conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first four paragraphs for a book with the title 'The Anubis Gates'?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Anubis Gates
  And when they've brought him here, thought Romanelli as the weary breaths trudged up and down his throat, I will simply wring him dry. I'll learn from him enough about the time jumping to do it myself, and I'll jump back to when I was healthy and tell my younger self how to do things differently, so that on Monday the second of April, 1811, I am not a trembling, bleeding, far overextended wreck.
  He opened his bloodshot eyes and glanced up at the clock that sat on a doll-crowded shelf just below the niche where old Dungy's head was perched. Quarter to nine. In another hour or so, he told himself, Horrabin's hoodlums will bring Ashbless to me, and we'll adjourn to the subterranean hospital.
  As the cab rattled past St. Paul's Cathedral William Ashbless peered out at the dark square on the west side of the huge church and remembered begging there as Dumb Tom. I never, he thought, get to use my voice. Dumb Tom was mute, and so of necessity was Eshvlis the cobbler, and though William Ashbless will be a voluble poet, he'll only be copying from memory poems he read and memorized long ago.
  His mood was a blend of relief, anticipation and vague disappointment. It was certainly pleasant to be back in England again, free at last of all that hellish magic, and able to look forward to meeting, as he knew he would, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and the rest of the gang-but now that he was, irrevocably, Ashbless, and had wandered back into the scope of the Bailey biography, there could be no more major surprises for him; he'd already read his own life story.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Anubis Gates
  And when they've brought him here, thought Romanelli as the weary breaths trudged up and down his throat, I will simply wring him dry. I'll learn from him enough about the time jumping to do it myself, and I'll jump back to when I was healthy and tell my younger self how to do things differently, so that on Monday the second of April, 1811, I am not a trembling, bleeding, far overextended wreck.
  He opened his bloodshot eyes and glanced up at the clock that sat on a doll-crowded shelf just below the niche where old Dungy's head was perched. Quarter to nine. In another hour or so, he told himself, Horrabin's hoodlums will bring Ashbless to me, and we'll adjourn to the subterranean hospital.
  As the cab rattled past St. Paul's Cathedral William Ashbless peered out at the dark square on the west side of the huge church and remembered begging there as Dumb Tom. I never, he thought, get to use my voice. Dumb Tom was mute, and so of necessity was Eshvlis the cobbler, and though William Ashbless will be a voluble poet, he'll only be copying from memory poems he read and memorized long ago.
  His mood was a blend of relief, anticipation and vague disappointment.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The harsh ammonia fumes dragged Ashbless back to consciousness—and the horrible little mud-floored, torch-lit room—one more time.
  After the last ammonia-enforced revival he'd found that he was able to remove himself from the tortured body tied down on the table, or, more accurately, to sink so far down into the fever dream depths of his head that he felt Romanelli's desperate surgeries only as distant tugs and jars, the way a deep swimmer can faintly feel agitations on the surface.
  It had been a welcome change, but in this new moment of clarity he realized that he was dying. While none of the injuries Romanelli had inflicted were instantly fatal, Ashbless would have needed the attentions of a 1983 Intensive Care ward to achieve even a qualified recovery.
  He blinked up at the near wall through his good eye, noting without even any wonder the row of four-inch tall toy men along a shelf above the water pump, then rolled his head and stared into the weirdly lit face of Romanelli. I guess this is an alternate world after all, he thought with a cold remoteness. Ashbless dies in 1811 here. Well, he'll die silent, too. I don't think, Romanelli, that you could extrapolate the location of a future gap by learning what I know about previous ones—but I'm not going to give you the chance. You can die here with me.
  The doorway was directly behind the two magicians, and Ashbless forced himself not to move his eye or show any reaction when he saw the monstrous forms appear in it and steal silently forward into the dim room. Whatever they are, he thought, I hope they're real, and kill us all.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Ashbless was so stunned that he almost forgot to parry the next lunge. But this is wrong, he thought bewilderedly, I know I won't be found with a wounded arm!
  The man sat down on the wet grass, clutching himself with hands already slick with blood. "Quick," he gasped, pale under his tan, "me be you."
  Several minutes went by before Ashbless moved, and when he did it was to kneel beside the body, which had stopped breathing, and lay his hand gently on the dead man's shoulder.
  If there is any reward after death, he thought, for such creatures as you, I'll bet you've earned it. God knows how you made your way back to England from Cairo, and how you found me. Maybe you were drawn back to me, very like the way ghosts are supposed to be drawn to the place where they died. Well, you get to share, a little bit at least, in my biography: you provide the corpse.
  Eventually Ashbless wiped his sword clean on an uprooted tuft of grass, and then stood up to sheathe it; and he tore off a strip of his scarf and knotted it around his cut forearm. The chilly spring breeze blew all thoughts of the past out of his mind, and with a sense of adventure he hadn't known in decades he walked on down the path to the moored boat, leaving behind him the ka which Doctor Romanelli had made of him so many years ago.