LIT.PALACE

Excerpt from:His Dark materials:Book II: The Subtle Knife by; Philip Pullman

"Hester, don't you go before I do," Lee whispered.
'Lee, I couldn't abide to be anywhere away from you for a single second," she whispered back.
"You think the witch will come?"
'Sure she will. We should have called her before."
"We should have done a lot of things'
"maybe so..."
Another crack, and this time the bullet went deep somewhere inside, seeking out the center of his life. He thought: It won't find it there. Hester's my center. And he saw a blue flicker down below, and strained to bring the barrel over to it.
"He's the one," Hester breathed.
Lee found it hard to pull the trigger. Everything was hard.
He had to try three times, and finally he got it. The blue uniform tumbled away down the slope.
Another long silence. The pain nearby was losing its fear of him. It was like a pack of jackals, circling, sniffing, treading closer, and he knew they wouldn't leave him now till they'd eaten him bare.
"there's one man left," Hester muttered. "He's a-making for the zeppelin."
And Lee saw him mistily, one soldier of the Imperial guard creeping away from his company's defeat.
I cain't shoot a man in the back," Lee said.
"Shame to die with one bullet left, though."
So he took aim with his last bullet at the zeppelin itself, still roaring and straining to rise with its one engine, and the bullet must have been red-hot, or maybe a burning brand from the forest below was wafted to the airship on an updraft; for the gas suddenly billowed into an orange fireball, and the envelope and the metal skeleton rose a little way then tumbled down very slowly, gently, but full of fiery death.
And the man creeping away and the six or seven others who were hte only remnant of the Guard, and who hadn't dared come closer to the man holding the ravine, were engulfed by the fire that fell on them.
lee saw the fireball and heard through the roar in his ears Hester saying, "That's all of'em, Lee."
He said, or thought, "Those poor men didn't have to come to this, nor did we."
She said, "We held 'em off. We held out.. We're a-helping Lyra."
Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.