Were they Egyptian frieze angels on eternal watch, cast in the exquisite concrete of their long-dead culture? A TV reporter learns to look for visual metaphors. These pleated linen, wing-shaped kilts and skirts and capes seemed celestial and reassuring.

Except that talk of “dead” cultures was a mind-blowing concept now that we’d seen some still “lived” on… undead.

I was glad to spot no throne rooms or the beautifully neurotic twin sibling pharaohs I’d encountered on my first visit.

Truthfully, I hoped never again to glimpse them or their court musicians and armies of animated mummies and tomb-painted legions leaping off the walls to battle intruders like us.

Nor did I ever want to see again that dank, undecorated dungeon reached by some underground mirror of the River Nile, where Ric had been tortured until virtually every drop of his blood seeped into thirsty undead throats.

I still wasn’t clear how the hellish river under the Inferno Hotel, doubtless the Styx, connected with a new supernatural Nile. Did moving water resemble a literal bloodstream in this Millennium Revelation world, linking cultures current and ancient, as well as lusts as old as time and as new as the latest cell phone model? At least this section of the Karnak’s lower depths was dry and so far deserted.

The lamplight cast Quicksilver’s canine profile ahead of us. His sharp snout and ears reminded me of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead. His entire body stiffened in warning, ears pricked even farther forward, eyes staring, shoulder muscles quivering.

I put a containing hand around his collar… and pulled back stung fingers. The silver circles dotting the wide black leather were pulsing like overheated hearts, hot enough to raise coin-shaped blisters on my fingertips.

Oh my.

Ric’s warning grip on my upper arm dimpled my steel-studded catsuit. We formed a linked trio in an instant, each in physical touch, all on high alert. I felt battle resolve amplify and echo between us like the drumbeat of a common heart.

We faced a darker opening, with no hint of hanging oil lamps beyond it.

Ric stepped through. We all did.

Our eyes slowly adjusted to a subtle twilight.

Gone were the lavish decorations. We stood among a thick convention of pillars like the towering black basalt ones that surrounded the Karnak Hotel entrance on the Las Vegas Strip.

These pillars, though, were of more human height, only twenty-some feet high, and made of humble yellow stone. So thick they still seemed squat, the forest of supportive pillars upheld a cavernous underground area we could see no end to.

“A royal basement?” I asked in a whisper.

The vast space with its unseen distances reverberated my three words into a muddled chorus from perhaps a thousand lips, losing all meaning in the process and becoming a rasping hiss.

I clapped a hand over my loose lips.

Too late to rethink and shut up. I’d already roused a native. From around one fat pillar popped a bizarre figure like an ancient Egyptian jackal-in-the-box.

It was half my height. I felt Ric’s grip ease at that fact.

A growl reverberated into a pack of hellhounds as my dog brushed past us. Quicksilver wasn’t standing off. To him, short stature was no sign of weakness. His canine grin became a widening maw and the long, low, gargled growl in his throat made a more menacing warning than any hundred rattlesnakes could broadcast.

“Aha!” cried our challenger, stomping his bare feet on the sandy stone floor and pumping his chubby hands up and down like an annoyed toddler. “Dance music at last in my deserted domain! Who goes there? Who comes to greet Bez? Man or beast, or pretty woman?”

Except for Quicksilver, who continued to growl into the creature’s curly-maned, blunt feline face, we were speechless. Ric and I had been primed to face insanely blood-thirsty vampires from a civilization that, in the search for eternal life, had invented the most death-centered culture in the ancient world.

Instead we meet a stumpy, grumpy figure from a flea-bag traveling circus?

“Well?” this “Bez” demanded again, in perfect English. “I’ve been waiting centuries to see natives beyond my prison doors. Are you man or woman? I can tell by the hyena breath that this rude individual at my level is a beast.”

Quicksilver whined a question and suddenly sat on his haunches. The creature had passed his acid test. It bewildered rather than awakened his combined canine and lupine instincts.

“To answer your question. We are all three,” Ric said.

I remembered that the lion-bodied, human-headed sphinx had offered a riddle to all who passed in some old fable.

“Ah, but is she pretty?” came another query.

I couldn’t fault Bez for asking. My black hair resembled the shoulder-length wigs both men and women wore in ancient Egypt. My camo-streaked face was missing elaborate Cleopatra eyeliner. And I didn’t wear a long tight skirt.

“What’s it to you?” Ric asked, not intimidated.

The figure did a clumsy somersault directly into our path. “Nothing and everything. Pretty women are a specialty of mine. Ugly ones too. As you may notice, I have no claim to beauty myself.”

I eased out my held breath and scanned our otherwise still-unpopulated surroundings.

No, no incoming spectral or physical hyena packs. No charging zombie mummies. No terra-cotta-skinned warriors armed with spears, battleaxes, bows and arrows. No royal gold chariot bearing twin male and female pharaohs braced for battle.

Just this impish squat figure blocking our passage.

Well, had we met our one Munchkin in this murderous Land of Egyptian Oz?

Was he-and I noticed the operative organ, rampant and outsize, that confirmed it beneath his round belly-a chubby Cupid-like court jester? His head was at about my waist level and, given his lascivious grin, I was not really comfy with that, even in a fully covering catsuit.

His legs and arms were all hairy muscle and his face surrounded by curly hair and long beard. He was a jug-eared, lion-maned, Egyptian-collared and kilted, rotund creature, both jovial and sinister.

I couldn’t decide if he was a pet or a demon.

From Quicksilver’s continuing blend of whimper and growl, he was as confused as I was.

Not Ric. He’d pulled out his boot knife, a wicked eight-inch blade, and aimed it at the navel on the jolly little potbelly, just above the too-obvious male member.

“Aren’t we the pretty foursome?” the creature demanded, unfazed and preening. He leered at me. “I bet you bear a tattoo of my image on the inside of your thigh, if you’re the pretty lady.”

Ric’s fist had him up in the air by the bunched beaded collar, dangling. Ric kept the powerful kicking legs two feet from his tensed torso, doing no harm.

“What,” he demanded, “have you to do with this lady’s thighs?”

“Nothing! And everything! Good sir. Fine sir. Gentle sir. I will give her sweet childbirth, that’s all.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. “You think I’d wear a tattoo of your person on my flesh?”

He shrugged and appealed to the dog.

“It does look too wet and slippery to hold ink,” he conceded of my thigh. “Yet many ladies do and are the better for that. I should introduce myself so you will explain your most fascinating selves.

“I am Bez, cousin of the goddess Bast, lion cub in some guises, otherwise humble domestic servant, protector of households and the birthing process, and licker of lady parts when invited.”

Quicksilver went to his belly, stretched out his legs, and fixed his canine jaws and eyes on what delicate bodily part-as with Cicereau’s goons in Sunset Park-he considered the creature’s “spleen.” One leap and…

Ric shook the little man. I realized Bez was a dwarf. Ric’s personal history of childhood slavery would keep him from hurting anything with a childish aspect unless he was dangerously and personally challenged. Bez might be many things, even dangerous at times, but now he was merely a friendly and curious obstacle. Ric’s frustration must be immense.