Disclaimer: The Bartimaeus Trilogy is not mine, Bartimaeus and the general world belongs to Jonathan Stroud. The plot of this fic and Dante belong to me... blah blah blah
The boy in the pentacle was pale as a corpse, his knees pulled up to his chest and shoulders hunched, as thin arms wrapped around them. He was dressed in a black suit, overly tight, that Dante recognized to be a fashion trend two thousand years out of date, and instead made him appear more like a cadaver than ever. His hair was a dark curtain over his face. Haunted grey orbs peeked out through the hair in look that was devoid of all hope. It was a look that sent shivers down Dante's back.
He forced himself to clear his throat. "I charge you to tell me, are you Bartimaeus of Uruk?" Of course, he knew the djinni's name already, but it was always good to start with something simple on the first summons. Something that the djinni would have no reason to disobey.
The boy stared up at him with those lifeless orbs, and blinked like an animal caught in headlights. Dante hissed through a clenched jaw, "I charge you again to answer, demon, are you Bartimaeus of Uruk, otherwise known as Rekhyt of Alexandria and Sakhr al-Jinni?" The djinni tilted his head to the side, the dark hair sliding off his face in an almost ethereal manner.
Cursing under his breath, Dante muttered a quick incantation and lightning bolts shot out towards the djinni from all five corners of the pentacle at once. The boy's face twisted in pain, and if possible, he curled up into an even tighter ball, but still he made not a sound. Dante wondered if it were possible for a demon to be mute. At fifteen, Dante had summoned a number of imps, foliots, and even half a dozen lower-level djinn. None of them had behaved quite like this one. The personalities of demons are usually divided into four groups – the sarcastic, the eager-to-please, the lazy, and the rebels. There were ones that belonged to two or more of the groups, and even ones who seemed to shift from day to day. But this Bartimaeus didn't seem to fit into any of these groups. It was certainly no sarcastic nor eager-to-please – why the demon didn't seem capable of speech at all. If Dante hadn't known better, he would have thought it lazy or rebellious, but the djinni wasn't any of these either, it seemed to have just… given up, for lack of a better word.
The boy was staring at him again, and this time, his face was so full of pain and betrayal that Dante stumbled backwards almost stepping out of his pentacle. Glaring down at the djinni, he found that it was smiling up at him – not in a predatory way, but smugly, like an unpleasant boy on the playground. "What's so funny?" he snapped, at the end of his patience.
To his surprise, the demon burst out laughing. "Stop that right now!" Dante demanded, almost yelling in his frustration, "Bartimaeus attend to me!" The boy on the floor of the pentacle clasped his hands over his mouth, but the originally expressionless grey orbs were filled with mirth.
"You," the djinni gasped out, "You're so petulant. So much like…" It paused for a moment, as if in wistful contemplation, "Like him." The boy's face softened at the last word, and the fingers of his left hand began to tug absentmindedly at the table-cloth sized ruffles of his right sleeve.
Dante pursed his lips, scowling in what he hoped was a menacing manner. At first the demon would not speak at all, and when it did, it spoke in riddles. He wasn't sure if the last part was meant to be an insult, but – him, petulant? He was a magician. Magicians didn't do petulant. "Am not," he grumbled under his breath, and the boy raised an eyebrow at him, a smirk playing across his lips. The magician blushed, realizing just how childish he'd sounded.
"Your charge, oh my master?" the demon asked, voice lilted in a tone of false servitude, jolting him back to reality. Dante noted that it had gotten to its feet, and a wooden staff had appeared between its fingers, which it was stroking with long, languid movements.
The magician shook his head to clear it, wondering how the vulnerable boy on the ground that had almost broken Dante's heart just by looking at him had suddenly transformed into this graceful creature. The former must have been a farce, Dante realized, only… it wasn't. There was just something in the way the boy had wrapped his wrapped his arms around himself as if a gust of wind could blow him apart, and the way the grey orbs seemed always to be staring somewhere into the distance, or distant past, that couldn't have been anything but sincere.
