Authors: Glen Cook
“What do you want?” she asked.
“To be left alone.”
“That isn’t going to happen. And you know it. A sensible man would cut himself a deal.”
“I’ve already referred to the fatal flaw that renders that idea specious. Based on the record, it’s only reasonable to assume that you all will fail to keep your half of any deal. Promise the fool mortal all the gold and girls he can handle, tell him he gets to be ruler of the world and several provinces in hell as soon as he delivers this nifty key that will save some divine butts.” Speaking of divinity of the foundation, she knew the nature of perfection. “When we’re done we’ll turn his mortal ass into a catfish or something.”
“You’re certainly a cynic.”
“I didn’t create myself.”
She appeared thoughtful. “You may have touched on a real problem. I’ll think about it.” She looked straight at me, radiating that heat but not extending any invite.
“What?”
“You’re a true curiosity. I’ve met believers, unbelievers, fanatics, skeptics, and heretics, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a man who plain just didn’t care.” She did not, however, seem displeased by my indifference.
“I do care. I care a whole bunch about being left alone.”
“Only the dead are left alone, Garrett.”
“And even that depends on which gods they chose while they were alive.”
“Perhaps, stubborn man.” She left me with an enigmatic smile and a philosophical conundrum. She seemed content with my attitude.
TunFaire has innumerable clots of gods. Each bunch anchors a different belief system. Some of those are as crazy as pickled cats. If competing groups of gods, like the Godoroth and the Shayir, actually revealed themselves to mortals and confirmed not only their own existence but also that of their enemies, by implication, the existence of all the rest of the gods would be validated. In my skewed view it further implied that any given value or belief system must be just as true as any other.
Maybe I should start my own Church of the Divine Chaos. Everything is true and nothing is true.
I had no trouble with the idea that all the gods might be real. I’d always liked the notion that gods will exist as long as there is someone who believes they exist. The solidity of my intuition was now at the root of my difficulties. What troubled me was the possibility that the dogmas surrounding various really wacko religions might bear equal validity while there were true believers. If the general population reached that conclusion, there would be a big winnowing fast. Some belief packages just look a whole lot better than others. I would much rather kick off and fall into a paradise stocked with wild women and free beer than just become part of a ball of light or shadow, or become some dark spirit that necromancers would summon, or be gone to eternal torment, or, as had always been my personal suspicion, be just plain dead.
Deserved some thought.
23
I didn’t get time. I had too much on my mind. And I kept getting interrupted by one god person after another, each with the same mission: convince Brother Garrett to scare up that precious key. I had several truly intriguing offers from a couple of goddesses who looked like I had made them up. Maybe I did, come to think. One side of me wished I had a really remote deadline so I could take advantage of all these wonderful offers.
I dozed off at last, started sighing my way through a marvelous dream wherein all these randy goddesses decided I should go in with them on starting a new paradise. We would forget all those stuffy, weird shadow lurkers and hammer pounders and generally unfun, gloomy-gus guy gods. Then the bane of my existence raised its ugly head once again.
Somebody tapped on my cell door.
Something buzzed like the world’s biggest bumblebee. Voices clashed in whispers. The buzzard-size bee went away.
Somebody tapped on the door again.
I did not respond, probably because I was so amazed that anyone here would have the courtesy not to walk right in. I decided to play possum. I cracked an eyelid and waited.
The door opened.
This one was a girl. Surprise, surprise.
At first watery glimpse she seemed chunky and plain, and at second glimpse she seemed vaguely familiar. She had the glow of a peasant girl lucky enough to have enjoyed good health, with a body designed for serious work and frequent childbearing. As lesser gods went, she might be some sort of spring lamb or crop planting specialist.
She poked my shoulder. She was between me and the candle. Nothing insubstantial about her. My earlier visitors, however determined or enthusiastic, had not been entirely impervious to the passage of light.
I opened my eyes completely, startling the girl. I frowned. I did know her... Ah. She looked like a young version of Imara, Imar’s wife. But the head god here looked like Imar, too. Maybe Lang had a kid. No! Hell. She was the girl from Brookside Park.
