Ptolemy's Gate (62 page)

³
We fourth-level djinn are not the easiest of spirits to summon correctly, since we are fastidious and proper and keep a sharp ear out for any small errors in the incantations. For this reason, and because of our formidable intellect and overpowering presence (generally
not
involving the smell of burned toast), magicians avoid us until they have had a good deal of practice.

⁴
Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.

⁵
My master, this was. Did you guess?

17

¹
Technically, I suppose I was
lioness
-headed, since I lacked a mane. Manes are very overrated; okay, they're good for posing, but they block out all your side vision in battle, and get terribly claggy with accumulated blood.

²
He was right, unfortunately. If he'd zapped me with a punishment spell, I could have turned it back on him (a major benefit of knowing his birth name), but I had no such defense against an actual spear-thrust, especially in my current debilitated state.

³
A confusing analogy, but you get the idea.

⁴
Confusing again. Sorry.

⁵
For the record, it was an interesting yellow-white. Sort of custardy.

⁶
Technical term: a measurement of essence.

⁷
The last time I used that strong wind/disembodied howling gag was to distract the giant Humbaba up in the pine forests so that my master Gilgamesh could creep up from behind and slay him. We're talking 2600
B.C.
here. And it only worked
then
because Humbaba was a few pinecones short of a fir tree.

⁸
Mwamba was as flighty as a butterfly, Cormocodran taciturn and brutish, while Ascobol and Hodge were just insufferable, being regrettably prone to sarcasm.

19

¹
A custard
: another technical term. Denotes a total collapse of essence while on the mortal plane. In the Other Place, of course, our essence is freewheeling at all times and does not have to be bound in any particular shape.

²
At least not when I can't do anything about them. But sooner or later, when I was back at full vigor, I'd meet Hodge, Ascobol, and Cormocodran again. Then I'd apply delayed retribution with all the savage ferocity of a wounded bear. Successful vengeance is all about timing.

³
Sample dialogue: “Oh, so you reckon you can, eh?” “Yeah, no problem, pal!” “Yeah?” “Yeah!” All to a backdrop of the others whooping and slapping their hairy haunches. For intellectual reach and vigor, it was midway between the debates of ancient Athens and those of more recent English parliaments.

⁴
With the possible exception of Cormocodran, who still contrived to resemble a heifer shoehorned into a suit.

⁵
Hurtful, coarse, but there
was
a grain of truth in it. I hadn't quite deteriorated as far as my condition with the frog, but with every passing minute my strength, and essence control, became a little less. I
was
a little fluid about the trousers.

⁶
I'd have
loved
to take part in the fight. Loved to. Ordinarily I'd have been first in line to fight the squidy head things. But that wasn't my brief just then. I had precious little essence left to spill.

⁷
It was his wounds that slowed him mainly, but his recent meal can't have helped. He'd really bolted the manager down.

20

¹
In the heat of the moment we djinn sometimes lose track of which lingo we're using. When working together in this world, we tend to speak languages familiar to us all and not necessarily the one used by the civilization
du jour
. (There you go, you see.)

²
The foliots Frisp and Pollux had been present when I was discovered; they'd amused themselves afterward recounting the tale to imps of their acquaintance. Sadly, both foliots and imps were all soon killed in a variety of ways during the course of a single night: a bizarre coincidence, which quite wore me out.

³
He wasn't like old Jabor had been, i.e. moronically strong to the point of indestructible. He wasn't like grim Tchue, who rarely needed to lift a finger to his enemies, so frightful and inventive were his words. No, Faquarl was an all-rounder—he had a practical take on survival that respected power and cunning equally. As of this moment, this was my view also: it was by cunningly respecting Faquarl's power that I intended to avoid being killed.

⁴
My crow-headed guise was the totem of the tribe that lived between plain and forest. They valued the bird's stealth and secrecy, his intelligence and guile. The cape included feathers of every bird living in those parts: with their power absorbed into mine, I could walk unnoticed over grass and stone and also converse respectfully with the tribe's shaman, who wore a similar costume, complete with mask.

⁵
Coming from a fairly senior djinni like Faquarl, this laughter was curiously unnerving. We higher spirits have our humor, of course, which we employ as a corrective to our endless years of servitude on Earth. Normally it falls into a certain category—dry, sardonic, and observational, perpetually amazed by the foibles of the magicians. We don't tend to fall about in hysterics—that's just not done. (I'm not talking about imps, of course, who seldom rise above recreational slapstick.) This being so, there was something oddly
unrestrained
about Faquarl's mirth here, something a little too
involved
.

⁶
This was true. Ever since the royal kitchens at Nineveh, circa 700
B.C.
, I'd been sent there by Babylonian magicians on a diplomatic mission, e.g. to slip arsenic into Sennacherib's food during a banquet. Unfortunately, Faquarl was employed by the Assyrian king to seek assassins: he took exception to my tasty calves'-fat trifle and chased me about the hall. After the mother of all food fights I felled him with a wellaimed ham bone and made good my escape. Our relationship had generally deteriorated from here.

Alexandria: 124 B.C.

¹
During which we successfully destroyed the principal pirate fort and released a hundred captives. The scrap was memorable mainly for me fighting single combat with a fiery afrit above two sinking ships.We chased back and forth along the burning oars, and fenced among the rigging using portions of the broken mast. In the end I brained him with a lucky blow and watched him sink, still smoldering, into the pea-green depths.

²
A certain red-skinned individual was prominent among them. After causing general havoc, Jabor was finally put out of action when I lured him into a system of sandstone caves and caused the tunnel roof to collapse upon him.

³
An
Egyptian
peace, that is. Still plenty of rape, pillage, and murder, but now carried out
by
us, rather than against us. So that's all right.

