Ptolemy's Gate

little. It swiveled painfully and focused for an instant on Ms. Farrar. The tiny voice sounded again. "Is this your bird? Tell me she's not. Oh dear."
    The eye closed, and despite all Mandrake's pleas and Farrar's commands, did not reopen. Mandrake sat back on his heels and ran a hand distractedly through his hair.
    Farrar laid an impatient hand on his shoulder. "Pull yourself together, John. It's only a demon. Look at the spilled essence! If we don't take steps right now, we'll lose the information!"
    He stood then, and looked at her wearily. "You think we can wake it?"
    "Yes, with the right techniques. The Shimmering Coil or the Essence Rack perhaps. But I'd say we've got less than five minutes. It can no longer maintain its form."
    "Those techniques would destroy it."
    "Yes. But we'd have the information. Come on, John. You!"
    She snapped her fingers at a manservant hovering at the fringes of a small knot of watching guests. "Over here! Bring a dustpan or some kind of shovel—we need to scrape this mess up fast."
    "No. . . there is another way." Mandrake spoke quietly, too quietly for Ms. Farrar to hear. As she issued orders to the men around her, he crouched once more beside the frog and uttered a long and complex incantation under his breath. The frog's limbs shivered; a faint gray mist dribbled off its body, as of cold air meeting warm. With great speed, the body of the frog melted into the mist; the mist coiled about Mandrake's shoes and ebbed away.
    Ms. Farrar turned around in time to see Mandrake rising. The frog was gone.
    For a few seconds she gazed at him dumbfounded. "What have you done?"
    "Dismissed my servant." His eyes were fixed elsewhere. The fingers of one hand fiddled with his collar.
    "But—the information! About Hopkins!" She was genuinely bewildered.
    "Can be acquired from my servant in a couple of days. By which time his essence will have healed sufficiently in the Other Place for him to be able to talk to me."
    "Two days!" Ms. Farrar uttered a little squeal of anger. "That might be far too late! We have no idea what Hopkins—"
    "He was a valuable servant," Mandrake said. He looked at her, and his eyes were dull and distant, though his face had flushed at her words. "It will not be too late. I will talk to him when his essence has healed."
    Ms. Farrar's eyes flashed darkly. She stepped close, and Mandrake caught a sudden wave of pomegranates, with a hint of lemon. "I would have thought," she said, "that you valued my regard rather higher than the spilled slime of a fading demon. That creature failed you! It was charged to bring you information, and it could not do so. Important intelligence was there for us to take. . . and you released it!"
    "Only temporarily." Mandrake had waved a hand, spoken a breathless syllable: a Bulb of Silence surrounded them, blocking their words from the sizable crowd now jostling at the garden entrance of the hall. They all still wore their masks: he glimpsed the sparkling, vibrant colors, the strange, exotic shapes, the blank eye-slits. He and Farrar were the only magicians who were maskless—it made him feel exposed and naked. Furthermore he knew that he had no real answer to her anger, for his actions had taken even himself by surprise. This made him furious in his turn. "Please control yourself," he said coldly. "I deal with my slaves in the manner of my choosing."
    Ms. Farrar gave a short, wild laugh. "Indeed you do. Your slaves. . . or perhaps you mean your little friends'?"
    "Oh, come now—"
    "Enough!" She turned from him. "People have been hunting for your weakness for some time now, Mr. Mandrake," she said over her shoulder, "and I, inadvertently, have found it. Extraordinary! I never would have guessed that you were such a sentimental fool." Her coat swirled around her; with imperious steps she passed through the membrane of the Bulb; without any further backward glance, she stalked from the hall.
    Mandrake watched her go. He took a deep breath. Then, with a single word, he dismissed the Bulb of Silence and was received eagerly by an ocean of noise, kerfuffle, and excited speculation.

PART THREE

    Alexandria: 125 B.C.

    That morning, as on every morning, a little group of supplicants gathered outside the apartments of my master Ptolemy. They were there long before dawn, wrapped in their shawls, blue-legged and shivering, waiting patiently for the sun. As light spilled over the river, the magician's servants opened the doors and let them in, one by