"Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stroud Jonathan)

An explosion in the room. Green sparks cascaded from the window.

The boy rose to his feet and tossed the knife upon the pallet. He adjusted his kilt and blew some
flakes of ash from his arms. Then he coughed loudly.

The faintest of scrapings. Across the room the golden chair shifted. The cloak draped over it was
nudged aside. Out from between its legs scrambled another boy, identical to the first, though
flushed and tousled from many hours of hiding.

He stood over the bodies of the assassins, breathing hard. Then he stared up at the ceiling. On
it was the blackened outline of a man. It had a kind of startled look.

The boy lowered his gaze to the impassive doppelganger watching him across the moonlit room.
I gave a mock salute.

Ptolemy brushed the dark hair from his eyes and bowed.

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 Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate




"Thank you, Rekhyt," he said.




1
Times change.

Once, long ago, I was second to none. I could whirl through the air on a wisp of cloud and churn
up dust storms with my passing. I could slice through mountains, raise castles on pillars of
glass, fell forests with a single breath. I carved temples from the sinews of the earth and led
armies against the legions of the dead, so that the harpers of a dozen lands played music in my
memory and the chroniclers of a dozen centuries scribbled down my exploits. Yes! I was
BartimaeusтАФ cheetah quick, strong as a bull elephant, deadly as a striking krait!

But that was then.

And now . . . well, right now I was lying in the middle of a midnight road, flat on my back and
getting flatter. Why? Because on top of me was an upturned building. Its weight bore down.
Muscles strained, tendons popped; try as I might, I could not push free.

In principle there's nothing shameful about struggling when a building falls upon you. I've had
such problems before; it's part of the job description.1 But it does help if the edifice in question
is glamorous and large. And in this case, the fearsome construction that had been ripped from
its foundations and hurled upon me from a great height was neither big nor sumptuous. It
wasn't a temple wall or a granite obelisk. It wasn't the marbled roof of an emperor's palace.