but pushed him onto the beam. There was no going back, no escaping. He didn’t try.
As he wound the beam, the people ahead moved aside to give him room. He came to the end, and the crowd, almost reverently, parted.
There, in the center of the platform, stood a terrifying scarecrow. Its clothes were rags. Long tangled weeds constituted the hair. It had a face like a desiccated fish—the mouth a wide, howling oval, the dark leathery skin pitted and taut and tanned. Despite its upright position, anyone could see that it wasn’t alive. For one thing, it had no eyes in its ragged sockets.
Finally he noticed its feet.
In complete disparity with the rest of the tattered thing, the big, clumsy shoes on its feet were brightly polished and red as blood. Far redder than when he had given them up. He looked at the dried-out and ravaged face again, and finally recognized the features of his brother.
Baloyd knew what had happened. Whenever he had chosen a destination, the shoes had not stopped until it had been reached. Suald had chosen the compass of the world: He had run across infinity. He had run himself to death.
His horrifying appearance kept everyone a comfortable distance away from Suald. When Baloyd touched him, the body collapsed like a heap of twigs. He caught it as it fell and laid it down. Then he untied the shoes and took them off his brother’s corpse. Bones sprinkled out of them—dust and small bits—all that remained of Suald’s feet. He upended the shoes to pour out the rest, then sat and, removing his slippers, put the shoes on again. People stared at him, many with distaste. He didn’t care. His brother had stolen the shoes from him, and he wasn’t about to let anyone else get the chance. They were his.
He left the slippers there on the hex.
The husk of his brother weighed little. Without assistance Baloyd carried the raggedy body along the spiral of the dragon beam, and bits of it crumbled as he walked, sprinkling over the wall and into the sea. The crowd backed away, some with revulsion, others in wonder. With each step the blood hammered in his head. In the pulse his wife’s voice chided him over and over and over again: You could have been a god. You could have been a god.
When he stepped from the beam onto Brink Lane, something plopped from the pocket of his brother’s trousers. The unblemished clay tablet lay at his feet. He turned the corpse to rummage through the other pockets until he found the stylus. It was dark and sharp, ready for use.
He set down Suald, then picked up the clay. In his other hand he held the stylus. What should he write? He could bring Suald back to life, and Seru as well from whatever hell she’d been cast into. With the tablet he might do anything at all.
People dared to come near him. They asked, “What’s wrong, Baloyd? Why have you stopped?”
He considered their eager faces. The pathetic, simple fools. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Everything is very right, and it’s going to be better than right.” He inscribed the tablet. Then he lowered the stylus.
Halfway.
That was as far as he got before the transformation took place.
A reddish brown dust swirled up from the street, spinning a web around his legs. Reddish brown color spread from his fingertips over his palms and up his arms, too. Like a living sheath the color encased his torso, his neck, his head. In a moment he ceased to be human, or alive.
The people on the street dropped to their knees and bowed down in veneration. They chanted his name, “Ba-loyd,” each time they bowed. Some of the nearest ones reached out and touched him. Their display brought others who, unmoved by the desire to venerate, came close enough to inspect the rough stone figure that had been Baloyd. Beside him they found his brother’s corpse and, lying beside it where it had fallen, the clay tablet. On the tablet they read the words he’d written: MAKE THEM WORSHIP ME LIKE A GOD.
“And so Baloyd was worshipped for many, many years,” said Leodora, “until the last of those people who’d been present that day had died. By then, the sandstone form of him had been worn down and scoured by wind and salt. The tablet proved useless to those who’d found it. A few tried writing upon it with sticks and knives to no effect.