The Anubis Gates

The pen paused in midair as a possible answer occurred to him. Why, I’ll bet that’s it, he thought almost with awe. Of course—didn’t the yags say: His new body works better? But he seemed so genuinely helpless when I had him. Was all that just an act? By Set, it must have been! Anyone who can get Amenophis Fikee to switch him into a superior body without poison in it, and can not only survive my best cold-cast but an instant later physically disarm me, is… well, not helpless.

As Romany continued drawing the ancient figures he tried to decide what time to jump to. Sometime in the future? No, not when it meant leaving tonight’s debacle as established history. Better to jump into the past, fix things up so that the situation tonight’s aborted effort was supposed to remedy never would have arisen in the first place. When had the Master’s troubles with England really started? Certainly far earlier than the sea-fight in Aboukeer Harbor in 1798, after which anyone could see that the British were destined to control Egypt; even if that battle had fallen out the other way, and the French general Kleber had not been assassinated, England still would have been running things by now. No, as long as he was going to go back, he may as well go way back, to when England got its first toe-hold in the African continent. That would have been in… about 1660, when Charles II was restored to the throne of England and married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, part of whose dowry was the city of Tangier. Romany did some rapid calculations… then scowled when he realized that there was no gap within twenty years of Charles’ wedding. There was one in 1684, though, on the—he scribbled furiously—on the fourth of February. That was one year before Charles’ death, during the Cairene Master’s first attempt to establish the foolish and malleable royal bastard James, Duke of Monmouth, as successor to the strong-willed Charles. Fikee had been, for almost two decades, holding in abeyance the Newtonian recoil of the yag conjuring of 1666, and had been instructed to let the equilibrium spring back—in the form of a tremendous freeze—in coordination with the poisoning of the sovereign, the forging of a “newly discovered” marriage certificate between Charles Stuart and Lucy Walter, Monmouth’s mother, and the secret return of Monmouth himself from Holland.

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.

Yes, Romany thought, getting quickly to his feet and moving the glass rods on the desk top, that’s where—sorry, when—I’ll jump to. And I’ll tell Fikee and the Master what their future holds, and tell them to forget about trying to control England, but rather to devote their energies to destroying her: work to make the frost continue and intensify rather than cease, pit Catholic against Protestant against Jew, murder the upcoming leaders while they’re still children…

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.

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