⁴
Ankh
: a kind of amulet, T-shaped, with a loop at the top. Symbol of life. In pharaonic Egypt, when magic was commonplace, many ankhs contained trapped entities and were powerful protectors. By Ptolemy's time they were usually symbolic only. But iron, like silver, always repels the djinn.

⁵
Bartimaeus, this was. Thought you might have forgotten. Ptolemy never used it, for politeness'sake.

24

¹
Even a
different
archenemy would have been marginally better.

²
It was the Kitty Jones bit that was astonishing. Not the table. Though it was very nicely polished.

³
Oh. Right. Well, it's like this. As I may have mentioned once or twice, there are five basic levels of spirit: imps (reprehensible), foliots (negligible), djinn (a fascinating class, with one or two absolute gems), afrits (overrated), and marids (dreadfully full of themselves). Above these levels exist more powerful entities, shadowy by nature, who are only occasionally summoned or even defined. Nouda was one such, and his rare appearances on Earth left a trail of blood and misery. Only the most unpleasant regimes employed him: the Assyrians (during the battle of Nineveh, when Nouda devoured a thousand Medes), Timur the Cruel (at the sack of Delhi, during which Nouda stacked the heads of prisoners to a height of 50 feet), the Aztecs (a regular engagement for Nouda this; in the end he discovered an ambiguity in Montezuma's summons—as a reward, Nouda ravaged Tenochtidin and left it defenseless against the Spanish). He was a formidable customer, in other words, hungry and not sympathetically inclined.

⁴
Note the absence of any jokes, sneers, or satirical content in these sentences. Despite Nouda's current indisposition, I didn't doubt that he could atomize me with a single glance. Best to be polite, I felt.

⁵
His treatment of her seemed … well, let's put it this way: it was hard to tell exactly
how
it was self-serving. No doubt there were ulterior motives aplenty, if you only knew where to look for them.

⁶
This was true: Naeryan's normal form involved an inky blue-black torso, three piercing eyes placed at random intervals, and a multitude of spiderlike limbs. Okay, that guise was an acquired taste, but it was a lot more dignified than
Jenkins
.

⁷
Somewhere deep inside those eyes I glimpsed the fearful energies of the Other Place, swirling, swirling. I couldn't help but wonder how long the mortal body would survive the strain of such an inhabitant.

32

¹
We each strove to make the sounds curt, assertive, growling. Neither of us quite succeeded. His voice had the kind of pitch usually reserved for bats and dog whisdes, while mine warbled like that of an elderly spinster requesting a cucumber sandwich with her cup of tea.

²
A couple of hundred years, in fact. A Czech master of mine had been inclined to plumpness. I used to criticize him for his lack of condition, gradually building up in him a sense of annoyed defiance. One night I challenged him to touch his toes while in his pentacle. He succeeded valiantly, but in so doing stuck his backside over the edge of the circle, allowing me to break my bonds. And sure enough, he
was
a bit fatty, but he still tasted pretty good.

³
That
didn't last long, of course. “Oh, Bartimaeus, could you just irrigate the Fertile Crescent?” “Could you just divert the Euphrates
here
and
here
?” “Look, while you're at it, do you mind just planting a few million wheat seeds up and down the floodplain? Thanks.” Didn't even give me a dibble. By the time I got to Ur I wasn't surging with any of that terrible joy, oh no. My back was
killing
me.

⁴
Believe me, I know all about bottle acoustics. I spent much of the sixth century in an old sesame oil jar, corked with wax, bobbing about in the Red Sea. No one heard my hollers. In the end an old fisherman set me free, by which time I was desperate enough to grant him several wishes. I erupted out in the form of a smoking giant, did a few lightning bolts, and bent to ask him his desire. Poor old boy had dropped dead of a heart attack. There should be a moral there, but for the life of me I can't see one.

⁵
A logical sensation from his point of view. He had absorbed
me
: a being of fire and air.

⁶
Nothing changes. Nefertiti was
always
doing that to Akhenaton, sidling over while he was doing the crop accounts, asking him how she looked in her nice new headdress. He never learned.

⁷
Using an item like this is a bit like unscrewing the top of a cola bottle. No. Perhaps it is moderately more exciting: imagine shaking the bottle first. Then you slowly, slowly turn the top …. The secret is to turn it enough to get just a
little
fizz. Then the magician can direct that power where he wants. Too much turning or doing it too fast, and your hands get sticky. In a manner of speaking. Notable buildings destroyed by careless use of talismans include: Alexandria's Library and the Pharos Lighthouse, Babylon's Hanging Gardens, the citadel of Great Zimbabwe, and the Underwater Palace of Kos.

33

¹
Slaves and prisoners of war were given iron knives and sent into Rome's great arena to combat captive djinn. The Roman elite used to just
love
the comedy chases and all the hilarious methods of death.

²
I first encountered Naeryan in Africa during the Scipio campaigns. Her favorite manifestation was as a lissom belly dancer, who would lure—

35

¹
Well, not to
me
, anyway, safely encased as I was inside. Nathaniel maybe got a few unnecessary bruises, like the time he went right when I was pointing left, and the Staff bashed him on the nose; or when he fired the Staff during the middle of an extra-fancy leap, and we were blown sideways into a gorse bush. Or that little incident down at the lake when he got so angry (we were only under water for a measly four or five seconds, and let's face it a little bindweed never hurt anyone). But by and large we managed to avoid self-inflicted wounds.

²
Or indeed your vital organs.

³
This latter was an observation I made on the edge of the lake. Nathaniel unfortunately took it as a command, which resulted in our temporary immersion.

⁴
There were probably forty or so. But when entering battle, a wise warrior deals with his enemies one by one.