Lyra woke early to find the m quiet and warm, as if the city never had any other weather than this calm summer. She slipped out of bed and downstairs, and hearing some childrens voices out oer, went to see what they were doing.
Three boys and a girl were splashing across the sunlit harbor in a couple of pedal boats, rag toward the steps. As they saw Lyra, they slowed for a moment, but then the race took hold of them again. The winners crashed into the steps so hard that one of them fell into the water, and theried to climb into the other craft and tipped that over, too, and then they all splashed about together as if the fear of the night before had never happehey were youhan
most of the children by the tower, Lyra thought, and she joihem ier, with Pantalaimon as a little silver fish glittering beside her. She never found it hard to talk to other children, and soon they were gathered around her, sitting in pools of water on the warm stoheir shirts drying quickly in the sun. Poor Pantalaimon had to creep into her pocket again, frogshaped in the cool damp cotton.
"What you going to do with that cat?"
" you really take the bad luck away?"
"Where you e from?"
"Your friend, he ain afraid of Specters?"
"Will ent afraid of anything," Lyra said. "Norm I. What you scared of cats for?"
"You dont know about cats?" the oldest boy said incredulously. "Cats, they got the devil in them, all right. You got to kill every cat you see. They bite you and put the devil in you too. And what was you doing with that big pard?"
She realized he meant Pantalaimon in his leopard shape, and shook her head ily.
"You must have been dreaming," she said. "Theres all kinds of things look different in the moonlight. But me and Will, we dont have Specters where we e from, so we dont know much about em."
"If you t see em, youre safe," said a boy. "You see em, you know they get you. Thats what my pa said, then they got him."
"And theyre here, all around us now?"
"Yeah," said the girl. She reached out a hand and grabbed a fistful of air, crowing, "I got one now!"
"They t hurt you," one of the boys said. "So we t hurt them, all right."
"And theres always beeers in this world?" said Lyra.
"Yeah," said one boy, but another said, "No, they came a long time ago. Hundreds of years."
"They came because of the Guild," said the third.
"The what?" said Lyra.
"They never!" said the girl. "My granny said they came because people were bad, and God sent them to punish us."
"Yranny don know nothing," said a boy. "She got a beard, yranny. Shes a goat, all right."
"Whats the Guild?" Lyra persisted.
"You know the Torre degU Angeli," said a boy. "The stoower, right. Well it belongs to the Guild, and theres a secret pla there. The Guild, theyre men who know all kind of things.
Philosophy, alchemy, all kind of things they know. And they were the ones who let the Specters in."
"That ain true," said another boy. They came from the stars."
"It is! This is what happened, all right: this Guild man hundreds of years ago was taking some metal apart. Lead. He was going to make it into gold. A it and cut it smaller and smaller till he came to the smallest piece he could get There ain nothing smaller than that. So small you could, even. But he cut that, too, and ihe smallest little bit there was all the Specters packed in, twisted over and folded up so