“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 any more.
“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. The 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.
He was just in the wrong place.
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, but in a new moment of time…
He remembered turning the Winnebago, shifting it at right angles to everything. He tried to capture that sensation—
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 papiermâché 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 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 each 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 he 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 a stroll, half a 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 sides. 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.