Petty Pewter Gods

  Not to fear. You will not remain amusing long. Some insects have longer attention spans.

  Not exactly an ego bash, that. I figured that out moments after meeting those dolls.

  My own attention began to slip its moorings. Nothing would keep me awake much longer.

  The Dead Man continued to spin confusions off all his minds at once.

  “You tossing a mental salad, Old Bones?”

  My apologies, Garrett. I was not aware that I was drawing you in. Iam trying to identify the missing ingredient. I am reviewing events as reported while sorting the clutter in your head. There must be something you know, although you are unaware that you know it. You would be unaware, in fact, that there is knowledge of which to be aware.

  “You’re zigging before I even get the chance to zag, sidekick.”

  There has to be something more to this.

  “You’ve been inside my head. You know I didn’t want to hear that. You say nothing is ever what it seems?” It never is when I get involved.

  Actually, I fear that, in this particular case it did indeed start out being what it seems. However, as is often the case with both human and divine endeavors, powerful outside forces and normal social dynamics will force what ought to be simple to become complex and devious.

  I leaned back and swilled me a long, long draft. Dean had bent that much. I had been so ragged when I turned up he hadn’t considered arguing over a few beers. Possibly he received some encouragement from the Dead Man. The Dead Man has no interest in whether or not food or drink is good for you. “At least the original problem is solved.”

  Is it?

  “There’s no need for anybody to choose between the Shayir and Godoroth. They don’t exist anymore.”

  Nog is inescapable.

  “On, shit!” I gulped air. I had forgotten Nog. Couldn’t he wait until I’d gotten some sleep? Then I caught on. “You had me going for a second.”

  Amused. I see. I do not indulge in practical jokes, do I?

  “Not too often.”

  Consider it a dramatized warning.

  “It was you?”

  Reminding you that at least one survivor of the Haunted Circle massacre likely carries a grudge.

  “Wish I could figure out a way to make this all your fault. But all I can think of is I didn’t have problems like this before I moved in with you.”

  Life was simpler in the old days. Not more pleasant, but definitely simpler. Life in the islands had been simpler still, if pure hell.

  The Dead Man made a mental noise that sort of implied intense festering disgust. If the anomaly is there, even I am blind to it. Maybe there is nothing after all. Possibly no one had any real, long-term plans. Self-proclaimed masters of the universe, yet they do everything by improvisation.

  “Tell you the truth, I’ve never seen any gods whose depth was more than a few pages.”

  Clever boy.

  “Yeah. So clever I go out chasing redheads because they look interesting. I’m dead. I can’t stay awake another twenty seconds.”

  Wait.

  “Come on. It can keep for a few hours.”

  The redhead. The shapechanger. Adeth? There is no place for her in the central events.

  “I told you that already. She led me into it but hasn’t been around much since. She visited me once — I think it was her — when the Godoroth had me. She didn’t make much sense. I saw her once in the Haunted Circle. Maybe one or two other glimpses round and about. Talk to Cat about Adeth. She knows something she won’t tell me.” I didn’t bother to glance at Cat. “I’m gone upstairs. Tell Dean to do whatever he wants with these people.”

  The beer, while just about the most wonderful liquid I had ever swallowed, had sapped my ability to stay awake.

  I met Dean in the hall, headed toward the Dead Man’s room. I grabbed a greasy sausage off the platter he carried. I gave him a quick review of what I had told Himself. I was asleep before my head hit the goosedown.

  56

  I plunged down the well of sleep faster than ever I had without the aid of somebody whapping me on the gourd. Only the well became a tunnel. At its far end an incredible woman waited, radiant in her dark beauty. She extended a taloned hand in welcome, offered green lips for my kiss. A snake winked at me from her hair.

  “Not yet, Maggie.”

  She smiled. The tip of a fang sparkled, though there was no light. Still smiling, she touched my cheek with a forefinger — then raked me with its nail. I felt hot blood on cold skin. It was chilly there, though I had been unaware of that until that moment. Soon it was cold beyond any imagining.

