Petty Pewter Gods

  Didn’t look like I had time for anything fancy. I ran toward the Dream Quarter. On the other side of the tenement row Rhogiro continued to bellow and blunder around. Maybe his displeasure was leaking over enough to have startled the locals.

  I could not see that some gods would be much missed.

  40

  I almost made it. The story of my life. A lot of almosts. I was almost king, except right at the last minute I got born to the wrong mother.

  I turned into Gnorleybone Street a few blocks short of the Street of the Gods. Gnorleybone isn’t much used because it don’t go anywhere, but it did offer a nice look at the distance I still had to travel. I saw only normal traffic for the place and the time of day. No funny shadows or lights, no big ugly guys, no pretty and deadly girls, no huntress or hounds, nothing but clear sailing. I slowed to a brisk walk, tried to catch what of my breath hadn’t gotten so lost it was out of the kingdom.

  They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. They ought to live my life. With me it’s always brightest just before the hammer of darkness comes smashing down.

  I don’t know what hit me. One minute I was just a-huffing and a-puffing and a-grinning, and the next I was crawling through a molasses blackness. Time passed there, inside my head, but beyond me seemed a timeless sort of state. Maybe I was in limbo, or nirvana, depending on your attitude.

  I sensed a light. I struggled toward it. It expanded to become a face. “Cat?” Fingers touched my cheek, caressed. Then pinched cruelly. The pain helped clear my head and vision.

  “No. Not Cat.”

  Cat’s mom. Imara. The Godoroth had gotten to me first. But when I looked around I saw no one but Imara. We were in a place like the inside of a big egg furnished only with a low divan draped with purple silk. The light came from no obvious source. “What’s going on?...”

  “We will talk later.” She laid a fingernail on my forehead, over that spot sometimes called the third eye. Then she trailed it down between my eyes, over my nose, across my lips. That nail felt as sharp as a razor. I shivered nervously but found her touch weirdly exciting, too.

  “You have a reputation.” Her hand kept traveling. “Is it justified?”

  “I don’t know.” My voice was an octave high. I couldn’t move. “Whoa!” That was a squeak.

  “I hope so. I seldom get an opportunity like this.”

  “What?” I wasn’t putting up much of a fight. This matronly goddess was about to have her way with me and, incidentally, establish her husband as my mortal enemy. There was no arrangement between them, only the arrangement Imar had with himself. Gods are always jealous critters, turning their spouses’ lovers into toads and spiders and whatnot.

  Which seemed of no particular concern to her. She had one thing on her mind and pursued it with a single-minded devotion more often associated with less than socially ept adolescent males. I began struggling too late. By then the inevitable was upon me. I had no heart for a fight. I hoped she wouldn’t turn into something with two hundred tentacles and breath like a dead catfish.

  I am one agnostic who got made a believer. I should have brought help.

  If they were all that way no wonder they were always getting into trouble.

  Panting, I asked, “You make a habit of just grabbing guys and getting on with it?”

  “Whenever I get away long enough. It’s one of the little rewards I permit myself for enduring that bastard Imar.”

  The Dead Man hadn’t said anything about Imar’s legitimacy. No doubt being a bastard was part of his divine charm.

  “Please stop for a while. I’m only human.” Imara seemed human enough herself, except for the scale of her appetites.

  “For the moment, then. We have to talk, anyway.”

  “Right.”

  “Have you found the key?”

  “Uh...” I was at a serious disadvantage here. I was getting sat upon at the moment. “No.”

  “Good. Have you bothered looking?”

  Good? I ground my teeth. She was a goddess of some substance. “Not really. I haven’t been given a chance.”

  “Good. Don’t bother.”

  “Don’t?”

  “Ignore it. Hide out. Let it go. Let the deadline pass.”

  “You want to get kicked out of the Dream Quarter?”

  “I want Imar and his band of morons to get kicked out. I’ve made arrangements. I’ve wanted to get shut of that belching idiot for a thousand years, and this is my chance.”

  She began numbering Imar’s faults and sins, which reminded me of the main reason I avoid married women. I didn’t hear one complaint that I haven’t heard from mortal wives a thousand times. Apparently, being a god is domestic and deadly dull most of the time. Pile it on for millennia and maybe some divine excesses start to make sense.

  Those recitals are boring at best. When you have no particular desire to be with the recitee they can become excruciating. Despite my improbable situation, my mind wandered.

  I came back fast when she decided I had recovered. “Ulp! So you’re gonna dump the Godoroth and sign on with the Shayir?”

  How could she manage that? Any honest historical theologian will admit that deities do move shop occasionally, but the mechanism by which they do so eludes me.

  “The Shayir? That’s absurd! Lang could be Imar’s reflection. Why would I want more of that? And his household has nothing to recommend its survival. Let them sink like stones into the dark cold deeps of time.” She said all that in a sort of distracted, catechistic manner. Her mind was on something else.

  Maybe the wrong gal got the temple whore job.

  “You haven’t communicated with the Shayir?”

  “No! Shut up.” She pressed her fingernails into my forehead again. I shut up. She took charge. She had her way with me for about a thousand years.

