chapter FOURTEEN
After Wotan left, I looked at the Pharaoh and asked, “How did you do that without him even knowing?”
The mummy smiled. “I told you, my friend, all my secrets are yours for the asking. But only if you meet my price.”
“Sorry.”
“I assumed as much, but it’s still a pity.”
Leticia smiled. “Not for me. The last thing I need is two big, strong men ganging up on helpless little me.”
The Pharaoh chuckled. “Even when I was alive, and people were smaller, I wasn’t considered especially large. And I daresay you were never considered ‘helpless.’”
She smiled that sultry movie-star smile. “Well, perhaps not completely helpless. Is it my deal?” She reached to gather in the cards.
As the game got rolling again, the friendly table talk died away. The Pharaoh went back to being a silent, rotten, withered thing. Leticia didn’t frown, squint, or hunch forward—except for that one moment in Rhonda’s store, when I’d forced her to set her love puppets free, I’d never seen her do anything that made her look less gorgeous in any way—but there was still something about her that let you know she was concentrating hard. I probably looked pretty serious myself.
After knocking Wotan out, the Pharaoh had more than half the chips on the table, and he tried to use them to push Leticia and me around. She played back at him aggressively. I didn’t, because I wasn’t catching any cards.
I flashed the Thunderbird to see if there was a magical reason for that. If anybody was cheating, I couldn’t spot it. I wondered if the others meant to finish out the game just playing normal poker. If so, great, just as long as I started getting some decent hands.
Finally I dealt myself the eight and nine of diamonds. I bet, and Leticia called. The Pharaoh sat and stared at us for a while. He was thinking of coming in, too. Since both Leticia and I were already in, there was a good chance he had the right odds. But in the end, he mucked.
I dealt the flop. It was the ace of hearts, the eight of clubs, and the eight of spades. That killed both my flush and straight draws, but gave me trips. Which were likely to win anyway.
Leticia bet. It looked like she had an ace to go with the one on the board. I didn’t want to scare her off, so I just called.
The turn was a brick. She checked, and I did, too.
As I started to deal the last card, she gave me a smile that made me feel warm and tingly from head to toe. “Whoever wins,” she said, “it’s been a delight. I’m grateful I had the chance to play with you.”
I swallowed. “You, too,” I said.
I burned a card and turned over the king of spades. Leticia sat and thought for a few seconds, then said, “All in.”
I figured she’d been playing ace-king, and now had top two pair. That’s a strong hand, and even with the eights on the board, you couldn’t blame her for taking a chance on it. Not this late in the tournament, and not when I’d been slow playing. I probably would have done the same, and I actually felt bad for her as I called. A part of me wanted to fold instead.
She turned over her cards. Ace-king, just like I figured. I reached for my hand. I guess my body language told her she was beat, because something came into those big green eyes.
Or maybe I should say that several things came into them. I could tell that she really did like me. That I could have her for the asking, and without needing to worry about her brainwashing me. We were past that. I also saw how sad she was going to be to lose the hand.
But she didn’t have to lose it. I could throw my cards away without turning them over, and that would keep her at the table. I could knock out the Pharaoh first, and then beat her heads up.
Even as I was thinking it, I knew it was all crazy, and a lie. She was taking one last shot at brainwashing me right now, and really giving it her all. Maybe somehow she’d gotten hold of another drop of my blood, or something else that boosted her signal.
But it might not matter what I knew, only what I felt. My hand was frozen in mid-air.
“If you aren’t going to show,” the Pharaoh murmured, “the lady has the right to claim the pot.”
I set the Thunderbird between Leticia and me. It helped. It still didn’t let me turn over my cards, but at least I was able to tear my eyes away from her face. Instinct made me look for A’marie among the railbirds like a drowning man looking for a life preserver.
She was there, looking all worried, and the sight of her shoved some more of the crazy out of my head. I gasped in a breath and turned over my hand.
“Sorry,” I said. “Even after everything you’ve tried to do to me, it was close.”
Leticia laughed. “Well, I suppose that’s something, anyway. I counted, and you have me covered, so…” She pushed her remaining chips to the center of the table, stood up, and offered the Pharaoh her hand. “Good game, you wise old thing. I’ll get you next time.”
