Disclaimer: The Bartimaeus Trilogy is the property of Jonathan Stroud
A/N: Thank you so much Riiko Shea, Tane, Allendra, Duchessa, Astreals Ashes, Bibby, beautyfrompain, Nari, Random Inspired, and Lisette for your reviews last chapter. 200 reviews – whew that's awesome! It's been delightful hearing your comments over these past 20 chapters. On that note, this is the second last chapter in the story (minus the epilogue) and things will soon be coming to an end.
PS – this chapter was betaed as always by the amazing Lady Noir.
"Stop that – it itches."
Nathaniel wriggled and squirmed as if he was attempting some kind of spaghetti noodle mating dance. Not that I blamed him. I'd squirm too if I had a spider crawling up my ear canal.
"Stop that," I whispered, trying hard not to deafen the boy, "Or else I'm going to slip and wind up in your cochlea or something."
Nathaniel flinched. "The second we're inside you are out, you hear me?"
"No worries," I assured him, "There's no way I'd be able to get that far unless I punctured your eardrum."
Nathaniel didn't seem comforted.
Westminster Bridge was just to the left, indicating that we had nearly arrived at the abbey. From my nestled spot in Nathaniel's ear I could hear the rushing waters of the great river, the main artery of London that pulsed its way here to the city's heart before snaking away southwards. [1. To extend the metaphor, icy Westminster made for a rather cold, miserable heart, over-populated with pigeon droppings, and if the Thames was an artery, it would be a particularly sluggish, polluted one. The plastic bottles and old fast food cartons that caught in the sooty clumps of slush that adorned the water's edge would, I suppose, represent those delightfully stringy blood clots that tend to fling the overly-gluttonous into instant cardiac arrest. A rather apt comparison if I do say so myself.]
"This area is closed off from civilians," a sharp voice declared. Nathaniel met the approaching soldier's gaze evenly.
"I'm no civilian Captain."
A muted gasp went up from the ranks as the Czech forces presumably recognized their prodigal magician in all of his battered, stringy-haired glory.
"Mandrake…" someone growled.
"Isn't he a defector?"
The Captain's leathery face took on a grim expression and he clamped a hand down on Nat's shoulder as if he expected the kid to run off.
"Farrar's going to want to deal with this herself," he told his compatriots, "Check him for weapons."
As the soldiers went about divesting Nathaniel of Hurricane Cubes, Inferno Sticks, Bottled Liquidifications and the like, the old Captain leaned in to mutter in his ear. [2. Not the one I was sitting in, incidentally.]
"I don't know what you think you're doing kiddo, but you're in for a world of disappointment."
Nathaniel gulped audibly as the last Implosion Prism was pulled from his pocket and he was pushed forwards into the shadow of the looming abbey, as defenseless as a garden slug.
…Well not quite.
He had me, after all.
oooooooooooooo
Nathaniel nearly tripped over his feet as he was shoved roughly over the uneven stonework of the abbey floor. He fiddled nervously with the pendant around his neck; Herodotus' Collar of Indefinite Entrapment was the only thing they hadn't thought to take from him. Not that a necklace that absorbed spirits would be much help against Jane Farrar in any case.
A turn of a sharp corner, and suddenly Nathaniel found himself in the vaulted corridor of the abbey's cloisters. A soft tip, tap, tip, tap, echoed from the other end, and suddenly Farrar swung into sight, pacing purposefully down the hall. The Captain hailed her and she halted, folding her arms stiffly across her chest.
"Captain Sedlak, why have you deserted your post?" she asked sharply, "There's a riot going on in Trafalgar square as I'm sure you're aware."
The soldier shrugged and gestured vaguely towards Nathaniel, who was still grinning faintly from the news of Kitty's successful provocation of the masses.
Farrar stiffened as her eyes fell on the young magician. Her face turned white, then red, then white again.
"Just what are you doing here John?" she hissed. The dragon on her shoulder bared its teeth menacingly.
"This is where I say adios," The spider whispered, darting out of Nathaniel's ear and becoming a blue-green dragonfly, "Good luck with Lady Psycho here, I'm off to find Zaba."
Nathaniel nodded imperceptibly as the dragonfly drifted out of sight and turned back to Farrar with a sickly-sweet smile on his face.
"Sister darling – it's good to see you again."
