Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,12

an impatient spitting noise. “I told you, I’m not like you. Now get a move on. We need to be at the table before the clock strikes midnight.”

I glanced at my watch and thought, no problem. We still had twenty minutes. A little clumsily, I held the door for him and steered him inside at the same time.

The concierge started toward us, his shoes clicking on a bare section of gray marble floor. Timon oriented on the sound and snapped, “I’m fine, traitor! Stay away from me!” The flunkies flinched. If they hadn’t realized he was going to find out what they’d all agreed on, they knew it now.

“We’re playing in the Grand Ballroom,” Timon said to me. “It’s the big arched doorway straight ahead.”

“I see it,” I said. It had a carving of a guy with wings falling out of the sky in the stonework above the opening. Now leaning on Davis’s arm, the mummy was hobbling inside. I guided Timon in the same direction.

We made it halfway across the lobby before things got complicated.

I was actually lucky I noticed as soon as I did. It was a big space, and even dozens of candles didn’t light it up like electricity would. And the vassals and thralls and whatever were pretty much just standing at their posts. They weren’t doing a lot of moving around.

But they were doing some, and suddenly, the motion wasn’t smooth anymore. It was jerky and jumpy, like a movie with some of the frames missing.

“Shit!” I said.

“What?” Timon asked. Meanwhile, the flickering got worse, like there were more frames missing between each of the ones I was seeing.

I tried to find the words to explain. “It’s like everything else is moving faster than us.”

“It is,” he said. “Fortunately, a gruntling could break this particular hex. Picture your sigil, and repeat this.” He rattled off words with a lot of consonants and hardly any vowels, in a language I’d never heard before. It sounded like he was puking up a cat, and the cat didn’t like it.

“What?” I asked.

He scowled. “There’s no time! Just visualize your sign and will the curse away.”

During my one whole hour of intensive training, he’d told me to pick a symbol to represent me and my mojo. Maybe just because we were sitting in the car, I chose the Thunderbird emblem. I pictured it now, with its long silver wings sticking straight out to the sides.

Then I brought the power shivering up from my insides. It wasn’t easy, but it had been a while since the brownwings, and I’d recharged my batteries at least to some extent. Since I couldn’t see any particular target, I tried to be a bomb again. To make the magic blast out in all directions and smash whatever had a hold on Timon and me.

Once again, the whole world seemed to lurch, but differently than before. This was like the hitch you feel when you step off the moving walkway back onto the regular floor in the airport.

Everything stopped flickering, and then I registered how the guys and women in the tuxes had gathered around to gawk at Timon and me moving in slow motion. I couldn’t see any sign that anyone had actually been trying to help us. Their eyes widened when we suddenly sped up.

Timon sniffed three times, then sneered like he could smell their unwillingness to get involved. He started to talk, probably to chew them out. Then, inside the ballroom, something bonged.

It had to be a clock striking the hour. We’d been stuck in slow-mo for twenty minutes.

I grabbed Timon and ran, dragging him along. One of the Oriental rugs slid under my foot. I almost went down and pulled the old man with me. But not quite.

The ballroom was fancy and full of candles like the lobby. The poker table with its covering of green felt sat in the pool of light under the chandelier. In the gloom on the far side of it were chairs for the flunkies the lords had brought along. The chiming grandfather clock stood beside the wall.

By the time I threw myself into the one empty seat at the table, there were only two bongs to go. The mummy clapped, too softly for me to hear. I wondered if his hands would explode into puffs of dust if he smacked them together hard enough to make a sound.

Standing beside me, Timon somehow oriented on the mummy, sneered, and said, “Was that you? It was a