The Golem's Eye

taking up the rear. Nathaniel made no move to follow them. Very well, he thought, I shall distance myself from you, too. I'll carry out investigations on my own.
    A junior magician was sitting on a pew in the nave, consulting her notebook. Nathaniel squared his shoulders and approached with as much of a swagger as he could muster. "Hello, Fennel," he said, gruffly. "Bad business, this."
    The woman looked startled. "Oh, Mr. Mandrake. I didn't know you were still on the case. Yes, a bad business."
    He nodded back toward the tomb. "Found out anything about them?"
    She shrugged. "For what it's worth. Papers on the old man identify him as one Terence Pennyfeather. Owned an artists' supply shop in Southwark. The others are much younger. They may have worked with him in the shop. Don't yet know their names. I was just going down to Southwark to consult his records."
    Nathaniel glanced at his watch. Two hours till the summoning. He had time. "I'll come with you. One thing, though..." He hesitated, his heart beating a little faster. "Back in the crypt... Was there a girl among them—slim, with dark, straight hair?"
    Fennel frowned. "Not the bodies I saw."
    "Right. Right. Well then, shall we go?"
     
    Burly Night Police were stationed outside Pennyfeather's Art Supplies, and magicians from several departments were busily combing the interior. Nathaniel and Fennel showed their passes and entered. They ignored the hunt for stolen artifacts going on about them, and instead began sifting through a pile of battered account books found behind the counter. Within minutes, Fennel had uncovered a list of names.
    "It's a list of payments to employees," she said. "A couple of months back. They might all be Resistance. None of them are here today."
    "Let's have a look." Nathaniel scanned it quickly. Anne Stephens, Kathleen Jones, Nicholas Drew... These names meant nothing to him. Wait—Stanley Hake and Frederick Weaver. Fred and Stanley, clear as day. He was on the right track, but there was no sign of a Kitty here. He flipped the page to the next month's payments. Same again. He handed the ledger back to Fennel, tapping his fingers on the glass counter.
    "Here's another, sir."
    "Don't bother. I've already seen—hold on."
    Nathaniel almost snatched the paper from Fennel's hands, peered at it closely, blinked, peered again. There it was, the same list, but with a single difference: Anne Stephens, Kitty Jones, Nicholas Drew... No doubt about it: Kitty Jones, Kathleen Jones, one and the same.
    During his many months of hunting, Nathaniel had scoured official records for evidence of Kitty, and found nothing. Now it was clear he had been looking for the wrong name all this time.
    "Are you all right, Mr. Mandrake?" Fennel was staring at him anxiously.
    Everything snapped back into focus. "Yes, yes, I'm fine. It's just..." He smiled at her, adjusted a cuff. "I think I may have had a good idea."

33
     
    Bartimaeus
     
    It was the biggest joint summoning that I'd been involved in since the great days of Prague. Forty djinn materializing more or less at once, in a vast chamber built for that purpose in the bowels of Whitehall. As with all such things, it was a messy business, despite the best efforts of the magicians. They were all lined up in tidy rows of identical pentacles, wearing the same dark suits and speaking their incantations quietly, while the officiating clerks scribbled their names down at tables to the sides. We djinn, of course, were less concerned with regimental decorum: we arrived in forty very different guises, trumpeting our individuality with horns, tails, iridescent flanges, spikes, and tentacles; with colors ranging from obsidian-black to delicate dandelion-yellow; with a menagerie full of hollerings and chitter; with a magnificent range of sulfurous guffs and stenches. Out of sheer boredom, I had reverted to one of my old favorites, a winged serpent with silver feathers arching from behind my head. [1]  To my right was a kind of bird thing on stilt legs, to my left an eerie miasma of blue-green smoke. Beyond him was a slavering griffin, and beyond him—more disconcerting than menacing, this one—was a stumpy and immobile footstool. We all faced our masters, waiting for our charges.
     
    [1] That used to bring the house down in the Yucatán, where you'd see the priests tumbling down the pyramid steps or diving into alligator-infested lakes to escape my mesmerizing sway. Didn't have quite the same effect on the boy