttered.
“Sinners have all kinds of tricks up their sleeves,” said Truncheon.
“Young lady, you had better watch your tongue before we decide you merit further questioning,” said Manacles.
Jaakko caught Lyra’s eye and mouthed, Run.
Lyra shook her head.
Manacles brought up the chains in his hands to fasten onto Jaakko’s wrists and Truncheon pulled his truncheon back to swing at Jaakko’s arm—but Jaakko twisted away and rammed a long white knife into Manacles’ chest.
Truncheon howled and swung the nightstick, but Jaakko skipped out of reach and kicked off the wall, pulling Lyra by the wrist. Truncheon’s dæmon, a terrier, burst out of his jacket and snapped at Ilmatar. She hissed like a goose and took off on moth-brown wings down the corridor. Pantalaimon skidded after her and Lyra hurriedly scooped him up as she ran.
She twisted back to see Manacles drop to the floor, his dæmon flickering. She didn’t look back again after that until she and Jaakko were in the main lobby of the museum. Truncheon and his terrier dæmon were sprinting out of the taxidermy room. The crowd of schoolchildren and curators scattered as he bounded toward them, his dæmon barking shrilly.
“Come on!” yelled Jaakko, and he and Ilmatar pushed Lyra and Pan forward, past the ropes, out of the grand entrance, and onto the road in front. He pulled Lyra and Pan to him and gripped the bough of cloud-pine.
“Hold on to me as tight as you possibly can!” he said. “And don’t drop your dæmon! Ilmatar doesn’t have the right kind of talons to hold him!”
Lyra wrapped her arms around his waist. Pan bristled at the contact with another human but gripped Lyra and Jaakko both as they soared into the air and over the River Cherwell out of Oxford. Ilmatar glided out in front of them and called down to the water-birds wading in the Cherwell. They swarmed up as one convulsing, honking body and surrounded the four of them in a mad horde of wingbeats.
On the cloud-pine bough, Jaakko, Lyra, and Pantalaimon sailed over the forest and away from the grand spires of Oxford.

They touched down several terrifyingly high minutes later in a clearing where moss and clover had completely swallowed the rocky land beneath. Jaakko let go of Lyra, and Lyra and Pan stumbled away.
“I’m so sorry,” gasped Jaakko, “I didn’t realize the Church had followed me this far.”
“What?” said Lyra.
“They tail any witch they can find that comes this far south, but I thought I lost them somewhere in Northumberland. I thought I was just being overcautious, having Ilmatar contact you and not me directly, but I guess that was the bare minimum I could do. I didn’t mean to endanger you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” said Lyra, “they’ve been following me since before I was born.” She and Pan wandered around the clearing. “Is this where you’ve been staying?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Jaakko. “I thought it best to keep out of sight…well. Now you see why.” He walked over to a fallen long and dug around in it, bringing out an oilskin bundle. He opened the bundle and unwrapped a long, slender recurved bow of glossy wood and a quiver of arrows. “I thought that these would bring too much attention.” He slung the quiver over his shoulder. “If I bring you back to Jordan, will you be safe?” he asked. “There’s some gyptians who are friends to the witches, and I hear they’re friends to you as well. Should I take you to them?”
“No,” said Lyra, “we got—we got to look for your friend.”
“You said they’re in another world,” said Jaakko. “I don’t think even a queen among witches could bring them back. Those windows did close after the war. I saw the angels pinch them shut and they hurried us along back to this world. We can hear other worlds through the veil, sometimes, but…not so much as before.” His eyebrows snapped together. He searched her face. “I only say any of this to you because the queens Serafina Pekkala and Ruta Skadi honor you as the child who ended destiny. This isn’t information for Magisterium scholars or anyone else, we have a deal?”
“Deal,” said Lyra, “I won’t share.”
“All right, then,” said Jaakko. He fumbled with the bow. “I—I’m—if they ask. A witch kidnapped you, and you escaped. You had nothing to do with harming any Magisterium official and were horrified at the idea.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lyra. Pan crouched and sniffed the duck daemon suspiciously.
“I didn’t mean to—but old habits die hard. They’ll be more than likely to believe you were innocent. Which you are. It’s not your fault I pulled a knife on the CCD fellow.”
He’s a murderer.
Lyra remembered a small, strange room in another world. A room that smelled like lemon trees and saltwater air. The alethiometer telling her, in Cittagazze, who Will was—or rather how he considered himself, what he was capable of, she thought now, because until the fight with Tullio at the top of the great tower of Cittagazze he had never really hurt anyone on purpose.
But the much, much older man standing apologetic and armed to the teeth in front of her now—this was someone who had taken lives. On purpose. To defend himself, to defend other people, probably, to fight for her father and the witches and bears in the north. But killed people, regardless.
Lyra was old enough now to know that this should scare her, but it never had in the past, and she wasn’t about to start now.
“I’m not going back to Jordan,” she said. “I’m going to find a way to the other world.”

