Almost at the same time, the tempter whom Father Gomez was setting out to follow was beied herself.
"Thank you, no, no, thats all I need, no more, holy, thank you," said Dr. Mary Maloo the old couple in the olive grove as they tried to give her more food than she could carry.
They lived here isolated and childless, and they had been afraid of the Specters theyd seen among the silver-gray trees; but when Mary Malone came up the road with her rucksack, the Specters had taken fright and drifted away. The old couple had weled Mary into their little vine-sheltered farmhouse, had plied her with wine and cheese and bread and olives, and now didnt want to let her go.
"I must go on," said Mary again, "thank you, youve been very kind, I t carry, oh, all right, another little cheese, thank you...」
They evidently saw her as a talisman against the Specters. She wished she could be. In her week in the world of Cittagazze, she had seen enough devastation, enough Specter-eaten adults and wild, sging children, to have a horror of those ethereal vampires. All she knew was that they did drift away when she approached; but she couldnt stay with everyone who wanted her to, because she had to move on.
She found room for the last little goats cheese ed in its vine leaf, smiled and bowed again, and took a last drink from the spring that bubbled up among the gray rocks. Then she clapped her hands gently together as the old couple were doing, and turned firmly away a.
She looked more decisive than she felt. The last unication with those entities she called shadow particles, and Lyra called Dust, had been on the s of her puter, and at their instru she had destroyed that. Now she was at a loss. Theyd told her to gh the opening in the Oxford she had lived in, the Oxford of Wills world, which shed doo find herself dizzy and quaking with wonder in this extraordinary other world. Beyond that, her only task was to find the boy and the girl, and then play the serpent, whatever that meant.
So shed walked and explored and inquired, and found nothing. But now, she thought, as she turned up the little track away from the olive grove, she would have to look fuidance.
Once she was far enough away from the little farmstead to be sure she wouldnt be disturbed, she sat uhe pirees and opened her rucksack. At the bottom, ed in a silk scarf, was a book shed had for twenty years: a entary on the ese method of divination, the I g.
She had taken it with her for two reasons. One was seal: her grandfather had given it to her, and she had used it a lot as a schoolgirl. The other was that when Lyra had first found her way to Marys laboratory, she had asked: "Whats that?" and poio the poster on the door that showed the symbols from the I g; and shortly afterward, in her spectacular reading of the puter, Lyra had learned (she claimed) that Dust had many other ways of speaking to human beings, and one of them was the method from a that used those symbols.
So in her swift pag to leave her own world, Mary Malone had taken with her the Book of ges, as it was called, and the little yarrow stalks with which she read it. And now the time had e to use them.
She spread the silk on the ground and began the process of dividing and ting, dividing and ting aing aside, which shed done so often as a passionate, curious teenager, and hardly ever since. She had almost fotten how to do it, but she soon found the ritual ing back, and with i