5 Strictly advisable when dealing with subtle, intelligent entities such as myself. It is often possible to interpret a pause for breath as a full stop, which either changes the meaning of the instructions or turns them into gobbledegook. If we can misinterpret something to our advantage, we most certainly will.
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1 Magicians are the most conniving, jealous, duplicitous group of people on earth, even including lawyers and academics. They worship power and the wielding thereof, and seek every chance they can to undercut their rivals. At a rough guess about eighty percent of all summonses have to do with carrying out some skulduggery against a fellow magician, or with defense against the same. By contrast, most confrontations between spirits aren’t personal at all, simply because they do not occur of our own free will. At that moment, for instance, I did not dislike Faquarl particularly; well, actually that’s a lie—I loathed him, but no more than I had before. Anyway, our mutual hatred had taken many centuries, indeed millennia, to build up. Magicians squabble for fun. We’d really had to work at it.
2 Minor magicians take pains to fit this traditional wizardry bill. By contrast, the really powerful magicians take pleasure in looking like accountants.
3 Amulets are protective charms; they fend off evil. They are passive objects and although they can absorb or deflect all manner of dangerous magic, they cannot be actively controlled by their owner. They are thus the opposite of talismans, which have active magical powers that can be used at their owner’s discretion. A horseshoe is a (primitive) amulet; seven-league boots are a form of talisman.
4 Natterjack impling: an unadventurous creature that affects the semblance and habits of a dull sort of toad.
5 Mouler: even less exciting than a natterjack impling, were that possible.
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1 Armed with this, I would be able to combat the whippersnapper’s most vicious attacks. Knowledge of the name redresses the power balance a little, you see, acting as a kind of defensive shield for djinn inside the circle. It’s a simple and very ancient kind of talisman and—Well, what are you hanging around reading this for? Read on quickly and see for yourself.
2 Old or young, small or fat, the besetting weakness of all magicians is their pride. They can’t bear to be laughed at. They hate it so much even the cleverest ones can lose control and make silly mistakes.
3 The Systemic Vise consists of a number of concentric bands of force that squeeze round you, tight as a mummy’s bandage-cloth. As the magician repeats the incantation, the bands grow tighter and tighter until the helpless djinni trapped inside begs for mercy.
4 Better-looking by far, of course.
5 Succubus: a seductively shaped djinni in female form. Oddly popular with male magicians.
6 Typical magician’s guff this. It was the unfortunate imp inside the bronze disc who did all the work.
7 A complicated penalty made up of fifteen curses in five different languages. Magicians can only use it on one of us who deliberately disobeys or refuses to carry out a given command. It causes immediate incineration. Only applied in extreme cases, since it is tiring for the magician and robs them of a slave.
8 There’s big business in protective herbal aftershaves and underarm deodorants for magicians. Simon Lovelace, for instance, positively reeked of Rowan-tree Rub-on.
9 The Indefinite Confinement spell is a bad ‘un, and one of the worst threats magicians can make.You can be trapped for centuries in horrid minute spaces, and to cap it all, some of them are just plain daft. Matchboxes, bottles, handbags… I even knew a djinni once who was imprisoned in a dirty old lamp.
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1 He wasn’t the only one, believe me.
2 Some societies I had known made great use of messenger imps. The rooftops and date palms of old Baghdad (which had neither telephone nor e-mail) used to swarm with the things after breakfast and shortly before sundown, which were the two traditional times for messages to be sent.
3 These polite asterisks replace a short, censored episode characterized by bad language and some sadly necessary violence. When we pick up the story again, everything is as before, except that I am perspiring slightly and the contrite imp is the model of cooperation.
4 On the night I stole the Amulet, I’d heard Lovelace being skeptical about the Prime Minister’s abilities and this gap in my knowledge suggested he was right. If Devereaux had been a prominent magician, chances are I would have heard his name. Word spreads quickly about the powerful ones, who are always the most trouble.
5 Besides, it would have given me a stitch when flying.
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1 Foliot: a cut-price djinni.
