Chapter 30 Thirty, Yunshan

Take care of yourself supreme heaven broad extension in the form of a circle Not sure if it's square or round With oval towers and battlements on the bunker Adorned with beautiful sapphires... — John Milton The mind machine was driven by Mrs. Coulter, and there was only her and her elf in the cockpit. The barometric altimeter wasn't much use in a storm, but she could gauge her approximate altitude by looking at the flames burning where the angel landed.The flames ran high in spite of the falling rain, and the course was easy: the flickering lightning around the mountain served as a bright beacon, but she had to avoid the various creatures still fighting in the air. Such flying objects, and dodge the higher and higher land below.

She didn't use a light because she wanted to get close and find somewhere to land before she was seen and shot down.As she approached, the rising wind became more intense, the gale more swift and brutal, and the rotorcraft would stand no chance: the rough draft would snap it to the ground like a fly.In the mind machine she could move lightly with the wind, balancing herself like a surfer in a peaceful sea. She began to climb cautiously, peering ahead, ignoring the instruments, flying by sight and instinct.Her spirit jumped from side to side of the little glass cabin, looking ahead, above, left and right, and kept shouting at her.Bright bolts of lightning flashed and burst above and around the telekinesis.She flew over all of this in a small plane, gaining altitude little by little, always heading towards the palace hanging in the clouds.

As she approached, Mrs. Coulter found herself distracted by the nature of the mountain itself. It reminded her of some loathsome heresy whose creator now deservedly perishes in the dungeons of the ecclesiastical courts.He proposed that there were many more spaces than the familiar three-dimensional space, saying that there were seven or eight other spaces on a very small scale, but it was difficult to examine directly.He even built a model to demonstrate how they might work, and before it was driven out and burned, Mrs. Coulter looked at the thing, layer upon layer, layer upon layer, corners both contained and contained. Tolerance: Its inner layer is everywhere, and its outer layer is everywhere.Yunshan gave her the same impression: rather than a rock, it is more like a battlefield, skillfully handling the space itself to contain, extend and overlap it into corridors, steps, rooms, colonnades and airy spaces. A sentry tower with only steam.

She felt a strange euphoria slowly swell in her chest as she figured out how to get the plane safely to the cloud-shrouded platform on the south side.The little plane pitched and strained in the murky air, but she kept her course steady, her daemon guiding her down on the platform. The light she'd relied on so far had been lightning, the occasional sun through a crack in the clouds, the firelight of a burning angel, and the beam of an electric searchlight, but the light here was different.It comes from the very substance of the mountain itself, which lights up and goes dark with a slow breathing rhythm, emitting emerald brilliance.

The woman and the elf got off the mind machine and looked around to see which way to go. She felt other beings moving rapidly up and down, zipping through the material of the mountain, carrying letters, orders, and messages.She couldn't see them, all she could see was the bewildering aspect of the encircling colonnade, staircase, steps, and facade. Before she could make up her mind which way to go, she heard voices, and hid herself behind a pillar, the voices were singing hymns, and as they came nearer she saw a procession of angels carrying a palanquin. As they approached her hiding place, they saw the telekinesis and stopped.The singing trembled a little, and some of the angels carrying the sedan chair looked around suspiciously and fearfully.

Mrs. Coulter was close enough to see what was inside the litter: an angel, indescribably old, not easy to see, because the litter was all surrounded by sparkling crystals, reflecting the all-encompassing light of the mountains, but she To feel that terrible old age, a face sunken into wrinkles, hands shaking and a mouth grunting and eyes full of mucus. The elderly man pointed tremblingly at the mind machine, giggled to himself, muttered to himself, kept pulling his beard, then threw his head back and let out a painful howl, Ku Mrs. Walter had to cover her ears. But the litter-bearers obviously had a job to do, for they braced themselves and continued up the steps, ignoring the shouts and grunts from inside.When they reached an open place, they spread their wings wide, took off at the command of the leader, carried the sedan chair, and flew out of Mrs. Coulter's sight in the swirling smoke.

