A/N: So guess who sucks at this updating thing because they picked a really shallow narrative style and is now finding difficulty maintaining this shallowness and lack of character exploration/development, and also has had writer's block since forever now and also has not edited this chapter in the least?

That's right. Me.

Seriously though, I thought I'd be done with this fic in a flash and now I'm regretting this hasty style I adopted under that presumption. And I don't know why anyone is bothering with this story, let alone leaving lovely reviews. So thank you for your patience.

Sort-of spoilers of Ring of Solomon, in that you have to have read it to understand some references/plot points here.

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Clara Bell, the girl previously known as Lizzie, previously known as Kitty, continued down the busy London street in an inconspicuous and self-assured way that pretended that she had every right to exist at the moment.

Which she didn't. She shouldn't.

Not only was this officially the case, as indicated by her original legal papers being filed away under some black label that read 'DECEASED', but she didn't really deserve to be a walking, breathing, free woman. Actually, she felt pretty wretched at the moment. If she was stupid enough to dash back into certain slaughter to save the life of a measly magician, why couldn't she be momentarily lose reason again to rescue her mentor and benefactor?

Mr. Button was elderly and legless. It was like he was perfectly conditioned potential victim to guilt-trip Kitty.

But instead, she'd scarpered and left a gentleman who was much more morally sound than Mandrake to fend for himself.

Several times had Kitty stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and nearly turned back to Mr. Button's flat. Each time she remembered that she'd already seen the siren-wailing trucks leave the house. Also that Farrar would very possibly be waiting there and might abduct her before she could be of any help to Mr. Button. She could only hope that the extent of the fire's damage hadn't been too great.

The best way to make amends now, she decided, was keep herself alive so she could pay off whatever damages she'd sustained to Mr. Button's flat. Other perks to keeping herself alive included summoning Bartimaeus and eventually uniting spirits and commoners to overthrow the magicians, but even that was long term and inconsequential compared to the prospect of shrewd insurance companies. It was good luck, then, that Clara Bell could get started right away by retrieving her check at The Frog, where she was to begin her noon shift very soon.

She entered the bar through the back door by the dumpster. It was 12:12 pm, just after noon.

"Sorry I'm late, Mr. Fox," she called as she hung her jacket on the employee coat rack. "I had an emergency at home."

No response. Kitty could make out the sound of smooth jazz playing softly on the radio and clinking glasses as someone prepared drinks behind the counter, so she assumed that no one had heard her enter.

Humming in an undertone along with the music, Kitty donned her apron and proceeded to a small closet to turn on the heat. She knew that Sam and Mr. Fox always forgot about this, so she'd made it her habit to check that the boiler was warmed up before the bar filled up. Also, stashed there was a cache of detonation sticks, jolt-sticks, silver knives, and other various weapons to defend against spirits. Kitty had been delighted beyond the comprehension of her peers when the French spies had dropped by to donate them, and also took it upon herself to coo over them in secret every day.

Carefully, she removed the loose plank beneath the water tank and peered into the resulting niche with a small but growing smile of goofy content at the thought of her lovely combative weapons.

It was empty.

Kitty immediately stopped moving, plank still held awkwardly above her head. With disbelief, she hesitantly reached a hand into the gap. Her fingertips scraped the dusty and cobwebbed bottom. Every last knife and bomb was definitely gone.

A pause. Then, as systematic and adept as ever in a crisis (and this was a crisis – she didn't care if it was a joke or simple thoughtlessness, nobody touched her babies without telling her or without a marid setting fire to the place), Kitty quickly replaced the plank and rocked back onto her heels.

"Sam?" she said in what she thought was reasonable calm. "Mr. Fox? Where are the weapons?"

Again, no answer. Kitty began to grow cross. "This isn't funny, sir. And Sam. We can't just be moving our only magical arms around without telling everyone. What if we really are attacked?"

Nothing. Still silence, but for the faint, jazzy melody lingering in the air like stale incense and the dim clink of glass. Kitty got to her feet.

"Honestly," she called out again, letting indignation creep into her voice. She smoothed down her apron and swept around the corner into the kitchenette. "You can't expect me to think that you can't hear me when I'm – "

She choked on her words and shut up.

The sink and the cook tops had been ripped out of counter and thrown on the floor. Little pieces of ash and electric wire dusted the tiles around the discarded appliances, and every cabinet had been thrown open, the glasses and pans within having been swept from their shelves. The icebox's door had been dented in; its door alarm wailed feebly in a streaming, continuous, single-toned beep as melted ice from the cooler seeped out onto the floor. A stout soup pot was still rocking back and forth on the tiles, pinging against the shattered glass on the ground. Clink. Clink. The pieces tinkled in a pitiful imitation of Sam's daily glass-cleaning sounds.

Jazz and blues continued to crackle echoingly over the radio. A brief, tinny, high trumpet trill punctured the tune's lulling murmur, and a snare solo started up jauntily.

