Lyra rode a strong young bear, and Roger rode another, while lorek paced tirelessly ahead and a squad armed with a fire hurler followed guarding the rear.
The way was long and hard. The interior of Svalbard was mountainous, with jumbled peaks and sharp ridges deeply cut by ravines and steep-sided valleys, and the cold was intense. Lyra thought back to the smooth-running sledges of the gyp-tians on the way to Bolvangar; how swift and fortable that progress now seemed to have been! The air here was more peingly chill than any she had experienced before; or it might have been that the bear she was riding wasnt as lightfooted as lorek; or it might have been that she was tired to her very soul.
At all events, it was desperately hard going.
She knew little of where they were bound, or how far it was. All she knehat the older bear S0ren Eisarson had told her while they were preparing the fire hurler. He had been involved iiating with Lord Asriel about the terms of his impriso, and he remembered it well.
At first, hed said, the Svalbard bears regarded Lord Asriel as being no different from any of the other politis, kings, or troublemakers who had been exiled to their bleak island. The prisoners were important, or they would have been killed ht by their own people; they might be valuable to the bears one day, if their political fortunes ged and they returo rule in their own tries; so it might pay the bears not to treat them with cruelty or disrespect.
So Lord Asriel had found ditions on Svalbard er and no worse than hundreds of other exiles had done. But certain things had made his jailers more wary of him than of other prisoheyd had. There was the air of mystery and spiritual peril surrounding anything that had to do with Dust; there was the clear pani the part of those whht him there; and there were Mrs.
Coulters private unications with lofur Raknison.
Besides, the bears had never met anything quite like Lord Asriels own haughty and imperious nature. He dominated even lofur Raknison, arguing forcefully and eloquently, and persuaded the bear-king to let him choose his own dwelling place.
The first one he was allotted was too low down, he said. He needed a high spot, above the smoke and stir of the fire mines and the smithies. He gave the bears a design of the aodation he wanted, and told them where it should be; and he bribed them with gold, and he flattered and bullied lofur Raknison, and with a bemused willihe bears set to work. Before long a house had arisen on a headland fag north: a wide and solid place with fireplaces that burned great blocks of ined and hauled by bears, and with large windows of real glass.
There he dwelt, a prisoner ag like a king.
And the about assembling the materials for a laboratory.
With furious tration he sent for books, instruments, chemicals, all manner of tools and equipment. And somehow it had e, from this source or that; some openly, some smuggled in by the visitors he insisted he was entitled to have. By land, sea, and air, Lord Asriel assembled his materials, and within six months of his ittal, he had all the equipment he wanted.
And so he worked, thinking and planning and calculating, waiting for the ohing he o plete the task that so terrified the Oblation Board. It was drawing closer every minute.
Lyras first glimpse of her fathers prison came when lorek Byrnison stopped at the foot of a ridge for the children to move and st