by Tim Powers
Focus and intensity returned into Byron’s eyes and he clicked his tongue impatiently. “This is worthless, Ashbless. I get nothing but incomprehensible dialogues, and I still can’t recall one detail of how I got from Greece to here. I do remember being taught the route back to this man’s camp, though, and I’ll return, sure enough—but I’ll bring a set of duelling pistols.” He stood up lithely and padded to the window—which Doyle still half-feared would recommence its contortions—and stood with his arms crossed, staring vengefully out across the roof-tops.
Doyle shook his head in exasperation. “This man isn’t a gentleman, my lord. He’d probably accept your challenge and then signal one of his men to blow your brains out from behind.”
Byron turned and squinted at him. “Who is he? I can’t recall hearing a name applied to him. What does he look like?”
Doyle raised his shaggy eyebrows. “Why don’t you just remember? Hear the voice: “Yes, Horrabin, I’d have that one killed too.’ But don’t just hear it—see it, too.”
Byron closed his eyes, and almost immediately said wonderingly, “I’m in a tent all full of Egyptian antiquities, and the most hideous clown in the world is sitting on top of a birdcage. He’s talking to a bald-headed old—good heavens, it’s my Greek doctor, Romanelli!”
“Romany,” Doyle corrected him. “He’s Greek?”
“It’s Romanelli. Well, no, I expect he’s Italian; but he’s the doctor that was treating me when I was in Patras. How is it that I didn’t recognize him until now? I wonder if he and I came back here together… but why should Romanelli want the king killed? And why bring me all the way back from Patras to do it?” He sat down again and stared hard, even belligerently, at Doyle. “No joking now, fellow—I need to know the true date.”
“It’s one of the few things I’m sure of,” said Doyle evenly. “Today is Wednesday the twenty-sixth of September, 1810. And you say you were in Greece only four days ago?”
“Damn me,” whispered Byron, sitting back, “I think you’re serious! And do you know, my recollections of lying sick in Patras don’t seem more than a week old. Yes, I was in Patras Saturday last, and so was this Romanelli villain.” He grinned. “Ah, there’s sorcery in this, Ashbless! Not even… cannons, arranged in a relay system across the continent, could have got me from there to here in time to have been buying drinks for people in London yesterday. Julius Obsequens wrote about such things in his book of prodigies. Romanelli evidently has command of aerial spirits!”
This is getting murky, thought Doyle. “Maybe,” he said cautiously. “But if Romanelli was your doctor out there, then he’s—well he’s probably still there. Because this Doctor Romany, who’s apparently a twin of him, has been here all along.”
“Twins, is it? Well, I’m going to get the full account from the London twin—at gunpoint, if necessary.” He stood up purposefully, then glanced down at his clothes and stockinged feet. “Damn! I can’t challenge a man while I’m dressed so. I’ll stop first at a haberdasher’s.”
“You’re going to threaten a sorcerer with pistols?” Doyle inquired sarcastically. “His… aerial spirits will drop a bucket over your head so you can’t see to aim. I say we pay a visit to this Antaeus Brotherhood first—if they were once a threat to Romany and his people, they may still know some effective defenses against them, mightn’t they?”
Byron snapped his fingers impatiently. “I suppose you’re right. We, you say? You have matters to settle with him yourself?”
“There’s something I need to learn from him,” said Doyle, standing up, “that he won’t… willingly… tell me.”
“Very well. Why don’t we investigate this Antaeus Brotherhood while my boots and clothes are being prepared. Antaeus, eh? I daresay they all walk around barefoot on dirt floors.”
This reminded Doyle of something, but before he could track it down Byron had struggled back into his despised shoes and opened the door.
“You are coming?”
“Oh, sure,” Doyle said, picking up Benner’s coat. But remember that remark about bare feet and dirt floors, he told himself. That reminds me of something that seems important.