But she didn't have time to think about that, and she and the monkey rushed on, up the huge staircase, over the bridge, and up.The higher they went, the more they felt the unseen activity around them, until at last they turned a corner into a wide space like a plaza suspended in mist, and came face to face with an angel with a spear in his hand. "Who are you? What's your business?" he said. Mrs. Coulter looked at him curiously.These are the creatures that long ago fell in love with mortal women. "No, no," she said gently, "please don't waste time, take me to the regent right away, he is waiting for me."

She felt it was time to unsettle them, to throw them off balance.The angel didn't know what to do, so he did as she asked.She followed him for a few minutes, through the bewildering lights, until she came to an anteroom.How she got there she didn't know, they got there anyway, and after a brief pause, something opened in front of her like a door. Her elf's sharp nails dug into the flesh of her upper arm, and she grabbed at his hair to reassure him. Facing them was a photosynthetic organism.She felt that he was human-shaped and human-sized, but she was so dizzy that she couldn't see him clearly.The golden monkey buried his face in her shoulder, and she raised an arm to shield her eyes.

Metatron said, "Where is she? Where is your daughter?" "I have come to tell you this, my lord regent," she said. "If she's in your hands, you'll take her." "She is not in my control, but her spirit is." "How is that possible?" "I swear, Metatron, her daemon is under my control. Great Regent, hide yourself a little—my eyes are dazzled..." He pulled a veil over her face, and now it was like looking at the sun through smoked glass, and her eyes could see him more clearly, but she still pretended to be dazzled by his face.He was exactly like the men of the early Middle Ages, tall, powerful, and imposing.Is he wearing clothes?does he have wingsShe couldn't tell because of the power of his eyes.She can't see anything else.

"Listen to me, Metatron, I have just come from Lord Asriel, who has the child's daemon in his hand, and he knows the child will come to him soon." "What does he want that kid for?" "Keep her away from you until she is of age, he does not know where I have gone, I must return to him at once, what I tell you is the truth. Look at me, great regent, for I cannot look at you easily .Look at me clearly and tell me what you see." The Prince Angel looked at her, the most thorough examination Marisa Coulter had ever experienced, stripped of every bit of cover and deceit, and she stood naked under Metatron's ferocious gaze.

