The Anubis Gates (41 page)

In the silence the unsteady, jarring footsteps from the corridor sounded loud. Horrabin looked up, though without much interest, since it wasn’t Romany’s twanging step, and his eyes widened in surprise when the newcomer stepped into the hall, for it was Romany after all, but he was wearing high platform boots instead of his spring-shoes.

The clown cast a triumphant glance around the company, then bowed grotesquely to the newcomer. “Ah, your Worship,” he piped, “we’ve been awaiting your arrival with, in a couple of cases,” he waved at the two corpses, “terminal suspense.” Then Horrabin’s smile faltered and he looked more closely, for the visitor was pale and reeling, and blood was running sluggishly from his nose and ears. “You’re… Horrabin?” the man croaked. “Take me … to Doctor Romany’s camp… now.” As the clown blinked uncomprehendingly, a voice screeched from the derelict’s corner. “No use going there, Pierre! That whole plan’s as dead as Ramses! But I can lead you to the man that wrecked it—and if you can take him and wring him dry, you’ll have a better thing than just England dead, Fred!” A few of the penny toss crowd had sufficiently recovered their aplomb to cheer and whistle at this pronouncement.

“Carrington,” whispered Horrabin, furious and embarrassed, “get that creature out of here. In fact, kill it.” He smiled nervously at Romanelli. “I do apologize, uh, sir. Our… democratic policies are sometimes too—”

But Romanelli was staring with almost horrified astonishment at the weightless derelict. “Silence!” he rasped.

“Yes, do shut him up, Carrington,” said Horrabin.

“I mean you, clown,” said Romanelli. “Get out of here if you can’t shut up. You,” he added to Carrington, “stay where you are.” Then almost reluctantly he turned to the ruin-faced derelict again. “Come here,” he said.

The thing flapped and jiggled across the floor and tapdanced to a stop in front of him.

“You’re him,” Romanelli said wonderingly, “the ka the Master drew eight years ago. But… that face wound was taken … decades ago, by the look of it. And your weight—you’re nearly at the disintegration point. How can this have happened in just eight years? Or no, since I last spoke with you?”

“It’s them gates Fikee opened,” the thing chittered. “I went through one, and was a long time making my way back. But let’s discuss it on the ride, Clyde—the man that knows it all is staying at The Swan With Two Necks in Lad Lane, and if you can take him to Cairo for a thorough sifting, then nothing since 1802 will have been a waste of time.” The thing turned its eye on Horrabin. “We’ll need six—no, ten—of your biggest and coolest boys, ones smart enough to grab and bind a big man without killing him or denting his precious brain. Oh, and a couple of carriages, and fresh horses.”

There was some snickering from the crowd, and Horrabin said, with a not very confident attempt at bravado, “I do not take orders from a damned… walking cast-off snakeskin.”

Romanelli opened his mouth to contradict him, but the ragged creature in the middle of the floor waved him to silence.

“That’s nearly exactly what you’ll take orders from, clown,” it said. “You’ve done my bidding before, though I can scarcely now remember those evenings of scheming, hanging side by side in the buried bell tower. What I remember more clearly is waiting for your birth. I knew your father when he stood no higher than the table there, and I knew him when he was the tall leader of this thieves’ guild, and then I used to chat with him over a snitched bottle of wine sometimes in the days after you’d shortened him down again so as to have a court jester.” A couple of the creature’s teeth were blown out of its mouth by the vehemence of its speech, and they spun away upward like bubbles rising through oil. “It’s a terrible thing to have to sit through one’s own foolish speeches again, knowing they’re all wrong while you wait for the clock to come around again, but I’ve done it now. I’m the only one in the world that knows the whole story. I’m the only one worth taking orders from.”

“Do as he says,” growled Doctor Romanelli.

“Aye,” said the bobbing creature. “And when you’ve got him, I’ll come along to Cairo with you, and after the Master’s finished with him I’ll kill whatever’s left of him.”

Having copied out the cover letter to The Courier from memory, Doyle tossed it onto the stack of manuscript pages that lay beside Doctor Romany’s sheathed sword on the desk. It hadn’t even come as too much of a surprise to him when he’d realized, after writing down the first few lines of “The Twelve Hours of the Night,” that while his casual scrawl had remained recognizably his own, his new left-handedness made his formal handwriting different—though by no means unfamiliar: for it was identical W. William Ashbless’. And now that he’d written the poem out completely he was certain that if a photographic slide of this copy was laid over a slide of the copy that in 1983 would reside in the British Museum, they would line up perfectly, with every comma and i-dot of his version precisely covering those of the original manuscript.

