The Breath of Suspension (15 page)

Shorty wasn’t having any. He didn’t even crack a smile to acknowledge my efforts. “We got the word on you. I know who you’re working for, and I don’t like it.”

Damn. They’d identified me as an officer of the Constabulary. That made things difficult. “I carve in the shop of Thutmose the sculptor,” I improvised. “You don’t like him? He can be a bit
annoying
at times, I guess, since he only likes to talk about rocks, but—”

“We have an agreement. We don’t like you people messing around with our territory, understand?”

“No, actually, I don’t.”

You never know what’s going to set somebody off. I think it was my flip tone, which my mother had always warned me about. One of the two in the back reached over with an impossibly long arm and hit me. The next instant I found myself on my back in the dust with my head buzzing. I got up, and everyone looked as if nothing had happened. They just stared at me. I put my hand to the corner of my mouth and brought it away bloody.

How had they pegged to me so fast? Who else knew I was here? Ridiculous thought, but... without really thinking about it, I repeated the gesture the Bishop of Chartres had made to me. One of the goons in the back made a response.

Shorty hit him. “What’s happened to security around here? Now we have to change the sign.”

The other rubbed his chest where Shorty had hit him, though I got the idea that it was more out of politeness than that Shorty had actually hurt him. “I thought that was our ID. It took me two months to learn that, and you never let me use it.”

“Shut up!” He turned back to me. “I don’t know where you learned the sign, but you penny-ante types in Rylieh’s gang know better than to horn in on R. E. Mann’s territory,” Shorty yelled. It made my head ache. “What’s wrong with you guys? The bosses divided it up. Who does Rylieh think he is, anyway? This is way out of his league. He should stick to smuggling Books of the Dead and Horus and Seth cults out of Heliopolis and stay the hell out of Akhetaten!”

“Yeah,” one of the two in the back said. “We worked this monotheism angle up ourselves. You guys ain’t got the brains to handle it.”

“Shut up!” Shorty said.

“We want to talk,” I said.

“Talk? There’s nothing to talk about.”

“About Saqqara,” I said, almost randomly. They didn’t know I was a member of the Constabulary after all, and had mistaken me for someone else. Who? I decided to play along. I remembered the speculations about the bulls that I had participated in, back in the Roman Forum during my vacation. The city of Saqqara was the center of the cult of the bullheaded god Apis. They would still be worshiping him fourteen hundred years in the future. “We want to renegotiate the agreement. The Apis bulls—”

“Apis is ours, you son of a bitch! Osiris is ours! Isis is ours! Saqqara is our territory! Throw the bastard in the Nile! Feed him to the crocodiles!” I sensed that he was getting excited. “Grab him!”

They grabbed me. I struggled a bit, just for form’s sake, and they pounded my head, for real, so I went limp. Shorty muttered all the way to the river. “A turf fight, and Rylieh started it. We’ll finish it for him. Hot damn! We’ll grab Anubis, God of the Underworld. They can’t handle him anyway. He’s popular, a great seller out around Algol and with the races of the Seven Clusters region. We’ve already got the rest of the death gods. We got Hades. We got Kali. Why not? Consolidate. Death Worship Enterprises. We’ll corner the market. Boy, oh boy, this could be big. Those morons won’t even know what hit them.” I began to think he had forgotten me.

No such luck. “Drop him here. Before we throw him in, I want to see what he’s carrying.” He searched my kilt quickly, and found my line. “How considerate. This makes it easier. Tie him up, boys.”

“The crocs like it better when they struggle,” one of the other two complained.

“Never mind the crocs. They’ll be happy enough.” Shorty made sure the bonds were tight. “We’ve got to head back to base now. R. E. Mann’s got to get the scoop as soon as possible.”

“Hey, he told us we’re not supposed to go until tomorrow morning,” one of the other two said. I still couldn’t tell them apart.

“There’s been a change of plan,” Shorty said.

“When did the plan change? Nobody told us nothing.”

“I’m telling you now!” Shorty yelled, patience exhausted.

“Okay, okay already. I was just making sure. Into the drink with this guy?”

“Right. We don’t have time to watch him.”

“We never get to have any fun.”

“Life’s just that way sometimes,” Shorty said philosophically. They picked me up, and the next thing I knew, the waters of the Nile were closing over my head.

