Blind God's Bluff

by Richard Lee Byers

  “But you,” I said, “you’re different.”

  “I am,” he said. “And I swear that if you help me win, I’ll make you the steward of Timon’s holdings. You’ll run this place—this city—whenever I’m not here. If you throw in with me but I don’t win, I’ll still make you one of my deputies. I’ll protect you, provide for you, and train you to use your gifts.”

  “That sounds pretty good. What do you want me to do, throw off all my chips to you?”

  “No. Or rather, not until you and I are heads up. I want you to help me eliminate the others.”

  “How?” I asked. Even though I had a good idea.

  He took a cautious look around. It made his head bob more than it had been before. “You’ve picked up on the fact that all our opponents practice the shadow sciences in one form or another.”

  “If by ‘shadow sciences’ you mean magic, then sure. It would be hard to miss.”

  “It’s how they cheat. And how they expect others to cheat. So if we do it differently—”

  “We can fly under their radar? Isn’t that what you were trying to do with the gadget inside your arm? It didn’t seem like it worked all that well.”

  “No,” he said, “it didn’t. But there are other ways.”

  “Like signaling,” I said. In other words, telling your partner what cards you hold. Which helps the cheaters in several different ways.

  “Do I take it that you already know how?”

  I shrugged. “There are lots of ways. One of the easiest is putting chips on the backs of your cards. Where you put them shows what you’ve got. Or, you can brush the spot with your finger. Your partner just has to make sure he doesn’t blink and miss it.”

  “Excellent! If I don’t even have to teach you, so much the better. We just need to compare notes and make sure we’re both using precisely the same system.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry.”

  He hesitated. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said I know it when I see it.” Maybe this kind of shit was cutting-edge in Fantasyland, but back on my turf, every serious poker player had to learn to spot it. “I didn’t say I’d ever used it, and I’m not going to start by teaming up with you.”

  “Even though I’ve warned you what Timon is.”

  “Even though I halfway believe you. I made a deal with him, and, well, that’s that. But I appreciate you letting me know you’re into signaling. I’ll watch for it, and if I spot it, I’ll say so. And if Wotan gets pissed off again, don’t expect me to hold him back.”

  Gimble stared at me long enough that I started to wonder if he was going to take a swing at me, and “traditions of hospitality” be damned. Then he made a long, soft sound that I didn’t recognize at first. Eventually I realized it was how a thing that didn’t need to breathe had taught himself to sigh.

  “You really won’t survive without a stronger patron than Timon,” he said. “He’s on his way down, and you’re too human. It shows in everything you say and every choice you make.”

  “You never know. It might make me harder to read.”

  “For me, perhaps. But you have opponents who started out as human, or nearly so. They’ll know exactly how to use it.”

  “Well, I’m still going to stick with Timon.”

  “I see that.” He stood up, so I did, too. “So I suppose there’s nothing left to say except thank you for coming between Wotan and me.”

  He held out his hand, and I gave him mine. I felt a sting in the meaty part of my palm.

  I said, “Ow!” Gimble let go. I looked at my hand and saw a little bead of blood.

  Gimble saw it, too, then looked around. “Clarence!” he bellowed. “Clarence!”

  Clarence came running. Or scurrying. He was one of the little squirrel guys, about three feet tall if you didn’t count the tail, skin black and leathery where the gray fur didn’t cover it. “Yes, Lord!” he chattered. “Here, Lord!”

  Gimble stuck out his hand. “You made this,” he said.

  Clarence hesitated. “Yes, Lord. I mean, my crew did.”

  “Look at it closely. See if you can find a sharp edge.”

  Clarence hesitated, and then, working partly by squinting at close range and partly by touch, obeyed. “There is a tiny little rough spot,” he said at last. “But it will only take a second to smooth it out.”

  Using that same hand, Gimble grabbed him by the throat and jerked him off the ground. Clarence made choking noises, kicked, and pawed at the tin man’s wrist.

