Ptolemy's Gate (11 page)

7

Bartimaeus
: By-name of the demon Sakhr al-Jinni, mentioned in Procopius and Michelot. A middle-ranking djinni of ancient standing, great ingenuity, and no little power. First recorded in Uruk; later in Jerusalem. Fought at the battle of al-Arish against the Assyrians. Known masters have included: Gilgamesh, Solomon, Zarbustibal, Heraclius, Hauser.

Bartimaeus's other names of power include: N'gorso, Necho, Rekhyt.

Linnaean ranking: 6, dangerous. Still extant.

 

K
itty lowered the book into her lap and stared out of the bus window. From her place on the upper deck she could see the sinews and tendons of the magicians' rule running up and down the London streets. Night Police strolled among pedestrians, vigilance spheres drifted on every corner, small swift points of light passed far above in the afternoon sky. Ordinary people went about their business, keeping their eyes carefully averted from the watchers all around. Kitty sighed. Even with its armies in action far away, the government's power was too complete, too obvious to allow dissent. Commoners alone could do nothing, that much was clear. They needed assistance of a different kind.

She glanced back down at Trismegistus's
Manual
, screwed up her eyes at the small crabbed typeface and reread the passage for the umpteenth time. The names Necho and Rekhyt were new to her, but the rest was drearily familiar. The meager list of masters, for instance. Though nothing much was known about the faces of Gilgamesh or Solomon, they were certainly adult kings. Heraclius was a magician-emperor—a warrior, not a child. As for Zarbustibal, she'd located a description of him months ago in an old inventory of Arabian masters: he was renowned about the Red Sea for his hook nose and protruding warts. Hauser
had
been youthful, right enough, but he was north European, fair and freckled—an engraving in one of Mr. Button's books had told her so. Not one of them could have been the dark-haired, dark-skinned boy whose guise Bartimaeus was fond of using.

Kitty shook her head, shut the book, and dropped it into her bag. She was probably just wasting time. She should forget her hunch and make the summons anyway.

Lunchtime had come and gone, and the bus was crowded with men and women returning to work. Some spoke together in hushed tones; others, worn-out already, dozed and nodded. A man sitting across the aisle from Kitty was reading the latest installment of
Real War Stories
, the Information Ministry's regular account of the war's progress.The front cover of the pamphlet was decorated by a woodcut; it showed a British soldier running up a hillside, bayonet at the ready. He was noble, determined, a classical statue in motion. At the top of the hill an American rebel cowered, his face contorted with anger, terror, and other unpleasant emotions. He wore an old-style magician's robe, drawn to seem ludicrous, effeminate. His arms were raised defensively; beside him sat his ally—a minor demon in similar pose. Its face was wizened and wicked; it wore, in miniature, the same clothes as the magician. The British soldier had no demon. A caption below the woodcut read: “Another Boston Triumph.”

Kitty curled her lip contemptuously at the blatant propaganda of the woodcut. That was Mandrake's work: he was head of Information now. And to think she'd let him live.

But it had been the djinni Bartimaeus who had encouraged her to do it, to act to spare the magician's life, and three years later, this still puzzled and intrigued her. Nothing that she had known about demons had quite prepared her for Bartimaeus's personality. Their conversations, framed against a backdrop of fear and danger, remained fresh in her mind—full of vitality, insight, and, above all, an unexpected rapport. He had opened a door for her, giving her a glimpse of a historical process she had never guessed at: thousands of years of magicians enslaving demons, forcing them to lend their power. Thousands of years, during which time a dozen empires had risen to glory, waned, then crumbled. The pattern recurred again and again. Demons were summoned, magicians fought their way to wealth and fame. Stagnation set in. Commoners discovered inherent abilities they didn't know they had—magical resilience built up through the generations that allowed them to rebel against their rulers. The magicians fell; new ones appeared elsewhere and began the process once more. So it went on: an endless cycle of strife. The question was—could it be broken?

A horn blared; with a jerk, the bus came to a sudden stop. Kitty lurched back into her seat and craned her neck against the window in an effort to see the cause.

