The Ring of Solomon Read online

  ‘A month for me – no, two!’ the man beside her said, between chews. ‘Still, when there is such bounty to enjoy, who am I to complain?’

  ‘It’s all right for some,’ the dour man said. ‘But I don’t hold with waiting. There’s famine coming in the Hittite lands, and we need help now. Why he can’t just send out his demons to help all of us straight off, rather than this bloody hanging about, I’ll never know. Enjoying himself too much up there, I reckon.’

  ‘Wives,’ said the first man.

  ‘He’ll get to us in time,’ the woman said. Her bright eyes sparkled. ‘I can’t wait to see him.’

  ‘Have you not even seen Solomon?’ Asmira cried. ‘Not in five whole weeks?’

  ‘Oh no, he never comes down here. He’s up in his apartments across the gardens. But next council day I’ll see him, sure enough. You get to stand before him, so I’m told, but then he’s up on a throne, of course, top of some steps, so it’s not exactly close, but even so …’

  ‘How many steps?’ Asmira said. She could throw a dagger forty feet with perfect accuracy.

  ‘I’m sure I couldn’t say. You’ll see soon enough, dear. In a month or two.’

  Asmira sat back from the conversation after this, a smile carefully maintained upon her face and a dull-edged stab of panic prodding in her gut. She did not have two months. She did not have one. She had two days to gain access to the king. Yes, she was in the palace, but that meant little, if she was expected to sit around with these fools, waiting. She shook her head as she regarded them, still busily discussing their hopes and needs. How blind they were! How fixated on their own small purpose! Solomon’s wickedness was invisible to them.

  She stared angrily about the crowded hall. Clearly the king did not rely purely on terror to maintain his rule, but laced it with charitable deeds so that some good would be spoken of his name. All very fine, but the upshot for her was that he was out of reach. And that was only the half of it. Even if, by some miracle, she managed to gain access to his very next council, it didn’t sound as if she would be allowed to approach the king at all. That wasn’t good enough. She needed to be so close that neither he, nor his demons, had time to act. Without that, her chances of success were small indeed.

  She needed to find another way.

  The voices of the nearby diners stilled; their hands hovered above their plates.

  Asmira’s skin prickled; she sensed a presence at her back.

  Grey fingers brushed against her sleeve, wine fumes plumed about her neck.

  ‘And what,’ the magician Khaba said, ‘are you doing sitting here?’

  He wore an elegant tunic of black and grey and a short grey cape. His face was flushed with wine. When he held out his hand to her, she noticed how long his nails were.

  Asmira attempted a smile. ‘The vizier, Hiram, said I should—’

  ‘The vizier is a fool and should be hung. I have been waiting for you at high table this last half-hour! Up with you, Cyrine! No, leave your cup – you’ll get another. You shall sit with the magicians now, not among this rabble.’

  The people all about her stared. ‘Someone’s got friends in high places,’ a woman said.

  Asmira rose, waved farewell, followed the magician through the ranks of tables to a raised platform. Here, at a marbled table piled high with delicacies, and attended by several hovering djinn, sat a number of richly apparelled men and women, who stared at her blankly. All carried about them the casual assurance that came with power; one or two had small animals sitting on their shoulders. At the far end sat Hiram; he, like Khaba, and most of the other magicians, had already consumed a good deal of wine.

  ‘These are the Seventeen,’ Khaba said. ‘Or what’s left of them, Ezekiel being dead. Here, take a seat by me, and we shall talk some more, get to know each other better.’

  Hiram’s eyes widened over the rim of his cup at the sight of Asmira, and his green-eyed mouse wrinkled its nose in distaste. ‘What’s this, Khaba? What’s this?’

  A sharp-featured woman with long braided hair frowned: ‘That is Reuben’s chair!’

  ‘Poor Reuben has the marsh fever,’ Khaba said. ‘He stays in his tower, swears he’s dying.’

  ‘Small loss if he is,’ a little, round-faced man grunted. ‘Never pulls his weight. So, Khaba – who’s this girl?’

  ‘Her name,’ Khaba said, taking his cup of wine and pouring another for Asmira, ‘is Cyrine. She is a priestess of … I do not recall the exact location. I saved her on the desert road today.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I heard,’ another magician said. ‘So you’re back in Solomon’s favour already? Didn’t take you long.’

