The Anubis Gates

CHAPTER 8

Though it had been difficult to find all the little motors and get them correctly wound, and to adjust the air vents around the dozens of concealed candles, the chest-high village Bavarois, as Monsieur Diderac had described the appallingly expensive toy, seemed to be ready to perform. All it needed was for the candles to be lit and the master switch, disguised as a miniature tree stump, to be clicked over to the right.

Doctor Romany sat back and stared morosely at the contraption. Damnable Richard had wanted to start it up so his monkey could see it work before the yags arrived, but Romany was afraid that a thing so complicated mightn’t work more than once, and he refused. He now reached out and gently touched the head of a tiny carved woodsman, and gasped in dismay when the little figure marched several inches down his painted path, swinging his toothpick-hafted axe and making a sound like a clock clearing its throat.

Apep eat me, he thought fretfully, I hope I haven’t broken it. Why have we all had to decline so, anyway? I remember when the yags demanded fine chess sets and sextants and telescopes for their services. And now what? Damn toys.

And they were never as respectful as they ought to be, he reflected ruefully, but now they’re downright rude.

He stood up and shook his head. The tent was murky with incense smoke and he crossed bobbingly to the entrance flap, lifted it away and hooked it to the side, and blinked in the sudden brightness at the heather fields of Islington.

It wasn’t so far from here, he reflected, that, eight years ago, poor old Amenophis Fikee gave himself to the dog-headed god of the gates, lost most of his mind and all of his magic—except that damned body-switching spell—and ran off with a pistol ball in his belly and the mark of Anubis whiskering out all over him … ran off to a dubious career as Dog-Face Joe, the “werewolf” that London mothers threatened badly behaving children with… leaving Romany, a ka that should have been retired long ago, in charge of Fikee’s post, the entire United Kingdom. Well, Romany thought complacently, the Master obviously did a good job of drawing this ka; I don’t think Fikee—or even Romanelli I—could have done any better at the task of maintaining and protecting the Master’s British interests. I suppose he’ll retire me—render me back down to the primal paut—after our coup here this week. I won’t be sorry to go.

Eight years is long enough for a ka.

I do just wish, though, he thought with a narrowing of his predatory eyes, that I could have solved the mystery of that alarmingly well-educated group of magicians that made use of Fikee’s haphazard gates for travel. That one I had, that Doyle, seemed like he would have cracked open nicely if I could have had a little time with him. I wonder where on earth they came from.

He cocked an eyebrow. But that should be easy to tell, he realized. Just calculate what other gate was open at the same time as the Kensington one. It was obviously one of those that exist in pairs, one big, long gate here and a little quick one over there during the period of the big one. They’re not common, and in such cases I’ve always chosen to monitor the larger one, but they do occur, and this was obviously an instance of it. It would be easy to calculate where they embarked from, and it might be a useful bit of research to leave to my successor.

Turning away from the sunlight, he sat down at his table and began shuffling through the more recent stacks of gate locus calculations. He found the one for the first of September, and frowningly scrutinized it.

After a few moments he bit his lip impatiently, dipped a pen in an inkwell, crossed out a whole section of figures and began laboriously re-working them. “Shouldn’t trust a ka to do high-level mathematics,” he muttered. “Lucky I even plotted the Kensington one accurately… “

His face went blank when he arrived at an answer, though, for the fresh calculations were identical to the ones he’d crossed out. He hadn’t made an error—there really had been only one gap open that evening. The September first gap had not been one of the infrequent twinned ones.

So where, he wondered, did they come from? And the answer came to him so quickly that he grimaced with self-disgust at not having thought of it sooner.

Certainly, the people in the coaches had jumped from one gate to another—but why had he assumed that the two gates had to exist at the same time?

Doyle’s crew of sorcerers had come to September first, 1810, from a gate in another time.

And if they can do that trick, thought Romany excitedly, then so can we. Fikee, your sacrifice may not have been in vain after all! Ra and Osiris, what could we—what couldn’t we do? Jump back and prevent the British from taking Cairo… Or further back, and undermine England so that by this century it isn’t a nation of any consequence! And to think, all Doyle’s party did with this power was come to hear a poet give a speech. We’ll use it more… purposefully, he thought as a rare wolfish grin slowly split his face.

But, he thought as he reached out and drew closer the Candle of Far Speaking, this is too big a thing to keep to myself. He lit it with the flame of the oil lamp on the table, and the lamp’s teardrop-shaped flame fluttered and seemed to recoil, when the little spherical fire bloomed at the tip of the magical candle’s wick.

To the minimal, insect-reflex extent that he was able to be glad about anything, the smiling young man was glad that Doctor Romany’s domination of him had not only removed his perceptibly burdensome free will, but also made an abstraction of physical discomfort. He was distantly aware of hunger, and cramped pains in his feet, and, much more distantly, of a voice that seemed to be howling in horror in the deepest cellar of his mind, but the fire of his consciousness had been doused with water so that the resulting steam could power some unimaginable engine; the few coals that still glowed could feel nothing but an anesthetized kind of satisfaction that the engine seemed to be working well.

Like a coachman instructed to ride around and around a certain block until his fare, ready at last, shall emerge from a house and hail him, the smiling young man began again at the top of the memorized page: “Good morning, my good man,” he said. “I am Lord Byron. May I buy you a pint of something?” The ever-smiling young man didn’t really hear the man’s answer—it seemed muffled, as if spoken on the other side of a partition—but some part of his brain, or perhaps the engine, recognized it as calling for reply number three: “I certainly am, my friend—sixth baron Byron of Rochdale; I inherited the title in 1798, when I was ten years old. If you’re wondering why a peer of the realm should be in a place like this, drinking with common laborers, well, it’s because I think it’s the common laborers that are this country, not the lords and royalty. I say—” There was the usual interruption that called for reply number one: “Innkeeper! A pint of whatever this gentleman will drink!” The young man’s hand, like a precision machine, fished a coin from his waistcoat pocket and dropped it onto the nearest level surface, and then his mouth picked up the number three response exactly where it had left off: “—to hell with these men who are supposed to govern us just because of the womb they happened to issue from! I say the King, and you, and me, are none of us better than the others, and it’s not right that some eat off silver and never work a day in their lives, while others just as good work backbreakingly hard every day and hardly taste real meat once in a week! The Americans rid themselves of that kind of artificial society, and the French tried to, and I say that we—”

He realized that the man he’d been reciting to was gone. When had he left? No matter—another would be along presently. He sat back, his blank smile returning to his face like something dead floating to the surface of a pond.

After a time he became aware that someone else had sat down next to him, and he started up again. “Good morning, my good man. I am Lord Byron. May I buy you a pint of something?”

He was answered with one of the sentences he had been warned he might get, and with an unfocussed uneasiness he responded with reply number eight: “Yes, my friend, I was travelling abroad until recently. I had to come home due to an illness, a brain fever, which still clouds my mind at times. Please excuse the uncertainty this infirmity plagues me with—do we know each other?”

After a long pause during which the still-smiling young man was aware of a vicarious sort of worry in himself, the man answered in the negative, and so with relief he went on. “If you’re wondering why a peer of the realm should be in a place like this, drinking with common—”

The newcomer interrupted the recital with a question that, frighteningly, was not muffled: “How are you coming with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage?” the stranger asked. “Oh, sorry, it’s Childe Buron’s Pilgrimage at this point, isn’t it? Ah—’Whilome in Albion’s isle there dwelt a youth, who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight… ‘ How does it go from there?”

For some reason these sentences hit the young man like a splash of ice water, and as they forced his hearing into clarity they did the same for his sight; his surroundings leaped from a congeries of comfortable blurs into awful focus, and for the first time in four days he saw a face clearly.

And the face of the man who had spoken to him was one that would attract attention—perched on impressively broad shoulders and a rope-muscled neck, and framed by a thick golden mane and beard, it was haggard, lined and mad-eyed as if with fabulous and harrowing secrets.

The no longer smiling young man knew that he’d been briefed on what to do in this situation—”If things become close up, and louder,” Romany had repeatedly told him, “and you lose the veil of protection my guidance give you, return to the camp here instantly, before the people in the streets tear you to bits like a crippled dog in a ratting pit… “—But this bearded man’s words had triggered something else, something more important than Romany’s command. Byron could hear himself speaking: “‘But spent his days in riot most uncouth, and vexed with mirth the drowsy ear of night.’” A swarm of astringent memories seemed to be loosed by these somehow very familiar phrases, and they stung like circulation returning to a suddenly unconstricted limb; he remembered being aboard the brig Spider with Fletcher and Hobhouse … the Albanians at Tepaleen with their white kilts and gold-trimmed capes, their belts bristling with ornate pistols and daggers… the dry yellow hills and deep blue sky of the Morea… and something about a fever, and… a doctor? His brain shut down with an almost audible slam on that line of recollection, but his voice continued, “‘Ah me! in sooth he was a shameless wight, sore given to revel and ungodly glee; he cheered the bad and did the good affright… ‘”

A hand seemed to squeeze his throat shut, and he knew it was Doctor Romany. In his head he heard the bald-headed doctor’s order: “Return to the camp here instantly.”

He stood up, darting bewildered glances around at the other drinkers in the low-ceilinged taproom, and then, muttering apologies, limped across to the door and out onto the street.

Doyle leaped to his feet, but his new height made him dizzy and he grabbed the table for support. My God, he thought as he took a deep breath and then reeled off in pursuit of the young man, it really is Byron—he knew Childe Harold, which no one in England will see for two years. But what’s wrong with him? And what’s wrong with history? How can he be here?

He lurched to the door and hung onto the wooden frame as he stepped down to the pavement. He could see Byron’s curly-topped head bobbing through the crowd to his right, and he followed unsteadily, wishing he could make this admittedly superior body work as gracefully as Benner had.

The people in the street seemed eager to get out of the way of the lurching, mad-eyed, lion-headed giant, and he caught up with Byron at the next tavern; grabbing his elbow, he steered him forcefully inside. “Beer for me and my friend,” he said carefully to the barmaid who was blinking up at him. Damn this cut-up tongue, he thought. He marched the ineffectually resisting young man to a table and sat him down, then leaned over him with one hand gripping the back of the chair so that his muscled arm barred any escape. “Now then,” Doyle rumbled sternly, “what’s the matter with you? Aren’t you curious about how I happened to know those lines?”

“I—I have an illness, a brain fever,” said Byron nervously, his smile seeming imbecilic when coupled with his evident anxiety. “I… must go, please, I… have an illness—” The words seemed to be jerked out of him one at a time, as if they’d been knotted along a piece of string that Doyle was pulling out of his throat.

Abruptly Doyle realized where he’d seen this mindless smile before—on the faces of the cultists who he used to see begging for change in airports and out in front of all-night restaurants. I’ll be damned, he thought—Byron acts like he’s been programmed.

“What do you think of this weather we’re having?” Doyle asked him.

“Please, I’ve got to go. My illness—”

“What day is it?”

“—a brain fever, which still clouds my mind at times—”

“What’s your name?”

The young man blinked. “Lord Byron, sixth baron of Rochdale. May I buy you a pint of something?”

Doyle sat down in the other chair. “Yes, thanks,” he said. “Here comes the girl with it now.”

Byron took a gold coin from his pocket and paid for the beers, though he didn’t touch his. “If you’re wondering why a peer of the realm—”

“‘For he through sin’s long labyrinth had run,’” interrupted Doyle, “‘nor made atonement when he did amiss—’ Who wrote that?”

Again Byron’s smile disappeared, and he pushed his chair back, but Doyle stood up and blocked his exit again.

“Who wrote that?” he repeated.

“Uh…” Sweat broke out on Byron’s pale brow, and when he finally answered, it was in a whisper. “I… I did…”

“When?”

“Last year. In Tepaleen.”

“How long have you been in England?”

“I don’t—four days? I think I’ve been sick… “

“How did you get here?”

“How did I… “

Doyle nodded his shaggy head. “Get here. On a ship? What ship? Overland?”

“Oh! Oh, of course, I came back…” Byron frowned. “I can’t recall.”

“You can’t? Doesn’t that seem peculiar to you, that you don’t know that? And how do you think I knew those verses of yours?” I wish I had Ted Patrick here, he thought.

“You’ve read my poetry?” said Byron, his weird smile returning. “You gratify me. But it all seems childish to me now; now I am pursuing the poetry of action, the well-placed sword rather than the well-chosen word. My goal is to strike the blow that shall sever the—”

“Stop it, “said Doyle.

“—chains that restrict us from—”

“Stop it. Look, I don’t have lots of time, and my mind isn’t firing on all cylinders either, but your presence here—I need to know what you’re doing here, I need to know… oh, hell, lots of things…” Doyle’s voice was becoming a distracted whisper as he picked up his beer mug. “Whether this is the real 1810 or some fake one… “

Byron stared at him for a moment, then reached uncertainly for the other mug and brought it halfway to his mouth. “He told me not to drink,” he said.

“To hell with him,” muttered Doyle, wiping foam from his bushy moustache. “You going to let him tell you when you can have a drink?”

“To… to hell with him,” agreed Byron, though speaking with some difficulty. He took a long, deep sip, and when he lowered the mug his eyes seemed more focussed. “To hell with him.”

“Who is he?” asked Doyle.

“Who?”

“Damn it, the man who has programmed—sorry, harnessed, blinkered and saddled you?” Byron frowned in puzzlement, the new clarity in his eyes fading, so Doyle said quickly, “‘Good morning, my good man. I am Lord Byron. May I buy you a pint of something? If you’re wondering why a peer of the realm should be in a place like this’—who said all that?”

“I did.”

“But who said it to you, who made you memorize it? Those aren’t your words, are they? Try to remember who said all that to you.”

“I don’t—”

“Close your eyes. Now hear those words, but in a different voice. What’s the voice like?”

Byron obediently shut his eyes, and after a long pause, said, “Deeper. An old man.”

“What else is he saying?”

“‘My lord,’” and Byron’s voice even went an octave deeper as he quoted it, “‘these statements and replies should be sufficient to get you through these two days. But if things become close up, and louder, and you lose the veil of protection my guidance gives you, return to the camp here instantly, before the people in the streets tear you to bits like a crippled dog in a ratting pit. Now Richard will drive you to town in the wagon, and he’ll pick you up at six o’clock this evening at the corner of Fish and Bread streets. Here’s Richard now. Come in. Ready to go? Avo, rya. Rya, that toy the foreign chal brought—let’s start it up, my monkey would like to see it move. We’ll talk about that later, if you please, Richard. Right now take milord here to town.’” Byron opened his eyes wonderingly. “And then,” he added, in his own voice again, “I was in a wagon.”

Doyle kept his face impassive, but his mind was racing. God help us, it’s Romany again, he realized. What in hell is the man up to here? What can he hope to gain by brainwashing Lord Byron and turning him loose to make semi-treasonous speeches? He’s certainly making the man visible—all I had to do to find him today was follow the rumors of the lunatic lord who’s buying everybody drinks. Is he responsible for Byron being in England now? Anyway, I’ve got to hang onto this poor devil.

“Listen,” he said, “you’ve got some high-octane memories to retrieve, and we can’t do it here. I’ve got a room a few streets away—inherited it, sort of—and the people that live there aren’t inclined to be nosy. Let’s go there.”

Still dazed, Byron got to his feet. “Very well, I suppose, Mr … ?”

Doyle started to answer, then sighed. “Oh hell. I guess you can call me William Ashbless. For now. But I’m damned if I’ll stay William Ashbless for the whole ride. All right?”

Byron shrugged bewilderedly. “That’s fine with me.” Doyle had to remind him to pay for the beers, and during the brief walk to the lodging house Byron kept craning his neck at the buildings and the crowds of busy people. “I really am in England again,” he muttered. His dark eyebrows lowered in a frown that he wore for the rest of the walk.

When they’d reached the shabby building and picked their way up the stairs—which several families seemed to consider their personal chamber, swearing at the two young men and jealously hiding bits of horrible food as they climbed past—and reached the room that had once been Dog-Face Joe’s, and when they’d filled two cups from the coffee pot that was still warm over the coals in the fireplace, Byron fixed on Doyle his first alert glance of the day.

“What’s today’s date, Mr. Ashbless?”

“Let’s see… the twenty-sixth.” Byron’s expression didn’t change, so after taking a cautious sip of the coffee, he added,

“Of September.”

“That’s not possible,” Byron stated. “I was in Greece… I remember being in Greece on Saturday the, uh, twenty-second.” He shifted on his chair and bent down to pull off his shoes. “Damn, these shoes hurt,” he began, then picked one of them up and stared at it. “Where on earth did I get these? Not only are they too small, they’re about a century out of fashion. Red heels, of all things, and these buckles—! And how in God’s name could I ever have put on this coat?” He dropped the shoe and said, in a voice so tightly controlled that Doyle knew he was scared, “Please tell me the true date, Mr. Ashbless, and as much as you know of what has happened to me since I left Greece. I gather I’ve been ill. But why am I not with my friends, or my mother?”

“It is the twenty-sixth of September,” Doyle said carefully, “and all I know about your recent actions is that for the past couple of days you’ve been buying drinks for half the population of London. But I know who can tell you what’s been happening.”

“Then let’s go to him immediately. I can’t bear this—”

“He’s here. It’s you. No, listen—you were recalling verbatim conversations a few minutes ago. Do it again, and listen to yourself. Let’s see… try ‘Avo, rya.’ Remember hearing that, in a different voice.”

“Avo, rya,” said Byron, and the alertness fell out of his expression. “‘Avo, rya. He’s very kushto with it. Handled guns before, it’s clear. That’s good, Wilbur. Though he won’t need much skill—he should be only a few feet away from him when he’ll use it. Does he seem to be able to draw it with sufficient speed? I’d like to just have it in his pocket, but I’m afraid even a lord might have to submit to a search before entering the royal presence. Oh, avo, rya, the little holster under his arm gives him no problem. You should see him—it’s in his hand quick as a snake. And he’s shooting with no hesitation? It’s got to be automatic. Avo, the dummy is all shot to bits, he’s done it so often—’”

Byron leaped out of the chair. “Good God, man,” he exclaimed in his own voice, “I was to go kill King George! What abomination is this? I was a puppet, sleep-walking, taking these diabolical instructions as… docilely as a maid would agree to serve dinner! By God, I’ll get satisfaction for this… atrocious affront! Matthews or Davies will convey my challenge to… to …” He slammed his right fist into his left palm and then pointed at Doyle. “I think you know who.”

Doyle nodded. “I think I do. But don’t go off half-cocked here. You may as well inventory what you know before you rush into it. Tell you what—try ‘Yes, Horrabin,’ in the same voice that was asking the questions in that last conversation. Do you get anything from that?”

Though still frowning, Byron sat down again. “Yes, Horrabin.” Again his face went blank. “‘Yes, Horrabin, I’d have that one killed too. This has got to run like clockwork, and it’s conceivable he may know enough to obstruct it at some point. Better to err on the side of excessive thoroughness, eh? Incidentally, is the Antaeus Brotherhood still actually in existence? I mean, do they meet and all? If so, I say we destroy them too. They were evidently quite a thorn in our side at one time. A hundred years ago they might have been, your Worship, but it’s nothing but an old men’s club these days. I’ve heard the old stories, and it certainly sounds as if they were formidable once; they’re relics now, though, and obliterating them would only call possibly harmful attention to their history. That’s a point… very well, but post some of your people at wherever it is that these old men congregate—Off Bedford Street, your Worship, rooms above a confectioner’s—and have them report back here if they see any … oh, never mind. I’m firing at shadows. Why don’t you take his lordship here outside and run him through his lines again.’ “

Focus and intensity returned into Byron’s eyes and he clicked his tongue impatiently. “This is worthless, Ashbless. I get nothing but incomprehensible dialogues, and I still can’t recall one detail of how I got from Greece to here. I do remember being taught the route back to this man’s camp, though, and I’ll return, sure enough—but I’ll bring a set of duelling pistols.” He stood up lithely and padded to the window—which Doyle still half-feared would recommence its contortions—and stood with his arms crossed, staring vengefully out across the roof-tops.

Doyle shook his head in exasperation. “This man isn’t a gentleman, my lord. He’d probably accept your challenge and then signal one of his men to blow your brains out from behind.”

Byron turned and squinted at him. “Who is he? I can’t recall hearing a name applied to him. What does he look like?”

Doyle raised his shaggy eyebrows. “Why don’t you just remember? Hear the voice: “Yes, Horrabin, I’d have that one killed too.’ But don’t just hear it—see it, too.”

Byron closed his eyes, and almost immediately said wonderingly, “I’m in a tent all full of Egyptian antiquities, and the most hideous clown in the world is sitting on top of a birdcage. He’s talking to a bald-headed old—good heavens, it’s my Greek doctor, Romanelli!”

“Romany,” Doyle corrected him. “He’s Greek?”

“It’s Romanelli. Well, no, I expect he’s Italian; but he’s the doctor that was treating me when I was in Patras. How is it that I didn’t recognize him until now? I wonder if he and I came back here together… but why should Romanelli want the king killed? And why bring me all the way back from Patras to do it?” He sat down again and stared hard, even belligerently, at Doyle. “No joking now, fellow—I need to know the true date.”

“It’s one of the few things I’m sure of,” said Doyle evenly. “Today is Wednesday the twenty-sixth of September, 1810. And you say you were in Greece only four days ago?”

“Damn me,” whispered Byron, sitting back, “I think you’re serious! And do you know, my recollections of lying sick in Patras don’t seem more than a week old. Yes, I was in Patras Saturday last, and so was this Romanelli villain.” He grinned. “Ah, there’s sorcery in this, Ashbless! Not even… cannons, arranged in a relay system across the continent, could have got me from there to here in time to have been buying drinks for people in London yesterday. Julius Obsequens wrote about such things in his book of prodigies. Romanelli evidently has command of aerial spirits!”

This is getting murky, thought Doyle. “Maybe,” he said cautiously. “But if Romanelli was your doctor out there, then he’s—well he’s probably still there. Because this Doctor Romany, who’s apparently a twin of him, has been here all along.”

“Twins, is it? Well, I’m going to get the full account from the London twin—at gunpoint, if necessary.” He stood up purposefully, then glanced down at his clothes and stockinged feet. “Damn! I can’t challenge a man while I’m dressed so. I’ll stop first at a haberdasher’s.”

“You’re going to threaten a sorcerer with pistols?” Doyle inquired sarcastically. “His… aerial spirits will drop a bucket over your head so you can’t see to aim. I say we pay a visit to this Antaeus Brotherhood first—if they were once a threat to Romany and his people, they may still know some effective defenses against them, mightn’t they?”

Byron snapped his fingers impatiently. “I suppose you’re right. We, you say? You have matters to settle with him yourself?”

“There’s something I need to learn from him,” said Doyle, standing up, “that he won’t… willingly… tell me.”

“Very well. Why don’t we investigate this Antaeus Brotherhood while my boots and clothes are being prepared. Antaeus, eh? I daresay they all walk around barefoot on dirt floors.”

This reminded Doyle of something, but before he could track it down Byron had struggled back into his despised shoes and opened the door.

“You are coming?”

“Oh, sure,” Doyle said, picking up Benner’s coat. But remember that remark about bare feet and dirt floors, he told himself. That reminds me of something that seems important.

The sweat drops were rolling like miniature crystal snails down Doctor Romany’s bald temples, and his concentration was shattered by physical exhaustion, but he resolved to try once more to contact the Master in Cairo. The trouble, he realized, was that the ether was for once too receptive, and within probably ten miles the beam of his message became a cone that widened out and extended its energy in lateral spread rather than motion forward toward the candle that was always burning in the Master’s chamber; and then the message shuddered to a halt, and rebounded back to Romany’s candle, producing the loud, warped echoes that infuriated Doctor Romany and terrified the gypsies.

Again he held the lamp flame to the black curl of candle wick, and because this was the twelfth attempt, he could feel the energy drain out of him at the instant the round flame appeared.

“Master,” he rasped into it. “Can you hear me? This is the Romanelli ka in England. It is urgent that I speak to you. I have news that may cause you to want to abort the present enterprise. I—”

“Gorble geermee?” His own voice, distorted and slowed, came back at him so loudly that he jerked away from the candle. “Diw a Rubberbelly kadingle. Idda zurjee…” Abruptly the idiot echo faded out, leaving only a sound like distant wind, waxing and waning as if heard through a flapping curtain. Romanelli leaned forward again. This wasn’t the sharpening that indicated successful contact, but at least it was something different. “Master?” he said hopefully.

Without becoming a voice or seeming to be anything more than the sound of vast emptiness, the distant sussuration began to form words. “Kes ku sekher ser sat,” the void whispered, “tuk kemhu a pet… “

The peculiar flame went out when the candle, propelled by Romany’s fist, thumped into the side of the tent. He stood up and, sweating and trembling and bobbing unevenly, strode out of the tent. “Richard!” he yelled angrily. “Damn it, where are you? Get your—”

“Acai, rya,” said the gypsy, hastening up to him. Doctor Romany glanced around. The sun was low in the west, throwing long shadows across the darkening heath, and was doubtless too concerned with its imminent entry into the Tuaut, and its boat trip through the twelve hours of the night, to glance back at what might be transpiring in this field. The rack of wood was laid out on the grass, looking like a twenty-foot section of a bridge, and the sharp aromatic fumes of brandy were so pungent on the evening breeze that he knew his threats had worked, and that the gypsies had used the entire keg to douse the wood and hadn’t saved any for drinking. “When did you splash it on?” he asked.

“Only a minute or so ago, rya,” answered Richard. “We were drawing lots to see who’d go fetch you.”

“Very well.” Romany rubbed his eyes and sighed deeply, trying to thrust out of his mind the whisper he’d heard. “Bring me the brazier of coals and the lancet,” he said finally. “And we’ll have a try at summoning these fire elementals.”

“Avo.” Richard hurried away, audibly muttering garlic, and Romany again turned toward the sun, which was now poised on the edge of entering the darkness, and while his guard was down the words he’d heard came rushing back to him: Kes ku setcher ser sat, tuk kemhu a pet… Your bones will fall upon the earth, and you will not see the heavens…

He heard Richard’s feet swishing through the long grass behind him, and he shrugged fatalistically and began prodding his left arm with the claw fingers of his right hand, trying to find a good bountiful vein.

I hope they’ll settle for ka blood, he thought.

The elderly man in the threadbare dressing gown lowered his white brows and widened his eyes in an almost ape-like expression of astonished disapproval when Doyle ventured to refill his tiny glass from the decanter of mediocre sherry, even though he’d only nodded and smiled and said, “Help yourself, my lord,” when Byron had refilled his for the second time.

“Ah, hmm, what were we discussing, before… ?” the man quavered. “Yes, aside from… ah… fellowship, yes, promoting the… quiet joys of sensible company, our main purpose is to prevent the… pollution of good old honest British stock by… inferior strains.” One trembling hand shook an incautiously large mound of snuff onto a lumpy knuckle of the opposite hand and then the old man snorted the powder up a nostril and seemed, to Doyle at least, almost to die of the resulting sneezing fit.

Byron made a silent snarl of exasperation and bolted his sherry.

“Mercy! I—kooshwah!—I beg your pardon, my lord.” The old man dabbed at his streaming eyes with a handkerchief.

Doyle leaned forward and rumbled impatiently, “And just how do you go about preventing this, as you call it, pollution, Mr. Moss?” He glanced around at the dusty curtains, tapestries, paintings and books that insulated the rooms of the Antaeus Brotherhood from the fresh autumn breeze outside. The smells of candle wax, Scottish snuff and deteriorating leather book bindings and upholstery was beginning to make him feel ill.

“Eh? Oh, why we… write letters. To the newspapers. Protesting the, ah, leniency in the immigration laws, and proposing statutes to… ban gypsies and Negroes and, uh, Irishmen from the larger towns. And we print and distribute pamphlets, which,” he said with an ingratiating grimace toward Byron, “tends, as you might imagine, to deplete the club kitty—ah, treasury. And we sponsor morality plays—”

“Why the Antaeus Brotherhood?” interrupted Doyle, angry that the vague hope he’d felt on hearing the name seemed to be proving so unfounded.

“—which… what? Oh! Yes, well we feel that England’s strength, like that of Antaeus in, as it were, classical mythology, is based on… maintaining contact with the earth, the soil… you know, the solid native British… uh … “

“Soil,” said Byron, nodding fiercely as he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Excellent. Thank you, Mr. Moss, it’s been inspiring. Ashbless, you may stay and glean more valuable information, in case we should be attacked by savage Negroes or Irishmen. I’d sooner wait at my haberdasher’s. There I shall simply be bored.” He turned on his heel, visibly suppressing a wince as his shoe pinched his foot, and limped out to the hall. His irregular footsteps thumped and knocked down the patchily carpeted stairs, and then the street door could be heard to slam.

“I beg your pardon,” Doyle said to the dumbstruck Moss. “Lord Byron is a man of tumultuous passions.”

“I… well, youth,” Moss muttered.

“But listen,” said Doyle earnestly, hunching forward in his chair, to Moss’ evident alarm, “didn’t you people used to be more … militant? I mean like a hundred years or so ago—weren’t things more… I don’t know… serious in their consequences than a letter to the Times would be?”

“Well, there do seem to have been… excesses, yes, incidents of a violent nature,” Moss allowed cautiously, “back when the Brotherhood had its quarters on London Bridge, down on the Southwark end of it. There are mentions in our archives of some rather—”

“Archives? Could I examine them, please? Uh, Lord Byron indicated he’d want to know the history of the Brotherhood before he decided to join,” he added hastily, seeing the simian frown reforming on Moss’s features. “After all, before he invests his fortune in an organization of this nature he’d like to check it out.”

“Oh? Well, yes of course. Irregular, you realize,” Moss said, precariously poling himself up out of his chair with a cane, “but I suppose in this case we may make an exception to the members only rule…” Erect at last, he tottered toward the door behind him. “If you’d bring the lamp and step this way,” he said, and the reference to a fortune earned Doyle the addition of a grudging “sir.”

The door swung inward with such creaking that Doyle knew it hadn’t been opened in quite some time, and when he’d stepped inside behind Moss, and the lamp illuminated the narrow room beyond, he could see why.

Stacks of mildewed, leather-bound journals filled the place from floor to ceiling, and had in places collapsed, spilling crumbled fragments of age-browned paper across the damp floor. Doyle reached for the top volume of a stalagmite stack that only came up chest-high, but rain had leaked into the room at some time and melted or germinated the ancient bindings into one solid mass. Doyle’s prying was exciting to madness a nation of spiders, so he stopped and looked at a shelf that contained several pairs of mummified boots. Catching a glitter by the heel of one, he looked closer and saw a three-inch length of fine gold chain trailing from the ancient leather. All the boots proved to have chains, though most were copper long since gone green.

“Why chains?”

“Mm? Oh, it’s… traditional, in our formal functions, to wear a chain attached to the heel of the right boot. I don’t know how the custom got started, just one of those peculiarities, I expect, like cuff buttons that don’t—”

“What do you know about the origins of the custom?” Doyle growled, for like Byron’s remark about bare feet and dirt floors, this seemed to remind him of something. “Think!”

“Now see here, sir… no need to… wrathful tones … but let’s see, I believe members wore the chains at all times during the reign of Charles the Second… oh, of course, and they didn’t just staple it to the heel as they do now, the chain actually entered the boot through a hole and passed through the stocking and was knotted around the ankle. God knows why. Over the years it’s been simplified… prevent chafing … “

Doyle had begun dismantling one of the drier and older-looking book stacks. He found that they were roughly chronological, arranged in the same pattern as geological strata, and that the journal entries from the eighteenth century chronicled nothing but a dwindling involvement in social affairs—a dinner at which Samuel Johnson was expected but didn’t show, a complaint against adulterated port wines, a protest against gold and silver galloon, whatever that might be, adorning men’s hats—but when he had unearthed the upper volumes of the seventeenth century the notes abruptly became sparser and more cryptic, and were generally slips of paper glued or laid into the books rather than written on the pages. He was unable to follow any gist of these older records, which consisted of lists, in some code, or maps with incomprehensibly abbreviated street names; but at length he found one volume that seemed to be entirely devoted to the occurrences of one night, that of February the fourth, 1684. The pieces of paper laid in it were generally hastily scrawled and in plain English, as if there hadn’t been time to use a cipher.

The writers of them did, though, seem to take it for granted that any reader would be familiar with the situation, and interested only in the details.

“… Then we followed him and his hellish retinue back a-crosse the ice from the Pork-Chopp Lane stayres to the Southwark side,” Doyle read on one slip, “our party dextrously in a Boat with wheeles, piloted by B. and our unnam’d Informant, and although we took care to avoid any clear conflict while on the water, onely endeav’ring to drive them onto the land… the Connexion of course being no good upon the frozen water… there ensu’d Troubles.” Another fragment read, “… destroied entirely, and their leader kill’d by a pistol-ball in the face… ” Toward the front of the book there was an entry actually written on a page: “As wee were about to set about dynynge upon sawfages and a rare chine of beef, in hee burst, and sadlie call’d us away from what was to bee one of the fine dinners.”

So what the hell happened, gang? Doyle thought. The “hellish retinue” sounds ominous… and what do you mean by “the Connexion”? He flipped hopelessly to the back of the book, and his eye was caught by a very short note written clearly on the endpaper.

He read it, and for the first time during all his adventures and mishaps he actually doubted his sanity.

The note read: “IHAY, ENDANBRAY. ANCAY OUYAY IGITDAY?”—and it was in his own handwriting, though the ink was as faded with age as every other notation in the book.

Suddenly dizzy, he sat down on a stack of books, which exploded to dust under his weight, spilling him backward against another pile, which toppled down upon him, burying him in damp, disintegrating parchment and showers of panicked spiders and silverfish.

The appalled Moss actually fled when the incoherently shouting giant, now garlanded with bugs and rotting paper, rose from the ruin like a Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse embodying Decay.

The man who at this point didn’t know whether he was Doyle or Ashbless or some long-dead member of the Antaeus Brotherhood got his feet under him and, still shouting, and slapping bugs out of his beard, ran out of the archive closet and through the sitting room into the hall. A cuckoo clock hung on the wall, and impelled by an impulse he didn’t pause to question he seized one of the dangling pendulum chains, yanked the brass pinecone-shaped weight off the end of it, and then drew the end of the chain up through the clock’s works and out free. He stumbled away down the stairs, clutching the length of chain and leaving the clock stopped forever behind him.

The heat of the burning platform was intense, and when Doctor Romany turned and took several steps away, the night air was frigid on his sweaty face. He clenched his fist and opened it, grimacing at the stickiness of the blood that had run down his arm during the repeated lancetings. He sighed deeply and wished he could sit down on the grass. At that moment it seemed to him that the freedom to just sit down on the ground must be the dearest of the countless things he’d had to forfeit in order to pursue sorcery.

Wearily, still facing out beyond the wheel of red firelight into the darkness that was connected to him by his long shadow, he took the stained lancet and the sticky bowl out of his pocket for one more try.

Before he could once more prod the exhausted vein in his arm, though, a voice like the drawing of a violin bow across a choked-up E string sang from behind him. “I see shoes.” There was merry savagery in the inhuman voice.

“I do, too,” replied another like it.

Romany breathed a sigh of thanks to dead gods, then braced himself for the always disconcerting sight of the yags, and turned around.

The awakened columns of flame had assumed roughly human outlines, so that at a quick glance they looked like burning giants waving their hands over their heads.

“The shoes face us now,” rang another voice over the crackling of the flames. “I believe they must belong to our indistinct summoner.”

Romany licked his lips, annoyed as always that the elementals couldn’t really see him. “These shoes do indeed belong to your summoner,” he said sternly.

“I hear a dog barking,” sang one of the fire giants.

“Oh, a dog, is it?” said Romany, angry now. “Well, fine. A dog couldn’t unveil for you the excellent toy under the sheet behind me, now could he?”

“You’ve got a toy? What does it do?”

“What are you asking a dog for?” said Romany.

For a few moments the bright figures waved their arms without speaking, then one said, “We beg your pardon, sir sorcerer. Show us the toy.”

“I’ll show it to you,” Romany said, bobbing on his spring-shoes over to the shrouded shape, “but I won’t turn it on until you’ve promised to do something for me.” He drew the sheet off the village Bavarois, pleased to see that the candles all still glowed in their proper places behind the windows of the miniature houses. “As you can see,” he said, trying to appear confident that the thing would work, and that the yags would keep any promise they might make, “it’s a Bavarian village. When it’s working, all the little men you see there walk around, and these sleds move, pulled by these horses, whose legs actually bend! And these girls dance to a, uh, refreshing accordion tune.” The tall flames were arched over toward him as if by a strong wind, and their outlines were no longer so carefully human, an indication that they were getting excited. “T-t-tuuurn… it on,” stuttered one of them.

Very carefully. Doctor Romany reached for the switch. “I will let you see it move for a moment only,” he said. “Then we will discuss what I want of you.” He clicked the switch over. The machine inhaled deeply, then began cranking out jolly music as the tiny figures danced and marched and moved around. He clicked it off again and glanced nervously at the yags.

They were just columns of roiling flame now, with bursts of fire shooting out in random directions. “Yaaah!” a couple of them were roaring. “Yaaah? Yaaaaah!”

“It’s turned off!” Romany shouted. “Look, it’s off, it’s stopped! Do you want me to turn it on again?”

The flames gradually settled down and reassumed their roughly human shapes. “Turn it on again,” spoke one.

“When you’ve done what I want done,” said Doctor Romany, mopping his forehead with his sleeve, “I will.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you all to appear in London tomorrow night—the blood and brandy fires will be set for beacons—and then I want you to remember this toy, and imagine what it will be like when you can watch it go for as long as you please.”

“London? You asked us to do this once before.”

“The time in 1666, yes.” Romany nodded. “But it wasn’t me asking you then. It was Amenophis Fikee.”

“It was a pair of shoes. How should we distinguish?”

“I guess it’s not important,” Doctor Romany muttered, feeling vaguely defeated. “But it’s to be tomorrow night, do you understand? If you do it at the wrong time, or at the wrong place, you won’t get to have this toy, or even see it again.”

The flames swayed restlessly; the yags weren’t inclined toward punctuality. “N-never see it again?” sang one, in a voice half pleading and half threatening.

“Never,” affirmed Romany.

“We want to see the toy work.”

“Very well. Then when you become aware of the beacon fires, come quickly and animate them. I want you to go wild then.”

“We will go wild then,” echoed a yag in tones of satisfaction.

Romany let his shoulders slump with relief, for the hard part was over. All that was necessary now was to wait politely until the yags departed, and the fire was once again just a fire. The only sounds were the flutter of flames, the occasional explosive snap of a splitting board, and, when the breeze was from the north, the muttered conversation of tree frogs.

Abruptly a shout sounded from the dark periphery of the camp: “Where are you hiding, Romany or whatever your name is? Step forward, you son of a bitch, unless the price of sorcery has left you a cowering eunuch!”

“Yaaah!” exclaimed one of the yags, simultaneously brightening and relaxing its human shape. “Shoes is a cowering eunuch!” A burst of billowing flame shot out, roaring like laughter.

“Ho ho!” the next one yelled. “Young curly-head wants to extinguish our host! Can’t you taste his wrath?”

“Perhaps he’ll work the toy for us!” yipped another, losing all consistency of form in its extreme excitement.

Doctor Romany cast a panicky glance toward the unseen intruder, agonizedly aware that the fire elementals were on the brink of going totally and disastrously out of control. “Richard!” he shouted. “Wilbur! Damn it, get that man at the south end of camp and shut him up!”

“Avo, rya,” wailed an unhappy gypsy’s voice from the darkness.

“If you’ll all just calm down,” Romany roared at the yags, who by this time were exploding fiery pseudopods in all directions, “I’ll turn on the toy one more time.” In addition to being scared, Romany was angry, and it was not so much the intrusion that irritated him as the fact that the yags could see the intruder—and even read his mind to a limited extent.

“Wait a moment,” commanded one of the flame columns to the others. “Shoes is going to work the toy again.” The flames slowly and reluctantly resumed their human template.

There came no more shouting from the edge of camp, and Romany relaxed a little, light-headed in the aftermath of the crisis. His confidence was almost fully restored as he turned once again toward the village Bavarois.

Richard hurried up just as Romany was reaching for the master switch. The old gypsy’s teeth were bared in a rictus of fear at being this close to the yags, but he walked right up next to Doctor Romany and spoke into the sorcerer’s ear. “The m-man shouting, rya, it was your gorgio lord, come home early.”

Romany sagged, his tenuous confidence abruptly eradicated like fresh ink washed from a page by a gush of ice water. “Byron?” he whispered, wanting to be absolutely sure of defeat.

“Avo, Byron,” Richard muttered quickly. “He’s wearing different clothes now, and he’s got two pistols in a case. Wanted to fight a duel with you, but we’ve got him tied up.”

The gypsy bowed and then sprinted wildly back into the darkness toward the tents.

That’s torn it, Romany thought, dazed, as he automatically continued the motion of reaching for the master switch. He must have met someone who knew the real Byron; and whoever it was awakened him, broke my control.

He pushed the switch into the on position, held it there for a few moments while the mannikins moved and the music jingled and honked incongruously away across the nighttime fields, and the yags began billowing and roaring, then he clicked it off.

