“No, listen. He’s right,” said an old man with iron-gray hair: Czernobog. He was holding a small sledgehammer, resting the head of it on his shoulder. “They have the high ground. The weather is against us. This is madness, to begin this now.”
Something that looked a little like a wolf and a little more like a man grunted and spat on the forest floor. “When better to attack them, dedushkal Shall we wait until the weather clears, when they expect it? I say we go now, I say we move.”
“There are clouds between us and them,” pointed out Is-ten of the Hungarians. He had a fine black mustache, a large, dusty black hat, and the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum siding and new roofs and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the ‘day after the checks clear whether the work is done or not.”
A man in an elegant suit, who had until now said nothing, put his hands together, stepped into the firelight, and made his point succinctly and clearly. There were nods and mutters of agreement.
A voice came from one of three warrior-women who comprised the Morrigan, standing so close together in the shadows that they had become an arrangement of blue-tattooed limbs and dangling crow’s wings. She said, “It doesn’t matter whether this is a good time or a bad time. This is the time. They have been killing us. Better to die together, on the attack, like gods, than to die fleeing and singly, like rats in a cellar.”
Another murmur, this time one of deep agreement. She had said it for all of them. Now was the time.
“The first head is mine,” said a very tall Chinese man, with a rope of tiny skulls around his neck. He began to walk, slowly and intently, up the mountain, shouldering a staff with a curved blade at the end of it, like a silver moon.
Even Nothing cannot last forever.
He might have been there, been Nowhere, for ten minutes or for ten thousand years. It made no difference: time was an idea for which he no longer had any need.
He could no longer remember his real name. He felt empty and cleansed, in that place that was not a place.
He was without form, and void.
He was nothing.
And into that nothing a voice said, “Ho-hoka, cousin. We got to talk.”
And something that might once have been Shadow said, “Whiskey Jack?’
“Yeah,” said Whiskey Jack, in the darkness. “You are a hard man to hunt down, when you’re dead. You didn’t go to any of the places I figured. I had to look all over before I thought of checking here. Say, you ever find your tribe?”
Shadow remembered the man and the girl in the disco beneath the spinning mirror-ball. “I guess I found my family. But no, I never found my tribe.”
“Sorry to have to disturb you.”
“Let me be. I got what I wanted. I’m done.”
“They are coming for you,” said Whiskey Jack. “They are going to revive you.”
“But I’m done,” said Shadow. “It was all over and done.”
“No such thing,” said Whiskey Jack. “Never any such thing. We’ll go to my place. You want a beer?”
He guessed he would like a beer, at that. “Sure.”
“Get me one too. There’s a cooler outside the door,” said Whiskey Jack, and he pointed. They were in his shack.
Shadow opened the door to the shack with hands he had not possessed moments before. There was a plastic cooler filled with chunks of river ice out there, and, in the ice, a dozen cans of Budweiser. He pulled out a couple of cans of beer and then sat in the doorway and looked out over the valley.
They were at the top of a hill, near a waterfall, swollen with melting snow and runoff. It fell in stages, maybe seventy feet below them, maybe a hundred. The sun reflected from the ice that sheathed the trees that overhung the waterfall basin.
“Where are we?” asked Shadow.
“Where you were last time,” said Whiskey Jack. “My place. You planning on holding on to my Bud till it warms up?”
Shadow stood up and passed him the can of beer. “You didn’t have a waterfall outside your place last time I was here,” he said.
Whiskey Jack said nothing. He popped the top of the Bud, and drank half the can in one long slow swallow. Then he said, “You remember my nephew? Henry Bluejay? The poet? He traded his Buick for your Winnebago. Remember?”
“Sure. I didn’t know he was a poet.”
Whiskey Jack raised his chin and looked proud. “Best damn poet in America,” he said.
He drained the rest of his can of beer, belched, and got another can, while Shadow popped openliis own can of beer, and the two men sat outside on a rock, by the pale green ferns, in the morning sun, and they watched the falling water and they drank their beer. There was still snow on the ground, in the places where the shadows never lifted.
The earth was muddy and wet.