Little Gods (15 page)

“You want me to break this cage, and free the jewel,” he said. “I've never used smith's tools."

“If you can't figure it out, my thief, we'll just find a blacksmith and let you eat him whole, hands and ankles, heart and eyeballs. Then you'll know how to wield a hammer. Do you prefer that course?"

“I ... think I can learn enough on my own to break this cage."

“Acts of destruction
are
the easiest to learn, aren't they, thief?"

They went down the hall.

“What will become of the captain and his family?” the thief asked. “Will you spare them?"

“Would you like to consume the daughter, eat every bit of her, and keep a little of her with you always in that fashion?"

“Gods! No, monster, I would not!"

“Very well. Then her soul will be consigned to wherever such things go. I'm going to kill them all, thief."

“You horrible—"

“Clutch that ball tightly, my dear,” she said. “And go to
sleep
."

The thief did.

He woke, groggy, lying on a pile of musty furs.

“My sleepy thief. I hit you with that enchantment hard. I'm sorry."

He sat up in the dimness and screamed as every part of his body exploded into pins and needles as his sleeping limbs woke.

Only his hands, still clasping the metal ball, were awake. The proximity to the iron had kept her enchantment from making his hands fall asleep.

“That's right, move around,” the woman said. “Work out the stiffness."

“We're back?” he croaked, his throat dry. “Underground?"

“You walked the whole way, though it's a jerky, stiff-legged walk, and it tired me out to drive you that way. I thought you'd wake up sooner, but I was a little ... annoyed ... when I put you under. You really shouldn't speak to me harshly, thief. I had you drag away the old metal trap door and build a wooden one to replace it, and there's a ladder now. Otherwise, yes, this is our familiar abode."

“The girl, the captain's daughter—"

“A puddle,” she said, waving her hand. “A pool of nothing much. When your arms are well awake, the smith's tools are there, and I've got a fire going. We'll figure out how to break that ball."

“Why did you kill them?” The thief squeezed the cold iron ball.

“Because of the hurt their ancestor gave me. He was beyond my reach, so I contented myself with the descendents."

“You're inhuman."

“You state the obvious."

“I need water,” he said suddenly.

“I imagine."

“The pitcher is...?"

“Over there,” she said, and stretched out her arm to point.

The thief saw his opportunity. He hurled the ball as hard as he could toward her midsection.

She grunted as the ball struck her, then screamed. Smoke rose from her dress as it caught fire. In the dimness, the thief could hardly see what had happened, but it seemed that the iron ball had buried itself into her stomach.

“You shit-eating bastard,” she shrieked. She reached down as if to pull the ball away, but screamed and pulled her hands back when she touched it.

Insubstantial hands gripped the thief's throat, and he grunted and started toward the fire and the smith's tools. The hands fluttered, faded, returned. She'd been tired anyway, she said, and now she was grievously wounded. Her hands of air and fire were tired. Still, his vision dimmed and he fell to his knees near the anvil. He reached out and gripped a pair of iron pincers. He struggled to lift the heavy tool, but managed to press it to his throat.

The woman screamed anew, and the invisible hands withdrew.

The thief laboriously gained his feet and stepped toward her. The ball of iron was almost invisible now, burning its way deeply into her guts.

“We could have had such fun,” she said, coughing up smoke. “You would have lived forever, if you'd just agreed to serve me."

“I think I might have figured out a way to do that anyway,” the thief said. He struck her in the face with the iron pincers.

It took him almost a full week to eat her body. She had no organs or bones, just soft, spongy meat throughout, which both relieved and disturbed him. Her flesh tasted like nothing at all, but it still repulsed him to cut and consume her.

The stories said that the Fair Folk had no souls, and so he wondered whether eating her would have any effect—what good was ingesting the spirit of a soulless thing?

But the night he finished her, he had strange dreams. And when he climbed the ladder and emerged into the dark forest, he discovered that he had hands of air and fire, and could move things with a thought, and feel them from far away.

As the years passed, he found that he did not age as men did, nor did he take wounds.

And so he felt satisfied, at last, that he was a master thief.

That's my story, boys. And now the sun's near gone, and you should go home, yes?