“I’ve changed my mind!” he shouted. “I’ve decided you can have the toy tonight—never mind London.” The Master, he remembered ruefully, had said that the burning of London alone, if not coupled with both the ruin of the British money and the scandalous regicide, would be an inconclusive blow at best, and a waste of a lot of valuable preparation. “Wait until my men can load it on a cart, and then we’ll carry it way out across the heath to the edge of the woods so you can enjoy it with, uh, a lot of elbow room.”

Romany’s voice was flat with disappointment, though the yags were flaring like powder keg detonations. “Take it easy now,” he told them, “here in camp. Wait till you get to the woods before you cut loose. Listen to me, damn it, or you can’t have the toy!”

At least there’s the time traveling possibility to explore, he told himself as he turned to go fetch Richard and Wilbur. At least I don’t have to report a total failure.

“They’ll be shut down for the night,” said the cab driver for the third time. “I’m certain of it. But see here, I can take you to a palm-reading lady I know in Long Alley.”

“No thank you,” said Doyle, pushing open the little door of the cab. He unfolded his tall frame out and stepped to the ground carefully, for the half-drunk driver hadn’t secured the brake. The air was chilly, and the sight of flames flickering in the distance beyond the dark gypsy tents made the prospect of going in there at least a little more attractive.

“I’d best wait anyway, sir,” the driver said. “It’s a long way back to Fleet Street, and you’ll not get another cab way out here.” The horse stamped a hoof in the dirt impatiently.

“No, you go, I’ll walk back.”

“If you’re sure. Good night then.” The driver snapped his long whip and the cab rocked and thumped away. A few seconds later Doyle heard the wheels rolling on the pavement of Hackney Road, moving back toward the dim glow in the southwest that was the city.

Faintly he could hear voices from the direction of Romany’s camp. I suppose Byron must already be here, he thought. The haberdasher had said he’d left his shop a good half hour before Doyle arrived there, and had paused after getting his boots and clothes only long enough to ask where the nearest gunsmith was; and by the time Doyle had found the gunsmith shop, Byron had moved on from there too, having purchased, with more of the gold sovereigns Romany had given him, a set of duelling pistols. And then Doyle had had to stop a policeman to ask where Doctor Romany’s gypsy camp was currently set up, while Byron already knew the way.

The damn fool, Doyle thought. I told him pistols wouldn’t daunt the likes of Romany.

He took two steps toward the flame-silhouetted tents, then stopped. What exactly do you hope to do here? he asked himself. Rescue Byron, if he’s still alive? The police are the ones for that. Make some kind of deal with Doctor Romany? Oh, right; sure, it would be useful to learn the location of the 1814 gap that Darrow’s employees will jump back to 1983 through, so that I could be there and run up and grab one of them by the hand an instant before the gap closed—but if Romany thought I knew anything he wanted, he’d just seize me, not bargain with me.

Doyle rolled his shoulders back and gripped his hands together hard, feeling the flexed muscles strain against the fabric of his shirt. Though this time, he thought with cautious satisfaction, he might not find me quite so easy to overpower. I wonder how Dog-Face Joe is doing with my old body. I guess he’s not one to worry about going bald, at least.

He could feel the vertigo coming on again, so he shook his head sharply, took several breaths of the chilly night air and strode forward through the grass. I’ll just sneak around and reconnoiter, he told himself. Snoop. I needn’t even get close to the tents. A thought struck him and he paused. Then he grinned deprecatingly and kept walking, but a moment later he stopped again. Why not? he asked himself. Enough insne things are proving to be true for it to be worth a try. He sat down in the grass, pulled his right boot off and, with Dog-Face Joe’s—or possibly Benner’s—pocketknife he hacked a hole through the stitching of the back seam. Then he pulled down his stocking, fished the length of clock chain out of his pocket, tied one end of it around his bare ankle and put the boot back on. With the blade of the knife it wasn’t difficult to draw the trailing end of the chain out through the hole so that the end of it dangled a foot and a half from his heel. He stood up and continued walking toward the tents.

The yags brightened and leaned over south, toward the tents. “Look at the confused man,” chimed one. “Coming here without knowing what he wants.”

“Or even who he is,” added another with lively interest. Doctor Romany glanced to the south, where he could dimly see Wilbur and Richard harnessing a horse to a wagon. It can’t be either of them the yags are reading, he thought. It must be the Byron ka, his head full of contradictory memories and instructions, radiating confusion. If his emotions continue to excite the yags, I’ll have Wilbur knock him out—or even kill him; he’s of no use anymore.

Doyle could feel the bright flickering intrusions in his mind, like the hands and eyes of frisky children who, finding the library door unlocked, dart inside to feel the bindings and gape at the dust jackets.

He shook his head again, trying to clear it. What was I doing now? he thought. Oh, of course—scouting the camp to see where the fine toy is… no! Byron and Romany. Why, he wondered uneasily, did I think of a toy just then? A wonderful intricate toy with little men and horses running cleverly down little paths… his heart was pounding with excitement, and he wanted to shoot huge fireballs glaring out across the dark fields…

“Yaaah!” came a weird, roaring shout from ahead of him, and at the same time the flames beyond the tents flared up.

Distantly he heard a more normal voice yelling, “Richard! Hurry up with that!”

Whatever’s going on over there, Doyle thought, it’s certainly holding everyone’s attention. He hurried forward, hunched over and keeping a broad tent between himself and the fires, and in a few moments he was crouched behind the tent, pleased to see that he was not panting at all.

The fluttering aliennesses brushed his mind again, and he heard a wild, roaring voice say, “His new body runs better!”

My God, Doyle thought, his palms suddenly damp, something over there is reading my mind!

“Never mind him!” shouted the voice that Doyle now realized differed from the roaring ones in that it was human. “He’s tied up! If you want the toy you’ve got to calm down!”

“Shoes is no fun at all,” sang another of the inhuman voices.

I’ve got to get out of here, Doyle thought, standing up straight and turning back toward the road.

“Richard!” called the voice Doyle now suspected was Doctor Romany’s. “Tell Wilbur to stay with the—with Byron, and be ready to kill him when I give the word.”

Doyle hesitated. I don’t owe him anything, he thought. Well, he did buy me lunch and give me a couple of his sovereigns … But hell, they were Romany’s to begin with… Still, he didn’t have to help me… But I did warn him not to come back here… Oh, he’ll be all right—he doesn’t die until 1824… in the history I remember, that is—of course in that history Byron wasn’t in London in 1810… Oh well, I guess I can at least keep an eye on things.

A lush old horse chestnut tree stood a few yards to his right, serving as a mooring for several of the tent ropes, and he quickly tiptoed over behind it. Looking up, he saw a branch that seemed likely to support him, and he leaped and caught it.

The chain that trailed from his right heel was suddenly swinging free in the air, and not touching the ground.

“He is disappeared.’” exclaimed one of the yags, its voice screechy with astonishment.

“Wilbur!” yelled Romany. “Is Byron still there, and conscious?”

“Avo, rya!”

Then what, Romany wondered, is the yag talking about? Could there have been a stranger hanging about? If so, I guess he’s gone. Richard had cringingly drawn the wagon up beside the village Bavarois, and now stepped down from the driver’s bench and approached the toy.

“Can you lift that into the wagon by yourself?” barked Romany tensely.

“I d-don’t think so, rya,” Richard quavered, keeping his eyes averted from the restless fire giants.

“We’ve got to get them out of the camp at once. Wilbur! Kill Byron and come here!”

Richard winced. He’d killed several men during the course of his life, but it had each time been a desperate, hot-blooded and roughly equal contest, and only the reflection that he’d have been killed himself if he’d held back had sustained him during the subsequent hours of horrified trembling and nausea; this cold throat-cutting of a bound man was not only beyond his capacity to perform, but even, he realized unhappily, beyond his capacity to stand by and observe.

“Wait, Wilbur!” he yelled, and when Romany turned wrathfully toward him he deliberately reached out and shoved the master switch of the village Bavarois into the on position—and then broke it off.

As soon as he’d heard Doctor Romany order Wilbur to kill Byron, Doyle had crawled out along a nearly horizontal branch, hoping to be able to see this Wilbur and pitch something down at him, but he had not yet learned to allow for the greater weight of his new body—the branch, which would only have flexed under his old body’s weight, bowed, gave a groan that went up the scale to a screech, and then with a rapid fire burst of cracks and snappings, tore right off the trunk.

The heavy limb and its rider plunged through the top of the tent below, demolishing what had served as the gypsies’ kitchen; kettles, spoons, pots and pans added a wild percussive clatter to the ripping and crashing and the ground-shaking thump, and then very quickly the billowed out, slowly settling tent fabric was illuminated from within by fire.

Doyle rolled off the collapsing tent onto his hands and knees on the grass. The tall fires beyond the tents were billowing and roaring like a gasoline dump going up, and he decided he must have been imagining things when, while still in the tree, he’d thought the flames were shaped like men.

He hopped to his feet, wary and ready to run in any direction, and as soon as his chained foot touched the ground he felt again the inquisitive flutter-touches in his mind, and he heard one of the inhuman voices shout, “There he is again?”

“Hello?” came a similar voice. “Brendan Doyle? Come see our toy?”

“Doyle is here?” he heard Romany cry.

“Yaaah?” something roared in a tooth-rattling bass, and a horizontal column of flame lashed out an incredible thirty yards and made a torch of one of the tents. Over the screams of the gypsies who scrambled out of it, Doyle thought he could hear, somehow, a tinkly piano and an accordion playing merrily.

Bouncing as agile as a bug on his spring-shoes. Doctor Romany came high-stepping away from the fires, glancing wildly around, but he jolted to a stop when he saw Doyle standing by the burning kitchen tent. “And who are you?” he gasped. Then he snarled, “Never mind.” The panting, sweaty-faced sorcerer reached one spread-fingered hand back toward the greater glare, as though drawing energy from it, and then jabbed the pointing finger of his other hand at Doyle. “Die,” he commanded. Doyle felt a cold grittiness strike him and freeze his heart and stomach, but a moment later it had drained away in an icy rush down through his right leg and out through his foot into the ground.

Romany stared at him in astonishment. “Who the hell are you?” he muttered as he stepped back. He reached to his belt and drew from it a long-barrelled flintlock pistol.

Doyle’s body seemed to react of its own accord—he sprang up and forward and straightened his leg hard, driving his heel like a piston into Romany’s chest; the wizard catapulted backward and landed on his back six feet to the rear. Doyle relaxed in midair and hit the ground in a crouch, and his left hand picked the falling pistol out of the air.

“Rya?” came a voice from behind him. “Do you want me to kill Byron or not?”

Doyle whirled and saw a gypsy with a bared knife standing and peering about at the entrance to a nearby tent. The man finally noticed the sorcerer rolling and flopping on the ground, and he turned quickly and re-entered the tent.

In two long, running strides Doyle covered the distance to the tent, and he tore the flap aside just in time to see the gypsy cock the knife back over the throat of Byron, who lay on a cot tightly bound and gagged. Doyle’s arm was kicked upward by the gun’s recoil before he even decided to shoot, and through the plume of smoke he saw the gypsy spin away to the rear of the tent with blood spattering from a hole in his temple.

His ears ringing with the bang of the shot, Doyle lunged forward, pried the knife out of the dead hand and, straightening up, sawed the blade up through the ropes around Byron’s ankles and wrists.

The young lord reached up and pulled the gag away from his mouth. “Ashbless, I owe you my life—”

“Here,” Doyle said, pressing the knife hilt into Byron’s hand. “Be careful, there’s wild things abroad tonight.” Doyle rushed out of the tent, hoping to seize Romany while he was still rolling helpless and unattended on the ground—but the sorcerer was gone.

Most of the tents were blazing now, and Doyle hesitated, trying to decide which direction of escape would be safest. Then his eyes were strained with trying to focus on what he was seeing, for unless he was somehow grossly misjudging the perspective, he’d just glimpsed two—and now a third!—completely burning men, each at least thirty feet tall, running and bounding energetically, even joyfully, across the grass between the tents and the road. Two more ran past a moment later, as fast, it seemed to Doyle, as comets.

It looks like we leave, and damn quick, by the north end of camp, Doyle thought, but as he turned that way he saw the fiery runners lap the north side, too. My God, he thought, whatever they are, they’re running in a circle around the camp!

He whirled to the south again, and in an instant two things were clear: there were now too many of them, racing far too fast, for anyone to hope to dart out of the circle between them; and the blazing wheel was growing perceptibly smaller with every second.

Romany called these things up, thought Doyle desperately, and if it turns out he can’t send ‘em back, it won’t be for lack of me twisting his arm—or his neck. He’s got to be in one of these tents.

Doyle sprinted toward the nearest one, his shadow fragmenting and whirling around hm.

CHAPTER 9

The requisite energy will present no problem, thought Doctor Romany as he hunched over the papers on his desk and tried not to hear the screams of the gypsies who hadn’t escaped, and the roaring of the now solid wall of fire spinning out of control around the camp; and by the degree of the angle at which I lay the glass rods I can decide how far I’ll jump. But how can I get back? I’ll need a vitalized talisman linked to this time… a piece of green schist inscribed with this time’s coordinates would be perfect… he glanced speculatively at a statue of Anubis, in use as a paperweight, carved from that stone.

Over the calamitous noise outside he heard a crashing in the next tent, and a voice shouting, “Where’s Romany, damn you? Are you hiding him in here?”

It must be that hairy giant who was somehow immune to my cold-cast, Romany thought. He’s after me. There’s no time to be carving stones. I’ll have to do it on paper and rely on some of my blood—some more of it—to vitalize it.

As he rapidly scrawled Old Kingdom hieroglyphics across a sheet of white paper, he wondered who the bearded man could be. And where was Brendan Doyle?

The pen paused in midair as a possible answer occurred to him. Why, I’ll bet that’s it, he thought almost with awe. Of course—didn’t the yags say: His new body works better? But he seemed so genuinely helpless when I had him. Was all that just an act? By Set, it must have been! Anyone who can get Amenophis Fikee to switch him into a superior body without poison in it, and can not only survive my best cold-cast but an instant later physically disarm me, is… well, not helpless.

As Romany continued drawing the ancient figures he tried to decide what time to jump to. Sometime in the future? No, not when it meant leaving tonight’s debacle as established history. Better to jump into the past, fix things up so that the situation tonight’s aborted effort was supposed to remedy never would have arisen in the first place. When had the Master’s troubles with England really started? Certainly far earlier than the sea-fight in Aboukeer Harbor in 1798, after which anyone could see that the British were destined to control Egypt; even if that battle had fallen out the other way, and the French general Kleber had not been assassinated, England still would have been running things by now. No, as long as he was going to go back, he may as well go way back, to when England got its first toe-hold in the African continent. That would have been in… about 1660, when Charles II was restored to the throne of England and married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, part of whose dowry was the city of Tangier. Romany did some rapid calculations… then scowled when he realized that there was no gap within twenty years of Charles’ wedding. There was one in 1684, though, on the—he scribbled furiously—on the fourth of February. That was one year before Charles’ death, during the Cairene Master’s first attempt to establish the foolish and malleable royal bastard James, Duke of Monmouth, as successor to the strong-willed Charles. Fikee had been, for almost two decades, holding in abeyance the Newtonian recoil of the yag conjuring of 1666, and had been instructed to let the equilibrium spring back—in the form of a tremendous freeze—in coordination with the poisoning of the sovereign, the forging of a “newly discovered” marriage certificate between Charles Stuart and Lucy Walter, Monmouth’s mother, and the secret return of Monmouth himself from Holland.

As he hurriedly took out the well-used lancet for one more dig into a vein, Romany remembered what had gone wrong with that plan. The fatal dose of mercury wound up in the stomach of one of Charles’ spaniels… and the Great Freeze, which was supposed to end with Monmouth’s triumphal arrival in Folkestone, proved to be more forceful than Fikee had anticipated, and continued well on into March… and the forged marriage certificate in its locked black box had somehow been lost. The Master had not been pleased.

The tent walls were orange with the glare of the spinning ring of frenzied yags outside, and drops of sweat diluted the thick blood that he now carefully smeared around the paper’s margins.

Yes, Romany thought, getting quickly to his feet and moving the glass rods on the desk top, that’s where—sorry, when—I’ll jump to. And I’ll tell Fikee and the Master what their future holds, and tell them to forget about trying to control England, but rather to devote their energies to destroying her: work to make the frost continue and intensify rather than cease, pit Catholic against Protestant against Jew, murder the upcoming leaders while they’re still children…

He smiled as he caressed the glass poles into the perfect angle and then reached an open hand out toward the ring of racing fire elementals outside, to draw off from them the tremendous energy that would be needed to fuel and propel his jump through time.

Doyle slammed the clothes trunk shut and, ignoring the cowering gypsies who lay on the floor panting, ran outside. The blazing wheel around the camp shone as white as the sun, impossible to look at, and he was gasping in the depleted air, feeling the sweat steam away as fast as it appeared on him. Tents around the periphery were all ablaze, and even the inner ones near him had begun to smoke. My God, he thought fearfully, why doesn’t he stop them? If the temperature in here goes up a few more degrees we’ll all torch off like matches on a griddle.

He ran to the next tent, the fringe of which burst into a trim of blue fire just as he struck the flap aside and stumbled in. Doctor Romany stood inside, next to a desk, with one hand flung out toward Doyle and the other clutching a piece of paper. Doyle sprang at him——and was swept up on an incandescent wind. For several seconds he just hunched, waiting for a shattering impact, and then he was free falling through a silent and lightless void … until without warning light and sound abruptly crashed back at him. He got a quick, bewildered impression of a large room lit by candles in crude wooden chandeliers, and then he was falling again, through air that felt shockingly cold, and a second later his boots crashed onto a table, one exploding a cooked, stuffed duck and the other splashing in all directions nearly the entire contents of a bowl of soup—his legs skidded away and he sat down jarringly in a platter of baked ham.

Spattered diners along both sides of the table yelled in astonishment and reared back, and Doyle saw Doctor Romany sprawled face down among the plates on the next table over.

“Excuse me… I beg your pardon,” Doyle muttered in confusion, scrambling down off the table.

“Damn me!” exclaimed one pop-eyed old fellow, mopping at his shirt with a napkin. “What is this damnable trick?” Everyone, in the aftermath of surprise, seemed to be angry, and Doyle heard someone say, “Stinking witchery it is. Let’s have them arrested.”

Romany too had attained the floor, and spread his arms so authoritatively that the people who had leaped to their feet near him now stepped back obediently. “There was an explosion,” he gasped, managing to sound stern as well as breathless. “Get out of my way, I must—” Then he noticed Doyle. And despite his total disorientation Doyle was surprised and gratified to see the sorcerer turn pale and then whirl, and punch and curse his way to the nearest door, which he wrenched open. He shot Doyle one last fearful look before disappearing into the night outside.

“After him, Sammy, and bring him back here,” spoke a calm voice from behind Doyle. He turned and met the suspicious gaze of a heavyset man wearing an apron and holding a cleaver with relaxed familiarity. “I heered no explosion,” he said to Doyle as a burly young man hurried out after Romany. “You’ll bide here until we determine at least who’s to pay for the spoilt dinners.”

“No,” said Doyle, forcing his new voice to sound reasonable—which wasn’t easy, for he’d noticed several men wearing wide-cuffed jackboots, knee-length vests and short wigs, and the accents he was hearing were nearly incomprehensible, and he was pretty sure he knew what had somehow happened. “I’m getting out of here, you understand. Now you can try to stop me with that thing, but I’m so scared that I’ll make a real try at taking it away from you, and I imagine we’ll both get hurt, and this looks like a lousy year to be injured in.”

To emphasize his words he reached out and lifted an empty pewter beer mug from a table. Benner, he thought as he hefted it and got a good grip on it, I hope you were capable of this. He squeezed the mug hard, hard enough to whiten his knuckles—the chatter had subsided, and everyone, even the innkeeper, was watching with interest—and then he redoubled the pressure, feeling every little nick and pit on the surface of the cup biting into the insides of his fingers; his arm was aching all the way back to his shoulder, and trembling violently… but the cup didn’t give at all.

After several more moments of useless straining he let off the pressure and gently set the cup back down on the table. “Very solid workmanship,” he muttered.

Several people near him were grinning, and there was open laughter from the farther tables. A grudged grin was even breaking through the innkeeper’s stolid frown. As Doyle turned to leave everyone began laughing, and like cracks starring a stretch of ice it broke the tension, so that he was able to thread his way, red-faced but unhindered, through the merriment to the door.

When he opened the door and stepped outside, the cold instantly burned his face and hands into numbness. His lungs retreated from the first breath he took, and he thought his nose must start bleeding just from the passage of the savagely frigid air. Jesus, he screamed in his mind as the door banged shut behind him, what is this? This can’t be England—the son of a bitch must have jumped us to some damned outpost in Tierra del Fuego or somewhere.

If everyone in the inn hadn’t been laughing at him he’d have turned around and gone back inside; as it was he pressed on, his stinging hands thrust into the pockets of his too-thin coat, and sprinted forward along the narrow, dark street, vaguely hoping to catch up with Romany and terrify the wizard into finding a warm place where he could just sit down for a while.

He didn’t find Romany, but Sammy did, and Doyle came upon Sammy curled up in a narrow alley mouth about a block and a half from the inn; in the ashy moonlight Doyle might not have seen him, but he heard his hopeless sobbing. Frozen tears had attached Sammy’s cheek to the brick wall, and there was a faint crackling when Doyle crouched and gently lifted the young man’s head up.

“Sammy!” said Doyle, loudly so as to break through the boy’s obsessive grief. “Where did he go?” Getting no answer, he shook him. “Which way, man?” The steam of his breath plumed away upward like smoke.

“He…” the young man gasped, “he showed me the… snakes inside me. He told me, ‘Look at yourself,’ and I did, and I seen all them snakes.” Sammy began sobbing again. “I can’t go back yonder, or home either. They’d get inside of everyone.”

“They’re gone,” Doyle told him firmly. “You understand me? They’re gone. They can’t stand the cold, I saw every one of them crawling away to die when I got here. Now where did the bastard go?”

Sammy sniffed. “Be they gone? And dead? Certes?” He glanced fearfully down at himself.

“Yes, damn it. Did you see where he went?”

After patting and prying at his clothes with diminishing dread, the young man began shivering. “I m-must get back,” he said, getting stiffly to his feet. “Devilish cold. Oh, aye, ye wanted to know where he went.”

“Yes.” Doyle was almost tap-dancing on the cobblestones in a fit of shivering. His right ankle was numb, and he was afraid that the trailing chain would freeze solid with his skin.

Sammy sniffed again. “He leapt over the house there into the next street.”

Doyle cocked his head to hear better. “What?”

“He jumped over that house, like a grasshopper.” Sniff. “He had metal coils on the bottoms of his shoes,” Sammy added by way of explanation.

“Ah. Well… thank you.” Obviously Romany hypnotized this boy with both barrels, Doyle reflected. And in only seconds! Better not let the fact that he seems to be afraid of you make you overconfident if you run into him. “Oh, by the way,” he said as the boy began shuffling away, “where are we? I’m lost.”

“Borough High Street. Southwark.” Doyle raised his eyebrows. “London?”

“Well of course London,” the boy said, beginning to jog in place impatiently.

“Uh, and what’s the year? The date?”

“Lord, mister, I don’t know. It’s winter, that’s certain.” He turned and hurried away back toward the inn.

“Who is king?” Doyle called after him.

“Charles!” came the over the shoulder reply.

Charles the whichth, thought Doyle. “Who was king before him?” he shouted after the disappearing figure.

Sammy chose not to hear him, but there was the snap and creak of a window being pushed open above him. “Oliver the Blessed,” called a man’s voice irritably, “and when he ruled, there beed not such street clamors at night.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Doyle hastily, turning his cold-stung eyes upward and trying to spot which one of the dozen small paned windows was slightly open. “I’m suffering from a,” why not, he thought, “from a brain fever, and I’ve lost my memory. I have nowhere to go. Could you let me sleep until dawn in the kitchen, or toss me down a more substantial coat? I—”

He heard the window bang closed, and the latch scritch tight, though he still hadn’t spotted which one it was. Typical Cromwellian, he thought, heaving a sigh that sailed away as a small cloud. So, he thought as he slouched onward, I’m somewhere between, uh, 1660 and—what? When did Charles II die? Around 1690, I think. This is worse still. At least in 1810 I had the chance of finding Darrow’s men and going home with them, or, failing that, to accept what fate seemed to have groomed me for and live out my life in fair comfort as William Ashbless. (Damnation, it’s cold.) You idiot—why didn’t you do that? Just write out Ashbless’ poems from memory, visit Egypt, and let the modest fame and fortune—and pretty wife, even—roll in. But no, instead you had to go bothering sorcerers, and so now history’s deprived of William Ashbless, and you’re stuck in a damn century when nobody brushed their teeth or took baths, and a man is middle-aged at thirty.

He happened to be glancing up when a bizarre figure swooped diagonally across the narrow strip of sky visible between the overhanging rooftops—it was silhouetted for an instant against the nearly full moon—and he leaped backward out of the street, huddling against the stones of the nearest wall, though he knew he must be invisible down among the shadows, for the impossibly high-bounding figure had been Doctor Romany, unmistakable even for a moment and at a distance with his bald head, flapping robe and the bottom sole of each shoe flying two feet behind him on the fully extended springs.

As his upward momentum disappeared and he felt gravity’s first faint cobweb net begin to coax him back down, and as the nearer rooftops began to rise again, blotting out the frosted splendor of the tall houses along the length of London Bridge and the motionless white river that lay under it. Doctor Romany realized that his leaps were not as high now as they had been several minutes ago, and his envelope of agitated air was losing its integrity and letting the intense chill in at him. This was not really an increase in his powers, but just his usual magical strength extending farther in the more archaic, and therefore more conducive to sorcery, environment—and already the effect was beginning to wear off. This is like, he thought as he flexed his legs against an outcropping gable and did a slow somersault down toward the cobblestones, a man finding his customary sword light after practicing for hours with a very heavy one: the sword is actually as heavy as ever, and the delusion of new strength soon disappears. This apparent increase in my powers probably won’t last the night… and the gate at that inn we disrupted will close at about dawn.

Therefore, he thought as he arrested his slow fall by draping an arm around the shoulder of an inn sign shaped like a dancing blackamoor, I shall have to get word to Fikee and the Master as soon as possible, tell them who I am and why I’m here.

One of the fine dinners this will be, thought Ezra Longwell, who always relished the excellent food the Brotherhood provided for its members. He refilled his glass of port from the bottle near the hearth—in this grim winter even champagnes had to sit for half an hour by the fire before they were served, and clarets and fortified wines needed a full hour and a half. As he sipped the still chilly wine he crossed to the little Tudor window, which the kitchen heat had kept unfrosted. He wiped the steam off it with his sleeve and peered out.

West of the bridge, lights twinkled among the clustered booths and tents of the frost fair that stretched across the iced-over river from the Temple Stairs to the Surrey shore. Skaters whirling lanterns raced merrily across the ice like rockets or shooting stars, but Longwell was glad to be indoors and looking forward to a hot meal.

He stepped away from the window and with one last affectionate look at the steaming pots—”Deal gently with those admirable sawfages!” he told the stout kitchen mistress—he walked out through the hall to the dining room, the fine chain on his ankle rattling faintly on the boards of the floor.

Owen Burghard looked up and smiled as Longwell entered the room. “And how is the ‘sixty-eight bearing up, Ezra?”

Longwell reddened as he crossed to his customary chair, aware of the amused glances he was getting from the other members. “Not too badly,” he said gruffly as the chair creaked under his weight, “though too damn cold.”

“The better to temper your sanguine humors, Ezra,” said Burghard, returning his attention to the chart on the table. He tapped the right-hand edge with the stem of his clay pipe and said, in his not quite pedantic manner, “So you see, gentlemen, that these periods of increased activity on the part of Fikee’s band of gypsies—”

He was interrupted by a heavy pounding on the door.

In an instant all of them were on their feet, hands on sword hilts and pistol butts, and each one of them had automatically flicked the chain trailing from his right boot before standing up, as though the free play of the chain was as vital as a weapon.

Burghard crossed to the door, drew the bolt and stepped back. “It’s not locked,” he said.

The door opened, and all eyebrows went up as what would appear to be a giant from Norse mythology lurched into the room. He was shockingly tall, more so even than the King, who stood a full two yards, and his peculiarly cut and unseasonably thin coat did nothing to conceal his broad shoulders and muscular arms. His ice-crusted beard made him look ancient. “If you’ve got a fire,” this frost apparition croaked in a barbarous accent, “and any kind of hot drink…” He swayed, and Longwell feared that the books would be shaken from their shelves if this monster were to topple over.

Then Burghard had gasped, pointing at the intruder’s right boot—from which an ice-clogged length of chain trailed across the floor—and rushed to support him. “Beasley!” he snapped. “Help me with him. Ezra, coffee and brandy, haste!” Burghard and Beasley helped the faltering, half-frozen man across the floor to the bench in front of the dining room fire.

When Longwell brought a big mug of fortified coffee, the giant just inhaled the pungent steam for a while before taking a sip. “Ah,” he breathed at last, putting the coffee down beside him and spreading his hands before the blaze. “I thought I was going to die out there. Are your winters always this bad?”

Burghard frowned and glanced at the others. “Who are you, sir, and how did you come here?”

“I heard you used to—that you meet in a house on the south end of the bridge. At the first place I knocked they wouldn’t let me in, but they gave me directions to get here. As to who I am, you can call me—well hell, I can’t think of a name that would do. But I came here,” and a smile split the haggard face, “because I knew I would. I think you’re the hounds I need to help me catch my fox. There’s a sorcerer called Doctor Romany—”

“Do you mean Doctor Romanelli?” asked Burghard. “We know of him.”

“You do? This far upstream? Good God. Well, Romanelli has a twin, called Romany, who has jumped—I think I may say by sorcerous means?—to your London. He must be caught and induced to return to… where he belongs. And with any luck he can be made to take me back with him.”

“A twin? A ka I’ll wager you mean,” said Longwell, longing up a coal from the grate and setting it carefully into the newly packed bowl of his pipe. “Would you like a pipe?”

“Lord, yes,” said Doyle, accepting from him a fragile white clay pipe and a bag of tobacco. “What do you mean, a ka?”

Burghard squinted at Doyle. “You’re a damn puzzling mix of knowledge and ignorance, sir, and sometime I would relish hearing your own story. For example, you are wearing a connection chain but don’t seem to know much about us, and you know of Doctor Romanelli but don’t know what a ka is or how it happens that this winter is so savage.” He smiled, though a calculating glint remained in his deceptively mild-looking eyes. He ran his fingers through his short-cropped, thinning hair. “In any case, a ka is a duplicate of a human, grown, in a vat full of a special solution, from as little as a few drops of the original person’s blood. If the procedure be done rightly, the duplicate will not only resemble the original in every particular, but will have, too, all the knowledge that the original had.”

Doyle had stuffed his pipe with the dry tobacco and now lit it the same way Longwell had. “Yes, I suppose Romany might be such a thing,” he said, puffing smoke and letting the fire melt the ice out of his beard. His eyes widened. “Ah, and I believe I know another man who is probably a… ka, also. Poor devil. I’m sure he doesn’t know.”

“Do you know of Amenophis Fikee?” asked Burghard.

Doyle looked around at the company, wondering how much he dared disclose. “He is, will be or has been the chief of a band of gypsies.”

“Aye, he is. Why all the was’s and shall-be’s?”

“Never mind. Anyway, gentlemen, this ka of Doctor Romanelli is here in London tonight, and he’s armed with knowledge no one here should have, and he needs to be found and driven back to where he belongs.”

“And you want to go back with him,” said Burghard.

“Right.”

“Why employ such a perilous, albeit quick, means of travel?” asked Burghard. “By ship and horse or donkey you could be anywhere in six months.”

Doyle sighed. “I gather that you function as a sort of… magical police force,” he began.

Burghard smiled and winced at the same time. “Not precisely, sir. What we’re paid by certain wealthy and savvy lords to do is prevent sorcerous treason. We employ not magic but the negation of magic.”

“I see.” Doyle laid down his pipe on the hearth. “If I tell you the story,” he said carefully, “and you agree that this Romany creature is a—let’s say direly powerful—menace to London and England and the world, will you help me catch him and then not hinder my return—if it’s even possible—to where I belong?”

“You have my word,” said Burghard quietly.

Doyle stared at the man for several seconds while the fire popped and crackled in the silence. “Very well,” he rumbled at last. “I’ll make it quick, for we must act soon, and I believe I know where he’ll be for the next hour or so. He and I jumped here by some magical process or other, but not from another place, such as Turkey. We jumped from… another time. The last morning I saw was that of September the twenty-sixth, in the year 1810.”

Longwell burst into a gale of laughter which ceased when Burghard raised his hand.

“Go on,” he said.

“Well, it seems that something has—” He paused, for he’d noticed a leather-bound book on the table, and though now it was new, and the 1684 stamped in gold on the spine gleamed brightly, he recognized it and stood up and crossed to it. A pen lay beside an inkwell ready to hand, and, grinning, he dipped the pen in the ink, flipped to the last page and scrawled across it, “IHAY, ENDANBRAY. ANCAY OUYAY IGITDAY?”

“What did you write?” asked Burghard.

Doyle dismissed the question with an impatient wave. “Gentlemen, something has broken holes in the structure of time… “

Only fifteen minutes later a band of a dozen men, bundled up against the extreme cold, filed out of the old building’s street door and hurried away south down the narrow bridge street toward the Surrey shore. There was room between the ancient houses to walk two abreast, but they moved in single file. Doyle was the second man in line, right behind the cloaked figure of Burghard, whose stride Doyle was able to match easily, even with the unaccustomed angular bulk of a sheathed sword bumping his right thigh. The thin streak of yellow light thrown by Burghard’s dark lantern was the only illumination, for the darkness was absolute in the dark defile of the street, though several storeys overhead the moonlight frosted the ragged roofs and the web of stout crossbeams meant to keep the unsteady old buildings from falling against each other. The bridge was silent except for the occasional rattle of an ankle chain against a cobblestone, and from away to his right Doyle could faintly hear music and shouted laughter.

“Here,” whispered Burghard, stepping into an alley and turning his light on a wooden framework that Doyle realized was a stairway leading down. “No sense announcing our coming by marching through the south gate.”

Doyle followed him down the dark stair’s, and after a long winding descent through a well cut into the stonework of the bridge they emerged into open air again below the underside of the vast span, and Doyle noticed for the first time that the river, visible beyond the lumber of the stairs and between the arches of the bridge, was a white, unmoving expanse of moon-lit ice.

A party could be seen moving across the ice toward the north shore, and after glancing at them once casually Doyle found his gaze drawn back to the distant figures. What was it about them that had caught his eye? The awkward, hunchback look of several of them? The prancing, bounding gait of the one in front?

Doyle closed his big, gloved hand on Burghard’s shoulder. “Your telescope,” he growled quietly as Longwell collided with him from behind, not jarring him at all.

“Certes.” Burghard fumbled under his coat and passed a collapsible telescope up to Doyle.

Doyle click-click-clicked the thing out to its full extent and trained it on the distant group. He was unable to focus, but he could see clearly enough to be sure the lightfooted leader was Doctor Romany; the other five—no, six—figures seemed to be misshapen men dressed in furs.

“That’s our man,” Doyle said quietly, handing the telescope back to Burghard.

“Ah. And so long as he be on the ice we daren’t confront him.”

“Why is that?” Doyle asked.

“The connection, man, the chains are no good on water,” hissed Burghard impatiently.

“Aye,” muttered Longwell from the darkness behind and above Doyle, “were we to confront him upon the ice, he’d set all the devils of hell on us in an instant, and our souls’d not be moored against the onslaught.”

A gust of Arctic wind battered the old stairway, making it sway like the bridge of a beleaguered ship.

“Still, we can follow ‘em to the north shore, can’t we,” mused Burghard, “and call ‘em halt yonder. Aye, come along.”

They resumed their downward course, and after a few more minutes of cramped shuffling arrived at a split, buckled and snow-dusted dock, and stepped off it onto the ice.

“They’re bearing more west now, after a fair northward stint,” said Burghard quietly, his eyes on the seven moving figures way out on the ice field. “We’ll come out from under the bridge on the west side and then curve north, and meet them ashore at the culmination of the circumbendibus.”

When they walked out through one of the high arches onto the ice, Doyle saw bobbing lights ahead, and heard again, louder, the laughter and music. There were tents and booths out on the river, and big swings with torches attached to the sides, and a large boat on axles and wheels tacking slowly back and forth across the face of the ice, with garish faces painted on its sail and wheels, and ribbons and banners streaming from the rigging. The silent procession of the Antaeus Brotherhood skirted the festivities on the east side, plodding north. When they were still a hundred yards from shore Doctor Romany’s party emerged from the blackness under the northernmost arch of the bridge and made for a set of steps below Thames Street. The tall, spry figure that was Doctor Romany turned around as they started up the stairs, and even as he’d begun to turn Burghard twisted himself to the side and turned a nimble cartwheel, finishing it up with a double-fisted push against Doyle’s chest; Doyle’s feet skated out from under him and he sat down heavily on the ice as Burghard laughed uproariously. Longwell began to do a grotesquely dainty ballet twirling, and for an instant Doyle was certain that Romany had fired a lunacy-inducing spell at them, and that at any moment he himself would begin barking like a dog or eating his hat.

Romany turned back toward the north and he and his surprisingly agile retinue bounded up the stairs. Then a ragged cloud sailed across the face of the moon, dimming the scene like a scrim. Burghard and Longwell, both sober-faced now, helped Doyle to his feet. “My apologies,” said Burghard. “‘Twas essential they think us but drunken roisterers. Quick now, let’s get ‘em.”

The dozen men on the ice began running toward shore—Doyle quickly got the hang of the half-sliding step necessary to maintain balance—and in a couple of minutes they were at the base of the stairs, climbing over a sunken boat’s mast, which projected at an angle from the solid ice.

They followed a narrow lane up to Thames Street, then paused in that wider boulevard, looking left and right for their vanished quarry.

“There,” said Burghard tensely, pointing at a snowy stretch in the middle of the street. “They’ve gone straight across into that alley.”

The twelve men followed, though Doyle couldn’t see how Burghard had deduced Romany’s course; all he saw when he passed the patch of snow were the tracks of a couple of very large dogs.

They ran into the alley, and Doyle’s body reacted to a faint, fast scratching sound before his mind had even properly heard it—his left hand whirled his sword out of the sheath and snapped it into line just as one of the things leaped at him and impaled itself on the point. He was jolted back by the solid impact and he heard a deep-throated growling and the clatter of teeth against steel in the instant before his left foot kicked the dying monster off his blade.

“Ware monsters!” he heard Burghard yell in front of him, and then the lantern clanged to the iced cobblestones and its sliding panel fell open, splashing the narrow alley with yellow light.

The scene Doyle found himself confronted with was like some lunatic painting Goya never quite worked himself up to: Burghard was rolling on the ground in a savage wrestling match with some inhumanly muscular thing that seemed to be both man and wolf, and several more of the creatures crouched ready beyond the desperately struggling pair; their shoulders were hunched, as though walking on their hind legs was a novelty, and their snouts extended out dog-like from their receding foreheads, and their wide mouths bristled with teeth that looked to Doyle like ivory cutlass blades … But intelligence glittered in their tiny eyes, and they stepped back warily as Doyle, without taking his eyes off them, drove his sword through the torso of the hairy creature struggling with Burghard at his feet.

“Sorls, Rowary!” barked one of the things over its shoulder as Burghard kicked his slain assailant aside and stood up, cuffing blood away from his eyes and drawing his sword with his right hand; his blood-stained dagger was already gripped in his left fist. The two contorted, thick-pelted corpses had quit shaking and now sprawled motionless between the two groups.

“Longwell, Tyson,” Burghard said quietly, “around these houses, fast, and stop up the other end of the alley.” There was a clatter and jingling as the two obediently hurried away.

Romany had turned and strode back, and now shouldered his way between two of his wolfish attendants and confronted his attackers. His lean face, weirdly underlit by the lantern, was contorted with rage as he opened his mouth and began to pronounce syllables that warped and shrivelled the very air that carried them—Doyle felt the chain around his ankle vibrate and grow warm—and then he noticed Doyle standing in the forefront with a bared and bloody sword in his hand, obviously immune to his magic and not even bothering to try to prevent it. The chant faltered and stopped, though Romany’s mouth stayed open in a dismayed gape.

Doyle crouched to pick up the lantern, then straightened, grinned at the wizard and pointed his sword at him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us, Doctor Romany,” he said.

The magician made a prodigious leap backward over the heads of the wolf men. He bounded away down the alley, and his creatures loped after him, cautiously followed by Doyle and Burghard and the others.

The loud bang of a pistol shot sounded from some point ahead of them, and an instant later a shrill howl echoed between the close stone walls, and as it died away into choked panting Doyle heard Longwell shout, “Halt, ye monsters—there be primed pistols enough here to send all of ye home.”

Doyle, running forward ahead of Burghard, raised the lantern just in time to glimpse a robed figure flying straight upward. “He’s jumped for the roof, get him quick!” he roared, and two more gunshots flared and banged ahead of him, the muzzle flashes angled upward, and then he was nearly deafened as Burghard’s pistol went off beside his ear.

