Nobody. Nothing. Just a chain marking the entrance to a cave as off-limits to guests.
Shadow stepped over the chain.
He looked around, peering into the darkness.
His skin prickled.
A voice from behind him, in the shadows, said, very quietly, "You have never disappointed me."
Shadow did not turn. "That's weird," he said. "I disappointed myself all the way. Every time."
"Not at all," said the voice. "You did everything you were intended to do, and more. You took everybody's attention, so they never looked at the hand with the coin in it. It's called misdirection. And there's power in the sacrifice of a son-power enough, and more than enough, to get the whole ball rolling. To tell the truth, I'm proud of you."
"It was crooked," said Shadow. "All of it. None of it was for real. It was just a setup for a massacre."
"Exactly," said Wednesday's voice from the shadows. "It was crooked. But it was the only game in town."
"I want Laura," said Shadow. "I want Loki. Where are they?"
There was only silence. A spray of rain gusted at him. Thunder rumbled somewhere close at hand.
He walked farther in.
Loki Lie-Smith sat on the ground with his back to a metal cage. Inside the cage, drunken pixies tended their still. He was covered with a blanket. Only his face showed, and his hands, white and long, came around the blanket. An electric lantern sat on a chair beside him. The lantern's batteries were close to failing, and the light it cast was faint and yellow.
He looked pale, and he looked rough.
His eyes, though. His eyes were still fiery, and they glared at Shadow as he walked through the cavern.
When Shadow was several paces from Loki, he stopped.
"You are too late," said Loki. His voice was raspy and wet. "I have thrown the spear. I have dedicated the battle. It has begun."
"No shit," said Shadow.
"No shit," said Loki. "So it does not matter what you do anymore."
Shadow stopped and thought. Then he said, "The spear you had to throw to kick off the battle. Like the whole Uppsala thing. This is the battle you'll be feeding on. Am I right?"
Silence. He could hear Loki breathing, a ghastly rattling inhalation.
"I figured it out," said Shadow. "Kind of. I'm not sure when I figured it out. Maybe when I was hanging on the tree. Maybe before. It was from something Wednesday said to me, at Christmas."
Loki just stared at him from the floor, saying nothing.
"It's just a two-man con," said Shadow. "Like the bishop with the diamond necklace and the cop who arrests him. Like the guy with the fiddle, and the guy who wants to buy the fiddle. Two men, who appear to be on opposite sides, playing the same game."
Loki whispered, "You are ridiculous."
"Why? I liked what you did at the motel. That was smart. You needed to be there, to make sure that everything went according to plan. I saw you. I even realized who you were. And I still never twigged that you were their Mister World."
Shadow raised his voice. "You can come out," he said, to the cavern. "Wherever you are. Show yourself."
The wind howled in the opening of the cavern, and it drove a spray of rainwater in toward them. Shadow shivered.
"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 Morrigan and the f**king 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. 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.
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 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 papier-mâché 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.