The Shattered Goddess (24 page)

Closer. Approach her.

His legs obeyed, stumbling over debris, awkward with the burden on his back. He saw that among the fallen masonry there were many skeletons, most of them headless.

Watch.
She raised her arms, and cried out with his voice, “Come! Come!
All ye shadows, all ye shades, all ye Dark Powers. Come!”

There was a rushing of wind. Again the feint red outlines he saw with his strange new sense were eclipsed, and the Dark Powers came, flowing, crawling, drifting down the stairway like an oily wave. They emerged from the walls, from the ceiling. They brushed him as they passed. They crawled over The Goddess like a million ants, then
melted into her to make way for more.

The bones were less visible. Her flesh was being made full. The squirming, flapping things, the things which were no more than dark patches against the great darkness spread over her as a thin film.

Behold how the godhead is reassembled and divinity is reborn.

The Goddess trembled, her body grinding the earth which imprisoned her. Stones
and dirt fell from the ceiling. Cracks appeared in the walls. The witch froze him where he stood, and debris rained all around him.

Now, touch me to that which I am to command, and I shall set you free.

“Free?” he said aloud, but there was no hope in the word.

Laughter knifed him again. He made his way forward clumsily, until he could reach out and touch the skull. But he did
not touch it Instead he turned his back to it, until his burden pressed against it and at that very moment he was released. Blood ran freely as the teeth were withdrawn from his neck. All his weakness came back to him, and he fell forward as she pushed him away. A jagged stone rammed into his stomach. He rolled off it, and looked up at the skull His night vision was going, but still he could see
the huge, curved outline in the red of dying embers, and on it the witch crawling, wholly inhuman in her aspect, like a black insect on the head of The Goddess. He thought of an earwig seeking an entrance.

Exactly.

She vanished over the curvature of the skull. There was a moment of absolute silence. Something flittered against his face and was gone. Visions of his life came to him
in his pain. He thought of himself floating gently in a pool of his own blood, and as he floated, as he lay there and knew he was dying, he saw, first, Tharanodeth emerge from the top of the stairs, his face solemn with ritual. He tried to think of the good times, the walk into the desert when he first saw his world from the outside, and suddenly it was all there: the city crouching beneath the moon
like a glittering, scaled beast, the sunrise with all its brilliant, subtle colors. He drifted through the sights and smells and shapes of die kata stables, watched the trainers trying to ride the wild beasts. He saw Tamarel, who had been Amaedig back when her shoulders were still hunched. He had been closer to her in the first days of their friendship, and innocent enough then to think that only
what few people he knew, what yards he walked in day by day, what food he ate and games he played constituted the whole of the world, and everything else was a vague, far away abstraction, like mist rising from the river in the dawn. He tried to reach for those days in his mind, like a swimmer determined to attain the ocean’s bottom, to seek release there, to lie forever in the soft mud.

He told himself it was well to die here, in sight of The Goddess, as, to his knowledge, no one ever had.

His sight was almost gone. Only the faintest outline of her head was visible.

There was a sound, a constant thumping like a thousand drummers drumming beneath the earth. No, he
was
beneath the earth,
here
. The travesty of The Goddess was
alive
, and its heart was beating;

There
seemed to be motion in the darkness. If more Powers streamed to join into her flesh, he couldn’t see them.

He reached out. He wanted to touch that flesh, just to have done so. But he couldn’t He couldn’t get up. The rest of his body would not respond. It was hard to breathe, as if his lungs were filled with mud.

His mind was wandering. He thought of himself sinking in an endless, red
sea, all his pain dissolving away. His thoughts were all irrelevances, little memories, the image of a bird on a windowsill, the sound of the night wind among the towers of Ai Hanlo, an illustration in a beautiful old book, the first time he had worn shoes and how silly he had felt in them.

Gutharad. Wandering on the caravan route between Randelcainé and Nagé. He sang further with an old
song.

A Zaborman who can last till dawn, I’ve never seen before...

