The Anubis Gates

A lush old horse chestnut tree stood a few yards to his right, serving as a mooring for several of the tent ropes, and he quickly tiptoed over behind it. Looking up, he saw a branch that seemed likely to support him, and he leaped and caught it.

The chain that trailed from his right heel was suddenly swinging free in the air, and not touching the ground.

“He is disappeared.’” exclaimed one of the yags, its voice screechy with astonishment.

* * *

“Wilbur!” yelled Romany. “Is Byron still there, and conscious?”

“Avo, rya!”

Then what, Romany wondered, is the yag talking about? Could there have been a stranger hanging about? If so, I guess he’s gone. Richard had cringingly drawn the wagon up beside the village Bavarois, and now stepped down from the driver’s bench and approached the toy.

“Can you lift that into the wagon by yourself?” barked Romany tensely.

“I d-don’t think so, rya,” Richard quavered, keeping his eyes averted from the restless fire giants.

“We’ve got to get them out of the camp at once. Wilbur! Kill Byron and come here!”

Richard winced. He’d killed several men during the course of his life, but it had each time been a desperate, hot-blooded and roughly equal contest, and only the reflection that he’d have been killed himself if he’d held back had sustained him during the subsequent hours of horrified trembling and nausea; this cold throat-cutting of a bound man was not only beyond his capacity to perform, but even, he realized unhappily, beyond his capacity to stand by and observe.

“Wait, Wilbur!” he yelled, and when Romany turned wrathfully toward him he deliberately reached out and shoved the master switch of the village Bavarois into the on position—and then broke it off.

As soon as he’d heard Doctor Romany order Wilbur to kill Byron, Doyle had crawled out along a nearly horizontal branch, hoping to be able to see this Wilbur and pitch something down at him, but he had not yet learned to allow for the greater weight of his new body—the branch, which would only have flexed under his old body’s weight, bowed, gave a groan that went up the scale to a screech, and then with a rapid fire burst of cracks and snappings, tore right off the trunk.

The heavy limb and its rider plunged through the top of the tent below, demolishing what had served as the gypsies’ kitchen; kettles, spoons, pots and pans added a wild percussive clatter to the ripping and crashing and the ground-shaking thump, and then very quickly the billowed out, slowly settling tent fabric was illuminated from within by fire.

Doyle rolled off the collapsing tent onto his hands and knees on the grass. The tall fires beyond the tents were billowing and roaring like a gasoline dump going up, and he decided he must have been imagining things when, while still in the tree, he’d thought the flames were shaped like men.

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?”