Inside Straight

“The captain must have been Ikhlas al-Din. A member or a sympathizer.” Klaus remembered Meret from his last visit to the New Temple. A dark, slender woman, she’d had vines and lotus flowers growing from her head in place of hair. She was gentle, too, and even had some German. Who would want to kill such a woman? “It was a rogue unit,” he told John, hoping it was true. “This mad captain—we will report him to his superiors.”

“He’s dead,” said John. The scarab in his swollen forehead seemed to throb. “I tore his throat out.”

Klaus nodded. “We must get you back to the New Temple. Can you ride? Hold on to me. That is all you need to do.” One of the jokers helped him lift John Fortune onto the Enfield. “Hold me tight,” he told him. “It is not so far.”

~ ~ ~

They were walking down the hill road an hour later when they heard the roar of a truck coming toward them.

Klaus had been pushing the Royal Enfield along for almost a kilometer. Its tank had gone bone dry, but he could not bring himself to abandon it. When he heard the truck he let go of the handlebars and called up his blade and armor. He could feel the heat of Sekhmet beside him, and smell the sulfur stench of the smoke rising from her nostrils. John had changed back as soon as the bike had died, too weak to continue in his own flesh.

When the driver of the truck came round the rocks and saw them, he screeched to a sudden stop, his air brakes screaming like a chorus of damned souls. Behind the wheel, a man with the long snout and gray-green, scaly skin of a crocodile grinned at them. “Those motorbikes go faster if you ride them instead of pushing them along,” he called out. “So you are not dead. Good. Taweret sent me, to fetch her sister back. You can come, too.”

Klaus lowered his sword and let the ghost steel dissolve back into nothingness. Of all the Living Gods he had met, old Sobek was the one that he liked best. No more than five-six, the Egyptian had heavy shoulders, big arms thick with muscle, and the sort of hard, round belly that tells of a great fondness for beer. Where his fellow gods dressed like pharaohs in silken robes, golden collars, and jeweled headdresses, Sobek wore baggy pants, suspenders, and a stained photographer’s vest. His skin was cracked and leathery, more gray than green, and what he lacked in hair and ears he made up for in teeth. They were long and sharp and crooked, those teeth, stained brown and yellow by the rank black Turkish cigarettes he smoked.

Sekhmet sprang up onto the bed of the truck, and Klaus grabbed his motorbike in both hands and swung it up beside her, before climbing into the cab next to Sobek. “Meret is dead,” he told him, as he slammed the door. Behind them, Sekhmet curled up and began to lick her bruises.

Sobek put the truck in gear. “We know.”

“This time it was not jackals. The army—”

“We know that, too.”

“How? Jonathan? Did he send his bugs to you?”

“He called Horus on his cell phone.” Sobek wrenched the wheel around, and sent the truck roaring back toward the river. “They sent soldiers to the Valley of the Kings as well, and there we had no one to fight back. The generals say they sent the troops in to protect the sites against the vandals and tomb robbers who were threatening to despoil the graves of the pharaohs and their queens. Only terrorists attacked the soldiers, they say, that was how the fighting started. It was on the radio, and Al Jazeera. The Twisted Fists are the cause of all the blood-shedding.” He gave Klaus a sideways glance. “You two are the Twisted Fists. In case you were not knowing this.”

Klaus was shocked. “They call us terrorists?”

“Why not? You terrify the Caliph, I think. At night he dreams of the crusader’s big sharp sword and wets his bed. In the morning his wives all smell of piss.” He laughed. “General Yusuf has sent word across the river. Cairo wants you and Sekhmet handed over to him for trial. If we do that, he says, the rest of us may leave in peace. Leave for where, you wonder? Hell, I am thinking. Well, it does not matter. Taweret will never hand you over.

Sekhmet is her sister, a fellow goddess. Your friend would turn into bugs and fly away, and you would make the white sword come and go chop, chop, chop.” Sobek drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other slamming at the horn, one of his foul black Turkish cigarettes turning to ash between his teeth.

“What will you do?” Klaus asked him.

“Go to Aswan. Where else? There are more of us in Aswan.”

“You mean to flee?”