Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (25 page)

It was the first of many such meetings. Always, she waited there and always he arrived thus, in a cloud, invisible in the darkness. It seemed to her after a while that his touch became more gentle, his voice more what she had once heard. He was returning to his humanity, slowly becoming as he had been so long before.

There is more than I can tell. In the end, though, the Goddess found them out. In my vision I felt the anger of a goddess, which is more terrible than may be described. She descended out of the night, seized the king by the throat, and raised him into the sky. He did not grow huge this time. He was a small, wriggling thing, like an insect plucked from the ground by a great bird.

I saw it all, even as Veiada fell to the ground and covered her eyes.
I
saw it, in my vision.

The Goddess tore him to pieces, flung his limbs to the ends of the Earth and beyond, into the dark, half-worlds and the spaces between. When she had done this, she stood over Veiada with the king’s heart in her hand. She made a fist over it, and the fist burned like the sun, bringing a sudden and unexpected dawn to the world.

Then she let the ashes of the heart trickle through her fingers, scattering them on the wind like Death dispensing a pestilence.

At the very end I saw Veiada, wrinkled, broken, clad in mourning, adrift on a black barge between the worlds, recovering the pieces of her lover one by one when by chance she found them.

“Now I think you understand,” she said, taking back the empty goblet.

And the vision left me.

* * * *

I awoke into howling wind and stinging sand. Azrethemne was shaking me and shouting, though I couldn’t make out anything she said. Sand caked my face like a mask, plastered there by my tears. I tried to tell her what I had seen, but it came out all garbled, drowned out by the wind.

When I could see again, I made out the familiar hillside, the beach, and the sea. Through a wavering curtain of sand I could make out a few stars in the sky, and the black barge bearing down on the island, so huge that it blocked out those scant stars even as I watched.

Everything was changing before me. The sea roared. Waves broke, and, for once, foamed. The air rapidly cleared, and I saw clearly, every detail of the barge visible, every rotting board, torn sail, flapping tatter of rigging. The thing rushed upon us inexorably, more vast than Ai Hanlo Mountain, obliterating the beach and the thousands of lost, damned folk standing there.

I cringed and screamed and tried to crawl away behind the dune we sat on, but Azrethemne held on to me.

The barge
broke
over us, like a wave, no, like an avalanche of ashy debris, enormous fragments like crumbled paper floating in the air, disintegrating further, choking us with dust. There was a strong smell of decay, of graves newly opened.

Gradually the dust rose into the sky, hiding the stars entirely, until we seemed to be sitting beneath a huge, gray bowl, but in time this too faded away, and the stars appeared again.

We found ourselves sitting, not on sand, but on cold, dry pavement, surrounded by walls of black stone. Houses rose many storeys on either side, their windows gaping dark. The wind over the rooftops made a sound that was almost a voice, almost singing. Shutters flapped.

Then I heard a footstep.

At the end of our little alleyway, Black Veiada stood waiting. She was still old, her hair a stringy gray, but she was dressed like a queen.

“Now come,” she said, “ and help me at last.”

“Yes,” I said. “I will.”

She held out her hand. I got up and walked over to her and took it. She began to lead me away.

“No!”
Azrethemne screamed. “Don’t! Think of yourself. You were going to be heroic, remember? Come back. Don’t give up like this.
Think of Kodos Vion
!”

Indeed, I thought of Kodos Vion, and for one last time I thought of my brave Azrethemne. There was no time to explain that I had forgotten nothing, that for the first time ever in my existence I
was
being heroic, or at least trying to. I merely turned back to her and said, “You are not a part of this. Escape if you can. One extra soul more or less won’t be noticed.”

“Come back!”

Her voice faded away quickly. Then she was gone altogether.

* * * *

The rest is a jumble, a swirl of sight and sound:

Veiada led me into a broad avenue. Above us, the city rose into the night sky, tier upon tier, gleaming in the starlight. The wind sang in the towers. The streets and houses filled with voices as we passed, as if thousands of inhabitants long dead now returned to life as their queen once more walked among them. There was a flicker of motion in a doorway. From a window, a name was called. Footsteps sounded on a balcony.

For a while, we might have been flying as we rose from level to level, as we followed the great stairway that engirdled the city like a serpent.

I saw faces, then, thousands of half-visible, misty figures drifting alongside us, bearing torches and lanterns so faint and so dimly flickering that I could barely tell they were there.

The winds sang. The people sang. Their voices were as one.

