“That doesn’t mean you understand what he tells you,” I fired back. “You and I already talked poker, remember? And it got to be obvious early on that you don’t know as much as I do.”
He took a breath. He didn’t want to lose control. I’ll give him that. “I’ve been gambling for hundreds of years.”
“And losing, until now you’re down to your last piece of real estate.”
“You’re playing as my proxy, and you’ll do as I say!”
“Go to hell!” I snarled. I jerked my arm out of his grip, then shoved him. He almost fell and pulled Gaspar down with him, but not quite. They both looked amazed at what I’d done.
So amazed that for a moment, nobody spoke. Then Timon said, in a soft voice that was scarier than shouting, “That was over the line.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” I answered. “Fire me? Kill me? No? I didn’t think so!” I turned and strode back into the ballroom.
And everybody watched me as I did. Maybe they didn’t know everything that had just happened, but they’d overheard enough. And in their world, a stooge just didn’t dis his own lord, not even one on the injured list like Timon. Not unless he had a death wish. So, even if they hadn’t been convinced I was tilting before, I hoped they were buying it now.
When we players got back to the table, I got a third Scotch, but since I didn’t want to get drunk for real, I nursed it. And tried to figure out when to make my move.
It was tricky, because a lot of times, the flop just misses you because it does. And when that happened to me, the Pharaoh wouldn’t need to change any of the cards. So how was I supposed to know when he was really doing it? I didn’t want to fire up the Thunderbird on every hand. I didn’t want to burn through that much power, and I was afraid one of my opponents would notice.
So I lost chips—and eventually the chip lead—sulked, and bitched, while Wotan threw taunts in my direction. Until finally it was the Pharaoh’s deal, I called a bet with the eight-seven of clubs and flopped an open-ended straight flush draw.
That meant I was a six-to-four favorite to end up with the winning hand. So when I didn’t, it would also be six to four that it was because the Pharaoh had screwed with the cards. In other words, now was the time to take a look.
The king of diamonds came out on the turn, and it really was the king of diamonds. Gimble made a big bet, and I had a decision to make. The chances of me picking up a straight or a flush had just dropped to thirty percent. And if I missed, I was going to end up seriously short-stacked.
But sometimes you just feel that you’re going to catch the card you need. And sometimes that feeling turns out to be nothing more than wishful thinking. Still, I had it, so I called, and the others who were still in the hand got out of the way.
The king of spades came on Fifth Street. Except that when I splashed the Thunderbird across the table, it blinked to the king of clubs, then back again.
Bingo! Or at least I thought so for half a second. Then I realized a flush wasn’t the nuts anymore. With a pair on the board, Gimble could have a full boat.
And if he did have me beat fair and square, would it matter if I proved that the one king was really a different king? The cards talk—that’s basic poker—he wasn’t even the one screwing with them, and the others all wanted me gone. That’s why they were colluding against me.
Suddenly scared, I looked at the Pharaoh and tried to figure out just how deep a game he was playing, just how exactly he was setting me up for kill. That shriveled, crumbling face didn’t give away a thing. All I saw was that his cheroot had gone out.
Gimble checked. I figured he wanted to sucker the man on tilt into bluffing, but it gave me a way out. I could check, too, and not risk any more than I had already.
But I realized I didn’t want to do that. I pushed all in, and Gimble beat me into the pot.
We turned over our cards. Gimble’s were the king and queen of hearts, which meant he only had trips. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but I felt a grin stretch across my face.
Reaching to rake in the pot, Gimble noticed my expression and hesitated. “What?” he asked in that scratchy voice.
“This.” I threw the Thunderbird, and this time, I put everything I had into it. I slammed it down on the tabletop like a sledgehammer.
Except, not a physical sledgehammer. It didn’t make the table break or even jiggle. Nobody’s chip stacks fell over. But all the other players felt it, and jerked back in their chairs. The king of spades turned into the king of clubs, and this time, it stayed that way.
I jumped up and stabbed my finger at it. Not the best poker manners, but I was excited. “I’ve got a flush, and that’s my pot!”
Gimble froze, not taking the chips, but not pulling his segmented tin hands back, either. Over the course of the night, he’d won enough and I’d lost enough that he’d had me covered. But not by much. Giving up this pot would cripple him.
“I felt you use magic,” he said. “I don’t know what you did with it. Maybe you changed the suit of the card.”
“Bullshit. You all know what the Pharaoh was doing. You were all in on it. But if I have to prove it more than I have already, let’s go through the deck. If I changed the card, there’ll be an extra king of clubs and no king of spades. If I just changed it back to what it really is, then there’ll be one of everything.”
Wotan shoved back from the table. “So you accuse us all of cheating?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, looking him in the eye not because it was easy but because something told me I’d better not flinch. “I understand it’s just part of the game the way you assholes play it. But you’re caught now. Let it go.”
He stood up. And up. Damn, he was big. “We don’t have to ‘let it go,’” he said, “if we dispute the claim.”
“I thought you guys cared about your reputations,” I said. “You’re going to look bad enough when the story goes around that you all teamed up to cheat a newbie. It’ll be worse if people hear that when I outsmarted you, you jumped me, four on one again, and murdered me because of it. Talk about bad sportsmanship! Who’s going to respect you after that? Who’s going to want to play with you?”
