The Attic

Nose pressed hard on frosted glass
Gazing as the swollen mass
On concrete fields where grows no grass
Stumbles blindly on

Iron trees smother the air
But withering they stand and stare
Through eyes that neither know nor care
Where the grass is gone

David McWilliams

The girl has gone out to buy food. I'm stuck indoors. Not that I'm complaining; and I shouldn't be calling her "the girl", either. Her name's Sunny and if I were a younger man I'm sure I would have fallen in love with her by now.

That was a foolish thing to write. I ought to scratch it out, but that'd only make a mess of this book. Instead, I'll let it stand as a monument to my own ridiculous nature. I'm not in love with her, anyway.

Come on, Peter, start making sense. Write down what happened, just the way it happened. You know how to do that, Viola tells me. You've done it before. This is my story; and I must tell it honestly, truthfully or not at all.

What happened is that we found this room. I mean Sunny found it. We left the concrete park and walked up into the Old Town as I'd suggested. I suppose I'd been thinking we'd find an hotel or a guest house to stay in, as we did in Frankland. We very soon found out that Geneva doesn't have accommodation for casual visitors. It seems you can't stay in the city unless you already live there or the authorities have invited you; in which case you use their guest quarters. Of course, we hadn't been invited by anybody. All the time we were finding this out I felt as if we were being stared at by everyone who passed - all those people wearing primary colours and us in dirty, drab clothes.

Once or twice somebody came up to us and addressed us. Sunny spoke to them; saying something along the lines of 'He's been hurt, I'm helping him,' I suppose.

After an hour or more of struggling up and down the steep and narrow streets of the Old Town we were both just about done in. Sunny suggested we find somewhere to stop and have something to eat and drink. Why we hadn't done that to begin with, I don't know. It seems so obvious now. Nobody functions at their best when they're tired, hungry and thirsty.

I kept forgetting that Geneva was a city under siege, so cut off were we from the outside world. Every now and then a distant boom or thud, from an explosion or impact so powerful that it could penetrate the thick shell of concrete that surrounded us, reminded me that we were in a dangerous place. I wondered if we would, in fact, be able to eat. Didn't people who had been besieged for a long time run out of food, like they did in the city of Colmar thirty or more years ago? We kept on searching.

There was an estaminet - the König - on a corner where five streets met. No tables stood outside, more because there was no room for them on the pavement rather than from any fear of rain. It didn't rain in Geneva any more. Nor did it snow, nor did icicles hang from the eaves of the houses in winter. No March or November winds chased fallen leaves along its streets and alleys. Every tree, every bush, every flowerbed was individually, theologically watered by a hosepipe run from the wells deep below the town. The temperature-controlled air hung lifeless on our shoulders, disturbed only by the passage of 'bus, car or tram.

This is a terrible place - a city of dreadful day. There is no real night here. It has been banished by order of the Church. The floodlights burn constantly, powered by the atomcraft stations which throb and rumble in their underground caverns far beneath our feet. We have conquered the sun.

I have drifted from my story. We found the estaminet as I have said, entered its musty, dark interior and took seats by the door, in case we needed to leave in a hurry. I'll rephrase that; in case Sunny needed to leave in a hurry. I wasn't rushing anywhere. The waiter came slowly over from the bar and asked us what we wanted. Sunny asked for two cups of kaffee and two pastries. She had seen them in the display cabinet and they looked délicieux. The waiter looked bemused. Yes, we could have two tasses of kaffee, but why did we want to eat wood? The pastries were for display only.

Sunny laughed. She quickly explained to the waiter that she was only having a joke and that two kaffees and whatever eatables they had to spare would be fine. Eventually, two cups of a very strange-tasting brew arrived, together with some biscuits and a dense, heavy cake, flavoured with ginger. Sunny offered Frankish money in payment, which made the waiter shake his head, return to the bar, take out a notepad and pencil and calculate an exchange rate that would have shocked any respectable banker. She paid anyway.

'Ersatz,' said Sunny, when the waiter had left our table. 'Artificial kaffee, but better than nothing.' Indeed it was.

Oh, what a relief it was to be able to sit down and rest; to be able to eat and drink and try to recover our strength. I was still very aware of how outlandish we looked, but sitting behind a corner table we weren't quite as conspicuous as we had been outside.

