a child when this happens, his dæmon had not yet settled into one particular form. However, towards the end of the novel, his dæmon is touched (described as a very intimate and usually forbidden action) by Lyra and she settles as a large cat with lustrous and subtle-coloured fur. She is named Kirjava by the witch Serafina Pekkala ('Kirjava' means 'mottled' in Finnish). Unusually, Kirjava has the ability to move far away from Will, much farther than dæmons normally can from their humans. It is this power that allows her and Pantalaimon to run away from Will and Lyra, having been rescued, in order to punish the children for abandoning them when they entered the Land of the Dead. During their absence, they travel through many worlds and though they return and reconcile with their humans, they agree to keep what they did and saw a secret until they feel the time is right to tell their humans. Role The Subtle Knife At the beginning of The Subtle Knife, Will is trying to discover the truth behind his father's disappearance and searches his house for a box of his mother's letters, which may contain a clue to his whereabouts. However, he is disturbed early in the morning by a group of government agents breaking into his house who are also searching for the same thing. Having found the letters, he flees but accidentally kills one of the men while doing so. He heads to Oxford so that he can talk to his father's lawyer and while looking for somewhere to sleep that night, he discovers an interdimensional window leading to the world of Cittàgazze. He explores the mysterious city and finds it completely empty of people – except for a girl about his own age called Lyra, who seems at first to be selfish and haughty. Will questions Lyra and soon realises that she is also from another world, one that is very different from his own. When Lyra learns that Will's world also has an Oxford in it, she decides to go there and speak to the physicists about Dust. Will returns there with her the next day but is unable to learn much more about his father from either his solicitor or the local library. Upon reading his mother's letters, however, he discovers that his father disappeared when he was just a year old while exploring an ‘anomaly’