the legs touched the ground at the same time, than I am about having written that poem.” He folded the manuscript, wrapped the cover letter around it, addressed it, then dripped some hot candle wax on it for a seal.
Byron nodded sympathetically, started to speak, stopped, and then quickly asked, “Who are you, by the way? I no longer want to demand any answers, for I became your lifelong friend when you shot that murderous gypsy who’d otherwise have ended my story. But I’m damn curious.” He smiled shyly, and for the first time looked his actual age of only twenty-three years.
Doyle took another long sip of the wine and set the bottle down on the table. “Well, I’m an American, as you’ve probably guessed from my accent, and I came… here… to hear Samuel Coleridge give a speech, and I ran afoul of this Doctor Romany fellow—” He paused, for he thought he’d heard something, a sort of thump, outside the window. Then, remembering that they were on the third floor, he dismissed it and went on. “And I lost the party of tourists I was with, and—” He halted again, beginning to feel the alcohol. “Oh, hell, Byron, I’ll tell you the real story. Give me some more wine first.” Doyle took a long sip and set the bottle down with exaggerated care. “I was born in—”
With simultaneous crashing explosions of glass from one side and splinters from the other, the window and the door burst inward and two big, rough-looking men were rolling to their feet from the floor. The table went over, spilling the food and shattering the table and the lamp—and in the sudden dimness more men were pouring in through the doorway, stumbling or leaping over the split door, which was hanging at an angle from one twisted hinge. Blue flames began licking over the oil-splash.
Doyle grabbed one man by the scarf knot, took two steps across the room and then hurled him through the window; the man collided with the frame, and for a moment it seemed he might grab the rope the first man had swung in on, but then his hands and heels disappeared and there was a receding, gasping cry.
Byron had snatched up and drawn Romany’s sword, and as two men with raised coshes stepped toward the still off-balance Doyle—and from below, outside, came a multiple crack, and startled yells—Byron kicked forward in a lunge too long to recover from easily and drove three inches of the extended blade into the chest of the man closest to Doyle. “Look out, Ashbless!” he yelled as he wrenched the sword free and tried to straighten up.
The other man, alarmed by this sudden appearance of lethally naked steel, swung his cosh down with all his strength onto Byron’s head. There was an ugly hollow smack and Byron fell dead to the floor, the sword clattering away.
To regain his balance Doyle had crouched and grabbed a leg of the desk, and from there he saw Byron’s inert form; “You son of a—” he roared, straightening and lifting the desk over his head—everything spilled off it, and the envelope for the Courier fluttered out the open window—”bitch!” he finished, bringing the desk shattering down on the head and upraised arm of the man who’d hit Byron.
The man dropped, and since several of the intruders were busy smothering the fire, Doyle launched himself in a furious charge toward the doorway; two men leaped forward to block his way, but were felled by his massive fists; but as he lurched out into the hall a carefully swung sock full of sand thudded against his skull just behind his right ear, and his forward rush became a sloppy dive to the floor.
Doctor Romanelli eyed the motionless form for a few seconds, waving back the men who had followed Doyle out of the room, then he thrust the weighted sock away in a pocket. “Tie the chloroform rag around his face and get him out of here,” he grated, “you incompetent clowns.”
“Goddamn, yer Honor,” whined the man who picked up Doyle’s ankles, “they was ready for us! There’s three of us dead, unless Norman survived his fall.”
“Where’s the other man who was in there?”
“Dead, boss,” said the last man to emerge from the room, pulling on a scorched and smoking coat.
“Let’s go, then. Down the back stairs.” He pressed his hands to his eyes. “Try to stay together, will you do that at least?” he whispered. “You’ve caused such a pandemonium that I’ll have to set a radiating disorientation spell to confuse the pursuit you’ve certainly roused.” He began muttering in a language none of Horrabin’s men recognized, and after the first dozen syllables blood began running out from between his fingers. Clumping footsteps sounded from the direction of the front stairs, and the men shifted and glanced at each other uneasily, but a moment later they heard a confused babble of argument, and the footsteps receded. Romanelli ceased speaking and lowered his hands, breathing hoarsely, and a couple of the men with him actually paled to see blood running like tears out of his eyes.
