"Jonathan Stroud - Bartimaeus 1 - The Amulet of Samarkand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stroud Jonathan)

Jonathan Stroud
The Amulet of Samarkand

The Bartimaeus Trilogy, book 1



For Gina




Part One

1
Bartimaeus

The temperature of the room dropped fast. Ice formed on the curtains and crusted thickly
around the lights in the ceiling. The glowing filaments in each bulb shrank and dimmed, while the
candles that sprang from every available surface like a colony of toadstools had their wicks snuffed
out. The darkened room filled with a yellow, choking cloud of brimstone, in which indistinct black
shadows writhed and roiled. From far away came the sound of many voices screaming. Pressure was
suddenly applied to the door that led to the landing. It bulged inward, the timbers groaning. Footsteps
from invisible feet came pattering across the floorboards and invisible mouths whispered wicked
things from behind the bed and under the desk.

The sulfur cloud contracted into a thick column of smoke that vomited forth thin tendrils; they
licked the air like tongues before withdrawing. The column hung above the middle of the pentacle,
bubbling ever upward against the ceiling like the cloud of an erupting volcano. There was a barely
perceptible pause. Then two yellow staring eyes materialized in the heart of the smoke.

Hey, it was his first time. I wanted to scare him.

And I did, too. The dark-haired boy stood in a pentacle of his own, smaller, filled with different
runes, three feet away from the main one. He was pale as a corpse, shaking like a dead leaf in a high
wind. His teeth rattled in his shivering jaw. Beads of sweat dripped from his brow, turning to ice as
they fell through the air. They tinkled with the sound of hailstones on the floor.

All well and good, but so what? I mean, he looked about twelve years old. Wide-eyed,
hollow-cheeked. There's not that much satisfaction to be had from scaring the pants off a scrawny
kid.[1]

[1] Not everyone agrees with me on this. Some find it delightful sport. They refine countless ways of
tormenting their summoners by means of subtly hideous apparitions. Usually the best you can hope for is to give
them nightmares later, but occasionally these stratagems are so successful that the apprentices actually panic and
step out of the protective circle. Then all is well—for us. But it is a risky business. Often they are very well trained.
Then they grow up and get their revenge.

So I floated and waited, hoping he wasn't going to take too long to get round to the dismissing
spell. To keep myself occupied, I made blue flames lick up around the inner edges of the pentacle, as