Alexandria: 124 B.C. 5 страница. Jessica Whitwell spoke quietly

Jessica Whitwell spoke quietly. "To all the others you have given a choice.You have not asked me for mine."

Faquarl lowered his book; his eyes were narrowed. "Well, I assume, like all the other wretches, you prefer life to death, even if it is life worked through another."

"You assume wrongly."

Ms. Whitwell raised her hands and made an ornate sign; she shouted out two words. A burst of yellow light, a cloud of brimstone—her afrit, wearing the form of an uneasy-looking grizzly bear—

appeared above her head. Whitwell screamed an order; a shimmering blue Shield rose up around her body. The afrit sent a Detonation at the startled Faquarl: it struck him head-on, knocking him off his chair and halfway through the wall.

The demons in the bodies of the conspirators set up a clamor. Naeryan raised a finger: from Jenkins's hand a lance of emerald light stabbed at Whitwell. The Shield absorbed it; Whitwell was already turning, running for the exit. The demon Caspar, encased in the body of Lime, leaped forward to intercept her; Nathaniel stretched out a boot; the demon tripped, was unable to right itself, fell crashing to the ground.

Nathaniel turned and ran; above his head the bear afrit sent successive Detonations toward the golden throne.

Where was Kitty? There! But the mercenary held her by the arm. She struggled, kicked, could not break free.

Nathaniel sped toward her—

The floor shook; he stumbled, fell—and, for a moment, looked behind him.

The body in the golden chair had moved. It was surrounded by a nimbus of pale fire. Energies Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

crackled from its fingers; its eyes were silver notches in the darkened face. One hand was outstretched. The power that came from it—arcing out in five looping bolts, one from each finger

—made statues fall and mortar tumble from the ceiling. The bolts were randomly directed: two plunged harmlessly into the floor; one leaped among the crowd of newly summoned demons, destroying several human bodies. The fourth struck WhitwelTs Shield, broke it into shards and cut straight through her back, killing her instantly. The bear afrit vanished. She fell midstride, facedown upon the flagstones.

The fifth bolt burst the floor at the mercenary's feet: he was blown one way, Kitty Jones the other.

Nathaniel was on his feet. "Kitty!"

His voice was drowned out by assorted howls, roars, bays, and trumpetings from the demons in the hall. Confused and panic-stricken, they willed their human carriers in every direction, legs working oddly, knees too high, elbows out. They collided with each other, let fly random Detonations and Infernos. Among them stumbled a few magicians who had yet to be processed, arms still tied, mouths gagged, eyes wide and staring. The room was filled with smoke, lights, and rushing forms.

Amid the tumult Nathaniel came to the place where Kitty Jones had fallen. She was nowhere to be seen. He flinched as a magical pulse passed above his head, and looked round a final time.

No, she had gone.

Without further hesitation he ducked between two flailing demons and made for the double doors. As he left the Hall of Statues, he could hear Faquarl's voice rising above the commotion.

"Friends, calm down! Calm down! The crisis is over! We must resume the summonings. Calm down...."

It took Nathaniel less than a minute to negotiate the corridors and arrive at the stairs to the Whitehall vaults. Abandoning all caution, he leaped over the balustrade and careered down the staircase two steps at a time. Down, down... the air grew colder, all sound from above faded clean away; Nathaniel heard nothing now but the gasping of his breath.

At the end of the third flight the steps opened out into the entrance vault. Two days before—or was it three?—he had come here as Information Minister and been shown the treasure room by a supercilious clerk. It seemed another life. Now the clerk's desk was empty. It gave signs of being abandoned in a hurry; papers were scattered upon it, a pen lay on the floor.

At the end of the chamber a passage led away into the earth. A line of red tiles marked the beginning of the security zone. Nathaniel stepped toward them; as his shoe rose to cross the line, he cursed, stopped dead, and felt inside his pocket. Careful! He had almost triggered the trap. Nothing magical was permitted beyond the line! He deposited the scrying glass upon the desk, smoothed down his hair, and stepped across the tiles.

If only the Pestilence guarding the Staff could be so easily bypassed. He hadn't a clue how to—

Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

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.

Kitty 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.

Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

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 shop-worn. 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 Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

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.

Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

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.

Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

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.

It 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.

She found herself in—well, in did not seem quite appropriate: she found herself part of a ceaseless swirl of movement, neither ending nor beginning, in which nothing was fixed or static.

