The Shattered Goddess (21 page)

He held the dragon staff like a burning brand. The creatures spread apart slowly before him, only the one holding the head, not moving.

Suddenly he
knew
that face. It was Tuella Marzad, wife of the man who had given him aid that first morning after
he and Amaedig had left the inner city. And the screaming, magnified a thousandfold, was her voice. Sick with revulsion, but angry, he charged the Dark Power holding her, swinging the staff like a club. It was a wild, unthinking action, but he was beyond thinking. The massive shapes scattered like startled toads, making no sound as they leaped beyond the range of his vision.

He was about
to bring the staff down on the unflinching monstrosity before him, when it vanished too, and all of them, no more tangible than miasmic vapor, whirled about him, laughing, hissing in his ears. The screaming reached a crescendo.

Just as suddenly the air was empty and there was silence. He looked around, puzzled, and poked the darkness with his staff. He thought himself alone.

And then
he realized that something heavy was dangling from the front of his shirt. He brought the light close to himself and looked down.

It was the head, clenching the cloth in its teeth.

He let out a shriek and brought the staff down on it, but missed, for those jaws which had hung slack now worked furiously, devouring the front of his shirt, climbing up him like a ravenous rat.

He
was the one screaming when it bit into his chest. He beat on it again and again. He pushed at it with both hands, dropping the staff, and as the pain grew worse he fell to the ground, trying to crush the thing under the weight of his body. But it wriggled beneath him and continued chewing, burrowing into him. He knew its intent. It was after his heart. It would get his heart between its teeth and
squeeze and squeeze...

He rolled onto his back, screaming, flopping like a beached fish. He fumbled for his knife and drew it out, stabbing at the thing again and again. Sometimes he missed and stabbed himself, but in the agony of the attack, as his blood flowed freely, he couldn’t tell when and he didn’t care. He plunged the long blade deep into one eye, then into the other, twisted, and
jiggled it sideways, till the bone between the sockets broke and there was one gouged trench.

And still the thing’s jaws worked like a machine. He stabbed lower, through the cheeks, cutting away and around until the impossibly snapping lower jaw broke over the edge of his blade. He had hacked the teeth completely out of the mouth. The head let go and rolled off him, then exploded, showering
him with blood and fragments of bone.

He staggered to his feet, drenched, his own blood mixing with the other, and he felt the lower jaw, broken off from the rest, still stirring in his flesh. With desperation and hopeless terror, barely able to control his weak and trembling fingers, he groped for the thing, and, careful as a surgeon, extracted it from himself with the knife. He dropped
the jaw to the pavement and ground it underfoot until he could feel nothing at all, not even the finest powder under his boot.

Then the pain came back to him, and with it nausea. He fell to his knees, then crumpled forward, but caught himself before he hit the pavement. Leaning on one arm, he coughed and heaved. He felt like he wanted to vomit his whole insides out, but nothing came, and
he remained there, gasping, while blood ran freely over his whole torso.

He sat, and tried to pull the tattered flaps of his shirt over the wound, to stop the bleeding with cloth and with his hands. He had no idea how badly hurt he might be.

With all his effort, he managed not to faint. After a while the bleeding seemed to stop. His hands were crusted with dried blood. He was getting
stiff. He forced himself to his feet His heart was beating and he still breathed, so he said to himself,
I guess I must be alive
.

He found his staff and staggered across the yard. He came to a large wooden door inset with iron. This was slightly ajar. He took a metal ring in hand, pulled, and the door swung open on greased hinges. Within, a staircase led up to a level floor. It was another
corridor. On either side tapestries billowed from drafts of frigid air passing behind them.