2 Most of us enact our duties only under sufferance, simply because we are hurt if we do not cooperate. But a few, typically ones in cushy jobs like Sholto’s servant, grow to enjoy their servile status, and no longer resent their situation. Often they do not even have to be summoned, but are happy to engage in prolonged work for their masters, heedless of the pain they suffer from being continually trapped in a physical body. The rest of us generally regard them with hatred and contempt.
3 Literally swelling, I mean. Like a lime-green balloon slowly inflated by a foot pump. Some foliots (the simple sort) change size and shape to express their mood.
4 How wrong can you get? I brought the anklet to Nefertiti in the first place. And I might add that she was a stunner before she put it on. (By the way, these modern magicians were mistaken. The anklet doesn’t improve a woman’s looks; it forces her husband to obey her every whim. I half wondered how the poor old Duke was getting on.)
5 You could see how far he’d gone over to the enemy by the way he described the death of a magician as “murder.” And was upset! Honestly, it almost makes you long for the simple aggression of Jabor.
6 No? Oh, well. It’s the poet in me, I think.
7 With the aid of their lenses, magicians can see clearly onto the second and third planes and blearily onto the fourth. Sholto was no doubt checking me out on these. Fortunately my imp-form extended to the fourth, so I was safe.
8 Silver hurts us badly; it burns our essence with its searing cold. Which is why Sholto had installed it in his security system. What it did to the djinn imprisoned within the mannequins I dread to think.
9 The djinni within was forced to obey its instruction—the defense of the shop—no matter what the consequence to itself. This was where I held a slight advantage, since my only current obligation was to save my skin.
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1 Several conscious levels, that is. By and large, humans can only manage one conscious level, with a couple of more or less unconscious ones muddling along underneath. Think of it this way: I could read a book with four different stories typed one on top of the other, and take them all in with the same sweep of my eyes. The best I can do for you is footnotes.
2 Essence: the fundamental, essential being of a spirit such as myself, wherein my identity and nature are contained. In your world, we are forced to incorporate our essences into some sort of physical form; in the Other Place, where we come from, our essences intermingle freely and chaotically.
3 In fact, it had the appearance and odor of dirty washing-up water.
4 A type of djinni much favored by the Assyrian magicians for their unintelligent devotion to violence. I first fought these at the battle of Al-Arish, when the pharaoh drove back the Assyrian army from Egyptian soil. The utukku looked good—four meters high, heads of beasts and birds of prey, crystal breastplates, flashing scimitars. But they could all be caught by the old “He’s behind you” trick. Recipe for success: l.Take a stone. 2. Chuck behind utukku so that it makes a diverting sound. 3.Watch utukku swivel, eyes popping. 4. Run him through the back with gusto. 5. Gloat to taste. Oddly, my exploits that day made me a few enemies among the surviving utukku.
5 Which was unlikely to be much. As a rough rule of thumb, you can gauge a djinni’s intelligence by the number of guises he or she likes to wear. Sprightly entities such as me have no limit to
the forms we take. The more the merrier, in fact; it makes our existence slightly less wearisome. Conversely, the true dullards (viz. Jabor, utukku, etc.) favor only one, and it’s usually one that is millennia out of date. The forms these utukku wore were fashionable in the streets of Nineveh back in 700 B.C. Who goes round as a bull-headed spirit nowadays? Exactly. It’s so passe.
6 Unexpectedly sharp. And cold. No one can say I don’t work hard describing things for you.
7 So right. I’ve been knocked out at various times by various people in places as far afield as Persepolis, the Kalahari, and Chesapeake Bay.
8 And I’m scrupulously honest, as you know.
9 Thoughtful persons might at this point object that since Lovelace had stolen the Amulet and was thus working against the Government, it might have been worth a gamble to tell them about his crimes. Perhaps both Nathaniel and I might have then been let off for services rendered. True, but unfortunately there was no knowing who eke was involved with Lovelaces plot, and since Sholto Pinn himself had been lunching with Lovelace the previous day, there was certainly no trusting him. All in all, the risks of coming clean far outweighed the possible benefits.
