The Anubis Gates

The man on the couch groaned, then leaned over and peered at the “floor”; the couch now sat right over the equator line. “Moonrise,” he said wearily. He lay back again and stared across the sphere at the balcony. “I see Doctors Romanelli and Romany, the latter standing as a clear indictment of my ability to cast a decent ka. I would have thought you would last a century without deteriorating to this point. But who is our giant visitor?”

“His name, I gather, is Brendan Doyle,” said Romanelli.

“Good evening, Brendan Doyle,” said the man on the wall. “I … apologize for not being able to come over and shake hands, but having renounced this present earth, I gravitate instead toward … another place. It’s an uncomfortable position, and one that we hope to remedy before long. And,” he went on, “what has Mr. Doyle got to do with the present debacle?”

“He did it, yer Honor!” chittered the ka. “He snapped the Byron ka out of the obedience spell we had him under, and he made the yags go crazy, and then when I jumped back to 1684 he followed me and alerted the Antaeus Brotherhood to my presence there—” He’d let go of his shoes in order to gesture, and he floated upward feet first, bumped against the round brick cowl that extended out around the balcony and rolled over it and began floating up toward the top of the dome, “—and they somehow knew that a weapon fouled with dirt could injure me and they shot my face off with a mud-clogged gun—”

“Jutmoop sidskeen efty door?” sputtered the Master. Romanelli and Doyle, and the ka, who by now was crouching upside-down beside the lamp chain mooring on the ceiling, all stared at him.

The Master squeezed his eyes and mouth tightly shut, then opened them. “Jumped,” he said carefully, “to sixteen eighty-four?”

“I believe he did, sir,” Romanelli put in hastily. “They used the gates Fikee made—traveling from gate to gate, through time, you understand? This ka,” he waved his hand upward, “is obviously too decayed for only eight years of action, and what I’ve pieced together of his story is consistent.”

The Master nodded slowly. “There was something peculiar about the way our Monmouth scheme misfired in 1684.” The couch rolled another few inches upward, and though the Master’s teeth clenched with pain, one of the motionless figures in the pen below groaned echoingly. Startled, Doyle glanced down at them again, and was not reassured to see that they were wax statues. The Master’s eyes opened. “Time travel,” he whispered. “And where did Mr. Doyle come from?”

“Some other time,” said the ka. “He and a whole party of people appeared through one of the gates, and I managed to capture him, though his companions returned the way they’d come. I had a little time to question him, and—listen—he knows where Tutankhamen’s tomb is. He knows lots of things.”

The Master nodded and then, horribly, smiled. “It could be that, in this late and sterile age, we’ve blundered onto the most powerful tool we’ve ever had. Romanelli, draw some blood from our guest and construct a ka—a full maturation one that will know everything he does. We mustn’t take any chances with what he’s got in his head—he might kill himself or catch some fever. Do that right now, and then lock him up for the night. Interrogation will commence in the morning.”

Ten minutes were wasted in getting the Romany ka down from the ceiling—it could no more scramble down to the balcony than a hamster could scramble up out of a bathtub—but it was finally recovered with a rope, and Romanelli led Doyle back down the stairs.

On the ground floor they entered a room where, in the dim light of a single lamp, the doorkeeper could be seen carefully stirring a long vat of some fishy-smelling fluid.

“Where’s the cup of—” Romanelli began, but even as he’d spoken the doorkeeper had pointed at a table against the wall. “Ah.” Romanelli crossed to it and carefully lifted a copper cup. “Here,” he said, returning to Doyle. “Drink it and save us the trouble of tying you down and administering it through broken teeth.”

Doyle took the cup and sniffed the contents dubiously. The stuff had a sharp, chemical reek. Reminding himself that he wasn’t slated to die until 1846, he lifted the cup to his blistered lips and downed the drink in one big, gagging gulp.

“God,” he wheezed, handing the cup back and trying to blink the fumes out of his eyes.

“Now we’ll just impose upon you for a few drops of blood,” Romanelli went on, drawing a knife from under his robe.

“Just pop the cork on a vein, Zane,” agreed the remnant of Doctor Romany. The ka was once more holding the buckles of its weighted shoes and walking on its hands.

“Blood?” Doyle asked. “What for?”

“You heard the Master tell us to make a ka of you,” Romanelli answered. “Now I’m going to free your hands, but don’t do anything idiotic.”