It was an infinite ocean of lights, colors, and textures, perpetually forming, racing, and dissolving in upon themselves, though the effect was neither as thick or solid as a liquid nor as traceless as a gas; if anything it was a combination of the two, in which fleeting wisps of substance endlessly parted and converged.

Scale and direction were impossible to determine, as was the passing of time-—since nothing remained still and no patterns were ever repeated, the concept itself seemed blank and meaningless. This mattered little to Kitty, and it was only when she attempted to locate herself, with a view to establishing her position in her surroundings, that she grew a little disconcerted.

She had no fixed point, no singularity to call her own; indeed, she seemed often to be in several places at once, watching the whirling traces from multiple angles. The effect was most disorientating.

She tried to fix upon a particular fleck of color and follow it, but found it no easier than following the motion of a single leaf in a distant windblown tree. As soon as it formed, each color split, melted, merged with others, shrugged off the responsibility of being itself. Kitty grew dizzy with the looking.

To make matters worse she began to notice something else too, flicking in and out of existence within the general swirl— random images, so fleeting she could not pin them down—like photographs turned on and off by crackling electric light. She tried to work out what they were, but the movement was too fast. This filled her with frustration. She sensed they might have told her something.

After an unknown duration Kitty remembered that she had come here for a purpose, although what that purpose was she could not recall. She had no inclination to do anything particularly; her main impulse was to remain exactly as she was, moving among the rushing lights....

Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

Nevertheless something about the ceaseless change irritated her and kept her separate from it.

She wanted to impose a little order, some solidity. But how could she do this when she lacked solidity herself?

Halfheartedly she willed herself to move toward a particular patch of orange and maroon swirling at an unknown distance. To her surprise, she moved all right, but in several discordant directions; when her vision stabilized, the patch of color was no closer than before. She tried several times with the same result: her movements were veering and haphazard; it was impossible to predict the outcome.

For the first time Kitty felt a faint anxiety. She noted several patches of boiling darkness curling and uncurling among the lights; they stirred echoes of old earthbound fears—of nothingness and solitude, of being alone amid infinity.

This is no good, Kitty thought. I need a body.

With mounting disquiet, she watched the remorseless movement flowing all around, the images flickering near and far, the crackles of light and senseless trails of color. One merry dancing blue-green coil caught her attention.

Stand STILL! she thought furiously.

Was it her imagination, or had a little portion of the flowing coil deviated from its course, slowing for an instant? The motion was so quick, she could not be sure.

Kitty spied another random wisp and willed it to halt and attend to her. The results were immediate and satisfactory: a sizable tendril of matter solidified into something resembling the rolled tip of a fern frond, colorless and glassy. When she relaxed her attention, the coil unfurled and vanished back into the general swirl.

Kitty tried again, this time willing a patch of matter to form a thicker, more compact object.

Once more she had success, and by concentrating further was able to mold the glassy lump into something approaching a block, unevenly squared. Again, when she desisted, the block dissolved to nothing.

The malleability of the substance all around reminded Kitty of something she had seen before.

What was it? With difficulty, her mind grasped at a memory—that of the djinni Bartimaeus, changing form. He needed to occupy a shape of some kind when he came to Earth, though his choices were always fluid. Perhaps, now that the positions were reversed, she should try the same.

She could make herself a shape.... And with this inspiration, the object of her visit came back to her. Yes, it was Bartimaeus she had come to find.

Kitty's anxiety faded; she was enthused. She set to work straightaway, building herself a body.

Unfortunately this was easier thought than done. She had no difficulty, by applying her will once Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

more, in forming a patch of the flowing energies into something approximating a human shape.

It had a bulbous head of sorts, a stumpy torso, and four uneven limbs, all dully see-through, so that the rushing colors and lights behind were distorted on its surfaces. But when Kitty tried to improve this rough marionette into something more refined and accurate, she discovered she was unable to concentrate on it all at once. While she shaped and evened out the legs, the head slumped like melted butter; when she hastened to repair this and add a token face, the bottom half dripped and sagged. So it went, until her series of rushed improvements had entirely ruined the figurine, and it had stabilized as a pinheaded blob with enormous buttocks. Kitty regarded it with dissatisfaction.

It also proved overly complex to maneuver. Although she was able to direct it back and forth—it floated among the raging energies like a bird amid a storm—Kitty found she could not individually direct its limbs. While she struggled to do so, the body's substance dribbled away from its extremities, like thread unraveling from a spindle. After a time Kitty gave up in disgust and allowed the figure to dissolve into nothing.

