“Lyra!”
Then she reached the summit, and saw what was happening.
Fifty yards away in the starlight Lord Asriel was twisting together two wires that led to his upturned sledge, on which stood a row of batteries and jars and pieces of apparatus, already frosted with crystals of cold. He was dressed in heavy furs, his face illuminated by the flame of a naphtha lamp. Crouching like the Sphinx beside him was his daemon, her beautiful spotted coat glossy with power, her tail moving lazily in the snow.
In her mouth she held Roger's daemon.
The little creature was struggling, flapping, fighting, one moment a bird, the next a dog, then a cat, a rat, a bird again, and calling every moment to Roger himself, who was a few yards off, straining, trying to pull away against the heart-deep tug, and crying out with the pain and the cold. He was calling his daemon's name, and calling Lyra; he ran to Lord Asriel and plucked his arm, and Lord Asriel brushed him aside. He tried again, crying and pleading, begging, sobbing, and Lord Asriel took no notice except to knock him to the ground.
They were on the edge of a cliff. Beyond them was nothing but a huge illimitable dark. They were a thousand feet or more above the frozen sea.
All this Lyra saw by starlight alone; but then, as Lord Asriel connected his wires, the Aurora blazed all of a sudden into brilliant life. Like the long finger of blinding power that plays between two terminals, except that this was a thousand miles high and ten thousand miles long: dipping, soaring, undulating, glowing, a cataract of glory.
He was controlling it…
Or leading power down from it; for there was a wire running off a huge reel on the sledge, a wire that ran directly upward to the sky. Down from the dark swooped a raven, and Lyra knew it for a witch daemon. A witch was helping Lord Asriel, and she had flown that wire into the heights.
And the Aurora was blazing again.
He was nearly ready.
He turned to Roger and beckoned, and Roger helplessly came, shaking his head, begging, crying, but helplessly going forward.
“No! Run!” Lyra cried, and hurled herself down the slope at him.
Pantalaimon leaped at the snow leopard and snatched Roger's daemon from her jaws. In a moment the snow leopard had leaped after him, and Pantalaimon let the other daemon go, and both young daemons, changing flick-flick-flick, turned and battled with the great spotted beast.
She slashed left-right with needle-filled paws, and her snarling roar drowned even Lyra's cries. Both children were fighting her, too; or fighting the forms in the turbid air, those dark intentions, that came thick and crowding down the streams of Dust—
And the Aurora swayed above, its continual surging flicker picking out now this building, now that lake, now that row of palm trees, so close you'd think that you could step from this world to that.
Lyra leaped up and seized Roger's hand.
She pulled hard, and then they tore away from Lord Asriel and ran, hand in hand, but Roger cried and twisted, because his daemon was caught again, held fast in the snow leopard's jaws, and Lord Asriel himself was reaching down toward her with a wire; and Lyra knew the heart-convulsing pain of separation, and tried to stop—
But they couldn't stop.
The cliff was sliding away beneath them.
An entire shelf of snow, sliding inexorably down—
The frozen sea, a thousand feet below—
“LYRA!”
Her heartbeats, leaping in anguish with Roger's—
Tight-clutching hands—
His body, suddenly limp in hers; and high above, the greatest wonder.
At the moment he fell still, the vault of heaven, star-studded, profound, was pierced as if by a spear.
A jet of light, a jet of pure energy released like an arrow from a great bow, shot upward from the spot where Lord Asriel had joined the wire to Roger's daemon. The sheets of light and color that were the Aurora tore apart; a great rending, grinding, crunching, tearing sound reached from one end of the universe to the other; there was dry land in the sky—
Sunlight!
Sunlight shining on the fur of a golden monkey….
For the fall of the snow shelf had halted; perhaps an unseen ledge had broken its fall; and Lyra could see, over the trampled snow of the summit, the golden monkey spring out of the air to the side of the leopard, and she saw the two daemons bristle, wary and powerful. The monkey's tail was erect, the snow leopard's swept powerfully from side to side. Then the monkey reached out a tentative paw, the leopard lowered her head with a graceful sensual acknowledgment, they touched—
And when Lyra looked up from them, Mrs. Coulter herself stood there, clasped in Lord Asriel's arms. Light played around them like sparks and beams of intense anbaric power. Lyra, helpless, could only imagine what had happened: somehow Mrs. Coulter must have crossed that chasm, and followed her up here….
Her own parents, together!
And embracing so passionately: an undreamed-of thing.
Her eyes were wide. Roger's body lay in her arms, still, quiet, at rest. She heard her parents talking:
Her mother said, “They'll never allow it—”
Her father said, “Allow it? We've gone beyond being allowed, as if we were children. I've made it possible for anyone to cross, if they wish.”
“They'll forbid it! They'll seal it off and excommunicate anyone who tries!”
“Too many people will want to. They won't be able to prevent them. This will mean the end of the Church, Marisa, the end of the Magisterium, the end of all those centuries of darkness! Look at that light up there: that's the sun of another world! Feel the warmth of it on your skin, now!”
“They are stronger than anyone, Asriel! You don't know—”
“I don't know? I? No one in the world knows better than I how strong the Church is! But it isn't strong enough for this. The Dust will change everything, anyway. There's no stopping it now.”