The Shattered Goddess (13 page)

He dreamt he stood in spirit above his body as it lay there on the dying grass. He looked down on himself, and on the girl beside him. He walked over to her and bent low to assure himself she was breathing. She muttered in
some dream of her own, turning fitfully from side to side as he watched.

Then he looked back to his body and saw a glimmering black line, like a stream of darkly shining oil, stretched from the side of the head away into the distance. He could not see the end of it. He had no rational way of knowing, but was sure that it reached southeast, all the way to Ai Hanlo.

The night was totally
dark, save that one thin strip of sky seemed slightly less so. It would have been impossible for his waking self to see the hand before his face, but his dream-self possessed some other kind of vision.

As he looked closer, he could tell that the black fluid was pouring out of his right ear—that of his body as it lay on the ground. Then the flow stopped, and the end of the stream withdrew
like a rope being dragged away from the other end. Somehow his spirit was bound to it, and he felt himself pulled along, away from the two reclining figures, as if he were no more substantial than smoke and a huge mouth were sucking him in.

He was carried over the way he had come so far, over the hills and the rocky plain, past the ruins of the caravan’s last camp. He tried to look away,
but there were corpses all around him. Finally he found the power to shut his eyes, and he drifted on, hovering above the stream or oil or tentacle or whatever it was. When he looked again the city of Estad was behind him. No torches or lanterns burned among its towers and walls. No voices of the watch called out

He began to move faster, as if the limb which had fetched him had grown impatient.
He raced over a countryside increasingly familiar, along the bank of a river he knew, over fields of failing crops and still puddles of irrigated water. Then Ai Hanlo loomed before him, silent and forbidding, a ghostly silhouette of a city, save for the golden dome which seemed to glow slightly with its own unnatural light. Shuttered houses and empty streets whizzed past, and he was moving
up, up into the inner city, into the palace, through courtyards, rooms, and corridors which had once been the whole of his world. The black stream reminded him of a tongue now, and he imagined some toad-like monstrosity crouching in the depths of the palace and reaching out windows, around towers, over walls, across miles and miles of midnight terrain to ensnare—what?

Suddenly he found himself
in a dimly lighted room which he recognized. He had not been there since the day Tharanodeth lay dying on the bed now occupied by an obese, pale form.

Kaemen sat up, spoke a word, performed a motion with his hands, and came out of his trance. He seemed to see Ginna standing at the foot of the bed. At first there was alarm on his face, then surprise, and this gave way to a malicious grin,

“So you followed me home. Are you really there? You must have been dreaming just as I—no, I won’t tell you anything more than you already know.”

The Guardian wriggled to the edge of the bed and dropped to the floor. He moved more like a festering, boneless mass of flesh than a person. He approached Ginna, reached out a hand to touch him, and the hand passed through. Ginna felt a cold
intrusion in his chest.

“Very interesting. The soul cannot exist outside the body except in such extraordinary instances as these. Otherwise there must be a receptacle. But you already know about that. Come with me. I haven’t got all night.”

Kaemen reached out again. His hand came no nearer than an arm’s length away, but somehow he seized him. Ginna felt himself dragged along as surely
as if he’d been collared. He drifted lightly. Often his feet didn’t touch the floor. The Guardian led him like a kite on a string along many empty, soundless corridors past doors which were either tightly barred or broken open. The open ones revealed empty rooms, sometimes in disarray. Once he thought he saw someone lying on the floor in one of them, twisted into a position no living person could
assume, but he wasn’t sure. The shadows were so thick. He was past it so quickly.

They came upon a woman dressed in the gown of a high caste of nobility. She had been running stealthily along a hallway, hiding in comers and behind pillars, looking to see if the way were clear, then scurrying on again. She had a small oil lamp to light her way.

She didn’t seem to be aware of Kaemen’s
approach until he was almost upon her. Then, by the faint light of the lamp the look of horror on her face as she recognized him was clearly visible. She screamed briefly, threw up her hands, and Kaemen pointed a finger at her. At once she fell to the floor, dead.