“Them things is going up the walls like spiders!” yelled Longwell. “Shoot ‘em off!”

A window squeaked open somewhere overhead, and what could only be a chamber pot burst against the opposite wall, showering Doyle. “Begone from here, ye thieves and murderers!” shrieked a woman’s voice.

Shingles and bits of stone blown loose by the gunshots clattered back down onto the alley floor. “Don’t shoot!” called Burghard, his voice harsh with disappointment, “You’ll hit that damned woman.”

“They’re gone, chief,” said Longwell, hurrying up to where Doyle and Burghard and the others stood. “Fled over the roof fast as rats.”

“Back to Thames Street,” rasped Burghard. “We’ve lost Romany—he could go in any direction across the roofs.”

“Aye, let us go back to our dinner,” suggested Longwell fervently as they sheathed their swords, thrust away their pistols and picked their way back over the two hirsute corpses to the moonlit pavement of Thames Street.

“I know where he’s going,” said Doyle quietly. “He’s heading back to the place where I originally said he’d be—the place where his magic will work best—the gap field, that inn in Borough High Street.”

“I’m not delighted with the idea of crossing the ice, now that he knows we oppose him,” spoke up a gangly, curly-haired member. “If he was to turn on us out there… “

“It wouldn’t necessarily doom us,” said Burghard, leading the way forward. “Don’t let yourself rely so heavily on your armor. Right now we’ll reconnoiter and make no incautious moves.”

They hurried back down the cross lane to the stairs below Thames Street, and leaning out over the railing at the top step they stared out across the ice at the torches and tents of the frost fair.

“Too many people about to be knowing if any is them,” grumbled Longwell.

“Perhaps,” muttered Burghard, who had pulled out his telescope and was inching it by slow degrees across the scene. “I see them,” he whispered finally. “They’re just making a straight line across, not even bothering to avoid people—ho, you should see some of these people recoil!” He turned to the towering figure of Doyle. “How much more powerful will he be when he gets to that inn?”

“I don’t know the precise amps or anything,” Doyle said; “let’s just say vastly. He must have had something pretty urgent in mind to have left it before.”

“I’m afraid we’ll have to follow right on his heels then,” said Burghard reluctantly, starting down the stairs. “Come along smartly—we’ve got some catching up to do.”

Oriental clog shoes knocked on frost-split cobblestones as another company of furtive men rounded the corner from Gracechurch into Thames Street. The peculiarly shod leader scanned the empty street for a moment and then resumed his determined stride.

“Wait one moment, alchemist,” said one of his company. “I’ll go no farther without an explanation. That was gunfire we heard, was it not?”

“Aye,” said the leader impatiently. “But ‘twasn’t aimed at thee.”

“But what was it aimed at? I think that was no man that screamed.” The breeze blew the man’s long brown curls, unconfined by a wig, forward across his somewhat pudgy and petulant face. He pushed his hat down more firmly on his head. “I’m in command here, though without official sanction, as much as was my father in France. I say all we need is what you carry in yonder box—we need no advice from another damned sorcerer.”

Amenophis Fikee walked back to where the man stood and, able to look down at him by virtue of his stilted shoes, hissed, “Listen to me, you posturing clown. If your damned backside is ever to rest on the throne it will be because of my efforts, and in spite of yours. Or do you imagine that the idiot assassination attempt you and Russell and Sidney set up last year was intelligent? Hah! Fools, trying to reach through a pane of glass for a sweet! You need me, and magic, and a damn large spoonful of luck even to steer clear of the headsman’s block, far less become king! And the man who contacted me tonight, greeted me through the candle with the ancient passwords, has more raw power than I’ve seen in a sorcerer for—well, a long time. You were there, man—I didn’t even have to light the candle to receive him—it just burst into flame! Now he’s run afoul of something, very possibly James’ precious Antaeus Brotherhood, and he’s had to fall back to the spot on the Surrey side where there’s one of those inexplicable bubbles of indulgence I mentioned to you, in which sorcery is freer. Therefore we will meet him there. Or would you rather return to Holland to pursue the crown on your own, without my help?”

The Duke of Monmouth still looked sulky, so Fikee waved the little black box at him. “And without my indetectibly forged marriage certificate?”

Monmouth scowled, but shrugged. “Very well, wizard. But let’s get moving, before your damned frost freezes us solid.” The band moved forward again, toward the bridge.

The boat had been sailing close-hauled, its half-drunk sailors waving their flaring torches more or less in time to their singing, but now the man at the tiller had cut too close into the wind and the sail luffed and fluttered empty; the boat lost its speed, the grotesque faces painted on the great wooden wheels becoming distinguishable as the disks rolled more and more slowly on the wooden axles penetrating the framework that supported the craft, and finally the boat lurched to a stop on the ice, and after a moment began to roll indecisively backward as the sail billowed in reverse.

Burghard, who had been leading Doyle and the ten Antaeus Brotherhood members in a long, curving sprint across the ice behind the screen the wheeled boat provided, caught up with it now, leaped for the rail, caught it, and swung over the gun-wale and tumbled into the boat. The drunken mariners, already irate at having lost the wind, turned angrily on this unimposingly slim boarder, but lurched back in confusion when the burly figure of Doyle came vaulting lightly over the rail, all flying mane and beard and cape.

“We’re taking command of this vessel,” he cried in a voice tight with restrained laughter, for he realized that he’d read about this adventure only a few hours ago. “Burghard, how do you get this thing running again?”

“Stowell,” the leader called over the rail, “get the back wheels pushed all the way over and then all of you get in. Everybody’s used to seeing this thing tacking around the river—our man won’t notice if it follows him.”

“It be my boat, though, mate,” objected a tubby man in the stern, who scrambled to his feet as the tiller moved slowly over.

Burghard handed him some coins. “Here. We’ll not mistreat her, and we’ll leave her on the south shore. Oh, and—” he counted out some more coins, “—this is yours too if we can have your masks and torches.”

The owner weighed the coins against the obvious determination of the boarders, then shrugged. “Abandon ship, lads,” he called to his companions. “And leave the masks and lights—we’ve got enough here for a whole butt of sack.”

The evicted sailors climbed over the gunwales and dropped to the ice cheerfully, and as the last of Burghard’s men swung aboard, the sail filled again and the boat began to rock forward.

Burghard, wearing some kind of blue and red toucan mask, worked the tiller and sheet carefully in order to follow but not overtake Romany, and they had got nearly all the way across, and were within thirty yards of the Jeter Lane stairs, when the bounding Romany glanced back for the third time, did a double take, and then skidded to a halt, aware at last that he was being followed. “He’s seen us!” Doyle yelled, but Burghard had already wrenched the tiller all the way over to the left, and the boat heeled, tilting dangerously to port as the two wooden wheels on that side kicked up sprays of shaved ice, then righted itself with a slam and cut sharply to starboard, no longer heading for the stairs but aiming straight at a long section of dock. Doyle stood up and drew his sword, and then instantly pitched it away, for it was not a sword at all, but a long silver snake looping back to bite him. A moment later his dagger began to squirm strongly out of its sheath, and it took both hands to hold it in. His clothes were undulating in an insane peristalsis, his mask was flapping wildly on his face, and the very hull under his feet was heaving up and down like the ribs of a big, panting animal. Realizing through his panic that he was in the midst of some awful sorcerous focus, he used the hull’s next heave as a springboard and catapulted right over the side of the rushing, wriggling boat; he landed on his outstretched hands and curled into a tumble. He rolled several yards and then slid to a stop a second or two after the wheeled boat plowed into the dock, loudly shattering the hull and the mast and pitching members of the Antaeus Brotherhood in all directions like bowling pins,

Doyle sat up, wrenched off his palpitating cat mask and flung it as far as he could, and then he noticed his dagger, which had fallen out of its sheath, crawling toward him like a big inchworm; he kicked it away—and instantly felt an almost crippling disorientation engulf him, for though it bounced away as limber as a length of rubber hose, it clinked each time it hit the ice.

Burghard was up on his feet again only a moment after he hit the ice, and though his face was a grimace of pain he managed to croak, “Up onto the land!” as he forced himself to limp forward. Flames had begun to lick up brightly here and there from the shattered hull. One of the boat’s wheels, wrenched loose from its axle, was rolling slowly around on the ice, its painted mouth opening and closing spasmodically and its painted eyes darting about with malign will; and as the flames found and streaked ravenously up the margins of the sail, the face painted on it rolled its eyes and crumpled its canvas furiously as it mouthed unreadable words.

Stowell, his face red as he struggled to stop his scarf from strangling him, bumped into Doyle on his way to the dock, and Doyle shook himself, took a deep breath and followed him. Something had begun to go wrong with the air—it tasted bad, and burned in Doyle’s eyes and nose and lungs, and he could feel the strength draining out of him.

A litter of wriggling and dancing pieces of broken wood had congregated in front of the nearest dock ladder, lashing out at the knees and rolling under the boots of anyone who tried to get near it—one man had fallen and almost been pounded to death before Burghard dragged him clear—and so Doyle simply picked the lurching Stowell up by his belt and collar and, after two swings to get momentum, used very bit of his remaining strength to fling the man powerfully upward; then Doyle fell to his knees and with dimming sight watched the man hurtle up, his arms and legs waving, and plop lightly onto the surface of the dock.

The air was astringent now with fumes like sulphur and chlorine, and Doyle knew that even if the jumping boards moved aside he wouldn’t have the strength to crawl over to the ladder and climb it. He pitched over on his side and rolled onto his back, and with no interest he watched Stowell lean over the edge of the dock, his face lit by the mounting flames, and reach downward with his sword. Doyle was faintly jealous that Stowell’s sword was straight and solid, while his own had turned into a leaping eel. Then he stopped thinking about that and every other thing.

Burghard, still somehow on his feet, staggered into the middle of the crowd of sticks, and as they cracked viciously at his knees and cartwheeled up to slam into his crotch and belly, and as he started to fall he snatched desperately upward and grabbed the razor-edged foible of the downward extended sword.

Instantly the sticks backed away from him, making a frustrated racket of knocking.

Burghard got his feet back under himself to take the weight off his mangled hand, and he inhaled shudderingly. “To me, Antei.’” he fairly screamed. Longwell crawled forward, one arm covering his head against the savage pounding of the wood pieces, and reached out and grabbed the chain that trailed from Burghard’s boot.

The sticks and boards spun away from him.

One by one three other men dragged themselves over to join the chain. The thwarted pieces of lumber—reinforced every moment by new boards, some of them afire, springing away from the burning hulk—skated and whirled toward the still unconnected Doyle. The smaller pieces moved faster, and as they found him and began to rap at his face, Burghard yelled,

“Reach him, one of you, quick!”

The man on the end of the chain strained, but couldn’t reach Doyle. The man glanced back and saw that the big, skull smasher sized boards were only a few yards away and closing in fast, and so with a hoarse curse he undid the leather restraining loop, drew his dagger, reached out and used the tip to pull Doyle’s foot close enough so that he could stab it right through and moor the point firmly in the ice underneath.

Heat spread from Doyle’s foot, relaxing his nearly petrified muscles, and finally reached his head, driving out of it the visions of huge, multiplying crystals that had been holding what minimal attention he was still capable of. He sat up on the ice, and as alertness washed hotly through him he became aware of the dagger transfixing his foot and the litter of lumber scuttling away from him to batter a couple of motionless human forms sprawled too far out to have been reached by the Antaeus chain.

“You!” Burghard was yelling. “With the beard! Don’t pull your foot free until you’ve got hold of Friedeman’s hand!”

Doyle nodded and inched his way back toward the man with the dagger. “Don’t worry,” he called to Burghard. “I’m not going to break the connection.” He reached Friedeman’s free hand and clasped it, and then the man levered the dagger blade loose and drew it out of Doyle’s foot. He sheathed it and reached behind himself to join hands with the man who had been gripping his boot chain. When Burghard said, “Up,” the five men rose shakily.

Doyle’s foot felt like the knife blade was still in it, and when the string of men began shuffling and limping carefully along the foot of the dock toward the ladder he looked back and saw that he was leaving steaming dark stains on the ice and that where his foot had originally been nailed down there was a large irregular dark blot, already iced over.

“Hang onto the man above you, and just use your feet on the ladder,” called Burghard, who now stood on the dock, his face visibly pale even in the orange firelight. “We’ll pull you up.”

In a couple of minutes Doyle and five members of the Antaeus Brotherhood sat or stood swaying unsteadily on the dock, catching their breath, basking in the heat from the burning boat and letting the healing strength spread upward through their boot chains like restoring slugs of brandy.

“He’s… moved on after swatting us,” Burghard panted as he knotted a handkerchief around his cut hand. “We’re lucky that he … underestimated the amount of time he had, and just shot the quick spell of Malign Animation at us. If he’d taken the time to chant the Deadly Air spell right away… “

A man was dashing across the ice toward them. “Ye sons of bitches!” screamed the portly owner of the destroyed boat. He gestured expressively at his unfortunate craft. “I’ll have ye all dragged before the magistrates!”

Burghard fumbled awkwardly in a pocket with his good but wrong side hand, yanked out a purse and tossed it. “Our apologies,” he shouted as the man caught it. “There is enough there for a new boat and to pay for your time while you find one.”

He turned to Doyle and the others. “We lost six men here,” he said quietly. “And some of you have sustained injuries that need immediate attention—your foot, sir, is a case in point—and our second greatest armor—ready cash—is gone. It would not be cowardly at this point to fall back to our rooms and… patch ourselves up, get some food and sleep, and pursue this matter on the morrow.”

Doyle, who had taken off his boot and knotted a section of his scarf around his foot and soaked it in brandy, pulled the boot back on, gritting his teeth against the pain, and then looked up at Burghard. “I’ve got to go on,” he said hoarsely, “if I’m ever to get home. But you’re right. You people have done… far more than I ever had a right to ask. And I’m terribly sorry about your six men.”

He stood up, glad now of the intense cold, for it acted as an anesthetic on his foot.

Longwell shook his head unhappily. “No,” he said. “On the north side of the river I’d have been most willing to forego the chase and return to our dinner. But now that McHugh and Kickham and the others are killed—I couldn’t savor the port, knowing that their slayer was at liberty… and probably boasting of his deed.”

“Aye,” said Stowell, still fingering his scarf mistrustfully. “Time enough for food and drink after we’ve sent this fellow to hell.”

Burghard’s face, haggard as sea-polished driftwood in the orange light, broke into a hard grin. “So be it. And, sir,” he said, turning to Doyle, “neither trouble nor flatter yourself with the notion that these men died in aid of you. This is the work we’re paid for, and the considerable danger is the reason for our considerable pay. And if you hadn’t pitched Stowell to safety, we’d all be lying dead out there. You can walk?”

“I will walk.”

“Very well.” Burghard stepped to the edge of the dock. “Is the payment adequate?” he called to the boat’s owner, who was crouched on the ice watching it burn.

“Oh aye, aye,” the man nodded, waving cheerfully. “Ye be free always to borrow any boat of mine.”

“At least someone is clearing a profit this evening,” muttered Burghard bitterly.

The boat, a seething inferno now, rolled over and by slow degrees fell through the broken and melted ice, and through the clouds of steam the burning cross beams could be seen to fall one at a time, like counting fingers.

The innkeeper’s eyes narrowed with annoyance when Doyle ducked under the lintel and stepped into the room, then widened in surprise when he saw Burghard and the others follow him in. “This fellow is with you, Owen?” the innkeeper asked doubtfully.

“Yes, Boaz,” Burghard snapped, “and the Brotherhood will pay for all damages he may have done. Have you seen a—”

“The man who fell with me onto the tables,” Doyle interrupted. “Where is he?”

“That one? Yes, damn it, he—”

The house trembled, as if a powerful bass organ had begun playing a dirge in notes too deep to hear, and a high, flat singing could be faintly heard, seeming to come from a great distance away. The chain around Doyle’s ankle began vibrating strongly. It itched.

“Where is he?” Burghard shouted.

Abruptly a lot of things happened at once. The candles in the wooden chandeliers flared and spouted like Fourth of July fireworks, bouncing bright purple fireballs off the ceiling and casting heavy clouds of a shockingly malodorous smoke, and with a racket of tearing and snapping the tables sprang to pieces, tossing food, dishes, pitchers and diners in all directions, and as Doyle blinked roundabout in the sudden pandemonium he noticed that a long, twisting white funnel like a tornado had appeared over the head of Boaz the innkeeper. Doyle looked at the sprawled diners and saw a similar funnel twisting and swelling over each head. In sudden fright he looked up, but no ectoplasmic larva writhed above him, nor, he ascertained a moment later, over the heads of any of his companions.

It must be the chains, he thought, protecting us from this unholy Pentecost. Glancing down, he saw that his chain was fizzing brightly with gold sparks, and his companions each seemed to be wearing a whole ignited pack of sparklers on the right boot.

The exploded tables hastily reassembled themselves into vaguely anthropoid shapes, their face surfaces bristling with twitching splinters like iron filings on a magnet, and they began stumbling and lurching through the purple-lit smoke, slamming their wooden arms randomly against people, walls and each other, like blind berserkers.

“Circle!” Burghard yelled, and Doyle found himself pushed between Longwell and Stowell as the members of the Antaeus Brotherhood shifted their positions to form a loop. The others had drawn swords and daggers, and though Doyle couldn’t see how such mundane weapons could damage adversaries like these, he crouched forward to wrench the sword from the scabbard of a diner who’d been felled on his way to the door.

The white funnels now stretched rapidly upward and all slapped against one point on the ceiling. A big lump of the stuff began forming there. The dozen or so people who were connected by their heads to this spidery unpleasantness had, whether sitting, standing or lying down, ceased all motion, but now they all turned imbecilically calm eyes toward the circle of armed men by the front door. And the ungainly wooden men paused, as if listening, and then, blind no longer, all turned to face the Brotherhood and shuffled toward them with a cautious restraint.

One of them paused in front of Burghard and drew its table leg arm back for a smashing blow, but before it swung Burghard lunged in and poked his sword against the thing’s shoulder joint, and the block of wood that was its arm ceased to adhere to the table top that was its chest, and fell off and banged on the floor.

Without conscious thought Doyle leaped forward in a hop-lunge that put his point squarely in the belly of another—and brought tears to his eyes from the pain in his foot—and the thing fell to the ground like an armful of firewood.

In the ensuing melee this proved to be the way to deal with the things, and though Stowell was knocked unconscious by a blow from one of them and Doyle’s right arm was nearly paralyzed by a blow on the point of the shoulder, in a couple of minutes of leaping, ducking and lunging they’d reduced all of the things except one to inert lumber—the exception was the last one which, when it had found itself alone facing four swords, had in a remarkably human display of dismayed panic, run out the open front door.

Though the purple fireballs had started a small fire or two among the tossed and scattered kindling, the chandeliers had subsided to their normal radiance and the acrid smoke had largely dissipated. “He’s on the premises somewhere,” Burghard gasped. “Let’s try the kitchen—and stay together.” He started forward.

“Wait,” came a chorus of flat voices, followed by a shuffling and knocking as Boaz and a dozen of his luckless patrons were drawn erect by the ectoplasmic umbilicus attached to their heads. Several of them drew swords and daggers, and the rest—including a couple of matronly ladies—picked up heavy, club-length pieces of lumber.

Doyle looked up at the intersection of all the white funnels, and saw that the lump that had grown on the ceiling there was now formed into a huge eyeless face, and the puppet-string tentacles all trailed out of its gaping, flap-lipped mouth.

“Doyle,” said all of the people in weird unison, “gather the remnants of your men and try to find a retreat so obscure that my wrath can’t follow.”

“Right, Burghard,” said Doyle, trying hard to keep hysteria from shrilling his voice, “a wizard in a hurry would head for the kitchen—where there’d be fire and boiling water and whatnot all just waiting for him.”

Doyle, Burghard, Longwell and the other remaining member, a short, stocky fellow, made a dash for the kitchen, but were instantly blocked by the innkeeper and diners.

Doyle ducked under a fat lady’s swing and managed to rap the board out of her hands with his sword pommel a moment before parrying a sword point that was rushing at his chest. His body automatically lunged forward in a riposte, and only at the last possible instant did he override the reflex and turn his sword to drive the knuckle guard, rather than the lethal point, into the belly of his puppet attacker.

The old lady had danced around behind him, and with a crabapple fist gave Doyle a hard punch in the kidney. He roared with pain and spun, kicking her legs out from under her, and as she tumbled he whirled his blade in a horizontal arc that snicked right through the white snake attached to her head—both ends shrivelled away, and the long end snapped up elastically and slapped the ceiling before being slurped like disgusting spaghetti into the now-grinning mouth. The fallen lady began snoring.

Though attacking with concentrated skill and attention, the erstwhile diners were muttering like sleep-walkers; one man who backed Doyle into a corner with a fast and deceptive series of sword thrusts—the instinctive parrying of which made Doyle profoundly thankful that Steerforth Benner had studied fencing—was saying in the most reasonable conversational tone, “… Might simply have asked before throwing it away, that’s all I’m claiming, and it seems to me if either of us has a right to be peeved… “

Peeved, he says, thought Doyle desperately as he finally got a bind on the elusive blade and twisted it out of the bemused man’s grip.

“… Why it’s me, my dear,” the man went on calmly, aiming a jackhammer kick which Doyle leaped over, “for it was my most treasured doublet… “

Two more jabbering, placid-faced men were rushing at him with bared swords, and not caring to have an enemy at his rear, Doyle lashed out backhanded at the trolley wire of the man who felt he had a right to be peeved; the blow had no force to it, and rebounded from the white cord, but the man screeched, leaped like a wounded rabbit and then dropped to the floor. Doyle whipped his sword back into line just as the two attackers made their final bounds, swords up and points aimed at Doyle’s chest.

Doyle flung himself to the right, parrying that man’s blade in a low quinte, and let himself keep falling forward into a sort of three-point crouch, catching himself with the fingertips of his right hand spread on the floor as he let his sword rebound from the parry back up into line, the point over his head; and he’d no sooner got the point up than the other man ran onto it, his own sword transfixing the empty air where Doyle’s torso had been a second ago.

The first man had recovered and stepped back, ready to drive his point into Doyle’s face—”If the damnable cat would just decide whether she wants to be inside,” he was saying quietly—and Doyle pulled hard sideways on his sword, toppling the dying man into the way of the thrust. “… or outside,” the first man continued as his sword chugged deep into his companion’s back.

God damn you, Romany, thought Doyle as his cold-bellied apprehension at last ignited into rage, you made me kill one of them. He dragged his sword free and clanked the flat of it against the temple of the man who wished the cat would make up her mind, and as he fell over Doyle snatched up an extinguished but unbroken oil lamp from the floor and pitched it like a football across the flame-lit dining room toward the kitchen door; it knocked the door open as it shattered, and Doyle scrambled over to the nearest fire—which was rushing up a wall and splashing at the ceiling—grabbed a long stick that was burning at one end, and hurled it like a flame-tipped javelin into the kitchen.

He heard the stick clatter on flagstones… and he had just decided the move had failed when there was a deep whoosh and an orange flash from the kitchen and the puppet people screamed in perfect unison, like a dozen radios all tuned to the same signal, then dropped their weapons, looked around with expressions of horror, and all but Boaz the innkeeper bolted for the door.

The ectoplasm tentacles dangled limp and unconnected, and a moment later the huge white face tore loose from the ceiling with a loud sucking sound and fell through the smoky air to splat horribly on the floor. Doyle leaped over it and sprinted toward the burning kitchen, closely followed by Burghard and a limping and swearing Longwell. Boaz ran to a shelf of glasses, swept them clanging and shattering to the floor, pulled a cloth-wrapped bundle from the back of the shelf and, untying it with trembling fingers, hurried after them.

Doyle bounded through the kitchen doorway whirling his sword in a wild figure eight in front of him—but Doctor Romany was gone. Doyle skidded to a halt on the dirt floor and looked around at first with caution, then with amazement—for though the kitchen was splashed with smokily blazing oil, he could see that the shelves, benches, tables and even the stone fireplace were all warped, pulled toward the center of the room as though they were forms painted on a taut sheet of rubber that had been pushed far in at the middle.

Burghard piled into Doyle from behind, and Longwell and the raging innkeeper, who was juggling the bell-muzzled flintlock pistol he had unwrapped, bumped into Burghard. Boaz dropped the gun, and it fell muzzle down in a muddy corner.

“Guerlay is dead,” Burghard panted. “I want this Doctor Romany.”

The innkeeper had retrieved his gun and was waving the mud-fouled muzzle in all directions and demanding to know if the Duke of York would reimburse him for the destruction of his inn.

“Aye, damn it,” snapped Burghard, “he’ll buy you a new one anywhere you please. Give me that before you kill somebody,” he added, snatching the gun away. “Where does that doorway go? “

“A hall,” answered Boaz grudgingly. “Right to the rooms, left to the stables out back.”

“Very well, let’s search—”

Suddenly the fires began to burn more furiously, so that instead of flames there was a static radiance, its glare moving up from yellow-orange to white, and for the second time that night Doyle was gasping in baking, oxygen-depleted air.

“He’s doing this from outside!” Burghard choked. “Run!”

Burghard and Longwell stumbled into the hall. Doyle moved to follow, then remembered the unconscious Stowell, and ran back into the dining room, which was also burning at a ferociously accelerated rate.

Stowell was sitting up, blinking in the white light, and Doyle crossed to him, yanked him upright, and propelled him toward the open front door.

Stowell reeled back, though, when the flaring lintel gave way in a swirl of white sparks and dropped half a ton of tumbling masonry and lumber onto the doorstep.

“No good!” yelled Doyle. “Back to the kitchen!” He grabbed Stowell’s shoulder and dragged the dazed man along. “Look out, it’s an oven in here,” he said as he braced himself before entering the incandescent kitchen. Then they lurched and bumped through, beating out sparks that sprang up on their clothing and Doyle’s beard, and burst at last into the relative coolness of the hallway beyond. “There should be a door here,” croaked Doyle—then he noticed that the leftward end of the hall was a slope of smoldering rubble. “Jesus,” he whispered hopelessly.

“Hist!” Doyle turned toward the sound, and at this point wasn’t very surprised to see the stout innkeeper’s head sitting up on the floor blinking at him. Then he realized that the man was neck-deep in a hole.

“Hither, you fools!” Boaz cried. “Into the cellar! It connects to a sewer in the next street—though why I should be saving bastards of the goddamned Antaeus Brotherhood… “

Doyle snapped out of his stupor and, pushing the half-stunned Stowell along in front of him, hurried over to the trapdoor. Boaz was already down the ladder, and he impatiently guided Stowell’s feet onto the rungs as he descended, followed closely by Doyle, who pulled the trapdoor closed over them. A moment later all three of them stood on a stone floor, peering about at the barrels and boxes dimly visible in the radiance of the two sparkling boot chains.

“French wine I was saving,” said the innkeeper shortly, nodding at a stack of crates. He sighed. “Come this way, past the onions.” As they left the cellar and made their way down a narrow stone corridor, Doyle asked, speaking instinctively in a whisper, “Why did you have this bolt-hole ready?”

“Never you mind why—oh, what the hell. Further on the sewer’s broad enough to row a boat up from the river. Sometimes it’s prudent not to trouble the Customs House about a taxable shipment… and occasionally a patron wants to leave, but not by a visible door.”

Here I go leaving by another invisible door, Doyle thought. When they’d gone about forty paces down the tunnel the boot chains dimmed and went out.

“We’re out of the magic sphere,” Stowell muttered.

“Like enough ‘twas the damned chains set the place ablaze,” Boaz growled. “But here we are—you can see the moonlight through the grating.”

The tunnel floor crowded up against the ceiling below the sewer grating, and Doyle, his knees bent, braced his shoulder against the iron bars. He grinned sideways at Boaz. “Let’s hope I’m better at ripping up sewers than crushing pewter mugs.” Then his face lost all expression as he strained with all his strength to straighten up.

The fact of the matter, thought the shivering Duke of Monmouth as he stepped closer to the conveniently burning inn, is that I don’t truly need these sorcerers—or their damned forged marriage certificate. I’ve told Fikee that I’ve every reason to believe that my mother really was documentably married to King Charles, by the Bishop of Lincoln, at Liege. Why doesn’t he try to find the real marriage certificate?

He pursed his lips—which, to his chagrin, were unattractively chapped—for he knew the answer, and didn’t like it. It was plain that Fikee didn’t believe Monmouth was the rightful successor to the throne; and therefore his efforts couldn’t be interpreted as simple patriotic concern. The sneaking sorcerer must be relying on favors and influence from me when I’m properly crowned, he thought. And I suppose the main favor would be the one he’s been agitating for for years: the abandonment of all British interests in Tangier. I wonder, thought Monmouth, why Fikee is so determined to prevent any European power from gaining a toehold in Africa.

He looked toward the artificially tall Fikee, who was standing a few feet away, holding the black box that contained the forgery. “What are we waiting for, wizard?”

“Shut up, can’t you?” Fikee snapped, not taking his eyes off the burning building. Suddenly he pointed. “Ah! There!”

A burning man had come bounding around the corner of the building, springing an impossible three yards with each step, hotly pursued by two men who also seemed to be partially afire—at least there was a lot of sparking around their boots.

Fikee started forward just as one of the pursuers flung himself forward in a flying tackle that knocked the burning man off his feet and tumbling through the snow.

A gallant rescue, thought Monmouth. But then the fat man scrambled over to the stunned and still partially flaming figure, and Monmouth gasped to see him draw a dagger and drive it down at the man’s chest—but the blade snapped off, and the two men in the snow fell to wrestling savagely.

Another few steps and I’m at them, thought Fikee as he ran awkwardly toward the prone figures. This may prosper us yet, for though the wizard must be in awful agony lying on the abdicated ground, these interfering men certainly can’t kill him with fire or steel—or lead, he added, for he’d just seen the lagging pursuer pull from under his cloak a wide-muzzled pistol.

Burghard knew a gunshot couldn’t kill a wizard—especially not inside a magic sphere—any more than Longwell’s idiotic dagger thrust, but he’d just seen Doctor Romany reach out and actually grasp Longwell’s boot chain—the hand sizzled audibly, and the wizard howled with the pain—and with a wrench pull it right off. There was only an instant in which to distract Doctor Romany from blasting the defenseless Longwell, and Burghard rushed up, shoved the gun’s muzzle in Romany’s face even as the wizard was opening his mouth to speak some devastating spell, and pulled the trigger.

Doctor Romany’s face disintegrated like a kicked sand castle, and he tumbled back onto the blood-sprayed snow.

Both Burghard and Amenophis Fikee froze, staring in astonishment at the sprawled and motionless form, and in that instant the Duke of Monmouth, fearful of being involved in a murder trial when his father the king had forbidden him even to set foot in the country, turned and ran.

Slowly Burghard reached out and knocked the black box out of Fikee’s grasp.

When Doyle had gotten to twenty-eight in the thirty-second count that, he figured, would take him to the end of his endurance, the iron frame that had been biting into his shoulder suddenly burst up from its moorings with a metallic clang and a rattle of broken mortar on the cobblestones of the street above. Doyle flung the grating away and hopped out of the sewer. He reached back down and grabbed the innkeeper’s wrist and hauled him up onto the pavement, then did the same for Stowell.

“Did you hear some noises while I was straining at that?” he asked Stowell. “I thought I did.”

“Aye,” gasped Stowell, rubbing his shoulder, “a scream and a shot.”

“Let’s get back there.”

They sprinted back the way they’d come, over the pavement this time, and after a few steps Doyle could feel his ankle chain heating up again. Wearily he dragged the sword out of his belt.

But when they rounded the corner of the burning building it was a played out scene that met their eyes. Burghard and Longwell were sitting in the middle of the street, watching the fire. Burghard was idly tossing and catching a small black box, but it fell forgotten to the cobbles and he leaped to his feet when he saw the sooty trio coming toward him. “How in God’s name did you get out?” he cried. “Your wizard pulled down all the doorways a second after we got outside.”

“Out through the sewer from the cellar,” croaked Doyle, swaying as the evening’s full measure of exhaustion began to catch up with him. “Where’s Romany?”

“I killed him somehow,” said Burghard. “I think he had some allies waiting for him out front here, but they fled when I shot him. We dragged him across the street out of the magical bubble—”

“Did you search him?” Doyle interrupted anxiously, wondering how much longer the gap field might continue, if indeed it hadn’t closed already.

“All he had about him was this paper—”

Doyle snatched the damp and darkly stained piece of paper from Burghard, gave it a quick glance, then looked up again. “Where’d you drag his body to?”

“Over yonder under that—” Burghard pointed, then his eyes widened in horror. “My God, he’s gone! But I blew his whole face off!”

Doyle slumped. “He must have faked it. I don’t think they can be killed with guns.”

“I didn’t think so either,” said Burghard, “but I saw his face blow to bits when I fired Boaz’s gun at him! Damn it, I’m not some stripling claiming kills I didn’t make! Longwell, you saw—”

“Wait a moment,” said Doyle. “The gun that fell in the mud?”

“Aye, that’s the one. I’m lucky it didn’t burst in my hand, it was so clogged with dirt.”

Doyle nodded. A barrelful of mud, he thought, might indeed have given Romany a terrible injury, while a pistol ball would not. It had to do with their aversion to touching the ground. He opened his mouth to explain it to Burghard, but at that moment all the light went out and Doyle fell away, as it seemed to him, right through the earth and out into starless space on the other side.

After the implosive thump, Burghard stared for a few moments at the empty space where Doyle had stood, and at the pile of empty clothes that had flopped and fluttered onto the snow there. Then he looked around.

Longwell walked over to him, craning his neck left and right. “Did you hear a sort of boom that wasn’t from the fire?” he asked. “And where’d our mysterious guide go?”

“Back where he came from, evidently,” said Burghard. “And I hope it’s warmer there.” He cocked an eyebrow at Longwell. “Did you recognize the man that was out here waiting for Romany?”

“Matter of fact, Owen, it looked like the gypsy chief, Fikee.”

“Hm? Oh, certainly Fikee was here—but I meant the other one.”

“No, I didn’t get a look at him. Why, who was he?”

“Well, he looked like—but he’s supposed to be in Holland.” He gave Longwell a grin that had a lot of weariness but no mirth in it. “We’ll probably never know what, precisely, was going on here tonight.”

He stooped and picked up the black wooden box. Stowell trudged up, his boots crunching in the snow. “I shouldn’t have left you there, Brian,” Burghard told him. “I’m sorry—and glad the bearded man went back for you.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Stowell. “I thought I was beyond rescue myself.” He knuckled his eyes. “Hell of a pace. What have you got in the box?”

Burghard tossed it and caught it. “Magical work, I imagine.”

He wound up and pitched it through one of the heat-burst windows into the seething ruin.

Hobbling down an alley, trying to see with his one remaining eye, Doctor Romany wept with rage and frustration. He couldn’t remember who had hurt him or why, but he knew he was marooned now. And there was a message he needed to give to someone—it was urgent—but the message seemed to have run out of his head along with all the blood that he’d lost before he regained consciousness and scrawled a few basic sustaining cantrips in the snow. If he could have spoken a spell he might have been able to repair himself, but his jaw was shattered and half gone, and the written charms only just managed to keep him alive and conscious.

There was one thing, though, that he knew and was profoundly glad of: the man Doyle was dead. Romany had trapped him inside that inn, and when he’d furtively crawled away from the place where they’d left him for dead, he had looked back and seen the exitless inn burning so thoroughly that he knew nothing inside could still be alive.

His sense of balance was gone, and he was having a rough time walking on his spring-shoes. Well, he thought, I’m already an old ka—after a few decades of deterioration I’ll be so light that gravity will hardly have a grip on me anyway, and I’ll be able to dispense with the damned shoes. And written spells will sustain me until my face heals and I can speak again. With any luck I should be able to live my way back to 1810.

And, he thought, when 1810 rolls around at last, I’ll look up Mr. Brendan Doyle. In fact, in the meantime I think I’ll buy that lot where the burning inn stands, and in 1810 I’ll take Mr. Doyle there and show him his own ancient, charred skull.

A bubbling rattle that might have been a tortured sort of laughter issued from the lower half of his destroyed face.

After a few more steps he lost his balance again, and lurched against a wall and started to slide to the pavement then an arm caught him, bore him back up and supported him as he took another step. He turned his head around to let his good eye have a look at his benefactor, and somehow he wasn’t surprised to see that it was not a person at all, but a vaguely man-shaped, animated collection of wood that had evidently once been a table. Romany gratefully draped an arm around the stout board that was the thing’s shoulder, and without a word, for neither of them was capable of speech, they made their way on down the alley.

CHAPTER 10

Doyle’s bare feet hit a desk after so short a fall that he barely had to flex his knees to stay upright. He was in a tent, and as a man suddenly awakened from a nightmare gradually and with mounting relief recognizes the details of his own bedroom, Doyle remembered where he’d seen this desk and litter of papers, candles and statues—he was in Doctor Romany’s gypsy tent. And, he noted as he hopped down from the desk, he was stark naked; thank God it was hot here. Clearly he’d returned to 1810.

But how can that be? he wondered. I didn’t have a mobile hook.

He crossed to the tent flap and pulled it slightly open just in time to see a couple of giant skeletal figures, as faintly luminous as after-images on the retina, running in slow motion behind the burning tents; they faded to nothing, so quickly that he wasn’t sure he’d even seen them. The only sound, aside from the quiet crackle of the fires, was incongruously merry piano and accordion music from the north end of camp.

He let the flap fall shut, then rummaged around in the litter until he found a belted robe and some high-soled sandals, which he put on, a clean scarf to knot around his still bleeding foot, and a scabbarded sword. Feeling a little better equipped, he left the tent.

Footsteps approached from his left. He drew the sword and turned toward them and found himself facing the old gypsy, Damnable Richard, who gaped at him in surprise and then leaped backward, snatching a dagger out of his sash.

Doyle lowered his point to the dirt. “You’re in no danger from me, Richard,” he said quietly. “I owe you my life… as well as several drinks. How’s your monkey?”

The gypsy’s eyebrows were as high on his forehead as they could be. After several indecisive wobbles his dagger-hand relaxed to his side. “Why… very kushto, thankee, and all the better for your concern,” he said uncertainly. “Uh… where’s Doctor Romany?”

On the cool evening breeze the music from the north slowed and took on a melancholy tone. “He’s gone,” said Doyle. “I don’t think you’ll ever see him again.”

Richard nodded, assimilating this, then put his dagger away, pulled his monkey out of a pocket and whispered the news to it. “Thank you,” he said finally, looking up at Doyle again. “Now I must go and gather my poor scattered people.” He started away, but after a few steps he paused and turned, and by the light of the burning tent Doyle saw his teeth flash in a grin. “I guess you gorgios aren’t always stupid,” he said, then started away again.

The tent Doyle had exited was now burning thoroughly and sending glowing patches of tent fabric whirling up into the clear night sky. Remembering the chamber pot that had shrapnelled over his head, Doyle gingerly felt his hair—but it seemed clean, and it occurred to him that he must have left the befoulment back in 1684 along with the borrowed clothes.

“Ashbless!” someone yelled from away to the right, and it took a moment for Doyle to remember that he was Ashbless. It must be Byron, he thought. Or, he amended, the Byron ka.

“Here, my lord, “he called.

Byron came limping up out of the shadows, glaring around and holding his dagger ready. “Here you are,” he said. He looked more closely at him. “What are you wearing the robe and odd shoes for?”

“It’s… a long story,” said Doyle, sheathing his sword. “Let’s get out of here—I need to find a pair of trousers and a long, strong drink.”

“Oh?” Byron blinked. “But what of the fire giants? Have they gone?”

“Yes. Romany consumed them, used them up to fuel a bolt-hole spell of his.”

“Spells,” Byron said disgustedly, then spat. “Where is he now, then?”

“Gone,” said Doyle. “Dead by now, almost certainly.”

“Damn. I had hoped to kill him myself.” He eyed Doyle suspiciously. “You seem to know an awful lot about it. And how did you manage to lose your trousers in the few minutes since I last saw you?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Doyle repeated, beginning to shiver.

They walked away, past the burning tent by the tree from which Doyle had broken a limb—only, he realized dazedly, a few minutes ago by local time—and then they set off across the grass beyond, and the streaks of their shadows in front of them were gradually absorbed by the darkness as they left the fire farther and farther behind.

The creature in the dark grass found it easier to crawl than walk through the field, for it could grab weed stalks and pull itself along and only use its feet for kicking off from the ground every now and then to keep itself from settling to the earth; if anyone had been watching, the thing would have looked like some agile crustacean skimming across the sea floor.

Well, thought the thing that had once been indistinguishable from a man, there’s the last score settled, the long circle closed, and the man who ruined me is off on his way to be killed by me. I saw the yags extinguished, so I know he’s gone. The thing chuckled like dry leaves rattling in the wind. Half an hour ago, it thought, I was afraid he might somehow evade his death, and now he’s been dead a hundred and twenty-six years.

It heard voices and the swishing of feet through the grass behind it and to its right, so it ceased all motion, turning over and over as it lost speed until it rocked to a halt against a bush, its arms and legs pointed upward.

“But if my friends will let us stay with them,” a man was saying impatiently, “and I tell you again they’d be glad to, then why not?”

