The Subtle Knife Read Online Free PDF Page A

pull the eggs up into soft ridges in the center as they cooked and tilt the pan to let raw egg flow into the space. She watched him, too, looking at his face and his working hands and his bare shoulders and his feet.
    When the omelette was cooked he folded it over and cut it in half with the spatula.
    “Find a couple of plates,” he said, and Lyra obediently did so.
    She seemed quite willing to take orders if she saw the sense of them, so he told her to go and clear a table in front of the café. He brought out the food and some knives and forks from a drawer, and they sat down together, a little awkwardly.
    She ate hers in less than a minute, and then fidgeted, swinging back and forth on her chair and plucking at the plastic strips of the woven seat while he finished his. Her dæmon changed yet again, and became a goldfinch, pecking at invisible crumbs on the tabletop.
    Will ate slowly. He’d given her most of the beans, but even so he took much longer than she did. The harbor in front of them, the lights along the empty boulevard, the stars in the dark sky above, all hung in the huge silence as if nothing else existed at all.
    And all the time he was intensely aware of the girl. She was small and slight, but wiry, and she’d fought like a tiger; his fist had raised a bruise on her cheek, and she was ignoring it. Her expression was a mixture of the very young—when she first tasted the cola—and a kind of deep, sad wariness. Her eyes were pale blue, and her hair would be a darkish blond once it was washed; because she was filthy, and she smelled as if she hadn’t bathed for days.
    “Laura? Lara?” Will said.
    “Lyra.”
    “Lyra . . . Silvertongue?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where is your world? How did you get here?”
    She shrugged. “I walked,” she said. “It was all foggy. I didn’t know where I was going. At least, I knew I was going out of
my
world. But I couldn’t see this one till the fog cleared. Then I found myself here.”
    “What did you say about dust?”
    “Dust, yeah. I’m going to find out about it. But this world seems to be empty. There’s no one here to ask. I’ve been here for . . . I dunno, three days, maybe four. And there’s no one here.”
    “But why do you want to find out about dust?”
    “Special Dust,” she said shortly. “Not ordinary dust, obviously.”
    The dæmon changed again. He did so in the flick of an eye, and from a goldfinch he became a rat, a powerful pitch-black rat with red eyes. Will looked at him with wide wary eyes, and the girl saw his glance.
    “You
have
got a dæmon,” she said decisively. “Inside you.”
    He didn’t know what to say.
    “You have,” she went on. “You wouldn’t be human else. You’d be . . . half dead. We seen a kid with his dæmon cut away. You en’t like that. Even if you don’t know you’ve got a dæmon, you have. We was scared at first when we saw you. Like you was a night-ghast or something. But then we saw you weren’t like that at all.”
    “We?”
    “Me and Pantalaimon. Us. But you, your dæmon en’t s
eparate
from you. It’s you. A part of you. You’re part of each other. En’t there
anyone
in your world like us? Are they all like you, with their dæmons all hidden away?”
    Will looked at the two of them, the skinny pale-eyed girl with her black rat dæmon now sitting in her arms, and felt profoundly alone.
    “I’m tired. I’m going to bed,” he said. “Are you going to stay in this city?”
    “Dunno. I’ve got to find out more about what I’m looking for. There must be some Scholars in this world. There must be someone who knows about it.”
    “Maybe not in this world. But I came here out of a place called Oxford. There’s plenty of scholars there, if that’s what you want.”
    “Oxford?” she cried. “That’s where I come from!”
    “Is there an Oxford in your world, then? You never came from my world.”
    “No,” she said decisively. “Different worlds. But in my world there’s an