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1 True, as it happens. That would be eight hundred years ago. In those days I was mostly in North America.
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1 Well, this loses something in translation, of course. I shouted it in the language of Old Egypt, which both of them knew and hated. It was a reference to the time when the pharaoh sent his armies deep into the lands of Assyria, causing general mayhem. It is deeply impolite for djinn to bring up between themselves the memories of human wars (in which we are always forced to take sides). Reminding utukku of wars that they lost is both impolite and deeply unwise.
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1 Horla: a powerful subclass of djinni. To a human, horlas appear as shadowy apparitions that cause madness and disease; to other djinn, they radiate a malicious aura that saps our essence.
2 Almost as much as silver, iron does not do a djinni any good. People have been using it to ward off our influence for millennia; even horseshoes are considered “lucky” because they are made of iron.
3 The less powerful the being, the quicker and easier it is to summon. Most magical empires employ some magicians specially to rustle up whole cohorts of imps at short notice. Only the greatest empires have the strength in depth to create armies of higher entities. The most formidable such army ever seen was put together by Pharaoh Tuthmosis III in 1478 B.C. It included a legion of afrits and a motley group of higher djinn, of which surely the most notable was … No, modesty prevents my continuing.
4 Mirror illusion: a particularly cunning and sophisticated spell. It forms false images of a large-scale object—e.g. an army, a mountain, or a castle. They are flat and dissolve away as you pass through them. Mirror illusions can baffle even the cleverest opponent. As demonstrated here.
5 Many modern products—synthetic plastics, metal alloys, the inner workings of machines—carry so much of the human about them that they afflict our essence if we get too close for too long. It’s probably some sort of allergy.
6 Chance or, as I prefer to think of it, my own quick-wittedness. But it “was true that somehow I’d always managed to avoid a full-on fight.
7 Only without the squeal. Obviously.
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1 At this point someone with excellent hearing might have heard a spurt of webbing being shot furiously into the ceiling in the corner of the room. Fortunately, the imp was busy trying to intimidate Underwood by changing its frozen expression very, very slowly. It didn’t hear a thing.
2 I felt a sudden surge of affection for the old fool. Didn’t last long. Just thought I’d mention it.
3 Oops. It looked as if Lovelace had guessed I might escape from Faquarl. He must have set spies watching the Tower to trail us once we broke free. And I’d led them straight back to the Amulet in double-quick time. How embarrassing.
4 He could have produced the Amulet, agreed to terms, and seen Lovelace head off satisfied into the night. Of course, now that he knew a little of Lovelace’s crimes, he would certainly have been bumped off soon afterward, but that breathing space might have given him time to shave his beard, put on a flowery shirt, fly off somewhere hot and sandy and so survive.
5 How unnecessary. What play-actors these magicians are.
6 So Faquarl had been right. A small army of horlas and utukku had been unable to stop Jabor. This didn’t bode too well.
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1 Typical Jabor, this. He’s just the sort who’d happily saw off a branch he was sitting on, or paint himself steadily into a corner. If he were given to D.I.Y., that is. Which he isn’t.
2 Don’t worry. It was in Old Babylonian. The boy wouldn’t have understood the references.
3 Without much conviction. It seemed a perfectly reasonable desire to me.
4 Psychology of this sort is not my strong suit. I haven’t a clue what motivates most humans and care even less. With magicians it’s usually pretty simple: they fall into three distinct types, motivated by ambition, greed, or paranoia. Underwood, for example, now he was the paranoid type, from what I’d seen of him. Lovelace? Easy—ambition leaked from his body like a foul smell. The boy was of the ambitious kind as well, but he was still young, unformed. Hence this sudden ridiculous burst of altruism.
