“Suppose they thought he wouldn’t, though,” she said, “suppose they thought he was so coldhearted he’d just watch us die. Maybe he better make ’em think that, if he can.”
She had brought the alethiometer with her, and now that it was light enough to see, she took the beloved instrument out and laid it on its black velvet cloth in her lap. Little by little, Lyra drifted into that trance in which the many layers of meaning were clear to her, and where she could sense intricate webs of connectedness between them all. As her fingers found the symbols, her mind found the words: How can we get rid of the spies?
Then the needle began to dart this way and that, almost too fast to see, and some part of Lyra’s awareness counted the swings and the stops and saw at once the meaning of what the movement said.
It told her: Do not try, because your lives depend on them.
That was a surprise, and not a happy one. But she went on and asked: How can we get to the land of the dead?
The answer came: Go down. Follow the knife. Go onward. Follow the knife.
And finally she asked hesitantly, half-ashamed: Is this the right thing to do?
Yes, said the alethiometer instantly. Yes.
She sighed, coming out of her trance, and tucked the hair behind her ears, feeling the first warmth of the sun on her face and shoulders. There were sounds in the world now, too: insects were stirring, and a very slight breeze was rustling the dry grass stems growing higher up the dune.
She put the alethiometer away and wandered back to Will, with Pantalaimon as large as he could make himself and lion-shaped, in the hope of daunting the Gallivespians.
The man was using his lodestone apparatus, and when he’d finished, Lyra said:
“You been talking to Lord Asriel?”
“To his representative,” said Tialys.
“We en’t going.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“What did he say?”
“That was for my ears, not yours.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “Are you married to that lady?”
“No. We are colleagues.”
“Have you got any children?”
“No.”
Tialys continued to pack the lodestone resonator away, and as he did so, the Lady Salmakia woke up nearby, sitting up graceful and slow from the little hollow she’d made in the soft sand. The dragonflies were still asleep, tethered with cobweb-thin cord, their wings damp with dew.
“Are there big people on your world, or are they all small like you?” Lyra said.
“We know how to deal with big people,” Tialys replied, not very helpfully, and went to talk quietly to the Lady. They spoke too softly for Lyra to hear, but she enjoyed watching them sip dewdrops from the marram grass to refresh themselves. Water must be different for them, she thought to Pantalaimon: imagine drops the size of your fist! They’d be hard to get into; they’d have a sort of elastic rind, like a balloon.
By this time Will was waking, too, wearily. The first thing he did was to look for the Gallivespians, who looked back at once, fully focused on him.
He looked away and found Lyra.
“I want to tell you something,” she said. “Come over here, away from—”
“If you go away from us,” said Tialys’s clear voice, “you must leave the knife. If you won’t leave the knife, you must talk to each other here.”
“Can’t we be private?” Lyra said indignantly. “We don’t want you listening to what we say!”
“Then go away, but leave the knife.”
There was no one else nearby, after all, and certainly the Gallivespians wouldn’t be able to use it. Will rummaged in the rucksack for the water bottle and a couple of biscuits, and handing one to Lyra, he went with her up the slope of the dune.
“I asked the alethiometer,” she told him, “and it said we shouldn’t try and escape from the little people, because they were going to save our lives. So maybe we’re stuck with ’em.”
“Have you told them what we’re going to do?”
“No! And I won’t, either. ’Cause they’ll only tell Lord Asriel on that speaking-fiddle and he’d go there and stop us—so we got to just go, and not talk about it in front of them.”
“They are spies, though,” Will pointed out. “They must be good at listening and hiding. So maybe we better not mention it at all. We know where we’re going. So we’ll just go and not talk about it, and they’ll have to put up with it and come along.”
“They can’t hear us now. They’re too far off. Will, I asked how we get there, too. It said to follow the knife, just that.”
“Sounds easy,” he said. “But I bet it isn’t. D’you know what Iorek told me?”
“No. He said—when I went to say good-bye—he said it would be very difficult for you, but he thought you could do it. But he never told me why . . .”
“The knife broke because I thought of my mother,” he explained. “So I’ve got to put her out of my mind. But . . . it’s like when someone says don’t think about a crocodile, you do, you can’t help it . . .”
“Well, you cut through last night all right,” she said.
“Yeah, because I was tired, I think. Well, we’ll see. Just follow the knife?”
“That’s all it said.”
“Might as well go now, then. Except there’s not much food left. We ought to find something to take with us, bread and fruit or something. So first I’ll find a world where we can get food, and then we’ll start looking properly.”