Gun belt was wide, heavy stiff patent leather and shiny—he’d prefer matte nylon webbing, lighter and more flexible—but probably police force standard again, not her choice. He took off the backpack and buckled the belt on. Needed to use one notch over from the faint crease where she usually wore it, he was wider around than her for all she stood at least half a foot taller. Slim. Like that gold Kali, all lean muscle, marathon-runner build. Being a goddess, she probably didn’t have to exercise to look like that. Part of the god-package . . . like he’d never been able to change the way he looked.
She’d moved on to the second door and stood leaning her forehead against it. Asking deeper questions? She shook herself, stepped back, shook herself again, and walked over to the third.
Not his problem. If she wanted him to know, she’d tell him. Meanwhile, that left him with an unfamiliar gun and holster. This one had a pretty serious top strap, probably designed to keep an alleged perpetrator from grabbing an officer’s weapon in a scuffle, so Albert needed to practice actually getting to the gun if he ever needed it.
He didn’t need a cowboy movie quick-draw, nothing like that, just reliable transfer from holster to hand. Without dropping the damned fat-gripped gun in the process. Same with grabbing a replacement magazine from its belt pouch in the middle of scare-the-shit-out-of-you violence. The snaps on the pouch cover-flaps wanted to stick. Metal, he talked them into a smooth release. Probably should have been Velcro in the first place, but you couldn’t polish that.
She’d moved on to staring out the front window, shaking her head, and then starting on the other bank of ground-floor doors. Just out of curiosity, he opened the back door again, disturbing her winds. Hard rain swept the alley outside, sleet mixed in, he could feel the sting of it when he reached his hand through that boundary. Cold, raw, not a place you’d want to be. Particularly if you happened to be homeless and living in a cardboard hut.
He closed the door and crossed the courtyard to the front window. It looked out on a streetscape, just as he remembered from their earlier check except raining now. Broken window on the second floor across the way and three rust-rimmed bullet-holes in the “No Parking” sign. He remembered those too.
He went back to unsnapping the holster strap and drawing the pistol and flipping off the safety and getting a sight picture, slow motion, just engraving muscle memory with unfamiliar hardware. Then he sat on the marble curb of the fountain, in hot sun next to gentle splashing water, and let the rays soak up some of the tension this place woke in his shoulders. Illusion, all of it. A damned convincing illusion, he could smell the water.
I don’t like gods.
The building wasn’t the only cause of tension.
She had worked her way up to the fourth floor galleries, he couldn’t see her but followed her footsteps as they echoed along spending only a moment or so with each door. Rather longer with the window to the front. And rather longer with the one he thought Mother had used. Balkis had used.
Gonna take a bit of time to digest that news, that Mother isn’t my mother. Not really bad news, considering who She is, but it shakes up my world a bit. Probably says that my brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles . . . aren’t. And that the reports of deaths in the family may be greatly exaggerated. Mother never let facts interfere with a good story.
The weird thing was, he believed it. Mother not being . . . Mother . . . fit in with too many things through the years. She was the kind of person who would tell a lie when the truth would serve as well. Or better. She was the center of the universe, and truth could twist itself as necessary to fit.
Mel clumped down the stairs again, boots heavy on stone treads, and walked over to sag down a few feet away from him on the fountain lip. She stared off into space. Little as he knew her, her body-language said she wasn’t happy.
“Doors won’t talk to you?”
“Oh, they talk, all right. Ones on the first two floors lead to places in this world. Except for the rear on the second floor. None of those three rear doors will open, for me or anyone. Not until Yawm al-Qiyāmah, maybe. If such a thing will ever come.”
“Well, nothing on the brick wall outside . . . ”
She shook her head. “They lead somewhere. They just won’t open. Maybe direct routes to Jannah and Jahannam. Outside means nothing. Illusions.”
Yawm al-Qiyamah—“The Day of Resurrection.” And the Muslim paradise and hell.
Maybe.
“The third rear door?”
“The Blessed Qu’ran does not contain all knowledge. The Prophet, may his name ever be praised, never had enough paper for that. All I know is all three doors go somewhere.”
“What about the upper two floors?”
She glanced up. “Those doors go to . . . other places. The winds are odd behind them, but they still speak to me. The one Bilqis took, that goes to an oasis of strange powers and smells. I think we would be unwise to take that door.”
“Where do the doors to this world go?”
“Some of them I know. The middle door on this side,” she nodded to the second one she’d tried, “goes to my mountains. Not to my home, but close. What you call Tibet, maybe, or Nepal. I know those winds. I could walk to my home from there. I wish that I had found this place many years ago.”
Something in her voice . . . he saw a glint on her cheek, and the breath caught in his throat. Tears. The Goddess of the Mountain Winds was crying. Kali was crying. Homesick. He looked away, quick before he shamed her.
This would be a good time for him to go sniffing at doors. He did so. He couldn’t feel or smell anything unusual about that middle one on the righthand side. Or any of the others on the first floor, for that matter. The second floor, he caught a whiff of northern forest out of the front-most on the left side, the particular mix of fir and pine and spruce and birch and autumn ferns around a lake in Finland. A lake that he could not put a name to, nor remember visiting.
