Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,94
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.”