Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,27

have sent someone to tell me. It’s nearly sunset. Come along.”

He and Fido led me up to the mezzanine, then into one of the meeting rooms. There were only a couple candles burning, so it was even gloomier than the lobby. Still, the space had a feeling of solid security to it, like we were sitting in a bunker. I had a hunch someone had hexed it to make sure nobody could spy on us or mess with us while we were inside.

And maybe someone had, but Timon still told Fido—whose real name turned out to be Gaspar—to stand guard outside the door. Then the old man picked up right where we’d left off before I went to bed, with the hand where I’d limped with jack-ten.

I put up with it for a while. I wasn’t so conceited that I thought nobody could teach me anything about poker in general, or my opponents in particular. After all, Timon had known them for years, and I’d only met them last night.

But after about twenty minutes, when it didn’t seem like I was getting anything out of it, I cut him off. “Look, I’ve read Super System. And Super System 2.”

“What?”

“I’m saying you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. So teach me more magic. That’s what I need to win.”

He frowned. “Have you looked inside yourself? Do you honestly think you can draw as much power as you did last night?”

I hesitated. “Well, no, but—”

“Then you can’t afford to squander any trying to learn new tricks. You have to hold on to what you have to protect yourself at the table.”

“Okay. I guess that makes sense. But you can at least tell me more about magic. Maybe that will help me.”

“Well.” A little more goo oozed out of his left eye socket. “It’s a huge subject.”

“Start anywhere. Start with me getting dragged to ancient Egypt.”

He cocked his head. “What?”

“When I was outside my body.”

“All I know is that someone tried to keep you from getting back in, but you managed to break free of his grasp. I couldn’t perceive any of the details.”

“Then let me tell you about them.”

When I finished telling Timon about my trip to ancient Egypt and the five mes—Silver, Red, Shadow, and so on—he said, “The Pharaoh.”

“I figured. But how did he split me into five different versions of myself? What would have happened if Big Ugly in the pit had eaten one of us?”

Timon scratched his stubbly chin with long, dirty nails. It made a rasping sound. “I’m not sure I can explain it completely. There are many systems of magic, each based on its own view of reality. I’m not an initiate in the Pharaoh’s version.”

“Well, do the best you can.”

“All right. Modern humans tend to think of themselves as being all one thing. Or, at most, two: body and soul. But many esoteric philosophies see the spirit as made of separate elements that fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, or matryoshka dolls.”

“Or the parts of an engine?”

He shrugged. “I suppose. At any rate, if I’m not mistaken, ancient Egyptians believed that people have five souls, not just one. The individual just isn’t able to perceive it under normal circumstances.”

I remembered the painful moment when my brain had tried to handle five different trains of thought at once. “Thank God for that. So what was the point of splitting the souls up?”

“To cripple you.”

“And why feed one of us to Godzilla?”

“I can’t be sure. It could have killed you—the whole you. Or permanently crippled or enslaved you.”

“Nice.” I mulled it over for a second. Then: “But here’s what I don’t get. I’m not sure that being split up really did weaken me. I—I mean, the self that I remember as being the real me through the whole thing—managed to work some magic, and another version of me did, too. I made a rifle, and he made a wall. Four of us working together fought our way through the giants where one probably couldn’t. Hell, once Shadow committed to the program, he was death on a stick.”

“That’s because the Pharaoh underestimated you. If you’re strong enough, you can actually accomplish quite a lot by temporarily splitting off a part of yourself, or bringing one aspect to the surface and burying the rest. That’s because each part is in tune with certain forces and suited to certain tasks. By forcing you to divide, the bastard may actually have helped you develop a useful