* * * *

He had lost all sense of time, and space was closing in on him. The thought came that he had walked in darkness for weeks now, and always the world he had known was still around him, but veiled. He could have walked in that darkness to the horizons he had once seen, and reach Nagé, Hesh,
Zabortash, Dotargun, or any of the other familiar countries. Now, for the first time, the darkness seemed different It had swallowed the world. It seemed to him that there was nothing left of the universe except the floor he stood on and the cold stones of the wall he followed with his right hand. He held the staff in his left, making a little circle of light in which he could see the clouds
of his breath. That was all. When he turned a comer and came to a stair, it was as if that stair had only then come into existence, and would fade out again when he had passed. Beyond this there were only sounds: water dripping, occasional sounds of wind. The only other real things were the throbbing pain from his chest wound, his numb feet, and the lethargy which was slowly setting over him.

He was forgetting who he was and what he was doing there, wandering lost in the corridors of Ai Hanlo, the holy mountain whose passageways and chambers, some sage once said, were as infinite as the whims of The Goddess.

He remembered the epic recited in the square at Estad, about the hero wandering across the Land of Night at the end of the world for some obscure reason or other. He
could identify with the hero now, but somehow the heroics weren’t working out.

Spiderwebs broke over his face. They seemed frozen, like delicate traceries of ice.

His staff glowed faintly, like the distant light of the last star in the sky.

He shook his head to keep awake, and as he paused his changed stance tore at his wound, and a warm trickle of blood ran down his belly. The
sudden pain woke him up and kept him going.

He noticed peripherally that the corridors were narrower than they had been, the walls closer together, the intervals between doorways longer. The air was filled with ice. The stones were coated with it and slippery underfoot. His fingers ached from touching the wall. His breath came with difficulty. His throat was raw, his head spinning as the
frigid air rushed into his lungs every time he gasped to inhale.

His attention wandered from the present into the past He wasn’t in darkness anymore, but in the warm sunlight, basking beneath the sparkling midsummer sky, on a porch Ugh above the city. As a child he often came to that porch, to be alone, to read, to watch the flocks of birds wheeling over the land or the river winding its
way to the hazy horizon or caravans diminishing into necklaces of tiny specks upon the desert He would sleep there sometimes on a couch, or just on the sun-warmed stones, and awaken in darkness with the stars looking down...

... and awaken in darkness with no stars at all, his head jerking up and down by reflex.

He was seated against the ice-covered wall. The staff had fallen between
his knees, still held in his limp hand, glowing faintly. He shook his head to clear it and tried to stand up. But his legs wouldn’t respond. His whole body was stiff.

He held the staff tightly and produced more light. A small, round room was revealed, filled with ice. Even as he watched, the crystals grew from the walls like some delicate tapestry of glass wrought by invisible weavers. There
was ice on his clothing. The latticework touched his legs, his sides, his shoulders. Weakly he leaned forward and found that his cloak was stuck to the wall. In these few minutes the ice on the floor rose to cover his knees, encasing his legs. He could not even feel his feet anymore.

Now fear shook him out of his stupor. He was trapped like a horse in quicksand. He wanted to writhe, to shriek,
to give in to panic entirely, but with the utmost effort, he controlled himself. He drew his knife and chipped at the ice around his legs. It was useless. As soon as he broke a piece away, another took its place. The stuff healed like an invulnerable, living thing. It was condensing out of the air. Pale, silvery stalactites grew from the ceiling fast enough that he could actually see them extending
downward, touching the floor, becoming pillars. Curtains of delicate flakes billowed between them. He sheathed the knife.

He could not call for help. There was no reason. No one remained in the city who could aid him, who would aid him, who would even be likely to reach him before he was frozen solid in an enormous mass of ice.

“Kaemen!”
he called out, and the ice shivered at the sound.
“I know you’re doing this...”
and he paused, feeling ridiculous, unsure of what he was trying to say. He was hardly in a position to threaten anyone.

The ice had worked its way up his chest, between the tatters of his clothing. It touched his wound and all sensation there passed away. This made his head clearer. He worked the staff loose. Ice chipped from his arms as his elbows bent. He
moved them constantly to keep them free. His fingers were stiff. His hands were like cement gloves. Only the force of his arms held the staff between them: He touched the sphere containing the tears of The Goddess to the ice and, as he had half expected, the crystals vanished, like lace in a fire. Sure enough, he could “burn” little holes this way, but they filled in as fast as he did. He could move
the staff from side to side, and a shower of fragments would come tinkling down. He could stop ah icicle from growing. But it wasn’t enough. The room continued to fill. The ice was up to his armpits. His lower body was completely numb, and breath came only with immense effort.