She knew her nature would answer for her, and she was afraid he wouldn't see enough in her, Lyra lied to Eofur Reknisson with her words, her mother was lying her whole life . "Yes, I saw it," said Metatron. "What did you see?" "Corruption, envy, and lust for power, cruelty and indifference, vile inquiring curiosity, pure, vicious, and intoxicating malice; from your earliest days you never expressed a single sympathy or pity or kindness or uncalculation to What have you got in return; you have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation, you have betrayed, plotted and taken pride in your betrayal, you are a cesspool of moral filth." Mrs. Coulter was deeply shaken by the voice expressing these judgments. She knew it would come, she was afraid of it, yet she wanted it to come, and now that it had been said, she experienced a slight sense of triumph. . She moved a little closer to him. "So you see," she said, "I would betray him easily, and I could take you to the place where he took my daughter's elf, and you could destroy Asriel, and the child would have no doubts into your palm." She felt the vapor move around her, and her senses became confused: his next words pierced her flesh like darts made of perfumed ice. "When I was human," he said, "I had many wives, but none as lovely as you." "When you were human?" "When I was human I was called Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son of Conan, the son of Enoch the son of God, and Enoch was the son of Seth, and Seth was the son of Adam. I lived sixty-five years on the earth, and then the Authority took me to his kingdom." "Have you had many wives?" "I have loved their bodies. This is the son of heaven who fell in love with the daughter of earth. I begged the authority to unite with them, but he firmly opposed them. He forced me to prophesy their doom." "You haven't had a wife for thousands of years..." "I became regent of the kingdom." "Shouldn't you have a spouse?" That was when she felt most exposed and dangerous, but she leaned on her flesh, on the strange truth she had learned about angels, perhaps especially angels who had been humans: no flesh, they coveted, longed to touch flesh.Metatron was close enough now, close enough to smell the fragrance of her hair, to gaze at the texture of her skin, close enough to touch her with hot hands. She heard a strange sound, like the grunt and crackle you hear before you realize you're hearing your house on fire. "Tell me what Lord Asriel is doing and where he is," he said. "I can take you to him now." The angels carrying the sedan chairs left Cloud Mountain and flew southward. Metatron's order was to take the Authority to a safe place away from the battlefield, because he wanted him to live for a while, but he did not arrange for him to be a general. The large body of guards, which drew the attention of the enemy, believed that the storm would serve as cover, thinking that in such circumstances a small company would be safer than a large one. Things might have gone as he expected, but a cliff ghost who was busy eating a dying warrior raised his head, just at that moment a searchlight shone on the crystal sedan chair. Something stirred in the cliff ghost's memory, and he paused, one hand on the warm liver, and the memory of a babbling arctic fox came back to him as his brother pushed him aside. He immediately opened up the other cliff ghosts in him to follow.Wings as tough as leather jumped up, and after a while the team Zephania and her angels worked hard for a night and a half morning, and finally found a small crack on the hillside to the south of the fortress. It was not there the day before.They had studied it and enlarged it, and now Lord Asriel was climbing down into the long series of caverns and tunnels that stretched beneath the keep. The cave was not completely dark as he thought. There was a faint light source, like a river composed of hundreds of millions of tiny particles, glowing faintly. They flowed steadily down the tunnel like a river of light. "Dust," he said to his daemon. He had never seen it with the naked eye, but he hadn't seen so much dust together then.He went on until the tunnel suddenly opened up, and he found himself on top of a huge cavern: a vault big enough to hold a dozen cathedrals, and a cavern so deep that it sloped down for hundreds of feet, It was dizzying and pitch black. That cascade of dust was flowing endlessly into the pit, pouring down without ceasing, its billions of particles like the stars of the Milky Way, each a tiny fragment of a conscious thought, seemingly a mass of A bleak and sad light. He and the elf crawled down toward the abyss, and as they went they gradually began to see something going on in the gloom, many hundreds of yards away, on the far side of the abyss.He thought there was something moving there, but the more he climbed down, the thing became clearer and clearer: a group of vague, pale figures were walking cautiously along the dangerous slope, men, women and children, he saw Every creature he had ever seen, and many he hadn't seen.They were so absorbed in their balance that they didn't notice him at all.Lord Asriel felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end when he realized they were ghosts. "Laila has been here," he said quietly to Snow Leopard. "Be careful with your step." That was all she answered. By this time Will and Lyra were drenched, shaking, and in pain, stumbling through mud, over rocks, and into small ravines where storm-formed rivers flowed red with blood. .Laila feared that Madame Salmachia was dying: she hadn't said a word for several minutes, she was lying limp in Laila's hands. When they stopped in a river bed where the water was at least white and scooped up handfuls of water into their thirsty mouths, Will felt Thales cheer up and say, "Will—I heard a horse coming Now—Lord Asriel has no cavalry, must be the enemy, cross the river and hide—I see some bushes yonder..." "Let's go," Will said to Lyra, and they scrambled through the bone-chilling water and climbed across the far valley in time.The riders who scrambled over the slope and came down to drink water did not look like cavalry: they seemed to be as densely haired and fleshy as their horses, without clothes or saddles, but with weapons: tridents, nets and bents. Knife. Will and Lyra didn't stop to look: they staggered over the rough ground, bent over, trying not to be seen. But they had to keep their heads down, and look down; the thunder exploded over their heads as they ran, so that they could not hear the screams and growls of the Cliff Ghosts until they ran among them. The guys were surrounding something glistening in the mud: something a little taller than them, lying on its side, a big cage maybe, with crystal walls.They were beating it with fists and rocks, screaming. Will and Lila failed to stop and run to the other side, but ran right into the middle of the cliff ghost's team.