The Anubis Gates (56 page)

Guards,
she thought—
Carrington’s men, probably, making sure nothing gets out of this ant’s nest.

She decided to go back and hide somewhere until the guards returned to the surface, and then swim down the waterway to the Thames, and she’d just turned and started back when the steady shouting doubled in volume and a dim, reflected glow sprang up in the corridor. It quickly waxed brighter, as if men with torches were just about to appear around a corner ahead. Jacky looked around in panic, hoping to see a doorway she might duck into, but there was none. She flattened herself against a wall.

The yelling grew louder still, and she could hear a fast wooden knocking, and then from out of one of the farther tunnels burst Horrabin, completely ablaze and running on his stilts, flanked and followed by what seemed to be a horde of bounding, chittering rats; a moment later his pursuers skidded around the same corner and came bounding after him, flinging rocks and baying like hounds.

Jacky looked back at the stairs, and dimly saw two men crouching just outside the archway, aiming some sort of guns at the approaching rout. No help in that direction, she thought. In desperation she flung herself down against the wall with one arm over her face, in the faint hope of being mistaken for a corpse by all parties.

The two guns went off with one prolonged roar and a flash that brightened the tunnel for a full second, and as stone chips flew from the walls and ceiling, the burning clown rocked to a stop—but caught his balance, evidently unhurt by the blasts; their impact did, though, stop him long enough for his bestial pursuers to catch up with him.

A number of the Spoonsize Boys and their foot-tall counter-parts had been blown away by the sprays of shot, but the survivors turned and flung themselves into the faces of the ravening Mistakes, who had knocked the flaming, screaming clown over against the wall and were tearing at his legs with mud-stained claws. The miniature men leaped right in past the talons of the Mistakes and drove their little swords into eyes and throats and ears, totally careless of their own survival; but the Mistakes were fighting to the death and were willing to risk the blades of the Spoonsize Boys, and a scorching, in order to get close enough to Horrabin to take a bite out of any reachable part of him with muddied teeth, or to pull one of the stilts farther out from under him.

The lunatic spectacle was taking place only a few yards in front of Jacky, and she couldn’t help lifting her head a little to watch. The blackened, whimpering clown wasn’t burning as brightly as before, but there was still enough flame to see some individual struggles: Jacky saw one of the Mistakes, a poodle-sized thing with tentacles all over it and both eyes ruined by the homunculi’s swords, latch a toothy mouth onto Horrabin’s clutching right hand, and, with a horrible snapping, bite most of it off; and a couple of things like unshelled snails, dying under the fierce attentions of a dozen of the little men, had got in between the wall and the left stilt, and managed with their last, expiring efforts to push it out past the supporting point, so that the clown came crashing down onto them; most of the light went out when Horrabin hit the floor, so that all Jacky could see was a heaving, tortured mass of dying shapes, and all she could hear was an ever-weaker chorus of gasps, crunchings, whimpers and long, rattling exhalations. A nasty smell like burning garbage choked the tunnel.

Jacky got up and ran past the mass of death, deeper into the maze, and after twenty paces in the darkness she lost her footing and tumbled, and when she slid to a dazed stop a hand closed firmly on her wrist.

She writhed around, wondering if she had the strength left to strangle something, but she halted when she heard her unseen companion’s voice. “I say, excuse me. Sir Thought or Whimsy or Fugitive Virtue, but could you possibly direct me to the waking levels of my mind?”

Ashbless had been dimly aware for some time that he was lying in the bottom of a boat that was being weakly rowed by Doctor Romanelli, but he came fully awake one more time when he noticed that the surface he was lying on had changed. The last time he’d been aware of it, it had been hard, angular wood, but now it seemed to be soft leather stretched loosely over some kind of flexible ribs. He opened his eye and was mildly surprised to find that he could see, though there was no light. The boat was passing through a vast ruinous hall, along the walls of which stood upright sarcophagi that shone with an intense blackness.

