Ptolemy's Gate (44 page)

A little noise behind him, a scraping of metal.

Nathaniel stopped, looked back … Across the chamber, at the bottom of the stairs, the mercenary was standing. A curved knife glinted in his hand.

27

K
itty shut the door.

Noises from the Hall of Statues echoed in her ears; she could hear the commotion even down the corridor and through the heavy wood. She remained still for a time, pressing her ear against the door. More than anything else she feared being followed by the terrible bearded man. Something in him filled her with more dread than the massing hordes of demons.

She listened.… As far as she could tell, nothing stirred in the corridor outside.

A heavy key protruded beside her hand. With some difficulty, and fully conscious of the only moderate security it represented, Kitty locked the door. Then she turned to face the room.

It was just as she remembered it from her failed escape attempt: someone's office, sparsely furnished. A bookcase ran along one wall; opposite was a desk piled high with papers. And, crucially, in the near corner, scuffed and scoured with many years of bureaucratic use—two circles, two pentacles.

Kitty only needed one.

The pentacle design was simple, of the kind she had frequently prepared with Mr. Button: conventional star, double circle, normal Latin hex-locks. It had been painted on a raised dais and, owing to the dimensions of the room, was not particularly large. Elsewhere—she made a quick inspection—she found the usual magician's accessories, gathered in the drawers of the desk. Chalks, pens, paper, candle stubs, lighters, jars of assorted herbs. The herbs were what she needed. She extracted them with calm efficiency and set them on the floor beside the outermost circle.

From somewhere not so very distant came a loud explosion. Kitty started nervously, heart pounding in her chest; she looked toward the door….

Concentrate.
What did she have to do?

Mandrake's—no,
Nathaniel's
summary of the instructions in the
Apocrypha
had been rapid and hard to digest, but Kitty had grown used to such things during her time with Mr. Button. Her memory was suitably elastic.

So … a conventional pentacle. No candles required. Yep, this one was fine.

But her body should be protected—and that meant herbs and iron. She emptied out the rosemary, Saint-John's-wort, and sticks of rowan wood, mixed them together, and separated the result into several rough piles, which she placed at intervals within the pentacle. As for the iron,
that
was more tricky. For a moment she cast her eyes about the room in vain. Perhaps she would have to do without it….

The key. Was it iron? Kitty had no idea. If it was, it might protect her. If not, it would do no harm. She pulled it from the door.

What else? Yes … Nathaniel had said something about breaking the circle, a symbolic act to allow the magician to return to his body. Very well, that could be done. She bent down, and with the key's edge scored a gash in the painted circle. It was useless now for any ordinary summons. But this was not what Kitty planned.

She stood upright. Finished. No other physical preparations were necessary.

Except … the small matter of her comfort. On the chair behind the desk she discovered a dirty old cushion, much used and battered, and this she placed in the pentacle as a pillow.

A mirror hung on the wall behind the desk; as she returned from the door, she caught sight of herself in passing. Only then did Kitty pause.

It had been a while since she had looked at her face; she could not remember the last time. There she was: the thick dark hair, dark eyes (complete with outstanding bags), the quizzical lips, a purple bruise swelling becomingly above one eye. No doubt about it, she was a little shopworn. But still young, still well.

And if she succeeded in what she planned? Terrible things had happened to those magicians who had tried to follow Ptolemy's course. Mr. Button had been unspecific in the details, but given dark hints of madness and deformity. As for Ptolemy himself, she knew he had not survived for long after creating his Gate. And Bartimaeus had said his face had—

With a curse, Kitty turned from the mirror. In truth, whatever risk she ran was immaterial compared with what was going on nearby. She had resolved to try and that was an end to it. There was nothing more she could do. Getting teary would achieve nothing. So.

So there was nothing left for her but to lie within the pentacle.

The floor was hard, but the cushion felt pleasant against the back of her head. Herb smells filled her nostrils. She took the key and closed it in her fist. A deep breath—

An afterthought struck her. She raised her head, looked along her body, and to her annoyance discovered an awkward fact. She was too long for the circle—her feet stuck out over the inner lines. Perhaps it wouldn't matter, but perhaps it would. Kitty rolled onto her side, drew her knees to her chest, and assumed a curled-up position, as if she were in bed. A quick squint along … fine, she was nice and tidy now. Nice and ready.

But ready for what? A sudden burst of skepticism exploded in her. This was nothing but another of her dreams, one of the ridiculous fancies Bartimaeus had derided. It was the height of arrogance to think she could succeed where no one else had in two thousand years or more. What was she thinking? She was no magician.

But perhaps this was an advantage. Bartimaeus had prompted her to try it, she
knew
he had. His last words as he left them had echoed his description of Ptolemy: “We do have a bond … but for the present there are limits to it.”
For the present …
What was that if not an implicit invitation to her and her alone? Ptolemy had known no limits: he had come to the Other Place by rejecting all the established magical conventions—by turning them on their head. And you didn't need more than the basic knowledge of summoning to do what he had done—the instructions in the
Apocrypha
were entirely straightforward. The crucial part was calling to the demon at the end. Kitty could do all this. The question was: would it work?

There was only one way to find out.

