“Hello?” came a similar voice. “Brendan Doyle? Come see our toy?”
“Doyle is here?” he heard Romany cry.
“Yaaah?” something roared in a tooth-rattling bass, and a horizontal column of flame lashed out an incredible thirty yards and made a torch of one of the tents. Over the screams of the gypsies who scrambled out of it, Doyle thought he could hear, somehow, a tinkly piano and an accordion playing merrily.
Bouncing as agile as a bug on his spring-shoes. Doctor Romany came high-stepping away from the fires, glancing wildly around, but he jolted to a stop when he saw Doyle standing by the burning kitchen tent. “And who are you?” he gasped. Then he snarled, “Never mind.” The panting, sweaty-faced sorcerer reached one spread-fingered hand back toward the greater glare, as though drawing energy from it, and then jabbed the pointing finger of his other hand at Doyle. “Die,” he commanded. Doyle felt a cold grittiness strike him and freeze his heart and stomach, but a moment later it had drained away in an icy rush down through his right leg and out through his foot into the ground.
Romany stared at him in astonishment. “Who the hell are you?” he muttered as he stepped back. He reached to his belt and-drew from it a long-barrelled flintlock pistol.
Doyle’s body seemed to react of its own accord—he sprang up and forward and straightened his leg hard, driving his heel like a piston into Romany’s chest; the wizard catapulted backward and landed on his back six feet to the rear. Doyle relaxed in midair and hit the ground in a crouch, and his left hand picked the falling pistol out of the air.
“Rya?” came a voice from behind him. “Do you want me to kill Byron or not?”
Doyle whirled and saw a gypsy with a bared knife standing and peering about at the entrance to a nearby tent. The man finally noticed the sorcerer rolling and flopping on the ground, and he turned quickly and re-entered the tent.
In two long, running strides Doyle covered the distance to the tent, and he tore the flap aside just in time to see the gypsy cock the knife back over the throat of Byron, who lay on a cot tightly bound and gagged. Doyle’s arm was kicked upward by the gun’s recoil before he even decided to shoot, and through the plume of smoke he saw the gypsy spin away to the rear of the tent with blood spattering from a hole in his temple.
His ears ringing with the bang of the shot, Doyle lunged forward, pried the knife out of the dead hand and, straightening up, sawed the blade up through the ropes around Byron’s ankles and wrists.
The young lord reached up and pulled the gag away from his mouth. “Ashbless, I owe you my life—”
“Here,” Doyle said, pressing the knife hilt into Byron’s hand. “Be careful, there’s wild things abroad tonight.” Doyle rushed out of the tent, hoping to seize Romany while he was still rolling helpless and unattended on the ground—but the sorcerer was gone.
Most of the tents were blazing now, and Doyle hesitated, trying to decide which direction of escape would be safest. Then his eyes were strained with trying to focus on what he was seeing, for unless he was somehow grossly misjudging the perspective, he’d just glimpsed two—and now a third!—completely burning men, each at least thirty feet tall, running and bounding energetically, even joyfully, across the grass between the tents and the road. Two more ran past a moment later, as fast, it seemed to Doyle, as comets.
It looks like we leave, and damn quick, by the north end of camp, Doyle thought, but as he turned that way he saw the fiery runners lap the north side, too. My God, he thought, whatever they are, they’re running in a circle around the camp!
He whirled to the south again, and in an instant two things were clear: there were now too many of them, racing far too fast, for anyone to hope to dart out of the circle between them; and the blazing wheel was growing perceptibly smaller with every second.
Romany called these things up, thought Doyle desperately, and if it turns out he can’t send ‘em back, it won’t be for lack of me twisting his arm—or his neck. He’s got to be in one of these tents.
Doyle sprinted toward the nearest one, his shadow fragmenting and whirling around hm.
CHAPTER 9
“… through thine arm
The sons of earth had conquer’d; now vouchsafe
To place us down beneath, where numbing cold
Locks up Cocytus.”
