I'm here now, telling you this story, so you know we got back.

The universe did its turn-itself-inside-out trick and I felt sicker than ever as a result, but after spending another twenty lifetimes – or was it one heartbeat – in non-space and non-time the real world appeared again outside the car.

Actually, it appeared inside the car, too.  We rematerialised (now, there's a word that's worth its penny) in a wood very similar to the one we'd left in Will and John's world.  And one of the trees suddenly appeared in the middle of the car, poking up through the floor, passing less than an inch from my neck and fitting exactly in the hole that it had made in the roof.  Little blue sparks were chasing each other up and down the trunk.

Holy bloody Magdelena! A little further over to the left or the right and that tree would have been inside one of us…

Where Lyra  found the energy and the will power to do what she did next, I don't know.

'Come on, chaps!'  Lyra opened the door and stepped lightly out of the car, as if she hadn't just said goodbye to the greatest love she'd ever known (I knew where I stood now) and given of her precious Dust – her life-force – to make sure that we got home safely.

'Arthur!  Where do you think we are?'  Arthur was still dazed, as I was, but he got out of the car, rather less quickly than Lyra, and I followed him.

'Somewhere near the canal, we supposes.'

'We'd better go carefully then, if we don't want to fall in and drown.  That's be a silly way to go, wouldn't it?  After all we've been through.'

I never thought I'd hear Lyra prattle, but she kept talking – about nothing, really – as Arthur and I got our bearings, looking about ourselves in the darkness of the midnight wood.

'Can't see a thing,' Arthur grumbled.

'Use the gun,' I said.  'That'll give us some light to see by.'

'It's high time we got rid of that car, too.'

'What about Miss Morley?' I said.  'How's she going to get home if we destroy the car?'

'She can bloody well walk.'

Arthur took the gun from his pocket.  It was tiny; only three or four inches long and, to be honest, I'd have taken it for a kid's toy if I hadn't seen what it could do.  How could something so small be so full of power?  It was a hateful object, as I've said already.

'Stand back!'  We all stood several yards off.  I thought it would be best if I put a sizeable tree between me and the car so I did.  That was definitely a good idea.  Arthur held the gun at arm's length and pointed it at the car.  He pulled the trigger and a blinding pencil of incandescent light leapt from the gun.   Arthur swept the beam from left to right, moving up and down.  The car flashed into molten metal where the energy from the beam brushed against it, and behind it, for its bodywork scarcely obstructed the ray of burning light, the trees began to flash into flame.

The sound of collapsing metal and tortured air (for the beam buzzed as it passed and gave off a sharp metallic odour that I could taste in the back of my mouth) was getting louder and louder, but it wasn't long before it began to be drowned out by the crackle and roar of burning wood as the birch trees, readily combustible after a dry winter and spring, blazed ever brighter behind the fallen silhouette of the car.

The anbaric (I suppose the gun was powered anbarically) beam suddenly ceased.

'Bugger it!' cried Arthur.  The gun had become so hot that he'd dropped it.  We fumbled about by his feet and picked it up gingerly.  Just in time, too, for the brown leaves it had fallen onto were beginning to smoulder.  'Watch out!'  A tree creaked and leaned, then fell, leaves outlined in fire, across the ruined car, just missing us.  We needed no further warning, but turned and ran up the hill away from the wood.

We reached the top of the hill and turned, panting, to see how much damage we had done.  Below us the wood, though it was so small that copse would have been a better word to describe it, was well ablaze.  Arthur gave a satisfied nod.  'That's sorted the bastards,' he said, and Sal pecked him on the neck.  We looked around us.  In the distance we could see the silvery sheen of water lit up by the moon.  We supposed that must be the canal, so somewhere nearby we might expect to find the Boreal's house and the village of Cropredy.

Our position was a difficult one.  There we were, in the middle of the countryside, in the middle of the night, with no good reason for being there.  Only two days ago, the nearby offices of a powerful organisation – the Boreal Foundation – had been attacked by gyptians.  There was no way that we could disguise Arthur's gyptian appearance.  Even Lyra's status as a full Professor of Jordan College, Oxford, wouldn't help us if agents of the Foundation found us, isolated and alone, in the woods and fields.