  That molasses darkness reclaimed me eventually. The last I knew, Imara was whispering a promise that I would never be sorry if neither Lang nor Imar ever got hold of the key.

  Why do these things happen to me?

  41

  I ached everywhere. I felt like I had done a thousand sit-ups, run ten miles, then finished with a couple hundred push-ups to cool down. I had bruises and scratches all over me. I was thinking about finding a new hobby. My favorite was getting dangerous.

  Then once again there was a face in my face. This one was uglier than original sin. It was the face of a ratman that not even a female of his own kind could love. I grabbed him by the throat. Ratmen are not real strong. I held on while I climbed to my feet.

  I had been lying on a bed of trash in an alley I did not recognize. The ratman had been going through my pockets. I relieved him of his ill-gotten gains. He wanted to whimper and beg, but I didn’t give him enough air. I was in such a bad mood I considered putting him out of my misery.

  My headache was back.

  Though the world would be better off for his absence, I just slapped him silly. Then an idea occurred. An experiment to try. I didn’t have much to lose. The gods all had a fair idea where I could be found.

  I did a quick stretch job on a bit of my mystic cord, cut that piece off, tied it around the ratman’s tail. He was too groggy to notice.

  I got my behind moving. My feet worked hard to keep up.

  Maybe the Godoroth would jump on a false trail.

  I found myself on Fleetwood Place, one of the many short and lightly trafficked streets that enter the Dream Quarter. Fleetwood Place runs right through the Arsenal. Even now, with the war gone moribund, the place was going full blast. I don’t know how the workers there put up with all the rattle and bang.

  I darted from cover to cover, confident that a few hundred yards would get me into the safety of the Dream Quarter. During one pause two huge owls hurtled overhead, tracking a blur up the far side of the street. I grinned. Had to be Jorken, going for my fake.

  A trickle of golden light leaked over the brick wall back up Fleetwood. That rustling-paper sound passed overhead. Hundreds
of black leaves fluttered in a minor whirlwind. Wolves howled in the distance. I’d like to say dragons roared and thunder lizards stomped, but it did not get that dramatic.

  I resumed putting one foot in front of the other as briskly as I could. A remote, foul bit of mind breath reminded me, Nog is inescapable. Nog didn’t have much of a vocabulary.

  As I ran I rehearsed what I had done to frame the ratman. Maybe I would work the stunt again, if I had to. I kept glancing back, expecting Jorken.

  A huge boil of dirty brown smoke burst upward back whence I had come. Lightning ripped through its heart. An owl came flying out, folded up on its back, following a high ballistic arc. A thunderclap reached me moments later. And these were not phenomena that only I could see. People ran into the street to gape.

  The Godoroth and Shayir were butting heads. I didn’t wait to see if they got down to it seriously. I kept sucking wind and pounding leather. A wolf, or maybe a dog the size of a cow, hollered behind me. It was a cry whose tone said, “I got the trail, boss.” I put my head down and went for new records.

  I sensed something in front of me, a picket of shadow forming out of nothing, right in front of the line where I thought I would get safe.

  That thing howled behind me. It was gaining fast. I didn’t even try to zig, zag, or stop. I went for the hurdle.

  42

  There was a face in my face.

  “This is getting old,” I muttered. I tried to move. The darkness held me tightly, except for my eyes. I realized that that was all I controlled. My ability to see. No other sense was working.

  The face in my face drifted back. It seemed to be a metal mask, its features stylized. Nothing but darkness appeared through the mouth, eye, and nose holes. It dwindled to a point of light.

  Countless similar points materialized over what seemed like several minutes. A few began to drift, loop, swoop toward me, pursuing some pattern I did not recognize. These few became faces and even figures. Some resembled our better-known local gods. No two sprang from the same mythology.

  Oh boy.

  I grew up in Saint Strait’s Parish of my mom’s peculiar religion, so wouldn’t you know the Strait Man himself would come shining up right center? “Are you with us, Mr. Garrett?”

  “Wouldn’t be smart to be against you.”

  Saint Strait was the patron of seekers after wisdom. And he looked out for fools, drunks, and little kids, which shows you that divine bureaucracies lump stuff together as rationally as do the mundane.

  Saint Strait didn’t get sanctified for his heavenly sense of humor or his divine tolerance for alternate viewpoints, but he was too preoccupied to indulge his famous temper. “If you will restrain yourself we can resolve several questions swiftly.”

  “Who is we?” I was in a mood so black I didn’t much care if I was toe to toe with the gods themselves, including a leading saint of the religion that I had disdained and mostly disbelieved from eleven years old onward.

  “We are The Commission, also sometimes called The Board, a permanent standing committee tasked with mediating and refereeing any arguments or contests between deities of different religions. Commission makeup changes continuously. Board service is a duty required of everyone. The Commission’s mission is to ensure peace in your Dream Quarter. We arbitrate entries and exits of the mainstream religions there.”

  “I’ve always been content to ignore the gods. How come you can’t return the courtesy?” These Commission types would be the clowns who had stuck me with being the key to divine nightmares — probably as a reward for past slights.

  “There was no better candidate than you. However, we did not anticipate your being so much at risk. Apologies. Estimates were that you would become wealthy off the interested parties.”

