Jonathan Stroud - The Amulet of Samarkand

But extraneous thees or not, he was quite right. Most ordinary pentacles bind you to one service only. Carry it out, and you are free to go. If the magician requires you again, he must repeat the whole draining rigmarole of summoning from the beginning. But Adelbrand's Pentacle countermanded this: its extra lines and incantations double locked the door and forced you to remain for further orders. It was a complex magical formula that required adult stamina and concentration, and this gave me ammunition for my next attack.

I allowed the steam to ebb away. "So where is he, then?"

The boy was busy turning the Amulet over and over in his pale hands. He looked up absently. "Where is who?"

"The boss, your master, the éminence grise , the power behind the throne. The man who has put you up to this little theft, who's told you what to say and what to draw. The man who'll still be standing unharmed in the shadows when Lovelace's djinn are tossing your ragged corpse around the London rooftops. He's playing some game that you know nothing of, appealing to your ignorance and youthful vanity."

That stung him. His lips curled back a little.

"What did he say to you, I wonder?" I adopted a patronizing singsong voice: " 'Well done , young fellow, you're the best little magician I've seen in a long while. Tell me, would you like to raise a powerful djinni? You would? Well, why don't we do just that! We can play a prank on someone too—steal an amulet—"

The boy laughed. Unexpected that. I was anticipating a furious outburst or some anxiety. But no, he laughed.

He turned the Amulet over a final time, then bent and replaced it in the pot. Also unexpected. Using the stick with the hook, he pushed the pot back through the circle to its original position on the floor.

"What are you doing?"

"Giving it back."

"I don't want it."

"Pick it up."

I wasn't about to get into a prissy exchange of insults with a twelve—year old, particularly one who could impose his will on me, so I reached out through my circle and hefted the Amulet.

"Now, what? When Simon Lovelace comes I won't be hanging on to this, you know. I'll be giving it right back to him with a smile and a wave. And pointing out which curtain you're shivering behind."

"Wait."

The kid produced something shiny from one of the inner pockets of his voluminous coat. Did I mention that this coat was about three sizes too big for him? It had evidently once belonged to a very careless magician, since, although heavily patched, it still displayed the unmistakable ravages of fire, blood, and talon. I wished the boy similar fortune.

Now he was holding in his left hand a burnished disc—a scrying glass of highly polished bronze. He passed his right hand over it a few times and began to gaze into the reflective metal with passive concentration. Whatever captive imp dwelled within, the disc soon responded. A murky picture formed; the boy observed it closely. I was too far off to see the image, but while he was distracted I did a bit of looking of my own.

His room… I wanted a clue to his identity. Some letter addressed to him, perhaps, or a name tag in his coat. Both of those had worked before. I wasn't after his birth name, of course—that would be too much to hope for—but his official name would do for a start. [26] All magicians have two names, their official name and their birth name. Their birth name is that given to them by their parents, and because it is intimately bound up with their true nature and being, it is a source of great strength and weakness. They seek to keep it secret from everyone, for if an enemy learns it, he or she can use it to gain power over them, rather in the same way that a magician can only summon a djinni if he knows their true name. Magicians thus conceal their birth names with great care, replacing them with official names at the time of their coming of age. It is always useful to know a magician's official name—but far, far better to learn his secret one. But I was out of luck. The most private, intimate, telltale place in the room—his desk—had been carefully covered with a thick black cloth. A wardrobe in the corner was shut; ditto a chest of drawers. There was a cracked glass vase with fresh flowers among the mess of candles—an odd touch, this. He hadn't put it there himself, I reckoned; so somebody liked him.

The kid waved his hand over the scrying glass and the surface went dull. He replaced the disc in his pocket, then looked up at me suddenly. Uh—oh. Here it came.

"Bartimaeus," he began, "I charge you to take the Amulet of Samarkand and hide it in the magical repository of the magician Arthur Underwood, concealing it so that he cannot observe it, and achieving this so stealthily that no one, either human or spirit, on this plane or any other, shall see you enter or depart; I further charge you to return to me immediately, silent and unseen, to await further instructions."

He was blue in the face when he finished this, having completed it all in one straight breath. [27] Strictly advisable when dealing with subtle, intelligent entities such as myself. It is often possible to interpret a pause for breath as a full stop, which either changes the meaning of the instructions or turns them into gobbledegook. If we can misinterpret something to our advantage, we most certainly will. I glowered under my stony brows.

"Very well. Where does this unfortunate magician reside?"

The boy smiled thinly. "Downstairs."

Downstairs… Well, that was surprising.

"Framing your master, are you? Nasty."

"I'm not framing him. I just want it safe, behind whatever security he's got. No one's going to find it there." He paused. "But if they do…"

"You'll be in the clear. Typical magician's trick. You re learning faster than most."

"No one's going to find it."

"You think not? We'll see."

Still, I couldn't float there gossiping all day. I encased the Amulet with a Charm, rendering it temporarily small and giving it the appearance of a drifting cobweb. Then I sank through a knothole in the nearest plank, snaked as a vapor through the empty floor space, and in spider guise crawled cautiously out of a crack in the ceiling of the room below.

I was in a deserted bathroom. Its door was open; I scurried toward it along the plaster as fast as eight legs could carry me. As I went I shook my mandibles at the effrontery of the boy.

Framing another magician: that wasn't unusual. That was part and parcel, it came with the territory. [28] Magicians are the most conniving, jealous, duplicitous group of people on earth, even including lawyers and academics. They worship power and the wielding thereof, and seek every chance they can to undercut their rivals. At a rough guess about eighty percent of all summonses have to do with carrying out some skulduggery against a fellow magician, or with defense against the same. By contrast, most confrontations between spirits aren't personal at all, simply because they do not occur of our own free will. At that moment, for instance, I did not dislike Faquarl particularly; well, actually that's a lie—I loathed him, but no more than I had before. Anyway, our mutual hatred had taken many centuries, indeed millennia, to build up. Magicians squabble for fun. We'd really had to work at it. Framing your own master, though, now that was out of the ordinary—in fact possibly unique in a wizardling of twelve. Sure, as adults, magicians fell out with ridiculous regularity, but not when they were starting off; not when they were just being taught the rules.

How was I sure the magician in question was his master? Well, unless age—old practices were now being dropped and apprentices were being bussed off to boarding school together (hardly likely), there was no other explanation. Magicians hold their knowledge close to their shriveled little hearts, coveting its power the way a miser covets gold, and they will only pass it on with caution. Since the days of the Median Magi, students have always lived alone in their mentors' house—one master to one pupil, conducting their lessons with secrecy and stealth. From ziggurat to pyramid, from sacred oak to skyscraper, thousands of years pass and things don't change.