The Ring of Solomon

I’m gone. Sorry – no arguments!’ She had begun a tirade of questions and demands. ‘The more we dawdle, the sooner Khaba will catch us. His marid Ammet is probably already trying to trace your aura. What we need to do is find an appropriate place for you to hide … Aha!’
    That ‘Aha’ was me noticing a thick rose bush just outside the cloister window. It had resplendent foliage, some slightly tired pinkish flowers and an awful lot of very spiny thorns. All in all, I felt it was perfect for our purposes. A swift grab, a hoist and dangle, and down the girl plopped into the thickest, thorniest patch of all.
    I listened hopefully … Not even a squeak. She was very well trained.
    With her safely disposed of, I changed into a small, brown and rather insignificant-looking cricket and flew off along the margins of the gardens, keeping low among the flowers.
    You might have noticed that after my initial rage and despondency, I was recovering a certain amount of my customary élan. The truth was that an odd, fatalistic exhilaration had begun to seize hold of me. The sheer magnitude, the sheer dumb audacity of what I was now attempting was beginning to exert its own appeal. OK, there was the certain-death part, which wasn’t so hot, but given that I had no choice in the matter, I found I rather relished the challenge of my night’s work. Outwit a palaceful of spirits? Destroy the most celebrated magician then living? Steal the most powerful artefact of all? These were objectives worthy of the legendary Bartimaeus of Uruk and a far better use of my time than carrying big string bags of artichokes about the place, or bowing and scraping before masters like the vile Egyptian. I rather wondered what Faquarl would say if he could see me now.
    Speaking of masters, the Arabian girl might be obsessive, driven and somewhat humourless, but despite my fury at the impudence of her summoning, I could not entirely despise her. Her personal courage was self-evident; also, there was the fact that she was prepared to sacrifice herself along with me.
    The insignificant cricket headed south beside the gardens, in the opposite direction to the apartments of the king. As I went, I fixed the position of as many sentries as I could spot, taking note of their size, manner and vibrancy of aura. 6 Most were djinn of medium potency, and there were a fair number of them about, albeit fewer than in the northern regions of the gardens.
    I felt there was room to make them fewer still.
    I was particularly interested in a secluded bit of garden not far from Solomon’s treasury: you could see its roof rising just beyond the trees. Before long I singled out a djinni stationed here, standing all on his own beside one of Solomon’s antiquities, a massive disc of weathered stone fixed upright in the grass.
    To my great delight I recognized the djinni in question. It was none other than Bosquo, that same pompous little bean-counter who had ticked me off when I’d brought the artichokes in ‘late’ a couple of weeks before. He stood with weedy arms folded, pot-belly protruding, and an expression of abominable vacancy on his dreary face.
    What better place could there be to begin?
    The cricket’s wings began to beat at a slightly faster, more sinister tempo. It made a series of discreet loops and passes to check no one else was around, then landed on the stone at Bosquo’s back. I tapped him on the shoulder with a foreleg.
    Bosquo gave a grunt of surprise, and turned to look.
    With that, the city’s night of carnage began.

    1 Dogs and Jackals : a board game, usually played with ivory pieces, although sometimes the pharaohs back in Thebes did it large-scale, with djinn taking on the relevant canine shapes and bounding around a courtyard-sized board. You had to wrestle your opponent when you landed on a square, and it was all done in the heat of the day, so everyone got quite sticky and odorous, and the collars didn’t half itch. Not that I know anything about it really, having been far too important to take part in such a humiliating exercise.
    2 Not to mention mindless optimism.
    3 Can you define ‘plan’ as ‘a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision and ignorance’? If so, it was a very good plan.
    4 It’s true that when it came to spirit-slaves there was serious devaluation going on in Jerusalem at that time. In normal eras a djinni is pretty close to the top of the pile,