Every Second

Lyra had read ten thousand pages in her life, and she had never read so fast.

She dropped to her knees at the base of the pedestal and tore the satchel open. The Roll of the Twelve slid out onto the glass floor, and the loose leaf of the nursery rhyme, and the creased sheet on which she had copied the Crown's inscription. She spread them in a half circle about her knees. Her hands were steady. It astonished her. Some part of her had gone cold and clear and distant, like a clerk in a burning library, noting down the titles of the books as the roof came in.

Eight minutes.

She did not look at the sphere.

"Master," she said. "The cradle."

"I see it."

"Read it with me. Quickly."

Ansgar knelt beside her. His breath rasped. He pressed his good hand to the side of the pedestal, where a band of tiny characters ran around the black stone just below the silver wire: the round, flowing, seed-like script of the First Tongue. They were worn almost smooth. They glimmered, faintly, in the pulsing light.

"A lullaby," he said.

"A what?"

"It is a verse. Seven lines. Cut into the base." His eyes ran along the band, and his lips moved. "The Council knew they could not destroy the sleeper. It was too strong, too old. They could only keep it asleep. And so they made a song." He swallowed. "It is the rhyme you read. The one in the register. But that is a translation, a children's version. This is the original."

"The original sleeper's song."

"Yes."

"If I sing it..."

"Then it sleeps. As it slept for three hundred years." He turned his head, and she saw the sweat on his face and the violet pulse at his throat, throbbing in time with the humming sphere. "But Lyra. There is a thing I must tell you. I see it written here. And I do not think I can say it."

"The collar."

"No. It is not the collar." A flicker of that old, dry, scholar's smile. "It is that I do not wish to."

…

Seven minutes.

The vault had begun to shudder.

It was a fine, steady, rising tremor, like the shiver of a great animal in a fever. Dust sifted from the roof. The Aethel-glass walls rang with a thin crystalline note. The gold had spread over three-quarters of the sphere, and where it flowed the black went white, and the white began to burn; she felt it on her face like the heat of an open oven. The hum had risen to a howl. She felt it in her teeth.

Malakor had not moved.

He stood on the far side of the pedestal in his scarlet cope with his crook in both hands and his face turned up to the beam, eyes closed, lips parted. He seemed to be listening to music. A look of rapt, tender joy had settled on his face, the look of a pilgrim at the end of a very long road. He was humming along with the note.

He is going to let it happen, she thought. He is going to stand there and let it happen.

She dragged her eyes back to the stone.

"Read," said Lyra.

Ansgar read.

His voice was low and dry and strangely beautiful. The First Tongue rolled out of him like water over smooth pebbles: round vowels, soft consonants, long falling cadences, a language made for singing to children in the dark. She wrote it down as he spoke. She wrote it in the Common letters, in her small clerk's hand, the symbols for sounds she had never heard. Her pen scratched. Her lip bled where she had bitten it. Her mind raced.

Hush-a-na. Hush-a-ven. Ashven sho-ra na tul.

"Say it again."

"Hush-a-na."

"That's hush. That's the nursery word. And ven..."

"Sleep. And ashven..."

"The verb. Devour, judge." She was writing so fast the pen tore the paper. "It's there. It's there in the lullaby. Sleeper, sleeper, do not devour; sleeper, sleeper, do not judge. They've put the whole warning in the song. They've put the cure in the curse." She caught her breath. "Master. The last line."

He did not answer.

"The last line!"

He was reading it. His lips had gone white. He knelt there on the glass floor, bent over the black stone, and she saw the color go out of his face and the ruined hand clench in the fold of his cloak, and she knew, before he said a word, that she was not going to like what was written there.

"Hush-a-ven ta kor," he said, almost inaudibly. "Ta kor, ta kor, ashvena."

"Translate."

"Whoever sings the sleeper to sleep..." His voice cracked. "...sleeps with it. Gives her tongue to the hush. Keeps no word."

Lyra stared at him.

"Keeps no word," she said.

"It is the price." He lifted his eyes, and they were wet. "The Council was clever. They made a song. But a song needs a singer. And the sleeper is hungry. It will not accept a lullaby for nothing. It wants language. It wants the thing that makes us people. Whoever sings it takes the silence on herself." His breath rasped. "Hugh of the Council did it. Three hundred years ago, in this very vault. They said that he walked out of here with the face of an angel, and never spoke again."

"Never..."

"Not in any tongue. Not even his mother's. He sat in the sun, and smiled, and made no sound."

She sat back on her heels.

The vault shook. Dust rained down. The light from the sphere was now so bright that she could see the bones of her own hands through the skin. It had a note, now, a clear, high, singing note that seemed to come from inside her own skull.

Six minutes.

"All of them?" said Lyra, in a very small voice.

"All the ones you have."

"All eleven years of them."

"Every tongue you have ever learned. Every word." He did not look away. "The price of the hush is the tongue."

She thought of a cellar, and a smuggled candle, and a voice saying no, little scholar, again. She thought of the smell of ink and the soft grain of vellum under her thumb. She thought of Old Aethelian and Archaic and the clipped Church Latin, of the shape of a verb she had loved, of a poem in the First Tongue about a boy and a heron that she had read once, at twelve, and never forgotten. She thought of every word she had ever been afraid to say aloud.

I will not be able to read.

