40

I almost made it. The story of my life. A lot of almosts. I was almost king, except right at the last minute I got born to the wrong mother.

I turned into Gnorleybone Street a few blocks short of the Street of the Gods. Gnorleybone isn’t much used because it don’t go anywhere, but it did offer a nice look at the distance I still had to travel. I saw only normal traffic for the place and the time of day. No funny shadows or lights, no big ugly guys, no pretty and deadly girls, no huntress or hounds, nothing but clear sailing. I slowed to a brisk walk, tried to catch what of my breath hadn’t gotten so lost it was out of the kingdom.

They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. They ought to live my life. With me it’s always brightest just before the hammer of darkness comes smashing down.

I don’t know what hit me. One minute I was just a-huffing and a-puffing and a-grinning, and the next I was crawling through a molasses blackness. Time passed there, inside my head, but beyond me seemed a timeless sort of state. Maybe I was in limbo, or nirvana, depending on your attitude.

I sensed a light. I struggled toward it. It expanded to become a face. “Cat?” Fingers touched my cheek, caressed. Then pinched cruelly. The pain helped clear my head and vision.

“No. Not Cat.”

Cat’s mom. Imara. The Godoroth had gotten to me first. But when I looked around I saw no one but Imara. We were in a place like the inside of a big egg furnished only with a low divan draped with purple silk. The light came from no obvious source. “What’s going on? . . . ”

“We will talk later.” She laid a fingernail on my forehead, over that spot sometimes called the third eye. Then she trailed it down between my eyes, over my nose, across my lips. That nail felt as sharp as a razor. I shivered nervously but found her touch weirdly exciting, too.

“You have a reputation.” Her hand kept traveling. “Is it justified?”

“I don’t know.” My voice was an octave high. I couldn’t move. “Whoa!” That was a squeak.

“I hope so. I seldom get an opportunity like this.”

“What?” I wasn’t putting up much of a fight. This matronly goddess was about to have her way with me and, incidentally, establish her husband as my mortal enemy. There was no arrangement between them, only the arrangement Imar had with himself. Gods are always jealous critters, turning their spouses’ lovers into toads and spiders and whatnot.

Which seemed of no particular concern to her. She had one thing on her mind and pursued it with a single-minded devotion more often associated with less than socially ept adolescent males. I began struggling too late. By then the inevitable was upon me. I had no heart for a fight. I hoped she wouldn’t turn into something with two hundred tentacles and breath like a dead catfish.

I am one agnostic who got made a believer. I should have brought help.

If they were all that way no wonder they were always getting into trouble.

Panting, I asked, “You make a habit of just grabbing guys and getting on with it?”

“Whenever I get away long enough. It’s one of the little rewards I permit myself for enduring that bastard Imar.”

The Dead Man hadn’t said anything about Imar’s legitimacy. No doubt being a bastard was part of his divine charm.

“Please stop for a while. I’m only human.” Imara seemed human enough herself, except for the scale of her appetites.

“For the moment, then. We have to talk, anyway.”

“Right.”

“Have you found the key?”

“Uh . . . ” I was at a serious disadvantage here. I was getting sat upon at the moment. “No.”

“Good. Have you bothered looking?”

Good? I ground my teeth. She was a goddess of some substance. “Not really. I haven’t been given a chance.”

“Good. Don’t bother.”

“Don’t?”

“Ignore it. Hide out. Let it go. Let the deadline pass.”

“You want to get kicked out of the Dream Quarter?”

“I want Imar and his band of morons to get kicked out. I’ve made arrangements. I’ve wanted to get shut of that belching idiot for a thousand years, and this is my chance.”

She began numbering Imar’s faults and sins, which reminded me of the main reason I avoid married women. I didn’t hear one complaint that I haven’t heard from mortal wives a thousand times. Apparently, being a god is domestic and deadly dull most of the time. Pile it on for millennia and maybe some divine excesses start to make sense.

Those recitals are boring at best. When you have no particular desire to be with the recitee they can become excruciating. Despite my improbable situation, my mind wandered.

I came back fast when she decided I had recovered. “Ulp! So you’re gonna dump the Godoroth and sign on with the Shayir?”

How could she manage that? Any honest historical theologian will admit that deities do move shop occasionally, but the mechanism by which they do so eludes me.

“The Shayir? That’s absurd! Lang could be Imar’s reflection. Why would I want more of that? And his household has nothing to recommend its survival. Let them sink like stones into the dark cold deeps of time.” She said all that in a sort of distracted, catechistic manner. Her mind was on something else.

Maybe the wrong gal got the temple whore job.

“You haven’t communicated with the Shayir?”

“No! Shut up.” She pressed her fingernails into my forehead again. I shut up. She took charge. She had her way with me for about a thousand years.

That molasses darkness reclaimed me eventually. The last I knew, Imara was whispering a promise that I would never be sorry if neither Lang nor Imar ever got hold of the key.

Why do these things happen to me?