As he hurriedly took out the well-used lancet for one more dig into a vein, Romany remembered what had gone wrong with that plan. The fatal dose of mercury wound up in the stomach of one of Charles’ spaniels… and the Great Freeze, which was supposed to end with Monmouth’s triumphal arrival in Folkestone, proved to be more forceful than Fikee had anticipated, and continued well on into March… and the forged marriage certificate in its locked black box had somehow been lost. The Master had not been pleased.
The tent walls were orange with the glare of the spinning ring of frenzied yags outside, and drops of sweat diluted the thick blood that he now carefully smeared around the paper’s margins.
He smiled as he caressed the glass poles into the perfect angle and then reached an open hand out toward the ring of racing fire elementals outside, to draw off from them the tremendous energy that would be needed to fuel and propel his jump through time.
* * *
Doyle slammed the clothes trunk shut and, ignoring the cowering gypsies who lay on the floor panting, ran outside. The blazing wheel around the camp shone as white as the sun, impossible to look at, and he was gasping in the depleted air, feeling the sweat steam away as fast as it appeared on him. Tents around the periphery were all ablaze, and even the inner ones near him had begun to smoke. My God, he thought fearfully, why doesn’t he stop them? If the temperature in here goes up a few more degrees we’ll all torch off like matches on a griddle.
He ran to the next tent, the fringe of which burst into a trim of blue fire just as he struck the flap aside and stumbled in. Doctor Romany stood inside, next to a desk, with one hand flung out toward Doyle and the other clutching a piece of paper. Doyle sprang at him——and was swept up on an incandescent wind. For several seconds he just hunched, waiting for a shattering impact, and then he was free falling through a silent and lightless void … until without warning light and sound abruptly crashed back at him. He got a quick, bewildered impression of a large room lit by candles in crude wooden chandeliers, and then he was falling again, through air that felt shockingly cold, and a second later his boots crashed onto a table, one exploding a cooked, stuffed duck and the other splashing in all directions nearly the entire contents of a bowl of soup—his legs skidded away and he sat down jarringly in a platter of baked ham.
Spattered diners along both sides of the table yelled in astonishment and reared back, and Doyle saw Doctor Romany sprawled face down among the plates on the next table over.
“Excuse me… I beg your pardon,” Doyle muttered in confusion, scrambling down off the table.
“Damn me!” exclaimed one pop-eyed old fellow, mopping at his shirt with a napkin. “What is this damnable trick?” Everyone, in the aftermath of surprise, seemed to be angry, and Doyle heard someone say, “Stinking witchery it is. Let’s have them arrested.”
Romany too had attained the floor, and spread his arms so authoritatively that the people who had leaped to their feet near him now stepped back obediently. “There was an explosion,” he gasped, managing to sound stern as well as breathless. “Get out of my way, I must—” Then he noticed Doyle. And despite his total disorientation Doyle was surprised and gratified to see the sorcerer turn pale and then whirl, and punch and curse his way to the nearest door, which he wrenched open. He shot Doyle one last fearful look before disappearing into the night outside.
“After him, Sammy, and bring him back here,” spoke a calm voice from behind Doyle. He turned and met the suspicious gaze of a heavyset man wearing an apron and holding a cleaver with relaxed familiarity. “I heered no explosion,” he said to Doyle as a burly young man hurried out after Romany. “You’ll bide here until we determine at least who’s to pay for the spoilt dinners.”
“No,” said Doyle, forcing his new voice to sound reasonable—which wasn’t easy, for he’d noticed several men wearing wide-cuffed jackboots, knee-length vests and short wigs, and the accents he was hearing were nearly incomprehensible, and he was pretty sure he knew what had somehow happened. “I’m getting out of here, you understand. Now you can try to stop me with that thing, but I’m so scared that I’ll make a real try at taking it away from you, and I imagine we’ll both get hurt, and this looks like a lousy year to be injured in.”
To emphasize his words he reached out and lifted an empty pewter beer mug from a table.
After several more moments of useless straining he let off the pressure and gently set the cup back down on the table. “Very solid workmanship,” he muttered.
Several people near him were grinning, and there was open laughter from the farther tables. A grudged grin was even breaking through the innkeeper’s stolid frown. As Doyle turned to leave everyone began laughing, and like cracks starring a stretch of ice it broke the tension, so that he was able to thread his way, red-faced but unhindered, through the merriment to the door.
When he opened the door and stepped outside, the cold instantly burned his face and hands into numbness. His lungs retreated from the first breath he took, and he thought his nose must start bleeding just from the passage of the savagely frigid air. Jesus, he screamed in his mind as the door banged shut behind him, what is this? This can’t be England—the son of a bitch must have jumped us to some damned outpost in Tierra del Fuego or somewhere.
If everyone in the inn hadn’t been laughing at him he’d have turned around and gone back inside; as it was he pressed on, his stinging hands thrust into the pockets of his too-thin coat, and sprinted forward along the narrow, dark street, vaguely hoping to catch up with Romany and terrify the wizard into finding a warm place where he could just sit down for a while.
He didn’t find Romany, but Sammy did, and Doyle came upon Sammy curled up in a narrow alley mouth about a block and a half from the inn; in the ashy moonlight Doyle might not have seen him, but he heard his hopeless sobbing. Frozen tears had attached Sammy’s cheek to the brick wall, and there was a faint crackling when Doyle crouched and gently lifted the young man’s head up.
“Sammy!” said Doyle, loudly so as to break through the boy’s obsessive grief. “Where did he go?” Getting no answer, he shook him. “Which way, man?” The steam of his breath plumed away upward like smoke.
“He…” the young man gasped, “he showed me the… snakes inside me. He told me, ‘Look at yourself,’ and I did, and I seen all them snakes.” Sammy began sobbing again. “I can’t go back yonder, or home either. They’d get inside of everyone.”
“They’re gone,” Doyle told him firmly. “You understand me? They’re gone. They can’t stand the cold, I saw every one of them crawling away to die when I got here. Now where did the bastard go?”
Sammy sniffed. “Be they gone? And dead? Certes?” He glanced fearfully down at himself.
“Yes, damn it. Did you see where he went?”
After patting and prying at his clothes with diminishing dread, the young man began shivering. “I m-must get back,” he said, getting stiffly to his feet. “Devilish cold. Oh, aye, ye wanted to know where he went.”
“Yes.” Doyle was almost tap-dancing on the cobblestones in a fit of shivering. His right ankle was numb, and he was afraid that the trailing chain would freeze solid with his skin.
Sammy sniffed again. “He leapt over the house there into the next street.”
Doyle cocked his head to hear better. “What?”
“He jumped over that house, like a grasshopper.” Sniff. “He had metal coils on the bottoms of his shoes,” Sammy added by way of explanation.
“Ah. Well… thank you.” Obviously Romany hypnotized this boy with both barrels, Doyle reflected. And in only seconds! Better not let the fact that he seems to be afraid of you make you overconfident if you run into him. “Oh, by the way,” he said as the boy began shuffling away, “where are we? I’m lost.”