He heard Romanelli gasp, and looked in his direction. The gaunt sorcerer too shone in the anti-light; he was staring in awe at something over Ashbless’ shoulder. Ashbless dragged an elbow under himself and managed to turn his head, and saw several tall, dim figures standing at the stern, and a little shrine in the center of the boat, encircled by a snake with its tail in its mouth, and in the shrine stood a man-high disk that blazed so darkly with the radiant blackness that it hurt Ashbless’ eye, and he had to look away; though he thought he had seen dimly the pattern of a kephera beetle inscribed on the disk. When he could see again he noticed that Romanelli was smiling with relief, and that tears were slicking his eroded cheeks.

“The boat of Ra,” he was whispering, “the Sektet boat, in which the sun journeys through the twelve hours of the night, from sunset to dawn! I’m in it—and at dawn, when we emerge into the world again, I’ll sail in the Atet boat, the boat of the morning sky, and I’ll be restored!”

Too ruined to care, Ashbless slumped back down onto the leather—beneath which, he noticed, he could hear a pulse beat. The wailing that he’d seemed to be hearing all night was louder now, and had a supplicating tone. He rolled his head and looked out over the low gunwale to the bank of the river and saw vague forms stretching out their arms toward the boat as it passed; and when it had passed them he could hear their despairing weeping. There were poles standing in the bank at intervals—marking the hours, he thought—with snakes’ heads stuck on the top of them, and as the boat passed each one it became, just for an instant, a bowed human head.

Ashbless sat up, and noticed for the first time that the boat was a huge snake, broadened in the middle like an exaggerated cobra’s hood, and that at both stern and bow it tapered up in a long neck to a living serpent’s head.

This is the poem,
he thought—
the twelve hours of the night. This is what I was writing about. I’m in the boat that only dead men see.

He sensed that the disk was alive—no, very dead, but aware—but that it was uninterested in the two stowaways. The tall figures in the stern, which seemed to be men with the heads of animals and birds, also ignored them. Ashbless slumped back again.

After a time the boat floated through a dim gate flanked by two sarcophagi as tall as telephone poles, and the shore figures on the other side were screaming and shifting from side to side along the shore and over their frightened cries he could hear a slow metallic slithering. “Apep!” the ghosts were shouting. “Apep!” And then he saw a shape of blackness rising, and realized it was the head of a serpent so vast that it dwarfed their freakish boat. Man-shaped forms dangled from its jaws, but it shook its ponderous head, sending them spinning away, and arched slowly forward over the river.

“The serpent Apep,” whispered Romanelli, “whose body lies in the deep realms of the keku samu where pure darkness becomes an impenetrable solid. It senses that there is a soul on this boat that… doesn’t qualify for emergence into the dawn.” Romanelli was smiling. “But I don’t need you any longer anyway.”

Unable even to prop himself up on his elbow anymore, Ashbless watched the absolutely black head blot out every other thing above him. The air became bitterly cold as the thing bent down closer, and when it opened its vast jaws he thought he could see negative stars shining in a remote distance, as if Apep’s mouth was the gateway to a universe of absolute cold and the absence of light.

Ashbless shut his eye and commended his soul into the care of any benign god there might still somewhere be.

A thin screaming drew his attention outward again, and he looked up for what he hoped would be the last time… and saw the disintegrating figure of Doctor Romanelli falling upward into the vast maw.

Just to be sure, Jacky stared into the dark west, where the broad Thames curled to the south past Whitehall before straightening out westward, and then she looked east again.

She smiled with relief. Yes, the sky was definitely paling. She could see the dark arches of Blackfriars Bridge against the tenuous pre-dawn glow.

She relaxed and sat back on the low stone wall, aware now that it was chilly out on the mud bank above the Adelphi Arches. She pulled her coat closer about her shoulders and began shivering.
Hopeless as this vigil is,
she thought,
I’ll nevertheless wait here until somewhat after dawn to see if Ashbless might drift out here—it’s just conceivable that he wasn’t dead when he fell past me in the deep cellar, and that he reached the subterranean river and was well along it before the dreadful … solidification began.

She shuddered and glanced for reassurance at the waxing eastern light, and then allowed herself to remember the ascent from the deep cellars.

She had taken Coleridge’s hand and cautiously begun to pick her way back up the lightless corridor when she noticed the silence. Not only had the distant wailing stopped, but the subtly complex resonances in the air, the echoes of the perpetual breeze through all the cubic miles of subterranean corridors and chambers below them, had ceased.

