Ptolemy's Gate (61 page)

²
The obvious solution would have been to change form—into a wraith, say, or a swirl of smoke, and just drift clear. But there were two problems. One: I found it hard to change shape these days, very hard, even at the best of times. Two: the considerable downward pressure would have blown my essence apart the moment I softened it to make the change.

³
Tru
er
, anyway. At bottom, we are all alike in our seeping formlessness, but every spirit has a “look” that suits them, and which they use to represent themselves while on Earth. Our essences are molded into these personal shapes on the higher planes, while—on the lower ones—we adopt guises that are appropriate to the given situation. Listen, I'm sure I've told you all this before.

⁴
I'd have kneed him first, then stuck a wingtip in his eye, while kicking his shin for good measure. Much more effective. The techniques of these young djinn were so inefficient, it pained me.

⁵
Will-O'-the-wisps:
small spirits who struggle to keep up with the times. Visible as flickering flames on the first plane (although revealed on others to be more like capering squid), wisps were once employed by magicians to lure trespassers off remote paths into pits or quags. Cities changed all that; urban wisps have now been forced into lurking over open manhole covers, to rather less effect.

3

¹
When goaded into invoking the spell of Indefinite Confinement, magicians usually compress the spirit into the first object they spy close at hand. I once cheeked a master a little too cleverly during his afternoon tea; before I knew it I was imprisoned inside a half-filled pot of strawberry jam and would have remained there, possibly for all eternity, had not his apprentice opened it by mistake at supper that same evening. Even so, my essence was infested with sticky little seeds for ages after.

²
The afrit Honorius was a case in point: he went mad after a hundred years' confinement in a skeleton. A rather poor show; I like to think with my engaging personality I could keep myself entertained a
little
longer than that.

³
It is a curious fact that, despite our fury at being summoned into this world, spirits such as I derive a good deal of retrospective satisfaction from our exploits. At the time, of course, we do our darnedest to avoid them, but afterward we often display a certain weary pride in the cleverest, bravest, or most jammy events on our resume. Philosophers might speculate this is because we are essentially
defined
by our experiences in this world, since in the Other Place we are not so easily individualized. Thus, those with long and glittering careers (e.g. me) tend to look down on those (e.g.Ascobol) whose names have been unearthed more recently, and haven't amassed so many fine achievements. In Ascobol's case, I also disliked him for his silly falsetto voice, which ill becomes an eight-foot cyclops.

⁴
Probably Germanic in origin—it involved nailing someone's entrails to an oak tree.

⁵
We were, after all, slaves together; we had both suffered long at Mandrake's hands. A bit of empathy would not, I think, have been out of place. But the imp's long confinement had rather soured its worldview, which has happened to far better spirits than it over the years.

⁶
If memory serves, these included the case of the Afrit, the Envelope, and the Ambassador's Wife; the affair of the Curiously Heavy Trunk; and the messy episode of the Anarchist and the Oyster. Mandrake nearly lost his life in all of those. As I say, none of them was of much interest.

⁷
To those of us abreast with human history, the cause of the latest war was drearily familiar. For years the Americans had refused to pay the taxes demanded of them by London. The British swiftly fell back on the oldest argument of all, and sent over an army to beat the colonists up. After initial easy victories, stagnation set in. The rebels retreated into thick woods, sending djinn out to ambush the advancing troops. Several prominent British magicians were killed; the Sixth and Seventh fleets were summoned from the China Seas to bolster the campaign—but still the fighting dribbled on. Months went by, the Empire's strength was frittered away in the American wastes, and the repercussions resounded around the globe.

⁸
His chance came thanks to the war. The rebel guerrillas were causing the British army problems. After a year of attritional fighting the Foreign Minister, a certain Mr. Fry, visited the colonies secretly with a view to arranging a truce. Eight magicians watched him as he traveled; a host of horlas guarded his every step: the minister was invulnerable. Or so they thought. On his first night in Philadelphia he was treacherously slain by an imp concealed in his evening pie. Amid general outrage, the Prime Minister reshuffied his ministers, and Mandrake joined the ruling Council.

⁹
I'm stretching the term a bit here, I know. By now, in his mid to late teens, he might just about have passed for a man. When seen from behind. At a distance. On a very dark night.

¹⁰
Following the Roman tradition, the magicians sought to keep the people docile with regular holidays, in which free shows were put on in all the major parks. Lots of exotic beasts from across the Empire were displayed, as were minor imps and sprites allegedly “caught” during the war. Human prisoners were paraded along the streets, or enclosed in special glass viewing globes in the St. James's Park pavilions for the populace to jeer at.

 

Alexandria: I26 B.C.

¹
Note my restraint here. My standard of conversation was pretty high in those days, on account of conversing with Ptolemy. Something about him made you disinclined to be too vulgar, blasphemous, or impudent, and even made me rein in my use of estuary Egyptian slang. It wasn't that he forbade any of it, more that you ended up feeling a bit guilty, as if you'd let yourself down. Harsh invective was a no-no, too. It's surprising I had anything left to say.

²
Patently all lies. Especially the last bit.

³
Hathor
: divine mother and protector of the newborn; djinn in her temples wore female guises with the heads of cattle.

⁴
He was a Ptolemy, too. As they all were, these kings of Egypt, for 200 years and more, one after the other until Cleopatra spoiled the run. Originality was not the family's strong suit. Easy to see, perhaps, why
my
Ptolemy regarded names so casually. They meant little. He told me his the first time I asked him.

⁵
They came from his mother's side, I guess. She was a native girl from upriver somewhere, a concubine in the royal apartments. I never saw her. She and his father died of plague before my time.

6

¹
Owing to my weakness it didn't make it across the pavement. But, boy, the gesture was savage.