'What do we do now?' Sunny said, sipping her peculiar, burnt-toast-and-cinnamon-flavoured beverage. 'We still need somewhere to sleep.' Her Alfie preened his whiskers on the table beside her. I had almost forgotten about his disturbing strangeness over the past few days.

'Yes, we definitely have to find somewhere to stay.'

'If it comes to the worst we could look for a hiding-place in a deserted cellar or something. We could even go back to the tunnel, I suppose.' She looked rather doubtful about that prospect.

'No, never. I couldn't stand it. Why don't you ask the waiter if he knows of anywhere we could live?'

'What, tell him we don't belong here? I expect you have to be registered to live in this town. I bet we ought to have papers, and identity cards, and be official members of a congregation and everything.'

'Ask him anyway.'

'Oh, all right. Let me think for a minute.'

Sunny sat with her head in her hands. Her bristly hair poked through her fingertips.

'Hmm... tricky. All right. He's heard us talking, so I can't pretend you've lost your voice. We'll have to say we've come from the Eastern Defences and that you've been wounded, but our home was outside the perimeter so we can't go back there. It's a pretty thin story...'

'Are there any Eastern Defences?'

'I don't know.' Sunny shrugged and stood up. 'I think we're about to find out.'

And so we're here. Sunny spoke to the waiter, and he shook his head and went somewhere behind the scenes and came back out with an old woman who was his mother and who owned the estaminet. She walked over to us, and I tried to stand up so I could shake her hand, and I made some odd noises in my throat that might have been an attempt by a badly hurt man to greet her politely, while Sunny told her in Frankish that we were separated from our comrades and needed somewhere to stay for a few nights until we could rejoin our unit. The woman looked curiously at us both, stood with her chin resting in her right hand for a minute or two, conversed with her moth-daemon, Viola says, and finally told Sunny, in Frankish that was too fast for me to follow, that there was an attic we could use, if we didn't mind it being a little dusty.

Sunny smiled at the old woman and thanked her profusely, almost forgetting to keep her voice pitched low. The woman, being enchanted by her smile and perhaps guessing that she was not altogether who or what she seemed, smiled in her turn and led us to the back of the premises. From there a narrow stair went up three floors to this attic bedroom, which is actually much better than we'd been given to expect. I think it was once used by the staff of this place, before the city was closed in and people started to frequent bars and restaurants less often.

It's a nice room, with sloping ceilings, dormer windows overlooking the street outside, a washbasin with running water and two single beds. There are two presses, a double-sided wardrobe made of mahogany and the windows have pull-down blinds which allow us to shut out the precipitate sky that hovers, ever-threatening, outside. We have been very lucky.

I felt bad, leaving Peter and Viola stuck indoors while Alfie and I were out and about in the city. He must have been terribly lonely there. "Indoors" was a silly word to use, of course, as everywhere was indoors here, but I'm sure you know what I mean. I guessed that he must have been used to spending time on his own in his workshop in Oxford, but he'd be working then; concentrating on making or mending things. He'd have been so absorbed in what he was doing that he wouldn't have minded there not being anyone else about. In fact, he probably preferred it that way and was grateful not to be interrupted. Now there was nothing for him to do and he was completely dependent on me.

I had some shopping to do. First things first, and I changed my money at a bank, claiming combatants' rate. Good - we still had enough to live on for a while. The car hire and the room rentals we'd been paying had knocked a big hole in the money I'd brought with me from England, but I didn't think I'd better try to find a branch of Coutts' here to pick up my next instalment of Aunt Sybil's allowance from.

Aunt Sybil... It all came back to me; home, Highdean, Mornington. All of them far, far away. No chance of returning to any of them, or so it seemed to me, stuck as I was in a foreign city under siege with nothing but my knowledge of schoolgirl Frankish between us and arrest by the authorities. I felt momentarily very homesick and lost.

Sunny...

Yes, Alfie?

I know we're a long way from home, but...

Yes, Alfie? I was sure I could feel the salty chill of tear-trails on my cheeks.

You're not a schoolgirl any more. You're a young woman out in the wide world, making her own way.

You mean I've got to stop crying? Be brave?

You're always brave, Sunny.

Oh, Alfie!

I found a pharmacy in a back street not far from the Citadel. The old man who owned the shop looked at me oddly when I asked him for essence de fleur de pavot en alcool but perked up when I tried laudanum.

'Ah, pour la douleur?' he asked.

