“Because of the holes in the fabric. You saw what was happening. One blew out right in your face. If the walls really break down...”
I knew enough mythology to guess. Cold beyond imaginable cold. Eternal darkness beyond imaginable darkness. The end of the world. But just the unspeakable beginning for the unnamable eldritch horrors from beyond the beginning of time. Never mind it all sprang from the imagination in the first place. “Come on! This is some game between two gangs of petty half-wit gods who needed me to sort them out to see who gets to stay respectable. All of a sudden I’ve got to save the world?” I’m not big on world-saving. Way too much traveling and not nearly enough reward in the end. Not to mention you don’t get much sleep.
“No! Of course not. Don’t be absurd! You think too much of yourself. If you keep your mouth shut except when somebody asks you a question and you don’t smart off when they do, you may survive long enough to see the world get saved.”
Put me in my place, she did. “What’s going on here?” We were sneaking between a couple of hills, crunching dry grass and bare stone, in weather that was appropriate for the season. Fourteen buzzed hither and yon, ahead, but very tentatively and very low to the ground. He wanted to be there less than I did. There was an astonishing shawl of stars flung across the shoulders of a cloudless sky. The moon was in no hurry yet, though it had climbed higher.
The light up ahead wavered, waxed, waned. Sounds came down the valley, inarticulate but angry. “I don’t like this, Cat. Last time I came home from the Cantard I swore I’d never leave TunFaire again. Till now I’ve stuck to that.” More or less. But no lapse of mine had brought me this far afield.
Damn! This could turn real nasty. I might have to walk home.
“The gods have a secret, Garrett.” She allowed the cherub to settle into her arms for a moment of rest. She held and patted him as if he were a baby. He seemed to like that.
“Just one? Then a lot of paper has gone to waste turning out holy books that claim to explain the ten million mysteries...”
“There you go again. Can’t you ever just listen?”
Maybe when I run my yap I feel like I’m in control. I needed some control here. Desperately.
“Go ahead.”
The cherub lit up a fresh banger that he pulled out of his diaper. He got fire by snapping his fingers.
Cat took the smoke. “Not now. Not here. Garrett, all gods, whatever their pantheon, whatever dogma has accreted around them, came from the same place and started out much the same. You looked into that place a while ago. The gods fled it because it’s so terrible. But over here they can’t stay functional, can’t hang on, without belief to sustain them. Or without drawing power from the other side, which risks opening new gateways. If they have no sustenance at all, eventually they fall back to the other side. Naturally, they don’t want to go home.”
“You mean they’re all related?”
“No. Is everyone in TunFair related? Of course not. They’re not even all of the same race. Say this is like some of the humans going off somewhere together, in search of a better life. If they found it they might not want to come back.”
“You telling me they’re refugees?” The gods are refugees from somewhere else? Wouldn’t that stir some excitement in the Dream Quarter? Wouldn’t that be dangerous knowledge for some non-god to be lugging around?
This was no place for me. I had a notion I was one of the non-gods.
“Cat, you’re a doll and I love you, but this isn’t my idea of the perfect date. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion my prospects would be a lot better if I headed some other direction.” Like any damned direction but this one.
Cat grabbed my hand. She was strong. My course remained steady, straight ahead. She told me, “You have a tool.”
“Huh?”
“You can make yourself invisible.”
“Yeah. But when I do, the Godoroth always know where I’m at.”
“And you think they’d try something here?”
“Why the hell not? They’ve already proved they’re bonkers. But you know them. I don’t.”
“We should remain unnoticed. For now.”
“That’s what I had in mind when I said let’s go.” I started to head for the horses. Just this once they looked like the lesser evil.
Cat still had my hand and she hadn’t gotten any weaker. I got nowhere.
We were near the edge of the light and had attracted no attention yet. Shapes and shadows haunted the hillsides. Wouldn’t you know a place called the Haunted Circle would be like that? I didn’t recognize any of them. Few were in anthropomorphic form.
More arrived by the moment, flopping, flying, slithering, jogging in on two hundred legs. “Sooner or later something is going to trip over us.” I tried beating feet again. Have I mentioned Cat’s unusual strength? I didn’t go anywhere this time either.
I took out Magodor’s cord, stretched it, knotted it, created a loop big enough for two. We hopped inside. “This may get real friendly,” I warned.
Cat smiled a wicked smile that told me the deviltry was in her but she wasn’t feeling flirtatious right now. She could stick to business where her mother could not. It seemed my sack of invisibility could be made as big as whatever loop I started with, plus however high I could raise that loop before I closed it up. By holding hands and staying in step, Cat and I were able to move the sack with little trouble. She insisted on heading right out into the middle of the lighted ground. Once we were there we could see all the hillsides. Our presence didn’t attract any attention. Still I saw nothing I recognized. The mob fell silent. The result was spooky. All that many humans in one place would have created a racket like hurricanes raising hell amongst the boughs of tropical forests. I turned slowly, examining every hill. I was scared, but I was not out of control. Not like Fourteen, who was down between our feet trying to vanish into our footprints, unable, apparently, to believe we were truly invisible.
I whispered, “I take it little ones like him don’t get treated real well by the big guys.”
