Ripping Time by Robert Asprin & Linda Evans

Memory stirred, sharp and terrible despite the lassitude holding her captive, whispered that she might not be in the station. She’d been smuggled out of TT-86 in Jenna Caddrick’s steamer trunk. And something had gone terribly wrong at the hotel, men had come after them with silenced, up-time guns, forcing them to flee through the window and down the streets. She was in London, then. But where in London? Who had brought her to this place? One of the men trying to kill them? And why did she feel so very strange, unable to move or think clearly? Other memories came sluggishly through the murk. The attack in the street. Running toward the stranger in a top hat and coat, begging his help. The belch of flame and shattering roar of his pistol, shooting the assassin. The touch of his hand against her wrist—

Ianira stiffened as shock poured through her, weak and disoriented as she was. Goddess! The images slammed again through her mind, stark and terrible, filled with blood and destruction. And with that memory came another, far more terrible: their benefactor’s pistol raised straight at Jenna’s face, the nightmare of the gun’s discharge, Jenna’s long and terrible fall to the pavement, blood gushing from her skull . . .

Ianira was alone in London with a madman.

She began to tremble and struggled to open her eyes, at least.

Light confused her for a moment, soft and dim and strange. She cleared her vision slowly. He had brought her to an unknown house. A fire burned brightly in a polished grate across from the bed where she lay. The room spoke of wealth, at least, with tasteful furniture and expensive paper on the walls, ornate decorations carved into the woodwork in the corners of the open, arched doorway leading to another room, she had no idea what, beyond the foot of her bed. Gaslight burned low in a frosted glass globe set into a wall bracket of polished, gleaming brass. The covers pulled up across her were thick and warm, quilted and expensive with embroidery.