Read Online Ptolemy's Gate by Jonathan Stroud - Free Book Online

bother you,” I said darkly, “but there are those in the palace for whom the issue is life and death.”
    â€œOnly those who drown in the stew of politics,” he said. “And I am nothing to them.”
    â€œMay it be so,” I said darkly. “May it be so. What are you writing now?”
    â€œYour description of the elemental walls at the margins of the world. So take that scowl off your beak and tell me more of it.”
    Well, I let it go at that. Arguing with Ptolemy never did much good.
    From the beginning he was a master of curious enthusiasms. The accumulation of wealth, wives, and bijou Nile-front properties—those time-honored preoccupations of most Egyptian magicians—did not enthrall him. Knowledge, of a kind, was what he was after, but it was not the sort that turns city walls to dust and tramples on the necks of the defeated foe. It had a more otherworldly cast.
    In our first encounter he threw me with it.
    I was a pillar of whirling sand, a fashionable getup in those days. My voice boomed like rock-falls echoing up a gully. “Name your desire, mortal.”
    â€œDjinni,” he said, “answer me a question.”
    The sand whirled faster. “I know the secrets of the earth and the mysteries of the air; I know the key to the minds of women. 2 What do you wish? Speak.”
    â€œWhat is essence?”
    The sand halted in midair. “Eh?”
    â€œYour substance. What exactly is it? How does it work?”
    â€œWell, um …”
    â€œAnd the Other Place. Tell me of it. Is time there synchronous with ours? What form do its denizens take? Have they a king or leader? Is it a dimension of solid substance, or a whirling inferno, or otherwise? What are the boundaries between your realm and this Earth, and to what degree are they permeable?”
    â€œUm …”
    In short, Ptolemy was interested in us. Djinn. His slaves. Our inner nature, that is, not the usual surface guff.The most hideous shapes and provocations made him yawn, while my attempts to mock his youth and girlish looks merely elicited hearty chuckles. He would sit in the center of his pentacle, stylus on his knee, listening with rapt attention, ticking me off when I introduced a more than usually obvious fib, and frequently interrupting to clarify some ambiguity. He used no Stipples, no Lances, no other instruments of correction. His summonings rarely lasted more than a few hours. To a hardened djinni like me, who had a fairly accurate idea of the vicious ways of humans, it was all a bit disconcerting.
    I was one of a number of djinn and lesser spirits regularly summoned. The normal routine never deviated: summons, chat, frenzied scribbling by the magician, dismissal.
    In time, my curiosity was aroused. “Why do you do this?” I asked him curtly. “Why all these questions? All this writing?”
    â€œI have read most of the manuscripts in the Great Library,” the boy said. “They have much about summoning, chastisement, and other practicalities, but almost nothing about the nature of demons themselves. Your personality, your own desires. It seems to me that this is of the first importance. I intend to write the definitive work on the subject, a book that will be read and admired forever. To do this, I must ask many questions. Does my ambition surprise you?”
    â€œYes, in truth. Since when has any magician cared about our sufferings? There’s no reason why you should. It’s not in your interests.”
    â€œOh, but it is. If we remain ignorant, and continue to enslave you rather than understand you, trouble will come from it sooner or later. That’s my feeling.”
    â€œThere is no alternative to this slavery. Each summons wraps us in chains.”
    â€œYou are too pessimistic, djinni. Traders tell me of shamans far off among the northern wastes who leave their own bodies to converse with spirits in another world. To my mind, that is a much