Now, contrary to popular opinion, there are not all that many crocodiles in any given stretch of the Nile. Or so I kept telling myself. I swam out a little way, as well as I could with my arms and legs tied, let the current take me, and tried to find the knife. I couldn’t feel it, since it was as flexible as the fabric of the kilt, which was why Shorty hadn’t found it when he searched me. My lungs began to burn. By almost dislocating my shoulder, I got my hand, finally, on the hilt of the knife, and twisted. I almost lost it when the blade hardened. I pulled it up, slicing through my kilt, and cut my bonds. The line was top quality. It took forever.

When I hit the surface it took all the self-control I had not to suck in deep noisy breaths. For all I knew, my three friends were still standing on the shore, waiting for the crocodiles to provide them with a show, just to make sure. I breathed slowly and swam back upstream, in case they should be of a mind to go downstream to recover the body. The current, sluggish though it was, had already taken me north of the city. It was quite a romantic sight, really, the city at the foot of the cliffs, with the great moon hanging overhead, turning the river Nile silver. My aesthetic sense, unfortunately, was somewhat impaired at the time, and it was a long unpleasant swim, with me expecting a crocodile to grab my leg at any moment. When the suspense finally became too much, I made for shore. I climbed up the reed-covered mud slope, straightened my sodden sliced-up kilt, and strode manfully out onto the street, mentally daring anyone to comment on my appearance. No one did, but that was because the streets were completely deserted. It had cooled off a little with the evening, and the wet kilt started to feel a bit cold, which put me back into my usual state on this job.

My inclination to scale the wall and explore the Great Temple of Aten, never great to begin with, had by this time become a positive aversion. I wanted to go home and go to bed, but that, unfortunately, was not one of the choices. I walked slowly back to where I had left my gear. I sat down on a pile of mud bricks and wondered what I was going to do next. My answer came in the form of three rapidly walking figures, the center one gesturing and mumbling. “Rylieh thinks he has Baal and Moloch all sewn up, and is making a mint selling those big brazen idols out around Arcturus. Boy, is he in for a surprise. When we’re done he won’t have a claim to the seven hundred seventy-seventh avatar of Vishnu.” I hid behind my pile of bricks and watched them pass. Once they had gotten far enough into the lead, I followed. I was looking for a religion addict, and a group of religion smugglers was as good a thing to use to find him as any. So the Bishop had put these guys on to me. That was interesting, though it didn’t really help me understand anything.

They left the city, which wasn’t hard, since it could be walked end to end in about ten minutes, and headed in the direction of a wadi that cut through the cliffs to the west, where the tomb of Akhenaten himself was going to be located. I kept well back, since, as seemingly the only other person in all of Akhetaten awake at this hour, I felt rather conspicuous and had trouble keeping track of them in the darkness. They climbed a small rise, then, silhouetted against the star-filled sky and cliffs glowing in the moonlight, turned left off the path into scrub. I could hear all three of them talking now, in low voices. They slowed down, turned, and were suddenly gone.

I waited, to make sure they hadn’t simply ducked down to catch me in an ambush, then made my way to the spot where I had last seen them. Nothing. Nothing at all. They had walked into a wormhole and disappeared from that tiny fragment of the space-time continuum I was able to keep under observation. Figuring out which wormhole they had taken would have to wait until morning, when I could see something. I sat down on an outcropping and watched the moonlit flow of the Nile, just visible at the end of the wadi. The excitement of this soon palled, and it ended up being a long night.

In the morning I could follow their footprints in the sand, up to the point where they vanished. It was clear. The city of Isfahan, Persia, 1617
CE
. Safavid Persia. Shiite Persia. I thought about the tomb full of Korans and clay disks. Stuff smuggled out of Isfahan, obviously, bound for somewhere there was a demand for it. Things were getting more interesting all the time. I checked some Persian garb out from Qerrarrquq, and followed.

❖

I was jumped as soon as I stepped into the sunlit street that ran past the base of the great mosque of the Masjid-i-Shah, Qerrarrquq’s “have fun” still ringing in my ears. It wasn’t Shorty and his two friends, however, but two dark-skinned toughs with broken teeth, wearing turbans. They, however, didn’t seem to have any shyness about attacking people to whom they had not been properly introduced, and moved in with their knives. I turned to run. Silly idea, really. There were three more of them behind me.

They were obviously adept at taking advantage of the moment of disorientation that comes just after coming through a wormhole. But the fact that they depended on that disorientation might make them lax. That was all I could count on. I scanned the men around me and picked out the one who seemed less sure of himself, who hung back, to let his comrades take care of the messy work. I screamed and attacked him. He went down, and I kicked him in the head. Big deal. The other four moved in to filet me with their knives.

