Did he need Dulcie for that? No. She had lived out her usefulness. In fact, she knew far too much. Another day or so while she helped him handle the various transfers of power, then her trip to Australia would end. He had decided that he could combine the need for an unsuspicious resolution with a little pleasure for himself, after all. Who would be surprised if an American tourist were to be found robbed and murdered in one of the seamier parts of Sydney?
The piano was joined again, not by a wild dog this time, but by the quiet beeping of an urgent message. Dread considered ignoring it, but knew it might be from Dulcie. Since they had such a short time left together, he wanted to keep her working. A good manager didn't waste an asset.
To his surprise, the call was on a line he hadn't yet used. The head that filled the view-window was shaved bald, the robes streaked gray and black with soot.
"O Lord of All!" the priest said, stuttering in his haste and panic. "Woe is come upon us, O Great House. Your servants are full of despair—all the Black Land is in terror!"
Dread frowned. It was one of the Old Man's virtual priests. The call had been routed directly to him through Jongleur's connection to the Grail network, just as though the servitor were calling from the real world instead of an imaginary Egypt.
"What do you want?"
"O blessed Anubis, master of the final journey, there is fire in great Abydos! Many priests are dead, many more lie burned and dying!"
Which was a pretty funny thing to call him about, Dread reflected, since he had been torturing and murdering priests himself in the temple complex of Abydos-That-Was not twenty-four hours ago. "So?"
The ash-smeared face went paler still. The man's mouth worked without noise for a moment. "And the prisoners of the great god have escaped."
"What?" He narrowed his eyes. "You let those two idiots from the Circle get away? Both of them?"
The priest swallowed. When he spoke, it was almost a whisper. "All of them. All of the great god's prisoners."
"What are you talking about?" He heard his voice rise to an angry howl, as though he truly were the god the priest must be seeing. "Don't move!"
With a flick of thought, he threw himself into Egypt.
Wells cowered on the floor of the cell, his mummy wrappings smeared with dirt, his banana-yellow face tight with fear and resentment as he stared up at the huge, jackal-headed figure of Anubis.
"How was I to know?" Wells was slurring his words as though something had damaged his brain. "It was just some kid—he must have been the same one who got Yacoubian. He just . . . stuck his hand in me. I was paralyzed—almost felt like I was thrown offline, except I was still locked inside this virtual body."
"What the hell are you babbling about?" Dread whirled and struck Wells hard across the side of the head, knocking the bandaged god to the floor. "I'll give you paralyzed, you whining poof. The priests said my prisoners escaped—all my prisoners. I had two little god-botherers I was hanging onto, but they weren't going anywhere. Almost dead, they were. So what are the priests talking about?"
"They just . . . showed up here," Wells said quickly. "The ones I came to Kunohara's world with. They showed up here and I was holding them for you."
"Kunohara's world. . . ?" Dread stared at the cowering figure. "Are you telling me. . . ?"
Wells climbed to his feet. "But Paul Jonas was with them, see?"
"Who the bloody hell is that?" The name was slightly familiar, but any memory was washed away in a hot red fury that made him feel as though he might burst into flame.
"Someone Jongleur was searching for!" Wells seemed to feel he had redeemed himself with this information; he clambered back onto his feet. "The Old Man turned the network upside down trying to find him, but we never knew why—we didn't even know his name. Jonas has some kind of post-hypnotic block on his memory, so I thought a little session with one of the kheri-heb priests might loosen it up. . . ."
"Shut up!" Dread roared. "I don't give a shit about this Jonas. Who was here? What prisoners? Who escaped?"
Wells flinched back, blinking. "I told you, the . . . the ones from Kunohara's world. You remember, don't you? You sent all those mutant bugs after them. The boy with the strange hand. The woman with the bandaged head. The blind woman. . . ."
"You . . . you had Martine here. . . ?" Dread could hardly speak. His hands were shaking. "You had Martine Desroubins and her friends here and you didn't tell me?"
Wells took a step backward. He tried to stand taller. "I would have told you. I would have! But I can make some decisions on my own, you know. I ran one of the largest companies in the world—and now I'm a god, too!"
Dread was on him so fast that Robert Wells did not even have time to squeak. The jackal-god's huge hand closed around the other's throat, then he lifted his victim up until his bandaged feet dangled helplessly a meter above the ground.
"Which way did they go?"
Wells shook his head violently, eyes bulging.
"Right. I'll find out myself." He pulled Wells closer still, until he could have closed his jaws on Ptah's hairless head and cracked it like a walnut. "You goddamned Yanks think you know everything. Well, here's some information for you, mate. You may be a god now . . . but around here, I'm God Almighty."
His captive struggled in terror, but only for a moment. Dread's hand shot out, swift as a cobra's strike, and plunged into Robert Wells' gaping mouth, then his fingers curved upward, poking through the skull as though it were an eggshell as he set his grip. With the smaller god secured, he took his other hand from Wells' throat and pulled the yellow lips hideously wide, stretching them back like a latex mask until the face disappeared. Then, with a terrible twisting motion of his long arm, Dread yanked Ptah's entire skeleton out of his body and let it drop to the floor. A puppet of bone and sinew twitched like a landed fish beside the empty, rubbery folds of its own flesh. The eyes, still trapped in the orbits of the naked skull, rolled wildly even as their intelligence began to fade.
"So you're a god, eh?" Dread spat beside the slick, shiny bones. "Then heal that.'"
His mood ever so slightly improved, Anubis went in search of his prisoners.
He could think better now. The oppressive cloud that had darkened and confused his thoughts was beginning to disperse, as if baked away by the glaring Egyptian sun, but despite the improvement, Paul found himself not just uninterested in thinking but actively unwilling to try. The memory of his own helplessness was a shame and a terror.
Upon waking he had dragged himself into the shade of the boat's gilded deck awning. They seemed to have left the canal and moved out onto the Nile itself: on either side of the wide brown river stretched kilometers of empty sand. The rugged mountains, ocher-gray and indistinct in the distance, only underscored the flat, featureless desert.
Whether he wanted them or not, scraps of memory fluttered through his head—Ava, the chirping of the birds, Mudd's triumphant, subhuman face as he found them embracing.
I kissed her. Did I love her? Why can't I feel it? If you love someone, surely you can't forget that.
But it was all too dark, too heavy with misery. He didn't want to know any more—surely one of them had somehow betrayed the other. Nothing else would explain his revulsion at the idea of uncovering additional memories.