  Khaba nodded. ‘Did you doubt it, Septimus? The bandits are destroyed, as requested. I shall make my formal representations to the king when he next allows an audience.’

  Asmira said: ‘Will you take me with you when you meet the king? I am fretful of delay.’

  Several of the other magicians snorted. Khaba looked around at them with a smile. ‘You see that young Cyrine is eagerness itself – I can scarcely restrain her! Dear Priestess, one may not come unbidden into Solomon’s presence. I shall do my best to speed matters for you, but you must be patient. Come to my tower tomorrow, and we shall discuss it further.’

  Asmira inclined her head. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Khaba!’ At the far end of the table the little vizier was scowling; he tapped the wood peremptorily with his finger. ‘You seem remarkably confident that Solomon will welcome you once more,’ he said. ‘Yes, you may have killed some robbers, all well and good, but your negligence on Temple Mount distressed him deeply, and he is getting ever more irritable with age. Don’t assume that you will find it smooth going with him.’

  Asmira, looking at Khaba, noticed something stir in the depths of the soft eyes, a sudden unveiling that made her soul recoil. Then it was gone, and he was laughing. ‘Hiram, Hiram, do you truly question my judgement?’

  A sudden silence fell among the magicians. Hiram held Khaba’s gaze; he spat an olive stone upon the table. ‘I do.’

  ‘The fact is,’ Khaba went on, ‘I know the king just as well as you. He likes his trifles, does he not? Well, I shall smooth my way with a little gift, a curiosity for his collection. I have it here. A pretty enough thing, don’t you think?’

  He put something on the table, a small round bottle of clear crystal, decorated with little flowers. The top had been plugged with a wad of lead; behind the crystal facets, faint coloured lights and traces swirled.

  One of the nearest magicians picked it up and inspected it closely, before passing it along. ‘Lost all form, I see. Is that normal?’

  ‘It may still be unconscious. It resisted its Confinement.’

  The long-haired woman turned the bottle over and over in her hand. ‘Is it liquid? Is it vapour? What vile, unnatural things they are! To think they can be reduced to this.’

  When the vizier took it, the green-eyed mouse shied away and hid its face behind its paws. ‘It makes a pretty trinket,’ Hiram said grudgingly. ‘Look how the lights wink in and out of view; it is never the same twice.’

  The bottle completed its circuit of the table and was returned to Khaba, who set it before him. Asmira was fascinated; she reached out her hand and touched the crystal; to her surprise the cold surface vibrated to the touch. ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘This, my dear,’ Khaba said, laughing, ‘is a bottled fourth-level djinni, imprisoned for as long as Solomon desires.’

  ‘More to the point,’ the long-haired woman said, ‘which is it?’

  ‘Bartimaeus of Uruk.’

  Asmira started, and opened her mouth to speak, then realized that Khaba did not know she knew the djinni’s name. Or perhaps he was too drunk to care.

  Evidently the others recognized the name also. There was a chorus of approval.

  ‘Good! Ezekiel’s ghost will take pleasure in the act.’

  ‘The hippo? You are right, Khaba – Solomon will certainly enjoy this gif
t!’

  Asmira stared at Khaba. ‘You have trapped a spirit in there? Is this not a rather cruel deed?’

  All around the table the magicians – old, young, men, women – burst into peals of raucous laughter. Khaba laughed louder than all of them. His eyes, when he looked at Asmira, were contemptuous, red-rimmed, bleary with wine. ‘Cruel? To a demon? That is a contradiction in terms! Do not worry your pretty little head about it. He was a pestilential spirit and no great loss to anyone. Besides, he’ll get his freedom eventually – in a few hundred years or so.’

  Conversation turned to other matters: to the magician Reuben’s illness, to the clearing of Ezekiel’s tower, to the increasing reclusiveness of King Solomon. It seemed that – apart from his regular councils in the garden hall – he was appearing less and less often about the palace; even Hiram, his vizier, had access to him only at certain times of day. His main interest appeared to be the temple he was constructing; aside from this, he remained remote. He paid little attention to his magicians, except for his frequent orders during council, which they resentfully obeyed.

  ‘Your desert sojourn is nothing, Khaba! Tomorrow I must travel to Damascus and set my djinn to rebuilding its fallen walls.’

