when the canoe’s weight came onto her arm. “Pull your end around there, Doyle—there’s a ladder that starts about four feet over your head.”
When they’d both climbed up to the narrow pier, Jacky said, “Now we’ve got to figure out what to do with you. You can’t come back to Copenhagen Jack’s house—Horrabin will have a dozen spies there watching for you.” They were walking slowly toward the building, which seemed to be some kind of riverfront inn, and Jacky, feet bare, was picking her way carefully over the ragged old timbers. “When does this friend of yours arrive in town? What’s his name, Ashbin?”
“Ashbless. I’ll meet him this Tuesday.”
“Well, the innkeeper here, old Kusiak, has a stable off to the side, and he’s always needing help. Can you shovel horse dung?”
“If there are people who can’t, I’d hate to think I was one of them.”
Jacky pulled open the inn’s dockside door and they stepped into a small room with a fireplace, and Doyle hurried over to it. A girl in an apron appeared, and her welcoming smile faltered a little when she noticed that both guests had evidently fallen into the river, and one was still dripping wet.
“It’s all right, miss,” Jacky said, “we won’t sit on the chairs. Would you tell Kusiak, please, that it’s Jacky from across the river, and a friend, and we’d like two hot baths—in individual private rooms—”
Doyle grinned. Modest little chap, this Jacky.
“—And some clean dry clothes, it doesn’t much matter what sort,” Jacky went on. “And after that two pots of your excellent fish chowder in the dining room. Oh, and some hot coffee with rum in it while we wait.”
The girl nodded and hurried away to check all this with the innkeeper.
Jacky squatted down beside Doyle at the fireplace. “You’re pretty sure this Ashbin character will get you set up in some decent sort of position?”
Doyle wasn’t sure, and was trying to convince himself more than Jacky when he said, a little defensively, “He’s not hurting for money, I believe. And I do know him pretty damn well.”
Also, Doyle wanted to interview Ashbless in detail about his early years and then stash the information somewhere where it wouldn’t be disturbed until he could “discover” it when he got back to 1983. Schliemann and Troy, he thought fatuously, George Smith and Gilgamesh, Doyle and the Ashbless Documents.
“Well, good luck with him,” said Jacky. “Maybe next month at this time you’ll have a job at the Exchange and rooms in St. James. And you’ll hardly remember your days as a beggar and a stablehand—” She smiled. “Oh yes, and your morning as a less than successful costermonger… what else have you done?”
The rum-laced coffee arrived then; and the girl’s smile, and her assurances that their baths were being drawn even now, showed that Kusiak had acknowledged Jacky as a good credit risk. Doyle sipped his coffee gratefully. “Nothing much,” he answered.
* * *
The structure known throughout the St. Giles rookery as Rat’s Castle had been constructed on the foundations and around the remains of a hospital built in the twelfth century; the hospital’s bell-tower still survived, but over the centuries the various owners of the site had, largely for warehousing purposes, steadily added new floors and walls around it, until now its arched Norman windows looked, instead of out across the city, into narrow rooms fronted right up against them and moored to the ancient stone; the cap of the tower was the only bit of the structure still exposed to the open air, and it would have been hard to find in the rooftop wilderness of chimney pots, airshafts and wildly uneven architecture.
The bellropes had rotted away centuries ago, and the pulleys plummeted to the floor to be carted away as scrap metal, but the ancient cross timbers still spanned the shaft, and new ropes had been looped over these in order to hoist Horrabin and Doctor Romany some fifty feet off the floor, roughly three-quarters of the way up the enclosed tower. Since it allowed them to converse at a comfortable distance from the ground, it was their preferred conference chamber. Oil lamps had been set on the sills of the old stone windows at the very top, and Damnable Richard attended this evening’s council, sitting on the sill of a window one level down from the lamps, which put him only a foot or two above the heads of the dangling chiefs.
“I have no idea who those two men were, your Honor,” Horrabin was saying, and his already weird voice echoed with a sort of nightmare ululation in the stone shaft. “They were certainly none of my crew.”
“And they really did mean to kill him?”
“Oh, yes. Dennessen says when he knocked the second man off our American he had already stabbed him once, and was cocking another thrust.”
Doctor Romany swung meditatively for a few moments back and forth, kicking off gently from the concave stonework. “I can’t understand who they could be. Someone working against me, obviously, who either already knows what the American has to tell … or simply doesn’t want me to learn any of it. It couldn’t be the people he came with, because I saw them all disappear when the gate ceased to exist, and I’ve monitored all gates since and nobody has come through them. And the Antaeus Brotherhood hasn’t been a threat to us for more than a century, I gather.”
“They’re a bunch of old men,” Horrabin agreed, “who have forgotten the original purpose of their organization.”
“Well, tell your man Dennessen that if he could recognize the man who tried to kill the American, and bring that man to me alive, the reward will be the same as if he’d killed Dog-Face Joe.” He flapped his arms to stop swinging. “The bearded man who shot at the American and then picked him up may be of the same group. You say you recognized the daring canoeist?”
“I believe so, yer Worship. He wasn’t wearing his usual turban, but it looked like a beggar who sometimes hangs around here, called Ahmed. A fake Hindoo. I’ve got an order and reward out now for his capture.”
“Good. We’ll wring the story out of one of these birds, Set willing, even if we have to peel him down to nothing but lungs and a tongue and a brain.”
Damnable Richard carefully reached for his wooden monkey, whom he’d set on the window ledge so as to be able to see the prodigy of two sorcerers hung up like hams in a smokehouse, and put his thumb and forefinger over its ears, for savage talk tended to upset it. And Richard himself wasn’t pleased. He’d been in town for a full week now, confined to Rat’s Castle and the hall under Bainbridge Street, while Doctor Romany at least got to travel around in order to be at each gate when it appeared, which involved going out into the country a good deal of the time.
“I can’t help thinking—wondering whether—this interference may be prompted by my… partner’s efforts in Turkey,” said Doctor Romany.
“But nobody knows what they are,” pointed out Horrabin. He added more softly, “Even I know only that your twin brother has found a young British lord, sojourning abroad alone, who you two seem to think you can make some use of. It seems to me I should be more fully acquainted with your plans.”
Romany seemed not to have heard him. He said thoughtfully, “I don’t believe there’s been any breach of secrecy at this end, simply because I’m the only one that knows anything important. But I don’t know much about what may be going on at Doctor Romanelli’s end of things, back in Turkey; I understand this young lord is fond of writing letters. I just hope my… brother hasn’t allowed some unobtrusively important bit of information to find its way, in one of these letters, to certain people in this island.”
Horrabin looked surprised. “Where’d you say this troublesome young peer is?”
