"No!" she said fiercely, A lake of molten sulphur extehe length of an immense yon, releasing its mephitic vapors in sudden gusts and belches and barring the way of the solitary winged figure who stood at its edge.
If he took to the sky, the enemy scouts who had spotted him, and lost him, would find him again at once; but if he stayed on the ground, it would take so long to get past this noxious pit that his message might arrive too late.
He would have to take the greater risk. He waited until a cloud of stinking smoke billowed off the yellow surface, and darted upward into the thick of it.
Four pairs of eyes in different parts of the sky all saw the brief movement, and at once four pairs of wings beat hard against the smoke-fouled air, hurling the watchers forward to the cloud.
Then began a hunt in which the pursuers couldhe quarry and the quarry could see nothing at all. The first to break out of the cloud on the far side of the lake would have the advantage, and that might mean survival, or it might mean a successful kill.
And unluckily for the single flier, he found the clear air a few seds after one of his pursuers. At ohey closed with each other, trailing streams of vapor, and dizzy, both of them, from the siing fumes. The quarry had the best of it at first, but then another hunter flew free of the cloud. In a swift and furious struggle, all three of them, twisting in the air like scraps of flame, rose and fell and rose again, only to fall, finally, among the rocks on the far side. The other two hunters never emerged from the cloud.
At the western end of a range of saw-toothed mountains, on a peak that anded wide views of the plain below and the valleys behind, a fortress of basalt seemed to grow out of the mountain as if some volo had thrust it up a million years ago.
In vast caverh the rearing walls, provisions of every sort were stored and labeled; in the arsenals and magazines, engines of war were being calibrated, armed, aed; in the mills below the mountain, volic fires fed mighty fes where phosphor and titanium were beied and bined in alloys never known or used before.
On the most exposed side of the fortress, at a point deep in the shadow of a buttress where the mighty walls rose sheer out of the a lava-flows, there was a small gate, a postern where a sentry watched day and night and challenged all who sought to enter.
While the watch was being ged on the ramparts above, I the sentry stamped once or twid slapped his gloved hands on his upper arms for warmth, for it was the coldest hour of the night, and the little naphtha flare in the bracket beside him gave . His relief would e in aen minutes, and he was looking forward to the mug of chocolate, the smokeleaf, and most of all his bed.
To hear a hammering at the little door was the last thing he expected. However, he was alert, and he snapped open the spy hole, at the same time opening the tap that allowed a flow of naphtha past the pilot light itress outside. In the glare it threw, he saw three hooded figures carryiween them a fourth, whose shape was indistinct, and who seemed ill, or wounded.
The figure in front threw hack his hood. He had a face the sentry knew, but he gave the password anyway and said, "We found him at the sulphur lake. Says his name is Baruch. Hes got an urgent message for Lord Asriel."
The sentry unbarred the door, and his terrier daemon quivered as the three figures maneuvered