This is so, Klaus thought, but your neighbors and your kin, they want you dead.
It was dusk by the time they reached the Nile. Across the river, Klaus could see the lights of Luxor coming on. Over there were colorful bazaars, air-conditioned hotels, five-star cruise ships, fine restaurants, holy mosques, a modern hospital, museums full of antiquities, hot baths, and service stations with all the oil and gas a motorbike could want. Two divisions of the Egyptian Second Army had surrounded Luxor to "protect" the city from homeless refugees and joker terrorists alike, while navy gunboats patrolled the Nile to deny them any hope of crossing. The tourist-haunted ruins of Karnak and Thebes were on the east bank as well, just north of the modern city, but those, too, had been declared off limits to the dispossessed.
Kemel, the founder of the movement to revive the Old Religion, had dreamed of restoring the ruined temples and making them seats of worship again, but the world's archeologists and the ministry of tourism had defeated all his efforts. The ruins were too valuable as ruins; tourists were the life's blood of Egypt's economy. Denied access to the ancient sites, Kemel had instead acquired land on the west bank of the Nile, and there erected the great complex called the New Temple, three hundred acres of shrines, altars, fountains, courtyards, gardens, and statuary, with half a dozen Living Gods in permanent residence.
A heaving sea of humanity surrounded the temple walls as they approached. Most nights the priests who served the Living Gods fed whatever beggars had turned up at their gates on lentils and spiced mutton, but not on this night. The temple gates were closed and barred, the road leading to them impassable.
Cursing, Sobek swung the truck off the road and took it wide around, bumping through a cane field to the back gate. Even here the crowds were thick, and they finally had to abandon the vehicle. When the people saw Sekhmet padding toward them, her tawny skin bruised but still aglow, they parted before her like the Red Sea. Some went to their knees, while others salaamed. Klaus followed behind her, all but unnoticed. At the temple gate the guardsmen moved aside when Sobek barked at them in Arabic and snapped his teeth. They reminded Klaus of the Pope's Swiss pikemen; more ornaments than warriors, they carried tall spears and dressed as warriors of the time of Ramses the Great. No doubt the tourists loved them, but when Klaus tried to imagine them facing the soldiers he had fought today, it made an ugly picture.
Only when they were inside the temple grounds, hidden by the thick walls and velvet shadows, did the lioness halt, shimmer, and transform back into John Fortune. He looks stronger than before, Klaus tried to convince himself. When he spoke to Sobek in Arabic, however, he knew that it was still Sekhmet he was looking at. Sobek barked an order, and two acolytes came hurrying to help escort them to John Fortune's quarters, while two more went in search of food and water.
John's bedchamber was in the inner temple, off a corridor lined with ram-headed sphinxes where the younger priests and acolytes were quartered. Though not as large or grand as the suite that Klaus and Jonathan had shared at the Luxor in Las Vegas, the room did have a window overlooking the Nile. Klaus could see the lights of Luxor beyond the river, and the white sails of feluccas shimmering palely in the moonlight. A dozen wasps were crawling on the walls, glistening green; Jonathan was with them, watching.
"I leave him now," said Sobek, as the acolytes were washing John and dressing him in a linen sleeping gown. "So should you. Eat first, you will be hungry. Then go. He needs to sleep."
It was true. The body that John shared with the woman Sekhmet had not slept since the day they had burned his mother's house down and melted her awards. Whenever John closed his eyes, Sekhmet opened them again; when she slept, he woke and took his body back. The flesh that they shared kept going night and day. It was a young body, strong and healthy, but all flesh must rest.
Now it was Sekhmet who was awake, with John asleep within. Klaus was just learning to tell the two of them apart. They spoke with the same voice, but different words. They had the same face, but not the same expressions. Sekhmet used her hands in speaking more than John Fortune ever had. If I had spent twenty years in an amulet, moving would feel good to me as well, Klaus reflected.
Temple servants brought them beer and bowls of lentil stew. Klaus ate it all, though he was sick of lentils. "Sobek intends to go to Aswan," he said, tearing at a loaf of black bread.
"Sobek is a crocodile. I am a lion." Sekhmet had eaten only a few bites. The outlines of the scarab were plainly visible through the swollen skin of John Fortune's brow. "With the power of Ra we might have turned them," she said, in a weary voice, "but we are only half of what we might have been."
With the power of Ra, John might have turned the world to ash. Klaus kept the thought to himself. He had read enough old legends to know that it was never wise to argue with a goddess. "The secretary-general is in Cairo. They say he helped end the fighting in Sri Lanka. If the United Nations will send help—"
"Would Germany allow United Nations peacekeepers upon its soil?" Sekhmet spoke with scorn. "Why should the Caliph do what your German chancellor would not? The United Nations was a bad jest when I went to sleep, and now that I am woken I find it is a worse one. Even Sobek has more teeth than this UN."
Klaus studied his friend's face. He is John, and he is not. "Sekhmet, my lady—might I speak with John?"
His eyes narrowed. "If that is your desire." The words were curt. After a moment, though, the face before him seemed to soften. Klaus was still uncertain. "John?"
A wan smile. "Yes. I was dreaming."
"A good dream?"
"Kate was in it. Curveball." He sounded almost himself again, like the boy that Klaus had met on American Hero. Though John was almost two years his elder, somehow Klaus still thought of him as a younger brother, the same way he thought of Kurt and Konrad. "I shouldn't be dreaming of her, though," the boy went on. "When two wild cards get together . . . my mother told me of the risks as soon as I was old enough to understand. That's why she was always frightened for me whenever I did anything that might have . . . whenever I did anything."
"All mothers are fearful for their sons," said Klaus.
"Not all of them keep a detective agency on retainer as babysitters, though." John pushed a hand through his hair. "I'm surprised Mom hasn't sent Jay Ackroyd to bring me back yet."
"Perhaps you should go back. I did not like the way you looked today. Those bruises . . ."
"They're fading." John picked disconsolately at his bowl of lentils. "Bullets melt when they touch our skin."
"Ja," said Klaus, "but that is not to say they do not harm you. If you throw a rat in a canvas sack and beat on it with a club, the sack will not tear, but the rat will still be smashed. The bullets may be smashing you up inside. And if they shoot her lion with some larger round, a cannon or a rocket—"
"She'll die, and I'll die with her," John snapped. "You sound like my mother now. She flies, you know. That's her power. Bullets don't bounce off her the way they bounce off you. She can't shoot balls of fire or stop time or raise the dead, the way my father could. All she can do is fly. When she was my age, she had these claws made, like big steel fingernails, and whenever there was trouble she'd slip them on to fight. She fought the Astronomer and his crazy Masons, she fought the Swarm monsters, she even came to Egypt and fought the Nur's people, with only wings and claws! I'm her son as much as Fortunato's. I'm not going to hide away in some monastery for fear of who I am. If I die, I die. I'm staying."