The Anubis Gates (36 page)

Doyle followed him down the dark stair’s, and after a long winding descent through a well cut into the stonework of the bridge they emerged into open air again below the underside of the vast span, and Doyle noticed for the first time that the river, visible beyond the lumber of the stairs and between the arches of the bridge, was a white, unmoving expanse of moon-lit ice.

A party could be seen moving across the ice toward the north shore, and after glancing at them once casually Doyle found his gaze drawn back to the distant figures. What was it about them that had caught his eye? The awkward, hunchback look of several of them? The prancing, bounding gait of the one in front?

Doyle closed his big, gloved hand on Burghard’s shoulder. “Your telescope,” he growled quietly as Longwell collided with him from behind, not jarring him at all.

“Certes.” Burghard fumbled under his coat and passed a collapsible telescope up to Doyle.

Doyle click-click-clicked the thing out to its full extent and trained it on the distant group. He was unable to focus, but he could see clearly enough to be sure the lightfooted leader was Doctor Romany; the other five—no, six—figures seemed to be misshapen men dressed in furs.

“That’s our man,” Doyle said quietly, handing the telescope back to Burghard.

“Ah. And so long as he be on the ice we daren’t confront him.”

“Why is that?” Doyle asked.

“The connection, man, the chains are no good on water,” hissed Burghard impatiently.

“Aye,” muttered Longwell from the darkness behind and above Doyle, “were we to confront him upon the ice, he’d set all the devils of hell on us in an instant, and our souls’d not be moored against the onslaught.”

A gust of Arctic wind battered the old stairway, making it sway like the bridge of a beleaguered ship.

“Still, we can follow ‘em to the north shore, can’t we,” mused Burghard, “and call ‘em halt yonder. Aye, come along.”

They resumed their downward course, and after a few more minutes of cramped shuffling arrived at a split, buckled and snow-dusted dock, and stepped off it onto the ice.

“They’re bearing more west now, after a fair northward stint,” said Burghard quietly, his eyes on the seven moving figures way out on the ice field. “We’ll come out from under the bridge on the west side and then curve north, and meet them ashore at the culmination of the circumbendibus.”

When they walked out through one of the high arches onto the ice, Doyle saw bobbing lights ahead, and heard again, louder, the laughter and music. There were tents and booths out on the river, and big swings with torches attached to the sides, and a large boat on axles and wheels tacking slowly back and forth across the face of the ice, with garish faces painted on its sail and wheels, and ribbons and banners streaming from the rigging. The silent procession of the Antaeus Brotherhood skirted the festivities on the east side, plodding north. When they were still a hundred yards from shore Doctor Romany’s party emerged from the blackness under the northernmost arch of the bridge and made for a set of steps below Thames Street. The tall, spry figure that was Doctor Romany turned around as they started up the stairs, and even as he’d begun to turn Burghard twisted himself to the side and turned a nimble cartwheel, finishing it up with a double-fisted push against Doyle’s chest; Doyle’s feet skated out from under him and he sat down heavily on the ice as Burghard laughed uproariously. Longwell began to do a grotesquely dainty ballet twirling, and for an instant Doyle was certain that Romany had fired a lunacy-inducing spell at them, and that at any moment he himself would begin barking like a dog or eating his hat.

Romany turned back toward the north and he and his surprisingly agile retinue bounded up the stairs. Then a ragged cloud sailed across the face of the moon, dimming the scene like a scrim. Burghard and Longwell, both sober-faced now, helped Doyle to his feet. “My apologies,” said Burghard. “‘Twas essential they think us but drunken roisterers. Quick now, let’s get ‘em.”

The dozen men on the ice began running toward shore—Doyle quickly got the hang of the half-sliding step necessary to maintain balance—and in a couple of minutes they were at the base of the stairs, climbing over a sunken boat’s mast, which projected at an angle from the solid ice.

They followed a narrow lane up to Thames Street, then paused in that wider boulevard, looking left and right for their vanished quarry.

“There,” said Burghard tensely, pointing at a snowy stretch in the middle of the street. “They’ve gone straight across into that alley.”

The twelve men followed, though Doyle couldn’t see how Burghard had deduced Romany’s course; all he saw when he passed the patch of snow were the tracks of a couple of very large dogs.

