“So is this where we find out what I get?” whispered Shadow to Bast. “Heaven? Hell? Purgatory?”
“If the feather balances,” she said, “you get to choose your own destination.”
“And if not?”
She shrugged, as if the subject made her uncomfortable. Then she said, “Then we feed your heart and your soul to Ammet, the Eater of Souls . . .”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I can get some kind of a happy ending.”
“Not only are there no happy endings,” she told him. “There aren’t even any endings.”
On one of the pans of the scales, carefully, reverently, Anubis placed a feather.
Anubis put Shadow’s heart on the other pan of the scales. Something moved in the shadows under the scale, something it made Shadow uncomfortable to examine too closely.
>
It was a heavy feather, but Shadow had a heavy heart, and the scales tipped and swung worryingly.
But they balanced, in the end, and the creature in the shadows skulked away, unsatisfied.
“So that’s that,” said Bast, wistfully. “Just another skull for the pile. It’s a pity. I had hoped that you would do some good, in the current troubles. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash and being powerless to prevent it.”
“You won’t be there?”
She shook her head. “I don’t like other people picking my battles for me,” she said.
There was silence then, in the vasty hall of death, where it echoed of water and the dark.
Shadow said, “So now I get to choose where I go next?”
“Choose,” said Thoth. “Or we can choose for you.”
“No,” said Shadow. “It’s okay. It’s my choice.”
“Well?” roared Anubis.
“I want to rest now,” said Shadow. “That’s what I want. I want nothing. No heaven, no hell, no anything. Just let it end.”
“You’re certain?” asked Thoth.
“Yes,” said Shadow.
Mr. Jacquel opened the last door for Shadow, and behind that door there was nothing. Not darkness. Not even oblivion. Only nothing.
Shadow accepted it, completely and without reservation, and he walked through the door into nothing with a strange fierce joy.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Everything is upon a great scale upon this continent. The rivers are immense, the climate violent in heat and cold, the prospects magnificent, the thunder and lightning tremendous. The disorders incident to the country make every constitution tremble. Our own blunders here, our misconduct, our losses, our disgraces, our ruin, are on a great scale.
—Lord Carlisle, to George Selwyn, 1778
The most important place in the southeastern United States is advertised on hundreds of aging barn roofs across Georgia and Tennessee and up into Kentucky. On a winding road through a forest a driver will pass a rotting red barn, and see, painted on its roof
SEE ROCK CITY
THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD