And frowned. Again.

“True, but who is this Nubian?”

Ric was Hispanic in camo black-face but that was going a little far. How to explain a man wearing head-to-toe undercover black in a context this disoriented god five thousand years out of his time would understand?

“I’m here to protect her.” Ric’s vibrant basso vibrated the sandstone under our feet, and particularly under Shezmou’s big bare feet.

For an instant I hallucinated a silver flash striking like a knife blade from Ric’s single contact lens-shrouded eye. Eyes were very significant to Egyptians. I guess I could be forgiven for imagining things. This was a rather hallucinatory place.

Shezmou stepped back, holding up a peaceful palm with a five-pointed figure tattooed in its center.

“The woman’s weight broke me free,” the liberated god said, “and I am satisfied. I care not whether she and her companions be Nubians or Hittites or Nile asps.”

This was a relief, in a way, but why did the Karnak Egyptians, from royals to god, speak English, even if it was weird formalized English? Had they been watching late-night TV movies too? Or PBS? Maybe not so far-fetched.

As one of the first cultures with written language, they had the interest, and their own language was fading. I’d read that Cleopatra was the first pharaoh to bother speaking Egyptian in three hundred years, the latest in a line of Greeks whom Alexander the Great appointed to rule Egypt. By then Egypt was a conquered territory.

Could the vampires have gone to ground beneath their own desert sand centuries ago? Possibly to escape Roman persecution back in 50 BC, as Christians had later? If so, they might speak their own language among themselves but learn the dominant language topside too. Plenty of time to do it.

I’d seen that the mystical rivers of both Egypt and Christian culture flowed beneath the Las Vegas sands. Might the vampire empire have been here, isolated and inbred, even while empty desert was becoming “Vegas!” seventy-five years ago? Imagining the Egyptian vampires as the second immigrants to our shores, only subterranean, after the Native Americans was a bit of a stretch even for my inquiring mind.

Speaking of “stretch,” Shezmou took one three-foot stride away from our party, then one long stride back.

“What a pleasure to be active again. My vintages of strong and sweet red wine will once more nourish the blood of pharaohs.”

Ric spotted an opening for a skilled interrogator and jumped into it.

“Obviously, you’re a mighty warrior,” he said, “but a wine connoisseur as well?”

“Wine.” Shez turned, a slight smile on his face. “This is the jewel of the Nile. Only the most perfect soil must be found to grow the grapes that will surrender their sweet juice in the wringing grasp of the wine press.

“Many white grapes bleed a weak and pallid ichor, but the precious red grape oozes only the sweet crimson wine that soothes a proper pharaoh’s throat and gives him the strength of a lion, my divine godhead.

“My vintages are much treasured. When I turn my press on the olive and other fruits of the earth, I squeeze out sweet scent and unguents for the living and dead. My concoctions soften living skin, sweeten its scents in the sun god Ra’s harshest rays, drive away biting insects, and prepare the dead for their passage to the Afterlife.”

This softer side of Shezmou was intriguing after Bez’s intimidating introduction. Still, I didn’t miss the implications some of his words branded on my brain: “the precious red grape oozes only the sweet crimson wine that soothes a proper pharaoh’s throat and gives him the strength of a lion.”

If this didn’t refer to a pharaohnic taste for blood from the git-go, I was Cleopatra’s asp!

While I was connecting the mythological dots, Shezmou’s measured pacing had grown more impassioned.

“I remember now! So many ungodly scenes have passed before my motionless stone eyes all… these… years. They grow sharper in my mind and heart and belly and in my sacred eye.”

His 3-D human form did come with two eyes, both dark and gorgeously outlined, Johnny Depp pirate-style. His dramatic gaze surveyed the surrounding pillars. Then they lifted to take in the yawning upper reaches of mineral salt-sparkled stalactites that had dripped down from the long-lost seas above our heads more than three million years ago.

He was beginning to understand that his confinement had lasted centuries and he lofted his fists like Bez. Shez’s infuriated shadow cast a far taller and broader darkness than his dwarfed brother.

“I have been held impotent through all these dynasties, while they, the unnaturally eternal of our kind, have perverted our rites and our people? While they have become… cannibals… to dine again and again on these helpless ones and even the most precious and protected of my small brother’s kind!”

His luminous, black-outlined gaze drifted to Bez, tenderly.

“Is it not written by the sage Amenemope? ‘Mock not the blind nor deride the dwarf nor block the cripple’s path; do not tease a man made ill by a god nor make outcry when he blunders. Man is clay and straw, the God is his builder. The Wise Man should respect people affected by reversal of fortune.’”

“Amen,” Ric said.

I recalled that dwarfism was common among the ancient Egyptians, including royal families. Even King Tut’s tomb included a funeral gift showing a female dwarf with bowed legs and clubfeet.

I was finally seeing the big picture, all the implications of the god-occupied front bank of pillars.

Bez had been left below as a harmless watchdog and his brother’s image chained because, being Anubis’s headsman-and since beheading was the only method they knew to kill vampires-Shezmou was the only god who could judge the utterly secret culture of vampire Egyptians who were suspended between life and afterlife.

When Bez goaded me to free Shezmou, he awakened to see what endless generations of a vampire ruling class had wrought.

Why had my act of breaking the chain freed Shezmou, though? Could anyone have done it? I hoped so, because I wanted as little power and its obligations as possible.

At least, thanks to us, Shez was back and poised to take action at last. I hadn’t seen any mobile gods during my first two visits to the Karnak, either during my personal escape or the aggressive military mission to free Ric. The real god had been down here, large and impressive and made of stone. Upstairs on the Strip level the impressive twenty-foot-high statues of the gods were the tourist attractions, gaudy and impotent.

With Shezmou finally on the loose, Kephron and Kepherati, the Twin Pharaoh vampires who’d separately tormented Ric and me, were about to become hyena leavings.

Ric and I eyed each other. We could always use powerful allies and were sitting pretty. One of us didn’t agree.

Quicksilver growled and shied away when I put a comforting hand on his head. His pale blue irises were almost all black pupils now, black moons set into his skittish eye whites, like a reverse of the night sky.

He trotted off, leaving us alone with the two living Egyptian gods, and went to scout the forest of stone pillars.

Good. He could guard the perimeter while we parlayed with our unusual new allies at the literal gates of Egyptian Hell.