The Anubis Gates

He drew his sword and ran awkwardly toward the door of the building, and when it opened he was only a dozen yards away and closing fast. He collided hard with the man in the doorway, and in his stunned state was not even surprised when the man’s head and right arm broke clean off; when they thudded on the floor he realized they were made of wax.

Three more of the wax men were just inside the doorway, two of them stumbling back as their disabled companion rebounded into them. Doyle parried a sword cut from the third and riposted with a punch of the hilt into the wax face, snapping the nose off and denting the cheek; and he saw that a line had appeared in the thing’s neck, so he hit it in the face again, with more force, and the head of this one too cracked free and rolled away.

The two undamaged ones stepped back and raised their weapons, while the two others knelt on the floor groping for their heads. A panicky shouting echoed down from upstairs, in words that didn’t seem to be Arabic, and the two whole wax men turned and ran ponderously down the hall toward the stairs.

Doyle followed. Someone else was shouting upstairs now, definitely in Arabic, and his voice sounded more anguished and defensive than personally scared. Doyle caught the words for I don’t know and immune and magic.

At the foot of the stairs he kicked off his remaining shoe and padded silently up, holding Ameen’s sword well out in front of him. Above he could hear gasps and grunts of effort, and feet scuffing on a gravelly floor, and it belatedly dawned on him what the emergency must be.

His eyes narrowed and a grin deepened the lines in his cheeks. Yes, he thought, let’s see if we can’t accomplish that—cut the title right out from under Neil Armstrong.

At the top of the stairs he peered around the corner, down the short corridor toward the inward-facing balcony. It was as he’d expected: the only light in the chamber was the dusk grayness coming in through the gaping hole. The sweating doorkeeper was standing on the right side of the balcony—the left side had been torn loose by the shot, and was swinging free—and he was hastily knotting a rope around one of the railing bars. The left wall of the corridor had collapsed, and Doyle could see the two wax men crouched out on the roof of the ground floor, leaning over the curved rim of the hole to peer down into the chamber; and even as Doyle watched, they leaned forward into the yawning gap where the eastern quarter of the dome had been and began pushing downward on something that evidently wanted to move up.

Having moored the end of the rope, the doorkeeper was pulling more of the line in, from some point below and to the left—against considerable resistance—and tying off all the slack he managed to get. Obviously he was trying to shorten the line.

Doyle waited until the man had drawn in another yard of line, and, before he could tie a knot in it, bounded up behind him, crouched, hooked his good hand under the man’s belt and hoisted him up, over and out past the balcony rail. For a moment the surprised doorkeeper held onto the line as he fell, and there was a rusty squealing of casters, then he lost his grip and tumbled to the rubble-littered floor of the chamber. The line snapped taut. There was a choked-off scream from near-by, and an empty, wheeled couch skated down the bowl-shaped wall and banged against the pile of broken masonry at the bottom.

Doyle whirled and ran out onto the roof through the hole in the corridor wall and, ignoring for the moment the twitching thing dangling at the end of the nearly horizontal rope, delivered a kick and a sword poke to the off-balance wax men, tumbling both of them, too, down into the round chamber.

Reluctant to face the man he knew he must kill, he stared for a moment down into the chamber. The doorkeeper had sat up and was rocking back and forth holding his leg, which was apparently broken, and the two wax men, one of whom had predictably lost his head, were crawling aimlessly over the rubble. Doyle supposed there was a door down there, but with any luck at all it would be buried under the shattered stones that had been the eastern quarter of the dome.

“Ah, Doyle!” came a voice from behind him, in an urbane tone that must have sorely taxed the self-control of the speaker. “You and I have a lot to discuss!”

The Master was swinging back and forth twenty feet away, supported by a rope knotted under his arms, but he was hanging straight out, with the rope roughly parallel to the roof. Behind him Doyle could see the moon, still low in the eastern sky. The Master had to strain his head back to look “up” at Doyle. The effect was as if he were a man-shaped kite in a strong wind, or as if he and Doyle were confronting each other through a mirror tilted 45 degrees.