He happened to be glancing up when a bizarre figure swooped diagonally across the narrow strip of sky visible between the overhanging rooftops—it was silhouetted for an instant against the nearly full moon—and he leaped backward out of the street, huddling against the stones of the nearest wall, though he knew he must be invisible down among the shadows, for the impossibly high-bounding figure had been Doctor Romany, unmistakable even for a moment and at a distance with his bald head, flapping robe and the bottom sole of each shoe flying two feet behind him on the fully extended springs.
* * *
As his upward momentum disappeared and he felt gravity’s first faint cobweb net begin to coax him back down, and as the nearer rooftops began to rise again, blotting out the frosted splendor of the tall houses along the length of London Bridge and the motionless white river that lay under it. Doctor Romany realized that his leaps were not as high now as they had been several minutes ago, and his envelope of agitated air was losing its integrity and letting the intense chill in at him. This was not really an increase in his powers, but just his usual magical strength extending farther in the more archaic, and therefore more conducive to sorcery, environment—and already the effect was beginning to wear off. This is like, he thought as he flexed his legs against an outcropping gable and did a slow somersault down toward the cobblestones, a man finding his customary sword light after practicing for hours with a very heavy one: the sword is actually as heavy as ever, and the delusion of new strength soon disappears. This apparent increase in my powers probably won’t last the night… and the gate at that inn we disrupted will close at about dawn.
Therefore, he thought as he arrested his slow fall by draping an arm around the shoulder of an inn sign shaped like a dancing blackamoor, I shall have to get word to Fikee and the Master as soon as possible, tell them who I am and why I’m here.
* * *
One of the fine dinners this will be, thought Ezra Longwell, who always relished the excellent food the Brotherhood provided for its members. He refilled his glass of port from the bottle near the hearth—in this grim winter even champagnes had to sit for half an hour by the fire before they were served, and clarets and fortified wines needed a full hour and a half. As he sipped the still chilly wine he crossed to the little Tudor window, which the kitchen heat had kept unfrosted. He wiped the steam off it with his sleeve and peered out.
West of the bridge, lights twinkled among the clustered booths and tents of the frost fair that stretched across the iced-over river from the Temple Stairs to the Surrey shore. Skaters whirling lanterns raced merrily across the ice like rockets or shooting stars, but Longwell was glad to be indoors and looking forward to a hot meal.
He stepped away from the window and with one last affectionate look at the steaming pots—”Deal gently with those admirable sawfages!” he told the stout kitchen mistress—he walked out through the hall to the dining room, the fine chain on his ankle rattling faintly on the boards of the floor.
Owen Burghard looked up and smiled as Longwell entered the room. “And how is the ‘sixty-eight bearing up, Ezra?”
Longwell reddened as he crossed to his customary chair, aware of the amused glances he was getting from the other members. “Not too badly,” he said gruffly as the chair creaked under his weight, “though too damn cold.”
“The better to temper your sanguine humors, Ezra,” said Burghard, returning his attention to the chart on the table. He tapped the right-hand edge with the stem of his clay pipe and said, in his not quite pedantic manner, “So you see, gentlemen, that these periods of increased activity on the part of Fikee’s band of gypsies—”
He was interrupted by a heavy pounding on the door.
In an instant all of them were on their feet, hands on sword hilts and pistol butts, and each one of them had automatically flicked the chain trailing from his right boot before standing up, as though the free play of the chain was as vital as a weapon.
Burghard crossed to the door, drew the bolt and stepped back. “It’s not locked,” he said.
The door opened, and all eyebrows went up as what would appear to be a giant from Norse mythology lurched into the room. He was shockingly tall, more so even than the King, who stood a full two yards, and his peculiarly cut and unseasonably thin coat did nothing to conceal his broad shoulders and muscular arms. His ice-crusted beard made him look ancient. “If you’ve got a fire,” this frost apparition croaked in a barbarous accent, “and any kind of hot drink…” He swayed, and Longwell feared that the books would be shaken from their shelves if this monster were to topple over.
