The Amulet of Samarkand

  “Well, if that’s what the P.M. wants…”

  “Dreadful.”

  “So handsome, though …”

  “John—”

  “You are shallow, Devina; mind you, I’d like to know where he got that suit.”

  “John!”

  Mrs. Underwood, her face flushed—perhaps with the heat of the room—materialized in front of Nathaniel. She grabbed his arm. “John, I’ve been calling and calling! Mr. Devereaux is about to make his speech. We need to go to the back; ministers only at the front. Hurry up.”

  They slipped to the side as, with a clopping of heels and a shuffling of gowns, a vigorous herd instinct moved the guests toward a small stage, draped with purple cloth, that had been wheeled in from a side room. Nathaniel and Mrs. Underwood were buffeted uncomfortably in the general rush, and ended up at the back and to the side of the assembled audience, near the doors that opened out onto the river terrace. The number of guests had swelled considerably since they had arrived; Nathaniel estimated there were now several hundred contained within the hall.

  With a youthful spring, Rupert Devereaux bounded up onto the stage.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, ministers—how glad I am to see you here this evening….” He had an attractive voice, deep but lilting, full of casual command. A spontaneous round of cheers and clapping broke out. Mrs. Underwood nearly dropped her champagne glass in her excitement. By her side, Nathaniel applauded enthusiastically.

  “Giving a state address is always a particularly pleasant task for me,” Devereaux continued. “Requiring as it does that I be surrounded by so many wonderful people…” More whoops and cheers erupted, fairly shaking the rafters of the ancient hall. “Thank you. Today I am pleased to be able to report success on all fronts, both at home and abroad. I shall go into more detail in a moment, but I can announce that our armies have fought the Italian rebels to a stalemate near Turin and have bunkered down for the winter. In addition, our alpine battalions have annihilated a Czech expeditionary force”—for a moment, his voice was drowned out in the general applause. “And destroyed a number of their djinn.”

  He paused. “On the home front, concern has been expressed again about another outbreak of petty pilfering in London: a number of magical artifacts have been reported stolen in the last few weeks alone. Now, we all know these are the actions of a handful of traitors, small-time ne’er-do-wells of no consequence. However, if we do not stamp it out, other commoners may follow their lead like the brainless cattle they are. We will therefore take draconian measures to halt this vandalism. All suspected subversives will be detained without trial. I feel sure that with this extra power, Internal Affairs will soon have the ring-leaders safely in custody.”

  The state address continued for many minutes, liberally punctuated with explosions of joy from the assembled crowd. What little substance it contained soon degenerated into a mass of repetitive platitudes about the virtues of the Government and the wickedness of its enemies. After a time, Nathaniel grew bored: he could almost feel his brain turning to jelly as he strove to listen. Finally he gave up trying altogether, and looked about him.

  By half turning, he could see through an open door onto the terrace. The black waters of the Thames stretched beyond the marble balustrade, picked out here and there by reflections of the yellow lights from the south side. The river was at its height, flowing away to the left under Westminster Bridge toward the docklands and the sea.

  Someone else had evidently decided the speech was too tedious to bear and had actually stepped out onto the terrace. Nathaniel could see him standing just beyond the well of light that spilled out from the hall. It was a reckless guest indeed who so blatantly ignored the Prime Minister … more probably it was just a security official.

  Nathaniel’s mind wandered. He imagined the ooze at the bottom of the Thames. Bartimaeus’s tin would be half buried now; lost forever in the rushing darkness.

  Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the man on the terrace make a sudden, decisive movement, as if he had drawn something large out from under his coat or jacket.

  Nathaniel tried to focus, but the figure was shrouded in darkness. Behind him, he could hear the Prime Minister’s mellifluous voice still sounding. “… this is an age of consolidation, my friends.We are the greatest magical elite on earth; nothing is beyond us….”

  The figure stepped forward toward the door.

  Nathaniel’s lenses logged a flash of color within the darkness; something not entirely on one plane….

  “…we must follow the example of our ancestors, and strive …”

  In doubt, Nathaniel tried to speak, but his tongue was furred to the roof of his mouth.

