The Fall

The Bishop of Caester did not notice the airship's approach until it was almost overhead. The roar of its engines was almost drowned out by the noise of the conflagration which was enveloping the tower. A guard tapped his arm and pointed upwards.

'My lord bishop! Look.'

A dirigible of the King's Flight! The vessel's markings were very distinctive. The Crown of State was emblazoned upon the hull and the tailfins. Where did that come from? His first thought was to order the guards to fetch an Armstrong gun and fire upon the airship. It would catch light very quickly if they fired tracer shells into it, with their trails of white-hot powder. But then he considered that if he did so, the burning wreckage of the vessel would fall directly upon his head.

'What shall we do, my lord?'

'What shall we do? Nothing. He cannot approach the tower without his ship catching fire. He cannot rescue the king.'

'My lord, it is a ship of the King's Flight.'

'I can see that! What of it? Do not waste my time! The worst they can do is shoot at us. Station a few men with rifles to return their fire, if you like. And keep an eye on the tower. I want to be told immediately if anyone comes out of it.'

Arthur looked down at the tower, two hundred feet below. It looked to him like a demonic eye, black in the centre, ringed with red-yellow fire. The airship shook as it was buffeted by the rising air. 'Sir Captain,' he yelled above the stuttering noise of the engines and the crackle of the flames below, 'How much water ballast does you carry?'

'About two hundred gallons at present. Not enough to put the fire out, if that's what you're thinking.'

'If you drop all your ballast on the tower at once, you'll start going straight up, won't you? We'll lose weight.'

'Yes, of course.'

'Can you drop the ballast and let gas out of the airship at the same time? So we stays level?'

'Yes, more or less. It will leave us with no lift to spare.'

'We're not worried about that. Sir Captain, I want you to drop as much water as you can onto the tower and while the flames are quietened down we wants you to lower me on a rope or a ladder if you've got one. I'll try to get into the tower through the roof.'

'Are you mad, Mister Shire? That's the most dangerous thing I ever heard of.'

'We is gibbering, Sir Captain. We is also close to fouling our breeches. But that is what we wants you to do. It's their only hope.'

The outer walls were too hot to touch and the air was shimmering with heat and becoming painful to breathe. Lyra and the king stood with their backs to the water tank, which was still blessedly cool.

Not long now, thought the king and he squeezed Lyra's hand.

The helmsman manoeuvred the Zeppelin so that its hull no longer hung over the Palace roof. A lookout in the aft gondola had seen the riflemen and alerted the go-captain to the danger.

Arthur was standing by a floor-hatch, wearing a harness around his waist which was attached by a rope to a winch in the main body of the airship. 'Are you ready, Mister Shire?'

'Yes, Sir Captain.'

The go-captain looked at his boatswain. 'Mister Tennyson, are you ready?'

'Aye-aye sir.'

'Then on my mark – now!'

The airship bucked violently as the ballast flaps opened wide. A deluge of water poured down upon the tower roof below while, from the upper hull, gas vented into the free air. Arthur stepped into the open hatch.

'What's he doing?' The bishop saw the ballast water cascading down from the airship. It streamed over the tower's roof, pouring through the windows of the Star Chamber and onto the furnace which burned inside it. Orange flame was replaced by dense black smoke.

'Hell and damnation!' I didn't think of that. The bishop shouted to the guard sergeant, 'Open fire!' The riflemen shot incandescent bullets into the Zeppelin's hull.

But it was a ship of the King's Flight.

Arthur landed directly on the platform from which the royal standard was hoisted. It was surrounded by a thick cloud of smoke, in which he could see an occasional leaping flame. 'That was a bit of luck, eh Sal!' he said to his daemon, pushing to the back of his mind with an effort the memory of the fire at Bolvangar and the death of his Maggie. The platform was surrounded by an iron railing with a door leading into the tower. It was still intact, as was the roof, and Arthur breathed a sigh of relief.

Paying out the rope behind him, Arthur unceremoniously kicked the door in. There were three stone steps leading down into the roof space which was to his surprise not open, but blocked by a curving grey wall. Hell! Where are they? They must be here somewhere! With Sal on his shoulder he ran round the outer wall. To his horror it was closed off after only a few yards by a solid stone buttress. Now what?

'Try the other way!' Sal launched herself from Arthur's shoulder and flew ahead of him, back around the corridor the way they had come. They passed over an iron trapdoor, glowing red with the heat from below. And there! At last! There they were, invisible until the last moment because they were standing with their backs to the inner wall, close to one another with their eyes shut and their hands clasped together.

'Hey! You lovebirds! Is you going to hang around here all night?'

There was a rope ladder waiting for them at the platform. It was beginning to smoulder, as the effects of the Zeppelin's water ballast wore off and the fires burned clearly again. 'Lyra! You go first!' Lyra climbed up the ladder with Pantalaimon wrapped around her neck. 'Now you, sire!'

'What about Eleanor?'

'She can go through the bottom rungs. Hurry, sire!' The flames were building up around them again, stronger than ever. The king climbed up the ladder and Eleanor slipped her elegant paws through it. Arthur looked up to the gondola above them. 'Pull!'

