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The temperature of the room drops fast. The newfound sharpness of the air prompts a deep ache in Kitty’s bones, unspecific and constant; she struggles to tug her shawl a little closer, peers into the gloom which had arrived in tandem with the sudden, unnatural chill. There is nothing but a shapeless haze hanging in the pentacle opposite, a dark, shadowy cloud whirling silently in an eerie vortex, but to Kitty it’s as welcome as the familiar face of a friend long lost – he’s here. He’s come. Bartimaeus is not dead.
It’s been five long and weary decades since they last met in this now unrecognisable city, and in that time Kitty has had plenty to keep her busy; plenty to keep her weary. Her body has aged twicefold in its short life, unnatural now followed by natural, the inevitable slow decay of time. Kitty Jones has but a little strength left in her body, and she has decided on this lazy summer’s night to spend it on the question which has plagued her for half a century. When younger, when more full of life, she had allowed herself to hope – not directly, never directly, but on the edge of a thought; with every solemn day of remembrance, with every inscribed plaque, with every bronze statue raised in every town square. But the very nature of this hope, so vague and fluttering at the turn of every breath, defied any attempt to solidify it either way; put simply, she had lived her life too frightened to squash it out entirely, to look at it direct and challenge it, for better or for worse.
And so the years had passed, and Kitty had seen fresh good and evil, fought a heady mix of both; but she had not found the courage within herself to perform the simplest of summons. Until tonight, in the glinting yellow light dancing silently from across the glittering rooftops of the capital, she had wheeled herself into this quiet room and set up her chair within the pentacle, fixing the damage its wheels wrought with precise but shaking movements. It’s been some years since she so much as summoned an imp, but the skill has never left her. It has taken the last of her to make the summons, she knows. She will not last the night. But this matters little, given that her call has not gone unheeded; her ageless question is now answered. And it will be good to see him again before she goes; she has missed him so. She’s missed the both of them.
The ever-spinning vortex sucks its way to the centre of the pentacle, swirls listlessly a few heartbeats more and then, eventually, parts, revealing a thin-faced, black-haired boy, impossibly young, endlessly young, and breathlessly familiar. It’s a face Kitty would have almost forgotten if it weren’t for the sketches hanging on her bedroom wall, drawn by her own hand in the immediate aftermath with the express purpose of keeping his face forever by her side. He is not alone in this; she has scattered, half-attempted drawings of a multitude of men and women, of Nicholas Drew, of her mother, of Jakob’s grandmother, of Sam and of others, but Nathaniel is alone in both quality and quantity, and in the plain wooden frame she’d trapped the best of them in. They hang boldly out on display, lest she should forget.
She hadn’t allowed the statue-makers access to her work, and none of their valiant attempts ever truly matched John Mandrake’s likeness; but the boy sat cross-legged before her is every inch Nathaniel. Save for his eyes; a bottomless, pitiless blue, a pure azure never found in nature. Bartimaeus regards her impassively through them, and though he aims nothing but a cool, direct calmness in her direction, he is not as proficient at hiding his emotions as he once was. Or perhaps he no longer cares to. Regardless, Kitty is left breathless by what she sees there, the endless, unquenched, unceasing tumult of grief and rage, unbounded and undiminished in its harshness in spite of the years gone by. She supposes she saw him two long millennia after Ptolemy; and not even a single century has yet passed. She tries to mask the soft ache inside her breast, of pity and of sympathy. She knows he would not thank her for it.
“I had not thought to be summoned again.” The voice is odd, neither unfamiliar nor unchanged. It sounds hollow to her ears; somehow it feels defeated.
“You’re on the list of the dead. Officially. But I – ” She bites her lip, draws in another sluggish, unsteady breath; she’s aware of how thin her voice is, how uncertain. Part of her cannot believe she even made the summons. “ – had to know,” she completes, in something of a rush. To this, he inclines his head, but stays silent. Kitty cannot help but notice how undefined the boy’s face is, in contrast to the detail of Ptolemy’s she’d once admired; she supposes he hasn’t had time to perfect the guise. But worse, infinitely worse, he never had the chance to study him so closely, to memorise each feature with gentle affection. Kitty’s sketches always include a soft smattering of freckles across his nose, but she no longer remembers whether this is truth or fantasy. She decides against mentioning it. “It’s good to see you again,” she says instead.