"Mandrake, look here–"
Whatever Farrar had expected probably didn't involve the long-lost magician throwing his arms around her and giving a hearty squeeze with a giant goofy smile plastered over his face.
"I…you…" Farrar trailed off, confounded. She gave his back an awkward pat and ducked hurriedly out of his enthusiastic embrace.
"Ahem. John," she began carefully, "Would you mind explaining what exactly is going on? The last I recall, you were gallivanting off with the enemy."
"Oh Jane, it was terrible," Nathaniel began, his voice dripping with distress, "That horrible girl sent her demon into my head and it took me right over! They kidnapped me and kept me tied up in the basement. I haven't eaten in days. I only managed to escape from them during the fighting and came here in search you. I want to help!"
Farrar's brow furrowed. "A demon in your head? You were possessed?"
"I couldn't do a single thing that the creature didn't ordain. It was like something had swallowed my mind."
"How fortunate that you managed to escape," Farrar said. "As right now is when we're in most need of your expertise. Jones and her people have stirred up some kind of commotion in Trafalgar square. Now that you're back, I could just have you waltz on down there and sort things out. You could talk down the populous – you've as much influence over them as Kitty does. Then it's a simple matter of killing the leaders and rounding up the rest to make an example of. I'd just have to hand you this," she stretched out her arm to offer up a slender Inferno Stick and Nathaniel reached eagerly for it.
"But then," she said coolly, snatching it just out of his grasp, "That's not what you're going to do with this, is it?"
Nathaniel reeled back, throwing himself to the ground as Farrar discharged the weapon in a jet of roaring blue flame.
"You're a terrible liar John."
Nathaniel rolled to the side as Farrar's dragon spirit dove for him in a confusion of teeth, wing beats, and long serrated talons.
"I suppose that –" the djinni's swing met skin and Nathaniel clutched the side of his face with a wince, "I suppose that I simply haven't had as much practice as you have."
The spirit let fly a barrage of Detonations, and the boy was forced to dart behind a stone colonnade. One crackling ball of green energy sailed over his head to explode at Farrar's feet.
"Sirrush!" Farrar yelled, startled by the near miss.
The dragon hesitated a moment, then lunged for the magician, and Nathaniel groped for the chain around his neck.
"Anoigo!" he shouted, raising the pendant above his head as Sirrush barreled towards him.
The silver necklace hummed with life as it pulled at the djinni's form in dark wisps, like old bathwater sucked into a vacuum cleaner. The bright coloured dragon looked surprised, and then resigned, as its body dissolved away around it. In a moment, the creature was gone entirely, drawn into the strange rune set into the metal. Nathaniel dropped the silver pendant and let it swing freely around his neck; the surface was hot enough to emit a hissing stream of smoke.
Panting from adrenaline as much as exertion, Nathaniel raised his eyes to the neatly dressed woman across the hall whose eyes bored into him with the divine fury of all nine circles of hell.
Nathaniel ran.
oooooooooooooo
Even from the interior, the nave of Westminster Abbey had a soaring, vertical feel. Morning sunlight filtered in from the long glass windows, chasing shadows from between the network of arcs in the ribbed ceiling high above and falling in glowing pools upon the tiled floor. The dragonfly flitted between pillars, scanning the vastly ornamented hall for any sign of Zaba.
The squat wooden chairs that normally sat here before the alter had been cleared away to make way for a wide, map covered table, around which several official-looking fellows gathered, arguing vehemently. I hung back in the event that some of them might be wearing lenses. There were few spirits in attendance – presumably those they had in their service had been sent out to the battle.
Zaba was not here. The dragonfly moved on. Flitting over the choir stalls, I came upon the dark wooden pews before the high alter. This seemed to be Zaba's hang-out, judging from the number of guards milling about the place. The conspicuously placed armchair upon the platform was, however, empty. Where had that blasted dictator got to?
Something else caught my eye.
At the foot of the steps to the altar, a skeletal figure drooped over a series of pale crystal orbs. His cheekbones protruded from his sunken face like wings and matted clumps of dull brown hair fell into his bloodshot eyes. His skin was a pasty grey, giving him the overall appearance of a zombie fresh from the grave.
Karl Kavka had certainly deteriorated since the last time Kitty and I had seen him. Zaba could wait, I decided. I had a job to do.
