The thing with humans is they never really change, do they? Not really. Oh, sure. Here and there one of them might bump into a good intention like finding a sharp sofa corner with a shin while trying to navigate a dark room, but give it two hundred years and that bruised leg is a dusty old bone and everyone who even overheard the cursing is long dead. And what remains? Ambition, greed, powerlust, a frankly single minded selfishness that can only be attributed to a base survival instinct honed by sabertooth tigers and then left to grow bored and fat. In short: the usual.
Which begs the question: What's even the point to any of it? When you've only got a measely eighty years in you, you'd think the least a person could do would be to scrounge up some basic decency. Honestly, if you ask him humanity would be vastly improved by either doubling their average life span or chopping it straight in half. Now there's a way to teach them to appreciate the simple things in life like not poking one another in the eyes with sharp sticks for millennia.
But that's just the trouble, isn't it? No one's ever asking for his opinion.
In retrospect, he'd made just one mistake in London. If he'd really been thinking, he'd have gone all in on the last heroic stand thing with a final request: 'Do me a favor, won't you? Make sure someone crosses my name out of all those dusty old books in that horrible little excuse of a library.'
Would it have stopped any of this? Definitely not. But he thinks now he could have found it satisfying on the smallest personal level. He just hadn't been thinking far enough ahead at the time, and can you blame him? --Oh and see, there it is again. No one thinks of the future when they're getting ready to bite it. The worst part about being enslaved to humans for centuries is the part where their bad habits start to wear off on you. Disgusting.
Oh well; if he had died, it would've been a real shame not to be remembered for it.
At least that's what he tells himself when untold centuries after the fact, a hundred grasping hands finally reach into the Other Place, sink their razor sharp nails into his essence, and rip him from the swirling lack of shape and time and identity with the snarling sound of Bartimaeus.
He materializes as a floating ember. The flames from the room's forest of candles are plucked effortlessly from their wicks and drift as if hypnotized to the pentacle's middle where they join it to become a rapidly elongating shape. The lit form twists, elegant as a dancer under a desert's cold night sky. Smoke from the extinguished candles wind through the darkened room to the circle's center, beckoned by the growing flame into a drifting pattern of latticework as intricate and beautiful as the finest lace lace. There the combination of smoke and fire beget heady smells of spice and perfume. In its beguiling shape there flickers first the suggestion of flexing wings, then the feathers too spiral and corkcrew to form an endless loop until the unheated flame in the pentacle becomes a perfect spinning disk.
It's all very sophisticated. But it's been a while and he might as well make an impression on whatever moon-eyed idiot finally thought to summon such a great spirit.
At last, an eye opens at the disk's center. It is black and endless and beautiful. It looks with infinite, ancient and unknowable wisdom upon the magician standing protected inside the second circle.
"You?!" Bartimaeus spits.
𓅁 𓅁 𓅁
Two days later, he is a common cuckoo1 on a rooftop very distant to the room in which he was summoned. He sits perched in the steel gray morning and watches a third floor window with two dark eyes. There's a parallel here and he finds he doesn't appreciate it at all. In fact, he'd spent all of yesterday wheeling around after his target trying in vain to think of a way to avoid this very moment as she'd made her way through various markets and bazaars and into leaning old shops on cramped old roads where thousands of years ago the dye baths there had stained the very earth purple and red and still the scent of chalk and lye lived in the stones.
1. Horrible, duplicitous, and traitorous birds not fit to eat from even the smelliest garbage heap. The lowest of the absolute low and rather indicative of his present mood.
But like it or not he has a schedule to keep, so at last the bird grudgingly tips off the roof tile's edge, gives its wings an unenthusiastic flap, and comes to land with a graceless thump on the window ledge. It looks into a simple but pleasant rented room where an aging woman with graying hair and surprisingly youthful eyes is just getting ready to leave for the day. He tries not to study her for too long through the glass and instead begins to peck with miserable insistence first at the window frame, then on the pane itself: tap, tap, tap.
Edited (edits this 600 times for bus typos) 2018-09-18 01:07 (UTC)
There are certain things that had changed in her after the Other Place. Rosemary makes her sneeze, now, and walking through a pine-grove makes her skin itch. Silver leaves her with a rash. All of those things are quite irritating. Less irritating is the odd little glimmer that she can catch sometimes from the corner of her eye, hovering about a cat or a songbird or a child sitting on the side of the street. She sees the little glimmer now, a moment before she hears the tapping. And she knows the bird is no real bird.
Genius, Kitty. As if it weren't enough that it's a bloody bird knocking on your window like it wants to sell you a bit of insurance. Yeah. Obviously it's not a real bird.
Still, it's a rather unexpected thing. Spirits haven't had much to do with her since she'd left London. Every once in a while, there'll be one hopping along a power-line, or slinking along in the shadows, squinting as it tries to make sense of her and her aura and her otherworldliness. But they don't come and talk to her, even though she'd smiled at them, trying to indicate that they're welcome.
So it makes her a bit nervous, that knocking, because it can spell something very bad. She knows that well. But here in Berlin, miles away from London, she can't imagine anyone much wants to kill her, and if they do then it's not as though she'll stop it by keeping the window closed and locked.
So. She steps over to it, and pulls the window open with a raised eyebrow.
"Come in, then," she says, stepping back to allow the spirit passage inside. "I'd offer you a bit of tea, but - well."
It's not a long flight to Berlin, really. Not for a djinni of his considerable power, ability, wit, charm and frequently good looks2. But he may have really taken his time with it so he could think out exactly how he meant to handle this exact moment. The order had been to find and go directly to her; it hadn't said anything about the velocity with which he had to do it. Still, for all that dilly dallying en route and the entire previous afternoon he'd kept conveniently just meters shy of reaching her, he's disappointed to find that he hasn't actually come up with anything.
He settles for stepping inside.
If the small bird had really been trying to make an entrance, it would have flown through the newly open window, raced twice around the old painted light fixture in the middle of the ceiling and finally alighted to one of the bed posts with a single spectacular backwing and the softest click of tiny talons on antique oak. This one hops ungainly to the interior ledge and no farther, its proportionally long wings slightly akimbo.
Finally, it says: "Berlin? At this time of year? Couldn't you picked somewhere a little less miserable?"
2. Present shape and disposition not withstanding.
She would recognize that voice anywhere. Even issuing from a very bedraggled-looking and droopy bird with several feathers sticking the wrong way out of its head in a very unappealing sort of way. Even a thousand miles away from where she'd last seen him. Even when she'd thought he was dead, lost with Nathaniel in the wreckage -
"You - " Under normal circumstances - if this were Jakob, or some other friend she'd not seen in a long time - she'd hurl her arms around him. But he's dreadfully small; hugging is out of the question - and so instead all she can do is hover over him and make vague motions at him. Finally, she settles on pushing those ruffled feathers back into place, adjusting his look so that he appears a bit less raggedy, hoping that'll do.
"I didn't think I'd - oh!" Quite flustered, she cries, "You couldn't have gotten word to me? Somehow? That you were all right?"
Despite very strong inclinations otherwise, he fights down the effort to adjust those feathers back to their irregular angles. It's the absolute smallest courtesy he would ever be caught affording anyone at all, much less the human he's been charged to see to, but what is he if not considerate? What's the purpose of any of it if you can't even repay some basic respect in kind? He isn't an animal, however much he might look like one right this instant.
She has a point about the message though.
Come to think of it, he could have done just that. He'd winged sportily around half a dozen nose picking imps and foliots in their various weak-willed guises in the last day alone and could have pinned any one of them to the spine of a rooftop of his choice with clear instructions to fly ahead of him and whisper something in her ear. The fact that he's only now just realizing this is slightly embarrassing, but it's not really his fault. He's never exactly had a reason to go out of his way to warn someone that he's coming to find them. Usually that would defeat the purpose-- well, not entirely. But it would make his task considerably more difficult, and who has the time?