  The figure leaped through into the hall. A youth with wild, dark eyes; he wore black jeans, a black anorak; his face was smeared with some dark oil or paste. In his hands was a bright blue sphere, the size of a large grapefruit. It pulsated with light. Nathaniel could see tiny white objects swirling within it, round and round and round.

  “…for further domination. Our enemies are wilting….”

  The youth raised his arm. The sphere glinted in the lantern light.

  A gasp from within the crowd. Someone noticing—

  “Yes, I say to you again…”

  Nathaniel’s mouth opened in a soundless cry.

  The arm jerked forward; the sphere left the hand.

  “…they are wilting.…”

  The blue sphere arced into the air, over Nathaniel’s head, over the heads of the crowd. To Nathaniel, transfixed by its movement like a mouse mazed by the swaying of a snake, its trajectory seemed to take forever. All sounds ceased in the hall, except for a barely discernible fizzing from the sphere—and from the crowd, the gulped, high-pitched beginnings of a woman’s scream.

  The sphere disappeared over the heads of the crowd. Then came the tinkle of breaking glass.

  And, a split second later, the explosion.

  20

  The shattering of an elemental sphere in an enclosed space is always a frightening and destructive act: the smaller the space, or the bigger the sphere, the worse the consequences are. It was fortunate for Nathaniel and for the majority of the magicians with him that Westminster Hall was extremely large and the tossed sphere relatively small. Even so, the effects were noteworthy.

  As the glass broke, the trapped elementals, which had been compressed within it for many years, loathing each other’s essences and limited conversation, recoiled from each other with savage force. Air, earth, fire, and water: all four kinds exploded from their minute prison at top speed, unleashing chaos in all directions. Many people standing nearby were at one and the same time blown backward, pelted with rocks, lacerated with fire, and deluged with horizontal columns of water. Almost all the company of magicians fell to the ground, scattered like skittles around the epicenter of the explosion. Standing at the edge of the crowd, Nathaniel was shielded from the brunt of the blast, but even so found himself propelled into the air and sent careering back against the door that led onto the river terrace.

  The major magicians escaped largely unscathed. They had safety mechanisms in place, mainly captive djinn charged to materialize the instant any aggressive magic drew near their masters’persons. Protective shields absorbed or deflected the ballooning gobbets of fire, earth, and water, and sent the gusts of wind screeching off toward the rafters. A few of the lesser magicians and their guests were not so fortunate. Some were sent ricocheting between existing defensive barriers, bludgeoned into unconsciousness by the competing elements; others were swept along the flagstones by small tidal waves of steaming water and deposited in sodden humps halfway across the hall.

  The Prime Minister was already gone. Even as the sphere crashed onto the stones three meters from the stage, a dark-green afrit had stepped from the air and swathed him in a Hermetic Mantle, which it promptly carried into the air and out through a skylight in the roof.

  Half dazed by his impact with the door, Nathaniel was strugg
ling to rise when he saw two of the men in gray jackets running toward him at frightening speed. He fell back; they leaped over him, out of the door and onto the terrace. As the second one passed above with a prodigious bound, he let out a peculiarly guttural snarl that raised the hairs on Nathaniel’s neck. He heard scuffling on the river terrace, a scrabbling noise like claws on stone, two distant splashes.

  He raised his head cautiously. The terrace was empty. In the hall the pent-up energy of the released elementals had run its course.Water sluiced along cracks between the flagstones; clods of earth and mud were spattered across the walls and the faces of the guests; a few flames still licked at the edges of the purple drape upon the stage. Many of the magicians were stirring now, levering themselves to their feet, or helping others to rise. A few remained sprawled upon the floor. Servants were running down the staircase and in from adjoining rooms. Slowly people began to find their voices; there was shouting, weeping, a few belated and rather redundant screams.

  Nathaniel got to his feet, ignoring a sharp pain in his shoulder where he had collided with the wall, and set off in anxious search of Mrs. Underwood. His boots slipped in the mess on the floor.