Kitty backed away and dropped to the ground. Shuffling forward on the balls on her feet, she navigated the broken glass carefully and ducked behind a row of floor cabinets.

Not daring to breathe, she pressed her chin to the ground and peered around the cabinet corner.

The heavy, honey-colored light of the wall lamps cast their bronze haze over overturned tables, splintered chairs, and soot-stained walls. Neither motion nor living thing revealed itself under Kitty's wary eye.

Cautiously, cautiously, she stood once more. Assuming a half-hunched position, she skirted around the counter to examine the damage more closely.

The weapons hadn't been moved, or even stolen, she realized. They'd simply all been used up.

Clink. Clink.

Crnnch.

That was the distinctive sound of a footstep.

Kitty instinctively snatched a half-shattered wine bottle from the counter. She set her feet wide apart and backed away towards the exit warily.

Clink. Crnnch. Crnnch. CRACK.

Rotating on her heel, Kitty faced the source of the sound with a firm grip on the neck of the wine bottle.

In the corner of the bar, the door of a half-decimated cabinet shuddered and splintered lightly. Visible through the narrow opening, a small girl peeked hesitantly out from within. She'd frozen, staring, with one tiny sneaker on the ground as she attempted to climb out of her hiding spot.

Kitty narrowed her eyes. She was well aware of the deceptive nature of demons.

"Don't move!" she barked. The child remained as she was, eyes wide and dark as if she were caught in spotlights. Never taking her eyes off of the girl, Kitty bent down and removed a pocket-sized silver dagger from her boot. It slid out of its sheath smoothly. With a tight and well-rehearsed motion, Kitty flicked her wrist and let the knife fly. The blade sunk its tip into the floor beside the child's foot. The girl didn't even flinch.

Paranoia placated, Kitty shifted out of her wary stance. She quickly made her way over to the cabinet and pried the shattered door open. Kneeling, she peered into the girl's petrified face. "Are you alright?"

The girl blinked. She shifted jerkily back and forth in the cabinet with movements that had a slightly hysterical edge, limbs and clothes getting tangled in the debris within. Kitty reached out and took little girl gently by the elbows. "Hey," she said firmly, "don't do that. Here, I'll – " Carefully, she half-pulled, half-carried the child out. Sitting her down on the floor in front of her, Kitty began methodically picking chips of wood and plaster out of the girl's dress. Still, the child stared down at her hands, silent.

Kitty frowned as she spotted the red stains on the girl's skirt. Blood? Paint? How old was this child, anyway? Four, or five years old perhaps, she answered herself. Where are her caretakers?

She brushed one of the girl's long pigtails out of the way and realized that the child bore a pink backpack.

"Do you want to take that off? It'll be more comfortable – " Kitty reached for the pack.

Without glancing up, the girl squirmed away, shrugging off Kitty's helping hand.

"Well, alright." Kitty retracted her arm. "So, where are your parents?"

Kitty waited for a reply. None came.

Taking a steadying breath, Kitty tried again. "Okay, then. Can you tell me what happened here?"

Her query was only met by a listless, blank look.

"Can you tell me your name, at least?"

The child raised her head, cocked it to the side. It was almost… endearing. "Mihailov," she uttered in a high, quiet voice.

"Um," said Kitty. "That's a nice name. Are you sure it's yours and not a Mafioso's?"

The child lowered her head again, played with the end of a pigtail.

Well, at least she's not so traumatized that she's totally unrepsonsive. "Do you have any idea where your parents are? I could take you home, if you like."

For a long moment, Kitty thought that Mihailov wasn't going to answer again, but then she abruptly slid her pack off. Unzipping a front pocket, she pulled a slightly crumpled sheet of paper. She turned to face Kitty.

"Take me here," said the child.

Kitty stared. The paper was covered with what looked like a blobby, black circle colored in with crayon. To Kitty, it distinctly resembled a bottomless hole. The small blank space in the corner was decorated with a clock with its hour hand on the three, or somewhere in that vicinity.

"Um, I don't know what this is… Mihailov."

The child regarded Kitty unblinkingly. "Take me here." She shook the paper. "Here. Hurry."

"Do you need to be somewhere by three o' clock?" asked Kitty bemusedly.

But the little girl said no more.

Though growing more and more mystified by the moment, Kitty decided that she would at the very least help the shell-shocked child find their home. She'd just have to brave the police station – maybe Mihailov was a last name, and they could find the girl's parents that way – and hope that no one was looking for an ex-Resistance member there. Gingerly, Kitty wrapped her arms around the child. The girl twitched violently and gave a surprisingly strong start in the other direction. Taken unaware, Kitty's grip slacked for a moment, but she refused to let go and scooped the child up in her arms. Kitty stood up and patiently waited for the girl to stop twisting.

Squirming, the girl fought Kitty's grip as if Kitty were white-hot and covered in cactus needles. But her efforts grew feeble very quickly. She eventually went limp in Kitty's arms and subsided into uncontrolled trembles. Kitty's heart gave an involuntary pang.