Third floor, he glanced out the front window and then stopped. Not raining. Sun shining. The store and building across the street looked neat and clean, prosperous but not new. The streetlights were gas units. Gaslights, but he saw cars parked on the street. Cars that looked modern.
Alternate world? What did that say about the doors that the winds had told her were normal? Did that door open into her hills?
Fourth floor, the window looked down on a meadow surrounded by forest, stream running out from under his feet and down the middle to a beaver pond and mounded brown lodge and sharp-gnawed aspen stumps. Did that version of the world even have humans in it? Or maybe lacked grabby Europeans, to come and build cities and bury trout streams deep in sewers? Or had the buildings fallen down from age or earthquake and weathered away to nothing, and the trees returned? Man had been here and left?
The door Mother . . . Balkis . . . had used—Mel had accepted and used that name, pronounced in the Arabic fashion—didn’t tell him or his nose anything. He continued widdershins around the fourth floor. The last door on that side . . .
No, don’t open it.
He glanced over the railing. The Goddess of the Mountain Winds still stared out into her memories. Not a good time for him to clatter down the stairs, bubbling over with news.
Just for kicks and killing time, he tried the rear door, the one that should open out over a clear drop to the alley and broken bones at best. That might actually open into Muslim paradise, or the fires of hell. The door handle wouldn’t budge. He felt his way into the metal. Knob on a square shaft, passing through a square hole in a cam inside an old mortise lockset that moved the latch against a spring. Exactly like dozens of locks in his apartment building. Not truly a lock at all, just a latch.
He asked the parts to move. They said, “No.”
Iron had never said “no” to him before. This wasn’t a loud “NO!” with the exclamation-mark of defiance, just a quiet and almost apologetic “no.”
It couldn’t. He could break it, he could feel that in his hand, no problem. A l
ot of the parts were cast iron, brittle and old beyond old. But he couldn’t move it. Breaking the lock wouldn’t open that door. Something beside the latch held it closed. Mel’s winds had told her true.
The moral of this story is, even gods have limits. Even Kali gets homesick.
He finished off the top gallery of doors, no further news either good or bad, and looked down into the courtyard and . . . Mel . . . was up and prowling like a caged tiger, shotgun held at the ready. No, not a tiger—a leopard, smaller and quicker and sleeker.
He was free to notice her again.
He thumped down the flights of stairs, white marble treads with green-gray veins, treads without a trace of wear in spite of the feeling they had been there since the rocks first cooled. How many feet had pounded them, without leaving a mark?
Illusions, too?
He waved around at the galleries. “Your winds give you any idea who made this?”
Head-shake. “I don’t think ‘made’ is the right word. It just is. What we see is what we want to see. The only part that’s real is the doorways. You probably saw what Bilqis thought she saw when she first brought you here, and now I see that, through you. Other eyes that could see it at all would see something else. Something with one way in and twenty-seven ways out, that’s the only constant. If there’s a Beaver God to go with the view out the top window, it probably sees a giant beaver lodge with many tunnels. Who knows?”
He stopped about halfway down the last flight of stairs and looked around, full circle, before turning back to her. “How do you find it in the first place? If you’re the kind of person who can see it at all, how can you tell one doorway from another, one cave mouth from another, and know you ought to walk inside?”
Another shrug. She did that a lot. “We both were drawn here, just like we both felt the Seal and were drawn to it. That’s probably why we’re in this damned backwater city in the first place. The Seal is a god-magnet, pulling us closer to better suck us dry. If Bilqis isn’t lying, she would have felt it more than we do. She still has more power. She still knows who and what she is.”
So Mel was buying at least part of that story. With reservations and questioning the source. Wise move.
“What did your winds tell you about that door, the last door on the fourth gallery?” He pointed.
She cocked her head to one side, looking up. “They didn’t like it. Nothing poisonous, that one shouldn’t kill us unless we do something stupid, just that it’s a closed space, tunnel or cave or cellar. No place for winds to play.” Then she turned back to him. “Why?”
“The Seal went through there. I felt it.”
He’d felt the painful and pained whine he’d left at the burned-out synagogue, faint and distant. Since he didn’t know how much the Seal had weakened, he couldn’t tell how far away, whether it sat behind still another gate into still another world. Or two, or five. But it had gone that way, and left its . . . scent, was the closest word he could find on such short notice. And, he’d smelled, no, felt, that touch of sandalwood, as well. That impossible touch, that might be the soul-trace of a dead salamander.
Did Balkis know he had touched the star and formed some kind of bond with it? And, if she knew, did she care? After all, no sane god would pass up the powers she offered. The name she offered. Let the damned Seal die.
He had as much power as he wanted. More than he wanted.
But he would like to remember his own name.
XII
The doorway framed . . . nothing.
Albert’s stomach churned when he stared at it. Or into it. He saw blank gray without depth or texture, but something wired into his brain knew it wasn’t a flat surface like a painted wall. It made the building spin around him. It offended his sense of where he stood in the universe. He tore his glance away and his feet settled back onto solid marble. Except he knew that also was illusion. He turned back to the Goddess of the Mountain Winds. Kali. Mel. Whoever she was.