  The fat man in the white suit was leaning on his crutches, talking to Simon Lovelace and the old, wrinkled magician. None of them seemed to have suffered much in the attack, although Lovelace’s forehead was bruised and his glasses slightly cracked. As Nathaniel passed them, they turned together and evidently muttered a joint spell of summoning, for six tall, slender djinn wearing silver cloaks suddenly materialized in front of them. Orders were given. The demons rose into the air and floated at speed onto the terrace and away.

  Mrs. Underwood sat on her backside with a bewildered look on her face. Nathaniel crouched at her side. “Are you all right?”

  Her chin was caked in mud and the hair around one ear was slightly singed; otherwise she seemed unharmed. Nathaniel felt a little teary with relief. “Yes, yes, I think so, John.You don’t need to hug me so. I am glad you are not hurt. Where is Arthur?”

  “I don’t know.” Nathaniel scanned the bedraggled crowd. “Oh, there he is.”

  His master had evidently not had time to mount an effective defense—if his beard, which now resembled the split halves of a lightning-struck tree, was anything to go by. His smart shirt and jacket front had been blown away, leaving only a blackened vest and a slightly smoking tie. His trousers had not escaped either; they now started too late and ended too soon. Mr. Underwood stood near a group of others in a similar predicament, with a look of goggling outrage on his red and soot-stained face.

  “I think he’ll live,” Nathaniel said.

  “Go and help him, John. Go on. I’m fine, really I am. I just need to sit down a litttle.”

  Nathaniel approached his master with some caution. He would not have put it past Underwood to blame him somehow for the disaster.

  “Sir? Are you—”

  His master did not seem to register his presence. A bright light of fury shone beneath his blackened eyebrows. With a magisterial effort, he drew the tattered remnants of his jacket together and joined them at the one remaining button. He flattened down his tie, wincing a little at the heat. Then he strode over toward the nearest straggling group of guests. Unsure what to do, Nathaniel trailed along behind.

  “Who was it? Did you see?” Underwood spoke abruptly.

  A woman whose evening gown hung like damp tissue from her shoulders shook her head. “It happened too fast.” Several of the others nodded.

  “Some object, came from behind…”

  “Through a portal, perhaps, a renegade magician—”

  A white-haired man with a whining voice cut in. “They say someone entered by the terrace….”

  “Surely not—what about security?”

  “Excuse me, sir …”

  “This Resistance, do you think they—?”

  “Lovelace, Schyler, and Pinn have sent tracker demons downriver.”

  “Sir—”

  “The villain must have jumped into the Thames and been swept away.”

  “Sir! I saw him!”

  Underwood turned to Nathaniel at last. “What? What did you say?”

  “I saw him, sir. The boy on the terrace—”

  “By heaven, if you’re lying …”

  “No, sir, it was just before he threw it, sir. He had a blue orb in his hand. He ran in through the doors and chucked it, sir. He was dark-haired, a boy, a little older than me, sir. Thin, with dark clothes on; he had a coat, I think; I didn’t see what happened to him after he threw it. It was an elemental sphere, I’m sure, sir, a small one; so he didn’t need to be a magician to break it.…”

  Nathaniel paused for breath, suddenly conscious that in his enthusiasm he had revealed a far greater knowledge of magic than was appropriate in an apprentice who had yet to summon his first mouler. But neither Underwood nor any of the other magicians seemed to notice this. They took a moment to absorb his words, then turned away from him and began chattering away at breakneck speed, each talking over the others in their eagerness to proclaim their theories.

  “It has to be the Resistance—but are they magicians or not? I’ve always said—”

  “Underwood, Internal Affairs is your department. Have any elemental spheres been registered stolen? If so, what the hell’s being done about it?”

  “I can’t say; confidential information….”

  “Don’t mutter into what’s left of your beard, man. We’ve a right to know!”

  “Ladies, gentlemen …” The voice was soft, but its effect was immediate. The clamor ceased, all heads turned. Simon Lovelace had appeared on the fringes of the group. His hair was back in place. Despite his broken glasses and bruised forehead, he was as elegant as ever. Nathaniel’s mouth felt dry.