Ah, the questions, the questions. What became of the thief? Well. Long after he ate the woman who was not a woman, after many years of wandering, he began to ponder his weakness. Because you see, along with his hands of air-and-fire and his long life, he'd also acquired the woman's weakness. He could no longer touch iron—the metal grew cold if he even put his hand near it, and he knew it would burn him if he touched it.

But he thought to himself,
Am I not, at bottom, a man? Could I not, perhaps, overcome this weakness, if I only had the right meal?

The thief thought back to the woman's suggestion that he could eat a smith to gain familiarity with tools. And the thief thought,
Yes—perhaps I'll eat a smith, and gain his ease with iron, and the metal will vex me no more.
For it is amazing how many things in this world are made of iron, boys, not least of all this cage. The thief had never eaten a man—he'd kept that vow all those years, because the woman did not count as a human, you see—but he thought the time had come to forget silly vows, just as he'd forgotten the face of the captain's daughter.

So the thief came to a village, and took a room in an inn, which had a ram's head on its sign, as many of them do. And the next day he went to the smith's. He was uncomfortable around the horseshoes and the anvil and the hammers but managed to put on a peaceful face. He hailed the smith, intending to inquire after a bit of work and then kill him and spirit his body away for a leisurely meal.

The smith looked familiar, and from the way his eyes went wide, the thief knew he recognized him, too.

Ah, boys—your own eyes are wide. Is this a familiar story?

The smith looked just like the old keeper of the inn, the one the woman had killed that first night the thief traveled with her. Casting back, far back in his memory, the thief thought that this, perhaps, was that same village, grown a little larger, but still the same. He realized the smith was the innkeeper's son all grown-up, that with his father dead he'd had to apprentice to a trade other than inn-keeping.

The son recognized the thief, and in his face it was clear that he remembered the witchery, remembered the murder and seeing the thief fly away.

The thief threw out his hands of air and fire, but the smith had iron all around him, and a hammer in his hand, and the invisible hands rebounded from those things.

The smith struck our thief with a hammer, and knocked him down, and the thief woke in a cage—yes, like this one, very like—with a grievous burn on his face from the hammer's iron. The thief tried to escape, but he could not open the cage himself, because his hands could not touch the iron bars, neither his real hands nor his
other
ones.

And now, my boys—the moral.

I fear I have misled you. There is no moral. Because a moral comes at the end of the tale. If I stayed in this cage, and died, there might be some lesson to be learned from my long life. But my life hasn't ended yet, and so it's a poor time for accounting, before the ledger's even closed.

Because I can still grab you, brats, despite this metal all around. I can reach my hands of air and fire through these bars and grasp you lightly by the necks, as I've done now. And you, smith's son ... you'll go, and take—and
steal
—your father's smallest hammer and chisel, and come back here in the dark, and break this cage open. If you don't, I'll squeeze your friends until they're blue, and then black. And if you serve me ... perhaps I'll teach you secrets, and show you wonders.

You only look afraid, now, but you'll learn to look happy, and hopeful, and bright, in time.

And after you release me, perhaps we can find something good to eat, yes?

Bleeding West

Kentucky Tom Granger stood in the dust-beaten main street of a town called Tolerance and faced the Spirit of the bleeding west. Wooden buildings lined the hardpacked street, discolored to gray uniformity by the sand-laden desert winds. Tom had crossed the Arizona border to reach the town, but Tolerance was not in Arizona, or any other state, either. Tolerance was simply in the west.

The seventeen badges pinned on Tom's ragged shirt glittered in the high sunlight, one for each lawman he'd killed since coming west. An ancient razor-strop hung around his neck like an untied scarf. His twice-great-grandfather had fought with the Kentucky volunteers in the War of 1812 and helped skin Tecumseh, the Indian chief who fought with the British, in 1814. The dangling strop, made from the flesh of Tecumseh's back, constituted the Granger family's sole heirloom.

Tom wore a pair of Colt .45 Peacemakers with plain wooden grips. He didn't go in for ivory inlays or engraved initials. Tom's guns were killing tools, and in their simple utility he found a powerful symbol of a lost time.

