by Tim Powers
“Jacky,” said Doyle helplessly, baffled by the impossible story but recognizing genuine suffering. “You couldn’t have known.”
London Bridge was less than half a mile ahead, and Doyle could see the hulks of grounded coal barges on the Surrey-side shore to his right. Jacky began angling in that direction. “There was a gun,” Jacky went on in a flat voice, “a flintlock pistol—that’s it there, by your foot—it was on the mantle, and when this furry thing came rushing into the house, I leaped up, grabbed the pistol and fired right into its chest. The thing dropped, bleeding all over the place. I went and stood over it, not too close, and it… looked at me for a moment before it sort of shuddered a few times and went limp. There was a mess. But when it looked at me I recognized him—I knew it was Colin. The color of the eyes was different, of course, but I recognized the… not expression, exactly… I recognized him in there.” Past the easternmost of the barges was a pier below a lighted house, and Jacky seemed to be heading for it. The glow from the narrow windows glittered warm gold on the oily black water. “After that I just slept through two weeks. Nobody else could—day and night I was screaming, throwing food and jabbering obscenities so foul that my innocent mother didn’t even understand most of them… but I was asleep. And after I came out of it I set out to kill Dog-Face Joe with the same gun that killed—with which I killed—Colin.” Jacky grinned sourly. “Follow all that?”
“Yes.” Doyle wondered how much of this Lovecraftian fantasy could be true—perhaps one of the mysterious Dancing Ape creatures had broken into Jacky’s house at roughly the same time that Lepovre decided to hit the road—and he wondered too whether he was correct in suspecting that this was more than grief for the death of a close friend. Could his first suspicions about Jacky have been correct? “It’s trite to say, Jacky, but I mean it—I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.” Jacky had been slowing the canoe by dragging the oar in the water, and now it slid, hardly moving at all, alongside the pier, and Jacky stopped it by grabbing a rope dangling between the pilings and hanging onto it when the canoe’s weight came onto her arm. “Pull your end around there, Doyle—there’s a ladder that starts about four feet over your head.”
When they’d both climbed up to the narrow pier, Jacky said, “Now we’ve got to figure out what to do with you. You can’t come back to Copenhagen Jack’s house—Horrabin will have a dozen spies there watching for you.” They were walking slowly toward the building, which seemed to be some kind of riverfront inn, and Jacky, feet bare, was picking her way carefully over the ragged old timbers. “When does this friend of yours arrive in town? What’s his name, Ashbin?”
“Ashbless. I’ll meet him this Tuesday.”
“Well, the innkeeper here, old Kusiak, has a stable off to the side, and he’s always needing help. Can you shovel horse dung?”
“If there are people who can’t, I’d hate to think I was one of them.”
Jacky pulled open the inn’s dockside door and they stepped into a small room with a fireplace, and Doyle hurried over to it. A girl in an apron appeared, and her welcoming smile faltered a little when she noticed that both guests had evidently fallen into the river, and one was still dripping wet.
“It’s all right, miss,” Jacky said, “we won’t sit on the chairs. Would you tell Kusiak, please, that it’s Jacky from across the river, and a friend, and we’d like two hot baths—in individual private rooms—”
Doyle grinned. Modest little chap, this Jacky.
“—And some clean dry clothes, it doesn’t much matter what sort,” Jacky went on. “And after that two pots of your excellent fish chowder in the dining room. Oh, and some hot coffee with rum in it while we wait.”
The girl nodded and hurried away to check all this with the innkeeper.
Jacky squatted down beside Doyle at the fireplace. “You’re pretty sure this Ashbin character will get you set up in some decent sort of position?”
Doyle wasn’t sure, and was trying to convince himself more than Jacky when he said, a little defensively, “He’s not hurting for money, I believe. And I do know him pretty damn well.”
