The Tower

There was a scream from outside the window. It trailed away into the night, terminating in a distant thump as a body hit the ground far below. That was a man's voice, thought the bishop. And: 'Hurry, man! They are getting away!' to Fra Pavel. The chaplain was huddled over his instrument in a corner of the king's salon. He looked up, 'Soon, my lord bishop.' Now, where was I?

A guard appeared at the door to the servants' hall. He banged the haft of his halberd against the tiled floor. Everyone looked up. 'Molly Pritchard. Which one of you is Molly Pritchard?'

'She's not here, sir. She's gone home to her sister's.'

'She was in the Palace only half an hour ago. Are you sure she's gone home?'

'Oh yes, sir. There was a message – her sister's been taken ill. She's ever so poorly, sir.'

'Where does this sister of hers live, wench?'

'Barnet, sir. Miles away. She'll have gone down to the Embankment and taken the 'thonic.'

'Are you sure?'

'Oh yes, sir. I saw her go myself.'

'And you are?'

'Delia Finchley. Tween-stairs maid. At your service, sir.'

The man left, annoyed and disbelieving. Molly leaned against Arthur's shoulder. 'Oh God, sir. I told a lie!'

'If that's the only lie you ever has to tell, you're luckier than we is. Come on Molly, we'd better go. Finchley is much too close to Barnet. He'll catch on in a minute and then he'll be back with his mates.'

'Oh sir, I never realised! Barnet, Finchley; they're both the names of London boroughs, aren't they?'

'Don't worry about it, Molly. You did well. Now come on! I've got an idea at last.'

Alan stood on the ledge with his back to the wall, fifty yards from the king's window. He was shaking with horror, feeling again the thud as his foot had made contact with the guard's knee, hearing again the ghastly sound he had made as he fell and the softer, yet hardly less horrible, sound that had ended his cry of despair.

I have killed a man. 'You had to. It was him or us,' his daemon said.

'I still feel like a murderer.'

'Look out. There's another of them coming.'

King Alfred closed the iron door behind them. 'The lock is on the inside, of course. Here, pass me that piece of wood.' There was a stack nearby, probably left behind by some workmen who had been repairing the roof. The king wedged it across the door. 'That'll hold it for a while.'

The roof of the Palace of Westminster stretched out before Lyra and Alfred. It was almost flat, sloping up to a gentle ridge along the spine of the building and dotted with skylights at regular intervals. The surface was of lead, gleaming dully in the moonlight. There wasn't enough cover to hide a mouse, let alone two adult humans and their daemons. The roof's area was vast – if it had not been for the slope and the obstructions it would have been possible to play four simultaneous football matches there, with plenty of room left over for the spectators.

'We can't stay here. That moon – it's like an acetylene searchlight. They'll pick us off easily.'

'Can't we get down anywhere? This feels like a trap, sire.'

It certainly does. 'We'll have to go back. Back to the tower.' Behind them the great bulk of the north-west tower loomed into the sky. There were no windows on any side of the tower for at least forty feet from the level of the roof of the main part of the Palace. The Star Chamber, whose mullioned windows looked out in all directions, was at the top of the tower, below a high conical roof.

'Wait, sire.' Lyra held out her hands and Pantalaimon jumped into them. 'There is something else we can do.'

Arthur pushed Molly behind him. He looked sideways into the stairwell. All clear. 'Down here, Molly.'

They ran down the staircase and pushed open the heavy oak door at the bottom. Before them stood a forest of stone columns, standing in a lake of dark water and illuminated by flaring naphtha lamps. They had reached the lowest basement of the Palace of Westminster.

A rowing boat was moored by the doorway. 'Ah!' said Arthur. 'This is more like it!'

'The last person I met who could do that…'

'Was called Serafina Pekkala. I know, sire. She told me.'

'There's more to you, Professor Belacqua, than meets the eye.'

'I don't suppose it's in my dossier, either.'

'You know about that?'

'I guessed. I'm learning.'

'You're right, it's not. Where is Pantalaimon going?'

'It's best if you don't know. Sorry, sire.'

'Call me Alfred, please.'

'If you don't know what he's doing or where he's going you can't tell anyone, can you Alfred?'

'No. I suppose you're right.'

'There's another thing – this is really going to confuse Fra Pavel!'

Monsignor Geoffrey Jones, Bishop of Caester, finally lost his patience. 'Pavel! What in the name of the Lord God, our Saviour Jesus Christ, the Holy Magdelena and the Numinous Spirit are you up to?'

The chaplain looked up to his master with reddened, strained eyes. 'My lord bishop, this is not easy. I am getting many answers to my question.'

'The oracle is working after a fashion, then. What answers are you getting?'

'They seem to have split up. The alethiometer says that they are above us and below us, outside the building and within it. If I had the books of reading with me…'

'Professor Belacqua does not need the books. Why do you? Never mind – concentrate your search on the king.'

'Yes my lord.' The cleric bent again to the alethiometer.

'Bishop!' It was a guard. 'We have found a hollow place in the panelling of the wall in the king's bedroom. It may be a secret passage.'

That's more like it. 'Good. Bring the battering ram. Let us see what rabbit hole his cowardly Brytannic majesty has run down.'

Pantalaimon darted down the stairs, feeling the distance between Lyra and himself growing ever greater by the second. The pain. The pain was a distant memory of their first parting in the World of the Dead. It was only a phantom pain now, but the memories it brought back to him encompassed a real pain of their own.

Kirjava. My Kirjava. Lost.

Hiding behind statues or curtains every time a human approached, the daemon scurried along the wainscots, searching desperately for the place the alethiometer had told Lyra of; the place where the only person who might be able to help them now was, though he did not know it as he lay fast asleep after a tiring day, being held a prisoner behind his own locked door.

'I am sorry, Lyra. I have made a terrible mistake in bringing us here.'

Lyra and Alfred stood in the Star Chamber, at the top of the north-west tower of the Palace of Westminster. All around them, and three hundred feet below them, stretched the metropolis of London, the greatest city in the world. But London had closed around them; reduced now to a single room, with enemies without and nowhere left to go.

'Could we hide in the roof-space, Alfred?'

'Yes. That might help.' Alfred did not voice his secret fear. The bishop, once he had determined that Lyra and the king were in the tower, had them. There would be no need to risk his life, or anyone else's, in their pursuit. One lucifer and a few scraps of paper, and soon the whole tower would be alight and then… then the bishop could sit back and watch in comfort as the king and his mistress died a fiery, heretic's death.

Outside the king's bedroom another dark figure screamed and fell. The bishop, standing on the roof above by the forced-open iron door, smiled grimly. 'Pavel!'

'My lord?'

The bishop pointed towards the north-west tower. 'Perhaps you can answer a simple question for me. Is the king in there?'

Fra Pavel wrestled with his alethiometer for a few minutes. He looked up in triumph.

'Yes, bishop. He is there, and the woman is with him.'

'Then,' Bishop Jones addressed the squad of guards who had followed him through the secret passage. 'What are you waiting for? Go and flush them out for me!'