Adjusting Mihailov's position so that her head lolled on Kitty's shoulder, Kitty retreated out the bar's back door.

It was 12:20 pm, after noon.

Within ten minutes, the two were aboard a public bus, and the child hadn't stopped shaking the whole time. All Kitty could do was hold her tighter and stare blankly out the window, wondering about what became of Mr. Fox and Sam and the bar's customers at the time of attack and whether she was going to get any red on her clothes from the little girl's dress.

Time passed, and Kitty snapped out of her semi-daze when she noticed that they were on Whitehall Street and the grand white steps themselves were visible down the walk. She nudged the child.

"Look," she remarked to the girl. "It's Whitehall. We're almost at the police station, you know – you can wait for your parents there."

Kitty was not expecting the girl to freeze in her arms.

She was most certainly not expecting the girl to give one last monumental shudder that had Kitty almost dropping the girl in surprise, then wrench herself away from Kitty, roll over on the floor, and unzip her pink backpack.

And Kitty was shocked, to say the least, when little Mihailov produced a detonation stick from the pack and fired at Kitty.

A roar of sound in her ears, and Kitty was flung sideways out of her seat. A bulb of white light flared in her eyes as she landed and knocked her head on something hard. Her hearing was obscured by a high, clear ringing.

Thanks to her resilience, the fire from the detonation hadn't harmed Kitty, but its force was clearly something to be reckoned with, as Kitty was reduced to laying sprawled dazedly for a few seconds. Slowly, white noise began to filter in again: faint shouting noises, muted crashes. By the time she'd roused blearily and realized that the bar's cache of magical weapons had not actually gone into protecting The Frog, but rather was now being used to ransack a bus full of civilians, the world started to spin wildly around her. Fleetingly, Ktty thought she was going to faint, but when the surrounding occupants also started skidding sideways she realized that the bus had simply tipped onto its side.

Underneath her, the floor became vertical. Kitty scrambled blindly as she slid across the isle and barely managed to wrap herself around a pole before hitting the other side. The windows shattered behind her. Kitty's spine vibrated with the impact of the bus hitting the pavement.

Groans and hysterical screams punctuated the air amidst a flurry of displaced dust and panicked motion. Kitty cracked open an eyelid and glanced about fervently.

The child was nowhere in sight.

Kitty really ought to have stayed put and waited for wailing sirens and the Night Police like the rest of the passengers. She probably should have stayed for questioning and wound treatment. She was definitely obliged to identify herself as being involved in this assault so that she could testify for a probable case of terrorism.

"Huh. Well, isn't this a right pickle?" Kitty remarked to a fellow bystander, one hand tucked casually in her pocket and the other inconspicuously brushing debris off her sleeve. "Wonder what caused the bus to flip over."

The curious crowd that had gathered around the wreck within five minutes all gave distracted nods and murmurs of assent. Together, they resembled a flock of little carrion birds in their dark, hooded long-coats and tightly wrapped scarves, hovering futilely around a dead beast that larger predators were already descending on.

The Night Police crawled all over the upturned public transportation vehicle, prying emergency doors open and breaking windows to reach the civilians. Kitty watched impassively as one officer descended through the window that Kitty had broken not a moment ago to escape.

A hawk-faced, diminutive old officer – clearly low-ranked and human – appeared to Kitty's left and snorted. "Another one of these… they'll be taking the news to Chamuel again, no doubt."

Kitty stiffened and lowered her face away from the Night Police. "Chamuel? Who's that?" she asked. The name sounded familiar… didn't Jane Farrar say that the trunk had made a victim of him?

"I believe that he is in charge of regulating contraband weapons – those that crashed the bus, for example. I've actually met him once or twice on a crime scene."

Nodding jerkily, Kitty began to inch away. She just barely caught the tail of end of what the officer had to say.

"Now that you mention it…" the officer continued thoughtfully. "I don't actually recall what he was like. I do remember exactly what he said to me on multiple occasions – he was a very clever, resourceful fellow, believe me – but I don't think I could describe him to you for the life of me. Must have been a quiet sort of fellow. Forgettable face."

Kitty halted abruptly. Her voice took on a careful flatness. "Oh, one of those sort of guys? So ordinary that they never stick to your memory and they're totally unnoticeable, just because you can't define anything about them that stands out?"

"Yeah! That's right. Um, he may have been a little pigeon-chested… or mousy-haired… hey, are you leaving?"

But Kitty was already gone. She blended in by trailing discreetly after the dissipating members of the crowd, stony-faced and furious of eye.

It was 1:00 pm in the afternoon.

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The last thing I heard before the pain was Rebecca Piper reading aloud the minutes as she played scribe from behind her table.

"12:12 pm in the afternoon. John Mandrake, accompanied by fourth-level djinni Bartimaeus, opens unidentified trunk of dangerous, magical disposition."

I suspect that whoever had chronicled Hiroshima while observing the event from a comfortable seat in a distant aircraft had used a similar, criminally clinical tone.