“My dear. Always a delight.” He took the cheroot out of his mouth and lifted her fingers to what was left of his lips.
I stood up to shake with her, but she hugged me instead. “Kick his ass,” she whispered into my ear, and followed it up with a flick of tongue.
Then she went to join the spectators. I took one more stab at disliking her as much as she deserved, but it just wasn’t in me. If you’re a guy, you couldn’t have done it, either.
The expression on A’marie’s face changed. Now she was giving me that half annoyed, half-amused I-can’t-believe-what-a-pig-you-are look women give you when you’re drooling over someone they think is a skank. I tried to look innocent and sat back down.
The Pharaoh washed the cards, spreading them around on the felt, then picked them up and did a one-handed weave shuffle. He hadn’t shuffled that way before, or passed the time doing chip tricks, either, and I assumed it was intended to distract me.
“Believe it or not,” he murmured, “I felt early on that it would come down to you and me in the end. I wonder, are you interested in making a deal? Four fiefs for the winner, and two for the runner-up.”
“That doesn’t work for me,” I said, keeping my voice just as low.
“Are you certain? That way, Timon would remain a lord. In fact, he and I would both come out ahead, no matter what.”
“I’m a winner-take-all kind of guy.”
“You could consult with him. I’ll wait.”
“I don’t need to. While I’m sitting here, I am him. Isn’t that the way it works?” I hoped so. I didn’t really know how far I could push it.
“If you say so.” His little smile gave me the feeling that somehow, he knew everything I had planned. If so, it was creepy. But if he wasn’t going to interfere, I guessed it didn’t matter.
A couple minutes later, I flopped quads, two nines in my hand and two more on the board. The Pharaoh looked at me for a little while, then made a big bet.
It was a perfect situation. After busting Leticia, I had a stack that was almost as big as his. And if I went all in, he’d probably call. I could cripple him right here and now.
In fact, everything was so perfect that I flashed the Thunderbird to see if the Pharaoh was using magic to set me up. He didn’t appear to be. Then, hating it, I folded.
Because the situation wasn’t quite perfect. The timing was wrong. I couldn’t put him away just yet.
Not long after, the clock struck three. It was time for a break, and I stood up and stretched. “Are you going to stay close by?”
The mummy shrugged. “I certainly can. As I imagine you’ve realized, I don’t have any biological requirements to address.”
“Thanks.” I headed for Timon, who was waiting for me impatiently as usual, but without Gaspar playing seeing-eye dog. It was a relief to get out of the stinging haze of the Pharaoh’s smoke, but only until I stepped into my boss’s stink zone.
“I have some pointers for you,” he said.
“That’s great,” I answered. “But I may not need them.”
Timon frowned. “Don’t get cocky.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that I’m thinking of throwing the game.”
The frown changed to a scowl. “Joke when you’ve won.”
“I’m not joking. All your subjects want to get rid of you. And even though I’ve only had a couple little tastes of the way you torture them, I see their point.”
“Why do you care how I treat them?”
“Considering everything they’ve tried to do to me, that’s a good question. But I just do. Anyway, here’s the deal. When I win, you give me Tampa, just like you were going to give the underwater part of it to Murk. That’ll still leave you with the five other fiefs I’m going to win for you.”
“Otherwise, you’ll make sure you lose.”
“That’s it.”
He sneered. “You’re bluffing. You’re a born gamester. It would damage your sense of self to do less than your best.”
“You’re right. But it would also hurt it to leave you in charge. So this is the compromise. We renegotiate our deal, or screw you.”
“Are you so stupid that you don’t understand what you’re risking? That night with the skull. That can be every night from now on. It can be your whole reality.”
I remembered Rufino, felt cold inside, but made myself smile anyway. “But I’m betting it won’t. Not if the Pharaoh tells you to get off his lawn, which I think he will. Because when you and I were flying together, I noticed what the permanent part of your version of dreamland looked like. And it wasn’t the whole earth. It was just Tampa. That makes me think you can’t mess with people from a long way off.”
“Then I’ll have to mess with you right now.” He rattled off a string of words in that jaw-breaking magical language I’d heard him use before. Naturally, I couldn’t understand it, but I heard him say “Billy Fox” a couple times in the middle. When he was done, he looked at me and waited. For me to apologize or drop to my knees or something.
