She tugged at his good arm, helping him, lifting him. He tried to respond, but he didnt have the
strength. He could only walk.
"All right," he said, "we t get to the trees. Too far away. So well go to that temple place. If we shut the door, maybe we hold them out for long enough to cut through after all."
Pantalaimon darted ahead, and Lyra gasped and called to him breathlessly, making him pause.
Will could almost see the boweehe daemon tugging and the girl responding. He stumbled through the thick grass with Lyra running ahead to see, and then back to help, and then ahead again, until they reached the stone pavement around the temple.
The door uhe little portico was unlocked, and they ran io find themselves in a bare circular room with several statues of goddesses in niches around the wall. In the very ter a spiral staircase ht iron led up through an opening to the floor above. There was o lock the door, so they clambered up the staircase and onto the floorboards of an upper level that was really a viewing place, where people could e to take the air and look out over the city; for there were no windows or walls, simply a series of open arches all the way around supp the roof. In each archway a windowsill at waist height was broad enough to lean on, and below them the pantiled roof ran down in a gentle slope all around to the gutter.
As they looked out, they could see the forest behind, tanta-lizingly close; and the villa below them, and beyond that the open park, and then the red-brown roofs of the city, with the tower rising to the left. There were carrion crows wheeling in the air above the gray battlements, and Will felt a jolt of siess as he realized what had drawhere.
But there was no time to take in the view; first they had to deal with the children, who were rag up toward the temple, screaming with rage aement. The leading boy slowed down and held up his pistol and fired two or three wild shots toward the temple. Then they came on again, yelling:
"Thiefs!"
"Murderers!"
"We gonna kill you!"
"You got our knife!"
"You don e from here!"
"You gonna die!"
Will took no notice. He had the k already, and swiftly cut a small window to see where they were—only to recoil at once. Lyra looked too, and fell ba disappoi. They were fifty feet or so in the air, high above a main road busy with traffic.
"Of course," Will said bitterly, "we came up a slope.... Well, were stuck. Well have to hold them off, thats all."
Another few seds and the first children were crowding in through the door. The sound of their yelling echoed iemple and reinforced their wildness; and then came a gunshot, enormously loud, and another, and the screaming took aone, and theairs began to shake as the first ones climbed up.
Lyra was croug paralyzed against the wall, but Will still had the knife in his hand. He scrambled over to the opening in the floor and reached down and sliced through the iron of the top step as if it were paper. With nothing to hold it up, the staircase began to bend uhe weight of the children crowding on it, and then it swung down and fell with a huge crash. More screams, more fusion; and again the gu off, but this time by act, it seemed.
Someone had been hit, and the scream was of pain this time, and Will looked down to see a tangle of writhing bodies covered in plaster and dust and blood.
They werent individual children: they were a