Why I believe it’s that young lord, thought the thing in the grass. We were going to have him do something for us. That’s right, and he was a ka—the original was in Greece. What was his name? And he was to have killed the king. Plots and schemes, half-wit dreams.

“Well,” answered someone else dubiously, “they think you’re out of the country. How would you explain your presence here?”

There was something about the second voice that profoundly upset the crawler, and it sat up so quickly that it left the ground and hovered for a few moments like a nearly worn out helium balloon, and when it touched down again it kicked strongly and flew twenty feet into the air so as to be able to see.

Two men were walking across the field away from the burning tents, and the slowly descending creature stared in horror at the taller of them. Yes, very tall, it thought, and—Isis!—a full mane and beard that seem to be blond! But by what damnable aid did he get out of that inn? And back to now? Who is this man Doyle?

It began flailing and swimming to get back to the ground quicker, for it had to follow him. If there was any spark of purpose left in the deteriorated ka that had once been Doctor Romany, it was to see, finally, Doyle dead.

The induced fever was breaking, and Doctor Romanelli stared angrily at his placidly sleeping patient. Damn you, Romany, he thought, let me know how it proceeds. This fever story won’t hold up much longer—I’m going to have to either kill him or let him recover.

The doctor laid his palm on Lord Byron’s forehead, and swore softly, for it felt cool. The sleeper shifted, and Romanelli tiptoed hastily out of the room. Sleep on, my lord, he thought; for a little while longer—at least until I hear from my incompetent duplicate. He strode into the disordered room he was using for a workshop, looked hopefully at the lit but inert Candle of Far Speaking, then sighed and let his gaze drift out the open window to where the sun was sinking over the hills beyond Missolonghi. The broad Gulf of Patras was already in shadow, and several fishing boats were plying for home, their triangular sails bellying in the evening breeze.

A sputtering from the table made him whirl and stare at the candle, which had begun to glow more brightly. “Romany!” he called into the flame. “Do you succeed?”

The candle flame was silent, and though it was glowing more brightly every second, it had not taken on the spherical shape.

“Romany!” the wizard repeated, louder now, not caring if he woke Byron. “Shall I kill him now?”

There was no reply. Suddenly the almost blindingly bright candle bent in the middle, like a beckoning finger—Doctor Romanelli grunted in surprise—then it split softly open in the middle and spilled a steaming flood of wax out onto the table top. As the candle folded down to a sizzling puddle Romanelli saw that the whole snaky length of the wick was glowing yellow-white.

Damn me, he thought, that means Romany’s candle is at this very moment burning up. His tent must have caught fire. Could he have lost control of the yags? Yes, that must be it—they got too excited, and burned down his camp. There’s no way they’ll be ready to burn London tomorrow, then; they’ll be sated and sluggish for weeks. Romany, you blundering, damned… forgery!

He waited until the wick stopped glowing and the puddle of wax had begun to scum over as it cooled, and then he went to the closet and unbuckled a trunk and carefully lifted out of it another candle. He unwrapped it, lifted the frosted glass hood of the room’s lantern to touch it alight, and in a few moments the new candle’s wick bloomed with the magical round flame.

“Master!” Romanelli barked into it.

“Yes, Romany,” answered the Master’s groaning voice at once. “Are the yags agreeable? Is the toy sufficiently—”

“Damn it, this is Romanelli. Something’s gone wrong at the London end. My candle just melted when I tried to contact him—you understand? His candle has burned up somehow. I think he must have lost control of the yags. I don’t know whether to kill Byron or not.”

“Roman-Romanelli? Burned up? Killed? What?”

Romanelli repeated his news several times, until the Master had finally grasped the situation.

“No,” the Master said. “No, don’t kill Byron. The plan may still be salvageable. Go to London and find out what’s happened.”

“But it will take me at least a month to get to England,” Romanelli protested, “and by then—”

“No,” the Master interrupted. “Don’t travel—go there instantly. Be there tonight.”

The last glowing sliver of the sun winked out behind the Patras hills, and there were no more boats out on the gulf. After a pause, “Tonight?” Romanelli echoed in a hoarse whisper. “I… I can’t afford that kind of thing. Magic like that… if I’m to be expected to function at my best when I get there… “

“Will it kill you?” grated the Master’s voice out of the flame.

Sweat stood out on Romanelli’s forehead. “You know it won’t,” he said, “quite.”

“Then stop wasting time.”

The little man walking along Leadenhall Street moved with a brash confidence that didn’t suit his appearance, for in the light from occasional windows and doorways that he passed, his clothes looked slept in, and his face, though bright-eyed and tightly grinning, was haggardly lined, and one ear was completely gone.

Many shops had closed for the night, but the new Depilatory Parlor was still spilling light across the cobblestones from its open doors, and the grinning little man entered and strode up to the long counter. There was a bell to ring for service, and he rang it as rapidly as if someone had promised him a shilling for each ping he could produce before being forcibly stopped.

A clerk hurried up on the other side of the counter, eyeing the little man carefully. “You want to stop playing with that?” he said loudly.

The ringing ceased. “I wishes to speak with yer employer,” the little man announced. “Take me to him.”

“If you’ve come to have some hair removed, you don’t need to talk to the boss. I can—”

“The boss I asked for, sonny, and the boss I’ll speak to. It’s to do with a friend of mine, you see—he sent me here, as it were. He can’t travel about because he—” and the man paused to give the clerk a massive wink, “—grows hair, terrible thick, all over himself. Eh? You understand? And don’t, sonny, try to go for yer tranky gun. Take me to the boss.”

The clerk blinked and licked his lips. “Uh… damn … okay, yes. Will you wait while I—no. Uh, will you come this way, please, sir?” He lifted away a hinged section of the counter so the little man could come inside. “Right through here. Now you won’t… do anything crazy back here, will you?”

“Not me, sonny,” the man said, evidently surprised and hurt by the very thought.

The two of them walked through a rear door and down a dim corridor, and were halted at the end of it by a man who stood up from a stool when they approached. “What’s this?” he asked, his hand going quickly to a bellpull rope. “Clients aren’t allowed back here, Pete, you know that.”

“This guy just now walked in,” said Pete hastily, “and he says—”

“A friend of mine grows fur all over his body,” the little man broke in impatiently. “Now take me to your bloody boss, will you?”

The hall guard gave Pete an accusing look.

Pete shrugged helplessly. “He… knew about it somehow. Told me not to go for it.”

After a moment of thought the guard let go of the bell rope. “Very well,” he said. “Wait here while I tell him.” He opened the door behind him and stepped through, shutting it carefully behind him, but the rope hadn’t even stopped swinging when he opened it again. “Pete,” he said, “back to the shop. You, sir, may follow me.”

“Aye aye, skipper.” The disheveled little man grinned and stepped smartly forward.

Beyond the door was a narrow carpeted stairway, and at the top was a hallway with several doors visible along it. The next to nearest one was open, and the guard waved toward it. “There’s his office,” he said, and stepped back. The little man brushed his joke wig hair back with ridiculous daintiness, then walked into the room.

An old man with hard, bright eyes stood up from behind a cluttered desk and pointed to a chair. “Sit down, sir,” he said in an impressively deep voice, “and let’s take it as given that I am thoroughly armed, shall we? Now I understand you—”

He paused, and looked more closely at his visitor’s face. “D-Doyle?” he said wonderingly. His hand darted out and turned up the wick of the lamp on the desk. “My God,” he breathed. “It is you! But… I see—I must have somehow overestimated Benner’s ruthless self-interest. He lied when he said he killed you.” His confidence was coming back, but there had been real fear in his face for a moment.

The other man was sitting back, grinning delightedly. “Oh, aye, he lied, right enough. But you might say I am dead.” He stuck out his tongue and crossed his eyes. “Poisoned.”

A bit of the fear was again visible in the old man’s eyes, and to cover it he spoke harshly. “Let’s not indulge in riddles. What do you mean?”

The grin left the little man’s face. “I mean if I throws away me razor I won’t be bald much longer.” He held up one lumpy hand. “Can ye see the whiskers between me fingers? They’ve started already.” His cheeks accordioned back as he bared all his teeth in a savage smile. “And let’s… take it as given, sir, that I can leave here any time. If I have to flee, this body will stay here, but there’ll suddenly be a very scared and confused soul in it—and I’ll be miles away.”

Darrow went pale. “Jesus, it’s you. Very well, no, don’t flee, I don’t want to do you any harm.” He stared hard into the eyes that had been Doyle’s. “What did you do with Doyle?”

“I was in yer Steerforth Benner’s body, and I’d been in it long enough so’s it was furry as a bear; I ate a whole lot o’ strychnine and also a drug that makes you see things and act crazy, and then I chewed my tongue up real good—so he’d not have a chance to talk to nobody—and then just switched places with him.”

“Good God,” Darrow whispered in an awed tone. “That… poor son of a bitch… “

He shook his head. “Well, let the dead bury the dead. I’ve come a long way to find you—to strike a bargain with you. Damn it, I’ve rehearsed this conversation in my mind a hundred times, but now I can’t think where to begin. Let’s see—for one thing, I can cure your hyperpilosity, the all-over fur, any time, and as many times as you please, so from now on you’ll be free to take a new body only when you choose to—you won’t have to anymore. But that’s not the main item I want to bargain with.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Listen to this extract from a book I own. ‘It seems,’” he read aloud, “‘a man at another table took exception to some—as I heard the tale later—heathen sentiments the stranger had voiced, and seized the front of the offender’s shirt in order the more forcefully to convey his displeasure; the shirt tore, and the man’s breast being exposed, it was remarked that the hitherto concealed skin was covered with new whiskers, such as would show on a man’s face after not shaving for a couple of days. Mr.—” Darrow looked up and smiled. “I can’t let you know his real name yet. Let’s call him Mr. Anonymous. ‘Mr. Anonymous,’” he resumed, “‘exclaimed to the company, “I believe it’s Dog-Face Joe; Seize him and take off those gloves.” The gloves were promptly pulled off of the struggling man’s hands, which proved to be likewise bewhiskered. Mr. Anonymous silenced the uproar and declared that if justice was to be visited on this notorious murderer it would have to be done at once, without involving the slow wheels of the law, and so the man was dragged out into the yard behind the pub, and hanged from a rope which was tied to one of the warehouse cranes.’” Darrow put the paper down and smiled at the other man.

“An entertaining fiction,” pronounced the man in Doyle’s body.

“Yes,” agreed Darrow, “it’s fiction now. But in a few months it will be fact—history.” He smiled. “This is going to be a long story, Joe. Would you like some brandy?”

Again Doyle’s face grinned. “Don’t mind if I do,” Amenophis Fikee said.

In the sudden silence Horrabin, his sling still swinging from his violent gesticulations of a few moments before, stared at the shattered corpse on the flagstones beside the table and realized that the fallen beggar lord had put control of the situation back within his reach. He grinned merrily, clapped his painted hands and cried, “He didn’t quite make it to the table, did he?” The clown knew he had his audience’s attention again, so he reached unhurriedly for a joint of meat on his plate, gnawed it thoughtfully, and then tossed it all the way to the back of the hall, where the shambling derelicts fell upon it with a satisfactory noise of growling and scuffling. “None of you,” said the clown quietly, “will ever take anything from me but what I let you have.”

He looked up at the remaining beggar lords. Their spider web hammocks were still swaying back and forth across the abyss, though they’d stopped yelling and waving and now just peered cautiously down, their eyes glittering in the smoky red glow from the oil lamps. Horrabin’s gaze dropped to the corpse, and then swung to the thief lords sitting at the long table. Miller, the one who had been loudest in the mutinous uproar, avoided meeting his eyes.

“Carrington,” Horrabin said softly.

“Aye,” said his lieutenant, stepping forward. He still limped from the beating he’d taken in one of the Haymarket brothels, but the bandages were gone, and his look of frustrated anger was tonight especially intense.

“Kill Miller for me.” As the suddenly pale and gasping thief lord kicked his chair back and scrambled to his feet, Carrington drew a pistol from his belt, poked it casually in Miller’s direction and fired. The ball struck Miller in the back of the throat through his open mouth, punching out a hole over his collar.

Horrabin spread his hands as the body hit the stones. “You see,” he said loudly before the tumult could start up again—then went on more quietly, “I’ll feed all of you… one way or the other.”

The clown smiled. It had been good theater. But where was Doctor Romany? Had all his promises, as Miller had insisted, been lies to manipulate the London thieves into furthering some privately profitable scheme of his own? Horrabin, who knew more than the rest about what was supposed to have happened, was concealing a disquiet greater than Miller’s had been. Was the king assassinated yet? If so, why hadn’t any of the clown’s surface runners reported it? Or was the news being suppressed? Where was Romany?

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.

It was locked from the outside, as he’d expected. There was a small window in the door at the level of his neck, with stout iron bars instead of glass—which helped explain why the room was so cold—and, crouching a little to look out of it, he saw a damp deck that disappeared within a few yards into a wall of gray fog, and, from out of the close murk, a rope, belt-high and parallel to the deck, that was evidently moored to the outside of his cabin bulkhead.

The strident whistling seemed to be coming from somewhere only a dozen yards ahead. Summoning all his nerve, and relying on the probability that his captors wanted to keep him alive, Doyle yelled, “Cut out that damned noise! Some of us are trying to sleep!”

Several of the whistles ceased instantly, and the rest faltered into silence a few moments later, and in spite of himself Doyle shivered to hear a voice that was almost Doctor Romany’s say, “You—no, you stay here; you—go shut him up. The rest of you idiots keep playing. If a mere man shouting distracts you, how do you expect to keep it up when the Shellengeri arrive?”

The eerie whistling started up again, and in a minute or so Doyle, still resolutely at the window, saw a disorienting thing—a tiny old man, bundled up in a tarred canvas coat and a leather hat, was pulling himself along the waist-high rope toward Doyle, but his legs trailed away upward; it looked like he was moving underwater. When the weightless crawler had bumped against the bulkhead and peered in through the little window, Doyle saw the half-face and single eye and realized that this was the same street lunatic who had once promised to take him to a time gap and then had only led him to a vacant lot and shown him some old charred bones.

“Shout all you… please when these… people are through, Lou,” the crawler said, “but if you do it again now, you won’t get fed for the rest of the voyage. And you want to keep up your strength, right, Dwight?” Then the thing shoved its awful face right at the bars and snarled, “I recommend you eat—I want there to be some tooth left in you when the Master’s done and turns you over to me for disposal.”

Doyle had let go of the fog-wet bars, and now he actually stepped back, startled by the raw hatred blazing out of that single eye. “Wait a minute,” he muttered, “take it easy. What did I ever do to—” Then he halted, struck by a grisly suspicion that instantly became a certainty. “My God, it was the same lot on the Surrey-side, wasn’t it?” he whispered. “And you couldn’t have known I escaped through the cellar… for all you knew it was my own skull you were showing me, right? God. And so you survived Burghard’s shot of mud… but I had that paper that worked as a mobile hook… Jesus, you must have simply lived your way back here!”

“That’s right,” chittered the thing that had been Doctor Romany. “And this is my homeward voyage—kas were never meant to survive nearly this long, and damn soon I’ll take that last boat ride through the twelve hours of the night—but before I do, you will be, finally and certainly, dead.”

Not unless you’re the one who’ll meet me in the Woolwich marshes on the twelfth of April in 1846, thought Doyle. “What do you mean, the twelve hours of the night?” he asked cautiously, wondering if this creature had read the poem he’d written out last night.

The thing clinging to the rope grinned. “You’ll see it before I do, Stu. It’s the course through the Tuaut, the underworld, that the dead sungod Ra follows every night on his dark voyage from sunset to sunrise. Darkness becomes solid there, and hours are a measurement of distance, like sailing on an uncoiled clock face.” The thing paused and emitted a thunderous belch that seemed to diminish its body mass by half.

“Quiet down there!” came a shout from out of the fog, loud enough to be heard over the skirling whistles.

“And the dead cluster along the banks of the underworld river,” Romany went on in a whisper, “and beg passage on the sungod’s boat back to the land of the living, for if they could get aboard they’d share in Ra’s restoration to youth and strength. Some even swim out and grab on, but the serpent Apep stretches out… oh, very far!… and snatches them off and devours them.”

“That’s what he—I—was referring to in the poem, then,” said Doyle quietly. He looked up and forced a confident smile. “I’ve already travelled on a river whose milestones are hours,” he said; “taken two very long voyages, in fact, and survived. If I wind up on your Tuaut river, I’ll bet I pop out the dawn end good as new.”

This statement angered Doctor Romany. “You fool, nobody—”

“We’re headed for Egypt, aren’t we?” Doyle interrupted.

The single eye blinked. “How did you know that?”

Doyle smiled. “I know all sorts of things. When will we arrive?”

The Romany thing went on frowning for a moment, then it seemed to forget its anger, and it said, almost confidingly, “In a week or ten days, if the gang on the poop deck there manages to raise the Shellengeri—wind elementals, like what Aeolus gave Odysseus.”

“Oh.” Doyle tried, unsuccessfully, to peer through the fog in the direction of the stern. “Anything like those fire giants that went berserk at Doct—I mean, your camp?”

“Yes yes!” cried the thing, clapping with its bare feet. “Very good. Yes, the two races are cousins. And there are others, the water and earth ones. You should see the earth ones, huge moving cliffs—”

A deafening, air-cleaving whistle—scream, rather, though out of no physical throat—hit the ship with a palpable impact, making every loose board vibrate to blurriness; Doyle leaped away from the window, certain for one unthinking moment that some massive jetliner, a 747 or something, was for some reason attempting a water landing at full throttle very nearby, possibly right on top of them; then he was flung back against the door again as a wall of wind struck from astern, snapped all the sails taut and burst several like a giant punching fist, and the ship’s bow went far down and then up again and the vessel surged powerfully forward.

In the few seconds before the ship and all its contents shifted and adjusted to the new velocity, the stern bulkhead pressing against Doyle’s back seemed more floor than wall, and when his coffin box clattered across the deck toward him he just lifted his legs away from the deck—no hop required—and let it slam end on where his ankles had been, Then gravity swung back to normal and he pitched forward onto his hands and knees in the box. Over the screaming wind he heard the first high-flung bow wave crash back across the decks.

He scrambled to his feet and grabbed the window bars and, squinting against the steady blast of icy air, peered around for the Romany remnant, but the creature was gone. I hope he went right overboard, he thought—though I guess he wouldn’t sink, just come paddling along after us like a big beetle. The ship was slamming along like a bus racing over a plowed field, but Doyle managed to hold onto the window long enough to glimpse a few figures huddled on the poop deck, evidently trying to get down. At least it’s dispelled the fog, he thought dazedly as he let go of the bars and slid down to a sitting position, blinking his wind-stung and watering eyes.

As time passed, bringing no abatement of the racket or the cold or the continual bouncing, Doyle was thankful that he was in Benner’s body—Doyle’s own had been prone to seasickness—though even in this one he was glad he hadn’t managed to eat any of the lobster salad poor Byron had bought.

At what must have been about noon a couple of things were pushed through the window bars: a paper-wrapped package, which thumped to the floor and proved to contain salt pork and hard black bread, and a lidded can that fell a few inches and then swung from a little hooked chain; this contained weak beer. Having been snatched away from the food at the Swan, and not eaten before that since lunchtime yesterday, which was longer ago for Doyle than the twenty-four hours that had passed here, he devoured it all with genuine pleasure, even licking the paper wrappings afterward.

About six hours later the procedure was repeated and again he consumed it all. Soon after, it began to get dark—though the wind and the bashing progress of the ship slacked not at all—and he had just gotten around to wondering how he’d sleep, when a couple of blankets were stuffed through the bars.

“Thank you!” he called. “And could I have another beer?” The room was not absolutely dark, and Doyle managed to improvise a good enough bed in his coffin; and as he was about to climb into it he was surprised to hear the beer can chain rattle as it was drawn up—the sluicing of the beer itself was inaudible over the wind shrilling through the harp of the rigging—and then a clank as it fell back into position, full.

He stood up and hurried over to it, and as he stood braced against the wall trying to drink the sloshing beer without spilling any of it he wondered why he was not too alarmed by his position as captive with torture and death in store. Partially, of course, it was the unthinking self-confidence he’d never entirely been without since finding himself in a body so much better than the one he’d been used to; and the balance of his stubborn optimism was based on being, as he was now willing to concede, William Ashbless, who wouldn’t die until ‘46. Watch yourself there, son, he thought. You can be fairly sure you’ll survive, but there’s no reason to assume Ashbless won’t get thoroughly stomped a time or two.

In spite of his predicament he smiled as he searched for a comfortable position, for he was thinking about Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy, whom he would somehow marry next year—he’d always thought she looked pretty in her portraits.

The voyage—during which the furious winds never once let up, so that after a couple of days the shambling mariners Doyle could see through his window seemed to have achieved a stunned indifference to them—lasted fifteen days, and in that time Doyle never once saw either Romanelli or the weightless vestige of Doctor Romany. Until an old and overstressed beam in the ceiling of his room developed a long crack on the fourth day, all the captive had done was eat, sleep, peer out the window and try to remember the all too few known facts of Ashbless’ visit to Egypt; after the beam split, he occupied his time pulling down a three-foot splinter and trying, with his teeth and nails, to trim a one-foot length of it into something like a dagger. He considered wrenching the beer can from the bars and flattening it to make a tool, but decided that not only would that deprive him of beer for the rest of the trip, but that anything so noticeable would earn him a search when they arrived.

Only once had anything nearly as disquieting as the arrival of the Shellengeri occurred. Sometime before midnight on Saturday, the eleventh night of the voyage, he’d thought he’d heard a wailing over the eternal wind scream, and he’d tried to see out, a trick as difficult as trying to see while riding a motorcycle at seventy miles per hour without goggles. After ten minutes he’d gone back to bed, more than half convinced that the black boat he’d seemed to see, visible because it shone a much deeper black than the waves behind it, had been nothing more than a retinal misfire caused by straining his eyes to see through the blast. After all, what would a boat be doing out there?

CHAPTER 11

On the morning of the tenth of October Doyle came blearily awake and realized that he was out on the deck… and that the planks under his bearded cheek were hot, and when he opened his eyes bright sunlight made him squeeze them shut again… and then it came to him that he could hear talking, creaking cordage, the slap of water against the gently rocking hull—the wind had stopped.

“—Drydock somewhere,” a man’s gruff voice was saying, “though not in this godforsaken outpost.”

Another voice said something about Greece.

“Sure, if it’ll get to Greece. Every damn seam is leaking, just about every sail is shredded, the goddamn masts are—”

The second voice, which Doyle now recognized as the one that was nearly identical to Doctor Romany’s, interrupted with some brief harshness that shut the other up.

Doyle tried to sit up, but only managed to roll over, for he was tightly bound with thick, tarry-smelling ropes. They’re not taking any chances with me, he thought; then he smiled, for he realized that the splintery object biting into his knee was his makeshift wooden dagger, overlooked by whoever had bound him.

“We were none too soon tying him up,” said the harsher voice. “He’s got a sound constitution—I’d have thought the drug would keep him under until this afternoon, at least.”

Though it made his temples throb even more severely, Doyle lifted his head and blinked around. Two men were standing by the ship’s rail, staring at him; one seemed to be a pre-time-jump version of Doctor Romany—that would be Romanelli, he thought, the original—and the other was evidently the captain of the ship.

Romanelli was barefoot, and he padded across to Doyle and crouched beside him. “Good morning,” he said. “I may want to ask you questions, and we probably won’t meet anyone who speaks English, so I’m going to leave the gag off. If you want to yell and make a commotion, though, we can tie it on and conceal it under a burnoose.”

Doyle let his head clunk back onto the deck, then closed his eyes and waited until the throbbing abated a little. “Okay,” he said, opening them again and blinking up at the empty blue sky beyond the tangle of spars and riggings and reefed sails. “We’re in Egypt?”

“Alexandria.” Romanelli nodded. “We’ll row you ashore, and then it’s overland to the Rosetta branch of the Nile, and we’ll sail you upriver to Cairo. Savor the view.” The sorcerer stood up with a loud popping of the knees and an imperfectly concealed wince. “You men,” he called irritably. “The boat’s ready? Then get him over the side and into it.”

Doyle was lifted up, carried to the rail, and after a hook was snugged in under the rope that went under his arms he was lowered like a bundled-up rug into a rowboat that bobbed and banged against the hull in the emerald water twenty feet below. A sailor in the boat grabbed his bound ankles and guided him down to a sitting position on one of the thwarts while Romanelli descended a rope ladder and, after swinging about for a minute on the end of it, waving a free foot and swearing, did a sort of half-slide into the boat. The sailor helped him to another thwart and then the last passenger came swinging wildly down the ladder—it was the Luck of the Surrey-side Beggars himself, the time-ruined Doctor Romany, with two big metal spikes tied to his shoes for weight. After placing this grinning, winking creature on the narrow bow, where it sat like a trained cormorant, the sailor wiped his hands and sat down himself, impassively facing Romanelli and Doyle; he picked up the oars and set to work.

Doyle immediately toppled over against the starboard gunwale, and from this position watched the ship’s hull slide past and eventually give way, as they rounded the high arch of the bow, to a view of Alexandria, half a mile away across the glittering water.

The city was a disappointment to him—he’d expected the labyrinthine Oriental city Lawrence Durrell had written about, but all he saw was a small cluster of dilapidated white buildings baking in the sun. There were no other ships in the harbor, and only a few boats lay moored to the weathered quays.

“That’s Alexandria?” he asked.

“Not what it used to be,” growled Romanelli in a tone that didn’t invite further discussion. The wizard was huddled against the opposite gunwale, breathing in long wheezes. What was left of Romany was giggling quietly on the bow.

The man at the oars let the harbor’s current slant them to the left, east of the town, and on a sandy rise Doyle finally saw some people; three or four figures in Arab robes stood in the shade of a dusty palm tree, while a number of camels stood and sat around a section of ruined wall nearby. Doyle wasn’t surprised when the sailor heeled the boat about and aimed the bow toward the palm tree and Romanelli waved and yelled, “Ya Abbas sabahixler!”

One of the robed men was now walking down to the shore. He waved and called, “Saghida, ya Romanelli?”

Doyle eyed the man’s lean, sharp-chiseled face and nervously tried to imagine the fellow doing anything just domestically pleasant, like petting a cat. He couldn’t.

When the boat was still a few yards from shore the keel grated on the sandy bottom, stopping the little craft and pitching Doyle forward.

“Ow,” he mumbled, his lips brushing the thwart, which was coldly and saltily wet from the splashing of the oars. A moment later Romanelli yanked him upright.

“That hurt?” asked the wide-eyed bow-croucher with mock alarm. “Sa-a-a-ay—did that hurt, Burt?”

The sorcerer had stood up and was barking instructions in Arabic, and two more of the men from under the palm hastened down toward the water, while the first man was already splashing out toward the boat. Romanelli pointed down at Doyle. “Taghald maghaya nisilu,” he said, and lean brown arms reached over the gunwale and lifted Doyle out of the boat.

Doyle was tied onto a camel and in spite of the several rest and water stops, by the time they arrived at the little town of El Hamed by the Nile, late in the afternoon, Doyle’s legs were distant columns of numbness, only recognizable as his own when they were occasionally lanced with tooth-grinding agony, and his spine felt like a big old dried sunflower stalk that kids had used for a blowgun dart target. When the Arabs untied him and carried him aboard the dahabeeyeh, a low, single-masted boat with a little cabin in the back, he was half delirious and muttering, “Beer … beer…” Fortunately they seemed to recognize the word, and brought him a jug of what was, blessedly and unmistakably, beer. Doyle drained it in several long swallows and fell back across the deck, instantly asleep.

He awoke in darkness when the boat bumped gently against wood and rocked to a stop, and when his captors hoisted him up and sat him on the dock, facing inland, he could see lights only a few hundred yards away to his left.

A man with a lantern stepped down onto the dock. “Is salam ghalekum, ya Romanelli,” he said quietly.

“Wi ghalekum is salam,” Romanelli answered.

Doyle had been dreading another camel ride, and he sighed with relief when he noticed the silhouette of a real British carriage up on the road behind the man. “Are we in Cairo?” he asked.

“Just past it,” Romanelli said shortly. “We’re going inland, toward the Karafeh, the necropolis below the Citadel.” He barked at the Arabs and obediently they lifted Doyle by his ankles and shoulders and carried him up a set of ancient stone steps to the road and pushed him into the carriage.

A few moments later he was joined by Romanelli, the Romany thing, one of the Arabs and the man who had met them here. Reins snapped and the carriage surged into rattling motion.

Necropolis, thought Doyle unhappily. Excellent. He pressed his knees together as he sat folded up on the floor of the carriage, and was only slightly reassured by the feel of his homemade wooden dagger. He hadn’t been aware of the tropical smells of the river until they diminished and were replaced by the fainter but harsher dessicated-stone smell of the desert.

After about two miles of slow travel on a crumbled but serviceable road they stopped, and when Doyle was lifted out and propped upright beside the carriage he stared at the lightless building they’d arrived at, standing alone in the desert waste. The lantern showed an arched doorway, flanked by wide pillars, in a wall otherwise featureless except for a couple of holes that might have been meant to be windows, though they were too small even to poke one’s head through. Above, he could dimly see a large dome silhouetted against the stars.

At a nod from Romanelli the Arab who’d accompanied them from the boat pulled a mirror-bright curved dagger from under his robe and sliced through three loops of rope around Doyle’s legs. All the rope from his waist down fell to the dusty ground, and Doyle kicked it off his ankles.

“Don’t run,” said Romanelli wearily. “Abbas would certainly outrun you, and then I’d have to instruct him to sever one of your Achilles tendons.”

Doyle nodded, wondering if he’d even be able to walk.

The shrunken ka had taken off its weighted shoes and, gripping the buckles of them, was walking around on its hands, with its legs flailing upward like ribbons tied to a floor heater vent. It grinned upside down at Doyle and said, “Time to go see the moon man, Stan.”

“Shut up,” Romanelli told it. To Doyle he said, “This way. Come on.”

Doyle limped after him toward the door, accompanied by the ka, and when they’d covered half the twenty foot distance to the front door there was a hollowly echoing snap and then the door swung inward and a hooded figure with a lantern was beckoning. Romanelli impatiently waved Doyle and the ka past him into the broad stone hallway and asked a question, in a language that didn’t seem to be Arabic this time, as the hooded man closed and re-bolted the door.

The man shrugged and gave a brief answer that seemed neither to surprise nor please Romanelli.

“He’s no better,” he muttered to the ka as he led the way forward. The man with the lantern followed, and the swinging shadows made the Old Kingdom bas reliefs on the walls, and even the columns of hieroglyphics, seem to move. Doyle noticed that the hall ended a dozen yards ahead at a carefully bricked surface of masonry that was bellied and leaning sharply out toward them, so that the floor extended a good deal farther than the ceiling; as if, he thought, there’s an above ground swimming pool on the other side.

“Was you expecting to hear he’d commenced turning summer-salties?” inquired the still-inverted ka.

Romanelli ignored the creature and, turning into an open arch in the left-hand wall, started up a set of steps. Light touched the pitted stair edges from around a corner above, and the man with the lantern remained—gratefully, it seemed to Doyle—below. The three of them climbed to another hall, much shorter than the one downstairs, and this one ended at a balcony that faced the lighted interior of the dome. The trio moved forward to the balcony rail.

Doyle found himself staring out across the inside of a huge sphere, roughly seventy-five feet across, illuminated by a lamp that hung in the precise center, at the same level as the balcony, from a long chain moored to the highest point of the dome. He leaned over the rail and looked down, and was surprised to see four motionless men in a round stone-walled pen at the very bottom of the spherical chamber.

“Greetings, my little friends,” came a grinding whisper from the opposite side of the sphere, and Doyle noticed for the first time that there was a man—a very old and withered and twisted man—lying on a couch that was somehow attached to the far wall only a foot or two below the horizontal black line that seemed to be the room’s equator. The man lay on the couch, and the couch on the nearly perpendicular wall, with such a convincing appearance of gravity holding them there that Doyle automatically looked around for the edges of the mirror that had to be there… but there was no break in the dome’s inner surface; couch and man actually hung up there, like some disagreeable wall ornament. And just as Doyle had begun to speculate about how the old man stayed on the evidently nailed-up couch with such an appearance of nonchalance, and where a ladder could be footed to get him up there, there was a squealing of casters and the couch rolled upward a little.

The man on the couch groaned, then leaned over and peered at the “floor”; the couch now sat right over the equator line. “Moonrise,” he said wearily. He lay back again and stared across the sphere at the balcony. “I see Doctors Romanelli and Romany, the latter standing as a clear indictment of my ability to cast a decent ka. I would have thought you would last a century without deteriorating to this point. But who is our giant visitor?”

“His name, I gather, is Brendan Doyle,” said Romanelli.

“Good evening, Brendan Doyle,” said the man on the wall. “I … apologize for not being able to come over and shake hands, but having renounced this present earth, I gravitate instead toward … another place. It’s an uncomfortable position, and one that we hope to remedy before long. And,” he went on, “what has Mr. Doyle got to do with the present debacle?”

“He did it, yer Honor!” chittered the ka. “He snapped the Byron ka out of the obedience spell we had him under, and he made the yags go crazy, and then when I jumped back to 1684 he followed me and alerted the Antaeus Brotherhood to my presence there—” He’d let go of his shoes in order to gesture, and he floated upward feet first, bumped against the round brick cowl that extended out around the balcony and rolled over it and began floating up toward the top of the dome, “—and they somehow knew that a weapon fouled with dirt could injure me and they shot my face off with a mud-clogged gun—”

“Jutmoop sidskeen efty door?” sputtered the Master. Romanelli and Doyle, and the ka, who by now was crouching upside-down beside the lamp chain mooring on the ceiling, all stared at him.

The Master squeezed his eyes and mouth tightly shut, then opened them. “Jumped,” he said carefully, “to sixteen eighty-four?”

“I believe he did, sir,” Romanelli put in hastily. “They used the gates Fikee made—traveling from gate to gate, through time, you understand? This ka,” he waved his hand upward, “is obviously too decayed for only eight years of action, and what I’ve pieced together of his story is consistent.”

The Master nodded slowly. “There was something peculiar about the way our Monmouth scheme misfired in 1684.” The couch rolled another few inches upward, and though the Master’s teeth clenched with pain, one of the motionless figures in the pen below groaned echoingly. Startled, Doyle glanced down at them again, and was not reassured to see that they were wax statues. The Master’s eyes opened. “Time travel,” he whispered. “And where did Mr. Doyle come from?”

“Some other time,” said the ka. “He and a whole party of people appeared through one of the gates, and I managed to capture him, though his companions returned the way they’d come. I had a little time to question him, and—listen—he knows where Tutankhamen’s tomb is. He knows lots of things.”

The Master nodded and then, horribly, smiled. “It could be that, in this late and sterile age, we’ve blundered onto the most powerful tool we’ve ever had. Romanelli, draw some blood from our guest and construct a ka—a full maturation one that will know everything he does. We mustn’t take any chances with what he’s got in his head—he might kill himself or catch some fever. Do that right now, and then lock him up for the night. Interrogation will commence in the morning.”

Ten minutes were wasted in getting the Romany ka down from the ceiling—it could no more scramble down to the balcony than a hamster could scramble up out of a bathtub—but it was finally recovered with a rope, and Romanelli led Doyle back down the stairs.

On the ground floor they entered a room where, in the dim light of a single lamp, the doorkeeper could be seen carefully stirring a long vat of some fishy-smelling fluid.

“Where’s the cup of—” Romanelli began, but even as he’d spoken the doorkeeper had pointed at a table against the wall. “Ah.” Romanelli crossed to it and carefully lifted a copper cup. “Here,” he said, returning to Doyle. “Drink it and save us the trouble of tying you down and administering it through broken teeth.”

Doyle took the cup and sniffed the contents dubiously. The stuff had a sharp, chemical reek. Reminding himself that he wasn’t slated to die until 1846, he lifted the cup to his blistered lips and downed the drink in one big, gagging gulp.

“God,” he wheezed, handing the cup back and trying to blink the fumes out of his eyes.

“Now we’ll just impose upon you for a few drops of blood,” Romanelli went on, drawing a knife from under his robe.

“Just pop the cork on a vein, Zane,” agreed the remnant of Doctor Romany. The ka was once more holding the buckles of its weighted shoes and walking on its hands.

“Blood?” Doyle asked. “What for?”

“You heard the Master tell us to make a ka of you,” Romanelli answered. “Now I’m going to free your hands, but don’t do anything idiotic.”

Not me, Doyle thought. History says I’ll leave Egypt in four months, sane and with all limbs intact. Why should I go out of my way to earn a concussion or a dislocated arm?

Romanelli cut the ropes that had bound Doyle’s wrists.

“Step over to the tub here,” he said. “I’m just going to nick your finger.”

Doyle stepped forward, holding his finger out and peering curiously into the pearly liquid. So, he thought, that’s where they’ll grow an exact duplicate of me…

Oh my God, what if it’s the duplicate that gets free and eventually returns to England to die in ‘46? I could die here without upsetting history.

His tenuous optimism abruptly extinguished, Doyle grabbed for Romanelli’s approaching wrist, and though he cut the heel of one hand deeply on the sorcerer’s knife, his other hand clamped onto Romanelli’s forearm, and with the strength of desperation he wrenched the sorcerer forward and off balance toward the tub; but Doyle winced to see several drops of blood from his cut hand plop into the pearly stuff.

It seemed certain that Romanelli would pitch into the tub, so Doyle whirled, crouching, drew the makeshift dagger from his pant leg and sprang in a wild lunge toward the upside-down ka. It hooted in alarm and let go of the shoe buckles, but before it could float upward Doyle’s wooden knife punched into its frail chest.

A blast of chilly and foul-smelling air hit Doyle in the face, and the ka flew backward off the end of the dagger and, visibly shrivelling as all the noxious air whooshed out of it, sailed across the room, rebounded from the wall, started to fly straight up toward the ceiling, then lost speed and stalled.

Romanelli was rolling in agony on the floor beyond the tub, having done an impromptu leap and roll over it without touching it. “Get him,” he managed to croak.

The doorkeeper stood between Doyle and the hall door, and Doyle ran straight at him, brandishing the dagger and roaring as loud as he could.

The man leaped out of the way, but not quickly enough; Doyle clubbed him with the butt end of the weapon and he tumbled to the floor unconscious as Doyle’s racing footsteps receded down the hall.

Romanelli was still struggling to get his protective shoes between himself and the torturing floor as, with a sound as soft as the fall of a dead leaf onto a pond, the empty skin and clothes of Doctor Romany settled onto it and didn’t move.

The beggars in Thames Street didn’t approach the little man who came striding along in the cool twilight, for his ill-fitting clothes, pale, grinning face and wild mop of graying hair all indicated that he’d have no pence to spare, and might well even be mad; though one legless beggar on a wheeled cart did a double take, pushed himself along after the man for a few paces, then coasted to a stop, shook his head uncertainly and then wheeled around to return to his post.

Walking across the open pavement of Billingsgate, the man skirted the little Punch and Judy stage, and he heard the piping voice of Punch exclaim, “Ah, one of the Dolorous Brethren, I do b—” The voice choked off, and the man glanced at the puppet.

He halted and grinned. “Somethin’ I can do for you, Punch?” he asked.

The puppet stared at him for several seconds. “Uh, no,” it said. “I thought for a moment I—no.”

The man shrugged and walked on toward the vacant dock. Soon his worn boot heels were knocking on the weathered wooden decking, and he paused only when he stood right on the splintery lip of the dock.

He stared out across the broad, darkening face of the great river at the first few lights on the Surrey-side, then he laughed quietly and whispered, “Let’s just test your… stamina, Chinnie.” He crouched, leaned forward and, arms over his head, kicked off in a long and fairly shallow dive. There was a splash and spatter, but it was not loud and there was no one nearby.

The ripples were just beginning to subside when his head broke the surface twenty feet farther out. He shook the wet hair out of his face and then trod water for a few moments, breathing in fast, whispered hoots. “Cold as the water through the seventh hour,” he muttered. “Ah well—sherry and dry clothes in Just a few minutes now.” He did a leisurely crawl, punctuated by rest stops during which he floated on his back and stared at the stars, until he was far out in the center of the river, nowhere near any of the few boats and barges that were on the water that evening.

Then he expelled all the air from his lungs in a slow hiss that quickly became bubbles as his head disappeared under the surface.

For nearly a full minute bubbles continued to float up and pop in the lonely center of the river. Then there weren’t any more, and the river resumed its featureless smoothness.

It had been a close bout all along, but at last, from his vantage point by the window, old Harry Angelo saw his premier pupil setting up his opponent for the thrust Angelo had recommended for use against a left-handed fencer.

The bout had been going on for more than five minutes without either fencer receiving a touch, and Richard Sheridan, who had strolled over, brandy glass in hand, to join the cluster of spectators, had remarked quietly to the pugilist “Gentleman” Jackson that it was the best display of swordplay he’d seen since Angelo had had his salle in the Opera House in Haymarket.

Angelo’s pupil, the prize fighter known as the Admirable Chinnie, had repeatedly disengaged from a feint toward the outside line of sixte into a thrust in the quarte line, on the other side of his opponent’s blade, and his opponent had each time parried it easily, though never managing to land a riposte on Chinnie.

