by Tim Powers
Fikee and Romanelli stared at the two stubs of straw protruding from beneath a scarf, then at each other.
“What is the spell?” queried Fikee.
“You know our gods are gone. They reside now in the Tuaut, the underworld, the gates of which have been held shut for eighteen centuries by some pressure I do not understand but which I am sure is linked with Christianity. Anubis is the god of that world and the gates, but has no longer any form in which to appear here.” His couch shifted a little, and the Master closed his eyes for a moment in pain. “There is a spell,” he rasped finally, “in the Book of Thoth, which is an invocation to Anubis to take possession of the sorcerer. This will allow the god to take physical form—yours. And as you are speaking that spell you will simultaneously be writing another, a magic I myself have composed that is calculated to open new gates between the two worlds—gates that shall pierce not only the wall of death but also the wall of time, for if it succeeds they will open out from the Tuaut of forty-three centuries ago, when the gods—and I—were in our prime.”
There was a silence long enough for the Master’s couch to move another painful couple of inches. At last Fikee spoke. “And what will happen then?”
“Then,” said the Master in a whisper that echoed round the spherical chamber, “the gods of Egypt will burst out in modern England. The living Osiris and the Ra of the morning sky will dash the Christian churches to rubble, Horus and Khonsu will disperse all current wars by their own transcendent force, and the monsters Set and Sebek will devour all who resist! Egypt will be restored to supremacy and the world will be made clean and new again.”
And what role could you, or we, thought Romanelli bitterly, play in a clean new world?
“Is,” Fikee said hesitantly, “is it still possible, you’re certain? After all, the world already was young that way once, and an old man can’t be made into a boy again any more than wine can go back to grape juice.” The Master was getting very angry, but he pressed on desperately, “Would it be completely out of the question to… adapt to the new ways and new gods? What if we’re clinging to a sinking ship?”
The Master had gone into a fit of rage, drooling and gabbling helplessly, and so one of the wax ushabti statues twitched and began working its jaws. “Adapt?” shouted the Master’s voice out of the wax throat. “You want to get baptized? Do you know what a Christian baptism would do to you? Negate you—unmake you—salt on a snail, moth in a fire!” The furious speaking was causing the wax lips to crack. “A sinking ship? You stinking, fearful body-vermin of a diseased whore! What if it should sink, is sinking, has sunk! We’ll ride it down. I’d rather be at the helm of this sunken ship than in the… cattle pen!… of that new one! Shall I—ack… ack… kha—” The tongue and lips of the wax statue broke off and were spat out by the still driving breath.
For several moments Master and ushabti gibbered together, then the Master regained control of himself and the statue fell silent. “Shall I,” asked the Master, “release you, Amenophis?”
Romanelli remembered, with unwelcome clarity, once seeing another of the Master’s very old servants suddenly made independent of the Master’s magical bonds; the man had, within the space of a few minutes, withered and broken down and dried and split apart and finally shaken himself to dust; but worse than the fact of death and dissolution was his memory that the man had retained consciousness through the entire process… And it had seemed to be an agony worse than burning.
The silence in the chamber lengthened, unbroken except for the faint slapping sound of the ushabti’s tongue on the floor tiles. “No,” said Fikee at last. “No.”
“Then you are one of my crew, and will obey.” The Master waved one of his crippled, driftwood arms. “Choose a straw.”
Fikee looked at Romanelli, who just bowed and waved after you toward the table. Fikee stepped over to it and drew out one of the straws. It was, of course, the short one.
The Master sent them to the ruins of Memphis to copy from a hidden stone the, hieroglyphic characters that were his real name, and here too a shock awaited them, for they had seen the Master’s name stone once before, many centuries ago, and the characters carved on it were two symbols like a fire in a dish followed by an owl and the looped cross: Tchatcha-em-Ankh, it spelled, Strengths in Life; but now different characters were incised in the ancient stone—now there were three umbrella shapes, a small bird, an owl, a foot, the bird again and a fish over a slug. Khaibitu-em-Betu-Tuf, he read, and mentally translated it: Shadows of Abomination.