If I had been human, I'd probably have gasped aloud and collapsed. As it was, beings of essence have no necessity to manifest lungs or inner organs of any kind, let alone breathe. It's impractical, and no one is crawling around in your intestines to marvel at your excellent craftsmanship anyway [1].

[[1. Don't think I can't do it. I've seen enough of the insides of humans throughout the centuries, whether snugly piled inside of a slit-open corpse, strewn about battlefields, or draped decoratively around temples. With the extensive knowledge I have on the subject of delicate inner-things, I could make an art of triggering gag reflexes at the dinner table.]]

That said, it says something for the degree of my agony as my vision plunged into throbbing red and I still choked and stumbled against my Shield. I was aching to the very core, with my nerves afire and the fabric of my essence burning with friction. I felt elastic; it was as if I were literally being rent in two different directions.

I hadn't known this particular feeling for a long time. Not for nearly three thousand years.

"Sh– shut the l– lid," I gasped.

A voice responded dimly somewhere over my shoulder. "What?"

"Shut the lid, Mandrake!"

"We can't do that. You're making no sense, Bartimaeus. What are you even doing?" The voice developed an irate edge. A spindly hand gingerly grasped my elbow and tugged half-heartedly upwards, as if debating on whether to help me to my feet or not. "Stop with the histrionics already."

"Nathaniel, just close the box!" I snapped.

The grasping hand stiffened, twitched like a dying spider. Mandrake released his grip at the exact same time the pain began to subside. As a result, I managed to salvage some dignity by not collapsing all over again and instead executing an elegant and practical lean against the Shield.

When the searing, stretching sensation was gone, I snuck a glance at the trunk. The thing had not changed outwardly in the least. It was still decrepit and gaping widely open.

The magician was bristling like a doused cat behind me. "I would advise you," he hissed, "to keep your voice down and not broadcast confidential information to the general public."

I drew my form away from the support of the Shield and allowed it to flicker out. "Didn't know that we're counting paranoid, preening, political vermin – a.k.a., the only other person here – as the general public now. Dear me, how society has decayed under the modern magician's rule," I returned lightly. "So, are you telling me that you didn't feel anything?"

Mandrake's stony grimace did not subside. "Besides a pounding headache and a lack of functioning in my sinuses that could easily be blamed on the drink? No. What exactly did you feel?"

Knotting Ptolemy's eyebrows, I inclined his noble profile towards the trunk again. "Nothing altogether very pleasant, I assure you. Curious. Last time I came across something like this, it affected humans too. Not as badly as it would spirits, but significantly nonetheless." Solomon's Ring had certainly given the king enough grief throughout his lifetime.

An electric tingle flew up my spine. Was it the Ring in the trunk? If so, how had it been uncovered? Frankly, I didn't much find the thought of the Ring being abused again entertaining, if I was going to be involved in it.

Besides, I was a little fed up with girls with knives, and given the Ring's history with such ladies I was a little paranoid that our resident (and conveniently probably still situated in London) armed female might turn up for the occasion, just for tradition's sake.

Mandrake pinched the bridge of his nose with a long-suffering sort of air that he wasn't entitled to use and shoved his way past me rudely. "Well, I suppose that we weren't disintegrated like Chamuel and Igneel because the trunk has used up all its current capacity for defense against intruders. The only thing to do now is to shed light on its contents."

This jolted me out of my reverie. "No I don't really think that's a, um – "

I fairly zipped after Mandrake to his side, seizing him by the collar and yanking him back. Though it was temporarily amusing to witness the expression on his face as he stumbled, I really needn't have done so.

I think we both noticed what was inside the trunk at the same time. It was difficult not to.

There was nothing in it.

A lot of nothing.

For a moment I was under the impression that an impenetrable haze of darkness of magical origin obscured the trunk's bottom. I then realized that the trunk didn't actually have a bottom at all, and that the light simply stopped revealing its contents past the four wooden walls that sealed the darkness in. The utter blackness went down for an incalculable length; gazing down into its depths was like squinting into an endless railway tunnel at night.

An absurd notion seized me. Perhaps the tunnel bore through the earth as well! With my sneakered foot, I nudged the side of the trunk, lifting it and revealing its underside. The trunk still had a bottom, and what's more, there was no hole that had magically been drilled through the courtyard's concrete.

I let the trunk fall back to the ground. Tumultuous and thundering booms echoed thinly through the air, as if reverberating through the massive, earthy tunnels of a far away cavern. Inside the trunk, the floor was as missing as ever.

Narrowing my eyes, I flicked through the seven planes. There was a magical halo of an aura surrounding the trunk, but of a faint and less-than-significant nature.

"Huh. That's different," I observed, shoving my hands into Ptolemy's jeans.

Mandrake made something like a numb noise of assent. Transfixed, he bent gingerly and stretched an arm towards the trunk. "I wonder… exactly how deep does this go?"

