After many minutes she felt the floor level out beneath her, and looking up she saw the distant torches and the archway. Carrington’s men no longer lurked there and whatever the action was, it was taking place somewhere else, so Jacky got up and ran madly toward the light.
When she’d got there she crouched panting for several minutes in the semicircle of wonderful yellow light, enjoying the delusion of safety it gave her, like the King’s X in the games of tag she’d played not that many years ago, and it was with reluctance that she finally got up and stepped through the arch and into darkness again.
She could hear nervous voices from the direction of the dock, so she padded silently up the corridor that led to the ascending stairway, but halted when she heard voices there too.
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.