“Make your point, Mama-ji,” said Wednesday.
“My point?” Her nostrils flared. The corners of her mouth turned down. “I—and I am obviously only a child—say that we wait. We do nothing. We don’t know that they mean us harm.”
“And will you still counsel waiting when they come in the night and they kill you, or they take you away?”
Her expression was disdainful and amused: it was all in the lips and the eyebrows and the set of the nose. “If they try such a thing,” she said, “they will find me hard to catch, and harder still to kill.”
A squat young man sitting on the bench behind her hrrumphed for attention, then said, with a booming voice, “All-Father, my people are comfortable. We make the best of what we have. If this war of yours goes against us, we could lose everything.”
Wednesday said, “You have already lost everything. I am offering you the chance to take something back.”
The fire blazed high as he spoke, illuminating the faces of the audience.
I don’t really believe, Shadow thought. / don’t believe any of this. Maybe I’m still fifteen. Mom’s still alive and I haven’t even met Laura yet. Everything that’s happened so far has been some kind of especially vivid dream. And yet he could not believe that either. All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end. Then the fire burned out, and there was darkness in Valaskjalf, Odin’s Hall.
“Now what?” whispered Shadow.
“Now we go back to the carousel room,” muttered Mr. Nancy. “And old One-Eye buys us all dinner, greases some palms, kisses some babies, and no one says the gee-word anymore.”
“Gee-word?”
“Gods. What were you doin’ the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?”
“Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger’s balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended.”
Mr. Nancy chuckled.
“But nothing was resolved. Nobody agreed to anything.”
“He’s workin’ them slowly. He’ll land ‘em one at a time. You’ll see. They’ll come around in the end.”
Shadow could feel that a wind was coming up from somewhere, stirring his hair, touching his face, pulling at him.
They were standing in the room of the biggest carousel in the world, listening to the “Emperor Waltz.”
There was a group of people, tourists by the look of them, talking with Wednesday over at the other side of the room, as many people as there had been shadowy figures in Wednesday’s hall. “Through here,” boomed Wednesday, and he led them through the only exit, formed to look like the gaping mouth of a huge monster, its sharp teeth ready to rend them all to slivers. He moved among them like a politician, cajoling, encouraging, smiling, gently disagreeing, pacifying.
“Did that happen?” asked Shadow.
“Did what happen, shit-for-brains?” asked Mr. Nancy.
“The hall. The fire. Tiger balls. Riding the carousel.”
“Heck, nobody’s allowed to ride the carousel. Didn’t you see the signs? Now hush.”
The monster’s mouth led to the Organ Room, which puzzled Shadow—hadn’t they already come through that way?
It was no less strange the second time. Wednesday led them all up some stairs, past life-sized models of the four horsemen of the apocalypse hanging from the ceiling, and they followed the signs to an early exit.
Shadow and Nancy brought up the rear. And then they were out of the House on the Rock, walking past the gift store and heading back into the parking lot.
“Pity we had to leave before the end,” said Mr. Nancy. “I was kind of hoping to see the biggest artificial orchestra in the whole world.”
“I’ve seen it,” said Czernobog. “It’s not so much.”
The restaurant was ten minutes up the road. Wednesday had told each of his guests that tonight’s dinner was on him, and had organized rides to the restaurant for any of them who didn’t have their own transportation.
Shadow wondered how they had gotten to the House on the Rock in the first place, without their own transportation, and how they were going to get away again, but he said nothing. It seemed the smartest thing to say.