As the smoke cleared and the fire began to re-establish itself the Bishop of Caester was finally able to see what was happening. The airship was moving slowly away from the tower, dipping dangerously towards the ground as it lost the extra lift which the hot air from the fire had given it. Two ropes hung down from its fore and aft gondolas and he could see figures clinging to them. Holy Mother of God! The bishop snatched the sergeant's revolver from his belt. 'Fire, you fools!' he screamed to the men, running towards the tower and shooting into the sky. 'Kill them!' But the heat-distorted air threw off the marksmen's aim and their bullets went wide of their targets, whistling harmlessly over the river Isis towards Puttney.

Arthur, suspended in the air, saw Lyra and Alfred clinging together to the rope ladder and his head swam. He seemed to see, all over again, the bodies of Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter as they made their endless fall into the Abyss.

The tortured stone of the north-west tower of the Palace of Westminster, strained beyond endurance first by the sudden cooling caused by the airship's ballast and then by the renewed heat of the naphtha-fuelled fires within, finally gave way. The tower fell; slowly, ponderously, yet too quickly for the bishop who, standing much too close, was pulled down after it into the wreckage. It is impossible to say what killed him first, whether it was the fall, or the crushing weight of the stone, or if he drowned in the six hundred tons of water from the tank which followed him to the ground and in which his sodden corpse was found floating face-down by the salvage crew.

He had not known that you cannot set fire to a ship of the King's Flight, for its hull is filled, not with flammable, explosive hydrogen but safe, inert helium.

* * * *

Lady Elizabeth Boreal had made her own escape from the Palace. She was sitting safely and comfortably with her daemon Parander on her lap in the window of the flat that had once belonged to her mother when she saw the airship fly low over the Agincourt Bridge and ditch in the river Isis. She paid it little attention at the time, for her mind was engaged with other matters. How could she disentangle the interests of the Boreal Foundation from those of the Church? It was clear to her now that change was coming; inevitable change. She could see that the Church's power had been waning for years, even though it had appeared to be so strong. It was like a hollow tree - apparently healthy on the outside, but weak and rotten at the core. The direct attack on the king had not been the act of a confident, powerful Church, but the last desperate throw of a gambler at the end of a losing streak.

The centre of power in Brytain is on the move. This was her opportunity to seize power for herself, while it was still up for grabs. Whether the king was dead or not, nobody would trust the men of religion again, nor believe any more in their hypocritical preachings. The future belonged to the forces of secularism, and why should the Boreal Foundation not be a fundamental part of those forces?

Elizabeth sat up all night making her plans, and when the morning brought news of the king's deliverance and the death of the Bishop of Caester, she was ready.

The Master of Jordan frowned as he read the note that the Dean had sent him. It was a confession, and a goodbye too. It told of a conspiracy, and a hidden allegiance, and love betrayed, and the Dean's complicity in the Church's attempt to murder Professor Belacqua by sending her into the storm which they themselves had conjured up by their secret arts.

'Will there be a reply, Master?' asked Horace the messenger, standing in the hallway of the Master's house.

'No, no reply. But would you go to the Proctor and ask him to call upon the Dean, as a matter of urgency?'

It was too late, of course.

The airship was recovered from the water, refilled with helium and flown back to Deptford, where it was repaired and refitted and eventually had its numeric designation replaced by the name HMZ Professor Lyra Belacqua, much to that lady's amusement and occasional embarrassment. So far as I know it is still sailing the skies of the Brytish Empire to this day.

In the world of Cittagazze, Guilietta Bellini greeted her bother Giancarlo with great joy when he returned, with his boat and crew all safe and sound, from the storm. He could not help but notice that she was accompanied by young Victor Reigali and that they were shyly holding hands.

King Alfred went straight to the Chelsea Barracks when the airship came down in the river and raised a troop of horse to retake the Palace of Westminster. They were not needed. When he got there the Church's last revolution was over, as dead as its leader. They found Fra Pavel the next day, crouched against the parapet, still whimpering with fear.

The following week Alfred buried his faithful servant Alan with full state honours. The King's Council was suspended indefinitely. Alfred had finished with talking.

Arthur returned to his beloved boats, and Molly Pritchard to a life of service in the Palace. They met up for drinks and reminiscences whenever Arthur's travels brought him to London. Lyra sometimes saw the Maggie and the Jimmy passing through Oxford on their way to Banbury and she and Arthur would spend the day together, when they could afford the time, and talk about Dust, and life, and loss. Many years later they were to find themselves facing danger together again but that is, as they say, another story.

Lyra said a fond goodbye to the king and went back to Oxford by train, with considerable relief. She was not cut out for a career in politics, she had decided. She never discovered the reason for the Dean's sudden and unexpected death, but Will guessed it when she called to him in his dreams and told him about her adventures in London. They both knew that they were breaking a solemn promise but I cannot find it within myself to blame them for it and neither, I think, should you.

Ceres Wunderkind, January 2003