American Gods (68 page)

“I’m tired of being played for a sucker,” said Shadow. “Just
show yourself. Let me see you.”

There was a change in the shadows at the back of the cave.
Something became more solid; something shifted. “You know too damned much, m’boy,”
said Wednesday’s familiar rumble.

“So they didn’t kill you.”

“They killed me,” said Wednesday, from the shadows. “None of
this would have worked if they hadn’t.” His voice was faint—not actually quiet,
but there was a quality to it that made Shadow think of an old radio not quite
tuned in to a distant station. “If I hadn’t died for real, we could never have
got them here,” said Wednesday. “Kali and the Morri-gan and the fucking
Albanians and—well, you’ve seen them all. It was my death that drew them all
together. I was the sacrificial lamb.”

“No,” said Shadow. “You were the Judas Goat.”

The wraith-shape in the shadows swirled and shifted. “Not at
all. That implies that I was betraying the old gods for the new. Which was not
what we were doing.”

“Not at all,” whispered Loki.

“I can see that,” said Shadow. “You two weren’t betraying either
side. You were betraying both sides.”

“I guess we were at that,” said Wednesday. He sounded
pleased with himself.

“You wanted a massacre. You needed a blood sacrifice. A sacrifice
of gods.”

The wind grew stronger; the howl across the cave door became
a screech, as if of something immeasurably huge in pain.

“And why the hell not? I’ve been trapped in this damned land
for almost twelve hundred years. My blood is thin. I’m hungry.”

“And you two feed on death,” said Shadow.

He thought he could see Wednesday, now. He was a shape made
of darkness, who became more real only when Shadow looked away from him, taking
shape in his peripheral vision. “I feed on death that is dedicated,to me,” said
Wednesday.

“Like my death on the tree,” said Shadow.

“That,” said Wednesday, “was special.”

“And do you also feed on death?” asked Shadow, looking at
Loki.

Loki shook his head, wearily.

“No, of course not,” said Shadow. “You feed on chaos.”

Loki smiled at that, a brief pained smile, and orange flames
danced in his eyes, and flickered like burning lace beneath his pale skin.

“We couldn’t have done it without you,” said Wednesday, from
the corner of Shadow’s eye. “I’d been with so many women ...”

“You needed a son,” said Shadow.

Wednesday’s ghost-voice echoed. “I needed you, my boy. Yes.
My own boy. I knew that you had been conceived, but your mother left the
country. It took us so long to find you. And when we did find you, you were in
prison. We needed to find out what made you tick. What buttons we could press
to make you move. Who you were.” Loki looked, momentarily, pleased with
himself. “And you had a wife to go back home to. It was unfortunate, but not insurmountable.”

“She was no good for you,” whispered Loki. “You were better
off without her.”

“If it could have been any other way,” said Wednesday, and
this time Shadow knew what he meant.—

“And if she’d had—the grace—to stay dead,” panted Loki. “Wood
and Stone—were good men. You were going—to be allowed to escape—when the train
crossed the Dakotas ...”

“Where is she?” asked Shadow.

Loki reached a pale arm, and pointed to the back of the
cavern.

“She went that-a-way,” he said. Then, without warning, he
tipped forward, his body collapsing onto the rock floor.

Shadow saw what the blanket had hidden from him; the pool of
blood, the hole through Loki’s back, the fawn raincoat soaked black with blood.
“What happened?” he said.

Loki said nothing.

Shadow did not think he would be saying anything anymore.

“Your wife happened to him, m’boy,” said Wednesday’s distant
voice. He had become harder to see, as if he was fading back into the ether. “But
the battle will bring him back. As the battle will bring me back for good. I’m
a ghost, and he’s a corpse, but we’ve still won. Th& game was rigged.”

“Rigged games,” said Shadow, remembering, “are the easiest
to beat.”

There was no answer. Nothing moved in the shadows.

Shadow said, “Goodbye,” and then he said, “Father.” But by
then there was no trace of anybody else in the cavern. Nobody at all.

Shadow walked back up to the Seven States Flag Court, but
saw nobody, and heard nothing but the crack and whip of the flags in the
storm-wind. There were no people with swords at the Thousand-Ton Balanced Rock,
no defenders of the Swing-A-Long bridge. He was alone.

There was nothing to see. The place was deserted. It was an
empty battlefield.

No. Not deserted. Not exactly.

This was Rock City. It had been a place of awe and worship
for thousands of years; today the millions of tourists who walked through the
gardens and swung their way across the Swing-A-Long bridge had the same effect
as water turning a million prayer wheels. Reality was thin here. And Shadow
knew where the battle must be taking place.

With that, he began to walk. He remembered how he had felt
on the carousel, tried to feel like that ...

He remembered turning the Winnebago, shifting it at right angles
to everything. He tried to capture that seiisation—

And then, easily and perfectly, it happened:’

It was like pushing through a membrane, like plunging up
from deep water into air. With one step he had moved from the tourist path on
the mountain to . £

To somewhere real. He was Backstage.

He was still on the top of a mountain, that much remained
the same. But it was so much more than that. This mountaintop was the
quintessence of place, the heart of things as they were. Compared to it, the
Lookout Mountain he had left was a painting on a backdrop, or a papier-mSchS model
seen on a TV screen—merely a representation of the thing, not the thing itself.

This was the true place.

The rock walls formed a natural amphitheater. Paths of stone
that wound around and across it, forming twisty natural bridges that Eschered
through and across the rock walls.

And the sky ...

The sky was dark. It was lit, and the world beneath it was
illuminated by a burning greenish-white streak, brighter than the sun, which
forked crazily across the sky from, end to end, like a white rip in the darkened
sky.

