Bartimaeus: The Golem’s Eye (20 page)

“No. I told you—the worst a mouler can do is knock you out. Its stench—”

“And that isn’t bad enough?” Kitty rose to her feet in fury.

“If you must go, don’t forget this.” The old man drew a thick white envelope from his jacket and tossed it contemptuously on the tabletop between the cups. “You’ll find the six hundred pounds there. Used notes. I don’t break my word.”

“I don’t want it!” Kitty was livid, incandescent; she wanted to smash something.

“Don’t be a fool!” The old man’s eyes flared. “Do you want to rot in the Marshalsea prison? That’s where debtors go, you know. That packet completes the first part of our bargain. Consider it an apology for the mouler. But it
could
be just the beginning….”

Kitty snatched up the envelope, almost knocking the cups flying as she did so. “You’re crazy. You
and
your friends. Fine. I’ll take it. It’s what I came for anyway.” She was still standing. She pushed her chair back.

“Shall I tell you how it began for me?” Mr. Pennyfeather was leaning forward now, his gnarled fingers pressing hard against the tablecloth, scrunching it up. His voice was low, urgent; he fought against his lack of breath in his eagerness to speak. “I was like you at first—the magicians meant nothing to me. I was young, happily married—what did I care? Then my dear wife, heaven rest her soul, attracted the attention of a magician. Not unlike your Mr. Tallow, he was: a cruel, strutting popinjay. He wished her for himself, tried to beguile her with jewels and fine Eastern clothes. But my wife, poor woman, refused his advances. She laughed in his face. It was a brave act, but foolish. I wish now—I have wished this for thirty years—that she had gone with him.

“We lived in a flat above my shop, Ms. Jones; each day I worked late into the evening, sorting my stock and completing my accounts, while my wife retired to our rooms to prepare our meal. One night, I was sitting at my desk as usual. A fire was burning in the grate. My pen scratched on the paper. All at once, the dogs in the street began to howl; a moment later, my fire quivered and went out, leaving the hot coals hissing like the dead. I rose to my feet. Already I feared … well, what it was I did not know. And then—I heard my wife scream. Just once, a shriek cut off. I have never run so fast. Up the stairs, tripping in my haste, through our door, into our little kitchen …”

Mr. Pennyfeather’s eyes no longer saw her. They gazed at something else, far off. Mechanically, hardly knowing what she did, Kitty sat down again and waited.

“The thing that had done it,” Mr. Pennyfeather said at last, “had barely gone. I smelled its presence lingering. Even as I knelt beside my wife upon our old linoleum floor, the gas hobs on the cooker burst back to life, the stew in the pot resumed its bubbling. I heard the barking of dogs, windows down the road banging in a sudden breeze … then silence.” He ran a finger among the éclair crumbs on a plate, gathered them up and popped them in his mouth. “She was a good cook, Ms. Jones,” he said. “I remember that still, though thirty long years have passed.”

On the other side of the coffeehouse, a waiter spilled a drink on a customer: the resulting uproar seemed to detach Mr. Pennyfeather from his memories. He blinked, looked at Kitty again. “Well, Ms. Jones, I shall cut my story short. Suffice it to say that I located the magician; for some weeks I followed him subtly, learning his movements, giving in neither to the ravings of grief nor the urges of impatience. In due time I had my chance; I waylaid him in a lonely spot and slew him. His corpse joined the bobbing filth floating down the Thames. However, before he died, he summoned three demons: one by one, their attacks on me all failed. It was in this manner that—somewhat to my surprise, for I was resolved to die in my revenge—I discovered my resilience. I do not pretend to understand it, but it is a fact. I have it; my friends have it; you have it. It is for each of us to decide whether we take advantage of this or not.”

His voice ceased. He seemed all of a sudden worn out, his face lined and old.

Kitty hesitated a few moments before replying. “All right,” she said, for Jakob’s sake, for Mr. Pennyfeather’s sake, and for the sake of his dead wife. “I won’t go yet. I’d like you to tell me more.”

20

O
ver several weeks, Kitty met regularly with Mr. Pennyfeather and his friends, at Seven Dials, at other coffee shops scattered across central London, and at Mr. Pennyfeather’s flat above his Artists’ Supplies shop, in a busy street just south of the river. Each time, she learned more about the group and their objectives; each time, she found herself identifying with them more closely.

It seemed that Mr. Pennyfeather had assembled his company haphazardly, relying on word of mouth and reports in newspapers to lead him to people with unusual capabilities. Some months he haunted the courtrooms, looking for someone such as Kitty; otherwise he simply used taproom chat to single out interesting rumors of people who had survived magical disaster. His art shop was modestly successful; generally he left it in the hands of his assistants and prowled through London on his surreptitious errands.

His followers had joined him over a long period of time. Anne, a vivacious woman of forty, had met him almost fifteen years before. They were veterans of many campaigns together. Gladys, the blond woman from the café, was in her twenties; she had withstood a side blast from a magicians’duel ten years earlier, when still a girl. She and Nicholas, a stocky young man with a brooding manner, had worked for Mr. Pennyfeather since they were children. The rest of the company were younger; no one older than eighteen. Kitty and Stanley, both thirteen, were the youngest of all.

