The Anubis Gates

“A few days out of Athens, obediently heading back up the Gulf of Corinth to Patras; for some reason milord is very vulnerable psychically when he’s in that little area: Patras, the Gulf of Patras, Missolonghi. So when he was last there, in July, Romanelli had the imperial consul, an employee of his, put milord to sleep by having him concentrate on the operation of a musical clock, and while he was asleep my brother placed a command in milord’s mind, under the thinking level so he wouldn’t be aware of it—a command to return to Patras in mid-September, by which time things should be warmed up here so that everything will come to a boil at once. And his lordship is even now carrying out the order, blithely supposing that the decision to return to Patras is his own.”

Horrabin was nodding impatiently. “The reason I asked was, well, for a letter of his to have incited trouble here, it would have to have been sent… when? Months ago, I should think. Aren’t there about a dozen wars going on between here and there? So even if he’d written to somebody right at first, in July, there hasn’t been time for the letter to arrive here and for somebody here to find out who you are and what you want.”

Romany raised his eyebrows and nodded. “You’re right—I hadn’t considered the slow pace of international mail these days.” He frowned. “Then who in hell were those men, and why are they interfering with me? “

“I couldn’t say,” answered the clown, slowly stretching and bending his limbs like some sort of huge, painted spider. Damnable Richard covered his monkey’s eyes. “But,” added Horrabin, “they’re interfering with me too. Four dozen of my tiniest homunculi were drowned out there tonight by that bloody Hindoo. You need to make your Master in Cairo send more of that stuff—what’s it called?”

“Paut,” said Doctor Romany. “That’s damned hard stuff to produce nowadays, magic being as strangled as it is.” He shook his head dubiously.

Horrabin’s painted face clenched in what was probably a scowl, but he continued his slow exercises. “I need it—to work for you I need it—to make more homunculi,” he said evenly. “Dwarves and such I can warp down from human stock, but for boys that can overhear conversations while hidden in a teacup, follow a man by crouching in a fold of his hat,” the clown’s voice was rising, “sneak into a bank through the drains and replace good gold sovereigns with your gypsy fakes—” and he tilted over so that his head was near Romany and his legs pointed away, and he added, in a whisper, “or if you want some lads that can enter a monarch’s chamber concealed in a nurse’s dress, and put mind-rot drugs in his soup without being seen, and then, dressed up as anything from bugs to the twelve apostles, do dances on a table top out of his reach, just to give his ravings added color—for work like that you need my Spoonsize Boys.”

“We won’t have to do that very much longer, if things work out as planned in Patras,” said Romany quietly. “But your creatures have their uses, I admit. I’ll explain the situation to my Master, and let you know tomorrow what he says.”

“You communicate by means of something faster than the mail,” observed Horrabin, his orange eyebrows inquiringly raised halfway to his hat.

“Oh yes,” said Romany with a deprecatory shrug. “By sorcerous means my colleagues and I can converse directly at any time, across any distance, and even send objects through space instantly. Such perfect communication ensures that our stroke, when we deal it, will be flawlessly aimed, timed and coordinated— unanswerable.” He permitted himself a smile. “In our hand is the King of Sorcerers, and that beats any of the cards John Bull may have in his hand.”

Damnable Richard looked at his monkey and rolled his eyes and shook his head. What a crock, eh, monkey? he thought. He just doesn’t want this terrible clown to know how much he needs him. How many times, monkey, have you and I seen him shouting at that silly candle of his with Egypt- writing on it, and after a couple of hours just get a faint voice saying, “What? What?” coming out of the round flame… and how about the times he’s tried to send or get objects from his pals in the far off lands? Remember the time his Master tried to send him a little statue, and all that showed up was a handful of red hot gravel? Hah! This to sorcery!

He spat disgustedly, earning an angry yell from Doctor Romany. “Sorry, rya,” Richard said hastily. He scowled at the monkey. Don’t start me chatting with you, he told it. You see what you did? Got me in trouble.

“In any case,” Doctor Romany went on, wiping the top of his bald head, “we flushed the American out of cover, and I want a serious search for him tonight, while he’s still running scared. Now the three of us here—are you paying attention, Richard? Very well—the three of us here know him by sight, so each of us should lead a search party. Horrabin, you’ll mobilize your wretches and search the area from St. Martin’s Lane to St. Paul’s Cathedral—and check with all lodging house owners; look into pubs; eye closely all beggars. Richard, you will lead a search of the south shore, from Blackfriars Bridge to past the granaries below Wapping. I’ll take some of my dockside boys southeast from St. Paul’s through the Clare Market rookery and the Tower and Docks and Whitechapel area. Frankly, that’s where I expect to find him; he’ll have made friends on the north side of the river, and when we last saw him he was being carried east, away from the area you’ll have, Horrabin.”

* * *

Two hours after dawn Damnable Richard trudged back up the stairs, stepping softly, for he believed the wooden monkey in his pocket was asleep. When he wearily took his place in the window the two sorcerers were already dangling from their ropes, though Doctor Romany was swinging back and forth as if only recently drawn up.

“I presume,” said the gypsy chief, turning up toward him a face haggard with exhaustion, “that you had no better luck on the Surrey-side than we did on the north.”

“Kek, rya.”

“Means no,” Romany told Horrabin.

There was a large stone missing from the tower’s dome, and as the spot of bright sunlight slid by slow inches down the sunlit wall, and the costermongers in Holborn Street could be faintly heard shouting the virtues of their vegetables, the two sorcerers discussed strategies, and Damnable Richard had tucked his awakened monkey into his shirt collar and was having a long talk with it in the faintest of whispers.

CHAPTER 6

“The other night upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there … “

—Old Rhyme

Tuesday morning, two days later, was overcast and threatening rain—but in the coffee houses around the Royal Exchange the brokers and auctioneers were conducting business as vigorously as ever. Doyle, stupefied by hunger and lack of sleep, sat in a corner of the Jamaica Coffee House and watched a dozen merchants bidding for a shipment of tobacco salvaged from some ship that had managed to founder in the Thames; the auction was by Inch of Candle, whereby the last bid made before a short candle went out was the one taken, and the candle was now very low and the bidding quick and loud. Doyle took another sip of his lukewarm coffee, forcing himself to take only a small one, for if he finished it he’d have to buy another to keep his table, and the purchase of his present set of clothes—brown trousers and jacket, a white shirt and black boots, all secondhand but clean and whole—had left him only a shilling, and he wanted to be able to buy Ashbless a cup of coffee when he arrived.

His shoulder burned with a hot ache, and he was afraid the brandy with which he’d soaked his bandage hadn’t killed the infection in the knife cut. I should just have drunk the brandy, he reflected. His eyes were watering and his nose tingled, but it seemed his body had forgotten how to sneeze. Hurry up, William, he thought. Your biographer is evidently dying. He hunched around to glance at the clock on the wall—twenty minutes after ten. Ashbless was due in ten minutes.

At least I made it to here and now alive, he told himself. There were moments when it looked like I wouldn’t. Knifed, shot at and nearly drowned on Saturday evening, and then captured by that gypsy later that night.

He smiled a little bewilderedly into his coffee as he remembered the encounter. He’d thanked Jacky and