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

1. There was the time when a small section of Khufu's Great Pyramid collapsed upon me one moonless
night during the fifteenth year of its construction. 1 was guarding the zone that my group was working
on, when several limestone blocks tumbled down from the top, transfixing me painfully by one of my
extremities. Exactly how it happened was never resolved, though my suspicions were directed at my old
chum Faquarl, who was working with a rival group on the opposite side. I made no outward complaint,
but bided my time while my essence healed. Later, when Faquarl was returning across the Western
Desert with some Nubian gold, I invoked a mild sandstorm, causing him to lose the treasure and incur
the pharaoh's wrath. It took him a couple of years to sift all the pieces from the dunes.


No.The object that was pinning me haplessly to the ground, like a butterfly on a collector's tray,
was of twentieth-century origin and of very specific function.

Oh, all right, it was a public lavatory. Quite sizable, mind, but even so. I was glad no harpers or
chroniclers happened to be passing.

In mitigation, I must report that the lavatory in question had concrete walls and a very thick
iron roof, the cruel aura of which helped weaken my already feeble limbs. And there were
doubtless various pipes and cisterns and desperately heavy taps inside, all adding to the total
mass. But it was still a pretty poor show for a djinni of my stature to be squashed by it. In fact,

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 Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 3 - Ptolemy's Gate

the abject humiliation bothered me more than the crushing weight.

All around me the water from the snapped and broken pipework trickled away mournfully into
the gutters. Only my head projected free of one of the concrete walls; my body was entirely
trapped.2

2. The obvious solution would have been to change formтАФinto a wraith, say, or a swirl of smoke, and
just drift clear. But there were two problems. One: I found it hard to change shape these days, very
hard, even at the best of times. Two: the considerable downward pressure would have blown my
essence apart the moment I softened it to make the change.


So much for the negatives. The good side was that I was unable to rejoin the battle that was
taking place up and down the suburban street.

It was a fairly low-key sort of battle, especially on the first plane. Nothing much could be seen.
The house lights were all out, the electric street lamps had been tied in knots; the road was
dark as an inkstone, a solid slab of black. A few stars shone coldly overhead. Once or twice
indistinct blue-green lights appeared and faded, like explosions far off underwater.

Things hotted up on the second plane, where two rival flocks of birds could be seen wheeling
and swooping at each other, buffeting savagely with wings, beaks, claws, and tails. Such loutish
behavior would have been reprehensible among seagulls or other down-market fowl; the fact
that these were eagles made it all the more shocking.

On the higher planes the bird guises were discarded altogether, and the true shapes of the