Mrs. Coulter whispered to the shadow beside her:
"Look how he hides, Metatron! He creeps through the dark like a rat..."
They stood on a ledge high up in the great cavern, watg Lord Asriel and the snow leopard make their careful way down, a long way below.
"I could strike him now," the shadow whispered.
"Yes, of course you could," she whispered back, leaning close; "but I want to see his face, dear Metatron; I want him to know Ive betrayed him. e, lets follow and catch him..."
The Dust fall shone like a great pillar of faint light as it desded smoothly and never-endingly into the gulf. Mrs. Coulter had no attention to spare for it, because the shadow beside her was trembling with
desire, and she had to keep him by her side, under what trol she could manage.
They moved down, silent, following Lord Asriel. The farther down they climbed, the more she felt a great weariness fall over her.
"What? What?" whispered the shadow, feeling her emotions, and suspicious at once.
"I was thinking," she said with a sweet malice, "how glad I am that the child will never grow up to love and be loved. I thought I loved her when she was a baby; but now...」
"There was regret," the shadow said, "in your heart there was regret that you will not see her grow up."
"Oh, Metatron, how long it is since you were a man! you really not tell what it is Im regretting? Its not her ing of age, but mine. How bitterly I regret that I didnt know of you in my own girlhood; how passionately I would have devoted myself to you..."
She leaoward the shadow, as if she couldnt trol the impulses of her own body, and the shadow hungrily sniffed and seemed to gulp at the st of her flesh.
They were moving laboriously over the tumbled and broken rocks toward the foot of the slope. The farther down they went, the more the Dust light gave everything a nimbus of golden mist. Mrs. Coulter kept reag for where his hand might have been if the shadow had been a human panion, and then seemed to recollect herself, and whispered:
"Keep behind me, Metatron, wait here, Asriel is suspicious, let me lull him first. When hes off guard, Ill call you. But e as a shadow, in this small form, so he doesnt see you, otherwise, hell just let the childs daemon fly away."
The Regent was a being whose profound intellect had had thousands of years to deepen and streself, and whose knowledge extended over a million universes. heless, at that moment he was blinded by his twin obsessions: to destroy Lyra and to possess her mother. He nodded and stayed where he was, while the woman and the monkey moved forward as quietly as they could.
Lord Asriel was waiting behind a great block of granite, out of sight of the Regent. The snow leopard heard them ing, and Lord Asriel stood up as Mrs. Coulter came around the er. Everything, every surface, every cubitimeter of air, ermeated by the falling Dust, which gave a soft clarity to every tiail; and in the Dust light Lord Asriel saw that her face ith tears, and that she was grittieeth so as not to sob.
He took her in his arms, and the golden monkey embraced the snow leopards ned buried his black fa her fur.
"Is Lyra safe? Has she found her daemon?" she whispered.
"The ghost of the boys father is proteg both of them."
"Dust is beautiful... I never knew."
"What did you tell him?"
"I lied and lied, Asriel.. .Lets not wait too long, I t bear it... We