Yes, I told him, my friend had been blessé in the defences and was in great pain. The pharmacist shook his head at that, said that war and fighting were terrible things and gave me a ten-ounce bottle of milky fluid, refusing to take any payment for it. I thanked him with a deep bow.

Next came clothes. Not everybody wore brightly coloured things against the awful flat grey light, I noticed. Clerics, nuns and police officers - and soldiers, of course - wore uniforms of some kind or another. I guessed that we had got away with our style of dress so far because we looked vaguely official. All the same, it would be better if we blended in with the background, so I bought some civilian clothes for Peter (I had to estimate his size) and myself.

Lastly, food. I was afraid there would be a rationing system and I would have to show a carnet of some kind just to be able to get us something to eat. Or, even worse, that food was no longer on general sale. But Alfie reminded me that we had been able to buy kaffee and cakes in the estaminet without having to show our papers, so we kept looking and eventually I found a self-service grocer's shop in the new part of the city, near the old lake. I discovered afterwards that people in work were issued with food parcels as part of their pay, or ate in common refectories.

So, armed with beer, cheese, bread, sausage ("real pork", the label claimed) and a fresh packet of cigarettes, I returned to the König, said bonjour to my friend Jean the waiter, and climbed the stairs to our garret.

Sunny returned with her arms full of shopping. I was half asleep on my bed and was startled when she opened the door. I must have said something, or sounded alarmed, for she came straight over to me and put her hand on my forehead. Her warm hand.

'Don't worry Mister... Peter. I've got what you need,' she said and showed me a half-pint bottle of brown-tinted glass. The fluid inside sloshed against the cork. 'Here.' She opened the bottle and poured a little of the laudanum into a spoon. 'How much?' she asked.

'Two dessert spoons,' I replied. She gave me the drug. If it were possible, I felt more ashamed of my addiction then than at any time before, but the relief it brought me - so swift, so certain - from the agony in my left arm and foot was, I thought, worth any disgrace. All the same, I felt that I was abusing her.

'Thank you,' I remembered to say.

'That's all right,' she replied. 'Now, I've got us something to eat. It's not much, but it'll keep us going for a while. First, though, you've got to lie with your face down on the bed. Here; I'll help you.'

'Why?' I asked as she helped me to turn over.

'You'll see.' I lay as she had put me for a couple of minutes, feeling the warmth of the poppy seeping through my body, driving away the pain until it was little more than a memory hiding somewhere in the back of my mind. I had learned not to torture myself with the knowledge that it would, in time, return. That was part of the deal I had made with the drug.

'Now!' said Sunny. 'Turn over!' I levered myself up into a sitting position on the bed. For a moment I looked around blindly. Where was she? And then...

Sunny was standing by one of the dormer windows. The blinds were rolled up, and the light from outside was falling on her from both sides, casting a glow around her shoulders. She had put on a light cotton frock in a print of pink and blue geraniums on a white ground - a summer dress whose skirt flared out over her hips and fell in loose pleats to a simple hem just below her knees. A length of pink ribbon was looped around her waist and tied at the back in a wide bow and at her neck there was a narrow, high-cut collar like a nurse's. The dress's short sleeves ended halfway down her upper arms in a fringe of white lace. She had washed her face in the hand-basin and her colour had risen so that her cheeks glowed from within. Her short dark hair, miraculously, no longer looked like a boy's but like a very young girl's; cut elfin style and accentuating the beauty of her oval face, hazel eyes and soft, mobile mouth.

'What do you think?' she said, and twirled round with her arms outstretched so that her skirts lifted and belled out briefly. 'Will I pass as a girl if I need to? Will I do?' And she smiled at me - a sweet, bewitching smile, like the smile of one who looks upon the stars of Heaven and hears their wild high oratorio.

'Oh, I think so,' I said somehow and smiled back at her, dazed as I was. She rushed over to the bed and leaned over me. She kissed me.

'You should do that more often,' she said. 'You've got a gorgeous smile - did you know that?'

Oh, what a joy it was to be able to wear skirts again! You are a monster of vanity, said Alfie, and a disgraceful show-off.

Yes, I admit it and I don't care one little bit! Now let me cut up this bread.

