Ptolemy's Gate

expected.
    Flickers of awareness came and went. One moment I thought I was far away in Egypt, talking with Ptolemy for the last time; the next I was watching fragments of cod and halibut drift by. Occasionally Faquarl's declaration echoed in my mind: From tonight, we take revenge. Sounded ominous for somebody. Well, they were welcome to it. I was tired. I'd had enough. I was glad to be somewhere quiet, dying on my own.
    And then, all of a sudden, the soup was gone; the freezing taint of silver likewise. I was freed from the tureen.
    Good news, unquestionably. Trouble was, I was no longer alone.
    My master—yes, that was predictable, I could just about cope with him. But then, when I rotated gloopily to check out the scene, who did I see next? Let's just say that when your archenemy's trapped you in a place of certain death, and you've
survived heroically against all the odds, the last thing you want to see, when you escape at last, is that same archenemy glaring down at you with an expression of annoyed distaste.[1] Not only that—you're weak, look like a jellyfish, and smell of clam chowder. In such circumstances the wind kind of goes out of your sense of triumph.

[1] Even a different archenemy would have been marginally better.

But that wasn't the half of it. As well as Mandrake and Faquarl, there were others in that room, and I arrived just in time to see exactly what they were.
    Five gates to the Other Place were open and my essence trembled with the onrush of activity. Humans stood in five pentacles. On the first plane they seemed to stand alone. On the second and third, they were accompanied by billowing shadows of uncertain proportions; on the higher planes these shadows resolved themselves into hideous writhing masses, in which numerous tentacles, limbs, eyes, spines, and prongs kept uncomfortable proximity. As I watched, each mass compressed itself down and merged inside the waiting human. Soon even the most awkward leg or feeler was withdrawn from sight.
    For the first few seconds the humans seemed to be in charge. They blinked, stirred, scratched their heads and, in the case of my old chum Jenkins, placed his glasses carefully on his nose. Only the fact that their auras now glowed with extraordinary strength indicated that anything odd had happened. I wasn't fooled, of course. From what I'd seen of Faquarl and his treatment of Mr. Hopkins, I didn't think the humans would be on top for long.
    And sure enough, they weren't.
    A vibration in the planes behind me: I swiveled like an amoeba on a turntable and saw another human, a short, round man wearing an excessively frilly shirt. And this is when I got really worried: his aura was huge —it radiated out like a sunburst, vibrating with otherworldly colors and a malevolent vitality. I didn't need to be told that something had already taken residence in him.
    He spoke; I wasn't listening. All of a sudden, his aura pulsed, just once, as if a door to a furnace deep inside him had been opened wide. And the short, round man lost his mind.
    For all Faquarl's protestations to the contrary, the notion of bonding with a human is a pretty obnoxious one. For one thing you don't know where it's been. For another, mixing your essence with horrid heavy earthy flesh is an aesthetic no-no; it makes you queasy just thinking about it. And then there's the small matter of control, of learning how to operate the human body. Faquarl had had some practice at this with Hopkins. But the newcomers had not.
    As one, the six magicians—the short, round man and the others in the circles—laughed, twitched, shook, stumbled, jerked their arms every which way, and fell over.
    I looked up at Faquarl. "Oooh, scary. The revenge of the djinn begins."
    He scowled, bent to assist his leader and was distracted by a movement near the door. It was another old friend—the mercenary. His face, which normally showed all the weakness and soft emotion of a granite slab, was wide-eyed with shock. Perhaps it was the sight of the magicians lying on their backs like upturned wood lice, arms and legs wriggling helplessly. Perhaps it was the realization that he was unlikely to get a fee. Whichever it was, he decided to depart. He moved to the door—
    Faquarl sprang through the air; he landed by the mercenary. A single shrug of the spindly arms—the mercenary was flung across the room to land heavily against a statue. He struggled to his feet and drew a knife; Faquarl was on him in a flash. There was