Nathaniel narrowed his eyes: on none of the three observable planes could he see any demonic activity. This thing, presumably, was human.
At last, the crunch of gravel indicated that the shadow had stepped out upon the path. It did not stop, but came smoothly onward, a ragged cloak or cape drifting drearily behind. As it drew close, Nathaniel noticed a pair of unpleasantly white hands protruding from the front of the cape, holding something that let off the feeble witch light. He tried hard to make out a face, too, but this was concealed by a heavy black hood that curved down like an eagle’s talon. Nothing else of the figure could be seen. He turned his attention to the object held in the pale hands, the thing that shed the strange, white glow. It was a candle, firmly wedged into …
“Euuch!” he said, in Czech. “That’s disgusting.”
The figure stopped short. A high, thin voice sounded indignantly from under the cowl. ‘"Ere, what d’you mean?” It coughed hastily; a deeper, slower, altogether more eerie voice emerged at once: “That is to say—What … do you mean?”
Nathaniel curled his lip. “That horrible thing you’re carrying. It’s foul.”
“Beware! It is an item of power.”
“It’s unhygienic, that’s what it is. Where did you get it?”
“I cut it down from a gallows myself, by the light of a gibbous moon.”
“I bet it isn’t even pickled. Yes! Look—there’s bits falling off it!”
“No, there aren’t. That’s drips of candlewax.”
“Well, maybe, but it’s still wrong to be carrying it around with you. I suggest you toss it behind those gravestones, then wash your hands.”
“Do you realize,” said the figure, who now had one fist wedged irritably against his hip, “that you are referring to an object that has the power to send my enemies into a stupor and can detect watchful magic at fifty paces? This is a valuable item. I’m not binning it.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “You ought to be locked up. That kind of behavior wouldn’t be tolerated in London, I can tell you.”
The figure gave a sudden start. “London? What’s that to me?”
“Well, you’re Harlequin, aren’t you? The agent.”
A long pause. “Might be.”
“Of course you are. Who else would be wandering through the graveyard at this time of night? I don’t need to see that icky candle thing to know it’s you, do I? Besides, you’re speaking Czech with a British accent. Enough of this! I need some information fast.”
The figure held up its free hand. “One moment! I don’t yet know who you are.”
“I’m John Mandrake, on government service. As you well know.”
“That’s not good enough. I must have proof.”
Nathaniel rolled his eyes. “See that?” He pointed upward. “Blood-red feather.”
The figure considered it. “That looks brick-red to me.”
“It’s blood-red. Or it will be in a minute if you don’t stop this nonsense and get down to business.”
“Well … all right, then. But first …” The figure adopted an eerie stance. “I must check that no watchers are among us. Stand back!” It held up the object in its hand, spoke a word. Instantly, the pale fire flared outward, becoming a luminous hoop of light that hovered in the air between them. On another command, and with a sudden rushing, the hoop expanded, rippling out in all directions across the graveyard. Nathaniel glimpsed the bat drop like a stone from its perch upon the tree, just before the band of light passed by. What happened to the bat he did not see; the hoop continued out beyond the edge of the graveyard and swiftly faded into nothing.
The figure nodded. “It is safe to talk.”
Nathaniel pointed to the candle, which had resumed its previous dimensions. “I know that trick. That’s an Illuminated Circlet, triggered by an imp. You don’t need a dead man’s extremities to pull that off. This gothic stuff is all jiggery-pokery, suitable for gawping commoners. It won’t work on me, Harlequin.”
“Perhaps …” A gaunt hand disappeared inside the cowl and scratched something ruminatively. “Even so, I think you’re being overly fastidious, Mandrake. You’re ignoring the fundamental basis of our magic. It isn’t so clean and pure as you make out. Blood, ritual, sacrifice, death … they are at the heart of every incantation we utter. We all rely on ‘gothic stuff,’when all’s said and done.”
“Here in Prague, maybe,” Nathaniel said.