He bit down on his lower lip. This was a demon, it was anything but vulnerable. It would hurt him if it got the chance. He wasn't going to let it get a chance. "Bartimaeus of Uruk," he commanded, "I charge you to retrieve to the Amulet of Samarkand from the ancient tomb of magician John Mandrake in the ruins of London. You shall not deviate from your task nor reveal yourself unnecessarily to sentient beings both human and spirit." The words came out in a rush, he'd spent hours preparing and practicing them so that there were no loopholes or stutters. This mission was top priority.
The boy in the pentacle had frozen up again, but this time instead of looking like a kicked puppy, his features were unfathomable. Dante gulped involuntarily, and there was a flicker of… something across the stony grey stare. He nearly took a step back again, before remembering that he was already on the perimeter of the protective circle; and instead, turned his head to one side to avoid the djinni's gaze. The hairs on the back of the magician's neck stood up; another step and djinni would have had him. Were all of the more powerful demons this temperamental? Small wonder magicians didn't summon them unless absolutely necessary. Of course, this was the most potent djinni that Dante had summoned in his short career, but according to the textbooks, the higher-level demons were supposed to be less temperamental, more dependent on their raw power than their less formidable counterparts.
Dante clenched his fist, feeling fingernails dig into the palms of his hands. Strangely enough, the small dose of pain calmed his racing heart and gave him the courage to look back at the djinni. "What are you still doing here?" he forced past a dry throat and mouth, "I gave you a charge – attend to it. I require you to bring it to me when I summon you at dawn tomorrow." Another flicker across the cold gaze, and this time Dante recognized it as a shadow of a memory.
"No." The word was spoken softly, but held absolute conviction. It wasn't a request. It wasn't even the grovelling supplication of a man who had just been given the death sentence. It was a simply a statement of truth. An utter refusal.
Dante felt his face flush red. He forced himself to take several deep breaths; it wouldn't do to let the demon see that he was agitated. "No?" he asked, and was surprised to hear that his voice was deathly quiet. "Then you force me to subject you to the Shrivelling Fire."
He expected the djinni to back off, to plead for forgiveness, but instead, a smile had worked its way onto its face again. A smile full of pain, gentle understanding, and… hope. "So be it, then." The four little words raked across Dante's heart. The boy in the black suit threw down the staff, and spread his arms wide as if welcoming the flames that would consume it. "Proceed."
Dante found himself shaking his head violently. "No!" This time, the word came out of his mouth, without him willing it to come. The djinni still waited, arms outstretched, and face upturned toward the heavens, welcoming death like an old friend. The magician grimaced, and lifted his hand like his master had made him practice so many times before and drew a pentacle in the air. Slowly, methodically, he unhinged his jaw and to speak the first syllable of the Shrivelling Fire. It was only the many hours of drilling it into his memory that allowed the words to flow from his mouth.
The entire time he chanted, the djinni moved not an inch. Even as sweat trickled down Dante's forehead, as he came to the nineteenth and last curse that made up the Shrivelling Fire, he noticed that the boy's face was not twisted in horror and fear as that foliot Dante had once seen his master destroy had been. Its features, though nothing special in themselves, were relaxed, if he didn't know better, he would have thought the demon asleep; and with the final rays of the sunset shining down upon them, they looked ethereal. Dante's tongue caught on the roof of his mouth. His throat constricted. "I… I can't do it," he whispered, and found that his cheeks were wet. Reaching up, he wiped away the tears in surprise – he could not remember the last time that he'd cried.
Even through his tears, he saw the djinni drop his arms and stare meet Dante's gaze with his own grey one, something like confusion on its face, tinged with disappointment. Again, Dante had to look away. Ending a spell without finishing it was no easy task. The more powerful spell, the more energy it took to end, and magicians rarely attempted it – had no rarely any reason to attempt it. And the Shrivelling Fire was perhaps one of the most powerful spells in a magician's inventory. Suddenly, Dante fell to his knees as the magical exhaustion overtook him on unawares… which wouldn't have been that much of a problem, if the tips of his fingers hadn't brushed the floor just outside the pentacle.
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