Ptolemy's Gate

  Something about his appearance disconcerted her … It took her a moment to realize she had never seen a magician so informally dressed.

  “I was simply trying to get hold of a volume of Gibbon,” Mr. Button was saying, “which I spied at the bottom of a pile. I was careless and lost my balance. There was such a landslide! You cannot imagine how taxing it is to find anything in this place.”

  Kitty looked around. Across the room innumerable stacks of books rose like stalagmites from the ancient carpet. Many of these columns were as tall as her; others had half capsized against each other, forming precarious arches swathed in dust. Books rested high upon a table and filled the cupboards of a dresser; they receded in unguessed-at numbers through an open door and deep into a side room. A few narrow walkways remained clear, connecting the windows with two sofas squeezed before a fireplace and the exit to the hall.

  “I think I’ve got some idea,” she said. “Anyway, here’s something to add to your problem.” She picked up her package. “From Hyrnek’s.”

  The old man’s eyes sparkled. “Good! Good! That would be my edition of Ptolemy’s Apocrypha, newly bound in calf hide. Karel Hyrnek is a marvel. My dear, you have improved my day twice over! I insist you stay for tea.”

  Within half an hour Kitty had learned three things: that the old gentleman was garrulous and affable, that he possessed a fine supply of tea and spice cake, and that his need for an assistant was greatly pressing.

  “My last helper left me a fortnight ago,” he said, sighing heavily. “Joined up to fight for Britain. I tried to talk him out of it, of course, but his heart was set on going. He believed what he was told—glory, good prospects, promotion, all that. He’ll be dead soon, I expect. Yes, do have that last piece of cake, dear. You need feeding up. It’s all very well for him, going off to die, but I fear my studies have been severely restricted.”

  “What studies are those, sir?” Kitty asked.

  “Researches, dear. History of magic and other things. A fascinating area, sadly neglected. It’s a crying shame that so many libraries are being closed—once again the government is acting out of fear. Well, I’ve saved a good many important books on the subject, and I wish to catalog and index them. It is my ambition to prepare a definitive list of all surviving djinn—existing records are so haphazard and contradictory … but as you have seen, I am not even dextrous enough to research my own collection, thanks to this impediment….” He shook a fist at his nonexistent leg.

  “Erm, how did it happen, sir?” Kitty ventured. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “My leg?” The old gentleman lowered his brows, glanced left and right, and looked up at Kitty. He spoke in a sinister whisper. “Marid.”

  “A marid? But aren’t they the most—?”

  “The most powerful type of commonly summoned demon. Correct.” Mr. Button’s smile was slightly smug. “I’m no slouch, my dear. Not that any of my colleagues”—he spoke the word with vehement distaste—“would admit as such, blast them. I’d like to see Rupert Devereaux or Carl Mortensen do as well.” He sniffed, settled back into his sofa. “The irony of it was that I just wanted to ask it a few questions. Wasn’t going to enslave it at all. Anyway, I’d forgotten to add a Tertiary Fettering; the thing broke out and had my leg off before the automatic Dismissal set in.” He shook his head. “That’s the penalty of curiosity, my dear. Well, I get by somehow. I’ll find another assistant, if the Americans don’t kill our entire population of young males.”

  He took a tetchy bite of his spice cake. Even before he had swallowed, Kitty had made up her mind. “I’ll help you out, sir.”

  The old magician blinked at her. “You?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be your assistant.”

  “I’m sorry, my dear, but I thought you worked for Hyrnek’s.”

  “Oh, I do, sir, but only temporarily. I’m looking for other work. I’m very interested in books and magic, sir. Really I am. I’ve always wanted to learn about it.”

  “Indeed. Do you speak Hebrew?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Or Czech? Or French? Or Arabic?”

  “No, none of those, sir.”

  “Indeed …” For a moment Mr. Button’s face became less amiable, less courteous. He looked at her sidelong, out of halfshut eyes. “And the fact of the matter is, of course, that you are nothing but a commoner’s girl.…”

  Kitty nodded brightly. “Yes, sir. But I’ve always believed that misfortunes of birth shouldn’t stand in the way of talent. I’m energetic and quick, and nimble too.” She gestured around the maze of dusty piles. “I’ll be able to get hold of any book you like, fast as thinking. From the bottom of the farthest stack.” She grinned, and took a sip of tea.

