Oxford
Judy takes hold of the dash of the VW Golf as Will drives furiously south and west on the Oxford Ring Road. The blue lamp that she has fixed to the roof of the car flashes above them, the hazard lights are on, and Will is using his horn to shoo stray traffic from their path.
'Where are we going?'
Will is concentrating hard on his driving. 'Blackbird Leys.'
Oh God. Blackbird Leys is not a part of Oxford that Judy would care to visit in broad daylight, let alone late at night. It is a run-down housing estate, originally built for the workers at the long-closed Morris car factory, but now full of car-jackers, drug-abusers and their suppliers. The people who live there will have no respect for their blue lamp – in fact it will mark them out as a target.
They stone the ambulances here, thinks Judy. What will they do to us?
'Who the fuck are you?' The boy is only thirteen, but he looks older. The two girls with him can be no more than eleven. One, sluttish in ripped tee shirt and shorts, jerks her head towards Giancarlo.
''E's got a knife, Jack.' She spits at her feet. 'Thinks 'e's hard.'
'Hard fucker, are you?' The boy grins, gap-toothed. 'You going to show me?' There is a bright flicker of metal around his left hand and suddenly he is holding a blade, eight inches long and wickedly notched.
Where are we? How can this have happened? Giancarlo tries to come to terms with their situation. Has the Knife worked wrong? Did the window he cut lead to a different world from the one he intended? They had come through the dawn-lit window in their own world into the darkness of this one, and been immediately disoriented by their strange surroundings. This world is like the one where he used to live with his father, but it is spoiled, corrupted and ruined.
Why is it so dark? A half-moon had allowed him to see the houses to the left and right of them, but the street in between was unlit. There were cars parked by the side of the road, but many of them looked abandoned, their windows broken and their headlights missing. Then, in the distance, he had seen the yellow glow of a solitary sodium lamp and followed it. Where there was light, there must be people.
They were completely unprepared for the hostility of the children they met, hanging about under the streetlight. He is carrying a weapon whose powers are beyond the understanding of the kids who are threatening him and Guilietta, but how can he use it to save his sister and him without killing or at least maiming their attackers?
'I only want to know where we are,' he appeals to the kids. 'We're looking for a hospital. My sister's hurt.' Guilietta is clinging to him, the blood from the Knife-cut running down from her thigh.
'What's all that blood on her leg? How do we know you didn't just rape her, eh?' says the other girl.
'Bastard rapist! Take him down, Jack. We don't want no fuckin' paedos here.'
The boy smiles humourlessly and switches his blade from hand to hand, lightning fast.
'I'm gonna cut you.' He lunges forward. Guilietta is holding on to him tightly, and Giancarlo cannot move fast enough, and his left arm is slashed by the boy's knife. Jack passes the blade from hand to hand again. 'Come on then, you fucking wanker. You gonna use that thing, arsehole?' He points to the Knife.
I could cut another window, but they would follow us through it. I could kill them, but that would make me a murderer.
Giancarlo decides that he must try to use the Knife with sufficient finesse to frighten the street kids off without crippling them permanently, and he gently pushes Guilietta away from him.
'Wait here, mia cara. I will not harm them any more than I must.'
'Come on!' The boy beckons him mockingly with both hands. Giancarlo advances towards him, Knife raised high. He is no practised knife-fighter, who would hold his weapon low and pointing up, ready to slide between the ribs of his opponent and into his heart.
Jack lunges forward, and Giancarlo dodges to the right, just fast enough. He swings the Knife down, but too late, too slow, to keep up with his opponent's street-honed reflexes. Jack laughs at his clumsiness, and leaps forward again. Again, Giancarlo jerks out of the way just in time, but not quickly enough to escape the boy's return downstroke. The blade slices down his left side and the red blood spurts out, soaking into his clothes. Pain lashes at Giancarlo, twisting his body in a scream of agony.
Giancarlo realises – too late – that he has made a fatal mistake in taking this boy on. Jack is a hardened street fighter. He is terrifyingly quick and he has one overwhelming advantage over Giancarlo.
He does not care how much he hurts him.
Giancarlo grits his teeth, fighting the pain, and stands upright, sweeping the Subtle Knife in front of him in a lethal arc of metal, the air singing as it passes.
'Nice knife, wanker. Fuckin' shame you can't use it.' The boy lunges forward and downwards next to Giancarlo's legs, slashing at them as he passes. He falls to his knees and the boy, leaping to his feet, kicks him in the back, knocking him to the ground. He lies dazed and unmoving on the concrete pavement.
'Finish the bastard off, Jacko.' The first girl kicks him hard in the groin with her square-toed shoes. Through a haze of pain he can hear Guilietta screaming in a faint high-pitched wail. Is this the way it's all going to end?
The Golf's tyres squeal as it rounds the turn into the Blackbird Leys spine road. Most of the streetlights do not work here; either they have been shot out or their power has been stolen to work the TVs and videos in the boarded-up houses nearby. Will switches his headlights to high beam and keeps his eyes open for the yellow shimmer of the angel Remiel who flies ahead of him and Judy, leading the way.
'Over there!' There is a working streetlight, and by it a group of children, clustered round another form which is lying by the side of the road. They look up as Will's car screeches to a halt next to them, jumping back out of his way. Are we too late?
Will leaps from the car and runs over to Giancarlo's prone body. He kneels next to it and checks for a pulse. Still alive. He looks up. 'Which one of you did this?'
'Me. I did. Bastard raped the girl.' Jack points to Guilietta who is crouched by a wall, shaking. 'What you wanna do about it?'
