The Anubis Gates

Only once had anything nearly as disquieting as the arrival of the Shellengeri occurred. Sometime before midnight on Saturday, the eleventh night of the voyage, he’d thought he’d heard a wailing over the eternal wind scream, and he’d tried to see out, a trick as difficult as trying to see while riding a motorcycle at seventy miles per hour without goggles. After ten minutes he’d gone back to bed, more than half convinced that the black boat he’d seemed to see, visible because it shone a much deeper black than the waves behind it, had been nothing more than a retinal misfire caused by straining his eyes to see through the blast. After all, what would a boat be doing out there?

CHAPTER 11

“… Nothing could be more horrible: its head and shoulders were visible, turning first to one side, then to the other, with a solemn and awful movement, as if impressed with some dreadful secret of the deep, which, from its watery grave, it came upwards to reveal. Such sights became afterwards frequent, hardly a day passing without ushering the dead to the contemplation of the living, until at length they passed without observation.”

—E. D. Clarke

On the morning of the tenth of October Doyle came blearily awake and realized that he was out on the deck… and that the planks under his bearded cheek were hot, and when he opened his eyes bright sunlight made him squeeze them shut again… and then it came to him that he could hear talking, creaking cordage, the slap of water against the gently rocking hull—the wind had stopped.

“—Drydock somewhere,” a man’s gruff voice was saying, “though not in this godforsaken outpost.”

Another voice said something about Greece.

“Sure, if it’ll get to Greece. Every damn seam is leaking, just about every sail is shredded, the goddamn masts are—”

The second voice, which Doyle now recognized as the one that was nearly identical to Doctor Romany’s, interrupted with some brief harshness that shut the other up.

Doyle tried to sit up, but only managed to roll over, for he was tightly bound with thick, tarry-smelling ropes. They’re not taking any chances with me, he thought; then he smiled, for he realized that the splintery object biting into his knee was his makeshift wooden dagger, overlooked by whoever had bound him.

“We were none too soon tying him up,” said the harsher voice. “He’s got a sound constitution—I’d have thought the drug would keep him under until this afternoon, at least.”

Though it made his temples throb even more severely, Doyle lifted his head and blinked around. Two men were standing by the ship’s rail, staring at him; one seemed to be a pre-time-jump version of Doctor Romany—that would be Romanelli, he thought, the original—and the other was evidently the captain of the ship.

Romanelli was barefoot, and he padded across to Doyle and crouched beside him. “Good morning,” he said. “I may want to ask you questions, and we probably won’t meet anyone who speaks English, so I’m going to leave the gag off. If you want to yell and make a commotion, though, we can tie it on and conceal it under a burnoose.”

Doyle let his head clunk back onto the deck, then closed his eyes and waited until the throbbing abated a little. “Okay,” he said, opening them again and blinking up at the empty blue sky beyond the tangle of spars and riggings and reefed sails. “We’re in Egypt?”

“Alexandria.” Romanelli nodded. “We’ll row you ashore, and then it’s overland to the Rosetta branch of the Nile, and we’ll sail you upriver to Cairo. Savor the view.” The sorcerer stood up with a loud popping of the knees and an imperfectly concealed wince. “You men,” he called irritably. “The boat’s ready? Then get him over the side and into it.”