  The old man was rubbing his chin with small, plump fingers, muttering to himself. “A commoner’s child … unvetted … it is highly unorthodox … in fact, the authorities expressly forbid it. But well, after all—why not?” He tittered to himself. “Why shouldn’t I? They’ve seen fit to neglect me all these years. It would be an interesting experiment … and they’d never know, blast them.” He looked at Kitty again, eyes narrowed. “You know I couldn’t pay you anything.”

  “That’s all right, sir. I’m, erm, interested in knowledge for its own sake. I’ll get other work. I could help you out whenever you needed it, part-time.”

  “Very well, then, very well.” Mr. Button extended a small pink hand. “We shall see how it works out. Neither of us has any contractual obligation to the other, you understand, and we are free to terminate the relationship at any time. Mind—if you are lazy or dishonest I shall raise a horla to shrivel you. But goodness, where are my manners? I’ve not yet asked your name.”

  Kitty selected an identity. “Lizzie Temple, sir.”

  “Well, Lizzie, very glad to have met you. I hope we shall get along well.”

  And so they had. From the beginning Kitty made herself indispensable to Mr. Button. To start with, her chores were entirely concerned with navigating her way about his dark and cluttered house, accessing obscure books in distant stacks, and bringing them out to him unscathed. This was easier said than done. She frequently emerged into the lamplight of the magician’s study wheezing and covered in dust, or bruised by a nasty book-fall, only to be told she had the wrong volume, or an incorrect edition, and be sent back to begin again. But Kitty stuck with it. Gradually she became adept at locating the volumes Mr. Button required; she began to recognize the names, the covers, the methods of binding employed by different printers in different cities across the centuries. For his part, the magician was highly satisfied: his helper spared him much inconvenience. So the months passed.

  Kitty took to asking brief questions about some of the works she helped locate. Sometimes Mr. Button gave succinct and breezy answers; more often he suggested she look up the solution herself. When the book was written in English, this Kitty was able to do. She borrowed some of the easier, more general volumes and took them home to her bedsit. Her nocturnal readings prompted further questions to Mr. Button, who directed her to other texts. In this way, directed by caprice and whimsical inclination, Kitty began to learn.

  After a year of such progress Kitty began going on errands for the magician. She procured official passes and visited libraries across the capital; she made occasional forays to herbalists and to suppliers of magical goods. Mr. Button had no imps at his service, and did not practice much actual magic. His interest lay in the cultures of the past, and the history of contact with demons. Occasionally he summoned a minor entity to question it on a particular historical point.

  “But it’s a difficult business with one leg,” he told Kitty. “Summoning’s bad enough with two of ’em, but when you’re trying to draw the circle straight and your stick’s slipping and you keep dropping the chalk, it’s hellish tricky. I don’t risk it often anymore.”

  “I could give you a hand, sir,” Kitty suggested. “You’d have to teach me the basics, of course.”

  “Oh,
that would be impossible. Far too dangerous for us both.”

  Kitty found Mr. Button quite adamant on this, and it took her several months of pestering to win him over. Finally, to gain a moment’s peace, he allowed her to fill the bowls with incense, hold the pin in position while he inscribed the circles’ arcs, and light the pig’s-fat candles. She stood behind his chair when the demon appeared and was questioned. Afterward she helped douse the scorch marks left behind. Her calm demeanor impressed the magician; soon she was actively assisting in all his summonings. As in all things, Kitty learned swiftly. She began to memorize some of the common Latin formulae, although she remained ignorant of the language. Mr. Button, who found active work taxing on his health, and who was also inclined to laziness, began to entrust his assistant with more and more procedures. In his cursory way, he helped fill in some of the gaps in her knowledge, although he refused to instruct her formally.

  “The actual craft,” he would say, “is simplicity itself, but it has infinite variations. We shall always keep to basics: summon the creature, keep it constrained, send it off again. I have neither the time nor the inclination to teach you all the subtleties.”