“Why do the windows give us a view, but the doors don’t?”
She sat in front of the doorway, full lotus position on the cold stone floor of the gallery, about as far back from the open door as she could get without pushing through the illusionary railing and falling the illusionary height of several illusionary floors to the illusionary courtyard, and his butt ached in sympathy. She didn’t carry much padding around with her.
It made the very picture of a serene yogini except for the shotgun pointing into the void, balanced on her right knee with her finger inside the trigger guard. He’d heard the click when she flipped the safety off before he’d pulled the door open. Not a particularly trusting woman. But he already knew that.
“Not exactly windows,” she answered. “You’ll have noticed, they don’t open. No hinges or latches or other hardware. And I think you would find the second floor view isn’t quite the same as the first, if you look and compare them for long enough. I’ve changed my mind. I think only the first floor doors open into our world.”
“I wonder what would happen if I tried to break the glass . . . ?”
That pulled her “meditation” away from the doorway. “I’d really rather you didn’t try. What happens to the contents of an illusion when it breaks? Makes a good Zen koan, but I’d rather not find that satori through personal experience.”
She focused back on the doorway. “Now, bug off. I’m trying to meditate here.”
So far, her public face added up to a maze of contradictions, some more dangerous than others—a Buddhist Kali who practiced yoga with a shotgun on her lap, identified quotes from the Qur’an from memory, and tossed off slang Americanisms like “bug off” at any random moment. “Bugging off” looked like a reasonable choice. He headed down the stairs to the second floor.
That door to Finland gave him the same gray nothing. Now they’d tried one on every floor, with the same result. Apparently one of the rules of this place was, you couldn’t see what waited for you beyond the gate. The homesick smell of northern forest didn’t get any stronger, just like the pained and painful whine of the damaged Seal hadn’t strengthened when he opened that door. She’d said her winds hadn’t changed, either. They still felt trapped, unable to use or even sense the open door.
Just for kicks, he poked the tip of his cane into the gray and watched it vanish, inch by inch up to just short of the grip and his hand. He tapped down with it and felt ground, soft lumpy ground, underneath. Then he pulled the cane back. Got it back, all of it, with a tuft of dead pine needles stuck to the end. He hadn’t been sure things could go through and then come back. He could replace the cane, but replacing a hand or foot got a little . . . complicated.
Water beaded on the surface of the steel. He sniffed. Rainwater, with the resins and aromatics of drips from pine boughs. It smelled good. He didn’t ache for the place, not as if he was bonded to it, didn’t think he was any kind of Finnish “god,” but the memories he didn’t have of it were pleasant ones. Maybe as a god of smiths, he didn’t tie as tightly to any one place as she did. His realm was the forge, no matter where it sat and who pumped the bellows.
He could step through that door. He could leave this whole stupid “quest” and re-forging the damned Seal, let it die, gain his memories and the powers of a god. If Legion wanted to argue, they’d met the letter of its contract. They’d found out who’d abused the salamander, who’d killed the salamander, and stopped her. Albert didn’t remember anything in the agreement about repairing magical artifacts. Or getting paid for that repair. And he objected to working for free . . .
But I don’t like gods.
Mel hadn’t tried the door into her hill country. She wouldn’t even go back to that gallery of doors on the first floor. The ground-level door they’d tried had been across the court from hers. He could understand.
He wandered over to study the second floor window, the one that might look into a different version of the street he’d walked.
Details. Two rust-rimmed bullet holes punctured the “No Par
king” sign beyond this one. He climbed down to the first floor and verified his memory. Three. He climbed back up the stairs again. Everything else looked the same, on a quick scan. He doubted that it held down to molecular-level detail.
The glass felt cold to his finger-tips, as glass on a rainy day should. Tapping with a knuckle gave a hollow thump, about as resonant as his ear expected from a pane of glass that size. Nothing . . . disturbing . . . like that formless gray. His cane would shatter it, no problem.
A half turn and he glanced up. She stared down at him from that upper gallery. She didn’t speak, didn’t nod or shake her head. Just watched.
He had a sudden flash-image of a popped balloon, a stroboscopic photo with shattered stretched rubber blasting out from the pin-point that had caused the catastrophe. What would breaking an illusion look like, if he could break it—something like that, with both of them thrown into the gray as “reality” pushed out into nothing? Or would they appear in the center of the tattoo parlor, suddenly contesting with a chair or cabinet or bit of structure for that particular volume of space-time?
Maybe not a good idea. He lowered the cane. He walked around the gallery, out of her gaze, and climbed back to the fourth floor. When he looked down again, the door to Finland, whatever alternate Finland, was closed. He hadn’t closed it.
Back up the stairs, her dark eyes studied him. “I sometimes get bored with living, too. Do you know if we can die?”
He shook his head. “Mother told me that my brothers and sister died. I never saw them killed. Never saw a body. She’s not the most reliable source.”
Her eyes shifted to staring across the courtyard, but their focus seemed far beyond any wall, any illusion. “I asked you for a blade to kill a god. Not for Legion, or for any blood feud cherished and kept warm through the centuries.”
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