She was waiting for the starlings. That year an extraordinary number of them had come to roost in the Botanic Garden, and every evening they would rise out of the trees like smoke, and swirl and swoop and dart through the skies above the city in their thousands.

   "Millions," Pan said.

   "Maybe, easily. I don't know who could ever count them.... There they are!"

   They didn't seem like individual birds, or even individual dots of black against the blue; it was the flock itself that was the individual. It was like a single piece of cloth, cut in a very complicated way that let it swing through itself and double over and stretch and fold in three dimensions without ever tangling, turning itself inside out and elegantly waving and crossing through and falling and rising and falling again.

   "If it was saying something ...," said Lyra.

   "Like signaling."

   "No one would know, though. No one could ever understand what it meant."

   "Maybe it means nothing. It just is."

   "Everything means something," Lyra said severely. "We just have to find out how to read it."

   Pantalaimon leapt across a gap in the parapet to the stone i n the corner, and stood on his hind legs, balancing with his tail and gazing more intently at the vast swirling flock over the far side of the city.

   "What does that mean, then?" he said.

   She knew exactly what he was referring to. She was watching it too. Something was jarring or snagging at the smokelike, flaglike, ceaseless motion of the starlings, as if that miraculous multidimensional cloth had found itself unable to get rid of a knot.

   "They're attacking something," Lyra said, shading her eyes.

   And coming closer. Lyra could hear them now, too: a high-pitched angry mindless shriek. The bird at the center of the swirling anger was darting to right and left, now speeding upward, now dropping almost to the rooftops, and when it was no closer than the spire of the University Church, and before they could even see what kind of bird it was, Lyra and Pan found themselves shaking with surprise. For it wasn't a bird, although it was bird-shaped; it was a daemon. A witch's daemon.

Text by Philip Pullman