The Pharaoh chuckled in the ghostly whisper that was all the voice he had left. “The young man has a point. There’s gamesmanship, and then there’s mere brutality.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Wotan snarled. “Do you really think anybody’s going to care that we put an upstart human in his place?”
Timon stood up. “They will when they hear the full story,” he said.
Wotan sneered. “From who? You? Everybody hates you, and after he’s gone, you won’t be a lord anymore. What you say won’t mean shit to anybody.”
“What about what I say?” said a female voice.
We all turned our heads. Queen was standing in the doorway with white, glistening little creatures crawling over her body, and more scuttling around her feet. The things looked soft, like some kind of larvae, which I guess they kind of were. But if you looked close, you could make out the human shape of the heads.
A couple of Queen’s maids stood behind her. They had baby bug people crawling on them, too.
The Pharaoh chuckled again. “My dear lady. I assumed you’d returned home to complete the blessed event.”
“I asked Lord Timon to move me to a nice, quiet part of the hotel,” Queen answered. “Because I was still interested in knowing how the tournament would go.”
“And in getting back at me if the opportunity presented itself?” the mummy asked.
“Yes,” said Queen. One of her four hands gently caught a larva that was trying to clamber up onto her face. “What you did to me was… inappropriate even by our standards. And I promise you that if this human dies now, like this, I will tell all our peers just how lacking in grace and finesse the four of you truly are.”
Now it was Leticia’s turn to chortle. “Well, goodness. We can’t have that.” She winked at me.
> “No,” said the Pharaoh. “I daresay we can’t.”
Gimble made a raspy noise that might have been his version of a sigh. He finally pulled his hands back and left the pot to me.
Wotan raked the three of them with his glare. “I can’t believe this. Who cares what people say?”
“Well,” Leticia said, “it’s more hurtful when you understand all the words.”
Wotan clenched his fists and shuddered. I winced, expecting another furniture-smashing tantrum if not worse. But then he got himself under control and just growled, “This isn’t over. Between me and any of you.” He threw himself back down in his chair. “Someone, deal!”
Leticia shuffled. The Pharaoh made a show of moving his cigarette case and lighter off to the side, where they couldn’t reflect the cards when he dealt. Queen, her maids, and the babies went to join the spectators.
As I pulled in the chips from the center of the table, I said, “When Gimble got caught cheating before, he had to post an extra big blind six times in a row. Since that last hand was rigged for his benefit, he should do it again. And so should the guy who did the rigging.”
The Pharaoh smiled around his cheroot. “I concede, that’s fair.”
It was also lights out for Gimble. The penalty ate up the few chips he had left in nothing flat. He made a move because he had to, everybody called, and Wotan knocked him out with a pair of sevens.
Gimble stood up and said, “Nice game, everyone.” Then he offered me his hand.
I hesitated, wondered if this was his idea of a joke, then decided the hell with it and shook with him. This time, nothing jabbed me. He shook with the others, too, and then headed over to sit with Queen. A squirrel guy came scurrying to see if he wanted anything.
As the rest of us played on, I could tell almost immediately that things were different. Everybody was playing against everybody. They weren’t all just gunning for me anymore. That trick had failed, and, shifting gears as fast as usual, each of them had moved on to the next strategy. I still flashed the Thunderbird once in a while, just to be on the safe side, but the cards stayed the same.
At dawn, we all had about the same number of chips. I stood up, yawned—even though I’d gotten up late, it had still been one hell of a long day—and then headed over to where Queen and Gimble were sitting.
Away from the table, the light was dim. I was careful not to step on any of the grub babies on the floor. Although Queen and her people didn’t seem especially worried that someone would.
“I guess I owe you my life,” I told her. “Thanks.”
She inclined her head. “I did it to take back what the Egyptian took from me.”
“Still, I’m grateful. But how did you know to come in right when you did? You weren’t listening outside the room the whole time?” Despite munching disgusting snacks, exposing her private parts, and laying eggs in front of everybody, she somehow seemed too dignified for that. I could imagine her eavesdropping, but not while Timon’s flunkies in the lobby looked on.
“No,” she said, “of course not. But if you live through this, you’ll discover there are many kinds of magic. When I care to pay the price, I can become extremely intuitive.”
“Nice.” Especially for a poker player. I wondered if she’d been using it at the table before the Pharaoh got rid of her.
One of the babies started climbed up my pant leg. I let it. It was even smaller and lighter than a brownwing, so it wasn’t really bothering me. And you don’t score points with any mom by acting like her kid is repulsive. When it got up to my hip, I tried to stroke its pale gleaming head with my fingertip.
It opened up a mouth that already had teeth and snapped at me. I jerked my hand back just in time to keep from getting nipped.
A maid rushed over to get the larva off me. And Gimble said, “We all bite in our own different ways.”
CHAPTER TEN
After talking to Queen and Gimble, I looked for Timon, but he was already gone. That surprised me and made me nervous, too, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I ignored a last come-hither smile from Leticia and a final sneer from Wotan and dragged myself off to bed.