From somewhere beyond the front of the bus a young man came flailing through the air. He landed heavily on the pavement, lay there an instant, and began to rise. Two Night Police, gray-uniformed, shiny of boot and cap, hurried into view. They flung themselves upon the youth, but he fought and kicked, punched his way free. He struggled to his feet. One officer produced a stick from her belt: she spoke a word—a glimmering blue current crackled at its end. The crowd that had gathered drew back in alarm. The young man retreated slowly. Kitty saw that his head was bloodied, his eyes wild.

The policewoman advanced, waving her jolt-stick. A sudden lunge, a jab.The current caught the young man in the chest. He jerked and twitched a moment; smoke billowed from his burning clothes.Then he laughed—a harsh and mirthless sound, like the calling of a crow. His hand reached out and grasped the stick at its active end. Blue energies juddered on his skin, but he seemed impervious: in two quick movements he had seized the stick, reversed it—and sent the policewoman jerking back upon the pavement in a flash of light. Her limbs twitched, her body arched, subsided. She lay quite still.

The young man threw the jolt-stick aside, turned upon his heel and, without a backward glance, disappeared down a side alley. The silent crowd parted for him.

With a grinding shudder and a rumble of gears, the bus set off. A woman sitting in front of Kitty shook her head at nobody in particular. “The war,” she said. “It's causing all this trouble.”

Kitty looked at her watch. Fifteen minutes to the library. She closed her eyes.

It was half true: the war
was
causing most of the trouble, both at home and abroad. But the spreading resilience of the commoners was helping to fan the flames.

Six months previously the War Minister, Mr. Mortensen, had implemented a new policy. In a bid to bludgeon the American rebels into submission, he determined to dramatically increase the size of the government force. To this end he enacted the Mortensen Doctrine—a policy of mobilization across the country. Recruitment offices were opened, and commoners were encouraged to sign up to the armed forces. Lured by the prospect of preferential jobs on their return, many men did so. After a few days of training they sailed for America on special troopships.

Months passed; the expected return of the conquering heroes did not materialize. Everything went quiet. Information from the colonies was hard to come by; government statements became elusive. At length rumors began, perhaps spread by traders operating across the Atlantic: the army was bogged down deep in enemy territory; two battalions had been massacred; many men were dead, some had fled into the trackless forests and had never been seen again. There was talk of starvation and other horrors. The recruitment office queues dwindled and died away; a sullenness stole imperceptibly across the faces of people in the London streets.

In due course passive resentment turned to action. It began with a few disjointed episodes, far-flung and brief, each of which could be ascribed to random local causes. In one town a mother conducted a solitary protest, hurling a rock through the window of a recruitment office; in another, a group of laborers set down their tools and refused to toil for their daily pittance. Three merchants tipped a truckload of precious goods—golden oats, fine flour, sun-cured hams—upon the Whitehall road and, dousing it with oil, ignited it, sending a fragile ribbon of smoke into the sky. A minor magician from the eastern colonies, perhaps maddened by years of foreign diet, ran screaming into the War Ministry with an elemental sphere in his hand; in seconds he had activated the sphere, destroying himself and two young receptionists in a maelstrom of raging air.

While none of the incidents was as dramatic as the attacks once carried out by the traitor Duvall, or even by the moribund Resistance, they had greater staying power in the public mind. Despite the best efforts of Mr. Mandrake at the Information Ministry, they were discussed repeatedly in markets, at workplaces, in pubs and cafes, until by the strange alchemy of gossip and rumor they were joined together into one big story, becoming the symptoms of a collective protest against the magicians' rule.

But it was a protest without teeth, and Kitty, who had tried active rebellion in her time, was under no illusions about how it was going to end. Each evening, at work in the Frog Inn, she heard proposals of strikes and demonstrations, but no suggestion of how to prevent the magicians' demons from cracking down.Yes, a few scattered individuals had resilience, as she had, but that alone was not enough.
Allies
were needed too.

The bus set her down in a peaceful, leafy road south of Oxford Street. Shouldering her bag, she walked the last two blocks to the London Library.

