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 feckless little ploy.”
“But helpful,” the mummy said, “whoever set the snare. Since he’s occupied your chair, I take this fellow to be your proxy. So it was necessary for him to prove he’s of the blood. And now he has, without a bit of wasted time. In fact, we could start playing immediately, if only you’d be so kind as to find a place among the spectators.”
Timon took a deep breath, then pointed his torn, eyeless face down at me. “Win,” he growled. He snapped his fingers, and a girl in a tux came scurrying. Her legs bent backward, and she didn’t have much in the way of feet. Her black little shoes were round.
Watching her lead Timon away, I suddenly felt like a little kid whose parents have just dropped him off for his first day of school. Or his first night in Dracula’s castle.
The mummy smiled at me around his cheroot. “But it’s only courteous,” he said, “to have a round of introductions before the cards start flying. Most people call me the Pharaoh.”
“Hi,” I answered. “I’m Billy.” Timon had told me not to give my full name.
“Lovely to meet you, Billy,” purred the woman on the Pharaoh’s left. “I’m Leticia.” When I really looked at her, I felt a shock, and for once, it wasn’t a surge of fear.
Leticia had waves of auburn hair, and big, shining green eyes. Smooth creamy skin and a strapless sequined evening dress that showed a lot of it. I could give you all the details, and you’d get the idea that she was beautiful, glamorous and sexy, but you wouldn’t really understand. Think of the girl who made you crazy in junior high, right when puberty kicked in. Or the actress who hypnotized you whenever you watched one of her movies, no matter how awful it was. That was Leticia.
My mouth was dry, and my heart pounded. She might have sunk her hooks into me right then and there, too deep for me ever to pull them out, except that I’d played against other good-looking women who used it to get the guys to go easy on them. So this wasn’t a new experience, just a familiar one amped to a new level. And, after things went bad between us, Victoria told me I’d rather gamble than make love, and maybe she was right about that, too. Put it all together, and it may explain why I suddenly realized I was in trouble.
I did what Timon had told me to do whenever someone was trying to hex me. I visualized the T-bird emblem, concentrating on it really hard. A shudder went through me. Afterward, I was still attracted to Leticia, but I wasn’t drunk with it anymore.
Leticia winked like we’d just shared a joke.
On her left-and my right-was a guy who, like the Pharaoh, shouldn’t even have been alive. He smelled like oil and was made of painted tin, hinges, and springs. With his hooked nose and chin, leering mouth, and head bobbing at the end of his long neck, he reminded me of a jack-in-the-box, and when he twisted in my direction, I half expected him to introduce himself as Jack. But, in a voice that hissed and popped like an old LP, he told me he was Gimble of the Seven Soft Rebukes.
On my other side was a scrawny woman with the round, blank, bulging eyes of a bug. She had four arms, all too skinny, all with too many joints, and all covered in bristles.
An open glass jar sat beside her chip stack. An assortment of insects crawled sluggishly inside, but didn’t fly, jump, or climb out. I guessed the lump of blue jelly gave off fumes that kept them drugged. The bug woman popped a grasshopper into her mouth and crunched it as she introduced herself as Queen.
The guy between Queen and the Pharaoh looked as human as Leticia or me. So you’d think he might not make much of an impression, not sitting at this table. But he did. I didn’t suppose he was really a whole lot bigger than Pablo Martinez. People don’t come a whole lot bigger. But he
“Wotan,” he rumbled. He stood up to offer me his hand.
Since I had a hunch what was coming, I wasn’t eager to take it. But table image matters, and I didn’t want to look scared. I got up again, and we shook.
If you want to call it that. Actually, he did his best to crush my hand. Since I’d been expecting it, I was able to squeeze back, but it still hurt. And creeped me out a little more, if that was possible, when I felt that he even had hair growing on his palm.
He stared into my eyes as we strained to mangle one another. His eyes were a muddy, bloodshot brown.
“I hope you realize,” he said, “a champion can lose as much as his lord. Sometimes he loses more.”
“And sometimes,” I said, just like I actually knew anything about it, “he kicks everybody else’s ass.”
“True enough,” the Pharaoh said. “I saw it happen in Punjab, two hundred years ago. So why not let go of him, Wotan, and we’ll see if he can do as well.”
Wotan couldn’t resist one last bone-grinding squeeze, but after that, he turned me loose. I sat back down and slipped my hand under the table, where I could flex the throbbing ache out of it without being obvious.
We didn’t have a dealer. We players were taking care of that ourselves. Queen was on the button, and her complicated four-handed shuffle was like a juggling act.
I took a breath and checked my stack. Timon wasn’t the chip leader, but he’d finished the previous night in decent shape. I checked everyone else’s. Wotan had the most, and Gimble, the least.