We could find our way down to the canal, in the hope of finding gyptians there.  The chances were, however, that every gyptian for miles around had been taken in for questioning.  We could go to the village of Cropredy, but, as Lyra said, probably everyone who lived there worked for, or depended on the Boreals and would report us to them.  We could stay where we were, but it was cold, and the fire in the copse would be attracting attention, and it was likely that there would soon be more people than we wanted to see, clustering about us.

Yes, all right Jim, it's obvious what we did in the end.  We asked the alethiometer Which Way Is Safe – at least, Lyra did – and it gave us a nice clear answer.  Go North.  That was easy; the Pole Star was clearly visible in front of us where we stood on the hill.  The direction was easy, anyway.  I wish we'd asked How Far as well.  That's the trouble with oracles.  You not only have to be able to understand the answers they give, you also have to ask the right questions.  None of us were really in the sort of condition where we were thinking very sensibly.  That's our excuse.

So it was only after an uncomfortable hour of wading through soggy marshes, and being snagged by sharp-toothed brambles, and being swiped by low-hanging branches and – well afterwards Lyra said 'So that's what they mean by looking as if you've been dragged through a hedge backwards!' – that we came across a cottage, sitting snugly in the fold of a low hill.  I knocked on the door, while the others waited by the garden gate, out of sight.  There was a short wait, then a light shone out briefly from a window by the front door, falling on my face.  Then a rattle of locks and latches and the door swung inwards.  Beside it stood the one person I was most glad to see.  Harry, from the Maggie, with his daemon peeping out of his top pocket and blinking at us.

'Peter!   Is there only you here?' he said, quietly.  I noticed then, as if for the first time, how unexpectedly well-spoken he was.  For a boatman, that is.

'No.  Lyra and Arthur are by the gate.'

'Thank heaven for that!'  I waved to the others where they stood hidden in the darkness and they came and joined Harry and me at the front door.

We gathered together in the kitchen.  'What's been going on?' Harry asked.

'You first,' answered Arthur. 'Tell us how the attack went.'  Harry looked resentful at that, I thought.

'It's simple enough.  For a start, there are three of us dead – Ashwald, Kinshen and Blabain.  We had to leave them where they lay.  The rest of us are mostly all right, though many of us have been hurt, more or less.

'We killed at least ten of them.  They were well-armed, but not so well trained, I think.  Poor Kinshen was killed by a guard who'd hidden in a cupboard on the first landing.  He jumped out as we were making for the attic stairs and stabbed him in the throat.  I shot the man where he stood.

'We found the children in the attic, after we'd broken down the doors.  There were five of them…'

'Intact?' asked Lyra in a sharp voice.

'Yes.  They were intact.  The ones in the house were well, but not, I'm afraid, the little boy we found in the garage.  Is that where you were?'

'Yes.'

'Why did you leave him all by himself?  I never thought you'd do a thing like that,' looking reproachfully at Arthur.

'We didn't mean to.  I'll tell you in a minute.  But what about the woman?'

'What woman?'

'Miss Morley.  She was there.  She killed the boy.'

'We don't know.  We never saw her.  What do you mean, killed?'

'He must be dead by now.  She severed his daemon from him.'

'Oh, it was her, was it?  But the equipment was damaged.  We saw the wreckage.  Did you do that?'

'Yes, we did.  With this.'  Arthur showed Harry the gun.

'Ugh!  That's a horrible thing.  But; to go back to where we were.  The boy wasn't killed.  He's still alive, after a fashion.  He's here, in the cottage.  Upstairs.'

I should explain, Jim, that Harry told us afterwards that the cottage was one of a number of safe houses that existed for the gyptian people to flee to in times of trouble.  They had been set up fifty years before, and were a great secret of the gyptians.  Not every gyptian knew of every house, obviously, in case he was caught and, as they used to say, put to the question by the official torturers of the Consistory Court of Discipline.

We followed Harry up the steep narrow stairs of the cottage to a small bedroom where the boy lay, stretched out rigidly in his bed and holding his daemon, which had taken the form of a sparrow, close to his heart.  Neither of them was moving.  They were both very pale; both very close to death, I could see.

'Arthur, do you think we could…' Lyra's eyes appealed to him.

'We doesn't know.  We hasn't tried…'

'Tried what?'  What did they mean?

'Peter, you've seen what Arthur can do with Dust.  He can't make it.  Well, he can, we all do, but although he is richly endowed with Dust, he can't make enough by himself to help this little boy...'

