The Golem's Eye

into the room, just in time to meet a chair swinging into the side of his face.
    He fell to the floor awkwardly, half-stunned. One spinning eye caught a skewed glimpse of Jakob Hyrnek hurling the chair aside and hurrying for the door. Nathaniel gabbled a command in Aramaic; a small imp materialized at his shoulder and loosed a lightning bolt at the seat of Hyrnek's pajamas. There was a sound of rapid scorching and a shrill yelp. Its work done, the imp vanished. Hyrnek halted momentarily, clutching his rump, then continued his stumbling progress toward the door.
    By now, Nathaniel had gotten to his feet; he flung himself forward and down in a clumsy tackle; his outstretched hand caught hold of a bed-socked foot and pulled it sideways. Hyrnek fell; Nathaniel clawed himself on top of him and began slapping him frantically about the head. Hyrnek replied in kind. They rolled around for a while at random.
    "What an unedifying spectacle."
    Nathaniel froze in the act of pulling Hyrnek's hair. He looked up from his prone position.
    Jane Farrar stood in the open doorway, flanked by two hulking officers of the Night Police. She wore the crisp uniform and peaked cap of the Graybacks and her eyes were openly scornful. One of the officers at her side made a guttural noise deep in his throat.
    Nathaniel cast through his mind for an explanation that might suffice, but found none. Jane Farrar shook her head sadly. "How the mighty have fallen, Mr. Mandrake," she said. "Extricate yourself, if you can, from this half-dressed commoner. You are under arrest for treason."

41
     
    Bartimaeus
     
    Werewolves in the street, Nathaniel back indoors. Which would you choose? Truth to tell, I was glad to get out and about for a bit.
    His behavior was disconcerting me more and more. In the years since our first encounter, doubtless under Whitwell's careful tutelage, he'd become an officious little beast, carefully obeying his orders with one eye always on promotion. Now he was deliberately going out on a limb, doing underhanded things, and risking much by so doing. This was no homegrown idea. Someone was putting him up to it; someone was pulling his strings. He'd been many things to me, Nathaniel had, most of them indescribable, but he'd never looked so much of a puppet as he did now.
    And already it had all gone wrong.
    The scene below was one of chaos. Wounded creatures lay here and there across the street amid piles of broken brick and glass. They writhed and growled and clutched their flanks, their contours altering with each spasm. Man, wolf, man, wolf... That's the problem with lycanthropy: it's so hard to control. Pain and strong emotion make the body shift. [1]

    [1] This chronic unreliability is one of the reasons werewolves get such bad press. As is the fact that they're ravenous, savage, bloodthirsty, and very poorly house-trained. Lycaon of Arcadia assembled the first wolf corps as his personal bodyguard, way back about 2000 B.C., and despite the fact that they promptly ate several of his houseguests, the notion of their fulfilling a useful enforcing role stuck fast. Many tyrannical rulers who had recourse to magic have used them ever since: casting complex transformation spells over suitably brawny humans, keeping them in isolation, and sometimes carrying out breeding programs to improve the strain. As with so much else, it was Gladstone who inaugurated the British Night Police; he knew their worth as instruments of fear.
     
    The girl had downed about five, I thought, not including the one blown to pieces by the Elemental Sphere. But several more were pacing redundantly in the road, and others, displaying a little more intelligence, were busily scaling drainpipes or searching for fire escapes to climb.
    Nine or ten were left alive. Too many for any human to handle.
    But she was still fighting: I saw her now, a little whirling figure on the rooftop. Something bright flashed in each hand—she was waving them high and low in little desperate feints and thrusts to keep three wolves at bay. But with every turn she made, the black forms inched a little closer.
    A scarab beetle, for all its many qualities, is not much cop in a fight. Besides, it would have taken about an hour to fly across to join the action. So I made my change, flapped my great red wings twice, and was upon them in a flash. My wings blocked out the moon, casting the four combatants on the roof into the blackest of shadows. For good measure, I uttered the fearsome cry of