The Anubis Gates (2 page)

A wild and agonized howl brought Doctor Romany to his feet; the sound rebounded among the trees by the river for several seconds, and when it had died he could hear a gypsy fearfully muttering protective cantrips. No further sounds issued from the tent, and Romany let out his breath and resumed his crouching position. Good luck, Amenophis, he thought—I’d say “may the gods be with you,” but that’s what you’re deciding right now. He shook his head uneasily.

When the French came into power it had seemed like the end of any hope of restoring the old order, and their Master had, by hard-wrought sorcerous manipulation of wind and tides, lent subtle aid to the British admiral Nelson when he destroyed the French fleet less than two weeks later. But then the French occupation turned to their Master’s advantage; the French curtailed the arrogant power of the Mameluke Beys, and in 1800 drove out the Turkish mercenaries who’d been strangling the country. And the general who took command of Cairo when Napoleon returned to France, Kleber, didn’t interfere with their Master’s political intrigues and his efforts to lure the Moslem and Coptic population back into the old pantheist worship of Osiris, Isis, Horus and Ra. It looked, in fact, as though the French occupation would do for Egypt what Jenner’s cowpox was evidently doing now for human bodies: substituting a manageable infection, which could be easily eliminated after a while, for a deadly one that would relent only upon the death of the host.

Then, of course, it began to go wrong. Some lunatic from Aleppo stabbed Kleber to death in a Cairo street, and in the ensuing months of confusion the British took up the slack; by September of 1801 Kleber’s inept successor had capitulated to the British in Cairo and Alexandria. The British were in, and a single week saw the arrest of a dozen of the Master’s agents. The new British governor even found reason to close the temples to the old gods that the Master had had erected outside the city.

In desperation their Master sent for his two oldest and most powerful lieutenants, Amenophis Fikee from England and Doctor Monboddo Romanelli from Turkey, and unveiled to them the plan that, though fantastic to a degree that suggested senility in the ancient man, was, he insisted, the only way to scorch England from the world picture and restore Egypt’s eons-lost ascendancy.

They had met him in the huge chamber in which he lived, alone except for his ushabtis, four life-size wax statues of men. From his peculiar ceiling perch he had begun by pointing out that Christianity, the harsh sun that had steamed the life-juices out of the now all but dry husk of sorcery, was at present veiled by clouds of doubt arising from the writings of people like Voltaire and Diderot and Godwin.

Romanelli, as impatient with the antique magician’s extended metaphors as he was with most things, broke in to ask bluntly how all this might aid in evicting the British from Egypt.

“There is a magical procedure—” the Master began.

“Magic!” Romanelli had interrupted, as scornfully as he dared. “These days we’d get headaches and double vision—not to mention losing about five pounds—if we tried to charm a pack of street dogs out of our way; and even then as likely as not it’d go awry and they’d all simply drop dead where they stood. It’s easier to shout and wave a stick at them. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten how you suffered after playing with the weather at the Bay of Aboukeer three years ago. Your eyes withered up like dates left too long in the sun, and your legs—!”

“As you say, I haven’t forgotten,” said the Master coldly, turning those partially recovered eyes on Romanelli, who involuntarily shivered, as always, before the almost imbecilic hatred that burned in them. “As it happens, although I’ll be present by proxy, one of you must perform this spell, for it has to be sited very near the heart of the British Empire, which would be the city of London, and my condition forbids travel. Though I’ll provide you with all the strongest remaining wards and protective amulets, the working of it will, as you suggest, consume quite a bit of the sorcerer. You will draw straws from the cloth on that table, and the man with the short straw will be the one to do it.”

Fikee and Romanelli stared at the two stubs of straw protruding from beneath a scarf, then at each other.

“What is the spell?” queried Fikee.