She’d pressed against the right-hand wall as they went past the place where she knew Horrabin’s corpse lay—and she nearly screamed when a startlingly deep voice spoke to them out of the darkness.

“This is not a place for people, my friends,” it said.

“Uh… right,” squeaked Jacky. “We’re leaving.” She heard a heaving and thudding—and several metallic clinkings—and when the voice spoke again, it was from over her head. “I’ll escort you,” it said heavily. “Even dying from the pinpricks of the clown’s little men, Big Biter is a protector few would care to cross.”

“You’ll… escort us?” asked Jacky incredulously.

“Yes.” The thing sighed ponderously. “I owe it to your companion, who freed my brothers and sisters and me and gave us the chance to revenge ourselves on our maker before we died.”

Jacky had noticed that the thing’s voice was not echoing, as though they stood in a room instead of a tunnel.

“Make haste,” Big Biter said, moving forward, “the darkness is hardening.” The peculiar trio made their way to the stairs and plodded up them. At the first landing Coleridge wanted to rest, but Big Biter told him there wasn’t time; the creature picked Coleridge up and they continued.

“Don’t hang behind,” their escort cautioned Jacky.

“I won’t,” Jacky assured it, for she realized that now there was no sound or echo from the corridor they’d vacated, or even from the flight of stairs they’d just ascended. What was it, the eyeless Sisters had said to her half a year ago?
The darkness is hardening, like thick mud, and we want to be away when it turns as solid as the stones… we mustn’t be caught forever in the stones that are hardened night!
Jacky made sure she matched Big Biter’s pace, and was glad he moved so quickly.

When they finally got to the top and stepped into the bright torchlight of the kitchen hallway in Rat’s Castle, a couple of Carrington’s men took a step toward them, then took two steps back when they saw the creature that was carrying Coleridge in its heavy arms. Jacky looked up at Big Biter and almost recoiled herself.

Their escort was an amphibious giant, with long black catfish tentacles around its face like a caricatured beard and hair, and eyes like glass paperweights, and a pig-like snout, but by far his most striking feature was his mouth: it was a twelve-inch slash across his face, which he could barely close because of the rows of huge teeth in it. He wore an ancient coat, the front of which was shredded and wet with red blood.

“These vermin won’t interfere with you,” Big Biter said quietly. “Come on.”

He set Coleridge down and walked with them to the front door. “Go now,” he said. “Quickly. I’ll watch until you’re out of sight, but I’ve got to get back down the stairs before the darkness hardens completely.”

“All right,” said Jacky, gratefully breathing the relatively fresh pre-dawn air of Buckeridge Street. “And thank you for—”

“I did it for your friend,” rumbled Big Biter. “Now go.”

Jacky nodded and hustled Coleridge outside and down the dark street.

They’d made it back to Hudson’s Hotel without mishap, and when they’d gotten into Coleridge’s room Jacky had flopped him onto the bed. The man was asleep before Jacky had gotten to the hall and gently closed the door behind her. She’d seen the laudanum bottle on the bedside table, and she believed she understood now why Carrington’s restraining measures had proven ineffective on the elderly poet. How could Carrington have known what a tremendous tolerance for opium Coleridge had developed?

Then she had walked down to the Thames, by the Adelphi Arches where the subterranean tributary emptied into the river, on the chance that Ashbless, or whatever remained of him, might emerge from the tunnel.

The sky was a bright steely blue in the east now, and a tattered string of clouds above the horizon had begun to smolder and glow. The sun would appear at any moment.

There was a turbulence in the water in the still deep shadows below the arches, and Jacky glanced down just in time to see a ghostly, semi-transparent boat surge out. As it emerged into the dawn grayness it became simultaneously incandescent and more transparent, and it receded away toward the eastern horizon at such a speed that Jacky was momentarily certain it was only a hallucination born of total exhaustion; but a split second later she became aware of two things: the first red sliver of the rising sun had appeared over the distant London skyline, and a man was splashing about in the water a dozen feet out from the bank, having apparently fallen through the ghost boat when it became insubstantial.