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 breath 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.