The Shattered Goddess (17 page)

They went as far forward as it was possible to go, till all three held onto the upright end of the long, curving
board which formed the ship’s keel. The lantern behind them cast their shadows huge upon the water. White foam churned just below their feet

“We are on the ocean now. We have left the river behind. In this ocean, not far from the mouth of the river, is the place called the Island of Voices.”

“Does it speak?” Ginna said.

“In a way it does. Here it was that men first learned that
The Goddess was dead. Long and long ago a ship passed on a dark night, even as we pass, and the wind blew through the limitless caverns which honeycomb the island. The sounds joined together to form a voice which spoke three times, saying,
“She is dead.”
The message was not understood for a generation, but in time the meaning was clear.”

“Does it say anything more?”

“I know not. No
voice has been reported, but sometimes ships come too close and are wrecked on its shores, and the ghosts of the mariners call out to other vessels as they pass.”

“Oh.”

In silence they watched until at last the bulk of the island loomed ahead of them, the texture of its darkness slightly different from the sea and the sky. The current drew them ever nearer. Now the helmsman and rowers
went about their work in deadly earnest. Ginna felt a touch of fear as the cliffs towered above them, but as long as Arshad was confident, he was not afraid, and the old man looked on calmly. Amaedig’s face was rigid. He could not know her thoughts.

The beam of the lantern revealed gaping caves all along the cliff face. There was no wind, nor any sound but the creakings and clatterings of
the ship, and the faint washing of surf at the base of the wall of stone. The island did not speak. In time it slid by and they were alone on the sea again.

“Nothing,” said Ginna.

“So it would seem,” the old man replied. “The voices speak not. Perhaps it is too late in the history of the world for further revelations.”

“Too late! Too late!”
came a coarse, croaking voice out of
the darkness ahead.

Arshad was as astonished as anyone else. Suddenly the fear which had hovered above Ginna reached down and clutched his heart.

“Here! Here!”

The leader raised his hand. The oars rose in unison out of the water and paused. The ship glided. The lantern probed ahead.

“Here!”

Ginna, Amaedig, and Arshad looked straight down. There, clinging to the keel
of the ship was a pale, naked man. Only his head and shoulders were visible. Waves broke over his back.

“What are you?” demanded Arshad, leaning over for a better look. At the same time he pushed Ginna and Amaedig away. They stood back.

“What I seem to be. Let me aboard, quick!”

“Foul apparition, ye are no natural thing, nor are ye what ye seem to be, nor shall I let ye up on
board! By the name of Tashad I exorcise ye, by the strength of his arm, by the sharpness of his sword, by the—”

Like a whiplash the creature’s arm reached out, impossibly far, impossibly fast, seized Arshad by the beard and dragged him over the bow. Ginna could not react. The deed came between heartbeats. But Amaedig screamed, and suddenly he was screaming too.

All around them, the
ship was in pandemonium. Ginna staggered back, tripped over something soft and fleshy, and tumbled down onto the rowers. He saw what tripped him. It was like a naked man, pale and deathly white, but not a man, heavy and flat of body, with another set of arms where the legs belonged. Another one appeared, and another, and another, scuttling over the bow like huge, shell-less crabs. They reached out
of the water and seized the oars. The sea was alive with them. Ginna had a brief glimpse of rolling waves of limbs and flesh coming at him out of the darkness. There was no sea at all, only millions of deformed bodies. They swarmed over the ship, up the mast and rigging like flames licking up a curtain. The Tashadim drew swords and slashed frantically, but the endless numbers readily replaced the
slain.

Ginna kicked one monster in the face, wriggled free of another, and crawled to Amaedig’s aid. She was clawing at the thing, forcing her fingers into its eyes, and dumbly it held on to her, insensitive to any hurt.

His hand found a heavy wooden peg in a notch by the railing. The sailors used them to secure ropes. Now he lurched to his feet and rushed forward, holding it like
a club, just as the ship shook violently, the sail shredded, and flailing bodies fell onto the deck in a chaos of canvas, rope, and tackle.

He was on top of the creature which was crushing the girl. He beat it again and again with the peg. Something grabbed his ankles and he rolled over, kicking a soft stomach with both feet. Again he pounded on the bald, blubbery head of the thing until
it split open. Still the arms held on like an iron vice. It was only when the whole skull was smashed away and there was little more than a pulpy tatter of skin left at the end of the neck that the creature let go. Blindly, it crawled down among its fellows.