I came to hover above a soldier who stood a little apart from the others, leaning against a wall near the north transept. He looked impossibly bored.
As inconspicuously as possible I dropped onto his head. Pushing past greasy follicles of hair, I pressed an Insentience to his scalp and jumped back as he toppled numbly to the ground and lay there, blinking stupidly up at the ceiling. One down, three to go.
Unfortunately, the second soldier wasn't quite so cooperative as the first, and I was forced to incinerate the last two with a hasty detonation as they rushed to answer their comrade's cries for help.
The smoke cleared, leaving Karl and I alone in a forest of gold leaf and dark-stained wood.
"I-Is someone there?" the young Czech man called timorously. I fluttered over and circled his head a few times before dropping down in the form of Ptolemy.
"Hey Karl," I greeted, leaning casually over the desk.
"Gahhh!" He jerked back, topping over his stool and crashing into the floor. I hoped he hadn't broken anything – the man looked like he was made of nothing but dust and cobwebs.
"Well, I'll just be taking these…" I hefted up one of the orbs from the desk and spun it on one finger. Over the murky surface flashed a brief image of an elderly man being stomped into the pavement, and I frowned.
Karl's eyes widened as he watched the precarious wobbling of the crystal ball. "What are you doing?" he gasped in a voice like sandpaper.
"What now," I let it come to a rest in my palm, "Surely you're not on Zaba's side?"
Karl wrung his boney hands and cast a glance over his shoulder. "Sir – whoever you are – if I lose control of the golems he'll kill me! Please!"
I raised an eyebrow and gave him a skeptical once-over. "If you haven't noticed, he's doing a pretty good job of that already. You're not exactly the picture of strength and virility at the moment, now are you?"
"I don't want to die!"
"Yeah?" I let the orb slide from my hand, and Karl went rigid with horror as gravity worked a number on the fragile sphere.
"Don't worry you're pretty little head," I said, making a show of contemplating the swirling surface of another orb before tossing it, too, over my shoulder, "Zaba's not going to find the time to kill you. Because I'm about to kill him."
A well aimed Hurricane was all it took to send the rest of the orbs hurdling off the table in a symphony of splintering glass, and a muted hiss like escaping steam went up as a mist of grey magic rose up from the orbs' shattered corpses.
Karl let out a woeful moan and buried his face in his hands.
oooooooooooooo
A bedraggled imp dropped to the pavement, felled by a blast from Kitty's Inferno Stick. The tide of Czech fighters seemed unending and her weapon was beginning to give out, sputtering and smoking with each gush of flame. Kitty was beginning to feel like a piece of driftwood washed out to sea; surrounded and carried along by a current of hostile forces, it was only a matter of time before she went under.
Here in the thick of things the golems ruled the battlefield. Kitty darted to the side to avoid a swinging stone limb, only to have a cold, hardened fist wrap around her shoulders and torso and hoist her into the air.
She fired away at the lumbering creature, but the electric blue flames fizzed and died against the damp clay of the golem's skin. It tightened its grip and Kitty gasped for breath.
"You want to fight dirty?" she yelled, chucking the Inferno Stick at the creature's head and striking it in its single Cyclops eye. The golem reeled back, growling.
Kitty tensed, waiting for a retaliating blow, but none came. The golem had frozen where it stood, its controlling eye dull and motionless as if the intelligence behind it had disappeared.
It wasn't just Kitty's golem either. All across Trafalgar Square the golems had stilled, paralyzed where they stood.
"Thank you, Bartimaeus," Kitty muttered, wriggling out from between the creature's fingers and crawling up the sloping arm to perch on its shoulders.
"Everyone," she shouted, "Remove the scrolls from the golem's mouth. Like this!" she leaned forwards as far as she could and fished around in the giant's gaping mouth. Her fingers struck a crisp roll of paper and she drew it out, holding it above her head for all to see.
The golem slumped forwards lifelessly, now nothing more than a doll of clay.
Kitty got to her feet atop the clay giant's broad shoulders and watched as the battlefield altered before her eyes; the frozen golems toppling right and left as the people snatched away the rolls of parchment that gave them life.
A triumphant smile curled at Kitty's lips and she raised an arm to point down the stretch of road between Trafalgar and the Abbey ahead.
"To Westminster!" she cried as the crowd surged forward around her.