As they moved on, they could see a movement on the horizon to the left and right, and ahead of them a dirty-colored smoke was rising slowly to add its darkness to the dismal air. The movement was people, or ghosts: in lines or pairs or groups or alone, but all empty-handed, hundreds and thousands of men and women and children were drifting over the plain toward the source of the smoke.
She withdrew, taking the dream-Mary with her, until she found herself in the house again, cross-legged on the earthen floor, with Mary's eyes glittering as they looked at her.
"Lyra," she said, "something's happened, they've found something they can't explain and it's... I don't know what it is... I've got to go and look. It's an hour or so away. I'll come back as soon as I can. Help yourself to anything you need from my house, I can't stop, they're too anxious...”
Yes, I do. But I didn't believe them until now. I saw the boy and the girl so clearly, and a voice told me to prepare for them.
All she could do was respond. "I am a human," she said.
"Does that mean we shall be birds, like witches' daemons?" said Pantalaimon.
"Of course. I certainly wouldn't give it to anyone else, ever."
She looked up from time to time and touched the spyglass in her pocket, but she couldn't use it till they'd stopped moving. And these mulefa were moving urgently, with the air of not wanting to stop for anything. After an hour's hard riding they swung inland, leaving the stone road and moving slowly along a trail of beaten earth that ran between knee-high grass past a stand of wheel trees and up toward a ridge. The landscape glowed under the moon: wide, bare hills with occasional little gullies, where streams trickled down among the trees that clustered there.
"Mr. Scoresby is dead," Serafina went on. "Before I parted from him, I gave him a flower to summon me with, if he should need me. I heard his call and flew to him, but I arrived too late. He died fighting a force of Muscovites, but I know nothing of what brought them there, or why he was holding them off when he could easily have escaped. King Iorek, I am wretched with remorse."
When we have grown up... Again Mary had to keep herself from becoming incoherent. One of the things she'd begun to suspect about Shadows was that children and adults reacted to them differently, or attracted different kinds of Shadow activity. Hadn't Lyra said that the scientists in her world had discovered something like that about Dust, which was their name for Shadows? Here it was again.
"Otyets Semyon," he said, standing, "you have been very kind, and I wish I could stay longer to taste your drink and to hear you talk, because what you tell me has been very interesting. But you understand I am unhappy about my family, and very anxious to find them again, so I think I must move on, much as I would like to stay."
He still hadn't answered her first question, and he wasn't going to, and she knew it.
"Where's the bomb?" he said, close to her ear. "They've just begun to unload it. It's the big crate on the ground over there. I can't do anything till they take it out, and even then...”
The crystals that gave them light were neither mounted on sconces nor enclosed in glowing pillars, but scattered loosely on the floor, and there were no flaring torches to add to the heat, so little by little the party began to feel cold again; and presently they came out, quite suddenly, into the night air.
There was Lord Roke, lying in the open on a patch of moss. How could they not have seen him? But something had happened, for he wasn't moving.
"But she has to follow him, if he has the knife. And I think that as soon as the knife's intact again, they'll use it to slip into another world, so as to get away from us. Did you see how he stopped her from speaking when she was going to say something more? They have some secret purpose, and it's very different from what we want them to do."
"Do, not much. Does she know something?"