into the newly packed bowl of his pipe. “Would you like a pipe?”
“Lord, yes,” said Doyle, accepting from him a fragile white clay pipe and a bag of tobacco. “What do you mean, a ka?”
Burghard squinted at Doyle. “You’re a damn puzzling mix of knowledge and ignorance, sir, and sometime I would relish hearing your own story. For example, you are wearing a connection chain but don’t seem to know much about us, and you know of Doctor Romanelli but don’t know what a ka is or how it happens that this winter is so savage.” He smiled, though a calculating glint remained in his deceptively mild-looking eyes. He ran his fingers through his short-cropped, thinning hair. “In any case, a ka is a duplicate of a human, grown, in a vat full of a special solution, from as little as a few drops of the original person’s blood. If the procedure be done rightly, the duplicate will not only resemble the original in every particular, but will have, too, all the knowledge that the original had.”
Doyle had stuffed his pipe with the dry tobacco and now lit it the same way Longwell had. “Yes, I suppose Romany might be such a thing,” he said, puffing smoke and letting the fire melt the ice out of his beard. His eyes widened. “Ah, and I believe I know another man who is probably a… ka, also. Poor devil. I’m sure he doesn’t know.”
“Do you know of Amenophis Fikee?” asked Burghard.
Doyle looked around at the company, wondering how much he dared disclose. “He is, will be or has been the chief of a band of gypsies.”
“Aye, he is. Why all the was’s and shall-be’s?”
“Never mind. Anyway, gentlemen, this ka of Doctor Romanelli is here in London tonight, and he’s armed with knowledge no one here should have, and he needs to be found and driven back to where he belongs.”
“And you want to go back with him,” said Burghard.
“Right.”
“Why employ such a perilous, albeit quick, means of travel?” asked Burghard. “By ship and horse or donkey you could be anywhere in six months.”
Doyle sighed. “I gather that you function as a sort of… magical police force,” he began.
Burghard smiled and winced at the same time. “Not precisely, sir. What we’re paid by certain wealthy and savvy lords to do is prevent sorcerous treason. We employ not magic but the negation of magic.”
“I see.” Doyle laid down his pipe on the hearth. “If I tell you the story,” he said carefully, “and you agree that this Romany creature is a—let’s say direly powerful—menace to London and England and the world, will you help me catch him and then not hinder my return—if it’s even possible—to where I belong?”
“You have my word,” said Burghard quietly.
Doyle stared at the man for several seconds while the fire popped and crackled in the silence. “Very well,” he rumbled at last. “I’ll make it quick, for we must act soon, and I believe I know where he’ll be for the next hour or so. He and I jumped here by some magical process or other, but not from another place, such as Turkey. We jumped from… another time. The last morning I saw was that of September the twenty-sixth, in the year 1810.”
Longwell burst into a gale of laughter which ceased when Burghard raised his hand.
“Go on,” he said.
“Well, it seems that something has—” He paused, for he’d noticed a leather-bound book on the table, and though now it was new, and the 1684 stamped in gold on the spine gleamed brightly, he recognized it and stood up and crossed to it. A pen lay beside an inkwell ready to hand, and, grinning, he dipped the pen in the ink, flipped to the last page and scrawled across it, “IHAY, ENDANBRAY. ANCAY OUYAY IGITDAY?”
“What did you write?” asked Burghard.
Doyle dismissed the question with an impatient wave. “Gentlemen, something has broken holes in the structure of time… “
* * *
Only fifteen minutes later a band of a dozen men, bundled up against the extreme cold, filed out of the old building’s street door and hurried away south down the narrow bridge street toward the Surrey shore. There was room between the ancient houses to walk two abreast, but they moved in single file. Doyle was the second man in line, right behind the cloaked figure of Burghard, whose stride Doyle was able to match easily, even with the unaccustomed angular bulk of a sheathed sword bumping his right thigh. The thin streak of yellow light thrown by Burghard’s dark lantern was the only illumination, for the darkness was absolute in the dark defile of the street, though several storeys overhead the moonlight frosted the ragged roofs and the web of stout crossbeams meant to keep the unsteady old buildings from falling against each other. The bridge was silent except for the occasional rattle of an ankle chain against a cobblestone, and from away to his right Doyle could faintly hear music and shouted laughter.
“Here,” whispered Burghard, stepping into an alley and turning his light on a wooden framework that Doyle realized was a stairway leading down. “No sense announcing our coming by marching through the south gate.”
Doyle followed him down the dark stair’s, and after a long winding descent through a well cut into the stonework of the bridge they emerged into open air again below the underside of the vast span, and Doyle noticed for the first time that the river, visible beyond the lumber of the stairs and between the arches of the bridge, was a white, unmoving expanse of moon-lit ice.
A party could be seen moving across the ice toward the north shore, and after glancing at them once casually Doyle found his gaze drawn back to the distant figures. What was it about them that had caught his eye? The awkward, hunchback look of several of them? The prancing, bounding gait of the one in front?
Doyle closed his big, gloved hand on Burghard’s shoulder. “Your telescope,” he growled quietly as Longwell collided with him from behind, not jarring him at all.
“Certes.” Burghard fumbled under his coat and passed a collapsible telescope up to Doyle.
Doyle click-click-clicked the thing out to its full extent and trained it on the distant group. He was unable to focus, but he could see clearly enough to be sure the lightfooted leader was Doctor Romany; the other five—no, six—figures seemed to be misshapen men dressed in furs.
“That’s our man,” Doyle said quietly, handing the telescope back to Burghard.
“Ah. And so long as he be on the ice we daren’t confront him.”
“Why is that?” Doyle asked.
“The connection, man, the chains are no good on water,” hissed Burghard impatiently.
“Aye,” muttered Longwell from the darkness behind and above Doyle, “were we to confront him upon the ice, he’d set all the devils of hell on us in an instant, and our souls’d not be moored against the onslaught.”
A gust of Arctic wind battered the old stairway, making it sway like the bridge of a beleaguered ship.
“Still, we can follow ‘em to the north shore, can’t we,” mused Burghard, “and call ‘em halt yonder. Aye, come along.”
They resumed their downward course, and after a few more minutes of cramped shuffling arrived at a split, buckled and snow-dusted dock, and stepped off it onto the ice.
“They’re bearing more west now, after a fair northward stint,” said Burghard quietly, his eyes on the seven moving figures way out on the ice field. “We’ll come out from under the bridge on the west side and then curve north, and meet them ashore at the culmination of the circumbendibus.”
When they walked out through one of the high arches onto the ice, Doyle saw bobbing lights ahead, and heard again, louder, the laughter and music. There were tents and booths out on the river, and big swings with torches attached to the sides, and a large boat on axles and wheels tacking slowly back and forth across the face of the ice, with garish faces painted on its sail and wheels, and ribbons and banners streaming from the rigging. The silent procession of the Antaeus Brotherhood skirted the festivities on the east side, plodding north. When they were still a hundred yards from shore Doctor Romany’s party emerged from the blackness under the northernmost arch of the bridge and made for a set of steps below Thames Street. The tall, spry figure that was Doctor Romany turned around as they started up the stairs, and even as he’d begun to turn Burghard twisted himself to the side and turned a nimble cartwheel, finishing it up with a double-fisted push against Doyle’s chest; Doyle’s feet skated out from under him and he sat down heavily on the ice as Burghard laughed uproariously. Longwell began to do a grotesquely dainty ballet twirling, and for an instant Doyle was certain that Romany had fired a lunacy-inducing