Chapter Text

“Would you pass to me the tongs, Lyra?” asked Jaakko. He was cutting up some root vegetables with yet another knife, this one shorter, wider, and only sharpened along one edge, rather than the long white dagger he had plunged into the chest of the CCD man.

The “tongs” were a set of only slightly modified tree branches that are charred along the side where they had been used to manipulate the coals of their campfire. Lyra handed them to Jaakko, who reached into the fire with them and dug into the coals until they formed what resembled small graves. The potatoes he had dug up from the edge of a farmer’s field went into the graves, along with corn still in its husk.

While they cooked, Jaakko reached into the silk bag he had been carrying all day and handed Lyra fistfuls of stringy greens and dark berries. She examined them critically. Pan nudged it with his nose.

“It’s watercress and elderberries,” said Jaakko, and muttered something that sounded like, “city people.”

“I lived with the gyptians when I was on the run from my—from the Magisterium,” said Lyra, offended.

Jaakko raised his eyebrows. “And what did you learn from the gyptians?”

“How to drive a boat, how to sail, how to fish…”

“Excellent. You can catch tomorrow’s supper for us, then,” said Jaakko.

“I—I don’t have fishing gear,” mumbled Lyra.

Jaakko’s face softened. “I can teach you how to snare fish, if you’d like. It’s a little less…exciting, I suppose. I…I am glad you’re here, Lyra.”

She wanted to ask him if the CCD man was the first person he’d killed, but she didn’t know yet how he would handle the question. Instead, she asked:

“Did you ever think Tamsin might be in another world?”

Jaakko nudged the potatoes with a stick. The duck dæmon settled her webbed feet underneath her until she resembled nothing more than a fine bleached bread loaf. “Some of the witches thought that might be the case. Plenty of them lost track of old lovers, or their sons, or friends, as the war went on. Especially when it ended. Some of the harder ones started to joke, when anything went missing, that it might have been left in the world where Asriel built his fortress.” He looked at her, eyes drawn. “I’m sorry. Possibly I should not have mentioned him.”

“It’s alright,” said Lyra. “Really it is. Did…did you ever meet him?”

“Lord Asriel? Not personally. I saw him at a distance, and I stayed around his fortress many nights with my clan. But no, I never exchanged words with him. We were all curious about him. If you don’t me asking…what was he like?”

Lyra studied this strange witch. “To describe him…he was…eh…commanding. The thing I looked forward to most when I was growing up at Jordan was seeing him. The Scholars were all afraid of him. He was always off adventuring, exploring Asia and the Arctic. One time he brought the fake head of Stanislaus Grumman to convince the Scholars at Jordan to fund his expedition.”

“Did it work?”

“No, they tried to poison him. But I saw. I warned him.”

“He must’ve been proud. And grateful.”

“Maybe.” The pleading of Roger’s ghost sounded in Lyra’s ears. “He was…he served himself, first. Or maybe his cause, first. Whatever cause he took up. And then himself. Do you reckon the potatoes are done?”

“Probably.” Jaakko poked around the firepit and extracted several crackling tubers. “I flew to Brytain to see you, of course, but I made a few stops first. One was to where Tamsin and I met, my friend I’m looking for, the place they grew up. The other was to check a rumor I’d heard. There’s a man, a Scholar you’d call him, in Oxford. He leaves the city every once in a while, to travel around the continent, for conferences as far as his college knows. But every place he goes is a place where there was some kind of great battle in this world, or the closest place in this world you can go to the site of a battle in another world.”

