Looking back, I saw the glow of at least one sphere trailing in our wake. We were still being observed from afar.
When the girl halted at last, it was in a small side room off the main basement. She switched on a meager bulb. The room was empty, except for a pile of logs in the far corner. Water dripped from the ceiling and trickled in rivulets across the floor. Nathaniel wrinkled his nose. “Well?” he snapped. “I don’t see anything.”
The girl stepped over to the logs and extended a foot somewhere into the pile. A squeaking; a section of brickwork swung open beyond her. Shadows yawned.
“Stop right there! You’re not going in.” Leaving Hyrnek for the first time, my master hurried forward to stand between Kitty and the secret door. “Bartimaeus—go inside and report what you find. If the Staff is there, bring it out to me.”
Rather more diffidently than is my wont, I approached the door, erecting a Shield about me in case of booby traps. As I drew close, I felt a warning throb on all seven planes, the indication of powerful magic up ahead. I stuck a tentative head through the hole and looked around.
It was little more than a glorified cupboard, a seedy hole half filled with the cheap gimmicks that the girl and her friends had pinched from the magicians. There were the usual glass orbs and metal containers: shoddy stuff all, none of it any good.7
The exception to this was the item propped casually in the far corner, incongruously fighting for space with a few explosive lances.
When I’d seen the Staff from afar across the burning roofs of Prague, it had been crackling with a storm’s power. Lightning bolts had converged on it from a rent and wounded sky, its shadow extended across the clouds. A whole city was subjugated before its anger. Now it was quiet and dusty and a spider was innocently spinning a web between its carved head and a recess in the wall.
Even so, its energy was still latent within it. Its aura pulsed strongly, filling the room (on the higher planes) with light. Such an object is not to be trifled with, and it was with hooked fingertip and thumb, in the reluctant manner of someone extracting a maggot from an apple, that I carried Gladstone’s Staff out of the secret storeroom and presented it to my master.
Oh, he was happy then. The relief just poured off him. He took it from me and gazed at it, and the aura of the thing lit the contours of his face with a dull radiance.
“Mr. Mandrake.” That was the girl talking. She was standing next to Hyrnek now, one arm around him protectively. The invisible foliot had swung to Hrynek’s opposite shoulder and was eyeing her with profound mistrust. Perhaps it sensed her innate resilience. “Mr. Mandrake,” she said, “I have completed my half of the bargain. Now you must set us free.”
“Yes, yes.” My master scarcely looked up from his appreciation of the Staff. “Of course. I will make the appropriate arrangements. An escort will be found for you. But first, let us get out of this gloomy place.”
By the time we emerged, the light of early morning had begun to spill into the corners of the cobbled mews and shone faintly on the chrome of the limousine on the opposite side of the lane. The chauffeur sat stock-still in his seat, gazing out in front; he did not appear to have moved in all the time we’d been gone. Now the girl tried again. She was very tired; her voice did not carry great hope. “You do not have to escort us from here, Mr. Mandrake,” she said. “We can make our own way.”
My master had just clambered up the steps holding the Staff. He did not appear to hear her at first; his mind was far away, dwelling on other things. He blinked, stopped dead in his tracks, and fixed his eyes upon her as if seeing her for the first time.
“You made a promise,” the girl said.
“A promise …” He frowned vaguely.
“To let us go.” I noticed her subtly shifting her weight onto the front of her feet as she spoke, readying herself for sudden movement. I wondered with some interest what she planned to do.
“Ah yes.” There might have been a time, a year or two back, when Nathaniel would have honored any agreement he had made. He’d have considered it beneath his dignity to break a vow, despite his enmity with the girl. It may be that, even now, part of him still disliked doing so. Certainly, he hesitated for a moment, as if in actual doubt. Then I saw him glance up at the red spheres, which had emerged from the cellar and were once more hovering above. His eyes went dark. His masters’ gazes were on him, and that decided matters.
