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. Th& 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 seiisation—
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-mSchS 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.