"Maybe that's what I'm doing right now. What, I can't drop in for a visit and a morning chat? And here I thought we understood each other."
"You could," she agrees levelly, "save for the fact that if you're here, that means that someone has summoned you. Spirits don't exactly just drop in." And why hadn't she? Kitty is quite thoroughly annoyed at Bartimaeus, but for a flash, she's annoyed at herself, too. Why hadn't she reached out? The thought had crossed her mind, now and again, that perhaps they had escaped. She had an easy way to confirm it, hadn't she? Draw the pentacles, speak his name. But -
Someone has summoned you. A little leap of painful hope in her chest. Maybe there was a magician who would have given Bartimaeus the freedom to go where he would. Oh, to be sure, he was a typical magician in many ways, binding Bartimaeus so cruelly, but he'd been different there at the end. Maybe not changed, past tense, but changing. An image flashes through her head, of a boy knocked unconscious by the blast but no worse than that, recuperating in an anonymous hospital bed somewhere - slipping away into the night, staying incognito, unwilling to assume power again, not summoning a spirit until now, to finally finally send word -
She swallows painfully, and squares her shoulders. Enough of that. That's a romantic fancy, better confined to the theater stage than believed as a truth. And so she manages to make her voice level when she asks this next question, betraying only the bare minimum of hope.
It's all very well and good to let oneself fall prey to optimism from time to time. Even he, slave though he his to the whims of whatever short sighted master had shackled him here, finds himself subject to the occassional flight of fancy (metaphorically speaking, though literally whenever he can wiggle it in) on a nice spring day. There's this nice thing humans know very little about called hope, which is the only thing that ever really gets a spirit working day in and day out in the world through the day. Hope your would-be master can't spell; hope you don't get indigestion after swallowing them whole; failing all that, at least hope to be done with your charge early so you can get in a game of cards before anyone notices and assigns you another task.
He's something of a connoisseur. So of course he has no trouble at all recognizing the faintest glimmer of it about Kitty. It's something in the eyes when it comes to humans, he thinks - a good sensible iron practicality actively being betrayed by a softened heart. He'd seen it in the faces of starving farmers after being ordered to carve irrigation systems into the land and before a king's man had come by to collect their new tax on their grain; he'd seen it once briefly in the eyes of a magician in a Moroccan tower as he'd joked about not immediately shredding through his protective wards like paper; and he'd felt it once in a boy who--
As is inevitable3, he stamps it out.
"Not who either of us would have preferred, I can tell you that much. But come," he says. The bird begins to preen a crooked feather. "Why don't we avoid troubling ourselves over any of that for the moment. You're looking well. I wouldn't have said it before, but now that we're both quite comfortable I should tell you the gray quite suits you."
3. Not that he's become a cynic. Ask him again in another thousand years and he might be a little less sour grapes about the whole thing.
So that's that, then. The little flare of hope is snuffed quickly as it came. What's a bit funny is that she's in precisely the same state she was before - previously, she assumed Nathaniel was dead, and now she assumes Nathaniel is dead. No change. Not really. And yet for some odd reason, there's something quite a bit colder about hearing the confirmation of his death, as opposed to simply assuming that it had happened. Odd, isn't it? No change in state, and yet something more leaden to it.
Well, she'll adjust to the certainty soon enough, she's sure of that. She adjusted to the uncertainty, didn't she? Soon she'll accept that her friend is dead, for certain and true, and that's that. And she'll learn to go about her day once more.
Maybe.
Because if Nathaniel didn't send Bartimaeus, then someone else did. And - And. And if Bartimaeus had come here of his own volition, and if this were a happy occasion, he'd have appeared before her in some truly spectacular guise. He'd have come before her as a fiery-winged angel, singing some loud obnoxious song about the spectacular cunning and strength that had allowed him to survive. Or maybe he'd have come as Ptolemy, so that she could have fallen upon him at once, overcome with joy at the sight of him. He'd have made some grand egotistical show of it, no doubt. Not come crawling to her as a raggedy cuckoo-bird.
So she closes her mouth on her tart comment about how she's not about to be distracted, especially not by that transparent a deflection. Instead, she lets out a breath. Presses her lips together. And holds out a hand to him to hop up into, so that she can carry him over to the table.
"I tried dyeing it once or twice," she says. "But I decided that I actually rather like it like this. Gray. It's nothing to be ashamed of, after all." Then - "You really don't eat, right? I can fetch you some biscuits. Or - bread-crumbs."
The cuckoo humors her, waddling to her lowered hand. It makes a mindful effort not to pinch or scratch the thin skin with its miniscule claws as it hops onto her forefinger. "With this figure? Don't be absurd."
To emphasize the point, he further smooths a few ragged feathers. By the time she reaches the table, he's done enough work between the bird's beak and a subtle shifting of his essence that he's looking practically chipper as he flits from her hand with a thoughtless flick of long wings. See? Everything is perfectly fine. In fact if he has his latitudes right, they have nearly five whole minutes before it gets really dire.
Might as well make the most of it.
"No, you'll just have to satisfy me by telling me what you're doing in Berlin. Most people are perfectly happy with upending one empire, you know. Besides that, Germany? Swinging just a little below your weight class, aren't you?"
"I'm exploring." On a certain level, Kitty's not actually certain how much Bartimaeus knows of her, outside of who she is in a crisis. In the Other Place, there'd been an intermingling of memories, a fluidity that left her with some sense of knowing him. She wonders if he's got the same for her. She wonders if he knows of her love of sweets, of her love of travel and reading. Because honestly - this is the first time they've actually talked, isn't it, when there's not death on the line. Every conversation they'd had until now, there was something far greater at stake; her life, Nathaniel's life, the rebellion, the fate of all London. She wishes, a little achingly, that it could stay like that. She wishes she could just talk with him like Ptolemy once had, to learn of him and who he is. She wishes it weren't going to fall apart.
"After Nouda and all them, I left London. Went to Brugges and stayed with Jakob for a while while I was getting up my strength. - Have you ever been there? It's utterly beautiful. But completely boring; I'm so glad I didn't follow Jakob there to begin with, when he first departed for the continent." For many reasons, as it turns out. "So after that, I went to Paris, and then to Prague, and now I'm here. It's not my favorite city, but it's not bad, either. I've picked up a few words of German."
She reaches out when he's not looking at her, and traces a finger over his head. A neighbor of hers had kept a parakeet that had liked to be stroked like this. Maybe he will, too.
"Is this your first time back on Earth? Since all that? You're looking - " Ragged and bedraggled. "Quite recovered."
"Exploring? And you went with Paris and Prague?" He scoffs under her finger, but doesn't so much as ruffle a feather4. "You didn't get very far, did you? Could't have gone straight to, I don't know, Siroktabe or Mituo? Now those are two places really worth your time. Hardly any people there at all."
It might have taken him even longer to find her then. His master would have snatched him back at the end of the time he'd been allotted for his task and for the first time in all of history both known and unknown, he, Bartimaeus of Uruk, could have been very happy indeed to report being a complete failure. There'd be consequences, sure. But he's confident he could have said or done something to get out of anything truly terrible if only by the skin of his pointed skin.
Hopping across the table, clacking over her comb and the occassional bobby pin, he makes his way to a small stack of books. He flips open the topmost one - a dog-eared copy of 1001 Useful Phrases for Everywhere - with a four-toed foot.
"The next time you plan a trip, be sensible and ask the advice of someone with expertise5. But yes," --he scans the table of contents; top ten spoken languages and it still surprises him that English is anywhere on it-- "as it just so happens, this is indeed my first time back. And much sooner than I would have liked, if I'm being honest."
The bird shoots her an apologetic look. It comes with surprising ease, given he's so unpracticed with them. "No offense."