“Move, you damned insects,” Romanelli croaked, shoving his way to the front of the group and leading them forward.
“What’s a pandemonium?” whispered one of the men in the rear.
“It’s like a calliope,” answered a companion. “I heard one played at the Harmony Fair last summer, when I went there to see my sister’s boy play his organ.”
“His what?”
“His organ.”
“Lord. People pay money to see things like that?”
“Silence!” Romanelli hissed. After that they were on the stairs, and gasping and straining too much with their unconscious burden even to want to speak.
It was a chorus of shrill, discordant whistling that finally led Doyle out of his drugged half-dreams. He sat up, shivering with the damp chill in his coffin-shaped box, the lid of which had been taken away, and after rubbing his eyes and taking several deep breaths he realized that the tiny bare room really was rocking, and that he must be aboard a ship. He hoisted a leg outside the box and let his sandalled heel clunk to the floor, and grabbing the sides he levered himself dizzily to his feet. His mouth was still full of the sharp reek of chloroform, and he grimaced and spat as he reeled to the door.
It was locked from the outside, as he’d expected. There was a small window in the door at the level of his neck, with stout iron bars instead of glass—which helped explain why the room was so cold—and, crouching a little to look out of it, he saw a damp deck that disappeared within a few yards into a wall of gray fog, and, from out of the close murk, a rope, belt-high and parallel to the deck, that was evidently moored to the outside of his cabin bulkhead.
The strident whistling seemed to be coming from somewhere only a dozen yards ahead. Summoning all his nerve, and relying on the probability that his captors wanted to keep him alive, Doyle yelled, “Cut out that damned noise! Some of us are trying to sleep!”
Several of the whistles ceased instantly, and the rest faltered into silence a few moments later, and in spite of himself Doyle shivered to hear a voice that was almost Doctor Romany’s say, “You—no, you stay here; you—go shut him up. The rest of you idiots keep playing. If a mere man shouting distracts you, how do you expect to keep it up when the Shellengeri arrive?”
The eerie whistling started up again, and in a minute or so Doyle, still resolutely at the window, saw a disorienting thing—a tiny old man, bundled up in a tarred canvas coat and a leather hat, was pulling himself along the waist-high rope toward Doyle, but his legs trailed away upward; it looked like he was moving underwater. When the weightless crawler had bumped against the bulkhead and peered in through the little window, Doyle saw the half-face and single eye and realized that this was the same street lunatic who had once promised to take him to a time gap and then had only led him to a vacant lot and shown him some old charred bones.
“Shout all you… please when these… people are through, Lou,” the crawler said, “but if you do it again now, you won’t get fed for the rest of the voyage. And you want to keep up your strength, right, Dwight?” Then the thing shoved its awful face right at the bars and snarled, “I recommend you eat—I want there to be some tooth left in you when the Master’s done and turns you over to me for disposal.”
Doyle had let go of the fog-wet bars, and now he actually stepped back, startled by the raw hatred blazing out of that single eye. “Wait a minute,” he muttered, “take it easy. What did I ever do to—” Then he halted, struck by a grisly suspicion that instantly became a certainty. “My God, it was the same lot on the Surrey-side, wasn’t it?” he whispered. “And you couldn’t have known I escaped through the cellar… for all you knew it was my own skull you were showing me, right? God. And so you survived Burghard’s shot of mud… but I had that paper that worked as a mobile hook… Jesus, you must have simply lived your way back here!”
“That’s right,” chittered the thing that had been Doctor Romany. “And this is my homeward voyage—kas were never meant to survive nearly this long, and damn soon I’ll take that last boat ride through the twelve hours of the night—but before I do, you will be, finally and certainly, dead.”
