They said no more till the chauffeur drew the car to a halt.
As they got out, Sir Charles lowered his window and said to Will, «By the way, if you can't get the knife, don't bother to return. Come to my house without it and I'll call the police. I imagine they'll be there at once when I tell them your real name. It is William Parry, isn't it? Yes, I thought so. There's a very good photo of you in today's paper.»
And the car pulled away. Will was speechless.
Lyra was shaking his arm. «It's all right,» she said, «he won't tell anyone else. He would have done it already if he was going to. Come on.»
Ten minutes later they stood in the little square at the foot of the Tower of the Angels. Will had told her about the snake daemon, and she had stopped still in the street, tormented again by that half-memory. Who was the old man? Where had she seen him? It was no good; the memory wouldn't come clear.
«I didn't want to tell him» Lyra said quietly, «but I saw a man up there last night. He looked down when the kids were making all that noise….»
«What did he look like?»
«Young, with curly hair. Not old at all. But I saw him for only a moment, at the very top, over those battlements. I thought he might be… You remember Angelica and Paolo, and Paolo said they had an older brother, and he'd come into the city as well, and she made Paolo stop telling us, as if it was a secret? Well, I thought it might be him. He might be after this knife as well. And I reckon all the kids know about it. I think that's the real reason why they come back in the first place.»
«Mmm,» he said, looking up. «Maybe.»
She remembered the children talking earlier that morning. No children would go in the tower, they'd said; there were scary things in there. And she remembered her own feeling of unease as she and Pantalaimon had looked through the open door before leaving the city. Maybe that was why they needed a grown man to go in there. Her daemon was fluttering around her head now, moth-formed in the bright sunlight, whispering anxiously.
«Hush,» she whispered back, «there en't any choice, Pan. It's our fault. We got to make it right, and this is the only way.» Will walked off to the right, following the wall of the tower. At the corner a narrow cobbled alley led between it and the next building, and Will went down there too, looking up, getting the measure of the place. Lyra followed. Will stopped under a window at the second-story level and said to Pantalaimon, «Can you fly up there? Can you look in?»
He became a sparrow at once and set off. He could only just reach it. Lyra gasped and gave a little cry when he was at the windowsill, and he perched there for a second or two before diving down again. She sighed and took deep breaths like someone rescued from drowning. Will frowned, puzzled.
«It's hard,» she explained, «when your daemon goes away from you. It hurts.»
«Sorry. Did you see anything?» he said. «Stairs,» said Pantalaimon. «Stairs and dark rooms. There were swords hung on the wall, and spears and shields, like a museum. And I saw the young man. He was … dancing.»
«Dancing ?»
«Moving to and fro, waving his hand about. Or as if he was fighting something invisible… I just saw him through an open door. Not clearly.»
«Fighting a Specter?» Lyra guessed. But they couldn't guess any better, so they moved on. Behind the tower a high stone wall, topped with broken glass, enclosed a small garden with formal beds of herbs around a fountain (once again Pantalaimon flew up to look); and then there was an alley on the other side, bringing them back to the square. The windows around the tower were small and deeply set, like frowning eyes.
«We'll have to go in the front, then,» said Will. He climbed the steps and pushed the door wide. Sunlight struck in, and the heavy hinges creaked. He took a step or two inside, and seeing no one, went in farther. Lyra followed close behind. The floor was made of flagstones worn smooth over centuries, and the air inside was cool. Will looked at a flight of steps going downward, and went far enough down to see that it opened into a wide, low-ceilinged room with an immense coal furnace at one end, where the plaster walls were black with soot; but there was no one there, and he went up to the entrance hall again, where he found Lyra with her finger to her lips, looking up.
«I can hear him,» she whispered. «He's talking to himself, I reckon.»
Will listened hard, and heard it too: a low crooning murmur interrupted occasionally by a harsh laugh or a short cry of anger. It sounded like the voice of a madman.
Will blew out his cheeks and set off to climb the staircase. It was made of blackened oak, immense and broad, with steps as worn as the flagstones: far too solid to creak underfoot. The light diminished as they climbed, because the only illumination was the small deep-set window on each landing. They climbed up one floor, stopped and listened, climbed the next, and the sound of the man's voice was now mixed with that of halting, rhythmic footsteps. It came from a room across the landing, whose door stood ajar.
Will tiptoed to it and pushed it open another few inches so he could see.
It was a large room with cobwebs thickly clustered on the ceiling. The walls were lined with bookshelves containing badly preserved volumes with the bindings crumbling and flaking, or distorted with damp. Several of them lay thrown off the shelves, open on the floor or the wide dusty tables, and others had been thrust back higgledy-piggledy.
In the center of the room, a young man was — dancing. Pantalaimon was right: it looked exactly like that. He had his back to the door, and he'd shuffle to one side, then to the other, and all the time his right hand moved in front of him as if he were clearing a way through some invisible obstacles. In that hand was a knife, not a special-looking knife, just a dull blade about eight inches long, and he'd thrust it forward, slice it sideways, feel forward with it, jab up and down, all in the empty air.
He moved as if to turn, and Will withdrew. He put a finger to his lips and beckoned to Lyra, and led her to the stairs and up to the next floor.
«What's he doing?» she whispered.
He described it as well as he could.
«He sounds mad,» said Lyra. «Is he thin, with curly hair?»
«Yes. Red hair, like Angelica's. He certainly looks mad. I don't know — I think this is odder than Sir Charles said. Let's look farther up before we speak to him.»
She didn't question, but let him lead them up another staircase to the top story. It was much lighter up there, because a white-painted flight of steps led up to the roof — or, rather, to a wood-and-glass structure like a little greenhouse. Even at the foot of the steps they could feel the heat it was absorbing.
And as they stood there they heard a groan from above.
They jumped. They'd been sure there was only one man in the tower. Pantalaimon was so startled that he changed at once from a cat to a bird and flew to Lyra's breast. Will and Lyra realized as he did so that they'd seized each other's hand, and let go slowly.
«Better go and see,» Will whispered. «I'll go first.»
«I ought to go first,» she whispered back, «seeing it's my fault.»
«Seeing it's your fault, you got to do as I say.»
She twisted her lip but fell in behind him.
He climbed up into the sun. The light in the glass structure was blinding. It was as hot as a greenhouse, too, and Will could neither see nor breathe easily. He found a door handle and turned it and stepped out quickly, holding his hand up to keep the sun out of his eyes.
He found himself on a roof of lead, enclosed by the battle-mented parapet. The glass structure was set in the center, and the lead sloped slightly downward all around toward a gutter inside the parapet, with square drainage holes in the stone for rainwater.