Bartimaeus: The Golem’s Eye by Jonathan Stroud Read Free Book Online

Hoorah! Hear the crowd cheer!
    It didn’t matter what they did in the end; it didn’t matter what they stole, what daring attacks they made. It would make no difference. Tomorrow the queues would still be forming in the streets outside the Metropolitan, the spheres would still be watching from above, the magicians would still be elsewhere, enjoying the trappings of their power.
    So it had always been. Nothing she had ever done had made any difference, right from the beginning.

4
    T he noise on the stage receded; in its place she heard birdsong, the hum of distant traffic. In her mind’s eye, the darkness of the theater was replaced by remembered light.
    Three years ago. The park. The ball. Their laughter. Disaster on its way, like lightning from a blue sky.
    Jakob grinning as he ran toward her; the bat’s weight, dry and wooden in her hand.
    The strike! The triumph of it! Dancing with delight.
    The distant crash.
    How they ran, hearts thudding. And then—the creature on the bridge …
    She rubbed her fingers into her eyes. But even that terrible day—was it truly the beginning? For the first thirteen years of her life, Kitty had remained unaware of the exact nature of the magicians’rule. Or perhaps she was not consciously aware of it, for looking back she realized that doubts and intuitions had managed to negotiate their way into her mind.
    The magicians had long been at the zenith of their power and no one could remember a time when this wasn’t so. For the most part, they kept themselves removed from the experience of the ordinary commoner, remaining in the center of the city and in the suburbs, where broad, leafy boulevards idled between secretive villas. What lay between was left to everyone else, streets clogged with small shops, waste ground, the factories and brickworks. Magicians passed through occasionally in their great black cars, but otherwise their presence was mainly felt in the vigilance spheres floating randomly above the streets.
    “The spheres keep us safe,” Kitty’s father told her one evening, after a large red orb had silently accompanied her home from school. “Don’t be frightened of them. If you’re a good girl, they’ll do you no harm. It’s only bad men, thieves and spies, who need to be afraid.” But Kitty had been frightened; after that, livid, glowing spheres often pursued her in her dreams.
    Her parents were visited by no such fears. Neither of them was overly imaginative, but they were robustly conscious of the greatness of London and of their own small place in it. They took for granted the superiority of the magicians and fully accepted the unchanging nature of their rule. Indeed, they found it reassuring.
    “I’d lay down my life for the Prime Minister,” her father used to say. “He’s a great man.”
    “He keeps the Czechs where they belong,” her mother said. “Without him, we’d have the hussars marching down Clapham High Road, and you wouldn’t want that, dear, would you?”
    Kitty supposed not.
    They had lived, the three of them, in a terrace house in the south London suburb of Balham. It was a small home, with a sitting room and a kitchen downstairs and a tiny bathroom out back. Upstairs was a little landing and two bedrooms—Kitty’s parents’and her own. A long, thin mirror stood on the landing, before which, on weekday mornings, the whole family stood in turn, brushing hair and arranging their clothes. Her father in particular fiddled endlessly with his tie. Kitty could never understand why he kept on tying and untying it, kept on weaving the strip of fabric in, up, around and out, since the variations between each attempt were practically microscopic.
    “Appearances are very important, Kitty,” he would say, surveying the umpteenth knot with furrowed brow. “In my job you’ve got only one chance to impress.”
    Kitty’s father was a tall, wiry man, stubborn of outlook and blunt of speech. He was shop-floor manager in a large department store in