Suddenly The Goddess gave a great shout, and all the earth shook. His ears streamed blood, and all sound left him. He saw the stairway close like a huge jaw as a single, immense mass of stone fell to fill it.

The Goddess moved. Her hand struck out, and walls and ceiling burst like overripe fruit, spewing the guts
of the mountain upon him. He was caught like a leaf in a tempest, tossed about, slammed to the floor, raised again. He rose to his hands and knees, but something hit him between his shoulders like a battering ram. He was down again, pummeled over his entire body with showering rocks. Hundreds of pounds of boulders smashed his legs to a pulpy tatters. He tried to crawl still, propelled by a frenzy
beyond any sense or reasoning, and somehow the boulder was broken to powder by another, and he moved a little ways, nearer to the head of The Goddess. Earth and rock broke over her like the ocean over a whale when it breaches.

He had come to his ending. One of his arms didn’t seem to be there. He reached up with the other. He touched something soft, something cold, something moving.

The mouth of The Goddess rolled down to meet him.

* * * *

There was a flash of pain more intense than anything he had known, as if his body had been wholly consumed in fire, and then he passed through the flame and rose, like smoke, feeling nothing.

Swimming up out of the warm, red sea.

There was a rushing in his ears.

A weight fell away. He was shedding his ruined
body like a husk, and yet he was complete in his own flesh once more, climbing upward, out of a tunnel of throbbing flesh, into a broader space.

He was naked. Before him were endless caverns and passageways, not of stone, but of black, dried, brittle matter like fat burned to a crisp.

He was rising out of the earth, without motion, without vibration, but the world fell away around
him, silently parting, and he swam up, up, out of the mountain like a whale breaching, die stones and dirt breaking over him like foam.

He was in a close place.

He was alone on a plain of black glass which stretched to the horizon.

He rose on a column of air.

Running.

Swimming upward through the earth, he felt tons of stone being pushed aside like sand by his arms,
his chest, by his feet as he kicked and crawled and scrambled to be free.

He felt Ai Hanlo Mountain rent asunder with his passage, the walls and towers of the city sprinkling over his skin like delicate traceries of glass broken into dust

He stood over the plains of Randelcainé, all things visible to him, viewing the strange towers raised up without fear of the sun.

And then,
for an instant, he withdrew into his tiny body, and was rocked from side to side among fleshy, sticky bands.

He staggered over the plains of Randelcainé, his head roaring inside, his knees buckling.

He spread his arms apart, reaching from horizon to horizon, and another voice called out from within him in something vaster than words, in the very language of darkness, and all the Dark
Powers of the world came to him, pouring on his flesh like rain, becoming part of him, filling him with power, drowning that tiny speck of a memory called Ginna in a whirlpool of hatred.

And Ginna felt their unreasoning, endless malevolence, the thundering of their hatred.

And he felt the triumph of the other who shared this state with him.

He became himself again, and he was
standing in a vast, curving room draped in black. There were two huge, round windows looking out into darkness, and he knew them to be the eye-sockets of the walking corpse of The Goddess.

He was facing the old, eyeless woman with the flames burning inside her. A bony hand reached out at him. She made a magical sign.

You. Not now. You can’t wreck my plans now.

He reached for
his knife, but felt only his nakedness. She seized him. They wrestled, her fingers tearing into his arms. He rammed his knee into her and she bent over with a gasp and tumbled, dragging him down on top of her. The flames burned hotter in her eyes. He could feel their heat on his face. She was far stronger than he, like a living statue, irresistible as stone. Her mouth gaped wide, wide, drooling curses.

The world reeled, horizontal to vertical to horizontal. They were thrown against a wall of bone. Suddenly his hands were inside her chest, closed together where her heart should have been, and they opened. He withdrew his hands as if from a muddy pool.

The black hag exploded with light. In bursts, in sheets, in showers of sparks, she vomited light out of her mouth, her eyes, her ears.
Her body burst asunder in light, the ragged sides flapping and split sailcloth in a tempest. Her arms flailed wildly. She screamed, and screamed, until her screaming was a wind, an avalanche, a force in itself.

