Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

Book Cover

THE

BARTIMAEUS

TRILOGY

BOOK THREE

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Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

Ptolemy's Gale

THE

BARTIMAEUS

TRILOGY

BOOK THREE

Ptolemy's Gate

JONATHAN STROUD

MIRAMAX BOOKS

HYPERION BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

NEW YORK

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First Edition

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Printed in the United States of America

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Reinforced binding

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

ISBN 0-7868-1861-1

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Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

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For Isabelle, with love

The Main Characters

THE MAGICIANS

Mr. Rupert Devereaux Prime Minister of Great Britain and the

Empire, and acting Chief of Police

Mr. Carl Mortensen Minister of War

Ms. Helen Malbindi Foreign Minister

Ms. Jessica Whitwell Security Minister

Mr. Bruce Collins Home Secretary

Mr. John Mandrake Information Minister

Ms. Jane Farrar Deputy Police Chief

Mr. Quentin Makepeace A playwright; author of Petticoats and

Rifles and other works

Mr. Harold Button Magician, scholar, and book collector

Mr. Sholto Pinn A merchant; proprietor of Pinn's

Accoutrements of Piccadilly

Mr. Clive Jenkins Magician Second Level, Department of

Internal Affairs

Ms. Rebecca Piper Assistant to Mr. Mandrake, Information

Ministry

THE COMMONERS

Ms. Kitty Jones A student and barmaid

Mr. Clem Hopkins An itinerant scholar

Mr. Nicholas Drew A political agitator

Mr. George Fox Proprietor of the Frog Inn, Chiswick

Ms. Rosanna Lutyens A private tutor

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Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

THE SPIRITS

Bartimaeus A djinni—in service to Mr. Mandrake

Ascobol

Cormocodran

Mwamba

Hodge

Greater djinn—in service to Mr. Mandrake

Purip

Fritang Lesser djinn—in service to Mr. Mandrake

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Laura Cecil, Delia Huddy, Alessandra Baker, and Jonathan Burnham; to the late

Rod Hall; and to everyone at Random House, Hyperion, and Miramax. And to Gina, most of all.

Part One

Alexandria: 125 B.C.

The assassins dropped into the palace grounds at midnight, four fleet shadows dark against the

wall. The fall was high, the ground was hard; they made no more sound on impact than the

pattering of rain. Three seconds they crouched there, low and motionless, sniffing at the air.

Then away they stole, through the dark gardens, among the tamarisks and date palms, toward

the quarters where the boy lay at rest. A cheetah on a chain stirred in its sleep; far away in the

desert, jackals cried.

They went on pointed toe-tips, leaving no trace in the long wet grass. Their robes flittered at

their backs, fragmenting their shadows into wisps and traces. What could be seen? Nothing but

leaves shifting in the breeze. What could be heard? Nothing but the wind sighing among the

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palm fronds. No sight, no noise. A crocodile djinni, standing sentry at the sacred pool, was

undisturbed though they passed within a scale's breadth of his tail. For humans, it wasn't badly

done.

The heat of the day was a memory; the air was chill. Above the palace a cold round moon shone

down, slathering silver across the roofs and courtyards.1

1. This was one of the peculiarities of their sect: they acted only when the moon was full. It made their

tasks more difficult, their challenge greater. And they had never failed. Aside from this, they wore only

black, avoided meat, wine, women, and the playing of wind instruments, and curiously ate no cheese

save that made from the milk of goats bred on their distant desert mountain. Before each job they

fasted for a day, meditated by staring unblinking at the ground, then ate small cakes of hashish and

cumin seed, without water, until their throats glowed yellow. It's a wonder they ever killed anyone.

Away beyond the wall, the great city murmured in the night: wheels on dirt roads, distant

laughter from the pleasure district along the quay, the tide lapping at its stones. Lamplight

shone in windows, embers glowed on roof hearths, and from the top of the tower beside the

harbor gate the great watch fire burned its message out to sea. Its image danced like imp-light

on the waves.

At their posts, the guards played games of chance. In the pillared halls, the servants slept on

beds of rushes. The palace gates were locked by triple bolts, each thicker than a man. No eyes

were turned to the western gardens, where death came calling, secret as a scorpion, on four

pairs of silent feet.

The boy's window was on the first floor of the palace. Four black shadows hunched beneath the

wall. The leader made a signal. One by one they pressed against the stonework; one by one

they began to climb, suspended by their fingertips and the nails of their big toes.2 In this

manner they had scaled marble columns and waterfalls of ice from Massilia to Hadhramaut; the

rough stone blocks were easy for them now. Up they went, like bats upon a cave wall. Moonlight

glinted on bright things gripped between their teeth.

