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The summer air is muggy and still after rainfall; trapped between four walls it stagnates into the sort of heavy heat that makes breathing hard and concentration near impossible. Nathaniel’s attention flickers constantly from the papers arrayed on his desk. Behind him the window’s been cracked open to let in a nonexistent breeze. Angled shutters direct shafts of afternoon light, undiluted, over his hunched back. Moisture prickles on the skin of his neck and drips down to dampen his collar.
Nathaniel shifts in his seat, uncomfortable, and pushes thick dark hair back from his brow with one sweat-slicked palm.
The distracted motion grabs the attention of the bigger nuisance in the room. The weather Nathaniel could endure on its own, but—
“What’d I tell you, Natty-boy? That flowing mane of yours does you no favors in this season. In any season, really. C’mon, lemme at it with a pair of shears. You’ll be thanking me after, I swear.”
—not coupled with the demon’s incessant prattle.
“Bartimaeus,” he grits with a patience he doesn’t have, “get off my desk.”
The djinni-in-question looks down, feigning surprise, at the polished wood supporting its entire weight. “Which?—ah, this. Real sturdy, this is,” it says approvingly, wiggling and further crumpling the important documents helplessly pinned under its stomach and thighs.
Nathaniel’s left eye twitches. The pen he grips in a now-fisted hand is stabbing into paper with too much pressure. Suddenly, the nib breaks and punches a parting hole, ink-splattered at the edges, into a half-written report. His fingers loosen. Nathaniel snaps.
“That’s it.”
Eyes blazing with ominous intent, he presses both palms against the table and levers off to sit back and face Bartimaeus head-on.
A dark-skinned Egyptian boy in a loincloth—its preferred guise—waits grinning. The false boy is the picture of relaxed and cheeky, lying belly-down with chin propped on elbows and feet kicked up. It raises an elegant eyebrow at the gears visibly turning, grinding in the young magician’s mind.
“A little hot under the collar, O my master?”
“Shut up. I’m thinking of your punishment.”
The demon’s grin only widens to Cheshire proportions. It looks feline as ever; the odd glimmer in its black eyes both predatory and uncanny, like a shifting, shapeless thing moving in deep shadows. The conjured image sends a stray shiver up Nathaniel’s spine despite himself, despite the temperature of the room. Careful, he has to remind himself. He’s the one holding the reins, the power. Bartimaeus is his servant, dealing nothing but cheap tricks and barbed words meant to unsettle him.
“Well? Let’s hear it,” Bartimaeus chirps, ever blithe.
Nathaniel’s glower intensifies. It’s meant to cover up the fact that, well, nothing suitably humbling and painful for the demon is coming to mind at the moment. In the next Nathaniel appears to deflate, all the fight escaping from his lungs in a rush of hot air. His anger fizzes out. He slumps in his chair, exhausted, and eyes the other boy mildly.
It’s all rather anti-climatic and wholly unexpected, for both combatants. The djinni nearly slips off the desk in surprise, mouth comically wide—and getting wider when Nathaniel snickers and almost, almost smiles.
“You’re gaping like a fish.”
Bartimaeus snaps its jaw shut with a start. “What’s gotten into you? Usually you’d have gone off like a volcano, hideous lacy plungers and all quivering in rage.”
“It must be the weather,” Nathaniel decides, absently fingering the silk and lace shirt cuffs that did bear a grudging resemblance to toilet plungers. “It’s too hot to think.”
“Now, that’s your own fault. Look at what you’re wearing, all that fabric sticking to places it shouldn’t stick. No wonder,” the djinni shakes its head, mock-sadly.
“So you’ve mentioned before.” The usual, tried and tested gibe aimed at his tight-fitting clothes fails to find its mark this time. The magician isn’t really listening, expression distrait and unsure, tentative in a way that betrays his youth, his fifteen years.
He glances up at Bartimaeus, in the process of engraving an obscene pictorial into the table’s surface with a sharp fingernail, and recoils back as if seeing the demon for the very first time. “Why are you still on my desk?” Then, upon spotting the defaced wood, spluttering: “Wh-Why would you draw that?”
Bartimaeus inspects its handiwork. “Maybe I enjoy seeing you suffer.”