Fikee shrugged, a little impatiently. “We are both servants. My post is England, yours is Turkey. I completely understand why it is that you can be present tonight only”—he waved vaguely—”in replica.”
“Needless to say,” Romany intoned, his voice becoming deeper as though trying to wring an echo out of the surrounding carpets, “if it happens that you die tonight, rest assured you will be embalmed and entombed with all the proper ceremonies and prayers.”
“If I fail,” Fikee answered, “there won’t be anybody to pray to.”
“I didn’t say fail. It could be that you will succeed in opening the gates, but die in accomplishing it,” the unruffled Romany pointed out. “In such a case you’d want the proper actions taken.”
“Very well,” said Fikee with a weary nod. “Good,” he added.
There was a sound of shuffling feet from the entry, and then an anxious voice. “Rya? Where would you like the crate? Hurry, I think spirits are coming out of the river to see what’s in it!”
“Not at all unlikely,” muttered Doctor Romany as Fikee instructed the gypsies to carry the thing inside and set it down on the floor. This they hastily did, making their exit as quickly as respectful deportment would permit.
The two very old men stared at the crate in silence for a time, then Fikee stirred and spoke. “I’ve instructed my gypsies that in my… absence, they are to regard you as their chief.”
Romany nodded, then bent over the crate and began wrenching the top boards away. After tossing aside some handfuls of crumpled paper he carefully lifted out a little wooden box tied up with string. He set it on the table. Turning back to the crate, he knocked away the rest of the loosened boards and, grunting with effort, lifted out a paper-wrapped package which he laid on the floor. It was roughly square, three feet on each side and six inches thick.
He looked up and said, “The Book,” unnecessarily, for Amenophis Fikee knew what it was.
“If only he could do it, in Cairo,” he whispered.
“Heart of the British kingdom,” Doctor Romany reminded him. “Or maybe you imagine he could travel?”
Fikee shook his head, and, crouched beside the table, lifted from under it a glass globe with a slide-away section in its side. He set it on the table and then began undoing the knots on the small wooden box. Romany meanwhile had stripped away the package’s paper covering, exposing a black wooden box with bits of ivory inlaid to form hundreds of Old Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyphics. The latch was leather, and so brittle that it crumbled to dust when Romany tried to unfasten it. Inside was a blackened silver box with similar hieroglyphic characters in relief; and when he’d lifted away the lid of that one a gold box lay exposed to view, its finely worked surface blazing in the lamplight.
Fikee had gotten the little wooden box open, and held up a cork-stoppered glass vial that had been nested in cotton inside. The vial contained perhaps an ounce of a thick black fluid that seemed to have sediment in it.
Doctor Romany took a deep breath, then lifted back the lid of the gold box.
At first Doctor Romany thought all the lamps had been simultaneously extinguished, but when he glanced at them he saw that their flames stood as tall as before. But nearly all the light was gone—it was as though he now viewed the room through many layers of smoked glass. He pulled his coat closer about his throat; the warmth had diminished too.
For the first time that night he felt afraid. He forced himself to look down at the book that lay in the box, the book that had absorbed the room’s light and warmth. Hieroglyphic figures shone from ancient papyrus—shone not with light but with an intense blackness that seemed about to suck out his soul through his eyes. And the meanings of the figures darted clearly and forcefully into his mind, as they would have done even to someone who couldn’t read the primeval Egyptian script, for they were written here in the world’s youth by the god Thoth, the father and spirit of language itself. He tore his gaze fearfully away, for he could feel the words burning marks on his soul like a baptism.
“The blood,” he rasped, and even the capacity of the air to carry sounds seemed weakened. “Our Master’s blood,” he repeated to the dimly seen figure that was Amenophis Fikee. “Put it into the sphere.”
He could just see Fikee thumb aside the hatch in the side of the globe and hold the vial to the opening before uncorking it; the black fluid spilled inside, falling upward, staining the top of the glass globe. The moon must be up, Romany realized. A drop fell up onto Fikee’s palm, and must have burned, for he hissed sharply between his teeth.
