The Anubis Gates (27 page)

“I think you’re overdoing it, but never mind. Have you got it all set up?”

“Oh yes, yes of course, no problem at all.”

Doyle reflected that Benner must be very hungry, for he kept looking around impatiently for the waiter. “The girl will do it?” Doyle asked.

“Certes the girl will do it, she’ll do it splendid. Where in hell is that man with our pies?”

“Screw the goddamn pies,” said Doyle impatiently. “What’s the story? Has there been a hitch? How come you’re acting so strangely?”

“No no, no hitch,” said Benner. “I’m just hungry.”

“So when do I go see Darrow?” Doyle asked. “Today? Tomorrow?”

“Not so soon, must give it a few days. Ah, here are our pies! Thank you. Fall to, Doyle, don’t want to let it get cold.”

“You have mine,” said Doyle, who had never been able to stand the thought of eating kidneys. “So why do we have to wait a few days? Have you lost the hairy man?”

“You eat your damned pie. I ordered it for you.”

Doyle rolled his eyes impatiently. “Stop trying to change the subject. Why the wait?”

“Darrow’s going to be out of town until, uh, Tuesday night. Would you rather have some soup?”

“Not anything, thank you,” said Doyle very distinctly. “So let’s say I go see him Wednesday morning?”

“Yes. Oh, and also I was concerned about a man who seems to be following me. I can’t imagine who he is—a short man with a black beard. I think I eluded him when I came here, but I’d like to be certain. Would you go look outside and see if he’s hanging about? If he is, I don’t want him to know I’m aware of him.”

Doyle sighed, but got up and walked to the door and, stepping out onto the pavement, looked up and down the sunlit expanse of Threadneedle Street. The street was crowded, but Doyle, ducking and pardon me-ing and standing on tiptoe, couldn’t see any short, black-bearded man. Someone was hoarsely screaming up the street to his right, and heads were craning in that direction, but Doyle wasn’t interested in finding out what the commotion was about. He went back inside and returned to the table.

“I didn’t see him.” Doyle sat down. Benner was stirring a cup of tea that hadn’t been there when Doyle went out. “How long has he been following you? And where did you first notice him?”

“Well…” Benner sipped the tea noisily. “Damn, they serve fine tea here. Try some.” He held the cup toward Doyle.

The yelling outside was getting louder and more general, and Doyle had to lean forward to be heard. “No, thank you. Will you answer me?”

“Yes, I’ll answer. But first, please try some. It’s really very good. I’m beginning to think you fancy yourself above eating or drinking with me.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Benner.” Doyle took the cup and tilted it impatiently to his lips, and just as he opened his mouth for a sip Benner reached out and lifted the bottom of the cup, so that Doyle got a real solid gulp. He only just managed to keep from choking on it. “Damn you,” he sputtered when he’d swallowed it, “are you crazy?”

“I simply wanted you to get a good draught of it,” Benner said happily. “Isn’t it savory?”

Doyle smacked his puckered lips. The stuff had been bitterly spicy and thick with leaves and, like a red wine with a lot of tannin, so dry that it made his teeth feel raspy. “It’s horrible,” he told Benner, and then a disquieting thought struck him. “You son of a bitch, let me see you drink some.”

Benner cupped a hand to his ear. “I beg your pardon?

There seems to be—”

“Drink some right now!” Doyle was almost shouting to be heard over the racket that was now just outside.

“Do you suppose I want to poison you? Hah! Watch.” To Doyle’s considerable relief Benner drained the cup with no hesitation. “You’re no connoisseur of tea, Doyle, that’s evident.”

“I guess not. What in hell do you suppose is going on outside? But tell me about this bearded—”

There were some panicky yells in the room behind Doyle, by the front door, and before he could turn around there was an explosive crash and roaring metallic splash as the front window burst inward. The street altercation doubled in volume. As Doyle whirled out of his chair and onto his feet he was peripherally aware of Benner coolly leaping up and drawing a small flintlock pistol from under his coat.

“My God,” someone was screaming, “kill it, I think it’s going for the kitchen!”

