Petty Pewter Gods Read Online Free PDF

remote past, from an age when the temporal power reigned supreme and was totally paranoid about the worldly ambitions of priesthoods. Those old emperors had wanted every priest where he could be watched easily — and could be round easily at massacre time.
    I looked around. Gods? Right.
    “You know how it works on the Street? It’s all marketing. If you win a good following, you migrate west to temples and cathedrals nearer the Hill. If you lose market share, you slide downhill eastward, toward the river. For three decades we have hung on by our nails, in the last temple to the east, while the Shayir holed up across the Street and one place west, with a monotheistic god named Scubs in the status niche between us. But Scubs won a family of converts last month. And immigrants from the Cantard have imported a god named Antitibet who has enough followers to seize a place a third of the way to the west. Which means a lot of shuffling around is due. And which also means that either we or the Shayir will have to leave the Street.”
    Yeah. I understood that. I knew how things worked in the Dream Quarter. I didn’t have a clue why, or how, the priests worked it all out amongst themselves, but the results were evident.
    Farthest west are the Chattaree cathedral of the Church and the Orthodox compound. These are feuding cousin religions that, with their various schismatic offspring, claim the majority of TunFaire’s believers. These are rich and powerful cults.
    And at the east end are dozens of cults like this one represented here, gods and pantheons known only to a handful of faithful. At that end of the street the temples are really nothing but worn-out storefronts.
    I thought I understood the situation. Which did not mean I believed these characters were actual gods and goddesses. Didn’t mean I didn’t believe, either. You ask me, the evidence in the god business is always thin and, in most cases, thoroughly cooked by priests who survive by charging admission to heavenly attention. But this is TunFaire, the wonderful city where any damned thing can happen.
    “You are a skeptic,” Magodor observed. She looked very pretty right then.
    I confessed with a nod. I did not confide my own beliefs, or the lack thereof.
    Wisps of smoke trailed from the big guy’s nostrils. He was up to eighteen feet tall. If he got any more perturbed he would run out of headroom.
    “We will explore your thinking another time. For the moment let’s just say that we Godoroth are in a situation both simple and desperate. We or the Shayir are going to leave the Street. For us that would mean oblivion. The Street has a power all its own, a manna that helps sustain us. Off the Street we would be little more than wraiths, and that only transiently.”
    Maybe. The ugly boys looked as solid and eternal as basalt.
    She reiterated, in case her point had gone over my head the past several times: “If we’re forced off the Street we are done, Mr. Garrett. Lost. Forgotten.”
    I’m not often accused of thinking before I open my big yap. I could not be convicted this time, either. “What actually does happen to gods who run out their string? You have gods or your own to report to, stand on the scales, be judged and all?”
    Rumble-rumble. A crown of little thunderheads rode the big guy’s head now. He was over twenty feet tall. Too tall for the cellar, even sitting down. He was bent over, glaring at me ferociously. I got the impression that, despite being the boss, he was not too bright.
    Isn’t that a lovely notion? Even in the supernatural world it isn’t necessarily the cream that rises to the top.
    Lack of brilliance was a suspicion I had entertained concerning numerous gods. Mostly their myths consist of vicious behaviors toward one another and their worshippers, spiced up with lots of adultery, incest, bestiality, parricide, and whatnot.
    “Some just fade till even the ghost is gone. Others become mortals, prey for time and the worm.” I cannot