  “Then you should have taken the second when you had it,” Gimble said. “Now it’s too late. You’ve embarrassed me and injured Lord Timon’s proxy.”

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “it was just a pinprick!”

  Gimble kept on strangling the little guy.

  “Look,” I said, “you said I helped you. Put him down, and we’re even.”

  Gimble dropped him. Clarence thumped down on the marble and lay there gasping and shaking.

  “Thanks,” I said. Not because I really felt like thanking Gimble—right then, I wouldn’t have minded taking a sledgehammer to him—but because it seemed like the smart thing to do.

  Head bob-bob-bobbing, Gimble kept looking down at Clarence. “The champion forgave you,” he said. “He saved your life. Thank him.”

  “Thank you, sir!” Clarence wheezed.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “But I don’t forgive you,” Gimble said. “Not yet.” He made a fist and backhanded Clarence across the side of the head. It knocked the little guy cold and stretched him out on the floor. Blood flowed from the gash in his forehead—if squirrels have foreheads.

  As I knelt down beside him to make sure he was breathing, I said, “And you’re the guy who takes good care of your assistants.”

  “Yes,” said Gimble, “but this is only a serf. I’ll see you at the table.” He turned and walked away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I checked to make sure Clarence was still alive. He was. But he didn’t show any signs of waking up, and his cut was bleeding a lot, like head wounds do.

  I felt a shiver at the center of me. It was my mojo, waking up so I could use it to help the little guy. Except that I didn’t know how to do that.

  And the shiver hurt like a twinge of backache. Shoveling down a disgusting amount of food had helped, but I was still hung over from using too much magic the night before.

  I looked around. “I need some help!” I shouted.

  Some of Clarence’s buddies came running. So did some of Timon’s people. Their bosses might be rivals, but I didn’t see any sign of bad blood between the two groups. It wasn’t like Yankee fans and, well, everybody else’s fans.

  A guy from the Tuxedo Team had a first-aid kit and seemed to know how to use it. After a couple seconds of confusion, the rest of us pulled back and gave him room to work.

  Someone brushed up beside me. I looked down and saw A’marie.

  “Gimble clocked the little guy for no reason,” I murmured. “And if he wins—”

  “We’ll celebrate,” she said. “Because this is nothing compared to what Timon likes to do.”

  She was almost as good at guilting me as Victoria had been. I reminded myself that she’d said she’d be okay with it if Wotan moved in and started eating humans. So who was she to make me feel bad?

  It was just about then that Timon himself showed up. He was hanging onto the shoulder of a scaly brown guy—another little one, like the squirrel people—with a growth like a sailfish fin on his hairless head, using him for a seeing-eye dog. Fido jabbered to his lord, and then they headed in our direction.

  “Gimble just got done beating up one of his people pretty bad,” I said. “How does that sit with your ‘traditions of hospitality?’”

  Timon sneered like it was a stupid question. Up close, I could see a sluggish squirming at the back of each eye socket, and sludge seeping out of them like snails had been crawling on his face. He smelled as ripe as ever, but today, his breat
h was more onion-y.

  “Naturally,” Timon said, “Gimble is entitled to deal with his own underlings however he likes. How long have you been out of your room?”

  “I don’t know. A while.”

  “You should have sent someone to tell me. It’s nearly sunset. Come along.”

  He and Fido led me up to the mezzanine, then into one of the meeting rooms. There were only a couple candles burning, so it was even gloomier than the lobby. Still, the space had a feeling of solid security to it, like we were sitting in a bunker. I had a hunch someone had hexed it to make sure nobody could spy on us or mess with us while we were inside.

  And maybe someone had, but Timon still told Fido—whose real name turned out to be Gaspar—to stand guard outside the door. Then the old man picked up right where we’d left off before I went to bed, with the hand where I’d limped with jack-ten.