Peter had fallen asleep under the influence of the laudanum. I was glad of it because he needed the rest. I knew that he had suffered terribly during our journey through the tunnel. I also knew that men who had serious injuries needed far more time to recover from them than you might think. They could appear to be perfectly well - over the worst of it, anyway - but inside they were still hurt and often deadly tired. I think that even without the poppy Peter would still have slept, although I couldn't help noticing that he'd been writing in his book while I'd been out. I shut it up without looking at its contents - they were private, after all - and put it down by the side of his bed. Then I tugged the bedclothes out from under him and replaced them on top, pulled his boots off and tucked him into bed as best I could. His Viola crept under the sheets and lay next to him.

I sat on my bed and ate my share of the bread and sausage and drank one of the bottles of beer. Then I stood by the open window and smoked a cigarette. A slight draught caused, I suppose, by an equalisation of air pressure between inside and outside the building, rustled my skirt and I felt once more the pleasure and relief of not having to wear trousers. I'd been in trousers for months and I'd had enough of their stiff practicality. I wanted to feel free again. I hadn't worn a frock since...

Since the Chelsea Barracks, said Alfie.

Yes. Sorry. I stubbed the ciggie out, pulled off the dress and climbed into bed. I was far too tired to dream.

Lyra and Pantalaimon came to me as I lay in bed, suspended between the drug-trance, sleep and death. She was in my favourite form; middle-aged, wearing a long black skirt, a white blouse and an academic hood in the colours of Jordan College, with her honey-blonde hair clasped behind her head. Her presence infused me with a deep happiness; transcending even the peace that the poppy had brought.

Hello, Peter.

Hello, Lyra. I'm glad to see you.

I'm glad to see you

We said nothing for a while. I was able to look at her, and that was enough.

Lyra... Are you here because... because I've died again?

No, Peter.

Am I going to die?

You know the answer to that question.

Yes, of course. I mean; am I going to die soon?

What is soon

Oh...

Don't worry, Peter.

No. Everything will work out for the best in the end. I know.

You're still writing your story in your book?

Yes.

Good. Lyra knelt by the side of the bed and kissed me gently on the lips. Her touch brought back to me with vivid immediacy the memory of the day that she and I had sailed down the river Isis and made love on its banks. I also remembered what had followed closely afterwards.

Lyra...

Yes? She kissed me again.

I pointed to the bed next to mine, where Sunny lay asleep.

I betrayed you. That day in Henley, with the Book Lady. Less than three hours after we loved each other I betrayed you. I was close to tears. How can I be sure I won't let you or Jane down again?

Lyra looked at Sunny and smiled. She's lovely, isn't she? One day, if she lives, I think she will be very beautiful indeed.

She's a lot like you; did you know that?

Lyra smiled again. She's a lot more like herself. Don't get us mixed up, will you?

No.

Sunny has her future and you have yours. I do not think that they are the same future, although your story and hers have come together for a while. Enjoy her beauty, Peter, as you would enjoy a fine painting or an evocative piece of music. Do what you can to help her. Let her help you but don't mistake her affection for love. Think blue and count two.

I won't abuse her trust, Lyra. Don't worry.

Good. Lyra kissed me again and Pan laid a velvet paw on Viola's head. She snuffled in her sleep. I could tell that it was time for them to go.

Goodbye, Lyra.

Goodbye, Peter. She stood up and blew me a last kiss.

Will I see you again soon? But she was gone. And what was soon?

Peter was better the next day. I gave him the remains of the bread and ran downstairs to ask Jean for some chai. Beer for breakfast seemed wrong, somehow. When he had eaten and drunk I helped Peter to the privy and then suggested that we could go down to the park. 'I think,' I said, 'It's time you told me what's going on, don't you?'

Peter grinned and drank the last dregs of his chai. 'Yes, you're right. I've had a bit of a think and I've decided it's time you knew everything. I should have told you before. I'm sorry.'

'Don't worry about it. Instead, look at this terrific red, green and blue suit I've bought you!'

Peter and I made our way down the steep narrow back stairs and into the street by means of the rear entrance. From there it was only ten minutes' walk to the park. We found a bench right in the middle, where there was nobody close by and where we would easily be able to see if anyone approached us. We sat down and, as Peter seemed unsure what to say at first I started the conversation:

'You told me that the reason the Horde are trying to conquer Geneva is that the Magisterium won't let them have access to the Holy Word. That's why there's all this war and killing and why we're surrounded by their forces now.'

'Yes.'

'So why doesn't the Church do to them what they did to us? Why don't they bring down another lightning strike?'

'It's too narrow, that beam. It would only kill a few hundred men - a thousand at the most. It's not designed for killing people but for destroying buildings and ships. The other reason is that it takes a long time to recharge. In fact, sometimes it destroys itself when it's fired, like a cannon bursting.'