  Magodor tugged at my hand. She didn’t speak. Words wouldn’t carry there. She led me to the tunnel’s end, high on the face of an immense black cliff, on a constructed balcony overlooking a vast black lake, facing a city on the far shore, that made TunFaire seem like a pig farmers’ village. Some towers had fallen. No light showed. There were no lights anywhere. The sun in the sky shed no light either. Neither did three black moons.

  Things swam in that lake and crawled across that landscape and flew in that sky so cold it held no air. They were things like nothing of our world, cold things that ate only the strange rays that wander between the stars, things for whom hope and despair and all other emotions were notions without meaning, utterly beyond comprehension. They were all ancient things, half as old as time, and for an eon they had been trying to escape that cold prison. They were not evil as we conceive of evil. There was no more malice in them than in a flood or earthquake or killing storm. No more than in the man who plows a field and turns up the nests of voles and rabbits and crushes the tunnels of moles.

  Yet they were imprisoned. Something had felt obliged to isolate them from the rest of existence. Eternally.

  Out in the lake something broke the surface of liquid as thick as warm tar. The light of remote and feeble stars was too weak to provide me a good look. Maybe that was just as well. I did not want a good look at something like that, ever.

  I think somebody, possibly in drug dreams, must have seen that place before me. That would explain all those tales of eldritch horrors and unnameable names and unspeakable spooks — though I expect a lot is exaggeration for the sake of extra impact.

  I wouldn’t want to live in that place either, though.

  A glimmering, pale, drowned man’s sort of hand reached up from the darkness and grabbed the edge of the balcony. A corpse with pools of shadow for eyes pulled itself up until its empty mouth was level with the platform. It took me a moment to recognize the face, it was so filled with despair. Imar. The All-Father. The Harvester of Souls. Lord of the Hanged Men. Ass-Kicker Supreme.

  He extended his other quaking hand toward Magodor, the Destroyer, the Driver of the Spoil, and all that stuff, his Executive Officer and First Assistant Supreme Kicker of Butts.

  Magodor stomped his fingers. She put a foot in his face and shoved. So much for company loyalty. Without a sound, Imar twisted and fell into the gulf below.

  I started walking back up the tunnel. Magodor stayed beside me a while, smiling up like we were headed home after a perfect date. She was excited. She could not stop shifting shape — although she never drifted far from human. Maybe we had grown on them over the millennia, too.

  Might be worth some speculation. Might have something to do with why they weren’t as all-powerful as they wanted us to believe.

  I faded out of the tunnel into normal sleep. Normal sleep did not last nearly as long as I would have liked.

  Surprise, surprise.

  57

  When first I awakened I was confused. My head hurt. But I hadn’t been drinking. There was noise outside in the street. But it was way too early for any reasonable being to be up and about.

  Didn’t I do this already? Had I been dreaming, and been dreaming dreams within dreams?

  It was the same damned racket out there. The same damned bigoted morons trying to start the same damned brickbat party.

  I groaned as I
tried to get up. My imagination was so good I had bruises and sore muscles.

  I just had to try to destroy my eyeballs. I pulled a corner of a curtain back... Whoops! They had thrown extra logs onto the fires of the sun this morning, then done away with any clouds that might temper its brilliance. I backed off until my eyes stopped watering and aching. Then I eased into it.

  Yep! Same old bunches of fools with too much time on their hands. Same old mischief looking for a place to happen.

  Across the street there... rooted in exactly the same spot. Exactly the same redhead. Looking right at me, just like before. But this time I knew what she was. Trouble. This time I knew better. This time I wouldn’t chase her and let her make a fool of me. I can manage that fine all by myself, thank you.

  I felt a slight tingle way back in my mind. The Dead Man was there. I realized he must have been there all night. Meaning maybe he had had a thread connected during my nocturnal adventure. Which suggested that he was very concerned indeed. I tried to give him a good look at the redhead.