“You know our gods are gone. They reside now in the Tuaut, the underworld, the gates of which have been held shut for eighteen centuries by some pressure I do not understand but which I am sure is linked with Christianity. Anubis is the god of that world and the gates, but has no longer any form in which to appear here.” His couch shifted a little, and the Master closed his eyes for a moment in pain. “There is a spell,” he rasped finally, “in the Book of Thoth, which is an invocation to Anubis to take possession of the sorcerer. This will allow the god to take physical form—yours. And as you are speaking that spell you will simultaneously be writing another, a magic I myself have composed that is calculated to open new gates between the two worlds—gates that shall pierce not only the wall of death but also the wall of time, for if it succeeds they will open out from the Tuaut of forty-three centuries ago, when the gods—and I—were in our prime.”

There was a silence long enough for the Master’s couch to move another painful couple of inches. At last Fikee spoke. “And what will happen then?”

“Then,” said the Master in a whisper that echoed round the spherical chamber, “the gods of Egypt will burst out in modern England. The living Osiris and the Ra of the morning sky will dash the Christian churches to rubble, Horus and Khonsu will disperse all current wars by their own transcendent force, and the monsters Set and Sebek will devour all who resist! Egypt will be restored to supremacy and the world will be made clean and new again.”

And what role could you, or we
, thought Romanelli bitterly,
play in a clean new world?

“Is,” Fikee said hesitantly, “is it still possible, you’re certain? After all, the world already was young that way once, and an old man can’t be made into a boy again any more than wine can go back to grape juice.” The Master was getting very angry, but he pressed on desperately, “Would it be completely out of the question to… adapt to the new ways and new gods? What if we’re clinging to a sinking ship?”

The Master had gone into a fit of rage, drooling and gabbling helplessly, and so one of the wax ushabti statues twitched and began working its jaws. “Adapt?” shouted the Master’s voice out of the wax throat. “You want to get baptized? Do you know what a Christian baptism would do to you? Negate you—unmake you—salt on a snail, moth in a fire!” The furious speaking was causing the wax lips to crack. “A sinking ship? You stinking, fearful body-vermin of a diseased whore! What if it should sink, is sinking, has sunk! We’ll ride it down. I’d rather be at the helm of this sunken ship than in the… cattle pen!… of that new one! Shall I—ack… ack… kha—” The tongue and lips of the wax statue broke off and were spat out by the still driving breath.

For several moments Master and ushabti gibbered together, then the Master regained control of himself and the statue fell silent. “Shall I,” asked the Master, “release you, Amenophis?”

Romanelli remembered, with unwelcome clarity, once seeing another of the Master’s very old servants suddenly made independent of the Master’s magical bonds; the man had, within the space of a few minutes, withered and broken down and dried and split apart and finally shaken himself to dust; but worse than the fact of death and dissolution was his memory that the man had retained consciousness through the entire process… And it had seemed to be an agony worse than burning.

The silence in the chamber lengthened, unbroken except for the faint slapping sound of the ushabti’s tongue on the floor tiles. “No,” said Fikee at last. “No.”

“Then you are one of my crew, and will obey.” The Master waved one of his crippled, driftwood arms. “Choose a straw.”

Fikee looked at Romanelli, who just bowed and waved after you toward the table. Fikee stepped over to it and drew out one of the straws. It was, of course, the short one.

The Master sent them to the ruins of Memphis to copy from a hidden stone the, hieroglyphic characters that were his real name, and here too a shock awaited them, for they had seen the Master’s name stone once before, many centuries ago, and the characters carved on it were two symbols like a fire in a dish followed by an owl and the looped cross: Tchatcha-em-Ankh, it spelled, Strengths in Life; but now different characters were incised in the ancient stone—now there were three umbrella shapes, a small bird, an owl, a foot, the bird again and a fish over a slug. Khaibitu-em-Betu-Tuf, he read, and mentally translated it: Shadows of Abomination.

Despite the baking desert heat the pit of his stomach went cold, but he remembered a thing that had whimpered and rolled about as it fell apart into dust, and so he only pursed his lips as he obediently copied down the name.

Upon their return to Cairo the Master delayed Romanelli’s return to Turkey long enough to fashion a duplicate of him out of the magical fluid paut. The animated duplicate, or ka, was ostensibly made to travel to England with Fikee and assist him in performing the Anubis summoning, but all three knew that its main task would be to serve as a guard over Fikee and prevent any dereliction of duty. Since the odd pair would be living with Fikee’s tribe of gypsies until the arrival of the Book and the vial of their Master’s blood, Fikee dubbed the ka Doctor Romany, after the word the gypsies used for their language and culture.