It was lightning, Shadow realized. Lightning held in one
frozen moment that stretched into forever. The light it cast was harsh and
unforgiving: it washed out faces, hollowed eyes into dark pits.

This was the moment of the storm.

The paradigms were shifting. He could feel it. The old
world, a world of infinite vastness and illimitable resources and future, was
being confronted by something else—a web of energy, of opinions, of gulfs.

People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe.
And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure
things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with
ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people
believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things
happen.

The mountaintop was an arena; he saw that immediately. And
on each side of the arena he could see them arrayed.

They were too big. Everything was too big in that place.

There were old gods in that place: gods with skins the brown
of old mushrooms, the pink of chicken flesh, the yellow of autumn leaves. Some
were crazy and some were sane. Shadow recognized the old gods. He’d met them
already, or he’d met others like them. There were ifrits and piskies, giants
and dwarfs. He saw the woman he had met in the darkened bedroom in Rhode
Island, saw the writhing green snake-coils of her hair. He saw Mama-ji, from
the carousel, and there was blood on her hands and a smile on her face. He knew
them all. He recognized the new ones, too.

There was somebody who had to be a railroad baron, in an antique
suit, his watch chain stretched across his vest. He had the air of one who had
seen better days. His forehead twitched.

There were the great gray gods of the airplanes, heirs to
all the dreams of heavier-than-air travel.

There were car gods, there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent,
with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human
sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs. Even they looked
uncomfortable. Worlds change.

Others had faces of smudged phosphors; they glowed gently,
as if they existed in their own light.

Shadow felt sorry for them all.

There was an arrogance to the new ones. Shadow could see
that. But there was also a fear.

They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing
world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image,
their time would already be over.

Each side faced the other with bravery. To eadh side, the
opposition were the demons, the monsters, the-damned.

Shadow could see an initial skirmish had taken place. There
was already blood on the rocks.

They were readying themselves for the real battle; for the
real war. It was now or never, he thought. If lie did not move now, it would be
too late.

In America everything goes on forever, said a voice in the
back of his head. The 1950s lasted for a thousand years. You have all the time
in the world.

Shadow walked in something that was half stroll, half controlled
stumble, into the center of the arena.

He could feel eyes on him, eyes and things that were not
eyes. He shivered.

The buffalo voice said, You are doing just fine.

Shadow thought, Damn right. I came back from the dead this
morning. After that, everything else should be a piece of cake.

“You know,” said Shadow, to the air, in a conversational
voice, “this is not a war. This was never intended to be a war. And if any of
you think this is a war, you are deluding yourselves.” He heard grumbling
noises from both sjdes. He had impressed nobody.

“We are fighting for our survival,” lowed a minotaur from
one side of the arena.

“We are fighting for our existence,” shouted a mouth in a
pillar of glittering smoke, from the other.

“This is a bad land for gods,” said Shadow. As an opening
statement it wasn’t Friends, Romans, countrymen, but it would do. “You’ve
probably all learned that, in your own way. The old gods are ignored. The new
gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big
thing. Either you’ve been forgotten, or you’re scared you’re going to be
rendered obsolete, or maybe you’re just getting tired of existing on the whim
of people.”

The grumbles were fewer now. He had said something they
agreed with. Now, while they were listening, he had to tell them the story.

“There was a god who came here from a far land, and whose
power and influence waned as belief in him faded. He was a god who took his
power from sacrifice, and from death, and especially from war. The deaths of
those who fell in war were dedicated to him—whole battlefields that had given
him in the Old Country power and sustenance.

“Now he was old. He made his living as a grifter, working
with another god from his pantheon, a god of chaos and deceit. Together they
rooked the gullible. Together they took people for all they’d got.

“Somewhere in there—maybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred,
they put a plan into motion, a plan to create a reserve of power they could
both tap into. Something that would make them stronger than they had ever been.
After all, what could be more powerful than a battlefield covered with dead
gods? The game they played was called ‘Let’s You and Him Fight.’

“Do you see?

“The battle you came here for isn’t something that any of
you can win or lose. The winning and the losing are unimportant to him, to
them. What matters is that enough of you die. Each of you that falls in battle
gives him power. Every one of you that dies, feeds him. Do you understand?”

The roaring, whoompfing sound of something catching fire
echoed across the arena. Shadow looked to the place the noise came from. An
enormous man, his skin the deep brown of mahogany, his chest naked, wearing a
top hat, cigar sticking rakishly from his mouth, spoke in a voice as deep as
the grave. Baron Samedi said, “Okay. But Odin. He died. At the peace talks.
Motherfuckers killed him. He died. I know death. Nobody going to fool me about
death.”

Shadow said, “Obviously. He had to die for real. He
sacrificed his physical body to make this war happen. After the battle he would
have been more powerful than he had ever been.”

Somebody called, “Who are you?”

“I am—I was—I am his son.”

One of the new gods—Shadow suspected it was a drug from the
way it smiled and spangled, said, “But Mister World said ...”

“There was no Mister World. There never was any such person.
He was just another one of you bastards trying to feed on the chaos he created.”

They believed him, and he could see the hurt in their eyes.

Shadow shook his head. “You know,” he said, “I think I would
rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep
going anyhow. It’s what we do.”

There was silence, in the high place.

And then, with a shocking crack, the lightning bolt frozen
in the sky crashed to the mountaintop, and the arena went entirely dark.’

They glowed, many of those presences, in the darkness.

Shadow wondered if they were going to argue with him, to attack
him, to try to kill him. He waited for some kind of response.

And then Shadow realized that the lights were going out. The
gods were leaving that place, first in handfuls, and then by scores, and
finally in the hundreds.

A spider the size of a rottweiler scuttled heavily toward
him, on seven legs; its cluster of eyes glowed faintly.