The man on the couch groaned, then leaned over and peered at the “floor”; the couch now sat right over the equator line. “Moonrise,” he said wearily. He lay back again and stared across the sphere at the balcony. “I see Doctors Romanelli and Romany, the latter standing as a clear indictment of my ability to cast a decent ka. I would have thought you would last a century without deteriorating to this point. But who is our giant visitor?”
“His name, I gather, is Brendan Doyle,” said Romanelli.
“Good evening, Brendan Doyle,” said the man on the wall. “I … apologize for not being able to come over and shake hands, but having renounced this present earth, I gravitate instead toward … another place. It’s an uncomfortable position, and one that we hope to remedy before long. And,” he went on, “what has Mr. Doyle got to do with the present debacle?”
“He did it, yer Honor!” chittered the ka. “He snapped the Byron ka out of the obedience spell we had him under, and he made the yags go crazy, and then when I jumped back to 1684 he followed me and alerted the Antaeus Brotherhood to my presence there—” He’d let go of his shoes in order to gesture, and he floated upward feet first, bumped against the round brick cowl that extended out around the balcony and rolled over it and began floating up toward the top of the dome, “—and they somehow knew that a weapon fouled with dirt could injure me and they shot my face off with a mud-clogged gun—”
“Jutmoop sidskeen efty door?” sputtered the Master. Romanelli and Doyle, and the ka, who by now was crouching upside-down beside the lamp chain mooring on the ceiling, all stared at him.
The Master squeezed his eyes and mouth tightly shut, then opened them. “Jumped,” he said carefully, “to sixteen eighty-four?”
“I believe he did, sir,” Romanelli put in hastily. “They used the gates Fikee made—traveling from gate to gate, through time, you understand? This ka,” he waved his hand upward, “is obviously too decayed for only eight years of action, and what I’ve pieced together of his story is consistent.”
The Master nodded slowly. “There was something peculiar about the way our Monmouth scheme misfired in 1684.” The couch rolled another few inches upward, and though the Master’s teeth clenched with pain, one of the motionless figures in the pen below groaned echoingly. Startled, Doyle glanced down at them again, and was not reassured to see that they were wax statues. The Master’s eyes opened. “Time travel,” he whispered. “And where did Mr. Doyle come from?”
“Some other time,” said the ka. “He and a whole party of people appeared through one of the gates, and I managed to capture him, though his companions returned the way they’d come. I had a little time to question him, and—listen—he knows where Tutankhamen’s tomb is. He knows lots of things.”
The Master nodded and then, horribly, smiled. “It could be that, in this late and sterile age, we’ve blundered onto the most powerful tool we’ve ever had. Romanelli, draw some blood from our guest and construct a ka—a full maturation one that will know everything he does. We mustn’t take any chances with what he’s got in his head—he might kill himself or catch some fever. Do that right now, and then lock him up for the night. Interrogation will commence in the morning.”
Ten minutes were wasted in getting the Romany ka down from the ceiling—it could no more scramble down to the balcony than a hamster could scramble up out of a bathtub—but it was finally recovered with a rope, and Romanelli led Doyle back down the stairs.
On the ground floor they entered a room where, in the dim light of a single lamp, the doorkeeper could be seen carefully stirring a long vat of some fishy-smelling fluid.
“Where’s the cup of—” Romanelli began, but even as he’d spoken the doorkeeper had pointed at a table against the wall. “Ah.” Romanelli crossed to it and carefully lifted a copper cup. “Here,” he said, returning to Doyle. “Drink it and save us the trouble of tying you down and administering it through broken teeth.”
Doyle took the cup and sniffed the contents dubiously. The stuff had a sharp, chemical reek. Reminding himself that he wasn’t slated to die until 1846, he lifted the cup to his blistered lips and downed the drink in one big, gagging gulp.
“God,” he wheezed, handing the cup back and trying to blink the fumes out of his eyes.
“Now we’ll just impose upon you for a few drops of blood,” Romanelli went on, drawing a knife from under his robe.
“Just pop the cork on a vein, Zane,” agreed the remnant of Doctor Romany. The ka was once more holding the buckles of its weighted shoes and walking on its hands.
“Blood?” Doyle asked. “What for?”
“You heard the Master tell us to make a ka of you,” Romanelli answered. “Now I’m going to free your hands, but don’t do anything idiotic.”
Not me, Doyle thought. History says I’ll leave Egypt in four months, sane and with all limbs intact. Why should I go out of my way to earn a concussion or a dislocated arm?
Romanelli cut the ropes that had bound Doyle’s wrists.
“Step over to the tub here,” he said. “I’m just going to nick your finger.”
Doyle stepped forward, holding his finger out and peering curiously into the pearly liquid. So, he thought, that’s where they’ll grow an exact duplicate of me…
Oh my God, what if it’s the duplicate that gets free and eventually returns to England to die in ‘46? I could die here without upsetting history.
His tenuous optimism abruptly extinguished, Doyle grabbed for Romanelli’s approaching wrist, and though he cut the heel of one hand deeply on the sorcerer’s knife, his other hand clamped onto Romanelli’s forearm, and with the strength of desperation he wrenched the sorcerer forward and off balance toward the tub; but Doyle winced to see several drops of blood from his cut hand plop into the pearly stuff.
It seemed certain that Romanelli would pitch into the tub, so Doyle whirled, crouching, drew the makeshift dagger from his pant leg and sprang in a wild lunge toward the upside-down ka. It hooted in alarm and let go of the shoe buckles, but before it could float upward Doyle’s wooden knife punched into its frail chest.
A blast of chilly and foul-smelling air hit Doyle in the face, and the ka flew backward off the end of the dagger and, visibly shrivelling as all the noxious air whooshed out of it, sailed across the room, rebounded from the wall, started to fly straight up toward the ceiling, then lost speed and stalled.
Romanelli was rolling in agony on the floor beyond the tub, having done an impromptu leap and roll over it without touching it. “Get him,” he managed to croak.
The doorkeeper stood between Doyle and the hall door, and Doyle ran straight at him, brandishing the dagger and roaring as loud as he could.
The man leaped out of the way, but not quickly enough; Doyle clubbed him with the butt end of the weapon and he tumbled to the floor unconscious as Doyle’s racing footsteps receded down the hall.
Romanelli was still struggling to get his protective shoes between himself and the torturing floor as, with a sound as soft as the fall of a dead leaf onto a pond, the empty skin and clothes of Doctor Romany settled onto it and didn’t move.
The beggars in Thames Street didn’t approach the little man who came striding along in the cool twilight, for his ill-fitting clothes, pale, grinning face and wild mop of graying hair all indicated that he’d have no pence to spare, and might well even be mad; though one legless beggar on a wheeled cart did a double take, pushed himself along after the man for a few paces, then coasted to a stop, shook his head uncertainly and then wheeled around to return to his post.