The Last Words of the Earth

The shawl was still damp when Lyra put it in her pocket.

She did not remember doing it. She remembered the Hall emptying in a long, shuffling, shocked procession of silk and satin. She remembered Elowen Varn's iron voice in the doorway, snapping orders to four hundred Northern riders who had somehow, in the space of a quarter hour, taken every door and stair of the Sun Palace. She remembered Cassian's hand on her sleeve and his voice saying I won't move tonight, I'll hold my men outside, you have my word, and Tobias, white-faced and fierce with a bloodied napkin pressed to his mouth, announcing to the room at large that he intended to sleep in the cellar with a sword.

She remembered none of it clearly. She remembered the small, ragged weight in her pocket, and a red-ink sorry.

"Lyra."

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

"I'm working, Kaelen." She said it more sharply than she meant. They were walking fast down a long gallery of the Cathedral, the Captain and the Scholar and four of the Sun Guard, their boots ringing on the flagstones. Behind them the great rose window bled red light from the Archive fire. "He took Wren. He took her because he wants something from me. Or because someone told him to. If I stop to think about what he'll do to her, I won't be any use."

"Then think about something else."

"What?"

"Ottoline."

She stopped.

He had stopped beside her. His face in the dim light was drawn and gray with weariness, his sleeve soaked dark to the elbow. But his eyes were very clear.

"She's the last one on his list," he said. "The Archmage of Earth. He couldn't take her at five, because you got there first. He's lost three of his four, and the clock has run on. Whatever he wants, he can't finish without her." His jaw tightened. "She's in the infirmary on the third floor, under guard. I put six men on the door. Dain's with her."

"Dain was at the Feast."

"He left at eleven. He took my order to relieve her watch."

Lyra's stomach turned over.

"Kaelen," she said. "The assassins at the pillar. Three of them. They were after Cassian, and they were very obvious about it. They waited for the cue."

"Yes."

"Why would a man who wants us alive send three knives at a Duke?"

He stared at her.

"To pull you away," said Lyra. "To pull all of us. The Guard, the Duke, the Duchess. Everyone who might be at that infirmary door."

For perhaps half a heartbeat, neither of them moved.

Then Kaelen broke into a run.

…

The infirmary was on the third floor of the east wing, a long vaulted ward lined with narrow white beds, smelling of lavender and vinegar. Candles burned in wall sconces. Lyra stopped dead on the threshold and sniffed, and the hair rose along her arms, and she nearly cried out with relief to find the tapers plain white and honest, with not a violet thread in them.

Six Sun Guards lay in the corridor outside.

They lay in a neat row against the wall, with their helms off and their hands crossed on their breasts, like children put to bed. For one dreadful moment she thought them dead. Then she saw the slow rise and fall of a chest, and the small dark mark in the neck of the nearest, no bigger than a thorn.

"Sleep-dart," she breathed. "Not Void."

"Alive?"

"All of them."

"Dain!" Kaelen was through the door. "Dain!"

"Here, sir."

The voice was weak, strained, a little puzzled. Lyra followed Kaelen through the ward, and found the lieutenant sitting on the floor at the far end beside a high white bed, with his back against the wall and a hand pressed to his ribs. A line of dark blood ran down his tunic. He was grinning, ghastly and apologetic.

"Sorry, sir. Bit of a surprise. He came out of the linen cupboard."

"Who?"

"Didn't see his face. Gray. Good with a knife. Went through the window, and I'm afraid I let him." He winced. "I'd have had him, but I was trying not to fall on the lady."

The lady lay on the bed.

She lay on her back, very straight, her white hair loose on the pillow and her thin hands folded on the coverlet. The pale eyes were open. They were fixed on the high vault with a curious, concentrated, almost impatient expression, the look of a person waiting for a very slow carriage.

"Lady Ottoline," said Lyra.

"I'm still here," said the Archmage of Earth, in a voice like dry paper. "Don't fuss."

…

She had been struck in the chest with a dart.