Suddenly, one of my assailants yelped and flew over my shoulder, to slam headfirst against the wall. He wore a circle of gold on his upper arm. I dodged a knife and kicked at my attacker’s groin. I missed my target and fell down, narrowly avoiding another swing of his knife. Someone got his throat in a hammerlock, and he gurgled and dropped his knife. “Someone” was a tiny dark-eyed woman with lots of rings on her fingers. She twisted, and he went limp. Meanwhile, the other two were being stood off by a hook-nosed man with a long curly beard. He kicked out, and his foot actually connected with its intended target. The footpad screamed, then he and his remaining associate turned and ran.

“Let’s go,” the man said, in a reasonable tone. “There may be others.” The three of us trotted off down the street. I gasped for air as we ran. I had absorbed several more blows, and on top of my previous night’s adventures in Akhetaten, they made my entire body hurt. I was getting a tour of the pummeling techniques of various world capitals. I started to plan a brochure for such a tour, for when I retired from the detective business.

We found ourselves on the Maidan-i-Shah, the central square of Isfahan. It was crowded with chattering people going about the business of running their lives, and was a symbol of a world prosperous and at peace. The day was sunny, and the tiled domes of the city were beautiful against the clear blue sky and the snow-covered mountains of the Zagros. I began to think that everything might make sense after all.

“We will have to make our reports to Mann,” my bearded rescuer said, gloomily. My thanks for my rescue brought him no joy. He made the already familiar gesture that R. E. Mann’s minions used to identify each other. I responded with the gesture I had seen Shorty’s goon use. He relaxed and introduced himself. His name was Solomon ben Ezra, and the woman, his wife, was named Rachel.

Both of them stared at me, two pairs of sharp brown eyes. “Where are the other two?” she asked.

I thought fast. If my three friends from Akhetaten had left early, to return to Isfahan six hours before I had, they had been jumped by the footpads in the dark. I remembered the gold armband, which had started out on Shorty’s arm and ended up on the thug’s. Somehow, I didn’t quite succeed in feeling sorry for him. But these two thought I was Shorty, since I had shown up at his scheduled arrival time. They’d obviously never seen him. “I, ah, I left them behind in Akhetaten. This monotheism stuff is delicate, and I think Kinbarn screwed it up.” I took a leap. If the Bishop had sent me to Akhetaten, it wasn’t because Kinbarn was still there. “It would be good if I could find him....”

Solomon shrugged. “I have no idea where he is. The Horizon of Aten was difficult for him. We had to detoxify him after that one. Sun gods, indeed.” He snorted, and Rachel looked contemptuous. “It took most of Isaac Newton’s
Principia
to snap him out of it.”

“The Talmud would have done just as well,” Rachel said, with some venom. Solomon darted a frightened look at me. “Be still,” he hissed. “These are private matters.” She glared back at him.

“Who jumped me?” I said. “Rylieh’s men?”

He looked startled. “Rylieh’s?
Here?
Hardly. Rylieh doesn’t have the channels for distributing Shiism. Last time he tried, he got stuck with a load of screaming ayatollahs somewhere off Procyon, where they don’t use the hard stuff, just a little Confucianism, you know, that sort of thing. That cost him. No, your assailants were simply thugs. That happens a lot, you know. Locals find out that confused people with interesting possessions just seem to pop up in one location, from nowhere, and can be killed and robbed without consequence. Worse things, sometimes. I’ve heard stories....”

He seemed glad to change the subject, so he told me a few. They were hair-raising. Rachel said nothing, but sulked. We walked the length of the Maidan, then through a gate into a side road lined with uniform buildings with arched recesses. He knocked on a door. It opened, and we entered R. E. Mann’s headquarters.

The narrow hallways and dark chambers of that place were piled with junk. Religious junk. Byzantine icons, Chinese bronze temple bells, jade statues of the Aztec god Tlaloc, Tibetan Tantric scrolls, a Zoroastrian fire altar, a roll of the Torah, a particularly striking marble Athena. There was barely any room to move. And lying on top of a statue of Mithra slaying the bull was draped a soiled and tattered piece of cloth that I recognized as the original for the scorched polyester copy of the Tunic of the Holy Virgin I had seen in Chartres Cathedral.