sword. “Wh—what did you say?”
Though his position must have been painful, the Master uncovered his teeth in a smile as he slowly rotated on the end of the rope. “I can save Rebecca—prevent her from dying. Through the time gaps which I caused to be opened and Darrow discovered. You can help. We’ll prevent them from getting on the motorcycle.”
The sword clattered onto the roof tiles and Doyle sank to his knees. His face was now level with the Master’s twenty feet away, and he stared in helpless fascination into the old man’s eyes, which seemed to shine with a terribly intense blackness.
“How… can you know about… Rebecca?” he gasped.
“Don’t you remember the ka we drew of you, son? The blood that fell into the tub? We grew a duplicate of you from it. It hasn’t been a great deal of use to us as far as getting any consistent and coherent information—it seems to be insane, which might or might not mean that you tend that way—but we have happened to learn, a bit at a time, a lot about you.”
“This is a bluff,” said Doyle carefully. “You can’t change history. I’ve seen that that’s true. And Rebecca… died.”
“A ka of her died. It wasn’t the real Rebecca that fell off your motorcycle. We’ll go into the future and get some of her blood, grow a ka, and then switch them at some point, let the ka go die as you remember, and then the real Rebecca can come back here with you and,” the Master smiled again, “change her name to Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy.”
Ashbless slowly and wonderingly shook his head.
“Oh. Yeah.” Doyle took hold of the rope.
With a good deal more ease than the doorkeeper, Ashbless drew in a yard of the rope. As he tried to knot it with one hand, he glanced once more at the Master’s face, and the smile on it was not only triumphant, contemptuous and smug, but imbecilic too.
That glimpse of idiocy in the supposedly all-knowing Master was like cold water on a fevered forehead.
“You’ll be saving Rebecca’s life, Doyle,” croaked the wincing Master. “And your own sanity—you’re going mad, you know that—and the facilities for the insane aren’t very nice here, remember.”
Ashbless turned away, snatched up the sword and as he and the Master both screamed he swung it in a hard overhead wood-chopping stroke that not only snapped the taut rope but shattered the blade and a roof tile.
Still screaming, the Master receded rapidly away, as though he were lying in the bed of an invisible truck that was trying to beat the zero-to-sixty record. Then he was out past the roof edge and picking up more speed, skimming away twenty feet or so above the ground. He was silhouetted against the moon, so Ashbless could see him clearly even in the deepening dusk.
“Enjoy it in the stinking madhouse, Doyle!” roared a voice from the pit below Ashbless’ feet. “Eating excrement and being buggered by the guards, that’s what’s in store for you, boy! It’s true, Romanelli jumped ahead and looked! And listen, we already rescued Rebecca, Romanelli’s got her, but now that she’s no good for barter I’ll tell you what she can look forward to… “
As the voice raved on, Ashbless realized that it was the Master speaking through the one wax man that still had a head. The Master himself was just a dot on the face of the moon now, slowly shrinking. After a minute or two the voice from the pit, which was still dilating upon the defilements in store for Rebecca, and how much she’d eventually come to relish them, abruptly choked and ceased. Either the wax speaking apparatus had broken down or the Master was out of range.
Ashbless shambled back through the hole in the wall and lurched down the stairs. When he reached the ground floor hall he saw someone start out of a dark doorway on his right and then, hearing his approach, scramble back inside; but Ashbless didn’t even look into the room as he passed it.
When he got outside he glanced around. The horses had suffered the same disintegrative fate as Mustapha’s sons, so Ashbless set out, barefoot, to walk the five and a half miles to the Harbor of Boolak. His boat didn’t leave until dawn, so it didn’t matter that he walked very slowly, pausing every few steps to glance fearfully up at the rising full moon.
A few minutes after Ashbless had shambled away out of sight a wild-eyed, dirty, bearded face peeked out of the doorway and blinked at the darkening funeral plain.
“See what you’ve done, Darrow?” the man was muttering. “Perfectly safe, you said! I remember you saying it—’It is perfectly safe, Doyle.’ Hell, you might as well have let Treff come along. He couldn’t have made things any worse. I’ve got to get back to the river, see if I can’t swim back up to when everything was all right.”
And the Ashbless ka tiptoed out into the evening air and stood looking around uncertainly, for he couldn’t exactly recall where the river was or what it was called, though he did know he’d seen a number of branches of it. Then he remembered that one could get to it anywhere, so he chose a direction at random and strode away, a jerky but confident smile on his face.
CHAPTER 14
—Thomas Gray
Once again he was trying to find his way out of the maze of fog-choked alleys; and though Darrow—in the dream he could never remember his new name—had groped several miles through the snaky, doubling-back and sometimes simply dead end lanes and alleys, he still hadn’t come to a street wide enough to wheel a cart through, much less the broad, well-trafficked pavement of Leadenhall Street. Finally he stopped, and heard, as he always did at this point in the dream, a slow, irregular knocking somewhere in the thick fog overhead; and then a second or two later a shuffling of footsteps nearby.
“Hello,” he said timidly; then, more confidently, “hello there! Perhaps you can help me find my way.”
The footsteps rasped closer across the fog-damp grittiness of the cobblestones, and a dark blur in the fog became recognizable as a ragged man.
As always, Darrow recoiled in mind-numbing fear when he realized it was Brendan Doyle. “Jesus, Doyle,” he screamed, “I’m sorry, stay away please, oh God…” He’d have run back up the alley, but his legs wouldn’t move.
Doyle smiled and pointed upward, into the fog.
Helplessly, Darrow looked up—and then put his entire soul into a shriek so loud that it woke him.
He crouched motionless on the bed until, with considerable relief, he recognized the furniture in the dim room, and realized he was in his own bed. Once again it had just been a dream. His hand darted out, seized the neck of the brandy decanter on the bedside table, tipped the thing upside-down to expel the glass stopper, and then he righted it and brought it to his lips.
The door to Claire’s room snapped open and she hurried across the room toward Dundee’s bed, frowning sleepily through her disordered hair. “What in hell is the matter, Jacob?”
“Muscle cramp… (gulp)… in my back.” He clanked the decanter back down on the table.
“You and your muscle cramps!” She sat down on the bed. “I’m your wife, Jacob, you don’t have to lie to me. I know it’s a nightmare. You always yell, ‘I’m sorry, Doyle!’ when you come crashing awake. Go ahead and tell me about it—who’s Doyle? Did he have something to do with you getting so wealthy?”
Dundee took a breath, then let it out. “It’s just muscle cramps, Claire. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
She pursed her lips. “Is the cramp gone now?”