“Sorry,” I said. “But I guess you needed my real name to make that work. And way back when we were first making our deal, I had a feeling I shouldn’t give it to you.”
In case you’re wondering, the “Billy” part was right. And I was “Billy Fox” to a lot of people, including the guys I gambled with. But “Fox” was actually short for “Foxcroft.”
“Very clever,” Timon snarled. “But sometimes clever people are so busy being clever that they miss the obvious. Like the fact that I can see again. Not perfectly, but well enough to take on the Pharaoh if I need to.”
I stiffened my index and middle fingers and stabbed them into his eyes. Moe himself couldn’t have done it any better. Timon yelped, staggered backward, and clapped his hands to his face.
“How about now?” I asked. It was the only sound in the room. He and I had been talking too softly for most people to realize we were arguing, but everybody was staring now.
Timon lowered his shaking hands. His eyes were a raw, seeping mess again. It made me hopeful and sick to my stomach at the same time.
“Grab him!” he screamed.
Some of the Tuxedo Team started toward me. Whether or not they’d heard about the big plan, they were too scared of Timon to disobey a direct order.
“You better think this through,” I told him. “Remember, nobody else will play for you. That’s why you needed to partner up with me in the first place.”
“Well, if I’m about to lose my lordship, then I don’t have time to deal with you as you truly deserve. But I promise to make these last few moments truly painful.”
Hands grabbed me from behind.
I’d been afraid this would happen. Timon couldn’t just knuckle under to extortion. That would cost him the other lords’ respect, and be just as bad as losing his lands. And the eye poke had only made it worse.
But I hoped he might still agree if I left him some wiggle room. If he didn’t have to cave completely in front of everybody. “Hang on,” I said. “Don’t you want to hear my second offer?”
“No.” He lifted his grubby, still-trembling hands toward my eyes.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” I said, talking fast. “I’ll beat the Pharaoh and win you all six fiefs. Then, when your eyes are okay, you and I will play a game. You’ll put up Tampa, and I’ll put up me. If you win, you can do any horrible thing you want to me. Or, for the rest of my life, I’ll be that loyal, obedient flunky you wanted me to be.”
His fingers with their black, ragged nails stopped a couple inches short of my eyes. I told myself I’d known all along that they would. Because the lords were addicted to gambling, and I’d just offered him a game.
“Are you talking about more poker?” he asked.
“I actually had some other ideas. You guys play all kinds of games, right? We can work out the details later.”
He smiled a nasty smile. “There’s one condition I insist on nailing down right now. However we play, we’ll do it in dream.”
I’d been expecting that, too. Because, while he and his buddies were hooked on gambling, they sure weren’t hooked on playing fair. “All right, but I’ve got a couple conditions, too.”
“You’re in no position to make any.”
“I’m doing it anyway. And you should check the time. Oops, sorry, I forgot you probably can’t see the hands on the clock. Anyway, the break’s almost over. In just a couple minutes, one of us needs to sit down at the table. It can be me, with everything it takes to win, or you and your handicap.”
“What do you want?” he gritted.
“First, swear right here and now in front of the other lords and everybody else that you’ll follow through on the deal like we’ve laid it out so far.”
“I swear it,” he said, “by sword, cup, rod, and stone.”
I hoped that meant something. As usual, I really had no idea.
“Second,” I said, “we need a referee. Somebody to help us work out rules that give me some kind of a chance, and then to enforce them. I’m thinking the Pharaoh. You guys all respect him, and since he can set up little ghost worlds of his own, I’m guessing that if you let him in, he can operate in yours.”
“Are you and he working together?” Timon asked. “Did you arrange this in advance?”
“I swear by the sacred Nile,” the Pharaoh said, “he didn’t.” Davis had pushed his wheelchair up close for a good view of the show. “I also swear that if you choose me to officiate, I’ll do so impartially.”
“Why would you bother?” Timon asked.
The mummy shrugged. “It should be an interesting contest, and how else would I obtain a view?”
Timon turned back to me. “I agree to your terms. Now beat him.”
The bodyguards took that as their signal to let me go. I did have a “biological requirement,” so I hurried to the john, slurped some water from a drinking fountain, and then rushed back to the table.