“Cruelty is in their nature.”
I didn’t stop turning, studying. Few of these gods clung to any shape I had seen in the Dream Quarter. Maybe out here the belief of their worshippers was attenuated enough to let them relax. Scary to think things as ugly as Ringo and as attractive as Star might be identical blobs on one of those hillsides. Pity, that.
I whispered, “You know any of those things?” I noticed a few taking imaginable shapes for flickering instants. Maybe their worshippers were thinking of them.
“No. My mother worked hard to keep me a secret from them. If Imar found out about me...”
Of course. It was just ducky being a half god if a god was your pop and your mom was human. A divine tradition. The great heroes of antiquity all had some heavenly blood. But goddesses aren’t supposed to boff the suckers, apparently.
The old double standard was alive and well amongst the sons of heaven. Or whatever you called that over there. Always nice to know that some things are the same in heaven as they are on earth. Lets everybody know where they stand.
The shadows continued to gather like buzzards to a freshly fallen thunder lizard. The great towering ones began to arrive, their eyes like cities burning, their hair the ugliest thunderheads. I whispered, “What’s happening here, anyway?” I was sure no such assembly had taken place before, ever.
“When they came here the gods left weak places in the fabric of the barriers between. When they want to show off or perform miracles, they use power they pull through those weak places. When they do they create a momentary opening. There are worse things still back there. They would like to come here, too. The fighting between the Godoroth and Shayir would have opened a lot of holes. Some of those things over there found them before they closed up again. They tried to break through. That’s what caused those flashes. The stupid fighting went on so long and the fabric of the barrier grew so weak that those horrors might actually bust their own hole thr
ough. This assembly is going to decide how to handle that. It’s also going to discuss the Shayir and Godoroth. They aren’t so stupid they didn’t know better. A universal terror of the evils left behind has underlain all divine law for ten thousand years.”
“How the hell do you all of a sudden know all this?” I knew she couldn’t have known much of it when we arrived.
“I can catch snatches of their debate.” She tapped her temple. “It’s really hot.”
On that level where the Dead Man communicates with me, inside my head, I was aware of a continuous dull buzz, like I was catching just the remotest edge of mindspeech going on in a somewhat similar manner. That buzz was extremely stressful. Before long I was going to have one ferocious headache.
Then I spotted somebody I knew.
50
Magodor stalked along the foot of a hill about a hundred feet away. She was no shadow. She was set solidly in her nastiest avatar. She looked right at me. She knew I was there. Good old Driver of the Spoil. She didn’t look pleased but seemed unlikely to try making my life less pleasant than it was already.
I recalled that people in TunFaire had been unable to see the divine clowns lurking around me. “Cat, you can see these things, can’t you?”
“I see Magodor. She sees us, too.”
“No. But she knows I’m here. She gave me the cord. She can tell where it is.”
“Uhm!” She seemed to have lost interest. Aha! Her mother had arrived. Imara seemed quite regal and totally indifferent to the censure of fellow gods.
The rest of the Shayir and Godoroth arrived, all frozen into their city forms. The anger around us grew palpable. My headache began worsening fast. Among the stragglers I spotted interesting faces. “Cat. Do you know that character there?” I indicated a huge, handsome, one-eyed guy who was neither Godoroth nor Shayir.
“That’s Bogge. He’s Mom’s lover.”
“Bogge? You sure?” He looked a lot like Shinrise the Destroyer. “Gets around, don’t she?” I wondered if a god would lie to a mortal about his identity. Or if a mother would lie to her daughter. My thoughtless remark earned me a dirty look. I asked, “How about the redhead there? The one who looks like an ordinary mortal.” Ordinary, hell. All women ought to look so ordinary. She looked like Star might if she decided to conform to my peculiar prejudices.
“Not in that form.” There was a small catch in her voice.
“She got me into this. She was watching my house. I decided to follow her.”
“She isn’t Godoroth or Shayir.”
Indeed. But you do have some ideas...
Nog is inescapable.
Well, of course he was. He kept coming back like an unemployed cousin, Nog did.
I recalled a little old lady at the mouth of an alley and reflected that goddesses were not required to keep one look. “The name Adeth mean anything? Magodor said an Adeth was trying to trap me. I thought she meant that woman.”
Nervously, Cat said, “One of the Krone Gods is called Adeth...” and cut herself off.
“What? Give, darling. Look around. We don’t need to play games.”
“Adeth is one of a bunch of tribal deities from way down south. The people are fur traders and rock hunters. They’ve never had enough people here to win a place on the Street of the Gods.”
Now that rolled off her tongue so smooth it must have been distilled twice.
She said, “I don’t see why some primitives like that would get involved. Though her name does mean Treachery, I think.”
“There’s a lot of that going on these days.” That redhead was just too polished to be the wishful thinking of fur trappers still using stone tools. Those guys go for malicious rocks and trees and such. And storm gods. They love gods who stomp around and bellow and smash things up a lot.
Be right at home around here.
Nog is inescapable.
“That boy needs a hobby,” I muttered.
The thing itself oozed out of a valley, stopped, turned in place slowly for half a minute, then began to shuffle our way. “Oh, damn,” Cat murmured.
