The Golem's Eye

shape was impossible to make out. I tried the first plane, and there, drained of all color by the descending sun, I caught my first glimpse of a leaping man-shaped form.
     
    [2] There were plenty more incredibly intelligent thoughts, which I won't bother troubling your pretty little heads with. Take it from me it was all good, damn good.
     
    It sprang from gable to weathervane with the precision of a mountain goat, teetering on the smallest crest, spinning around like a top, then bounding on. As it drew nearer, I began to hear thin cries, like those of an excited child, erupting from its throat.
    My fellow imps were possessed by sudden eleventh-hour anxiety. They left off picking their toenails and polishing their tails and began to skitter to and fro about the roof, attempting to hide behind each other and sucking in their bellies in an attempt to look less obvious. "Uh-oh," they said. "Uh-oh."
    I spied one or two of my fellow djinn following the leaping figure at a cautious distance. Quite why they hadn't yet attacked, I couldn't fathom. Perhaps I would soon find out. It was coming my way.
    I got up, tucked my tail over my shoulder for neatness' sake, and waited. The other imps darted around me, squeaking incessantly. Eventually, I stuck out a foot and tripped one up. The other cannoned into him and ended up on top. "Quiet," I snarled. "Try showing a bit of dignity." They looked at me in silence. "That's better."
    "Tell you what..." The first imp nudged the other and pointed at me. "He could be next."
    "Yeah. It might take him this time. We could be saved!"
    "Get behind him. Quick."
    "Me first! After me!"
    There followed such an undignified display of scuffling and scurrying, as they fought with each other to hide behind my back, that my attention for the next few moments was entirely taken up with administering some well-deserved slaps, the noise of which echoed around the town. In the midst of this performance, I looked up; and there, standing astride a parapet at the edge of the tower-block roof, not two meters away, was the renegade afrit.
    I admit his appearance startled me.
    I don't mean the golden mask, shaped with the deathly features of the great magician. I don't mean the wispy hair drifting out behind it on the breeze. I don't mean the skeletal hands resting easily on the hips, or the vertebrae peeping out above the necktie, or the dusty burial suit hanging so limply off his frame. None of that was particularly exciting; I've taken on the guise of a skeleton dozens of times—haven't we all? No, what surprised me was the realization that this was not a guise, but real bones, real clothes, and a real golden mask up top. The afrit's own essence was quite invisible, hidden somewhere within the magician's remains. He did not have a form of his own—on this, or any of the other planes. I'd never seen this done before. [3]

    [3] It is a simple fact that, upon materializing in the human world, we have to take on some form or other, even if it is just a drift of smoke or a dribble of liquid. Although some of us have the power to be invisible on the lower planes, on the higher, we must reveal a semblance: that is part of the cruel binding wrought by the magicians. Since we have no such definite forms in the Other Place, the strain of doing this is considerable and gives us pain; the longer we remain here, the worse that pain gets, although changing form can alleviate these symptoms temporarily. What we don't do is "possess" material objects: the less we have to do with earthen things the better, and anyway, this procedure is strictly forbidden by the terms of our summoning.
     
    Whatever the skeleton had been getting up to during the course of the day, it had evidently been quite energetic, since the clothes were looking the worse for wear: there was a trendy slit across the knee, [4]  a burn mark on one shoulder, and a ragged cuff that looked as if it had been sliced by claws. My master would probably have paid good money for that ensemble if he'd seen it in some Milanese boutique, but for an honest afrit it was a pretty shoddy affair. The bones below the cloth seemed complete enough, however, the joints hinging smoothly as if they had been oiled.
     
    [4] Less trendy was the bony patella poking out.
     
    The skeleton regarded the heap of imps with its head cocked to one side. We stood stock still, our mouths agape, frozen in the middle of our scuffle. At last it spoke.
    "Are you breeding?"
    "No," I said.