Doyle could see a frantically churning crowd on the street side of the room, and sticks from shattered chairs were being swung as clubs, but for the first tense several seconds he couldn’t see who or what was at the center of it; then a waiter was flung tumbling through the air to bowl down half a dozen people, and Doyle saw, in the small central clearing of the riot, a squat ape with fur the color of a red setter. Though shorter than most of its opponents, it managed by sheer, gibbering ferocity to burst through the hole left by the catapulted waiter, and in two bounds it had covered half the distance to Doyle and Benner’s table. In the instant before Benner’s gun cracked at his ear Doyle had time to notice that the ape’s fur was matted with blood in a number of places, and that it seemed to be bleeding more profusely through the mouth.

Doyle felt the concussion of the air slap at his cheek and saw blood jump from the ape’s chest as the slug hammered it right back off its feet. Its shoulders struck the floor ten feet behind where it had last been, and for one moment before its limp, rattling collapse the creature was nearly standing on its head.

In the instant of ringing silence that followed, Benner seized Doyle’s arm above the elbow and marched him quickly into the kitchen and through the back door into a very narrow, shadowed alley.

“Go,” Benner said. “This alley connects with Cornhill.”

“Wait a minute!” Doyle nearly tripped over an old broken cartwheel that had somehow eluded all the scrap scavengers. “That was one of Dog-F—I mean, the hairy man’s cast-offs! Why did it come—”

“It doesn’t matter. Now will you—”

“But it means he’s in a new body now! Don’t you understand—”

“I understand it better than you do, Doyle, believe me. Everything’s under control and I’ll explain later.”

“But—oh, okay. Hey, wait! Damn it, when will I meet you again? You said what, Tuesday?”

“Tuesday’s fine,” said Benner impatiently. “Trot!”

“Where on Tuesday?”

“Don’t worry about that—I’ll find you. Oh, what the devil. Tuesday right here at ten in the morning, does that make you feel better?”

“Okay. But could you loan me some more money? I don’t—”

“Oh aye, aye, mustn’t have you starving yourself. Here. I don’t know how much is there, but it’s bountiful. Now go, will you?”

The gray-haired waiter had swept the dustpan full of glass bits, and with the napkin he’d tied in a turban-like bandage around his head he looked like some sort of Grand Vizier looking about for a sultan to present a heap of randomly cut diamonds to. “I’m sorry, son, but things were too excited just then for me to really take notes, yes?” He dumped the panful of glass into the trash barrel and stooped to sweep up another load.

“But he was heading for two men at a table?”

The waiter sighed. “Heading for them or more likely just making a break in their direction.”

“And can you remember anything else about the man who shot him?”

“Just what I said, tall and blond. And the guy with him was short and dark and skinny and sick-looking. Now be off home, eh?”

There seemed nothing more to be learned here, so Jacky thanked the man and slouched disconsolately out onto the cobbles of Exchange Alley, where several men were gingerly loading into a wagon the red-pelted corpse of Kenny whatever-his-name-had-been, vacated a week ago by Kenny but only today by Dog-Face Joe.

Damn, Jacky thought. He’s moved on, and now I have no idea at all whose body he may be in.

She stuck her hands deep into the pockets of her oversized coat and, picking her way around the wagon and through the pack of gawking spectators, ambled away down Threadneedle Street.

Halfway home Doyle started trembling, and when he’d got to his rooftop perch and downed a first quick beer he lowered his face into his hands and breathed very deeply until the shivering stopped.
My God,
he thought,
so that’s what it’s like when the damn things appear. No wonder poor Jacky went a little mad after killing one, so that he believed he saw Colin Lepovre’s soul staring out of the dying creature’s eyes. Or, hell, maybe he did.
Doyle poured and drank off another cupful of beer.
I sure hope,
he thought,
that Benner knows what he’s doing. I hope he knows what kind of fire he’s playing with.
Doyle put down his cup and let his gaze wander to his left.

And where is he now, Doyle wondered uneasily, and has the fur begun to whisker out like grime on the new body yet, and has he started looking for another one to take?

On the weathered stone doorstep of a little whitewashed house roughly two thousand miles southeast of Doyle’s roof-top eyrie, a bald-headed old man sat stolidly smoking a long clay-bowled pipe and staring down the slope of dusty yellow grass at the pebbled beach and the water. The warm, dry wind was from the west, coming in with long ripples across the otherwise smooth Gulf of Patras, and in the occasional moments of its abatement he could sometimes hear the quiet clatter of sheep’s bells among the foothills of the Morea behind him.

