The Ring of Solomon

the Ring and I’ll give you a lift home. How’s that for a deal? True, I haven’t got a nice big carpet like Khaba, but I’m sure we could find you a towel or napkin or something. You can see that Solomon’s right, can’t you? The Ring is nothing but trouble. Even the ancients didn’t use it. They sealed it in a tomb.’
    Still the girl said nothing. The king sat quiet in his chair, maintaining his attitude of meek acceptance, but I knew that he was watching her closely, hanging on her word.
    She looked up; her eyes focused on me at last. ‘Bartimaeus …’
    ‘Yes, Asmira.’
    Surely she would see sense now after all she’d been told and seen. Surely , after feeling the Ring’s power for herself, she would know what she had to do.
    ‘Bartimaeus,’ she said, ‘fetch me the Ring.’
    ‘To give to Solomon?’
    ‘To take to Sheba.’ Her face was hard, expressionless. She turned away from me. Without looking at the king, she sheathed her dagger in her belt and walked off towards the door.

    1 The fly was an optional extra right then. They were so preoccupied I don’t think they’d have noticed me if I’d turned into a flatulent unicorn and pirouetted gently across the room.
    2 Tatty chipped ones, they were, no doubt chosen specially by Solomon for his humble little whitewashed bedroom, to go along with the earthen plates and the rough wood furniture. I bet going there after the day’s luxuries were over made him feel all virtuous and austere … and therefore, paradoxically, even more superior to the rest of us than before.
    3 My very first job, in fact, when I arrived on Earth fresh-faced and dewy-eyed, was nicking a fertility statue from the love goddess’s sanctuary in Ur. Morally speaking, this pretty much set the tone for my next two thousand years.
    4 Not to mention trying to use it. Turning the Ring would have been equivalent to opening the door to the Other Place and subjecting one’s essence to the full power of its pull. Any Earth-tethered spirit who tried such a thing would surely soon be torn in two. Here was an irony which Philocretes, Azul and the other restless spirits who desired the Ring had not lived to discover.
    5 Actually, I couldn’t help being impressed by her all-round feistiness in defying Solomon, despite the threat of the ‘Ring’. Though I suppose hopeless last stands always look best viewed from the outside.
    6 Stupefaction’s putting it mildly. Two blocks of limestone crudely daubed with cartoon faces would have been more animated than Solomon and the girl right then.
    7 Not a calamari ring, note: he seemed to have gone off them.
    8 In other words, he was a typical magician, wanting old-time freebies to supplement his power.
    9 I was thinking about the unknown corpse, that person who had been bound to the chair with the Ring upon their finger, then carefully buried alive. All that power (and pain) literally at their fingertips, yet forced to endure a helpless death! It was a terrible end. It was also striking how keen the ancient executioners were to rid themselves of the allegedly wondrous Ring.
    10 Spontaneous matter transfer is very, very tricky. I can’t do it. No one I know can do it. The only time a spirit shifts instantaneously from one place to another is when it’s being summoned, and we’re made of essence. Moving a great fat heavy human (like you) in this fashion is even harder.
    11 I too understand a little about being trapped by circumstances, about enduring pain.

31
    T ransporting an object as potent as the Ring of Solomon is a ticklish task, particularly if you’re keen to avoid being toasted as you do so.
    In an ideal world I’d have put it in a lead-lined box, put the box inside a sack, and pulled the sack behind me on the end of a mile-long chain, so that neither my essence nor my sight suffered in any way from its emanations. Instead I had to make do with wrapping it in a scrumpled ball made from the parchments found on Solomon’s writing table. 1 This solution shielded the worst of the heat quite well, but even through the thick, coarse layers its aura remained uncomfortable. I could feel my fingers tingling.
    The girl had already gone. Holding the ball of parchment gingerly like the unwilling slave I was, I followed in her wake. At the door I paused, looked back. The king was still in his chair, his chin lowered almost to his chest. He seemed older, more hunched and far more shrunken than before. He did not look at me, nor seek to