The Anubis Gates

And he’s got friends and influence, Doyle added to himself, and he might just be able to get me an audience—in enforced immunity!—with old Romany, in which we could bargain on my terms: I’ll let him have certain harmless bits of information—or even outright lies; yes, that would be safer—in exchange for a gap location. If I could have the right sort of friends waiting outside the tent he wouldn’t dare do any more things like his cigar in the eye trick. And it would take me months, or years, to build up that kind of influence unaided, and Darrow said the gaps decrease in frequency after 1802, and in any case I don’t think I have months—this cough was already killing me before tonight’s swim. It may now choose to develop into real pneumonia. I’ve got to get back, soon, to where there are hospitals.

Also, Doyle wanted to interview Ashbless in detail about his early years and then stash the information somewhere where it wouldn’t be disturbed until he could “discover” it when he got back to 1983. Schliemann and Troy, he thought fatuously, George Smith and Gilgamesh, Doyle and the Ashbless Documents.

“Well, good luck with him,” said Jacky. “Maybe next month at this time you’ll have a job at the Exchange and rooms in St. James. And you’ll hardly remember your days as a beggar and a stablehand—” She smiled. “Oh yes, and your morning as a less than successful costermonger… what else have you done?”

The rum-laced coffee arrived then; and the girl’s smile, and her assurances that their baths were being drawn even now, showed that Kusiak had acknowledged Jacky as a good credit risk. Doyle sipped his coffee gratefully. “Nothing much,” he answered.

* * *

The structure known throughout the St. Giles rookery as Rat’s Castle had been constructed on the foundations and around the remains of a hospital built in the twelfth century; the hospital’s bell-tower still survived, but over the centuries the various owners of the site had, largely for warehousing purposes, steadily added new floors and walls around it, until now its arched Norman windows looked, instead of out across the city, into narrow rooms fronted right up against them and moored to the ancient stone; the cap of the tower was the only bit of the structure still exposed to the open air, and it would have been hard to find in the rooftop wilderness of chimney pots, airshafts and wildly uneven architecture.

The bellropes had rotted away centuries ago, and the pulleys plummeted to the floor to be carted away as scrap metal, but the ancient cross timbers still spanned the shaft, and new ropes had been looped over these in order to hoist Horrabin and Doctor Romany some fifty feet off the floor, roughly three-quarters of the way up the enclosed tower. Since it allowed them to converse at a comfortable distance from the ground, it was their preferred conference chamber. Oil lamps had been set on the sills of the old stone windows at the very top, and Damnable Richard attended this evening’s council, sitting on the sill of a window one level down from the lamps, which put him only a foot or two above the heads of the dangling chiefs.

“I have no idea who those two men were, your Honor,” Horrabin was saying, and his already weird voice echoed with a sort of nightmare ululation in the stone shaft. “They were certainly none of my crew.”

“And they really did mean to kill him?”

“Oh, yes. Dennessen says when he knocked the second man off our American he had already stabbed him once, and was cocking another thrust.”

Doctor Romany swung meditatively for a few moments back and forth, kicking off gently from the concave stonework. “I can’t understand who they could be. Someone working against me, obviously, who either already knows what the American has to tell … or simply doesn’t want me to learn any of it. It couldn’t be the people he came with, because I saw them all disappear when the gate ceased to exist, and I’ve monitored all gates since and nobody has come through them. And the Antaeus Brotherhood hasn’t been a threat to us for more than a century, I gather.”

“They’re a bunch of old men,” Horrabin agreed, “who have forgotten the original purpose of their organization.”