  “That’s fine, sir,” Kitty said. She had neither the time nor the inclination to learn them. A basic practical knowledge of summoning was all that she required.

  The years passed. The war dragged on. Mr. Button’s books were neatly sorted, cataloged, and stacked by author. His assistant was invaluable to him. Now he could direct her to summon foliots and even minor djinn while he sat in comfort watching. It was a highly satisfactory arrangement.

  And—barring the odd fright—Kitty found it satisfactory too.

  With the kettle boiled at last, Kitty made the tea and returned to the magician, who was sitting as before in the sofa’s depths, studying his book. Mr. Button gave a grunt of thanks as she set the teapot down.

  “Trismegistus notes,” he said, “that succubi tend to recklessness when summoned, and are often impelled to self-destruction. They can be placated by placing citrus fruits among the incense, or by the soft playing of panpipes. Hum, they are sensual beasts evidently.” He scratched his stump absently through his trousers. “Oh, I found something else too, Lizzie. What was that demon you were asking about the other day?”

  “Bartimaeus, sir.”

  “Yes, that’s it. Trismegistus has a reference to him, in one of his tables of Antique Djinn. Somewhere in the appendices, you’ll find.”

  “Oh, really, sir? That’s great. Thank you.”

  “Gives a little of his summoning history. Brief. You won’t find it terribly interesting.”

  “No, sir. I very much doubt it.” She held out a hand. “Do you mind if I take a look?”

  On a hot morning in midsummer, a sacred bull broke free of its compound beside the river; it rampaged up among the fields, biting at flies and swinging its horns at anything that moved. Three men who tried to secure it were badly injured; the bull plunged on among the reeds and broke out onto a path where children played. As they screamed and scattered, it paused as if in doubt. But the sun upon the water and the whiteness of the children’s clothes enraged it. Head down, it charged upon the nearest girl, and would have gored or trampled her to death had not Ptolemy and I been strolling down that way.

  The prince raised a hand. I acted. The bull stopped, midcharge, as if it had collided with a wall. Head reeling, eyes crossed, it capsized into the dust, where it remained until attendants secured it with ropes and led it back into its field.

  Ptolemy waited while his aides calmed the children, then resumed his constitutional. He did not refer to the incident again. Even so, by the time we returned to the palace a flock of rumors had taken flight and was swooping and swirling about his head. By nightfall everyone in the city, from the lowest beggar to the snootiest priest of Ra, had heard or misheard something of it.

  As was my wont, I had wandered late among the evening markets, listening to the rhythms of the city, to the ebb and flow of information carried on its human tide. My master was sitting cross-legged on the roof of his quarters, intermittently scratching at his papyrus strip and gazing out toward the darkened sea. I landed on the ledge in lapwing’s form and fixed him with a beady eye.

  “It’s all over the bazaars,” I said. “You and the bull.”

  He dipped his stylus into the ink. “What matter?”

  “Perhaps no matter; perhaps much. But the people whisper.”

  “What do they whisper?”

  “That you are a sorcerer who consorts with demons.”

  He laughed and completed a neat numeral. “Factually, they are correct.”

  The lapwing drummed its claws upon the stone. “I protest! The term ‘demon’ is fallacious and abusive in the extreme!”1

  Ptolemy put down his stylus. “It is a mistake to be too concerned with names and titles, my dear Rekhyt. Such things are never more than rough approximations, matters of convenience. The people speak thus out of ignorance. It’s when they understand your nature and are still abusive that you will have to worry.” He grinned at me sidelong. “Which is always possible, let’s face it.”

  I raised my wings a little, allowing the sea wind to ruffle through my feathers. “Generally you come off well in the accounts so far. But mark my words, they’ll be saying you let the bull loose soon.”

  He sighed. “In all honesty, reputation—for good or ill—doesn’t much bother me.”

  “It may not bother you,” I said darkly, “but there are those in the palace for whom the issue is life and death.”

  “Only those who drown in the stew of politics,” he said. “And I am nothing to them.”

  “May it be so,” I said darkly. “May it be so. What are you writing now?”

