Resurrecting a human being is not hard. Its only difficulty lays in the conditions necessary to said resurrection.
Kitty closed her book. Her current status was enough for her to acquire very prized books. She was in Alexandria for three weeks now, and no one seemed to be able- or want- to translate her book farther than these lines. She held it and concentrated.
"Who could translate this for me?" she thought out loud as she tried to understand the hieroglyphs…
"I managed to get Ptolemy's original Acrophya, but it seems useless" Whichever way she read it, she just couldn't understand those signs. All she knew was that there were mans with the heads of birds on the paper. And one with the head of a jackal… and those kept reappearing.
She decided to get up. Sitting down and mourning wasn't going to help her. Bartimaeus was right about one thing at least… the Nile was very impressive. For weeks she had been walking down the Nile, figuring that where there were people, she might understand what was written in her book.
She walked past innumerable stands in which people were all yelling, that they could translate ancient Egyptian. But they would all laugh, cower out or pretend to not understand what was written when they read it. She was losing most of her hope of ever getting a chance to know what was written in the chapters, which were not translated in most of every other language.
She was wondering why she even was going through all this. Nathaniel was dead. He broke the staff, blew up the whole glass palace and destroyed half the neighborhood. He was as dead as can be. He was disintegrated. Not a parcel of him was left. Even if he could resurrect, there wouldn't be anything for him to resurrect in. But strangely enough, she felt that those hidden chapters would be able to help her, help him… help them…
She suddenly started thinking about the jinni again. Wondering what he would do. How he would react. And most of all, if she should summon him, even if it meant breaking her promise. Breaking a promise? Nathaniel did enough of that for both of us…she didn't know what to do, or what to think.
She went back to London. She had to give the book back after all… She went to the Great London Library of Occult Sciences and Magic. Like every single other time, she was always looked at when she went there. The unequal laws were more or less supposed to have been abolished, but culture was one thing you didn't abolish in a couple months. Each time she sat down there were "humph" of magicians next to her and walking away. But so what? She had learned to cope with that much…
She was handing the book in. The librarian had grown attached to her. Well, attached as in, somewhere half-way between a master to his puppy and a father to his child. "Any success?" he asked her. Her silence was eloquent enough for him to catch the answer. He pointed to a man who was studying some ancient looking books -mind you, every single book in the library were ancient looking- and some hieroglyphs too. "He might help" the librarian said. "He's had the reputation of being calm and open minded, especially when it comes to studies of ancient magic books".
Kitty sighed. What did she have to lose? Sure, she had nothing to lose, but she would have bet her life that the reaction would be more or less the usual one. The man seemed nice and smiled at her. "May I help you?" he asked. She explained the whole story. His eyes shined with excitement. He pushed everything he was working on off the table and opened the book.
"Now, yes, I see… Ra, over Anubis would mean the dead rise again as new… yes, it looks interesting-" his eyes suddenly changed. They weren't shining with amused curiosity anymore. "-HERESY!!!" he yelled. "Pure heresy! There is absolutely no way this is right." He turned to Kitty. "Forget about it young girl. The dead are dead, they cannot resurrect!" he told her, and then got up and left. She was, to say the least, extremely unsurprised. Though there was an improvement. The comment had been madness and folly, now its heresy… what next?
Her mind drifted off to the djinni again… she was wondering how Bartimeus was doing… what he was doing… And how things were in that unsubstantial spirit world. No time sulking. She got up and went outside… she wasn't sure where or how, but she kept hope that she would someday understand what was written.
Then she decided she would stop hoping. She got up and sat down again. She was going to understand what was written, and that was a final. Now she just needed to find a way how.
Kitty had given up on asking people. She knew what the reactions were. So why go around and act as if she didn't? No, what she decided was that she would learn how to read the thing herself.
There are lots of places you can do that… But, she discovered, decrypting hieroglyphs is harder than learning a new language. Someone though had given her a hint. They're just pictures for god's sake!!!. She tried to rethink it. Well, no point hurting her mind by thinking without understanding. She sat down, opened the book and looked. So what was there?
First there was a man. Then a man with the face of a jackal holding a scale with a feather on it. Then there was a man with the face of a bird and a big ball on its head. After that there was the jackal man again. And then a gap before the next picture. Did the gap mean anything? She wondered.
After the gap a man, then the ball bird man and the jackal headed man again. Then there was a man and a thumb. And after that there was another bird headed man in the ball of the first bird headed man. And there was a flower. And then, as if it wasn't complicated enough, there was the jackal headed man, followed by a man, followed by a bird headed woman, followed by the bird headed man without the ball.
She had the feeling she was losing track there. Then there was a man that was about twice the size of the others and right after it, a man that was about half the size of the others.
She went in the library again and found a book that explained what those figures were… so… let's see… the normal bird headed man… she flicked a few pages Osiris she took note. The one with the ball Ra, she took note again. The jackal headed one was… Anubis The female bird headed figure was… Isis and then she saw that the man meant a man and that the thumb meant one and the flower meant five
Kitty was sure she was on a trail now. So this Ra god was apparently the chief god as well as the god of sun. The Anubis god seemed to be the god of death. The Osiris god was the husband of the Isis goddess and… She looked in another book. Osiris was apparently killed and resurrected by the Isis goddess, who seems to be some sort of goddess of life while Osiris was a mix between god of death and pharaoh of Egypt…
So… she had… a man, then Anubis, then Ra, and then Anubis again. Then there was a gap. After that there was a man, then Ra and Anubis. After that, there was a man and a "one". Then… Osiris, inside Ra's sun and a "five". And finally, a man followed by Isis, followed by Osiris, followed by Anubis…
It was just like a guessing game now. She just needed to understand what the whole thing meant. And so she went back at her table and started scribbling notes. A few weeks later which made a total of twenty hours of sleep, doubled the baggage under her eyes and about three notebooks of scrap, She finally had managed to scribble a couple of lines. When she read them, the first reaction he had was to say… well, she wanted to scream, but she felt too exhausted to do so, so she just mumbled. "This is impossible"
And fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.
If Ptolemy said it was correct, then who was she to say he was wrong? But she still couldn't believe it was so simple. But Ptolemy had said so… the actual thing was easy, but for it to be possible, she needed really big conditions. Some might say they were almost impossible. But she was sure they had all been accomplished.
She took a pen and drew a circle on the floor. Now… there must be absolutely no mistakes at all. If there was the tiniest one then… Good thing she hadn't eaten, because the images in her mind wouldn't have let her keep the food in. Anyway, it was done. The pentacle was complete, including -even though this had not been in the text, but she guessed it would be a good idea- three holes in the pentacle. She did a second one and went in. So she finally was going to break a promise.