AN OFFERING THE KING MAKES
D.J. Butler
“The trouble started,” Kamal Arslan said, “when we entered the videogame. This is wicked technology, and these are not gods. They are devils.” Arslan was a Druze soldier of fortune from Lebanon, the captain of the Shining Warriors, the freelance minitank company providing the bulk of the physical muscle. He was lean and well built, with streaks of gray in his black hair and neatly trimmed beard. Dressed in khaki, he wore a sidearm strapped to each leg.
“The trouble started,” Rex “Thrower” Grundy said, “when your men were so excited the Ramada had pay-per-view skin flicks that they couldn’t focus on their instructions about how to avoid getting crushed by these gods. Or devils.” His stomach was cramped; this was not what he had been trained for. The CIA had taught him how to finesse foreign traitors for information and to flip them. Now he was carrying a gun through a tunnel that was some kind of electronic mythoscape, a tunnel into the soul of Pharaonic Egypt built by a meth-addicted whiz-kid gamer champion.
Back when there was a CIA. Before the Social Wars of the 2030s had torn the United States into seven bloody chunks.
He envied Salem Chalabi, back in the arcade with the shimmering golden gate stretching between two old upright consoles. Pac-Man and Dig Dug, he recalled, though he hadn’t looked closely. In the real world, Chalabi was under attack in a crumbling arcade, adjacent to the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome built upon the ruins of an ancient temple to Isis.
The CIA had prepared Grundy for none of this.
Chalabi and Jason Pointer would both have insisted on the phrase “physical world” rather than “real world.” To be fair, this virtual world had imposed quite a bit of real injury and death on the team that had dared to enter it.
“Gods, devils,” Pointer said in his crisp received pronunciation. The Surrey-born wizard was wrapped in a strange panther-skin garment. He clutched his baked-clay curse doll to his chest. Short and stubby, he tended to trip over his own feet as he walked; rather than giving him dignity, the costume made him look comical. “Potayto, potahto. Does it matter?”
Pointer ignored the digitalized bat-like creatures overhead, the long-limbed crocodiles in the shadows, the phantom turreted droids surrounding the company on the ground, materializing to fire bursts at the surrounding monsters and then fading out of sight, and even the real growling M1461 Minis, reduced from their original twelve to a mere seven. He was focused on a shimmering golden gate before them, an immense structure that stood out of the streams of alphanumeric data cascading from the infinite darkness above, solid and glorious, at the top of a short ramp. Two red serpents hung from the massive golden lintel, spitting flames. Within the gate sat a man with a ram’s face and curling horns growing horizontally left and right from his scalp. Above the horns sprouted a high crown shaped like a golden cone surrounded by feathers. He held a shock of grain.
The ram-headed man was thirty feet tall, if he was an inch.
Grundy studied Pointer’s face. He wasn’t looking at the gate, he was looking through it.
“It matters,” Grundy insisted. “There’s a difference between a god and a demon, and there’s a difference between one god and another. It matters who’s in charge! And you believe that too, Pointer, or you’d just let the Pharaoh take the world!”
Arslan spat. His spittle left his mouth as fluid and struck the ground as a string of data that scattered on impact. “The antiputrefaction charm did not work.”
Pointer’s head swiveled around sharply. “Your men didn’t wear it, Captain. I told them to keep it on their persons, and they hung it inside their tanks, instead, like fuzzy dice in some cheap muscle car.”
“You should have been clearer!” Arslan snarled.
Pointer shrugged and looked back at the gate. He gripped the curse doll with both hands; it was an image of a tall-crowned mummy holding a crook, flail, and long staff, with a knob atop it fashioned into an animal’s head. The image was instantly recognizable, as an age-old evocation of Egypt, and also as a representation of the Pharaoh Death-Manifest-in-Fire, the Son of Ra Jimmy Whitlock. The god they had come to kill. “I was clear.”
Chalabi’s voice echoed from the mezuzah-like medallions hanging around all their necks. “I can’t hold out much longer, my peeps.”
Grundy looked around the company. “Looks to me like your turrets are winning,” he said.
Chalabi’s voice dripped with pride. “I can blast bats and crocs all day, that isn’t the issue. My problem is in meatspace, bruv. The physical world.”
“You’re under attack?” Arslan asked.
Pointer was already slowly advancing toward the gate. “Stay close to me,” he called.
“You got it, bruv.”
“What about the soldiers we left to defend you?” Grundy asked. “Ogbuwa and his men?”