“Never forget, London’s power was built on Prague’s. So then …” Harlequin’s voice turned suddenly businesslike. “The imp that reached me said you were here on a top secret mission. What is it, and what information do you want from me?”
Nathaniel spoke quickly and with some relief, outlining the main events of the previous few days. The man under the hood heard him out in silence.
“A golem abroad in London?” he said, when Nathaniel drew to a halt. “Wonders will never cease. There’s your gothic stuff coming home to roost, whether you like it or not. Interesting …”
“Interesting and intelligible?” Nathaniel asked, hopefully.
“I don’t know about that. But I may have some details for you—quick! Duck down!” With the speed of a snake, he threw himself to the ground; without hesitation, Nathaniel did likewise. He lay with his face pressed against the graveyard soil, listening to the sound of jackboots echoing on the cobblestones outside. A faint scent of cigarette smoke drifted on the wind. The sounds faded. After another minute or so, the agent got slowly to his feet. “Patrol,” he said. “Fortunately, their sense of smell is deadened by those fags they smoke; we’re all right for now.”
“You were saying …” Nathaniel prompted.
“Yes. First, the issue of the golem’s eye. Several of these objects are kept in magical repositories belonging to the Czech government. The Prague Council prevents any access to them. As far as I know, they have not been used for magical purposes, but they are of high symbolic value, since the golems were instrumental in causing great damage to Gladstone’s army back in his first European campaign. Several years ago, one of the eyes was stolen, and the culprit never found. I speculate—and it is only speculation, mark you—that this missing eye is the one later found in the collection of your friend Simon Lovelace.”
“Pardon me,” Nathaniel said, stiffly, “but he was not my friend.”
“Well, he’s nobody’s friend now, is he? Because he failed. If he’d won, you’d all have been hanging on his every word and inviting him to dinner.” The agent gave a long, melancholy sniff of disparagement from somewhere within the hood. “Hang on to this a minute, I need a drink.”
“Euuch! It’s all cold and clammy. Hurry up!”
“Coming.” Harlequin’s hands were rummaging within his cloak in a complex sort of way. A moment later, they emerged, holding a dark green bottle with a cork stopper. He pulled out the cork and tilted the bottle into the depths of his cowl. A gulping noise ensued, followed by the smell of strong liquor.
“That’s better.” Unseen lips smacked, cork returned to bottle, and bottle returned to pocket. “I’ll take that back. You didn’t damage it, did you? It is a bit fragile. Now,” Harlequin went on, “perhaps Lovelace intended to use the eye himself; if so, his plan was thwarted by his death. Someone else, maybe an associate of his—who knows?—has now stolen it from our government, and appears to have got the thing to work.…This is where it gets difficult.”
“They need the formative spell, too,” Nathaniel said. “It is written on a parchment and inserted into the golem’s mouth before it comes to life. That’s the bit that nobody’s known for all these years. No one in London, anyway.”
The agent nodded. “The secret may have been lost; equally, it may still be known in Prague, but just remain unused. The Council does not want to enrage London at present; the British are too strong. They prefer to send spies and small groups over to London to work quietly, gathering information. This golem of yours … it’s too dramatic a move for the Czechs—they would expe
ct invasion to follow as a direct result. No, I think you are hunting for a maverick, someone working for their own individual ends.”
“So where do I look?” Nathaniel asked. He couldn’t help yawning as he spoke; he had been awake since the British Museum incident the previous night. It had been a taxing day.
“I must consider …” The agent remained lost in thought for a few moments. “I need time to make inquiries. We will meet again tomorrow night, when I will give you names.” He wrapped his cloak about himself with a dramatic sweep. “Meet me—”
Nathaniel interrupted him. “I hope you’re not going to say ‘in the shadow of the gibbet’or ‘at Execution Dock’or anything dreary like that.”
The figure drew itself up. “Ridiculous. The very idea.”
“Good.”
“I was going to suggest the old plague pits on Hybernska Street.”
“No.”
The agent seemed rather miffed. “All right,” he growled.
“Six o’clock at the hot-dog stand in the Old Town Square. That mundane enough for you?”