The deck was cracking under him. There was a loud snap followed by a perpendicular tilt, and suddenly he was falling. He reached frantically
for Amaedig and she for him, and tangled in one another’s arms they struck the water. Instantly the cold shock and the silence beneath the surface seemed to convey him into another world. Something was slowly closing down over him, squeezing him out of the world he knew. Then he realized what it was, let go of Amaedig, and swam deeper, struggling to get free of the tom rigging which had
almost caught him like a fishnet.

It was only when his lungs were nearly bursting that he turned upward. He broke into the air with a spout of foam, gasping for breath. Amaedig was beside him, splashing to stay afloat. The sea rolled gently and was quiet. There were no voices, no sounds of the ship’s timbers breaking. There was no trace of anything.

Both of them tried to tread water,
but it was obvious that they could not last. They were land dwellers. Neither really knew how to swim. They were exhausting themselves minute by minute.

It seemed like a miracle when something solid nudged Ginna’s back. He grabbed for it without fear of what it might be, and touched jagged wood. It was a broken piece of the ship’s mast. He pulled Amaedig over, and each looped an arm over
it.

His legs hung limply down into the water. The cold seeped into him. He tried to move his legs after a time to keep warm, but all feeling had gone out of them. He lost track of time. Slowly he rose and fell with the motion of the sea. His arm was going numb. He switched to the other, but there was hardly any improvement He put both arms over the mast and tried to pull himself up onto
it, but it began to roll and he fell back.

Without a sound, Amaedig lost her grip and disappeared under the surface.

“No!”

He reached down, caught her by the hair, and dragged her up again. Dumbly, coughing out sea water, she resumed her place. He felt a little better for the movement and effort, but quickly the cold came back. His teeth chattered. His ears and face hurt intensely,
and then stopped hurting at all. They felt like heavy wax.

He paused to wonder. Tashad had foretold that his followers would die on the island of light at the end of the world, but they had died at sea. Was the ship with its torches the “island?” Had the end come?

Prophecies and mysteries. The world was full of them. He didn’t care. They drifted some more. Darkness seemed to soak into
his eyes. His vision was going—

— briefly he had a terrifying inner glimpse of Kaemen, pale and fat, gripping the arm rests of his throne seated in the great room beneath the golden dome, alone in the darkness, watching—

From far away, Amaedig’s voice came to him.

“We’ll make it... to the island. Listen for the surf.”

The night was still.

“Hang on,” she said again,
an indefinite time later. “We must keep hanging onto...”

But even as she spoke, dark as it was and dim as his eyes were, he could tell she was losing her grip. With the last of his strength he worked his right arm under hers, so when her fingers finally lost all ability to grip, he had her. She floated with her face barely above the water, while he held onto the mast with his left arm.

When that arm gave out, they would die.

At the very last, after what seemed like many hours, when he found himself dropping into a final soft, inviting sleep, he cried aloud.

“Do you hear me? This is the end. I have had enough. I am ready to die now.”

And his life moved before his eyes in quick procession, and it seemed mostly filled with horrors. Darkness. Flight Screaming
men and women burning upside down on stakes. Gutharad’s corpse dropping from the sky. The heads in the fountain. The child’s hand on the doorstep in the deserted village. The few fleeting, happy moments seemed unreal, half buried memories of mirages and fever dreams.

The mast was slipping away. He couldn’t move his arm. The cold was in his lungs. He couldn’t breathe.

And somehow Amaedig’s
face, floating on the sea like a film, spoke, “No... You must keep trying. Do... something. Make a light...”

His mind worked like a frozen thing slowly thawing, dripping into dim awareness.

He remembered the steps in the realm of the Powers. Another place, beyond the world. He remembered the Zaborman magician who had folded space around himself like a cloak.

Amaedig seemed to
understand. She was holding him as much as he was holding her. He let go of the mast. They floated on their backs. He held both hands out of the water, empty, coming together as stiff fingers touched. The hands moved without any conscious will on his part, touching, parting, touching again. A ball of light rose over the sea. There was another, and another. He caught one with his right hand, another
with his left, missing a third. He pressed the two together. He was entering a trance. The world withdrew. The ocean, the darkness were no longer with him. The pale oval of Amaedig’s face was a faint, abstract thing.

The ball of light grew. He held it in his outstretched hands.

He wrapped the light around himself like a cloak.