"Oh no you don't." I carelessly wrenched him back once more. Seizing upon the lapel of his suit, I tugged, hard. Something snapped, and a silvery button came out in my hand. Before Mandrake could utter any outraged sound of protest, I deftly tossed the sparkling chip of metal into the depths of the trunk.

With barely a twinkle, it vanished into the depths. I listened hard. The sound of the button hitting rock bottom never came.

"That was a good suit," said Mandrake petulantly. He pulled at his lapel, attempting to pinch together the undone top of his jacket.

I ignored him. To follow up the button experiment, I conjured a Pulse. The marble-sized sphere of light jittered nervously about Ptolemy's fingers for an instant, then dove into the inky depths after the button.

"So," I began conversationally as I rocked my heels in Mandrake's direction. "Can you make anything of this?"

The magician shrugged, maintaining a certain surliness in the motion. "My guess is that it's been enchanted to be bigger on the inside that it is on the outside. Such a practice is not entirely uncommon, though much more so in modern times. It's not something most demons can do directly, and the required ritual for the modification is largely lost… also, since such a feat is technically physically impossible, it's understandably difficult to pull off."

I considered this. Not impossible, given that I'd come across such a thing before [2]."Well, taking the complexity of the magic into consideration, this trunk can't be terribly big – though I would consider any size up to that of a small room. It might even be as big as your head [3]."

[[2. Pandora's Box, outwardly an unassuming if delicately crafted vase, contained a group of full-grown assassins from a Mediterranean cult. I had been charged to escort them to Athens on their mission. When the 'box' was at last opened, each highly-trained mercenary leapt out with the speed of king's falcons and the deftness of shadows. I, having been on Earth for some time by then, was a little slow on the uptake, and by the time I was out the target was already dead. Silver nets welcomed me at the vase's lip with open arms. Greece left a bad taste in my mouth, but thankfully that was the first and last I ever saw of it. It does comfort me to know that I am remembered as 'Hope'.]]

[[3. Alright, so I was being exceedingly unfair and sarcastic here. The trunk couldn't have possibly been nearly the size of Mandrake's swollen cranium.]]

The boy barely paused to shoot a dirty look. "Yes… I would, however, like to know what's being kept in it." Mandrake peered dubiously into the trunk again. A useless endeavor. It was as if the trunk swallowed light; there was no gauging its depths simply from looking. "Where is your Pulse, anyhow?"

Presently, a flash of light shot out of the trunk at speed. The light was rapidly dwindling and shuddering intensely where it hovered. All I managed to glimpse was a throbbing, warning-light-red with violent indigo highlights before the Pulse winked out.

I took this as my cue to make a decision on the spot. "Well, it's something that will likely see us both as so much ash in a cremation pot – which means that it's right up your alley, based my observations of you on our past ventures. I'll let you do the honors then, shall I?"

Scowling, Mandrake shook his head 'no'. "Investigating this immediately would be foolish. I hate to acknowledge that Farrar was right, but we need time to research and gather back up."

"Well, personally I'm pretty indifferent to the slaughter of mindless imp slaves as you pitch them into the abyss for experimental purposes so long as it doesn't involve me, but I'll admit to being a little impressed by your willingness to chain-sacrifice dozens and refer to the act so impartially. Very dictator-esque. Living off the work of spirits and commoners while oppressing them, scrabbling greedily for scraps of authority in the dirt amongst your fellow power-mongers … you're moving up! I'm quite proud of you." This jibe had nothing to do with anything, of course, but magicians are always fair game and by now I was cross enough to goad whenever I could.

Before the magician had a chance to respond in livid rage and expound on how the glorious Empire was not oppressive in the least, a certain little mouse piped up from behind her table-barricade. "Mr. Mandrake?"

The magician twisted his neck about and entreated Piper with a self-righteous and self-pitying look. "Ms. Piper, you believe that the government's sole purpose isn't to live off the backs of others, right?"

Piper started. "Er. You might be… hard-pressed to find another area that they excel as much in [4]. But Sergeant Jane Farrar has just sent a message imp." Behind the secretary, the unfamiliar and pockmarked face of a gremlin stretched to accommodate a toothy smile, then vanished in a puff of purple smoke. "She says to prepare the trunk for her, as she'll be arriving at Whitehall shortly."

[[4. My hero.]]

"What? Is she ready so soon?" I saw with slightly rueful amusement that Mandrake was reacting more aggressively to this news that he had to the prospect of a physics-denying storage case. "But she's not authorized to have access to the evidence without clearance!"

"Yes. She says that she has important and relevant information regarding the origin of the trunk, and that she'll only share it under the condition that she be allowed to see the object in question, if only briefly. Apparently, she's been deemed worthy of the Security department's time."

Now Mandrake began to look concerted. A certain shifting about his feet indicated his desire to pace. "No, no, that's a bluff. Farrar can't have gotten any actually important information in so short a time – but that hardly matters. What matters is that she's been granted access once more, and one more chance at the box is all she needs. We have to move quickly."

