Ptolemy's Gate

the authorities were taking no chances in the center of the capital. Imps and foliots watched from recesses in the eaves of nearby buildings.
    I alighted in a walnut tree in the little courtyard that separated the Internal Affairs building from the road, and waited. A policeman stood below me at the gate. Presently the door opened and Jenkins emerged; he wore a long leather coat and carried a crumpled hat in one hand. At the gate he nodded to the guard, showed a pass, and exited. He turned north into Whitehall, set his hat on his head at a jaunty angle, and with suddenly eager steps plunged into the crowd.
    It's not easy following an individual amid a mi lling throng, but when you're an expert tracker like me, you take it in your stride. The secret is not to get distracted. I kept my eyes fixed upon the crown of Jenkins's hat and fluttered high above, keeping a little behind him, just in case he looked around. There wasn't much chance that he would guess he was being followed, but you know me, I do things properly. You have to get up pretty early to catch me out in the art of trailing.[1]

[1] Once, when I was employed by the Algonquin shamans, an enemy afrit came to our tribe by night and abducted a chief's child. When the discovery was made, the afrit was far away; it had disguised itself as a buffalo cow, and spun a Glamour on the child, so it seemed a lowing calf. But afrits have fiery hooves: I followed the singed grass stalks for a hundred miles across the rolling prairie and slew the abductor with a silver spear. The child was returned alive, if a little green from eating so much grass.

Beyond the roofs the autumn sun was dropping down behind the trees of Hyde Park; a pretty red haze hung in the sky. The sparrow watched it approvingly. It reminded me of evening at the pyramids, when the djinn flitted like swallows above the tombs of the kings, and—
    A bus horn honked; the sparrow snapped back to the present. Careful —almost caught daydreaming there. . . Now then: Jenkins . . .
    Ah.
    I scanned frantically to and fro. Where was the distinctive hat? Nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he'd taken it off. . . Nope: no fox's coiffure in the vicinity. Men, women, children, yes. All the flotsam and jetsam of humanity. But no Jenkins.
    The sparrow snapped its beak together in irritation. This was Mandrakes fault. If he'd given me a few months' rest, my head would be clearer. I wouldn't keep getting distracted. It was like the time when—
    Concentrate. Perhaps Jenkins was on a bus. I did a quick fly past the nearest few, but the secretary was not aboard. Which meant he'd either dematerialized or gone inside a building. . .I noticed a pub now, the Cheddar Cheese, squeezed between two government offices, roughly at the point where Jenkins had vanished. Since voluntary dematerializing in humans is rare,[2] I figured the pub was the likely option.

[2] It tends to be involuntary: i.e. when you hit them with a Detonation.

No time to waste. The sparrow dropped like a stone to the pavement and crept, unnoticed by the hurrying throng, to the open door. In the act of passing through, I gritted my teeth and changed: the sparrow became a fly, a bluebottle with a furry rump. The flash of pain from the alteration made my flight pattern erratic; I lost track of where I was, meandered for a moment through the smoky air and landed, with a soft plop, in the wineglass of a lady who was just setting it to her lips.
    She looked down, sensing movement, and saw me floating on my back an inch below her nose. I waved a hairy leg; she emitted a scream like a baboon and dashed the glass away. Wine spattered into the face of a man standing at the bar; he careered back in shock, knocking two other ladies from their stools. Cries, yells, much flailing of limbs. All around was tumult. Soused with wine, the bluebottle landed on the surface of the bar, bumped, skidded, righted itself, and hid behind a bowl of peanuts.
    Well, if I hadn't been quite as unobtrusive as I'd wished, there was at least enough distraction for me to make a quick survey of the room. I wiped a couple of eye-facets clean and did a quickstep off the bar and up a nearby pillar, sashaying between the crisps and bags of pork scratchings. From a vantage point aloft I looked about.
    There, standing in the center of the room, talking avidly with two others, was Jenkins.
    The fly flitted closer among the shadows, checking the planes. None of the men had active magical defenses, though