Not anymore. Fear had died on the tree, as Shadow had died. There was no fear left, no hatred, no pain. Nothjng left but essence.
Something big splashed, quietly, in the distance, and the splash echoed into the vastness. He squinted, but could see nothing. It was too dark. And then, from the direction of the splashes, a ghost-light glimmered and the world took form: he was in a cavern, and in front of him, mirror-smooth, was water.
The splashing noises came closer and the light became brighter, and Shadow waited on the shore. Soon enough a low, flat boat came into sight, a flickering white lantern burning at its raised prow, another reflected in the glassy black water several feet below it. The boat was being poled by a tall figure, and the splashing noise Shadow had heard was the sound of the pole being lifted and moved as it pushed the craft across the waters of the underground lake.
“Hello there!” called Shadow. Echoes of his words suddenly surrounded him: he could imagine that a whole chorus of people were welcoming him and calling to him and each of them had his voice.
The person poling the boat made no reply.
The boat’s pilot was tall, and very thin. He—if it was a he—wore an unadorned white robe, and the pale head mat topped it was so utterly inhuman that Shadow was certain that it had to be a mask of some sort: it was a bird’s head, small on a long neck, its beak long and high. Shadow was certain he had seen it before, this ghostly, birdlike figure. He grasped at the memory and then, disappointed, realized that he was picturing the clockwork penny-in-the-slot machine in the House on the Rock and the pale, birdlike, halfglimpsed figure that glided out from behind the crypt for the drunkard’s soul.
Water dripped and echoed from the pole and the prow, and the ship’s wake rippled the glassy waters. The boat was made of reeds, bound and tied.
The boat came close to the shore. The pilot leaned on its pole. Its head turned slowly, until it was facing Shadow. “Hello,” it said, widiout moving its long beak. The voice was male, and, like everything else in Shadow’s afterlife so far, familiar. “Come on board. You’ll get your feet wet, I’m afraid, but diere’s not a diing can be done about dial. These are old boats, and if I come in closer I could rip out the bottom.”
Shadow took off his shoes and stepped out into the water. It came halfway up his calves, and was, after the initial shock of wetness, surprisingly warm. He reached the boat, and the pilot put down a hand and pulled him aboard. The reed boat rocked a little, and water splashed over the low sides of it, and then it steadied.
The pilot poled off away from the shore. Shadow stood tiiere and watched, his pants legs dripping.
“I know you,” he said to the creature at the prow.
“You do indeed,” said the boatman. The oil lamp mat hung at the front of the boat burned more fitfully, and the smoke from the lamp made Shadow cough. “You worked for me. I’m afraid we had to inter Lila Goodchild widiout you.” The voice was fussy and precise.
The smoke stung Shadow’s eyes. He wiped the tears away widi his hand, and, through the smoke, he diought he saw a tall man in a suit, witii gold-rimmed spectacles. The smoke cleared and the boatman was once more a half-human creature with the head of a river bird.
“Mister Ibis?”
“Good to see you,” said the creature, widi Mr. Ibis’s voice. “Do you know what a psychopomp is?”
Shadow thought he knew the word, but it had been a long time. He shook his head.
“It’s a fancy term for an escort,” said Mr. Ibis. “We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past thaj may or may not ever have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.”
“I thought this was the world of the dead,” said Shadow.
“No. Not per se. It’s more of a preliminary.”
The boat slipped and slid across the mirror-surface of the underground pool. And then Mr. Ibis said, without moving its beak, “You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.”
“You can’t,” said Shadow. “Can you?” The echoes whispered his words back at him from across the pool.
“What you have to remember,” said Mr. Ibis, testily, “is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter.”
“And if I had a double-headed quarter?”
“You don’t.”