“They’re pretty great with submachine guns, bruv. But you know what submachine guns really suck at? Killing waves of flesh-eating scarab beetles.”
Grundy cursed.
“That’s how I feel, too,” Chalabi said. “Guess we should have gone with flamethrowers. I’m just telling you, you have ten minutes, max.”
“And then what?” Arslan asked.
“Either I scram, bruv, or I get eaten.”
“And we lose the turrets’ support?” Grundy watched a row of turrets leap into view, annihilate two charging crocodiles, and disappear again.
“You lose the tunnel,” Chalabi said.
“And we . . . what?” Grundy asked. “Die?”
“Ask the wizard, bruv.”
“Pointer!” Arslan snapped. “The . . . videogame . . . collapses in ten minutes. What happens then?”
Pointer nodded. “Ten minutes will be enough.” He began climbing the steps.
“That wasn’t what I asked.” Arslan rushed to catch up to Pointer. Grundy followed. He drew his pistol; not that it would do anything to the ram-headed titan, but the weight felt reassuring in his hand. “We needed the game to get here, right?”
Pointer nodded. “We had to triangulate. Not having the full liturgical apparatus, not to mention the hieratic authority, we needed two entry points into the collective unconscious from which to work out the right angle. Hence, the stolen papyrus—the Book of Going Forth by Day—and the videogame. And it worked, see?”
“Triangulate?” Grundy asked. “What does that even mean? How do you triangulate from a videogame and a papyrus to . . . this? At most, that’s a metaphor!”
Pointer faced the intelligence agent. “Thus you take the first steps on the road to understanding my arts.”
“None of this answers my question!” Arslan snapped.
Pointer ignored him.
The ram-headed giant stepped forward out of the gate, raising his shock of grain like a weapon. “I am He Who Cannot Be Cut,” he thundered. “I am He Who Triumphs. I repel the demolishers. Who are you and what is your business?”
This was not the first gate the company had faced. Grundy had lost track, but he thought it might be the seventh. At each gate, the wizard had been the one to get them through. At the third, five minitank crews had rotted to corpses before his eyes. Pointer turned now, and gestured to Arslan. “This should be the last gate. Make sure your men have their gum ready.”
Arslan grunted. “Hotep gum.”
“Hetep gum!” Pointer hissed. “Like it says on the wrapper!”
Grundy checked his own small brick of gum; it hadn’t fallen from his pocket. It reeked of yeast through the foil wrapper bearing the printed word HETEP.
Arslan spoke into the small comms unit on his wrist. “Ready hotep gum. Do not deploy until my signal.”
Grundy heard a baffled laugh from the open hatch of the nearest M1461. The tanks were small, sized like sedans. The two-man crews occupied the turrets on top, only lightly shielded by sheets of steel angled like the windshields of a convertible. An autoloader and a self-driving AI let the minitanks operate with minimal crews and made the vehicles highly maneuverable. Given the narrow tunnels and broken terrain the team had traversed, Grundy was certain larger tanks wouldn’t have gotten this far.
Pointer knelt before the giant. “I come to you, Osiris,” he declaimed, “to be declared free of evils. May you circle Shu. May you see Ra and all the dead. You sail in the night bark around the Akhet! You have made the excellent path that leads me to you!”
“I’m just about ready to let the Pharaoh have Rome,” Arslan muttered. “This has gotten way too strange.”
The snakes hissed and spat fire.
“Pass,” the giant rumbled.
Pointer walked through the gate. He moved slowly, with measured strides, as if he were in a convocation or walking a bride up the aisle. Arslan and Grundy followed. The tanks rolled slowly behind them.
“I might have overestimated the time, bruv,” Chalabi’s voice announced. “You might have five minutes now. Uh . . . maybe four.”
“It’s enough,” Pointer said.
Grundy’s heart rattled free and crazy in his chest. Sweat on his palms made it hard to grip the pistol. He shot a look over his shoulder; the last two M1461s rolled forward with their swiveling turrets pointed behind them, firing. Was he seeing fewer of the phantom turrets now? And more of the bats?
The space beyond the gate was split into two halves. Grundy squinted and tried to focus on the space where the two halves met, looking for a seam or a joint, but he couldn’t find one. To his left, a black cave and a huge beast. To his right, a golden-walled audience hall, and two high-crowned giants on thrones. The golden walls radiated light, but the shining beams evaporated into twists of smoke as they penetrated the cave. The beast lurking in the shadows was immense and had a long, toothy muzzle.
