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djinn out to ambush the advancing troops. Several prominent British magicians were killed; the Sixth and Seventh fleets were summoned from the China Seas to bolster the campaign—but still the fighting dribbled on. Months went by, the Empire's strength was frittered away in the American wastes, and the repercussions resounded around the globe.

Time passed; Mandrake worked at his job with his usual zeal. An opportunity for promotion came, and he accepted it. He was now Information Minister, one of the great ones of the Empire.[8]

[8] His chance came thanks to the war. The rebel guerrillas were causing the British army problems. After a year of attritional fighting the Foreign Minister, a certain Mr. Fry, visited the colonies secretly with a view to arranging a truce. Eight magicians watched him as he traveled; a host of horlas guarded his every step: the minister was invulnerable. Or so they thought. On his first night in Philadelphia he was treacherously slain by an imp concealed in his evening pie. Amid general outrage, the Prime Minister reshuffled his ministers, and Mandrake joined the ruling Council.
    Officially, his duties were to do with propaganda—devising clever ways of selling the war to the British people. Unofficially, at the Prime Minister's behest, he continued much of his Internal Affairs police work, operating an unsavory network of surveillance djinn and human spies, which reported directly to him. His workload, which had always been severe, now became crippling.
    There followed a dismal sea change in my master's personality. Never exactly famous for his lighthearted banter, he became positively abrupt and antisocial, even less willing than before to shoot the breeze with a debonair djinni. But by cruel paradox, he also began to summon me more and more frequently, and for less and less reason.
    Why did he do so? Mainly no doubt because he wished to minimize the chances of my being summoned by another magician. His old fear, now fueled by chronic fatigue and paranoia, was that I would divulge his birth name to an enemy, rendering him vulnerable to attack. Well, fair enough, that was always possible. I might have done it. Can't say for sure. But he'd managed without me in the past, and nothing had happened to him. So I thought something else was going on too.
    Mandrake masked his emotions well enough, but his whole life was work—remorseless and never-ending. Moreover, he was now surrounded by a gang of vicious, hot-eyed maniacs— the other ministers—most of whom wished him harm. His only close associate, for a time, was the hack playwright Quentin Makepeace, as self-serving as all the rest. To survive in this friendless world, Mandrake cloaked his better qualities under layers of smarm and swank. All his old life—the years with the Underwoods, his vulnerable existence as the boy Nathaniel, the ideals he'd once espoused—was buried away deep down. Every link with his childhood was severed, except for me. I don't think he could bring himself to break this last connection.
    I proposed this theory in my usual gentle way, but Mandrake was unwilling to listen to my taunts. He was a worried man.[9] The American campaigns were vastly expensive, the British supply lines overstretched. With the magicians' attention diverted, other parts of the Empire had become troublesome. Foreign spies infested London like maggots in an apple. The commoners were volatile. To counter all this, Mandrake worked like a slave.

[9] I'm stretching the term a bit here, I know. By now, in his mid to late teens, he might just about have passed for a man. When seen from behind. At a distance. On a very dark night.
    Well, not literally like a slave. That was my job. And a pretty thankless one it was too. Back at Internal Affairs, some of the assignments had been almost worthy of my talents. I'd intercepted enemy messages and deciphered them, given out false reports, trailed enemy spirits, duffed a few of them up, etc. It was simple,