4. It's not so bad really - a little stroke here and there from the right hand. Ptolemy had once scratched him under the chin while he'd been in the guise of a cat, but that had been early days and he'd objected at such length that it had never happened again. Live for a few thousand years and learn.
5. This is an awkward turn of phrase, knowing what he knows. But just go with it. They're trying to have a nice time here.
She'd have to know quite a lot less than she knows to take offense at that. The earthly world takes less out of him than the Other Place did her, but it's still not like it's pleasant for him, is it. It hurts him to be here. Even if she likes him - and that's a surprising thing, isn't it, realizing that she really likes him - she doesn't necessarily want him here. She doesn't want him suffering. And whether he's here for her or here for a different reason, she doesn't want him to be a slave again.
"I wish there were some way to keep you safe, Bartimaeus." She lifts her hand to her chin and props her head up in it. Her gaze on him is melancholy. "I wish that there were some way to keep you away from them. Honestly - " She shakes her head. "I spent a bit of time reading, seeing if I could track down some information about what the Other Place is. How it is that magic works, how we can reach across it and grab spirits like you. 'Cause what I'd like to do, more than anything else, is kill magic altogether. But I've not found any books yet that might help."
Ninety-eight times out of a hundred, a human wanting to do something impossible is annoying at best and deadly at worst. All things considered, Kitty Jones has a shockingly strong track record when it comes to managing to be neither.
"I'm not surprised," he says as he flicks through the phrasebook. "Outside of the obvious exceptions, I don't think anyone much cares for how this world connects to the Other Place. Just that it does and that they can stick their warty hands through. No magician in their debtably right mind would dare to question it, much less wonder how to burn the bridge. Which isn't possible, by the way. I should know, having built a few in my day."
Still, it's lovely little thing to dream up isn't it? The fact that she'd thought of it at all has the aggravating dual effect of making him feel both pleasantly warm and like he's been plunged into six feet of cold, clinging mud. Can't she tell he's trying to avoid feeling any more guilty than he already does? It's downright inconsiderate to keep clanging on about anything that might possibly further endear a more softhearted fool than him.
"You know this book doesn't have any swear words in it. Would you like me to teach you the best ones? We can shout them at people as we go."
"You haven't the best track record on differentiating the possible from the impossible, you know." Her voice is soft and level. Once, she might have fumed at his certainty, but there's a deep well of calm in her that's hard to stir into anything more than ripples; anger and frustration do come slower to her now than they did before. It's like she's able to take a much longer view. Honestly, nowadays, she hardly even ever mutters under her breath in irritation when someone doesn't have correct change for the bus. (Well, she doesn't mutter curse words, at least.)
Maybe that's why she doesn't feel jarred or upset by...all of this. Oh, it's rubbish, no question of that, but there's not much point in a lot of screaming and shouting and fighting, is there. Yet, at the same time - at the same time, she doesn't want to prompt him by asking what he means when he says as we go. She wants to stay here just a bit longer.
"Perhaps it will be in time," she says, and once again strokes his head with a gentle finger. "London's better, now, than it used to be. Lots of places are better than they used to be. Maybe it'll happen. You have got to keep up hope, you know."
There she goes again, saying things with only the barest possible context. It's not that she's wrong --Well no, she is completely about this particular thing. But he can see some truth to the meaning of the thing she's talking about. Sometimes for all that their lives are brief and flickering, the things humans (especially in the company of certain djinni) do with their time and their ambition and their funny little dreams end up mattering to someone else down the line. Spirits such as himself are usually the only ones with the right perspective to see any of it of course - sometimes very close up indeed -, but sure. Why not. Things happen. The past reaches into the present in all kinds of unexpected ways.
It's just the thing is - and this is the part that gets him every time -, none of that is going to change today for either of them. Which is a pretty raw deal if you ask him.
He looks at her from where he stands in the open phrasebook, dark eyes thoughtful. The bird's small claws have left inconsequential scratches on the pages though he thinks she'll forgive him for that too.
"You're becoming very evasive in your old age, Kitty Jones. Do you want to learn a few naughty words from an expert or not?"
She lets out a small breath. She could keep delaying, she supposes. Kick her feet over in your old age - not least because she suspects that Bartimaeus actually wouldn't know whether she really was old or not, given his odd ideas on human anatomy. Interrogate him about...what he's been doing, what happened with Nathaniel, how he escaped, and she does want to know all those things. She really does. But longer she takes, she expects, the worse it'll be for him.
So she smiles at him. Her brows are knit together just a bit - she can't help but be a little anxious, honestly she can't - but she does smile at him.
"Yeah, all right," she says. "Teach me one or two. Not bad ones, mind. I certainly don't need a mouth quite as foul as yours."
But he likes that she refuses him. It feels very right for her to do it, not just because she must know part of why he's here and every dark thing that must entail, but because she has always been a very particular kind of girl all largely regardless of anyone else's input. And because despite all that determination, she retains some compassion, curiosity, and - most puzzling of all - real kindness. All rare enough traits in even the most optimistic spirit, much less in lower creatures like garden snakes, house spiders and humans.
Not that he really expected her to have changed much in the short time he'd last seen her, but it's always nice to be right.
So he teaches her a few mid-grade curses just rude enough to make a grossmutter frown. He spends far more time appalled at her perfectly average pronunciation, insisting she speak a sampling of her vocabulary so he can correct her through each with painstaking attention. It's only when at last they've finally argued over the finer points of her 'entschuldigen's and 'ich will's that the bird stretches its legs and spreads its wings like a cat rising from an afternoon nap.
Time's up.
"Now," he says. At some point during the discussion, the filament strands of his essence had shifted. The cuckoo now wears dark gleaming feathers, its eyes large and dark, its beak hooked predatively, its talons clacking on the table as it rises. "Is that what you're wearing? Find a jacket, won't you. And something warm for your head if your ears are the type to get cold."
She'd been able to forget about it all, just for a few moments. It had helped that Bartimaeus had obviously been deliberately difficult, because at several points he'd clearly just been saying the same thing twice and pretending it was two different sounds - those dots over the o and the u are there for decoration, she's quite certain, and no matter how many times he kept hooting away they still sounded exactly the same. For a few moments, the disagreements had been delightful; she'd felt a bit like her old self again, the bull-headed energy rising up in her.
But it does have to end, of course. Is it silly that what she feels, most of all, is disappointment? Oh, anxiety is there, make no mistake. And anger. But mostly she's disappointed. She could have reached out to him in all those months - could have been sitting with him like this, squabbling over nothing, learning from him. Perhaps her summoning would even have saved him; perhaps it would have ensured that his new master's pentacle would have stayed cold and empty. It could have been so much better, if only...If only she'd been willing to try.
"What I'm wearing is fine." She wants to laugh for a moment over him clucking like a hen - you're the wrong sort of bird entirely for that sort of brooding, Bartimaeus. But instead she just smooths down her trousers, adjusts her tunic - she knows they quite flatter her figure, which has led one or two young men to shoot the spry and trim old lady looks of confusion as she walked down the street - and smiles at him. "Come on, then. Before your master gets anxious and starts wanting to take it out on you."
"My master," he spits the word, as is traditional. "Could stand to be a little anxious. There are some people out there who would really benefit from doubting themselves more often."
Present company excluded, of course.
--Which is a funny thing, actually. Five minutes shouldn't make any difference at all - and they certainly haven't changed the circumstances of his visit or what comes after -, but it's planted a strange itch between his wings that feels rather like... Well, he can't say what just yet, but he's certain it will come to him in the next few hours. Even that slim possibility of something is more than he'd been nurturing out on that wet rooftop a moment ago.
"But since you insist, at least one of us is doing this in style." With a flap of its wings, the bird comes away from the tabletop. In another instant it is no longer a bird at all.