They ran into the alley, and Doyle’s body reacted to a faint, fast scratching sound before his mind had even properly heard it—his left hand whirled his sword out of the sheath and snapped it into line just as one of the things leaped at him and impaled itself on the point. He was jolted back by the solid impact and he heard a deep-throated growling and the clatter of teeth against steel in the instant before his left foot kicked the dying monster off his blade.

“Ware monsters!” he heard Burghard yell in front of him, and then the lantern clanged to the iced cobblestones and its sliding panel fell open, splashing the narrow alley with yellow light.

The scene Doyle found himself confronted with was like some lunatic painting Goya never quite worked himself up to: Burghard was rolling on the ground in a savage wrestling match with some inhumanly muscular thing that seemed to be both man and wolf, and several more of the creatures crouched ready beyond the desperately struggling pair; their shoulders were hunched, as though walking on their hind legs was a novelty, and their snouts extended out dog-like from their receding foreheads, and their wide mouths bristled with teeth that looked to Doyle like ivory cutlass blades … But intelligence glittered in their tiny eyes, and they stepped back warily as Doyle, without taking his eyes off them, drove his sword through the torso of the hairy creature struggling with Burghard at his feet.

“Sorls, Rowary!” barked one of the things over its shoulder as Burghard kicked his slain assailant aside and stood up, cuffing blood away from his eyes and drawing his sword with his right hand; his blood-stained dagger was already gripped in his left fist. The two contorted, thick-pelted corpses had quit shaking and now sprawled motionless between the two groups.

“Longwell, Tyson,” Burghard said quietly, “around these houses, fast, and stop up the other end of the alley.” There was a clatter and jingling as the two obediently hurried away.

Romany had turned and strode back, and now shouldered his way between two of his wolfish attendants and confronted his attackers. His lean face, weirdly underlit by the lantern, was contorted with rage as he opened his mouth and began to pronounce syllables that warped and shrivelled the very air that carried them—Doyle felt the chain around his ankle vibrate and grow warm—and then he noticed Doyle standing in the forefront with a bared and bloody sword in his hand, obviously immune to his magic and not even bothering to try to prevent it. The chant faltered and stopped, though Romany’s mouth stayed open in a dismayed gape.

Doyle crouched to pick up the lantern, then straightened, grinned at the wizard and pointed his sword at him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us, Doctor Romany,” he said.

The magician made a prodigious leap backward over the heads of the wolf men. He bounded away down the alley, and his creatures loped after him, cautiously followed by Doyle and Burghard and the others.

The loud bang of a pistol shot sounded from some point ahead of them, and an instant later a shrill howl echoed between the close stone walls, and as it died away into choked panting Doyle heard Longwell shout, “Halt, ye monsters—there be primed pistols enough here to send all of ye home.”

Doyle, running forward ahead of Burghard, raised the lantern just in time to glimpse a robed figure flying straight upward. “He’s jumped for the roof, get him quick!” he roared, and two more gunshots flared and banged ahead of him, the muzzle flashes angled upward, and then he was nearly deafened as Burghard’s pistol went off beside his ear.

“Them things is going up the walls like spiders!” yelled Longwell. “Shoot ‘em off!”

A window squeaked open somewhere overhead, and what could only be a chamber pot burst against the opposite wall, showering Doyle. “Begone from here, ye thieves and murderers!” shrieked a woman’s voice.

Shingles and bits of stone blown loose by the gunshots clattered back down onto the alley floor. “Don’t shoot!” called Burghard, his voice harsh with disappointment, “You’ll hit that damned woman.”

“They’re gone, chief,” said Longwell, hurrying up to where Doyle and Burghard and the others stood. “Fled over the roof fast as rats.”

“Back to Thames Street,” rasped Burghard. “We’ve lost Romany—he could go in any direction across the roofs.”

“Aye, let us go back to our dinner,” suggested Longwell fervently as they sheathed their swords, thrust away their pistols and picked their way back over the two hirsute corpses to the moonlit pavement of Thames Street.

“I know where he’s going,” said Doyle quietly. “He’s heading back to the place where I originally said he’d be—the place where his magic will work best—the gap field, that inn in Borough High Street.”