At the age of fifty-four, Harry Angelo had been the unquestioned master of fencing instruction in England ever since his legendary father’s retirement a quarter of a century ago, and now he could read his pupil’s intention as clearly as if Chinnie had spoken it: another sixte feint and then the by now expected disengage—but this time not all the way around the opposing bell guard to the quarte line, but instead up under the opponent’s guard into the unprotected low flank.

Angelo smiled as the sixte feint was thrust out—then frowned, for the tipped point just wavered there. The opponent started to make the conditioned quarte parry, then noticed that Chinnie’s blade was motionless, and so picked it up in a lightning bind that sent his own point corkscrewing in to thud and flex against Chinnie’s canvas-jacketed stomach.

Angelo expelled his held breath in a whispered oath; then the Admirable Chinnie staggered back and almost fell over, and several of the spectators rushed to him to hold him up. Chinnie’s opponent yanked off his mask and dropped it and his foil on the hardwood floor and exclaimed, “My God, did I hurt you, Chinnie?”

The prize fighter took off his own mask, straightened and shook his head as if to clear it. “No no,” he said hoarsely. “Just a bit of trouble catching my breath just now. Right in a sec. Strain of the peculiar posture.”

Angelo raised his gray eyebrows. In three years of concentrated instruction this was the first time he’d ever heard the Admirable Chinnie describe the en guard position as peculiar.

“Well, we certainly shan’t count a point that was made when you were off guard,” declared Chinnie’s opponent. “Whenever you’re ready we’ll resume the bout at zero and zero.”

Though smiling cheerfully, Chinnie shook his head. “No,” he said. “Later. Right now—fresh air.”

Old Richard Sheridan helped him to the door, with Angelo striding along beside them, as the rest of the company shrugged and picked up their foils and masks as two couples squared off on opposite sides of the pistes painted on the floor. “I trust he’s all right,” someone muttered.

Out in the hall Chinnie waved the other two men away as the clang and rasp resumed in the salle. “I’ll be back in after a moment,” he said. But when they’d reluctantly gone in, Chinnie hurried down the stairs to the street door, flung it open and sprinted away down the Bond Street pavement.

When he reached Piccadilly he slowed to a walk, taking deep lungfuls of the chilly autumn air, and at the Strand he glanced to his right, toward the river, and whispered, “How ye doin’, Chinnie me lad? Cold, ain’t it?” Another man on the sidewalk had started toward him as if he recognized him, but drew back, disconcerted, when Chinnie burst into maniacal giggling and did a fast, if inexpert, dance step on the pavement.

He continued muttering to himself all the way down Fleet Street to Cheapside. “Hah!” he exclaimed at one point, bounding into the air. “Good as Benner’s, this is. Better! Don’t know why it never occurred to me before to grab the West End sort of merchandise.”

The first part of the dream was devoid of horror, and Darrow never remembered until he woke up that he’d been through it many times before.

The fog was so thick that he could see no more than a few yards ahead, and the damp black brick walls on either side were visible only because they were so claustrophobically close. The alley was silent except for an irregular knocking somewhere in the fog overhead, as though an unfastened shutter was swinging in a breeze.

He’d been taking a short cut that should have wound up at Leadenhall Street, but he’d been lost for what seemed like hours in this maze of courts and alleys and zigzagging lanes. He hadn’t met a soul yet, but he’d stopped now because he’d heard a low cough from the dimness ahead.

“Hello,” he said, and was instantly ashamed of the timidity in his voice. “Hello there!” he went on more strongly. “Perhaps you can help me find my way.”

He heard the shuffle of slow steps, and saw a dark form begin to emerge from the wall of mist; then the figure was close enough for him to see the face—and it was Brendan Doyle.

A hand seized Darrow’s shoulder and the next thing he knew he was sitting bolt upright in his own bed, clenching his teeth against the despairing cry that in the dream had burst from his lips and resounded flatly in the fog-deadened air:

“I’m sorry, Doyle! God, I’m sorry!”

“Jeez, chief,” said the young man who’d awakened him, “didn’t mean to startle you. But you said to roust you out at six-thirty.”

“Right, Pete,” Darrow croaked, swinging his legs to the floor and rubbing his eyes. “I’ll be in the office. When the fellow I described gets here, send him in, will you?”

“Aye aye.”

Darrow stood up, ran his hands through his white hair and then walked down the hall to the office. The first thing he did was pour himself a glass of brandy and drain it in one long swallow. He set the glass down, lowered himself into the chair behind the desk and waited for the liquor to sluice the images of his dream out of his head.

“May the damned dreams go with the body,” he whispered, fumbling a cigarette out of a box and lighting it in the lamp flame. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs, leaned back and blew it toward the ranked ledgers on the shelf next to the desk. He considered, then discarded, the idea of doing some more work on his already complicated network of investments. He was getting rich again rapidly, and it was irritating to have to work without computers and calculators.

Soon two sets of boots could be heard ascending the stairs, and in a moment there was a knock on the office door.

“Come in,” said Darrow, forcing his voice to sound easy and confident.

The door opened and a tall young man strode in, a smirking grin on his handsome, clean-shaven face. “Here it is, yer Honor,” he said, doing a satirical pirouette in the middle of the room. “Okay, hold still. The doc will go over you in a few minutes, but I wanted to eyeball it myself first. How’s it feel walking?”

“Springy as new French steel. You know what surprised me? All the smells on the way over here! And I don’t think I ever was able to see this well.”

“Well, we’ll get you a good one too. No headache, stomachache? He’s been making a living for years as a prize fighter.”

“None atall.” The young man poured a brandy for himself, bolted it and refilled the glass.

“Easy on the sauce,” said Darrow.

“The wha’?”

“The sauce, the booze—the brandy. Want me to get an ulcer?” With an injured expression the young man set the glass down. His hand went to his mouth.

“And don’t bite the nails, please,” Darrow added. “Say, do you … ever catch any of the old tenant’s thoughts, left behind in the, like, cupboards of his head after his eviction? Uh, do things like dreams ever stay with the old body?”

“Avo—I mean, yes, yer Honor—I believe so. It’s not the sort of thing I pay attention to, but sometimes I find myself dreaming of places I’ve never seen, and I believe it’s bits from the lives of the lads I’ve passed through. No way of knowin’ for sure. And,” he paused, and his eyebrows drew together, “and sometimes when I’m just driftin’ over the line from awake to asleep, I hear… well, picture standin’ on the forecastle of an emigrant ship, you know, in the middle of the night with all them bunks like bookshelves all over the walls?… And imagine that each of those men is talking in his sleep… “

Darrow reached across the desk, took the filled glass and drained it. “This stomach doesn’t matter,” he said, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. “Come on, let’s go see the doc.”

Young Fennery Clare, his bare feet still tingling from having stood for a while in the warm pool below the sheet metal manufactory by Execution Dock, waded out from the docks, skirting the Limehouse Hole, and tried to line up the landmarks he’d memorized this morning. It was getting darker by the minute, though, and the two chimneys across the river were completely invisible, while the crane on the third pier downstream of him seemed to have been moved since he saw it last. And though the tide was on its way out again, he was already in up to his waist, and like most Mud Larks he couldn’t swim.

Damn that bunch of Irish kids, he thought. If they hadn’t been hanging about the Hole here this morning, I could have just picked the sack up and carried it out, for I can thrash any of the local kids. Them Micks would have taken it from me for sure, though, and a stroke of luck like this might come only once in a lifetime: a cloth bag, evidently dropped by one of the workmen who were re-sheathing that big ship here last week, absolutely filled with copper nails!

The very thought of the money he’d get from the rag shop for the haul—eight pence at least, more likely a shilling and some—made the boy’s mouth water, and he resolved that if he found it and couldn’t work it back up the slope with his feet, he’d risk being swept away and just bend down and pick it up. It would be well worth the risk, for he could live high for several lazy days on a shilling, at the end of which time he’d be ready to do his usual early winter trick of getting caught stealing coal from one of the barges up at Wapping so as to be sent off to the House of Correction, where he’d have a coat and shoes and stockings and regular meals for several months, and not have to wade half-clad out into the cold mud in the winter dawns.

He tensed and the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile, for the toes of his left foot had plunged through the top layer of silt and found cloth. He turned, trying to get his other foot onto it without losing his balance.

“Can,” croaked a voice from a few yards out in the water, “can someone… help me?”

The boy recovered his balance after starting in surprise, and belatedly realized that some of the river sounds that he’d been too absorbed to pay attention to had been the ripple and swish of weak swimming.

There was the spatter of a wet head being shaken. “Hey… boy! Is that a boy there? Help me!”

“I can’t swim,” said Fennery.

“You’re standing there, aren’t you? The shore’s so close?”

“Aye, just behind me.”

“Then I can… make it myself. Where am I?”

“I’ll tell you if you come pick up this sack of nails for me.” The swimmer had been angling toward the boy, and was now close enough to stand on the underwater mud slope. For a few minutes he just stood there as his frame was racked with gasping and choking and retching. Fennery was glad he was upstream of the man.

“God,” the man gasped finally. He rinsed his mouth and spat. “I must have… swallowed half the Thames. Did you hear an explosion earlier?”

“No, sir,” said Fennery. “What blew up?”

“I think a block in Bond Street did. One moment I was—” He gagged and threw up another cupful of river water. “Pah. Lord preserve me. I was fencing at Angelo’s, and an instant later I was at the bottom of the Thames with empty lungs. I think it took me five minutes to fight my way to the surface—I don’t think anybody who wasn’t a trained athlete could have done it—and in spite of clenched teeth and a… firm resolve, I tried to breathe the river on the way up. I don’t even recall breaking the surface—I think I had fainted, and the cold air revived me.”

The boy nodded. “Could you reach down and get me my bag?”

Dazedly obedient, the man bent over, ducked his head under, groped for and found the neck of the bag and yanked it up out of the mud.

“Here you go, lad,” he said when he’d straightened up. “Lord, I’m weak! Scarce could lift it. And I think I’ve damaged my ears—voice sounds odd. Where is this?”

“Limehouse, sir,” said Fennery gleefully, wading back toward the stairs.

“Limehouse? Then I’ve been swept much further than I’d thought.”

The water was only at Fennery’s knees now, and he was able both to hang onto the bag and support the bedraggled swimmer, who was reeling dizzily. “You’re an athlete, sir?” the boy asked dubiously, for the shoulder he was supporting felt bony and thin.

“Aye. I’m Adelbert Chinnie.”

“What? Not the Admirable Chinnie, the singlestick champion?”

“That’s me.”

“Why, I saw you in Covent Garden once, fighting Torres the Terrible.” They had reached the stairs, and started haltingly up them.

“Summer before last, that was. Yes, he nearly beat me, too.”

When they had laboriously gotten up to street level they walked along a cinder path in the shadow of a brick wall for a dozen paces, then rounded the end of it and started across a littered, industrial-looking yard that was lit by a couple of lanterns hung on the wall of a warehouse.

Fennery was glad to be so impressively escorted in this neighborhood, which was one of the most perilous in London. He glanced up at his companion—and halted.

“You stinking liar!” he hissed, all at once fearful of making any noise.

The man seemed to be having difficulty walking. “What?” he asked distractedly.

“You’re not the Admirable Chinnie!”

“Of course I am. What the devil do you suppose is wrong with me, though? My whole body feels strange, as though—”

“Chinnie’s taller than you, and younger, and muscular. You’re some sort of derelict.”

The man chuckled weakly. “You young wretch. If there was ever an occasion I’d every right to look like a derelict, this is it. How do you suppose you’d look after swimming up, breathless, from the floor of the river? And I am taller—when shod.”

The boy shook his head incredulously. “You’ve sure gone to hell since that summer. Look, I live just over there, so I’m gonna go, but if you follow that lane it’ll get you to Ratcliff Highway. You ought to be able to get a cab there.”

“Thank you, lad.” The man began to walk unsteadily in the indicated direction.

“Take care of yourself, eh?” called the boy. “And thanks for helping me with the bag!” His bare feet slapped away into the darkness.

“You’re welcome,” the man muttered. What was the matter with him? And what actually had happened? Now that he’d had time to catch his breath and consider the problem, the explosion idea made no sense. Had he been waylaid on the way home and tossed into the river, and shock erased the memory of everything since that bout at Angelo’s? But no, he never left Angelo’s before ten, and the sky in the west wasn’t even completely dark yet.

As he was about to round the corner of the warehouse he noticed a window set into the brick just below the lantern, and he glanced into it as he walked past… then halted, walked back, and stared into it.

He raised a hand to his face, and was horrified to see the figure in the reflection do the same, for it was not him. The face was not his face.

He leaped away from the glass and looked at his clothing—no, he hadn’t noticed it before, one set of wet clothes on a dark night being very much like another, but these weren’t any jacket and trousers that ever belonged to Adelbert Chinnie.

For an insane second he wanted to dig his fingers into this face and peel it away; and then he considered the notion that he wasn’t and never had been the Admirable Chinnie, but was just a—God knew what, beggar, apparently—who had dreamt it.

He forced himself to walk back to the window and look into it again. The face that peered fearfully out at him was thin, sagging and deeply lined, with, he noticed when he tilted his head back, a network of crazy wrinkles around the eyes, and though the thick tangle of hair was dripping wet, he could see a lot of gray in it. And when he pushed the hair back he nearly burst into sobs, for he had no right ear at all.

“Well, I don’t care,” he said in a voice as tense as a stressed glass pane. He was so wet, and the body’s sensations so unfamiliar to him, that he really didn’t know if the wetness in his eyes was tears.

“I don’t care” he said. “I’m Adelbert Chinnie.”

He attempted—and quickly abandoned—a brave smile but nevertheless squared his narrow shoulders and strode resolutely toward the Ratcliff Highway.

CHAPTER 12

With the war against France going on, and its attendant embargoes and black markets and rumors of a proposed invasion of England by Napoleon, the financial and mercantile situations in Threadneedle Street were in perpetual turmoil, and a man who was in the right place at the right time with the right commodity could become wealthy in hours, while a fortune that in other times would take decades to lose could now evaporate in one morning at the Royal Exchange. And though only someone who kept an extra sharp eye on the market would have noticed, there was one speculator who had a hand in nearly every area of commerce, and invariably managed to be standing on the winning side of every surprise, disaster and reverse.

Jacob Christopher Dundee, as J. Cochran Darrow now called himself, had only begun his investment career on the twenty-second of October, but within one month he had, by an inspired series of shiftings and reinvestments and possibly extra-legal international currency exchanges, increased his initial capital tremendously. And though his antecedents were of the vaguest, such was the charm of the handsome young Dundee that on the fifth of December the London Times announced his engagement to “Claire, daughter of the successful importer Joel Peabody.”

In his office over a defunct depilatory parlor in Leadenhall Street, Jacob Dundee irritably waved away a cloud of tobacco smoke that issued from the pipe of his elderly companion, and then squinted again at the notice in the Times. “Well, they seem to have spelled all the names correctly, at least,” he said, “Though I could have done without the reference to ‘the shrewd newcomer on the London market scene.’ A low profile is essential in this kind of work—already I’ve got people watching me and riding along on deals.”

The old man glanced curiously at the paper. “Nice girl?”

“Adequate for my purposes,” Dundee said impatiently, waving away more smoke.

“Your purposes? And what be they, pray?”

“To have a son,” said the young man softly. “A boy that I can set up with a fortune, and a solidly established background, and perfect health. My medical lads say that Claire is as healthy and intelligent a marriageable young lady as can be found in England today.”

The old man grinned. “Most engaged young gentlemen look forward to somethin’ a little less philosophical, but more fun, eh? And I’ve heerd this Peabody piece is a comely one. But no doubt you’ve already ridden around the course a few times, familiarized yerself wi’ the turf?”

Dundee reddened. “Well, I—no, I’m not in any—damn it, I’m not a young man—I mean, I am, but all that sort of thing will have to—” He coughed. “Damn it, do you have to smoke that stuff? How do you think you got cancer in the first place? If you need nicotine, settle for chewing tobacco in my presence, okay?”

“Okay,” said the old man. “Okay, okay, okay.” He’d only learned the word recently, and still relished it. “Why do you care, anyway? Part of the bargain was a new one any time you like.”

“I know.” Dundee rubbed his eyes and ran his fingers through his curly brown hair. “It’s like a new car, that’s all,” he muttered. “Until it gets the first dent you worry about everything.”

“For such a healthy young sprout yer lookin’ distinctly wilted,” observed the old man, putting his black clay pipe on the floor and reaching out to snag the brandy decanter instead. He sucked down an awesome amount of it.

“Yeah, I’m not sleeping too well,” Dundee admitted. “Dream I keep having… “

“You’ve got to get away from dreams, laddie, get some distance. I suppose I dream all the time, and if I ever paid attention to ‘em I’m sure I’d be stark mad right now. I’ve kind of… split off a little bit of me mind to watch the dreams, so I don’t have to be bothered.”

“That sounds healthy,” said Dundee with a despairing nod. “Yeah, that sounds fine.”

His companion, missing the irony, nodded complacently. “Okay, you’ll get used to it. After a couple more jumps you’ll pay no more mind to dreams than to the dust your wheels raise on the road behind you.”

Dundee poured himself some brandy, added some water from a nearby carafe, and took a sip. “Have you decided where you’ll go from,” he waved vaguely at the old man, “here?”

“Aye. I think I’ll oust Mr. Maturo—yer Mister Anonymous. He dines there very frequent, and it ought not to be any trouble sifting the unhinging herbs into his stew some night a week or so hence.”

“Maturo? The guy who hangs you? From the account in Robb’s Journals he sounds like he’s about fifty years old.”

“Aye, he is, and I won’t stay in him more than the necessary week—but I will so enjoy the expression on his face when, in the moment before he kicks that barrel away, he finds himself up there standing on it with the rope round his neck, and me in his body grinnin’ up at him.”

Dundee shuddered. “God rest ye merry, gentlemen,” he said.

Down the relatively snow-free gutter in the middle of the street the short man jogged energetically, puffing white clouds like a laboring steam engine as he forced himself to carry the ten-pound box of raisins in one hand at arm’s length. After twenty paces he switched the box to his other hand and flailed the now-free one to unstiffen it. His solid shoulders and unfatigued pace were evidence that physical exercise wasn’t just a fad he’d taken up this afternoon.

It was only five days before Christmas, and in spite of the snow a number of people were out on the street, bundled up in coats and hats and mufflers, and a couple of boys and a dog were romping about with a sled. Occasionally a costermonger’s cart would rattle and jingle past, smoke pluming from the driver’s pipe and steam from the horse’s nostrils, and the jogger would have to move out of the way. When they came from behind he never seemed to hear the carts until they were almost on top of him, and he’d been shouted at so many times that when he heard another insistent call behind him he just moved aside without looking back.

But the cry was repeated. “Hey, Doyle!”

The short man glanced over his shoulder and then let himself slow to a walk and finally a halt, for a skinny, moustachioed street boy was waving at him and plodding through the street edge snowbank toward him.

“Doyle!” the boy called. “I found your William Ashbless! He had a poem published in this week’s Courier!”

The man waited until the boy caught up with him. “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong fellow,” he said. “My name’s not Doyle.”

The boy blinked and stepped back. “Oh, sorry, I—” He cocked his head. “Sure it is.”

“I’d know, wouldn’t I? It’s not.”

Jacky frowned dubiously at him for a moment, then said, “Excuse me if I’m wrong—but don’t you have a knife scar running down across your chest below your collar-bone?”

The man’s response struck Jacky as peculiar. “Wait a minute!” he gasped, then pressed his palms to his chest. “You know this man?”

“You mean… you?” asked Jacky uncertainly. “Yes. What, have you lost your memory?”

“Who is he?”

“He’s… you’re Brendan Doyle, a… one-time member of Copenhagen Jack’s beggar guild. Why, who do you think you are?”

The man watched Jacky carefully. “Adelbert Chinnie.”

“What, the prize fighter? But Brendan, he’s a lot taller, and younger… “

“Until two months ago I was taller and younger.” He cocked an eyebrow sternly. “Is this Doyle of yours by any chance a magician?” Jacky had been staring at the man’s head, and now said, unsteadily, “Look at your shoes.”

The man did, though he looked up again when he heard a gasp. The boy had gone white, and seemed for some reason to be on the verge of tears. “My God,” Jacky whispered, “you’re not bald anymore.”

It was the man’s turn to be mystified. “Uh… no… “

“Oh, Brendan…” A couple of tears spilled down Jacky’s cold-reddened cheeks. “You poor innocent son of a bitch,… your friend Ashbless arrived too late.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t,” Jacky sniffed, “talking to you.” She wiped her face with the end of her scarf. “I suppose you really are the Admirable Chinnie.”

“Yes, I am—or was. You find that… credible?”

“I’m afraid I do. Listen, you and I have got to get together and compare notes. Are you free for a drink?”

“As soon as I deliver this to my boss I’m due for a supper break. It’s just around the corner here, Malk’s Bakery in St. Martin’s Lane. Come on.”

Jacky trotted along beside Chinnie, who resumed his exercises. They turned left into St. Martin’s Lane and soon arrived at the bakery. Chinnie told Jacky to wait for him, then pushed his way through the gang of little boys that had been drawn by the warm plum pudding smell to cluster around the windows, and disappeared inside.

A few moments later he came out again. “There’s a public house down Kyler Lane here where I frequently stop for a pint. Nice people, though they think I’m barmy.”

“Ah, it’s the Admirable!” the aproned landlord said cheerfully when they pushed open the pub door and stepped into the relative dimness. “With his pal Gentleman Jackson, I perceive.”

“A couple of pints of porter, Samuel,” said Chinnie, leading Jacky to a booth on the rear. “I got drunk here once,” he muttered, “and was fool enough to tell them my secret.”

When the mugs of black beer had arrived and been tentatively sipped, Jacky asked, “When—and how—did the body switch occur?”

“When was a Sunday two months ago—the fourteenth of October. How…” He gulped more of the beer. “Well, I was fencing at Angelo’s, and just as I was about to do a particularly clever disengage, I—I suddenly found myself at the bottom of the Thames with no air in my lungs.”

Jacky smiled bitterly and nodded. “Yes, that’s how he works. Leaving you that way, I guess he wouldn’t have to chew the tongue to bits before he left.” She looked at the man with some respect. “You must be Chinnie—he’d never have left you in that position if it was at all likely you’d survive.”

Chinnie drained his mug and signalled for another. “I damn near didn’t. Sometimes, lying awake nights in my bed by the bakery oven, I wish I hadn’t.” He gave Jacky a hard stare. “Now you talk. Who’s this he you’re referring to? Your friend, this Doyle? Is he in my real body?”

“No, Doyle’s dead, I’m afraid. He obviously got the same treatment you did, but I can’t see him swimming up from the Thames bottom. No, it’s a… magician, I guess… known as Dog-Face Joe, who can switch bodies with people at will—and has to frequently because for some reason he starts growing thick fur all over himself as soon as he’s in a fresh body.”

“Yes!” said Chinnie excitedly, “right! I was all hairy when I climbed out of the river—even had whiskers between my fingers and toes. One of the first things I did was buy a razor and shave most of my body. Thank God it doesn’t seem to be growing back.”

“I guess it wouldn’t, after Joe’s moved on. I—”

“So this magician is walking around in my body. I’m going to find him.”

Jacky shook her head. “Not after two months, I’m afraid. I’ve been trying to find him for quite a while, and he never stays in any one body for more than a week or two.”

“What do you mean? What would he do with it?”

“The same thing he did to poor Doyle’s when it started to get furry—get into a position where death is only seconds away, then switch with someone else who’s maybe miles distant, and just walk off in the new body while the man he evicted finds himself dying before he even knows where he is. The cast-offs never live long, and I think you’re probably the only one to actually survive.”

The landlord brought Chinnie a fresh mug of porter. “Th-thank you,” Chinnie said, and when the man had returned to the bar he stared at Jacky out of Doyle’s eyes. “No,” he said firmly. “He wouldn’t just abandon that carcass of mine. Listen, I’ve never been vain, but that was one hell of a fine… v-vehicle, in his terms.” Chinnie was obviously maintaining his composure only with considerable effort. “Handsome, young, strong, agile… “

“—And hairy as an ape—”

“So he’ll have to shave then, won’t he?” shouted Chinnie loudly enough to make everyone else in the pub turn toward them. There were tolerant chuckles when they realized who it was.

“‘At’s right. Admirable,” called the host, “shave ‘im bald as an egg. But keep the racket down, eh?”

“And,” the blushing Chinnie went on more quietly, “there’s these places, aren’t there, where people go to have hair removed? What’s to say he’d not go to one of those?”

“I don’t think any of those places really—”

“Do you know? Have you been? You ought to, you know, that m-moustache looks like—” His voice had been rising again but abruptly he stopped, and rubbed his eyes. “I’m sorry, lad. There’s tensions involved.”

“I know.”

For a moment they just sat and drank beer.

“You say you’ve been looking for him?” said Chinnie. “Why?”

“He killed my fiancé,” Jacky said evenly.

“And what’ll you do if you find him?”

“Kill him.”

“What if he’s in my old body?”

“I’ll still kill him,” said Jacky. “Face it, man, you won’t get the body back.”

“I’m… not resigned to that. What if I find him, and tell you where he is—will you, in return, help me get him to … switchback?”

“I can’t imagine the circumstances.”

“Never mind imagining them. Will you?”

Jacky sighed. “If you can find him, and set it up—sure, if I can be certain of killing him afterward.”

“Very well.” Chinnie reached across the table and they shook hands. “What’s your name?”

“Jacky Snapp, at one-twelve Pye Street, near Westminster Cathedral. What name are you using?”

“Humphrey Bogart. It came to me in a dream I had, the first night I was in this body.”

Jacky shrugged. “It might be a name that meant something to Doyle.”

“Who cares? Anyway, you can reach me at Malk’s Bakery, St. Martin’s Lane. And if you find him, will you let me know?”

Jacky hesitated. Why should she take on a partner? Of course a strong companion could be useful, and Joe would certainly be in another body by now, so Chinnie’s concern for his ex-body’s welfare wouldn’t be a hindrance… and certainly nobody had a better claim to share in her revenge. “All right,” she said finally. “I’ll take a partner.”

“Good lad!” They shook hands again, then Chinnie glanced at the clock. “I’d better be moving on,” he said, getting to his feet and throwing some change on the table. “The yeast is working, and time and dough wait for no man.”

Jacky drained her beer and got up too.

They walked together out of the pub, though the landlord tapped Chinnie on the shoulder and, when he paused, said, “You’re right about what Jackson’s moustache looks like. If I you can’t get him to shave it off, I advise you to give him an exploding cigar.”

The laughter of the patrons followed them out into the street.

On Christmas Eve the taproom at the Guinea and Bun in Crutchedfriars was already fairly crowded by three-thirty in the afternoon. Aromatically steaming cups of hot punch were being handed, free, to each patron after he’d beaten the snow from his hat, hung his cloak or coat on one of the hooks along the south wall and hurried, shivering, over to the bar.

The bartender, an affable balding man called Bob Crank, had poured punch for the last couple of arrivals and now leaned back against the counter and took a sip from his mug of fortified coffee as he glanced around the low-ceilinged room. The crowd seemed to be cheery—as well they ought to be on Christmas Eve—and the logs in the fireplace were set up for a good draft, and wouldn’t need attention for an hour or so. Crank knew nearly everyone in the room, and the only patron he might have felt even slightly doubtful of was the old man sitting alone at the table nearest to the fireplace—a crazy-eyed smirking old fellow who, despite the warmth of his position, had his shirt buttoned up to the neck and was holding his glass with gloved hands.

With a bang and a squeak the front door opened, letting a swirl of snow into the entry hall. Crank had poured the cup of punch before looking up, and was holding it out before he recognized the newcomer. “Doug!” he exclaimed when the burly, gray-haired man stepped up to the bar. “Cold out there, is it? Let me,” he said, lowering his voice and the cup, “put a bit of flying buttress in that, eh?” He uncorked a brandy bottle and, down behind the bar, topped up the cup. “Thankee, Crankie.”

They both laughed, and Crank stopped laughing first. “Your mates are yonder,” he said, nodding toward the fire. “Ah, so they are.” Doug Maturo drained the punch cup and clinked it down on the bar. “Send over a brandy, will you, Crank?”

“Right.”

Maturo clumped across to the indicated table and sat down, acknowledging with a grin and a wave the drunken greetings of his friends.

“You bums,” he said, helping himself to a stray mug of beer until his brandy would arrive. “Who’s minding the shop?”

“The shop can look after itself, Mr. Doug,” mumbled one of the men at the table. “Nobody gonna want hub bosses on Christmas Eve.”

“Damn right,” agreed another. “Tomorrow too, by God. Here’s to Christmas’”

They all raised their glasses, but paused when the old man at the next table said, distinctly, “Christmas is for idiots.”

Maturo turned around and stared at him, noting with one contemptuously raised eyebrow the effeminate gloves. Crank arrived just then with his brandy, though, so he shrugged and turned back to his companions. He muttered something that set them all laughing, then took a hearty swig of the brandy as the momentary tension relaxed.

“A celebration,” the old man went on loudly, “of all that’s weakest and most unrealistic in the damned western culture. Show me a man that celebrates Christmas and I’ll show you a dewy-eyed bugger that wishes he could still be tucked in every night by his mum.”

“Write it all down, sign it ‘Iconoclast’ and send it to the Times, mate,” advised Maturo over his shoulder. “And right now stop up your jabbering mouth with drink, before someone stops it less pleasantly.”

The old man made an obscene suggestion as to how Maturo would do that.

“I don’t need this today,” Maturo sighed, pushing back his chair and standing up. He walked over to the old man and seized him by the shirt-front. “Listen to me, you unpleasant old creature. There’s plenty of taverns right nearby that’ll provide you with the fight you’re looking for, so why don’t you tote your wretched old bones thither, eh?”

The old man had started to stand up, but lost his footing and fell back into his chair. His shirt tore, and a button plunked into the cup of punch in front of him.

“Now I suppose you’ll want me to pay for your shirt,” said Maturo exasperatedly. “Well you can—” Suddenly he stopped talking and peered at the old man’s exposed chest.

“Holy God, what kind of—” The old man tore loose from Maturo’s momentarily relaxed grip and ran for the door.

“Stop him!” roared Maturo, with such urgency that Crank forgot his never interfere rule and hurled a big jar of pickled pig’s feet into the old man’s path. It burst with a loud pop and splash, and the old man lost his footing on the wet floor, fell heavily on his hip and slid rolling into a bar stool, which toppled over. Maturo was on him in an instant, and dragged the gasping old fellow to his feet. “What did he do, Doug?” asked Crank worriedly. Maturo twisted one of the old man’s arms up and forced it down on the bar. “Open your fist, you bastard,” he hissed. The fist stayed clenched for a few moments, but sprang open when Maturo began to exert pressure against the locked elbow.

“Jesus, his hand’s empty, Doug!” exclaimed Crank with some agitation. “Here we’ve roughed him up and he didn’t take noth—”

“Pull off his glove.”

“Damn it, man, we’ve done enough to—”

“Pull off his glove.”

Rolling his eyes unhappily, Crank pinched the fabric at the ends of the thumb and middle finger and jerked the glove off.

The pale, wrinkled hand was completely covered with coarse whiskers.

“It’s Dog-Face Joe,” Maturo pronounced.

“What?” wailed the flustered Crank. “The werewolf from the kid stories?”

“He’s not a werewolf. He’s the uncanniest murderer that ever walked this city’s streets. Ask Brock over in Kenyon Court what became of his boy Kenny. Or ask Mrs. Zimmerman—”

“He’s the one that did in my brother,” said a young man who quickly stood up from a corner table. “Frank was a priest, and ran off from the rectory one day, and didn’t recognize me when I found him, and laughed when I told him who I was. But I followed him to where he lived, and a week later a thing they said was an ape leaped from the roof of the place. The busted-up corpse in the street was all covered with fur, but I looked in its mouth and saw the tooth I chipped when Frankie and me was playing sword fights when we was kids.”

The captive at the bar laughed. “I remember him. I didn’t have too bad a time in his body—though I fear I made a sad shambles of his vow of celibacy.”

The young man sprang forward with an inarticulate cry and a raised fist, but Maturo shouldered him back. “What are you going to do, hit him?” Maturo asked. “Justice has got to be done.”

“Aye, fetch the police!” someone shouted.

“That’s no good either,” said Maturo. “By the time he’d even come up for trial he’d be long gone, leaving some innocent poor devil in this carcass.” He stared at the young man, then looked around at everyone else. “He’s got to be executed,” he said carefully. “Now.”

Dog-Face Joe began struggling wildly, and at the same moment a number of people leaped to their feet, loudly protesting that they wouldn’t be party to a murder. Crank grabbed Maturo’s sleeve and said, “Not in here, Doug. No way in here.”

“No,” Maturo agreed. “But who’s with me?”

“John Carroll is,” said the young man, stepping forward again.

“Me too,” spoke up a hefty, middle-aged matron. “They pulled one o’ them apes out of the river at Gravesend, and it was wearin’ my Billy’s ring on a finger so furry that it couldn’t be pulled off—and couldn’t have been pulled on, either, after the fur was growed.”

One by one three more people walked over and stood beside John Carroll and the woman.

“Good,” Maturo said. He turned toward the table he’d leaped up from. “Any of you lads?”

His suddenly sobered friends all shook their heads. “We’re none of us the sort to shrink from a scrape, Doug,” said one pleadingly, ”’but helping in a cold-blooded murder… we’ve got families … “

“Sure.” He looked away from them. “Leave, all of you that are leaving. And fetch a constable if you feel you must—but first consider what sort of thing you’d be freeing. Remember the stories this man and woman just told you, and call to mind the stories I’m sure you’ve heard already.”

Most of the people in the room scrambled for the door, though two more men hung back to join Maturo’s group. “Just realized,” said one of them, “I was going to leave clean-handed, though damn glad it was being done. That’s no way to go.”

Maturo clapped a hand over Dog-Face Joe’s mouth, then said casually to Crank, “You know, Crankie, I believe I’ve changed my mind. I’ll just take him to the police after all. You understand? The last thing you heard me say was that I was going to take him, alive, to the authorities.”

“Got it,” said the pale-faced Crank, pouring himself a liberal slug of neat brandy. “Thanks, Doug.”

Maturo, assisted by his companions, led the struggling figure toward the back door.

“Uh, Doug?” said Crank in a strained voice. “That’s the… back door you’re leaving by?”

“We’re going to go over the fence.”

The nine vigilantes half-dragged, half-marched their captive outside into the pub’s small back lot, and Maturo glanced around at the mounded snow, which in the far corner had nearly buried a derelict beer wagon. A section of the yard wall had been knocked down, doubtless due to the mishandling of some craneful of ironwork by an employee of the forge whose yard adjoined the pub lot. There was no one visible in the forge yard, and the shadow of the unattended crane fell across the pub’s back door.

“You,” said Maturo, pointing at one of the men with him, “see if there’s a length of rope anywhere about that old wagon there. And—where’s John Carroll? Ah, there you are—do you think you can climb that crane?”

“If somebody will lend me some gloves I can.”

Dog-Face Joe’s other glove was wrenched off and the pair was tossed to him, and a moment later he was scrambling over the tumbled and snow-dusted masonry of the gap in the wall.

“There’s a rope here,” called the man Maturo had sent over to the wagon, “tied around the yoke. It’s frozen on, but I think I can get it loose.”

“When you do, meet us in the forge yard,” Maturo called. To the woman he remarked, “It looks like we may be able to do this properly, and not just hold his head in a horse trough.”

In a few minutes the nine people were grouped in a half-circle around a four-foot-tall nail keg on top of which Dog-Face Joe, his head held high, stood on tiptoe, for the rope had proven to be a few inches short, and if he let his heels rest on the barrel top the slip-knot around his neck would be uncomfortably tight.

“If you let me down,” Joe said hoarsely, peering down at them over the swell of his cheekbones, “I’ll make you all rich. I’ve kept money from each of my hosts! It’s a fortune, and I’ll let you people have it all!” He twitched his scarf-bound wrists.

“You said that before,” Maturo told him. “And we said no before. Say some prayers, Joe, you’re on your way out.” Maturo was clearly uneasy about the situation, and he kept squinting up at their captive suspiciously.

“I don’t need prayers,” said Joe. “My soul’s in good hands.” His confident words must have been a bluff, though, for an instant later he gave a despairing wail and shrieked, “Wait a minute! I’m D—”

The tightening halter choked off any further speech then, for Maturo had kicked the barrel out from under him with such force that it rolled away across the snow-covered pavement as the old man rocked and swung on the end of the suddenly taut rope, his eyes staring with intense supplication out of the darkening face and his mouth forming words that he had no breath to vocalize.

Maturo, who seemed to have dismissed his misgivings now that the deed was done, waited with a faint smile until the grisly pendulum had rotated around to face away from the executioners, toward the yard and the low sun and the still-rolling barrel, and then he leaped onto the shoulders of the dangling man as though to get a piggyback ride.

The snap of the breaking neck was loud in the chilly stillness, and John Carroll turned away and vomited into the snow.

Doug Maturo entered the dingy office building over whose door could still faintly be seen painted-out letters that spelled DEPILATORY PARLOR, locked the door behind him and walked across the floor through the slanting bars of gray light that came in around the edges of the shutters, past the dusty counter to the dark hallway and the stairs. Halfway up the stairs he became aware of voices on the floor above, and he trod very softly the rest of the way up.

“… In Jermyn Street near St. James Square,” Dundee was saying. “The rent they’re asking is exorbitant, but as you remarked the other day, I do need a better address.”

“Honestly you do, Jake,” replied a young woman’s contralto voice. “And I like the notion of you worrying about rent! What did you say you make every day?”

“Right now an average of nine hundred pounds, but it’s an upward geometrical progression—the more I’ve got, the more I get. By the end of 1811 there’ll be no way to calculate it—the time it would take to do all the math would make the figures hopelessly obsolete before you got them.”

“What a wizard it is I’m marrying!” the girl exclaimed with a smile in her voice. There was some cooing and giggling, and then she added teasingly, “Not very affectionate, though.”

Dundee’s laugh sounded, to the man smirking in the dark hall at any rate, forced, and there was no conviction in his voice when he said, “There’ll be plenty of that when we’re married, Claire. We’d be—betraying the trust your father has in us if we were to … misbehave now, here.”

The man in the hall stepped quietly back to the stairs, tramped a number of times with increasing force on the top step, then clumped up to Dundee’s door and knocked on it.

“Uh… yes?” said Dundee. “Who is it?”

The man opened the door and walked in, nodded to Dundee and smiled broadly at the slim blonde girl. “It’s Sizzlin’ Stan the Immortal Man,” he said cheerfully.

Dundee stared bleakly at the tall, burly intruder. He’d never seen this ruddy face before, with its flinty eyes and wiry gray hair, but he knew who it was. “Oh—hello,” he said. “I see it all… went well.”

“Aye, no problem atall atall—matter of fact, I’ve been doing sprints and bounds on the way here, and I’ve decided this one has it points—I think I’ll stay here a while, your electro-hair-killer devices permitting. And who is this lovely creetur?”

He made a flailing, theatrical bow.

“Uh, Joe,” said Dundee, standing up from the couch, “this is Claire Peabody, my fiancée. Claire, this is… Joe, a business associate.”

Joe bared his even white teeth in a grin. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Claire.”

Claire frowned uneasily, not pleased by the undivided attention this man was giving her. “Pleased to meet you, Joe,” she said. Suddenly aware that he was staring at her bosom, she frowned more deeply and threw a pleading glance at Dundee.

“Joe,” the young man said, “perhaps you could—”

“Isn’t that nice,” Joe interrupted, smiling more broadly than ever, “we’re both… pleased.”

“Joe,” repeated Dundee, “perhaps you could wait in your room. I’ll speak with you there presently.”

“Sure, Jake,” said Joe, turning toward the door. He paused. “Merry Christmas, Miss Claire.” There was no reply, and he chuckled almost noiselessly as he closed the door.

Jacky paid her penny at the bar and joined the queue, and after a few minutes, during which she moved one step at a time closer to the back door and the man outside who was periodically shouting, “All right, you’ve seen it, give someone else a chance,” it was her turn to go through the door and join the crowd in the back lot. The snow was all trampled to slushy mud.

Jacky couldn’t see anything but the broad back of the man in front of her, but the line was moving, and before long she filed with everyone else through a ragged gap in the brick wall into a larger, paved yard. She could see the crane and the rope now. On the next street over someone was singing snatches of Christmas carols in a drunken baritone.

So what do I do now? she wondered. Go home? Back to the little house in Romford, and school, and eventually some earnest, promising young bank clerk for a husband? Yeah, I suppose so. What else? The thing you came to London to do has been done, though by someone else. Is that what’s got you feeling so… useless and unmoored and—yes, face it—scared? Yesterday you had a purpose, a reason for living this way, and today you don’t. You’ve got no reason to be Jacky Snapp anymore, but you’re not quite Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy anymore, either. What’s to become of you, girl?

She rounded the last loop of the line, and got at last a clear view of the scene. A rope had been tied to the crane boom, and from the end of it swung in the chilly breeze a sack-headed dummy with patches of moth-eaten fur sewn onto the face, hands and feet.