  “Your description of the elemental walls at the margins of the world. So take that scowl off your beak and tell me more of it.”

  Well, I let it go at that. Arguing with Ptolemy never did much good.

  From the beginning he was a master of curious enthusiasms. The accumulation of wealth, wives, and bijou Nile-front properties—those time-honored preoccupations of most Egyptian magicians—did not enthrall him. Knowledge, of a kind, was what he was after, but it was not the sort that turns city walls to dust and tramples on the necks of the defeated foe. It had a more otherworldly cast.

  In our first encounter he threw me with it.

  I was a pillar of whirling sand, a fashionable getup in those days. My voice boomed like rock-falls echoing up a gully. “Name your desire, mortal.”

  “Djinni,” he said, “answer me a question.”

  The sand whirled faster. “I know the secrets of the earth and the mysteries of the air; I know the key to the minds of women.2 What do you wish? Speak.”

  “What is essence?”

  The sand halted in midair. “Eh?”

  “Your substance. What exactly is it? How does it work?”

  “Well, um …”

  “And the Other Place. Tell me of it. Is time there synchronous with ours? What form do its denizens take? Have they a king or leader? Is it a dimension of solid substance, or a whirling inferno, or otherwise? What are the boundaries between your realm and this Earth, and to what degree are they permeable?”

  “Um …”

  In short, Ptolemy was interested in us. Djinn. His slaves. Our inner nature, that is, not the usual surface guff.The most hideous shapes and provocations made him yawn, while my attempts to mock his youth and girlish looks merely elicited hearty chuckles. He would sit in the center of his pentacle, stylus on his knee, listening with rapt attention, ticking me off when I introduced a more than usually obvious fib, and frequently interrupting to clarify some ambiguity. He used no Stipples, no Lances, no other instruments of correction. His summonings rarely lasted more than a few hours. To a hardened djinni like me, who had a fairly accurate idea of the vicious ways of humans, it was all a bit disconcerting.

  I was one of a number of djinn and lesser spirits regularly summoned.
The normal routine never deviated: summons, chat, frenzied scribbling by the magician, dismissal.

  In time, my curiosity was aroused. “Why do you do this?” I asked him curtly. “Why all these questions? All this writing?”

  “I have read most of the manuscripts in the Great Library,” the boy said. “They have much about summoning, chastisement, and other practicalities, but almost nothing about the nature of demons themselves. Your personality, your own desires. It seems to me that this is of the first importance. I intend to write the definitive work on the subject, a book that will be read and admired forever. To do this, I must ask many questions. Does my ambition surprise you?”

  “Yes, in truth. Since when has any magician cared about our sufferings? There’s no reason why you should. It’s not in your interests.”

  “Oh, but it is. If we remain ignorant, and continue to enslave you rather than understand you, trouble will come from it sooner or later. That’s my feeling.”

  “There is no alternative to this slavery. Each summons wraps us in chains.”

  “You are too pessimistic, djinni. Traders tell me of shamans far off among the northern wastes who leave their own bodies to converse with spirits in another world. To my mind, that is a much more courteous proceeding. Perhaps we too should learn this technique.”

  I laughed harshly. “It will never happen. That route is far too perilous for the corn-fed priests of Egypt. Save your energy, boy. Forget your futile questions. Dismiss me and have done.”

  Despite my skepticism, he could not be dissuaded. A year went by; little by little my lies dried up. I began to tell him truth. In turn, he told me something of himself.

  He was the nephew of the king. At birth, twelve years before, he had been a frail and delicate runtling, coughing at the nipple, squealing like a kitten. His discomfort cast a pall over the ceremony of naming: the guests departed hurriedly, the silent officials exchanged somber looks. At midnight his wet nurse summoned a priest of Hathor,3 who pronounced the infant close to death; nevertheless, he completed the necessary rituals and gave the child into the protection of the goddess. The night passed fitfully. Dawn came; the first rays of sun glimmered through the acacia trees and fell upon the infant’s head. His squalling subsided, his body grew calm. Without noise or hesitation, he nuzzled at the breast and drank.