* * *
The sweat drops were rolling like miniature crystal snails down Doctor Romany’s bald temples, and his concentration was shattered by physical exhaustion, but he resolved to try once more to contact the Master in Cairo. The trouble, he realized, was that the ether was for once too receptive, and within probably ten miles the beam of his message became a cone that widened out and extended its energy in lateral spread rather than motion forward toward the candle that was always burning in the Master’s chamber; and then the message shuddered to a halt, and rebounded back to Romany’s candle, producing the loud, warped echoes that infuriated Doctor Romany and terrified the gypsies.
Again he held the lamp flame to the black curl of candle wick, and because this was the twelfth attempt, he could feel the energy drain out of him at the instant the round flame appeared.
“Master,” he rasped into it. “Can you hear me? This is the Romanelli ka in England. It is urgent that I speak to you. I have news that may cause you to want to abort the present enterprise. I—”
“Gorble geermee?” His own voice, distorted and slowed, came back at him so loudly that he jerked away from the candle. “Diw a Rubberbelly kadingle. Idda zurjee…” Abruptly the idiot echo faded out, leaving only a sound like distant wind, waxing and waning as if heard through a flapping curtain. Romanelli leaned forward again. This wasn’t the sharpening that indicated successful contact, but at least it was something different. “Master?” he said hopefully.
Without becoming a voice or seeming to be anything more than the sound of vast emptiness, the distant sussuration began to form words. “Kes ku sekher ser sat,” the void whispered, “tuk kemhu a pet… “
The peculiar flame went out when the candle, propelled by Romany’s fist, thumped into the side of the tent. He stood up and, sweating and trembling and bobbing unevenly, strode out of the tent. “Richard!” he yelled angrily. “Damn it, where are you? Get your—”
“Acai, rya,” said the gypsy, hastening up to him. Doctor Romany glanced around. The sun was low in the west, throwing long shadows across the darkening heath, and was doubtless too concerned with its imminent entry into the Tuaut, and its boat trip through the twelve hours of the night, to glance back at what might be transpiring in this field. The rack of wood was laid out on the grass, looking like a twenty-foot section of a bridge, and the sharp aromatic fumes of brandy were so pungent on the evening breeze that he knew his threats had worked, and that the gypsies had used the entire keg to douse the wood and hadn’t saved any for drinking. “When did you splash it on?” he asked.
“Only a minute or so ago, rya,” answered Richard. “We were drawing lots to see who’d go fetch you.”
“Very well.” Romany rubbed his eyes and sighed deeply, trying to thrust out of his mind the whisper he’d heard. “Bring me the brazier of coals and the lancet,” he said finally. “And we’ll have a try at summoning these fire elementals.”
“Avo.” Richard hurried away, audibly muttering garlic, and Romany again turned toward the sun, which was now poised on the edge of entering the darkness, and while his guard was down the words he’d heard came rushing back to him: Kes ku setcher ser sat, tuk kemhu a pet… Your bones will fall upon the earth, and you will not see the heavens…
He heard Richard’s feet swishing through the long grass behind him, and he shrugged fatalistically and began prodding his left arm with the claw fingers of his right hand, trying to find a good bountiful vein.
I hope they’ll settle for ka blood, he thought.
* * *
The elderly man in the threadbare dressing gown lowered his white brows and widened his eyes in an almost ape-like expression of astonished disapproval when Doyle ventured to refill his tiny glass from the decanter of mediocre sherry, even though he’d only nodded and smiled and said, “Help yourself, my lord,” w
hen Byron had refilled his for the second time.
“Ah, hmm, what were we discussing, before… ?” the man quavered. “Yes, aside from… ah… fellowship, yes, promoting the… quiet joys of sensible company, our main purpose is to prevent the… pollution of good old honest British stock by… inferior strains.” One trembling hand shook an incautiously large mound of snuff onto a lumpy knuckle of the opposite hand and then the old man snorted the powder up a nostril and seemed, to Doyle at least, almost to die of the resulting sneezing fit.
Byron made a silent snarl of exasperation and bolted his sherry.
“Mercy! I—kooshwah!—I beg your pardon, my lord.” The old man dabbed at his streaming eyes with a handkerchief.