“Yes, friends,” said the barker in a hushed voice, “this is where the dreaded man-wolf Dog-Face Joe was brought to justice at last. The effigy you see before you was carefully constructed so as to let you all see exactly the scene the police found here last night.”

“The way I heard it,” quietly commented the man in front of Jacky to his companion, “he simply had whiskers all over him, like a two-day beard.”

“Indeed, my lord?” replied the other man politely.

The line shuffled past the display, which had shifted around to face away from them, exposing a wide, straw-leaking rip in the seat of the trousers. Several people laughed, and Jacky heard one whispered speculation on the circumstances of Dog-Face Joe’s capture.

Jacky felt a hysteria kindling deep inside herself. Are you aware of this, Colin? she thought. Can you see this… country fair side-show exhibit? You’re avenged at last. Isn’t that wonderful? And isn’t it wonderful of all these people to hang this wonderful memento of the fact? How grand and noble and satisfying it all is.

She was sobbing before she knew it was coming, and the heavy-set man in front of her took her elbow and led her out of the line to the exit point, a gate leading to the lane that the Guinea and Bun fronted on.

Once they were on the pavement outside, he said, “Parker—my flask.”

“Yes, my lord,” said the man who had docilely followed them out. He produced a pewter flask from under his coat, unscrewed the top and handed it to him.

“Here you go, lad,” said the portly man. “Drink up. Nothing in that silly show is worth tears on such a beautiful Christmas morning.”

“Thank you,” said Jacky, sniffing and wiping her nose on her sleeve after handing the flask back. “I believe you’re right. I don’t suppose anything is ever worth tears. Thank you again.”

She touched her cap, then shoved her hands in her pockets and strode away down the street at a sturdy pace, for it was a long walk back to Pye Street.

CHAPTER 13

More than seven miles distant across the noon-bright Nile Valley the pyramids stood sharply clear on the horizon, and, seeming to be only a little closer, though just two miles away from the Citadel wall on which the watcher stood, the green-bordered Nile stretched like a polished steel band from north to south. A few wavering pencil strokes of smoke stood up from what he knew was El Roda island, though it was not distinguishable as a separate land mass from this distance, and he could see individual palm trees and minarets and windows of buildings in the old quarter of Cairo on the hither bank. Some of our guests, he thought, the Bahrites, are probably coming through those streets right now. And a splendid parade it no doubt is, too—all the little boys will have stopped work to watch, and the dogs will be barking, and all the mashrebeeyeh lattices of the second-floor harems are sure to be glittering with kohl-darkened eyes peering down at the haughty war lords riding past below. Soon the bejewelled procession will be clear of the old district and will be visible riding this way over the old stone road that transects the mile of desert between old Cairo and the Citadel.

Doctor Romanelli shivered slightly in spite of the heat and turned to the north, squinting at the bristling, tangled maze of whitewashed walls and brightly colored enamelled domes that was the new section of the city, which had grown up like lush riverside vegetation around the highway, called the Mustee, that connected the Citadel with the ancient Harbor of Boolak. The bulk of this afternoon’s guests would be riding even now through the crowded Mustee.

He thought he caught a distant wink of glare, as of the sun reflecting on a lance head or polished helmet. Two hundred years ago, he thought, there was a purpose for the army of ex-slaves called the Mamelukes; but in today’s Egypt they’re an embarrassment that’s strangling the country, imposing a crushing and savagely enforced tax on anyone who seems to have money, and strong enough in force of arms to acknowledge no law but their own tastes. We couldn’t let them retain that kind of power, especially now that Mohammed Ali is in power and the eyes of the world are watching us, to gauge their own actions by what we do. Independence is within our reach again for the first time in thousands of years, and we can’t have it imperilled by a group of local brigands. How fortunate that Ali looks to the Master—through me—as his main advisor!

And if I return to England, he thought as he turned and watched the sweating slaves loading the signal cannon, it will be to disassemble the history of that nation, so that today—a new today—they’ll be nothing, probably a possession of France, which we’ll also impede. All we’ve got to do is rediscover the knowledge that died with the Romany ka—and we will before long, either through the completion of our calculations or, still conceivably, the wringing of some vital clue from that wretched ka we managed to draw of Brendan, Doyle before he got away from us.

That is a very long shot, though, he thought sourly, remembering last night’s interrogation as he walked down the stone steps to the narrow, sun-baked street outside the el-Azab gate.

The ka had been dragged out of its basement cell for the first time in at least a month, and for half an hour hadn’t even seemed to hear the questions the Master was putting to it, but just sat on the balcony chewing the end of its filthy beard and springing with little cries away from, evidently, imaginary insects. Finally it had spoken, though not in reply to any question. “I keep trying to stop them,” it had muttered, “from getting on the bike, you know? But it’s always too late, and they’re on the freeway before I can catch them, and I pull over ‘cause I don’t want to see it… But I hear it… the clank of the fall, and the grinding slide… and the smash of the helmet exploding against the pillar… “

“How did you exit the time stream?” the Master asked, for the fourth time.

“Jacky pulled me out,” the ka replied. “He threw a net over the little men and then pulled me into his canoe… “

“No, the time stream. How did you exit it?”

“It’s all one river, and the mile posts are calendar pages. If your keels be nimble and light, you may get there by candle light. The river is iced-over, you see—weren’t you listening when Darrow explained it?—but there’s a boat, with faces painted on the wheels, that can sail over the ice—the boat can come alive, and kill you… a black boat, blacker than the darkness… “

The Master had fallen into a fit of incoherent rage at this point, and had had to speak through one of the wax ushabti figures in the pen on the bottom of the sphere. “Take it away,” croaked the voice, “and stop the delivery of food to its cell—we don’t need it.”

Yes, a long shot, certainly—but still a possibility; after all, there were a couple of interesting hints of pattern in its ravings.

In any case, Romanelli reflected as he opened a door that quite soon would be securely locked, we may not even need the Anubis Gates. There will be further bold political strokes like the one that will occur this afternoon, and with as strong a leader as Mohammed Ali taking the Master’s council, we might be able to re-establish Egypt even without being able to rewrite history. The question of when to arrange a secret assassination and substitution by a docile ka can be deferred for at least several years.

Before stepping into the hall he glanced up and down the narrow, empty street between the high walls. Quiet right now, he thought.

The Mustee, at an hour past noon, was at its most crowded, with heavily laden camels pressing stolidly through the throng, and the shouts of the veiled women selling oranges rising in jarring cacophony over the song of the rat catcher—on whose broad-brimmed hat six trained examples of his prey, each wearing a little hat of its own, formed a pyramid—and the yells of the fish and milk vendors and the chanted prayers of the beggars. But the mob parted hastily before the relentless hooves of the procession riding down the center of the street at a relaxed but indomitable walk. In hopes of a tip at the end of the ride, a street boy had taken it upon himself to serve as the—in this case unnecessary—sais, or runner-ahead;

“Riglak!” he would warn some Nubian merchant, whose foot had been snatched out of the way even before the boy called, and “Uxrug!” to two ladies from a harem who had already crowded up against a wall and were shrilly and indignantly protesting this usurpation of the street.

But everyone was as eager to see the parade as to get out of its way, and the British elfendis turned their palm-branch chairs around on the sidewalk in front of the Zawiyah Cafe to keep an uneasy eye on the procession as they took somewhat deeper sips of their drinks, for this was a formal procession of the Mameluke Beys in all their finery. The hot sun glinted on the precious stones that studded their sword hilts and pistol butts, and their colorful robes and feathered turbans and helmets made the rest of the street seem drab by comparison; but in spite of the grandeur of the jewelled weapons and the rich cloths and the gorgeously caparisoned Arabian horses, the most striking aspect of the parade was the lean, hawk-nosed brown faces and the narrowed eyes that remained haughtily above the crowd.

Not least impressive of the faces was the helmeted, black-bearded one that belonged to an impostor; and though many of the people who scurried out of the way or peered down from windows knew the cobbler Eshvlis, whose place of business was a niche in the outside wall of a mosque two blocks away, none of them recognized him in the gold-chased armor of the Mameluke Bey Ameen.

And none of them knew that even in his daily routine of repairing shoes Eshvlis was an impostor—that, before choosing that name and dying his hair and beard black, he had been called Brendan Doyle.

Over the past few months Doyle had got used to being Eshvlis, but he was far from confident in this role he’d assumed today, and he averted his face whenever he noticed one of his patrons in the crowd. The impersonation that he’d agreed to so cheerfully this morning was beginning to make him nervous—was it, he wondered, a crime to attend the Pasha’s banquet by arriving disguised as one of the invited guests? Probably. If his friend Ameen hadn’t been counting on the success of the deception, Doyle would have spurred the borrowed horse out of the parade, divested himself of the sword, daggers and fine clothes, and sneaked back to his cobbler’s niche to enjoy the show from a comfortable distance.

He glanced at his niche as they rode past it, and, although he had booked passage out of the country on a ship that would weigh anchor tomorrow, he was surprised and angry to see another cobbler perched there in a nest of dangling shoes. Absent one morning, he thought bitterly, and the competition moves in like rats.

Up ahead was the square where he’d first encountered Ameen. Doyle smiled grimly, remembering that hot October morning, which had begun to go wrong when Hassan Bey’s shoe buckle broke off during a meeting with the British governor.

The humiliating misfortune had caused the immediate termination of the interview, and Hassan and his brothers-in-law Ameen and Hathi had left the Citadel and ridden back toward their boat at Boolak, but in this square by the Mustee there had occurred a further disaster: the burly beggar known as Eshvlis, whose large, wood-framed placard proclaimed him a deaf-mute, was a little slow in scrambling to his feet and getting out of the Mamelukes’ way, and a projecting nail on his placard caught in a fold of Hassan’s embroidered robe and tore a wide rent in it, exposing the outraged Mameluke’s thigh.

Hassan had roared a blasphemous curse, reached around and snatched the ivory inlaid hilt of his sword, and in one lightning motion drew the yard of gleaming steel and whirled it in a torso-splitting arc at the beggar.

But quick as a mongoose Doyle had dropped to all fours in the dust, so that though the blade shattered his begging sign, it flashed harmlessly over him, missing the top of his head by several inches—and before the surprised Mameluke could raise the sword again, Doyle sprang up at him, seized the grip of one of the horseman’s daggers and wrenched it free, and with it parried the weaker return stroke of the great sword.

Hathi had moved then, with a sort of indolent swiftness, reining his horse back and lifting the barrel of his sheathed rifle to hip level; and even as Ameen’s eyes widened with the realization of what Hathi was about to do, and he rode forward with a shout, Hathi pulled the trigger.

With a bang that echoed around the square the rifle had recoiled out of the sheath; Hathi’s battle-trained horse hadn’t jumped, but shook its head and flapped its lips in the sudden burst of smoke. Doyle finished a backward somersault face down on the paving stones, and a glistening red hole torn in the back of his robe quickly disappeared as flowing blood soaked the fabric.

“You villains!” Ameen had shouted then. “He was a beggar.” His voice conveyed the point that a beggar was not only no sword-worthy opponent but, in the Moslem view of things, an actual representative of Allah, with the job of demanding the alms every true believer was bound by duty to give.

The street took a jog to the left now, and beyond the shadowed shoulder of; a building Doyle could see, still a mile away, the minarets and sheer stone walls of the Citadel seeming to loom halfway to the sky on the top of the precipitous Mukattam Hill, and though the occasion that brought the Mamelukes to the fortress was nominally social—the appointment of Mohammed Ali’s son as a pashalik—the forbidding aspect of the tall edifice made Doyle glad that he and his companions were so well armed.

Ameen had assured him this morning that the mass arrest he expected, and was secretly fleeing to evade, would not take place at this banquet. “Relax, Eshvlis,” he had told Doyle as he drew the straps tight on the last of his trunks and peered out the window at the baggage-laden camels on the street below, “Ali is not insane. Though he will—and soon, I believe—curtail the unreasonable power of the Mamelukes, he’d never dare try to arrest all four hundred and eighty of the Beys as a lot, and while they’re armed. I think the real purpose of this banquet is to count his foes, make sure they’re all in the city, so that sometime tonight, before dawn, he can drag them drunk and unarmed out of their beds on some charge or other. Not that we don’t deserve exactly such treatment, as you with your bullet scar would be, if you weren’t so polite, the first to aver. But I am off for Syria this afternoon, and you are returning to your Eshvlis identity right after the banquet and leaving Cairo tomorrow morning, and so you and I will escape the net.”

Ameen had made it sound perfectly safe… And Doyle owed him his life, for it had been Ameen who had ordered Doyle’s bleeding body to be picked up and taken to the Moristan of Ka’aloon for medical attention, and two months later got him well started in the cobbling trade by demanding that Hassan pay him a hundred gold pieces for the repair of the broken shoe buckle. The torn robe had never been alluded to, and Hassan probably considered it paid for—by the two holes, entry and exit, in the cobbler’s hide.

Doyle frowned, and for just a moment wondered why none of these events were even hinted at in the Bailey biography of Ashbless. After all, they were just the sort of thing that would make a poet’s biography interesting: a brief career as a beggar, shot through the side by a Mameluke warlord, attending a royal banquet in disguise—and then he smiled, for of course he couldn’t tell Bailey these things, because Doyle was going to read the biography some day. And would you, he asked himself, have gone anywhere near that square if you’d known you’d be shot there that day?

Well, at least I know that Ashbless does leave Egypt on the Fowler, bound for England, tomorrow morning, so even though I never got around to researching Cairo in 1811, there can’t be too many more surprises I’ll neglect to tell Bailey about. I guess I won’t, for example, be recaptured by Romanelli, who has now, I hear, got himself set up as Mohammed Ali’s personal physician. I don’t think he’d recognize me now anyway, with the black dyed hair, the deep tan and all the new furrows and lines in my face that are the legacy of a long convalescence without anesthesia. At least this body’s still got both ears.

At the parade ground in front of the Citadel the ranks of mainland Mamelukes were joined by the Bahrite Beys, and for fifteen hot minutes—during which Eshvlis sweated into the appallingly expensive borrowed robe and let Ameen’s horse follow Hathi’s, who rode just ahead of him—all but one of the four hundred and eighty Mameluke Beys, the tribe of one-time slaves that had risen to absolute control of the country, and had in recent years fallen only a little from that zenith, paraded in colorful, barbaric splendor under the empty blue sky of Egypt.

Ameen’s agile and powerful mare, Melboos, pranced proudly along, tossing her head sometimes, and in general making her rider seem to be what he was not, a competent horseman. She was a fine animal, and had been Ameen’s proudest possession, but the impersonation had demanded that he leave her behind.

It suddenly occurred to Doyle that he’d miss Ameen, who’d been the only one in Cairo who knew Eshvlis was not really a deaf-mute. Schooled in Vienna, the young Bey had learned other goals and perspectives than the traditional war and glory ones of the Mamelukes, and through many long afternoons Ameen had stood beside the cobbler’s niche and talked to him in English about history and politics and religion—though they’d always been careful to cease speaking if a customer crowded close enough to hear their low-pitched conversation, for Ameen had heard that the Pasha was offering a reward for any information about a big, English-speaking fugitive.

Now several ranks of the Pasha’s Albanian mercenaries rode up, bristling with swords and maces and pistols, and rifles taller than themselves, and looking, to Eshvlis at least, ridiculous in their pleated white skirts and extra-tall turbans.

The Albanians rode down a set of steps into a narrow street leading up the steep slope to the Citadel, and the ranks of the Mamelukes followed them into it as the Bab-el-Azab gate at the far end of the sunken street slowly swung open.

In spite of the fact that they were now out of sight of the spectators, the Mamelukes maintained their stately pace, though the Albanians galloped rowdily ahead toward the open gate.

Doyle stared curiously around at the twenty-foot-deep ascending trench through which they were marching; it was certainly part of the Citadel’s fortifications, for there were only a few stout doors in the solid stone walls on either side, and the windows, though many, were vertical slits just wide enough to poke a gun barrel through.

Now fifty yards ahead, the galloping Albanian mercenaries had reached the Bab-el-Azab gate… and Doyle’s eyes widened in surprise to see, when the last of them was inside the Citadel, the gate begin to close. He hunched around in the saddle to look behind, and saw that the distant entrance to the walled street was blocked by more of the mercenaries. Even as he watched, the front row of them dropped to their knees and every one of them raised a long rifle and sighted along the barrel.

As he took a breath to yell an alarm a cannon boomed and spurted a stain of gray smoke into the blue sky, and an instant later the street erupted with deafening and continuous gunfire from in front and behind and from every slit window, and the air chirped and twanged with the whipping flight of dozens of bullets every second, and dust and stone chips burst from the walls as churning smoke burned in eyes and throats and obscured any view of the foe.

The ranks of Mamelukes broke apart like a row of Japanese lanterns struck by fire hoses. Most of the Beys were slammed off their horses in the first couple of seconds, although even the ones who managed to draw their weapons had no visible enemy to attack except the clot of Albanians at the far end of the street. But the several Mamelukes—including, Doyle dazedly noticed, Hassan—who tried to charge at them were punched down by the ceaseless spray of lead before they’d taken five paces.

Though he’d felt several sharp tugs at his robe, after four whole seconds Doyle wasn’t hit yet, and to judge by the way Melboos sprang forward over a pile of the slain when a wall exploded by her flank, neither was she. Doyle’s cry of “God damn it, over the wall, horse!” was lost in the tumult, but the horse bounded ahead, scrambling and leaping over the heaped corpses that twitched as bullets thudded into them. A spent ricochet struck Doyle a solid knock above his left ear, and while he reeled in the lunging saddle three shots hit him almost simultaneously—one nicked his right arm bicep, one plowed a long furrow down his left thigh, and the third tore shallowly across his belly, helping him hang on by making him jack-knife forward onto the horse’s neck—and then Melboos was climbing the highest hill of corpses, at what he been the front of the procession, and from the top of it she vaulted up toward the rim of the wall, still an unmerciful eight feet above.

Doyle felt the catapulting power of her jump, and through smoke-stung eyes saw the wall rim loom closer—then he could see over it in the weightless moment of apogee. In an instant, he knew, gravity would tumble them back down into the raking crossfire—but the horse got her fore hooves onto the rim agile as a cat, replaced them with her hind hooves, and a moment later they were falling, all right, but outside the wall.

The horse fell head-first and Doyle rolled helplessly backward after having got a glimpse of a moat fifty feet below, and then he was plummeting unsupported downward, blinking in horror at the moat rushing up at him with shocking velocity.

The duration of the fall was torture, and twice on the way down Doyle emptied his lungs and sucked in a fresh breath to hold, though the eventual impact punched all the air out of him anyway, and banged his hands and knees against the stones at the bottom of the moat. As he rebounded, his feet swung back under him and he forced his legs to kick, propelling him back up through twenty-five feet of thickly swirling bubbles.

He rolled to the surface like something loosened from the bottom of a pot of boiling water, and then began thrashing weakly toward the high coping, where a man obviously interrupted in the process of urinating into the moat gaped at him for a moment and then rearranged his robes and fled. “Filthy damn slob!” Doyle sobbed after him. As soon as the fugitive cobbler had dragged his trembling and bleeding body out of the now dirtier than ever moat, he pulled off Ameen’s robes and weapons and tossed them—except for the sword, which he wrapped up in the unrolled turban and hung onto—in all directions, confident that the street beggars would make off with them. He found a nearby patch of sun-baked, powdery dirt and, naked except for his loincloth, rolled in it until he was dry—though far from clean. The bundled sword, he thought, would pass for a crutch inherited from a diseased ancestor.

“Melboos!” exclaimed a couple of shopkeepers who’d observed the whole performance, and until Doyle remembered that the word meant “clothed in divinity,” frenzied to madness by the perception of Allah, he thought they somehow knew the name of the horse, which had clambered out of the moat and was now being eyed avariciously by several members of the ragharin, the Egyptian gypsies. “Yes, take her!” Doyle croaked. “Avo, chals!” Though the day was hot, he shivered as he ran across the road and down a narrow lane, moving through alternate brightness and shade as he passed beneath the occasional wide cloths strung from building to building. It was only after he sat down in a recessed doorway and lowered his face into his hands that he realized he’d been weeping ever since he crawled out of the moat. He lifted his head and tried to stop it.

Laid like multiple exposures over the narrow, tan-colored street scene in front of him were images of the dozen seconds in the street of the Bab-el-Azab; now they demanded, almost audibly, his attention. He saw for the first time—his brain having only stored it unregarded before—the spray of blood and dust and bits of cloth exploding away from a horse and rider who were jigging violently in a particularly intense moment of the crossfire, both of them dead but kept upright and animate by the ceaseless upward-slanting blasts from either side… one quick glimpse of a face behind one of the gun barrels poking out of the wall, a face calmly intent on doing a moderately difficult job well… one Mameluke Bey, blinded and dying from a cross shot that had punched in one temple and out the other, standing on the pavement and swinging furious sword strokes at a blank section of wall during the few seconds between his horse’s death and his own …

Doyle wailed and pressed his forehead against the gritty stone of the doorway, provoking another exclamation of “Melboos?” from a boy carrying a water bag down the lane.

Doyle couldn’t hear very much over the ringing in his ears, but he saw the boy lope out of the street and flatten himself against the far wall, and a moment later a dozen white-skirted Albanian mercenaries rode down the lane, scrutinizing every person; and each of the twelve stared hard at the prodigiously dirty old beggar with awful mud-caked sores on his arm and leg and belly, sobbing and hugging a stick in a doorway. A couple of the mercenaries laughed, and one threw a coin at the wretch, but none of them stopped.

When they’d ridden around the next corner, Doyle picked up the coin, stood up, and waved to the water boy, who trotted over and let him have a drink from the neck of the goat-skin. Though warm and fetid, the water rinsed the taste of gunpowder out of his head, and made the horrid new memories recede enough that he could think of something else.

Well, Ameen, he thought dizzily, you were right on two counts—Ali sure enough did intend to sharply curtail the inordinate power of the Mamelukes, and he sure enough didn’t attempt to arrest four hundred and eighty fully armed Mameluke Beys—but you were wrong in thinking it was therefore safe to go to the banquet.

He was still shivering and sweating, and his arm was bleeding as freely as ever. I need clothes and medical attention, he thought—and maybe just a bit of revenge. There was a Mameluke place down by the Nile, the summer house of Mustapha Bey, where Mustapha’s sons and wives would be idling the day away. Doyle set off in that direction. He had some news and a proposal for them.

Though the sun had just set behind the Mukattam Hills, and just above the eastern horizon the moon stood out on the deep blue velvet of the sky like the print of an ash-dusted penny, the tops of the pyramids across the valley still shone with the ruddy gold of direct sunlight, and the colored lanterns on the ungainly wagon leaving the old quarter of the city were, for the next hour or so at least, more decorative than functional.

The gay ribbons and bells with which the wagon was lavishly adorned struck an incongruous note to the expressions of the six men who rode on it—their tight-lipped faces were set in hard lines of weariness, grief and, more than anything else, rage too deep to be vented by any speech or gestures. And in spite of its festive appearance, a sharp-eyed palace guard would have stopped them, for the rear wheels, which were most heavily disguised with woven garlands, cut a surprisingly deep pair of tracks in the dust, while the front wheels almost skated over it, and the wide carpet that flared out from the wagon’s stern and trailed on the ground seemed to be concealing something—but no guard would see it, for the six horses harnessed to it turned right on the old road to the Karafeh, the necropolis, rather than bearing left on the new one that ran to the Citadel.

“Yeminak,” said the man who rode up on the carpet-concealed hump of the wagon, just under the wide parasol, and the man at the reins obediently turned the horse off onto a path that slanted away to the right. “Slow now. I’ll know it when I see it.” He carefully scanned the tombs and headstones scattered haphazardly over the low hills.

“There,” he said finally. “That place with the dome there. And just as I said, Tewfik, there don’t seem to be any guards. They certainly expect retaliation from the remaining Mamelukes, but they don’t expect it here.”

“I wanting more attacking the Citadel, professor,” growled the man at the reins. “Having head of Ali rest forever in public toilet if could I. But orders of him coming from this magic man I know. Him we killing certainly.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Doyle. “I hope Romanelli’s there too.”

“Yes.” Tewfik eyed the building that squatted in the dusk a hundred yards away. “Here?”

“You know these things better than I do. I’d say we should be close enough so that we can ride in right after the door’s blown.”

“But not so they see us make ready.” Tewfik nodded decisively. “Here.”

Doyle shrugged and climbed down, very carefully, for one arm was in a sling. He glanced up the slight rise at the building, and was chilled to see the doorkeeper—probably the same one he’d clubbed four months before—standing out front and watching them. “Hurry,” he said quietly. “They see us.”

“Is no harm from at distance of us,” said Tewfik, lifting a long pole from a slot in the wagon. He quickly stripped the ribbons from the length of it and then yanked a huge baby’s-face mask off the end of it. The pole now terminated in a thick wooden disk. “She be loaded already, only needing to be shove down tight again.” He tossed back a flap of the carpet covering the wagon’s central hump, exposing the yawning muzzle of a cannon, and rattled the disk-headed pole all the way down inside the barrel and bumped it twice, hard, against the ball at the bottom. “Good.” He drew it back out in three quick jerks and dropped it on the ground, then turned to the four others and barked something in Arabic.

One of them lit a cigar from a lantern swinging at the rear of the wagon and then strolled away puffing great clouds of smoke, engrossed, to all appearances, by the view of the Citadel a mile to the north. Another of the young Mamelukes flipped the carpet away from the breech end of the concealed cannon and began energetically whirling a ratcheted crank that slowly raised the breech and lowered the muzzle. Doyle glanced up the rise to see what the doorkeeper was making of all this, and saw the man hurry back inside and close the door.

“Hurry,” Doyle repeated.

The man by the breech ceased his cranking and called to the man with the cigar.

“Hurry, goddammit!” whispered Doyle shrilly, for the ground had begun to vibrate as if a note too deep to hear had been struck on some vast subterranean organ, and the cool evening air was suddenly sharp with a smell like garbage. He bent down and hastily set about unbuckling one of his borrowed shoes.

The man with the cigar began sprinting back toward the cannon but tumbled to the ground when a beam of green light lanced from the top of the dome and struck him. At the same time, the barrel of the carpet-draped cannon began, incredibly and with a loud squealing, to bend upward.

Doyle got his shoe off, flung it away and drew a dagger and, just as the beam flashed across the intervening ground toward the cannon, jabbed the dagger point into his bare heel and then slammed his foot to the ground.

Then they were all in the sickly green radiance, choking in a stench of wetly rotting vegetation, and Tewfik and the three other young Mamelukes dropped limply to the ground.

Against resistance, Doyle reached up and slapped a hand against the hot cannon barrel, and with more squealing and an agonizing increase in the heat of the metal it began to bend down straight again. With slow, wading steps he shambled toward the breech of the cannon, trailing his blistering fingertips along the barrel and being careful to drag his bleeding foot through the dirt—maintain the connection, he kept dazedly telling himself—and when he got there he unhooked one of the colored lanterns and crushed it against the powder-primed vent.

The paper lantern flared, caught fire, went out, and then a smoldering bit of the wick fell into the vent.

A moment later he was staring up into the darkening sky, wondering why he was lying flat on his back and why his face stung so, and wishing someone would answer at least a couple of the dozen telephones that were all ringing at once. He rolled his head and looked at what had, a few seconds ago, been Tewfik. There was still some bulk within the agitated heap of clothing, but most of the glistening, crab-like pieces into which Tewfik’s flesh had broken up had struggled free and were crawling away in random curlicues across the dirt. Doyle spasmed away in horror from the nearest of them and came up in a tense crouch, whimpering and scrabbling at the hilt of his borrowed sword and looking around wildly.

Smoke was still spilling up from the muzzle of the cannon, which was no longer concealed amid the wreckage of the makeshift wagon, and at the top of the rise the silhouette of the building had changed: the broad curve of the dome was shattered open like the shell of a huge egg. Doyle thought he could hear shouting, but with his abused ears he couldn’t be sure.

He drew his sword and ran awkwardly toward the door of the building, and when it opened he was only a dozen yards away and closing fast. He collided hard with the man in the doorway, and in his stunned state was not even surprised when the man’s head and right arm broke clean off; when they thudded on the floor he realized they were made of wax.

Three more of the wax men were just inside the doorway, two of them stumbling back as their disabled companion rebounded into them. Doyle parried a sword cut from the third and riposted with a punch of the hilt into the wax face, snapping the nose off and denting the cheek; and he saw that a line had appeared in the thing’s neck, so he hit it in the face again, with more force, and the head of this one too cracked free and rolled away.

The two undamaged ones stepped back and raised their weapons, while the two others knelt on the floor groping for their heads. A panicky shouting echoed down from upstairs, in words that didn’t seem to be Arabic, and the two whole wax men turned and ran ponderously down the hall toward the stairs.

Doyle followed. Someone else was shouting upstairs now, definitely in Arabic, and his voice sounded more anguished and defensive than personally scared. Doyle caught the words for I don’t know and immune and magic.

At the foot of the stairs he kicked off his remaining shoe and padded silently up, holding Ameen’s sword well out in front of him. Above he could hear gasps and grunts of effort, and feet scuffing on a gravelly floor, and it belatedly dawned on him what the emergency must be.

His eyes narrowed and a grin deepened the lines in his cheeks. Yes, he thought, let’s see if we can’t accomplish that—cut the title right out from under Neil Armstrong.

At the top of the stairs he peered around the corner, down the short corridor toward the inward-facing balcony. It was as he’d expected: the only light in the chamber was the dusk grayness coming in through the gaping hole. The sweating doorkeeper was standing on the right side of the balcony—the left side had been torn loose by the shot, and was swinging free—and he was hastily knotting a rope around one of the railing bars. The left wall of the corridor had collapsed, and Doyle could see the two wax men crouched out on the roof of the ground floor, leaning over the curved rim of the hole to peer down into the chamber; and even as Doyle watched, they leaned forward into the yawning gap where the eastern quarter of the dome had been and began pushing downward on something that evidently wanted to move up.

Having moored the end of the rope, the doorkeeper was pulling more of the line in, from some point below and to the left—against considerable resistance—and tying off all the slack he managed to get. Obviously he was trying to shorten the line.

Doyle waited until the man had drawn in another yard of line, and, before he could tie a knot in it, bounded up behind him, crouched, hooked his good hand under the man’s belt and hoisted him up, over and out past the balcony rail. For a moment the surprised doorkeeper held onto the line as he fell, and there was a rusty squealing of casters, then he lost his grip and tumbled to the rubble-littered floor of the chamber. The line snapped taut. There was a choked-off scream from near-by, and an empty, wheeled couch skated down the bowl-shaped wall and banged against the pile of broken masonry at the bottom.

Doyle whirled and ran out onto the roof through the hole in the corridor wall and, ignoring for the moment the twitching thing dangling at the end of the nearly horizontal rope, delivered a kick and a sword poke to the off-balance wax men, tumbling both of them, too, down into the round chamber.

Reluctant to face the man he knew he must kill, he stared for a moment down into the chamber. The doorkeeper had sat up and was rocking back and forth holding his leg, which was apparently broken, and the two wax men, one of whom had predictably lost his head, were crawling aimlessly over the rubble. Doyle supposed there was a door down there, but with any luck at all it would be buried under the shattered stones that had been the eastern quarter of the dome.

“Ah, Doyle!” came a voice from behind him, in an urbane tone that must have sorely taxed the self-control of the speaker. “You and I have a lot to discuss!”

The Master was swinging back and forth twenty feet away, supported by a rope knotted under his arms, but he was hanging straight out, with the rope roughly parallel to the roof. Behind him Doyle could see the moon, still low in the eastern sky. The Master had to strain his head back to look “up” at Doyle. The effect was as if he were a man-shaped kite in a strong wind, or as if he and Doyle were confronting each other through a mirror tilted 45 degrees.

“We have nothing to discuss,” said Doyle coldly. He raised Ameen’s sword over his head one-handed, and sighted at a point on the taut rope.

“I can bring back Rebecca for you,” said the Master, quietly but distinctly.

Doyle exhaled sharply, as though he’d been punched in the stomach, and he stepped back and lowered the sword. “Wh—what did you say?”

Though his position must have been painful, the Master uncovered his teeth in a smile as he slowly rotated on the end of the rope. “I can save Rebecca—prevent her from dying. Through the time gaps which I caused to be opened and Darrow discovered. You can help. We’ll prevent them from getting on the motorcycle.”

The sword clattered onto the roof tiles and Doyle sank to his knees. His face was now level with the Master’s twenty feet away, and he stared in helpless fascination into the old man’s eyes, which seemed to shine with a terribly intense blackness.

“How… can you know about… Rebecca?” he gasped.

“Don’t you remember the ka we drew of you, son? The blood that fell into the tub? We grew a duplicate of you from it. It hasn’t been a great deal of use to us as far as getting any consistent and coherent information—it seems to be insane, which might or might not mean that you tend that way—but we have happened to learn, a bit at a time, a lot about you.”

“This is a bluff,” said Doyle carefully. “You can’t change history. I’ve seen that that’s true. And Rebecca… died.”

“A ka of her died. It wasn’t the real Rebecca that fell off your motorcycle. We’ll go into the future and get some of her blood, grow a ka, and then switch them at some point, let the ka go die as you remember, and then the real Rebecca can come back here with you and,” the Master smiled again, “change her name to Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy.”

Ashbless slowly and wonderingly shook his head. I really think I’m going to do it, he thought. I believe I’ll actually reel him in and save him. My God, I thought he was only going to offer me money. “But there’s already an Elizabeth Tichy—somewhere.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Doyle took hold of the rope. Sorry, Tewfik, he thought. Sorry, Byron. Sorry, Miss Tichy. Sorry, Ashbless, but it looks like you live out the rest of your life as a slave of this creature. And sorry, Becca—God knows this isn’t any way you’d have chosen it.

With a good deal more ease than the doorkeeper, Ashbless drew in a yard of the rope. As he tried to knot it with one hand, he glanced once more at the Master’s face, and the smile on it was not only triumphant, contemptuous and smug, but imbecilic too.

That glimpse of idiocy in the supposedly all-knowing Master was like cold water on a fevered forehead. Jesus, Doyle thought, was I really going to buy Rebecca back with the death of the Tichy girl, whom I’ve never even met? “No,” he said conversationally. He let go of the rope and it snapped back out with a twang and an evidently agonizing jerk against the Master’s shoulders.

“You’ll be saving Rebecca’s life, Doyle,” croaked the wincing Master. “And your own sanity—you’re going mad, you know that—and the facilities for the insane aren’t very nice here, remember.”

Ashbless turned away, snatched up the sword and as he and the Master both screamed he swung it in a hard overhead wood-chopping stroke that not only snapped the taut rope but shattered the blade and a roof tile.

Still screaming, the Master receded rapidly away, as though he were lying in the bed of an invisible truck that was trying to beat the zero-to-sixty record. Then he was out past the roof edge and picking up more speed, skimming away twenty feet or so above the ground. He was silhouetted against the moon, so Ashbless could see him clearly even in the deepening dusk.

“Enjoy it in the stinking madhouse, Doyle!” roared a voice from the pit below Ashbless’ feet. “Eating excrement and being buggered by the guards, that’s what’s in store for you, boy! It’s true, Romanelli jumped ahead and looked! And listen, we already rescued Rebecca, Romanelli’s got her, but now that she’s no good for barter I’ll tell you what she can look forward to… “

As the voice raved on, Ashbless realized that it was the Master speaking through the one wax man that still had a head. The Master himself was just a dot on the face of the moon now, slowly shrinking. After a minute or two the voice from the pit, which was still dilating upon the defilements in store for Rebecca, and how much she’d eventually come to relish them, abruptly choked and ceased. Either the wax speaking apparatus had broken down or the Master was out of range.

Ashbless shambled back through the hole in the wall and lurched down the stairs. When he reached the ground floor hall he saw someone start out of a dark doorway on his right and then, hearing his approach, scramble back inside; but Ashbless didn’t even look into the room as he passed it.

When he got outside he glanced around. The horses had suffered the same disintegrative fate as Mustapha’s sons, so Ashbless set out, barefoot, to walk the five and a half miles to the Harbor of Boolak. His boat didn’t leave until dawn, so it didn’t matter that he walked very slowly, pausing every few steps to glance fearfully up at the rising full moon.

A few minutes after Ashbless had shambled away out of sight a wild-eyed, dirty, bearded face peeked out of the doorway and blinked at the darkening funeral plain.

“See what you’ve done, Darrow?” the man was muttering. “Perfectly safe, you said! I remember you saying it—’It is perfectly safe, Doyle.’ Hell, you might as well have let Treff come along. He couldn’t have made things any worse. I’ve got to get back to the river, see if I can’t swim back up to when everything was all right.”

And the Ashbless ka tiptoed out into the evening air and stood looking around uncertainly, for he couldn’t exactly recall where the river was or what it was called, though he did know he’d seen a number of branches of it. Then he remembered that one could get to it anywhere, so he chose a direction at random and strode away, a jerky but confident smile on his face.

CHAPTER 14

Once again he was trying to find his way out of the maze of fog-choked alleys; and though Darrow—in the dream he could never remember his new name—had groped several miles through the snaky, doubling-back and sometimes simply dead end lanes and alleys, he still hadn’t come to a street wide enough to wheel a cart through, much less the broad, well-trafficked pavement of Leadenhall Street. Finally he stopped, and heard, as he always did at this point in the dream, a slow, irregular knocking somewhere in the thick fog overhead; and then a second or two later a shuffling of footsteps nearby.

“Hello,” he said timidly; then, more confidently, “hello there! Perhaps you can help me find my way.”

The footsteps rasped closer across the fog-damp grittiness of the cobblestones, and a dark blur in the fog became recognizable as a ragged man.

As always, Darrow recoiled in mind-numbing fear when he realized it was Brendan Doyle. “Jesus, Doyle,” he screamed, “I’m sorry, stay away please, oh God…” He’d have run back up the alley, but his legs wouldn’t move.

Doyle smiled and pointed upward, into the fog.

Helplessly, Darrow looked up—and then put his entire soul into a shriek so loud that it woke him.

He crouched motionless on the bed until, with considerable relief, he recognized the furniture in the dim room, and realized he was in his own bed. Once again it had just been a dream. His hand darted out, seized the neck of the brandy decanter on the bedside table, tipped the thing upside-down to expel the glass stopper, and then he righted it and brought it to his lips.

The door to Claire’s room snapped open and she hurried across the room toward Dundee’s bed, frowning sleepily through her disordered hair. “What in hell is the matter, Jacob?”

“Muscle cramp… (gulp)… in my back.” He clanked the decanter back down on the table.

“You and your muscle cramps!” She sat down on the bed. “I’m your wife, Jacob, you don’t have to lie to me. I know it’s a nightmare. You always yell, ‘I’m sorry, Doyle!’ when you come crashing awake. Go ahead and tell me about it—who’s Doyle? Did he have something to do with you getting so wealthy?”

Dundee took a breath, then let it out. “It’s just muscle cramps, Claire. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

She pursed her lips. “Is the cramp gone now?”

Dundee groped for the stopper and poked it back into the decanter neck. “Yes. You can go back to bed.”

She leaned forward and kissed him lightly. “Maybe I’ll stay here with you for a little while.”

“I don’t think—” he began hastily, but was interrupted by a knock at the hall door.

A muffled voice asked, “Are you all right, sir?”

“Yes, Joe, no problem,” Dundee called. “Just couldn’t sleep.”

“I could bring you a cup of rum coffee if you’d like, sir.”

“No thank you, Joe, I—” Dundee hesitated, glanced at his wife, then said, “Thank you, Joe, yes, that might help.”

Footsteps receded away down the carpeted hall, and Claire stood up.

Knowing she wouldn’t take him up on it now, Dundee raised his eyebrows and said, “I thought you were going to stay here for a bit.”

Claire’s mouth was a straight line. “You know how I feel about Joe.” She strode back into her own room and closed the door.

Dundee stood up, clawed the hair back from his forehead and crossed to the window. He pulled the curtain aside and stared down at the broad curve of St. James Street, the uniformly elegant housefronts all palely lit in amber by the flickering street lights. The sky was less black toward the east—it would be dawn soon, a clear Sunday in March.

Yes, my dear, he thought bleakly, I do know how you feel about Joe. But I certainly can’t explain to you why I need to support him and keep him around. I wish to hell he’d get a new body, though, so I could tell you I fired him and hired this new guy—but he likes Maturo’s body, and I don’t dare try to force him. After all, he’s going to be my partner long, long after you’ve died of old age, my dear… after I’ve taken the best of our sons, and then our grandsons, and then great-grandsons, getting richer and buying more and more during my successive stays in each descendant’s body, until by the time 1983 rolls around again I will be the secret owner of all the world’s important corporations. I’ll own whole cities—whole countries. And after 1983, when old J. Cochran Darrow disappears, I’ll be able to come out of hiding, step out from behind the screen of corporate links and overlaps and figureheads and front men, and I’ll damn well no exaggeration rule the goddamn world.

If I can keep Joe happy.

So you see, my poor bride of two months—during which time I still haven’t been able to consummate the marriage and set to work on the second generation of the Dundee line—you’re replaceable. Joe’s not.

The richest man in London sighed, let the curtain fall back across the window and sat down on the bed to wait for his rum coffee.

