Glen Cook - Petty Pewter Gods

"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.

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.

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.