And he’s got friends and influence, Doyle added to himself, and he might just be able to get me an audience—in enforced immunity!—with old Romany, in which we could bargain on my terms: I’ll let him have certain harmless bits of information—or even outright lies; yes, that would be safer—in exchange for a gap location. If I could have the right sort of friends waiting outside the tent he wouldn’t dare do any more things like his cigar in the eye trick. And it would take me months, or years, to build up that kind of influence unaided, and Darrow said the gaps decrease in frequency after 1802, and in any case I don’t think I have months—this cough was already killing me before tonight’s swim. It may now choose to develop into real pneumonia. I’ve got to get back, soon, to where there are hospitals.
Also, Doyle wanted to interview Ashbless in detail about his early years and then stash the information somewhere where it wouldn’t be disturbed until he could “discover” it when he got back to 1983. Schliemann and Troy, he thought fatuously, George Smith and Gilgamesh, Doyle and the Ashbless Documents.
“Well, good luck with him,” said Jacky. “Maybe next month at this time you’ll have a job at the Exchange and rooms in St. James. And you’ll hardly remember your days as a beggar and a stablehand—” She smiled. “Oh yes, and your morning as a less than successful costermonger… what else have you done?”
The rum-laced coffee arrived then; and the girl’s smile, and her assurances that their baths were being drawn even now, showed that Kusiak had acknowledged Jacky as a good credit risk. Doyle sipped his coffee gratefully. “Nothing much,” he answered.
* * *
The structure known throughout the St. Giles rookery as Rat’s Castle had been constructed on the foundations and around the remains of a hospital built in the twelfth century; the hospital’s bell-tower still survived, but over the centuries the various owners of the site had, largely for warehousing purposes, steadily added new floors and walls around it, until now its arched Norman windows looked, instead of out across the city, into narrow rooms fronted right up against them and moored to the ancient stone; the cap of the tower was the only bit of the structure still exposed to the open air, and it would have been hard to find in the rooftop wilderness of chimney pots, airshafts and wildly uneven architecture.
The bellropes had rotted away centuries ago, and the pulleys plummeted to the floor to be carted away as scrap metal, but the ancient cross timbers still spanned the shaft, and new ropes had been looped over these in order to hoist Horrabin and Doctor Romany some fifty feet off the floor, roughly three-quarters of the way up the enclosed tower. Since it allowed them to converse at a comfortable distance from the ground, it was their preferred conference chamber. Oil lamps had been set on the sills of the old stone windows at the very top, and Damnable Richard attended this evening’s council, sitting on the sill of a window one level down from the lamps, which put him only a foot or two above the heads of the dangling chiefs.
“I have no idea who those two men were, your Honor,” Horrabin was saying, and his already weird voice echoed with a sort of nightmare ululation in the stone shaft. “They were certainly none of my crew.”
“And they really did mean to kill him?”
“Oh, yes. Dennessen says when he knocked the second man off our American he had already stabbed him once, and was cocking another thrust.”
Doctor Romany swung meditatively for a few moments back and forth, kicking off gently from the concave stonework. “I can’t understand who they could be. Someone working against me, obviously, who either already knows what the American has to tell … or simply doesn’t want me to learn any of it. It couldn’t be the people he came with, because I saw them all disappear when the gate ceased to exist, and I’ve monitored all gates since and nobody has come through them. And the Antaeus Brotherhood hasn’t been a threat to us for more than a century, I gather.”
“They’re a bunch of old men,” Horrabin agreed, “who have forgotten the original purpose of their organization.”
“Well, tell your man Dennessen that if he could recognize the man who tried to kill the American, and bring that man to me alive, the reward will be the same as if he’d killed Dog-Face Joe.” He flapped his arms to stop swinging. “The bearded man who shot at the American and then picked him up may be of the same group. You say you recognized the daring canoeist?”
“I believe so, yer Worship. He wasn’t wearing his usual turban, but it looked like a beggar who sometimes hangs around here, called Ahmed. A fake Hindoo. I’ve got an order and reward out now for his capture.”
“Good. We’ll wring the story out of one of these birds, Set willing, even if we have to peel him down to nothing but lungs and a tongue and a brain.”