“Do you think there are—that there are doorways in those places?” Lyra caught her breath.

“No, there aren’t,” said the witch, and Lyra’s heart sunk. “We’ve checked every single one. The other witches, and me and Ilmatar. That was one of the jobs my clan queen gave us when the war ended and we had to start picking up the debris. There’s no way you can get through to any other world anymore, as far as we can tell, but maybe…maybe this man, this Scholar, maybe he knows something the witches don’t.”

Lyra had thought the witches knew practically everything. Certainly Serafina Pekkala had known things about her and Will and Pan and Kirjava that she had had to learn by walking through the land of the dead. “Have you spoken to the man?”

Jaakko looked at his dæmon.

“I have,” said the duck. “I was looking for you. And there was a strange light coming through one of the windows of your college. It was a color like an aurora pattern, something like that, shifting like that. Just for a minute. I thought it was you, like your exposure to the alethiometer might have made it, so I flew to the window, but it wasn’t you. It was that Scholar we had heard about.”

“If it is him, one of us should talk to him. We could pretend to be students. But how did you know it was the same person?” asked Lyra.

“I recognized him by his dæmon. She’s a cliff swallow.”

Chapter Text

“Dr. Ruíz?”

There was a young man with wisps of patchy red-blond beard on the sides of his face leaning in the doorframe. He had a faint accent—Svedish, maybe—and he spoke with a directness of speech and brightness of eye that Ruíz had come to associate with the more ambitious Under-Scholars who either went on to work for the more iron-handed wings of the Magisterium or joined seditionist groups.

“What can I do for you?” asked Ruíz. The cliff swallow dæmon perched on the stand on his desk.

“I have a question about some lecture material, and I wanted to ask a different professor for a second opinion.”

“Oh, what subject?”

“Experimental theology.”

“I’m afraid most of my research is on mortuary history these days, but I remember the rudimentary bits. If you’re in an advanced class, though, I’d recommend maybe Dr. Davies, or…”

“Dr. Davies said you were the most approachable expert on postmortem theology in Oxford, sir. He said you did your post-Under-Scholarship thesis on it.”

The cliff swallow dæmon took off abruptly from the perch and soared up to the corner of a bookcase set against the outer wall.

“I…didn’t realize Dr. Davies was so interested in my Under-Scholarship days. But I’ll take the compliment.” Ruíz laughed a bit high in his chest. “What’s your lecture on? Who’s the professor?”

“Professor Jones,” said the young man immediately. “Not here at Jordan’s, but I take classes at different colleges. We were going over different branches of experimental theology and he was talking about branches that explore the interaction between human action and particle action, and he said postmortem theology was a sort of material bridge between human action and particle action, but I didn’t quite understand what he meant, and Dr. Davies said you might…?”

Dr. Davies was a wizened man who was known to go off on tangents on his own research in a sort of half-whistling, nasal voice that emanated from disparate corners of his mouth. He and Ruíz had spoken at dinner perhaps ten times in the years that Ruíz had spent at Jordan.

            “Well, you should know that postmortem theology is a bit of a touchy subject these days.”

            “How so?”

            Ruíz considered him. He looked awfully young to be a Magisterium agent, but then again some of their most fanatical agents started godawfully young. “Frankly, much of the discussion has been…discouraged, and I do my level best to respect that.”

            “Oh. I didn’t mean to…I am sorry. I did not mean to put you in an uncomfortable position.” The young man looked genuinely contrite. Still he leaned in. “Would you prefer to discuss this at a different time?”

            “I’m afraid my current recent schedule is not very permitting. Again, I would refer you to Dr. Davies. He is a more official expert in this topic.” Ruíz regretted immediately throwing Dr. Davies under the bus, so to speak, but it sounded like he had already attracted some uncomfortable attention.

            Ever since the death of some of their stronger agents, Oxford had held a reputation as being somewhat safe from the stricter arms of the Magisterium, but Ruíz cursed himself for thinking this wouldn’t happen someday. He mentally thumbed through his excursions over the past few weeks. He should have been more careful.

