Okay, so here's how this story happened.
We read The Amulet of Samarkand, and then the rest. And it gave us this peculiar feeling. Sometimes, you like a book, and sometimes you don't, and sometimes you like half the story and not the other half. But with the Amulet of Samarkand, we liked basically all the story, except that it felt like we'd only got half of it. The setup was great, but the bits we cared about didn't seem like the same ones the author did, and so we kept waiting for the follow-through on them that never came.
So we decided to do what any sane and reasonable people would do: rewrite the book. We basically liked it, but felt it needed more. And while we were there, why not start tweaking things? Plus, it'd be an unusual sort of challenge, and good practice.
To avoid boring you (and to not run any further afoul of copyright law) chapters we're leaving as they are won't be posted. The first chapter, for example, is Bartimaeus and Nate interaction, which we're down with and see no need to improve. We pick up on Chapter Two.
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When I alighted on the top of a lamppost in the London dusk the rain had reached the deeply unpleasant point of sheeting. My luck, it seemed, was remaining constant. I had taken the form of a brilliant white tern with wings edged with blue earlier, not long after the rain began. I had been a lovely deep blue darter for earlier exploration, only for my magnificent wings to get soaked and the wet saturate my essence. Terns are decent enough birds for simple observation, but they, like most of the smaller animals, aren't something you want for flying about - hawks get tiresome. Shifting my feet unhappily on the wet metal, I looked for a more auspicious perch. My options were limited. After a moment, I settled on a large beech tree as my best choice. The branches had long ago been stripped of leaves by the wet November winds, but their thick tangle near the truck would still offer some protection from this rain - more, at least, then I was getting on my present perch. The tern hopped into the air and soared to a large bough, shadow crossing over a lone car that eased along despite the wide and empty suburban street. The ugly off-white facades of looming villas stared out at me from behind their high stone walls and the lingering greenery of their gardens, shining wetly in the dimness like skulls peering out from a moldy, lichen-encrusted crypt.
Well, maybe it was my morbid mood that made it seem so grim. I was bothered by five things. Firstly, a dull ache was already building in my form, the pain that comes with every physical shape I hold. I could feel the pain in my feathers, creeping through my essence like the rain had. Transforming removes the ache, but repeatedly changing form while trying to steal the Amulet would get me caught faster than a baby cobra that had wandered into a mongoose's lair. I wasn't in the mansion yet, though. Making sure nothing saw me, I changed to the form of a hooded crow, a handsome creature with lovely white plumage and a jet-black head and wings, but my essence remained uncomfortably damp.
The second thing bothering me was the downpour. Enough said.
Third, I'd forgotten the limitations of material bodies. I had an itch just above my beak, and kept futilely trying to scratch it with a wing before I remembered and rubbed against the tree trunk instead.
Fourth, that boy. He brought up many perplexing questions. Who was he? Why did he choose such a convoluted method of suicide? How would I get my revenge on him before he got brutally killed? News travels, especially in spirit-heavy areas, and I was sure to take some abuse for scurrying around on behalf of a weakling like him. I remember back in Mesopotamia when a few other spirits and I spent weeks beating up a foliot after we heard he spent most of his time scurrying around to do an apprentice's shopping. Ah, good times.
Fifth...the Amulet. It was a potent charm, able to protect the wearer from even the most powerful magic. But not, I wagered, from a sufficiently pissed off magician. I had no clue why that foolish kid wanted it. If he had such a death wish, surely he could simply have spend things up and poked a toe from the circle? Or maybe he wanted to wear the tacky thing. Perhaps fighting over amulets was the latest craze in London. It would hardly have been the stupidest thing magicians had gotten up to over the years. (There are many contenders, but my personal vote has to be that delightful period in Italy when it was the height of fashion to summon afrits to destroy one's own ancestral home. The massive destruction was only a sidenote for me, honestly - the real humor was in the number of magicians who attempted it after drawing the pentacle drunk and got eaten for their troubles.) Whatever the reason, I had to get it as soon as possible, and it would by no means be easy, even for a great and honorable djinni like myself.
