The Golem's Eye

because, as expected, there was nothing in the room. Right. Fine. That meant I had to try the next one. No problem. With a deep breath, the minotaur tiptoed tentatively through the debris to the splintered wall. It peeped around with great caution.
     
    [5] Guaranteed to strike fear into a human enemy, there's nothing better than a bullheaded minotaur if you want a bit of the old shock and awe. And after centuries of careful honing, my particular minotaur guise was a doozy. The horns had just the right amount of curl and the teeth were nicely sharpened, as if filed. The skin was blue-black ebony. I'd kept the human torso, but had gone for a satyr's goat legs and cloven hooves, which are that bit scarier than pimply knees and sandals.
     
    Darkness, rain drumming on the windows, amphorae and Phoenician pots lying scattered on the floor. And somewhere distant—breaking glass. The enemy was still several rooms ahead. Good. The minotaur stepped bravely through the hole.
    The next few minutes saw a rather slow game of cat and mouse, with this process repeated several times. New room, empty, sounds farther on. The marauder went on its merrily destructive way; I trailed uncertainly in its wake, less keen than I strictly might have been to catch up with it. It wasn't exactly your traditional Bartimaeus panache, I'll admit. Call me overcautious, but Zeno's fate lay heavy on my mind and I was trying to think of a foolproof plan to avoid being killed.
    The extent of the carnage I was passing made it seem unlikely that I was dealing with any human agency, so what would it be? An afrit? Possible, but oddly out of style. You'd expect afrits to use lots of magical attacks—high-class Detonations and Infernos, for instance—and there was no evidence of anything here except sheer brute force. A marid? Same again, and surely I'd have sensed their magical presence before now. [6]  But I was getting no familiar feedback. All the rooms were dead and cold. This was in line with what the boy had told me about the previous attacks: it did not seem that spirits were involved at all.
     
    [6] Marids radiate so much power that it is possible to track their recent movements by following residual magical trails: they leave them hanging in the atmosphere much as a snail deposits slime. It isn't wise to use this analogy to a marid's face, of course.
     
    To be absolutely sure, I sent a small magical Pulse bubbling ahead of me through the next jagged hole, from which loud noises were emanating. I waited for the Pulse to return, either weaker (if no magic lay ahead) or stronger (if something potent lurked in wait).
    To my consternation, it did not come back at all.
    The minotaur rubbed its muzzle thoughtfully. Odd, and vaguely familiar. I was sure I'd seen this effect somewhere before.
    I listened at the hole; once again, the only sounds were distant ones. The minotaur sneaked through—
    And came out in a large gallery, double the height of the other rooms. The rain beat against tall rectangular windows high up on either side, and from somewhere in the night, perhaps some distant tower, a faint white light shone down upon the contents of the hall. It was a room filled with ancient statues of colossal size, all swathed in shadow: two Assyrian gatekeeper djinn—winged lions with the heads of men, which had once stood before the gates of Nimrud; [7]  a motley assembly of Egyptian gods and spirits, carved in a dozen kinds of colored stone and given the heads of crocodile, cat, ibis, and jackal; [8]  huge carved representations of the holy scarab beetle; sarcophagi of long-forgotten priests; and, above all, fragments of the monolithic statues of the great pharaohs—shattered faces, arms, torsos, hands, and feet, found buried in the sands and carried by sail and steamship to the gray lands of the north.
     
    [7] These were stone representations only; in the glory days of Assyria, the djinn would have been real, asking riddles of strangers in a manner similar to the Sphinx, and devouring them if the answer was incorrect, ungrammatical, or simply spoken in a rustic accent. They were punctilious beasts.
     
    [8] This last one, old Anubis, always unnerves me if I spot it out of the corner of my eye. But gradually I'm learning to relax. Jabor is long gone.
     
    On another occasion, I could have had a nostalgic trip here, looking for images of distant friends and masters, but now was not the time. A clear corridor had been driven halfway through the