Despite the baking desert heat the pit of his stomach went cold, but he remembered a thing that had whimpered and rolled about as it fell apart into dust, and so he only pursed his lips as he obediently copied down the name.
Upon their return to Cairo the Master delayed Romanelli’s return to Turkey long enough to fashion a duplicate of him out of the magical fluid paut. The animated duplicate, or ka, was ostensibly made to travel to England with Fikee and assist him in performing the Anubis summoning, but all three knew that its main task would be to serve as a guard over Fikee and prevent any dereliction of duty. Since the odd pair would be living with Fikee’s tribe of gypsies until the arrival of the Book and the vial of their Master’s blood, Fikee dubbed the ka Doctor Romany, after the word the gypsies used for their language and culture.
Another howl broke from the tent downstream, this one sounding more like pieces of metal being violined against each other than an issue from any organic throat. The sound rose in volume and pitch, drawing the air as taut as a bowstring, and for a moment, during which Romany numbly noted that the river was holding still like a pane of rippled glass, the ringing, grating peak note held, filling the dark countryside. Then something seemed to break, as if a vast bubble over them had popped, silently but palpably. The ghastly howl broke too, and as the shattered bits of sound tumbled away in a mad, despairing sobbing, Romany could feel the air spring back to its usual pressure; and as though the molecules of the black fabric had all abruptly relaxed even their usual clench, the tent burst into bright yellow flame.
Romany sprinted down the bank, picking his footing with ease in the glare of the fire, and with scorching fingers flicked the burning entry curtain aside, and bounded into the smoky interior. Fikee was a huddled, sobbing bulk in the corner. Romany slammed the Book of Thoth shut and put it in the gold box, tucked that under his arm and stumbled outside again.
Just as he got away from the intense heat, he heard a barking, whimpering sound behind him, and turned. Fikee had crawled out of the tent and was rolling on the ground, presumably to put out his smoldering clothes.
“Amenophis!” Romany called over the roaring of the fire.
Fikee stood up and turned on Romany a glance devoid of recognition, then threw his head back and howled like a jackal at the moon.
Instantly Romany reached into his coat with both hands and drew out two flintlock pistols. He aimed one and fired it, and Fikee folded up in midair and sat down hard several feet behind where he’d been standing; but a moment later he had rolled back up on his hands and knees and was scuttling away into the darkness, now on two legs, now on all fours.
Romany aimed the other pistol as well as he could and fired again, but the loping shape didn’t seem to falter and soon he lost sight of it. “Damn,” he whispered. “Die out there, Amenophis. You do owe us that.”
He looked up at the sky—there was no sign of any gods breaking through; he stared toward the west long enough to satisfy himself that the sun wasn’t going to reappear. He shook his head in profound weariness.
Like most modern magics, he thought bitterly, while it probably did something, it didn’t accomplish what it was supposed to.
Finally he tucked the pistols away, picked up the Book and bobbed slowly back to the gypsy camp. Even the dogs had hidden, and Romany met no one as he made his way to Fikee’s tent. Once inside, he put down the gold box, lit a lamp, and then far into the night, with pendulum, level, a telescope and a tuning f
ork and reams of complicated calculations geometrical and alchemical, worked at determining to what extent, if any, the spell had succeeded.
CHAPTER 1
“In this flowing stream, then, on which there is no abiding, what is there of the things which hurry by on which a man would set a high price? It would be just as if a man should fall in love with one of the sparrows which fly by, but it has already passed out of sight.”
—Marcus Aurelius
When the driver swung the BMW in to the curb, braked to a quick but smooth stop and clicked off the headlights, Brendan Doyle hunched forward on the back seat and stared at the rubbled, fenced-in lot they’d arrived at. It was glaringly lit by electric lights on poles, and he could hear heavy machinery at work close by.