Another howl broke from the tent downstream, this one sounding more like pieces of metal being violined against each other than an issue from any organic throat. The sound rose in volume and pitch, drawing the air as taut as a bowstring, and for a moment, during which Romany numbly noted that the river was holding still like a pane of rippled glass, the ringing, grating peak note held, filling the dark countryside. Then something seemed to break, as if a vast bubble over them had popped, silently but palpably. The ghastly howl broke too, and as the shattered bits of sound tumbled away in a mad, despairing sobbing, Romany could feel the air spring back to its usual pressure; and as though the molecules of the black fabric had all abruptly relaxed even their usual clench, the tent burst into bright yellow flame.

Romany sprinted down the bank, picking his footing with ease in the glare of the fire, and with scorching fingers flicked the burning entry curtain aside, and bounded into the smoky interior. Fikee was a huddled, sobbing bulk in the corner. Romany slammed the Book of Thoth shut and put it in the gold box, tucked that under his arm and stumbled outside again.

Just as he got away from the intense heat, he heard a barking, whimpering sound behind him, and turned. Fikee had crawled out of the tent and was rolling on the ground, presumably to put out his smoldering clothes.

“Amenophis!” Romany called over the roaring of the fire.

Fikee stood up and turned on Romany a glance devoid of recognition, then threw his head back and howled like a jackal at the moon.

Instantly Romany reached into his coat with both hands and drew out two flintlock pistols. He aimed one and fired it, and Fikee folded up in midair and sat down hard several feet behind where he’d been standing; but a moment later he had rolled back up on his hands and knees and was scuttling away into the darkness, now on two legs, now on all fours.

Romany aimed the other pistol as well as he could and fired again, but the loping shape didn’t seem to falter and soon he lost sight of it. “Damn,” he whispered. “Die out there, Amenophis. You do owe us that.”

He looked up at the sky—there was no sign of any gods breaking through; he stared toward the west long enough to satisfy himself that the sun wasn’t going to reappear. He shook his head in profound weariness.

Like most modern magics, he thought bitterly, while it probably did something, it didn’t accomplish what it was supposed to.

Finally he tucked the pistols away, picked up the Book and bobbed slowly back to the gypsy camp. Even the dogs had hidden, and Romany met no one as he made his way to Fikee’s tent. Once inside, he put down the gold box, lit a lamp, and then far into the night, with pendulum, level, a telescope and a tuning fork and reams of complicated calculations geometrical and alchemical, worked at determining to what extent, if any, the spell had succeeded.

“In this flowing stream, then, on which there is no abiding, what is there of the things which hurry by on which a man would set a high price? It would be just as if a man should fall in love with one of the sparrows which fly by, but it has already passed out of sight.”

—Marcus Aurelius

When the driver swung the BMW in to the curb, braked to a quick but smooth stop and clicked off the headlights, Brendan Doyle hunched forward on the back seat and stared at the rubbled, fenced-in lot they’d arrived at. It was glaringly lit by electric lights on poles, and he could hear heavy machinery at work close by.

“Why are we stopping here?” he asked, a little hopelessly. The driver hopped nimbly out of the car and opened Doyle’s door. The night air was cold. “This is where Mr. Darrow is,” the man explained. “Here, I’ll carry that,” he added, taking Doyle’s suitcase.

Doyle hadn’t spoken during the ten-minute ride from Heathrow airport, but now nervousness overcame his reluctance to admit how little he knew about his situation. “I, uh, gathered from the two men who originally approached me in Fullerton—California, that is—that this job has something to do with Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” he said diffidently as the two of them plodded toward the gate in the chain link fence. “Do you know… what it is, exactly?”

“Mr. Darrow will explain it fully, I’m sure,” said the driver, who seemed much more relaxed now that his own part in the relay race was almost over. “Something to do with a lecture, I believe.”

Doyle stopped. “A lecture? He rushed me six thousand miles overnight, to London”—and offered me twenty thousand dollars, he added mentally—”just to give a lecture?”