Despite this setback she felt pleased with her idea in principle, and immediately began work again. In quick succession she tried a variety of other surrogate bodies, testing each for ease of control. The first, a stick figure—rather like a child's drawing—contained less substance than its predecessor; Kitty was able to prevent it from unraveling, but found the savage energies all around made it crumple like a cranefly.The second, a snaking sausage with a questing tendril at its front, was more stable, but aesthetically unsound. The third, a simple ball of swirling matter, was far stronger and easier to maintain, and with it she progressed a considerable distance, floating serenely through the chaos.

Lack of limbs is the key, Kitty thought. A sphere is good. It imposes order.

The shape certainly had some effect on her surroundings, since it was not long before Kitty began to notice a slight change in the fabric through which her ball was passing. Up until then the coils of color, the shimmering lights, the intermittent images had all been entirely neutral and unresponsive, flowing randomly where they would. But now—perhaps because of the new decisiveness with which she maintained the sphere—they seemed to become aware of her presence. She sensed it in the movement of the swirls, which suddenly became more definite, intentional.They began to change direction slightly—darting in close to the ball, then veering away as if in doubt. Time and again this happened, with the coils and flickers growing steadily in strength and number. They seemed merely inquisitive, but it was an ominous kind of attention, like sharks gathering about a swimmer, and Kitty didn't like it. She slowed the progress of her ball, and with a careful exertion of will—she was now gaining in confidence—imposed herself upon the whirling substance. Taking the static sphere as her center, she drove outward,, pushing back the nearest intrepid coils, which dissolved and scattered.

The remission this provided was short-lived. Just as Kitty was congratulating herself on her strength of purpose, a sudden glassy coil extended out from the main mass like an amoeba's pseudopodium and bit into the edge of her sphere, carrying off a chunk. As she strove to make good the damage, another coil darted in from the opposite side and took another slice.

Furiously she beat the coils back. The main mass all about her pulsed and quivered. Lights flickered intently in random clusters. For the first time Kitty felt true fear.

Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

Bartimaeus, she thought. Where are you?

The word seemed to conjure a reaction in the substance; a sudden burst of static images fired and faded, stronger and more lingering than before. One or two lasted long enough for her to catch details: figures, faces, random snatches of sky, once a definite building—a roof with columns. The figures were human, but wore unfamiliar styles of clothes. The fleeting pictures reminded Kitty of past occasions, when long-forgotten memories rose unbidden into her mind.

But these were not her memories.

As if in response to this thought, a sudden burst of activity far out in the whirling confusion ended with an image that did linger. It was fractured, as if seen through the lens of a broken camera, but what it showed was clear enough: her parents, standing together hand in hand. As Kitty watched, her mother raised a distorted hand and waved.

Kitty! Come back to us.

Go away... Kitty reacted with confusion and dismay. It was a trick, obviously it was, but that didn't make it any less upsetting. Her concentration wavered; her hold over her sphere and her single area of cleared order lurched and trembled. The sphere slumped and sagged; coils of matter came creeping in from every side.

Kitty, we love you.

Get lost! She drove the coils back again. The image of her mom and dad winked out. With grim determination, Kitty returned her sphere to its proper shape. She was increasingly dependent on it for any semblance of control, for any semblance of being herself. More than anything she feared being adrift again without it.

Other pictures flashed on and off, each one different, most too fast to fathom. Some, though barely perceptible, must have been familiar to her—they awoke inarticulate feelings of agitation and loss. A flurry of lights; another picture, very far away. An old man leaning on a stick. Behind his back was a rushing slab of blackness.

Kitty, help! It's coming!

Mr. Pennyfeather...

Don't leave me! The figure looked over its shoulder, cried out in terror.... The vision was gone.

Almost immediately another appeared—a woman running between columns with something dark and agile skittering in pursuit. A flash of white among shadows. Kitty concentrated her energies on the sphere. Ignore them. They were nothing but phantasms, blank and empty. They meant nothing.

Bartimaeus! Again she thought the name, beseechingly this time. Again it awoke activity among the floating lights and drifting spurs of color. Close up, with crystal clarity, came Jakob Hyrnek, smiling sadly.

Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

You always did try to be too independent, Kitty. Why not just give up? Come and join us here.

It's best not to go back to Earth. You won't like it if you do.

Why? She couldn't help but ask the question.

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