Standing out in the alley by one of the building’s side doors, Len Carrington impatiently answered one more objection from the party of six men that was about to leave for Fleet Street. “You’ll do it because it’s the very last suth errand you’ll ever run for them, and because if you didn’t it would tip them off, and we want to hit them with no warning—and also because once you fetch this fellow for them they’ll be so absorbed with him that we’ll be able to kill them both with no trouble.”
“Is by any chance this lad we’re going to fetch the same one that pitched Norman out the window at the Swan With Two Necks?” asked one of the men.
Carrington pursed his lips, for he’d hoped they wouldn’t make that connection. “Yes—but you mishandled that abduction.”
“And they seem to have mishandled hangin’ onto him,” the man added.
“—And this time you’ll take him quiet,” Carrington went I on sternly. Then he grinned. “And if we all do our parts correctly, there’ll be a real celebration in Rat’s Castle tonight.”
“Amen to that,” whispered another of the men. “Let’s off—he’ll be at his silly book meeting by now.”
The six men padded away down the alley and Carrington went back inside. The huge old kitchen was empty at the moment, and lit only by the dull red glow of the hearth. He dragged the door closed behind him and the room was quiet, except for the faint sound of distant wailing and grunting. He sat down on a bench and hooked a jug of cool beer down from a shelf.
He took one long swallow, then, re-corked the jug, put it back and stood up. He’d better be getting back to the front room; it wouldn’t do to let the clown wonder what had delayed him.
As he walked toward the inner door he passed the drain, and the wailing and groaning were louder. He paused and peered with distaste down into the black hole that led to the deep cellars and the subterranean river. I wonder, he thought, what’s got Horrabin’s Mistakes so riled up this evening. Maybe old Dungy was right, and the things are able to read minds a little, and they’re aware of our imminent mutiny tonight. He cocked his head, listening for the basso profundo voice of Big Biter, who was the only one of the Mistakes anyone would pay any attention to, but he didn’t hear him. Good boy, Carrington thought nervously—if you sense any part of our plans, keep it behind the portcullis of your appalling teeth.
He groped around for the wooden plug, found it under a pile of potato peelings, and fitted it over the drain hole, effectively silencing, up here at least, the noise from the deep cellars.
He opened the door to the hallway just as Horrabin’s fluty voice called from the front room, “Carrington! Where in hell are you?”
“Right here, yer Worship,” Carrington said, striding forward and forcing his voice to sound relaxed. “Just stopped in the kitchen for a sip of beer.” He stepped unhurriedly into the room.
The clown, looking like a huge spider perversely made of ribbon candy, was penduluming rapidly back and forth in his swing, while Romany or Romanelli or whatever his name was this week was reclining in his high wheeled cart that looked like nothing so much as a baby’s perambulator, the snapping glow of St. Elmo’s Fire flickering around his tortured frame even more brightly now than it had five minutes ago.
“I assume they’re off?” asked Horrabin.
“They are.”
“And instructed not to bungle it this time?” put in Romanelli.
Carrington gave the man a cold look. “They got him for you that time and they’ll get him for you this time.”
Romanelli scowled, then made his face relax, as though he just didn’t have the spare energy to resent the insubordination. “Go downstairs to the old hospital,” he said. “Make sure they’ve got everything ready.”
“Aye aye.” Carrington hurried out of the room and his boots could be heard clumping along the hall and then tapping down the long flight of stone steps.
“Why don’t you go too?” croaked Romanelli to the clown.
“I just got here!” the clown protested. “And there’s a couple of things you and I have to straighten out. Now I had an agreement with your ka: I was to—”
“He’s dead and you have no agreement with me. Go.”
After a pause Horrabin reached out and snared his stilts, thrashed out of his swing and onto them, and stood wobbling in the center of the floor. “You’re pretty damn sure of—”
“Go,” Romanelli repeated. He had closed his eyes, and his face looked like a thin rag that someone had draped over some stones to dry in the sun and forgotten forever. The knocking of Horrabin’s stilt-poles receded away. Romanelli’s mouth fell open and a deep sigh echoed in and out of his chest.
His time was getting damned short—he only weighed thirty pounds now, but he knew he wasn’t as strong as the Master had been; he would lose his hold on the unnaturally maintained components of his body, and simply break down or fly to bits, long before the zero gravity point was reached. There’d be no big dive to the moon for him.
He shuddered, trying to remember how many sorcerers had been both strong enough and contra-natural enough—the two qualities were tremendously difficult to hold onto at the same time, like trying to press the positive ends of two lodestones together—to build up that weird lunar attraction which in extreme cases, such as the Master’s, could become a fiercely drawing force far, far greater than could be explained by the actual physical gravity of the moon. There had been that Turk, Ibrahim, who had finally had himself encased to the knees in solid stone in a high-walled courtyard several miles outside of Damascus, and used to charge fortunes to tell fortunes—he’d only do it when the moon was overhead, and his hair and arms were dangling straight up, an effect that mightily impressed his customers—until one man, not pleased with his augury, had drawn a scimitar and chopped right through both of Ibrahim’s knees, and the truncated screaming body had shot away upward into the sky. And there was a brief mention in one of the lost books of the apocryphal Clementine Recognitions of a very old magician who had just floated off the ground one afternoon in Tyana, and was visible in the sky for days, gesticulating and crying, before he drifted too far away to be seen anymore. Obviously there was some truth in the very old stories of the once inhabited moon having become, through some long-forgotten but transcendent perversity, the monument and archetype and fitfully living embodiment of desolation.
Romanelli remembered that he had been overseeing the disagreeable task of clearing out the street below the Bab-el-Azab when he’d heard the hollow knock of a cannon shot from away to the south. He had tensed, ready to call out the Albanians to repel a revenge raid by sons of the murdered Mameluke Beys, but there were no further sounds of gunfire, and when he climbed to the battlements he hadn’t seen any troops massing on the darkening plain. It wasn’t until later that night that he heard one of the fellahin talking about an old man who had been seen by many to fly over the old quarter of Cairo just at dusk… He’d rushed back to the Master’s house and found it broken, and empty except for some damaged ushabtis and the injured doorkeeper…
From the doorkeeper he’d learned that the man who had done this was the Brendan Doyle who’d escaped from them back in October, and the next day he’d discovered that Doyle had left Egypt aboard the England-bound Fowler, having booked passage under the name William Ashbless. Romanelli had abandoned his post as Mohammed Ali’s physician and taken the next ship for England and, by whistling on the stern until his lips were numb and the very captain had ordered him to stop it, several times managed to summon a couple of the Shellengeri for a few hours—the voyage wasn’t nearly as quick as the trip south in the Chillico had been, but Romanelli did manage to step off his ship onto a London dock on Sunday, the day before yesterday, while this Ashbless-Doyle person’s ship hadn’t arrived until this morning.