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The pharaoh was yelling for his men to stand down. I heard the sounds of a scuffle, but I didn’t have the energy to look up and see what was happening. Thoth, Ptah, and Mateo were all yelling, too, but I had a hard time making out what they were saying.
The Philosopher’s Stone could automatically heal me—but not with a spear still stuck in my flesh. I tried to pull it out, but Elijah, misunderstanding the situation, attempted to stop me.
“You’ll bleed out!” he yelled, not knowing that the Philosopher’s Stone had already slowed the bleeding to a trickle. It had also been able to numb the pain from the wound. I had a hard time hearing him over the surrounding commotion, and I couldn’t speak loudly enough for him to hear me.
“Let me through. I’m a healer!”
Mateo had gotten closer, and suddenly, the other yelling died down.
“I have to remove the spear for Garth to heal properly.”
Elijah blinked for a moment as if he were trying to understand, but then he backed out of the way.
Urania and Lian had reached me by that time, and they helped lay me out on the floor. Mateo, just as eager to avoid divulging that the Philosopher’s Stone was within me as I was, made quite a show of healing me, spreading enough of his curanderismo magic around to make it more difficult for any magically aware onlookers to sense what was really happening.
As soon as my wound had closed, Mateo poked and prodded a little, again mostly for show.
“His injury is healed,” said Mateo. “He will need time to recover from the blood loss.”
I looked down at the floor, now marred by a much larger puddle of blood than I would have expected to see. The spear must have severed some arteries on its way in. There was a time when losing that much blood would probably have caused me to pass out, but I could already feel the Philosopher’s Stone regenerating my blood supply.
“There is a clinic within the palace,” said Alksandar. “It is at your disposal. And please accept my apology for my guard’s reckless action. He will be dealt with appropriately.”
Feeling much stronger, I looked around, doing my best to maintain a dazed expression, so that I would still appear to need rest.
The pharaoh didn’t look particularly upset by what had just happened, though he wasn’t looking in my direction. Instead, he was studying the guards as if expected someone else to attempt to murder me.
Ptah looked more genuinely concerned. But it was hard to tell how much. It occurred to me that a golem face might be less flexible than that of a human and thus less able to show emotion. Or perhaps Ptah was concealing his feelings, though I wasn’t sure why.
Thoth continued to look at me, his moonlit eyes staring into me as if he knew I was faking disorientation. I looked away from him—slowly, so as not to give myself away any further.
“I need to lie down,” I said.
The pharaoh nodded to some of the guards, who formed an escort around me and led me out of the banquet hall. Mateo walked directly in front of me. Urania supporting me on my right and Lian on my left helped sell the idea that I couldn’t quite walk on my own.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to keep up this act for too long. The medical facility was only a few doors down from the banquet hall.
The room was large and much plainer than the rest of the palace. Naturally, it had no modern medical equipment, but it was filled with rows of beds. It was clearly arranged, not for the occasional case of flu, but for a large casualty event, like a battle between Alexandrian soldiers and ghouls that didn’t go as planned. The enormous amounts of tape, gauze, and bandages stacked around the periphery of the room made me wonder how secure Alexandria really was.
Right now, all the beds were empty. So was the room, except for someone I took to be the on-call doctor. He wore the traditional white coat and hurried over as soon as we entered.
What we needed was a private place where we could talk. What we got instead was guards who wanted to hang around and a doctor who wanted to do a complete examination.
“As chief palace physician, every patient here is my responsibility,” said the doctor, who I judged to be about the same age as Mateo—and every bit as stubborn.
“I am a healer,” replied Matteo. “And Garth is not really your patient. He just needs a place where he can lie down. The guards will confirm that he was wounded. If you’d like, you can examine the spot where the wound was. After that, Garth would benefit most from being left alone.”
The doctor took a moment to check the wound site. “Not even the tiniest scar,” he said as if he didn’t quite believe his eyes. “How did you heal him so quickly and so completely?”
“I will be happy to talk about my methods later,” said Mateo. “After I have had a brief conversation with Garth about our diplomatic mission and he has rested.”
The doctor backed off a little bit, but Mateo couldn’t convince him that he needed to move out of hearing range to avoid compromising the confidentiality of our diplomatic conversation. Since we apparently didn’t have a diplomatic mission anymore, I thought that was a risky justification, but the doctor reluctantly went back to his desk—which was still close enough to hear from. As for the guards, they were further away, but they showed no sign of leaving.
As I tried to settle myself on one of the beds, Mateo leaned over and asked, “Are you up to a little concealment?”
I nodded, hoping I wouldn’t have to do conceal us for long. In this case, we didn’t need total concealment, anyway, so I created a bubble that muted our sound and blurred us enough to prevent lip reading.
However, it didn’t prevent us from hearing what was going on around us. That was how I caught the doctor’s audible gasp when he realized what we’d done. But he made no attempt to interfere. Neither did the guards, though one of them did leave, I assumed to ask Pharaoh what to do about us.
“We may not have long,” I said. “What do we need to talk about?”
“Getting out of here,” said Mateo. “I don’t trust our host, and I’m not especially pleased with Thoth, either.”
“He isn’t responsible for what the guard did,” I said. “But Thoth’s reaction does worry me. I was hoping he could sort out the mess in my head that make Hermetic magic so painful to use.”
“To do that, you’d have to reveal everything that’s going on inside of you,” said Lian. “Including the Philosopher’s Stone.”
“Which means you need to trust him,” said Mateo. “And I don’t. If nothing else, it’s clear that he doesn’t trust you. He’s only going to see you as more of a threat if he knows how powerful you really are.”
Everything Mateo said was true—but his words wounded me worse than the spear had. Thoth’s superior knowledge of magic made him the best bet to cure me, at least among the former deities I had any knowledge of. I wasn’t ready to give up the opportunity that I’d spent so long hoping for.
“It may not matter whether we decide to trust Thoth or not,” said Urania. “The fact that the pharaoh sent so many guards with us, apparently with an order to stay, speaks volumes about his intent. Whether he distrusts us or simply wants to keep us here as his golem repair team, I don’t know. He was quick enough to offer us a place for Garth to recuperate, but he could have offered us the opportunity to return home, and he didn’t.”
At that point, the guard’s stationed at the door stepped aside to allow Thoth to enter. I hadn’t been expecting one of the former gods to show up, so I hadn’t put as much energy into concealment as I should have. But it really didn’t matter. With a single gesture, he tore the concealment away, leaving us exposed to his unmerciful silver glare.
“Garth needs his rest—” began Mateo.
“Silence!” said Thoth in a tone that wouldn’t be denied. He stared at me with anger hot enough to roast me at the slightest provocation. “You might be able to fool these mortals, but do you think I don’t recognize the magic of Hermes? Though we dealt with different parts of the world, we also worked together on occasion. I would recognize his power anywhere.”
“It’s not as if I stole his power,” I said, sitting up. There was no point trying to feign fatigue. “He gave it freely.”
“Perhaps,” conceded Thoth. “Hermes has often been more generous than I thought wise. But now his generosity has finally caught up with him.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Thoth glared at me with eyes suddenly as bright as twin moons. “Hermes is dead—and it is your fault!”
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Interesting...bringing to life ancient Egyptian gods!