—Virgil addressing Antaeus in Dante’s Inferno
The requisite energy will present no problem, thought Doctor Romany as he hunched over the papers on his desk and tried not to hear the screams of the gypsies who hadn’t escaped, and the roaring of the now solid wall of fire spinning out of control around the camp; and by the degree of the angle at which I lay the glass rods I can decide how far I’ll jump. But how can I get back? I’ll need a vitalized talisman linked to this time… a piece of green schist inscribed with this time’s coordinates would be perfect… he glanced speculatively at a statue of Anubis, in use as a paperweight, carved from that stone.
Over the calamitous noise outside he heard a crashing in the next tent, and a voice shouting, “Where’s Romany, damn you? Are you hiding him in here?”
It must be that hairy giant who was somehow immune to my cold-cast, Romany thought. He’s after me. There’s no time to be carving stones. I’ll have to do it on paper and rely on some of my blood—some more of it—to vitalize it.
As he rapidly scrawled Old Kingdom hieroglyphics across a sheet of white paper, he wondered who the bearded man could be. And where was Brendan Doyle?
The pen paused in midair as a possible answer occurred to him. Why, I’ll bet that’s it, he thought almost with awe. Of course—didn’t the yags say: His new body works better? But he seemed so genuinely helpless when I had him. Was all that just an act? By Set, it must have been! Anyone who can get Amenophis Fikee to switch him into a superior body without poison in it, and can not only survive my best cold-cast but an instant later physically disarm me, is… well, not helpless.
As Romany continued drawing the ancient figures he tried to decide what time to jump to. Sometime in the future? No, not when it meant leaving tonight’s debacle as established history. Better to jump into the past, fix things up so that the situation tonight’s aborted effort was supposed to remedy never would have arisen in the first place. When had the Master’s troubles with England really started? Certainly far earlier than the sea-fight in Aboukeer Harbor in 1798, after which anyone could see that the British were destined to control Egypt; even if that battle had fallen out the other way, and the French general Kleber had not been assassinated, England still would have been running things by now. No, as long as he was going to go back, he may as well go way back, to when England got its first toe-hold in the African continent. That would have been in… about 1660, when Charles II was restored to the throne of England and married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, part of whose dowry was the city of Tangier. Romany did some rapid calculations… then scowled when he realized that there was no gap within twenty years of Charles’ wedding. There was one in 1684, though, on the—he scribbled furiously—on the fourth of February. That was one year before Charles’ death, during the Cairene Master’s first attempt to establish the foolish and malleable royal bastard James, Duke of Monmouth, as successor to the strong-willed Charles. Fikee had been, for almost two decades, holding in abeyance the Newtonian recoil of the yag conjuring of 1666, and had been instructed to let the equilibrium spring back—in the form of a tremendous freeze—in coordination with the poisoning of the sovereign, the forging of a “newly discovered” marriage certificate between Charles Stuart and Lucy Walter, Monmouth’s mother, and the secret return of Monmouth himself from Holland.
As he hurriedly took out the well-used lancet for one more dig into a vein, Romany remembered what had gone wrong with that plan. The fatal dose of mercury wound up in the stomach of one of Charles’ spaniels… and the Great Freeze, which was supposed to end with Monmouth’s triumphal arrival in Folkestone, proved to be more forceful than Fikee had anticipate
d, and continued well on into March… and the forged marriage certificate in its locked black box had somehow been lost. The Master had not been pleased.
The tent walls were orange with the glare of the spinning ring of frenzied yags outside, and drops of sweat diluted the thick blood that he now carefully smeared around the paper’s margins.
Yes, Romany thought, getting quickly to his feet and moving the glass rods on the desk top, that’s where—sorry, when—I’ll jump to. And I’ll tell Fikee and the Master what their future holds, and tell them to forget about trying to control England, but rather to devote their energies to destroying her: work to make the frost continue and intensify rather than cease, pit Catholic against Protestant against Jew, murder the upcoming leaders while they’re still children…
He smiled as he caressed the glass poles into the perfect angle and then reached an open hand out toward the ring of racing fire elementals outside, to draw off from them the tremendous energy that would be needed to fuel and propel his jump through time.