Damnable Richard carefully reached for his wooden monkey, whom he’d set on the window ledge so as to be able to see the prodigy of two sorcerers hung up like hams in a smokehouse, and put his thumb and forefinger over its ears, for savage talk tended to upset it. And Richard himself wasn’t pleased. He’d been in town for a full week now, confined to Rat’s Castle and the hall under Bainbridge Street, while Doctor Romany at least got to travel around in order to be at each gate when it appeared, which involved going out into the country a good deal of the time.
“I can’t help thinking—wondering whether—this interference may be prompted by my… partner’s efforts in Turkey,” said Doctor Romany.
“But nobody knows what they are,” pointed out Horrabin. He added more softly, “Even I know only that your twin brother has found a young British lord, sojourning abroad alone, who you two seem to think you can make some use of. It seems to me I should be more fully acquainted with your plans.”
Romany seemed not to have heard him. He said thoughtfully, “I don’t believe there’s been any breach of secrecy at this end, simply because I’m the only one that knows anything important. But I don’t know much about what may be going on at Doctor Romanelli’s end of things, back in Turkey; I understand this young lord is fond of writing letters. I just hope my… brother hasn’t allowed some unobtrusively important bit of information to find its way, in one of these letters, to certain people in this island.”
Horrabin looked surprised. “Where’d you say this troublesome young peer is?”
“A few days out of Athens, obediently heading back up the Gulf of Corinth to Patras; for some reason milord is very vulnerable psychically when he’s in that little area: Patras, the Gulf of Patras, Missolonghi. So when he was last there, in July, Romanelli had the imperial consul, an employee of his, put milord to sleep by having him concentrate on the operation of a musical clock, and while he was asleep my brother placed a command in milord’s mind, under the thinking level so he wouldn’t be aware of it—a command to return to Patras in mid-September, by which time things should be warmed up here so that everything will come to a boil at once. And his lordship is even now carrying out the order, blithely supposing that the decision to return to Patras is his own.”
Horrabin was nodding impatiently. “The reason I asked was, well, for a letter of his to have incited trouble here, it would have to have been sent… when? Months ago, I should think. Aren’t there about a dozen wars going on between here and there? So even if he’d written to somebody right at first, in July, there hasn’t been time for the letter to arrive here and for somebody here to find out who you are and what you want.”
Romany raised his eyebrows and nodded. “You’re right—I hadn’t considered the slow pace of international mail these days.” He frowned. “Then who in hell were those men, and why are they interfering with me? “
“I couldn’t say,” answered the clown, slowly stretching and bending his limbs like some sort of huge, painted spider. Damnable Richard covered his monkey’s eyes. “But,” added Horrabin, “they’re interfering with me too. Four dozen of my tiniest homunculi were drowned out there tonight by that bloody Hindoo. You need to make your Master in Cairo send more of that stuff—what’s it called?”
“Paut,” said Doctor Romany. “That’s damned hard stuff to produce nowadays, magic being as strangled as it is.” He shook his head dubiously.
Horrabin’s painted face clenched in what was probably a scowl, but he continued his slow exercises. “I need it—to work for you I need it—to make more homunculi,” he said evenly. “Dwarves and such I can warp down from human stock, but for boys that can overhear conversations while hidden in a teacup, follow a man by crouching in a fold of his hat,” the clown’s voice was rising, “sneak into a bank through the drains and replace good gold sovereigns with your gypsy fakes—” and he tilted over so that his head was near Romany and his legs pointed away, and he added, in a whisper, “or if you want some lads that can enter a monarch’s chamber concealed in a nurse’s dress, and put mind-rot drugs in his soup without being seen, and then, dressed up as anything from bugs to the twelve apostles, do dances on a table top out of his reach, just to give his ravings added color—for work like that you need my Spoonsize Boys.”
“We won’t have to do that very much longer, if things work out as planned in Patras,” said Romany quietly. “But your creatures have their uses, I admit. I’ll explain the situation to my Master, and let you know tomorrow what he says.”
“You communicate by means of something faster than the mail,” observed Horrabin, his orange eyebrows inquiringly raised halfway to his hat.
