by Tad Williams
Well, that was just wonderful. Maybe the ghallu would step on something nasty while it was eating us and get tetanus.
“The indoor pools,” Sam panted. “If you want water, I think they’re still fed from the bay. Maybe someone left the sluices open.”
Just then I heard a sound like bombs going off and turned. The monster had climbed onto one of the shops behind us, smashing the remnants of its roof as it scrambled toward the edge. It saw us then and leaped down as quickly as a cat (if cats came in combine-harvester size) then began to close the ground between us, leaping over the cement pits of the empty therapy pools.
Nobody had bothered to put a lock on the indoor pool, and we slammed through the door and into the echoing space. The reason it was open quickly became apparent. It might have been an indoor pool once, but the roof had been made of something less permanent than the walls and had long since rotted away. The ceiling was nothing but a basket of rusted metal spars, completely open to the sky, but even so the place still stank of urine and human feces and rotting dead things.
Even as we ran across the slippery tiles, I saw that for once Fate had smiled on me, or at least not simply flipped me the bird: as Sam had guessed, there was water in the indoor pool, gleaming darkly where the moon touched it through the tangle of rusted struts. In fact, the pool was nearly full.
But the moon wasn’t the only thing above us. A large shadow appeared at the edge of the roof and sprang down, less like a cat or a toad this time than like something with lots of legs dropping onto its prey. It crouched in the shadows, temporarily shapeless, but I could see the burning eyes, and it could just as obviously see me.
Then Sam slipped and fell, cracking his head hard against the floor, and before I could slide to a stop, struggling to keep my balance on the filthy, muddy tiles, I was a dozen feet past him. Sam lay on the ground, not moving. The ghallu came toward us with horns down and arms spread. I wasn’t sure how many shells I might have left in my gun-two, maybe three if I was lucky-but I stepped toward the thing.
“Hey, you-ugly!” I shouted. “You don’t want him, you want me!”
It actually stopped, tipping its wide-pronged head like a dog.
“Come on and try me, you ancient bastard! Come and taste the twenty-first century!”
It sprang over Sam as if it had meant to do that in the first place. Something that big should never be that fast-never. I realized it was going to be on me before I could even get traction again, so I fired. With no time for careful placement I just aimed for the shadowy center of it and pulled the trigger, then squeezed off another for good measure. I saw both bullets hit and the thing shuddered as the silver pierced it, slowing its loping progress to a stumble. Sprays of molten orange leaped like sunspots from its torso, but the bullets didn’t kill it any more than meteors would kill the sun. All that those shots did for me was allow me time to get my feet under me again, so I could scramble toward the dark indoor plunge and leap in.
Sam had been right about another thing: the pool was full of salt water from the bay-but that wasn’t all. Left open to the elements and only the Highest could guess what other kind of filth, the water smelled like sewage and clung like oil. Floating branches and other debris tangled my arms as I swam. I wasted no time on the aesthetics, but paddled as fast as I could to the deep end where the chipped tiles still faintly read “12”-twelve feet, I hoped, not “Lane 12” or something equally useless. When I got there I turned, treading water, trying to keep my gun out of the muck, and waited.
I didn’t wait long. Growling and rumbling, the huge thing scrabbled along the side of the pool for a moment as if gauging whether it could reach me from there, then leaped into the murky water. A geyser of steam vomited into the air.
It was fast in the water, too. It came toward me like a shark, just a dark bulge beneath the water’s surface. To my horror, I learned that simply because something hates water doesn’t mean it can’t swim. Instead of staying and waiting for it, I dove down and felt the creature pass just above me in a wave of scalding heat and furiously bubbling froth, its flames doused but its skin still hot as a branding iron.
The ghallu turned then and dug back toward me, too far up for me to slip past it to the surface. I did my best to ignore the foul water burning my eyes as I tried to kick out of the monster’s way, but I wasn’t fast enough and a moment later it was right over me.
I am no Olympic swimmer. My superiors gave me a good body, but not Superman’s. The ghallu had speed and strength far beyond any human frame, even one on loan to an angel. As I tried to dart away again it reached out and caught me-I could feel the skin of my ankle blistering. I did my best to turn and shoot at it, hoping I had one round left and that the Five-Seven would fire underwater, but some garbage floating in the pool had tangled itself with my trigger finger, and before I could get it untangled the monster yanked me toward it and dragged me upward.
It was dangling me upside down by one leg as it surfaced and thrashed its way toward the shallower end where it could stand up. The demon-beast’s skin was black, smooth as a dolphin’s, and smelled like melting rubber and sulfur. Even soaking wet the thing was painfully hot, and as it stood there dripping, up to its belly in the water, little flames began to run along its head and shoulders as the remaining moisture steamed away. I fought with my remaining strength but couldn’t wriggle loose. The pain of my ankle was so intense that I could only pray that there really was one bullet left so I could put it into my own skull and end the agony. The ghallu had dived into a full pool and swallowed a pound of silver and still barely broke stride. I had nothing else to try.
Helpless. That’s the word.