Will takes the Knife from Giancarlo's outstretched hand. 'Do you know what this is?'
'A knife, innit?' Twat! Is this stupid grownup gonna to try to fight me?
Will has no fear of Jack or his followers. Armed with this weapon, aged only thirteen, he faced down Iorek Byrnison, the armoured bear. This is the Subtle Knife, the God-Killer, which he wielded in the Battle of the Plain, below the Clouded Mountain and the Fortress of Lord Asriel. With one easy relaxed stroke he swings the Knife around his head, slicing straight through the lamppost next to them. He pushes at it, and in a shower of sparks it tips over and falls across the road with a loud crash.
Will walks slowly over to the fallen lamppost and casually cuts it up into three-foot sections, the Knife scarcely hesitating as it passes though the steel and concrete. He turns to the kids, taking up the characteristic crouch of the expert knife-fighter.
'Well?'
They turn and run.
'Let's be quick. They'll be back soon, with their friends.'
Judy and Will carry Giancarlo to the Golf and Guilietta limps behind them.
'There's a first-aid kit on the back shelf.' Will points to the rear of the car. He j-turns it in a cloud of burning rubber and they fishtail back down the way towards the Ring Road, and safety. Judy turns in her seat and grabs the box, spilling antiseptic cream and plasters.
'Are we going to the JR?'
'No, we're going back home. You'll see why.'
Giancarlo, Judy, Will and Kirjava sit by the fireside in Will's flat, the humans drinking coffee and eating plain chocolate digestive biscuits. Guilietta has been dosed up with paracetamol and put to bed in the spare room. Her injury is not as serious as Giancarlo had feared. Judy has cleaned and bandaged the cut in her leg, which is as clean as Giancarlo's wounds are ragged. Fortunately, they are not deep.
'You've been very lucky,' Will tells Giancarlo. 'Of all the places you could have come out round here, that was the worst you could have chosen.'
'I didn't choose it!'
'If Remiel hadn't found us in time…'
'Would Somebody Please Tell Me What The Hell Is Going On?'
'Go on, Will,' says Kirjava. 'You tell her. I'll fill in the bits you leave out.'
A talking cat? Is he a ventriloquist too? 'How did you do that?'
Judy has been given Will's bed. Will and Giancarlo are rolled up in duvets on the sitting room floor. She should be asleep, but her churning thoughts will not let sleep come.
Angels. Real angels. An infinite number of other worlds, with people like us, but different. Talking cats, that aren't cats at all but daemons. Daemons, which aren't demons, nothing to do with Hell, but are part of us all, whether we can see them or not.
The End of Death. The Death of God. Love… and hatred. And a gap between worlds that is infinitely narrow, but unbridgeably wide. Unless you have and can wield… the Knife.
The Knife. Not a simple material object, but a Purpose; living metal, infused with intention. Infinitely sharp, beautiful and dangerous.
A name. Lyra. And a rending apart.
Will he ever be able to let her go?
And where does that leave Will and me?
It is fortunate that the next day is quiet at the John Radcliffe Hospital, as neither Will nor Judy are at their best. Back at Will's flat, Giancarlo, Kirjava and Guilietta have a quiet day, too.
When she woke, Guilietta ran around Will's flat, marvelling at all the everyday wonders with which it is filled. The refrigerator, the light switches, the stereo, the microwave, the taps from which hot water comes steaming without anyone having to light a fire, the packets full of unfamiliar, but very attractive, food.
Most of all, she is entranced by the TV and sits on the floor three feet in front of it, clutching the remote and switching channels every few minutes. She cannot contain her delight at the stream of glamorous brightly coloured images and sounds it presents to her.
'Carlo! It's wonderful! Why don't we have this at home?' She does not fully understand that home is now further away than she has ever dreamed of travelling.
'Can we get a… TV when we get back?' she asks, eyes shining brightly.
Giancarlo is familiar with the workings of this twenty-first century England, and he is less overwhelmed by the endless parade of vivid impressions which have captured the imagination of his sister. Six years since he was last here and surprisingly little has changed, he thinks. He last lived in Will's world when he shared a flat in London with his father Giovanni.
Papa. There are things he must do in his father's world. Their stay here can be only a short one.
In the afternoon they leave the flat and go into a nearby park. Guilietta holds her brother's hand tightly. 'It is cold, Carlo. And why does everybody go so fast all the time?' The speeding cars frightened her as they crossed the road by the corner shop where they bought crisps and soft drinks – 'Oh! This is what a Coke is like!' – to eat and drink as they lean on the playground railings next to the slides and swings. Overhead, the vapour trails of passing aircraft draw unfamiliar linear clouds across the sky. Guilietta sniffs.
'The air smells funny. This is such a strange place.'
'It's not strange to the people who live here.'
Kirjava speaks: 'There are many stranger worlds than this.' She tells them of the many places she and Pantalaimon saw while Will and Lyra sought their destiny in the Land of the Dead. Giancarlo and she swap reminiscences of their world-travelling days while Guilietta listens, open-mouthed. If anybody passing by notices that the oddly-dressed boy and girl are talking to a cat, which may or may not be visible to them, they do and say nothing. This is England, after all.
Will returns home at six o'clock, Judy with him. Guilietta is glued to VH1 and pays them little attention.
'Have you chaps had anything to eat? No, thought not. Right, Judy and me are going down to Sainsbury's to stock up. We'll be back in half an hour or so.
'We'll eat. And then… we'll hold a council of war.'