The Anubis Gates

“Go,” Romanelli repeated. He had closed his eyes, and his face looked like a thin rag that someone had draped over some stones to dry in the sun and forgotten forever. The knocking of Horrabin’s stilt-poles receded away. Romanelli’s mouth fell open and a deep sigh echoed in and out of his chest.

His time was getting damned short—he only weighed thirty pounds now, but he knew he wasn’t as strong as the Master had been; he would lose his hold on the unnaturally maintained components of his body, and simply break down or fly to bits, long before the zero gravity point was reached. There’d be no big dive to the moon for him.

He shuddered, trying to remember how many sorcerers had been both strong enough and contra-natural enough—the two qualities were tremendously difficult to hold onto at the same time, like trying to press the positive ends of two lodestones together—to build up that weird lunar attraction which in extreme cases, such as the Master’s, could become a fiercely drawing force far, far greater than could be explained by the actual physical gravity of the moon. There had been that Turk, Ibrahim, who had finally had himself encased to the knees in solid stone in a high-walled courtyard several miles outside of Damascus, and used to charge fortunes to tell fortunes—he’d only do it when the moon was overhead, and his hair and arms were dangling straight up, an effect that mightily impressed his customers—until one man, not pleased with his augury, had drawn a scimitar and chopped right through both of Ibrahim’s knees, and the truncated screaming body had shot away upward into the sky. And there was a brief mention in one of the lost books of the apocryphal Clementine Recognitions of a very old magician who had just floated off the ground one afternoon in Tyana, and was visible in the sky for days, gesticulating and crying, before he drifted too far away to be seen anymore. Obviously there was some truth in the very old stories of the once inhabited moon having become, through some long-forgotten but transcendent perversity, the monument and archetype and fitfully living embodiment of desolation.

Romanelli remembered that he had been overseeing the disagreeable task of clearing out the street below the Bab-el-Azab when he’d heard the hollow knock of a cannon shot from away to the south. He had tensed, ready to call out the Albanians to repel a revenge raid by sons of the murdered Mameluke Beys, but there were no further sounds of gunfire, and when he climbed to the battlements he hadn’t seen any troops massing on the darkening plain. It wasn’t until later that night that he heard one of the fellahin talking about an old man who had been seen by many to fly over the old quarter of Cairo just at dusk… He’d rushed back to the Master’s house and found it broken, and empty except for some damaged ushabtis and the injured doorkeeper…

From the doorkeeper he’d learned that the man who had done this was the Brendan Doyle who’d escaped from them back in October, and the next day he’d discovered that Doyle had left Egypt aboard the England-bound Fowler, having booked passage under the name William Ashbless. Romanelli had abandoned his post as Mohammed Ali’s physician and taken the next ship for England and, by whistling on the stern until his lips were numb and the very captain had ordered him to stop it, several times managed to summon a couple of the Shellengeri for a few hours—the voyage wasn’t nearly as quick as the trip south in the Chillico had been, but Romanelli did manage to step off his ship onto a London dock on Sunday, the day before yesterday, while this Ashbless-Doyle person’s ship hadn’t arrived until this morning.

And Doctor Romanelli had kept busy during his forty-eight hours of lead time. He’d learned that under the Ashbless name his quarry was expected to appear at, of all things, a literary gathering in the offices of the publisher John Murray, and Romanelli had browbeaten the sorcerer-clown Horrabin into having some of his swinish thugs follow Ashbless everywhere he went, and to abduct him and bring him back here to Rat’s Castle after he left Murray’s offices.

And when they’ve brought him here, thought Romanelli as the weary breaths trudged up and down his throat, I will simply wring him dry. I’ll learn from him enough about the time jumping to do it myself, and I’ll jump back to when I was healthy and tell my younger self how to do things differently, so that on Monday the second of April, 1811, I am not a trembling, bleeding, far overextended wreck.