In the center, a golden table, piled high with loaves, jugs, and joints of meat.
As he stepped through the gate, one of the fire-spitting snakes thudded softly to the ground, to his right and behind him. The second followed immediately afterward, on his left.
Grundy’s knees wobbled. Why was he here? Why, really, was it his business whether the Pharaoh Death-Manifest-in-Fire, the Son of Ra Jimmy Whitlock, the former neopagan lecturer and obsessive gamemaster of the obscure tabletop role-playing game, The Valley of the Pharaohs, took Rome? Grundy was just a cultural attaché to the embassy of the United States of New England. He did a little light intelligence work, rescued a field operative here and there, and threw around a football with embassy staff on Thanksgiving, imagining how his life might have been different if he’d gone on to play in college. He could still get a flight out if he wanted, even if the Pharaoh refused to recognize his diplomatic credentials, even if his cover was blown.
But instead of going home, he had taken Pointer, after meeting him at an exhibit of stunning shabti figurines at the Vatican’s Gregorian Museum, to meet with Arslan. Arslan’s enthusiasm for resisting the Pharaoh had been infectious enough that Pointer had finally stopped whining about the girl, Marian, who had just dumped him. When Grundy had pointed out that the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva was really sopra the old temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis and was next door to, of all things, a videogame arcade, Arslan had taken them all to meet Chalabi.
And somehow, over sake and sushi, but mostly sake, they’d hatched this plan.
Did he just want to experience adventure?
The thing with the long snout roared in the shadows.
Grundy stagger-stepped sideways as the creature emerged fully into view. Its gait was lopsided; front legs that resembled those of a lion prowled with grace, while the hind legs, which resembled those of a hippopotamus, thudded dully up and down, thrusting a gray rump from side to side in a determined waddle. The beast seemed to be fighting an internal battle to move at all. The result would have been laughable, but for the train-car-sized crocodilian snout that protruded from the front of the affair. The teeth jutting up and down from the green-skinned jaws of the monster were each as tall as Grundy, if not taller.
“God help us,” Arslan said. “Pointer, do we attack it?”
“No,” Pointer said. “We came here to chew gum, not to kick ass.”
“Deploy hotep gum,” Arslan said into his comms unit.
Grundy looked at the tank crews. Of the seven, five—ten men—dutifully popped the brick of gum into their mouths and chewed. Arslan and Pointer and Grundy all did the same.
Two crews, four men, didn’t.
The two giants stood and approached.
“I said deploy hotep gum!” Arslan barked. “Yossy, you idiot, did you hear me?”
Yossy’s voice came out of the comms unit loud enough for Grundy to hear. “Uh, gum already deployed, sir. A couple hours ago.”
“I chewed mine last night,” said another voice from the wrist-bound device. “It’s disgusting.”
Pointer shook his head. “I’m sorry, Captain.”
The soldiers were right; the gum was foul. It was supposed to taste like bread and beer, and if Grundy closed his eyes and concentrated, he could find those flavors. But it wasn’t a delicious bread, it was some sort of oat or barley loaf, unsweetened. Mostly what Grundy tasted was yeast.
He gagged, but kept chewing.
“What’s going to happen to them?” Arslan asked.
Again, Pointer ignored his question. “We approach the table,” the wizard said.
Grundy’s hands were shaking. He followed Jason to the table. The two giants strode up to the table, too, and stood to their right. The huge beast shuffled up on the left and stood snuffling the air.
“Pointer!” Arslan snapped. “What’s going to happen to my men?”
“We have to eat the meal before we can talk to Isis and Osiris,” Pointer said. “Don’t any of you read? This is the meal with the gods. It’s the offering the king makes.”
“Who’s the king?” Grundy asked.
Pointer shrugged. “The answers to all the really important questions are ambivalent. Or multivalent, really. Is the king the initiate approaching? Is the king Osiris there? Is the king someone else entirely? Is the king Salem Chalabi and his videogame?” Pointer shrugged. “Yes.”
“The gum is to fool someone into thinking we’ve eaten the meal when we haven’t?” Grundy eyed the loaves and jugs.
“Well, you can’t actually eat the meal.” Pointer snorted. “Not without the right preparation, anyway. You guys don’t read, do you?” The wizard was looking at the female giant. Whose crown seemed, strangely, to be a throne. Or perhaps she was a throne, with arms, legs, and a face. A lovely face, with full lips and large eyes. The thrones on which both giants had been sitting were gone—the woman, somehow, was the thrones.
