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There was a sky. Drifts and eddies of colourless maelstrom twisted and snarled in on each other as they tore apart, leaving behind splashes of blue and grey and rosy gold above him. Floating gave way to falling gave way to the sudden firmness of earth beneath as it froze itself into cracked grey cement and stubborn green weeds springing up amongst them. It cracked and trembled, glass showering down on him, never landing, wind whipping itself up into reality. It took too long for him to register sound for him to hear the screaming, cut off with one almighty crack of glass and shearing tear of metal, replaced with the settling of dust and grinding of metal and concrete grating together. Heaviness gave way to the realisation of touch— the hard soles of shoes, the weight of a thick woollen coat, hair lashing at his brow and cold wind scrapping at his exposed palms. Just his palms, where they were wet with blood, the sweat-slicked back of his neck.
He had been dying, he realised. Not just that dying was the last he remembered, but he had been dying for as long as he could remember, for days that turned into weeks and months over the centuries.
Because it had been. Centuries. Centuries, and the blood on his hands was not yet dry. His own blood.
Nathaniel tore up his gaze, and looked over the ruins of a city. Great cracked buildings, higher than the clock tower or the cathedral of London even in their disrepair, loomed about him, all grey and sheer with panes of cracked glass catching the light every which way as if all the world were wearing a crown.
He took a pace. Hesitated.
The courtyard where he stood was barren but for a broad plinth which must once have been metres higher but had shorn clean in half, the other half toppled behind it and stretching away towards the stone building behind. He took a couple of paces towards it, recognising the shape of a human at what had once been the top, and then drew to a halt as the copper plate bolted to the base caught his eye.
Here fell John Mandrake, an honour to his countrymen.
The bottom half of the pate was utterly illegible. Nathaniel felt his lip curl at the kind of trite, tired platitudes he had published on a dozen soldiers’ monuments. It probably served him right to suffer the same fate.
He felt a little warmer at the thought, even as he absorbed the chilling realisation of where he stood. Nathaniel had fallen here, as well. It has been some time, long enough for the plinth to chip and the plaque to green over with age, but so had everyone else.
It had been the world ending, the cacophony of noise and colour and the suddenness of physical reality. This had been his world. The walls, even impossibly high up, those strange glass monoliths, were splattered with blood. There was nobody left.
He felt chill seep in through his extremities. The wind that had long since settled was beginning to whip up again, howling not only around him but clean through him, cold and hard and screechingly irregular.
Screeching. They had each different voices, he realised with dawning horror, colour tangled in their essences as the—
His memory and his current state and the world around him clicked together into place. He had died not in this world. Not entirely, tethered elsewhere by the essence being cast out from his own body and the power of Nouda’s form crushed in amongst the silver with him.
He had not been a ghost, bound to the world where he had lived. If he was here, then the world around him had been struck by whatever place he had lain in, and if they were here, it had been hit by more besides.
That was what had ended it.
“Pull yourself together,” snapped a woman’s voice behind him.
4- Kitty and Ptolemy, they have been in the Other Place while he was caught between worlds.
Nathaniel whipped around, and the wind dropped to just the breeze against his face.
“Standing there crying at your own grave,” the old woman went on. She hobbled forwards, leaning on a wooden cane.
“The world ended,” he said dumbly. “Are you alive?”
“No, and I’m not crying over it. Nor’s he.” She jerked her head towards another figure, his back to them, examining the skyline. “And don’t you tell me the world’s ended, Nathaniel. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Looks like you got to take the fast route.”
He blinked. “Kitty?”
“You didn’t completely knock your brains out of your head then,” she snapped. She lifted her stick and brandished it at him, shaking him out of the way to get to the plinth. “Now, if you’ll let me at it…”
“Sorry,” he mumbled, stepping aside in the hesitance of shock.
She muttered under her breath as she pride at the plaque, something he couldn’t quite see in her hand, until it fell away. “There we are,” she said. “Much better.”
The inscription underneath called him Nathaniel .
“Much,” he said faintly. “Sorry, what ?”
“The world’s not ended,” she said. “Just your bit. All that you think matters.”
He glared at her.
“Be nice, Kitty.” It was the other figure, finally turning his attention to them.
Nathaniel blinked in slow, idiotic confusion. The face was familiar, bright eyes and flashing dimples and a scar under his chin, but without the wicked edge to its smile or the faint aura of otherworldly confinement.
Kitty scoffed. “Nice?” she demanded. “To him? He wouldn’t know it was me.”
“The world’s not ended,” the boy who was not Bartimaeus said, turning back to Nathaniel. “Not exactly. It’s been happening for months, you see. We could only go on criss crossing between worlds for so long without consequences. I did try to warn them.”