  As though she realized she was under special scrutiny she sort of stepped sideways and backward and evaporated into a mob surrounding two women glaring at one another nose to nose. One was a very short, fat, ugly human woman. The other was a tall, skinny, beautiful dwarf. They looked like sisters.

  Somebody had noticed and made mention of that fact. Somebody had been stirring with a big, big spoon.

  A woman left the knot. There was a ghost of a hint of furtiveness about her. “That her?”

  Indeed. I am able to follow her by sensing her as a sort of absence of presence in motion.

  I didn’t ask him to explain. I didn’t care. I was watching the wonder of the latter half of our century. Mrs. Cardonlos and her broom were breaking up the all-female confrontation. She found the assistance of a public-spirited giantess invaluable.

  “Damn me, the old harridan ain’t all bad after all. What’ll I do for somebody to hate?”

  The Goddamn Parrot squawked on cue.

  “Of course. Thanks, Morley.”

  Mr. Dotes himself was coming up Macunado, his sartorial elegance causing a stir all the way. Or maybe that stir was caused by the grolls accompanying him, a pair of ugly green guys fifteen feet tall. They had snaggly fangs in their mouths and knobbly clubs in their hands and raggedy sacks on their shoulders. They were smiling, but a smiling groll looks twice as fierce as a frowning groll.

  Grolls are the result of careless dalliances between giants and trolls. These two came from a single lapse in judgment. They were brothers. Doris and Marsha by name.

  Nobody alive in TunFaire would rag those two about their names. They are slow of wit and slower to anger, but once they get started you really don’t want to be in the same county.

  They were related to Morley in some obscure fashion.

  Why was he leading them to my house?

  “You still tracking Adeth, Old Bones?” Looking at Doris and Marsha left me wondering how The Call could take itself seriously. Boys like these could be more trouble than any fool wanted.

  I am. Her movements seem haphazard. Perhaps even aimless.

  “Think she knows you’re onto her?”

  Improbable.

  I considered reminding him that he was highly improbable, but now Morley was just fifty feet from my stoop. The grolls were not his only companions. Several of his old crew, including Sarge, Puddle, and Dojango Roze, pint-size brother of the grolls, were with him. All were armed as heavily as the law allowed. All in all, that crowd had barely enough candlepower to light up the inside of a one-hole outhouse, but they had muscle enough to toss the toilet half a mile.

  The Dead Man warned Dean. As Morley reached the foot of my steps the Goddamn Parrot went flapping into the morning, turning to follow Adeth. The shiny little buzzard was entirely under the Dead Man’s control. He let fall a gift that would have spoiled Morley’s splendor in a grand way, but Dotes was far too alert and quick. He eased out of the way.

  Chuckling, I dropped the curtain, got myself dressed in something presentable, stumbled downstairs. I had aches and pains everywhere. And my head hurt, too. For nothing. Damn! You get up feeling awful, you ought to at least have had some drinks and fun.

  58

  At the foot of the stair I turned right into the kitchen. Dean wasn’t back yet. I snagged a couple of fresh biscuits, broke them open and pasted them with butter, then smeared on great gobs of honey. Then I poured me a mug of tea and put some honey into that. Then I dug out an old teapot and put some water on to heat so I could follow the regular tea with an infusion of willow bark.

  Dean returned to the kitchen shaking his head. “I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

  “That pot is for willow bark tea.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full. You didn’t drink anything last night.”

  “Just one long one. This pain is from the job.”

  He frowned suspiciously. “What is this job? Nothing honest would pay so much.”

  He always worries about us getting paid at all. I’ve never heard him carp about us getting overpaid. “Huh?”

  “Mr. Dotes just brought in what looks like a pirates’ treasure.”

  “Argh! And she be a huge un, aye, matey?”

  “Too huge.”

  “Great. I won’t have to work for a while.”

  “Wrong. Mr. Weider requires your help as soon as you clean up this mess.”

  I sighed, buttered another biscuit. “It’s a conspiracy. Everybody thinks I should work. You ever see a cat do anything more than he has to to get by? The world would be a better place if we all took a lesson from the cat.”