Lyra saw it as she knelt beside the bed and drew back the coverlet. A small dart of black glass, no longer than a finger, buried to the fletching in the left side of the old woman's nightgown. Around it the white linen had gone gray, and the gray was spreading, slowly, in a delicate web of violet threads that crept outward through the cloth like frost across a window.

"Void-glass," said Lyra. Her voice came out very small.

"Yes."

"Why didn't you cry out?"

"My dear, I was seventy-three years old and I have spent my life in rooms with men who wanted me quiet." A thin, dry ghost of amusement. "Besides. I had a feeling he'd come back. I thought, let him think he's finished." The pale eyes slid toward her. "How long?"

"I don't—"

"Don't lie to an old woman. How long?"

Lyra's throat worked. She looked at the spreading web of purple, at the way it shone faintly in the candlelight. She had read a hundred pages on the Void, in a dozen forgotten languages. She knew the rate of spread. She could have written it out in a table.

"Ten minutes," she whispered. "Perhaps fifteen."

"Good. That's enough." The old woman's gaze sharpened. "Send the lieutenant for water. And the Captain to the door."

"My lady—"

"Do as you're told, girl."

They did. Dain, white-faced, limped off with a pitcher. Kaelen stood in the doorway with his back to the room and his hand on his sword, a black silhouette against the corridor lamps, and said nothing.

Lyra sat on the edge of the bed and took the old woman's hand.

It was cold as a stone and as light as a bird's wing.

"I'm sorry," said Lyra. "I'm so sorry. We tried. We were too late again."

"You weren't late. You were on time for what mattered." The thin fingers tightened. "You saved me at five. You gave me seven hours. I had a bath and a hot dinner. I told a priest he was a fool." A faint smile. "It's more than most get."

"Please don't."

"Be quiet and listen, child. I haven't the breath to say it twice." The old voice dropped. "Ansgar. You know him?"

"Yes."

"Is he the one who's killing us?"

"He's—he's the one who hangs the chains."

"But not the one who gives the orders."

"No."

"No." The Archmage's eyes slid shut, and opened again, with effort. "I told you. The one who gives the orders sits in the light. Now I'll tell you the rest. I wasn't sure, before. I'd only my own wits, and an old woman's wits are unreliable. But when the dart struck..." Her mouth twisted. "He had a smell. Not the assassin. The one in the corridor, who gave the order. I was lying here and heard the guards go down, and I smelled him as he passed the door. Jasmine."

Lyra's blood ran cold.

"You're sure?"

"I've a good nose." A wheeze of a laugh. "It's the only thing about me that hasn't worn out. Sweet. White flower. A little cloves, in his hair oil. I knew it at once. I'd have known it blind." She drew a shaky breath. "I used to smell it at the old Pontiff's table. Every Epiphany. Every Easter. For forty years."

"Who?"

"You know who."

Lyra did not answer.

She did not need to. She sat on the edge of the narrow white bed, with the old woman's cold fingers in hers, and felt the last of her doubts go out of her like breath. It did not feel like grief. It was colder than grief. It was the stillness of a stone dropped into a well, falling and falling in the dark, a long way down.

Doubt is the first prayer.

The person you trust most holds the knife.

"It could be a servant," she said, and heard how thin it sounded. "A priest. Half the Cathedral wears..."

"Girl."

"—cloves. Everyone uses cloves."

"Lyra." It was the first time the Archmage had used her name. She turned her head on the pillow, and the cloudy eyes held hers with an unexpected fierceness. "I'm dying. I've no time for your kindness. You're the cleverest child the Academy ever raised and you've got every piece in your hand. Put them down on the table and look."

A long silence.

"Yes," said Lyra, in a whisper. "I know."

"Good. Then listen to the last piece."

…

"Clement," said Ottoline.

She said it slowly, between gasps. The violet web had reached her collarbone. It crept up her neck in fine glittering threads, and her breath rattled in her throat.

"He came to me. Three days ago. In the night. He was afraid. He gave me a letter, sealed, and made me swear on the Sun I'd never open it." A cough. "I didn't. I'm a woman of my word. But I put it where he asked."

"Where?"