The Spirit of the bleeding west stood under the high noon sun, nevertheless casting an impossible shadow that stretched all the way to Tom's feet. The Spirit didn't move, and Tom couldn't make out anything but its huge hat, and its hands hanging motionless above its gun butts. Tom coughed, then pulled his bandanna over his nose. He'd grown accustomed to dust over the years, but the dust in Tolerance seemed thicker, dryer, and more abrasive. This dust could get into his lungs and slice like diamond chips until he spat blood.

Tom drew a deep breath through his bandanna. “I want to ride with you!” he shouted.

The Spirit, a faceless silhouette, did not react.

A wet, gurgling laugh came from Tom's right. He turned, drawing his gun, and saw a man leaning against a hitching post in front of the Trail Blossom saloon. A dead horse lay beside him in a broken-legged pile, still tied up. The man (or
thing
, Tom thought, gripping his guns more tightly) wore a black banker's suit and a bowler hat. His gray skin glistened, and while his green eyes had no pupils, Tom could see the amusement there.

Tom lowered his gun. “What's so funny?"

“Oh, nothing,” the thing in the suit said. “Just thinking how one man's hell is another man's heaven.” He cocked his head. “Come on in, stranger. I'll buy you some firewater."

“You'd better not be laughing at me,” Tom said. He glanced up the broad street. The Spirit of the bleeding west had moved on, but it wouldn't go far.

“Stranger,” the thing said seriously, “in Tolerance, I'll do anything for a laugh."

Broken glass crunched under Tom's feet when he entered the Trail Blossom. Overturned tables and chairs littered the sawdust-covered floor. A few men sat in the back, playing cards, and they looked up with sharp-eyed curiosity when Tom and the thing came in. A blonde woman dressed in red (and little enough of it) sat at a busted piano, tinkling keys at the high end of the register. The bar was as utilitarian as Tom's guns. People came here to drink, screw, and gamble, and the place made no pretense to any other purpose.

The thing in the suit lifted a fallen table with one hand and set it upright, then placed a pair of chairs beside it. “Have a seat, stranger. Want a drink?"

“No.” Tom sat down, sizing up the heavyset bald bartender and the five card-players in the back.

“No?” The thing sounded surprised. “I don't think I've ever offered to buy a man a drink before and been turned down."

Tom tipped back in his chair. “They say the drunker Doc Holliday got, the faster he drew. I'm no Holliday. When I get drunk, I can't shoot straight, and there might be shooting today."

“Suit yourself,” the thing said, and went to the bar. He returned with a shot glass and a thick deck of oversized cards. He sat and shuffled the cards deftly. He had seven fingers on each hand, and delicate webbing between them. “I'm Cosmocrator,” he said. “Call me Cos."

“Tom.” He looked at the cards distrustfully. He'd met a fortune teller in Missouri who read his future with cards like those, and she'd predicted his death in a dry gutter. “Those aren't Tarot cards, are they?” Tom rubbed his single Texas Ranger's star with his thumb.

“No, no. Just a homemade deck. Cards are rare here, valuable as gold. I used to have Tarot cards, but when I came to Tolerance, the pictures changed.” Cos made a sour face. “Death became a big cowboy with a straw in his teeth. The Hanged Man hung by his neck instead of his feet, and the Lovers...” Cos shivered. “The Lovers wandered in the desert, raving, and they'd gouged out their own eyes. I don't like to look at them anymore."

Tom took that in thoughtfully. He was not as dumb as most people thought—perhaps not as dumb as his profession demanded. “Then it's true. This place, Tolerance, stands outside the rest of the world, and the Spirit of the bleeding west still rules."

Cos riffled the cards. “The Spirit lives here. Deserts are hard places, stranger."

“Not anymore,” Tom said bitterly. “The frontier's gone. The gangs are all broken up, the boomtowns are busted, and even the law's gotten fat and lazy.” He touched the Ranger's star and remembered one lawman with a scar on his cheek who hadn't been fat or lazy, not a bit. He'd almost been too fast for Tom.

“Oh, I don't know,” Cos said, grinning. His teeth looked like shards of broken seashell, poking up crookedly from bloodless gums. “There's a sense in which all deserts are one desert. Not in the particulars, maybe ... but they have the same nature. Merciless. A proving ground. Isn't that why you came?"