But instead of ripping my head off or burning me to ashes, the ghallu lifted me up and began to open its mouth, which kept opening and opening until it was a gaping hole, its distended lower jaw almost touching its chest. This time, instead of flames, I saw nothing inside it-nothing. Not the emptiness of an open gullet, but the void itself, belching out empty, freezing cold despite the heat of the ghallu’s body, a bottomless pit stinking of oblivion. And then I realized that this demon wasn’t going to carry me back to Eligor, it was going to send me back. It was going to swallow me right down that horrible throat into Hell.
I struggled to get my gun up, but the thing was clutching me against its chest and I couldn’t lift my arms above my shoulders. The tangling object wrapped around my trigger finger slid into the palm of my gun hand. It was Caz’s silver locket, hard and smooth against my skin. Her parting gift…or her last lie. It seemed appropriate that it had kept me from firing. Then I suddenly realized what it was made from.
When Orban warned me how tough the ghallu was, how hard it would be to kill even with the bullets he’d just sold me, he’d said I’d need something more: “Not just ordinary silver. Special.” What else did I have with even a chance of fitting that bill? But Caz’s locket was only special if it meant something-if I let it mean something. I had to believe there was a reason it was in my hand in that moment, not lying in the debris at the bottom of the pool. Which meant…what? Faith?
All this flashed through my head in an instant as the thing began lifting me toward its cold-steaming maw. As the stink washed over me, I could feel the monster’s fingers cracking my ribs even as they roasted my skin like a Christmas goose. In between screams of pain I kicked the monster as hard as I could but it was like kicking a steam shovel. Still, I somehow managed to work my other hand loose and grabbed the little silver locket, then pressed it against the hot, rubbery expanse of the ghallu’s chest, right where its heart should be if it had one. I rammed the barrel of the automatic against the locket, said a prayer that didn’t really have any words-mostly that I still had a bullet in the chamber-and pulled the trigger.
The blast rocked me as if I’d been struck by lightning. I felt the pit-spawn’s molten blood spurt burning onto my chest as the creature roared and thrashed, then it flailed through the scummy water toward the side of the pool, flinging me
away as if I no longer mattered. I narrowly missed the concrete lip, landed hard against the tiles, and slid to within a few yards of the place where Sam lay. The ghallu was making terrible sounds, bending where no living thing should bend, writhing as though it was tearing itself apart inside, but it managed to pull itself out and crawl close enough to us that its huge, twitching black fingers nearly closed on me before it finally stopped moving.
I watched it long enough to make certain it was dead, or whatever happened to things like that when you shot them in whatever passed for their important organs, then I fell back and stared up at the broken ribs of the roof, gasping and shivering uncontrollably. My sides were on fire and my ribs stabbed at me every time I breathed. The gun was still clutched in my hand like a wrecked ship’s spar in the grip of a drowned man. I may even have cried for a moment before I rolled onto my side and puked up a belly’s worth of whatever had been in that horrible pool, then I surrendered to the darkness growing in my head.
Sam was stirring beside me when my brain began to work again. He didn’t ask any questions, but his eyes got appropriately wide when he saw the immense black shape of the dead ghallu, the last thin wisps of steam rising from its skin as its internal furnaces shut down.
“Somebody gave me a gift,” I offered by way of explanation. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Sam rolled over and sat up, holding his head as though his hands were all that was keeping it attached. “I know we need to talk, Bobby,” he said at last. “Let’s get out of here. My place. We can clean up, get something on those burns, then I’ll tell you everything.”
We both heard the telltale sound of a gun being cocked. It echoed from the walls of the roofless hall as if someone had banged on them with a stick.
“No, I think you’d better talk right here, Sammariel,” a voice said. “Because I really want to hear this. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got a gun. And I’m pretty sure I’ve also got the only bullets in the room.”
thirty-eight
the third way
“You?” I said. “Really?”
Clarence looked at me but he kept the strange little gun pointed at Sam, which didn’t really make sense. “Surprised? Or disappointed?” He was playing it very tough, but there was a telltale tremor in his gun hand.
“Depends, I guess. How did you find us out here?”
“Hold on,” he said. “Before anybody does any more talking, I just want to mention that this is a needle gun full of some kind of South American plant toxin, Sam, so if you try do something dramatic like kill yourself, I’ll drop you with it, and you’ll be paralyzed for hours. And I can make the shot, too-I’ve been practicing.” He looked down at the titan corpse of the ghallu. “Wow. Did you do that, Bobby? That must have been tough.”
“Hold on, why would Sam want to kill himself?” I demanded.
“Because he’s got access to at least one other body,” Clarence said. “Habari’s.”
Startled, I looked at Sam, who shrugged. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Habari was you?”
“Who did you think it was?” he asked me. “I thought you knew. Fuck’s sake, I thought that’s why you took me to that headstone.”
“I knew you had something to do with all this Magian Society stuff, but I thought Habari might be…well, Leo. Because they both died about the same time.”
“You’re talking about our Leo? From the Harps?” Sam shook his head. “As far as I know, he’s dead and we’re not getting him back. And Habari died a year or so after Leo. But Leo was involved, indirectly….”
“Wait a minute.” I turned back to Junior, who was still trying to perfect his I’m-in-control stance. “This is going too fast for me. How did you find us here?”
