The Anubis Gates

Doyle, forty feet out now, calmed down a little and began to dog paddle silently. If anything, he thought, any boat or swimmer comes near me, I’ll surface dive and go as far as I can under water, and then try to let my head emerge slow and breathe quietly. Hell, with any luck I should be able to elude them … And, with a good deal more luck, get back to shore somewhere before my strength gives out. The current was carrying him to his left, away from Doctor Romany.

He heard a new sound—oarlocks clacking rhythmically behind him to his right.

Horrabin smiled, for a dim glow had appeared under the second pier to his left, and as it moved out from under the overhang it could be seen to be a shotgun pattern of dozens of tiny lights whirling across the face of the dark water. The clown pointed out toward where he’d last heard Doyle splashing, and the cluster of tiny lights scudded out into the river as quick as the wind-blown petals of some luminous flower.

“Follow the lights, Doctor Romany!” Horrabin called merrily.

What lights? Doyle wondered. The nearest lights are across the river. Sure, Doctor Romany, follow them while I drift east.

He quietly treaded water with his legs and right arm, giving his left shoulder a rest. Staying afloat was no problem; he had discovered that by taking turns with his dog paddle, floating on his back and slowly treading water he was able to keep his face out of water with no strenuous use of any one set of muscles. The current was taking him toward Blackfriars Bridge, and he was cautiously confident that he’d be able to climb up on one of the pilings and, once his pursuers had decided he’d drowned, make a segmented swim from piling to piling to the shore.

Suddenly he learned what lights Horrabin had meant, for what seemed to be a couple of dozen little floating candles were skimming across the surface straight toward him. He yanked his head under water and, with just a kick-splash to mark where he’d been, swam away under water in a direction at right angles to the course the lights had been taking.

His tenuous confidence was gone. This reeked of sorcery—hadn’t Jacky said Doctor Romany was a magician? Evidently Horrabin was too—and he felt like a man who, limbering up for a fistfight, sees his opponent snap the loaded cylinder closed on a revolver.

He frog-kicked along as far as he could and still expect to surface without gasping, and then he let his head float up and break the surface of the water. Slowly he lifted a hand and pushed the soaked flap of hair away from his eyes.

For a moment he just hung stunned in the water, for the lights had followed him and now surrounded him, and staring at the nearest couple he saw that they were eggshell halves, equipped with tiny torches, straw masts and folded paper sails, and—and it didn’t even occur to him to ascribe it to fever delirium—a tiny man, no bigger than his little finger, crouched in each one, twisting the toy mast deftly in the breeze to hold his diminutive craft in position.

Doyle screamed and flung his arm around in an arc to capsize them, then without waiting to see the effect drew a sobbing breath and dived again.

When his lungs were heaving at his clenched shut throat and he thought he must be about to crack his head against the stones of the bridge pilings, Doyle again let himself bob to the surface. The tiny eggshell mariners were again grouped in a ring around him when he surfaced. They didn’t approach nearer than two arm’s lengths, and in spite of the kalunk… kalunk… kalunk of Doctor Romany’s boat drawing ever closer he paused, thrashing weakly in the water, to get his breath back. Something slapped the water, hard, an inch from his left cheek, and the spray stung his eye. A moment later he heard the boom of a gunshot roll across the water from the shore. It was instantly followed by a shot from Romany’s boat, but because the boat was moving the shot was badly aimed and kicked up spray among the lighted eggshells, sending one spinning through the air.

God, I’m being shot at from all sides, Doyle thought despairingly as he once more filled his lungs and pushed himself under. They don’t even want me alive anymore.

Horrabin had glanced down to his left when a gunshot went off down there among the fishing boats, then his head snapped back up when there was a shot from Doctor Romany’s boat. The clown saw the tiny light spring up from the surface and go out when it came down again, and he realized the gypsy chief was shooting at the man in the water.

Horrabin quickly cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “I thought you wanted him alive!”

There was a moment’s silence, and then Romany’s voice echoed across the water. “Isn’t this Dog-Face Joe?”

“It’s the American.”

“Apep eat me. Then why did you shoot at him, you doomed sod?”

* * *

Jacky had already snatched a close-mesh fishing net out of a nearby boat, flung it into one of the canoes and was pushing the narrow craft out into the water when she heard Horrabin yell, in a voice made even shriller by fear, “It wasn’t me, damn it, your Worship, I swear! It’s somebody down among the boats here—there he goes now, in a canoe, heading toward you!”

Jacky handled the single oar with speed and grace, and propelled the canoe rapidly out toward the ring of little lights, which was shifting even further east, toward the bridge. God, she thought as she panted with the effort, I’m sorry Tom—I mean Doyle. I was just too eager to kill Dog-Face Joe. I’m sorry, please don’t be killed.

She felt hollow and cold with horror, though, for it had felt like a good shot, and she’d been aiming directly at the center of the dimly seen head.

Her canoe was moving faster than Doctor Romany’s larger boat, and she’d started well to the east of him, so when Doyle’s head burst up out of the water again—again right in the middle of the infallible ring of lights—she was almost a hundred yards closer to him than Romany was.

“Doyle!” she called, profoundly relieved to see him still alive. “It’s Jacky. Wait for me.”

Doyle was so exhausted that he was almost annoyed to hear Jacky’s voice. He’d resigned himself to being captured, and this rescue attempt of Jacky’s sounded as if it would involve further exertions, and likely avail nothing but to anger Doctor Romany.

“Sink straight down as deep as you can, and then come back up,” came Jacky’s voice again, closer now.

Doyle turned his head and, by the light of the candles of his Lilliputian retinue, saw a bearded man in a canoe.

His eyes widened with surprise, but before he could duck under water again the figure in the canoe said, “Wait!” and, reaching up, yanked off the beard. “It is me, Doyle. Now do what I said, and hurry!”

I guess you can’t relax yet, Doyle told himself wearily as he slid under the surface again and obediently let half the air in his lungs bubble out through his nose, so that he sank easily through the cold black water; then he halted his descent with a scissors-kick when it occurred to him that there wasn’t going to be a pool floor to kick upward from. What if I’ve sunk so deep, he thought, that I can’t thrash my way back to the surface before my lungs mutiny and suck in river water? He instantly began clawing and kicking his way up, and he felt a rope loop brush the back of his hand a moment before he burst out into the air.

There was a wild chittering nearby, like a cageful of excited birds, and Jacky, leaning out over the side, was bundling up the wet weight of a fishing net, in among the tangles of which a few little lights still burned. “Get in,” Jacky snapped. “Clamber over the side up front, I’ll balance you from the back. Stay away from that net—those little bastards carry knives. And hurry.”

Doyle took a moment to look upstream—he could see Romany’s boat perhaps fifty yards off, the synchronized knocking of the oars very loud now—and then he heaved himself up and rolled into the canoe. Jacky was crouched in the rear, rigidly holding the oar straight down into the water.

As soon as the canoe had stopped wobbling, Doyle panted, “Step on the gas.”

Jacky began plying the oar desperately. Having come to a full stop and taken on more weight, though, the canoe was reluctant to move.