  Lovelace looked around the group with his quick, dark eyes. “Don’t bully poor Arthur, please,” he said. For an instant, the smile flicked across the face. “He isn’t responsible for this outrage, poor fellow. The assailant appears to have entered from the river.”

  A black-bearded man indicated Nathaniel. “That’s what the boy said.”

  The dark eyes fixed on Nathaniel and widened slightly with recognition. “Young Underwood.You saw him, did you?”

  Nathaniel nodded dumbly.

  “So. Sharp as ever, I see. Does he have a name yet, Underwood?”

  “Erm, yes—John Mandrake. I’ve filed it officially.”

  “Well, John.” The dark eyes fastened upon him. “You’re to be congratulated; no one else I’ve spoken to so far got much of a look at him. The police may want a statement from you in due course.”

  Nathaniel prised his tongue free. “Yes, sir.”

  Lovelace turned back to the others. “The assailant left a boat below the terrace, then climbed up the river wall and cut the throat of the guard. There’s no body, but a fair bit of blood, so he presumably lowered the corpse into the Thames. He too seems to have jumped into the water after the attack and allowed himself to be swept away. He may have drowned.”

  The black-bearded man tutted. “It’s unheard of! What was Duvall thinking? The police should have prevented this.”

  Lovelace held up a hand. “I quite agree. However, two officers are speedily on the trail; they may find something, though water won’t help the scent. I’ve sent djinn out along the banks too. I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything more at this point. We must all be grateful that the Prime Minister is safe and that no one important was killed. Might I humbly suggest that you all head home to recuperate—and perhaps treat yourselves to a change of clothes? More information will no doubt come your way at a later time. Now, if you’ll forgive me…”

  With a smile he detached himself and walked away to another knot of guests. The group looked after him, open-mouthed.

  “Of all the arrogant—” The black-bearded magician stopped himself with a snort. “You wouldn’t think he was only Deputy Minister for Trade. He’s going to find an afrit waiting for
him one of these days…. Well, I’m not hanging around, even if you lot are.” He stomped away; one by one, the others followed suit. Mr. Underwood silently collected his wife, who was busily comparing bruises with a couple from the Foreign Office, and with Nathaniel trotting along behind, left the breathless confusion of Westminster Hall.

  “All I can hope,” his master said, “is that this will encourage them to give me more funds. If they don’t, what can they expect? With a measly department of six magicians! I’m not a miracle worker!”

  For the first half of the journey, the car had been heavy with silence and the smell of singed beard. As they left central London, however, Underwood suddenly became talkative. Something seemed to be preying on his mind.

  “It’s not your fault, dear,” Mrs. Underwood said, soothingly.

  “No, but they’ll blame me! You heard them in there, boy—accusing me, because of all the thefts!”

  Nathaniel ventured a rare question. “What thefts, sir?”

  Underwood slapped the steering wheel with frustration. “The ones carried out by the so-called Resistance, of course! Magical objects thieved from careless magicians all over London. Objects like the elemental sphere—a few of them were taken back in January from a warehouse, if I remember rightly. In the last couple of years, crimes like this have become more and more common, and I’m meant to tackle it—with just six other magicians in Internal Affairs!”

  Nathaniel was emboldened; he leaned forward on the backseat. “Sorry, sir, but who are the Resistance?”

  Underwood turned a corner too fast, narrowly avoiding an old lady and startling her into the gutter by slamming his fist down on the horn. “A bunch of traitors who don’t like us being in control,” he snarled. “As if we hadn’t given this country all its wealth and greatness. No one knows who they are, but they certainly aren’t numerous. A handful of commoners drumming up support in meeting houses; a few halfwit firebrands who resent magic and what it does for ’em.”

  “They’re not magicians, then, sir?”

  “Of course not, you fool, that’s the point! They’re common as muck! They hate us and everything magical, and want to bring the Government down! As if that were possible.” He accelerated through a red light, waving his arm impatiently at the pedestrians diving back to the safety of the pavement.