  ‘I travel to Petra, to help build grain silos—’

  ‘I must irrigate some pathetic little Canaanite village—’

  ‘That Ring! Solomon feels he can treat us like slaves! I only wish—’

  Asmira paid little attention to their complaints. She had picked up the bottle and was turning it slowly between her fingers. How light it was! How strange the substance within! Beyond the panes of crystal, little flecks of colour twirled and shimmered, moving slowly like fading petals drifting on the surface of a lake. She thought of the djinni, solemn-eyed and silent, standing beside her in the ravaged gorge …

  Across the hall, many of King Solomon’s guests had now departed towards the stairs, though others still sat and gorged on the remnants of the food. Beside her, the magicians were sinking lower in their seats, talking louder, drinking deeper …

  She looked again at the bottle in her hands.

  ‘Yes, study it by all means!’ Khaba had swayed in close, and was regarding her unsteadily. ‘You are drawn to the strange and wonderful, are you not? Ah, but I have many more such things hidden in my tower! Such choice delights! You shall experience them tomorrow!’

  Asmira did her best not to recoil at the vapours of his breath. She smiled. ‘Please, your cup is empty. Let me get you more wine.’

  23

  How slowly, how painfully the long years pass when you’re immured inside a bottle! I don’t recommend the experience to anyone.1

  The effect on your essence is the worst of it. Each and every time we’re summoned to this Earth, our essence begins to die a little, but providing we aren’t kept here too long, and distract ourselves with plenty of fights, chases and sarcastic wordplay, we can keep the ache at bay before returning home to recover. This just isn’t possible in a prolonged Confinement. Opportunities for fights and chases are somewhat limited when it’s just you in an enclosure an inch or two square, and since sarcasm is one of those activities best enjoyed in company, there’s nothing to do but float and think and listen to the soft sound of your essence shrivelling, wisp by sorry wisp. To make matters worse, the Confinement spell itself has the property of drawing out this process indefinitely, so you don’t even have the dignity of actually dying. Khaba had chosen well for me: it was a punishment worthy of a bitter foe.

  I was utterly cut off inside that crystal sphere. Time was unknowable. No sound penetrated. Sometimes lights and shadows moved against the confines of my prison, but the powerful Binding spell that had been fused into the crystal obscured my vision and I couldn’t make the forms out clearly.2

  To add to my discomfort, the ancient bottle’s original contents had evidently been an oily substance, perhaps hair grease for some long-dead Egyptian girl. Not only was the interior still faintly perfumed (rosewood, I thought, with a hint of lime), it was also darn slippery. When I tried, for variety’s sake, to take on the guise of a scarab or some other tiny insect, my tarsal claws kept slipping out from under me.

  For the most part, therefore, I stayed in my natural state, floating quietly, drifting, thinking noble and somewhat melancholy thoughts, and only occasionally scrawling obscene graffiti on the inside of the glass. Sometimes my mind turned to episodes from my past. I thought of Faquarl and his dismissive assessment of my powers. I thought of the girl, Cyrine, who had so nearly got me freed. I thought of the wicked Khaba – now, with time’s remorseless passing, presumably a cursed heap of bones – and his vile helpmate, Ammet, perhaps still wreaking evil somewhere on the hapless world. Most often, of course, I thought of the peace and beauty of my distant home, and wondered when I’d ever return.

  And then, after untold ages, when I’d utterly given up hope …

  The bottle broke.

  One moment it was there, as it had always been, my small domed dungeon, tightly sealed. The next, the walls collapsed into a shower of crystal shards that fell about me, spinning, glittering, borne on a sudden tide of sound and air.

  With the destruction of the bottle, Ammet’s spell could not survive. Its strands tore; they burst asunder.

  I felt myself dismissed.

  A tremor bristled through my essence. With a sudden rush of joy, all pain and suffering were at once forgotten. I lingered not at all. Like a soaring lark I departed from the Earth, faster and faster, passing through the elemental walls that opened to receive me, plunging into the sweet infinity of my home.

  The Other Place enfolded me. I was embraced, made many where I had once been one. My essence shook itself free and spread, singing, across the reaches. I joined the endless, whirling dance …

  And froze.

