Ring Of Solomon (29 page)

‘What now?’ the girl hissed. ‘I thought this was meant to be a quiet shortcut.’

‘It normally is. It’s like Thebes marketplace tonight. This is Solomon’s vizier.’

‘Hiram?’ She frowned. ‘He’s got a mouse—’

‘It’s not a mouse on the higher planes, believe you me. With that perched on him, it’s no surprise he’s got a limp. Stay very still.’

Unlike the marid, Hiram’s footsteps were loud enough to hear, and to begin with they appeared to be moving off in a satisfactory manner. Then, all at once, I heard the mouse squeak warily and the footsteps stop. There was a soft, wet sound and, a moment later, the smell of rotten eggs drifting down the hall.

I knew what
that
meant. The foliot Gezeri.

‘Well?’ Hiram’s voice was clear; he must have been standing twenty paces from where we hid. ‘What do
you
want, creature?’

‘A quick chat, O great Hiram,’ Gezeri said, his tone somehow completely subverting the respectful nature of the words. ‘My master, magnificent Khaba, has lately been a little indisposed.’

‘I saw him at dinner.’ Hiram’s distaste was clear. ‘He was drunk.’

‘Yeah, well, he’s come round now, and he’s lost something. Small bottle. Mislaid it, can’t find it. Maybe rolled off the table, maybe been cleared away with the other scraps. We’ve had a look about, can’t set eyes on it. Very mysterious.’

Hiram snorted. ‘His gift to Solomon? That’s of no consequence to me. I should have thought
you
would have kept an eye on it, being his slave; you, or that vile shadow of his.’

‘Ah no, we were in his tower, clearing up a mess that— Oh, it’s not important. Listen’ – Gezeri spoke nonchalantly; I could imagine him sitting in his cloud, twirling his tail in a casual paw – ‘you ain’t seen that Arabian girl about, have you?’

‘The priestess Cyrine? She will have gone to her room.’

‘Yeah. Which room
is
that, if you don’t mind telling? See, Khaba’s wondering—’

‘Actually, I
do
mind.’ Hiram’s footsteps suddenly resumed. He would have been walking away from Gezeri now, speaking over his shoulder. ‘Let Khaba sort out his own mess in the morning. He’s not to disturb any of our guests now.’

‘But see, we think—’ There followed a muttered word from the magician, a mouse’s battle-squeak and a shrill curse from Gezeri. ‘Ow!’ he cried. ‘Keep it off! All right, all right, I’m going!’ After that came the unmistakable sound of a lilac cloud imploding. The magician’s footsteps pattered slowly away along the hall.

I scowled over at the girl. ‘
That
didn’t take long. We’ve got Khaba on our heels. We’d better hurry up and get killed by something else before he discovers where you are.’

Rather to my relief no further demonic waifs and strays came wandering along the Babylonian Hall, and we got to the far end unmolested. After that it was a simple matter to duck through the Hittite Room, veer past the Sumerian Annexe, take a left beside the Celtic Cabinet
⁸²
and, just before we got to the sprawling (and guarded) Egyptian Halls, step through a little arch into the southern cloisters beside the gardens.

‘OK,’ I breathed. ‘Now we pause and have a recce. What do you see here?’

The night beyond the cloisters was at its deepest, darkest and most secretive. The air was clear; a breeze still carried warmth from the eastern deserts. I scanned the stars: judging by the brightness of Arcturus, and Osiris’s waning, we had four or five hours left before dawn.

The gardens stretched away from us, north and south. They were ink-dark, save where rectangles of light from the palace windows lay twisted over shrubs and statues, fountains, palm trees, oleander flowers. At some unseen distance to the north lay the black wall of the king’s tower, conveniently beside the harem, but separated from the main section of the palace. To the south were many of the public halls, including the audience chambers, the rooms where Solomon’s human servants lived and worked, and – slightly apart from the other buildings – his treasury, filled with gold.

The girl had been taking it all in. ‘These are the gardens? Seem quiet enough.’

