The Ring of Solomon

slapdash workmanship with strategically placed Illusions. They’d spent a bit longer on the palace itself, admittedly, and the city walls only wobbled if you pushed really hard, but this temple Solomon wanted done without any magical sleights of hand, which in my view kind of defeated the point of using djinn.
    3 Tivoc and Chosroes voted against: Tivoc because of a complicated argument involving certain subtleties in clause 51c of his summoning; Chosroes because he was just plain chicken.
    4 Hippo in a skirt : this was a comic reference to one of Solomon’s principal wives, the one from Moab. Childish? Yes. But in the days before printing we had limited opportunities for satire.
    5 A bit showy, that. You only need a middling djinni for a stone that size.
    6 Again, do you need an afrit to catch a wife? No, except maybe in the case of the one from Moab.
    7 I suppose I should have been glad he’d only touched the thing and not turned it. It was when the terrible Spirit of the Ring was invoked that things were supposed to get really nasty.
    8 Rat’s arse : technical term, this, corresponding to about 1/15 th of a cubit. Other units of measurement used by the djinn during this period were ‘camel’s thigh’, ‘leper’s stretch’, and ‘the length of a Philistine’s beard’.

12
    R eturning to his tower at speed, Khaba descended by secret ways to his cellar workroom, where a doorway of black granite stood embedded in the wall. As he approached, he spoke an order. Soundless as thought, the spirit residing in the floor spun the door ajar. Khaba passed through without breaking stride; he spoke another word and the door shut fast behind him.
    Blackness enfolded him, incalculable and absolute. The magician stood there for a time, enduring as an exercise of will the silence and the solitude and the relentless pressing of the dark. Gradually soft noises started in the cages: shuffles, faint mewlings of things shut long in blackness, the anxious stirring of other things that anticipated light and feared its violence. Khaba luxuriated in the plaintive sounds a while, then stirred himself. He gave a fresh command, and all along the ceiling of the vault, the imps trapped in their faience globes made their magic flare. Eerie blue-green radiance filled the chamber, waxing, ebbing, deep and fathomless as the sea.
    The vault was broad and domed; its roof supported at intervals by rough-hewn columns that cut across the blue-green haze like the stalks of giant underwater reeds. Behind his back the granite door was one block among many on an immense grey wall.
    Between the columns stood an assortment of marble plinths and tables, chairs, couches and many instruments of subtle use. It was the heart of Khaba’s domain, an intricate reflection of his mind and inclinations.
    He threaded his way past the slabs where he conducted his experiments of dissection, past the preservation pits, acrid with the taint of natron, past the troughs of sand where the process of mummification could be observed. He skirted between the ranks of bottles, vats and wooden piping, between the pots of powdered herbs, the trays of insects, the dim, dark cabinets containing the carcasses of frog and cat and other, larger, things. He bypassed the ossuary, where the labelled skulls and bones of a hundred beasts sat neatly side by side with those of men.
    Khaba ignored the calls and supplications from the essence-cages in the recesses of the hall. He halted at a large pentacle, made of smooth black onyx and mounted in a raised circle on the floor. Stepping into its centre, he took up the flail that hung loosely at his belt. He cracked it once into the empty air.
    All sounds from the cages stilled.
    In the shadows beyond the columns, on the margins of the blue-green light, a presence made itself known by a deepening of darkness and a clattering of teeth.
    ‘Nurgal,’ Khaba said. ‘Is that you?’
    ‘It is I.’
    ‘The king insults me. He treats me with disdain, and the other magicians laugh.’
    ‘What do I care? This is a cold, dark vault, and its occupants make for dismal company. Release me from my bonds.’
    ‘I shall not release you. I wish something for my colleague Reuben. It was he who laughed the loudest.’
    ‘What do you wish for him?’
    ‘Marsh fever.’
    ‘It shall be done.’
    ‘Make it last four days, worsening each night. Make him lie awash in his misery, his limbs afire, his body chilled; make his eyes blind, but let him see