Grundy eyed the male giant closely. Wrapped in linens, clutching crook and flail and a long, animal-headed staff, the giant was a dead ringer for the curse doll. And a match for the Pharaoh Jimmy Whitlock.
His stomach cramped so hard, he almost fell over.
The monster swung its bus-sized snout over the company. Saliva spattered Grundy in the face and the floor all around him. He could hear the beast sniffing.
“What do you call that thing?” he asked, pointing.
The wizard looked at him calmly. “Her name is Ammut, and she will take her due.”
The snout poked in Grundy’s direction. A nostril the size of a refrigerator, not one of the ridiculous tiny refrigerators they had in Rome, but a full-sized, American-style refrigerator like the one he had back in Worcester, dilating and contracting, sniffed the intelligence officer . . .
Grundy exhaled into the enormous schnoz, blowing the smell of yeast in a redolent cloud.
Ammut grunted and moved on.
Grundy didn’t have a heartbeat anymore, just a stabbing pain in his chest that wouldn’t relent.
He heard the slapping of boots. Turning, he saw four of the tankers rushing toward the table. He recognized Yossy, who was the fastest and in front. He was still trying to think of the others’ names when Ammut lunged forward and scooped two of them up in a single bite.
Blood spattered everywhere. A severed arm hit Grundy in the chest and landed in front of him. He kicked it as far away as he could, not wanting to attract Ammut’s attention again.
The tanker whom Ammut had missed pulled his sidearm and fired at the creature’s eyes. The pop of gunfire echoed across the chamber as he emptied his magazine.
One of the tanks swiveled its guns around and fired. Both the .50-caliber machine gun and the tank’s 125-millimeter main gun blasted Ammut in the side of her leathery jaw.
With one leonine paw, Ammut reached forward and smashed the soldier flat. Then, with the single minitank still hammering her in the head, she snaked a long, pink tongue through her foremost teeth and licked the dead soldier off the floor.
Snakes. That reminded Grundy, where were the two snakes? He scanned the room and found them, one coiled around each of the giant woman’s legs.
That didn’t reassure him.
“Uh, my peeps,” Salem Chalabi’s voice cut into the hectic scene from three directions, “you’re on your own, I gotta—aaaaaaaaaaaagh!”
His scream cut out abruptly.
Ammut swung ponderously around to face Yossy, the last of the gumless tankers. Yossy had reached the table, and was furiously munching bread and swilling beer. The golden liquid sloshed from the clay vessel’s wide mouth and splashed him in his khaki shirt.
Ammut leaned forward to sniff Yossy.
Yossy belched.
Ammut swung her elongated face from side to side, slowly. Pointer and Arslan both ducked. Then she raised her crocodile snout, rising up on extended catlike forelegs, and bellowed at the unseen ceiling of the cavern.
“An offering the king makes!” Pointer shouted. “Bread and—”
Yossy leaped forward and knocked him to the ground.
The snakes wrapped around the giant woman’s legs hissed and exhaled jets of crimson fire.
The cavern floor shook. “Salem,” Grundy said into his mezuzah. Then he remembered. Salem Chalabi was dead.
Yossy was growing. He loomed over the wizard in the panther skin, and he was ten feet tall already, and still swelling. His head was deforming rapidly, nose lurching forward into a birdlike beak, hair sweeping up and becoming featherlike.
“Target Yossy now,” Arslan said into his wrist communicator. “Kill him.”
A burst of machine gun fire ripped across the front of the golden table. The bullets threw the expanding Yossy backward. They knocked him up and onto the table. Joints of meat and beer jugs fell to the floor. The jugs shattered on impact.
Grundy threw himself to the ground. He crawled to Pointer. On his back and breathless, the magician was still staring at the giant woman.
“Who is she?” Grundy asked. “What’s so fascinating about her?”
“She is Isis now,” Pointer murmured. “But that is nothing.”
The wizard stood. Grundy stood with him and dragged him sideways, away from the table and the gunfire. Pointer resisted, but Grundy was stronger and wrestled him out of harm’s way.
Scraps of meat and bread flew in all directions. Yossy, now fifteen feet tall, stood atop the table and roared. He had an ax in his hand. Where had the ax come from?
Pointer was chanting incomprehensibly. Grundy shook him.
