Ptolemy's Gate (5 page)

For I was no longer the carefree Bartimaeus of old. My essence was raddled with Earth's corruption; my mind was bleary with the pain. I was slower, weaker, distracted from my tasks. I found it hard to change form. In battle my attacks were sputtering and weak—my Detonations had the explosive power of lemonade, my Convulsions trembled like jelly in a breeze. All my strength had gone. Where once, in the previous night's scrap, I would have sent that public convenience right back at the she-pig, adding a phone box and a bus stop for good measure, now I could do nothing to resist. I was vulnerable as a kitten. A few small buildings in the face, I could stand. But already I was practically at the mercy of second-rate fops such as Ascobol, a fool with no great history to speak of.
³
And if I met a foe with even a grain of power, my luck would surely end.

A weak djinni is a bad slave—bad twice over, since he is both ineffective
and
a laughingstock. It does a magician no favors to maintain one in the world. This is the reason why they usually allow us back to the Other Place on a temporary basis, to repair our essence and renew our strength. No master in his right mind would permit a djinni to deteriorate as far as I had done.

No master in his right mind
… Well, that of course was the problem.

I was interrupted in my gloomy cogitation by a stirring in midair. The girl looked up.

Above the road appeared the faintest shimmering—a delicate tingling of pretty pink and yellow lights. It was invisible on the first plane, and thus went unnoticed by the people trudging up the street, but if any children had seen it, they'd probably have guessed it to be fairy dust.

Which shows how wrong you can be.

With an abrupt scratching noise, the lights froze and were drawn back from the middle like two curtains. Between them appeared the grinning face of a bald baby with bad acne. Its evil little eyes were red and sore, indicating an owner who kept long hours and bad habits. For a few moments they peered myopically to and fro; the baby swore under its breath and rubbed its eyes with dirty little fists.

All at once it noticed my Concealment and let out a dreadful oath.
⁴
I regarded it with cool impassivity.

“Oi, Bart!” the baby cried. “That you in there? Stir yourself! You're wanted.”

I spoke casually. “By whom?”

“You know full well. And boy, are you in trouble! I reckon it's the Shriveling Fire for sure this time.”

“Is that so?” The girl remained firmly seated on the broken chimney and crossed her slender arms. “Well, if Mandrake wants me, he can come and get me himself.”

The baby grinned nastily. “Good. I was hoping you'd say that. No problem, Barty! I'll pass that on. Can't wait to see what he'll do.”

The imp's malicious glee irritated me.
⁵
If I'd had a little more energy I'd have leaped up and swallowed it there and then. I contented myself with snapping off a chimney pot and throwing it with unerring aim. It struck the baby's bald fat head with a satisfactory ringing sound.

“As I thought,” I said. “Hollow.”

The unlovely grin converted into a scowl. “You cad! Just you wait—we'll see who's laughing when I watch you burn.” Propelled by a gust of ripe language, it popped back behind its curtains of glimmering lights and drew them smartly together. Twinkling softly, the lights dissipated on the breeze. The imp was gone.

The girl pushed a strand of hair behind one ear, refolded her arms grimly, and settled back to wait.
Now
there would be consequences, which was exactly what I needed. It was time for a proper confrontation.

To begin with, years before, my master and I had got along well enough. I don't mean amicably, or anything ridiculous like that, but our mutual irritation was founded on something approximating respect. During a series of early incidents, from the Lovelace conspiracy to the golem affair, I'd been forced to acknowledge Mandrake's verve and daring, his energy and even (faintly) the glimmerings of his conscience. It wasn't much, admittedly, but it made his prissiness, stubbornness, pride, and ambition a little less hard to stomach. In return, I obviously had no shortage of wonderful traits for him to admire, and anyway, he could barely get up in the morning without needing me to save his sorry skin. We coexisted in a wary state of toleration.

For a year or so after the defeat of the golem and Mandrake's promotion to Head of Internal Affairs, he didn't push me around too much. He summoned me from time to time to help out with minor incidents, which I haven't got time to go into here,
⁶
but generally speaking he left me pretty much alone.

On the odd occasion that he did call me, we both knew where he stood. We had an agreement of sorts. I knew his birth name, and he knew I knew it. Though he threatened me with dire consequences if I told anyone, in practice he treated me with careful detachment in all our dealings. I kept his name to myself and he kept me away from the most dangerous tasks—which basically boiled down to the fighting in America. Dozens of djinn were dying there—the reverberations of the losses rang harshly through the Other Place—and I was happy to have no part in it.
⁷

Time passed; Mandrake worked at his job with his usual zeal. An opportunity for promotion came, and he accepted it. He was now Information Minister, one of the great ones of the Empire.
⁸

Officially, his duties were to do with propaganda—devising clever ways of selling the war to the British people. Unofficially, at the Prime Minister's behest, he continued much of his Internal Affairs police work, operating an unsavory network of surveillance djinn and human spies, which reported directly to him. His workload, which had always been severe, now became crippling.

There followed a dismal sea change in my masters personality. Never exactly famous for his lighthearted banter, he became positively abrupt and antisocial, even less willing than before to shoot the breeze with a debonair djinni. But by cruel paradox, he also began to summon me more and more frequently, and for less and less reason.

Why did he do so? Mainly no doubt because he wished to minimize the chances of my being summoned by another magician. His old fear, now fueled by chronic fatigue and paranoia, was that I would divulge his birth name to an enemy, rendering him vulnerable to attack. Well, fair enough, that was always
possible.
I
might
have done it. Can't say for sure. But he'd managed without me in the past, and nothing had happened to him. So I thought something else was going on too.