'His name is Davey,' interrupted Harry.  'His daemon's called Miranda.'

'Peter, Miss Morley stole this boy's Dust to power the vehicle we travelled to Will's and John's world in.  We'd never have got there – I wouldn't have been able to see Will again – if it weren't for Davey and his Dust.  It was taken from him by brutal force.

'Arthur, we've got to try to save him!  Restore his Dust to him, if we can.'

Arthur shook his head.

'We doesn't know.  We is tired.  We doesn't know if we can help him…'

Sal suddenly did something I've hardly ever seen a daemon do.  She took off from Arthur's shoulder, turned in the air and flew at his face, cutting a bloody swathe across his cheek with her beak.  We all heard what she said:  'Arthur, if you don't try to save this kid, I'm going to fly through the window, and down the garden and into the fields.  I'll fly and fly and fly until we're both dead!'

Arthur flinched.  Not with the pain of the cut, but at Sal's words.

'We'll need some help,' was all he said.

We all held hands around the bed.  Before Lyra had the chance to say anything I joined the circle.  I was going to do my bit and help.  If John could do it, so could I.  Our daemons huddled together around Davey's Miranda.  I realised with a shock that Harry had a male daemon.  In any other circumstances I'd have run a mile rather than let myself come into contact with a same-sex human daemon pair.  Stars above; but they were good people, our people.  I'm ashamed now of how I felt then.

It was obvious from the start that this was going to be a terrible ordeal for Arthur.  He had used much of his strength only a few hours before – as we all had, except Harry (and we only found out later that he had been wounded in the assault on the house)  – but the greatest burden fell on him.

Slowly, so slowly, the air in the tiny bedroom filled with spinning flecks of golden Dust.  I was facing Lyra this time, and saw that she was the source of most of the conscious energy that was steadily building up in the atmosphere and flowing to and fro between the walls.  She looked unsteady and exhausted, and even as the power drained from me and I grew faint, I could see her swaying on her feet.

Arthur… Arthur stood with his eyes closed and Sal on his shoulder.  I could see his lips moving but heard no words.  Perhaps he was saying good-bye to her.  The boy still lay straight and rigid as a board on the narrow bed, unchanged.  Was this going to do any good?  Were we going to sacrifice ourselves for nothing?

The Dust condensed onto the daemons where they lay on Davey's chest, brightly gilding them.  Arthur was breathing quick shallow breaths and leaning against the wall behind him.  His old cloth cap had tilted over to a funny angle, I remember.  As we watched breathlessly the Dust was slowly absorbed by the daemons (Viola later described it to me as being "suffused with gladness") and they clustered ever closer together.  I was holding my breath and looking fearfully at Arthur.  All the colour had drained from his face, leaving him grey and old.  The effort, I could tell, was killing him.

Harry saw it first, I think, that first movement of Davey's.  The room was empty of visible Dust now and we were waiting to see if all our efforts had been in vain or not.

'Look!' he cried, and broke the circle, leaning over the bed and gathering up his daemon.  Viola scurried up my arm, and Pantaliamon ran down the length of the bed to Lyra.  The change in Davey was clear to see.  The colour had come back to his cheeks and his chest was moving up and down.  But, best of all, his daemon Miranda opened one eye, peered at us suspiciously, and…

And she changed.  Into cat-form.

I don't know which of us shouted loudest.  I know I was jumping up and down, thumping and bumping on the floor.

'Where am I?  This isn't the house?  What's going on?'  Davey was a boy who was always full of questions, we were to discover.

We were all talking at once and crashing and banging about, slapping each other, and laughing so loud, that for a moment we didn't miss Arthur.  But then there was a sudden desperate cry from Lyra.

'Arthur!'

Arthur had collapsed.  His knees had buckled and he had fallen to the floor.  We'd have noticed it sooner, if we hadn't been so busy celebrating Davey's return to life.  Lyra threw herself down to the gyptian's side.  'Arthur, Arthur,' she said softly.  'Everything's all right.  It's worked.  Davey is whole again.  You did it!'

But he made no reply.  As I leaned across the bed to see where he lay on the floor, Lyra kneeling by his side, I could see why.  Arthur was slumped against the side of the boy's bed, stiff and unmoving.  And of his daemon Sal there was nothing to be seen.