Ptolemy's Gate (24 page)

In rather heated fashion I had been ornamenting my argument with a series of brisk finger-jabs, one of which overshot the mark and touched the red chalk of my pentacle. With a small explosion of yellow sparks, my essence was rebuffed: I was tossed up and backward, head over heels, frantically pedaling in midair to avoid crossing the line on the other side. With the agility born of desperation, I managed it, and sank down to earth with blackened face and my loincloth torn asunder.

The girl considered the latter with a disapproving twist of the mouth. “Tsk,” she said. “We're back to square one.”

I delicately rearranged the fragments of cloth. “The point remains. By summoning me, you've redefined our roles. There can be nothing but hatred between us.”

“Oh, rubbish,” she said. “How else was I to get hold of you? I'm not enslaving you, you idiot. I wanted to discuss something with you, as equals.”

I raised what remained of my eyebrows. “Hardly feasible. Do dust mites confer with lions?”

“Oh, stop being so sniffy. Who's Nathaniel, anyway?”

I blinked at her uncertainly. “Who? Never heard of him.”

“You just referred to someone called Nathaniel.”

“No, no, you must have misheard.” I changed the subject swiftly: “The whole idea is ridiculous, anyway. Equality is impossible between humans and djinn. You are young and foolish, so perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on you, but the notion is misguided. I have known a hundred masters over five thousand years, and whether their pentacles have been drawn on the desert sand or on the turf-moss of the steppe, the enmity between me and my summoners has been great and everlasting. So it has always been. So it shall always be.”

I finished in resounding, plangent tones that brooked no argument. They echoed dramatically back and forth across the empty room. The girl smoothed back her hair.

“Absolute tripe,” she said. “What about you and Ptolemy?”

15

K
itty knew immediately that her theory had been correct. The djinni's response told her so. Since his accident at the margins of the pentacle, the young Egyptian boy had been facing her, chest and chin thrust out, hands sweeping this way and that to illustrate his expansive statements and occasionally return his loincloth to position. As soon as she spoke, however, all his blustering and bravado instantly ceased. A great stillness came over him: the face became quite frozen, the body utterly transfixed, as if somehow caught in time. Only the eyes moved: slowly, very slowly, the pupils shifted to fix their gaze on her. The boy's eyes had always seemed dark—but now they had become quite black. Without wishing it, Kitty found herself staring into them: it was like looking at a clear night sky—all black and cold and infinite, with tiny lights glinting, unreachable and far away.… It was terrible, yet beautiful; she was drawn to it as a child to a window. She had been sitting safely in the center of her pentacle. Now she half uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, supporting herself on one arm, stretching out the other, reaching up slowly toward the eyes, toward their solitude and emptiness. Her fingertips trembled above the fringes of her circle; she sighed, hesitated, reached out….

The boy blinked, his eyelids flicking like a lizard's. The spell was broken. Kitty's skin crawled; her hand jerked back. She shrank into the center of the circle, fresh sweat beading on her brow. Still the boy did not move.

“What do you presume,” a voice said, “to know about me?”

It had sounded all around her—not loudly, but very near at hand—a voice different from any that she had heard before. It spoke in English, but the inflection was odd, as if the tongue found the language alien and strange; it sounded close, but also not so, as if dredged up from some incalculable distance.

“What do you know?” the voice said again, quieter than before. The djinni's lips were still, the black eyes locked on her. Kitty hunched herself against the floor, trembling, teeth clenched together. Something in the voice unmanned her, but what? It did not speak violently or with anger, quite. But it was a voice of power from a far-off place, a voice of terrible command, and it was a child's voice too.

She lowered her head and shook it dumbly, gazing at the floor.

“TELL ME!”
Now
there was anger in the voice; as it spoke, a great noise sounded in the room—a thunderclap that shook the window and rippled out across the floorboards, sending chips of rotten plaster dropping from the walls. The door slammed shut (but she had not opened it, nor seen it open); the window shattered and fell away. At the same time a great wind rose up around the chamber, whirling all about her, faster and faster, sending the bowls of rosemary and rowan wood flying, slamming them out against the walls, seizing the book and the candlesticks, her satchel and her coat, carrying them high and low around the room, whistling and wailing, around and around and around until they blurred. And now the very walls were moving too, tearing from their sockets in the floor and joining in the frenzied dance, spitting bricks loose as they spun, spiraling around and around beneath the ceiling. And finally the ceiling was gone, and the awful immensity of the night sky stretched above, with stars and moon spinning and the clouds being drawn out into pale white threads that shot in all directions, until the only still points in all the universe were Kitty and the boy inside their circles.

Kitty clapped her fingers across her eyes and buried her head between her knees.

“Please stop,” she cried. “Please!”

And the tumult ceased.

She opened her eyes; saw nothing. Her hands were still clamped to her face.

With stiff and painful care, she raised her head and lowered her hands. The room was exactly as before, as it had always been: door, book, candlesticks and window, walls, ceiling, floor; beyond the window, a placid sky. All was quiet, except … the boy in the opposing pentacle was moving now, bending his legs slowly, slowly—then sitting with abrupt finality, as if all the energy had gone out of him. His eyes were closed. He passed a hand wearily in front of his face.

He looked at her then, and the eyes, though dark, had nothing of their former emptiness. When he spoke, his voice was back to normal, but it sounded tired and sad. “If you're going to summon djinn,” he said, “you summon their history with them. It's wise to keep matters firmly in the present, for fear of what you might awaken.”

With great difficulty, Kitty forced herself to sit upright and face him. Her hair was wet with perspiration; she ran a hand through it and wiped her forehead. “There was no need for that. I merely mentioned—”

“A name. You ought to know what names can do.”