  “Thank you very much. That sounds great. There’ll never be another black day in my life. When does the bribing begin? I’d really like to get those bars of gold stashed away. And what sort of protection will I be getting?”

  “Protection?” The concept was so alien he had trouble pronouncing the word. Him who looked out for our less-capable folk. How can you be labeled a hopeless cynic when your cynicisms prove valid all the time?

  His response was an answer all by itself. But I soldiered on. “Protection from those lunatic Godoroth and Shayir who have started figuring out the fact that I’m the key they want. You guys set it up winner-take-all — including me. But the losers aren’t going to just go away, are they? Maybe they’ll want to lay their despair off on somebody. Maybe they’ll want to hurt somebody by way of getting even with the universe. So who are they going to look for?”

  While I rambled, the good saint had his eyes closed, either enduring my diatribe or communing with his associates.

  He opened his eyes. “You will be protected. You have been troubled excessively already. They were supposed to win your support, not take it by intimidation. We will issue some addenda to the ground rules.”

  Divine figures moved toward and away from me in some rhythm known only to the gods themselves. I felt some poke around inside my head, picking my mental pockets as habit rather than policy. They were bored and wished those creatures from down where celestial glamour turned to celestial slum would take a powder and save their betters all this ugly, finger-dirtying work.

  “Was there some point to my being dragged here?”

  “The Shayir and the Godoroth collided not far off. They were out of control. It seemed possible the key might be at risk at an insalubrious juncture. You must remain alive for a while longer.”

  Had I been anything but disembodied vision I would have sniffed the air and checked my soles for accretions.

  “Gracious of you. Can we work it so I can hang in here, the age I am now, for a couple thousand more years? Say until the last one of you Commission characters goes?”

  “I could tell you what you want to hear, but you would realize its worthlessness as soon as the air blew past you.” Saint Man had him a sense of humor after all. “If we made an exception for you, every man, woman, and child out there would petition us with unique circumstances.”

  Grumble grumble whine whine. Gods forfend anybody actually has to do their job.

  “You were made the key because it was our hope that you, being mortal, could distinguish the superiority of one pantheon over another and thus resolve the question of which should remain on the Street of the Gods.”

  Boy, did they pick the wrong man. So much for omniscience. “I haven’t fallen in love with any of the contenders. How about you hide me out till after the deadline and let them all suck the death pipe?”

  “That is not an option. Persevere, Mr. Garrett. And work on your decision. Which temple should remain with us?”

  He had rejected my suggestion already.

  He began to shrink away from me. “Few mortals ever stand in judgment upon the gods.”

  Other Commission members fluttered about. Some swooped toward me, apparently curious. I got the distinct feeling that the gods from the uptown pantheons were way out of touch. They were like factory owners who never entered their factories for fear they would, somehow, sully themselves by associating with the people whose labor made it possible for them to live the high life. It was blatantly plain that for many, the notion that they had a responsibility to their followers was entirely alien. Many of these gods were what human teenagers would turn into, given unlimited resources and time. They watched me like I was a bug under glass.

  “Good-bye for now, Mr. Garrett.” His voice was a fading whisper.

  Then I wasn’t in a place where remote shimmers became curious gods and goddesses. I was where darkness was as thick as treacle. I swam hard. I was going to get out of town for real, let these crazies finish their incomprehensible game without me.

  A genie in a bottle would have been a nice find. I could use her to straighten things out. But instead of something gorgeous and eager, I got another wave of darkness, of an altogether different kind. This invaded me, penetrated ri
ght down to the core of me. I began to feel better. Aches and pains vanished. My headache went away. Bruises and scratches healed. I felt the stitches in my scalp fall out. Suddenly I felt so good I almost turned positive. I almost wished I was bald so I could grow new hair. I felt younger, bouncier, eager to get into action — and more likely to do something stupid because I was regaining youth’s impatience.

  Then yet another darkness engulfed me. In a moment I felt nothing at all.

  43

  I awakened in an alley. Surprise. Surprise, I did it with a face nose to nose with mine. I was going in circles. At least it was a different face each time. “This is getting old.” I tried to grab a throat again, but this scroat was no ratman. He was strong. He lifted me one-handed and shook me till my teeth wobbled. “Mom?” I asked. She used to shake me if I did something especially irritating. When I was still small enough to snake.

  “Huh?”

  Oh-oh. Another mental marvel.

  He held me at arm’s length so he could check me out. Turnabout is fair play. I checked him out right back.

  He had long, wavy blonde hair. He had blue eyes to kill for. One blue eye, anyway. The other was covered by a black leather patch. He was nine feet tall. He was gorgeous. He had muscles on top of his muscles. Obviously, he didn’t have much to do but work on his physique and study himself in a mirror.

  I’d never seen his like running loose in TunFaire, so I assumed he was another pesky pewter god, though neither Godoroth nor Shayir.

  “Now what?” I muttered. “Who the hell are you?”

  My body still felt young and tough enough to whip its weight in wildcats.

  Pretty boy shook me again.

  Whip its weight in gerbils?

  “You will speak when spoken to.”