Original manuscript?
he thought with a mixture of awe and unease.
This stack of papers here is the original manuscript … it’s just newer now than it was when I saw it in 1976. Hah! I wouldn’t have been so impressed to see it then if I’d known I had made or would make those pen scratches. I wonder when, where and how it’ll pick up the grease marks I remember seeing on the early pages.

Suddenly a thought struck him.
My God,
he thought,
then if I stay and live out my life as Ashbless—which the universe pretty clearly means me to do—then nobody wrote Ashbless’ poems. I’ll copy out his poems from memory, having read them in the 1932 Collected Poems, and my copies will be set in type for the magazines, and they’ll use tear sheets from the magazines to assemble the Collected Poems! They’re a closed loop, uncreated! I’m just the… messenger and caretaker.

He pushed the vertiginous concept away, stood up and went to the window. Lifting the curtain aside, he looked down at the wide yard of the Swan With Two Necks, crowded with post and passenger coaches.
I wonder where Byron is,
he thought.
He should have been able to find any number of bottles of claret by now. I wouldn’t mind having a few glassfuls of something, so I could postpone considering certain questions… such as what is to become of this Byron ka—he’s got to disappear, for I know there’s no historical record of him, but here he is talking about looking up old friends tomorrow. So how will he vanish? Do kas wear out? Will he die?

Even as he let the curtain fall there was a knock at the door. He crossed to it. “Who’s there?” he asked cautiously.

“Byron, with refreshments,” came the cheery reply. “Who did you suppose?”

Doyle undid the chain and let him in. “You must have gone far afield for them.”

“I did go over to Cheapside,” Byron admitted, limping over to the table and setting a waxed paper bundle down on it, “but with good result.” He tore the paper away. “Voila! Hot mutton, lobster salad and a bottle of what is unlikely to be, as the vendor swore it was, a Bordeaux.” His face went blank. “Glasses.” He looked up at Doyle. “We haven’t any.”

“Not even a skull to drink it out of,” Doyle agreed.

Byron grinned. “You’ve read my Hours of Idleness!”

“Many times,” said Doyle truthfully.

“Well, I’ll be damned. In any case, we can pass the bottle back and forth.”

Byron glanced around the room, and noticed the stack of poetry on the desk. “Aha!” he cried, snatching it up. “Poesy! Confess, it’s your own.”

Doyle smiled and shrugged deprecatingly. “It’s no one else’s.”

“May I?”

Doyle waved awkwardly. “Help yourself.”

After reading the first several pages—and, Doyle noticed, leaving grease stains on them from having upwrapped the mutton—Byron put the manuscript down and looked at Doyle speculatively. “Is it your first effort?” He pulled the already loosened cork out of the bottle neck and took a liberal swig. “Uh, yes.” Doyle took the proffered bottle and drank some himself.

“Well, you’ve got a spark, sir, it seems to me—though a lot of it is damned obscure crinkum-crankum—and God knows in these times a poet is a worthless thing to be. I prefer the talents of action—in May I swam the Hellespont, from Sestos to Abydos, and I’m prouder of that feat than I could be of any literary achievement.”

Doyle grinned. “As a matter of fact, I agree. I’d be more pleased with myself if I’d made a decent chair, so all the legs touched the ground at the same time, than I am about having written that poem.” He folded the manuscript, wrapped the cover letter around it, addressed it, then dripped some hot candle wax on it for a seal.

Byron nodded sympathetically, started to speak, stopped, and then quickly asked, “Who are you, by the way? I no longer want to demand any answers, for I became your lifelong friend when you shot that murderous gypsy who’d otherwise have ended my story. But I’m damn curious.” He smiled shyly, and for the first time looked his actual age of only twenty-three years.