I felt it prudent to interject at this point. "Yes, Mandrake. Move quickly in the other direction. Didn't you see the color of that Pulse? You'd have to be nothing short of an utter fool to be the first to attempt something."

"Exactly. Which is why you're going in first."

I paused, taking in the significance of this. "If you're trying to get me to take back what I said and admit that you are the very image of competence and intelligence, it's not going to happen."

Biting quips aside, I was now rifling rapidly through my mind for ideas on how to stop Mandrake. Was I curious as to why the trunk induced the feeling of being caught and stretched between earth and the Other Place? Yes. Was I apprehensive of the possibility of the Ring being back and even half-tempted to attempt to dispose of such an object before London's magicians squared it away? Yes. But there were better solutions. Unfortunately, none of them involved fulfilling Mandrake's insatiable ambition, as I rather think he'd throw a fit if I tossed the thing into a volcano.

The remaining options seemed to only portend of the severe compromise of my livelihood, and that was not acceptable – especially considering my dear master's currently highly unrepentant attitude. Who would be willing to lend a hand to someone treating you like that? But I wasn't about to let him know that his whimsy moods had any effect on my own rational detachment.

Before I could counter with any sort of coherent defense, Mandrake's pale, pinched face grew even tighter. I noted that he was still a little green around the gills and was becoming even more so with how worked up he was getting.

"No jokes, Bartimaeus. You're heading in," he said coldly.

I regarded the boy with a weary look. A look that palpably conveyed refined disdain, muted pity, and loss of respect – if that were even possible any more at this point – without a single word.

"I suppose that whatever I say won't mean anything. After all, I'm only a slave – what do I know?"

The lines of his face tightened, betraying only the slightest undertone of grim satisfaction. "After you."

If my sarcasm had made a dent in his thick skull at all, he didn't care.

The maw of the trunk was just barely wide enough to slip Ptolemy's slim shoulders through, but I didn't bother with the potential embarrassment of attempting to squeeze through. In the form of a ruby-throated hummingbird with verdant feathers, I darted uncertainly about the chest's lip before plunging myself into the darkness.

The lighting didn't get any better down there, and while I continued descending cautiously, I had no point of reference to tell how fast I was going. I glanced upwards and squinted past my beak. The opening was a dull square of white light, and not too far away. Below me, the blackness remained.

Now that I was submerged, I perceived a distinct change in atmosphere. No breeze ruffled the hummingbird's plumage, and the surrounding air itself was utterly still and without temperature. I felt neither warmth nor chill, humidity nor dryness. The volume of air I occupied did not seem hollow or empty, and the quality of the darkness was almost that of intimacy, not unlike that of a snug bedroom's; yet I was aware of a prominent sense of great space, inconceivable and unspecific in its expanse. It was not a natural feeling, and humans would not have liked it. I felt strangely at home.

I also felt that I had to reassess my initial estimate of the size of the trunk. The hummingbird stopped its descent and assumed a stationary position. Out of nervous habit, I flipped rapidly through the planes again. I caught my breath.

The night of the trunk was interrupted by a collectively psychedelic mass of magical aura, shimmering and pulsing in rolling hills some hundred meters below. Sheathed inside this immense halo were hulking, mound-like shapes made indistinct by distance. The mounds had distributed themselves in close formation, huddling close together and filling up almost every available space until the aura pooled up and pushed against what I presumed were the trunk's true walls – which, I noted, stretched some fifty meters in either direction. The space was roughly cubical and truly cavernous.

But for all the grandeur of this spectacle, my little hummingbird eyes weren't exactly blinded. The aura did not extend far past its source, the hills, and the darkness didn't automatically give way under its brightness. I reasoned that the Pulse had come back so vibrantly colored due to the sheer quantity of magic here, not the average strength of it. Either way, even djinn can't see everything in total darkness; a severely limited amount of natural light I can work with, e.g. the stars or suspicious candles, but this wasn't cutting it for me. I couldn't make out the exact appearance of the walls or the ceiling, nor could I identify the nature of what was causing the aura.

Sending out a Flare, I observed as the darkness of the first plane was lit up. The Flare crackled, exploded, and faded. From the short-lived brightness, I glimpsed the walls, unimpressive and uneven dark surfaces that arched overhead until the square of dim daylight broke its expanse. Far below, the rusty, sporadic glimmer of gold caught my eye before disappearing.

Time to report back, I think.

The hummingbird fixed its beady eyes on the opening of light and made its way speedily up towards it.

"Well, it's no Pandora's Box," said the hummingbird. It circled twice around Mandrake's head, then turned into the Egyptian boy in a dark sweater.

The boy looked disappointed [5]. "So the box is not enhanced?"

[[5. Right after he looked disoriented and cross-eyed. Trying to follow the progress of a small avian zipping around your head will do that.]]

"Oh, it's enhanced alright. It's just that Pandora's Box is to this thing what the average commoner's living wage is to a magician's ego."