'You still haven't told me why it was aimed at us.'

'I think the Church was using its alethiometers just as I was using mine - to find out where its greatest danger lay.'

'And we're its greatest danger?'

'We may well be.'

'Hmmm. I never knew I was so important!'

Sunny, chided Alfie. I've never known a time when you didn't think you were the most important thing in the world...

'Arthur thinks you are.'

'Oh yes. Tell me about Arthur.'

Peter shook his head. 'I'm worried about him. We should have heard from him by now.'

'He was all the men and boys I met along the way, wasn't he? Even that Colonel Braeburn?'

'Yes.'

'He was going to meet us by the dock, he said.'

'Yes he did, but there is no dock here. The lake's been filled in. I don't know why he didn't know that.'

'Oh. So does that mean we don't know what we're going to do?'

'No, I know exactly what we're going to try to do. But we've got to do it without Arthur's help.'

I asked Peter about Arthur. He explained that the Arthurs I had seen had been time-ghosts. That wasn't a word I knew. It seemed that, despite appearances, there was more than one of everybody and that all these different everybodies occupied different parallel time-streams. 'Some people,' said Peter, 'can leap from one time-stream to another and appear as ghosts of themselves in worlds where they don't belong.'

'So the boy I saw on the Pompey Docks was a younger version of Arthur?'

'That's right. But there's another way of looking at it, and that is that he was a manifestation of the self, or Ka, of he who occupies the greater stream in which all the time-streams flow. That Ka can influence all the other selves.'

'They're like puppets, you mean?'

'Not quite, but sort of. Just to make it even more complicated, you can also think of the Arthurs you saw as being Dust-spirits, made of raw human consciousness, like the angels are.'

'Dust? Angels?' That led to a lot more explanation. It was funny - Peter explained everything very clearly and I'm not dim so I had no trouble following what he told me. I was even able to make some good guesses based on what he said, which pleased him. Like:

'So these Dust-spirits or time-ghosts - they're not physical beings?'

'No, they're metaphysical, just like the angels.'

'So they're not physically strong? You could fight one and it wouldn't be able to hurt you?'

'Not unless you were very unfortunate.'

'I see. Go on, then.'

Peter went on, but it was all so outlandish and none of it corresponded to anything I had learned at school. It was more like a story - a really good, inventive story - that somebody had made up. I couldn't make it real in my mind.

'All right,' I said eventually. 'I'll take it as read that Arthur is some kind of magic man. I expect his magic doesn't work here.' I pointed up to the dome through the branches of the anbarically-watered tree that sheltered our bench. 'But how are we going to stop the war?'

It was all down to information, Peter said. The Horde had surrounded the Holy City because they wanted the information that was treasured there. The Magisterium didn't want them to have it.

'But why should they have it?' I said. 'It's not theirs. The Holy Spirit didn't reveal it to them.'

'That's not altogether true. There are some very clever theologians in Africa and Hindustan. But there's another thing to consider. If I have two coins and I give you one of them I've only got half the money I had before. But if I have a piece of knowledge and I give it to you, then we both have it. I've lost nothing and you've gained everything. Knowledge - the Word - wants to be set free.'

'Why don't we wait until our armies drive the Horde back and liberate the City? They'll be here soon. Then we can give the Word to everybody.' Just to reinforce my point there was a boom from overhead. A rocket must have exploded outside.

Peter shook his head again. 'Do you think we would? After losing so many good men in battle, would we give the Enemy what they'd been fighting for once we'd defeated them? Would you?'

'No... I don't think we would.' Not after they'd killed Gerry.

'Sunny,' Peter turned to face me with a quick grimace of pain and leaned forward. 'I know what you're thinking. Your brother died in this war. But look at it this way. Suppose we give the Word to the Africs and the Hindus. Suppose the City no longer has exclusive ownership of all knowledge. Wouldn't that end the war? Wouldn't that save more young men from being killed?'

Don't forget his son Danny's in the army, said Alfie.

'Let me think.' I stood up and walked a short distance from the bench. So was Peter only trying to save his own son? And why had he told me all those fairy-tales about angels and Dust and ghosts? How convincing was that? Not very, was the answer. And then, wouldn't I be a traitor if I gave the Holy Word to the Enemy, even supposing such a thing were possible? How many books did the Word fill? How would I be able to get them out of the city? How would I carry them? Or was I supposed to open a gate or a tunnel like the one Peter and I had come in by and let the Horde in? Wouldn't there be a dreadful slaughter in the streets of Geneva if I did that?