2. All horrid and curved they were, filed sharp like eagles' talons. The assassins took good care of their

feet, because of their importance in their work.They were washed frequently, rubbed with pumice, and

marinated in sesame oil until the skin was soft as eiderdown.

The first' of the assassins reached the window ledge: he sprang tigerlike upon it and peered into

the chamber.

Moonlight spilled across the room; the pallet was lit as if by day. The boy lay sleeping,

motionless as one already dead. His dark hair fell loose upon the cushions, his pale lamb's

throat shone against the silks.

The assassin took his dagger from between his teeth. With quiet deliberation, he surveyed the

room, gauging its extent and the possibility of traps. It was large, shadowy, empty of

ostentation. Three pillars supported the ceiling. In the distance stood a door of teak, barred on

the inside. A chest, half filled with clothes, sat open against the wall. He saw a royal chair

draped with a discarded cloak, sandals lying on the floor, an onyx basin filled with water. A faint

trace of perfume hung on the air. The assassin, for whom such scents were decadent and

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Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

corrupt, wrinkled his nose.3

3. The sect avoided perfumes for practical reasons, preferring to coat themselves with scents

appropriate to the conditions of each job: pollen in the gardens, incense in the temples, sand-dust in

the deserts, dung and offal in the towns. They were dedicated fellows.

His eyes narrowed; he reversed the dagger, holding it between finger and thumb by its shining,

gleaming tip. It quivered once, twice. He was gauging the range here—he'd never missed a

target yet, from Carthage to old Colchis. Every knife he'd thrown had found its throat.

His wrist flickered; the silver arc of the knifes flight cut the air in two. It landed with a soft

noise, hilt-deep in the cushion, an inch from the child's neck.

The assassin paused in doubt, still crouched upon the sill. The back of his hands bore the

crisscross scars that marked him as an adept of the dark academy. An adept never missed his

target. The throw had been exact, precisely calibrated ... yet it had missed. Had the victim

moved a crucial fraction? Impossible— the boy was fast asleep. From his person he pulled a

second dagger.4 Another careful aim (the assassin was conscious of his brothers behind and

below him on the wall: he felt the grim weight of their impatience). A flick of the wrist, a

momentary arc—

4. I won't say where he pulled it from. Let's just say that the knife had hygiene issues as well as being

quite sharp.

With a soft noise, the second dagger landed in the cushion, an inch to the other side of the

prince's neck. As he slept, perhaps he dreamed—a smile twitched ghostlike at the corners of his

mouth.

Behind the black gauze of the scarf that masked his face, the assassin frowned. From within his

tunic he drew a strip of fabric, twined tightly into a cord. In seven years since the Hermit had

ordered his first kill, his garrote had never snapped, his hands had never failed him.5 With

leopard's stealth, he slid from the sill and stole across the moonlit floor.

5. The Hermit of the Mountain trained his followers in numerous methods of foolproof murder. They

could use garrotes, swords, knives, batons, ropes, poisons, discs, bolas, pellets, and arrows inimitably,

as well as being pretty handy with the evil eye. Death by fingertip and toe-flex was also taught, and the

furtive nip was a specialty. Stomach-threads and tapeworms were available for advanced students. And

the best of it was that it was all guilt-free: each assassination was justified and condoned by a powerful

religious disregard for the sanctity of other people's lives.

In his bed the boy murmured something. He stirred beneath his sheet. The assassin froze rigid,

a black statue in the center of the room.

Behind, at the window, two of his companions insinuated themselves upon the sill. They waited,

watching.

The boy gave a little sigh and fell silent once more. He lay faceup among his cushions, a

dagger's hilt protruding on either side.

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Seven seconds passed. The assassin moved again. He stole around behind the cushions, looping

the ends of the cord around his hands. Now he was directly above the child; he bent swiftly, set

the cord upon the sleeping throat—

The boy's eyes opened. He reached up a hand, grasped the assassin's left wrist and, without

exertion, swung him headfirst into the nearest wall, snapping his neck like a reed stalk. He flung

off his silken sheet and, with a bound, stood free, facing the window.

Up on the sill, silhouetted against the moon, two assassins hissed like rock snakes.Their

comrade's death was an affront to their collective pride. One plucked from his robe a pipe of

bone; from a cavity between his teeth he sucked a pellet, eggshell thin, filled with poison. He

set the pipe to his lips, blew once: the pellet shot across the room, directed at the child's heart.

The boy gave a skip; the pellet shattered against a pillar, spattering it with liquid. A plume of

green vapor drizzled through the air.