"Beneath the altar. In the Cathedral." The old eyes burned. "There's a stone under the Sun Altar that moves. The Pontiffs have known it for four hundred years. A hidden recess. They keep their private testament there, each of them, against the day they die. He put it in himself. With my help." A thin smile. "I held the lamp."

"A testament?"

"His confession. His account of what the Church did. What he found in the lower Archive. What he meant to say at dawn." She gripped Lyra's hand with sudden desperate strength. "He knew they'd kill him. He wrote it all down. He signed it in his own hand and his own blood. It names the man who ordered the Cleansing, and the man who ordered the fire at Varnhold, and the man who hired the boy to murder him. All of them."

"It names him."

"By name."

"Do you know what it says?"

"No. I swore." The old woman's lips were turning blue. "But I know what he told me, as he left. He said, Ottoline, if I'm dead by dawn, you'll know the testament is true. And he said..." Her face softened. She seemed, for an instant, very young. "He said, tell the girl who reads. Tell her it's not her fault."

Lyra's breath caught.

"Me?"

"He knew you. Clement. He'd watched you for years. Through the grille in the Archive floor. He said you were the only one of them who ever read for love." The cloudy eyes were wet. "He said you reminded him of the girl he used to be."

Tears were running down Lyra's face. She had not known she was crying.

"The Pontiff's prayer," whispered Ottoline. "The third verse. It's the key. He wrote it in the margin of his hymnal. In the old tongue. You'll know it." Her voice thinned. "Look beneath the altar. Take it. Read it. Show it to the boy."

"I will."

"Promise."

"I promise."

"Then I may rest." The old woman's head sank back. "Tell the lieutenant the water wasn't necessary. I was only getting rid of him."

A laugh, or a sob, broke from Lyra's throat.

The pale eyes closed.

"Lady Ottoline—"

"Don't wake me," said the Archmage of Earth, in a voice already far away. "I've had a very long day."

She did not speak again.

…

It took a long time for the violet threads to stop moving.

Lyra sat on the narrow bed and watched them, because she could not look at anything else. They crept across the old woman's face, up her cheeks, into her white hair; they lingered at the corners of her mouth in a faint delicate lace; and then, one by one, they dimmed and went out. Her hand lay in Lyra's. It was already growing cold.

Someone's boots scraped in the doorway.

"Is she—" said Dain, and stopped.

"Yes," said Kaelen quietly.

Lyra looked up.

He was standing beside the bed. She had not heard him cross the floor. His face was in shadow, his eyes unreadable, but she could see his hand, still on his sword, and the knuckles standing out white as bone.

"She told you," he said.

"Yes."

"What did she say?"

She opened her mouth.

It was Malakor. The words rose to her tongue as plain and cold as a coin. He was in the corridor. He ordered the dart. He ordered the fire. She smelled him.

She looked at his face.

She saw the man who had knelt that afternoon on a worn red carpet, and bowed his head to be blessed. She saw the child in the coal chute. She saw the fifteen years of a boy raised in a cage and called it a garden.

If I say it now, she thought, he will go to the Cardinal with his sword out. And the Cardinal will smile, and say something gentle, and Kaelen will break. Or the Cardinal will not smile at all.

And Wren is somewhere in the dark.

"She said," said Lyra, and her voice shook only a little, "that Clement left a testament. Under the altar. And that he named the murderer. And that she smelled jasmine in the corridor when the dart struck."

Kaelen did not move.

"Jasmine," he said.

"Yes."

"Not a name."

"No. She didn't say a name."

It was not a lie. It was only a very careful piece of the truth. She watched him take it in, and watched the stillness settle over his face like frost on a pane. He did not speak. He stood there for what seemed a long time, looking down at the old woman's face, and then he bent, very gently, and drew the sheet up over it.

"Then we go to the altar," said Kaelen.

"Now?"

"Now. Before anyone else dies." His voice was quite steady. He did not look at her. "I'll not be told by a dead woman's nose what to think of my father. I'll read it myself."

He turned and walked out of the ward without another word.

Lyra sat for a moment longer in the lavender-scented dark, her hand on the sheet. Then she rose, and folded the old woman's fingers one last time, and followed.

On the stair, behind her, Dain began very quietly to pray.