Then Burghard had gasped, pointing at the intruder’s right boot—from which an ice-clogged length of chain trailed across the floor—and rushed to support him. “Beasley!” he snapped. “Help me with him. Ezra, coffee and brandy, haste!” Burghard and Beasley helped the faltering, half-frozen man across the floor to the bench in front of the dining room fire.
When Longwell brought a big mug of fortified coffee, the giant just inhaled the pungent steam for a while before taking a sip. “Ah,” he breathed at last, putting the coffee down beside him and spreading his hands before the blaze. “I thought I was going to die out there. Are your winters always this bad?”
Burghard frowned and glanced at the others. “Who are you, sir, and how did you come here?”
“I heard you used to—that you meet in a house on the south end of the bridge. At the first place I knocked they wouldn’t let me in, but they gave me directions to get here. As to who I am, you can call me—well hell, I can’t think of a name that would do. But I came here,” and a smile split the haggard face, “because I knew I would. I think you’re the hounds I need to help me catch my fox. There’s a sorcerer called Doctor Romany—”
“Do you mean Doctor Romanelli?” asked Burghard. “We know of him.”
“You do? This far upstream? Good God. Well, Romanelli has a twin, called Romany, who has jumped—I think I may say by sorcerous means?—to your London. He must be caught and induced to return to… where he belongs. And with any luck he can be made to take me back with him.”
“A twin? A ka I’ll wager you mean,” said Longwell, longing up a coal from the grate and setting it carefully into the newly packed bowl of his pipe. “Would you like a pipe?”
“Lord, yes,” said Doyle, accepting from him a fragile white clay pipe and a bag of tobacco. “What do you mean, a ka?”
Burghard squinted at Doyle. “You’re a damn puzzling mix of knowledge and ignorance, sir, and sometime I would relish hearing your own story. For example, you are wearing a connection chain but don’t seem to know much about us, and you know of Doctor Romanelli but don’t know what a ka is or how it happens that this winter is so savage.” He smiled, though a calculating glint remained in his deceptively mild-looking eyes. He ran his fingers through his short-cropped, thinning hair. “In any case, a ka is a duplicate of a human, grown, in a vat full of a special solution, from as little as a few drops of the original person’s blood. If the procedure be done rightly, the duplicate will not only resemble the original in every particular, but will have, too, all the knowledge that the original had.”
Doyle had stuffed his pipe with the dry tobacco and now lit it the same way Longwell had. “Yes, I suppose Romany might be such a thing,” he said, puffing smoke and letting the fire melt the ice out of his beard. His eyes widened. “Ah, and I believe I know another man who is probably a… ka, also. Poor devil. I’m sure he doesn’t know.”
“Do you know of Amenophis Fikee?” asked Burghard.
Doyle looked around at the company, wondering how much he dared disclose. “He is, will be or has been the chief of a band of gypsies.”
“Aye, he is. Why all the was’s and shall-be’s?”
“Never mind. Anyway, gentlemen, this ka of Doctor Romanelli is here in London tonight, and he’s armed with knowledge no one here should have, and he needs to be found and driven back to where he belongs.”
“And you
want to go back with him,” said Burghard.
“Right.”
“Why employ such a perilous, albeit quick, means of travel?” asked Burghard. “By ship and horse or donkey you could be anywhere in six months.”
Doyle sighed. “I gather that you function as a sort of… magical police force,” he began.
Burghard smiled and winced at the same time. “Not precisely, sir. What we’re paid by certain wealthy and savvy lords to do is prevent sorcerous treason. We employ not magic but the negation of magic.”
“I see.” Doyle laid down his pipe on the hearth. “If I tell you the story,” he said carefully, “and you agree that this Romany creature is a—let’s say direly powerful—menace to London and England and the world, will you help me catch him and then not hinder my return—if it’s even possible—to where I belong?”
