The boat slipped and slid across the mirror-surface of the underground pool. And then Mr. Ibis said, without moving its beak, “You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.”
“You can’t,” said Shadow. “Can you?” The echoes whispered his words back at him from across the pool.
“What you have to remember,” said Mr. Ibis, testily, “is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter.”
“And if I had a double-headed quarter?”
“You don’t.”
Shadow had a frisson, then, as they crossed the dark water. He imagined he could see the faces of children staring up at him reproachfully from beneath the water’s glassy surface: their faces were waterlogged and softened, their blind eyes clouded. There was no wind in that underground cavern to disturb the black surface of the lake.
“So I’m dead,” said Shadow. He was getting used to the idea. “Or I’m going to be dead.”
“We are on our way to the Hall of the Dead. I requested that I be the one to come for you.”
“Why?”
“You were a hard worker. Why not?”
“Because . . .” Shadow marshaled his thoughts. “Because I never believed in you. Because I don’t know much about Egyptian mythology. Because I didn’t expect this. What happened to Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates?”
The long-beaked white head shook from side to side, gravely. “It doesn’t matter that you didn’t believe in us,” said Mr. Ibis. “We believed in you.”
The boat touched bottom. Mr. Ibis stepped off the side, into the pool, and told Shadow to do the same. Mr. Ibis took a line from the prow of the boat, and passed Shadow the lantern to carry. It was in the shape of a crescent moon. They walked ashore, and Mr. Ibis tied the boat to a metal ring set in the rock floor. Then he took the lamp from Shadow and walked swiftly forward, holding the lamp high as he walked, throwing vast shadows across the rock floor and the high rock walls.
“Are you scared?” asked Mr. Ibis.
“Not really.”
“Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.”
Shadow was not scared. He was interested, and apprehensive, but no more. He was not scared of the shifting darkness, nor of being dead, nor even of the dog-headed creature the size of a grain silo who stared at them as they approached. It growled, deep in its throat, and Shadow felt his neck hairs prickle.
“Shadow,” it said. “Now is the time of judgment.”
Shadow looked up the creature. “Mr. Jacquel?” he said.
The hands of Anubis came down, huge dark hands, and they picked Shadow up and brought him close.
The jackal head examined him with bright and glittering eyes; examined him as dispassionately as Mr. Jacquel had examined the dead girl on the slab. Shadow knew that all his faults, all his failings, all his weaknesses were being taken out and weighed and measured; that he was, in some way, being dissected, and sliced, and tasted.
We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor.
“Please,” said Shadow. “Please stop.”
But the examination did not stop. Every lie he had ever told, every object he had stolen, every hurt he had inflicted on another person, all the little crimes and the tiny murders that make up the day, each of these things and more were extracted and held up to the light by the jackal-headed judge of the dead.
Shadow began to weep, painfully, in the palm of the dark god’s hand. He was a tiny child again, as helpless and as powerless as he had ever been.
And then, without warning, it was over. Shadow panted, and sobbed, and snot streamed from his nose; he still felt helpless, but the hands placed him, carefully, almost tenderly, down on the rock floor.
“Who has his heart?” growled Anubis.
“I do,” purred a woman’s voice. Shadow looked up. Bast was standing there beside the thing that was no longer Mr. Ibis, and she held Shadow’s heart in her right hand. It lit her face with a ruby light.
“Give it to me,” said Thoth, the Ibis-headed god, and he took the heart in his hands, which were not human hands, and he glided forward.
Anubis placed a pair of golden scales in front of him.