Clarence had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “Sam’s phone is hacked. I can always find out where he is. I had some help from Upstairs on that.”
“You were tracking Sam all this time, not me?” I looked at Sam. “So you lied to me. It wasn’t me he was spying on.”
“Shit, B,” he said, “I lied to you about a lot of things. Yeah, the kid’s been keeping an eye on me all along. Some of our bosses were getting suspicous.”
Then something else occurred to me, and I turned back to Clarence. “But Sam lost his phone earlier tonight, long before we got here. So how did you track us to Shoreline Park?”
Clarence stared back, but he was hesitating. “I bugged your phone, too,” he admitted at last. “After I got here, I followed the noise.”
If he’d had access to my phone he might know everything, even about Caz. This wasn’t good at all. “So Temuel was just double-bluffing me? You’ve been working for our bosses all this time? That still doesn’t explain how you got here, kid-you can’t drive. Or did you lie about that too?”
Now Clarence looked really guilty. “I…found a ride.”
I laughed despite myself. “And is what’s-her-name, your nice old landlady, sitting out there in her Continental keeping the heater running ’til you get back?”
He scowled. “You don’t know everything, Bobby. I’ve been renting from them because Burt has an indoor shooting range in his basement. They let me practice down there.” He turned to Sam. “Now it’s your turn, Angel Sammariel. Start talking, because once I turn you over to our superiors they’ll clamp down on all this and I’ll never find out what happened. How did the Third Way approach you? What did they offer you?”
“Not they,” Sam said after a moment. “Kephas.”
The other name Temuel had given me, along with the Magians.
“Never heard of him,” said Clarence.
Sam shook his head. “Not a him, necessarily. Just a disguised presence, not male, not female. A high-up angel, though, that’s for sure. Kephas offered me a deal.”
“Kephas means ‘rock,’” I said, remembering what Fatback had told me. “As in, ‘On this rock I will build My church…’”
Sam nodded. “The higher angels, they like that old school stuff.”
Clarence snorted at this. “Betraying Heaven is old school?”
Sam gave the kid a cold look. “You wouldn’t know about it, Junior, but me and Bobby saw a lot of ugly stuff when we were in the Harps. Stuff they don’t teach you in the Records department-”
“Yeah, yeah, it was hell out there,” Clarence interrupted. “Spare me the justifications, Sam. You didn’t like what our superiors gave you to do, so you decided to find some nicer bosses.”
Sam shook his head again, not in negation but in something more like resignation. “It was our old top-kicker Leo who first got me thinking, actually. He was always talking about the politics, the stuff going on behind the scenes, wondering who was really in charge.”
“Another paranoid.” But Clarence sounded like he might be trying to convince himself more than us.
“Said the undercover spy to his ex-partner.” Sam forced a sour grin. “After awhile, what Leo said began to make sense; whoever’s really in charge, they don’t seem to have our interests at the top of their priority list. I couldn’t ignore that any longer. And then Leo died-the real death, the final kind. I didn’t think it was an accident. Still don’t. Maybe I said a few things afterward that drifted around Upstairs, I don’t know. Whatever tipped them off, the Third Way group found me. Kephas was their representative, and he, she, whatever it is, asked me if I wanted to do something to make Heaven better.” Sam then repeated most of the stuff I’d already heard in Walker’s quasi-suicide letter about the Third Way, their belief in the need for an alternative to Heaven and Hell, their willingness to try to do something about it. “They weren’t ready to move yet-this was years ago-but I couldn’t take being in the Harps any longer.” He turned to me. “It was beginning to feel like a lie, Bobby-all that talk about how we were the only bulwark against Hell’s evil on Earth, but there we were doing all that awful shit.”
“Don’t apologize,” I said. “I might have listened, too.” But I wasn’t certain about that. I don’t like chaos. I d
on’t like secrets. And I sure as hell didn’t like the idea of people as powerful as Karael and his friends being angry at me.
“So I quit the Harps,” Sam went on, “took an informal leave of absence, and for a while I just…well, sort of bummed around. Settled here in San Judas and tried to figure out what I was doing. Made friends-mortal friends, even. One of them was Reverend Habari.” The tone of Sam’s voice said this was important to him. “I really wish you’d known him, Bobby. He was a good man. Truly good. He wasn’t just a community political activist, he would take in homeless folk and feed them and let them stay until he could get them into a shelter. He marched in all the marches, but he also stayed up late supervising the night basketball league in Sierra Park. Visited shut-ins. Read to sick folks. And then he got cancer and died. And all I could think was, ‘And that’s the end of a good man. He’s gone.’”
“What do you mean?” Clarence sounded outraged. “He died. If he was as good as you say, then he went straight to Heaven!”
Sam’s voice rose. “For what? To become what? Our masters have made certain we don’t know anything for sure, kid. The only angels we know are like us-ciphers with their memories wiped, working for the Man down here on Earth or our bosses in Heaven. Is that what happened to Moses Habari? They just erased everything and started him over, like us? Or is he one of those poor fools square-dancing in the Fields of the Blessed with about as much of his personality left as a psychiatric patient pumped full of happy drugs?”