“You’re… on your own,” croaked Doctor Romany, and lurched blindly out of the tent into the clearing, where the evening air felt warm by comparison. He blundered away up the riverbank, yawing and pitching on his peculiar shoes, and finally crouched, panting and bobbing, on a slight rise fifty yards upstream and looked back at the tent.
As his breathing and heartbeat decelerated he thought about his glimpse of the Book of Thoth, and shuddered. If any evidence were needed to document the inversion of sorcery during the last eighteen centuries, that prehistoric book provided it; for though he’d never actually seen it before, Romany knew that when the Prince Setnau Kha-em-Uast had, thousands of years ago, descended into the tomb of Ptah-nefer-ka at Memphis to recover it, he had found the burial chamber brightly illuminated by the light that radiated from the book.
And this spell, he thought unhappily, this tremendous effort tonight, would have been almost prohibitively dangerous even in those days, before sorcery became so much more difficult and personally costly to the sorcerer, and, despite the most rigid control, unpredictable and twisted in its results. Even in those days, he thought, none but the bravest and most transcendently competent priest would have dared to employ the hekau, the words of power, that Fikee was going to speak tonight: the words which were an invocation and an invitation to possession addressed to the dog-headed deity Anubis—or whatever might remain of him now—who, in the time of Egypt’s power, presided over the underworld and the gates from this world to the other.
Doctor Romany let his gaze break away from the tent and drift across the river to the heathery landscape that rolled beyond it up to another rise crested with trees that seemed to him too tall for their girth, waving their emaciated branches in the breeze. A northern landscape, he thought, stirred by a wind that’s like flowing gin, sharp and clean and smelling of berries.
Reacting to the alien qualities of these things, he thought of the voyage to Cairo, he and Fikee had taken four months before, summoned by their Master to assist in the new crisis.
Though prevented by a startling disorder from ever leaving his house, their Master had for quite a while been using a secret army of agents, and an unchartably vast fortune, in an effort to purge Egypt of the Moslem and Christian taints and, even more difficult, to throw out the governing Turkish Pasha and his foreign mercenaries, restoring Egypt as an independent world power. It was the Battle of the Pyramids four years ago that provided the first real breakthrough for him, though at the time it had seemed the final defeat—for it had let the French into Egypt. Romany narrowed his eyes, remembering the rippling crackle of the French muskets echoing from the Nile on that hot July afternoon, underscored by the drum-roll of the charging Mameluke cavalry … by nightfall the armies of the Egyptian governors Ibraheem and Murad Bey had been broken, and the French, under the young general Napoleon, were in possession.
A wild and agonized howl brought Doctor Romany to his feet; the sound rebounded among the trees by the river for several seconds, and when it had died he could hear a gypsy fearfully muttering protective cantrips. No further sounds issued from the tent, and Romany let out his breath and resumed his crouching position. Good luck, Amenophis, he thought—I’d say “may the gods be with you,” but that’s what you’re deciding right now. He shook his head uneasily.
When the French came into power it had seemed like the end of any hope of restoring the old order, and their Master had, by hard-wrought sorcerous manipulation of wind and tides, lent subtle aid to the British admiral Nelson when he destroyed the French fleet less than two weeks later. But then the French occupation turned to their Master’s advantage; the French curtailed the arrogant power of the Mameluke Beys, and in 1800 drove out the Turkish mercenaries who’d been strangling the country. And the general who took command of Cairo when Napoleon returned to France, Kleber, didn’t interfere with their Master’s political intrigues and his efforts to lure the Moslem and Coptic population back into the old pantheist worship of Osiris, Isis, Horus and Ra. It looked, in fact, as though the French occupation would do for Egypt what Jenner’s cowpox was evidently doing now for human bodies: substituting a manageable infection, which could be easily eliminated after a while, for a deadly one that would relent only upon the death of the host.
Then, of course, it began to go wrong. Some lunatic from Aleppo stabbed Kleber to death in a Cairo street, and in the ensuing months of confusion the British took up the slack; by September of 1801 Kleber’s inept successor
