“What does that mean, then?” he said.
She knew exactly what he was referring to. She was watching it too. Something was jarring or snagging at the smokelike, flaglike, ceaseless motion of the starlings, as if that miraculous multidimensional cloth had found itself unable to get rid of a knot.
“They're attacking something,” Lyra said, shading her eyes.
And coming closer. Lyra could hear them now, too: a high-pitched angry mindless shriek. The bird at the center of the swirling anger was darting to right and left, now speeding upward, now dropping almost to the rooftops, and when it was no closer than the spire of the University Church, and before they could even see what kind of bird it was, Lyra and Pan found themselves shaking with surprise. For it wasn't a bird, although it was bird- shaped; it was a daemon. A witch's daemon.
“Has anyone else seen it? Is anyone looking?” said Lyra.
Pan's black eyes swept every rooftop, every window in sight, while Lyra leaned out and looked up and down the street on one side and then darted to the other three sides to look into Jordan's front quadrangle and along the roof as well. The citizens of Oxford were going about their daily business, and a noise of birds in the sky wasn't interesting enough to disturb them. Just as well: because a daemon was instantly recognizable as what he was, and to see one without his human would have caused a sensation, if not an outcry of fear and horror.
“Oh, this way, this way!” Lyra said urgently, unwilling to shout, but jumping up and waving both arms; and Pan too was trying to attract the daemon's attention, leaping from stone to stone, flowing across the gaps and spinning around to leap back again.
The birds were closer now, and Lyra could see the daemon clearly: a dark bird about the size of a thrush, but with long arched wings and a forked tail. Whatever he'd done to anger the starlings, they were possessed by fear and rage, swooping, stabbing, tearing, trying to batter him out of the air.
“This way! Here, here!” Pan cried, and Lyra flung open the trapdoor to give the daemon a way of escape.
The noise, now that the starlings were nearly overhead, was deafening, and Lyra thought that people below must be looking up to see this war in the sky. And there were so many birds, as thick as flakes in a blizzard of black snow, that Lyra, her arm across her head, lost sight of the daemon among them.
But Pan had him. As the daemon-bird dived low toward the tower, Pan stood up on his hind legs, and then leapt up to gather the daemon in his paws and roll with him over and over toward the trapdoor, and they fell through clumsily as Lyra struck out with her fists to left and right and then tumbled through after the two demons, dragging the trapdoor shut behind her.
She crouched on the steps just beneath it, listening to the shrieks and screams outside rapidly lose their urgency. With their provocation out of sight, the starlings soon forgot that they were provoked.
“What now?” whispered Pan, just below her.
These wooden steps led up from a narrow landing, and were closed by a door at the bottom of the flight. Another door on the landing led to the rooms of young Dr. Polstead, who was one of the few Scholars capable of climbing all the way up the tower several times a day. Being young, he had all his faculties in working order, and Lyra was sure he must have heard her tumble through and bang the trapdoor shut.
She put her finger to her lips. Pantalaimon, staring up in the near-dark, saw and turned his head to listen. There was a faint patch of a lighter color on the step next to him, and as Lyra's eyes adjusted she made out the shape of the daemon and the V-shaped patch of white feathers on his rump.
Silence. Lyra whispered down:
“Sir, we must keep you hidden. I have a canvas bag—if that would be all right—I could carry you to our room….”
“Yes,” came the answering whisper from below.
Lyra pressed her ear to the trapdoor, and, hearing no more tumult, opened it carefully and then darted out to retrieve her bag and the books she'd been studying. The starlings had left evidence of their last meals on the covers of both books, and Lyra made a face as she thought about explaining it to the Librarian of St. Sophia's. She picked the books up gingerly and took them and the bag down through the trapdoor, to hear Pan whispering, “Shhh…”
Voices beyond the lower door: two men leaving Dr. Polstead's room. Visitors—the university term hadn't begun, and he wouldn't be holding tutorials yet.
Lyra held open her bag. The strange daemon hesitated. He was a witch's daemon, and he was used to the wide Arctic skies. The narrow canvas darkness was frightening to him.
“Sir, it will only be for five minutes,” she whispered. “We can't let anyone else see you.”
“You are Lyra Silvertongue?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Very well,” he said, and delicately stepped into the bag that Lyra held open for him.
She picked it up carefully, waiting for the visitors' voices to recede down the stairs. When they'd gone, she stepped over Pan and opened the door quietly. Pan flowed through like dark water, and Lyra set the bag gently over her shoulder and followed, shutting the door behind her.
“Lyra? What's going on?”
The voice from the doorway behind her made her heart leap. Pan, a step ahead, hissed quietly.
“Dr. Polstead,” she said, turning. “Did you hear the birds?”
“Was that what it was? I heard a lot of banging,” he said.
He was stout, ginger-haired, affable; more inclined to be friendly to Lyra than she was to return the feeling. But she was always polite.