There was only one solution. He had used it before. He remembered Arshad’s cabin, the swinging lanterns and shifting
shadows, the deck rocking beneath him as the ship moved on the great river. He tried to go into a trance, as he had then, but it was hard to concentrate. He began to chant the formula Arshad had taught him, but his grip on it was like that of his hands on the staff. Syllables ran together. His attention was drifting. He was withdrawing from the world, but into sleep. He tried to think of himself
as on that ship, to be on that ship, chanting.

He let the staff drop. It went out. He closed his hands together, opened them, and a ball of light rose. A little flexibility returned to his fingers. He made another, and another, dropping many, but in time he held an enormous sphere. The ice glittered and sparkled, revealing fantastic shapes as the light filled the room, as the sphere drifted
down on top of Ginna. It sank into the ice without bursting, and its soft glow increased to a blinding glare, until he could see nothing but drifting motes of brilliant white against the flaming yellow. He was rising, tumbling in the light—

—and he fell into darkness with a thump. He sat up sputtering in six inches of frigid, muddy water. Rising unsteadily to his feet, he wrapped his ragged,
soaked cloak about himself. His chest hurt more than ever. The tatters of his shirt were sticking in the wound. He couldn’t tell if he was bleeding or not. His legs burned as sensation returned to them. He tried to clear his throat and the result was a deep, liquid cough.

His floating staff nudged his ankle. He picked it up and held it tightly against his body. The light returned.

* * * *

Following the corridor, his hand brushing the wall, he came to a large room. One minute he was touching the wall, the next he was groping in space. He turned, examined the spot with his light, and saw another wall receding perpendicularly into the gloom. The doorway was a stone arch carven in the likeness of a leafy vine. The top and the other side were too far away to be visible.
Walking in what he took to be a straight line, he found the other side after ten paces. It was a very large doorway, betokening a great hall.

He paused. He could either follow one of the walls all the way around, or strike out boldly through the center in hopes of finding a similar door on the other side. In any case he wanted to leave the corridor he was in. He suspected it went around
in circles.

He decided to go for the center of the room. He didn’t know why. He just did it. The doorway fell behind him like the ghostly shape of a wreck a diver sees on the ocean floor, dropping away as he rises. He walked slowly. His knees threatened to give out. He was very weak. He thought he was bleeding again. Somehow die world seemed even smaller, for all that he knew he was in a
large enclosed space. All that obviously existed was a small patch of floor on which he stood. He could discern alternating black and white squares, one at a time. They were two paces across. There was absolute silence except for his footsteps; no echoes, even of those footsteps. If he paused and listened, he could hear the blood coursing through his veins and pounding in his head.

A hand
appeared, level with his forehead. His reflexes were ruined to the point he could only stagger back from it. He was too tired to be afraid.

The pale, white hand hung stationary in space. The fore-finger was extended and pointed slightly downward. It did not move. He swayed where he stood, leaning on the staff.

“I am... a friend,” he said.

There was no reply.

Cautiously
he approached. The light of the staff revealed a sleeve behind the hand, of the same pale hue and equally unmoving. Then there was a body, taller than that of a normal man. He reached out and touched the hand. It was marble. The thing was a statue. He held up his light and saw that its head had been knocked off. Using the base of this statue as a reference point, he moved in a straight line beyond
it and found another, a barrel-chested warrior in full armor, also headless.

The whole room was filled with statues, all larger than life, all without heads. He sat down on the base of one, between the feet of a lady, and rested. His whole body was stiff. He wasn’t sure he could ever get up again. His resolution to do so never quite came. For the moment, he felt safe. At least he knew where
he was. It had been the custom of the folk of Ai Hanlo ever since the foundation of the city to carve images of noted persons and display them in a great hall, the deeds of those person inscribed on the bases.