Free Book 08 - Petty Pewter Gods by Glen Cook Page B

was
young.”
    “I figured. Marine?”
    “Hey! Fugginay! How’d you know?”
    It might have been the tattoos. “You can always tell a
Marine. Got that special attitude.”
    “Yeah. Ain’t dat da troot? You too, eh?”
    “First Force.” I added the years, so he would know
there was no chance we had acquaintances in common. I hate it when
people play that game. They find out you are from a particular
neighborhood, whatever, they spend an hour asking do you know this
one or that like all you ever did with your life was keep track in
case somebody asked.
    “Good. Dat’s good. You come wit’ me. I show
you where dey hang. What you say you want to know for?”
    “I didn’t, No-Neck. But I’m supposed to check
up on some changes going on down here.” I told him about the
Antitibet cult coming in.
    “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I’m gonna help
wit’ da moving. Dese here Dellbo priests from da Cantard, you
ask me, dey got no business taking over from honest TunFairen gods,
but rules is rules and the gods made dem demselfs. You can only
have so many temples and stuff or pretty soon you lose control and
have dem loony churches wit’ only tree members where nutsos
worship killer radishes and stuff.”
    I am no heartbreaker, so I didn’t let him know there were
some off-Street storefront temples where minuscule congregations
really did worship holy rutabagas and snails and whatnot. If the
mind of man can come up with a screwball god, however bizarre, a
god will arise to answer that lunatic appeal. At least in the
imagination of man.
    Many of the nonhuman species have their religions, too, but they
do not go for diversity and cuckoo. Only us humans need gods
crazier than we are.
    And we are the future of the world. The other races are the
fading past.
    Makes you wonder if there isn’t a god of gods with a
really nasty sense of humor.
----

16
    For a couple of sceats No-Neck showed me both the former Shayir
temple and the Godoroth.
    “Couple of real dumps,” I said. “Tell me what
you know about these gods.” Thought I would catch him while
he had a grateful glow on. I glanced around. Once you have
experienced Chattaree it is hard to imagine such squalor.
    “Cain’t tell you jack, pal. Wisht I could. But it
ain’t smart even ta name names, like Strayer, or Chanter, or
Nog the Inescapable. Dey is nasty as hell, all a dem.”
    “That’s no surprise.”
    The Shayir and Godoroth were competing for the last hovel on the
Street. It was beyond the levee, leaned out over the river on
rotting piles fifteen feet tall. One good flood surge and it would
be gone. But it was home to the Godoroth, I guess, and nobody wants
to get kicked out of their own house.
    No-Neck told me, “Bot’ places is closed down.
Dey’ll open back up in a couple days.”
    “Under new management?”
    No-Neck frowned. He didn’t have a lot of brain left over
to untangle jokes and decipher sarcasms.
    I asked, “Any reason I can’t go in and look
around?” There were no physical locks on the doors.
    “You’d be trespassing.”
    Right on top of it, my man No-Neck.
    “I wasn’t planning to touch anything. I just want to
see the setups. For my client’s information.”
    “Uhm.” He focused his intellect, frowning, investing
heavily for a small return. The No-Necks of the world are great for
getting work done as long as they have somebody to tell them what
to do.
    “I don’t tink I unnerstand what you do.”
    I explained, not for the first time since we teamed up. I said,
“It’s like being a private soldier. A client hires me,
I’m his one-man army, except I don’t bust heads or
break arms, I just find out things. The client I have now wants to
find out as much as he can about these two cults.”
    No-Neck made a connection. “Like dat might be somebody
what has to help decide who gets dat last temple.”
    “There you go.” Far be it from me to disabuse a man
of an erroneous intuition. Not that he was entirely off the
mark.
    “I