“Oh yes,” said Romany with a deprecatory shrug. “By sorcerous means my colleagues and I can converse directly at any time, across any distance, and even send objects through space instantly. Such perfect communication ensures that our stroke, when we deal it, will be flawlessly aimed, timed and coordinated—unanswerable.” He permitted himself a smile. “In our hand is the King of Sorcerers, and that beats any of the cards John Bull may have in his hand.”
Damnable Richard looked at his monkey and rolled his eyes and shook his head. What a crock, eh, monkey? he thought. He just doesn’t want this terrible clown to know how much he needs him. How many times, monkey, have you and I seen him shouting at that silly candle of his with Egypt-writing on it, and after a couple of hours just get a faint voice saying, “What? What?” coming out of the round flame… and how about the times he’s tried to send or get objects from his pals in the far off lands? Remember the time his Master tried to send him a little statue, and all that showed up was a handful of red hot gravel? Hah! This to sorcery!
He spat disgustedly, earning an angry yell from Doctor Romany. “Sorry, rya,” Richard said hastily. He scowled at the monkey. Don’t start me chatting with you, he told it. You see what you did? Got me in trouble.
“In any case,” Doctor Romany went on, wiping the top of his bald head, “we flushed the American out of cover, and I want a serious search for him tonight, while he’s still running scared. Now the three of us here—are you paying attention, Richard? Very well—the three of us here know him by sight, so each of us should lead a search party. Horrabin, you’ll mobilize your wretches and search the area from St. Martin’s Lane to St. Paul’s Cathedral—and check with all lodging house owners; look into pubs; eye closely all beggars. Richard, you will lead a search of the south shore, from Blackfriars Bridge to past the granaries below Wapping. I’ll take some of my dockside boys southeast from St. Paul’s through the Clare Market rookery and the Tower and Docks and Whitechapel area. Frankly, that’s where I expect to find him; he’ll have made friends on the north side of the river, and when we last saw him he was being carried east, away from the area you’ll have, Horrabin.”
* * *
Two hours after dawn Damnable Richard trudged back up the stairs, stepping softly, for he believed the wooden monkey in his pocket was asleep. When he wearily took his place in the window the two sorcerers were already dangling from their ropes, though Doctor Romany was swinging back and forth as if only recently drawn up.
“I presu
me,” said the gypsy chief, turning up toward him a face haggard with exhaustion, “that you had no better luck on the Surrey-side than we did on the north.”
“Kek, rya.”
“Means no,” Romany told Horrabin.
There was a large stone missing from the tower’s dome, and as the spot of bright sunlight slid by slow inches down the sunlit wall, and the costermongers in Holborn Street could be faintly heard shouting the virtues of their vegetables, the two sorcerers discussed strategies, and Damnable Richard had tucked his awakened monkey into his shirt collar and was having a long talk with it in the faintest of whispers.
CHAPTER 6
“The other night upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there … “
—Old Rhyme
Tuesday morning, two days later, was overcast and threatening rain—but in the coffee houses around the Royal Exchange the brokers and auctioneers were conducting business as vigorously as ever. Doyle, stupefied by hunger and lack of sleep, sat in a corner of the Jamaica Coffee House and watched a dozen merchants bidding for a shipment of tobacco salvaged from some ship that had managed to founder in the Thames; the auction was by Inch of Candle, whereby the last bid made before a short candle went out was the one taken, and the candle was now very low and the bidding quick and loud. Doyle took another sip of his lukewarm coffee, forcing himself to take only a small one, for if he finished it he’d have to buy another to keep his table, and the purchase of his present set of clothes—brown trousers and jacket, a white shirt and black boots, all secondhand but clean and whole—had left him only a shilling, and he wanted to be able to buy Ashbless a cup of coffee when he arrived.
His shoulder burned with a hot ache, and he was afraid the brandy with which he’d soaked his bandage hadn’t killed the infection in the knife cut. I should just have drunk the brandy, he reflected. His eyes were watering and his nose tingled, but it seemed his body had forgotten how to sneeze. Hurry up, William, he thought. Your biographer is evidently dying. He hunched around to glance at the clock on the wall—twenty minutes after ten. Ashbless was due in ten minutes.