He changes in the blink of an eye, landing with heavy lion paws on protesting floorboards. The sphinx with its red-gold fur and purple-black feathers nearly fill the small room, the crest of its burnished battle helmet - the likes of which has not seen since the Battle of Qadesh - scoring a deep groove in the ceiling's plaster. Its face behind the helm is that of a dark and beautiful woman with eyes like burning embers, her throat collared by fire tipped down.
If they have to do this, they might as well leave an impression before she goes.
All very impressive, she's quite sure, except that as usual, his sense of drama is completely impractical. "Bartimaeus," she huffs in frustration, "I paid a deposit, and now - ugh - " A chunk of plaster drops from the ceiling. "And my landlady was very sweet, you know. We are not destroying her wall on the way out."
She does, obligingly, climb onto the back of the sphinx. Which is actually quite comfortable, when you get down to it. The last time she and Bartimaeus had traveled together, he'd been dangling her over the London rooftops, and she'd been furiously stabbing at his scaly feet in an attempt to cause any sort of damage. In contrast, now, her perch is quite nice: the spinx's back is narrow enough that it doesn't strain her thighs, and its fur is thick and luxurious enough that she can dig her hands in and enjoy the plushness. Really quite lovely.
"You," she dictates, "are going to lower your head and take the stairs and then use the front door like a rational perso- spirit. Understood?"
"Excuse me?" Here at last he begins to sound like his old dignified self again. "Take the stairs?!"
He surruptiotiously stops flexing the toes of one forepaw from where he'd just been about to flick a Detonation at the unsuspecting wall. Had she taken even a split second longer about being so particular, she could have kissed that fading wallpaper goodbye.
"I'm trying to do you a favor, Kitty. And your sweet landlord, come to think of it. This room could use some more natural light. Do you know I nearly missed seeing that window entirely when I was trying to figure out how to get inside? I can barely even see you now. I've been squinting in the dark this whole time we've been talking. It's dreadful. It really is."
This he complains without remit as he sulkily maneuvers himself around in the tight confines of the room, making loathed changes to his shape and dimension as he goes. By the time he's facing the door inside of the perfectly good window he can fit through it without so much as cracking the door frame. Lower his head? Use the front door? Just who does she think she is? He is perfectly within his rights to refuse her entirely, thank you very much.
He takes the stairs, though makes a point of staying as large as the stairwell allows without scraping her off on any light fixtures or low hanging doorways like gum from a shoe. Which for the record, is actually more technically skilled than blowing out any old crumbling wall and flouncing off into the sky. It requires a constant subtle manipulation of his essence to both maintain the sphinx's appearance and gravitas all while elongating and contracting certain key elements of his form to fill every available cobwebby corner. Any old djinni can bust through a few inches of plaster and stone. It takes one of real ability to look imposing in a little old foyer.
"Thank you, Bartimaeus," Kitty says primly once they're outside, and gives the djinni a scratch between the shoulder blades. Which, yes, her earlier stroking of his head made it clear enough that he didn't have a birdlike reaction to her touch, so there's no reason to think he'll have a catlike reaction to a bit of rubbing, but it just feels like the right thing to do. "And Mrs Koehler thanks you, too, even if she doesn't know it."
She wraps her arms around him, then, bracing for liftoff. "Now," she says, "you can make as much of a scene as you'd like. I'm with you."
She wraps her arms around him. He can feel the warmth of her through his feathers and fur, the pinch of her knees at his sides, and the dispersing tingle between his shoulder blades where she'd scratched the sphinx approvingly. For just a moment, he lingers there on Mrs Koehler's doorstep in one of city's many quiet side streets as a chill breath of air twists up the road to ruffle the great wine dark primary feathers of his wings and through the pale gossamer of Kitty's hair.
Well. No time like the present.
"You're going to regret not bringing that jacket," he tells Kitty tartly even as he spins a barrier about her against the wind.
Then, with a coil of its muscular haunches and a powerful beat of outstretched wings, the sphinx leaps into the air. The force batters the shutters of the nearest houses. It shakes window glass in panes. Licked with streaming embers, they climb level to the gray rooftops where they startle an assortment of pigeons and blackbirds from their roosts. The lion body moves with great undulations as it climbs higher and higher above the old neighborhood and then the district, but his head is steady and the thick fur and feathers at his neck makes for a reasonably good handhold until they catch an updraft and can coast in a dazzling glitter of red fire and black feathers against a steel sky over the heart of Berlin. With only the briefest of detours to buzz dramatically through the Brandenburg Gate, he turns at last toward their destination - not West to London, but South for somewhere else entirely.
𓅁 𓅁 𓅁
But they won't get there all in one go. Powerful as he is, being the picture of efficiency and grace at all times, Kitty's heavier than she looks. Having altered his shape since leaving Berlin, gradually reducing in bulk and majesty, by the time they spiral down alongside a broad country lane at the outskirts of a positively saccharine Bavarian town he might as well be a giant falcon made of folded origami paper for all his weariness. His good will has similarly dwindled. When the dark shape he'd very sensibly assumed to be a low stone wall where he might delicately come to rest instead materializes out of the night as an unexpected hedgerow, he curses loudly and at length6 before landing with an unsophisticated crunch of greenery and poking twigs.
"Who ruins a perfectly good roadside with an ugly old hedge?! Off, off! We're done with this free ride nonsense. You're on foot from here on out."
6. Now there's some real swearing for you, and in five different languages to boot.
He comes to a halt. But she still has some momentum. Kitty gives a very reasonable cry of surprise as she tumbles off him (a noise which uncharitable people might describe as a "squeak," but which is really just a perfectly normal and normally-pitched noise of protest, thanks) and into the hedgerow. Now she regrets not bringing that jacket indeed, as the scratchy twigs and leaves jab at her poor arms and legs.
"Ow," she says, firmly and calmly registering her displeasure. She thrashes about a moment, then manages to dig herself out of the hedge with a minimum of bloodshed - and then she gives Bartimaeus a look. Oh, he managed to get out of the hedge just fine, didn't he.
"Warn me next time, won't you. Honestly - " She purses her lips, brushing more foliage off herself. "It's like you've never given someone a ride before." Then, straightening her tunic and squaring her shoulders, she squints around them. This...seems a long way from anything of note. "Are we...almost there, then? Is this - erm - France, or...?"
Oh sure, he'd made it out of the hedgerow without much in the way of nicks and scratches, but that doesn't account for all places he's worn tragically thin elsewhere. Have you ever seen a huge bird waddling along the ground? Well he's living it and it's not exactly dignified, now is it?
"Not even slightly. What on earth did they teach you in school? Aren't you meant to be something of a globe trotter these days? France. As if they've a monopoly on stupid shrubs. Pah!" He's lumbered awkwardly up to the road proper and pauses there, looking critically down onto the town with its horrible cheery street lights and it's sickeningly cute red tiled roofs. "No, we're just into Austria with a day yet to go, but I'm done carrying you. Has anyone ever told you how pointy your knees are7?"
He'd have no trouble at all after a little rest of course, but only the stupidest of foliots solves every problem by throwing themselves at it. And seeing as she's not actively running in the opposite direction the moment they'd set down, why put himself out when they have the luxury of being smart about it? It might not be the more stylish way of getting where they're going, but as long as no one's looking then there's no harm in loosening the belt just a little.
"There's a train track running through here. If I'm right" --as per usual-- "It should get us where we're going. Or close enough to count."
Even better: a train might tell her most of what he couldn't.
7. They're really not that bad, but you try carrying someone around on your shoulders for twelve hours and see how you like it. You'd have some insults ready too.
"A train?" In spite of her irritation over that jab at her knees (oh, she could show him exactly how pointy her knees are if she wanted), and in spite of her continued apprehension, she can't help but smile at that. Bartimaeus. On a train. She imagines Ptolemy's form, resolute and stern-faced, perched cross-legged atop a locomotive and trying ever so hard to look impressive and imposing, and the image is perfect in every way. Or perhaps even better, him as a little old German granny, hunched over her playing cards, staying incognito.
