Ptolemy's Gate

careless use of talismans include: Alexandria's Library and the Pharos Lighthouse, Babylon's Hanging Gardens, the citadel of Great Zimbabwe, and the Underwater Palace of Kos.

Kitty was watching us narrowly. "Do you think you can activate it?"
    "Yes," we said.
    Nathaniel held the Staff with both hands. (I allowed him to manipulate our limbs here. This was his moment—we needed his formula to start the process, his direction. I was just providing the extra energies, the strength behind his will.) We stood with legs slightly apart, body braced for the impact. He began to speak. While he did so, I looked through his eyes around the little room. There was Kitty, sitting in the chair. Her aura more than matched the Staff's. Beyond was a doorway, broken in by some small blast. Piled up on the floor were several Inferno sticks and elemental spheres. Nathaniel had brought them; he'd used a Detonation cube to destroy the door. He'd been so anxious about Kitty, he'd forgotten the pain in his shoulder, forgotten his weariness for a time. . .
    A curious thing, feeling a man's mind move. It shifted like a sleeper in the dark, while elsewhere his conscious thoughts churned out the incantation. Faces floated past me: Kitty's; an older woman's; others that I didn't recognize at all. And then (a shock this)—Ptolemy's too, clear as a bell. So long since I had seen it. . .two thousand years . . . But of course, this image was nothing but a memory of me.
    Time to concentrate. I felt my energies being drawn upon—sucked out through Nathaniel's words and converted into bonds around the Staff. The incantation was coming to its close. Gladstone's Staff shuddered. Pale streams of light ran up its length and congregated by the carved pentacle at the end. We felt the beings within pressing against the crack we had created in their prison; we felt Gladstone's locking mechanisms struggling to seal themselves. We denied them both.
    Nathaniel's chant came to an end. The Staff pulsed once—a brilliant white light filled the room on every plane. We stumbled where we stood: Nathaniel shut our eyes. Then the light fell back. Equilibrium was reached. All was still. The room was quiet. Almost too faintly to be heard, the Staff of Gladstone hummed in our grasp.
    As one, we turned to where Kitty sat watching in her chair.
    "Ready now," we said.

33

    Jus t for a moment, when the Staff had been activated and the djinni s energies had flowed through him to keep its power in check, Nathaniel remembered the wound in his shoulder. He got an indignant stab of pain, a sudden wooziness in his head . . . then his new strength waxed in him once again, and the frailty vanished. He felt better than he had ever done.
    His body still echoed with the sensation of that first instant, when Bartimaeus's powers had fused within him. It was like an electric shock, a surge that threatened to carry him off the floor, to deny gravity altogether—all his weight and weariness fell away. He burned with life. With sudden clarity (his mind seemed sharper, newly whetted), he perceived the djinni s nature—understood its ceaseless urge for movement, change, and transformation. He sensed how harsh a fate it was for this nature to be forcibly restricted, to be pent up among earthly, solid things. He glimpsed (only blearily at first) an endless succession of images, memories, imprints, stretching back into a terrible abyss of time. It gave him a feeling not unlike vertigo.
    All his senses were afire. His fingers felt each whorl and grain upon the Staff, his ears caught its minute hum. Best of all he saw and understood each plane—all seven of them. The room was bathed in the colors of a dozen auras—from the Staff, from himself and, most extraordinary of all, from Kitty. Through its glow her face seemed smooth and young again, her hair shone like flames. He could have gazed at her forever—
    Stop that nonsense right now. I feel quite sick.
    If a wretched djinni hadn't been gabbling in his head.
    I wasn't doing anything, he thought.
    Not much you weren't. Staff's up and running. We need to go.
    Yes. Warily; in case the djinni had other plans for his legs, Nathaniel turned to Kitty. "You should stay here."
    "I'm feeling stronger."To Nathaniel's alarm, she inched forward in the chair and, supporting her weight with shaking hands, got to her feet. "I can walk," she said.
    "Even so, you're not coming with us."
    He felt the djinni stir within his mind; its voice echoed from his