“I’m not delighted with the idea of crossing the ice, now that he knows we oppose him,” spoke up a gangly, curly-haired member. “If he was to turn on us out there… “

“It wouldn’t necessarily doom us,” said Burghard, leading the way forward. “Don’t let yourself rely so heavily on your armor. Right now we’ll reconnoiter and make no incautious moves.”

They hurried back down the cross lane to the stairs below Thames Street, and leaning out over the railing at the top step they stared out across the ice at the torches and tents of the frost fair.

“Too many people about to be knowing if any is them,” grumbled Longwell.

“Perhaps,” muttered Burghard, who had pulled out his telescope and was inching it by slow degrees across the scene. “I see them,” he whispered finally. “They’re just making a straight line across, not even bothering to avoid people—ho, you should see some of these people recoil!” He turned to the towering figure of Doyle. “How much more powerful will he be when he gets to that inn?”

“I don’t know the precise amps or anything,” Doyle said; “let’s just say vastly. He must have had something pretty urgent in mind to have left it before.”

“I’m afraid we’ll have to follow right on his heels then,” said Burghard reluctantly, starting down the stairs. “Come along smartly—we’ve got some catching up to do.”

Oriental clog shoes knocked on frost-split cobblestones as another company of furtive men rounded the corner from Gracechurch into Thames Street. The peculiarly shod leader scanned the empty street for a moment and then resumed his determined stride.

“Wait one moment, alchemist,” said one of his company. “I’ll go no farther without an explanation. That was gunfire we heard, was it not?”

“Aye,” said the leader impatiently. “But ‘twasn’t aimed at thee.”

“But what was it aimed at? I think that was no man that screamed.” The breeze blew the man’s long brown curls, unconfined by a wig, forward across his somewhat pudgy and petulant face. He pushed his hat down more firmly on his head. “I’m in command here, though without official sanction, as much as was my father in France. I say all we need is what you carry in yonder box—we need no advice from another damned sorcerer.”

Amenophis Fikee walked back to where the man stood and, able to look down at him by virtue of his stilted shoes, hissed, “Listen to me, you posturing clown. If your damned backside is ever to rest on the throne it will be because of my efforts, and in spite of yours. Or do you imagine that the idiot assassination attempt you and Russell and Sidney set up last year was intelligent? Hah! Fools, trying to reach through a pane of glass for a sweet! You need me, and magic, and a damn large spoonful of luck even to steer clear of the headsman’s block, far less become king! And the man who contacted me tonight, greeted me through the candle with the ancient passwords, has more raw power than I’ve seen in a sorcerer for—well, a long time. You were there, man—I didn’t even have to light the candle to receive him—it just burst into flame! Now he’s run afoul of something, very possibly James’ precious Antaeus Brotherhood, and he’s had to fall back to the spot on the Surrey side where there’s one of those inexplicable bubbles of indulgence I mentioned to you, in which sorcery is freer. Therefore we will meet him there. Or would you rather return to Holland to pursue the crown on your own, without my help?”

The Duke of Monmouth still looked sulky, so Fikee waved the little black box at him. “And without my indetectibly forged marriage certificate?”

Monmouth scowled, but shrugged. “Very well, wizard. But let’s get moving, before your damned frost freezes us solid.” The band moved forward again, toward the bridge.

The boat had been sailing close-hauled, its half-drunk sailors waving their flaring torches more or less in time to their singing, but now the man at the tiller had cut too close into the wind and the sail luffed and fluttered empty; the boat lost its speed, the grotesque faces painted on the great wooden wheels becoming distinguishable as the disks rolled more and more slowly on the wooden axles penetrating the framework that supported the craft, and finally the boat lurched to a stop on the ice, and after a moment began to roll indecisively backward as the sail billowed in reverse.

Burghard, who had been leading Doyle and the ten Antaeus Brotherhood members in a long, curving sprint across the ice behind the screen the wheeled boat provided, caught up with it now, leaped for the rail, caught it, and swung over the gun-wale and tumbled into the boat. The drunken mariners, already irate at having lost the wind, turned angrily on this unimposingly slim boarder, but lurched back in confusion when the burly figure of Doyle came vaulting lightly over the rail, all flying mane and beard and cape.