“Why are we stopping here?” he asked, a little hopelessly. The driver hopped nimbly out of the car and opened Doyle’s door. The night air was cold. “This is where Mr. Darrow is,” the man explained. “Here, I’ll carry that,” he added, taking Doyle’s suitcase.
Doyle hadn’t spoken during the ten-minute ride from Heathrow airport, but now nervousness overcame his reluctance to admit how little he knew about his situation. “I, uh, gathered from the two men who originally approached me in Fullerton—California, that is—that this job has something to do with Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” he said diffidently as the two of them plodded toward the gate in the chain link fence. “Do you know… what it is, exactly?”
“Mr. Darrow will explain it fully, I’m sure,” said the driver, who seemed much more relaxed now that his own part in the relay race was almost over. “Something to do with a lecture, I believe.”
Doyle stopped. “A lecture? He rushed me six thousand miles overnight, to London”—and offered me twenty thousand dollars, he added mentally—”just to give a lecture?”
“I really don’t know, Mr. Doyle. As I say, he will explain—”
“Do you know if it has anything to do with the position he recently hired Steerforth Benner for?” pressed Doyle.
“I don’t know of Mr. Benner,” said the driver cheerfully. “Do come along now, sir, this is all scheduled rather tightly, you know.” Doyle sighed and resumed walking, and he wasn’t reassured when he noticed the coils of barbed wire strung along the top of the fence. Looking more closely, he saw little scraps of scribbled-on paper, and sprigs of what might have been mistletoe, tied on at intervals along the wire strands. It was beginning to seem likely that the rumors he’d read about Darrow Interdisciplinary Research Enterprises—DIRE—were true. “I probably should have mentioned it before,” he called, only half joking, to the driver, “but I can’t work a Ouija board.” The man put the suitcase down on the dirt and pressed a button on the gatepost. “I don’t think that will be necessary, sir, “he said.
On the other side of the fence a uniformed guard was hurrying toward them. Well, you’re in it now, Doyle told himself. At least you get to keep the five thousand dollar retainer check even if you decline his offer… whatever it turns out to be.
Doyle had been grateful, an hour earlier, when the stewardess woke him to tell him to fasten his seat belt, for he’d been dreaming about Rebecca’s death again. Always in the first part of the dream he was a stranger with foreknowledge, trying desperately to find Brendan and Rebecca Doyle before they got on the bike, or at least before Doyle could gun the old Honda up the curling onramp from Beach Boulevard onto the Santa Ana Freeway—and always he was unsuccessful, screeching his car around the last corner only in time, tormentingly, to see the old bike speed up, lean into the curve and disappear around the landscaped bend. Generally he was able to force himself awake at that point, but he’d had several scotches earlier, and this time he might not have been.
He sat up and blinked around at the spacious cabin and the people in the other seats. The lights were on, and only speckled blackness showed beyond the little window—it was night again, though he remembered seeing dawn over icy plains only a few hours ago. Jet air travel was disorienting enough, it seemed to Doyle, without doing it in over the pole jumps that left you unable to guess what day it was. The last time he’d been to England there had been a stopover in New York, but of course DIRE was in too much of a hurry for that.
He stretched as well as he could in his seat, and a book and some papers slid off the fold-down tray in front of him and thump-fluttered to the floor. A lady across the aisle jumped, and he smiled in embarrassed apology as he leaned over to pick the stuff up. Sorting it out and noting the many blanks and question marks he’d scrawled, he wondered bleakly if even in England—for he was certainly going to take advantage of this free trip to try and pursue his own researches—he would be able to dig up some data on the poet whose definitive biography he’d been trying to write for two years. Coleridge was easy, he thought as he tucked the papers back into the briefcase between his feet; William Ashbless is a goddamn cipher.
The book that had fallen was Bailey’s Life of William Ashbless. It had landed open and several of the age-browned pages were broken. He laid them back in carefully, closed the book gently and brushed dust off his fingers, then stared at the unhelpful volume.