He slides her a look, unreadable. “I do not see many of my masters old.” He turns his gaze to the window instead; it offers him a bare, uninformative view of the capital’s rooftops. “Has it been long?”
Long enough, Kitty thinks; long enough for all but the eldest survivors of the magicians’ regime to have passed, for her friends’ faces to long since dwindle into shadows, hazy, cloudy thoughts clustering at the back of her mind, lost to her save for her sketchbook and what few photographs she could find. Not long enough for him, though, she understands with a slow, aching breath. For him it must feel like heartbeats. “Fifty years or so.” She hesitates. It is possible he will not want to know; but equally she wants to reassure him that their friend did not die in vain. “We have a Parliament now. A democracy. No Empire, no America – but freedom.”
She’s treated to a second remorseless stare, as awful for its remoteness as any vestigial rage. “It will not last,” he says in even tones, measured and ostensibly uncaring. For a moment, Kitty is returned to their first meeting, so many years ago; as it is then, so it is now, Bartimaeus had decreed. The rise and fall of Empires. The endless cycle of greed. Kitty had once thought she’d broken the back of it, but already the new generation is living without the fear of the old; already their eyes turn back to magic, to the easy power it provides. The last decade of Kitty’s life had seen her fight against this, wearily and futilely, until her ill health had left her alone with her studies and her unheeded warnings. “You wish to know what happened,” Bartimaeus says, and the words jolt her from her rêverie and regret.
“He Dismissed you,” Kitty guesses. A brief wrench of fresh grief flickers fleetingly across Bartimaeus’ face; she knows without further confirmation that her thinking is correct.
“He loved me, and I doubted him,” Bartimaeus says quietly, staring at the ground. “I did not recognise it until the end.”
Unbidden, Kitty’s eyes grow hot, and she blinks hard, pushes the tears back; she hasn’t the strength to lift her arm and wipe them away. Before her, Bartimaeus is folded in on himself in quiet sorrow, and Kitty suddenly feels grubby, ugly in her voyeurism, staring openly at Bartimaeus’ achingly private grief. She wants to apologise for her summons, for dragging him here on nothing but a whim, but knows it will be meaningless – and is reminded instantly, painfully of the conversation she’d had with Nathaniel years ago, one she’d all but forgotten. “I’m sorry,” she makes herself say, in memory of this if nothing else.
Bartimaeus’ face is quite blank when he lifts it towards hers, but he nods once nonetheless. “You are forgiven, Kitty Jones.” He appraises her in silence for a while, then adds, “I am glad we spoke again.”
The sun has sunk fully under the edge of even the lowest rooftops; Kitty knows she hasn’t much longer before she loses the strength to Dismiss him altogether, and she would not have him watch her die, too. As if knowing her mind, Bartimaeus climbs to his feet, watching her with tired eyes and letting his arms fall loosely at his sides. A thought seems suddenly to occur to him; a swift change flickers through his face, the smallest hint of a grin. “He said to say hello,” Bartimaeus says, and for a moment Kitty is thrown, startled; then they share a quiet smile, brief and fleeting, and for a moment Bartimaeus’ face is free from grief, warm and open once again.
With this departure, Bartimaeus’ name will no longer be known on Earth; Nathaniel’s other gift to him, an eternity of freedom, a little broken and besmirched by Kitty’s summons, but now restored and whole once again. “Be well,” Kitty says quietly, and Bartimaeus bows his head. She speaks the words of Dismissal, and, with a final flutter of the curtain, he is gone.
Kitty herself does not move. Presently, the quiet girl she employs for such purposes enters the room, and, ignorant of the pentacles laboriously drawn in the centre, walks directly across them to take her mistress’ chair and wheel her to the bedroom. By morning, Kitty Jones, the last surviving member of the Resistance, the commoner who fought a golem and crossed through Ptolemy’s Gate, is dead; but she went with a smile upon her face, her silver pendant clutched tightly in her hand.