He tugged at a cuff as he spoke, but his resemblance to the other magicians was now deeper than such outward mimicry. “Promises made to terrorists are scarcely obligatory, Ms. Jones,” he said. “Our agreement is void. You will be interrogated and tried for treason forthwith, and I shall make it my business to escort you to the Tower myself. Do not try anything!” His voice rose in warning—the girl had slipped a hand into her jacket. “Your friend’s life hangs by a thread. Sophocles, reveal yourself!” The grinning foliot on Hyrnek’s shoulders shrugged off its invisibility on the first plane, gave the girl an insolent wink and snapped its teeth beside its prisoner’s ear.
The girl’s shoulders sagged a little; she looked crestfallen. “Very well,” she said.
“Your weapon—whatever it is in your coat. Bring it out. Slowly.”
She hesitated. “It’s not a weapon.”
Nathaniel’s voice grew dangerous. “I don’t have time for this! Show it, or your friend will lose his ear.”
“It’s not a weapon. It’s a present.” So saying, she drew forth her hand. In her fingers was something small, circular, glinting in the light. A bronze disc.
Nathaniel’s eyes widened. “That’s mine! My scrying glass!”8
The girl nodded. “Have it back.” She flicked her wrist. The disc flew spinning high into the air. Instinctively, we watched. it go: Nathaniel, the foliot, and I. As we watched, the girl acted. Her hands reached out and snared the foliot around its scrawny neck, jerking it backward off Hyrnek’s shoulders. It was taken by surprise, its grip was loosened, its talons snicking in midair, but its slender tail looped around Hyrnek’s face, fast as a whip, and began to squeeze. Hyrnek cried out, clawing at the tail.
Nathaniel was stepping backward, following the spinning disc. He still held the Staff, but his free hand was stretched out, hoping to catch it.
The girl’s fingers bore down upon the foliot’s neck; its eyes bulged, its face grew purple.
The tail tightened on Hyrnek’s head.
I watched all this with great interest. Kitty was relying on her resilience here, on her power to counteract the foliot’s magic. It all depended how strong that resilience was. It was quite possible that the foliot would soon reassert itself, crush Hyrnek’s skull, and move on to deal with her. But the girl was strong, and she was angry. The foliot’s face swelled; it uttered a reproachful sound. A crisis point was reached. With the sound of a balloon popping, the foliot burst into vapor, tail and all; it dissipated on the air. Both Kitty and Hyrnek lost their balance, tumbled to the ground.
The scrying glass landed safely in Nathaniel’s hand. He looked up, and for the first time took in the situation. His prisoners were unsteadily getting to their feet.
He uttered a cry of annoyance. “Bartimaeus!”
I was sitting myself quietly on a post. I looked over. “Yes?”
“Why didn’t you act to halt this? I gave you strict instructions.”
“You did, you did.” I scratched the back of my head.
“I told you to kill her if she tried anything!”
“The car! Come on!” Already the girl was moving, dragging Hyrnek along with her. They scampered across the cobblestones toward the limousine. This was better watching than the Aztec ball game. If only I’d had some popcorn.
“Well?” He was incandescent with rage.
“You told me to kill her if she broke the terms of your agreement.”
“Yes! By escaping—as she’s doing now! So get to it! The Shriveling Fire—”
I grinned cheerily. “But that agreement is null and void. You broke
it yourself, not two minutes ago—in a particularly noxious manner, if I may say so. So she can hardly be breaking it herself, can she? Listen, if you put that Staff down, you can tear your hair out more easily.”
“Ahh! I rescind all previous orders and issue a new one, which you cannot misinterpret! Stop them from departing in that car!”
“Oh, very well.” I had to obey. I slouched down from the post and set off in reluctant and leisurely pursuit.
All the while we’d been gabbing, Nathaniel and I had been watching our friends’ frantic progress across the lane.
The girl was in the lead; now she reached the limo and swung open the driver’s door, presumably with the intention of forcing him to drive them away. The chauffeur, who at no point in the proceedings had evinced even the slightest interest in our scuffling, remained staring forward. Kitty was shouting at him now, frantically issuing orders. She tugged at his shoulder. He gave a sort of limp wobble and slipped sideways out of his seat, knocking into the startled girl, before collapsing face down on the cobblestones. One arm lolled discouragingly.