As I sat down, the Pharaoh said, “A week ago, you didn’t even know the Old People exist. Now, you’re trying to seize control of a fief. Nobody can say you lack ambition.”
I grinned. “Tell that to my teachers, the major who wanted me to put in for Ranger training, and my ex-fiancée.”
“Nonetheless.” He blew out a swirl of smoke. “Although it doesn’t really matter anyway, since I’m going to win the current contest.” He did a Hindu shuffle. Apparently, like the weave shuffle, it was just for fun or show, because then he moved on to the standard riffle-and-box technique you see in every casino.
For a while, we traded chips back and forth. Then I caught a run of good hands. I bet them, he folded, and before long, my stack was bigger than his.
He lit a fresh cheroot. “Perhaps I was overly optimistic.”
“It’s still anybody’s game,” I said, although really, I felt good about my chances.
“You were shrewd not to share your true name with anyone. Names have power in my—or should I say our?—style of magic no less than in Timon’s. Raise twenty thousand.” He pushed the chips out.
“Make it sixty thousand more.”
He mucked. “In fact, the creator god Re was all powerful precisely because no one else knew his name. None of the other gods could match him, any more than any of us lords has thus far proved able to contend with you.”
“Really.” I was paying attention, but not a lot. I liked his stories but figured they were meant to distract his opponents, and I wasn’t going to let this one distract me now. “I call.”
He dealt the flop. It had the king of hearts in it. “Re took on human form and ruled as the first pharaoh,” the mummy said.
The card flickered. Just for an instant, the crown turned into a King Tut headdress, and the sword, into a hooked stick. The fancy robes disappeared and left the king with a bare chest and a loincloth.
“Hey!” I said. I flashed the Thunderbird, but I wasn’t fast enough on the draw. The king already looked normal again by the time the emblem appeared.
“Is something wrong?” the Pharaoh asked.
“You changed the king. The way it looked.”
“Not intentionally, I assure you. But sometimes, when people like us speak of the sacred mysteries, a bit of power stirs and plays on its own.”
“Then maybe you should ‘speak of’ something else.”
“I could. But then you’d miss out on acquiring one of the keys you need to unlock your abilities.”
“A free sample of what you’ll teach me if I throw the game?”
He smiled. And when he continued the story, I let him.
Maybe that was stupid. But really, if he insisted, how was I supposed to stop him? Anyway, I couldn’t see how that one little blink of magic had hurt me. The picture on the card had changed, but it had never stopped being what it was, with red K’s and heart symbols in the corners. So I just kept the silver bird with its long straight wings hanging in the air.
“For hundreds of years,” the Pharaoh said, “Re was a great monarch. He ruled well, and his kingdom thrived in peace and plenty.”
I got to see it thriving, too. Little glimpses, anyway. The smoke in the air coiled into shapes that, vague and momentary as they were, made me think of farmers harvesting rich fields, busy marketplaces, and crowds in temples singing hymns of thanks. The Thunderbird didn’t stop them from appearing.
That ought to mean that they were harmless, too, except as more distractions. I made a point of refocusing on the cards on the table and the dead guy sitting on the other side of it.
I had nothing. But I stabbed at the pot anyway, and as he’d been doing more often than not, the Pharaoh folded. Maybe Re and I really did have something in common.
The mummy didn’t seem upset that I was steadily nibbling away his stack. It was like the story was distracting him more than me. “But eventually,” he said, “a problem arose. Re had taken on the form of a man, and he gradually aged like one, until he grew senile. Then, as you can imagine, he no longer ruled wisely. In fact, his edicts brought misery and injustice.” The smoke showed me that, too. Floggings, beheadings, battles, and people sitting in the dirt with swollen bellies and skinny arms and legs, too weak with starvation to brush away the flies. “Check.”
“Raise forty thousand. At that point, couldn’t the other gods stage a coup?”
“Fold.” He gathered in the cards. “One would think. But even though his mind was failing, Re was still mightier than all the others combined. And because he was addled, he couldn’t see that the best thing for everyone, himself included, would be for him to abandon earthly life and return to the sky.”
He dealt, looked at his cards, and paused to think. Eventually he raised, I called, and we played on quietly for a while.
Until finally, against my better judgment, I asked, “So what happened? What did the other gods do?” Hell, why not? I was curious, and the story still wasn’t doing me any harm. I was still winning.
