Free Lyra's Oxford by Philip Pullman Page B

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 onlv 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.
    “I don't know what was the matter with them. Starlings, from over Magdalen way. They were all going mad. Look!”
    She held out her bespattered books. He made a face.
    “Better get those cleaned,” he said.
    “Well, yes,” she said, “that's where I was going.”
    His daemon was a cat, as ginger as he was. She purred a greeting from the doorway, and Pan acknowledged her courteously and moved away.
    Lyra lived at St. Sophia's in term time, but her room in the back quad at Jordan was always there when she wanted to use it. The clock was striking half-past six as she hurried there with her living burden—who was much lighter than her own daemon, as she intended to tell Pantalaimon later.
    As soon as the door had closed behind them, she set down the bag on her desk and let the daemon out. He was frightened, and not only of the dark.
    “I had to keep you out of sight—” she began.
    “I understand. Lyra Silvertongue, you must guide me to a house in this city—I can't find the house, I don't know cities—”

    “Stop,” she said, “slow down, wait. What is your name, and your