Ptolemy's Gate

since my first few summonings back in Sumer, back when I thought my energies could cope with anything. [3] I hadn't realized how much of my recent weakness had simply been down to the accumulated pain; the moment it was gone I was ten times the djinni that I'd been before. No wonder Faquarl and the others had recommended it so.

[3] That didn't last long, of course. "Oh, Bartimaeus, could you just irrigate the Fertile Crescent?" "Could you just divert the Euphrates here and here!" "Look, while you're at it, do you mind just planting a few million wheat seeds up and down the flood-plain? Thanks." Didn't even give me a dibble. By the time I got to Ur I wasn't surging with any of that terrible joy, oh no. My back was killing me.

I let out a cry of triumph.
    Which echoed curiously, as if I were trapped in a bottle.[4]

[4] Believe me, I know all about bottle acoustics. I spent much of the sixth century in an old sesame oil jar, corked with wax, bobbi ng about in the Red Sea. No one heard my hollers. In the end an old fisherman set me free, by which time I was desperate enough to grant him several wishes. I erupted out in the form of a smoking giant, did a few lightning bolts, and bent to ask him his desire. Poor old boy had dropped dead of a heart attack. There should be a moral there, but for the life of me I can't see one.

An instant later came another cry, curiously loud and all around. It deafened me. With this distraction, I awoke to my surroundings. To what cloaked me and shielded me from the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was human flesh.
    Nathaniel's, to be precise.
    Where the soup in Faquarl's tureen had given me a modicum of protection from the deathly silver on all sides, Nathaniel's body made a much better job of it. My essence was immersed—in bone and blood and little thready things that I suppose might have been sinew; I'd spread throughout him from hair to toe. I felt the pulsing of his heart, the endless flow across the veins, the whispery wheeze-box of his lungs. I saw the flitting drifts of electricity moving back and forth across the brain; I saw (less certainly) the thoughts they signified. And for a moment there I marveled—it was like stepping into a great building—some holy mosque or shrine—and glimpsing its perfection; something airy built of clay. Then came the secondary wonder: that such a ropey thing could actually work at all, so fragile was it, so weak and cumbrous, so tied to earth.
    How easy it would have been to take control, to treat the body like a cart or chariot—a humble vehicle to be ridden where I pleased! The faintest of temptations ran through me. . . Without a second's pause, I could have closed in upon the brain and damped down its little energies, set myself to pull the levers to keep the mechanism going. . . No doubt Nouda and Faquarl and Naeryan and all the rest had been pleased to do this. It was their revenge in microcosm, their triumph over humanity carried out in miniature.
    But that was not for me.
    Not that it wasn't tempting, mind.
    I've never been the biggest fan of Nathaniel's voice. It was just about bearable at a distance, but now it was as if I were tied up inside a loudspeaker on full volume. When he spoke, the reverberations hummed and quivered through my essence.
    "Kitty!" that great galumphing elephant of a voice cried. "I feel such energy!"
    Her voice came to me slightly muffled, refracted through his ears. "Tell me! What does it feel like?"
    "It ripples through me! I feel so light! I could leap to the stars!"[5] He hesitated, as if embarrassed at his unmagicianish enthusiasm. "Kitty," he said, "do I look any different?"

[5] A logical sensation from his point of view. He had absorbed me: a being of fire and air.

"No. . . Except you're less stooped. Can you open your eyes?"
    He opened them for the first time and I looked out. It was an odd double vision to begin with; for a moment it was all blurred and vague. I suppose that was his human vision—so weak and halting! Then I shifted my essence into alignment and things got clearer. I ratcheted through the seven planes and heard Nathaniel gasp.
    "You'd never believe it!" he bellowed in my ear. "Kitty! It's like everything's got more colors, more dimensions. And around you there's such a glow!"
    That was her aura. Always stronger than average, since her visit to the Other Place it had waxed into noonday splendor. Just as Ptolemy's had done. I never saw another human one like it.