The two assassins leaped into the room; one this way, the other that. Each now held a scimitar

in his hand; they spun them in complex flourishes about their heads, dark eyes scanning the

room.

The boy was gone. The room was still. Green poison nibbled at the pillar; the stones fizzed with

it.

Never once in seven years, from Antioch to Pergamum, had these assassins lost a victim.6 Their

arms stopped moving; they slowed their pace, listening intently, tasting the air for the taint of

fear.

6. And they didn't intend to start now. The Hermit was known to be pretty sniffy about disciples who

returned in failure. There was a wall of the institute layered with their skins—an ingenious display that

encouraged vigor in his students, as well as nicely keeping out the drafts.

From behind a pillar in the center of the room came the faintest scuffling, like a mouse flinching

in its bed of straw. The assassins glanced at each other; they inched forward, toe-tip by toe-tip,

scimitars raised. One went to the right, past the crumpled body of his fellow. One went to the

left, beside the golden chair, draped with the cloak of kings. They moved like ghosts around the

margins of the room, circling in upon the pillar from both sides.

Behind the pillar, a furtive movement: a boy's shape hiding in the shadows. Both assassins saw

it; both raised their scimitars and darted in, from left, from right. Both struck with mantis speed.

A dual cry, gargling and ragged. From around the pillar came a stumbling, rolling mess of arms

and legs: the two assassins, locked together in a tight embrace, each one skewered on the

other's sword. They fell forward into the pool of moonlight in the center of the chamber,

twitched gently, and lay quiet.

Silence. The windowsill hung vacant, nothing in it but the moon. A cloud passed across the

bright round disc, blacking out the bodies on the floor. The signal fire in the harbor tower cast

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faint redness on the sky. All was still. The cloud drifted out to sea, the light returned. From

behind the pillar walked the boy, bare feet soundless on the floor, his body stiff and wary, as if

he sensed a pressure in the room. With careful steps, he neared the window. Slowly, slowly,

closer, closer ... he saw the shrouded mass of gardens, the trees and sentry towers. He noticed

the texture of the sill, the way the moonlight caught its contours. Closer . . . now his hands

rested on the stone itself. He leaned forward to look down into the courtyard at the bottom of

the wall. His thin white throat extended out. . . .

Nothing. The courtyard was empty. The wall below was sheer and smooth, its stones picked out

by moonlight. The boy listened to the quietness. He tapped his fingers on the sill, shrugged, and

turned inside.

Then the fourth assassin, clinging like a thin black spider to the stones above the window,

dropped down behind him. His feet made the noise of feathers falling into snow. The boy heard;

he twisted, turned. A knife flashed, swiped, was deflected by a desperate hand—its edge clinked

against stone. Iron fingers grappled at the boy's neck; his legs were knocked from under him.

He fell, landing hard upon the floor. The assassin's weight was on him. His hands were pinioned.

He could not move.

The knife descended. This time it met its mark.

So it had finished as it must. Crouching above the body of the boy, the assassin allowed himself

a breath—his first since his colleagues had met their ends. He sat back on his sinewy haunches,

loosened his grip upon the knife, and let the boy's wrist drop free. He inclined his head in the

traditional mark of respect to the fallen victim.

At which point the boy reached up and plucked the knife from the center of his chest. The

assassin blinked in consternation.

"Not silver, you see," the boy said. "Mistake." He raised his hand.

An explosion in the room. Green sparks cascaded from the window.

The boy rose to his feet and tossed the knife upon the pallet. He adjusted his kilt and blew some

flakes of ash from his arms. Then he coughed loudly.

The faintest of scrapings. Across the room the golden chair shifted. The cloak draped over it was

nudged aside. Out from between its legs scrambled another boy, identical to the first, though

flushed and tousled from many hours of hiding.

He stood over the bodies of the assassins, breathing hard. Then he stared up at the ceiling. On

it was the blackened outline of a man. It had a kind of startled look.

The boy lowered his gaze to the impassive doppelganger watching him across the moonlit room.

I gave a mock salute.

Ptolemy brushed the dark hair from his eyes and bowed.

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"Thank you, Rekhyt," he said.

1

Times change.

Once, long ago, I was second to none. I could whirl through the air on a wisp of cloud and churn

up dust storms with my passing. I could slice through mountains, raise castles on pillars of

glass, fell forests with a single breath. I carved temples from the sinews of the earth and led

armies against the legions of the dead, so that the harpers of a dozen lands played music in my

memory and the chroniclers of a dozen centuries scribbled down my exploits. Yes! I was

Bartimaeus— cheetah quick, strong as a bull elephant, deadly as a striking krait!