"Honestly, all of this seems like such a production. Couldn't you just materialize me where you want to go? Not that I'm complaining, mind, this truly is lovely countryside - " And it's not like she's in a rush to reach their destination - "but surely there's an easier way to go about this."
Still, she obediently bends over and holds out her hand. "I can carry you a while, if you'd like. I think we ought to stop off in this town and get something to eat. I'm utterly famished."
He scoffs or laughs with a certain superior, but no doubt infinitely kind and knowing air. It might be easy to forget that for all that Kitty knows a thing or two about-- well, about a thing or two, that she doesn't have a clue when it comes to numbers three through forty thousand if it weren't for her habit of bringing it up every thirty seconds or so. If he were a less understanding sort and she was a little more irritating, he might find himself telling all sorts of stories purely because no one in the room would know enough to catch him at it.
But he's tired and boundless though his creativity is, it might be best to keep a lid on it before he talks his way out of that free ride she's offering. Besides, she can't exactly help being so painfully oblivious.
He settles for airy, but painstakingly educational: "As a matter of fact, I can't. I might be above most of the rules that you have to deal with, but I can't just jump around willy nilly without being summoned. And you--! Well you're even more exhausting to take with me that way than this one. And you have enough complicated parts that it might be perfectly understandable to lose a few on the way even for the likes of me."
Somewhere in there, the falcon has disappeared. In its place - and clambering wearily into her open palm now - is a field mouse with twitching whiskers and small velveteen ears.
It's always funny to see Bartimaeus in forms like that. She sometimes wonders what it means when he goes drab and little. Most of the time, he's so ridiculously focused on looking powerful and impressive, picking his guises to strike awe into the hearts of onlookers. Like that absurd sphinx - honestly, he probably could have made it another hundred miles if he hadn't been so focused on ensuring that the helmet was perfectly gleaming and gorgeous. It must have taken quite a lot of mental energy. If she were in a situation like that, she'd absolutely give no thought whatsoever to her appearance, as she's quite above common vanity of that sort, thanks.
She tugs her tunic back into place and adjusts her hair as she straightens up. Her resilience is, no doubt, less than pleasant for him, so she slips him instead into her breast pocket. Close enough that they can chat, but sheltered from her skin and from the world around them.
"Well, then," she says, "I do quite appreciate you taking the slow route. Not least because the view was quite lovely." She uses a single finger to stroke him gently where he's nestled.
She's a little weary from the journey, but in decent enough condition that she can stride towards the village at reasonable speed. "Now, I'll need you to be my translator, if you don't mind. Doubt any of these people speak English. And do it subtly, if you please, I'd sooner not have any of these poor folks getting nervous about demons and all that. How do I ask for - oh - I suppose something with apples in it would be nice. One of those turnover-type things?"
He's being low profile, thank you very much. It's a shape perfectly calculated for subtlety, for whispering things secretly at her, for - as is just so happens - fitting neatly into pockets where he can nest with his long tail tucked close about him like a cat's. If anyone spots him in this guise, they can mistake Kitty for a batty woman and nothing more.
Which of course he thinks no part of whatsoever, seeing as she's been so prudent as to keep her thoughts to herself. But had Kitty mentioned anything about his chosen form or if he were the sort to uselessly rationalize at length to himself, that might be the sort of thing he'd come up with. Instead, the mouse flicks it ears, wets a paw and smooths its fur back where the tip of her finger - he really should correct that behavior - has mussed it.
"You might as well ask for it in German. --Hey now, here's your chance to really get in some practice on those finer points we discussed earlier," he says, then tells her slowly and with typically flawless pronunciation how to go about it all the while cleaning his whiskers and squirming to get comfortable in the corner of her pocket.
Now that's more like it. The strange squint-and-miss-it texture of her aura isn't quite as offensive like this as it had been after hours of her behind his wings.
"Slow down when you say it," Kitty says, a little exasperated. "That was way too fast. And also, did you use one of those swear words in there? You know I can pick them out now that you've taught them to me."
The town really is a sweet little place. There were parts of the countryside that she'd seen when she traveled that were still scorched with remnants of magic from the Great War those hundred years before. There were parts of London like that, too - areas that felt unsettled and poisoned, wastelands of destruction where no one dared to live. She supposed that that's what the remnants of the Crystal Palace would become, too, in time...But this town clearly had been untouched by the hand of war, hadn't seen violence or destruction or anything of the sort. It's just nice and ordinary.
She does hope it stays like that. Things do have a tendency to get destroyed when Bartimaeus is around, after all.
There's an inn with windows bright and golden with the light inside. Kitty pushes in and is rewarded with warmth and bustling activity, the noise of two dozen people enjoying a pint and chattering away to each other. She gets a few curious looks, but no suspicion or hostility; she suspects she's not the only outsider to come here, not with the train line so close. In fact - yeah, there's a table with a knot of three people with travel-rumpled clothes, hunching over a map and looking awfully confused...She'll be fine here.
"There's a fire in the corner," she says to him softly. "Would it help your essence to be near it?" She knows Bartimaeus is made up of fire and air, more than anything else - but, admittedly, she doesn't exactly know what that means for him in terms of...things that make his time on Earth more comfortable or anything like that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
for kitty.
Which begs the question: What's even the point to any of it? When you've only got a measely eighty years in you, you'd think the least a person could do would be to scrounge up some basic decency. Honestly, if you ask him humanity would be vastly improved by either doubling their average life span or chopping it straight in half. Now there's a way to teach them to appreciate the simple things in life like not poking one another in the eyes with sharp sticks for millennia.
But that's just the trouble, isn't it? No one's ever asking for his opinion.
In retrospect, he'd made just one mistake in London. If he'd really been thinking, he'd have gone all in on the last heroic stand thing with a final request: 'Do me a favor, won't you? Make sure someone crosses my name out of all those dusty old books in that horrible little excuse of a library.'
Would it have stopped any of this? Definitely not. But he thinks now he could have found it satisfying on the smallest personal level. He just hadn't been thinking far enough ahead at the time, and can you blame him? --Oh and see, there it is again. No one thinks of the future when they're getting ready to bite it. The worst part about being enslaved to humans for centuries is the part where their bad habits start to wear off on you. Disgusting.
Oh well; if he had died, it would've been a real shame not to be remembered for it.
At least that's what he tells himself when untold centuries after the fact, a hundred grasping hands finally reach into the Other Place, sink their razor sharp nails into his essence, and rip him from the swirling lack of shape and time and identity with the snarling sound of Bartimaeus.
He materializes as a floating ember. The flames from the room's forest of candles are plucked effortlessly from their wicks and drift as if hypnotized to the pentacle's middle where they join it to become a rapidly elongating shape. The lit form twists, elegant as a dancer under a desert's cold night sky. Smoke from the extinguished candles wind through the darkened room to the circle's center, beckoned by the growing flame into a drifting pattern of latticework as intricate and beautiful as the finest lace lace. There the combination of smoke and fire beget heady smells of spice and perfume. In its beguiling shape there flickers first the suggestion of flexing wings, then the feathers too spiral and corkcrew to form an endless loop until the unheated flame in the pentacle becomes a perfect spinning disk.
It's all very sophisticated. But it's been a while and he might as well make an impression on whatever moon-eyed idiot finally thought to summon such a great spirit.
At last, an eye opens at the disk's center. It is black and endless and beautiful. It looks with infinite, ancient and unknowable wisdom upon the magician standing protected inside the second circle.
"You?!" Bartimaeus spits.
Two days later, he is a common cuckoo1 on a rooftop very distant to the room in which he was summoned. He sits perched in the steel gray morning and watches a third floor window with two dark eyes. There's a parallel here and he finds he doesn't appreciate it at all. In fact, he'd spent all of yesterday wheeling around after his target trying in vain to think of a way to avoid this very moment as she'd made her way through various markets and bazaars and into leaning old shops on cramped old roads where thousands of years ago the dye baths there had stained the very earth purple and red and still the scent of chalk and lye lived in the stones.