The lamp handle was still hooked around her thumb. Oil spilled out when it hit the floor, burning in a little puddle. This Kaemen
stamped out, taking up the lamp. It was still lighted.

“I am not wholly of the darkness yet,” he said. “We’ll need this to see where we are going.”

They came to chambers Ginna had never seen before. Huge metal doors opened to The Guardian’s touch, leading to a long, winding staircase descending into darkness. A cold, earthy draft blew, and there were voices, many faintly whispering
voices like a million leaves rustling over a dry floor. It seemed to Ginna that the mortar between the stones of the walls glowed a faint, bloody red, while the stones themselves flowed and changed in the familiar pattern of darkness, as Kaemen’s own face had, as the things atop the golden dome had. Darkness poured out of the walls and rippled down the stairs over the feet of Kaemen and Ginna. It
bubbled and rose up in flabby, half-formed shapes which reached out with feeble hands, which stared with randomly spaced eyes, which croaked and gibbered with lips that flapped and melted back into the overall mass.

A force opposed Ginna’s passage, but it was not quite strong enough to stop him. He moved like a vessel against a stiff current.

At the bottom of the stairs the darkness
pooled on the floor of a large, circular room. Kaemen lit several lamps from his hand-held one and the darkness recoiled and diminished. The room was empty except for two larger than human-sized statues of The Goddess, one in black marble, one in white. The head of the white one had been knocked off.

They approached a massive rectangular door set in the curved wall of the place, carven out
of the same marble as the statues only somehow mixed, so that the dark and light veins flowed together. Kaemen reached for the golden ring to pull the door open and paused, his hand outstretched, as if he too were meeting strong resistance. Momentary anger turned into terror on his face. He lowered his arm and staggered back as if pushed by invisible hands.

Ginna saw The Guardian’s face
darkening, losing its shape as it had once before, and it seemed another body was imposing itself over Kaemen’s.

It was the black hag with the empty sockets, with fire burning inside her skull.

“No!”
she shrieked. “Are you mad? He shall not come any closer. You just wanted to gloat”

At the same time, behind her wavering visage, Ginna could see Kaemen. There was a look on his
face he had never imagined possible. The wide, staring eyes he would never forget. Tears ran down the cheeks. The Guardian was trapped, frustrated, both enraged and in despair, afraid and completely alone.

Their eyes met for an instant, but already Ginna was reeling back.

The witch held up her hand like a shadow of Kaemen’s.

“Begone!”
she commanded, and the boy’s spirit was tumbling
head over heels in a rushing wind, up the winding stairs, out of the palace, and over the open country once more. The wind was frigid. Bitter cold and darkness were all he was aware of. He was moving too fast to see anything but a whirring blur. He was falling, dizzily falling into an abyss without a bottom—

—and awoke motionless in complete darkness. The ground was solid and damp beneath
him, but the icy wind was gone. He willed his eyes open, felt with his hands to make sure they were, and could see absolutely nothing. He moved his hands over his body to assure himself he was really there. He touched his right ear gingerly.

Amaedig stirred nearby.

The grass beneath him was wet and the night air was filled with the odor of its decay.

Again the night refused to
end. He lay awake for he knew not how long, and there was no change. But then, there was no feature against which to measure change. Feeling and smell were the only senses left to him. When Amaedig was not shifting in her sleep, he heard nothing but the beating of his own heart.

He slept for a while, dreamlessly, then woke again. He sat up and stretched his arms to relieve a cramp in his
back, and paused, terrified.

When they had first stopped here, it was an open place. Now he felt something solid and smooth, like a glass wall.

“Amaedig!”

“Huh? What—?” She sat up and also felt the strange thing which had grown up during the night, hemming them in. She began to scream. The two of them leapt to their feet, and as they stood crashed through something so light it
seemed only half solid. Fragments of it sprinkled over them like sand.