She closed her eyes and tried to relax her muscles. The room was very quiet—no sound came through the door. Time to begin the summons? No, something was still not right.… What was it? After a moment she realized her hand was clenched so tightly upon the key that it dug hard into her skin. That was a symbol of her fear. She concentrated for a few moments, allowing her finger-grip to slacken…. Now she cupped the metal gently. Better …

Remembered fragments came into her head, words written by past authorities about the Other Place:
a region of chaos, a whirl of endless abominations, a sump of madness
… cheerful pronouncements all. Then there was Mr. Button's pithy edict:
to venture there risks body and soul.
Oh, God, so what would happen to her? Would she melt or burn? Would she see—? Yes, but whatever she saw could hardly be worse or more abhorrent than Nouda and his crippled hybrids—his demons cloaked in human flesh. And none of Mr. Button's authorities had even visited the Other Place! It was all pure speculation. Besides, Ptolemy
had
returned alive.

She ran through the words of the reverse summons in her head, then—since to delay was merely to invite further fears—she spoke them out loud. As far as she could tell, it was all correct—she used her own name rather than a demon's and swapped the normal verbs. She finished by calling Bartimaeus's name, three times.

Done.

She lay there in the quiet room.

Seconds passed. Kitty quelled her mounting frustration. No good being impatient. Conventional summonings needed time for the words to travel to the Other Place. She listened, though for what she did not know. Her eyes were closed. She saw nothing but darkness and flickering brain-echoes of light.

Still nothing. Evidently the process was not going to work. Kitty's hopes passed away; she felt hollow and a little sad. She toyed with getting up, but the room was warm, she was comfortable on her pillow and after the privations of the night, was happy to rest a little. Her mind drifted on currents of its own devising: she wondered about her parents, what they were doing, how these events would touch them; how Jakob, far away in Europe, might respond; whether Nathaniel had survived the conflagration in the hall. She found herself hoping so.

A distant sound came to her ears, a clear bell ringing. The demons, perhaps, or survivors trying to alert the city …

Nathaniel had saved her from the mercenary's knife. She had enjoyed sparring with him, forcing him to face the truth about many things, Bartimaeus most of all. He had taken it surprisingly well. As for Bartimaeus … she remembered how she'd last seen him, a forlorn shapeless mass of slime, worn down by weariness of the world. Was it wrong to be pursuing him? Like anyone else, the djinni needed rest.

The bell continued to ring. It was an odd sound, now she thought about it—high and pure, as if struck on crystal, not low and booming as most bells in the city were. Also, rather than repeatedly ringing, it was a single continuous vibration that remained slightly out of reach, right on the edge of her hearing. She strained to catch it…. First it faded, then grew louder—but though alluring, its character was still impossible to pin down; it was lost somewhere amid the pulsing of her blood, her quiet breathing, the little rasps of her clothing as her chest went up and down. She tried again, suddenly fascinated. The ringing seemed somewhere above her, far away. She strove to listen, wishing she could draw closer to the source. She tried to block out all other sounds. Her efforts paid off—little by little, then with a sudden rush, the ringing clarified, became unmuffled. She was alone with it. It rang perpetually, like something precious on the verge of breaking. She felt that it was very close.

Was it visible too? Kitty opened her eyes.

And saw many things at once. A complex grid of stonework all around, little walls and floors running off in three dimensions, separating, joining, arching, ending. Among them were stairs, windows, and open doors; she was passing among them at speed, both very close and somehow far away Glancing down, she saw a girl's body curled up at a distance—it reminded her of a sleeping cat. Other figures were frozen, doll-like, all about the grid of stone—groups of men and women clustered closely, many lying prone, as if asleep or dead. Around them stood strange blurry things with uncertain outlines—neither human nor completely otherwise. She could not distinguish their nature—each one seemed almost to cancel itself out. Below it all, in some remote corridor, she saw a youth fixed in a running posture, face turned over his shoulder; behind him was a figurine that
moved
—a man with a knife, legs going slowly, boots covering ground. And about them both, different shapes, remote and indistinct …

Kitty felt a certain detached curiosity about all this, but her real interest lay elsewhere. The ringing sound was louder than before; somewhere very close. She concentrated still harder, and slightly to her surprise the pretty little latticework of stones and figures distorted and twisted out of focus, as if pulled in four directions all at once. First it was quite clear, next it had blurred into a smudge; then even the smudge had gone.

Kitty felt a rushing on all sides; not a physical sensation, for she was not aware of having an actual body, but a conceptual one. Dimly she glimpsed four barriers all around her: they towered above, plummeted below, stretched to infinity on either side. One was dark and solid, and threatened to crush her with remorseless weight; the next was a raging fluid, which surged avidly to carry her away. The third barrier tore at her with the unseen tumult of a hurricane; the fourth was an implacable wall of unquenchable fire. All four beat upon her for an instant only, then they recoiled. With reluctance, they gave her up and Kitty passed through the Gate to the other side.

28

I
t was as well for Kitty that she experienced what followed with the detachment of an observer, rather than as a helpless participant—if it had been otherwise, she would immediately have gone mad. As it was, the lack of bodily sensation gave what she saw a certain dreamlike quality. Curiosity was her main emotion.