one way will kill you.”
“I’m already dead, I think,” said Shadow. “I died on the tree.”
She made a moue. “There’s dead,” she said, “and there’s dead, and there’s dead. It’s a relative thing.” Then she smiled again. “I could make a joke about that, you know. Something about dead relatives.”
“No,” said Shadow. “It’s okay.”
“So,” she said. “Which way do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
She tipped her head on one side, a perfectly feline gesture. Suddenly, Shadow knew exactly who she was, and where he knew her from. He felt himself beginning to blush. “If you trust me,” said Bast, “I can choose for you.”
“I trust you,” he said, without hesitation.
“Do you want to know what it’s going to cost you?”
“I’ve already lost my name,” he told her.
“Names come and names go. Was it worth it?”
“Yes. Maybe. It wasn’t easy. As revelations go, it was kind of personal.”
“All revelations are personal,” she said. “That’s why all revelations are suspect.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No,” she said, “you don’t. I’ll take your heart. We’ll need it later,” and she reached her hand deep inside his chest, and she pulled it out with something ruby and pulsing held between her sharp fingernails. It was the color of pigeon’s blood, and it was made of pure light. Rhythmically it expanded and contracted.
She closed her hand, and it was gone.
“Take the middle way,” she said.
Shadow hesitated. “Are you really here?” he asked.
She tipped her head on one side, regarded him gravely, said nothing at all.
“What are you?” he asked. “What are you people?”
She yawned, showing a perfect, dark-pink tongue. “Think of us as symbols—we’re the dream that humanity creates to make sense of the shadows on the cave wall. Now go on, keep moving. Your body is already growing cold. The fools are gathering on the mountain. The clock is ticking.”
Shadow nodded, and walked on.
The path was becoming slippery now. There was ice on the rock. Shadow stumbled and skidded as he walked down the rock path, toward the place where it divided, scraping his knuckles on a jut of rock at chest height. He edged forward as slowly as he could. The moon above him glittered through the ice-crystals in the air: there was a ring about the moon, a moonbow, diffusing the light. It was beautiful, but it made walking harder. The path was unreliable.
He reached the place where the path divided.
He looked at the first path with a feeling of recognition. It opened into a vast chamber, or a set of chambers, like a dark museum. He knew it already. He had been there once, although for several moments he was unable to remember where or when. He could hear the long echoes of tiny noises. He could hear the noise that the dust makes as it settles.
It was the place that he had dreamed of, that first night that Laura had come to him, in the motel, so long ago; the endless memorial hall to the gods that were forgotten, and the ones whose very existence had been lost.
He took a step backward.
He walked to the path on the far side, and looked ahead. There was a Disneyland quality to the corridor: black Plexiglas walls with lights set in them. The colored lights blinked and flashed in the illusion of order, for no particular reason, like the console lights on a television starship.
He could hear something there as well: a deep vibrating bass drone which Shadow could feel in the pit of his stomach.
He stopped and looked around. Neither way seemed right. Not any longer. He was done with paths. The middle way, the way the cat-woman had told him to walk, that was his way. He moved toward it.
The moon above him was beginning to fade: the edge of it was pinking and going into eclipse. The path was framed by a huge doorway.
There were no deals to make any more, no more bargains. There was nothing to do but enter. So Shadow walked through the doorway, in darkness. The air was warm, and it smelled of wet dust, like a city street after the summer’s first rain.
He was not afraid.
Not any more. Fear had died on the tree, as Shadow had died. There was no fear left, no hatred, no pain. Nothing 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