Doyle leaned forward and rumbled impatiently, “And just how do you go about preventing this, as you call it, pollution, Mr. Moss?” He glanced around at the dusty curtains, tapestries, paintings and books that insulated the rooms of the Antaeus Brotherhood from the fresh autumn breeze outside. The smells of candle wax, Scottish snuff and deteriorating leather book bindings and upholstery was beginning to make him feel ill.
“Eh? Oh, why we… write letters. To the newspapers. Protesting the, ah, leniency in the immigration laws, and proposing statutes to… ban gypsies and Negroes and, uh, Irishmen from the larger towns. And we print and distribute pamphlets, which,” he said with an ingratiating grimace toward Byron, “tends, as you might imagine, to deplete the club kitty—ah, treasury. And we sponsor morality plays—”
“Why the Antaeus Brotherhood?” interrupted Doyle, angry that the vague hope he’d felt on hearing the name seemed to be proving so unfounded.
“—which… what? Oh! Yes, well we feel that England’s strength, like that of Antaeus in, as it were, classical mythology, is based on… maintaining contact with the earth, the soil… you know, the solid native British… uh … “
“Soil,” said Byron, nodding fiercely as he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Excellent. Thank you, Mr. Moss, it’s been inspiring. Ashbless, you may stay and glean more valuable information, in case we should be attacked by savage Negroes or Irishmen. I’d sooner wait at my haberdasher’s. There I shall simply be bored.” He turned on his heel, visibly suppressing a wince as his shoe pinched his foot, and limped out to the hall. His irregular footsteps thumped and knocked down the patchily carpeted stairs, and then the street door could be heard to slam.
“I beg your pardon,” Doyle said to the dumbstruck Moss. “Lord Byron is a man of tumultuous passions.”
“I… well, youth,” Moss muttered.
“But listen,” said Doyle earnestly, hunching forward in his chair, to Moss’ evident alarm, “didn’t you people used to be more … militant? I mean like a hundred years or so ago—weren’t things more… I don’t know… serious in their consequences than a letter to the Times would be?”
“Well, there do seem to have been… excesses, yes, incidents of a violent nature,” Moss allowed cautiously, “back when the Brotherhood had its quarters on London Bridge, down on the Southwark end of it. There are mentions in our archives of some rather—”
“Archives? Could I examine them, please? Uh, Lord Byron indicated he’d want to know the history of the Brotherhood before he decided to join,” he added hastily, seeing the simian frown reforming on Moss’s features. “After all, before he invests his fortune in an organization of this nature he’d like to check it out.”
“Oh? Well, yes of course. Irregular, you realize,” Moss said, precariously poling himself up out of his chair with a cane, “but I suppose in this case we may make an exception to the members only rule…” Erect at last, he tottered toward the door behind him. “If you’d bring the lamp and step this way,” he said, and the reference to a fortune earned Doyle the addition of a grudging “sir.”
The door swung inward with such creaking that Doyle knew it hadn’t been opened in quite some time, and when he’d stepped inside behind Moss, and the lamp illuminated the narrow room beyond, he could see why.
Stacks of mildewed, leather-bound journals filled the place from floor to ceiling, and had in places collapsed, spilling crumbled fragments of age-browned paper across the damp floor. Doyle reached for the top volume of a stalagmite stack that only came up chest-high, but rain had leaked into the room at some time and melted or germinated the ancient bindings into one solid mass. Doyle’s prying was exciting to madness a nation of spiders, so he stopped and looked at a shelf that contained several pairs of mummified boots. Catching a glitter by the heel of one, he looked closer and saw a three-inch length of fine gold chain trailing from the ancient leather. All the boots proved to have chains, though most were copper long since gone green.
“Why chains?”
“Mm? Oh, it’s… traditional, in our formal functions, to wear a chain attached to the heel of the right boot. I don’t know how the custom got started, just one of those peculiarities, I expect, like cuff buttons that don’t—”
“What do you know about the origins of the custom?” Doyle growled, for like Byron’s remark about bare feet and dirt floors, this seemed to remind him of something. “Think!”