But like it or not he has a schedule to keep, so at last the bird grudgingly tips off the roof tile's edge, gives its wings an unenthusiastic flap, and comes to land with a graceless thump on the window ledge. It looks into a simple but pleasant rented room where an aging woman with graying hair and surprisingly youthful eyes is just getting ready to leave for the day. He tries not to study her for too long through the glass and instead begins to peck with miserable insistence first at the window frame, then on the pane itself: tap, tap, tap.
no subject
Genius, Kitty. As if it weren't enough that it's a bloody bird knocking on your window like it wants to sell you a bit of insurance. Yeah. Obviously it's not a real bird.
Still, it's a rather unexpected thing. Spirits haven't had much to do with her since she'd left London. Every once in a while, there'll be one hopping along a power-line, or slinking along in the shadows, squinting as it tries to make sense of her and her aura and her otherworldliness. But they don't come and talk to her, even though she'd smiled at them, trying to indicate that they're welcome.
So it makes her a bit nervous, that knocking, because it can spell something very bad. She knows that well. But here in Berlin, miles away from London, she can't imagine anyone much wants to kill her, and if they do then it's not as though she'll stop it by keeping the window closed and locked.
So. She steps over to it, and pulls the window open with a raised eyebrow.
"Come in, then," she says, stepping back to allow the spirit passage inside. "I'd offer you a bit of tea, but - well."
no subject
He settles for stepping inside.
If the small bird had really been trying to make an entrance, it would have flown through the newly open window, raced twice around the old painted light fixture in the middle of the ceiling and finally alighted to one of the bed posts with a single spectacular backwing and the softest click of tiny talons on antique oak. This one hops ungainly to the interior ledge and no farther, its proportionally long wings slightly akimbo.
Finally, it says: "Berlin? At this time of year? Couldn't you picked somewhere a little less miserable?"
no subject
"Bartimaeus - "
She would recognize that voice anywhere. Even issuing from a very bedraggled-looking and droopy bird with several feathers sticking the wrong way out of its head in a very unappealing sort of way. Even a thousand miles away from where she'd last seen him. Even when she'd thought he was dead, lost with Nathaniel in the wreckage -
"You - " Under normal circumstances - if this were Jakob, or some other friend she'd not seen in a long time - she'd hurl her arms around him. But he's dreadfully small; hugging is out of the question - and so instead all she can do is hover over him and make vague motions at him. Finally, she settles on pushing those ruffled feathers back into place, adjusting his look so that he appears a bit less raggedy, hoping that'll do.
"I didn't think I'd - oh!" Quite flustered, she cries, "You couldn't have gotten word to me? Somehow? That you were all right?"
no subject
She has a point about the message though.
Come to think of it, he could have done just that. He'd winged sportily around half a dozen nose picking imps and foliots in their various weak-willed guises in the last day alone and could have pinned any one of them to the spine of a rooftop of his choice with clear instructions to fly ahead of him and whisper something in her ear. The fact that he's only now just realizing this is slightly embarrassing, but it's not really his fault. He's never exactly had a reason to go out of his way to warn someone that he's coming to find them. Usually that would defeat the purpose-- well, not entirely. But it would make his task considerably more difficult, and who has the time?
"Maybe that's what I'm doing right now. What, I can't drop in for a visit and a morning chat? And here I thought we understood each other."
no subject
Someone has summoned you. A little leap of painful hope in her chest. Maybe there was a magician who would have given Bartimaeus the freedom to go where he would. Oh, to be sure, he was a typical magician in many ways, binding Bartimaeus so cruelly, but he'd been different there at the end. Maybe not changed, past tense, but changing. An image flashes through her head, of a boy knocked unconscious by the blast but no worse than that, recuperating in an anonymous hospital bed somewhere - slipping away into the night, staying incognito, unwilling to assume power again, not summoning a spirit until now, to finally finally send word -
She swallows painfully, and squares her shoulders. Enough of that. That's a romantic fancy, better confined to the theater stage than believed as a truth. And so she manages to make her voice level when she asks this next question, betraying only the bare minimum of hope.
"Who is it that's summoned you?"
no subject
It's all very well and good to let oneself fall prey to optimism from time to time. Even he, slave though he his to the whims of whatever short sighted master had shackled him here, finds himself subject to the occassional flight of fancy (metaphorically speaking, though literally whenever he can wiggle it in) on a nice spring day. There's this nice thing humans know very little about called hope, which is the only thing that ever really gets a spirit working day in and day out in the world through the day. Hope your would-be master can't spell; hope you don't get indigestion after swallowing them whole; failing all that, at least hope to be done with your charge early so you can get in a game of cards before anyone notices and assigns you another task.
He's something of a connoisseur. So of course he has no trouble at all recognizing the faintest glimmer of it about Kitty. It's something in the eyes when it comes to humans, he thinks - a good sensible iron practicality actively being betrayed by a softened heart. He'd seen it in the faces of starving farmers after being ordered to carve irrigation systems into the land and before a king's man had come by to collect their new tax on their grain; he'd seen it once briefly in the eyes of a magician in a Moroccan tower as he'd joked about not immediately shredding through his protective wards like paper; and he'd felt it once in a boy who--
As is inevitable3, he stamps it out.
"Not who either of us would have preferred, I can tell you that much. But come," he says. The bird begins to preen a crooked feather. "Why don't we avoid troubling ourselves over any of that for the moment. You're looking well. I wouldn't have said it before, but now that we're both quite comfortable I should tell you the gray quite suits you."
no subject
Well, she'll adjust to the certainty soon enough, she's sure of that. She adjusted to the uncertainty, didn't she? Soon she'll accept that her friend is dead, for certain and true, and that's that. And she'll learn to go about her day once more.
Maybe.
Because if Nathaniel didn't send Bartimaeus, then someone else did. And - And. And if Bartimaeus had come here of his own volition, and if this were a happy occasion, he'd have appeared before her in some truly spectacular guise. He'd have come before her as a fiery-winged angel, singing some loud obnoxious song about the spectacular cunning and strength that had allowed him to survive. Or maybe he'd have come as Ptolemy, so that she could have fallen upon him at once, overcome with joy at the sight of him. He'd have made some grand egotistical show of it, no doubt. Not come crawling to her as a raggedy cuckoo-bird.
So she closes her mouth on her tart comment about how she's not about to be distracted, especially not by that transparent a deflection. Instead, she lets out a breath. Presses her lips together. And holds out a hand to him to hop up into, so that she can carry him over to the table.
"I tried dyeing it once or twice," she says. "But I decided that I actually rather like it like this. Gray. It's nothing to be ashamed of, after all." Then - "You really don't eat, right? I can fetch you some biscuits. Or - bread-crumbs."
no subject
To emphasize the point, he further smooths a few ragged feathers. By the time she reaches the table, he's done enough work between the bird's beak and a subtle shifting of his essence that he's looking practically chipper as he flits from her hand with a thoughtless flick of long wings. See? Everything is perfectly fine. In fact if he has his latitudes right, they have nearly five whole minutes before it gets really dire.
Might as well make the most of it.
"No, you'll just have to satisfy me by telling me what you're doing in Berlin. Most people are perfectly happy with upending one empire, you know. Besides that, Germany? Swinging just a little below your weight class, aren't you?"
no subject
"After Nouda and all them, I left London. Went to Brugges and stayed with Jakob for a while while I was getting up my strength. - Have you ever been there? It's utterly beautiful. But completely boring; I'm so glad I didn't follow Jakob there to begin with, when he first departed for the continent." For many reasons, as it turns out. "So after that, I went to Paris, and then to Prague, and now I'm here. It's not my favorite city, but it's not bad, either. I've picked up a few words of German."