There were other lights on the sea, columns standing
in a circle around him, remaining absolutely still while he rose and fell with the waves. They resolved into beautiful figures, tall men and women in shining cloaks, with starry crowns on their heads. Some of them had four arms. Some had wide, delicate wings. They strode radiant and majestic across the heaving sea, closing in.

Ginna heard their soft voices whispering. He held the light close
around him. He thought of Amaedig. He willed her to be at his side.

Hands like feathers were brushing over him, and he was drifting in the light.

Asleep, dreaming in the light.

CHAPTER 10

The Watchers

Kaemen, lord of the darkening world, sat in his throne room, as alone as he ever could be. The Black Lady was asleep. Always, always she stirred in his mind like a horde of rats, whispering, scratching, but now, after long labors and conjurings, after making the bones of The Goddess tremble, she lay dormant, perhaps exhausted in some manner he could never
understand. She was still there. He could feel the weight of her within himself, but she was no more than a chill, a faint sense of another presence which he had known since earliest childhood.

Only rarely was she thus, and at those few times his thoughts and his sensations were all his own.

He sat contemplating his triumphs, and he was troubled. As she had promised, he was becoming
the master of a whole new kind of world. The force which flowed through her like a raging torrent had swept him along also, and by joining with the inevitable, he would be one of the few creatures of human flesh to retain a place after the change was complete. Even she did not fully understand what was happening, save that like a tide, the new universe was submerging the old.

This much he
knew. The knowledge had been with him for a long time. He feared no opposition now, but still he was uneasy.

The boy and the girl had disappeared. There was something magical about the boy, but wholly opposite himself. The idiot Ginna could still make bubbles of light and throw them around, the same as he had when he was a drooling infant. But there was the potential for something more.

Why had they not killed him? He had brought the question up, taking counsel within himself, speaking with the Hag.
No,
she said.
If his role has any meaning, another will fill it after him. Watch and wait. Protect him if you have to. As he was my instrument once, he may become the instrument of someone else. Find out what he is so that he may be combatted.

He had no choice but to obey.
So he watched and waited.

While she slept, he entered into his trance, and beheld Ginna in Arshad’s cabin. Sensing a great power there, he had been very careful to remain undetected, interfering not at all. It was like walking on a delicate pane of glass. He had succeeded, and moved with Ginna into that other world, but it was like wading upstream against floodwaters. The very nature of
the place repelled him. The strain to remain where he was, let alone advance, became more than he could bear. Just before his consciousness was expelled, he heard the chief of the Tashadim proclaim the boy to be more adept than any other pupil he had ever had. There was a brief chaos of falling, and he awoke on his throne in a sweat, considering the implications of Ginna’s coming to understand and
use whatever powers he might possess.

“Great Lady, awake. Help me. Tell me what to do.” He spoke to the empty air, to the shadows, and his voice echoed through die palace. It was useless to try to rouse her. Never had he any control over her, nor could he speak to her when she did not wish to hear.

And so he panicked. Ginna was learning. He was being taught with alarming speed, gaining
strength. In a few days, a few hours even—

Therefore he, Kaemen, Guardian of the darkness-cloaked bones of the dead Goddess, took it upon himself to act, to prevent this disastrous state of affairs from continuing.

He had severed the teacher from the student. That the girl Amaedig had survived was sheerest coincidence. That Ginna still lived was not overwhelmingly important as long
as the process of learning was interrupted.
She
would have understood why he had done what he had done—

To reassure himself, he projected his spirit forth once more. Drifting above the midnight world, above the new cities rising without fear of the sun, he had crossed plains and mountains, followed a great river to its source, then another to its mouth. He soared over the sea, entranced
by the vast movements of the waves and currents, listening to the wails and cries of the monsters beneath.

His spirit hovered near Ginna, without any attempt to enter his body, watching, gloating as the boy and his companion bobbed up and down in the frigid water.

The words of despair and final surrender had been especially sweet but then something happened. There was light everywhere,
columns standing on the waves, then figures. He knew them: Bright Powers, once in balance against the Dark, but now all but banished from the world. Yet here, alone, he was far weaker than their concentrated numbers. He felt himself repelled more firmly than he had been from the cabin of the ship. He reached out, like one drowning, for Ginna’s mind, struggling to get inside, to see with his eyes,
to understand what was going on, but he was yanked away and hurled far. There was a flash of all-encompassing light.

He found himself on the floor before his throne, lying in a puddle of vomit. A spasm in his trance had hurled him from the seat, off the dais, to the very spot where he had had the nurse flogged to death.