Doyle took another long sip of the wine and set the bottle down on the table. “Well, I’m an American, as you’ve probably guessed from my accent, and I came… here… to hear Samuel Coleridge give a speech, and I ran afoul of this Doctor Romany fellow—” He paused, for he thought he’d heard something, a sort of thump, outside the window. Then, remembering that they were on the third floor, he dismissed it and went on. “And I lost the party of tourists I was with, and—” He halted again, beginning to feel the alcohol. “Oh, hell, Byron, I’ll tell you the real story. Give me some more wine first.” Doyle took a long sip and set the bottle down with exaggerated care. “I was born in—”

With simultaneous crashing explosions of glass from one side and splinters from the other, the window and the door burst inward and two big, rough-looking men were rolling to their feet from the floor. The table went over, spilling the food and shattering the table and the lamp—and in the sudden dimness more men were pouring in through the doorway, stumbling or leaping over the split door, which was hanging at an angle from one twisted hinge. Blue flames began licking over the oil-splash.

Doyle grabbed one man by the scarf knot, took two steps across the room and then hurled him through the window; the man collided with the frame, and for a moment it seemed he might grab the rope the first man had swung in on, but then his hands and heels disappeared and there was a receding, gasping cry.

Byron had snatched up and drawn Romany’s sword, and as two men with raised coshes stepped toward the still off-balance Doyle—and from below, outside, came a multiple crack, and startled yells—Byron kicked forward in a lunge too long to recover from easily and drove three inches of the extended blade into the chest of the man closest to Doyle. “Look out, Ashbless!” he yelled as he wrenched the sword free and tried to straighten up.

The other man, alarmed by this sudden appearance of lethally naked steel, swung his cosh down with all his strength onto Byron’s head. There was an ugly hollow smack and Byron fell dead to the floor, the sword clattering away.

To regain his balance Doyle had crouched and grabbed a leg of the desk, and from there he saw Byron’s inert form; “You son of a—” he roared, straightening and lifting the desk over his head—everything spilled off it, and the envelope for the Courier fluttered out the open window—”bitch!” he finished, bringing the desk shattering down on the head and upraised arm of the man who’d hit Byron.

The man dropped, and since several of the intruders were busy smothering the fire, Doyle launched himself in a furious charge toward the doorway; two men leaped forward to block his way, but were felled by his massive fists; but as he lurched out into the hall a carefully swung sock full of sand thudded against his skull just behind his right ear, and his forward rush became a sloppy dive to the floor.

Doctor Romanelli eyed the motionless form for a few seconds, waving back the men who had followed Doyle out of the room, then he thrust the weighted sock away in a pocket. “Tie the chloroform rag around his face and get him out of here,” he grated, “you incompetent clowns.”

“Goddamn, yer Honor,” whined the man who picked up Doyle’s ankles, “they was ready for us! There’s three of us dead, unless Norman survived his fall.”

“Where’s the other man who was in there?”

“Dead, boss,” said the last man to emerge from the room, pulling on a scorched and smoking coat.

“Let’s go, then. Down the back stairs.” He pressed his hands to his eyes. “Try to stay together, will you do that at least?” he whispered. “You’ve caused such a pandemonium that I’ll have to set a radiating disorientation spell to confuse the pursuit you’ve certainly roused.” He began muttering in a language none of Horrabin’s men recognized, and after the first dozen syllables blood began running out from between his fingers. Clumping footsteps sounded from the direction of the front stairs, and the men shifted and glanced at each other uneasily, but a moment later they heard a confused babble of argument, and the footsteps receded. Romanelli ceased speaking and lowered his hands, breathing hoarsely, and a couple of the men with him actually paled to see blood running like tears out of his eyes.

“Move, you damned insects,” Romanelli croaked, shoving his way to the front of the group and leading them forward.

“What’s a pandemonium?” whispered one of the men in the rear.

“It’s like a calliope,” answered a companion. “I heard one played at the Harmony Fair last summer, when I went there to see my sister’s boy play his organ.”

“His what?”

“His organ.”

“Lord. People pay money to see things like that?”

“Silence!” Romanelli hissed. After that they were on the stairs, and gasping and straining too much with their unconscious burden even to want to speak.

It was a chorus of shrill, discordant whistling that finally led Doyle out of his drugged half-dreams. He sat up, shivering with the damp chill in his coffin-shaped box, the lid of which had been taken away, and after rubbing his eyes and taking several deep breaths he realized that the tiny bare room really was rocking, and that he must be aboard a ship. He hoisted a leg outside the box and let his sandalled heel clunk to the floor, and grabbing the sides he levered himself dizzily to his feet. His mouth was still full of the sharp reek of chloroform, and he grimaced and spat as he reeled to the door.