"A giant pentacle," he whispered. "And we're all inside."
"Nathaniel," said the fly. "You know I told you to keep calm and not bother waving or shouting?"
"Yes."
"Cancel that. Make as much movement as you can. Perhaps we can attract the attention of one of these idiots."
Nathaniel jiggled about, waved his hands and jerked his head from side to side. He shouted until his throat was sore. Around him whirled the fly, its body flashing in a hundred bright warning colors. But the magicians nearby noticed nothing. Even Jessica Whitwell, who was closest, still gazed at the ceiling with starry eyes.
The terrible helplessness that Nathaniel had felt on the night of the fire flooded over him again. He could feel his energy and resolution draining away.
"Why won't they look?" he wailed.
"Pure greed," the fly said. "They're fixated with the trappings of wealth. This is no good. I'd try a Detonation, but it would kill you at this range."
"No, don't do that," Nathaniel said.
"If only you'd already freed me from the Indefinite Confinement spell," the fly mused. "Then I could break out and tackle Lovelace. You'd be dead, of course, but I'd save everyone else, honest, and tell them all about your sacrifice. It would—Look! It's happening!"
Nathaniel's eyes had already been drawn to Lovelace, who had made a sudden movement. From pointing at the ceiling, his hands now descended to the back of the lectern with feverish haste. He drew something out, hurled its covering cloth to the floor and raised the object to his lips: a horn, old, stained, and cracked. Sweat beaded his forehead; it glistened in the light from the chandeliers.
Something in the crowd gave an inhuman roar of anger. The magicians lowered their heads in shock.
Lovelace blew.
Bartimaeus
When the carpet drew back and the giant summoning pentacle was revealed, I knew we were in for something nasty. Lovelace had it all worked out. All of us, him included, were trapped inside the circle with whatever he was calling from the Other Place. There were barriers on the windows and no doubt in the walls as well, so there was no chance any of us would escape. Lovelace had the Amulet of Samarkand—and with its power, he was immune—but the rest of us would be at the mercy of the being he had summoned.
I hadn't lied to the boy. Without the constraining pentacle, there was a limit to what any magician would willingly summon. The greatest beings run amok if they're given any freedom,[112] and Lovelace's hidden design meant that the only freedom this one was going to get would be inside this single room.
But that was all the magician needed. When his slave departed, he alone of the great ones of the Government would be left alive, ready to assume control.
He blew the horn. It made no sound on any of the seven planes, but in the Other Place it would have rung loud.
As was to be expected, the afrit acted fastest. Even as the summoning horn came into view, she let out a great bellow, seized Rupert Devereaux by the shoulders and flew at the nearest set of windows, picking up speed as she went. She crashed into the glass; the magical barriers across it flared electric blue, and with an impact like thunder, she was propelled back into the room, head over heels, with Devereaux spinning limply in her grip.
Lovelace took the horn away from his lips, smiling slightly.
The cleverer magicians had understood the situation the instant the horn was blown. With a flurry of colored flashes, imps appeared at several shoulders. Others summoned greater assistance—the woman by our side was muttering an incantation, calling up her djinni.
Lovelace stepped down carefully from the podium, his eyes trained somewhere high above. Light danced on the surface of his spectacles. His suit was elegant, unruffled. He took no notice of the consternation all around.
I saw a flicker in the air.
Desperately, I threw myself at the edges of the web that surrounded us, searching for a weakness and finding none.
Another flicker. My essence shivered.
Nathaniel
Many of the magicians were on their feet now, their voices raised in alarm, heads turning from side to side in bewilderment, as thick iron and silver bars slid into position across every door and window. Nathaniel had long since stopped bothering to move: it was clear that no one would take any notice of him. He could only watch as a magician some way in front slung his chair to one side, raised a hand and shot a ball of yellow flame at Lovelace from a distance of only a couple of meters. To the surprise of the magician, the flame altered its course slightly in midair and disappeared into the center of Lovelace's chest. Lovelace, who was staring intently up toward the ceiling, appeared to have noticed nothing.
The fly buzzed back and forth, butting its head against the wall of the Stricture. "That's the Amulet's work," it said. "It'll take whatever they throw."
Jessica Whitwell had finished her incantation: a short, stumpy djinni hovered in the air beside her; it had taken the form of a black bear. She pointed, yelled an order. The bear moved forward through the air, paddling its limbs as if swimming.
Other magicians sent attacks in Lovelace's direction: for perhaps a minute, he was the center of a lightning storm of furious, crackling energy. The Amulet of Samarkand absorbed it all. Lovelace was unaffected. He carefully smoothed back his hair.
The afrit had picked itself up from where it had fallen and, having set the dazed Prime Minister lolling on a chair, leaped into the fray. It flew on speedy, shining wings, but Nathaniel noticed that it approached Lovelace on a peculiar circular course, avoiding the air directly above the podium.
Several magicians had by now reached the door of the hall, and were vainly straining at the handles.
The afrit sent a powerful magic toward Lovelace. Either it went too fast, or it was primarily on a plane he could not see, but Nathaniel only saw it as the suggestion of a jet of smoke that crossed to the magician in an instant. Nothing happened. The afrit cocked its head, as if bemused.
On Lovelace's other side, the black bear djinni was closing fast. From each paw, it unsheathed two scimitar—like claws.
Magicians were running helter—skelter, making for the windows, the door, for anywhere at all, accompanied by their host of shrieking imps.
Then something happened to the afrit. To Nathaniel, it was as if he was looking at the afrit's reflection in a pond and the water surface was suddenly disturbed. The afrit seemed to shatter, its form splitting into a thousand quavering shards that were sucked toward a section of air above the podium. A moment later they were gone.
The black bear djinni stopped paddling forward. Its claws were drawn back out of sight. Very subtly, it went into reverse.
The fly buzzed loudly against Nathaniel's ear, shouting in pure panic. "It's happening!" it cried. "Can't you see it?"
But Nathaniel saw nothing.
A woman ran past, mouth open in panic. Her hair was a pale shade of blue.
Bartimaeus
The first thing most of them noticed was the afrit. That was the spectacular one, the real curtain raiser, but in fact plenty had been going on in the previous seconds. The afrit was unlucky, that was all; in her haste to destroy the threat to her master, she got too close to the rift.
The split in the air was about four meters in length and only visible on the seventh plane. Perhaps a few of the imps glimpsed it, but none of the humans could have done so.[113] It wasn't a nice, clean, vertical sort of rift, but diagonal, with jagged edges, as if the air had been torn like thick, fibrous cloth. From my prison, I had watched it form: after the first flicker above the podium, the air had vibrated, distorted wildly, and finally snapped along that line.[114]
112
One of the worst examples was the Mycenean outpost of Atlantis on the island of Santonni in the Mediterranean About 3,500 years ago, if memory serves. They wanted to conquer another island (or some predictable objective like that), so their magicians clubbed together and summoned an aggressive entity. They couldn't control it. I was only a few hundred miles away on the Egyptian delta; I heard the explosion and saw the tsunami waves come roaring across to deluge the African coast. Weeks later, when things had settled down, the pharaoh's boats sailed to Santorini. The entire central section of the island, with its people and its shining city, had sunk into the sea. And all because they hadn't bothered with a pentacle.
113
Unless they noticed a faint gray smudge along the line of the rift. This was where light was draining away, being sucked off into the Other Place.
114
It was the old chewing—gum principle in action. Imagine pulling a strip of chewed gum between your fingers: first it holds and stretches, then gets thin somewhere near the middle. Finally a tiny hole forms at the thinnest point, which quickly tears and splits Here, Lovelace's summoning had done the pulling. With some help from the thing on the other side.