“What?” I asked.
She didn’t seem to have in mind using woman’s oldest tool of persuasion.
“Hush. I’m here to help.”
“Funny. You don’t look like any royal functionary I ever met.” I touched her. She flinched. Earlier visitors had felt just as solid but had seemed awfully warm. This one was a normal temperature and lacked the absolute self-confidence the others had shown. “You’re mortal.” Clever me. Now I was sure she was the girl I had seen in the park. The pixies had seen her, too.
“Half mortal. Come on! Hurry!” An angry buzz waxed and waned in the corridor outside. “Before they realize there’s something happening outside their set pattern.”
I debated it for a long time, six or seven seconds. “Lead on.” I couldn’t see her getting me into the hot sauce any deeper, whatever her scheme.
Sometimes you just got to roll the bones.
“Who are you? How come you’ve been following me? Why are you doing this?”
“Hush. We can talk after we get out of here.”
“There’s an idea I can get behind.” And right in front of me was a behind I could get behind. She wore the peasant skirt again, whitish linen under a pale blue apron. I liked what I could see.
This mess had its aesthetic up side. I could not recall ever having run into so many gorgeous females in such a short time.
So some were a little strange. We all have our moments of weird, and life is a series of trade-offs anyway.
Blonde braids trailed down the girl’s back. “Wholesome” was the word that came to mind. Generally, some wholesome is the last thing most guys find interesting. But...
She beckoned. I rose to follow. She opened the door a crack, beckoned again. I caught a bit of that buzzing racket again. It had an angry edge. Or perhaps it was impatience.
I don’t think the Shayir ever posted a guard. I guess when you have a Nog on staff you don’t much worry about prisoner escapes. Or maybe it was just divine hubris.
I wondered how my new pal planned to cope with the owl girls and Nog and his girlfriend with the dogs and weapons and no sense of humor.
“Come on!” She was intense but would not raise her voice above a whisper. Which was a good plan, probably.
She was flesh for sure. The floorboards creaked under her, ever so softly. They groaned under me. My earlier visitors had not made the house speak.
“This way, Mr. Garrett.”
Her chosen route was not the one the Shayir had used when escorting me to my spacious new apartment. It was not the route I would have chosen to make my getaway. It led down a narrow hallway only to a small, open window. A chill breeze stirred the thin, dirty white cotton curtains there. Outside, an almost full moon slopped light all over and made the whole manor look like a haunted graveyard. Maybe it was. How were we going to deal with that?
There was a whole lot of buzzing going on out there, suddenly. Somebody said, “Come on, babe, getcher buns moving.” Outside. Stories and stories up.
The girl went right out the window, indifferent to the fact that she was not dressed to play monkey on the wall. I stuck my head outside — and discovered that the big darling was not going downward. Gulp! What the?... Where was the rope? There wasn’t any rope. I had expected a rope from the moment I’d realized her plan included us climbing out that silly little window.
Buzz overhead. I looked up in time to glimpse just a hint of movement vanishing behind the edge of the roof.
Meantime, the girl had gotten herself onto a ledge that was not much wider than my palm. She was sidestepping industriously, headed I couldn’t tell where.
I then noted that the ledge was not a ledge as such. It was the top side of some kind of decorative gingerbread I could not make out because I wasn’t out there in the moonlight. I drew a deep breath, meaning to tell the young lady that I preferred my adventures at low altitudes with solid footing. Somebody behind me spoke up first. “Here, now! You! Who are you? What are you doing there?”
The speaker was a real live human old man, possibly of the butler calling. He wore only nightclothes but was armed with one truly wicked-looking meat cleaver. A door stood ajar behind him. Feeble light leaked into the hallway. If he had pests in his room the way I’d had them in mine that might explain why he slept with kitchen utensils.
The old man didn’t look like he was interested in conversation. He began slicing the air. I considered using my magical cord to climb down. But there was no time to stretch it. Nor did I see any handy place to tie it off.
Why not just jump? Falling would be less unpleasant than an encounter with a slab of sharp steel. The ground wasn’t more than a mile down.
