“Secretions aside,” Rufus Lime inteqected sourly, “hadn’t you better get on with it? Some of those candles are burning low.”
Makepeace glared at him, but returned his hanky to his pocket. “Very well. My friends, following the success of Hopkins here in subduing a demon of moderate power”—Hopkins gave a little smile, which might have meant anything—“I have decided to apply my more considerable ability to the taming of a greater entity.” He paused. “This very evening Hopkins located in the London Library a volume listing the names of spirits from ancient Persia. I have decided to make use of a name he found there. My friends, here and now, before your very eyes, I shall summon into myself the greater demon known as … Nouda!”
Nathaniel uttered a small exclamation. Nouda? The man was mad. “Makepeace,” he said. “Surely you’re joking. This procedure is risky enough without trying something so powerful.”
The playwright pursed his lips fretfully. “I’m not joking, John, just ambitious. Mr. Hopkins has assured me that control is simplicity itself—and I am very strong-willed. I hope you don’t mean to imply that I’m not up to this.”
“Oh no,” Nathaniel said hastily. “Not at all.” He leaned close to Kitty. “The man’s a fool,” he whispered. “Nouda is a terrible entity; one of the most fearsome recorded. It left Persepolis in ruins.…”
Kitty leaned over, whispered back. “I know. Destroyed Darius’s own army.”
“Yes.” Nathaniel nodded. Then he blinked. “What? How did you know?”
“John!” Makepeace’s voice was tetchy. “Enough canoodling! I need silence now. Hopkins—if you see anything go amiss, reverse the process; use Asprey’s Overrule. Right. Quiet, all.”
Quentin Makepeace closed his eyes, bent his head toward his chest. He flourished his arms and flexed his fingers. He breathed deeply. Then he lifted his chin, opened his eyes, and began to declaim the incantation in a loud, clear voice. Nathaniel listened hard: as before, it was a simple enough Latin summons, but the strength of the oncoming spirit meant that it had to be reinforced with multiple word-locks and tortuous subclauses doubling back on themselves to shore up the binding. He had to admit that Makepeace spoke it well. Minutes passed—his larynx never faltered, he ignored the perspiration running down his face. There was a hush in the chamber: Nathaniel, Kitty, the conspirators—all watched, transfixed. Most avid of all was Mr. Hopkins—he was leaning forward with his mouth open; he had a slightly hungry look.
On the seventh minute the room grew cold. Not slowly, but in an instant, as if a switch had suddenly been pressed. Everyone began to shiver. On the eighth minute came the sweetest of fragrances, that of meadow flax and celandine. On the ninth minute Nathaniel detected something in the pentacle with Makepeace. It was there on the third plane—something hazy, fluctuating, sucking in the light—a dark, horned mass, now tall, now broad, with arms that spread out and pressed against the pentacle. Nathaniel looked down; he thought he saw the inlaid boundaries of the circle bulge out a little in the floor. The features of the newcomer could not be seen. It towered over Makepeace, who spoke on, quite oblivious to his new companion.
Makepeace came to the climax of his command, the moment when he bound the demon inside himself. With a cry, he spoke the final words: the dark figure vanished, like blinking.
Makepeace stopped. He was quite still. His eyes looked out beyond his audience, as if at something far away.
Everyone watched, frozen to the spot. Makepeace did nothing; his face was blank.
“Hopkins,” Rufus Lime said hoarsely. “Dismiss it … Quick!”
With a great cry, Makepeace sprang into life. It was quite without warning. Nathaniel cried out, everyone jumped; even the mercenary stepped back.
“Success!” Makepeace leaped from the circle. He clapped his hands, capered, hopped, skipped, and twirled. “Success! Such triumph! I cannot begin to tell you …”
The conspirators inched closer. Jenkins peered out above his glasses. “Quentin … is it true? How does it feel … ?”
“Yes! Nouda is here! I feel it within! Ah—for a moment or two, my friends, there was a struggle—I admit it. The effect was disconcerting. But I commanded it most strictly, with all my power. And I felt that demon shrink back and obey. It is subservient within me. It knows its master! What is it like? Hard to describe.… It is not painful exactly.… I sense it like a hard, hot coal within my head. But when it obeyed—I felt such a surge of energy! Oh, it cannot be imagined!”
