Petty Pewter Gods (20 page)

The Goddamn Parrot guided me to Stuggie Martin’s. That swillery, for all its lack of glory, had seen a dramatic improvement in business. Overflow guys were standing around outside, drinking and muttering. Some of their buddies preferred to mutter and drink.

Having failed to get so much as a taste off the keg delivered to my house, I decided to stop in, maybe revel in the ambience for one beer. My spirits were flying too high anyway.

It did not occur to me that the Dead Man actually wanted me to visit the place.

Yesterday Stuggie Martin’s had been depressing. Today it was like the dead of winter inside. I called for a dark Weider’s, then asked Stuggie’s successor, “What’s with these guys? They look like they just found out rich Uncle Ferd croaked and left everything to the home for wayward cats.”

“You ain’t heard? Got to be that you ain’t heard. It was your pal No-Neck, man. Most everybody ’round here liked that old goof.”

“Did something happen to No-Neck?”

“They found him a little while ago. He was alive, but that wasn’t ’cause somebody never tried to make it go some other way. They tortured him really bad.”

I smacked a fist down hard on what passed for a bar in there. “We tried to warn him. He didn’t want to listen.”

“Huh?”

“He did a favor for somebody that was sure to piss somebody else off. We tried to tell him they wouldn’t let it slide.”

The barkeep poured me another and nodded. He had been sampling his wares, no doubt making sure he was serving only the best. He was having trouble keeping up.

Hell, I was having trouble and my first few sips hadn’t hit bottom yet.

“You guys friends?” the barkeep asked, topping my mug for me.

“Not really. Just had things in common. Like the Corps.” This guy had the right tattoos. He could be diverted.

When I arose a while later I was in a bitter, black mood. No-Neck had been tortured to death only because his precognitive sense had failed him and he had gone walking around with me.

Thus we rail, in vain, against the whims of gods and fates.

Unless his killers were really stupid, one god-gang would have it figured out and would be out of control.

Getting into the Dream Quarter, fast, sounded like a really good plan now.

The barkeep asked, “No-Neck have any people?”

“I didn’t know him. Just met him yesterday. He never mentioned any.”

“Too bad. He was a good guy. Be nice to let somebody know. So somebody could do right by him.”

Had I not been at the bottom of a deep barrel with herds of gods out to get me I might have volunteered to find No-Neck’s family. But I was so far down there the open top looked no bigger than a bunghole.

So No-Neck would be seen into the great beyond by the city’s ratmen, who would cart his remains to the nearest public crematorium.

39

The Goddamn Parrot plopped onto my shoulder as I hit the street. “Shiver me timbers,” I muttered. “Do I live a blessed life, or what?”

“Awk. Something is following you.”

“Am I surprised.”

“Many of the presences are coming this way.”

People stared. It was not often you saw a man chatting with a parrot. “And I’m headed thataway.” I began trotting toward the Dream Quarter. Shouldn’t be that hard to make the safety of the Street of the Gods. Getting back off again might turn out to be a grand adventure, though.

Apparently the Dead Man had little trouble detecting gods once he took an interest. In fact, there was an amazing array of things he could do if you could just get him started.
That
was a secret I really wanted to crack. I might trade my keyness... Nah.

I wondered if the Dead Man being able to spot them meant that my divine acquaintances had chosen to manifest themselves especially strongly during their struggle or if, perhaps, TunFaire was always infested with petty gods and we were detecting this bunch only because we were watching for them. My guess was that these two gangs were obvious mainly because they were fighting for their lives.

The Goddamn Parrot fluttered up and away, off to I-don’t-know-where, once again leaving me to dread a future in which the Dead Man could tag along wherever I went through that bird-brained feather duster.

I walked around a corner and there was Rhogiro, bigger than life and twice as ugly, holding up a wall like your everyday garden-variety street thug. Obviously he wasn’t really waiting for me but was there just in case something turned up. I never slowed a step. I whipped across into a narrow breezeway. It dead-ended on me. I put my back against one wall, my hands and feet against the other. Up I went. Meantime, Rhogiro realized who he had seen, came to the end of the breezeway and did some holy thundering. He was too big to get into the crack and too stupid to recall that he had divine powers. At least in the moments it took me to get up top.

My luck, as always, was mixed. The climb was just two stories. Good. The roofs up there were flat and identical and stretched on and on. Excellent. They could be run upon almost like the street. None of the buildings were more than three feet from their neighbors. Fine.

But in this part of town the slumlords wasted no resources on maintenance. My foot went through a roof almost immediately. I didn’t get hurt, but I realized that I had to slow down or get down.

Slowing down gave me time to think about what I was doing, which, mainly, was heading
away
from the Dream Quarter. I needed to get down and head the other way.

I got down rough, after jumping to a roof so fragile I punched right through. I caught myself before I plunged into whatever disaster lurked below. I stared downward. My eyes were not used to the gloom there, but the area immediately below me looked empty. I lowered myself as far as I could, let go. The floor was not that far. And it held.

The place had been abandoned. Only the masonry was more substantial than the roof. Now that I was into the gloom I could see light leaking through the overhead in fifty places.

The walls consisted of plaster crumbled till it was almost gone, the lathing behind it mostly fallen too. The floor groaned and creaked. The stairway looked so precarious I backed down on all fours. I was interested only in getting out but did note that there was nothing left worth stealing except the brick itself and some wooden bits that would end up as firewood.

I was surrounded by things on their last legs. My partner was dead already. My housekeeper had one foot in the grave. The city where I lived seemed ready to commit suicide.

The street out front was almost empty. That was an ugly omen. These tenement blocks swarm with kids playing, mothers gossiping, grannies whining about their rheumatiz, old men playing checkers and complaining about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Where was the Goddamn Parrot? I could use a good scouting report.

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.