That bumblebee buzz whirred off the roof and dropped down behind me. “Why you want to waste your time on this candyass pug, sweetheart?” I caught a strong whiff of weed smoke.
I looked back. Floating behind me was a pudgy baby with a thousand-year-old midget’s head. The critter wore what looked like a diaper but was actually a loincloth. “What you gawking at, Jake?” it snapped. And, “Get your lard ass moving.” He yelled upward, “Hey, babe, this one’s a fourteen-karat dud.”
The critter carried a teeny little bow and a quiver of little arrows and had the world’s biggest weed banger drooping from the corner of his mouth, smouldering. Here was the source of the buzz. And of the weed stink.
I managed to stand myself up on that ledge. A dud, huh? Look here. Sometimes a military education
is
useful in civilian life. Watch me now.
The old man leaned out the window and took a swipe at me. Rusty iron dealt the air a deep, bitter wound entirely too close to my nose. For a moment it looked like pappy was going to come outside after me.
The buzz changed pitch. I glanced back but kept my feet moving. The little guy doing the floating and cussing slapped a little arrow across his little bow and plinked the old man in the back of his meat-chopping hand. “Get moving, ya drooling moron!” he growled at me. “If you’d hauled your ass from the start they’d never have seen me.”
“I wouldn’t have missed you.”
Sometimes it’s wonderful to be young and dumb. A stunt like this would not have bothered me ten years ago.
About twenty feet from the window a bit of rope hung over the edge of the roof, which at that point descended to within eight feet of our footing. However, the roof did overhang us by several feet. Young and dumb, my new friend just leaped, grabbed the rope, clambered right up, skirt flying. Although he was busy cursing his wound, the old man caught that action. His eyes bugged more than mine did.
As the girl’s feet vanished, the flying critter soared up after her with the same sort of ponderous grace you see in large flying insects, the sort of stately defiance of gravity of a thing that don’t look like it ought to get off the ground at all. He filed various verbal complaints as he went. What a team the girl and I would make, her with her chattering whatisit and me with the Goddamn Parrot.
I shut my eyes, took a deep breath, considered the racket the old man was raising now, opened my eyes, offered the old boy a salute, took the plunge.
That sort of thing was all very well when I was nineteen and only one of a bunch of lunatics who tried to outdo one another in the face of an implacable enemy and almost certain premature death, but I was thirty now. I had a reasonably ordered and comfortable life. Well, sort of. Why the hell couldn’t I remember the moments like this when Old Man Weider made one of his pitches aimed at getting me to work the brewery full time?
I grabbed the rope, found arm strength I had feared was not there anymore, scrambled toward the roof. No longer did I possess the liquid grace of youth, but I did manage to get the job done.
“Can ya believe it, toots? The wuss actually dragged his lead ass up here.”
“Hurry!” The girl beckoned from the top of a slope of slate. “The alarm is spreading.”
Wouldn’t you know. I hurried. After bellying up twenty feet of steep and treacherously dew-slick slate, I dragged myself onto the flat part of the roof, which was large enough for a battalion’s drill ground. You could farm there if you wanted to haul the soil up first. I got to my feet. The girl beckoned anxiously. Beckoning had to be her top skill. I got the notion this was going slower than she’d planned.
The flying baby with the hallucinogenic stogie watched sourly from the back of a horse big enough to haul ogre knights around. The little guy had wings sprouting out of his shoulder blades. They looked just about big enough to lug a pigeon around. I guess he had to work hard when he flew.
There were two horses. “Oh no,” I said. “No. I’ve done all the riding I want for today.” Me and horses never get along. My ribs informed me that Black Mona’s mount had made every effort to ensure that my immediate future was one filled with misery. And that thing was only related to horses. Did I really want to escape badly enough to put myself at the mercy of these monsters?
“Look at this clown, babe. He don’t...”
“Please stop horsing around, Mr. Garrett.” The girl was exasperated.
“You don’t understand. They have you fooled.”
The house shuddered underfoot. Somebody big had begun to stir downstairs.
“See ya later, Sweet Buns.” The little thing’s wings turned into a blur. He buzzed off into the night.