²
All part of his attempt to appease the commoners, Mandrake had initiated a series of penny-dreadful pamphlets, which told heroic tales of British soldiers fighting in the American wilderness. A typical title was
Real War Stories
. They were illustrated by bad woodcuts and purported to be true accounts of recent events. Needless to say, the American magicians were savage and cruel, using the blackest magic and the most hideous demons. Conversely, the square-jawed Brits always insisted on good manners and fair play and invariably got out of scrapes by improvising homemade weapons from fence posts, tin cans, and pieces of string. The war was depicted as being both necessary and virtuous. It was the old, old story—I've seen imps carve similar claims on official stelae up and down the Nile delta, defending pharaohic wars. The people tended to ignore those too.

³
Too right he did. His birth name hung over his head like a naked sword.

9

¹
Once, when I was employed by the Algonquin shamans, an enemy afrit came to our tribe by night and abducted a chief's child. When the discovery was made, the afrit was far away; it had disguised itself as a buffalo cow, and spun a Glamour on the child, so it seemed a lowing calf. But afrits have fiery hooves: I followed the singed grass stalks for a hundred miles across the rolling prairie and slew the abductor with a silver spear. The child was returned alive, if a little green from eating so much grass.

²
It tends to be
in
voluntary: i.e. when you hit them with a Detonation.

³
Atlas
: a marid of unusual strength and muscular definition, employed by the Greek magician Phidias to construct the Parthenon, circa 440
B.C.
Adas shirked the work and bodged the foundations. When cracks appeared, Phidias confined Adas below ground, charging him to hold the building up indefinitely. He may still be there, for all I know.

⁴
What made it worse was that it was a copy of
Real War Stories
that did the deed. Mandrake's paper! Another injury to add to my list of his endless crimes.

⁵
Insert achievement of your choice from the following selection: (a) fought the utukku single-handed at the battle of Qadesh, (b) carved the great walls of Uruk from the living ground, (c) destroyed three consecutive masters by use of the Hermetic Quibble, (d) spoke with Solomon, or (e) other.

⁶
Not that I could do anything against him in my current state. At least, not alone. Certain djinn, Faquarl among them, had long espoused collective rebellion against the magicians. I'd always dismissed this as so much hogwash, impossible to achieve, but if Faquarl had come up to me with some boneheaded scheme right then, I'd have joined him with much high-fiving and inane whoops of joy.

⁷
The Pulse had the form of a small green-blue sphere, about the size of a marble, visible only on the seventh plane. It would meander at speed around the locale before returning to its sender. On its return its appearance indicated the level of magic it had discovered: green-blue meant the area was clear; yellow that a trace of magic existed; orange suggested strong enchantments, while red and indigo were my cue to make my excuses and head for the exit.

⁸
Or indeed by me. The battalions of imps I'd foced into my service had a frightful time, while I reclined in my hammock at a safe distance, gazing at the stars.

⁹
Lime!
That's
the name I was searching for. The fish-faced man in the coffee shop had been one of the conspirators in the Lovelace affair five years before. If he was coming out of hiding suddenly, things were definitely hotting up.

10

¹
In contrast to most of my master's shoes, which just positively stank.

²
It must have been piping hot, too. Boy, he was tough.

³
Poor Truklet's essence was meager fare. Ordinarily I'd have turned my nose up at it. But these were desperate times, and I needed all the energy I could get. Besides, the little swine was going to snitch me up.

⁴
It was going to be quite a wait. I should have bought him another coffee.

⁵
Some of the beauties were real people, though on the higher planes I spotted two who weren't all they should have been: one an empty shell, solid at the front, hollow at the back; another a grinning foliot with spiny limbs concealed beneath its Glamour.

⁶
I saw Mandrake's hand behind much of this—it had all his attention to detail, together with the theatricality he had learned off his mate, the playwright Makepeace. A perfect combination of the crude and the subde. The captive “American” demon was particularly good, I thought, doubdess summoned by someone in the government specially for the occasion.

⁷
In such circumstances you have to act quickly before you are simply absorbed by the other. Weak entities have no chance if swallowed by a greater power, and this was going to be a close-run thing.

Alexandria: 125 B.C.

¹
He claimed that any connection between the two must be for a purpose: it was the job of magicians and spirits to work toward a closer understanding of what this purpose was. I regarded this (politely) as utter balderdash. What little interaction there was between our worlds was nothing but a cruel aberration (the enslavement of us djinn), which should be terminated as soon as possible. Our argument had become heated, and earthy vulgarities were avoided only by my concern for rhetorical purity.

²
They included senior priests, nobles of the realm, flophouse drinking partners, professional wresders, a bearded lady, and a midget. The king's son had a jaded appetite and broad tastes; his social circle was wide.

³
i.e. a whirlwind of slaughter. Carried out by me.

⁴
One account, daubed upon the harbor walls and illustrated by a lively sketch, described the king's son being bent bare-bottomed over a library table and spanked with a royal flail by demon or demons unknown.

⁵
The ancient pharaohs had traditionally relied upon their priests for such services, and the Greek dynasty had seen no reason to alter this policy. But whereas in the past talented individuals had made their way to Egypt to ply their trade, allowing the Empire to grow strong on the backs of weeping djinn, that time had long since gone.

⁶
Bit of Egyptian street argot crept in here. Well, I was riled.

14

¹
Or almost so. I sometimes exaggerated the curves.

²
Her outfit wasn't the issue for me right then, but for the completists among you this was her attire: she wore a black tunic and trouser combo, very fetching, if you were that way inclined. Her tunic was open at the throat; she wore no jewelry. Her feet were encased in big white trainers. How old was she now? Around eighteen, at a guess. I never thought to ask her, and now it's too late.