Will leaped after him, kicking again and again, kicking whatever parts he could reach, driving the man back and back toward the glass house. If he could get him to the top of the stairs . . .
This time the man fell more heavily, and his right hand with the knife in it came down on the lead at Will’s feet. Will stamped on it at once, hard, crushing the man’s fingers between the hilt and the lead, and then wrapped the rope more tightly around his hand and stamped a second time. The man yelled and let go of the knife. At once Will kicked it away, his shoe connecting with the hilt, luckily for him, and it spun across the lead and came to rest in the gutter just beside a drainage hole. The rope had come loose around his hand once more, and there seemed to be a surprising amount of blood from somewhere sprinkled on the lead and on his own shoes. The man was pulling himself up—
“Look out!” shouted Lyra, but Will was ready.
At the moment when the man was off balance, he threw himself at him, crashing as hard as he could into the man’s midriff. The man fell backward into the glass, which shattered at once, and the flimsy wooden frame went too. He sprawled among the wreckage half over the stairwell, and grabbed the doorframe, but it had nothing to support it anymore, and it gave way. He fell downward, and more glass fell all around him.
And Will darted back to the gutter, and picked up the knife, and the fight was over. The young man, cut and battered, clambered up the step, and saw Will standing above him holding the knife; he stared with a sickly anger and then turned and fled.
“Ah,” said Will, sitting down. “Ah.”
Something was badly wrong, and he hadn’t noticed it. He dropped the knife and hugged his left hand to himself. The tangle of rope was sodden with blood, and when he pulled it away—
“Your fingers!” Lyra breathed. “Oh, Will—”
His little finger and the finger next to it fell away with the rope.
His head swam. Blood was pulsing strongly from the stumps where his fingers had been, and his jeans and shoes were sodden already. He had to lie back and close his eyes for a moment. The pain wasn’t that great, and a part of his mind registered that with a dull surprise. It was like a persistent, deep hammer thud more than the bright, sharp clarity when you cut yourself superficially.
He’d never felt so weak. He supposed he had gone to sleep for a moment. Lyra was doing something to his arm. He sat up to look at the damage, and felt sick. The old man was somewhere close by, but Will couldn’t see what he was doing, and meanwhile Lyra was talking to him.
“If only we had some bloodmoss,” she was saying, “what the bears use, I could make it better, Will, I could. Look, I’m going to tie this bit of rope around your arm, to stop the bleeding, cause I can’t tie it around where your fingers were, there’s nothing to tie it to. Hold still.”
He let her do it, then looked around for his fingers. There they were, curled like a bloody quotation mark on the lead. He laughed.
“Hey,” she said, “stop that. Get up now. Mr. Paradisi’s got some medicine, some salve, I dunno what it is. You got to come downstairs. That other man’s gone—we seen him run out the door. He’s gone now. You beat him. Come on, Will—come on—”
Nagging and cajoling, she urged him down the steps, and they picked their way through the shattered glass and splintered wood and into a small, cool room off the landing. The walls were lined with shelves of bottles, jars, pots, pestles and mortars, and chemists’ balances. Under the dirty window was a stone sink, where the old man was pouring something with a shaky hand from a large bottle into a smaller one.
“Sit down and drink this,” he said, and filled a small glass with a dark golden liquid.
Will sat down and took the glass. The first mouthful hit the back of his throat like fire. Lyra took the glass to stop it from falling as Will gasped.
“Drink it all,” the old man commanded.
“What is it?”
“Plum brandy. Drink.”
Will sipped it more cautiously. Now his hand was really beginning to hurt.
“Can you heal him?” said Lyra, her voice desperate.
“Oh, yes, we have medicines for everything. You, girl, open that drawer in the table and bring out a bandage.”
Will saw the knife lying on the table in the center of the room, but before he could pick it up the old man was limping toward him with a bowl of water.
“Drink again,” the old man said.
Will held the glass tightly and closed his eyes while the old man did something to his hand. It stung horribly, but then he felt the rough friction of a towel on his wrist, and something mopping the wound more gently. Then there was a coolness for a moment, and it hurt again.
“This is precious ointment,” the old man said. “Very difficult to obtain. Very good for wounds.”
It was a dusty, battered tube of ordinary antiseptic cream, such as Will could have bought in any pharmacy in his world. The old man was handling it as if it were made of myrrh. Will looked away.
And while the man was dressing the wound, Lyra felt Pantalaimon calling to her silently to come and look out the window. He was a kestrel perching on the open window frame, and his eyes had caught a movement below. She joined him, and saw a familiar figure: the girl Angelica was running toward her elder brother, Tullio, who stood with his back against the wall on the other side of the narrow street waving his arms in the air as if trying to keep a flock of bats from his face. Then he turned away and began to run his hands along the stones in the wall, looking closely at each one, counting them, feeling the edges, hunching up his shoulders as if to ward off something behind him, shaking his head.
Angelica was desperate, and so was little Paolo behind her, and they reached their brother and seized his arms and tried to pull him away from whatever was troubling him.
And Lyra realized with a jolt of sickness what was happening: the man was being attacked by Specters. Angelica knew it, though she couldn’t see them, of course, and little Paolo was crying and striking at the empty air to try and drive them off; but it didn’t help, and Tullio was lost. His movements became more and more lethargic, and presently they stopped altogether. Angelica clung to him, shaking and shaking his arm, but nothing woke him; and Paolo was crying his brother’s name over and over as if that would bring him back.
Then Angelica seemed to feel Lyra watching her, and she looked up. For a moment their eyes met. Lyra felt a jolt as if the girl had struck her a physical blow, because the hatred in her eyes was so intense, and then Paolo saw her looking and looked up too, and his little boy’s voice cried, “We’ll kill you! You done this to Tullio! We gonna kill you, all right!”
The two children turned and ran, leaving their stricken brother; and Lyra, frightened and guilty, withdrew inside the room again and shut the window. The others hadn’t heard. Giacomo Paradisi was dabbing more ointment on the wounds, and Lyra tried to put what she’d seen out of her mind, and focused on Will.
“You got to tie something around his arm,” Lyra said, “to stop the bleeding. It won’t stop otherwise.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said the old man, but sadly.
Will kept his eyes averted while they did up a bandage, and drank the plum brandy sip by sip. Presently he felt soothed and distant, though his hand was hurting abominably.
“Now,” said Giacomo Paradisi, “here you are, take the knife, it is yours.”
“I don’t want it,” said Will. “I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“You haven’t got the choice,” said the old man. “You are the bearer now.”
“I thought you said you was,” said Lyra.
“My time is over,” he said. “The knife knows when to leave one hand and settle in another, and I know how to tell. You don’t believe me? Look!”
He held up his own left hand. The little finger and the finger next to it were missing, just like Will’s.
“Yes,” he said, “me too. I fought and lost the same fingers, the badge of the bearer. And I did not know either, in advance.”
Lyra sat down, wide-eyed. Will held on to the dusty table with his good hand. He struggled to find words.
“But I—we only came here because—there was a man who stole something of Lyra’s, and he wanted the knife, and he said if we brought him that, then he’d—”