Mandrake masked his emotions well enough, but his whole life was work—remorseless and never-ending. Moreover, he was now surrounded by a gang of vicious, hot-eyed maniacs—the other ministers—most of whom wished him harm. His only close associate, for a time, was the hack playwright Quentin Makepeace, as self-serving as all the rest. To survive in this friendless world, Mandrake cloaked his better qualities under layers of smarm and swank. All his old life—the years with the Underwoods, his vulnerable existence as the boy Nathaniel, the ideals he'd once espoused—was buried away deep down. Every link with his childhood was severed, except for me. I don't think he could bring himself to break this last connection.

I proposed this theory in my usual gentle way, but Mandrake was unwilling to listen to my taunts. He was a worried man.
⁹
The American campaigns were vastly expensive, the British supply lines overstretched. With the magicians' attention diverted, other parts of the Empire had become troublesome. Foreign spies infested London like maggots in an apple. The commoners were volatile. To counter all this, Mandrake worked like a slave.

Well, not
literally
like a slave. That was
my
job. And a pretty thankless one it was too. Back at Internal Affairs, some of the assignments had been almost worthy of my talents. I'd intercepted enemy messages and deciphered them, given out false reports, trailed enemy spirits, duffed a few of them up, etc. It was simple, satisfying work—I got a craftsman's pleasure from it. In addition, I helped Mandrake and the police in the search for two fugitives from the golem affair. The first of these was a certain mysterious mercenary (distinguishing features: big beard, grim expression, swanky black clothes, general invulnerability to Infernos/Detonations/pretty much everything else). He'd last been seen far away in Prague, and predictably enough we never got a whiff of him. The second was an even more nebulous character, whom no one had even set eyes on. He apparently went by the name of Hopkins, and claimed to be a scholar. He was generally suspected of masterminding the golem plot, and I'd heard he'd been involved with the Resistance too. But he might as well have been a ghost or shadow for all the substance we could pin down. We found a spidery signature in an admissions book at an old library that might have been his.That was all. The trail, such as it was, went cold.

Then Mandrake became Information Minister and I was soon engaged in more depressing work, viz. pasting up adverts on 1,000 billboards across London; distributing pamphlets to 25,000 homes across ditto; corralling selected animals for public holiday “entertainments”;
¹⁰
supervising food, drink, and “hygiene” for same; flying back and forth across the capital for hours on end trailing pro-war banners. Now, call me picky, but I'd argue that when you think of a 5,000-year-old djinni, the scourge of civilizations and confidante of kings, certain things come to mind—swashbuckling espionage, perhaps, or valiant battles, thrilling escapes and general multipurpose excitement. What you
don't
readily think of is that same noble djinni being forced to prepare giant vats of chili con carne for festival days, or struggling on street corners with bill-posters and pots of glue.

Especially without being allowed to return home. Soon my periods of respite in the Other Place became so fleeting I practically got whiplash traveling there and back. Then, one day, Mandrake ceased dismissing me altogether, and that was it. I was trapped on Earth.

Over the next two years I grew steadily weaker, and just when I was hitting rock bottom, scarcely able to lift a poster brush, the wretched boy began sending me out on more dangerous missions again—fighting bands of enemy djinn that Britain's many enemies were using to stir up trouble.

In the past I'd have had a quiet word with Mandrake, expressing my disapproval with succinct directness. But my privileged access to him was no more. He'd taken to summoning me along with a host of other slaves, giving orders en masse and sending us off like a pack of dogs. Such multiple summoning is a difficult business, requiring great mental strength on the part of the magician, but Mandrake did it daily without apparent effort, talking quietly with his assistant or even flicking through a newspaper while we stood and sweated in our circles.

I did my best to get to him. Instead of using a monstrous guise like my fellow slaves (Ascobol's cyclops and Cormocodran's boar-headed behemoth were typical), I took to wearing the semblance of Kitty Jones, the Resistance girl Mandrake had persecuted years before. Her assumed death still weighed on his conscience: I knew this because he always reacted to my echo of her face with a reddening of his own. He'd get all angry and sheepish, assertive and embarrassed at the same time. Didn't make him treat me any better, mind.

Well, I'd had about as much as I could stand from Mandrake. It was time to have it out with him. By refusing to go back with the imp, I obliged the magician to recall me officially, which would doubtless hurt, but was at least likely to mean he gave me the benefit of his attention for five minutes.

The imp had been gone for hours. In the past I'd have got a swift response from my master, but the delay was typical of his new distractedness. I smoothed back Kitty Jones's long dark hair and cast my eye around the little rural town. Several commoners had gathered around the ruined post office and were engaged in passionate debate; they resisted the efforts of a lone policeman to make them return to their homes. No doubt about it: the people were growing restless.

Which turned my thoughts to Kitty once again. Despite appearances to the contrary, she
hadn't
died in battle with the golem three years before. Instead, after acting with unusual selflessness and bravery to save Mandrake's worthless hide, she'd slipped quietly away. Our encounter had been brief but stimulating: her passionate opposition to injustice reminded me of someone else I'd known, a long time ago.

Part of me
hoped
Kitty had bought a one-way ticket to somewhere safe and distant and had set up a cafe on a beach or something, out of harm's way. But deep down I knew she was still close by, working against the magicians. That knowledge rather pleased me, though she'd had no love for djinn.

Whatever she was doing, I hoped she was keeping out of trouble.

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