Though it had been difficult to find all the little motors and get them correctly wound, and to adjust the air vents around the dozens of concealed candles, the chest-high village Bavarois, as Monsieur Diderac had described the appallingly expensive toy, seemed to be ready to perform. All it needed was for the candles to be lit and the master switch, disguised as a miniature tree stump, to be clicked over to the right.
Doctor Romany sat back and stared morosely at the contraption. Damnable Richard had wanted to start it up so his monkey could see it work before the yags arrived, but Romany was afraid that a thing so complicated mightn’t work more than once, and he refused. He now reached out and gently touched the head of a tiny carved woodsman, and gasped in dismay when the little figure marched several inches down his painted path, swinging his toothpick-hafted axe and making a sound like a clock clearing its throat.
Apep eat me, he thought fretfully, I hope I haven’t broken it. Why have we all had to decline so, anyway? I remember when the yags demanded fine chess sets and sextants and telescopes for their services. And now what? Damn toys.
And they were never as respectful as they ought to be, he reflected ruefully, but now they’re downright rude.
He stood up and shook his head. The tent was murky with incense smoke and he crossed bobbingly to the entrance flap, lifted it away and hooked it to the side, and blinked in the sudden brightness at the heather fields of Islington.
It wasn’t so far from here, he reflected, that, eight years ago, poor old Amenophis Fikee gave himself to the dog-headed god of the gates, lost most of his mind and all of his magic—except that damned body-switching spell—and ran off with a pistol ball in his belly and the mark of Anubis whiskering out all over him … ran off to a dubious career as Dog-Face Joe, the “werewolf” that London mothers threatened badly behaving children with… leaving Romany, a ka that should have been retired long ago, in charge of Fikee’s post, the entire United Kingdom. Well, Romany thought complacently, the Master obviously did a good job of drawing this ka; I don’t think Fikee—or even Romanelli I—could have done any better at the task of maintaining and protecting the Master’s British interests. I suppose he’ll retire me—render me back down to the primal paut—after our coup here this week. I won’t be sorry to go.
Eight years is long enough for a ka.
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.
Like a coachman instructed to ride around and around a certain block until his fare, ready at last, shall emerge from a house and hail him, the smiling young man began again at the top of the memorized page: “Good morning, my good man,” he said. “I am Lord Byron. May I buy you a pint of something?” The ever-smiling young man didn’t really hear the man’s answer—it seemed muffled, as if spoken on the other side of a partition—but some part of his brain, or perhaps the engine, recognized it as calling for reply number three: “I certainly am, my friend—sixth baron Byron of Rochdale; I inherited the title in 1798, when I was ten years old. If you’re wondering why a peer of the realm should be in a place like this, drinking with common laborers, well, it’s because I think it’s the common laborers that are this country, not the lords and royalty. I say—” There was the usual interruption that called for reply number one: “Innkeeper! A pint of whatever this gentleman will drink!” The young man’s hand, like a precision machine, fished a coin from his waistcoat pocket and dropped it onto the nearest level surface, and then his mouth picked up the number three response exactly where it had left off: “—to hell with these men who are supposed to govern us just because of the womb they happened to issue from! I say the King, and you, and me, are none of us better than the others, and it’s not right that some eat off silver and never work a day in their lives, while others just as good work backbreakingly hard every day and hardly taste real meat once in a week! The Americans rid themselves of that kind of artificial society, and the French tried to, and I say that we—”