“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.”
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 anticipated, 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…