Free The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) by Philip Pullman Page B

from his dæmon, Cariad, had brought back immediately that abominable betrayal of her own on the shores of the world of the dead, when she had abandoned Pan to go in search of the ghost of her friend Roger. The guilt and the shame would still be as fresh in her heart on the day she died, no matter how far away that was.
    Perhaps that wound was one reason they were estranged now. It had never healed. There was no one else alive to whom she could talk about it, except for Serafina Pekkala, the witch queen; but witches were different, and anyway she hadn’t seen Serafina since that journey to the Arctic so many years before.
    Oh, but…
    â€œPan?” she whispered.
    He gave no sign that he’d heard. He seemed to be fast asleep, except that she knew he wasn’t.
    â€œPan,” she went on, still whispering, “what you said about the man who was killed…The man this diary’s about, Hassall…He and his dæmon could separate, isn’t that what you said?”
    Silence.
    â€œHe must have found her again when he came out of that desert, Karamakan….That must be a place like the one the witches go to when they’re young, where their dæmons can’t go. So maybe there are other people…”
    He didn’t move; he didn’t speak.
    She looked away wearily. But her eye was caught by something on the floor by the bookcase: it was the book she’d used to prop the window open, the one Pan had thrown down in distaste. Hadn’t she put it back on the shelf? He must have thrown it down again.
    She got up to replace it, and Pan saw her and said, “Why don’t you get rid of that rubbish?”
    â€œBecause it’s not rubbish. I wish you wouldn’t throw it about like a spoilt child just because you don’t like it.”
    â€œIt’s poison, and it’s destroying you.”
    â€œOh, grow up.”
    She laid it on the desk, and he sprang down to the floor, his fur bristling. His tail swept back and forth across the carpet as he sat and stared at her. He was radiating contempt, and she flinched a little but kept her hands on the book.
    They said not another word as she went to bed. He slept in the armchair.

She couldn’t sleep for thinking of the journal, and the meaning of the word akterrakeh. It meant something to do with the journey to the red building, and possibly something to do with separating, but she was so tired that none of it made sense. The man who’d been murdered was able to separate, and it seemed from what Dr. Strauss had written that no one could make the journey if they were intact. Was akterrakeh a word in one of the local languages for separation?
    The best way to think about it would have been by talking with Pan. But he was unreachable. Reading about the separation of the two men from Tashbulak upset him, angered him, frightened him—perhaps all of those things—just as it did her, but then there’d come the distraction of the novel that he hated so much. There were so many things they had to disagree about, and that book was one of the most toxic.
    The Hyperchorasmians, by a German philosopher called Gottfried Brande, was a novel that was having an extraordinary vogue among clever young people all over Europe and beyond. It was a publishing phenomenon: nine hundred pages long, with an unpronounceable title (at least until Lyra had learnt to pronounce the ch as a k ), an uncompromising sternness of style, and nothing that could remotely pass for a love interest, it had sold in the millions and influenced the thinking of an entire generation. It told the story of a young man who set out to kill God, and succeeded. But the unusual thing about it, the quality that had set it apart from anything else Lyra had ever read, was that in the world Brande described, human beings had no dæmons. They were totally alone.
    Like many others, Lyra had been spellbound, hypnotized by the force of the story, and found her head ringing