"Stop with the denigrations. So what do you mean, how big exactly is…?"

I shrugged and scraped the sole of Ptolemy's shoe against the concrete. "Big."

"What were the contents?"

"I'm not sure, I valued my life too much to get closer. There's an awful lot of stuff down there though. Dental, rusty, metal things. Old rubbish. Probably not worth it."

"You're only prolonging your stay on earth, you know."

I blew a raspberry and resumed my scraping. The magician's face hardened.

"Take me down there then."

I stopped scraping. "Um. I'm pretty sure that you have scores of imps available to throw for inane purposes like this. What you don't have readily available, it seems, are good ideas and self-preservation skills."

"I am running out of both time and patience, Bartimaeus," he snapped. "Clearly, I can't trust you to be honest about anything. If you want something done, do it yourself, right?"

Rolling my eyes, I transformed into the hummingbird and dove into the trunk once more, too exasperated to argue. Once wrapped in darkness again, I changed back into Ptolemy and hovered below the chest's opening.

"Alright, Mandrake. Jump."

A startled noise reached me from outside. "What?"

I affected an unseen grin and opened my arms invitingly. "Come on now, how else do you expect to get down? You'll fit through the opening fine, being as spindly as you are. Your dear slave will catch you."

More sounds of discomfort were mumbled. Music to my ears.

"By stalling, you are beginning to try my patience," I called benevolently. "And who knows what might happen if I get miffed enough with you?"

A cease in the flow of muttered incoherent dissent. Rustlings. Through the opening was thrust a shiny shoe on the end of a gangly leg. A pause. The other foot followed, and suddenly the square of light was obscured by a tumbling Mandrake.

..

..

..

..

Mandrake felt a twinge of satisfaction as his flailing foot connected hard with something fleshy before experiencing an onslaught of terror as he continued falling and collided into the said fleshy thing.

He waited for the djinni to steady itself and halt their fall, but that never came. Instead, Mandrake tumbled head over heels through the darkness, lightheaded and panicking, unable to mark his progress or slow down.

Apparently Bartimaeus had managed to slow down to a degree, because their landing was not overly painful, though admittedly lacking in gentleness department. All the breath left Mandrake's lungs in a whoomph as he landed flat on his back. His resulting flinch brought about clinking, metallic sounds from underneath him. While his elbow struck some painful corner, his back was rather well padded by the djinni flattened underneath him.

Mandrake caught himself mumbling an apology, choked himself off mid-sentence, and rolled away. Now that there was no longer a barrier between him and the surface he'd landed on, the magician realized that its topography was irregular, jagged, and of multiple textures. As he moved, the uneven ground shifted, clinked, and gave in slightly under his weight. Head still spinning sickeningly from the wild tumble, he crawled off on all fours and ghosted his hand over what felt like the shape of a wooden… cup? He played his fingers blindly but carefully over the next unique texture. This part of the surface was metallic, solid and…

Hissing through his teeth, Mandrake withdrew his hand fast. He'd cut himself on the edge of something unmistakably sharp and blade-like. Probably some dented sheet of used metal.

"A junkyard?" he mused aloud.

"Not quite." The answering voice belonged to none other than Bartimaeus. And it was coming from some distance to Mandrake's left.

An orange flare lit up the darkness, and Mandrake moaned and slapped his hands over his eyes.

A derisive snicker. "Sorry I'm not more sensitive to your hangover needs, but you might want to take a look. You do have your contact lenses in, right?"

"I have a suspicion that I have actually died and that the afterlife consists of my head being mounted on a ever-spinning carousel, my stomach eternally being crushed by the fist of the divine, and my eyeballs forever used as billiard balls," wheezed Mandrake.

"A punishment of the most mollycoddling sort."

"When I have the energy to stand up and go over there, I'm going to hurl all over you."

"Duly noted."

Reluctantly, Mandrake squinted out from between his fingers. While his eyes were still being tortured by needles, the lighting was still too dim to make out anything but the form of Bartimaeus' Egyptian boy standing some distance off on roughly the same level as Mandrake.

"How did you get all the way over there?" asked Mandrake irritably. The magician hadn't heard the djinni move from where he'd alighted ungracefully on top of it.

Looping strings of light around its fingers, Bartimaeus lazily shot each new glowing, amber thread off into the darkness. Little by little, visibility increased. The honeyed glaze of reflected light shimmered into existence on the 'ground' on which the two of them were situated, and Mandrake struggled to make out what exactly this junkyard was made up of.

The guise of the boy brushed off its hands. "I don't know what you're talking about," it said loftily. "I slowed down some distance before we both injured ourselves upon docking, then dropped you like a sack of potatoes before initiating my own landing roughly where I am standing now."

Mandrake's brow crumpled in incertitude. Then what…?

