Asmira roused herself, looked up. The column was certainly peculiar, its strata bulbous and contorted, with several stunted protrusions at the summit. As she looked, the sun’s last rays, running like scarlet water down its flanks, almost seemed to give it form …
‘That, they say, is the afrit Azul,’ the merchant said. ‘A slave of Solomon in the early years of his reign. He tried to destroy the magic Ring, or so the story goes, and such was the result. Turned to stone and never moved again!’ He turned aside and spat into the fire. ‘Good thing too, I say. Look at the size of him. Must be twenty-five feet tall.’
Asmira stared at the lowering pillar, conscious of a sudden numbness in her bones. She shivered; the night seemed newly chill. The rock rose up so high. It seemed almost to merge into the stars. And what was that? Could she see the traces of a vast and brutal face amongst the shadows near the top …?
No. The wind and sand had done their work. The undulating surface no longer held expression.
Drawing her cloak around her, she shuffled closer to the fire, ignoring further questions from the merchant at her side. Her stomach had turned to water, her teeth felt loose in her mouth. The fierce exultation in her heart had gone, snuffed out as if by a giant hand. All at once she truly understood the implications of what she was about to do. The scale of the transformed demon, its solid, blank immensity, brought home to her what all the fireside tales had not: the sheer contemptuous power of the man who wore the Ring.
On the morning of the tenth day, the camel train reached a place where the sandstone hills pressed close upon the road. The upper reaches of the cliffs were bathed in sun; down in the gorge, where the camels walked, the light was grey and cool.
Asmira had slept badly. The wave of fear that had broken over her the night before had drained away, leaving her dull and sluggish and irritated with herself. Her mother would not have reacted so to a simple lump of stone, nor would the queen expect it of her champion now. She sat hunched upon the camel, weighed down with gloomy thoughts.
The gorge grew tight about the road; on the right-hand side the slope had collapsed into a mess of stones. Listlessly surveying the desolation, Asmira caught sight of something small and brown perched amongst the boulders. It was a desert fox, with large, black-tufted ears and gleaming eyes, sitting on a rock, watching the camel train go by.
Her camel slowed to negotiate the rough ground, and for a moment Asmira came level with the fox. She was right alongside it, just a few feet away. If she had wished, she could almost have leaned out from her couch and touched it. The fox showed no fear. Its round black eyes met hers.
Then the camel moved on, and the fox was left behind.
Asmira sat very still, feeling the slow swaying of the camel under her, listening to its tireless pad, pad, pad amid the silence of the gorge. Then, with a gasp, she took her whip from its holster in the saddle and, wrenching on the reins, forced her camel onwards at a run. Her sluggishness was gone; her eyes were bright. Her hand sought the dagger hilt beneath her cloak.
The master was four camels further up the gorge, and Asmira drew level only with difficulty.
‘Speed up! We need to speed up!’
The master stared. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘Your imps – set them loose! Djinn too, if you have them – there’s something here.’
He hesitated only a moment, then turned to shout an order. As he did so, a ball of blue-black flame hit his camel from the left-hand side. There was an explosion of dark blue fire; the master and his camel were blown horizontally across the road and dashed upon the rocks. Asmira screamed, throwing up her hands against the buffet of burning air. Her camel reared in terror; she fell back, almost plunging from the saddle, then swung out sideways, clinging to the reins. Her outstretched hand caught hold of a pole upon her canopy; she hung to it, half dangling above the ground. The camel plunged and bucked. Craning her neck desperately from where she hung, Asmira glimpsed dark forms wheeling in the sky. Bolts of fire rained down upon the road.
Other explosions sounded; and screams and panicked shouts. Buffets and echoes rebounded through the gorge, seeming to come from every side. Smoke blocked her vision. Her camel sought to turn, but another explosion behind made it lurch back towards the cliff. Pulling savagely on the reins with one hand, wrenching at the pole with the other, Asmira drew herself upright, narrowly escaping being crushed against the stones. Grasping the pommel of her saddle, she brought the silver dagger from her belt.
