2 Not that my advice was always taken: check out the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
3 Not a good enough description for you? Well, I was only trying to move the story on. Heddleham Hall was a great rectangular pile with stubby north—south wings, plenty of tall, arched windows, two stories, high sloping gables, a surfeit of brick chimneys, ornate tracery that amounted to the Baroque, faux-battlements above the main door, high vaulted ceilings (heavily groined), sundry gargoyles (likewise) and all constructed from a creamy-brown stone that looked attractive in moderation but en masse made everything blur like a big block of melting fudge.
4 So decoratively that I wondered if their feet had been glued in position.
5 Don’t think I’d forgotten Simpkin. On the contrary. I have a long memory and a fertile imagination. I had plans for him.
39
1 How the weavers of Basra must have loathed being commissioned to create such a monstrosity. Gone are the days when, with complex and cruel incantations, they wove djinn into the fabric of their carpets, creating artifacts that carried their masters across the Middle East and were stain-resistant at the same time. Hundreds of us were trapped this way. But now, with the magical power of Baghdad long broken, such craftsmen escape destitution only by weaving tourist tat for rich foreign clients. Such is progress.
2 The only remains of the first person to blow the horn, it being an essential requirement of such items that their first user must surrender himself to the mercy of the entity he summons. With this notable design flaw, summoning horns are pretty rare, as you’d imagine.
3 In a perfect example of most magicians’dreary style, each and every vehicle was big, black, and shiny. Even the smallest looked as if it wanted to be a hearse when it grew up.
4 Inadvisable.
5 I’d thought my blows would keep them unconscious for at least a couple of days. But I’d fluffed it. That’s what comes of hurrying a job.
6 Potent magical devices, invented in medieval Europe. At the wearer’s command, the boots can cover considerable distances in the smallest of strides. Normal (Earth) rules of time and space do not apply. Allegedly, each boot contains a djinni capable of traveling on a hypothetical eighth plane (not that I would know anything about that). It was now easier to understand how the mercenary had managed to evade capture when he first stole the Amulet for Lovelace.
7 They were intertwined. Never mind how.
41
1 In both senses. And I can tell you I’ve been in some sticky places in my time, but for sheer waxy unpleasantness, his earlobe would be hard to beat.
2 The threads of a Stricture act as a seal. They allow no object (or sound) to escape their cocoon. It’s a kind of temporary prison, more usually employed on unfortunate humans than on djinn.
3 One of the worst examples was the Mycenean outpost of Atlantis on the island of Santorini in the Mediterranean. About 3,500 years ago, if memory serves. They wanted to conquer another island (or some predictable objective like that), so their magicians clubbed together and summoned an aggressive entity. They couldn’t control it. I was only a few hundred miles away on the Egyptian delta; I heard the explosion and saw the tsunami waves come roaring across to deluge the African coast. Weeks later, when things had settled down, the pharaoh’s boats sailed to Santorini. The entire central section of the island, with its people and its shining city, had sunk into the sea. And all because they hadn’t bothered with a pentacle.
4 Unless they noticed a faint gray smudge along the line of the rift. This was where light was draining away, being sucked off into the Other Place.
5 It was the old chewing-gum principle in action. Imagine pulling a strip of chewed gum between your fingers: first it holds and stretches, then gets thin somewhere near the middle. Finally a tiny hole forms at the thinnest point, which quickly tears and splits. Here, Lovelace’s summoning had done the pulling. With some help from the thing on the other side.
42
1 They could only see the first three planes clearly, of course, but that was enough to get the outline.
2 The entity trapped inside the Amulet had to be at least as powerful as this newcomer if Lovelace was to withstand its force. Even as a long-suffering djinni, I still had a grudging admiration for the ancient Asian people who had managed to capture and compress it.
3 This being was greater by far than all the various marids, afrits, and djinn that magicians normally summon. A strong magician can summon an afrit on his own; most marids require two. I was calculating a minimum of four for this one.
4 I hadn’t heard of this particular being before. Unsurprising really, since though there are many thousands of us that magicians have cruelly summoned—and thus defined—there are countless more that merge into the Other Place without any need for names. Perhaps this was the first time Ramuthra had been summoned.
5 Ombos: city in Egypt sacred to Seth, Jabor’s old boss. For a century or two, Jabor lurked in a temple there, feeding on the victims brought to him, until a pharaoh from Lower Egypt came and burned the place to the ground.
6 Or air, really. We were about twenty feet up.
7 I hadn’t a clue. Words of Command are magicians’business. That is what they are good at. Djinn can’t speak them. But crabbed old master magicians know an incantation for every eventuality.
43
1 If magicians rely on theatrical effects to overawe the people, they also use much the same techniques to impress and outmaneuver each other.
2 Amanda Cathcart, Simon Lovelace, and six servants had also vanished into the rift or the mouth of Ramuthra, but under the circumstances, the magicians did not consider these significant losses.
3 That is, at exactly the moment Lovelace perished.
4 So, once again, our paths had crossed without a definitive confrontation. A pity really; I was looking forward to giving Faquarl a good hiding. I just hadn’t quite had time to get round to it.
5 As well as no doubt creating the secret mechanism in an adjacent room, which pulled back the carpet from the floor and triggered the bars upon the windows. Certain types of foliot are very gifted at construction jobs; I used to have a band of them under me when working on the walls of Prague. They’re good workers, provided they don’t hear the sound of church bells, in which case they drop tools and crumble into ashes. That was a drag on festival days—I had to employ a bunch of imps with dustpans and brushes to sweep away the pieces.
6 Homunculus: a tiny manikin produced by magic and often trapped in a bottle as a magician’s curio. A few have prophetic powers, although it is important to do exactly the opposite of what they recommend, since homunculi are always malevolent and seek to do their creators harm.
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1 Government offices tend to be full of afrits and search spheres, and I feared they might take exception to my presence.
2 An old Egyptian vow. Be careful when you use it—it invariably comes true.
About the Author
Jonathan Stroud is the author of the New York Times best-selling Bartimaeus books: The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem’s Eye, Ptolemy’s Gate, and The Ring of Solomon, as well as The Amulet of Samarkand: A Bartimaeus Graphic Novel (written with Andrew Donkin). His other books include Heroes of the Valley, The Last Siege, The Leap, and Buried Fire. He lives in England with his family. Visit him online at www.jonathanstroud.com.
Praise for the Bartimaeus Books
* “One of the liveliest and most inventive fantasies of recent years.” – Booklist (starred review)
“The pace never slows in this wisecracking adventure.” – The Horn Book
A 2004 ALA Notable Book
A 2004 Best Books for Young Adults Top Ten Pick
A Bank Street 2004 Best Book of the Year
A Booklist Top 10 Fantasy Book for Youth 2004
Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand
(Series: Bartimaeus # 2)
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