            “Understood, sir. Thank you for speaking with me.” Ruíz exhaled a steady, measured breath as the young man nodded, scooped up his fluffy white dæmon in one arm, and closed the office door behind him.

After the young man left, Dr. Ruíz watched his lupine lope across the lawn out of his office window. When he had disappeared among the labyrinth of brick edifices that characterized the University district, Dr. Ruíz closed and locked his office door and set off himself down a series of narrow alleys where rats and smelting waste competed to soil the shoes of anyone who set foot there. He arrived at a basement walkdown, took a long iron key from a ring of similar keys fastened to his wallet, and entered, locking the door behind him. Yet another key opened a cabinet whose handle lay flush with the wall. Yet another, a long steel box like an eyeglass case. Contents in hand, Ruíz continued on down a set of dimly lit stairs and into a room where the constant rumble of the street two stories above abruptly vanished. Ruíz flicked a hanging switch and set a long cylindrical anbaric bulb humming grimly over the room.

In the middle of the concrete floor, on a steel mortuary table that shone mirror-bright in the sudden light, lay the corpse of an angel.

For years, Dr. Ruíz had been taking an afternoon constitutional between his third lecture of the day and the evening meal. He was grateful for that at this point, because it meant he did not have to spend hours each night sneaking to and from Jordan to the small, soundproofed subbasement where he performed what the cliff swallow dæmon referred to as his “postdoctoral work.”

It was unfortunate that the work had to be secret, thought Dr. Ruíz, as he often did when closing the door behind himself in the slightly damp, musty room. By nature, Ruíz was not a solitary creature. His study groups as an Under-Scholar were boisterous things, which was how he worked best—with diagrams aplenty, by teaching others and being taught. It made him a popular lecturer. He was grateful for living in a world of dæmons. It must be so lonely, he reflected, to be born in a world where—if one was inclined to secret activities that would have one quietly murdered by the Church—one would have no other confidential entity as coworker. Two can keep a secret if one of them is your mortally bound better half, as it were.

He pulled up a stool from under the counter and aligned the two lenses of the large scope just so.

The first time Dr. Ruíz dissected an angel, nearly the whole of the cadaver had dissolved before he had even finished the basics: opening fascia, thoracotomy, identifying the bright but quickly fading nexus of cords and fractal patterns that might be analogous to a heart.

At any other time in history he would have exhausted his supply of study material at that first sitting. It would take a disaster on the scale of the entire cosmos to kill more than one angel in a thousand years, let alone leave their bodies strewn where any mortal with a couple of unusual tools might be able to find them.

Fortunately for Ruíz and his human lifespan, Asriel Belacqua had been an apocalypse unto himself. Europe was practically littered with angelic remains.

This particular angel Ruíz had preserved in an amalgam of considerable trial and error: honey, cloud-pine resin, gin, a few drops of ambergris, and rose oil, among other ingredients. The dissecting-room air was thick and waxy. Sweat beaded his cheeks and upper lip although his gloved hands throbbed with cold where they plunged into the angel. He was probing between what looked and felt almost exactly like pleura and diaphragm, but glittered like mica, when his hand lost the resistance against it and his fingers poked deeper than what he could understand as spatially possible from the depth of the table. He pushed deeper and found that he could reach in to his shoulder. Still his fingers felt only something giving way.

The cliff-swallow dæmon gripped her tiny claws into his shoulder and hissed under her breath.

“Is this—is this hurting you?” asked Ruíz, surprised.

“No,” she said, “it’s just a really strange feeling. Like pins and needles. Keep going,” she added, when he started to pull back his arm. “Pull it apart.”

“Pass me the pins?”

He marked out the layers of tissue and then, with a scalpel and clamps, wedged the opening wider and wider until he could see something other than a golden haze with droplets of amalgam glimmering along the edge.

It was grimy and dark. A fine powder crumbled from the surface as Ruíz brushed along it with his fingers, but the dæmon and the Scholar both knew at once that the wall inside the angel’s corpse—and the room it defined—had been built around the same time as Ruíz’s own basement, but in quite another world.