‘Which shows how much you know,’ I said. ‘You humans really are useless, aren’t you? It’s all go here. See that statue over by the rhododendrons? That’s an afrit. If you could make out the higher planes, you’d see – well, it’s probably just as well you can’t see what he’s doing. He’s one of the night-shift captains. All the sentries in this section of the palace will report to him periodically; they keep watch on each other too, just to ensure nothing’s untoward. I can see five – no, six – djinn either concealed in the shrubbery or floating amongst the trees, and there are a few wispy firefly things that I don’t like the look of either. In the middle of that central walkway is a trip-thread that triggers something nasty, and up there in the sky there’s a great big soaring fifth-plane dome covering the gardens; any spirit flying through that will activate alarms. So, taken all in all, this part of the palace is pretty well locked down.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ the girl said. ‘How do we get through?’

‘We don’t,’ I said. ‘Not yet. We need to cause a distraction. I think I can arrange that, but first, I’ve got a question for you: Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why are we doing all this? Why must we die?’

The girl scowled. Thinking again! How it taxed her. ‘I told you. Solomon threatens Sheba.’

‘In what way precisely?’

‘He demands our frankincense! A vast ransom! If we do not pay, he will destroy us! He told my queen so.’

‘Came himself, did he?’

‘No. He sent a messenger. What difference does it make?’

‘Maybe none. So pay the ransom.’

It was as if I’d asked her to kiss a corpse. Anger, incredulity and revulsion jostled for position in her dumbstruck face. ‘My queen would
never
do such a thing,’ she hissed. ‘It would be a crime against her honour!’

‘Ye-e-e-s,’ I said. ‘And we wouldn’t be dead.’

For a second you could sense the cogs whirring; then her expression went all hard and blank. ‘I serve my queen, just as my mother did, and my grandmothers, and
their
mothers before them. That is all there is to it. Now, we’re wasting time.
Let’s go
.’

‘Not you,’ I said shortly. ‘You need to keep undercover here a moment, and don’t talk to any strange imps while I’m gone. Sorry – no arguments!’ She had begun a tirade of questions and demands. ‘The more we dawdle, the sooner Khaba will catch us. His marid Ammet is probably already trying to trace your aura. What we need to do is find an appropriate place for you to hide … Aha!’

That ‘Aha’ was me noticing a thick rose bush just outside the cloister window. It had resplendent foliage, some slightly tired pinkish flowers and an awful lot of very spiny thorns. All in all, I felt it was perfect for our purposes. A swift grab, a hoist and dangle, and down the girl plopped into the thickest, thorniest patch of all.

I listened hopefully … Not even a squeak. She was very well trained.

With her safely disposed of, I changed into a small, brown and rather insignificant-looking cricket and flew off along the margins of the gardens, keeping low among the flowers.

You might have noticed that after my initial rage and despondency, I was recovering a certain amount of my customary élan. The truth was that an odd, fatalistic exhilaration had begun to seize hold of me. The sheer magnitude, the sheer dumb audacity of what I was now attempting was beginning to exert its own appeal. OK, there was the certain-death part, which wasn’t so hot, but given that I had no choice in the matter, I found I rather relished the challenge of my night’s work. Outwit a palaceful of spirits? Destroy the most celebrated magician then living? Steal the most powerful artefact of all? These were objectives worthy of the legendary Bartimaeus of Uruk and a far better use of my time than carrying big string bags of artichokes about the place, or bowing and scraping before masters like the vile Egyptian. I rather wondered what Faquarl would say if he could see me now.

Speaking of masters, the Arabian girl might be obsessive, driven and somewhat humourless, but despite my fury at the impudence of her summoning, I could not entirely despise her. Her personal courage was self-evident; also, there was the fact that she was prepared to sacrifice herself along with me.

The insignificant cricket headed south beside the gardens, in the
opposite
direction to the apartments of the king. As I went, I fixed the position of as many sentries as I could spot, taking note of their size, manner and vibrancy of aura
⁸³
. Most were djinn of medium potency, and there were a fair number of them about, albeit fewer than in the northern regions of the gardens.

I felt there was room to make them fewer still.

I was particularly interested in a secluded bit of garden not far from Solomon’s treasury: you could see its roof rising just beyond the trees. Before long I singled out a djinni stationed here, standing all on his own beside one of Solomon’s antiquities, a massive disc of weathered stone fixed upright in the grass.

To my great delight I recognized the djinni in question. It was none other than Bosquo, that same pompous little bean-counter who had ticked me off when I’d brought the artichokes in ‘late’ a couple of weeks before. He stood with weedy arms folded, pot-belly protruding, and an expression of abominable vacancy on his dreary face.