“Oh, yes. The story. Well, as it happened, Re had a daughter named Isis. Among other things, she was the goddess of magic, and though her power was less than his, she still contrived a way to use it against him.”
The queen of clubs had come out on the turn, and for a second, it turned into a picture of Isis. She had dark hair, and was so beautiful and queenly that it wasn’t even funny that she was wearing a crazy hat, made of black feathers with horns tacked onto the sides and a golden disk riding in the center of her forehead.
“In his decrepitude,” the Pharaoh said, “Re had begun to drool. Where his spittle reached the ground, it formed mud. Raise fifty thousand.”
“Call.”
“Isis took some of the mud and molded it into the first cobra. The first animal in all the world that Re himself hadn’t created. And her sorcery, combined with the power in his saliva, brought it to life.”
The queen of clubs flickered again, showing me the cobra rearing up at Isis’s feet.
“Isis sent the snake to lie in wait beside a path where Re doddered along every day.” The Pharaoh burned a card before dealing the river. “And the next time he passed that way, it bit him.”
The cobra that struck at me came out of the smoke. I imagine that if I’d been looking at the smoke, it would have come out of the cards instead. At any rate, it formed from a twist of the drifting blue haze, and if the Thunderbird slowed it down any, you sure couldn’t tell it. It shot forward, stabbed its fangs into my cheek, and dissolved, all in a split second. It hurt like hell, like fire burning me from the inside out, and I screamed.
“The venom couldn’t kill almighty Re,” the Pharaoh went on, just like nothing had happened. “But because Isis had used a bit of his own essence to make the cobra, and because he hadn’t created it and didn’t know its name, it caused him extraordinary pain, and so he too let out a bloodcurdling shriek. I bet a hundred and fifty thousand, by the way.”
“You bastard,” I croaked. “Everybody saw you cheat.”
“Who’s ‘everybody?’ If there were any other players left, they would indeed be within their rights to enforce the rules. But in fact, only you and I remain.”
And how was I supposed to enforce anything? The pain was getting so bad that I doubted I could even stand. Even if I could, what good would it do to throw a punch at the Pharaoh? Wotan had ripped his head off and it hadn’t really hurt him.
“You did notice my bet, didn’t you?” the mummy asked. “Have you decided what you want to do?”
I looked at the river. My eyes were so blurry with tears that I wasn’t sure what it was. I wasn’t sure I remembered what I had in the pocket, either.
I struggled to focus despite the pain. I called Red, and he grew and filled me up. He didn’t make me feel all happy and peppy—there was no chance of that with the poison alternately burning and freezing me—but his power dialed back the torment a little.
The Pharaoh patted his withered hands together. “Well done. But I’m afraid it only delayed the inevitable.”
“Screw you.” My vision had cleared enough to show me that the king of diamonds had come out on the river. I managed to check my hole cards and found a king there, too. “All in.”
The Pharaoh folded. “I see I’m still no match for omnipotent Re. Shall I tell what happened to him next?”
“No.”
“I promise to make it short.” He gathered in the cards and did a faro shuffle. “Isis came running when she heard her father scream. She feigned horror at what had happened, and behaved as though she only cared about ending his suffering.”
“And she told him she could only do it if he gave her his secret name.”
“Very astute. That’s exactly what she said. He resisted for a while, and simply recited a string of aliases. Like ‘Billy Fox.’ But ultimately the agony wore him down, and he gave it up. As promised, she used it to purge the venom from his body, but also to set herself above him. She stripped away what was mortal in him and sent him to pilot the boat that is the sun across the heavens by day and through the underworld at night.”
He dealt the cards. Since he was the dealer, and we were heads up, he’d act first before the flop. But he wasn’t in any hurry to look at his hand.
“Of course,” he continued, “one difference between the myth and our current reality is that Re was a god and you’re a man. I’m afraid that means the venom that merely caused him unendurable pain is likely to put an end to you.”
“Unless I give you my real name and the power to make me lose.”
“Indeed.”
A spasm of more intense pain made my muscles clench and wrung a grunt out of me. I called for Red like a patient in a hospital bed hitting the button for a dose of morphine. He came and it helped, but not as much as before.