The old man dominated them all with his presence, which was at once inspiring and autocratic. His willpower was iron-strong and his mental energies untiring, but his body was gradually failing him, and this roused him to outbursts of incoherent fury. In the early days such occasions were rare, and Kitty listened intently to his impassioned accounts of the great struggle in which they were engaged.

Ordinarily, Mr. Pennyfeather argued, it was impossible to resist the magicians or their rule. They did exactly as they pleased, as all the company had discovered to their cost. They ran everything important: the government, the civil service, the biggest businesses, and the newspapers. Even the plays put on at the theaters had to be officially sanctioned in case they contained subversive messages. And while the magicians enjoyed the luxuries of their rule, everyone else—the vast majority—got on with providing the essential services the magicians required. They worked in the factories, ran the restaurants, fought in the army … if it involved real work, the commoners did it. And providing they did it quietly, the magicians left them alone. But if there was even the smallest hint of dissatisfaction, the magicians came down hard. Their spies were everywhere; one word out of place and you were whisked off for interrogation in the Tower. Many troublemakers disappeared for good.

The magicians’ power made it impossible to rebel: they controlled dark forces that few had glimpsed but which everyone feared. But Mr. Pennyfeather’s company—this small handful of souls gathered up and driven forward by his implacable hatred—was more fortunate than most. And its good fortune came in several forms.

To some degree, all of Mr. Pennyfeather’s friends shared his resilience to magic, but how far this stretched was impossible to say. Because of his past, it was clear Mr. Pennyfeather could withstand a fairly strong attack; most of the others, such as Kitty, had only been gently tested so far.

Some of them—these were Anne, Eva, Martin, and the surly and pockmarked Fred—had another talent. Since early childhood, they had each regularly observed small demons traveling hither and thither through the streets of London. Some flew, others walked among the crowds. No one else noticed them, and upon investigation, it appeared that to most people the demons were either invisible or masked by disguise. According to Martin—who worked in a paint factory, and was, after Mr. Pennyfeather, the most fiery and passionate—a good many cats and pigeons were not what they seemed. Eva (brown curly hair, fifteen, still at school) said she had once seen a stickle-backed demon walk into a grocer’s and buy a bunch of garlic; her mother, who was with her, had seen nothing but a bent old lady doing her shopping.

Penetrating illusions in this way was a trait that was very useful to Mr. Pennyfeather. Another ability that he highly prized was that of Stanley, a chipper, rather cocksure boy who, despite being Kitty’s age, had already left school. He worked delivering newspapers. Stanley could not see demons; instead, he was able to perceive a faint, flickering radiance given off by any object containing magical force. As a small boy, he had so delighted in these auras that he had taken to stealing the objects concerned; by the time Mr. Pennyfeather caught up with him (at the Judicial Courts) he was already an accomplished pickpocket. Anne and Gladys had a similar ability, but it was not nearly so marked as that of Stanley, who could sense magical items through clothes and even behind thin wooden partitions. As a result, Stanley was one of the key figures of Mr. Pennyfeather’s company.

Instead of
seeing
magical activity, the gentle, quiet Timothy seemed able to
hear
it. As far as he could describe it, he sensed a kind of humming in the air. “Like a bell ringing,” he said, when pressed. “Or the sound you get when you tap an empty glass.” If he concentrated, and if there wasn’t too much other noise around, he could actually trace the hum to its source, perhaps a demon or a magical object of some kind.

When all these abilities were set together, Mr. Pennyfeather said, they formed a small but effective force to set against the might of the magicians. It could not declare itself openly, of course, but it could work to undercut their enemies. Magical objects could be traced, hidden dangers could be avoided and—most important of all—attacks could be made on the magicians and their wicked servants.

From the first, these revelations enthralled Kitty. She observed Stanley as, on a training day, he picked out a magical knife from six ordinary specimens, each one concealed from him in a separate cardboard box. She followed Timothy as he walked back and forth through Mr. Pennyfeather’s shop, locating the resonance of a jeweled necklace that had been hidden in a pot of brushes.

Magical objects were at the center of the company’s strategy. Kitty regularly observed members of the group arriving at the shop with small parcels or bags that they passed to Anne, Mr. Pennyfeather’s second-in-command, to be stowed quietly away. These contained stolen goods.

“Kitty,” Mr. Pennyfeather said to her one evening, “I have studied our verminous leaders for thirty years, and I believe I have learned their biggest weakness. They are greedy for everything—money, power, status, you name it—and quarrel incessantly about them all. But nothing arouses their passions more than magical trinkets.”

She nodded. “Magic rings and bracelets, you mean?”

“Doesn’t have to be jewelry,” Anne said. She and Eva were with them in the backroom of the shop, sitting beside stacked rolls of paper. “Might be anything—staves, pots, lamps, pieces of wood. That mouler glass we chucked at you; that counts as one, doesn’t it, Chief?”

“It does indeed. Which is why we stole it. Which is why we steal
all
these things, whenever we can.”