In the pantry Joe the butler had climbed up onto the counter—for though he’d been able to touch the ground without pain ever since he ceased practicing high level magic nine years ago, he seemed to be able to think better when slightly elevated—and he was slowly sifting his fingers through a bowl of gray-green powder.

I’ve learned a great deal from the nervous young master, he thought. I’ve learned that having a lot of money is more fun than not having a lot of money, and that once you’ve got it, it tends to grow all by itself, like a fire.

He’s got a lot of it. And he’s got a truly beautiful young wife who may as well be his sister, and who hates the way old Joe looks at her… though it seems to me somebody ought to look at her, aye, and do more than look. She’ll turn to vinegar in the cask if she’s not tapped.

Yessir, young Dundee, thought Joe, you’d still be a dying old man if it weren’t for me—and what do I get in return for setting you up? Employment as a butler. It’s not fair as it stands right now. Things aren’t balanced. But I’ve got a solution to everyone’s problems right here in this bowl. Miss Claire’s handsome young husband will become much more affectionate, and poor old butler Joe will commit suicide. Everybody will be happy.

Except, of course, the one who’s in Joe’s body when it hits the pavement.

He reached up to a shelf, took down a jar of ground cinnamon, and shook a lot of it over the powder in the bowl. He put the jar down and stirred the mixture with his fingers, then tapped it all into a big mug, added a hearty slug of rum, and then hopped to the floor, lifted the now ready pot of coffee and filled the mug with the steaming black brew.

He stirred it with a spoon as he walked down the hall and up the stairs. When he rapped quietly at Dundee’s door, Dundee told him to come in and set it on the table. Joe did, and then stepped back respectfully.

Dundee seemed preoccupied, and a faint frown rippled his unlined brow. “You ever notice, Joe,” he asked, mechanically picking up the mug, “that it always takes a little more trouble to get something than the thing was really worth?”

Joe considered it. “Better than taking a lot of trouble and getting nothing.”

Dundee sipped the coffee. He didn’t seem to have heard Joe. “There’s so much weariness and fatigue in it all. For every action there is an equal… stupefaction. No, that might be bearable—it’s greater than the action. What’s in this?”

“Cinnamon. If you don’t like it I could make another cup without.”

“No, it’s all right.” Dundee stirred it with the spoon and took another sip.

Joe waited for a while, but Dundee didn’t seem to have any further instructions, so he left the room and closed the door quietly.

“Hey, Snapp? That you?”

Jacky looked around. A stocky little dark-haired man sprinted lightly up to her from the other side of the street.

“Who’s that?” asked Jacky, not sounding interested.

“Humphrey Bogart, remember? Adelbert Chinnie, Doyle.” The man grinned excitedly. “I’ve been walking up and down this damn street for an hour, trying to find you.”

“What for?”

“My body—my real body—I’ve found it! The fellow that’s in it has grown a little moustache and he dresses and walks different, but it’s me!”

Jacky sighed. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Humphrey. The body-switching man was caught and killed three months ago. So even if this person you’ve found really is in your old body—which is damned unlikely; he’d never fail twice in a row to kill the discarded host—there’s no conceivable way you can switch with him. There’s nobody around anymore that knows how to do the trick.” She shook her head wearily. “Sorry. Now if you’ll excuse me … “

The grin had fallen from Chinnie’s face. “He’s dead? Did—did you kill him? God damn it, you promised me—”

“No, I didn’t kill him. A crowd in an East End pub did. I heard about it next day.” She started to walk on.

“Wait a moment,” said Chinnie desperately. “You heard about it, you say. Have many people heard about it?”

Jacky stopped and said, with exaggerated patience, “Yes. Everybody—except you.”

“Right!” said Chinnie, beginning to get excited again. “If I was the body-switching man I’d do the same thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen, I went looking for depilatory shops, remember I said I would? Places where they take hair off so it won’t grow back. And I learned that there was one in Leadenhall Street where the people really could do it, something to do with electricity. The place closed down last October, but that doesn’t mean the process was lost. Hell, the body-changer might have bought the place. Anyway, if I was him, and now had the option of being able to stay in a body without turning into an orang-outang, why, I’d let myself be recognized, and caught, and then just as I was falling through the gallows trap, I’d switch into another body. Let ‘em all think they’d killed me so they’d call off the hunt.”

Jacky slowly walked back to where Chinnie stood. “Right,” she said softly, “I like it so far. But what’s all this about your old body? He’d already moved on out of it—when he was hanged he was a skinny old man.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he put someone else in my body just to hold it while he went off to get killed, and then he switched back into it. Or maybe—yes—maybe he’s placing wealthy but elderly people in young bodies for tremendous fees. Or maybe any number of things. It’s getting hold of the hair-killing trick that made it all possible.”

“This person in your old body,” Jacky said, “what’s he doing? How’s he situated?”

“He’s living high. Offices in Jermyn Street, big house in St. James with servants and everything.”

Jacky nodded, feeling the old excitement building in her again. “That fits well enough with your idea. It could be an old man that paid Dog-Face Joe to make him young and healthy again—or it could be Joe himself. Let’s go have a look at that house in St. James.”

“Why, but,” sputtered the disconcerted doorman, “you said, sir, that it would be an hour at least before you’d be needing the carriage. Yustin’s just gone off in it for a spot of supper. Ought certainly to be back in a—”

“Yustin’s fired,” rasped Dundee harshly, his face looking, in the lamplight, as drawn and pinched as an old man’s. He strode away down the sidewalk, the heels of his elegant boots locking against the cobbles like the works of an old clock.

“Sir!” the doorman called after him. “It’s late to be walking unaccompanied! If you’d wait a few minutes—”

“I’ll be all right,” Dundee answered without pausing or turning around. He reached inside his coat and touched the butt of one of the pair of miniature pocket pistols he’d had specially made for him by the Haymarket gunsmith Joseph Egg. Though no bigger than a bulldog pipe with the stem pulled out, each of the guns fired a .35 caliber ball from a charge detonated by a thing Dundee called a percussion cap, which he’d diagrammed for the fascinated gunsmith.

On a sudden impulse he turned left a block sooner than he usually did. I’ll walk halfway down this block, he thought, and then cross to St. James through the service alley. I’ll come out just across the street from my house, and if that loafer I’ve seen hanging about is still there I’ll shake an explanation out of him—and if he tries any funny business he’ll be the first man in history to be killed by a percussion cap pistol.

In the fog the street lamps were just shifting yellow blurs, and tiny drops of moisture began to collect on Dundee’s little moustache. He scratched it irritably. You’re awfully short-tempered these days, he told himself. That poor devil you shouted at in the conference room back there probably won’t do business with you now, and those patents and factories he has to sell will be damn useful in a decade or two. Oh hell—wait and buy ‘em from his heirs.

He paused when he turned into the service alley. Well, he thought, as long as you’re sneaking, you may as well do it right. He took off his boots, held them both in his left hand and then padded noiselessly down the dim alley. His right hand rested on the knob grip of one of the Egg pistols.

Suddenly Dundee froze—he’d heard whispering up ahead. He drew the pistol out of its little holster and tiptoed forward, probing the fog with the two-inch barrel.

Two floors overhead someone rattled a window latch and Dundee nearly fired—and then nearly dropped—the gun, for abruptly, totally and without any warning he had remembered the last part of his recurring nightmare, the part he’d never been able to recall after he woke up. With photographic clarity he’d seen the thing that in the dream had made the random knocking sound in the fog overhead, the thing the corpse-figure of Doyle had pointed up at.

It was the body of J. Cochran Darrow dangling from a rope tied around its neck, its booted feet knocking against the wall like the devil’s own wind chime, and its head, twisted into a posture exclusive to hanged men, staring down at him with a rictus grin that seemed to bare every single one of the yellow teeth.

His gun hand was shaking now, and he was more aware of the clammy chill of the air, as though he’d shed an overcoat. Ahead he could see a brightening stain of yellow light, for he was nearly through to the St. James sidewalk, and a street lamp stood only a few yards from the alley mouth.

There was more whispering from in front of him, and now he could see two vague silhouettes standing just inside the alley.

He raised the gun and said, clearly, “Don’t move, either of you.”

Both figures exclaimed in surprise and leaped out onto the sidewalk. As Dundee stepped forward out of the alley to keep them both covered he let his boots clop to the pavement and drew his other pistol. “Jump like that again and I’ll kill both of you,” he said calmly. “Now I want an explanation, fast, of what you’re doing here and why you’ve—”

He’d been looking at the younger of the two ragged lurkers, but now he glanced at the other.

And the color drained from his features and was instantly replaced by sweat as cold as the fog, for he recognized the man’s face. It was Brendan Doyle’s.

At the same instant Chinnie realized who it was behind the pistols. “Face to face at last,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “We’re going to change places, you and I…” He took a step toward Dundee.

The gunshot had a flat sound in the thick fog, like someone slapping a board against a brick wall. Dundee began sobbing as Adelbert Chinnie stepped back and then sat down on the sidewalk. “God, I’m sorry, Doyle!” Dundee wailed. “But you should stay dead!”

The other gun wobbled toward Jacky, but before it could train on her she lunged forward and brought the chopping edge of her hand down hard on Dundee’s wrist. The little gun clattered onto the pavement and she dove for it.

Dundee, jolted out of his hysteria by the sharp pain in his wrist, was right on top of her.

Jacky grabbed the gun just as Dundee’s weight slammed her onto her knees and his right forearm hooked around under her chin; his free hand was scrabbling at her wrist, but weakly—her blow must have numbed it. From the opposite side of the street came the sound of a window breaking, but both of the gasping combatants were too busy to look up; Jacky was fighting to get her legs under her and keep air passing through her constricted throat, and Dundee was striving with considerably more strength to prevent those things. Jacky couldn’t raise the gun without pitching face down onto the pavement. The pulse in her head sounded to her like labored strokes of a pickaxe through frozen topsoil.

“Lead the dead back to me, will you, boy?” Dundee was whispering harshly. “I’ll send you across that river yourself.”

In a last desperate gambit Jacky suddenly bent her arm and rolled hard to the left. For a moment her gun hand was free, and she swung the barrel toward Dundee, who had fallen back and now snatched for the gun, missed it, and instead grabbed her shirt collar and kneed her with all his strength; but the blow that he thought would jackknife his opponent in oblivious agony only jolted Jacky, and didn’t prevent her from pressing the stubby barrel of the pistol against the bridge of Dundee’s nose, and pulling the trigger.

The shot was even more muffled than the previous one had been. Dundee relaxed his hold on Jacky’s collar, evidently in order to give his full attention to doing a sort of gargled imitation of a rattlesnake. A moment later he was limp, staring at her with two bulging eyes, between which a neat round hole had been punched. A gleaming crescent of blood collected on the lower edge, then spilled in a line across the forehead.

“All of ye smug bastards!” came a loud cry from across the street. Jacky sat up. “Ye’ve won, ye heartless sons of bitches,” shouted the voice from the fog, and it seemed to Jacky to be coming from higher than street level. “Ye’ve driven old Joe to the point where he’d rather be dead than take yer smarmy ways any longer. May it trouble what shreds of conscience—”

“Joe!” called a quiet voice. “Are you drunk? What the devil are you shouting about? Stop it this instant!”

Jacky knew she should run away before the racket attracted a police officer, but besides being very shaky she was curious about the invisible drama across the street.

“I broke this here window. Miss Claire,” said the man’s voice. “And I reckon it’ll cost ye something to get the front walkway cleaned tomorrow. Write up a bill for it all and send it to me in hell, ye teasing bitch!”

“Joe,” said the lady’s voice, louder now. “I order you to—oh my God?”

Jacky wondered. Did he jump? an instant before she heard the solid crack and thudding of something impacting hard onto the pavement.

Then Jacky’s attention was distracted by Dundee’s corpse. It had sat up.

The blind eyes were blinking, and an expression of abysmal horror was forming on the blood-streaked face. One of Dundee’s hands wobbled up, awkward as a rusty hinge, and groped at his punctured face. For a moment it seemed to be trying to get up; then it shuddered and collapsed, and its last exhalation seemed to go on forever.

Jacky got up and ran.

CHAPTER 15

Though the lightermen and bargemen on the Thames had another half hour of April sunlight to work in, the inhabitants of the St. Giles rookery had seen the sun set an hour ago behind the tall, ragged old buildings that were their drab and stultifyingly close horizon, and nearly every one of the unmatched windows of Rat’s Castle glowed with light.

Standing out in the alley by one of the building’s side doors, Len Carrington impatiently answered one more objection from the party of six men that was about to leave for Fleet Street. “You’ll do it because it’s the very last suth errand you’ll ever run for them, and because if you didn’t it would tip them off, and we want to hit them with no warning—and also because once you fetch this fellow for them they’ll be so absorbed with him that we’ll be able to kill them both with no trouble.”

“Is by any chance this lad we’re going to fetch the same one that pitched Norman out the window at the Swan With Two Necks?” asked one of the men.

Carrington pursed his lips, for he’d hoped they wouldn’t make that connection. “Yes—but you mishandled that abduction.”

“And they seem to have mishandled hangin’ onto him,” the man added.

“—And this time you’ll take him quiet,” Carrington went I on sternly. Then he grinned. “And if we all do our parts correctly, there’ll be a real celebration in Rat’s Castle tonight.”

“Amen to that,” whispered another of the men. “Let’s off—he’ll be at his silly book meeting by now.”

The six men padded away down the alley and Carrington went back inside. The huge old kitchen was empty at the moment, and lit only by the dull red glow of the hearth. He dragged the door closed behind him and the room was quiet, except for the faint sound of distant wailing and grunting. He sat down on a bench and hooked a jug of cool beer down from a shelf.

He took one long swallow, then, re-corked the jug, put it back and stood up. He’d better be getting back to the front room; it wouldn’t do to let the clown wonder what had delayed him.

As he walked toward the inner door he passed the drain, and the wailing and groaning were louder. He paused and peered with distaste down into the black hole that led to the deep cellars and the subterranean river. I wonder, he thought, what’s got Horrabin’s Mistakes so riled up this evening. Maybe old Dungy was right, and the things are able to read minds a little, and they’re aware of our imminent mutiny tonight. He cocked his head, listening for the basso profundo voice of Big Biter, who was the only one of the Mistakes anyone would pay any attention to, but he didn’t hear him. Good boy, Carrington thought nervously—if you sense any part of our plans, keep it behind the portcullis of your appalling teeth.

He groped around for the wooden plug, found it under a pile of potato peelings, and fitted it over the drain hole, effectively silencing, up here at least, the noise from the deep cellars.

He opened the door to the hallway just as Horrabin’s fluty voice called from the front room, “Carrington! Where in hell are you?”

“Right here, yer Worship,” Carrington said, striding forward and forcing his voice to sound relaxed. “Just stopped in the kitchen for a sip of beer.” He stepped unhurriedly into the room.

The clown, looking like a huge spider perversely made of ribbon candy, was penduluming rapidly back and forth in his swing, while Romany or Romanelli or whatever his name was this week was reclining in his high wheeled cart that looked like nothing so much as a baby’s perambulator, the snapping glow of St. Elmo’s Fire flickering around his tortured frame even more brightly now than it had five minutes ago.

“I assume they’re off?” asked Horrabin.

“They are.”

“And instructed not to bungle it this time?” put in Romanelli.

Carrington gave the man a cold look. “They got him for you that time and they’ll get him for you this time.”

Romanelli scowled, then made his face relax, as though he just didn’t have the spare energy to resent the insubordination. “Go downstairs to the old hospital,” he said. “Make sure they’ve got everything ready.”

“Aye aye.” Carrington hurried out of the room and his boots could be heard clumping along the hall and then tapping down the long flight of stone steps.

“Why don’t you go too?” croaked Romanelli to the clown.

“I just got here!” the clown protested. “And there’s a couple of things you and I have to straighten out. Now I had an agreement with your ka: I was to—”

“He’s dead and you have no agreement with me. Go.”

After a pause Horrabin reached out and snared his stilts, thrashed out of his swing and onto them, and stood wobbling in the center of the floor. “You’re pretty damn sure of—”

“Go,” Romanelli repeated. He had closed his eyes, and his face looked like a thin rag that someone had draped over some stones to dry in the sun and forgotten forever. The knocking of Horrabin’s stilt-poles receded away. Romanelli’s mouth fell open and a deep sigh echoed in and out of his chest.

His time was getting damned short—he only weighed thirty pounds now, but he knew he wasn’t as strong as the Master had been; he would lose his hold on the unnaturally maintained components of his body, and simply break down or fly to bits, long before the zero gravity point was reached. There’d be no big dive to the moon for him.

He shuddered, trying to remember how many sorcerers had been both strong enough and contra-natural enough—the two qualities were tremendously difficult to hold onto at the same time, like trying to press the positive ends of two lodestones together—to build up that weird lunar attraction which in extreme cases, such as the Master’s, could become a fiercely drawing force far, far greater than could be explained by the actual physical gravity of the moon. There had been that Turk, Ibrahim, who had finally had himself encased to the knees in solid stone in a high-walled courtyard several miles outside of Damascus, and used to charge fortunes to tell fortunes—he’d only do it when the moon was overhead, and his hair and arms were dangling straight up, an effect that mightily impressed his customers—until one man, not pleased with his augury, had drawn a scimitar and chopped right through both of Ibrahim’s knees, and the truncated screaming body had shot away upward into the sky. And there was a brief mention in one of the lost books of the apocryphal Clementine Recognitions of a very old magician who had just floated off the ground one afternoon in Tyana, and was visible in the sky for days, gesticulating and crying, before he drifted too far away to be seen anymore. Obviously there was some truth in the very old stories of the once inhabited moon having become, through some long-forgotten but transcendent perversity, the monument and archetype and fitfully living embodiment of desolation.

Romanelli remembered that he had been overseeing the disagreeable task of clearing out the street below the Bab-el-Azab when he’d heard the hollow knock of a cannon shot from away to the south. He had tensed, ready to call out the Albanians to repel a revenge raid by sons of the murdered Mameluke Beys, but there were no further sounds of gunfire, and when he climbed to the battlements he hadn’t seen any troops massing on the darkening plain. It wasn’t until later that night that he heard one of the fellahin talking about an old man who had been seen by many to fly over the old quarter of Cairo just at dusk… He’d rushed back to the Master’s house and found it broken, and empty except for some damaged ushabtis and the injured doorkeeper…

From the doorkeeper he’d learned that the man who had done this was the Brendan Doyle who’d escaped from them back in October, and the next day he’d discovered that Doyle had left Egypt aboard the England-bound Fowler, having booked passage under the name William Ashbless. Romanelli had abandoned his post as Mohammed Ali’s physician and taken the next ship for England and, by whistling on the stern until his lips were numb and the very captain had ordered him to stop it, several times managed to summon a couple of the Shellengeri for a few hours—the voyage wasn’t nearly as quick as the trip south in the Chillico had been, but Romanelli did manage to step off his ship onto a London dock on Sunday, the day before yesterday, while this Ashbless-Doyle person’s ship hadn’t arrived until this morning.

And Doctor Romanelli had kept busy during his forty-eight hours of lead time. He’d learned that under the Ashbless name his quarry was expected to appear at, of all things, a literary gathering in the offices of the publisher John Murray, and Romanelli had browbeaten the sorcerer-clown Horrabin into having some of his swinish thugs follow Ashbless everywhere he went, and to abduct him and bring him back here to Rat’s Castle after he left Murray’s offices.

And when they’ve brought him here, thought Romanelli as the weary breaths trudged up and down his throat, I will simply wring him dry. I’ll learn from him enough about the time jumping to do it myself, and I’ll jump back to when I was healthy and tell my younger self how to do things differently, so that on Monday the second of April, 1811, I am not a trembling, bleeding, far overextended wreck.

He opened his bloodshot eyes and glanced up at the clock that sat on a doll-crowded shelf just below the niche where old Dungy’s head was perched. Quarter to nine. In another hour or so, he told himself, Horrabin’s hoodlums will bring Ashbless to me, and we’ll adjourn to the subterranean hospital.

As the cab rattled past St. Paul’s Cathedral, William Ashbless peered out at the dark square on the west side of the huge church and remembered begging there as Dumb Tom. I never, he thought, get to use my voice. Dumb Tom was mute, and so of necessity was Eshvlis the cobbler, and though William Ashbless will be a voluble poet, he’ll only be copying from memory poems he read and memorized long ago.

His mood was a blend of relief, anticipation and vague disappointment. It was certainly pleasant to be back in England again, free at last of all that hellish magic, and able to look forward to meeting, as he knew he would, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and the rest of the gang—but now that he was, irrevocably, Ashbless, and had wandered back into the scope of the Bailey biography, there could be no more major surprises for him; he’d already read his own life story.

He still half wished that the test he’d thought up during the month-long voyage of the Fowler had turned out negative. It had occurred to him that if the universe was dead set on his being Ashbless it would have to get busy and do two things. It would have to have seen to it that the manuscript of “The Twelve Hours of the Night,” which he’d last seen on the desk in that room at the Swan With Two Necks, was somehow conveyed to the Courier office in time to have been published in December; and it would have to make sure the Fowler arrived in London in time for him to attend the gathering at John Murray’s, and meet Coleridge again, on the second of April. Both were unalterable facts in the life of the Ashbless he’d studied, and if either one didn’t happen, then he might still be able to be his own man, with the capacity for chosen action, able to feel hope and fear.

But when he’d gone to the Swan this afternoon and asked them if they were holding any mail for William Ashbless, they’d told him he owed postage on three items. These had proven to be a letter of acceptance from the Courier, together with a check for three pounds; the December 15 issue of the paper, with the poem printed in it; and a letter from John Murray, dated the twenty-fifth of March, inviting Ashbless to an informal gathering at the publisher’s office a week later—tonight.

It was settled. He was Ashbless.

And it wouldn’t be dull—for one thing, there were some pieces of the story he would be interested to watch unfold. Where, for example, is Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy, my wife to be? I’ll presently tell Bailey that I first met her way back in September of last year. I wonder why I’ll say that. And of course the final question is: who is it that will meet me in the Woolwich marshes on the twelfth of April in 1846, stab me through the stomach and leave my body to be found more than a month later? And how in hell will I make myself keep that appointment?

The cab had slanted to the right, past the Old Bailey onto Fleet Street, and now drew to a stop at number 32, a narrow, pleasant-looking building with lights glowing behind the curtains. Ashbless stepped down, paid the driver, and as the cab clopped and jingled away into the night he took a deep breath, glanced up and down the street—noticing a beggar boy slouching in his direction—and then knocked on the door.

After a few moments there was the snap of a bolt being drawn back and the door was opened by a sandy-haired man with a glass in his hand; and in spite of the haircut, beard-trim and respectable clothes that Ashbless had spent most of his three pounds on, the man stepped back uncertainly when he got a look at the huge bronzed visitor.

“Uh… yes?” he said.

“My name is Ashbless. Are you John Murray?”

“Oh? Yes, yes, do come in. Yes, I’m Murray. You gave me a start—if there is such a thing as a typical poet, sir, may I say you don’t look anything like him. Would you care for a glass of port?”

“I’d love it.” Ashbless stepped into the entry hall and waited white Murray re-bolted the door.

“There’s a beggar boy been hanging round out front,” Murray explained apologetically. “Tried to sneak in earlier.” He straightened, had a gulp of his port and then gingerly stepped past his guest. “Right this way. I’m glad you were able to come—we’re lucky enough to have Samuel Coleridge with us this evening.”

Ashbless grinned and followed. “I knew we would.”

Jacky had timidly started forward when she saw the stranger climb out of the cab, but before she could think of what to say, the man had knocked and been admitted into the house by that ill-tempered Murray. She walked back to the lightless recessed doorway she’d been crouching in during the past hour.

That’s certainly the man Brendan Doyle described, she thought. Murray wasn’t just talking through his hat to that Times columnist when he said he had reason to believe that the controversial new poet William Ashbless would be a guest at his Monday night gathering.

So how do I get to talk to the man? she wondered. I owe poor old Brendan Doyle that much—to convey the sad news of his death to this friend of his. I guess I’ll just have to wait here until he comes out, and then catch him before he can get into a cab.

Though Jacky hadn’t slept since killing Dundee—and, by extension, Dog-Face Joe—two nights ago, she’d begun having hallucinations, as if her dreams were impatient to get at her. Huge shadows seemed to rush toward her, but after she flinched away there’d be nothing there; and she kept hearing… not the sound, not even the echo, but a sort of after reverberation in the air of a vast iron door slamming down over the sky. It hadn’t begun yet, for it was still early in the evening, but she was wearily certain that in a few hours she’d begin to wonder why it wasn’t dawn yet… and long before five o’clock the uneasy wondering would deepen to a panicked conviction that something really had shut down over the sky, and she’d never again see the sun.

She’d once visited the Magdalen Hospital for insane women—”Maudlin,” as it was known in the streets—and she had vowed to kill herself rather than be committed there, if the options should ever become as narrow as that.

Tonight she was pretty sure they’d become that narrow.

Her only remaining intentions were to meet Ashbless, break to him the news about Doyle, and then do The Admirable’s Dive, swim out to the middle of the Thames and empty her lungs and sink to the bottom.

She shivered—for it had just occurred to her that subjectively her fears were justified: for her there wouldn’t be any dawn.

As far as the professional purposes of the gathering went, Coleridge and Ashbless were disappointments to Murray. When the publisher strolled over to the corner of the book-lined room where the two of them were talking, and managed first to enter the conversation and then to change the subject to a proposal of publication for each of them, neither one looked eager; which puzzled Murray, for Coleridge was in financial ruin, his family having to be supported on the charity of friends, and Ashbless was a raw novice who ought to have been delighted at the prospect of getting such a good publisher so quickly.

“A translation of Goethe’s Faust?” said Coleridge doubtfully. When his attention had been distracted from the subject he and Ashbless were discussing, the animation had left his face, and now he looked old and ill again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Though Goethe is a genius whose work—especially that work—it would be a privilege and a challenge to translate, I’m afraid that my own philosophy is so much… at odds with his that such an undertaking would… compromise us both. I do have many essays… “

“Yes,” said Murray, “we’ll certainly have to discuss publication of your essays sometime. But what do you think, Mr. Ashbless, of the idea of publishing a volume of your own verse?”

“Well,” Ashbless began. You can’t, Murray, he thought helplessly, for it happens that Ashbless’ first book will be published by Cawthorn this May. Sorry—but that’s history for you. “At the moment,” he said, “the ‘Twelve Hours’ is all I have. Let’s wait and see if I manage to write any others.”

Murray forced a smile. “Right. Though I may not have a space in my schedule when you’re ready. You gentlemen will excuse me?” He returned to the group by the table.

“I’m afraid I shall really have to be excused as well,” said Coleridge, putting down his scarcely tasted glass of port and massaging his gray forehead. “I feel one of my headaches coming on, and they make dull company of me. The walk home may even cure it.”

“Why not take a cab?” Ashbless asked, walking with him toward the door.

“Oh… I like to walk,” Coleridge answered, a little shamefacedly, and Ashbless realized that the man didn’t have cab fare.

“Tell you what,” Ashbless said casually. “I’ve about had my fill here, and I don’t particularly like walking. Perhaps I could give you a lift.”

Coleridge brightened, then asked cautiously, “But in which direction are you going?”

“Oh,” Ashbless said with a careless wave, “I’m heading in all directions. Where are you staying?”

“Hudson’s Hotel, in Covent Garden. If it isn’t an inconvenience … “

“Not at all. I’ll go make excuses to Mr. Murray, and fetch our hats and coats.”

A few minutes later they were being let out the front door, and Murray leaned out and scowled at the vagrant lad who was still loitering a few doors away.

“Thank you, Mr. Ashbless, for seeing our friend home.”

“It’s no trouble—and I believe I see a cab now. Hey! Taxi?”

The cab driver didn’t understand the call, but the waving arm was a clear enough summons. He slanted his vehicle in toward them and Murray bade them goodnight, closed the door and re-bolted it.

The cab had just rocked to a halt when there came a cry of, “Mr. Ashbless! Wait a moment!” and the ragged boy came dashing up.

My God, thought Ashbless as the boy’s face was lit for a moment by the street lamp, it’s Jacky. He’s shorter than he used to be; no, that’s right, I’m taller. “Yes?”

Jacky stopped in front of them. “Excuse me for interrupting,” she panted, “but I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news about a friend we have in common.”

Ashbless stared at Jacky in the light from the curtained window at his back. The months have dealt harshly with him, Ashbless thought. The kid looks starved and exhausted and … somehow, in spite of those things, even a trifle more effeminate than he used to. Poor devil.

“I really think,” said Coleridge awkwardly, “that a walk would be restorative. I—”

“No,” protested Ashbless. “This damp fog would do you no good, and I’d like to hear more of your thoughts on the Logos. I’m sure this lad—”

“Does anybody want the bloody cab?” called the driver, twitching his whip impatiently.

“Yeah, let’s all three hop in,” said Ashbless, opening the door. “And maybe after we see Mr. Coleridge home, young man, you’ll let me buy you some dinner.”

“I’ll ride along,” said Jacky, scrambling in, “but I’ll have to … decline your kind offer of dinner. I’ve got… an appointment on the river to keep.”

“Don’t we all?” grinned Ashbless, helping Coleridge in and then climbing in himself. “Driver! Hudson’s Hotel, please, Covent Garden!” He slammed the door and the overloaded cab lurched back out into traffic.

The carriage that Jacky had seen waiting near Murray’s got under way too, following the cab at a distance of a dozen yards, though not even the cab driver noticed it.

“So what friend and what bad news?” asked Ashbless, who had wedged his tall frame into the corner by the port window.

“You… knew a man named Brendan Doyle, I think,” said Jacky.

Ashbless raised his eyebrows. “Knew him pretty damn well, yes. Why?”

“He’s dead. I’m sorry. I knew him myself, briefly, and I liked him. He was trying to find you before he died—he thought you’d help him, and you do seem to be as generous as he said. You just… arrived too late.” There was real grief in Jacky’s voice.

The cab halted at the Chancery Lane intersection, and Jacky reached for the door handle. “I’d better leave. This isn’t getting me any closer to the river. Good to have met you both.”

Alarmed by the flatness of Jacky’s voice, and suddenly guessing the nature of the river appointment, Ashbless closed his hand firmly over Jacky’s and held the door shut. “Wait.”

The driver seemed to be having some difficulty getting the cab going again—it sounded as if he jumped to the pavement and punched the horse—but eventually they got moving again, and Ashbless released Jacky’s hand.

“He’s not dead, Jacky,” he said quietly. “Later I’ll tell you how I know—right now just take my word for it. And I don’t care if you saw his corpse. As you know,” and Ashbless winked, “there are cases where that’s not conclusive evidence.” Jacky’s eyes widened with comprehension, and Ashbless smiled and sat back as much as he could. “In any case! Mr. Coleridge and I were discussing the concept of the Logos. What are your thoughts on the subject?”

It was Coleridge’s turn to raise his eyebrows in surprise at asking a grimy street urchin such a question; and his eyebrows climbed even higher when Jacky answered.

“Well,” said Jacky, not too disconcerted by the conversational change of gears, “it seems to me that there’s something about the Logos, as defined by St. John, that parallels Plato’s idea of absolutes: the eternal, constant forms that material things are sort of imperfect copies of. Some of the pre-Socratic philosophers, in fact—”

She was interrupted by a fist abruptly poking in through the open window and pressing the muzzle of a pistol against her upper lip. She could feel the coldness of the metal right through her false moustache. Another arm had snaked in through the other window at the same moment and was holding a pistol against Ashbless’ eye.

“No one moves,” said a harsh voice, and a lean, squinting face grinned in at them through Jacky’s window. “‘Ello, Squire,” he said to Ashbless, who was too jammed in to make a move even if he could think of one. “Not gonna be pitchin’ anybody through a winder this time, eh? ‘Pologize to break in on yer pretty talk, but we’re takin’ a detour—to Rat’s Castle.”

To his own surprise, Ashbless realized that his breathless feeling was as much elation as it was fear. By God, he thought, you never know when you’ll come across a chapter Bailey missed. “I’m pretty sure it’s me you want,” he said carefully, blinking against the muzzle. “Let these two go and I’ll promise to go quiet.”

“Yer fair makin’ me weep with yer heroicals, sport.” The man poked lightly with the gun, rocking Ashbless’ head back. “Now shut the hole, eh?”

The cab made a right turn onto Drury Lane, and though the new driver almost had the starboard wheel spinning in midair as he wrenched the vehicle around the corner, the two men crouching outside on the step bars never flinched or lowered their guns.

“I’m not sure I follow this,” said Coleridge, who had shut his eyes and was rubbing his temples. “Are we to be robbed, or killed? Or both?”

“Probably both,” said Jacky evenly, “though I think their boss would be more interested in stealing your soul than your purse.”

“They can’t steal that unless you’ve lost it already,” said Coleridge calmly. “Perhaps the time would be best spent if each of us… shored up his claim to possession of one.” He composed his pudgy features into a placid blankness and let his hands fall into his lap.

The cab paused at Broad Street, then moved rapidly across. The clatter and jingle of the cab sounded louder now, for the lane was much narrower north of Broad Street.

After a few moments Jacky sniffed. “We’re in the St. Giles rookery, sure enough,” she muttered jerkily, as though she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs. “I can smell the trash fires.”

“The man said shut up,” her guard reminded her, giving her a poke in the moustache. She obediently remained silent, afraid that another such would knock the thing off.

At last the cab halted and the two armed hijackers hopped down and opened the doors. “Out,” said one of them.

The three passengers unbent themselves from the cramped interior and climbed out. Coleridge promptly sat down on the step bar, held his head and moaned; evidently the headache was getting worse. Ashbless glanced bleakly up at the huge, ragged building they’d arrived at.

Partially brick—brick in every degree of size, shade and age—and half-timbered, the structure was linked to the dark bulks of other buildings at every level by flimsy bridges and ratlines, and was pierced by windows in such an uneven pattern that they couldn’t, it seemed to him, reflect the arrangement of floors inside. Jacky just stared down at the wet mud between her boots, and breathed deeply.

Len Carrington hurried out of the well-lighted open doorway and surveyed the scene. “All go smoothly?” he asked the driver, who was still perched up on the bench.

“Aye. By yer leave I’ll take this back to Fleet Street before the real cabbie can report it missing.” “Right. Go.”

The whip snapped and the cab rolled forward, for there was no room to turn it around. Carrington stared at the captives. “That’s our man,” he said, pointing at Ashbless, “and that’s… what was the name, haven’t seen him in a while… Jacky Snapp!—whose involvement in this I’ll want explained… but who’s the sick old bastard?”

The hijackers shrugged, so Ashbless said quietly, “He’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a very famous writer, and you’ll be buying more trouble than you can afford if you kill him.”

“Don’t tell us what we—” began one of the hijackers, but Carrington shut him up with a wave.

“Get ‘em all inside,” he said. “And quickly—the police have been known to come this deep into the rookery.”

The captives were marched at gunpoint into the large front room, and for the first time that night Ashbless felt the icy emptiness and despairing inner wail of real fear, for Doctor Romanelli was there, reclining in some sort of wheeled crib and staring at him with wrathful recognition.

“Bind him,” the sorcerer croaked, “and take him downstairs to the hospital. Hurry.” The St. Elmo’s fire was flickering wildly now, and popped every time he pronounced a hard consonant.

Ashbless leaped at the man to his right and with the whole weight and strength of his body punched him in the throat; the man went straight over backward and his reflexive shot exploded the face of the clock on the wall. Ashbless had just gotten his balance back and was about to whirl and grab Jacky and Coleridge when his left leg was abruptly slammed out from under him and he landed awkwardly on the floor.

The scene stopped being a moving mix of impressions for him, and he could only perceive things one at a time: his new trousers had a gaping, blood-wet hole blown out in the left knee; his ears were ringing from the bang of a second gunshot; blood, and bits of bloody cloth and bone, were spattered on the wall and floor in front of him; his left leg, which was extended straight out in front of him, was bent sideways at the knee.

“I still want you to bind him,” rasped Romanelli. “And put a tourniquet on his thigh—I want him to last a while.”

Ashbless lost consciousness when Carrington and the gunman grabbed him under the arms and yanked him upright.

Three minutes later the room was empty except for Coleridge, who was sitting pale-faced in Horrabin’s swing with his eyes closed, and one of Carrington’s men, a rat-faced young man named Jenkin who was embarrassed at having been posted as guard over such a harmless old fellow. Jenkin looked around the room curiously, noting the fresh blood puddle and the shattered clock, and wondered exactly what had happened here before Carrington had called him in. He’d seen three people being taken out of the room as he hurried in, and only one of them was walking, but everything had seemed to be under control; Jenkin had thought when he heard the two shots that it was the start of the mutiny, but evidently that would have to wait for a bit.

He started violently when he heard a step in the hall, and then sighed with relief to see Carrington enter the room.

“They got tea hot in the kitchen?” Carrington growled.

“Aye, chief,” replied the mystified Jenkin.

“Fetch a pot and a cup—and sugar.”

Jenkin rolled his eyes but obeyed. When he got back with it Carrington had him set it on a table, then went to one of the higher shelves and took down a brown glass bottle. He uncorked it and shook several splashes of a sharp-smelling liquid into the tea. “Throw a lot of the sugar in, too,” he whispered to Jenkin.

Jenkin did, and jerked a thumb inquiringly toward Coleridge.

Carrington nodded.

Jenkin drew the thumb across his neck and raised his eyebrows.

Carrington shook his head and whispered, “No, it’s laudanum. Opium, you know? It’ll just put him to sleep, and then you’ll stash him in Dungy’s old room. And when we’ve got rid of the clown and the wizard we’ll take him down the underground river and dump him by the Adelphi somewhere. He won’t remember where this is. Extra trouble, but after the publicity the papers stirred up over the murder of that Dundee fellow Saturday, we don’t dare kill a well-known goddamn writer.”

He poured a cup of the tea and carried it across to Coleridge. “Here you go, sir,” he said gently. “A bit of hot tea will help.”

“Medicine,” Coleridge wheezed. “I need my… “

“The medicine’s in the tea,” said Carrington reassuringly. “Drink up.”

Coleridge drank the cup empty in four swallows. “More… please… “

“That’s plenty for now.” He took the empty cup back to the table. “He’ll sleep till noon with that dose,” he told Jenkin. “I’ll dump the pot before somebody else finds it. Be quick about getting our friend here down to Dungy’s room if you don’t want to carry him there.”

Jenkin lowered his voice and asked, “When do we… ?”

“Soon now, though we’re one man short—that Ashbless bastard punched Murphy in the throat, and smashed everything from his chin to his collarbone. Dead before he hit the floor.”

“Who is this Ashbless?”

“I don’t know—but it’s luck for us that he seems tough; their lordships will need a bit of time to wreck him. But he won’t last forever and we’ve got to take them while they’re busy with him, so get moving.”

Jenkin crossed to the swing, helped Coleridge up and hustled him out of the room.

Carrington, his face looking leaner than ever with tension, took the teapot to the front door and dumped it out on the steps, then bolted the door, tossed the teapot into a chair and glanced around. It certainly wouldn’t do to let any inquisitive police officer see the place like this. He dragged a couple of little rugs over from the hall and flung them over the broken glass and the smeared pool of blood.

He straightened and shook his head wonderingly, remembering the quickness of Ashbless’ strike at Murphy. Who the hell was the man? And why was he out riding in the mismatched company of an evidently well-known writer and a beggar boy, like Jacky Snapp?

Some of the color left Carrington’s face, and very carefully he conjured in his mind an image of Jacky Snapp… and then compared it to a face he’d seen six months ago, on the afternoon old Dungy and Ahmed the Hindoo Beggar had tried to kill Horrabin and escape down the underground river.

Brother and sister? A boy masquerading as a girl? Or just a coincidental likeness? Carrington was going to find out.

He hurried to the hall, wrenched open the stairwell door and began hastily skipping down the first of the four flights of stairs, each one more ancient than the one above it, that bottomed out in the deep cellars.

Now that it looked pretty certain that she’d be killed before dawn, Jacky’s intended suicide seemed to her like the gesture of a vain and affected lunatic. Maudlin indeed! She was locked in the nearest to the stairs of a row of low-roofed cages, and the sounds made by the occupants of the other cages made her glad that the nearest wall torch was dozens of yards away along the hall, and was kept low fluttering by the cold stale-smelling breeze from the underground watercourse; for though the roars and growls and wails, and the wet slitherings, the rustling of heavy, scaled limbs being shifted and the rattle of claws on the stone floor might have led her to believe she was sharing the accommodations with an exotic menagerie, she also heard, obviously linked with those sounds, quick whispers and muted laughter and, from one of the farther cages, a low voice monotonously reciting nursery rhymes.

After she’d been sitting in the cage about five minutes she was brought bolt upright by a harsh scream—and as it died away in sobbing and coughing she recognized the voice of William Ashbless. “All right, you bastards,” she heard Ashbless say, spitting the words out like pieces of teeth, “you want it, you can buy it. I’ll tell you—” His voice broke off and the scream was wrenched out of him again. The sound seemed to Jacky to come from some distance to her right, amplified by the tunnels.

“You’re in the position,” grated a voice, “to buy yourself a quick death. Nothing else. Buy now before we add more tax.”

“God damn it,” gasped Ashbless, “I’m not going to—”

Once more the full-throated scream abraded the stones of the tunnel walls.