But that was then.

And now . . . well, right now I was lying in the middle of a midnight road, flat on my back and

getting flatter. Why? Because on top of me was an upturned building. Its weight bore down.

Muscles strained, tendons popped; try as I might, I could not push free.

In principle there's nothing shameful about struggling when a building falls upon you. I've had

such problems before; it's part of the job description.1 But it does help if the edifice in question

is glamorous and large. And in this case, the fearsome construction that had been ripped from

its foundations and hurled upon me from a great height was neither big nor sumptuous. It

wasn't a temple wall or a granite obelisk. It wasn't the marbled roof of an emperor's palace.

1. There was the time when a small section of Khufu's Great Pyramid collapsed upon me one moonless

night during the fifteenth year of its construction. 1 was guarding the zone that my group was working

on, when several limestone blocks tumbled down from the top, transfixing me painfully by one of my

extremities. Exactly how it happened was never resolved, though my suspicions were directed at my old

chum Faquarl, who was working with a rival group on the opposite side. I made no outward complaint,

but bided my time while my essence healed. Later, when Faquarl was returning across the Western

Desert with some Nubian gold, I invoked a mild sandstorm, causing him to lose the treasure and incur

the pharaoh's wrath. It took him a couple of years to sift all the pieces from the dunes.

No.The object that was pinning me haplessly to the ground, like a butterfly on a collector's tray,

was of twentieth-century origin and of very specific function.

Oh, all right, it was a public lavatory. Quite sizable, mind, but even so. I was glad no harpers or

chroniclers happened to be passing.

In mitigation, I must report that the lavatory in question had concrete walls and a very thick

iron roof, the cruel aura of which helped weaken my already feeble limbs. And there were

doubtless various pipes and cisterns and desperately heavy taps inside, all adding to the total

mass. But it was still a pretty poor show for a djinni of my stature to be squashed by it. In fact,

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the abject humiliation bothered me more than the crushing weight.

All around me the water from the snapped and broken pipework trickled away mournfully into

the gutters. Only my head projected free of one of the concrete walls; my body was entirely

trapped.2

2. The obvious solution would have been to change form—into a wraith, say, or a swirl of smoke, and

just drift clear. But there were two problems. One: I found it hard to change shape these days, very

hard, even at the best of times. Two: the considerable downward pressure would have blown my

essence apart the moment I softened it to make the change.

So much for the negatives. The good side was that I was unable to rejoin the battle that was

taking place up and down the suburban street.

It was a fairly low-key sort of battle, especially on the first plane. Nothing much could be seen.

The house lights were all out, the electric street lamps had been tied in knots; the road was

dark as an inkstone, a solid slab of black. A few stars shone coldly overhead. Once or twice

indistinct blue-green lights appeared and faded, like explosions far off underwater.

Things hotted up on the second plane, where two rival flocks of birds could be seen wheeling

and swooping at each other, buffeting savagely with wings, beaks, claws, and tails. Such loutish

behavior would have been reprehensible among seagulls or other down-market fowl; the fact

that these were eagles made it all the more shocking.

On the higher planes the bird guises were discarded altogether, and the true shapes of the

fighting djinn came into focus.3 Seen from this perspective, the night sky was veritably awash

with rushing forms, contorted shapes, and sinister activity.

Truer, anyway. At bottom, we are all alike in our seeping formlessness, but every spirit has a "look" that

suits them, and which they use to represent themselves while on Earth. Our essences are molded into

these personal shapes on the higher planes, while—on the lower ones—we adopt guises that are

appropriate to the given situation. Listen, I'm sure I've told you all this before.

Fair play was entirely disregarded. I saw one spiked knee go crunching into an opponent's belly,

sending him spinning away behind a chimney to recover. Disgraceful! If I'd been up there I'd

have had no truck with that.4

I'd have kneed him first, then stuck a wingtip in his eye, while kicking his shin for good measure. Much

more effective. The techniques of these young djinn were so inefficient, it pained me.

But I wasn't up there. I'd been put out of action.

Now, if it had been an afrit or marid who'd done the damage, I could have lived with it. But it

wasn't. In fact my conqueror was none but a third-level djinni, the kind I could normally roll up

in my pocket and smoke after dinner. I could still see her now from where I lay, her nimble

feminine grace rather undermined by her pig's head and the long rake she clutched in her

trotters. There she was, standing on a post-box, laying left and right with such brio that the

government forces, of which I was nominally a part, backed off and left her well alone. She was

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