The next thing I knew, I was standing in a hotel room a lot swankier than the one in the Icarus, with a huge canopy bed, and Dom Perignon chilling in a bucket. French doors led to a marble balcony. I stepped out under a night sky glittering with more stars than I’d ever seen, even up in the Pamir Mountains. Smelling of salt water, a cool breeze brushed my face. The sea whispered in the distance, where waves broke to foam on a white sand beach.
Closer in were gardens with paths winding through them. The long building itself reminded me of the palace of Versailles—not that I’d ever seen it, but one of my high school teachers showed slides—and had a big bronze statue of King Neptune with his pitchfork out in front. Distinguished-looking men in dinner jackets and beautiful women in fancy gowns and diamonds strolled in the main entrance while valets parked their Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and Aston Martins.
Something nudged me to look down at myself. When I did, I saw that, for the first time ever, I was wearing a dinner jacket, too. Maybe it meant I was supposed to go eat dinner.
Feeling cautious but curious too, I wandered out into the hotel. But I never made it to the restaurant. The casino sucked me in. I stood and watched the rich guys and their girlfriends play roulette, blackjack, and baccarat until I felt the itch to do it, too. Maybe the same person who’d dressed me for this place had supplied me with cash or credit cards. I started to check my pockets, and then a familiar stink washed over me.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, turning around, “even here?”
“‘Even here?’” Timon asked. The grime on his cheeks had stripes in it where sludge had leaked out of his half-formed eyes. “Do you understand where we are?”
“It’s another ghost world, like the one the Pharaoh dumped me in, only a lot more complicated. I’m guessing this is your world of dreams, and this particular piece of it is somebody dreaming about Monte Carlo. Or maybe a James Bond movie.”
“Very good.” Timon waved his hand. “That’s our host over there.”
He meant a little bald guy in black-rimmed glasses. He was sitting at a roulette table, but it didn’t look like he was placing any bets, talking to anybody, or even sipping the huge margarita that looked like he’d sneaked it in from a Viva Vallarta. His face sweaty and slack, he just stared at the spinning wheel and rattling, tumbling ball.
“Is he dreaming about losing?” I asked. “He doesn’t look like he’s having any fun.”
“His unconscious wanted to dream about something else entirely. But I thought a fellow gambler would enjoy these surroundings.”
“If you want me to enjoy my surroundings, just do something about your BO. You can cut that poor bastard loose.”
Timon scowled. “Your attitude… but that’s what we’re here to work on, isn’t it? All right, if you like, we’ll go to the permanent part of this place. That’s easier anyway.”
The casino spun away like water swirling down a toilet. For a moment, in the center of the whirl, the guy with the ugly glasses was standing on a driveway in front of the basketball hoop mounted on the garage. His mouth moved, though I couldn’t hear the words, and he pretended to shoot. A little girl was actually holding the ball, and, her round face squinting with concentration, she did her awkward best to copy the motion. But it all blinked away before I could see if she scored.
Now Timon and I were standing in a supermarket parking lot at the east end of Ybor City. There was marching-band music—a brassy version of some Latin pop song—playing somewhere down Seventh Avenue, and a different marching band in green and white uniforms forming up a few feet away from us. The band members all had the same build and the same face, like toy soldiers. It was only their instruments that made one different from the next.
“Climb aboard,” Timon said.
I looked around. He was clambering onto a gold and purple parade float. It didn’
t seem possible that I’d missed it before. Maybe it really hadn’t been there.
I climbed up after him. He sat in the throne at the highest point on the thing. I found a place to stand beside the chair.
The drummers pounded out a cadence, and the marching band tramped out into the street. The float followed. It was the last thing in the parade. The big finish, like Santa on Thanksgiving. And as it neared the spectators crowded onto the sidewalks, they started going down on their knees.
“I thought,” said Timon, raising his voice so I could hear him over the band, “that perhaps you didn’t respect me as you should because you’d never seen the real me. You didn’t understand when I told you I’m a god.”
“First off,” I said, “I do respect you.” Well, his powers, anyway. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to do everything you say, even when my own judgment tells me different.”
“If you wanted my help to deceive the other players, you should have let me in on the scheme.”
“Is that what this is about? If we’d gone off somewhere private and talked, then staged an argument, the others would have been suspicious. Besides, the way we did it, you didn’t have to act. When you got upset, it was real.”
“It wasn’t your decision to make.”
I took a deep breath. Not a great idea since, even out in the open air, I was still inside his cloud of funk. “Look, I know you hate not being in total control. And I’m sorry if the way things happened worried you or made you feel dumb. But the trick worked. Gimble’s history. Isn’t that what’s important?”
“It’s not just the trick,” he said. “It’s everything.” He looked back out at the kneeling crowds. “I’m bored with this. Let’s make them livelier.”
The spectators jumped to their feet, stretched out their arms, and howled for his attention. Girls pulled up their shirts and flashed. Timon now had plastic beads in his hands, and he tossed them right and left. Jostling and shoving one another, people snatched them out of the air.
Timon turned his milky, seeping eyes on me and waited for a reaction.
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