“You have my word,” said Burghard quietly.
Doyle stared at the man for several seconds while the fire popped and crackled in the silence. “Very well,” he rumbled at last. “I’ll make it quick, for we must act soon, and I believe I know where he’ll be for the next hour or so. He and I jumped here by some magical process or other, but not from another place, such as Turkey. We jumped from… another time. The last morning I saw was that of September the twenty-sixth, in the year 1810.”
Longwell burst into a gale of laughter which ceased when Burghard raised his hand.
“Go on,” he said.
“Well, it seems that something has—” He paused, for he’d noticed a leather-bound book on the table, and though now it was new, and the 1684 stamped in gold on the spine gleamed brightly, he recognized it and stood up and crossed to it. A pen lay beside an inkwell ready to hand, and, grinning, he dipped the pen in the ink, flipped to the last page and scrawled across it, “IHAY, ENDANBRAY. ANCAY OUYAY IGITDAY?”
“What did you write?” asked Burghard.
Doyle dismissed the question with an impatient wave. “Gentlemen, something has broken holes in the structure of time… “
* * *
Only fifteen minutes later a band of a dozen men, bundled up against the extreme cold, filed out of the old building’s street door and hurried away south down the narrow bridge street toward the Surrey shore. There was room between the ancient houses to walk two abreast, but they moved in single file. Doyle was the second man in line, right behind the cloaked figure of Burghard, whose stride Doyle was able to match easily, even with the unaccustomed angular bulk of a sheathed sword bumping his right thigh. The thin streak of yellow light thrown by Burghard’s dark lantern was the only illumination, for the darkness was absolute in the dark defile of the street, though several storeys overhead the moonlight frosted the ragged roofs and the web of stout crossbeams meant to keep the unsteady old buildings from falling against each other. The bridge was silent except for the occasional rattle of an ankle chain against a cobblestone, and from away to his right Doyle could faintly hear music and shouted laughter.
“Here,” whispered Burghard, stepping into an alley and turning his light on a wooden framework that Doyle realized was a stairway leading down. “No sense announcing our coming by marching through the south gate.”
Doyle followed him down the dark stair’s, and after a long winding descent through a well cut into the stonework of the bridge they emerged into open air again below the underside of the vast span, and Doyle noticed for the first time that the river, visible beyond the lumber of the stairs and between the arches of the bridge, was a white, unmoving expanse of moon-lit ice.
A party could be seen moving across the ice toward the north shore, and after glancing at them once casually Doyle found his gaze drawn back to the distant figures. What was it about them that had caught his eye? The awkward, hunchback look of several of them? The prancing, bounding gait of the one in front?
Doyle closed his big, gloved hand on Burghard’s shoulder. “Your telescope,” he growled quietly as Longwell collided with him from behind, not jarring him at all.
“Certes.” Burghard fumbled under his coat and passed a collapsible telescope up to Doyle.
Doyle click-click-clicked the thing out to its full extent and trained it on the distant group. He was unable to focus, but he could see clearly enough to be sure the lightfooted leader was Doctor Romany; the other five—no, six—figures seemed to be misshapen men dressed in furs.
“That’s our man,” Doyle said quietly, handing the telescope back to Burghard.
“Ah. And so long as he be on the ice we daren’t confront him.”
“Why is that?” Doyle asked.
“The connection, man, the chains are no good on water,” hissed Burghard impatiently.
“Aye,” muttered Longwell from the darkness behind and above Doyle, “were we to confront him upon the ice, he’d set all the devils of hell on us in an instant, and our souls’d not be moored against the onslaught.”
A gust of Arctic wind battered the old stairway, making it sway like the bridge of a beleaguered ship.
“Still, we can follow ‘em to the north shore, can’t we,” mused Burghard, “and call ‘em halt yonder. Aye, come along.”
They resumed their downward course, and after a few more minutes of cramped shuffling arrived at a split, buckled and snow-dusted dock, and stepped off it onto the ice.
