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Chapter Twenty-Three

The Bridge To The Stars

Once lorek Byrnison was out of sight, Lyra felt a great weakness co over her, and she turned blindly and felt for Pantalaihtened - and so tired - all this way, and I’m scared to death! I wish it was someone else instead of me, I do honestly!"

Her dae

"I just don’t knoe got to do," Lyra sobbed "It’s tooto hi the sobs cry out wildly over the bare snow

"And even if - if Mrs Coulter got to Roger first, there’d be no saving hiar, or worse, and they’d kill s to children, Pan? Do they all hate children so much, that they want to tear them apart like this? Why do they do it?"

But Pantalai her close Little by little, as the storain She was Lyra, cold and frightened by all means, but herself

"I wish" she said, and stopped There was nothing that could be gained by wishing for it A final deep shaky breath, and she was ready to go on

The moon had set by now, and the sky to the south was profoundly dark, though the billions of stars lay on it like diah, by the Aurora, outshone a hundred times Never had Lyra seen it so brilliant and draht danced across the sky And behind the ever-changing gauze of light, that other world, that sunlit city, was clear and solid

The higher they climbed, the more the bleak land spread out below them To the north lay the frozen sea, coes where two sheets of ice had pressed together, but otherwise flat and white and endless, reaching to the Pole itself and far beyond, featureless, lifeless, colorless, and bleak beyond Lyra’s ireat jagged peaks thrusting sharply upward, their scarps piled high with snow and raked by the wind into bladelike edges as sharp as scimitars To the south lay the way they had coly back, to see if she could spy her dear friend lorek Byrnison and his troops; but nothing stirred on the wide plain She was not even sure if she could see the burned wreckage of the zeppelin, or the crimson-stained snow around the corpses of the warriors

Pantalaih, and swooped back to her wrist in his owl form

"They’re just beyond the peak!" he said "Lord Asriel’s laid out all his instruet away - "

And as he said that, the Aurora nickered and dimmed, like an anbaric bulb at the end of its life, and then went out altogether In the glooh, Lyra sensed the presence of the Dust, for the air seehts not yet born

In the enfolding dark she heard a cry:

"Lyra! Lyra!"

"I’, sprawling, struggling, at the end of her strength; but hauling herself on and further on through the ghostly-glea snow

"Lyra! Lyra!"

"I’er!"

Pantalaile, wildcat, hare, salamander, owl, leopard, every for the Dust -

"Lyra!"

Then she reached the su

Fifty yards away in the starlight Lord Asriel isting together tires 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 illu like the Sphinx beside hilossy with power, her taillazily in the snow

In her er’s dae, fighting, one ain, and calling every , trying to pull away against the heart-deep tug, and crying out with the pain and the cold He was calling his dae Lyra; he ran to Lord Asriel and plucked his ar and pleading, begging, sobbing, and Lord Asriel took no notice except to knock hie of a cliff Beyond thee 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 terh and ten thousand , a cataract of glory

He was controlling it

Or leading power down froe 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 dae 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 ca forward

"No! Run!" Lyra cried, and hurled herself down the slope at him

Pantalaier’s daemon from her jaws In a moment the snow leopard had leaped after hi dae 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 ca 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 froer cried and twisted, because his daeain, held fast in the snow leopard’s jaws, and Lord Asriel hi doard 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 the inexorably down -

The frozen sea, a thousand feet below -

"LYRA!"

Her heartbeats, leaping in anguish with Roger’s -

Tight-clutching hands -

His body, suddenly lireatest 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 froreat bow, shot upward froer’s daeht 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 tra 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 arht played around them like sparks and beaine what had happened: somehow Mrs Coulter must have crossed that chasm, and followed her up here

Her own parents, together!

And e

Her eyes ide Roger’s body lay in her ar:

Her mother said, "They’ll never allow it - "

Her father said, "Allow it? We’ve gone beyond being allowed, as if ere 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 ant to They won’t be able to prevent them This will isterium, the end of all those centuries of darkness! Look at that light up there: that’s the sun of another world! Feel the warer 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"

"Is that what you wanted? To choke us and kill us all with sin and darkness?"