She reaches out when he's not looking at her, and traces a finger over his head. A neighbor of hers had kept a parakeet that had liked to be stroked like this. Maybe he will, too.
"Is this your first time back on Earth? Since all that? You're looking - " Ragged and bedraggled. "Quite recovered."
no subject
It might have taken him even longer to find her then. His master would have snatched him back at the end of the time he'd been allotted for his task and for the first time in all of history both known and unknown, he, Bartimaeus of Uruk, could have been very happy indeed to report being a complete failure. There'd be consequences, sure. But he's confident he could have said or done something to get out of anything truly terrible if only by the skin of his pointed skin.
Hopping across the table, clacking over her comb and the occassional bobby pin, he makes his way to a small stack of books. He flips open the topmost one - a dog-eared copy of 1001 Useful Phrases for Everywhere - with a four-toed foot.
"The next time you plan a trip, be sensible and ask the advice of someone with expertise5. But yes," --he scans the table of contents; top ten spoken languages and it still surprises him that English is anywhere on it-- "as it just so happens, this is indeed my first time back. And much sooner than I would have liked, if I'm being honest."
The bird shoots her an apologetic look. It comes with surprising ease, given he's so unpracticed with them. "No offense."
no subject
"I wish there were some way to keep you safe, Bartimaeus." She lifts her hand to her chin and props her head up in it. Her gaze on him is melancholy. "I wish that there were some way to keep you away from them. Honestly - " She shakes her head. "I spent a bit of time reading, seeing if I could track down some information about what the Other Place is. How it is that magic works, how we can reach across it and grab spirits like you. 'Cause what I'd like to do, more than anything else, is kill magic altogether. But I've not found any books yet that might help."
no subject
"I'm not surprised," he says as he flicks through the phrasebook. "Outside of the obvious exceptions, I don't think anyone much cares for how this world connects to the Other Place. Just that it does and that they can stick their warty hands through. No magician in their debtably right mind would dare to question it, much less wonder how to burn the bridge. Which isn't possible, by the way. I should know, having built a few in my day."
Still, it's lovely little thing to dream up isn't it? The fact that she'd thought of it at all has the aggravating dual effect of making him feel both pleasantly warm and like he's been plunged into six feet of cold, clinging mud. Can't she tell he's trying to avoid feeling any more guilty than he already does? It's downright inconsiderate to keep clanging on about anything that might possibly further endear a more softhearted fool than him.
"You know this book doesn't have any swear words in it. Would you like me to teach you the best ones? We can shout them at people as we go."
no subject
Maybe that's why she doesn't feel jarred or upset by...all of this. Oh, it's rubbish, no question of that, but there's not much point in a lot of screaming and shouting and fighting, is there. Yet, at the same time - at the same time, she doesn't want to prompt him by asking what he means when he says as we go. She wants to stay here just a bit longer.
"Perhaps it will be in time," she says, and once again strokes his head with a gentle finger. "London's better, now, than it used to be. Lots of places are better than they used to be. Maybe it'll happen. You have got to keep up hope, you know."
no subject
It's just the thing is - and this is the part that gets him every time -, none of that is going to change today for either of them. Which is a pretty raw deal if you ask him.
He looks at her from where he stands in the open phrasebook, dark eyes thoughtful. The bird's small claws have left inconsequential scratches on the pages though he thinks she'll forgive him for that too.
"You're becoming very evasive in your old age, Kitty Jones. Do you want to learn a few naughty words from an expert or not?"
no subject
So she smiles at him. Her brows are knit together just a bit - she can't help but be a little anxious, honestly she can't - but she does smile at him.
"Yeah, all right," she says. "Teach me one or two. Not bad ones, mind. I certainly don't need a mouth quite as foul as yours."
no subject
But he likes that she refuses him. It feels very right for her to do it, not just because she must know part of why he's here and every dark thing that must entail, but because she has always been a very particular kind of girl all largely regardless of anyone else's input. And because despite all that determination, she retains some compassion, curiosity, and - most puzzling of all - real kindness. All rare enough traits in even the most optimistic spirit, much less in lower creatures like garden snakes, house spiders and humans.
Not that he really expected her to have changed much in the short time he'd last seen her, but it's always nice to be right.
So he teaches her a few mid-grade curses just rude enough to make a grossmutter frown. He spends far more time appalled at her perfectly average pronunciation, insisting she speak a sampling of her vocabulary so he can correct her through each with painstaking attention. It's only when at last they've finally argued over the finer points of her 'entschuldigen's and 'ich will's that the bird stretches its legs and spreads its wings like a cat rising from an afternoon nap.
Time's up.
"Now," he says. At some point during the discussion, the filament strands of his essence had shifted. The cuckoo now wears dark gleaming feathers, its eyes large and dark, its beak hooked predatively, its talons clacking on the table as it rises. "Is that what you're wearing? Find a jacket, won't you. And something warm for your head if your ears are the type to get cold."
no subject
But it does have to end, of course. Is it silly that what she feels, most of all, is disappointment? Oh, anxiety is there, make no mistake. And anger. But mostly she's disappointed. She could have reached out to him in all those months - could have been sitting with him like this, squabbling over nothing, learning from him. Perhaps her summoning would even have saved him; perhaps it would have ensured that his new master's pentacle would have stayed cold and empty. It could have been so much better, if only...If only she'd been willing to try.
"What I'm wearing is fine." She wants to laugh for a moment over him clucking like a hen - you're the wrong sort of bird entirely for that sort of brooding, Bartimaeus. But instead she just smooths down her trousers, adjusts her tunic - she knows they quite flatter her figure, which has led one or two young men to shoot the spry and trim old lady looks of confusion as she walked down the street - and smiles at him. "Come on, then. Before your master gets anxious and starts wanting to take it out on you."
no subject
Present company excluded, of course.
--Which is a funny thing, actually. Five minutes shouldn't make any difference at all - and they certainly haven't changed the circumstances of his visit or what comes after -, but it's planted a strange itch between his wings that feels rather like... Well, he can't say what just yet, but he's certain it will come to him in the next few hours. Even that slim possibility of something is more than he'd been nurturing out on that wet rooftop a moment ago.
"But since you insist, at least one of us is doing this in style." With a flap of its wings, the bird comes away from the tabletop. In another instant it is no longer a bird at all.
He changes in the blink of an eye, landing with heavy lion paws on protesting floorboards. The sphinx with its red-gold fur and purple-black feathers nearly fill the small room, the crest of its burnished battle helmet - the likes of which has not seen since the Battle of Qadesh - scoring a deep groove in the ceiling's plaster. Its face behind the helm is that of a dark and beautiful woman with eyes like burning embers, her throat collared by fire tipped down.
If they have to do this, they might as well leave an impression before she goes.
"Well don't just stand there," he says. "Hop on."
no subject
She does, obligingly, climb onto the back of the sphinx. Which is actually quite comfortable, when you get down to it. The last time she and Bartimaeus had traveled together, he'd been dangling her over the London rooftops, and she'd been furiously stabbing at his scaly feet in an attempt to cause any sort of damage. In contrast, now, her perch is quite nice: the spinx's back is narrow enough that it doesn't strain her thighs, and its fur is thick and luxurious enough that she can dig her hands in and enjoy the plushness. Really quite lovely.
"You," she dictates, "are going to lower your head and take the stairs and then use the front door like a rational perso- spirit. Understood?"
no subject
He surruptiotiously stops flexing the toes of one forepaw from where he'd just been about to flick a Detonation at the unsuspecting wall. Had she taken even a split second longer about being so particular, she could have kissed that fading wallpaper goodbye.
"I'm trying to do you a favor, Kitty. And your sweet landlord, come to think of it. This room could use some more natural light. Do you know I nearly missed seeing that window entirely when I was trying to figure out how to get inside? I can barely even see you now. I've been squinting in the dark this whole time we've been talking. It's dreadful. It really is."