For the third time during that long afternoon the boy Nicolo ran out of the house, this time actually kicking the doctor’s arm so that he nearly dropped his pipe. And the boy didn’t even apologize. The doctor smiled coldly up at the unhappy boy, promising himself that one more piece of rudeness from this Greek catamite would result in an ugly, painful and prolonged death for his beloved “padrone.”

“Doctor,” gasped Nicolo. “Come now! The padrone, he rolls on the bed and speaks to people who are not in the room! I think he will die!”

He won’t die until I let him,
thought the doctor. He looked at the sky—the sun was well down the western side of the cloudless Grecian sky, and he decided that he could proceed now; not that it really mattered anymore at which hour of the day he did it—but old dead laws hang on as superstitions, and just as he wouldn’t dream of pronouncing the name of Set on the twenty-fourth day of the month Pharmuthi, or willingly see a mouse on the twelfth of Tybi, he could not bring himself to perform a work of black magic while Ra the sungod was overhead, and might see.

“Very well,” said the doctor, laying aside his pipe and getting laboriously to his feet. “I’ll go see him.”

“I will come also,” declared Nicolo.

“No. I must be alone with him.”

“I will come also.”

The ridiculous boy had placed his right hand on the hilt of the curved dagger he always carried in his red sash, and the doctor almost laughed. “If you insist. But you will have to leave when I treat him.”

“Why?”

“Because,” said the doctor, knowing that this excuse would sit well with the boy—though it would have set milord anglais, inside, scrabbling for his pistols—”medicine is magic, and the presence of a third soul in the room might change the healing sorceries into malevolent ones.”

The boy looked sulky, but muttered, “Very well.”

“Come along, then.”

They walked into the house and down the hallway to the doorless room at the end, and although the stone walls had kept the inside air cool, the young man lying on the narrow iron bed was drenched with sweat, and his curly black hair was plastered to his forehead. As Nicolo had reported, he was tossing fretfully, and though his eyes were closed he was frowning and muttering.

“You must leave now,” the doctor told the boy.

Nicolo went to the doorway, but paused, mistrustfully eyeing the odd collection of things—a lancet and bowl, colored liquids in little glass bottles, a metal loop with a wooden bead halfway along it—on the bedside table. “One thing before I go,” he said. “Many of the people you have treated for this fever have died. Monday the Englishman George Watson slipped through your fingers. The padrone,” he waved at the man on the bed, “says you are more of a periculo, a danger, than the fever itself. And so I will tell you this—if he too should be one of your many failures, you will follow him into death on the same day. Capeesh?”

Amusement was struggling with annoyance on the doctor’s craggy and eroded face. “Leave us, Nicolo.”

“Have a care, Doctor Romanelli,” said Nicolo, then turned and strode away down the hall.

The doctor dipped a cup into the basin of water that stood on the table and took a few pinches of powder-dry crushed herbs from a pouch at his belt, sifted them into the cup and stirred it with a forefinger. Then he slipped one arm under the delirious man’s shoulders, lifted him to a half-sitting position and put the cup to his still muttering lips.

“Drink up, my lord,” he said softly, tilting the cup. The man in the bed drank it reflexively, though he frowned, and when Doctor Romanelli took the empty cup away the man coughed and shook his head like a cat with a noseful of something it doesn’t like. “Yes, it’s bitter, isn’t it, my lord? I had to down a cup of it myself eight years ago, and I still remember the taste.”

The doctor stood up and moved quickly to the table, for time counted now. Romanelli struck sparks to a little pile of tinder in a dish, got a flame, and held his special candle in it until the wick wore a corona of round flame, then he wedged it back into its holder and stared earnestly at it. The flame didn’t trail upward as a normal candle’s would have done, but radiated evenly in all directions so that it was a sphere, like a little yellow sun, and it cast heat waves down as well as up, making the hieroglyphic figures on the candle shaft seem to shift and jitter like race horses waiting in the starting gate.

Now if only his ka in London was doing his part correctly!

He spoke into the flame. “Romany?”

A tiny voice answered. “Ready here. The tub of paut is fresh and warmed to the right temperature.”

“Well, I would hope so. The way is paved for him?”

“Yes. The request for an audience with King George was acknowledged and approved earlier this week.”