He glanced back across the distance that he'd crawled. Certainly there was some sort of unevenly shaped silhouette where he'd landed that wasn't reflecting any of Bartimaeus' light, but it was because of this lack of illumination that Mandrake could not pinpoint its exact nature. As far as he could see, the figure was horizontal and on long side in shape. A blanket roll came to mind, or a perhaps a pillow.

A pointed cough cut in on the magician's focus, and Mandrake whipped his head back again. "What is it?"

"Contact lenses, Mandrake. Might want to use them at some point."

After sniffing and taking his time readjusting the cuffs of his jacket, just to let the djinni know he wasn't obeying its orders on any account, Mandrake flipped through the first three planes. He did a double take.

In the light of the all-encompassing aura, Mandrake saw piles and piles of miscellaneous articles as far as his eye could see. This, admittedly, was not far with the darkness and his hindered human eyesight, but it was enough to tell that the cavernous space was filled with hill-like structures – if one could call them that – all made up of magical objects contributing to the aura. Each hill was of varying height, but averaged a towering five to ten meters. Outliers of this median went as high as halfway to the nearly invisible opening, which was still a hopeful pinhead of daylight set in the arching ceiling. Rune-bearing shields, sheathed swords, string-less harps, cracked wine caskets, and other odd instruments of unknown use comprised most of the visible surface, with the exception of narrow, winding pathways between each haphazardly unorganized mound. Mandrake even recognized he indistinct outline of what looked like an ancient sailboat precariously riding the crest of a hill. The walls, floor, and ceiling appeared ashen and uneven; Mandrake came up blank on what material they could be made of.

Mandrake noted that he was surveying this all from a relatively flat and plateau-like 'hilltop', and that Bartimaeus was perched on the one directly opposite across a gorge-like pathway somewhere below. He then turned his attention to his bleeding hand. After scanning the objects around him, Mandrake quickly found the culprit of his cut: a silver dagger, sparkling dangerously in bronze, unsheathed glory.

"Don't be too overwhelmed by the rustic splendor of it all." Once again, his attention was drawn away by the demon. This time, Bartimaeus had picked up a ceramic vase the size of the dark-skinned boy's thin torso and was tossing it from hand to hand. "I'm not so sure anything of notable strength is here, save for whatever nearly tore apart my essence earlier. If you look closely, it's largely half-functional or mundane junk. You might find a few peculiar items of real power here, but the rest is average spoil-of-wars stuff. Look at this." Bartimaeus dangled the vase from one hand and thrust it towards Mandrake. "Jar full of chalk. Complete with – " the boy pulled a short, wooden stick out of a slot in the ceramic. With a flick of its wrist, the stick snapped to its full length, which was a good few meters. " – extra long pentacle-drawing stick. Big deal, your slave can appear as something bigger and flashier to impress your peers." Both drawing stick and jar were discarded flippantly to rejoin their mound with a lazy, fluid shrug of the djinni's shoulder.

With disappointment, Mandrake realized that djinni was correct in its observations. The aura in the planes that the magician could access did not yield any object of particular power, as far as he could see. Then again, he couldn't see everything, and all this would make for fantastic anthropological research… and the trunk was of gargantuan proportions! Retreating deep into thought, Mandrake mulled over the possible consequences and benefits from this venture. No matter what the eventual finds in the contents, the trunk itself would still be a formidable addition to government property, and there was no knowing what would eventually be uncovered within.

But before he would allow himself to be consumed by triumph, there was something he needed to put himself at ease about. Mandrake turned away from Bartimaeus and squinted behind him. The unreflective lump was still there.

Mandrake began to crawl back to it.

"Find something?" The weight of Bartimaeus' guise settled next to Mandrake as he picked his way carefully across breastplates and feathered headdresses.

"Something buffered my fall, and apparently it wasn't you," Mandrake addressed Bartimaeus' shins as he shuffled past the djinni. "I'm just taking a look."

Bartimaeus' gaze was drawn to the mysterious silhouette. "That thing? Well, lucky you had a mattress magically appear where you happened to land. A body-catching bed – the most useful artifact here, I imagine." The Egyptian boy pranced lightly ahead of Mandrake and over the barely-perceptible shape. Extending its leg, Bartimaeus flipped the lump over with a foot.

The djinni raised its eyebrows in mild intrigue. "Oh."

Mandrake stopped in his tracks. "Oh?"

"As in, 'oh, we didn't expect that'." Without warning, Bartimaeus seized one end of the shape and lifted it off the ground – it was strangely floppy, like a very big, rolled up, wet rag – and tossed the whole thing in Mandrake's direction.

The thing rolled limply before stopping close enough to be touching one of Mandrake's hands. A rancid stench rose into the magician's nostrils, and he coughed and uttered noises of disgust.

Just as his hacking fit subsided, he noticed the true nature of the thing and descended into revolted coughs once more.

Staring up at him with hollow eyes was the bloated, mottled-white face of a dead man.

..

Up above in the daylight, Piper scribbles the minutes. "Twenty minutes since entry of the trunk; 1:00 pm in the afternoon."

..

..