  I put up with it for a while. I wasn’t so conceited that I thought nobody could teach me anything about poker in general, or my opponents in particular. After all, Timon had known them for years, and I’d only met them last night.

  But after about twenty minutes, when it didn’t seem like I was getting anything out of it, I cut him off. “Look, I’ve read Super System. And Super System 2.”

  “What?”

  “I’m saying you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. So teach me more magic. That’s what I need to win.”

  He frowned. “Have you looked inside yourself? Do you honestly think you can draw as much power as you did last night?”

  I hesitated. “Well, no, but—”

  “Then you can’t afford to squander any trying to learn new tricks. You have to hold on to what you have to protect yourself at the table.”

  “Okay. I guess that makes sense. But you can at least tell me more about magic. Maybe that will help me.”

  “Well.” A little more goo oozed out of his left eye socket. “It’s a huge subject.”

  “Start anywhere. Start with me getting dragged to ancient Egypt.”

  He cocked his head. “What?”

  “When I was outside my body.”

  “All I know is that someone tried to keep you from getting back in, but you managed to break free of his grasp. I couldn’t perceive any of the details.”

  “Then let me tell you about them.”

  When I finished telling Timon about my trip to ancient Egypt and the five mes—Silver, Red, Shadow, and so on—he said, “The Pharaoh.”

  “I figured. But how did he split me into five different versions of myself? What would have happened if Big Ugly in the pit had eaten one of us?”

  Timon scratched his stubbly chin with long, dirty nails. It made a rasping sound. “I’m not sure I can explain it completely. There are many systems of magic, each based on its own view of reality. I’m not an initiate in the Pharaoh’s version.”

  “Well, do the best you can.”

  “All right. Modern humans tend to think of themselves as being all one thing. Or, at most, two: body and soul. But many esoteric philosophies see the spirit as made of separate elements that fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, or matryoshka dolls.”

  “Or the parts of an engine?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose. At any rate, if I’m not mistaken, ancient Egyptians believed that people have five souls, not just one. The individual just isn’t able to perceive it under normal circumstances.”

  I remembered the painful moment when my brain had tried to handle five different trains of thought at once. “Thank God for that. So what was the point of splitting the souls up?”

  “To cripple you.”

  “And why feed one of us to Godzilla?”

  “I can’t be sure. It could have killed you—the whole you. Or permanently crippled or enslaved you.”

  “Nice.” I mulled it over for a second. Then: “But here’s what I don’t get. I’m not sure that being split up really did weaken me. I—I mean, the self that I remember as being the real me through the whole thing—managed to work some magic, and another version of me did, too. I made a rifle, and he made a wall. Four of us working together fought our way through the giants where one probably couldn’t. Hell, once Shadow committed to the program, he was death on a stick.”

  “That’s because the Pharaoh underestimated you. If you’re strong enough, you can actually accomplish quite a lot by temporarily splitting off a part of yourself, or bringing one aspect to the surface and burying the rest. That’s because each part is in tune with certain forces and suited to certain tasks. By forcing you to divide, the bastard may actually have helped you develop a useful ability.”

  “Yeah, lucky me. All you guys keep jumpstarting me. It’s going to be great right up until the time it doesn’t work and I just get killed instead.”

  “Concentrate on protecting yourself and that shouldn’t happen.”

  “If you say so. But what are a person’s ‘aspects?’ What’s each one good for?”

  He leaned back in his chair, brought his hands up in front of his chin, and tapped the fingertips together a few times, like it was helping him organize his thoughts. Professor Hobo.

  “There are seven influences in all,” he said. “Or perhaps ten, but the classical system works better for me. The sun self is pure power. You can invoke it to act in matters involving creativity, health, and your ambitions. The moon self comes into play when you’re concerned with change and transformation. Mercury—”

  “Hang on,” I said.

  His scowl reminded me that he didn’t like being interrupted. “What?”