Somewhere amid the smoke, black shapes thudded down to land upon the road; men and animals screamed in pain and terror. Asmira clung to her maddened camel, staring all around. Wresting control of it at last, she backed away through swirling darkness to press close against the shelter of the overhanging walls. Here she crouched, while bolts of fire went ripping past, and the shouts of the dying sounded, removing two more daggers from her bag. She pulled the silver necklace from her robes, let it hang loose upon her breast.
Movement in the smoke, a silhouette: something inhuman questing near. Asmira took swift aim and loosed a dagger. There was a gargling cry, a brief, dull flash. The shape was gone.
She held another weapon ready. Time passed; the smoke began to lift.
A second shape came bounding up the road. As it drew level, it paused; the head had turned. Asmira, stiffening, raised her knife in readiness; her blood beat against her ears.
The cloud parted. A creature with a reptile’s head burst forth, a bloodied scimitar whirling in its three-clawed hand.
Asmira clutched her necklace and spoke a Ward of force. Yellow discs of light shot down and hit the creature, which flinched back, but did not retreat. It looked up at her, grinning, and slowly shook its head. Then it bent its legs and sprang at her, mouth gaping pinkly in delight.
14
Peace and quiet. That’s one thing to be said for deserts. They give you a chance to get away from the everyday pressures of life. And when those ‘everyday pressures’ consist of seven furious djinn and one apoplectic master magician, a few hundred thousand square miles of sand, rock, wind and desolation is exactly what you need.
Three days had passed since my uncomfortable encounter with Solomon back at Jerusalem – time enough, one might reasonably feel, for water to run under bridges, tempers to become soothed and bad moods to ease gently into calm introspection.
But had they? Not a hope.
Khaba was livid, of course – that was to be expected. The king had belittled and humiliated him in front of his peers, and his cushy existence at the palace had been replaced, for the moment, with bandit-hunting on the open road. Though it’s true he wasn’t exactly slumming it – he travelled by flying carpet, complete with cushions, grapes and a chained foliot holding a parasol, and at night slept in a black silk tent complete with couch and incense bath – you could see he felt it deeply, and blamed me.1
The curious and disconcerting thing, though, was that beyond a few initial scourings back on the building site, Khaba hadn’t actually punished me much for my misdemeanour. This was so out of character that I found myself getting jumpy; I kept expecting his wrath to fall upon me when I least expected it, and as a result expected it all the time. I watched him and his shadow obsessively, but nothing nasty came my way.
Meanwhile my fellow djinn were cross with me as well, indignant that the safe and predictable routines of life at the temple had been replaced with combing the arid badlands in search of dangerous djinn to fight. I tried to argue that outlaw-killing was far better suited to our ferocious talents than building work, but was by turns shouted down, insulted and plain ignored. Xoxen, Tivoc and Beyzer refused to speak to me at all, and the others were decidedly snippy. Only Faquarl, who had loathed the quarry, showed any disposition to sympathy. He contributed a few acerbic comments, but otherwise left me alone.
The first two days were uneventful. Each morning Khaba emerged from his tent, berated us soundly for our failings, uttered random threats and packed us off
in all directions. Each evening, having crisscrossed the skies from dawn to dusk, we returned empty-handed to face his censure. The desert was large and our enemy elusive. The brigands, whoever they were, lay low.
On the afternoon of the third day I was the phoenix again, flying high above the southern trade routes. The town of Hebron had passed beneath, and Arad. Not far to the east I caught the mirror flash of the great Salt Sea, where bones of ancient cities lay bleaching by the shore. Ahead rose the mountains of Edom, gateway to yet vaster wastes, and at their feet a low, dark purpled mass: the waterless desert of Zin.
The spice road here was a thin brown vein in the dirt, spooled between the lifeless ridges. If I followed it long enough, I would arrive at last at the Red Sea, and the trading depots where caravans converged from Egypt, Sheba, even distant Nubia and Punt. But my business lay close by.
As I circled, my dark eye flashing as it turned against the sun, I caught an answering gleam below. It came from a track just off the main highway, a path winding towards a village in the hills. The gleam was definite, and warranted investigation.