I closed my crow's eyes to avoid distraction and opened my inner ones one at a time, each looking at a different plane (As a high ranking djinni I had access to all seven of the planes. Some insufferable braggart spirits will claim vision into an eighth or ninth or twenty-third plane, but only magicians could be so foolish as to believe something so absurd. After all, plenty of the rest are busy denying the existence of any plane beyond the fourth, which is patently ridiculous. How stupid would you have to be not to believe in entire planes of existence simply because you couldn't see into it yourself?). I peered around, tilting my head. This was a magician's section of town, and quite wealthy (but I repeat myself) so only three of the houses on either side of the street failed to display at least a flicker of magical protection. I ignored most of the glowing barriers and interwoven mental tripwires. It was the one across the street, on the left that I focused on. It was a gaudy, overflowing mess of stories and additions that had half-swallowed much of the grassy area in front under overhanging porches, done in the same sepulchral white. A magician's residence. (Obviously) Lovelace's, to be precise.
This would not be pleasant.
The first plane, as usual, had been clear. The second plane was covered with burning cerulean strands, like a translucent cloth thrown over the house, the edges reaching to drape across the tall fitted stone wall down to the manicured grass outside.
The third and fourth planes, which magicians can also see into, were as clear as the first. Any magician, therefore, would have been unpleasantly surprised by what I, as a noble djinni, could easy see on the fifth - three sentries floating in a circuit, just inside the walls. They were an unpleasant brownish yellow, with three legs arranged in a tripod that rotated endlessly in midair. A thick torso sprouted from the center of the useless legs, with a mouth on either side and a double ring of yellowish brown eyes at the top.
One approached near the edge of the wall on the far right (That is, his left. Humans.), and the crow shifted its body closer against the tree trunk and flattened down. At this distance I would appear as a crow all the way to the seventh plane, of course. It was only when I was closer that more discerning spirits could notice anything amiss on the higher levels. Discerning spirits, though, knew this, and these sentries might be keeping one of their various eyes out for suspicious birds. After all, they could spare it.
The sixth plane held nothing new, which wasn't much of a surprise - the fifth was good enough to blindside any rogue magicians. The seventh, by appearances, was the same, but I felt suspicious. Call it a gut feeling. Call it intuition. Call it several thousand years of practice seeing what disguise attempts on the seventh level look like. The point is, I wasn't reassured. Things looked clear to my sight, but I looked the same on the various planes to those sentries on watch. And while I am, of course, a master of disguise among my many talents, I was also bright enough to know never to assume.
Especially when the seventh level is the level stronger spirits lurk on.
All in all, it was depressingly as I'd expected. I'd done a bit of reconnaissance (I'd had to, with the boy not even bothering with an address. Magicians always think the world positively revolves around whatever petty squabbles are going on in their own tiny patch of dirt. One morning you're in China, the next afternoon it's South Africa, and all of them utterly convinced that their own local jostling for power are such interesting, important affairs that we spirits have been following every word of the decades-long dramas) and it confirmed what I already knew - the boy was someone's patsy. The imps I'd beaten up were all in agreement that Lovelace was not to be trifled with, and my essence would be on the line if ever identified. (Magicians have the most regrettable tendency to hold a grudge against us, the slaves, as if we had something against them. Well, we do, of course, but all the same.)
But if the kid wanted that thing, I had no choice.
The rain was slowly trickling to a stop when the crow took off a bit heavily and flew in a curving arc that just happened to avoid the round blotch of light cast from the streetlamp. It landed with a hop in a narrow patch of grass between two of the several trash bags left out for collection by the edge of the street. A few more hops took it out of sight.
A cat that nestled within a nearby evergreen bush watched this entire affair (On the second plane as well as the first. Cats have that power) and kept its green eyes fixed on the spot, waiting for the bird to reappear. After a minute had passed, it slid out from beneath the twigs, braving the damp grass to stalk across the ground, readying itself to pounce. But it found only a short gap between the bags, with a round hole in the grass, smelling of damp, freshly dug earth.