It would be an understatement, he reflected disconsolately, to say that Ashbless’ life was scantily documented. William Hazlitt had written a brief evaluation of his work in 1825, and incidentally provided a few details about the man, and Ashbless’ close friend James Bailey had written the cautious biography that was, for lack of anything else, considered the standard account. Doyle had managed to supplement the narrative with a few illuminating letters and journals and police reports, but the poet’s recorded life was still flawed by many gaps.
Which town in Virginia was it, for example, that Ashbless lived in from his birth until 1810? Ashbless at one time claimed Richmond and at another Norfolk, but no records of him had so far turned up at either place. Doyle was going on the assumption that the troublesome poet had changed his name when he arrived in London, and he had unearthed the names of several Virginians who disappeared in the summer of 1810 at about the age of twenty-five. Ashbless’ years in London were fairly easy to trace—though the Bailey biography, being Ashbless’ own version, was of dubious value—and his brief trip to Cairo in 1811, while inexplicable, was at least a matter of record.
What’s missing, Doyle thought, is all the details—and some of the undetailed areas tormented Doyle’s curiosity. There was, for example, his possible connection with what Sheridan had lastingly dubbed the Dancing Ape Madness: the surprising number—by sober accounts six, by extravagant three hundred—of fur-covered creatures that appeared one at a time in and around London during the decade between 1800 and 1810; evidently human beings, they outdid even the shock of their sudden, agonizedly capering appearances by falling quickly to the ground and dying in violent convulsions. Madame de Stael noted that Ashbless once, when drunk, told her that he knew more about the peculiar plague than he’d ever dare say, and it was fairly certain that he had killed one of the creatures in a coffee house near Threadneedle Street a week after his arrival in London… But there, to Doyle’s chagrin, the trail ended. Ashbless apparently never got drunk enough to tell de Stael the story—for she’d certainly have passed it on if he had—and of course the Bailey biography didn’t refer to the matter at all.
And what, precisely, were the circumstances of his death? God knows, Doyle thought, the man made many enemies during his lifetime, but which one was it that caught up with him on, probably, the twelfth of April in 1846? His body was found in the marshes in May, decomposed but verifiably his, also verifiably killed by a sword thrust through the belly.
Hell, thought Doyle, dejectedly staring at the book in his lap, more is known about the life of Shakespeare. And Ashbless was a contemporary of such appallingly thoroughly chronicled people as Lord Byron! Granted, the man was a minor poet, whose scanty and difficult work would, if not for some derogatory remarks made about it by Hazlitt and Wordsworth, be absolutely forgotten instead of just reprinted rarely in notabl
y complete anthologies—still, the man’s life ought to have left more marks.
Across the aisle, through the windows on that side of the plane, he saw the twinkling lights of London rise as the huge plane banked, and he decided the stewardess wouldn’t bring him another drink so near disembarking time. He glanced around, then surreptitiously drew his flask out of his inside jacket pocket, unscrewed the top and poured an inch of Laphroaig into the plastic cup his last drink had arrived in. He put the flask away and relaxed, wishing he could also clip and light one of the Upmann cigars waiting in the opposite pocket.
He took a sip of the warm scotch and smiled—Laphroaig was still damn good, if not quite the wonder it had been when it was being bottled at 91.4 proof. In fact, he thought, these new Upmann cigars from the Dominican Republic aren’t nearly what they were when they were being rolled in the Canary Islands.
And none of the young ladies I’ve gone with since Rebecca have been interesting at all.
He flipped open the old book and stared at the frontispiece engraving, a portrait done from the Thorwaldsen bust: the sunken-eyed, startlingly bearded poet stared back at him from the picture, his massive height and breadth of shoulder clearly implied by the sculptor’s skill. And how was it in your day, William? Doyle thought. Were the cigars and scotch and women any better?
For a moment Doyle imagined that Ashbless’ faint sardonic grin was directed at him… Then, in a moment of vertigo so strong that he nearly dropped his cup and grabbed the arms of the seat, it seemed that Ashbless really was looking at him, through a picture and across a hundred and fifty years, in scornful amusement.