“We have to do something!” Grundy shouted.
“Shut up!” Pointer screamed. “I am doing something!”
At least he was looking at Yossy and not at Isis.
Isis and the Pharaoh gazed down upon the mayhem. The Pharaoh’s face was frozen, expressionless. What was the look on Isis’s face . . . curiosity?
The hall shook again.
Yossy leaped to attack, and took a tank’s sabot round in the chest. The bird-headed giant slammed back into the table and skidded across the floor. He struck the Pharaoh’s foot, and the Pharaoh murmured a deep, uneasy sound.
The two giant snakes spat fire. The heat warmed Grundy’s forehead and cheeks.
Yossy stood unharmed and roared.
“Finished,” Pointer said.
“Finished what?” Grundy shrieked. “Nothing has changed.”
In a split second, Yossy leaped across the space between himself and the first minitank. His ax swung left and right in his hands; the tank gun sheared away from the body of the M1461, flying straight up. The treads were blown off, and the minitank screeched to a halt. Yossy was already flying past, ax raised over his head with both hands as he bore down on the second minitank.
Before the first minitank’s crew could evacuate, the severed gun barrel crashed down on the turret, crushing both men instantly.
“An offering the king makes,” Pointer said again, facing the golden table with his arms upraised, elbows squared, the baked-clay curse doll in his right hand. Isis and the Pharaoh turned to look at him.
Yossy split the second tank horizontally, as if he were slicing open a roll to make a sandwich. Fire engulfed the turret. Another sabot round struck him and knocked him to the ground. Captain Arslan jumped on Yossy. The Druze soldier of fortune had a long knife in his left hand and a pistol in his right. He slashed at Yossy’s birdlike face and fired point-blank into his chest, over and over.
Yossy roared in irritation. He hurled Arslan at Pointer.
The knife and pistol went flying, disappearing into the corners of the chamber. The tank commander crashed into Pointer. They both hit the ground. Arslan lay still, his neck bent at an extreme angle, blood trickling down his chin.
Yossy stood. He gripped the front of a third minitank’s chassis and flipped it onto its top. The treads continued to churn, and the main gun fired once in protest, but the men inside were crushed.
“You did nothing!” Grundy shouted at the wizard. He fired several rounds at the giant Yossy, without effect.
“Shut up!” Pointer stood, raising his arms again. “An offering the king makes, bread and beer for the ka of the Osiris Jason Pointer, true of—”
CRASH!
Grundy didn’t see what walls the tanks broke through, but suddenly the room was choked with rubble and dust. A flying stone struck the magician between the shoulders and knocked him down. The Pharaoh and Isis grunted wordless objections, and minitanks rolled into view, firing.
Five minitanks.
They were Arslan’s men—Grundy recognized them immediately—the ten crewmen who had messed up the antiputrefaction charm. Arslan had left them behind after they’d rotted to death at the third gate. They were still decaying, flesh peeling from hands and faces to reveal white bone, but now they were in motion.
Three charged Yossy, firing. Two raced straight ahead, toward the flame-spitting serpents. The snakes leaped into the air, and Grundy saw for the first time that they were winged. Fire rained down around the room.
Grundy dove under the table to avoid the flames. Pointer stood again, shaking dust from his panther skin and coughing.
“See?” he shouted.
From the dark side of the chamber, Ammut emerged again. She sniffed the air, roared, and grabbed the nearest zombie minitank in her jaws.
Apparently, the decaying men hadn’t chewed their gum.
The tank in the monster’s jaws buckled, but the men fell from it. They were putrefying, but they kept fighting. One dragged himself slowly up Ammut’s hippo-like tail and the other crawled up Yossy’s back. Then dead men and living men and whole minitanks, sprockets, idler arms, roadwheels, and thrashing creatures coalesced into chaos. Grundy had to look away.
On the other side, a zombie tank had impaled a flying snake on its main gun. Its companion tank lay smoldering, and two burning dead men fought the second snake hand to hand under a hail of their comrades’ machine-gun fire.
“An offering the king makes,” Pointer began again. Grundy rolled out from under the table to watch him. The only way Grundy was making it out of this self-imposed hell was by whatever road Pointer planned to take. “Bread and beer for the ka of the Osiris Jason Pointer, true of voice.”
He picked up a morsel of bread from the table and ate it.
Isis immediately spun to look at him. Her lips moved, and for the first time, she formed comprehensible sounds. “Jason,” she murmured.
