Inside Straight

He had no trouble finding the soldiers, though. The first man he slew was coughing when he emerged from the smoke, but as soon as he saw Lohengrin he raised his rifle. “Yield!” Klaus called out to him. “Throw down your weapon, and I will not harm you.” Instead the soldier dropped to one knee and squeezed his trigger. Klaus saw the muzzle flash. The round struck him near the temple and caromed off. “You cannot harm me,” he warned the man, his voice booming through his warhelm. “Yield.” The soldier fired again, and then a third time. By then Klaus was on top of him. When he swung his sword, the man raised the rifle to protect himself, but the ghost steel blade sliced through stock and barrel and opened him from neck to belly.

Klaus did not have the time to watch him die. Other soldiers had appeared by then, and they were firing, too. He gave them all the chance to yield. None did, though a few of them broke and ran when they saw him cutting down their friends. Perhaps they did not have the English to understand what he was saying. Klaus would need to learn the Arabic word for “yield.”

Riding through the smoke and slaughter like a ghost, Lohengrin soon lost all sense of time and place. No blood stained his ghost steel; his armor gleamed white and pure, unblemished, and his blade glimmered palely in his hand. “God wills it,” he remembered thinking—though, why any god would will such carnage, the white knight could not have said.

When the fighting ended, Klaus was hardly conscious of it. The fires had burned low by then, and a hot wind out of the red lands to the west had begun to dissipate the smoke. He realized suddenly that he could no longer hear the helicopter. Sekhmet had fallen silent as well. It had been a long while since he had last heard her roar. John, he thought.

Jonathan’s wasps had found him by then. They buzzed around his head, the thrum of their wings strangely reassuring. Klaus wondered how much Bugsy had seen of what had happened here. He turned his head, searching for the enemy, but all of the soldiers were dead or fled. Klaus let his sword and helm dissolve, but kept his body clad in ghost steel. “John!” he bellowed, rolling slowly across the battlefield. “John Fortune!”

In the end it was the wasps who found him, sprawled naked by the entrance to a tomb, where he had been protecting the jokers who had taken shelter within. John was drenched in blood, but none of it was his own. When Klaus tried to lift him he gave a gasp of pain. “My ribs,” he said. “I think they broke some. The bullets—they melt when they touch her flesh, but they still hurt. They hit like hammers.”

“You look ghastly,” Klaus admitted.

“I just tore a dozen men to pieces with my fingernails.”

“That was Sekhmet,” said Klaus. “She fought nobly.”

“With my fingers!” John’s skin was damp with sweat.

He looks forty years old, Klaus thought. His face had thinned to the point of gauntness, and he had lines around his eyes that had not been there in Hollywood. The red scarab that was Sekhmet sat above his eyes like some huge blood blister, making his forehead seem to bulge the way his famous father’s had bulged when he fought the Astronomer in the sky above Manhattan, a year before Klaus was even born. John’s skin had darkened, too; daily exposure to the harsh Egyptian sun had browned him several shades. That made him look more like Fortunato, too.

Some of the surviving jokers had emerged from the tomb. A hunchbacked woman with snakes for fingers offered Klaus a charred and torn blanket. He wrapped it around John Fortune to stop his shivering. His smooth brown skin was covered with dark bruises. Klaus unhooked his canteen from his motorbike to give him a drink of water. “Not too much, now,” he cautioned. “Sip.”

Between sips, John told him how the fight had started. The camp had been a small one, perhaps three hundred people, jokers and their families down from Port Said and Damietta. Even among the followers of the Old Religion, jokers were reviled if their wild card deformities did not mimic the old Egyptian gods, so these had chosen to take refuge in the Valley of the Queens, well away from the larger camps to the east. When word of them reached the New Temple, however, Taweret had dispatched the goddess Meret to bring them food, clothing, and medical supplies. John went with her, in case of trouble.

“When we first saw the helicopter, Meret waved to them,” John said. “She thought it was Ikhlas al-Din we had to fear, not the army. Then they touched down and the soldiers started pouring out. We did not know what to make of that. Meret told me to continue with the food distribution and went to speak with their captain. She was walking toward them when the soldiers opened fire. There was no warning, no reason given. They just started shooting. All I could think to do was let Sekhmet work the change, so we could fight them.” His voice was hoarse.