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.
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.
Doyle sprinted toward the nearest one, his shadow fragmenting and whirling around hm.
CHAPTER 9
—Virgil addressing Antaeus in Dante’s Inferno
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?”
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.
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.