With this, the conspirators erupted into raucous celebration; they squealed and jumped for joy “The demon’s power, Quentin!” Lime shouted. “Use it!”
“Not yet, my friends.” Makepeace held up his hands for calm; the room fell silent. “I could destroy this room,” he said, “turn all of it to powder if I chose. But there shall be time enough for fun once you have followed me. Go to your pentacles! Summon your demons! Then we shall set about our destiny! We shall seize the Staff of Gladstone and take a stroll through London. I believe some commoners are busy demonstrating. Our first task will be to put them in their place.”
Like eager children, the conspirators scampered to their circles. Nathaniel grasped Kitty by the arm, drew her to one side. “In a moment,” he hissed, “I will be called upon to join this madness. I will pretend to do so. Do not be alarmed. At the last minute I shall use the pentacle to summon a troupe of the strongest djinn. With luck they will destroy Makepeace and these other fools. At the very least we shall have the opportunity to escape!” He paused triumphantly. “You don’t seem overly impressed.”
Kitty’s eyes were tired, red-rimmed. Had she been crying? He hadn’t noticed. She shrugged. “I hope you’re right.”
Nathaniel swallowed his irritation; in truth, he was nervous too. “You’ll see.”
Across the hall the summonings began: Rufus Lime, eyes tight shut, fish-mouth open, intoning his words in a muttered croak; Clive Jenkins, glasses removed from his little nose and held anxiously between his hands as he spoke in a rapid monotone. The others, whose names Nathaniel could not remember, stood in solitary postures, hunched, erect, shaking, stammering out their incantations, making the necessary gestures. Hopkins and Makepeace walked approvingly among them.
“John!” That was Makepeace; with a trill of delight, he bounded over. “Ah! Such energy! I could leap to the stars!” His face went serious. “Not holding back on us, are you, boy? Why aren’t you in a circle?”
Nathaniel raised his hands. “Perhaps if I was untied?”
“Ah, yes. How discourteous of me. There!” A snap of the fingers; the cords burst into lilac flames. Nathaniel shook himself free. “There is an empty pentacle in that corner, John,” Makepeace said. “What demon have you chosen for yourself?”
Nathaniel chose two at random. “I was debating between two djinn from Ethiopian texts: Zosa and Karloum.”
“An interesting, if modest, choice. I suggest Karloum. Well, off you go.”
Nathaniel nodded. He took a quick sidelong glance at Kitty, who was watching him intently, then strode toward the nearest vacant pentacle. He hadn’t much time: through the corner of his eye he saw strange, contorted shadows flittering above Jenkins and Lime. Heaven knew what the idiots had summoned, but with luck it would take a while for them to control their internal slaves. Before that happened, Cormocodran and Hodge would make short work of them.
He stepped inside his circle, cleared his throat and looked around. Makepeace was watching him intently. Doubtless he was suspicious. Nathaniel grinned bleakly to himself; well, those suspicions were about to be confirmed in the most dramatic possible way.
A final moment of preparation—he would need to work swiftly when his djinn arrived, give precise and urgent orders—then Nathaniel acted. He made an ornate gesture, cried out the names of his five strong demons and pointed at the neighboring circle. He steeled himself for the explosions, the smoke and hellfire, the sudden appearance of straining, hideous forms.
With a miserable squelch,
something small and insubstantial struck the center of the circle, spattering outward like a fruit dropped from on high. It had no discernible shape, but gave off a strong smell of fish.
A bulge rose in its center. A small voice sounded. “Saved!” The bulge rotated, appeared to notice Mr. Hopkins. “Oh.”
Nathaniel gazed at it wordlessly.
Quentin Makepeace had seen it also. He stepped close, inspected it. “How peculiar! It seems to be some kind of uncooked meal. With added sentience. What do you think, Hopkins?”
Mr. Hopkins approached; his eyes glittered as they glanced at Nathaniel. “Nothing so innocent, I am afraid, sir. It is the remains of a pernicious djinni, which earlier this evening attempted my capture. Several other demons, who accompanied him, I have already slain. I fear that Master Mandrake was hoping to catch us unawares.”