* * *
Doyle slammed the clothes trunk shut and, ignoring the cowering gypsies who lay on the floor panting, ran outside. The blazing wheel around the camp shone as white as the sun, impossible to look at, and he was gasping in the depleted air, feeling the sweat steam away as fast as it appeared on him. Tents around the periphery were all ablaze, and even the inner ones near him had begun to smoke. My God, he thought fearfully, why doesn’t he stop them? If the temperature in here goes up a few more degrees we’ll all torch off like matches on a griddle.
He ran to the next tent, the fringe of which burst into a trim of blue fire just as he struck the flap aside and stumbled in. Doctor Romany stood inside, next to a desk, with one hand flung out toward Doyle and the other clutching a piece of paper. Doyle sprang at him——and was swept up on an incandescent wind. For several seconds he just hunched, waiting for a shattering impact, and then he was free falling through a silent and lightless void … until without warning light and sound abruptly crashed back at him. He got a quick, bewildered impression of a large room lit by candles in crude wooden chandeliers, and then he was falling again, through air that felt shockingly cold, and a second later his boots crashed onto a table, one exploding a cooked, stuffed duck and the other splashing in all directions nearly the entire contents of a bowl of soup—his legs skidded away and he sat down jarringly in a platter of baked ham.
Spattered diners along both sides of the table yelled in astonishment and reared back, and Doyle saw Doctor Romany sprawled face down among the plates on the next table over.
“Excuse me… I beg your pardon,” Doyle muttered in confusion, scrambling down off the table.
“Damn me!” exclaimed one pop-eyed old fellow, mopping at his shirt with a napkin. “What is this damnable trick?” Everyone, in the aftermath of surprise, seemed to be angry, and Doyle heard someone say, “Stinking witchery it is. Let’s have them arrested.”
Romany too had attained the floor, and spread his arms so authoritatively that the people who had leaped to their feet near him now stepped back obediently. “There was an explosion,” he gasped, managing to sound stern as well as breathless. “Get out of my way, I must—” Then he noticed Doyle. And despite his total disorientation Doyle was surprised and gratified to see the sorcerer turn pale and then whirl, and punch and curse his way to the nearest door, which he wrenched open. He shot Doyle one last fearful look before disappearing into the night outside.
“After him, Sammy, and bring him back here,” spoke a calm voice from behind Doyle. He turned and met the suspicious gaze of a heavyset man wearing an apron and holding a cleaver with relaxed familiarity. “I heered no explosion,” he said to Doyle as a burly young man hurried out after Romany. “You’ll bide here until we determine at least who’s to pay for the spoilt dinners.”
“No,” said Doyle, forcing his new voice to sound reasonable—which wasn’t easy, for he’d noticed several men wearing wide-cuffed jackboots, knee-length vests and short wigs, and the accents he was hearing were nearly incomprehensible, and he was pretty sure he knew what had somehow happened. “I’m getting out of here, you understand. Now you can try to stop me with that thing, but I’m so scared that I’ll make a real try at taking it away from you, and I imagine we’ll both get hurt, and this looks like a lousy year to be injured in.”
To emphasize his words he reached out and lifted an empty pewter beer mug from a table. Benner, he thought as he hefted it and got a good grip on it, I hope you were capable of this. He squeezed the mug hard, hard enough to whiten his knuckles—the chatter had subsided, and everyone, even the innkeeper, was watching with interest—and then he redoubled the pressure, feeling every little nick and pit on the surface of the cup biting into the insides of his fingers; his arm was aching all the way back to his shoulder, and trembling violently… but the cup didn’t give at all.
After several more moments of useless straining he let off the pressure and gently set the cup back down on the table. “Very solid workmanship,” he muttered.
Several people near him were grinning, and there was open laughter from the farther tables. A grudged grin was even breaking through the innkeeper’s stolid frown. As Doyle turned to leave everyone began laughing, and like cracks starring a stretch of ice it broke the tension, so that he was able to thread his way, red-faced but unhindered, through the merriment to the door.
When he opened the door and stepped outside, the cold instantly burned his face and hands into numbness. His lungs retreated from the first breath he took, and he thought his nose must start bleeding just from the passage of the savagely frigid air. Jesus, he screamed in his mind as the door banged shut behind him, what is this? This can’t be England—the son of a bitch must have jumped us to some damned outpost in Tierra del Fuego or somewhere.