Down I dropped, enjoying the wind in my plumage and the simple freedom of the air. All in all, things weren’t so bad. I was alive, I was aloft, I was away from that wretched building site. True, I had some ‘monsters’ to track down and slay, but when you’re a swashbuckling djinni of more than average talent who’s survived the battles of Qadesh and Megiddo, and who (more to the point), has been cooped up in Jerusalem with some of the most irritating entities ever to squeeze inside a pentacle, a bit of a scrap is precisely what you need.
I was too late for the scrap here, though. It had been and gone.
Even while I was in the air, I could see the devastation on the little track. The ground was charred and blistered, and stained with something dark. Fragments of cloth and wood had been strewn over a wide area. I smelled old horror: spent magic, sundered flesh.
The gleam I’d seen turned out to come from a broken sword-blade lying on a rock. It wasn’t alone. Parts of its owner lay nearby.
As I landed, I turned into the handsome young Sumerian, dark-eyed and watchful. I stood and looked around. The remains of several carts were clearly visible, their wood split and blackened, their wheels smashed. The rocks of the cliffs on either side had sad, limp things scattered on them. I didn’t look closely. I knew what they were.
One of the victims was lying in the centre of the road, a splintered shield beside him. His arms and legs were out-flung casually, almost as if he slept. I say almost advisedly, since he lacked a head. He, like his colleagues, had been robbed as well as murdered – the contents of the carts were gone. This was bandit work for sure, and it was recent. I guessed I was one day behind them at the most. They might still be near.
I walked a little way up the winding track, listening to the wind whispering in the rocks, studying the ground. In general the dirt was too hard and compacted to reveal footprints, but in one place, where something – perhaps a water-skin – had been punctured and the dirt made briefly wet, I found the deep impression of a triangular, three-clawed foot. I bent low and studied it a while, then rose and turned to go back the way I’d come.
And froze.
Below me, the track curled off to the right, following a steady gradient down. Twenty or thirty yards away, just beyond the area where the attack had happened, it disappeared from view behind the valley wall. The cliffs on the left-hand side were abrupt and sheer, and brightly lit from above by the noonday sun. Every detail upon them – each rock, each fissure, the slow pink twist of the tangled strata – was picked out for me in perfect detail.
As was Khaba’s shadow.
The outline of his bald head was thrown in sidelong silhouette upon the sunlit cliff. I saw the smooth dome-shape, his long, beaked nose, the jut of his bony chin; his bulky shoulders and upper arms were visible too, but his lower half was lost in the tumbled rocks of the valley floor. It was as if the magician himself stood just out of sight round the bend in the road, facing uphill towards me.
I stared at the apparition. The head upon the rocks stayed perfectly still.
I took a slow step back, and immediately the head began to flow forwards around the curve of the cliff, rippling over its contours like dark water. As it came, it grew; and now its long thin arms rose into sight, with its long thin shadow-fingers stretching out towards me.
My backward steps were somewhat faster now; I stumbled on the uneven ground.
Still the shadow grew and stretched – a long, black arch with clutching hands, its face elongated, its chin and nose protruding to grotesque proportions, its great mouth opening wide, wide, wide …
I gathered myself, stood fast; I let flame ignite between my fingers.
There was a flapping noise in the air above.
The shadow started; the questing fingers drew back in doubt. At incredible speed it fled back across the cliffs, shrinking, reducing, returning to its original position. Now it shrank still further, and was gone.
Someone coughed behind me. Spinning round, a Detonation flaring at my fingertips, I saw a broad, plump Nubian lounging on a rock, studiously brushing flight-ice off his arms with taloned fingers while regarding me with detached amusement. He wore wings in the traditional style of Mesopotamian djinn – feathered, but split into four like those of beetles.
‘Bit jumpy, Bartimaeus?’ Faquarl said.
I gazed at him dumbly. Wheeling round again, I stared back along the road. The cliffs were quiet and still – silent planes of light and shadow. None of the shadows had familiar form. None of the shadows moved.
The blue fire coursing between my fingers fizzled and went out. I scratched my head uncertainly.