  “You’re telling me about seven selves. I split into five, so how does that match up?”

  “It doesn’t. I’m teaching you the system my masters taught me.”

  “Fair enough. But… ” I fumbled for the words to say what I was feeling. “The Pharaoh broke me into five pieces, and I think that’s where the… fault lines are now. I think that anytime I split, it’ll be the same.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “No, but that’s my hunch. So it’ll do me more good if you explain about the five Egyptian souls.”

  “I told you, I’m not initiate in the Pharaoh’s disciplines.”

  “But you’ve watched him. Studied him.”

  “True. But almost no one walking the earth today fully understands the old Egyptian religion. The Pharaoh and the few like him work to keep it that way.”

  “Just give me what you’ve got.”

  “All right. If you promise to focus on what I want to teach you afterwards. And understand that even when you’re at full strength, it’s dangerous to try to work any magic based on partial knowledge.”

  “Sure. I get that.”

  His mouth twisted in a skeptical kind of way. “I hope so. At any rate, let’s get through this quickly. The Ba is what we might loosely view as the personality.”

  “I don’t understand how I could have souls that don’t have anything to do with my personality.”

  “Well, you do! And you don’t. I’m trying to take a completely foreign way of viewing existence—one I don’t fully understand myself—and translate it into terms that will make sense to you.”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “The Ba is something like a copy of you. It’s the piece we could most easily mistake for the whole, and I think it’s the piece whose memories you kept after the aspects joined back together.”

  “Okay.”

  “The soul you called Silver may have been the Ib, or heart. That’s the part that lives on after death. Except that really, all the souls continue after death.” He cocked his head, waiting for me to complain about the contradiction.

  I decided not to give him the satisfaction. “I’m with you.”

  He frowned. “The ancients probably considered the Ib to be the finest, or potentially finest, and most important part of you. Although we can’t be absolutely sure.”

  “But we can be pretty sure it would have been bad to let a giant mons
ter eat him.”

  “Yes. The soul that looked exactly like you—or exactly like the Ba—may have been the Ren. Your name. The aspect that will survive as long as people talk about you.”

  “That makes sense. He was worried that we’d die and nobody would remember us. So he’s my ego, or pride, or something like that?”

  “Possibly. Particularly if you’re inclined to see it that way. The glowing red soul may have been the Ka. Your physical vitality. The dark figure was almost certainly the Sheut. Your shadow.”

  “My evil side?” That might explain why he’d kicked so much ass.

  Timon smirked. “Not necessarily, or not entirely. But then again, perhaps.”

  “Okay. Whatever they all are, how do I use them?”

  “I already told you, I have no idea. Which means we’ve been wasting time we don’t have to spare. Now, it occurs to me that, even though we don’t want you using any power, we can still work on your ability to visualize. I want you to be able to invoke your protective sign at will, instantly and effortlessly, as clearly as you can see me now.”

  I could see how that would be useful. So I put aside the rest of my questions and did what he wanted.

  It took a while. By the time we finished, I was hungry again, and glad to hear we were adjourning to a buffet in one of the rooms adjacent to the Grand Ballroom. But what I saw there killed my appetite.

  All the other players were already inside, although naturally, Gimble wasn’t eating. Neither was the Pharaoh. He was just puffing on another cheroot. I had a hunch it was the only physical pleasure he had left.

  The kitchen staff had set out several jars of half-paralyzed bugs for Queen, and she was chowing down. It was gross, but it wasn’t what rattled me. That was Wotan piling his plate high with raw bloody meat from a long silver tray. The meat lay in several heaps of different colors and textures, and, from the doorway, in the dim light, I couldn’t see any pieces I absolutely recognized. But I was pretty sure that if I went too close, I would, and it made me sick to my stomach.

  Wotan turned and grinned at Timon, Gaspar, and me. “Human!” he said. “Come try some of this. I caught her myself not two hours ago, and she’s very tender.”