Oh Alfie, this is impossible. No wonder he didn't tell me any of this before now. I'd have dumped him in Frankland days ago and Jacques Fourneaux would still be alive.

There have been many deaths. Too many. We could stop them if we gave the Enemy the Word.

Would they stop? The Enemy might take the Word from us and carry on fighting anyway.

They know they'd lose. They're falling back as it is. You know our forces are winning.

That's true.

But... There'd be more fighting and more killing. More horribly injured men and women. The only chance we've got of stopping them is if the Word is set free and everybody knows about it. If there's nothing left to fight for then maybe, just maybe, the fighting will stop.

I stood absolutely still for several minutes. All right, Alfie. I'm only half convinced, but I can't think of anything better to do. We'll go along with Arthur's and Peter's plans, whatever they are.

I turned around and returned to the bench, carrying Alfie in my arms. Peter was sitting where I had left him, stroking his Viola's back. 'Right,' I said. 'Any idea where they keep the library in this town?'

Of course I didn't mean a public library, like the ones you borrow books from at home. It seemed most likely to Peter and me that the Word would be kept well guarded in a private store. 'But,' he said, 'There's bound to be more than one copy of it and it's probably kept in more than one place. The other thing is that, although it may be written down in books it's probably also stored anbarically.'

I didn't understand what he meant so he showed me some of the things in his knapsack. There was a little black box, labelled Sony in faded letters. It was anbaric, he said, and he tried to turn it on, but nothing happened. Was it full of delicate parts? I asked. Yes, Peter replied and you could see that he instantly realised what I'd already guessed - that the lightning which had damaged the alethiometer and his watch had also done for this Sony box. He looked terribly sick about that.

'I do wish I hadn't brought it with me. Jane loved this little player.' He explained that a friend from a different time-stream, or world, had given him the Sony, and that it was full of music and kinos and books. 'But they're all lost now. Lost to this world, apart from the tunes Arthur learned from it. Oh Sunny, there were such kinos in it, like you wouldn't believe. Magical things...'

There was also a little book I'd seen him reading and I asked to borrow it. This book also came from another world, and the stories in it were strange beyond all my imagining. Strange, and haunting, and alien. I think that it was reading those stories, and feeling the odd texture of the paper under my fingers and smelling the unusual odour of the book's pages that put me on the path of believing in the truth of what Peter had told me in the park.

During the next few days I explored the city, looking for the Word. I moved among the people of Geneva, speaking little and listening as much as I could. Most of them spoke Frankish, though I heard a little Swiss-Doytch as well. I couldn't understand that at all, but as the days passed and I became, so far as I could, part of the life of the town, I picked up more and more of what was going on.

It was amazing how little the war and the siege affected the life of the common people. I should have worked this out for myself, I suppose. After all, life carried on pretty much as usual in London, despite the Zeppelin raids and the blackouts, and Geneva had been living under its concrete roof for nearly ten years. War and peace were much the same beneath it. People still had to eat and work and go home in the evening. As I wandered up and down the alleyways and boulevards of the town, looking for a public street-map, browsing in the bookshops, drinking kaffee and chai in the public bars and restaurants, it was the sense of orderliness and business as usual that struck me the most strongly.

Around eight o'clock every night the city authorities turned two-thirds of the dome's floodlights off and covered the remaining ones with blue filters, casting the city into semi-darkness. I returned to our attic then with things for Peter and me to eat and drink. Sometimes he would be asleep, whether from tiredness or the effects of the opium I didn't know. But often he would be awake and alert and we would share out the bread and meat and kaffee I brought. Once, as a special treat, I spent most of the day's allowance on two real apples. They tasted wonderfully real after the artificial reconstituted stuff that was all that the ordinary folk of Geneva usually ate.

After eating we would lie on our beds with the lights out. The dim, purple-tinged glow from outside gave just enough light for us to see by. If only we could have looked out and seen the stars... Those were the times we talked. We told each other about our lives in the real world beyond the city. Peter talked about Oxford, and his wife and sons, and about the business of making and selling clocks and instruments. He told me about the day he gained his Mastership, with the demonstration of a gravity-driven clock he had made. It had taken him two years to design and build, he said, and was accurate to within a second a month. I talked about home, and school and the Ambulance Brigade.

