The Anubis Gates

“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.”