“Is that so?” Quentin Makepeace straightened sadly. “Oh dear. That rather changes things. I always had such high hopes for you, John. I really thought we might work well together. Still, never mind—I have Hopkins and my five loyal friends to count on.” He glanced round at the conspirators who, having finished their summonings, stood quietly in their circles. “That is enough. Our first pleasure will be to watch you and your creature die—Ulp!” He put his hand to his mouth. “Excuse me. I fear I—hic!—have indigestion. Now then—” Another gulp, a gasp; his eyes bulged. “This is most curious. I—” His tongue protruded. His limbs shook, his knees sagged; he seemed about to fall.
Nathaniel stepped back in shock. Makepeace’s body gave a sudden wriggle; it writhed, somewhat like a snake, as if all his bones were newly fluid. Then it steadied, stiffened. The playwright seemed to rally. For the briefest of instants a panicked look erupted in the eyes; the tongue managed to gabble out the words: “It is …”
A furious writhing drowned out the rest. Makepeace moved like a puppet on twisted strings.
The head jerked up. The eyes were staring, lifeless.
And the mouth laughed.
Standing all around him in their circles, Lime, Jenkins, and the rest of the conspirators joined in the laughter. Their bodies seemed to ape their leader’s; they twitched and wriggled too.
Nathaniel stood transfixed as the noise erupted around him. It was not kind or pleasant laughter, nor was it particularly malicious, greedy, triumphant, or cruel. It would have been less distressing if it had been. Instead the sound was hollow, discordant and utterly alien. It contained no recognizable human emotion.
In fact, it wasn’t human at all.
24
It was the soup that saved me. Fish soup, it was, thick and creamy, filling the space of the silver tureen. At first, when I was pressed hard up against the silver walls, my essence dissolved rapidly away. But unexpectedly, things got better. Almost as soon as Faquarl left me, I lapsed into silver-induced unconsciousness, and that meant my crow guise fell apart. I subsided into an oily, fluid mass, not unlike dishwater, which floated within the soup, insulated from the silver by the liquid all around. I wouldn’t say I was well off exactly, but my essence was now disintegrating a good deal slower than Faquarl would have expected.
Flickers of awareness came and went. One moment I thought I was far away in Egypt, talking with Ptolemy for the last time; the next I was watching fragments of cod and halibut drift by. Occasionally Faquarl’s declaration echoed in my mind: From tonight, we take revenge. Sounded ominous for somebody. Well, they were welcome to it. I was tired. I’d had enough. I was glad to be somewhere quiet, dying on my own.
And then, all of a sudden, the soup was gone; the freezing taint of silver likewise. I was freed from the tureen.
Good news, unquestionably. Trouble was, I was no longer alone.
My master—yes, that was predictable, I could just about cope with him. But then, when I rotated gloopily to check out the scene, who did I see next? Let’s just say that when your archenemy’s trapped you in a place of certain death, and you’ve survived heroically against all the odds, the last thing you want to see, when you escape at last, is that same archenemy glaring down at you with an expression of annoyed distaste.1 Not only that—you’re weak, look like a jellyfish, and smell of clam chowder. In such circumstances the wind kind of goes out of your sense of triumph.
But that wasn’t the half of it. As well as Mandrake and Faquarl, there were others in that room, and I arrived just in time to see exactly what they were.
Five gates to the Other Place were open and my essence trembled with the onrush of activity. Humans stood in five pentacles. On the first plane they seemed to stand alone. On the second and third, they were accompanied by billowing shadows of uncertain proportions; on the higher planes these shadows resolved themselves into hideous writhing masses, in which numerous tentacles, limbs, eyes, spines, and prongs kept uncomfortable proximity. As I watched, each mass compressed itself down and merged inside the waiting human. Soon even the most awkward leg or feeler was withdrawn from sight.
For the first few seconds the humans seemed to be in charge. They blinked, stirred, scratched their heads and, in the case of my old chum Jenkins, placed his glasses carefully on his nose. Only the fact that their auras now glowed with extraordinary strength indicated that anything odd had happened. I wasn’t fooled, of course. From what I’d seen of Faquarl and his treatment of Mr. Hopkins, I didn’t think the humans would be on top for long.
And sure enough, they weren’t.
