The Anubis Gates

I do just wish, though, he thought with a narrowing of his predatory eyes, that I could have solved the mystery of that alarmingly well-educated group of magicians that made use of Fikee’s haphazard gates for travel. That one I had, that Doyle, seemed like he would have cracked open nicely if I could have had a little time with him. I wonder where on earth they came from.

He cocked an eyebrow. But that should be easy to tell, he realized. Just calculate what other gate was open at the same time as the Kensington one. It was obviously one of those that exist in pairs, one big, long gate here and a little quick one over there during the period of the big one. They’re not common, and in such cases I’ve always chosen to monitor the larger one, but they do occur, and this was obviously an instance of it. It would be easy to calculate where they embarked from, and it might be a useful bit of research to leave to my successor.

Turning away from the sunlight, he sat down at his table and began shuffling through the more recent stacks of gate locus calculations. He found the one for the first of September, and frowningly scrutinized it.

After a few moments he bit his lip impatiently, dipped a pen in an inkwell, crossed out a whole section of figures and began laboriously re-working them. “Shouldn’t trust a ka to do high-level mathematics,” he muttered. “Lucky I even plotted the Kensington one accurately… “

His face went blank when he arrived at an answer, though, for the fresh calculations were identical to the ones he’d crossed out. He hadn’t made an error—there really had been only one gap open that evening. The September first gap had not been one of the infrequent twinned ones.

So where, he wondered, did they come from? And the answer came to him so quickly that he grimaced with self-disgust at not having thought of it sooner.

Certainly, the people in the coaches had jumped from one gate to another—but why had he assumed that the two gates had to exist at the same time?

Doyle’s crew of sorcerers had come to September first, 1810, from a gate in another time.

And if they can do that trick, thought Romany excitedly, then so can we. Fikee, your sacrifice may not have been in vain after all! Ra and Osiris, what could we—what couldn’t we do? Jump back and prevent the British from taking Cairo… Or further back, and undermine England so that by this century it isn’t a nation of any consequence! And to think, all Doyle’s party did with this power was come to hear a poet give a speech. We’ll use it more… purposefully, he thought as a rare wolfish grin slowly split his face.

But, he thought as he reached out and drew closer the Candle of Far Speaking, this is too big a thing to keep to myself. He lit it with the flame of the oil lamp on the table, and the lamp’s teardrop-shaped flame fluttered and seemed to recoil, when the little spherical fire bloomed at the tip of the magical candle’s wick.

* * *

To the minimal, insect-reflex extent that he was able to be glad about anything, the smiling young man was glad that Doctor Romany’s domination of him had not only removed his perceptibly burdensome free will, but also made an abstraction of physical discomfort. He was distantly aware of hunger, and cramped pains in his feet, and, much more distantly, of a voice that seemed to be howling in horror in the deepest cellar of his mind, but the fire of his consciousness had been doused with water so that the resulting steam could power some unimaginable engine; the few coals that still glowed could feel nothing but an anesthetized kind of satisfaction that the engine seemed to be working well.