“They’re bearing more west now, after a fair northward stint,” said Burghard quietly, his eyes on the seven moving figures way out on the ice field. “We’ll come out from under the bridge on the west side and then curve north, and meet them ashore at the culmination of the circumbendibus.”
When they walked out through one of the high arches onto the ice, Doyle saw bobbing lights ahead, and heard again, louder, the laughter and music. There were tents and booths out on the river, and big swings with torches attached to the sides, and a large boat on axles and wheels tacking slowly back and forth across the face of the ice, with garish faces painted on its sail and wheels, and ribbons and banners streaming from the rigging. The silent procession of the Antaeus Brotherhood skirted the festivities on the east side, plodding north. When they were still a hundred yards from shore Doctor Romany’s party emerged from the blackness under the northernmost arch of the bridge and made for a set of steps below Thames Street. The tall, spry figure that was Doctor Romany turned around as they started up the stairs, and even as he’d begun to turn Burghard twisted himself to the side and turned a nimble cartwheel, finishing it up with a double-fisted push against Doyle’s chest; Doyle’s feet skated out from under him and he sat down heavily on the ice as Burghard laughed uproariously. Longwell began to do a grotesquely dainty ballet twirling, and for an instant Doyle was certain that Romany had fired a lunacy-inducing spell at them, and that at any moment he himself would begin barking like a dog or eating his hat.
Romany turned back toward the north and he and his surprisingly agile retinue bounded up the stairs. Then a ragged cloud sailed across the face of the moon, dimming the scene like a scrim. Burghard and Longwell, both sober-faced now, helped Doyle to his feet. “My apologies,” said Burghard. “‘Twas essential they think us but drunken roisterers. Quick now, let’s get ‘em.”
The dozen men on the ice began running toward shore—Doyle quickly got the hang of the half-sliding step necessary to maintain balance—and in a couple of minutes they were at the base of the stairs, climbing over a sunken boat’s mast, which projected at an angle from the solid ice.
They followed a narrow lane up to Thames Street, then paused in that wider boulevard, looking left and right for their vanished quarry.
“There,” said Burghard tensely, pointing at a snowy stretch in the middle of the street. “They’ve gone straight across into that alley.”
The twelve men followed, though Doyle couldn’t see how Burghard had deduced Romany’s course; all he saw when he passed the patch of snow were the tracks of a couple of very large dogs.
They ran into the alley, and Doyle’s body reacted to a faint, fast scratching sound bef
ore his mind had even properly heard it—his left hand whirled his sword out of the sheath and snapped it into line just as one of the things leaped at him and impaled itself on the point. He was jolted back by the solid impact and he heard a deep-throated growling and the clatter of teeth against steel in the instant before his left foot kicked the dying monster off his blade.
“Ware monsters!” he heard Burghard yell in front of him, and then the lantern clanged to the iced cobblestones and its sliding panel fell open, splashing the narrow alley with yellow light.
The scene Doyle found himself confronted with was like some lunatic painting Goya never quite worked himself up to: Burghard was rolling on the ground in a savage wrestling match with some inhumanly muscular thing that seemed to be both man and wolf, and several more of the creatures crouched ready beyond the desperately struggling pair; their shoulders were hunched, as though walking on their hind legs was a novelty, and their snouts extended out dog-like from their receding foreheads, and their wide mouths bristled with teeth that looked to Doyle like ivory cutlass blades … But intelligence glittered in their tiny eyes, and they stepped back warily as Doyle, without taking his eyes off them, drove his sword through the torso of the hairy creature struggling with Burghard at his feet.
“Sorls, Rowary!” barked one of the things over its shoulder as Burghard kicked his slain assailant aside and stood up, cuffing blood away from his eyes and drawing his sword with his right hand; his blood-stained dagger was already gripped in his left fist. The two contorted, thick-pelted corpses had quit shaking and now sprawled motionless between the two groups.