I will not be able to read the letters he writes me.

She closed her eyes.

It's only language, she told herself. It's only language. It's only everything I am.

…

"You will not sing it," said Ansgar.

"What?"

"I said you will not." He had risen. He stood over her, bent and gray and shaking, with his ruined hand held out before him, and the old scholar's authority had come back into his voice like a bell. "I forbid it."

"Master—"

"You are twenty-one years old. You have a life. A man who loves you. A whole city of books." His eyes burned. "I am sixty-four. I have a collar around my neck, a murder on my hands, and nothing left to lose. I will sing it."

"You can't."

"Why not?"

"You don't know the melody!"

"I will learn."

"You don't have a chance!"

"I have five minutes." He smiled. "It is a long time."

She stared up at him. And she understood. It came to her not as an idea, but as a pain, sharp and cold and clean, like a knife slid between the ribs. He would never sing it. He did not need to. He did not mean to try.

"You're going to stop him," said Lyra.

His smile deepened.

"I am going," said Ansgar softly, "to do the one thing in my life that I should have done three years ago."

He turned.

…

Malakor had opened his eyes.

He was looking at them, over the pedestal, with a faint frown of concern. The beam fell on the crown of his mitre and set it burning like a lamp. "My dear Ansgar," he said gently. "You are not going to disturb the ceremony."

"I am."

"You are not strong enough."

"No." Ansgar's voice shook. "I am not."

"The collar..."

"Yes. The collar." His good hand lifted to his throat. "It is keyed to a name. I have been unable to speak it for three years. I have been unable to write it. I have lain awake at night composing the sentence, and my throat has closed on the first syllable, and I have wept like a child." He drew a long ragged breath. "I think it is time that I said it."

Malakor's frown deepened.

"Ansgar. No."

"Malakor," said Ansgar.

The word rang off the glass.

It was a little thing. Three syllables. A plain old name. But he said it in a clear and carrying voice, with his head thrown back and his eyes wide, and the black band at his throat blazed up like a lit coal. A violet fire raced through it. It bit. His body arched. He staggered, and his hand clawed at his neck, and a sound came out of his throat that no man should make.

He did not stop.

"Malakor," he said again. "Cardinal Malakor of Aethel. Murderer of Clement. Burner of the Academy. The man who sits in the light. I name you. I name you!" His voice cracked, and roared, and cracked again. "Malakor! Malakor!"

He charged.

He ran across the glass, a stooped old man in a gray cloak, with a lame leg and a ruined hand and a fire in his throat, and he hit the Cardinal full in the chest. They went down together in a tangle of scarlet and gray. The crook clattered away. The mitre rolled. Ansgar's good arm had locked round the old man's neck; his ruined claw had caught him by the cope. He was shouting something. It might have been a prayer. It might have been a curse.

"Sing!" he gasped. "Lyra! Sing!"

…

She did not remember rising.

She remembered the glass beneath her palms and the chill of the pedestal against her chest. She remembered the page, swimming before her eyes, and the thread of the song winding through her head: three lines, four, the long falling cadence, the vowels like water. She remembered a sound behind her, a wet, terrible, choking sound, and a voice saying her name.

Don't look.

She looked.

The collar had split.

It had burst open at the throat, and a dark stain was spreading across the gray wool, black and bright, and the old man's head hung back on Malakor's shoulder, and the lips were parted. His eyes were open. They were fixed on her. Even now, even now, they held that look: dry, attentive, patient, a master at his desk, waiting for a pupil to find the answer.

Again, the eyes said. No, little scholar. Again.

"Master," she whispered.

His lips moved. No sound came.

But she read them.

Well done.

Then his head rolled sideways on the glass, and was still.

…

Four minutes.

The boots thundered on the stair a heartbeat later. She heard them before she saw them: the clash of steel, the roar of a voice, the sound of a man taking the last thirty steps in a leap. She heard, from the black mouth of the stair, a voice that she would have known in her sleep, torn and hoarse and furious:

"LYRA!"

"Here!"

He burst through the arch like a thunderbolt.

His borrowed sword was notched and red. His face was gashed. His left sleeve was black with blood, and his armor hung in tatters, and he skidded to a stop on the glass floor with his chest heaving and his amber eyes wild. He took it all in at a glance: the shining sphere, the shaking vault, the old man dead on the floor, the girl on her knees with a pen in her fist.

And the white-robed figure, rising slowly out of the wreck of the old man's arms, with the blood of his friend on his cope and the light of the Quiet Sun on his face.

"Kaelen," said Malakor.

"Father."

"You have come."

"Yes."

"I knew you would." The old man smiled. It was a terrible smile, loving and glad and utterly serene. He picked up his crook, which lay at his feet, and stood with it in both hands, and the Void-wand at its head caught the light and flashed. "Come, my son. Stand by me. The hour is almost at hand."

Kaelen lifted the sword.

"I'm not your son."

"You always will be."

"Not any more."

"Child." Malakor shook his head, almost sadly. "I cannot let you stop this."

"You don't have a choice."

"No," agreed the Cardinal. "I suppose I do not."

The wand came up.

And Lyra, kneeling in the white fire with the song half-sung in her throat, saw the two of them, the old priest and the young soldier, standing face to face over the body of her master in the heart of a dying sun.

Three minutes.

Sing, she told herself.

She opened her mouth.