“Now see here, sir… no need to… wrathful tones … but let’s see, I believe members wore the chains at all times during the reign of Charles the Second… oh, of course, and they didn’t just staple it to the heel as they do now, the chain actually entered the boot through a hole and passed through the stocking and was knotted around the ankle. God knows why. Over the years it’s been simplified… prevent chafing … “
Doyle had begun dismantling one of the drier and older-looking book stacks. He found that they were roughly chronological, arranged in the same pattern as geological strata, and that the journal entries from the eighteenth century chronicled nothing but a dwindling involvement in social affairs—a dinner at which Samuel Johnson was expected but didn’t show, a complaint against adulterated port wines, a protest against gold and silver galloon, whatever that might be, adorning men’s hats—but when he had unearthed the upper volumes of the seventeenth century the notes abruptly became sparser and more cryptic, and were generally slips of paper glued or laid into the books rather than written on the pages. He was unable to follow any gist of these older records, which consisted of lists, in some code, or maps with incomprehensibly abbreviated street names; but at length he found one volume that seemed to be entirely devoted to the occurrences of one night, that of February the fourth, 1684. The pieces of paper laid in it were generally hastily scrawled and in plain English, as if there hadn’t been time to use a cipher.
The writers of them did, though, seem to take it for granted that any reader would be familiar with the situation, and interested only in the details.
“… Then we followed him and his hellish retinue back a-crosse the ice from the Pork-Chopp Lane stayres to the Southwark side,” Doyle read on one slip, “our party dextrously in a Boat with wheeles, piloted by B. and our unnam’d Informant, and although we took care to avoid any clear conflict while on the water, onely endeav’ring to drive them onto the land… the Connexion of course being no good upon the frozen water… there ensu’d Troubles.” Another fragment read, “… destroied entirely, and their leader kill’d by a pistol-ball in the face… ” Toward the front of the book there was an entry actually written on a page: “As wee were about to set about dynynge upon sawfages and a rare chine of beef, in hee burst, and sadlie call’d us away from what was to bee one of the fine dinners.”
So what the hell happened, gang? Doyle thought. The “hellish retinue” sounds ominous… and what do you mean by “the Connexion”? He flipped hopelessly to the back of the book, and his eye was caught by a very short note written clearly on the endpaper.
He read it, and for the first time during all his adventures and mishaps he actually doubted his sanity.
The note read: “IHAY, ENDANBRAY. ANCAY OUYAY IGITDAY?”—and it was in his own handwriting, though the ink was as faded with age as every other notation in the book.
Suddenly dizzy, he sat down on a stack of books, which exploded to dust under his weight, spilling him backward against another pile, which toppled down upon him, burying him in damp, disintegrating parchment and showers of panicked spiders and silverfish.
The appalled Moss actually fled when the incoherently shouting giant, now garlanded with bugs and rotting paper, rose from the ruin like a Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse embodying Decay.
The man who at this point didn’t know whether he was Doyle or Ashbless or some long-dead member of the Antaeus Brotherhood got his feet under him and, still shouting, and slapping bugs out of his beard, ran out of the archive closet and through the sitting room into the hall. A cuckoo clock hung on the wall, and impelled by an impulse he didn’t pause to question he seized one of the dangling pendulum chains, yanked the brass pinecone-shaped weight off the end of it, and then drew the end of the chain up through the clock’s works and out free. He stumbled away down the stairs, clutching the length of chain and leaving the clock stopped forever behind him.
* * *
The heat of the burning platform was intense, and when Doctor Romany turned and took several steps away, the night air was frigid on his sweaty face. He clenched his fist and opened it, grimacing at the stickiness of the blood that had run down his arm during the repeated lancetings. He sighed deeply and wished he could sit down on the grass. At that moment it seemed to him that the freedom to just sit down on the ground must be the dearest of the countless things he’d had to forfeit in order to pursue sorcery.
Wearily, still facing out beyond the wheel of red firelight into the darkness that was connected to him by his long shadow, he took the stained lancet and the sticky bowl out of his pocket for one more try.
