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At thatabout the knife Having made a suspicious peace with Iorek Byrnison, they clie to be out of the way, and as the crackle of fla of the fire filled the air, Tialys said, "We must never leave his side As soon as the knife is mended, we must keep closer than a shadow"

"He is too alert He watches everywhere for us," said Sal I think we could win her around She’s innocent, and she loves easily We could work on her I think we should do that, Tialys"

"But he has the knife He is the one who can use it"

"He won’t go anywhere without her"

"But she has to follow him, if he has the knife And I think that as soon as the knife’s intact again, they’ll use it to slip into another world, so as to get away fro when she was going to say so more? They have some secret purpose, and it’s very different from ant theht, Tialys, I think We must stay close to the boy at all costs"

They both watched with some skepticism as Iorek Byrnison laid out the tools in his ihty workers in the ordnance factories under Lord Asriel’s fortress, with their blast furnaces and rolling es and hydraulic presses, would have laughed at the open fire, the stone ha of a piece of Iorek’s armor Nevertheless, the bear had taken the measure of the task, and in the certainty of his an to see some quality that muffled their scorn

When Lyra and Will ca branches carefully on the fire He looked at each branch, turning it from side to side, and then told Will or Lyra to place it at such-and-such an angle, or to break off part and place it separately at the edge The result was a fire of extraordinary ferocity, with all its energy concentrated at one side

By this time the heat in the cave was intense Iorek continued to build the fire, and made the children take two h fuel for the whole operation

Then the bear turned over a small stone on the floor and told Lyra to find some more stones of the saas that would surround the blade and keep the air from it, for if the hot metal came in contact with the air, it would absorb some and be weakened by it

Lyra set about searching, and with owl-eyed Pantalaimon’s help soon had a dozen or more stones to hand Iorek told her how to place them, and where, and showed her exactly the kind of draft she should get as flowed evenly over the work piece

Will was placed in charge of the fire, and Iorek spent severalsure he understood the principles he was to use So much depended on exact placement, and Iorek could not stop and correct each one; Will had to understand, and then he’d do it properly

Furthermore, he mustn’t expect the knife to look exactly the same when it was mended It would be shorter, because each section of the blade would have to overlap the next by a little way so they could be forged together; and the surface would have oxidized a little, despite the stone-gas, so some of the play of color would be lost; and no doubt the handle would be charred But the blade would be just as sharp, and it would work

So Will watched as the fla eyes and scorched hands he adjusted each fresh branch till the heat was focused as Iorek wanted it

Meanwhile, Iorek hi rejected several until he found one of the right weight With massive blows he shaped it and s the sh up Even Pantalais and make the fire burn faster

Eventually the hammer was formed to Iorek’s satisfaction, and he set the first two pieces of the blade of the subtle knife a wood at the heart of the fire, and told Lyra to begin wafting the stone-gas over thelare, and Will saw the surface of the low red and then yellow and then white

Iorek atching closely, his paw held ready to snatch the pieces out After a few ain, and the surface beca, and sparks just like those from a firework sprayed up froht paw darted in and seized first one piece and then the other, holding the them on the slab of iron that was the backplate of his ar, but Iorek took no notice of that, and le at which the pieces overlapped and then raised his left paw high and struck a bloith the rock hammer

The knife tip leapt on the rock under thethat the whole of the rest of his life depended on what happened in that tiny triangle of aps inside the ato every flicker of every fla of every atoan, he had supposed that only a full-scale furnace, with the finest tools and equipment, could work on that blade; but now he saw that these were the finest tools, and that Iorek’s artistry had constructed the best furnace there could be

Iorek roared above the clangor, "Hold it still in your e it, too! This is your task asquiver under the blows of the stone hammer in the bear’s fist The second piece of the blade was heating, too, and Lyra’s leafy branch sent the hot gas along to bathe both pieces in its flow and keep out the iron-eating air Will sensed it all and felt the ato each to each across the fracture, for theood

"The edge!" roared Iorek "Hold the edge in line!"