The guard had seen her often, both singly and in the company of Mr. Button. Nevertheless, he ignored her greeting, held out his hand for her pass, and scanned it sourly from his perch on a high stool behind a desk. Without comment, he ushered her on. Kitty smiled sweetly and strolled into the library foyer.

The library filled five labyrinthine floors, extending across the width of three town houses in the corner of a quiet square. Although out of bounds to commoners, it was not primarily concerned with magical texts, but instead with works that the authorities considered dangerous or subversive in the wrong hands. These included books on history, on mathematics, astronomy and other stagnant sciences, as well as literature that had been forbidden since Gladstone's day. Few of the leading magicians had the time or inclination to visit it, but Mr. Button, from whose attentions few historical texts were safe, sent Kitty to browse there frequently.

As usual, the library was almost deserted. Looking into the alcoves stretching away from the marbled stairs, Kitty made out one or two elderly gentlemen, sitting crumpled below the windows in the apricot afternoon light. One held a newspaper loosely in his hands; another definitely slept. Along a distant aisle a young woman was sweeping the floor;
shht, shht, shht
went the broom, and faint clouds of dust seeped through the shelving to the aisles on either side.

Kitty had a list of titles to borrow on Mr. Button's behalf, but she also had an agenda of her own. After two years' regular visits, she knew her way around; before long she was in a secluded corridor on the second floor, standing in front of the Demonology section.

Necho, Rekhyt
… Her knowledge of ancient languages was nonexistent: these names might belong in almost any culture. Babylonian? Assyrian? On a hunch, she tried Egyptian. She consulted several general demon listings, all bound in cracked black leather, yellowed pages covered in tight, faint columns of script. Half an hour passed; she found nothing. A brief consultation with the library index led her to a remote alcove beside a window. A window seat with purple cushions waited invitingly. She hauled down several specialist Egyptian almanacs and began to search.

Almost immediately, in a portly dictionary, she found something.

 

Rekhyt
: Engl, transl.:
lapwing.
This bird symbolized slavery to the Egyptians; occurs commonly in tomb art and in hieroglyphs on magicians' papyri. Demons with this byname recur in the Old, New, and Late Periods.

 

Demons
plural
… That was frustrating. But she'd pinned the epoch down, for sure. Bartimaeus
had
been employed in Egypt; for some of that time, at least, he had been known as Rekhyt.… In her mind's eye Kitty saw the djinni as she remembered him: dark, slight, wearing a simple wraparound kilt. From what she knew of the appearance of the Egyptians, Kitty felt she might be onto something.

For another hour she sat there, flipping contentedly through the dusty pages. Some books were useless, written in foreign tongues, or in phrases so abstruse that the sentences seemed to coil up on themselves before her eyes. The rest were dense and forbidding. They gave her lists of pharaohs, of civil servants, of the warrior-priests of Ra; they provided tables of known summonings, of surviving records, of obscure demons sent on mundane tasks. It was a daunting search, and more than once, Kitty's head nodded. She was startled back into life by police sirens in the distance, by shouts and chanting from a nearby street, once by an elderly magician blowing his nose loudly as he shuffled down the passage.

The autumn sun was lowering level with the library window; its rays warmed the seat with a golden light. She glanced at her watch. Four-fifteen! Not long before the library closed, and she hadn't even found Mr. Button's books. In three hours she must be at work too. It was an important night and George Fox of the Frog Inn was a stickler for punctuality. Wearily she pulled another volume across the window seat and flipped it open. Just another five minutes, then—

Kitty blinked. There it was. A list, eight pages long, of selected demons, tabulated alphabetically. Now then … Kitty scanned down it with practiced speed. Paimose, Pairi, Penrenutet, Ramose … Aha—Rekhyt. Three of them.

Rekhyt
(I): Afrit. Slave of Sneferu (4th Dynasty) and others; of legendarily vicious temperament. Killed at Khartoum.

Rekhyt
(II): Djinni. By-name of Quishog. Guardian of the Necropolis of Thebes (18th Dynasty). Morbid tendencies.

Rekhyt
(III): Djinni. Also named Nectanebo or Necho. Energetic, but unreliable. Slave of Ptolemaeus of Alexandria (fl. 120s
B.C.
).