For a couple of seconds, we all halted what we were doing. The girl remained transfixed, perhaps wondering at her own strength. I contemplated the remarkable work ethic of the traditional British workman. Even my master stopped frothing at the mouth for a moment in perplexity. We all edged nearer.
“Surprise!” Up from behind the body of the car popped a smiling face. Well, it was grinning, really—skulls, as we know, don’t really smile. Nevertheless, it exuded a certain irrepressible gaiety, which contrasted sharply with the lank white hair flecked with river slime, with the sodden black rags clogged upon its bones, with the fetid graveyard stench now floating on the breeze.
“Uh-oh.” Blindingly articulate, that’s me.
With a clacking of bones and a gleeful cry, Honorius the afrit leaped upon the bonnet of the car, femurs akimbo, hands on hip bones, skull cocked at a jaunty angle. From there, framed by the light of the new sun, he appraised us one by one.
45
For the first seconds, Kitty was no longer in the cobbled lane, no longer breathing morning air; she was once more underground, trapped in a black crypt, with the taste of death in her mouth and her friends cut down before her eyes. The terror was the same, and the helplessness; she felt her strength and resolution shrivel into nothing, like scraps of paper consumed by fire. She could scarcely breathe.
Her first thought was anger at the demon Bartimaeus. His claim to have destroyed the skeleton was now revealed as just another falsehood. Her second thought was for Jakob, who stood quivering beside her: because of her actions, he would die—she knew this with utter certainty, and hated herself for it.
Most of the skeleton’s clothing had fallen away; what little remained hung shapelessly upon the yellowed bones. The golden mask was missing; tiny red flames burned in the skull’s dark sockets. Below, sunlight filtered between the ribs and out through the remnants of the jacket. The trousers and shoes were entirely gone. But the creature’s energy was unchanged. It hopped from foot to foot with an appalling jerky swiftness.
“Well, jolly nice, I call it.” The merry voice rang clear as a bell from between the dangling teeth. “I couldn’t have asked for more. Here I am, happy as a lamb, if a little damp about the cartilage, hard at work. What do I want? Simply to follow the scent of my lost possession, collect it and be off on my way. What do I find? My Staff—yes! Good as new—but more than that … Two other little lambs to play with—two lambs whom I’ve been thinking about long and hard, as I swilled around the estuary in the cold, cold water, and my beautiful clothes grew rotten on my bones. Oh, don’t look so innocent, my dear”—the high voice dropped to a snarl, the skull jutted down toward Kitty—“you’re one of them. The little mouse who disturbed my master’s rest, who took his Staff and thinks it ladylike to carry vicious silver in her purse. You, I’ll deal with last.”
The skeleton straightened with a bound, tapped its metatarsals on the limousine bonnet, and jerked out a finger toward Bartimaeus, who still wore the semblance of a dark-skinned boy. “Then there’s you,” it said, “the one who stole my face. The one who drowned me in the Thames. Oh, I’m most terrible mad at you.”
If it was anxious, the demon was doing a good job of hiding it. “I can understand that,” it said coolly “In fact, I’m a little disappointed myself. Mind telling me how you got here?”
The skull gnashed its jaw in fury. “Merest chance saved me from oblivion,” it whispered. “As I drifted, helpless in the current and the cold, cold dark, the crook of my elbow snagged in a rusted chain rising from an anchor in the riverbed. In an instant I had seized the chain in my fingers and my jaw; I fought against the pull of the ocean, clambered upward to the light. Where did I come out? An old barge, tethered for the night. As the cruel water dropped from my bones, my strength returned. What did I want? Vengeance! But first, the Staff, to give me back my power. I crept along the shore by night and day, snuffling for its aura like a dog…. And today”—the voice erupted in sudden riotous delight—“I found it, traced it to this yard, waited here in coziness with that fellow on the floor.” It indicated the chauffeur’s body with a dismissive toe. “I fear he did not have good conversation.”
Bartimaeus nodded. “Humans aren’t known for their wit. Very dull.”
“Aren’t they, though?”
“Deathly.”
“Mmm. Hey!” The skeleton collected itself indignantly. “You’re trying to change the subject.”
“Not at all. You were saying you were terribly mad at me.”