As the days passed, Peter and I grew closer and we began to feel that we could tell each other our secrets. One night I asked him to tell me about the professor he had known in Oxford and who had taught him to read the alethiometer. He'd had a natural talent for it, he said, and went on to tell me about the first time he met Professor Belacqua on a cold winter's day, and how he'd fallen hopelessly in love with her, despite the thirty years' difference in their ages.

'And did she love you?' I asked.

'She could never show it. Not until...' And then Peter told me his story; about how he had died and been brought back to life in the wrong universe and then been separated from his Viola (I gasped in horror) and met Lyra, who had died in his world but still lived in another. And how, when he died again, he had met Lyra for the third time in a world that was beyond time and they had finally confessed their love for one another.. Peter hesitated then. 'I can't tell you everything that happened after that. Not even now. But I chose to return to my world, knowing that I ran the risk of being very badly hurt. Which, as you can see, is what happened.'

And so, echoing his reticence, I never told Peter about Alfie's specialness and in the end we never revealed our very deepest secrets to each other. I am sure that, had we done so, we would have become lovers.

I feel completely, utterly useless. Neither of us has said it out loud, but somehow it's become accepted that we have a much better chance of finding the Word if I stay up here in the attic bedroom of the König and Sunny investigates in the city. I hate this. It's horribly dangerous. She only has to ask the wrong question of the wrong person and she's likely to be arrested. If that happens, the prediction I made on the Marie-Louise that she might have to face torture will suddenly become very, very real. There are places deep below the Citadel where the white-tiled rooms in which the Consistory Court of Discipline once performed its autos-da-fé still exist, I am quite sure. She's going out and about dressed as a girl, so she's not even got her sword with her. She's quite defenceless.

I made the most discreet enquiries I could, I am sure. Too bloody discreet, really, because after three days of searching I was getting no closer to the truth. It was on the fourth day, with the pounding from overhead becoming louder and more insistent - our armies were getting closer and our time was running out - that I or, rather, Alfie had a brainwave.

'Suppose,' he said out aloud as we sat on my bed in the attic eating artificially sweetened flapjacks. 'Suppose you were a theologian of the Magisterium and you had custody of the Word. Let's also suppose that the Word is portable - that it's kept in an anbaric box like the Sony. What would you do if the City were invaded by hostile forces?'

'I'd try to hide it, I suppose,' I said.

'Yes, you might,' said Peter. 'But you might want to do something else.'

'You might try to get away with it. Escape,' said Viola. Her voice was light and lilting.

'That's right,' said Alfie. 'And if you were going to try to escape, what route would you use?'

'A tunnel, like the one we used to get here?'

'Give the squirrel a coconut! Yes, there are probably a fair number of escape tunnels, leading out of the city in all directions. Now, if you wanted to be sure of getting hold of a copy of the Word before you made your escape - bearing in mind that the streets of Geneva might well be full of foreigners waving cudgels and guns and looking with fell intent for theologians and priests - where would you keep it?'

'Near the tunnel!' Peter said.

'For example, in the building whose cellar led to the tunnel. The one we originally entered the city by.'

I looked around us. 'What you're saying, smartarse daemon, is that we've spent the last four or five days looking for something that we probably missed by only a few yards when we first came to the city?'

'Yes, more or less.'

'Well, you could have said so a little earlier!'

The next day, Peter and I gathered together our things and said goodbye to the König. I let Jean kiss me on the cheek and squeeze my waist even though I was once more dressed as a boy. I hadn't fooled him for a minute, of course. 'Libération!' I said to his mother and him as we left. We made our way back down the streets of Geneva as carefully as we could. This time we were properly prepared for the rigours of the tunnel. Peter's knapsack was stuffed with matches, candles, food and water and I was wearing my sword.

Our plan was terribly simple. We would locate a copy of the Word in an easily carried anbaric form, if such a thing existed. We would steal that copy somehow and scarper into the tunnel, making sure to block the way behind us; either by lowering the iron bulkheads which we knew were there or, if necessary, by fighting and killing anyone who tried to follow us.

It was a simple plan, as I have said. Too simple, really. But when all is said and done nothing could have prepared us for what we were to find in the building at the tunnel's end.

Author's note

When this tale is finally finished I'll append to it another of the stories from The Book of the Wonders of Urth and Sky.