Tad Williams: The Dirty Streets of Heaven

I struggled to get my gun up, but the thing was clutching me against its chest and I couldn’t lift my arms above my shoulders. The tangling object wrapped around my trigger finger slid into the palm of my gun hand. It was Caz’s silver locket, hard and smooth against my skin. Her parting gift…or her last lie. It seemed appropriate that it had kept me from firing. Then I suddenly realized what it was made from.

When Orban warned me how tough the ghallu was, how hard it would be to kill even with the bullets he’d just sold me, he’d said I’d need something more: “Not just ordinary silver. Special.” What else did I have with even a chance of fitting that bill? But Caz’s locket was only special if it meant something-if I let it mean something. I had to believe there was a reason it was in my hand in that moment, not lying in the debris at the bottom of the pool. Which meant…what? Faith?

All this flashed through my head in an instant as the thing began lifting me toward its cold-steaming maw. As the stink washed over me, I could feel the monster’s fingers cracking my ribs even as they roasted my skin like a Christmas goose. In between screams of pain I kicked the monster as hard as I could but it was like kicking a steam shovel. Still, I somehow managed to work my other hand loose and grabbed the little silver locket, then pressed it against the hot, rubbery expanse of the ghallu ’s chest, right where its heart should be if it had one. I rammed the barrel of the automatic against the locket, said a prayer that didn’t really have any words-mostly that I still had a bullet in the chamber-and pulled the trigger.

The blast rocked me as if I’d been struck by lightning. I felt the pit-spawn’s molten blood spurt burning onto my chest as the creature roared and thrashed, then it flailed through the scummy water toward the side of the pool, flinging me away as if I no longer mattered. I narrowly missed the concrete lip, landed hard against the tiles, and slid to within a few yards of the place where Sam lay. The ghallu was making terrible sounds, bending where no living thing should bend, writhing as though it was tearing itself apart inside, but it managed to pull itself out and crawl close enough to us that its huge, twitching black fingers nearly closed on me before it finally stopped moving.

I watched it long enough to make certain it was dead, or whatever happened to things like that when you shot them in whatever passed for their important organs, then I fell back and stared up at the broken ribs of the roof, gasping and shivering uncontrollably. My sides were on fire and my ribs stabbed at me every time I breathed. The gun was still clutched in my hand like a wrecked ship’s spar in the grip of a drowned man. I may even have cried for a moment before I rolled onto my side and puked up a belly’s worth of whatever had been in that horrible pool, then I surrendered to the darkness growing in my head.

Sam was stirring beside me when my brain began to work again. He didn’t ask any questions, but his eyes got appropriately wide when he saw the immense black shape of the dead ghallu , the last thin wisps of steam rising from its skin as its internal furnaces shut down.

“Somebody gave me a gift,” I offered by way of explanation. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Sam rolled over and sat up, holding his head as though his hands were all that was keeping it attached. “I know we need to talk, Bobby,” he said at last. “Let’s get out of here. My place. We can clean up, get something on those burns, then I’ll tell you everything.”

We both heard the telltale sound of a gun being cocked. It echoed from the walls of the roofless hall as if someone had banged on them with a stick.

“No, I think you’d better talk right here, Sammariel,” a voice said. “Because I really want to hear this. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got a gun. And I’m pretty sure I’ve also got the only bullets in the room.”

“You?” I said. “Really?”

Clarence looked at me but he kept the strange little gun pointed at Sam, which didn’t really make sense. “Surprised? Or disappointed?” He was playing it very tough, but there was a telltale tremor in his gun hand.

“Depends, I guess. How did you find us out here?”

“Hold on,” he said. “Before anybody does any more talking, I just want to mention that this is a needle gun full of some kind of South American plant toxin, Sam, so if you try do something dramatic like kill yourself, I’ll drop you with it, and you’ll be paralyzed for hours. And I can make the shot, too-I’ve been practicing.” He looked down at the titan corpse of the ghallu . “Wow. Did you do that, Bobby? That must have been tough.”

“Hold on, why would Sam want to kill himself?” I demanded.

“Because he’s got access to at least one other body,” Clarence said. “Habari’s.”

Startled, I looked at Sam, who shrugged. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Habari was you ?”

“Who did you think it was?” he asked me. “I thought you knew. Fuck’s sake, I thought that’s why you took me to that headstone.”

“I knew you had something to do with all this Magian Society stuff, but I thought Habari might be…well, Leo. Because they both died about the same time.”

“You’re talking about our Leo? From the Harps?” Sam shook his head. “As far as I know, he’s dead and we’re not getting him back. And Habari died a year or so after Leo. But Leo was involved, indirectly….”

“Wait a minute.” I turned back to Junior, who was still trying to perfect his I’m-in-control stance. “This is going too fast for me. How did you find us here?”

Clarence had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “Sam’s phone is hacked. I can always find out where he is. I had some help from Upstairs on that.”

“You were tracking Sam all this time, not me?” I looked at Sam. “So you lied to me. It wasn’t me he was spying on.”

“Shit, B,” he said, “I lied to you about a lot of things. Yeah, the kid’s been keeping an eye on me all along. Some of our bosses were getting suspicous.”

Then something else occurred to me, and I turned back to Clarence. “But Sam lost his phone earlier tonight, long before we got here. So how did you track us to Shoreline Park?”

Clarence stared back, but he was hesitating. “I bugged your phone, too,” he admitted at last. “After I got here, I followed the noise.”

If he’d had access to my phone he might know everything, even about Caz. This wasn’t good at all. “So Temuel was just double-bluffing me? You’ve been working for our bosses all this time? That still doesn’t explain how you got here, kid-you can’t drive. Or did you lie about that too?”

Now Clarence looked really guilty. “I…found a ride.”

I laughed despite myself. “And is what’s-her-name, your nice old landlady, sitting out there in her Continental keeping the heater running ’til you get back?”

He scowled. “You don’t know everything, Bobby. I’ve been renting from them because Burt has an indoor shooting range in his basement. They let me practice down there.” He turned to Sam. “Now it’s your turn, Angel Sammariel. Start talking, because once I turn you over to our superiors they’ll clamp down on all this and I’ll never find out what happened. How did the Third Way approach you? What did they offer you?”

“Not they,” Sam said after a moment. “Kephas.”

The other name Temuel had given me, along with the Magians.

“Never heard of him,” said Clarence.

Sam shook his head. “Not a him, necessarily. Just a disguised presence, not male, not female. A high-up angel, though, that’s for sure. Kephas offered me a deal.”