Ginna watched, horrified, fascinated. Then, in an instant, faster than thought, many things happened: up became down as the huge body crumpled. The witch was above him, then on him,
grasping his back, clawing, locking arms and legs around him like an agonized, dying spider. Awash with light, she scrambled over him until her face was before him, her burning mouth stretching impossibly wide to swallow him, to close over his head like a hood, flooding his mind with thoughts and fears and memories not his own. The two of them fused together like melting figures of wax, losing
all shape and form and substance in the great cauldron of light

There were fires in his eyes. His flesh was hard as crystal, his joints grating as he moved.

Something seized him by the hair, yanking his head back. His arms and legs were sinking into a soft mass. Yes, like wax. It was like swimming in wax as it hardens. He was frozen in place. He felt his body dissolve away; a thousand
million voices whispered; a thousand million screamed, and above all the witch babbled an incomprehensible litany in the language of night. His sense of self was rapidly being broken up into countless, tiny particles and lost to otherness. He was sharing his mind with the witch, with the Dark Powers that still screamed to join him, with the lingering residue of The Goddess. He was a silent drop
of water suddenly cast into the roaring ocean.

He stopped falling. His knees straightened. He stood up. The witch stood up. That which had been The Goddess stood up. All in the same motion.

The last thing he, Ginna, was able to do as a discrete, if tenuous remnant of his original consciousness, was to move his hands.
His
hands, with bony fingers the size of towers, long arms stretching
to the ends of the earth. He brought his hands together; he thought his final thought; and separated them.

There was a burst of light. The witch shrieked for the last time.

A sphere expanded.

Worlds
. Hadel of Nagé had said. Those little balls of luminous nothing were embryonic worlds, and now one spread out and grew with all the strength of The Goddess behind it

And the
Earth was reborn. The new age began.

Ginna sought a meaning, a revelation, an answer.

He was not answered.

* * * *

It was to Tamarel, who had been Amaedig, that the final vision came.

She sat with the Mother of The Goddess in the afternoon of her life, in the gentle light of the grove, by the edge of the fountain. The water was dark, but the Mother watched it intently.
Tamarel looked too, and saw a tiny spark appear like the first star in an evening sky. It was equally far away as a star, only below. Surely the fountain was infinitely deep.

The fish with the hourglass in its mouth stared forlornly. No water flowed.

She wondered what the Mother saw. Did that spark mean that Ginna was still alive? She wondered what it would be like if she were ever
to meet him again. She tried to tell herself that their last meeting had been a dream, and he would be his old self.

But dreams tended to be true.

Suddenly the Mother rose and said, “Come.”

“What has happened?”

“He has done what he was always meant to do.”

The Mother took her by the hand and led her through the forest, away from the fountain. The trees grew nearer
together. Even in the presence of the Mother, the shadows deepened.

The Mother raised her arms, and cried out a command in something beyond words, in the very language of light The Powers streamed around them, forming a glowing vessel which lifted them up on the substance of light. It was like drifting on a cloud made of airy faces and bodies, with lacy wings of fire whirring everywhere.
Tamarel felt herself lurch and twist at impossible angles. Then she was falling gently, her senses slipping away, into light.

She came to rest, standing, on hard, polished stones. The blinding light faded into blinding darkness. The Powers hovered around them like a constellation of glowing moths.

“We are in Ai Hanlo,” the Mother said. “Look.”

Tamarel looked. She saw two red
stars high in the sky, far away.

“Ye lights, ye motes, ye flames of Powers, come to me!”
The Mother cried out and the air around her burst into brilliance. All the Powers of the grove, all the remaining Bright Powers in existence came streaming to her command. They arched away from where Tamarel stood, over the plain like a rainbow of a thousand suns, revealing in their passing the wide
plain, the ruined city of Ai Hanlo all around them, with half its mountain broken away, and beyond the city, on that plain, a colossal figure standing, a thing like a crudely carven stone statue, with red stars for eyes.