What better place could there be to begin?

The cricket’s wings began to beat at a slightly faster, more sinister tempo. It made a series of discreet loops and passes to check no one else was around, then landed on the stone at Bosquo’s back. I tapped him on the shoulder with a foreleg.

Bosquo gave a grunt of surprise, and turned to look.

With that, the city’s night of carnage began.

⁷⁸
Dogs and Jackals
: a board game, usually played with ivory pieces, although sometimes the pharaohs back in Thebes did it large-scale, with djinn taking on the relevant canine shapes and bounding around a courtyard-sized board. You had to wrestle your opponent when you landed on a square, and it was all done in the heat of the day, so everyone got quite sticky and odorous, and the collars didn’t half itch. Not that I know anything about it really, having been far too important to take part in such a humiliating exercise.

⁷⁹
Not to mention mindless optimism.

⁸⁰
Can you define ‘plan’ as ‘a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision and ignorance’? If so, it was a very good plan.

⁸¹
It’s true that when it came to spirit-slaves there was serious devaluation going on in Jerusalem at that time. In normal eras a djinni is pretty close to the top of the pile, treated by all and sundry with appropriate awe and respect. But thanks to the Ring, and the concentration of top magicians drawn into its orbit, it had got so you couldn’t throw a stone over your shoulder without hitting an afrit on the kneecap. The consequence was that honest entities like me were shoved right down the pecking order, lumped together with foliots, imps and other undesirables.

⁸²
Celtic Cabinet
: a small bureau containing a few pots of dried woad and a frayed grass G-string brought back from the British Isles. Solomon’s djinn had travelled the globe in many directions, hunting for cultural marvels to stimulate his appetite. Some journeys yielded better dividends than others.

⁸³
Since most of us are able to adopt all manner of shapes, the most reliable way of assessing our relative strength quickly is by our auras, which wax and wane (wane mainly) throughout our time on Earth.

It was very
quiet
carnage to begin with, though. I didn’t want to disturb anyone.

To deal with Bosquo took approximately fifteen seconds. This was slightly longer than expected. He had a couple of awkward tusks.

In the four minutes that followed I paid several little visits to other sentries in that area of the gardens. Each encounter was similarly short, sharp and relatively painless – at least for me
⁸⁴
.

With everything concluded, I turned back into a cricket and – temporarily somewhat full and sluggish – drifted back in the direction of the girl. But I didn’t go to get her yet; I was more interested in the night-shift captain standing near the rhododendron thicket. I flew as close as I could to him in safety; then, alighting on one of Solomon’s more unusual sculptures, crept beneath the crook of a thigh to watch developments.

They weren’t long in coming.

The afrit was masquerading as a statue himself on the first plane – a demure milkmaid or some such fiction. On the others he was a glowering grey ogre with knobbly knees, bronze armbands and an ostrich-feather loincloth; in other words he was
exactly
the kind of spirit I didn’t want stationed in the gardens while the girl and I were passing. From his belt hung an enormous horn of ivory and bronze.

Presently, things began to happen. Out from the bushes scampered a gangling ape, with a bright pink muzzle and a shock of orange hair. It skidded to a halt before the afrit, sat back on its haunches and performed a brief salute. ‘Zahzeel, I crave a word!’

‘Well, Kibbet?’

‘I have been making my rounds in the southern gardens. Bosquo is missing from his post.’

The afrit frowned. ‘Bosquo? Who sits below the treasury? He has leave to patrol the Rose Glade and the eastern arbours. No doubt you will find him there.’

‘I have looked under every twig and leaf,’ the ape replied. ‘Bosquo is nowhere to be seen.’

The ogre pointed at the sparkling dome high above the garden. ‘The outer nexus has not been breached. There is no attack from outside. Bosquo has gone walkabout and shall be Stippled soundly when he chooses to return. Go back to your duties, Kibbet, and report to me at sunrise.’

The ape departed. Safe in its hiding place, the cricket chirped quietly in satisfaction.

Standing on a plinth for hours isn’t my idea of fun, but Zahzeel the ogre seemed happy with his lot. Over the next minute or two he rocked idly back on his heels a bit, flexed his knees once or twice and made a variety of contented smacking noises with his mouth. Perhaps he would have spent the whole night doing this if he’d been given the opportunity.