This he complains without remit as he sulkily maneuvers himself around in the tight confines of the room, making loathed changes to his shape and dimension as he goes. By the time he's facing the door inside of the perfectly good window he can fit through it without so much as cracking the door frame. Lower his head? Use the front door? Just who does she think she is? He is perfectly within his rights to refuse her entirely, thank you very much.
He takes the stairs, though makes a point of staying as large as the stairwell allows without scraping her off on any light fixtures or low hanging doorways like gum from a shoe. Which for the record, is actually more technically skilled than blowing out any old crumbling wall and flouncing off into the sky. It requires a constant subtle manipulation of his essence to both maintain the sphinx's appearance and gravitas all while elongating and contracting certain key elements of his form to fill every available cobwebby corner. Any old djinni can bust through a few inches of plaster and stone. It takes one of real ability to look imposing in a little old foyer.
no subject
She wraps her arms around him, then, bracing for liftoff. "Now," she says, "you can make as much of a scene as you'd like. I'm with you."
no subject
Well. No time like the present.
"You're going to regret not bringing that jacket," he tells Kitty tartly even as he spins a barrier about her against the wind.
Then, with a coil of its muscular haunches and a powerful beat of outstretched wings, the sphinx leaps into the air. The force batters the shutters of the nearest houses. It shakes window glass in panes. Licked with streaming embers, they climb level to the gray rooftops where they startle an assortment of pigeons and blackbirds from their roosts. The lion body moves with great undulations as it climbs higher and higher above the old neighborhood and then the district, but his head is steady and the thick fur and feathers at his neck makes for a reasonably good handhold until they catch an updraft and can coast in a dazzling glitter of red fire and black feathers against a steel sky over the heart of Berlin. With only the briefest of detours to buzz dramatically through the Brandenburg Gate, he turns at last toward their destination - not West to London, but South for somewhere else entirely.
But they won't get there all in one go. Powerful as he is, being the picture of efficiency and grace at all times, Kitty's heavier than she looks. Having altered his shape since leaving Berlin, gradually reducing in bulk and majesty, by the time they spiral down alongside a broad country lane at the outskirts of a positively saccharine Bavarian town he might as well be a giant falcon made of folded origami paper for all his weariness. His good will has similarly dwindled. When the dark shape he'd very sensibly assumed to be a low stone wall where he might delicately come to rest instead materializes out of the night as an unexpected hedgerow, he curses loudly and at length6 before landing with an unsophisticated crunch of greenery and poking twigs.
"Who ruins a perfectly good roadside with an ugly old hedge?! Off, off! We're done with this free ride nonsense. You're on foot from here on out."
no subject
"Ow," she says, firmly and calmly registering her displeasure. She thrashes about a moment, then manages to dig herself out of the hedge with a minimum of bloodshed - and then she gives Bartimaeus a look. Oh, he managed to get out of the hedge just fine, didn't he.
"Warn me next time, won't you. Honestly - " She purses her lips, brushing more foliage off herself. "It's like you've never given someone a ride before." Then, straightening her tunic and squaring her shoulders, she squints around them. This...seems a long way from anything of note. "Are we...almost there, then? Is this - erm - France, or...?"
no subject
"Not even slightly. What on earth did they teach you in school? Aren't you meant to be something of a globe trotter these days? France. As if they've a monopoly on stupid shrubs. Pah!" He's lumbered awkwardly up to the road proper and pauses there, looking critically down onto the town with its horrible cheery street lights and it's sickeningly cute red tiled roofs. "No, we're just into Austria with a day yet to go, but I'm done carrying you. Has anyone ever told you how pointy your knees are7?"
He'd have no trouble at all after a little rest of course, but only the stupidest of foliots solves every problem by throwing themselves at it. And seeing as she's not actively running in the opposite direction the moment they'd set down, why put himself out when they have the luxury of being smart about it? It might not be the more stylish way of getting where they're going, but as long as no one's looking then there's no harm in loosening the belt just a little.
"There's a train track running through here. If I'm right" --as per usual-- "It should get us where we're going. Or close enough to count."
Even better: a train might tell her most of what he couldn't.
no subject
"Honestly, all of this seems like such a production. Couldn't you just materialize me where you want to go? Not that I'm complaining, mind, this truly is lovely countryside - " And it's not like she's in a rush to reach their destination - "but surely there's an easier way to go about this."
Still, she obediently bends over and holds out her hand. "I can carry you a while, if you'd like. I think we ought to stop off in this town and get something to eat. I'm utterly famished."
no subject
But he's tired and boundless though his creativity is, it might be best to keep a lid on it before he talks his way out of that free ride she's offering. Besides, she can't exactly help being so painfully oblivious.
He settles for airy, but painstakingly educational: "As a matter of fact, I can't. I might be above most of the rules that you have to deal with, but I can't just jump around willy nilly without being summoned. And you--! Well you're even more exhausting to take with me that way than this one. And you have enough complicated parts that it might be perfectly understandable to lose a few on the way even for the likes of me."
Somewhere in there, the falcon has disappeared. In its place - and clambering wearily into her open palm now - is a field mouse with twitching whiskers and small velveteen ears.
no subject
She tugs her tunic back into place and adjusts her hair as she straightens up. Her resilience is, no doubt, less than pleasant for him, so she slips him instead into her breast pocket. Close enough that they can chat, but sheltered from her skin and from the world around them.
"Well, then," she says, "I do quite appreciate you taking the slow route. Not least because the view was quite lovely." She uses a single finger to stroke him gently where he's nestled.
She's a little weary from the journey, but in decent enough condition that she can stride towards the village at reasonable speed. "Now, I'll need you to be my translator, if you don't mind. Doubt any of these people speak English. And do it subtly, if you please, I'd sooner not have any of these poor folks getting nervous about demons and all that. How do I ask for - oh - I suppose something with apples in it would be nice. One of those turnover-type things?"
no subject
Which of course he thinks no part of whatsoever, seeing as she's been so prudent as to keep her thoughts to herself. But had Kitty mentioned anything about his chosen form or if he were the sort to uselessly rationalize at length to himself, that might be the sort of thing he'd come up with. Instead, the mouse flicks it ears, wets a paw and smooths its fur back where the tip of her finger - he really should correct that behavior - has mussed it.
"You might as well ask for it in German. --Hey now, here's your chance to really get in some practice on those finer points we discussed earlier," he says, then tells her slowly and with typically flawless pronunciation how to go about it all the while cleaning his whiskers and squirming to get comfortable in the corner of her pocket.
Now that's more like it. The strange squint-and-miss-it texture of her aura isn't quite as offensive like this as it had been after hours of her behind his wings.
no subject
The town really is a sweet little place. There were parts of the countryside that she'd seen when she traveled that were still scorched with remnants of magic from the Great War those hundred years before. There were parts of London like that, too - areas that felt unsettled and poisoned, wastelands of destruction where no one dared to live. She supposed that that's what the remnants of the Crystal Palace would become, too, in time...But this town clearly had been untouched by the hand of war, hadn't seen violence or destruction or anything of the sort. It's just nice and ordinary.
She does hope it stays like that. Things do have a tendency to get destroyed when Bartimaeus is around, after all.
There's an inn with windows bright and golden with the light inside. Kitty pushes in and is rewarded with warmth and bustling activity, the noise of two dozen people enjoying a pint and chattering away to each other. She gets a few curious looks, but no suspicion or hostility; she suspects she's not the only outsider to come here, not with the train line so close. In fact - yeah, there's a table with a knot of three people with travel-rumpled clothes, hunching over a map and looking awfully confused...She'll be fine here.
"There's a fire in the corner," she says to him softly. "Would it help your essence to be near it?" She knows Bartimaeus is made up of fire and air, more than anything else - but, admittedly, she doesn't exactly know what that means for him in terms of...things that make his time on Earth more comfortable or anything like that.