Ptolemy's Gate

hunch, she tried Egyptian. She consulted several general demon listings, all bound in cracked black leather, yellowed pages covered in tight, faint columns of script. Half an hour passed; she found nothing. A brief consultation with the library index led her to a remote alcove beside a window. A window seat with purple cushions waited invitingly. She hauled down several specialist Egyptian almanacs and began to search.
    Almost immediately, in a portly dictionary, she found something.

Rekhyt: Engl. transl.: lapwing. This bird symbolized slavery to the Egyptians; occurs commonly in tomb art and in hieroglyphs on magicians' papyri. Demons with this byname recur in the Old, New, and Late Periods.

Demons plural . . . That was frustrating. But she'd pinned the epoch down, for sure. Bartimaeus had been employed in Egypt; for some of that time, at least, he had been known as Rekhyt. . . In her mind's eye Kitty saw the djinni as she remembered him: dark, slight, wearing a simple wraparound kilt. From what she knew of the appearance of the Egyptians, Kitty felt she might be onto something.
    For another hour she sat there, flipping contentedly through the dusty pages. Some books were useless, written in foreign tongues, or in phrases so abstruse that the sentences seemed to coil up on themselves before her eyes. The rest were dense and forbidding. They gave her lists of pharaohs, of civil servants, of the warrior-priests of Ra; they provided tables of known summonings, of surviving records, of obscure demons sent on mundane tasks. It was a daunting search, and more than once, Kitty's head nodded. She was startled back into life by police sirens in the distance, by shouts and chanting from a nearby street, once by an elderly magician blowing his nose loudly as he shuffled down the passage.
    The autumn sun was lowering level with the library window; its rays warmed the seat with a golden light. She glanced at her watch. Four-fifteen! Not long before the library closed, and she hadn't even found Mr. Button's books. In three hours she must be at work too. It was an important night and George Fox of the Frog Inn was a stickler for punctuality. Wearily she pulled another volume across the window seat and flipped it open. Just another five minutes, then—
    Kitty blinked. There it was. A list, eight pages long, of selected demons, tabulated alphabetically. Now then. . . Kitty scanned down it with practiced speed. Paimose, Pairi, Penrenutet, Ramose. . . Aha—Rekhyt. Three of them.

Rekhyt (I): Afrit. Slave of Sneferu (4th Dynasty) and others; of legendarily vicious temperament. Killed at Khartoum.

Rekhyt (II): Djinni. By-name of Quishog. Guardian of the Necropolis of Thebes (18th Dynasty). Morbid tendencies.

Rekhyt (III): Djinni. Also named Nectanebo or Necho.Energetic, but unreliable. Slave of Ptolemaeus of Alexandria (fl. 120s B.C.).

It was the third one, it had to be. . . The entry was shortness itself, but Kitty felt a surge of excitement in her veins. A new master, a new possibility. Ptolemaeus . . . the name was quite familiar. She was sure she'd heard Mr. Button mention it; sure even that he owned books with it in the title. . . Ptolemaeus. She racked her brains—well, it would be easy enough to track down the reference, when she got back.
    With fevered haste, Kitty noted down her findings in her jotter, snapped the elastic band around it, and shoved it into her tattered satchel. She gathered the books into an untidy pile, hoisted them into her arms, and returned them to the shelves. As she did so, the distant buzzer sounded in the foyer. The library was closing! And she'd still not got her master's books!
    Time to move. But it was with a definite sense of triumph that Kitty sprinted down the corridor. Better look out, Bartimaeus, she thought as she ran. Better look out. . . I'm closing in on you.

8

    The afternoon's Council meeting was even less satisfactory than John Mandrake had feared. It took place in the Hall of Statues at Westminster, a rectangular room built of pink-gray stone, with soaring medieval vaulting high above, and thickly layered Persian rugs covering the flagstones. In a dozen niches along the walls stood life-size statues of the great magicians of the past. There at the end, austere and forbidding, was Gladstone; opposite him, flamboyant in a frock coat, his deadly rival Disraeli. All the succeeding Prime Ministers were featured, together with other notables. Not every alcove yet contained a statue,