“That’ll do nicely.”
“Until then, then …” With a billow of the cloak and a creak of hidden knees, the figure turned and swept its way up the cemetery path, its corpse light flickering dimly into the distance. Soon the light was gone, and nothing but a fleeting shadow and a muffled curse when it knocked into a gravestone indicated it had ever been.
Nathaniel sat down on a headstone, waiting for Bartimaeus to show. The meeting had been satisfactory, if a little irritating; now he had plenty of time to rest before the following evening. His weary mind drifted. The memory of Jane Farrar came back to him. How pleasant it had been to have her so close.… It had affected him almost like a drug. He frowned—of course it was like a drug. She’d worked a Charm on him, hadn’t she? And he’d nearly fallen for it, completely ignoring his sensor’s warning. What a fool he was.
The girl had either wanted to delay him, or learn more about what he knew. Either way, she would be working for her master, Duvall, who evidently did not want Internal Affairs having any sort of success in this matter. When he got back, he would doubtless face more hostility of the same kind. Duvall, Tallow, Farrar … Even his master, Ms. Whitwell, was not to be relied on, if he didn’t produce the goods for her.
Nathaniel rubbed his eyes. He suddenly felt very tired.
“Bless, you look ready to drop.” The djinni was sitting on an opposite gravestone, in its familiar boy guise. It was crossing its legs in identical fashion to Nathaniel, and pulling an extravagant yawn. “You should have been tucked up hours ago.”
“Did you hear everything?”
“Most of it. I missed a bit after he let loose that Circlet. It nearly hit me, and I had to take evasive action. Good job those tree roots had dislodged a few gravestones. I was able to drop into an underground cavity while the probe passed over.” The boy paused to shake a bit of gray dust out of its hair. “Not that I generally recommend graves as a place to hide. You never know what you might find. But the occupant of this particular one was quite hospitable. Let me cuddle up to him for a few moments.” It gave a knowing wink.
Nathaniel shuddered. “How perfectly foul.”
“Speaking of which,” the djinni said. “That candle the bloke was carrying. Was it really …?”
“Yes. I’m trying not to think about it. Harlequin is more than half-mad, which is no doubt what comes of living in Prague too long.” Nathaniel stood and buttoned up his coat. “But he does have his uses. He’s hoping to give us some contact names tomorrow night.”
“Good,” the boy said, busily buttoning its coat in a similar fashion. “Then perhaps we’ll have a bit of action. My recipe for informers is either to roast them over a slow flame or hang them by a leg out of a high window. That usually makes a Czech spill the beans.”
“There’ll be none of that if we can possibly avoid it.” Nathaniel began to walk down the path out of the graveyard. “The authorities mustn’t know we’re here, so we can’t draw attention to ourselves. That means no violence or obvious magic. Got that?”
“Of course.” The djinni smiled broadly as it fell in step beside him. “You know me.”
25
At 9:25 on the morning of the great raid, Kitty was heading down a backstreet in London’s West End. She went quickly, almost jogging; the bus had been held up by traffic on Westminster Bridge, and she was running late. A small rucksack bounced on her back; her hair streamed behind her as she went.
At precisely 9:30, disheveled and a little out of breath, Kitty arrived at the Stage Door of the Coliseum Theatre, pushed gently, and found it unlocked. She took a quick look behind her at the rubbish-strewn street, saw nothing, slipped inside.
A drab and dirty corridor was filled with buckets and obscure wooden constructions presumably destined for the stage. A little light filtered through a grubby window; there was a strong smell of paint in the stale air.
Ahead was another door. Obeying her memorized instructions, Kitty soundlessly crossed to it and passed through into a second room, this one filled with quiet racks of costumes. The staleness of the air increased. Someone’s bygone lunch—pieces of sandwich and potato chips, and half-filled cups of coffee—lay scattered on a table. Kitty entered a third room and found a sudden change: beneath her feet was a thick carpet and the walls were papered. The air now smelled distantly of smoke and polish. She was near the front of the theater, in the public corridors.
