"You telling me they're refugees?" The gods are refugees from somewhere else? Wouldn't that stir some excitement in the Dream Quarter? Wouldn't that be dangerous knowledge for some non-god to be lugging around?
This was no place for me. I had a notion I was one of the non-gods.
"Cat, you're a doll and I love you, but this isn't my idea of the perfect date. I've got a sneaking suspicion my prospects would be a lot better if I headed some other direction." Like any damned direction but this one.
Cat grabbed my hand. She was strong. My course remained steady, straight ahead. She told me, "You have a tool."
"Huh?"
"You can make yourself invisible."
"Yeah. But when I do, the Godoroth always know where I'm at."
"And you think they'd try something here?"
"Why the hell not? They've already proved they're bonkers. But you know them. I don't."
"We should remain unnoticed. For now."
"That's what I had in mind when I said let's go." I started to head for the horses. Just this once they looked like the lesser evil.
Cat still had my hand and she hadn't gotten any weaker. I got nowhere.
We were near the edge of the light and had attracted no attention yet. Shapes and shadows haunted the hillsides. Wouldn't you know a place called the Haunted Circle would be like that? I didn't recognize any of them. Few were in anthropomorphic form.
More arrived by the moment, flopping, flying, slithering, jogging in on two hundred legs. "Sooner or later something is going to trip over us." I tried beating feet again. Have I mentioned Cat's unusual strength? I didn't go anywhere this time either.
I took out Magodor's cord, stretched it, knotted it, created a loop big enough for two. We hopped inside. "This may get real friendly," I warned.
Cat smiled a wicked smile that told me the deviltry was in her but she wasn't feeling flirtatious right now. She could stick to business where her mother could not. It seemed my sack of invisibility could be made as big as whatever loop I started with, plus however high I could raise that loop before I closed it up. By holding hands and staying in step, Cat and I were able to move the sack with little trouble. She insisted on heading right out into the middle of the lighted ground. Once we were there we could see all the hillsides. Our presence didn't attract any attention. Still I saw nothing I recognized. The mob fell silent. The result was spooky. All that many humans in one place would have created a racket like hurricanes raising hell amongst the boughs of tropical forests. I turned slowly, examining every hill. I was scared, but I was not out of control. Not like Fourteen, who was down between our feet trying to vanish into our footprints, unable, apparently, to believe we were truly invisible.
I whispered, "I take it little ones like him don't get treated real well by the big guys."
"Cruelty is in their nature."
I didn't stop turning, studying. Few of these gods clung to any shape I had seen in the Dream Quarter. Maybe out here the belief of their worshippers was attenuated enough to let them relax. Scary to think things as ugly as Ringo and as attractive as Star might be identical blobs on one of those hillsides. Pity, that.
I whispered, "You know any of those things?" I noticed a few taking imaginable shapes for flickering instants. Maybe their worshippers were thinking of them.
"No. My mother worked hard to keep me a secret from them. If Imar found out about me... "
Of course. It was just ducky being a half god if a god was your pop and your mom was human. A divine tradition. The great heroes of antiquity all had some heavenly blood. But goddesses aren't supposed to boff the suckers, apparently.
The old double standard was alive and well amongst the sons of heaven. Or whatever you called that over there. Always nice to know that some things are the same in heaven as they are on earth. Lets everybody know where they stand.
The shadows continued to gather like buzzards to a freshly fallen thunder lizard. The great towering ones began to arrive, their eyes like cities burning, their hair the ugliest thunderheads. I whispered, "What's happening here, anyway?" I was sure no such assembly had taken place before, ever.
"When they came here the gods left weak places in the fabric of the barriers between. When they want to show off or perform miracles, they use power they pull through those weak places. When they do they create a momentary opening. There are worse things still back there. They would like to come here, too. The fighting between the Godoroth and Shayir would have opened a lot of holes. Some of those things over there found them before they closed up again. They tried to break through. That's what caused those flashes. The stupid fighting went on so long and the fabric of the barrier grew so weak that those horrors might actually bust their own hole through. This assembly is going to decide how to handle that. It's also going to discuss the Shayir and Godoroth. They aren't so stupid they didn't know better. A universal terror of the evils left behind has underlain all divine law for ten thousand years."
"How the hell do you all of a sudden know all this?" I knew she couldn't have known much of it when we arrived.
"I can catch snatches of their debate." She tapped her temple. "It's really hot."
On that level where the Dead Man communicates with me, inside my head, I was aware of a continuous dull buzz, like I was catching just the remotest edge of mindspeech going on in a somewhat similar manner. That buzz was extremely stressful. Before long I was going to have one ferocious headache.
Then I spotted somebody I knew.
50
Magodor stalked along the foot of a hill about a hundred feet away. She was no shadow. She was set solidly in her nastiest avatar. She looked right at me. She knew I was there. Good old Driver of the Spoil. She didn't look pleased but seemed unlikely to try making my life less pleasant than it was already.
I recalled that people in TunFaire had been unable to see the divine clowns lurking around me. "Cat, you can see these things, can't you?"
"I see Magodor. She sees us, too."
"No. But she knows I'm here. She gave me the cord. She can tell where it is."
"Uhm!" She seemed to have lost interest. Aha! Her mother had arrived. Imara seemed quite regal and totally indifferent to the censure of fellow gods.
The rest of the Shayir and Godoroth arrived, all frozen into their city forms. The anger around us grew palpable. My headache began worsening fast. Among the stragglers I spotted interesting faces. "Cat. Do you know that character there?" I indicated a huge, handsome, one-eyed guy who was neither Godoroth nor Shayir.
"That's Bogge. He's Mom's lover."
"Bogge? You sure?" He looked a lot like Shinrise the Destroyer. "Gets around, don't she?" I wondered if a god would lie to a mortal about his identity. Or if a mother would lie to her daughter. My thoughtless remark earned me a dirty look. I asked, "How about the redhead there? The one who looks like an ordinary mortal." Ordinary, hell. All women ought to look so ordinary. She looked like Star might if she decided to conform to my peculiar prejudices.
"Not in that form." There was a small catch in her voice.
"She got me into this. She was watching my house. I decided to follow her."
"She isn't Godoroth or Shayir."
Indeed. But you do have some ideas...
Nog is inescapable.
Well, of course he was. He kept coming back like an unemployed cousin, Nog did.
I recalled a little old lady at the mouth of an alley and reflected that goddesses were not required to keep one look. "The name Adeth mean anything? Magodor said an Adeth was trying to trap me. I thought she meant that woman."
Nervously, Cat said, "One of the Krone Gods is called Adeth... " and cut herself off.
"What? Give, darling. Look around. We don't need to play games."