"Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 2 - The Golem's Eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stroud Jonathan)

talent and set about developing it fully.

Living in a spacious apartment in his master's riverside townbouse, Nathaniel led an ordered,
well-directed existence. The house was modern and sparsely furnished, its carpets lynx-gray and the
walls stark white. The furniture was made of glass and silvered metal, and of pale wood felled in
Nordic forests. The whole place had a cool, businesslike, almost antiseptic feel, which Nathaniel
came to admire strongly: it signaled control, clarity, and efficiency, all hallmarks of the contemporary
magician.

Ms. Whitwell's style even extended to her library. In most magical households, libraries were
dark, brooding placesтАФtheir books bound in exotic animal skins, with embroidered pentacles or
curse runes on the spines. But this look, Nathaniel now learned, was very last century. Ms. Whitwell
had requested Jaroslav's, the printers and bookbinders, to provide uniform bindings of white leather
for all her tomes, which were then indexed and stamped with identifying numbers in black ink.

In the center of this white-walled room of neat white books was a rectangular glass table, and
here Nathaniel would sit two days every week, working on the higher mysteries.

In the early months of his tenure with Ms. Whitwell, he had embarked on a period of intensive
study and, to her surprise and approval, mastered successive grades of summoning in record time. He
had progressed from the lowest level of demon (mites, moulers, and goblin-imps), to medium (the full
range of foliots), to advanced (djinn of various castes) in a matter of days.

After watching him dismiss a brawny djinni with an improvisation that administered a slap on its
blue rump, his master expressed her admiration. "You're a natural, John," she said. "A natural. You
displayed bravery and good memory at Heddleham Hall in dismissing the demon there, but I little
realized how adept you'd be at general summonings. Work hard and you'll go far."

Nathaniel thanked her demurely. He did not tell her that most of this was nothing new to him,
that he had already raised a middle-ranking djinni by the age of twelve. He kept his association with
Bartimaeus strictly to himself.

Ms. Whitwell had rewarded his precocity with new secrets and tuition, which was exactly what
Nathaniel had long desired. Under her guidance, he learned the arts of constraining demons to
multiple or semipermanent tasks, without recourse to cumbersome tools such as Adelbrand's
Pentacle. He discovered how to protect himself from enemy spies by weaving sensor webs around
himself; how to dispel surprise attacks by invoking rapid Fluxes that engulfed the aggressive magic
and carried it away. In a very short space of time, Nathaniel had absorbed as much new knowledge
as many of his fellow magicians who were five or six years older. He was now ready for his first job.



It was the custom for all promising magicians to be given work in lowly departmental positions
as a way of instructing them in the practical use of power. The age at which this occurred depended
on the talent of the apprentice and the influence of the master In Nathaniel's case, there was another
factor, too, for it was well known about the coffee bars of Whitehall that the Prime Minister himself
was following his career with a keen and benevolent eye. This ensured that, from the outset, he was
the object of much attention.

His master had warned him of this. "Keep your secrets to yourself," she said, "especially your