“Marian,” he said.
The stabbing pain in Grundy’s stomach nearly knocked him down. The hall shook, and the golden gate crumbled, collapsing in on itself.
The Pharaoh noticed, too. He turned to look down at Jason Pointer, and he laughed.
“This is the end of the road, Whitlock.” Pointer raised the curse doll over his head with both hands and slammed it on the edge of the offering table.
Nothing happened.
He slammed the clay doll again, and a third time, and it didn’t break.
The Pharaoh laughed. “You have greatly overestimated yourself, Jason Pointer,” he roared. The floor shook at the sound of his voice. “And you have greatly underestimated my power. Or, as the ancients used to say, you come at the king, you best not miss.”
“Help me!” Pointer screamed to Isis.
She shook her head.
The curse doll dropped from Pointer’s shaking hands and rolled across the floor toward Grundy. He heard monsters roaring, and the hissing of flames, and the dull thuds of firearms, but they all sounded far away as he stared down at the baked-clay replica of the Pharaoh.
Pointer shouted and waved his arms. The Pharaoh strode forward.
Grundy still had his pistol. Pointing it at the figurine, he squeezed the trigger. The curse doll leaped and spun through the air, but when it landed, it was still intact.
The Pharaoh swung his crook like a croquet mallet. He hit Pointer, sending the man flying across the room. Pointer, somehow still alive, stood up just in time for the Pharaoh to slam his flail down on the wizard’s head.
The magician rolled away from the impact. He was bleeding, but he still shouted his mumbo jumbo and waved his arms. Where was he getting this resilience? Was it from his chant at the table?
Grundy wanted to be able to take a beating like that, and still fight. He’d need it if he was going to get out of this mess. He scooped up the curse doll and set it on the table—didn’t want to lose track of that. He holstered his gun and then raised both arms. Fortunately, CIA training had given him a strong memory.
“An offering the king makes,” he said. “Bread and beer for the ka of the Osiris Rex Grundy, true of voice.”
The battle to his left split apart into halves, suddenly, and through the crack in the middle, Ammut charged. Was she running toward Grundy? He grabbed the nearest object to hand, heart thudding violently, and hurled it at her.
It was the clay figurine.
The curse doll flew in a perfect spiral, straight through the dust and the noise, and—in the words of Coach Henderson—hard enough to pound a nail into the wall of a barn. If Rex Gundy had thrown like that in every high-school game of his senior year, he would have ended up in the Superbowl.
Ammut roared, opening her crocodile jaws wide, and the clay statuette went right down her gullet.
She stopped, fell silent, and blinked.
Pointer had eaten something, Grundy remembered. He grabbed a scrap of bread from the table, spat his gum on the floor, and ate the bread, hoping he didn’t metamorphose into a bird-headed troll.
Pointer rose unsteadily to his feet, shouting. The Pharaoh raised his crook to swing it again, but then stopped.
He turned and look back at Grundy, and then at Ammut.
“What have you done?” he growled.
Grundy swallowed, his throat dry. “Bread and beer for the ka of the Osiris Rex Grundy!” he shouted. Beer, there was beer on the table. He turned and found a jug that hadn’t been shattered. He gulped down the warm liquid, which had a strong yeasty flavor, much like the hetep gum. “True of voice!”
“What have you done?” the Pharaoh roared.
Ammut bellowed, and to Grundy’s ears the sounds seemed to harmonize.
The Pharaoh spun about, took a long step, and a second, then collapsed to the floor.
Grundy tried to sidestep the falling crowned mummy, but as he moved, he felt himself growing larger. The pain in his stomach stabbed him one final time as he feared he was transforming into a bird-ogre as Yossy had, but then the pain was abruptly gone, and he was standing beside a beautiful woman.
“Hello.” She smiled at him. “I am the Isis Marian Seidel.”
He nodded. “I am the Osiris Rex Grundy. Some people call me Thrower.”
“The Pharaoh has died,” she said. “The Osiris Jimmy Whitlock has had his resurrection revoked, and is in the belly of Ammut.”
“Don’t worry,” he said to her. “All is in order. The Pharaoh is dead. Long live the Pharaoh.”
He didn’t know where the words came from, but they felt right.
“What shall we do about these?” The Isis Marian gestured at the humans scrambling about on the floor.
“Nothing,” the Osiris Rex said. “They have done their work.”
He extended his elbow to his queen and turned to escort her from the offering chamber.