There is no greater insult you can pay an armoured bear than to ask him to dance. This, Lyra found out the hard way.

The battle against the gobblers had been – for the moment – won. One of Iorek's fire-throwers had downed Mrs Coulter's  zeppelin, and her golden monkey of a daemon had last been seen shrieking with terror as a cliff-ghast dragged it from the cabin. Mrs Coulter, frenzied with the separation-pain, had plunged out after it into the blizzard, falling through the gusts of flame.

  Her body had not been found. But for the panserborne, the victory was enough to be going on with. In the great hall, the censers had been lit. Armour was put aside and the bears sat in their bare fur around the hall, chewing on dried otter-flesh, and swigging from great golden tureens of honey-coloured wine. Soon, one of the gyptian boatmen who had joined battle with the bears – this one a wiry man with a red scarf around his neck and a rat-daemon squeaking on his shoulder – removed a pair of tarnished spoons from a fold of his cloak, and holding them fanned in one hand, started to clack them against his left bicep – setting up a lively dancing beat.

  It was not long before an ancient gyptian lady produced a comb and a twist of greasy paper, and blew a buzzing tune with it, as another started to scratch out a skirling, feverish accompaniment on an fiddle with a string missing. Soon men and gyptians filled the centre of the high hall, warmed by the wine and the great smoky fires burning at either end of the cavernous room, dancing with wild delight, legs only recently tired from battle finding new strength to jig and caper. Their hosts, the great bears, roared with laughter and shouted encouragement, pelting the less accomplished dancers good-naturedly with scraps of chewed otter-meat.

  Lyra could not remember ever feeling so happy. She ran to Iorek, enthroned at the top of the hall, and reached her little hand up to tug at his huge, dangling front paw, its great claws at last sheathed.

  "Iorek, oh Iorek Byrnison," she said, as his muzzle tilted to consider her pink, upturned face. "Oh lovely Iorek, come and dance with me…" In an instant, she felt the shock of sudden pain, and found herself thumping onto the stone flags of the great hall, her head ringing and her sight circling dizzily. She looked up and saw the bear standing on his hind legs. His left paw was smeared with blood – her own – from where he had cuffed her to the ground. Iorek's eyes were fixed on her, and he was bellowing with rage, his forearms – each as long as Lyra was tall – extended wide and high beside him, readying for a second and final strike to avenge the old insult.

  Her daemon, in his tiny vole shape, was cringing and keening in a deep pocket of her robe. Lyra closed her eyes. She heard the squeaking of the vole, and then came a vast silence. When she opened her eyes again, she was looking into the face of a kindly man around thirty years old. He was looking at her with concern, and his right hand, in which he was holding a bunch of daffodils, was gently shaking her shoulder.

  He was wearing large square glasses and a white shirt, patterned with faint pink tracery and unbuttoned quite low down his skinny chest. She noticed that, though the man's hair stuck up at the front in a carefully-tended quiff, those shirt buttons that were done up were done unevenly, so one shirt-tail hung lower over his brown corduroy trousers than the other.

  "Are you… God?" she asked, finally.

  "No," he replied in a gentle Mancunian voice. "Sorry. He went to the shops for a packet of cigarettes and left me in charge. I'm Morrissey."