‘Looks as if you found something interesting,’ Faquarl said.
Still I didn’t say anything. The Nubian walked past me, surveying the devastation on the road with a few sweeps of his practised eyes. ‘Not like you to get put off by a little bit of blood and sand,’ he remarked. ‘It’s not pretty, admittedly, but it’s not exactly Qadesh, is it?2 We’ve seen worse.’
I was still shaken, looking all around. Except for a few scraps of fabric flapping pathetically among the rocks, nothing stirred anywhere at all.
‘Doesn’t look like anyone survived …’ Faquarl came to the mutilated corpse in the centre of the road and nudged it with a sandal. He chuckled. ‘Now then, Bartimaeus, what have you been doing to this poor fellow?’
I came to life then. ‘That was how I found him! What are you suggesting?’
‘It’s not for me to judge your little habits, Bartimaeus,’ Faquarl said. He stepped close and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Calm down, I’m only joking. I know you wouldn’t devour a dead man’s head.’
I nodded tersely. ‘Thank you. Too right.’
‘You prefer a juicy buttock, as I remember.’
‘Quite. Much more nutritious.’
‘Anyhow,’ Faquarl went on, ‘the wounds are clearly old. Been lying there the best part of twenty-four hours, if I’m any judge of dead men.’3
‘The magic’s cold too,’ I said, surveying the scattered debris. ‘Detonations, mainly – fairly high-powered ones, though there were a few Convulsions here and there. Nothing too sophisticated, but very brutal.’
‘Utukku, you think?’
‘I’d say so. I found a footprint: bulky, but not big enough to be an afrit.’
‘Well, we’ve got a scent at last, Bartimaeus! I’d suggest going back to tell our master right away, but let’s face it – he’s unlikely to want to hear anything from you.’
I glanced about me once more. ‘Speaking of Khaba,’ I said quietly, ‘I had an odd experience just now. When you came down, you didn’t happen to see anything else here with me?’
Faquarl shook his gleaming head. ‘You seemed just as isolated as ever, if slightly more jittery. Why?’
‘Only I thought I had Khaba’s shadow after me—’ I stopped myself, cursed. ‘Not thought, know – it was creeping after
me along the gorge. Just now! Only when you turned up, it scarpered.’
Faquarl frowned. ‘Really? This is bad.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Yes, it means technically I may have saved you from a nasty fate. Please don’t tell anyone about this, Bartimaeus. I’ve got a reputation to maintain.’ He rubbed his chin meditatively. ‘Odd, though, that Khaba should move against you out here,’ he mused. ‘Why not back at camp? Why the secrecy? It’s an intriguing little problem.’
‘I’m glad you feel that way,’ I snarled. ‘Personally speaking, it’s a bit more urgent than that.’
The Nubian grinned. ‘Well, what can you expect? In all honesty, I’m surprised you’ve survived this long. Khaba’s got a grudge against you after that hippo debacle. And then, of course, there’s the ongoing issue of your personality. That’s two good reasons to bump you off for starters.’
I stared at him askance. ‘My personality? Meaning what?’
‘How can you even ask the question? I’ve been around the ziggurat a few times, Bartimaeus, but I’ve never known a spirit like you. Ghuls4 are bad enough, skrikers5 likewise – they may all have appalling habits, but by Zeus at least they don’t talk out of turn so loudly, or cheek their betters the way you do. Let’s face it, just the sight of you is enough to drive any reasonable spirit insane.’
Whether it was my recent shock, or the smug expression on his face, my temper snapped. Blue flames flared between my fingers; I stepped in fury towards him.
Faquarl gave an indignant snort. Shards of green lightning crackled about his pudgy hands. ‘Don’t even think about it. You haven’t got a chance.’
‘Is that so, my friend? Well, let me tell you—’
I halted; my fires died suddenly away. At the same time Faquarl let his hands fall back. We stood silent on the road, facing each other, listening hard. We could both detect the same sensation: an almost imperceptible shivering on the planes, with every now and then a faint, decisive thud. It was familiar and it was not far off.
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