The boat touched bottom. Mr. Ibis stepped off the side, into the pool, and told Shadow to do the same. Mr. Ibis took a line from the prow of the boat, and passed Shadow the lantern to carry. It was in the shape of a crescent moon. They walked ashore, and Mr. Ibis tied the boat to a metal ring set in the rock floor. Then he took the lamp from Shadow and walked swiftly forward, holding the lamp high as he walked, throwing vast shadows across the rock floor and the high rock walls.
“Are you scared?” asked Mr. Ibis.
“Not really.”
“Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.”
Shadow was not scared. He was interested, and apprehensive, but no more. He was not scared of the shifting darkness, nor of being dead, nor even of the dog-headed creature the size of a grain silo who stared at them as they approached. It growled, deep in its throat, and Shadow felt his neck-hairs prickle.
“Shadow,” it said. “Now is the time of judgment.”
Shadow looked up at the creature. “Mister Jacquel?” he said.
The hands of Anubis came down, huge dark hands, and they picked Shadow up and brought him close.
The jackal head examined him with bright and glittering eyes; examined him as dispassionately as Mr. Jacquel had examined the dead girl on the slab. Shadow knew that all his faults, all his failings, all his weaknesses were being taken out and weighed and measured; that he was, in some way, being dissected, and sliced, and tasted.
We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor.
“Please,” said Shadow. “Please stop.”
But the examination did not stop. Every lie he had ever told, every object he had stolen, every hurt he had inflicted on another person, all the little crimes and the tiny murders that make up the day, each of these things and more were extracted and held up to the light by the jackal-headed judge of the dead.
Shadow began to weep, painfully, in the palm of the dark god’s hand. He was a tiny child again, as helpless and as powerless as he had ever been.
And then, without warning, it was over. Shadow panted, and sobbed, and snot streamed from his nose; he still felt helpless, but the hands placed him, carefully, almost tenderly, down on the rock floor.
“Who has his heart?” growled Anubis.
“I do,” purred a woman’s voice. Shadow looked up. Bast was standing there beside the thing that was no longer Mr. Ibis, and she held Shadow’s heart in her right hand. It lit her face with a ruby light.
“Give it to me,” said Thoth, the ibis-headed god, and he took the heart in his hands, which were not human hands, and he glided forward.
Anubis placed a pair of golden scales in front of him.
“So is this where we find out what I get?” whispered Shadow to Bast. “Heaven? Hell? Purgatory?”
“If the feather balances,” she said, “you get to choose your own destination.”
“And if not?”
She shrugged, as if the subject made her uncomfortable. Then she said, “Then we feed your heart and your soul to Ammet, the Eater of Souls…”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I can get some kind of a happy ending.”
“Not only are there no happy endings,” she told him. “There aren’t even any endings.”
On one of the pans of the scales, carefully, reverently, Anubis placed a feather.
Anubis put Shadow’s heart on the other pan of the scales. Something moved in the shadows under the scale, something it made Shadow uncomfortable to examine too closely.
It was a heavy feather, but Shadow had a heavy heart, and the scales tipped and swung worryingly.
But they balanced, in the end, and the creature in the shadows skulked away, unsatisfied.
“So that’s that,” said Bast, wistfully. “Just another skull for the pile. It’s a pity. I had hoped that you would do some good, in the current troubles. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash and being powerless to prevent it.”
“You won’t be there?”
She shook her head. “I don’t like other people picking my battles for me,” she said.
There was silence then, in the vasty hall of death, where it echoed of water and the dark.
Shadow said, “So now I get to choose where I go next?”
“Choose,” said Thoth. “Or we can choose for you.”
“No,” said Shadow. “It’s okay. It’s my choice.”
“Well?” roared Anubis.
“I want to rest now,” said Shadow. “That’s what I want. I want nothing. No heaven, no hell, no anything. Just let it end.”
“You’re certain?” asked Thoth.
“Yes,” said Shadow.
Mr. Jacquel opened the last door for Shadow, and behind that door there was nothing. Not darkness. Not even oblivion. Only nothing.
Shadow accepted it, completely and without reservation, and he walked through the door into nothing with a strange fierce joy.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Everything is upon a great scale upon this continent. The rivers are immense, the climate violent in heat and cold, the prospects magnificent, the thunder and lightning tremendous. The disorders incident to the country make every constitution tremble. Our own blunders here, our misconduct, our losses, our disgraces, our ruin, are on a great scale.
—LORD CARLISLE, TO GEORGE SELWYN, 1778
The most important place in the southeastern United States is advertised on hundreds of aging barn-roofs across Georgia and Tennessee and up into Kentucky. On a winding road through a forest a driver will pass a rotting red barn, and see, painted on its roof
SEE ROCK CITY
THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD
and on the roof of a tumbledown milking shed nearby, painted in white block letters,
SEE SEVEN STATES FROM ROCK CITY
THE WORLD’S WONDER
The driver is led by this to believe that Rock City is surely just around the nearest corner instead of being a day’s drive away, on Lookout Mountain, a hair over the state line, in Georgia, just southwest of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Lookout Mountain is not much of a mountain. It resembles an impossibly high and commanding hill, brown from a distance, green with trees and houses from up close. The Chickamauga, a branch of the Cherokee, lived there when the white men came; they called the mountain Chattotonoogee, which has been translated as the mountain that rises to a point.
In the 1830s Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act forced them all from their land—all the Choctaw and Chickamauga and Cherokee and Chickasaw—and U.S. troops forced every one of them they could find and catch to walk over a thousand miles to the new Indian Territories in what would one day be Oklahoma, down the Trail of Tears: a cheerful gesture of casual genocide. Thousands of men, women, and children died on the way. When you’ve won, you’ve won, and nobody can argue with that.