A vibration in the planes behind me: I swiveled like an amoeba on a turntable and saw another human, a short, round man wearing an excessively frilly shirt. And this is when I got really worried: his aura was huge—it radiated out like a sunburst, vibrating with otherworldly colors and a malevolent vitality. I didn’t need to be told that something had already taken residence in him.
He spoke; I wasn’t listening. All of a sudden, his aura pulsed, just once, as if a door to a furnace deep inside him had been opened wide. And the short, round man lost his mind.
For all Faquarl’s protestations to the contrary, the notion of bonding with a human is a pretty obnoxious one. For one thing you don’t know where it’s been. For another, mixing your essence with horrid heavy earthy flesh is an aesthetic no-no; it makes you queasy just thinking about it. And then there’s the small matter of control, of learning how to operate the human body. Faquarl had had some practice at this with Hopkins. But the newcomers had not.
As one, the six magicians—the short, round man and the others in the circles—laughed, twitched, shook, stumbled, jerked their arms every which way, and fell over.
I looked up at Faquarl. “Oooh, scary. The revenge of the djinn begins.”
He scowled, bent to assist his leader and was distracted by a movement near the door. It was another old friend—the mercenary. His face, which normally showed all the weakness and soft emotion of a granite slab, was wide-eyed with shock. Perhaps it was the sight of the magicians lying on their backs like upturned wood lice, arms and legs wriggling helplessly. Perhaps it was the realization that he was unlikely to get a fee. Whichever it was, he decided to depart. He moved to the door—
Faquarl sprang through the air; he landed by the mercenary A single shrug of the spindly arms—the mercenary was flung across the room to land heavily against a statue. He struggled to his feet and drew a knife; Faquarl was on him in a flash. There was a blur of movement, the sound of multiple blows being struck; it sounded like a brawl in a saucepan factory. The scimitar spun across the floor. The mercenary slumped against the flagstones, gasping for breath. Faquarl straightened, adjusting Mr. Hopkins’s tie, and strode back to the center of the room.
I’d watched with grudging approval. “Nice one. I’ve been trying to do that for years.”
Faquarl shrugged. “The secret is to avoid magic, Bartimaeus. The fellow’s resilience is excessive; it almost seems to feed off our energies. It helps to be encased in a mortal body. And don’t think you’re going anywhere either. I’ll tend to you shortly.” He trotted after the body of the short,
round man, which was now rolling across the floor, uttering odd barks and cries.
Maybe it was a vanity thing, but I was a bit tired of remaining as a pool of glop. With a tremendous effort, I drew myself up into a pyramid of slime. Was that any better? No. But I was too far gone to try anything sophisticated. The slime looked about for Mandrake. If things were bad for me, they weren’t too sunny for him either.
To my astonishment I saw him standing at a table with Kitty Jones.2
Now that took me by surprise. I couldn’t fit her into the equation at all. What was more, Mandrake was busily trying to untie some cords binding her hands. Weird! If anything, this was odder than the Faquarl/Hopkins combo thing. Neither looked in very good nick, but they were talking avidly, peering toward the door. The mercenary’s misadventure had not been lost upon them—they made no hasty move.
Slowly, as slime will, I set off across the floor toward them. But I hadn’t gone far when the whole floor shook, flagstones cracked, and statues toppled against the wall. It was as if an earthquake had struck, or a mother roc had landed overhead. In fact, the culprit was the short, round man, who still lay upon the ground. He had managed to roll onto his side, but was now attempting to rise using his legs alone—an effort that made him rotate slowly in a clockwise direction. Whatever was inside him was growing frustrated; a hand slapped petulantly against the stones—with every slap, it shook the room.
Faquarl had hastened over and was seeking to haul him upright. “Press the feet flat against the ground, Lord Nouda. There! Let me take your weight.That’s it. Steady yourself. Now you can rise. Success! We are vertical!”
Nouda …The pyramid of slime tilted its apex. Had it heard correctly? Surely not. Surely not even the stupidest magician would have been so vain, so foolhardy, so plain ignorant as to invite a being like Nouda within them. Surely everyone knew his track record.3
It seemed not. Faquarl was ushering the twitching body forward like an invalid, encouraging it with soothing words. “Just a little farther, Lord Nouda. A chair awaits. Try moving the feet instead of the hands. That’s it—you are doing splendidly.”