“I told you,” the Pharaoh said, “that can’t save you. In our mysteries, the spells that recapitulate the primal myths are the most potent of all.”
“Yeah?” I panted, sweat dripping off my face and plopping on the felt. “Well, guess what? This isn’t ancient Egypt. It’s America. And we don’t have myths. We have movies. We put them on DVD’s. And then they have alternate endings.”
He frowned. “I’m afraid the poison is making you delirious. If so, you’re nearly out of time.”
“In my version of the movie, Re sees through his bitch daughter’s lies, and he doesn’t give in to the pain. He gets up and slaps her around until she gives him the antidote. In other words, I’m going to win this God damn game, and when I do, it will break your hex.”
As I said the last word, I poured mojo into the Thunderbird until it glowed like it was white hot. Like I was trying to brand reality with it and make what I’d just said true.
I don’t think the Pharaoh could really see my personal sign. But he sensed the blaze of power somehow, and flinched back slightly in his wheelchair.
But only slightly. Then he smiled and exhaled smoke. “That was… creative. But, like the invocation of your Ka, insufficient.”
“Look at your damn cards. Play the game or forfeit.”
He played. With a lot more nerve and cunning than before, while the venom chewed me up inside. My eyes kept blurring, and my guts cramped. When the chills hit me, my teeth chattered. I played basic poker because I didn’t trust my judgment for anything fancier. I used the chip lead like a sledgehammer because I was afraid it was the only advantage I had left.
At some point, I glanced around and noticed Wotan laughing at all my struggling and pain. Considering that it was the Pharaoh who’d busted him, that struck me as stupid. He should have hated the mummy worse than me. But apparently me being an upstart human bugged him even more.
I thought about flipping him off. Then the cramps hit again, harder, and I twisted so I wouldn’t throw up on the table.
Somehow, that tipped me off balance. I fell out of the chair and overturned it, too. I ended up retching while lying on my stomach. You get a good view of your puke when it’s landing just a few inches away. Some of it splashes back into your face.
“Davis,” the Pharaoh said, “please assist the gentleman.”
The chauffeur trotted over and tried to lift me to my feet. I feebly pushed his hands away, grabbed the edge of the table, and dragged myself up.
I let him pick up the chair, though. I was pretty sure that if I tried to do that, I’d fall down again.
“You can end this,” the Pharaoh said.
I tried to work up some spit and then swallow away the hot, foul taste in my mouth. “I’m working on it.”
“You can end it right now. I promise to be the best master any apprentice wizard could hope to find. I promise to rule Tampa with kindness and generosity.”
“Says the guy who was willing to murder all of Queen’s babies just to win a game.”
He sighed. “If that’s your final word, on your own head be it. You realize, at this point I can simply play conservatively and wait for you to die.”
He probably could have, too. Except that I hung on for a few more minutes. Until the clock struck four, and the blinds jumped again.
They’d been big enough to matter before. Now they were finally so big that you just couldn’t sit out more than one or two hands in a row. Your stack would shrink to nothing if you did.
I didn’t plan to sit out any of them. I meant to shove all in every time pre-flop, without even looking at my cards. Because I knew that with five more to come, any starting hand, no matter how shitty, can beat any other. And I was out of time.
I got away with it once. The second time, the Pharaoh peeked at his down cards and smiled. He had something good, and so, of course, he called.
I looked at what I had in the hole. Eight-three off-suit, about as rotten a starting hand as there is. I don’t know how I could have suddenly felt sicker than I did already, but it sure seemed like it.
But then my luck kicked in. A three came out as part of a rainbow flop, and an eight came on the turn. I’d lucked my way into two pair, and I was almost positive the Pharaoh hadn’t improved.
By then, I don’t suppose I was able to keep what I felt from showing in my face. Anyway, the Pharaoh somehow realized I was ahead. I could tell it from the way his dry, sunken eyes narrowed, and the way his mouth tightened. A speck of dry rot dropped from his lower lip.
As he dealt the last card, I was suddenly sure he was going to use magic to turn things around. Maybe to change the river into something that matched a pocket pair and made trips. I flashed the Thunderbird and poured energy into it. Timon had said that defense was my strength, and I just willed my power to protect me.
It took so much out of me that I passed out. When I came to, it was to the sound of chips rattling and clinking.