The creatures in the neighboring cages were muttering and shifting uneasily, evidently upset by the noise.

Jacky heard footsteps on the stairs and looked up. A tall man had stepped out of the stairway door and was walking quickly in this direction, and as he passed the mounted torch he yanked it off the wall without breaking stride—and Jacky cowered back in her cage, for the newcomer was Len Carrington.

She hunched up and hid her face on her crossed arms as Carrington’s boot heels knocked closer and closer. He’s going to check on how they’re doing with Ashbless, she told herself. Keep your head down and he’ll walk right on by.

Tears began running out of her eyes and she began to sob, very softly, when the knocking steps stopped directly in front other.

“Hello there, Jacky,” crooned Carrington’s voice. “I’ve got a question or two for you. Look at me.”

She kept her head down.

“God damn it, you little sod, I said look at me!” Carrington shouted, shoving the torch in through the bars and whacking the flaming end against Jacky’s shin.

Burning oil had splashed on her trousers and she had to leap up to slap it out. She wound up on her hands and knees on the floor of the cage, face to face through the bars with Carrington.

Another scream from Ashbless batted echoes up and down the halls, and when it had died away Carrington chuckled. “Oh, there’s a resemblance, all right,” he said, softly but with cold satisfaction. “Now listen to me, boy—I want to know who that girl was that I met upstairs here, who sent me off to the Haymarket to be nearly killed six months ago.”

“I swear to God, sir,” gasped Jacky, “I don’t—”

With a snarl of impatience Carrington thrust the torch through the bars again, but before he could do anything with it, two green, long-fingered hands gripped the bars that divided Jacky’s cage from the next one, and Carrington found himself staring into the wide-mouthed, huge-eyed reptilian face of one of Horrabin’s Mistakes. “Leave her alone,” the thing said very clearly.

Carrington blinked and withdrew the torch. “Her?” He peered closely at Jacky, who had scooted back to the rear of the cage and was sobbing again. After several seconds, “Oh, well now,” he said in an almost choked voice, as if he’d swallowed a tablespoonful of honey just before speaking. “Oh, yes yes yes.” He dug in his pocket, fumbled out a ring of keys and shoved one into the cage lock, snapped the bolt back and pulled the door open so fast that the ring of keys was set banging against the iron door frame.

Horrabin’s voice echoed up the hall from the direction of the hospital: “I’m afraid he’s dead, your Worship,” the clown fluted. Carrington grimaced in. frustration and started to close the cage.

“There’s still a heartbeat,” came Romanelli’s voice. “Get the ammonia spirits over here, he’s still got a good half hour left in him, and I need some answers.”

“Hang in there, Ashbless,” Carrington whispered, yanking the door back again. He reached in, grabbed Jacky by the upper arm and dragged her out. She was struggling, and he slapped her across the face hard enough to unfocus her eyes. “Come on,” he said, and marched his dazed captive down another hall and through the arch that led to the wide, downward sloping cellar.

A dozen armed men waited on the other side of the arch, and one of them sprinted over to Carrington. “Now, chief?” the man asked tensely.

“What?” snapped Carrington. “No, not yet—there’s still plenty of sand in Ashbless’ hourglass. I’ll be back soon; I’m taking Jacky here to the deep end to collect on a long-standing debt.”

The man gaped at him.

Carrington smiled, pinched the corner of Jacky’s moustache and ripped it off. “Old Jacky’s been a girl all along.”

“Wh—you mean you—not now, chief! Put her back in the cage and save her for dessert! My God, we’ve got things to do here, you can’t—”

“I’ll be back in plenty of time.” He shoved Jacky forward, out across the floor, and she tripped over the lid of one of the sunken cells, and fell.

“Please, chief!” the man insisted, catching Carrington’s arm as he went to pick her up. “For one thing, you can’t go down into the deep end by yourself! All the Fugitive Mistakes live down there, and—”

Carrington dropped the torch, spun and drove his fist into the man’s belly, and the man sat down hard and rolled over on his side. Carrington looked up at the rest of the men. “I’ll be back,” he said, “in plenty of time. Is that clear?”

“Sure, chief,” a couple of them muttered uncomfortably.

“Fine.” He picked up the torch and hoisted Jacky to her feet and walked away from the lighted end of the vast chamber, down the increasing incline into the darkness. His torch flickered in a damp breeze from below, and lit only the wet stones of the ancient pavement right around them; whatever walls and ceiling there might have been were lost in the solid blackness.

After they’d been walking down the slope for several minutes, and each of them had twice slipped on the wet and ever-steeper paving stones and done short, sitting slides, and the wall torches by the entry arch were not even a faint glow over the hump of the floor behind and above them anymore, Carrington tripped Jacky, knelt beside her and shoved the butt of the torch into a wide patch of mud between two of the flagstones.

“Be nice and I’ll kill you quick afterward,” he said with an affectionate grin.

Jacky drew her legs back and kicked at him—he blocked it easily with his forearm, but as her heels rebounded they knocked the torch loose; it rolled away downward, picked up speed, began cartwheeling and then abruptly went out far below with a wet sizzle.

“Want the lights out, eh?” said Carrington in the now absolute darkness. He seized her shoulders and knelt on her knees to hold her down. “That’s fine—I like shy girls.”

Jacky was weeping hopelessly as Carrington shifted his position above her; he paused for a long several seconds, and then jerked and began making a peculiar muffled groaning. He shifted again, his hand scrabbling weakly at her face, and a moment later he lurched off of her and she heard a sound like a pitcher of water slowly being poured out; and when she caught a smell like heated copper she realized that it was blood splashing on the stones.

Because she’d been crying she hadn’t heard the things approach, but now she heard them whispering around her. “You greedy pig,” giggled one, “you’ve wasted it all.”

“So lick the stones,” came the hissed reply.

Jacky started to get up, but something that felt like a hand holding a live lobster pushed her back down. “Not so fast,” said another voice. “You’ve got to come deeper with us—to the bottom shore—we’ll put you in the boat and push you out, and you can be our offering to the serpent Apep.”

“Take her without her eyes,” whispered another of them. “She promised them to my sister and me.” Jacky didn’t begin screaming until she felt spidery fingers groping at her face.

What he found in the cages pretty much confirmed Coleridge’s suspicion that he was having another opium dream—albeit an extraordinarily vivid one.

When the pain of his headache and stomach cramps had receded a while ago he’d found himself in a dark room with no recollection of how he’d arrived there, and when he sat up on the bed and reached for his watch and couldn’t even find the table—and noticed how profoundly dark the room was—he realized he was not at his room at Hudson’s Hotel; and after standing up and blind-man’s-bluffing his way around the tiny chamber, he’d realized he wasn’t in John Morgan’s house either, or Basil Montagu’s, or any other place he’d ever been before. Eventually he’d found the door, and opened it, and for a full minute just stood in the doorway, staring up and down the dimly torchlit stairwell, whose architecture he recognized as debased provincial Roman, and listening to the distant wails and roarings that he didn’t recognize at all.

This Fuseli-esque scene, together with the familiar—though extra strong this time—balloon-headed feeling and the warm looseness in his joints, made him certain that he had once again taken too strong a dose of laudanum and was hallucinating.

In Xanadu, he’d thought wryly, did such a morbid dungeon world decree.

After a while he had wandered out onto the stairwell landing. The folk notion that a house explored in a dream symbolically represented one’s mind had always struck him as having a grain of truth in it, and while in many dreams he had explored the upper floors of his mind house, he’d never before seen the catacombs beneath. The nightmare noises were coming from below, so, bravely curious about what sort of monsters might inhabit the deepest levels of his mind, he carefully picked his way down the ancient steps.

Despite a moderate apprehension about what he might run into, he was pleased with himself for conjuring up such a detailed fantasy. Not only were the weathered stones of the stairwell done in painstaking chiaroscuro detail, and the scuffing of his shoes producing a faint echo, but the cold air rushing up from below was dank and stale and smelled of mold, mildew, seaweed and—yes, that was it—a zoological garden.

It had grown darker as he’d descended, and when he reached the bottom of the stairs he was in an absolute blackness relieved only by occasional faint flickerings that might have been distant torchlight reflected around more than one corner, or might just have been the random star patterns provided by a bored retina.

He had walked slowly out across the uneven floor in what seemed to be the direction the groaning and cawing came from, but when he’d still been a few yards short of finding the cages he’d been frozen by an echoing scream that had as much weariness and hopelessness as agony in it. And what was that? he’d wondered. My ambition, fettered and all but starved by my sloth? No, that’s misleading; more likely it’s the embodiment of my duties—not the least of which is talent—ignored by me and imprisoned in this bottommost oubliette of my mind.

Now he continued forward, and in a moment he felt the cold bars of the nearest cage. Something slapped heavily on the floor within, then there was a sound like a wet mop being slowly dragged over stones, and presently Coleridge realized that the intermittent breeze on his hand was the breath of something.

“Hello, man,” it said in a profoundly deep voice.

“Hello,” said Coleridge nervously. After a bewildered pause he said, “You’re locked up?”

“We are… all locked up,” assented the unseen thing, and there were grunts and chirps of agreement from other cages on each side.

“Are you, then,” muttered Coleridge, mostly to himself, “vices that I have actually managed to shackle? I wouldn’t have thought there were any.”

“Free us,” said the thing. “The key is in the lock of the cage at the end.”

“Or are you,” Coleridge went on, “as is more likely, strengths, virtues I’ve been too lazy to exercise, warped by long confinement and inattention down here?”

“I don’t know… these things, man. Free us.”

“And would not a twisted strength be a thing more to be feared than an atrophied vice? No, my friend, I think I’d be wise to leave you caged. I must have had good reason to make these bars so solid.” He started to turn away.

“You cannot just ignore us.”

Coleridge paused. “Can’t I?” he asked thoughtfully. “That might be true. Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans’ error. But surely these cages represent a—rare!—manifestation of my will, my control. I must already have taken you into account.”

“Free us and be sure.”

Coleridge stood pondering it in the darkness for a full minute; then, “I don’t see how I can not,” he whispered, and groped his way to the last cage, where Carrington’s key ring still dangled from the lock on the open cage door.

The harsh ammonia fumes dragged Ashbless back to consciousness—and the horrible little mud-floored, torch-lit room—one more time.

After the last ammonia-enforced revival he’d found that he was able to remove himself from the tortured body tied down on the table, or, more accurately, to sink so far down into the fever dream depths of his head that he felt Romanelli’s desperate surgeries only as distant tugs and jars, the way a deep swimmer can faintly feel agitations on the surface.

It had been a welcome change, but in this new moment of clarity he realized that he was dying. While none of the injuries Romanelli had inflicted were instantly fatal, Ashbless would have needed the attentions of a 1983 Intensive Care ward to achieve even a qualified recovery.

He blinked up at the near wall through his good eye, noting without even any wonder the row of four-inch tall toy men along a shelf above the water pump, then rolled his head and stared into the weirdly lit face of Romanelli. I guess this is an alternate world after all, he thought with a cold remoteness. Ashbless dies in 1811 here. Well, he’ll die silent, too. I don’t think, Romanelli, that you could extrapolate the location of a future gap by learning what I know about previous ones—but I’m not going to give you the chance. You can die here with me.

“You’re overdoing it,” came Horrabin’s Mickey Mouse voice from behind him. “It’s not as easy or quick as just ripping open a crate. You’re just killing him.”

“He may think that too,” gasped Romanelli. The sorcerer stood in an evidently painful net of miniature lightning bolts.

“But listen to me, Ashbless—you won’t die until I let you. I could cut your head off—and I may—and still keep you alive in it by magic. You probably imagine you’ll be dead by dawn. Let me assure you I can prolong your death agonies decades.”

The doorway was directly behind the two magicians, and Ashbless forced himself not to move his eye or show any reaction when he saw the monstrous forms appear in it and steal silently forward into the dim room. Whatever they are, he thought, I hope they’re real, and kill us all.

But there was a flicker of motion on the shelf above the pump—one of the little dolls twitched, pointed its tiny arm and shrilled, “The Mistakes are loose!”

Horrabin spun on one stilt like a compass and, poking out his tongue until it touched his nose, produced a piercing two-tone whistle that jarred Ashbless’ remaining teeth. At the same moment Romanelli took a deep breath—it sounded like an open umbrella being dragged down a chimney—and then barked three syllables and flung his bloodstained hands out, palms forward.

One of the Mistakes, a long, lithe furry thing with huge ears and nostrils but no eyes, launched itself in a cat-like leap at Horrabin, but thudded against a barrier and tumbled back to splash in the mud of the wet floor.

“Get… rid of them,” sobbed Romanelli. Blood was welling freely from his nose and ears. “I can’t do… another one of these.”

Half a dozen of the Mistakes, including one amphibian giant with an underslung lower jaw and multiple ranks of wedge-shaped teeth, were noisily hitting and clawing at the barrier.

“Open little holes along the floor,” said Horrabin tensely. “My Spoonsize Boys will make ‘em glad to get back in their cages.”

“I… can’t,” Romanelli said in a faint whine. “If I try to alter it… it will just… break.” Blood had begun running from his eyes like tears. “I’m… falling to pieces.”

“Look at the clown’s trousies,” boomed the thing with all the teeth.

Horrabin automatically glanced down at himself, and saw by the torchlight that his baggy white pantaloons were spattered with mud from the furry Mistake’s splash in the puddle.

“Mud goes through,” the creature bellowed, prying up a fist-sized stone from the floor and flinging it.

The stone thudded into Horrabin’s belly, and he reeled gasping on his stilts until two more struck him, one on his polka dot ruffled wrist and one on his white forehead, and he folded backward, his face a mask of horrified wrath, to sit down with a loud splat in the mud.

The Spoonsize Boys bounded down from their shelf like oversized crickets, drawing their tiny swords in midair, splashed and tumbled in the mud and then bounded through the barrier, stabbing the ankles and swarming up the legs of the Mistakes.

Romanelli folded Ashbless’ ruined leg back and belted the ankle to the thigh, then, with an effort that crumbled the teeth between his hard-clenched jaws, the sorcerer lifted the dying poet and lurched across the floor to the far archway.

Every step down the hall produced further snaps and internal burstings, but Romanelli plodded on, the breath shrieking in and out of him, as crashes and shouts erupted from the hospital behind them, to the archway that led into the descending cellar.

Carrington’s men, huddled against the wall below one of the torches, had been getting increasingly impatient for the return of their chief, and swearing to each other in whispers that they would damn well go in there without him, but they blanched and stepped back when the grisly spectacle of Romanelli and his burden walked in through the arch and passed them.

“Jesus,” whispered one of them, fingering the grip of a dagger, “shouldn’t we go after him and kill him?”

“What are you, blind?” growled one of his fellows. “He’s dead already. Let’s go get the clown.”

They had just started toward the arch when a gang of the Mistakes burst hopping and slithering through, hotly pursued by a leaping swarm of the Spoonsize Boys.

Ashbless had, despite all the chemical and sorcerous consciousness maintainers, sunk into a semi-comatose state from which he roused only for moments at a time. At one point he was vaguely aware that he was being carried down a steep incline; at another he noticed that his bearer was mindlessly and in a bubbling voice singing some jolly little song; then things became confused: there was a lot of yelling behind them, and by the light of his bearer’s personal electrical storm he saw a thing like a huge toad wearing a three-cornered hat bound past on one side while a six-legged dog with a man’s head galloped by on the other, and then the air was full of leaping bugs which weren’t bugs at all but tiny angry men waving little swords.

Then his bearer had stumbled, and everyone was tumbling down the increasingly steep slope, and the last thing Ashbless glimpsed before losing consciousness one more time puzzled him even through his death-fog: he saw Jacky’s face, streaked with tears and shorn of its moustache, staring at him in surprise as he rolled past.

The sparking, flickering thing that tumbled against Jacky collided with the Eyeless Sisters too and sent them spinning away into the darkness, chittering in disappointment, and Jacky scrambled to her hands and knees in time to see that the blue-flashing thing was a man, and that William Ashbless, evidently dead, was sliding down the slope right behind him; then Jacky ducked her head and dug her fingers and toes into the mud between the stones, for a rush of barking and mewling forms, invisible in the darkness, spilled heavily past and over her, closely followed by a horde of what felt and sounded like large locusts. A few moments later the Hell’s circus rush was receding below her, and she began crawling back up the slope.

There were noises from above too, faint screams and shouts and maniacal laughter that echoed weirdly through the cavern, and she wondered dazedly what madness had struck Rat’s Castle this night.

After many minutes she felt the floor level out beneath her, and looking up she saw the distant torches and the archway. Carrington’s men no longer lurked there and whatever the action was, it was taking place somewhere else, so Jacky got up and ran madly toward the light.

When she’d got there she crouched panting for several minutes in the semicircle of wonderful yellow light, enjoying the delusion of safety it gave her, like the King’s X in the games of tag she’d played not that many years ago, and it was with reluctance that she finally got up and stepped through the arch and into darkness again.

She could hear nervous voices from the direction of the dock, so she padded silently up the corridor that led to the ascending stairway, but halted when she heard voices there too.

Guards, she thought—Carrington’s men, probably, making sure nothing gets out of this ant’s nest.

She decided to go back and hide somewhere until the guards returned to the surface, and then swim down the waterway to the Thames, and she’d just turned and started back when the steady shouting doubled in volume and a dim, reflected glow sprang up in the corridor. It quickly waxed brighter, as if men with torches were just about to appear around a corner ahead. Jacky looked around in panic, hoping to see a doorway she might duck into, but there was none. She flattened herself against a wall.

The yelling grew louder still, and she could hear a fast wooden knocking, and then from out of one of the farther tunnels burst Horrabin, completely ablaze and running on his stilts, flanked and followed by what seemed to be a horde of bounding, chittering rats; a moment later his pursuers skidded around the same corner and came bounding after him, flinging rocks and baying like hounds.

Jacky looked back at the stairs, and dimly saw two men crouching just outside the archway, aiming some sort of guns at the approaching rout. No help in that direction, she thought. In desperation she flung herself down against the wall with one arm over her face, in the faint hope of being mistaken for a corpse by all parties.

The two guns went off with one prolonged roar and a flash that brightened the tunnel for a full second, and as stone chips flew from the walls and ceiling, the burning clown rocked to a stop—but caught his balance, evidently unhurt by the blasts; their impact did, though, stop him long enough for his bestial pursuers to catch up with him.

A number of the Spoonsize Boys and their foot-tall counter-parts had been blown away by the sprays of shot, but the survivors turned and flung themselves into the faces of the ravening Mistakes, who had knocked the flaming, screaming clown over against the wall and were tearing at his legs with mud-stained claws. The miniature men leaped right in past the talons of the Mistakes and drove their little swords into eyes and throats and ears, totally careless of their own survival; but the Mistakes were fighting to the death and were willing to risk the blades of the Spoonsize Boys, and a scorching, in order to get close enough to Horrabin to take a bite out of any reachable part of him with muddied teeth, or to pull one of the stilts farther out from under him.

The lunatic spectacle was taking place only a few yards in front of Jacky, and she couldn’t help lifting her head a little to watch. The blackened, whimpering clown wasn’t burning as brightly as before, but there was still enough flame to see some individual struggles: Jacky saw one of the Mistakes, a poodle-sized thing with tentacles all over it and both eyes ruined by the homunculi’s swords, latch a toothy mouth onto Horrabin’s clutching right hand, and, with a horrible snapping, bite most of it off; and a couple of things like unshelled snails, dying under the fierce attentions of a dozen of the little men, had got in between the wall and the left stilt, and managed with their last, expiring efforts to push it out past the supporting point, so that the clown came crashing down onto them; most of the light went out when Horrabin hit the floor, so that all Jacky could see was a heaving, tortured mass of dying shapes, and all she could hear was an ever-weaker chorus of gasps, crunchings, whimpers and long, rattling exhalations. A nasty smell like burning garbage choked the tunnel.

Jacky got up and ran past the mass of death, deeper into the maze, and after twenty paces in the darkness she lost her footing and tumbled, and when she slid to a dazed stop a hand closed firmly on her wrist.

She writhed around, wondering if she had the strength left to strangle something, but she halted when she heard her unseen companion’s voice. “I say, excuse me. Sir Thought or Whimsy or Fugitive Virtue, but could you possibly direct me to the waking levels of my mind?”

Ashbless had been dimly aware for some time that he was lying in the bottom of a boat that was being weakly rowed by Doctor Romanelli, but he came fully awake one more time when he noticed that the surface he was lying on had changed. The last time he’d been aware of it, it had been hard, angular wood, but now it seemed to be soft leather stretched loosely over some kind of flexible ribs. He opened his eye and was mildly surprised to find that he could see, though there was no light. The boat was passing through a vast ruinous hall, along the walls of which stood upright sarcophagi that shone with an intense blackness.

He heard Romanelli gasp, and looked in his direction. The gaunt sorcerer too shone in the anti-light; he was staring in awe at something over Ashbless’ shoulder. Ashbless dragged an elbow under himself and managed to turn his head, and saw several tall, dim figures standing at the stern, and a little shrine in the center of the boat, encircled by a snake with its tail in its mouth, and in the shrine stood a man-high disk that blazed so darkly with the radiant blackness that it hurt Ashbless’ eye, and he had to look away; though he thought he had seen dimly the pattern of a kephera beetle inscribed on the disk. When he could see again he noticed that Romanelli was smiling with relief, and that tears were slicking his eroded cheeks.

“The boat of Ra,” he was whispering, “the Sektet boat, in which the sun journeys through the twelve hours of the night, from sunset to dawn! I’m in it—and at dawn, when we emerge into the world again, I’ll sail in the Atet boat, the boat of the morning sky, and I’ll be restored!”

Too ruined to care, Ashbless slumped back down onto the leather—beneath which, he noticed, he could hear a pulse beat. The wailing that he’d seemed to be hearing all night was louder now, and had a supplicating tone. He rolled his head and looked out over the low gunwale to the bank of the river and saw vague forms stretching out their arms toward the boat as it passed; and when it had passed them he could hear their despairing weeping. There were poles standing in the bank at intervals—marking the hours, he thought—with snakes’ heads stuck on the top of them, and as the boat passed each one it became, just for an instant, a bowed human head.

Ashbless sat up, and noticed for the first time that the boat was a huge snake, broadened in the middle like an exaggerated cobra’s hood, and that at both stern and bow it tapered up in a long neck to a living serpent’s head.

This is the poem, he thought—the twelve hours of the night. This is what I was writing about. I’m in the boat that only dead men see.

He sensed that the disk was alive—no, very dead, but aware—but that it was uninterested in the two stowaways. The tall figures in the stern, which seemed to be men with the heads of animals and birds, also ignored them. Ashbless slumped back again.

After a time the boat floated through a dim gate flanked by two sarcophagi as tall as telephone poles, and the shore figures on the other side were screaming and shifting from side to side along the shore and over their frightened cries he could hear a slow metallic slithering. “Apep!” the ghosts were shouting. “Apep!” And then he saw a shape of blackness rising, and realized it was the head of a serpent so vast that it dwarfed their freakish boat. Man-shaped forms dangled from its jaws, but it shook its ponderous head, sending them spinning away, and arched slowly forward over the river.

“The serpent Apep,” whispered Romanelli, “whose body lies in the deep realms of the keku samu where pure darkness becomes an impenetrable solid. It senses that there is a soul on this boat that… doesn’t qualify for emergence into the dawn.” Romanelli was smiling. “But I don’t need you any longer anyway.”

Unable even to prop himself up on his elbow anymore, Ashbless watched the absolutely black head blot out every other thing above him. The air became bitterly cold as the thing bent down closer, and when it opened its vast jaws he thought he could see negative stars shining in a remote distance, as if Apep’s mouth was the gateway to a universe of absolute cold and the absence of light.

Ashbless shut his eye and commended his soul into the care of any benign god there might still somewhere be.

A thin screaming drew his attention outward again, and he looked up for what he hoped would be the last time… and saw the disintegrating figure of Doctor Romanelli falling upward into the vast maw.

Just to be sure, Jacky stared into the dark west, where the broad Thames curled to the south past Whitehall before straightening out westward, and then she looked east again.

She smiled with relief. Yes, the sky was definitely paling. She could see the dark arches of Blackfriars Bridge against the tenuous pre-dawn glow.

She relaxed and sat back on the low stone wall, aware now that it was chilly out on the mud bank above the Adelphi Arches. She pulled her coat closer about her shoulders and began shivering. Hopeless as this vigil is, she thought, I’ll nevertheless wait here until somewhat after dawn to see if Ashbless might drift out here—it’s just conceivable that he wasn’t dead when he fell past me in the deep cellar, and that he reached the subterranean river and was well along it before the dreadful … solidification began.

She shuddered and glanced for reassurance at the waxing eastern light, and then allowed herself to remember the ascent from the deep cellars.

She had taken Coleridge’s hand and cautiously begun to pick her way back up the lightless corridor when she noticed the silence. Not only had the distant wailing stopped, but the subtly complex resonances in the air, the echoes of the perpetual breeze through all the cubic miles of subterranean corridors and chambers below them, had ceased.

She’d pressed against the right-hand wall as they went past the place where she knew Horrabin’s corpse lay—and she nearly screamed when a startlingly deep voice spoke to them out of the darkness.

“This is not a place for people, my friends,” it said.

“Uh… right,” squeaked Jacky. “We’re leaving.” She heard a heaving and thudding—and several metallic clinkings—and when the voice spoke again, it was from over her head. “I’ll escort you,” it said heavily. “Even dying from the pinpricks of the clown’s little men, Big Biter is a protector few would care to cross.”

“You’ll… escort us?” asked Jacky incredulously.

“Yes.” The thing sighed ponderously. “I owe it to your companion, who freed my brothers and sisters and me and gave us the chance to revenge ourselves on our maker before we died.”

Jacky had noticed that the thing’s voice was not echoing, as though they stood in a room instead of a tunnel.

“Make haste,” Big Biter said, moving forward, “the darkness is hardening.” The peculiar trio made their way to the stairs and plodded up them. At the first landing Coleridge wanted to rest, but Big Biter told him there wasn’t time; the creature picked Coleridge up and they continued.

“Don’t hang behind,” their escort cautioned Jacky.

“I won’t,” Jacky assured it, for she realized that now there was no sound or echo from the corridor they’d vacated, or even from the flight of stairs they’d just ascended. What was it, the eyeless Sisters had said to her half a year ago? The darkness is hardening, like thick mud, and we want to be away when it turns as solid as the stones… we mustn’t be caught forever in the stones that are hardened night! Jacky made sure she matched Big Biter’s pace, and was glad he moved so quickly.

When they finally got to the top and stepped into the bright torchlight of the kitchen hallway in Rat’s Castle, a couple of Carrington’s men took a step toward them, then took two steps back when they saw the creature that was carrying Coleridge in its heavy arms. Jacky looked up at Big Biter and almost recoiled herself.

Their escort was an amphibious giant, with long black catfish tentacles around its face like a caricatured beard and hair, and eyes like glass paperweights, and a pig-like snout, but by far his most striking feature was his mouth: it was a twelve-inch slash across his face, which he could barely close because of the rows of huge teeth in it. He wore an ancient coat, the front of which was shredded and wet with red blood.

“These vermin won’t interfere with you,” Big Biter said quietly. “Come on.”

He set Coleridge down and walked with them to the front door. “Go now,” he said. “Quickly. I’ll watch until you’re out of sight, but I’ve got to get back down the stairs before the darkness hardens completely.”

“All right,” said Jacky, gratefully breathing the relatively fresh pre-dawn air of Buckeridge Street. “And thank you for—”

“I did it for your friend,” rumbled Big Biter. “Now go.”

Jacky nodded and hustled Coleridge outside and down the dark street.

They’d made it back to Hudson’s Hotel without mishap, and when they’d gotten into Coleridge’s room Jacky had flopped him onto the bed. The man was asleep before Jacky had gotten to the hall and gently closed the door behind her. She’d seen the laudanum bottle on the bedside table, and she believed she understood now why Carrington’s restraining measures had proven ineffective on the elderly poet. How could Carrington have known what a tremendous tolerance for opium Coleridge had developed?

Then she had walked down to the Thames, by the Adelphi Arches where the subterranean tributary emptied into the river, on the chance that Ashbless, or whatever remained of him, might emerge from the tunnel.

The sky was a bright steely blue in the east now, and a tattered string of clouds above the horizon had begun to smolder and glow. The sun would appear at any moment.

There was a turbulence in the water in the still deep shadows below the arches, and Jacky glanced down just in time to see a ghostly, semi-transparent boat surge out. As it emerged into the dawn grayness it became simultaneously incandescent and more transparent, and it receded away toward the eastern horizon at such a speed that Jacky was momentarily certain it was only a hallucination born of total exhaustion; but a split second later she became aware of two things: the first red sliver of the rising sun had appeared over the distant London skyline, and a man was splashing about in the water a dozen feet out from the bank, having apparently fallen through the ghost boat when it became insubstantial.

Jacky leaped to her feet, for she recognized the man, who was now swimming a little dazedly toward shore.

“Mr. Ashbless!” she shouted. “Over here!”

Just as the snake boat had passed between the two poles—each supporting a pharaoh-bearded head—that flanked the last archway, Ashbless felt a tremendous swelling heat burst up inside himself, stunning the beleaguered shred that was his consciousness, and until he splashed into the icy Thames he was blissfully sure that this was death.

When he’d thrashed to the surface and shaken the long hair out of his eyes it occurred to him that he once again had hair, and two eyes. He held up first one hand, and then the other, in front of his face, and grinned to see all fingers present, all skin unbroken.

The restoration Doctor Romanelli had hoped for in vain had happened to him—when the sun was resurrected and made whole and alive again at dawn, Ashbless had been allowed—God knew why—to partake in it.

He’d just begun to swim in toward shore when he heard a call. He paused, squinting at the shadowed shore, then recognized the person sitting on the wall, waved, and resumed his stroke.

The water was surging and swashing around the Adelphi Arches, and when he stood up in the shallows and splashed his way up onto the mud bank he saw why: the subterranean waterway had stopped flowing into the Thames, as completely as if a huge valve had been closed somewhere—and now that the immediate backwash had abated, the river was flowing past Ashbless’ point of exit as smoothly as it swept past the rest of the bank. A few river birds had swooped down to peer inquisitively at the churned-up mud that was swirling away downstream.

He looked up at the thin figure perched on the wall. “Hello, Jacky,” he called. “Coleridge got out too, I think.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jacky.

“And,” said Ashbless, climbing up the bank, “I daresay he won’t remember anything he saw last night.”

“Well,” said Jacky, mystified, as the dripping, bearded giant scrambled up the slope and hoisted himself up to sit next to her on the wall, “as a matter of fact, he may not.” She peered closely at him. “I thought you were dead when you slid past me down there. Your… eyes, and… “

“Yes,” said Ashbless gently. “I was dying—but there was magic loose last night, not all of it malign.” It was his turn to peer at her. “You found time to shave?”

“Oh!” Jacky rubbed her bare upper lip. “It… the moustache… was singed off.”

“Good Lord. I’m glad to see you made it out, anyway.” Ashbless leaned back, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. “I’m going to sit here,” he said, “until the sun’s high enough to dry me off.”

Jacky cocked an eyebrow. “You’ll die of the chill—which seems at least a waste, after surviving the… condensed works of Dante.”

He grinned without opening his eyes, and shook his head. “Ashbless has got lots of things to do before he dies.”

“Oh? Such as what?”

Ashbless shrugged. “Well… get married, for one thing. Fifth of next month, as a matter of fact.”

Jacky tossed her head carelessly. “That’s nice. To whom?”

“A girl named Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy. Pretty girl. Never met her, but I’ve seen a picture of her.”

Jacky’s eyebrows went up. “Who?”

Ashbless repeated the name.

Her face twitched irresolutely between a piqued smile and a frown. “You’ve never met her? So how can you be so damn sure she’ll have you?”

“I know she will, Jacky me lad. You might say she hasn’t any choice.”

“Is that a fact now,” said Jacky angrily. “I suppose it’s your broad shoulders and fair hair that will… render her incapable of resisting you, eh? Or no, don’t tell me—it’s your poetry, isn’t it? Sure, you’re going to read her a few verses of your incomprehensible damned ‘Twelve Hours,’ aren’t you, and she’ll figure since she can’t understand it, it must be… Art, right? Why, you arrogant son of a bitch… “

Ashbless had opened his eyes in astonishment and sat up. “Damn it, Jacky, what’s the matter with you? Lord, I didn’t say I was going to rape her, I—”

“Oh, no! No, you’re just going to give her the once in a lifetime chance to—what, consort?—with a real poet. What a bit of luck for her!”

“What in hell are you raving about, lad? I only said—”

Jacky leaped to her feet on the wall and planted her fists on her hips. “Meet Elizabeth Tichy!”

Ashbless blinked up at her. “What do you mean? Do you know her? Oh my God, that’s right, you do know her, don’t you? Listen, I didn’t mean—”

“Damn you!” Jacky brushed her hair out with her fingers. “I’m Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy!”

Ashbless laughed uneasily—then did a double take. “Holy God. Are… are you really?”

“It’s one of the perhaps four things I’m sure of, Ashbless.”

He flapped his hands in dismay. “Damn me, I’m sorry, Ja—Miss Tichy. I thought you were just… good old Jacky, my buddy from the old days at Captain Jack’s house. I never dreamed that all this time you—”

“You were never at Captain Jack’s house,” said Jacky. Almost pleadingly she added, “I mean, were you?”

“In a way I was. You see, I—” He halted. “What do you say we discuss this over breakfast?”

Jacky was frowning again, but after a pause she nodded. “All right, but only because poor Doyle thought so highly of you. And it doesn’t mean I’m conceding anything, you understand?” She grinned, then caught herself and frowned sternly. “Come on, I know a place in St. Martin’s Lane where they’ll even let you sit by the fire.”

She hopped down from the wall as Ashbless stood up, and together they walked away, still bickering, north toward the Strand in the clear dawn light.

EPILOGUE—APRIL 12,1846

After standing in his doorway for nearly a quarter of an hour, staring out across the gray, hummocked expanse of the Woolwich marshes that stretched for several miles under the rain-threatening sky, William Ashbless nearly took off his coat and went back inside. The fire was drawing well, after all, and he had not entirely killed the bottle of Glenlivet last night. Then he frowned, tucked his cap lower over his bone-white hair, touched the pommel of the sword he’d strapped on for the occasion, and drew the door closed behind him. No, I owe it to Jacky, he thought as he trudged down his steps. She met her own appointment so … gallantly, seven years ago.

During the last couple of solitary years, Ashbless had fretfully noticed that his memory of Jacky’s face had disappeared—the damned portraits had looked fine when they were new and she was still alive to supplement them, but recently it had seemed to him that they hadn’t ever caught her with her real smile on. But today, he realized, he could remember her as clearly as if she’d just that morning taken the coach into London; her affectionately sarcastic grin, her occasional snappishness, and the gamin, Leslie Caron prettiness that, to his mind, she had kept right up until her death of a fever at the age of forty-seven. Probably, he thought as he crossed the highway and started out along the marsh path—which he’d morbidly watched appear over the last couple of seasons, knowing he would this day walk it—probably I remember her so well today because today I join her.

The path rose and fell over the hilly marshes, but when the river came into view after ten minutes of brisk walking, his step was still springy and he wasn’t panting at all, for he’d been exercising and studying fencing now for years, determined at least to seriously injure whoever it might prove to be that was destined to kill him.

I’ll wait here, he decided, standing on a low rise that overlooked the willow-fringed Thames bank fifty yards away. They’ll find my body closer to the bank, but I’d like to get a long, clear look at my murderer first. And who on earth, he wondered, will it turn out to be? He noticed that he was trembling, and he sat down and took several deep breaths. Take it easy, old lad, he told himself. You’ve known for thirty-five long and mainly happy years that this day was coming.

He leaned back and stared up at the turbulent gray clouds. And most of your friends are dead now, he thought. Byron went—of a fever, too—in Missolonghi twenty-some years ago, and Coleridge bit the dust in 1834. Ashbless smiled and wondered, not for the first time, how much of some of Coleridge’s very late poems—particularly “Limbo” and “Ne Plus Ultra”—might have derived some of their imagery from his dimly remembered experiences that night in the early April of 1811. Certain lines made Ashbless curious:

and

He rubbed his eyes and stood up—and froze, and his chest went icy hollow, for a rowboat had been moored to one of the willows while he’d been looking away, and a tall, burly man was climbing sturdily up the slope, a sheathed sword swinging on his right hip. Interesting, Ashbless thought nervously—a lefty like myself. Okay, he told himself, now stay calm. Remember, the wound in the belly is the only one they’ll find on you, so don’t bother with the epee-type parries, that protect the arms, legs and head—only parry thrusts to the body… while knowing, of course, that there’s one coming that you’ll fail to parry.

His right hand fluttered over his stomach, and he wondered which patch of presently healthy skin would soon be parted to admit several inches of cold steel.

In an hour it’ll be done, he thought. Try to brave out this last hour as well as Jacky did. For she knew it was coming too … knew it ever since that night in 1815 when you got drunk enough to give in to her demands to know the date and circumstances of her death.

Ashbless squared his shoulders and stepped off the crest of the rise and walked down the path toward the river to meet his murderer halfway.

The man looked up, and seemed startled to see Ashbless coming toward him. I wonder what our quarrel will be, thought Ashbless. At least he isn’t young—his beard looks as white as mine. He’s been in foreign parts, too, judging by that tan. His face does look vaguely familiar, though.

When they were still a dozen yards apart Ashbless stopped. “Good morning,” he called, and he was proud of how steady his voice was.

The other man blinked and grinned craftily, and Ashbless realized with a chill that the man was insane. “You’re him,” the stranger said in a cracked voice. “Ain’t you?”

“I’m who?”

“Doyle. Brendan Doyle.”

Ashbless answered, in a tone that concealed his surprise, “Yes … but it’s a name I haven’t used for thirty-five years. Why? Do we know each other?”

“I know you. And,” he said, drawing his sword, “I’ve come to kill you.”

“I guessed,” said Ashbless quietly, stepping back and drawing his own blade from its sheath. The wind whispered in the tall grasses. “Any use asking why?”

“You know why,” the other man replied, lunging fast as a whiplash on the word know; Ashbless managed to parry it with a wild outside flail in sixte, but he forgot to riposte.

“I really don’t know why,” he gasped, trying to get a firm footing on the muddy ground.

“It’s because,” the man said as he launched a quick feint and disengage that Ashbless barely avoided with a screeching circular parry, “while you’re alive,” the man’s sword sped up out of the bind and darted in at Ashbless’ chest, so that Ashbless had to hop back out of distance, “I can’t be.” As he recovered from his lunge his blade flicked sideways at Ashbless’ forearm, and Ashbless felt the edge cut right through his jacket and shirt and grate against the bone.

Ashbless was so stunned that he almost forgot to parry the next lunge. But this is wrong, he thought bewilderedly, I know I won’t be found with a wounded arm! And then he laughed, for he’d figured it out.

“Yield now or die,” Ashbless called almost merrily to his opponent.

“It’s you that’s to die,” the tanned man muttered, starting a lunge and then abruptly halting halfway through it, so as to provoke Ashbless into a premature parry; but Ashbless didn’t fall for it, and caught the end of his opponent’s blade with the forte of his own, and lunged forward with a strong bind that drove his point corkscrewing in to poke, and then deeply stab, the tanned man’s belly. He felt the narrow blade stop and constrictedly flex against the spine.

The man sat down on the wet grass, clutching himself with hands already slick with blood. “Quick,” he gasped, pale under his tan, “me be you.”

Ashbless just stared down at him, his exhilaration suddenly gone.

“Come on,” grated the man on the ground, dropping his sword and beginning to crawl. “Do the trick. Switch.”

Ashbless stepped back. His opponent crawled forward for a yard or two, then fell forward onto the grass.

Several minutes went by before Ashbless moved, and when he did it was to kneel beside the body, which had stopped breathing, and lay his hand gently on the dead man’s shoulder. If there is any reward after death, he thought, for such creatures as you, I’ll bet you’ve earned it. God knows how you made your way back to England from Cairo, and how you found me. Maybe you were drawn back to me, very like the way ghosts are supposed to be drawn to the place where they died. Well, you get to share, a little bit at least, in my biography: you provide the corpse.

Eventually Ashbless wiped his sword clean on an uprooted tuft of grass, and then stood up to sheathe it; and he tore off a strip of his scarf and knotted it around his cut forearm. The chilly spring breeze blew all thoughts of the past out of his mind, and with a sense of adventure he hadn’t known in decades he walked on down the path to the moored boat, leaving behind him the ka which Doctor Romanelli had made of him so many years ago.

It’s unknown, whatever happens to me from here on out, he thought with a smoldering elation as he untied the rope. No book I ever read can give me any hint. It may be that I’ll capsize the boat and drown within five minutes, or it may be I’ll live another twenty years!

He climbed in and fitted the thole pins into the oarlocks, and after three strong strokes he was well out onto the face of the river. And as he rowed on, toward whatever might prove to be the true destiny of the man who’d been Brendan Doyle and Dumb Tom and Eshvlis the cobbler and William Ashbless, and was not any of them any longer, he regaled the river birds with every Beatles song he could remember… except Yesterday.