Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

John did not reply, but Bugsy did. “The king is dead,” he said. “Just imposters left.”

Sobek shrugged. “Ah, well. I am too old for showgirls.”

The wrath of Horus finally ran its course. Taweret mumbled a reply in Arabic, looking as sour as a hippopotamus can look. Then some of the other gods stepped forward to say their piece, as Sobek translated. “Babi and the temple guard go where Taweret goes. Serquet means to stay and fight with Horus. She will summon a thousand of her small red sisters, she says. Bast says this is folly. She will go upriver on the Pharaoh. Min is not so sure. Unut believes we should send envoys to Cairo, to sue for peace.” He dropped the cigarette, crushed it out beneath a heel.

“My heart would stand with Horus,” Sekhmet said, in the voice of John Fortune, “but my head knows that Taweret is right. If we had the power of Ra—”

“If we had eggs we could have bacon and eggs,” Jonathan muttered. “If we had bacon.”

Klaus frowned. “What does that mean?”

“It means we’re fucked.”

Sobek nodded. “Aswan is our only hope.”

“And if the army follows you to Aswan?” asked Klaus.

It was Sekhmet who answered. “South of Aswan there is only Abu Simbel, and Abu Simbel is not large enough to support a tenth our numbers. If they will not let us be in Aswan, then the Nile must run red with blood.”

“I saw that movie,” said Jonathan Hive. “Skip the blood, it doesn’t work. Go straight to the death of the firstborn, maybe you’ll get their attention.”

So let it be written , thought Klaus, so let it be done. He had seen that movie too.

Nightfall found the three of them in John Fortune’s rooms, overlooking the Nile. Jonathan was on his laptop once again, checking flight times out of Egypt. “Fuck,” he kept saying, “I am so dead. Aswan is the closest airport that’s still open, would you believe it? And all the flights connect through Cairo! ”

“Perhaps God does not wish for you to go,” said Klaus. “If you leave us, who will bear witness for the world?”

“Wolf Blitzer. Katie Couric. Jon Stewart. Geraldo Rivera. Okay, maybe not Geraldo, he couldn’t bear witness to his dick if he found it in Al Capone’s vault.” The laptop gave a cheerful beep. Jonathan punched a key, read the screen, scowled. “Oh, look, another girl who wants to have John Fortune’s baby. This one’s pretty cute, at least. Why do I even bother with e-mail? All I get is spam, and girls sending naked pictures to the two of you. What am I, your pimp? No offense to your father, John. How come none of these girls ever send me naked pictures?”

“You turn into bugs,” said John Fortune.

“Ja,” said Klaus. “And you are very small, where women want men to be large.”

“That’s cold,” said Jonathan, stung. “I’ll have you know that I’m perfectly normal, Nancy Heffermann told me so in junior high. Anyway, size doesn’t matter. I could show you sites—”

“I was speaking of your heart.” Klaus thumped his chest with a closed fist. “Here.”

“Leave him be,” said John Fortune. To Jonathan he said, “The Pharaoh will take you to Aswan. From there you can a charter a plane to Addis Ababa or Nairobi, and connect to a flight back to Europe. Take my Amex card, I won’t be needing it.”

“The black card? That’s…dude, I don’t know what to say.”

Klaus could not listen to any more. He turned for the door. “Lohengrin, wait,” he heard John say, but he was weary of waiting, tired of talk. Just now, he wanted quiet.

He found it in the maze that was the New Temple, wandering through moonlit gardens and down long marble corridors. Red lamps glowed along the walls, mimicking the light of torches. Temple guards and acolytes watched him pass in silence, and once he turned a corner and came upon Anubis, attended by half a dozen lithe young priestesses. The light was too dim for Klaus to say whether it was Red Anubis or Black Anubis, but from the way the jackal-headed god stared at him it was plain he was not wanted, so he made an awkward bow and backed away.

Finally he found himself in a cavernous hall beneath a towering sphinx. She had a lion’s body and a woman’s face, which reminded him of Sekhmet, but she had the wings of an eagle, too, and ram’s horns coiling from her temples. She was some god, he was certain, though Klaus did not know her name. He wondered if his own god would hear, if he said a prayer to this one. His family was Lutheran, though he had never been especially devout. Church was for Christmas and for Easter. “Father,” he said, in a soft voice, “hear me now. We are lost.”

A pair of slender arms encircled him, and two soft hands covered his eyes. “And found,” a voice whispered by his ear.

Klaus knew that touch, that spicy-sweet scent, that voice. “Lili?” he gasped, incredulous. “Can it be you?”

“Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate, darling I remember the way you used to wait,” she sang. “My Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene.” The lyrics he had taught her. Her voice echoed in the hall, low, smoky, intoxicating.

Klaus ripped her hands away, whirled, and took her in his arms. When he kissed her, her own mouth answered him, no less hungry. The dark red lipstick that she wore looked black in the gloom of the hall, but her eyes shone silver pale. Klaus kissed her on each eyelid and then again upon the mouth, picked her up bodily, whirled her in the air. Breathless with laughter, she demanded that he put her down, and Klaus obeyed. “You are here,” he said. “You are truly here, in Egypt. But…but how?”

A half-smile brushed her lips, full of mischief. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

“No. Truly. Lili, what could you be doing here?”

Her face turned serious. “I could ask the same of you.”

That confused him. “I came for John.”

“And I came for you.”

That made him happy. “I have dreamed of you. But how could you know where I was?”

“The whole world knows where you are, my gallant knight. Every time your friend Hive uploads a new installment of his blog, a million people read about your latest exploits.”

“A million?” Klaus had no idea. “So many?”

“This week. By next week it will be ten million, if Hive is still alive. No one likes to find bugs crawling through their dirty laundry, least of all a caliph.”

“The Caliph will be pleased, then. Jonathan is going home.”

“Is he? Clever lad. He’ll live to blog again. You should go with him, Klaus. And take your friend John Fortune.”

“John will not leave. The Living Gods are his people.”

“Sekhmet’s people, you mean.” She took his hand. “Klaus, you are being used. The Living Gods are no more gods than the characters at Disney World. We’ve known for half a century that the wild card has a psychological component, so it is hardly surprising that here in the shadow of the pyramids some of those afflicted should mimic the forms of Isis, Osiris, and the rest, but to suggest that they are those gods…Kemel, the man who started this cult, belongs up there with Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard. Take a closer look at your new friends, love. They are very good at accepting offerings, you’ll find, but not quite so apt when it comes to answering prayers.”