The Anubis Gates

Doyle whirled and saw a gypsy with a bared knife standing and peering about at the entrance to a nearby tent. The man finally noticed the sorcerer rolling and flopping on the ground, and he turned quickly and re-entered the tent.

In two long, running strides Doyle covered the distance to the tent, and he tore the flap aside just in time to see the gypsy cock the knife back over the throat of Byron, who lay on a cot tightly bound and gagged. Doyle’s arm was kicked upward by the gun’s recoil before he even decided to shoot, and through the plume of smoke he saw the gypsy spin away to the rear of the tent with blood spattering from a hole in his temple.

His ears ringing with the bang of the shot, Doyle lunged forward, pried the knife out of the dead hand and, straightening up, sawed the blade up through the ropes around Byron’s ankles and wrists.

The young lord reached up and pulled the gag away from his mouth. “Ashbless, I owe you my life—”

“Here,” Doyle said, pressing the knife hilt into Byron’s hand. “Be careful, there’s wild things abroad tonight.” Doyle rushed out of the tent, hoping to seize Romany while he was still rolling helpless and unattended on the ground—but the sorcerer was gone.

Most of the tents were blazing now, and Doyle hesitated, trying to decide which direction of escape would be safest. Then his eyes were strained with trying to focus on what he was seeing, for unless he was somehow grossly misjudging the perspective, he’d just glimpsed two—and now a third!—completely burning men, each at least thirty feet tall, running and bounding energetically, even joyfully, across the grass between the tents and the road. Two more ran past a moment later, as fast, it seemed to Doyle, as comets.

It looks like we leave, and damn quick, by the north end of camp, Doyle thought, but as he turned that way he saw the fiery runners lap the north side, too. My God, he thought, whatever they are, they’re running in a circle around the camp!

He whirled to the south again, and in an instant two things were clear: there were now too many of them, racing far too fast, for anyone to hope to dart out of the circle between them; and the blazing wheel was growing perceptibly smaller with every second.

Romany called these things up, thought Doyle desperately, and if it turns out he can’t send ‘em back, it won’t be for lack of me twisting his arm—or his neck. He’s got to be in one of these tents.

Doyle sprinted toward the nearest one, his shadow fragmenting and whirling around hm.

CHAPTER 9

“… through thine arm

The sons of earth had conquer’d; now vouchsafe

To place us down beneath, where numbing cold

Locks up Cocytus.”

—Virgil addressing Antaeus in Dante’s Inferno

The requisite energy will present no problem, thought Doctor Romany as he hunched over the papers on his desk and tried not to hear the screams of the gypsies who hadn’t escaped, and the roaring of the now solid wall of fire spinning out of control around the camp; and by the degree of the angle at which I lay the glass rods I can decide how far I’ll jump. But how can I get back? I’ll need a vitalized talisman linked to this time… a piece of green schist inscribed with this time’s coordinates would be perfect… he glanced speculatively at a statue of Anubis, in use as a paperweight, carved from that stone.

Over the calamitous noise outside he heard a crashing in the next tent, and a voice shouting, “Where’s Romany, damn you? Are you hiding him in here?”

It must be that hairy giant who was somehow immune to my cold-cast, Romany thought. He’s after me. There’s no time to be carving stones. I’ll have to do it on paper and rely on some of my blood—some more of it—to vitalize it.

As he rapidly scrawled Old Kingdom hieroglyphics across a sheet of white paper, he wondered who the bearded man could be. And where was Brendan Doyle?