  “Cats don’t leave anything for their children.”

  “Dean, take a quick head count here. How many kids? How many can even have kids? We don’t need to give a damn about posterity because we don’t have no posterity.”

  Dean sighed. “Perhaps not. You can’t even learn not to talk with your mouth full.”

  He should have been somebody’s mother. He was a worse nag than my mom ever was. He was more determined, too.

  “I’ll be in there with the rest.” I left him.

  I visited the front door first and used the peephole to check the stoop. Sure enough, the grolls and Dojango were seated out there, gossiping in grollish. Dojango Roze was Morley’s size but claimed he and the grolls were triplets born of different mothers. Morley backed him up. I’d always considered that a bad joke, but after having wallowed in the mythological for a few days I had no trouble imagining one of our religions boasting some dire prophecy about the coming of triplets born of different mothers.

  I took one cautious peek into the small front room. No owl girls. Maybe they left with the Goddamn Parrot. I wasn’t surprised to see them gone.

  I headed for the Dead Man’s room. “You put out the Cat?”

  Upstairs asleep.

  The cherub, I noted, remained immobile. And visible. Sarge and Puddle were looking it over. Curious. “And the owls?”

  Gone. Bored. But they will return. I fear they may be so simple they will think of nowhere else to go.

  “That could make life interesting.”

  Pshaw!

  “Thought you didn’t like cats?” Morley said.

  “You know me. Big soft spot for strays.”

  “Two-legged strays. Of the under twenty-five and female sort.”

  I turned. “How you hanging, Puddle? Sarge? The new business going all right?”

  “Fugginay, Garrett. Only problem is da kind a people ya got ta put up wit’. All dem highfalutin, nose-in-da-air types, dey can be a real pain in da ass.”

  “Hell, people are the big problem in any line of work.”

  “Fugginay.’Specially dem Call guys. Dey’s gonna find some a dem cut up inta stew meat...”

  Morley cleared his throat.

  “Fugginay. Boss, you really need us here?” Puddle, doing all the talking, had been keeping one nervous eye on the Dead Man. The Dead Man can be
salt on the raw nerves of folks without clear consciences.

  “Wait out front with the Rozes. Try to keep them from getting into another brawl.” Dotes shrugged my way. “Every time I turn around some damned human rights fool is starting something with Doris or Marsha.”

  “Sounds like a problem that will cure itself, given time. Good for the human race, too. Eliminate the stupid blood from the breeding stock.”

  “There aren’t enough grolls and trolls and giants in the world to accomplish that, working full time. I dug up your treasure.” He indicated the sacks scattered around us.

  It wasn’t likely that he’d done any digging with his own hands. These days he was acutely conscious of the line between management and labor.

  Just for grins I remarked, “I see you’ve gotten your share already.”

  He gave me exactly the look I expected. Little boy caught with hand in cookie jar. Only, “I took some to pay the guys to dig and carry and guard. They don’t work for free, Garrett.”

  Not when they were exhuming a treasure. I was surprised that any of it had made it to my house.

  I poked around like I knew what I was doing. Morley couldn’t know that I had no real idea of the size of the treasure, or of its makeup.

  He said, “Instead of playing games you could ask your partner.”

  I could. But where was the fun in that? “He’s a tenant here, not a partner. Tell you what. Since you’ve been such a big help I’ll see that you get something unique in all TunFaire. Maybe in the whole world.”

  “I’m not taking the parrot back.”

  Damn! Everybody is a mind reader anymore.

  When he wants to bother, the Dead Man can move stuff with his thoughts. The treasure sacks tinkled and stirred. “Big mice around here.” What was he doing?

  Morley asked, “What’s this all about, anyway? How did you find a treasure right here in town?”

  “Eyewitness to the burial told me all about it. It was her way of paying me to do a job.” Which, I had to remember, had not been completed to her satisfaction.

  Morley didn’t believe me. “Those coins are ancient, Garrett.”