“We all did,” Kitty muttered mutinously. “Magicians .”
“That doesn’t tell me what happened,” Nathaniel said.
The boy blinked at him, dewily confused. “Doesn’t it?”
“Ptolemy,” Kitty chided, gently. Nathaniel restrained himself from laughing at the tone— almost grandmotherly, utterly alien to the Kitty Jones he had dealt with.
“The densest places— the ones which have had the most magicians— they’ll be wrecked, I suppose,” said this Ptolemy in an absent tone, still staring over the expanse of ruined London. “Too much all in one place, like overmended fabric. It just tore. But its still here. The spirits will be pulling together, just as we did. We had a little more practise at being person shaped, you see.”
“Do you think there’s people left alive?” Nathaniel asked.
Kitty glared at him. “We’re people!”
“Probably. Not all that close together.” It was quite clear he wasn’t paying any attention to them at all, staring once again at the buildings.
Nathaniel glanced at Kitty, hesitant.
She ignored him. “Ptolemy, you get yourself on. Do you know if we need feeding?”
“Probably. We have all the mechanics.”
“Then let’s find you something to eat. It can’t have changed that much since my time, but I don’t fancy your chances with a tin of beans.” She hustled over to him, drawing Nathaniel in her wake to drag Ptolemy out of the smooth, polished square.
5- They don’t know if they will move on.
Nathaniel’s hands kept going through the bottles. He glared at the neatly lined shelves of coloured juices and tonics, trying to force himself into tangibility. Tried a different bottle, in the hope that orange juice might be more friendly to ghosts than apple.
His fingers slipped through it. In a horribly ocld sensation, the solid flesh of his palm bumped uselessly against the plastic.
He glared. Reached with both hands to scoop it up. Clasped his bottle of juice awkwardly between his wrists.
It slipped through and hit the floor with a thud, bursting open and splashing juice all over the aisle.
The boy appeared, silent of step, near the packaged sandwiches. “What is that?” he asked, apparently unbothered that the object of his curiosity had become a puddle.
“Orange juice.” Nathaniel picked up another with solid-once-more grip. The boy— Ptolemy — was staring over the array of drinks with pensieve absence. “People have it with their breakfast.”
“It’s just sitting around juiced?” Ptolemy was holding up the bottle to examine its ingredients list. “Fascinating.”
Nathaniel did not agree. “Did Kitty send you?”
“To see what that noise was…”
“And now that you know?”
No response. Nathaniel sighed. “Enjoy.”
He walked away, and as soon as he turned the corner of the aisle, the bottle slipped out of an intangible grasp and smashed against the ground.
—-
“No, stir the bottom , not just the top, it’ll burn!” Kitty pulled away from showing Ptolemy which parts of the leeks to chop off to harp on Nathaniel’s technique.
“It’s a liquid, when you stir it it all stirs,” he insisted.
She growled at him. “Magicians. Useless. Just make sure you can feel the bottom once in a while.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t you get lippy with me young man,” she snapped back with gleeful vinegar.
“I’m older than you,” he said, despite knowing where it would lead.
Kitty tutted. “Ptolemy’s the oldest, shall we put him in charge?”
Ptolemy turned back from his solemn inspection of the leek’s course flesh, returning the thin stump and roots to their jug of water. “Is the water as permeated with spirits as the air, do you imagine?”
Neither of them responded. He was prone to answering himself anyway, especially when he was speaking Greek.
“I stand corrected, clearly you are exactly as much a crotchety old hag as you look,” Nathaniel said, ducking theatrically as Kitty’s cane swung a foot over his head.
“Sometimes I think Bartimaeus left a little wit behind when you dismissed him. Hell knows it’s not yours— no, just chop them, Ptolemy, I’ll fry them in with the garlic!” Kitty bustled off to the far side of the kitchen.
The little flat they had invaded was basement level, under one of the older houses which had been rather less crumpled by the onslaught of the Other Place. The kitchen as more a corner of the living room and the dining room than anything else, not like anything Nathaniel had seen in life, but Kitty seemed familiar enough and had soon rounded them into collaboration to keep the place habitable.
Despite his insistence that other humans were left alive, Ptolemy had refused to leave the ruins of London. He had explained his thought process for thinking the world outside of magician-dominated cities might still be working, although they’d picked up not so much as a radio signal to prove it— and Nathaniel was entirely in agreement with the reasoning. Despite this, too, Ptolemy would explain nothing.
Nathaniel poked at him with questions whenever he could, torn between awed and disbelieving at this apparition of scholarly history which shared a shower with him.
The shower which Nathaniel needed for cleaning off the blood which had not stopped seeping, while the others used daily as usual. They needed to sleep, too, whilst he spent his nights pacing the flat as he composed more questions for Ptolemy, or roaming the city in search of any change.
