The Ring of Solomon

the vault itself, and bent them to encircle me.

    1 The town of Zafar is in Himyar, as I knew well, having flown over it several times on my trips to collect roc’s eggs for assorted pharaohs. It’s not a ‘rock city’, though, but just your usual provincial town, as the girl should definitely have known.
    2 This is called irony. Djinn-guards aren’t much cop, if truth be known, being little more than a few flakes of silver attached with cat-gut to a wickerwork frame. Desert peoples wave them about at a moment’s notice to ward off evil influence, and I suppose a particularly feeble spirit might take the hint and leg it. But as far as warding off real djinn is concerned, they’re about as effective as a chocolate toothbrush. You just keep away from the silver and brain the owner with a rock or something.
    3 Despite her protests, it has to be said.
    4 In its profound infinity the canopy of stars echoes the measureless expanse of the Other Place. On clear nights many spirits are often found sitting on mountain crests or palace rooftops, staring at the heavens. Others fly fast and high, swooping and circling, so the tumbling lights begin to resemble the fluid wonder of our home … I sometimes used to do this, back in the days of Ur, but the melancholy soon affected me. Now, more often, I avert my eyes.
    5 Like silver, iron repels all spirits, and burns our essence if we touch it. Most Egyptian magicians wore iron ankhs about their necks as a basic protection. Not Khaba, though. He had something else.
    6 Incidentally this was an actual punishment meted out by the Xan people of East Africa to corrupt leaders and bogus priests. With their cloths nicely filled, they were forced to crouch in a barrel, which was promptly rolled down a hill to the riotous accompaniment of shekere gourds and drums. I enjoyed my association with the Xan. They lived life to the full.
    7 We were old hands, you see, well aware of the latent ambiguities contained in even the most blandly reassuring sentence. Dismissing us sounded good, naturally, but it needed clarification; and as for us getting our ‘just reward’ … in the mouth of someone like Khaba, that phrase was almost an overt threat.
    8 Just for a moment, as his essence shrugged off Earth’s limitations and became susceptible to the infinite possibilities of the Other Place, seven Faquarls were visible across the planes, each one in a slightly different place. It was an amazing sight, but I didn’t look too closely. One Faquarl is quite enough.

20
    ‘L ost your voice, Bartimaeus?’ Khaba said. ‘That’s not like you.’
    It was true. I’d not said much. I was too busy looking all about me, coolly assessing my predicament. The downsides, certainly, were clear enough. I was deep underground in the stronghold of a wicked magician, cornered in my circle by the questing fingers of his giant shadow-slave. In a moment or two I was to be compressed into a rather tawdry bottle and turned into a cheap sideshow attraction, possibly for all eternity. Those were the downsides. As for the upsides …
    Well, I couldn’t see any just yet.
    But one thing was for sure. If I was going to meet a horrid fate, I wasn’t going to do it in the form of a squat, plump-stomached imp. Drawing myself up, I changed, grew, became a tall and elegant young man with shining wings upon my back; I looked no different, even down to the pale-blue nets of veins running through my slender wrists, from when I’d been Gilgamesh’s spear-bearer in Sumer, so many centuries before.
    It certainly made me feel better. But it did little more than that.
    ‘Mmm, delightful,’ Khaba said. ‘It’ll look all the more amusing when you’re compressed at speed through this little hole. Sadly I shan’t be here to see it. Ammet …’
    Without a glance at the great black column swaying at his back, Khaba held up the crystal bottle. At once a wispy arm, whose fingertips had been hovering close beside my neck, shrank back, bent like a reed stem, then, with probing deftness, plucked the bottle from the magician’s hand and raised it high into the air.
    ‘The Indefinite Confinement spell,’ Khaba said, tapping the papyrus strip upon the lectern, ‘is long and arduous, and I do not have time to work it now. But Ammet here can speak it for me.’ He looked up then, and from its height a shadow-head shaped just like his own bent down to meet him. ‘Dear Ammet, the hour of the banquet approaches fast, and since I have a