She paused and listened. In all the empty building, not a sound.
Yet somewhere above, someone was waiting.
* * *
She had received her instructions that morning, in an atmosphere of fevered preparation. Mr. Pennyfeather had closed the shop for the day and had retired to the cellar storeroom to begin sorting their equipment for the raid. Everyone else was busy, too, assembling dark clothes, polishing tools and, in Fred’s case, practicing knife-throwing in the privacy of the cellar. Mr. Hopkins had given Kitty directions to the Coliseum. The mysterious benefactor, he said, had chosen the disused theater as a suitably neutral venue, a place where magician and commoner might meet on equal terms. There she would be given the assistance they required to break into Gladstone’s tomb.
Despite certain misgivings about the whole enterprise, Kitty could not help thrilling to the name. Gladstone. Stories of his splendor were legion. Friend to the People, Terror of their Enemies … To desecrate his tomb was an act so unthinkable her mind scarcely comprehended it. And yet, if they succeeded, if they returned home with the Founder’s treasures, what wonders the Resistance might yet accomplish.
If they should fail, Kitty was under no illusion about the consequences. The company was crumbling. Pennyfeather was old: despite his passion, despite his fury, his strength was dwindling. Without his stern guidance, the group would splinter—they would all return to their humdrum lives beneath the magicians’ heels. But if they had the crystal ball and the magic purse, what then? Perhaps their fortunes might be turned around and new blood won to fight their cause. It made her heart pound to think of it.
But first, she had to meet the unknown benefactor and win his aid.
* * *
Kitty passed a number of half-open doors along the corridor; through them she could see the shrouded reaches of the theater’s auditorium. It was very still, every sound muffled by the heavy carpet and the elegant furred paper on the walls. The carpet was a wine-dark red, the wallpaper striped with pink and terra-cotta. Fading theatrical posters and chipped brass candelabras, which emitted a weak, flickering light, were the only decoration. Kitty walked swiftly until she reached the stairs.
Up a long, curving flight of shallow steps, then—doubling almost back upon herself—up a second flight, along a silent corridor and so to the place where six curtained alcoves waited along the left-hand side. Each was the entrance to one of the boxes used by the magicians, overlooking the stage.
Each alcove had a number inscribed on a brass
plaque above the curtain. Without pausing, Kitty made her way to the last alcove in the line. This was number 7; the place where the benefactor would be waiting.
As with all the others, the curtain was fully drawn. Kitty stopped outside, listened, heard nothing. A wisp of hair had fallen down over her face. She smoothed it back and, for luck, touched the silver pendant in her pocket. Then she grasped the curtain firmly and stepped through.
The box was empty except for two heavy golden chairs facing the stage. A curtain had been drawn across from the left, shielding the box from the auditorium below. Kitty frowned in perplexity and frustration. Had she mistaken the number, or come at the wrong time? No. More likely, the benefactor had gotten cold feet and hadn’t shown up.
A small piece of paper was pinned to the arm of one of the chairs. Kitty stepped over to pull it loose. As she did so, she became aware of a slight shift in the air, the faintest of noises behind her. Her hand jerked to her coat. A small, sharp pressure was applied to the back of her neck. She froze.
A voice, quiet and reflective. “Please do not attempt to turn around at any time, my dear. The pinprick you feel is the tip of a stiletto, forged in Rome for the Borgias. Sharpness is not its only quality—a finger’s width up the blade is a bead of poison; should this touch your wound, death will follow in thirteen seconds. I mention this simply so that we observe the proper niceties. Without turning, please take hold of the chair, and align it facing the wall…. Good. Now sit. I shall sit close behind you, then we shall talk.”
Kitty dragged the chair to face the wall, moved slowly around, and sat gingerly upon it, feeling all the while the little sharpness on her neck. She heard a rustle of cloth, the squeak of leather shoes, a soft sigh as someone sat and took his ease. She looked at the wall and said nothing.
The voice came again. “Good. Now we are ready and I hope we can do business. You understand that the precautions I take here are merely safeguards? I do not wish you harm.”