  For an instant my joyous forward momentum and the sudden pull behind me were equal and opposite. I was held suspended, motionless. I just had time to register my alarm …

  Then I was wrenched away, ripped from the infinite, plucked back down time’s corridor no later than I’d left it. It happened so fast I almost met myself going back.

  I dropped like a shower of gold down an endless well.

  I funnelled inward to a point, and landed.

  I looked around. The point was at the centre of a pentacle drawn on dark, red-tinted fabric. Close by, in inky shadow, silken curtains hung like spider-webs, stifling the contours of the room. The air was close and thick with burning frankincense. Reddish candlelight glimmered across a marbled floor like the memory of a gout of blood.

  I was back on Earth.

  I was back on Earth! Confusion and my shock of loss mingled with the resumption of my pain. With a howl of rage I rose up from the middle of the circle as a red-skinned demon, slender, agile, avid for revenge. My eyes were blazing orbs of gold, their thorn-thin pupils darting to and fro. Below the jutting wad of gristle that functioned as my nose, there gaped a snarling, fang-filled mouth.3

  The demon bent low, questing all around. It scanned the square of fabric in which it stood, it saw the weights of carven jade that held that fabric to the floor. It saw a flickering oil lamp, the waxen candles, the pots of burning frankincense set out upon the tiles beyond. It saw a certain bag of red-brown leather, open on a silken couch. It saw an upturned plinth, a broken bottle; it saw a scattering of crystal shards …

  It saw a second pentacle on another fabric square. And standing in that pentacle –

  ‘Bartimaeus of Uruk,’ the Arabian girl intoned, ‘I bind you by the cords of Nakrah and the manacles of Marib, which are both most grievous and terrible, to hereafter do my bidding, on pain of immediate and fiery expunction. Stand fixed in your proper place until I give you leave, then depart upon your errand with fleet and true intent, without deviation or delay, to return at the precise time and place that I shall give you …’

  There was a good deal more of this, all very archaic, not to say long-winded, and spoken in a tortuous
south Arabian dialect that was difficult to follow. But I’d been round the block a bit. I got the gist.

  I admit that I was shocked. I admit that I was baffled. But put me in a pentacle and the age-old rules are immediately back in force. Whoever summons me risks everything, regardless of what has gone before. And the girl was not safe yet.

  She was speaking the Binding mechanisms in something of a trance, standing quite rigid, swaying slightly with the effort of the summoning. Her small fists were clenched, her arms fixed as if bolted to her sides. Her eyes were closed; she recited with metronomic precision the word-seals and phrase-locks that would hold me fast.

  The red-skinned demon edged forward within its circle, claws pricking at the cloth beneath its feet. My golden eyes gleamed in the candle-smoke. I waited for the mistake or hesitation that would let me snap my bonds like celery and treat her body likewise.

  ‘Almost there,’ I prompted. ‘Don’t mess things up now. Steady … this is the hard bit. And you’re so very, very tired … So tired I can almost taste you.’ And I snapped my teeth together in the dark.

  She blanched then, went paler than the mountain snows. But she made no mistake, she didn’t hesitate.4

  All too soon I felt the bonds grow tight. My hungry readiness slackened and I subsided in my circle.

  The girl finished. She wiped the sweat from her face with the sleeve of her robe.

  She looked at me.

  There was silence in the room.

  ‘And what,’ I said, ‘do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I just saved you.’ She was still a little breathless, and her voice was faint. She nodded towards the crystal fragments on the floor. ‘I got you out.’

  The red-skinned demon nodded slowly. ‘So you did. So you did … But only so you could enslave me again within seconds!’ Livid flames erupted from the cloth about my feet and licked up to shroud my wrathful form. ‘Do you not recall,’ I roared, ‘how I saved your wretched little life so long ago?’

  ‘So long a— What?’

  Fire darted from my eyes; trails of burning sulphur flickered on my shining skin. ‘Can you conceive the pain and suffering I’ve since endured?’ I cried. ‘Trapped inside that tiny, suffocating prison all those endless years, through all those long slow cycles of the sun and moon? And now, no sooner am I released than you summon me again, without so much as a …’ I hesitated, noticing the girl was tapping a delicate foot upon her cloth. ‘Just how long was I trapped, incidentally?’