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origin—it involved nailing someone's entrails to an oak tree .

"Oi, Bart!" the baby cried. "That you in there? Stir yourself! You're wanted."
    I spoke casually. "By whom?"
    "You know full well. And boy, are you in trouble! I reckon it's the Shriveling Fire for sure this time."
    "Is that so?" The girl remained firmly seated on the broken chimney and crossed her slender arms. "Well, if Mandrake wants me, he can come and get me himself."
    The baby grinned nastily. "Good. I was hoping you'd say that. No problem, Barty! I'll pass that on. Can't wait to see what he'll do."
    The imp's malicious glee irritated me.[5] If I'd had a little more energy I'd have leaped up and swallowed it there and then. I contented myself with snapping off a chimney pot and throwing it with unerring aim. It struck the baby's bald fat head with a satisfactory ringing sound.

[5] We were, after all, slaves together; we had both suffered long at Mandrake's hands. A bit of empathy would not, I think, have been out of place. But the imp's long confinement had rather soured its worldview, which has happened to far better spirits than it over the years.

"As I thought," I said. "Hollow."
    The unlovely grin converted into a scowl. "You cad! Just you wait—we'll see who's laughing when I watch you burn." Propelled by a gust of ripe language, it popped back behind its curtains of glimmering lights and drew them smartly together. Twinkling softly, the lights dissipated on the breeze. The imp was gone.
    The girl pushed a strand of hair behind one ear, refolded her arms grimly, and settled back to wait. Now there would be consequences, which was exactly what I needed. It was time for a proper confrontation.
    To begin with, years before, my master and I had got along well enough. I don't mean amicably, or a nything ridiculous like that, but our mutual irritation was founded on something approximating respect. During a series of early incidents, from the Lovelace conspiracy to the golem affair, I'd been forced to acknowledge Mandrake's verve and daring, his energy and even (faintly) the glimmerings of his conscience. It wasn't much, admittedly, but it made his prissiness, stubbornness, pride, and ambition a little less hard to stomach. In return, I obviously had no shortage of wonderful traits for him to admire, and anyway, he could barely get up in the morning without needing me to save his sorry skin. We coexisted in a wary state of toleration.
    For a year or so after the defeat of the golem and Mandrake's promotion to Head of Internal Affairs, he didn't push me around too much. He summoned me from time to time to help out with minor incidents, which I haven't got time to go into here,[6] but generally speaking he left me pretty much alone.

[6] If memory serves, these included the case of the Afrit, the Envelope, and the Ambassador's Wife; the affair of the Curiously Heavy Trunk; and the messy episode of the Anarchist and the Oyster. Mandrake nearly lost his life in all of those. As I say, none of them was of much interest.

On the odd occasion that he did call me, we both knew where he stood. We had an agreement of sorts. I knew his birth name, and he knew I knew it. Though he threatened me with dire consequences if I told anyone, in practice he treated me with careful detachment in all our dealings. I kept his name to myself and he kept me away from the most dangerous tasks— which basically boiled down to the fighting in America. Dozens of djinn were dying there—the reverberations of the losses rang harshly through the Other Place—and I was happy to have no part in it.[7]

[7] To those of us abreast with human history, the cause of the latest war was drearily familiar. For years the Americans had refused to pay the taxes demanded of them by London. The British swiftly fell back on the oldest argument of all, and sent over an army to beat the colonists up. After initial easy victories, stagnation set in. The rebels retreated into thick woods, sending