Everything was a portent. It probably meant something, but he
had more pressing things on his mind. He reached out for a third time, seeking merely to find Ginna, not to touch him, and found him not

Always, because their lives were somehow joined, he had been able to locate the one he laughingly called his “brother” and spy on him at any time. Not to find him was like waking up after a calm night’s sleep to discover oneself deaf and blind.

Gone.

He rose and left the throne room. The corridors and chambers were utterly dark, thick with slithering spirits. No torch or lantern burned in all the city of Ai Hanlo. Those few inhabitants who had not fled and still survived huddled wretchedly in the gloom. Only he could find his way about He was developing a new sense. He could see without light. The darkness had taken on a kind of texture,
dense around solid objects, thin as smoke in mere shadows, forming images in his mind as he passed.

Thus he walked through many deserted hallways. He came to a room in which a certain distinguished lady of the court had spent her last days in madness, where now her skeleton lay twisted among her bedsheets. He entered, took a mirror from her dressing table, and held it before his face. He
could perceive the mirror itself all the way down to the pearls around the rim and the ornate silver work on the back, but the glass remained a black oval, without returning the image of his face. Curious, he thought.

The new sense was not like seeing. It was more like projecting his soul across distances and feeling the echo. Like spying on Ginna.

Gone.

He smashed the mirror
against the floor. He stirred the glass fragments with his foot, contemplated the skeleton briefly, and returned to the corridor.

He stood on a parapet where astrologers had once stood divining the courses of the stars. There were no stars above him now. Constantly the darkness spread out through the upper spaces, extinguishing them, filling the universe. There was no light on the horizon.

To anyone else, there would have been an endless void beyond the stone railing, but to him with his secret sense, the changing landscape was revealed in all its detail.

He gazed far. He watched mile-long serpents rolling in thunder beneath the sea. And yet Ginna was nowhere to be found.

He leaned over the edge, wondering what it would be like to fling himself into space, to float
on the darkness, to let his body soar as his soul did when he projected it, but the darkness itself seemed to come alive and whisper hoarsely and form a barrier against him.

Her
darkness, not his own.

He went back inside and descended many flights of stairs until he came to a room he had once known. He had not been there in years. It was dusty and full of books, most of which he had
never opened. His nurses had locked him in there sometimes when he’d misbehaved, telling him to do something useful with his time. Little did they know he liked the place. The mustiness and solitude appealed to him. It had not even the tiniest window, and in those days it had been lighted by a chandelier set with candles. Now it was not lighted at all. He felt the walls. They were firm and smooth
as ever. It was truly one of the oldest rooms in all Ai Hanlo, hewn as legends told, out of the living rock of the mountain. He had called it his “tomb” and imagined himself the child-king of some ancient dynasty of an earlier cycle of history, waiting for the time when he would rise up and make all the world tremble beneath his tread.

A game, nothing more. Now the world trembled and bowed
to darkness, and it was not a game.

He opened one of the books. His dark sense could discern the writing. This was one of the romances he had found exciting and had genuinely enjoyed as a boy. He used to slip them behind his school books sometimes while his tutors droned away.

It seemed that his few moments of happiness and calm were in this room, this “tomb,” and now they were buried
there.

Certainly he knew no peace now.

He ascended the stairs, emerging into a series of courtyards, then a paved lane between the stables and the guard barracks. He came to a gate through which one could pass into the lower city.

Idly, he approached the gate.

But he could not pass. At once he perceived the darkness becoming almost solid, swirling into shapes: huge, pale,
rubbery, fleshy things with hunched shoulders and inverted faces bulging out of their chests like the pustules of a disease. Topmost, flaccid lips dripped slime over the upturned nostrils and blind eyes. Membranous wings whirred and flapped. Hard, talon-like claws clicked open and closed.

Behind them crouched something sloping and rounded, but big as a house. Out of it rose a head with a
curving beak easily twenty feet long, opened to reveal rows and rows of teeth. The head twitched from side to side, the beak slicing through the air like a sword.

He raised his hands. He called out words of power. He tried to banish them. They would not go. They would not let him pass.

At last he understood that he was a prisoner within the palace as much as he was within his own body,
that it was not his power which mastered anything, that he would no more rule the world than the glove on a king’s hand actually holds the scepter.

He wept. He had never been more alone, more utterly afraid. Ginna had disappeared. He, the slave, had acted on his own for the first and probably last time, and botched the task. It was his fault, his poor judgment, his hasty panic.

Within
him, the Black Witch began to rouse herself.