The Anubis Gates

Jacky was glad the water was flowing fast enough in the subterranean canal to make the rudder useless in downstream travel, for if it was swung very far to port it would hit her in the head; and if the people in the boat had been exerting any more control over the craft than just using barge poles to push it away from the walls whenever the current swung it too close, they’d have felt the drag of their secret passenger. The water swirling around her neck was becoming even colder as they approached the river, and it was all she could do to keep her teeth from chattering. She was careful to keep her head out of the water, for she had a small flintlock pistol wrapped up in her turban, and she wanted to keep the flashpan dry. The torches at bow and stern of the boat flickered in the sulphury breeze, sometimes casting only a dim red glow and at others flaring up to illuminate starkly every stone of the arched ceiling passing by close overhead.

Five minutes ago she had been dry and warm, cooking a panful of sausages over the fire in the kitchen of Horrabin’s Rat’s Castle on Maynard Street. She’d been dressed in her Ahmed the Hindoo Beggar outfit, with a turban, sandals, and a robe made from a chintz bedspread, with walnut stain on her face and hands and a false beard supplementing her customary false moustache, for she’d seen the exiled Fairchild at the Rat’s Castle, and didn’t want to be recognized as one of Copenhagen Jack’s people. Doctor Romany had arrived a half hour earlier, and had perched in one of Horrabin’s swings, taken his weird shoes off and absorbed himself with a stack of shipping reports.

Then one of Horrabin’s beggars, a sturdy red-faced old fellow, had burst in, out of breath from running but gasping out a message almost before he was in the room. “Doctor Romany… hurry … the Strand, and moving south toward the river… a man’s been shot… “

“Who? Who’s been shot?” Romany hopped down from the swing without putting his spring-shoes back on, and his old face twisted with agony; quickly he climbed back into the swing and pulled the shoes on. “Who, damn you?” he rasped.

“I don’t know… Simmons saw it and… sent me to fetch you. He said it’s the man you’ve… offered a reward for.”

Romany had his shoes on and laced by this time, and he had again jumped down from the swing, and was bobbing agilely now on the powerful springs. “Which one? But it must be Dog-Face Joe. They’d never dare to shoot the American. Well, where is he? The Strand, you say?”

“Yes, sir. And moving south, by the Adelphi. It’d be quickest, yer Honor, to take a boat down the underground canal straight to the Adelphi Arches. All the waterways are running strong, what with the rains… “

“Lead the way—and hurry. I knew old Joe for years, and if they haven’t outright killed him he’ll get away from them.”

When the two men hurried down the cellar stairs Ahmed the Hindoo Beggar was only a few paces behind, the sausages forgotten. This sounds like it, Jacky had thought, her heart pounding as she forced herself to hang back far enough so they wouldn’t see or hear her following. God, let him be still alive; and let me get close enough to put a pistol ball through his brain. And if I could somehow have a moment to whisper to him first, explain who I am and why I’m going to kill him… and then at last, she had thought longingly, I could go home.

When they had reached the old stone dock in the under basement there came a moment when two beggars were untying the boat and lighting the torches, and Doctor Romany was staring impatiently down the dark tunnel, and Jacky had been able to pad across the stone floor and slip noiselessly into the cold black water. The boat, which the two men dragged and bumped alongside the dock for Doctor Romany to get into, had rings along the outside of the gunwale so that a tarpaulin could be lashed over it, and Jacky looped two fingers through one of them and let herself be towed along when the boat was poled out into the strong current.

* * *

“Ha ha?” came the high, birdy voice of the clown. “Now where’s my old pal Dumb Tom?” There was a slow knocking of wood on wood as Horrabin moved back and forth on the boardwalk. The only other sounds were the fitful breeze in the rigging of the fishing boats moored nearby, and the lapping of the water around the pier pilings.

Doyle, sitting behind the box at the end of the pier, didn’t even breathe, and he wondered how long he could hold out before leaping to his feet and shouting, Get it over with, here I am, as you very well know! For there was a teasing note in the clown’s voice, as if it did know.