American Gods

He stood on an open plain. Beside him was the place from which he had once emerged, from which the earth had squeezed him. Stars were still falling from the sky and each star that touched the red earth became a man or a woman. The men had long black hair and high cheekbones. The women all looked like Marguerite Olsen. These were the star people.

They looked at him with dark, proud eyes.

“Tell me about the thunderbirds,” said Shadow. “Please. It’s not for me. It’s for my wife.”

One by one they turned their backs on him, and as he lost their faces they were gone, one with the landscape. But the last of them, her hair streaked white on dark gray, pointed before she turned away, pointed into the wine-colored sky.

“Ask them yourself,” she said. Summer lightning flickered, momentarily illuminating the landscape from horizon to horizon.

There were high rocks near him, peaks and spires of sandstone, and Shadow began to climb the nearest. The spire was the color of old ivory. He grabbed at a handhold and felt it slice into his hand. It’s bone, thought Shadow. Not stone. It’s old dry bone.

It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began. Shadow continued to climb. His hands hurt. Bone popped and crushed and fragmented under his bare feet. The wind tugged at him, and he pressed himself to the spire, and he continued to climb the tower.

It was made of only one kind of bone, he realized, repeated over and over. Each of the bones was dry and ball-like. He imagined that they might be the egg shells of some huge bird. But another flare of lightning told him differently: they had holes for eyes, and they had teeth, which grinned without humor.

Somewhere birds were calling. Rain spattered his face.

He was hundreds of feet above the ground, clinging to the side of the tower of skulls, while flashes of lightning burned in the wings of the shadowy birds who circled the spire—enormous, black, condorlike birds, each with a ruff of white at its neck. They were huge, graceful, awful birds, and the beats of their wings crashed like thunder on the night air.

They were circling the spire.

They must be fifteen, twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip, thought Shadow.