“I think that glass came from the house in Chelsea, didn’t it?” Anne said. “The one where Eva and Stanley shinned up the drainpipe to the upstairs window while the party was going on at the front of the house.”

Kitty was open-mouthed. “Isn’t that terribly dangerous? Aren’t magicians’ houses protected by … all sorts of things?”

Mr. Pennyfeather nodded. “Yes, though it depends on the power of the magician concerned. That one merely had magical tripwires laced across the room…. Naturally, Stanley evaded them easily…. We got a good cluster of objects that day.”

“And what do you do with them?” Kitty asked. “Apart from throwing them at me, that is.”

Mr. Pennyfeather smiled. “Artifacts are a major source of every magician’s power. Minor officials, such as the Assistant Secretary for Agriculture—I think he was the owner of the mouler glass—can afford only weak objects, while the greatest men and women aspire to rare pieces of terrible force. They all do so because they are decadent and lazy. It is much easier to use a magical ring to strike down a foe than it is to summon some demon from the pit to do it.”

“Safer, too,” Eva said.

“Quite. So you see, Kitty, the more items we can get a hold of, the better. It weakens the magicians considerably.”

“And we can use them instead,” Kitty added promptly.

Mr. Pennyfeather paused. “Opinion is a little divided on this. Eva here”—he curled his lip back slightly, showing his teeth—“believes it is morally dangerous to follow too closely in the magicians’ footsteps. She believes the items should be destroyed.
I
however—and it is
my
company, is it not, so
my
word goes—believe that we must use whatever weapons we can against such enemies. And that includes turning their own magic against them.”

Eva shifted in her seat. “It seems to me, Kitty,” she said, “that by using such things, we become no better than the magicians themselves. It’s far better to remain detached from the temptations of evil things.”

“Hah!” The old man gave a disparaging snort. “How else can we undermine our rulers? We need direct attacks to destabilize the government. Sooner or later, the people will rise up in support of us.”

“Well,
when?”
Eva said. “There’s been no—”

“We do not study magic like the magicians,” Mr. Pennyfeather interrupted. “We are in no moral danger. But by doing a little research—a little reading in stolen books, for instance—we can learn to operate basic weapons. Your mouler glass, Kitty—that required only a simple Latin command. This is enough for small … demonstrations of our displeasure. The more complex artifacts we can stockpile safely, out of magicians’ hands.”

“I think we’re going about it the wrong way,” Eva said quietly. “A few little explosions will never make any difference. They’ll always be stronger. We—”

Mr. Pennyfeather slammed his stick hard upon his work bench, making both Eva and Kitty jump. “Would you rather do nothing?” he yelled. “Very well! Go back out among the herds of sheep, put your head down and waste your lives!”

“I didn’t mean that. I just don’t see—”

“My shop is closing! It is late. You are no doubt expected home, Ms. Jones.”

Kitty’s mother and father had been greatly relieved by her prompt payment of the court fine. In keeping with their incurious personalities, they did not inquire too closely into where the money came from, gratefully accepting Kitty’s stories about a generous benefactor and a fund for miscarriages of justice. In some surprise, they watched Kitty’s gradual detachment from her old habits as, throughout the summer holidays, she spent more and more time with her new friends in Southwark. Her father, in particular, did not hide his satisfaction. “You’re better off keeping away from that Hyrnek boy,” he said. “He’ll only get you into trouble again.”

Although Kitty continued to visit Jakob, her visits were generally brief and unsatisfactory. Jakob’s strength was a long time returning, and his mother kept sharp vigil at his bedside, sending Kitty packing as soon as she detected exhaustion in her son. Kitty could not tell him about Mr. Pennyfeather; and Jakob, for his part, was preoccupied with his streaked and itching face. He grew inward-looking and perhaps, Kitty thought, slightly resentful of her health and energy. Gradually, her trips to the Hyrnek household became less frequent, and after some months, they ceased.

Two things kept Kitty involved with the company. First, gratitude for the payment of her fine. She felt herself to be under a definite obligation to Mr. Pennyfeather. For all that he never mentioned it again, it was possible that the old man sensed her feelings on the matter; if so, he did not attempt to gainsay them.

The second reason was in many ways the more important. Kitty wanted to learn more about the “resilience” that Mr. Pennyfeather had discovered in her and to find out what it could do. Joining the company seemed the only way of achieving this; it also promised her a direction, a sense of purpose, and the glamour of a small and secret society hidden from the world at large. It was not long before she was accompanying the others out on foraging expeditions.

At first she was an onlooker, keeping watch while Fred or Eva scrawled anti-government graffiti on walls, or broke into magicians’cars and houses in search of artifacts. Kitty would stand in the shadows, fingering the silver pendant in her pocket, ready to whistle at any sign of danger. Later, she accompanied Gladys or Stanley as they followed magicians home, tracing the aura of the objects they carried. Kitty noted down the addresses in preparation for later raids.

Occasionally, late in the evening, she would observe Fred or Martin departing the shop on missions of a different kind. They wore dark clothes, their faces smudged with soot; they carried small, heavy bags under their arms. No one referred openly to their objectives, but when the next morning’s newspaper carried reports of unexplained attacks on government properties, Kitty drew her own conclusions.