Kitty cleared her throat. The first surge of fright was wearing off, to be fast replaced with a teary feeling. She fought it down. “If you're so keen to keep matters in the present,” she gulped furiously, “why do you persist in wearing …
his
form?”

The boy frowned. “You're a little too clever today, Kitty. What makes you think I'm wearing
anyone'
s guise? Even in my weakened state I can look how I please.”Without stirring, he changed shape once, twice, half a dozen times, each form more startling than the last, each one sitting in exactly the same position in the circle. He finished as a giant rodent of some kind, plump and fluffy, with hind legs crossed and forelegs folded irritably.

Kitty did not blink. “Yes, but you don't generally go around as a king-size hamster,” she snapped. “You always revert to the same dark kid in a loincloth. Why? Because it means something to you. That's obvious. It's someone important from your past. All I had to do was work out who.”

The hamster licked a pink paw and smoothed a tuft of fur behind one ear. “I don't acknowledge there's any truth in those far-fetched statements,” it said. “But I'm curious. Where did you go from there? The boy could have been anyone.”

Kitty nodded. “True. It happened this way. After our last meeting I was keen to speak with you again. All I knew about you was your name—or one of them—Bartimaeus. Which was tough enough, since I didn't even know how to spell it. But I knew that if I looked hard, you'd turn up in the historical records somewhere. So when I began to study, I kept my eyes peeled for mention of you.”

The hamster nodded modestly. “I imagine that it didn't take long. There must be countless references to my exploits.”

“In fact it took almost a year to find the slightest mention. I got the names of plenty of other demons of all sorts here and there among the library books. Nouda the Terrible kept coming up, as did an afrit named Tchue, and something called Faquarl was notable too in a dozen cultures. And then at last you appeared—a fleeting mention in a footnote.”

The hamster bristled. “
What?
Which books did you look in? All the best ones must have been taken out. A footnote indeed!” It continued muttering indignantly into its fur.

“My problem,” Kitty said hastily, “was that you weren't always known as Bartimaeus, so even when you had long, long,
very
important mentions, I couldn't pick up on it. But the footnote helped me out, you see, because it linked the name I knew—Bartimaeus of Uruk—to two others—Sakhr al-Jinni (wasn't that your Persian one?) and Wakonda of the Algonquin. After that I was able to get more references to you here and th—I mean, everywhere I looked. And so I proceeded. I learned a bit about some of your tasks and ventures, and discovered the names of several of your masters, which was interesting too.”

“Well, I hope you were impressed,” the hamster said. It still sounded rather put out.

“Of course,” Kitty went on. “
Very.
Did you
really
speak with Solomon?”

The hamster grunted. “Yeah, yeah, only a brief chat.” All the same, it seemed a little mollified.

“All the while,” Kitty said, “I was learning the art of summoning. My master was rather slow, and I was slower, I'm afraid, but I was gradually getting to the stage when I felt I might call you. But I still had no clue to the identity of this boy, which was a pity, because I knew he was important to you. And then I suddenly found the vital clue! I discovered your Egyptian name—Rekhyt—and linked
that
to the magician Ptolemaeus.” She broke off, grinning with triumph.

“Even so,” the hamster said, “what did that tell you? I have had a hundred masters, and whether their pentacles have been drawn on the sand or the steppe, the enmity—”

“Yes, yes.” Kitty waved the hamster into silence. “That was exactly the point. One account mentioned a close bond between this Ptolemaeus and his slaves. It also mentioned that he was only a boy when he died. That's when it became clear to me. That's when I realized the identity of your favorite guise.”

The hamster was busy cleaning one of its toenails. “And what details,” it asked lightly, “might the account have given about the relationship between the djinni and the boy? Just out of interest, you understand.”

“Not a lot,” Kitty admitted. “In fact, nothing. I don't think anything much is known about Ptolemaeus as a person any more. Some of his writing's survived, I believe. They mentioned a thing called ‘Ptolemy's Gate,' whatever that is—”

She broke off. The hamster was staring out of the window at the midnight moon. At last it turned its head to her, and as it did so reverted back to the familiar shape of the boy-magician, Ptolemy of Alexandria.

“Enough,” the boy said. “What is it you want from me?”

Now that her guess had been confirmed, Kitty found her perception of the djinni's guise had completely changed. It was a curious and disconcerting thing to realize that she was looking into the face of a real boy, two thousand years dead. Previously she had viewed the guise merely as a mask, a costume, one illusion among many. Now, while acknowledging that still to be true, she could not help but sense the ancient presence. That the demon was reproducing the boy accurately she had no doubt: for the first time she noticed two moles on the thin brown neck, a little pale scar running beneath the chin, a particular boniness of the elbows on the slender arms. There was a devotion to detail here that could only come with genuine affection, or perhaps even with love.

This knowledge gave her confidence to proceed.

“Okay,” she said, “I'll tell you. But first I want to repeat—I am not going to enslave you. Whatever your response, I'll set you free.”

“That's mighty big of you,” the boy said.

“All I want is for you to listen fairly to what I have to say.”

“Well, if you actually get on with it, I might give it a try.” The djinni folded its arms. “I'll tell you one thing that's in your favor, though,” it went on ruminatively. “In all the centuries of my burden, not one
single
magician has been interested enough even to
ask
about this guise. Why should they? I'm a ‘demon,' and therefore willfully perverse. I have no motives but wickedness and temptation. Through general fear and a desire for self-preservation, they never ask me anything about myself. But
you
have done so. You've found things out. I wouldn't say it was clever, because you're human, but it wasn't a bad effort, all in all. So, then”—it waved a regal hand—“fire away.”