He and Kitty talked about it, when Ptolemy had collapsed into bed. About what he was waiting for. About what they would do next.
He might be the oldest, and it only stung a little to admit he was the brightest, but he was too young for some things. Unlike the two of them, he had been murdered. Even if he had been just as odd in life, as Kitty claimed, neither would begrudge him it.
Ptolemy was working on an understanding of what was going on around them, and Nathaniel was up to little more than acting as a sounding board and a spare pair of hands as they ransacked libraries. Kitty, unlike either of the two of them, had the least idea of how to run the house. Nathaniel kept watch, wakeful and frankly bored enough to spot even the most minute of changes.
The hurricane of violently neon colours that ransacked their street, was not the most minute of changes. He woke Kitty and Ptolemy both. Watched through a window that sat three feet below street level as the thing tore up the road, shifting and dancing, but not touching the buildings on either side. It was rather beautiful, in its own way, Nathaniel thought absently.
So, naturally, Ptolemy bolted out of the door without stopping to grab a coat looted from the dead man’s rack.
Nathaniel panicked for a moment, stopping to help Kitty before she shrieked at him to get moving, and by the time he stepped outside, boy and hurricane both were gone.
—-
In the end, Ptolemy’s absence lasted less than two full days. At dusk the next evening, he swanned back into the flat as though nothing were wrong. Kitty dropped her books with a thump and a burst of dust cloud, creaking herself up from the table. “Ptolemy!”
“Where the hell have you been?” Nathaniel demanded.
“We were worried sick!” Kitty snapped, her tone even more waspish than his.
Ptolemy blinked at them in owlish confusion. The cat that had followed him in twined out from around his ankles. A moment later, a second Ptolemy was sitting on the edge of the dining table, legs crossed and smile viciously crooked.
“Why,” Bartimaeus said. “Anyone would think you didn’t want me back.”
Nathaniel froze.
—-
Bartimaeus, it seemed, was what they had been waiting for. Nathaniel rather regretted his not wanting to know.
Kitty, fortunately, was somewhat adamant about old hips and what they had roughly agreed to be late November’s storms and downpours, so the four of them remained crammed into the flat with one large bed and a pull-out sofa that Kitty still had to operate for them for Ptolemy to sleep on.
Bartimaeus didn’t sleep either, as a rule, though he tended to curl up in cat form to doze on the pullout.
Possibly to avoid Nathaniel.
This seemed a little rich, since all three of them had summoned him before, and Ptolemy had died in what by all accounts seemed to be entirely similar circumstances, but Nathaniel has thus far restrained from commenting.
Not that that stopped Bartimaeus from commenting.
“So, you and Jones, what’s going on there?” he asked, lionness-formed and lounging beside Ptolemy’s bed. Hushed so as to not wake him. “You humans are always so hung up on age.”
Nathaniel wrinkled his nose, and smothered the order he wanted to issue. “I don’t see what business it is of yours,” he said.
“I live with you, apparently.”
“Then you can see for yourself.” For whatever reason, Bartimaeus seemed unwilling to detach himself from Ptolemy. Ptolemy, in turn, would not leave Kitty. Most oddly of all, Bartimaeus was unwilling to force him. Into anything, really. Doted on the boy, far more than Nathaniel or Kitty had been willing to indulge him. Eyes for nothing else, save a few hushed conversations with Kitty.
The spirit’s business was its own. Nathaniel returned his attention to his book, and set the matter out of mind.
The foul winds and scatters of hail or snow brought to mind a surety of December. It was Bartimaeus who managed to get the chimney and fireplace functioning, but Kitty kept them in warm food— Nathaniel was catching onto cooking slower than Ptolemy, who claimed it was a good time for thinking, and Bartimaeus rejected the practise entirely except to chime in with corrections of Nathaniel’s mistakes. Nathaniel tried to pick up the slack by cleaning the flat by night, his watch duties now split with Bartimaeus.
The city was abandoned no longer, filled with spirits that whipped about the air or skittered through the streets in forms which changed too rapidly to track.
Bartimaeus did not leave the flat. Ptolemy was quite happy to remain inside with him, undelighted by the British weather. Nathaniel did not ask what had happened after his death.
Kitty taught them card games in the evening, insisting on everyone’s involvement with characteristic determination. Nathaniel made no attempt to escape her, just helped clear the dinner plates while Bartimaeus stoked the fire.
He resolutely did not cheat, because Ptolemy deserved better than the example set for him by Bartimaeus. Kitty absolutely did cheat.
Ptolemy won the hand regardless. Quite suddenly, it did not seem so long a wait until spring.