Suddenly there were crashing and tinkling sounds all around them, spreading farther and farther away. He reached out and felt the barrier crumble to his touch. It was as if an enormous palace, a life-sized model of Ai Hanlo made out of paper-thin black glass, were collapsing around them. They huddled together and drew
their cloaks over their heads and fragments rained upon them. Later Ginna pulled his back and looked, and caught a glimpse of distant towers and walls crumbling against the faint light of day. The northwestern sky was a dark grey, but it seemed brilliant compared to the rest.

When they began to walk in that direction, there were no fragments underfoot, only earth and stones and dead grass.
Neither spoke. After what seemed like only an hour or two, the world was again wholly dark. They sat down, unwilling to venture further in that fathomless night, but afraid to sleep, lest some other fundamental change occur while they did. But at last exhaustion returned and they lay down, holding hands to reassure one another of their presence.

Again Ginna did not dream. This time he woke
in complete darkness, stared into it for a while, and suddenly beheld a bright speck. He thought it a trick of his eyes. Once when he was a small child, he had wandered into a tunnel which turned out to be much longer and much darker than he had expected. As he groped his way along, red and white specks drifted before him, and he ignored them. Only the steady, unshifting rectangle of light at the
tunnel’s end had convinced him of its reality.

Now there was this single point of light. It did not drift or grow indistinct around the edges. It was like a star only on the ground.

He nudged Amaedig awake. “Look at that. Do you see it?”

“Yes! A light! We’re saved!”

“I don’t know about that, but at least it’s real.”

She got to her feet, stretching stiffened limbs.

“You were thinking it was a dream. Were you dreaming?”

“No.”

“I was. I had a funny dream. It wasn’t frightening. I was lying at the bottom of a pool or a fountain, looking up through water deep enough to dip your arms in to your elbows. Somebody was moving nearby, but I couldn’t see him clearly.”

“Then how do you know it wasn’t a woman?”

“I don’t. I only saw a black
shape. Flapping like a cloak.”

He decided not to tell her about his dream of returning to Ai Hanlo just yet. There was too much to be afraid of already.

“Let’s go see what the light is.”

Hand in hand, warning one another of pitfalls, they made their way down the slope of the hill they had rested on. They followed a little valley for a while in the direction of the light. The
fact that it seemed near was encouraging. They knew it was not some beacon on the horizon, but a smaller light near at hand. When they walked in the valley it was above them. When they had set out it had been on the same level. This meant it was atop a nearby hill, perhaps the next one over, or one slightly taller beyond that.

They came to a beaten path which rose slowly. Eventually it topped
a rise and became a paved road. Now the light was level with them again. It was still too dark to see the landscape.

The road curved and something eclipsed the light. They groped their way to a low, stone hut and pushed the door open.

“Hello?” said Ginna, leaning inside.

Silence. He made a ball of light and let it rise to the ceiling. Before it winked out he saw an overturned
chair, a table pushed aside, and broken dishes on the floor.

They found another house. It too was empty.

“Where are all the people?” asked Amaedig.

“Fled, I imagine. Or dead.”

Carefully retracing their steps, they found the road again. They walked a little ways and it straightened out and the light was visible ahead once more. It was very close. The pavement broadened out
into what must have been a square or market place. In the middle was a fountain in which water still splashed out of carven figures into a circular pool. In the middle of the pavement, a dozen paces from the fountain, a campfire burned untended.

There was a definite scent in the air meat cooking.

“Food!” gasped Amaedig. She let go of Ginna’s hand and rushed forward. He ran too. Both
squatted by the fire. Two sticks had been driven into cracks between the paving stones. Horizontally between them, a fowl of some kind had been spitted.

“I wonder why anyone would set this up and leave?” Ginna thought aloud.

“Just shut up and eat before he gets back!”

Both of them ate, tossing bones aside, looking over their shoulders lest someone burst upon them at any moment,
furious at the intrusion. But when they had finished and still no one came, they ceased to question their good fortune. Both sat in the circle of firelight, wiping grease from their faces with their sleeves.

“I don’t think anything ever tasted so good,” he said.

“No, nothing ever did.”

“If only once or twice a day someone could do us a favor like this—”