The Ring of Solomon

tore; they burst asunder.
    I felt myself dismissed.
    A tremor bristled through my essence. With a sudden rush of joy, all pain and suffering were at once forgotten. I lingered not at all. Like a soaring lark I departed from the Earth, faster and faster, passing through the elemental walls that opened to receive me, plunging into the sweet infinity of my home.
    The Other Place enfolded me. I was embraced, made many where I had once been one. My essence shook itself free and spread, singing, across the reaches. I joined the endless, whirling dance …
    And froze.
    For an instant my joyous forward momentum and the sudden pull behind me were equal and opposite. I was held suspended, motionless. I just had time to register my alarm …
    Then I was wrenched away, ripped from the infinite, plucked back down time’s corridor no later than I’d left it. It happened so fast I almost met myself going back.
    I dropped like a shower of gold down an endless well.
    I funnelled inward to a point, and landed.
    I looked around. The point was at the centre of a pentacle drawn on dark, red-tinted fabric. Close by, in inky shadow, silken curtains hung like spider-webs, stifling the contours of the room. The air was close and thick with burning frankincense. Reddish candlelight glimmered across a marbled floor like the memory of a gout of blood.
    I was back on Earth.
    I was back on Earth! Confusion and my shock of loss mingled with the resumption of my pain. With a howl of rage I rose up from the middle of the circle as a red-skinned demon, slender, agile, avid for revenge. My eyes were blazing orbs of gold, their thorn-thin pupils darting to and fro. Below the jutting wad of gristle that functioned as my nose, there gaped a snarling, fang-filled mouth. 3
    The demon bent low, questing all around. It scanned the square of fabric in which it stood, it saw the weights of carven jade that held that fabric to the floor. It saw a flickering oil lamp, the waxen candles, the pots of burning frankincense set out upon the tiles beyond. It saw a certain bag of red-brown leather, open on a silken couch. It saw an upturned plinth, a broken bottle; it saw a scattering of crystal shards …
    It saw a second pentacle on another fabric square. And standing in that pentacle –
    ‘Bartimaeus of Uruk,’ the Arabian girl intoned, ‘I bind you by the cords of Nakrah and the manacles of Marib, which are both most grievous and terrible, to hereafter do my bidding, on pain of immediate and fiery expunction. Stand fixed in your proper place until I give you leave, then depart upon your errand with fleet and true intent, without deviation or delay, to return at the precise time and place that I shall give you …’
    There was a good deal more of this, all very archaic, not to say long-winded, and spoken in a tortuous south Arabian dialect that was difficult to follow. But I’d been round the block a bit. I got the gist.
    I admit that I was shocked. I admit that I was baffled. But put me in a pentacle and the age-old rules are immediately back in force. Whoever summons me risks everything, regardless of what has gone before. And the girl was not safe yet.
    She was speaking the Binding mechanisms in something of a trance, standing quite rigid, swaying slightly with the effort of the summoning. Her small fists were clenched, her arms fixed as if bolted to her sides. Her eyes were closed; she recited with metronomic precision the word-seals and phrase-locks that would hold me fast.
    The red-skinned demon edged forward within its circle, claws pricking at the cloth beneath its feet. My golden eyes gleamed in the candle-smoke. I waited for the mistake or hesitation that would let me snap my bonds like celery and treat her body likewise.
    ‘Almost there,’ I prompted. ‘Don’t mess things up now. Steady … this is the hard bit. And you’re so very, very tired … So tired I can almost taste you.’ And I snapped my teeth together in the dark.
    She blanched then, went paler than the mountain snows. But she made no mistake, she didn’t hesitate. 4
    All too soon I felt the bonds grow tight. My hungry readiness slackened and I subsided in my circle.
    The girl finished. She wiped the sweat from her face with the sleeve of her robe.
    She looked at me.
    There was silence in the room.
    ‘And what,’ I said, ‘do you think you’re doing?’
    ‘I just saved you.’ She was still a little breathless, and her voice was faint. She nodded towards the crystal