5 To me. Which is what counts.
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1 One side-benefit of this route was that its difficulties eventually took his mind off the loss of his precious scrying glass. Honestly, the way he went on about it, you’d think that imp was his blood brother, rather than a vulgar baby impersonator trapped against its will. He did seem to have taken his misfortune personally. But after the loss of his beloved Mrs. Underwood, I suppose the disc was his only friend in the world, poor thing.
2 A “good master” is a contradiction in terms, of course. Even Solomon would have been insufferable, he was so prissy in his early years, but fortunately he could command 20,000 spirits with one twist of his magic ring, so with him I got plenty of days off.
3 Obviously not classical history. This ignorance would have upset Faquarl, as it happens, who often boasted how he’d given Odysseus the idea for the wooden horse in the first place. I’m sure he was lying, but I can’t prove it because I wasn’t at Troy: I was in Egypt at the time.
4 They’ve got the worst taste in the world, magicians. Always have done. Oh, they keep themselves all suave and sober in public, but give them a chance to relax and do they listen to chamber orchestras? No. They’d rather have a dwarf on stilts or a belly dancing bearded lady any day. A little-known fact about Solomon the Wise: he was entertained between judgements by an enthusiastic troupe of Lebanese clowns.
5 Even though they have been scraped and shaped by human will, fields do not have magicians’stench about them. Throughout history, magicians have been resolutely urban creatures: they flourish in cities, multiplying like plague rats, running along thickly spun threads of gossip and intrigue like fat-bellied spiders. The nearest that nonurban societies get to magicians are the shamans of North America and the Asian steppe. But they operate so differently that they almost deserve not to be called magicians at all. But their time is past.
6 How true this was. Magicians are essentially parasitic. In societies where they are dominant, they live well off the strivings of others. In those times and places when they lose power and have to earn their own bread, they are generally reduced to a sorry state, performing small conjurations for jeering ale-house crowds in return for a few brass coins.
7 A variety with five eyes: two on the head, one on either flank, and one—well, let’s just say it would be hard to creep up on him unawares while he was touching his toes.
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1 Very, very nasty it was. Remind me to tell you about it some day.
2 Faquarl would have argued that it was more expedient simply to devour them, while Jabor wouldn’t have argued at all, but just done it. But I find that human fle
sh makes my essence ache. It’s like eating bad seafood—too much accumulated grime per mouthful.
3 To date, the only experience I’d had of driving had been during the Great War, when the British army had been camped thirty miles outside Prague. A Czech magician, who shall remain nameless, charged me to steal certain documents. They were well guarded and I was forced to pass the enemy djinn by driving a staff ambulance into the British camp. My driving was very bad, but at least it enabled me to complete my disguise (by filling the ambulance with each soldier I knocked down en route). When I entered the camp, the men were rushed off to the hospital, while I slipped away to steal the campaign plans.
4 Ghuls: lesser djinn of an unsavory cast, keen on the taste of humans. Hence efficient (if frustrated) sentries. They can only see onto five planes. I was Squalls on all but the seventh.
5 Everything seems to aspire to be something better than it is. Mites aspire to be moulers, moulers aspire to be foliots, foliots aspire to be djinn. Some djinn aspire to be afrits or even marids. In each case it’s hopeless. It is impossible to alter the limitations of one’s essence. But that doesn’t stop many entities waltzing around in the guise of something more powerful than they are. Of course, when you’re pretty darn perfect to start with, you don’t want to change anything.
6 All built to celebrate one insignificant tribe’s victory over another. From Rome to Beijing, Timbuktu to London, triumphal arches crop up wherever there are cities, heavy with the weight of earth and death. I’ve never seen one I liked.
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1 I wasn’t being rude here. Well, all right, I was, but it was accurate abuse nevertheless. I may not be a search sphere imp (all nostrils, remember), but I’ve got an acute sense of smell, and can nearly always identify a magician, even when they’re going incognito. All those years of hanging out in smoky rooms summoning powerful entities gives their skin a distinctive odor, in which incense and the sharp pang of fear feature prominently. If after that you’re still unsure, the clincher is to look ’em in the eyes: usually you can see their lenses.
The Amulet of Samarkand Page 38