“Quite. Where was I …? Terribly mad … Two little lambs, a girl and a djinni …” It appeared to have quite lost its train of thought.
Kitty jerked a thumb at the magician Mandrake. “What about him?”
Mandrake gave a start. “I’ve never seen this excellent afrit in all my life! He can have no grudge against me.”
The flames in the skull’s eye sockets flared. “Except that you carry my Staff. That is no small matter. And what is more … you plan to use it! Yes! No denials—you are a magician!”
Its outrage was worth building on. Kitty cleared her throat. “He made me steal it,” she said. “It’s all his fault. Everything. He made Bartimaeus attack you, too.”
“Is that so?” The skeleton considered John Mandrake. “How very interesting.” It bent toward Bartimaeus again. “She’s not correct, is she? Is that fop with the Staff really your master?”
The young Egyptian boy looked genuinely embarrassed. “I’m afraid so.”
“Tsk. Dear me. Well, don’t worry. I’ll kill him—after I kill you.”
Even as it spoke, the skeleton raised a finger. Green flame erupted where the demon had stood, but the boy was already gone, somersaulting across the cobblestone to land neatly on a dustbin beside the nearest house. As if propelled by a single thought, Kitty, Jakob, and John Mandrake turned and ran, making for the arch that led out of the mews courtyard to the road beyond. Kitty was the swiftest, and it was she who first noticed the sudden darkening of the atmosphere, a rapid leaching away of the dawn light about them, as if some power was thrusting it bodily away from the ground. She slowed and stopped. Thin tendrils of blackness were waving and probing through the archway ahead, and behind them came a dark cloud. The view beyond was utterly blocked out, the courtyard cut off from the world outside.
What now? Kitty exchanged a helpless glance with Jakob and looked back over her shoulder. The Egyptian boy had sprouted wings and was swooping to and fro across the courtyard, just out of reach of the bounding skeleton.
“Keep away from that cloud.” It was John Mandrake’s voice, quiet and faltering. He was near them, eyes wide, slowly retreating. “I think it’s dangerous.”
Kitty sneered at him. “Like you care.” Even so, she too backed away.
The cloud extended toward them. A terrible silence hung about it, and an overpowering smell of wet earth.
Jakob touched her arm. “Can y
ou hear …?”
“Yes.” Heavy footfalls in the depths of the shadows, something coming closer.
“We’ve got to get out of this,” she said. “Make for the cellar.”
They turned and ran toward the steps that led to Mr. Pennyfeather’s cellar store. From across the courtyard, the skeleton, which had been vainly firing bolts of magic at the energetic demon, perceived them and clapped its hands. A tremor—the cobblestones rattled. The lintel above the basement door split in two, and a ton of brickwork descended with a rush upon the stairs. The dust subsided; the door was gone.
With a hop and a skip, the skeleton was upon them. “That darned demon is a bit too spry,” it said. “I’ve changed my mind. You two are first.”
“Why me?” Jakob gasped. “I’ve done nothing.”
“I know, dear child.” The eye sockets glittered. “But you’re full of life. And after my time underwater, I frankly need the energy.” It reached out a hand—as it did so, it noticed, for the first time, the dark cloud stealing across the courtyard, sucking the light from the air. The skeleton gazed into the blackness, jaw lolling uncertainly.
“Well, well,” it said softly. “What’s this?”
Kitty and Jakob scuffled back against the wall. The skeleton paid no heed. It swiveled its pelvis and straightened to face the cloud, calling out something in a strange tongue. Beside her, Kitty felt Jakob give a start. “That was Czech,” he whispered. “Something like: ‘I defy you!’”
The skull rotated 180 degrees and stared at them. “Excuse me a minute, children. I have unfinished business to take care of. I will attend to you in half a jiff. Wait there.”
Bones clicking, it moved away, circling out into the center of the courtyard, its eye sockets fixed upon the swelling cloud. Kitty tried to gather her wits. She looked about her. The road was engulfed by shadows, the sun a veiled disc faintly shimmering in the sky. The exit from the mews was blocked by the menacing darkness; on all other sides, blank walls and barred windows stared down. Kitty cursed. If she had a single sphere, she could blast their way out; as it was, they were helpless. Rats in a trap.