Hethe es lined up perfectly Then that join was made, and Iorek turned to the next piece

"A new stone," he called to Lyra, who knocked the first one aside and placed a second on the spot to heat

Will checked the fuel and snapped a branch in two to direct the flaan to ith the hammer once more Will felt a new layer of complexity added to his task, because he had to hold the new piece in a precise relation with both the previous two, and he understood that only by doing that accurately could he help Iorek mend it

So the work continued He had no idea how long it took; Lyra, for her part, found her ar, her skin scorched and red, and every bone in her body aching with fatigue; but still she placed each stone as Iorek had told her, and still the weary Pantalais readily and beat them over the flames

When it ca, and he was so exhausted by the intellectual effort he could barely lift the next branch onto the fire He had to understand every connection, or the knife would not hold together And when it came to the most complex one, the last, which would affix the nearly finished blade onto the s at the handle - if he couldn’t hold it in his full consciousness together with all the others, then the knife would siun

The bear sensed this, too, and paused before he began heating the last piece He looked at Will, and in his eyes Will could see nothing, no expression, just a bottomless black brilliance Nevertheless, he understood: this ork, and it was hard, but they were equal to it, all of theh for Will, so he turned back to the fire and sent his iination out to the broken end of the haft, and braced himself for the last and fiercest part of the task

So he and Iorek and Lyra together forged the knife, and how long the final join took he had no idea; but when Iorek had struck the final blow, and Will had felt the final tiny settling as the atoms connected across the break, Will sank down onto the floor of the cave and let exhaustion possess hilassy and red-rimmed, her hair full of soot and sed in several places, dark streaks of ashits rich cream-white

Tialys and Salmakia had slept in turns, one of the, but as the blade cooled froray and finally to silver, and as Will reached out for the handle, she woke her partner with a hand on his shoulder He was alert at once

But Will didn’t touch the knife: he held his palreat for his hand The spies relaxed on the rocky shelf as Iorek said to Will:

"Come outside"

Then he said to Lyra: "Stay here, and don’t touch the knife"

Lyra sat close to the anvil, where the knife lay cooling, and Iorek told her to bank the fire up and not let it burn down: there was a final operation yet

Will followed the great bear out onto the dark mountainside The cold was bitter and instantaneous, after the inferno in the cave

"They should not have made that knife," said Iorek, after they had walked a little way "Maybe I should not have mended it I’m troubled, and I have never been troubled before, never in doubt Now I a If I a’s bad And I’ve made it worse"

"But when the first bear made the first piece of armor, wasn’t that bad, too, in the same way?"

Iorek was silent They walked on till they ca drift of snow, and Iorek lay in it and rolled this way and that, sending flurries of snow up into the dark air, so that it looked as if he himself were made of snow, he was the personification of all the snow in the world

When he was finished, he rolled over and stood up and shook hi for an answer to his question, said:

"Yes, I think it ht have been, too But before that first ar before that That hen custoan We know our customs, and they are fire Bear nature is ithout custom, as bear flesh is unprotected without armor

"But I think I have stepped outside bear nature inthis knife I think I’ve been as foolish as Iofur Rakinson Time will tell But I am uncertain and doubtful Now you must tell me: why did the knife break?"

Will rubbed his aching head with both hands

"The woht she had the face ofto recollect the experience with all the honesty he had "And the knife ca it couldn’t cut, and becauseit back both at the same time, it snapped That’s what I think The wo, I’m sure She’s very clever"

"When you talk of the knife, you talk of your mother and father"

"Do I? Yes I suppose I do"

"What are you going to do with it?"

"I don’t know"

Suddenly Iorek lunged at Will and cuffed him hard with his left paw: so hard that Will fell half-stunned into the snow and tumbled over and over until he ended so

Iorek ca up, and said, "Answer me truthfully"

Will was tempted to say, "You wouldn’t have done that if I’d had the knife in my hand" But he knew that Iorek knew that, and knew that he knew it, and that it would be discourteous and stupid to say it; but he was teue until he was standing upright, facing Iorek directly

"I said I don’t know," he said, trying hard to keep his voice calm, "because I haven’t looked clearly at what it is that I’htens Lyra, too Anyway, I agreed as soon as I heard what she said"

"And as that?"

"We want to go down to the land of the dead and talk to the ghost of Lyra’s friend Roger, the one who got killed on Svalbard And if there really is a world of the dead, then hosts, I want to talk to him