If everyone in the inn hadn’t been laughing at him he’d have turned around and gone back inside; as it was he pressed on, his stinging hands thrust into the pockets of his too-thin coat, and sprinted forward along the narrow, dark street, vaguely hoping to catch up with Romany and terrify the wizard into finding a warm place where he could just sit down for a while.
He didn’t find Romany, but Sammy did, and Doyle came upon Sammy curled up in a narrow alley mouth about a block and a half from the inn; in the ashy moonlight Doyle might not have seen him, but he heard his hopeless sobbing. Frozen tears had attached Sammy’s cheek to the brick wall, and there was a faint crackling when Doyle crouched and gently lifted the young man’s head up.
“Sammy!” said Doyle, loudly so as to break through the boy’s obsessive grief. “Where did he go?” Getting no answer, he shook him. “Which way, man?” The steam of his breath plumed away upward like smoke.
“He…” the young man gasped, “he showed me the… snakes inside me. He told me, ‘Look at yourself,’ and I did, and I seen all them snakes.” Sammy began sobbing again. “I can’t go back yonder, or home either. They’d get inside of everyone.”
“They’re gone,” Doyle told him firmly. “You understand me? They’re gone. They can’t stand the cold, I saw every one of them crawling away to die when I got here. Now where did the bastard go?”
Sammy sniffed. “Be they gone? And dead? Certes?” He glanced fearfully down at himself.
“Yes, damn it. Did you see where he went?”
After patting and prying at his clothes with diminishing dread, the young man began shivering. “I m-must get back,” he said, getting stiffly to his feet. “Devilish cold. Oh, aye, ye wanted to know where he went.”
“Yes.” Doyle was almost tap-dancing on the cobblestones in a fit of shivering. His right ankle was numb, and he was afraid that the trailing chain would freeze solid with his skin.
Sammy sniffed again. “He leapt over the house there into the next street.”
Doyle cocked his head to hear better. “What?”
“He jumped over that house, like a grasshopper.” Sniff. “He had metal coils on the bottoms of his shoes,??
? Sammy added by way of explanation.
“Ah. Well… thank you.” Obviously Romany hypnotized this boy with both barrels, Doyle reflected. And in only seconds! Better not let the fact that he seems to be afraid of you make you overconfident if you run into him. “Oh, by the way,” he said as the boy began shuffling away, “where are we? I’m lost.”
“Borough High Street. Southwark.” Doyle raised his eyebrows. “London?”
“Well of course London,” the boy said, beginning to jog in place impatiently.
“Uh, and what’s the year? The date?”
“Lord, mister, I don’t know. It’s winter, that’s certain.” He turned and hurried away back toward the inn.
“Who is king?” Doyle called after him.
“Charles!” came the over the shoulder reply.
Charles the whichth, thought Doyle. “Who was king before him?” he shouted after the disappearing figure.
Sammy chose not to hear him, but there was the snap and creak of a window being pushed open above him. “Oliver the Blessed,” called a man’s voice irritably, “and when he ruled, there beed not such street clamors at night.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Doyle hastily, turning his cold-stung eyes upward and trying to spot which one of the dozen small paned windows was slightly open. “I’m suffering from a,” why not, he thought, “from a brain fever, and I’ve lost my memory. I have nowhere to go. Could you let me sleep until dawn in the kitchen, or toss me down a more substantial coat? I—”
He heard the window bang closed, and the latch scritch tight, though he still hadn’t spotted which one it was. Typical Cromwellian, he thought, heaving a sigh that sailed away as a small cloud. So, he thought as he slouched onward, I’m somewhere between, uh, 1660 and—what? When did Charles II die? Around 1690, I think. This is worse still. At least in 1810 I had the chance of finding Darrow’s men and going home with them, or, failing that, to accept what fate seemed to have groomed me for and live out my life in fair comfort as William Ashbless. (Damnation, it’s cold.) You idiot—why didn’t you do that? Just write out Ashbless’ poems from memory, visit Egypt, and let the modest fame and fortune—and pretty wife, even—roll in. But no, instead you had to go bothering sorcerers, and so now history’s deprived of William Ashbless, and you’re stuck in a damn century when nobody brushed their teeth or took baths, and a man is middle-aged at thirty.