A spear blade twelve feet tall slammed into the earth in front of Nog, nearly shaving his nose off. It was slightly transparent but did have a definite impact when it hit. Clods flew a hundred feet. Lightning slithered down the spear shaft. Sparks played tag along the edges of the blade.
One of the very tall, very big-time gods had admonished Nog.
Fourteen was whimpering out loud now. He was down flat on his pudgy belly with his chubby, too short arms trying to cover his head. I said, “I’m beginning to wonder, Cat.” She grimaced but didn’t answer. Nog considered his situation, decided that since he was inescapable he could afford to wait. He resumed moving along a new course. He joined the rest of the Godoroth gang. Those swinging party guys had gathered at the foot of a slope opposite the Shayir. Both crews looked troubled. And angry, though no actual lightning bolts flew.
The last stragglers must have arrived because all of a sudden most all the gods tried to assume their worldly avatars. About a third were not successful. Maybe there wasn’t enough power to go around.
I had an idea. This happens on occasion. “Are the walls between the worlds thinner in the Dream Quarter?”
“Will you stop blubbering?” Cat stuck a toe into the cherub’s ribs. Then she looked at me almost suspiciously. She seemed reluctant to answer my questions now.
I said, “It seems reasonable to assume that they would cluster where it would be easiest to tap their sources of power.” Which, of course, added meaning to the struggle of the Shayir and Godoroth to remain on the Street. Cat grunted.
There was a change in the painful background racket gurgling down in the bottom of my mind. It faded. I caught the edge of what had to be one big guy really booming. There was no motion at all on the surrounding slopes.
The meeting had been called to order.
I thought about gods and points of power. Seemed likely that in addition to collecting where power was most accessible they would develop caste systems based on ability to grab and manipulate that power. Somebody like my little ankle-biting buddy Fourteen would be way down at the bottom of the pile.
If I have the innate ability to seize sixty percent of the power available and you can grab only thirty percent, guess who is in charge? Assuming we subscribe to the sociopathic attitudes generally ascribed to the gods.
Sudden anger surged along the thought stream I sensed so marginally. With the pure cold voice I had felt no pain, but this anger was a powerful blow, however glancing. It sent me to my knees. I ground the heels of my fists into my temples. I managed not to scream.
Imar came out from the Godoroth team. Lang moved forward, too. They raced to see who could grow big the fastest. Each surrounded himself with all the noisy, dramatic effects demanded by mortal worshippers.
Since I was down already, I settled against a not entirely uncomfortable rock. I patted Fourteen’s bottom like he really was a baby and reflected, “I should have brought a lunch. This punch-out is going to take a while.”
I saw representatives of the Board called on the carpet while the mirror-image boss gods looked one another over. The mind stream had a blistery touch. The supreme busybodies seemed to want to give everybody a yellow card for unnecessary roughness.
Me, I thought they all deserved big penalties for unnecessary stupidity.
I kept one eye on Imara and another on her boyfriend, whatever name he was using. I kept one on the incipient ruckus out front and another on the redhead Cat was determined to keep mysterious. That didn’t really leave a lot of eyes for anything else.
51
Boy. Talk about a big bunch of nothing! There I was, all bent over and scrunched up expecting the Midnight of the Gods, or at least the little ones getting their pants pulled down and their holy heinies spanked, and all I got was a headache that left me nostalgic for my hangover.
“Nobody is doing anything,” I whined.
“There’s plenty go
ing on. You don’t see it because you can’t listen in. The Shayir and the Godoroth are really upset.”
I did note a certain restlessness on the sidelines, reflected by the squared-off boss gods, who, I now suspected, were supposed to shake hands and make up. And I noted that Imara sort of drifted slowly throughout the midfield confrontation. She got smaller as she moved. And she assumed a whole new look.
Interesting. Very interesting.
“Cat. You keeping an eye on your mom?”
“Huh? Why?”
I pointed. “That’s her there. Sliding over to her boyfriend. She’s been changing her looks as she goes.” I assumed she was disguising herself on levels seen only by gods, too.
“Oh. She looks a lot younger.”
“She sure does. She’s turning herself into a dead ringer for you.” I kicked the cherub. I wanted him to stop whining long enough to get a good look at this transformation, too. “You got any thoughts about this, Cat?”
My suspicion was that Cat might not be as big a secret as she thought. I had a hunch she might be just another angle in a carefully managed escape maneuver.
Cat’s eyes narrowed. She glared at her mother. She glared at me. She didn’t have to be told that I suspected the worst. We both knew that gods and goddesses don’t cling to any wordly code of conduct.
Cat said, “Maybe we ought to leave.”
“That might have been a good idea a while ago. Before anybody knew we were here. But now? How far could we run? Could we run fast enough?”
“Nothing is settled here. The deadline still hasn’t come.” But she climbed to her feet and grabbed up her little buddy, plainly interested in quick relocation.
I got up myself. The whole situation had me thinking, which, according to some, doesn’t happen all that often.
And according to the Dead Man, not often enough.
“Cat. The world was here before the coming of the gods. Right?”
“Yes. Of course it was. Why?”