“Come on, Mike,” Duplessis says. “Time’s wasting. Go on in.”
“How long did you say can I stay?”
“Like I told you. Almost until sundown tomorrow.”
“That long? You sure?”
“You think it does me any good if you get stranded over there?” Duplessis says. “Trust me. I tell you you’ve got until sundown, you’ve got until sundown. Go on, now. Will you get going, for Christ’s sake?”
There’s no need for Mulreany to show his transit license. The police know all the licensed border-crossers. Only about two dozen people have the right combination of skills—the knowledge of the Empire’s language and customs, the knack of doing business in a medieval country, the willingness to take the risks involved in making the crossing. The risks are big, and crossers don’t always come back. The Empire’s official attitude toward the merchants who come over from Chicago is that they are sorcerers of some kind, and the penalty for sorcery is public beheading, so you have to keep a low profile as you do your business. Then, too, there’s the chance of catching some archaic disease that’s unknown and incurable in the modern era, or simply screwing up your timing and getting stuck over there in the Empire when it pops back to its own period of history. There are other odd little one-in-a-thousand glitch possibilities also. You have to have the intellectual equipment of a college professor plus the gall of a bank robber to make a successful living as a crosser.
The easiest place to enter today, according to Kulikowski, is the corner of Blue Island and Taylor. The imperial city is only about four feet above Chicago street level there, and Kulikowski has brought along a plank that he sets up as a little bridge to carry them up the slight grade. Mulreany leads the way; Anderson follows, and Schmidt brings up the rear, toting the two bags of trade goods. As they pass through the eerie yellow glow of the interface Mulreany glances back at Duplessis and Kulikowski, who are beginning to fade from view. He grins, winks, gives them the upturned thumb. Another couple of steps and Chicago disappears altogether, nothing visible now to the rear except the golden flicker, opaque when seen from this side, that marks the border of the materialization zone. They are in the Empire, now. Halfway across the planet and nine centuries ago in time, waltzing once more into the glittering capital city of the powerful realm that was the great rival of the Byzantines and the Turks for the domination of the medieval world.
Can of corn, he tells himself.
In today, out tomorrow, another ten or twenty million bucks’ worth of highly desirable and readily salable treasures in the bag.
The imperial barge—its back half, anyway—is just on their left as they come up the ramp. Its hull bears the royal crest and part of an inscription testifying to the greatness of the Emperor. Lounging alongside it with their backs to the interface glow are half a dozen rough-looking members of the Bulgarian Guard, the Emperor’s crack private militia. Bad news right at the outset. They give Mulreany and his companions black menacing glances.
“Nasty bastards,” Anderson murmurs. “They going to be difficult, you think?”
“Nah. Just practicing looking tough,” says Mulreany. “We stay cool and we’ll be okay.” Staying cool means telling yourself that you are simply an innocent merchant from a distant land who happens to be here at this unusual time purely by coincidence, and never showing a smidgeon of uneasiness. “But keep close to your gun, all the same.”
“Right.” Anderson slips his hand under his tunic. Both he and Schmidt are armed. Mulreany isn’t. He never is.
He figures they’ll get past the guardsmen okay. The Bulgars are a wild and unpredictable bunch, but Mulreany knows that nobody over here wants to go out of his way to find trouble at a time when the weird golden light in the sky is shining, not even the Bulgars, because when the light appears and everything surrounding the capital disappears from the view of its inhabitants it means that the powers of sorcery are at work again. Events like this have been going on for 800 years in this city, and everyone understands by now that during one of the sorcery-times there’s a fair possibility that some stranger you try to hassle may come right back at you and hit you with very mighty mojo indeed. It’s been known to happen.
This is something like Mulreany’s 25th crossing—he doesn’t keep count, but he doesn’t miss an Empire appearance and he’s been a licensed crosser for about a dozen years—and he knows his way around town as well as anybody in the trade. The big boulevard that runs along the shore parallel to the wharves is the Street of the Eastern Sun, which leads to the Plaza of the Customs-Brokers, from which five long streets radiate into different parts of the city: the Street of Persians, the Street of Turks, the Street of Romans, the Street of Jews, and the Street of Thieves. There are no Jews to be found on the Street of Jews or anywhere else in the capital, not since the Edict of Thyarodes VII, but most of the best metal-workers and jewelers and ivory-carvers have shops in the quadrant between the Street of Jews and the Street of Thieves, so it’s in that section that Mulreany will make his headquarters while he’s here.
Plenty of citizens are milling around in the Plaza of the Customs-Brokers, which is one of the city’s big gathering-places. Mulreany hears them chattering in a whole bouillabaise of languages. Greek is the Empire’s official tongue, but Mulreany can also make out Latin, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, a Slavic dialect, and something that sounds a little like Swedish. Nobody is very upset by what has happened to the city. They’ve all had experience with this sort of thing before, and all of them are aware that it’s just a temporary thing: when the sky turns golden and the capital goes flying off into the land of sorcery, the thing to do is sit tight and wait for everything to get back to normal again, which it eventually will do.
He and Anderson and Schmidt slide smoothly into the crowd, trying to seem inconspicuous without conspicuously seeming to be trying to seem inconspicuous, and leave the plaza on the far side by way of the Street of Jews. There was a decent hotel seven or eight blocks up that way the last time he was here in the reign of Basil III, and though he doesn’t know whether the date of that visit, in Empire time, was five years ago or five years yet to come, he figures there’s a good chance the hotel will be there today. Things don’t change really fast in the medieval world, except when some invading horde comes in and rearranges the real estate, and that isn’t due to happen in this city for another couple of centuries.
The hotel is exactly where he remembers it. It’s not quite in a class with the Drake or the Ritz-Carlton: more like a big barn, in fact, since the ground floor is entirely given over to straw-strewn stables for the horses and camels and donkeys of the guests, and the actual guest rooms are upstairs, a series of small square chambers with stiff clammy mattresses placed right on the stone floors, and tiny windows that have actual glass in them, almost clear enough to see through. Nothing lavish, not even really very comfortable, but the place is reasonably clean, at least, with respectable lavatory facilities on every floor and a relatively insignificant population of bugs and ticks. A pleasant smell of spices from the bazaar next door, ginger and aniseed and nutmeg and cinnamon, maybe a little opium and hashish too, drifts in and conceals other less savory aromas that might be wandering through the building. The place is okay. It’ll do for one night, anyway.