Faces appeared in the stones too: a woman seemingly carven into the corner of a building, coming awake suddenly, eyes snapping open, but blank, the wind howling out of her gaping mouth. Pillars became writhing masses of black marble, with hundreds of faces and limbs drifting within them, turning, heads and shoulders sometimes protruding, as if struggling to break free. From these, too, wind and howling voices came.

In a courtyard, where the pavement was somehow transparent as glass, I saw, moving beneath the ground, the blue-faced snake-man I had helped dig up and rebury on the beach. He was mouthing something. I couldn’t make it out.

Onward Veiada led me. As we neared the highest level of the city, suddenly every window was ablaze with light, as if a million stars had gathered there.

We moved like flecks of foam in the tide of the great multitude, all of one purpose, to one destination. I could see the people clearly now. Their torches blazed. They shouted and sang with great joy, but I did not feel their joy. It was as if I were viewing some ghostly re-enactment of a former time.

“Where are they going?” I asked.

“To the wedding of their queen,” Veiada said to me.

* * * *

I didn’t know what to expect in the end, but in the end I felt only a certain inevitability.

We reached the uppermost part of the city. Here, the silver dome still lay in ruins, as it had for so many centuries. Brittle skeletons of glass pillars gleamed in the torchlight, as the place filled with people, as they crowded against walls, swarmed onto ledges, leaned out windows.

But the place was also strewn with corpses, burned and shriveled husks, and with heaps of bone. As I walked among the charred stalks of the gigantic flowers, I realized, to my growing dread—for all the people sang with oblivious joy—that there were fresh corpses here too; and I was brought up suddenly as I came upon one I recognized. It was the boy from the Inn of Sorrows. His face was very pale. His throat had been slit, and gaped like a second, dark mouth.

The winds sang. The people sang. Black Veiada led me.

In the middle of the terrace, in the act center of the circular ruin of the dome, a large hole had been gouged into the pavement. A hole like a grave, filled with ash, and carefully embedded in that ash was a coffin of polished wood, in which a giant lay, a huge man clad all in gold like a king, with a crown on his head and his hands crossed upon his breast. His face was perfect white, like marble.

As I watched, Black Veiada reached down and parted his hands, placing them one after the other at his sides. She opened his robe, exposing a cavity filled with soft light but nothing else.

The giant had no heart. His lover had not been able to recover
all
of the pieces of him.

Then Black Veiada, Queen Veiada, stood over the coffin of her beloved, flanked on every side by her ghostly priests and ministers, clad in a gorgeous robe of scarlet inset with black gems, and wearing a crown of bone-white spikes. She held a shallow dish in both of her hands, in which, glowing, beating even yet and very much alive, was the heart of my friend Kodos Vion.

The wind sang. The voice of the people rose in crescendo. Phantom children like wisps of smoke drifted by, holding candles. White-draped maidens like puffs of mist off a lake at dawn made solemn procession through the ruined flowers, gathering around us.

Veiada spoke a word of power, and the giant stirred and opened his eyes. But there was no intelligence in them yet.

A goblet was pressed into my hands and a priest said, “Drink this, so you may understand at last.”

I drank, and tasted the wine of vision one last time. Countless voices, sensations rushed at me. I could hear so many voices, share so many minds, look out through so many eyes all at once. I heard, I felt every one of those countless songs. I felt, too, the souls of all those people awakening into something that was almost life, and I knew, too, for an instant, the infinite despair of all those “lost ones” who had lost their hold on life and fallen out of the world into this other place, the ones who had been “melted down” as the snake-man had phrased it. But even this was overwhelmed by the anticipation, the joy of Queen Veiada, as the sand on the shore is overwhelmed by a raging tide.

I felt the stars moving into place, one by one, like tumblers in a lock.

And, very briefly, very faintly, I was aware of Azrethemne’s presence nearby. I felt her terror and her despair at the sight of me standing passively before that coffin, as the Queen held Kodos Vion’s heart and I made no move to take it. It was Azrethemne’s own determination, intense to the point of madness, that I
must not
surrender to Black Veiada, however she had been wronged in the past. I seemed to hear her actual voice saying,
Remember Kodos Vion. Do not abandon him.

All these things came together, and I understood.

I reached out and caught Veiada by the wrist. She held on to the disk with a frantic grip. I could sense her astonishment, even fear. The singing stopped. The ghostly children stood still. The wind was hushed.

“Stop,” I said. “Great Queen,
take my heart instead
.”

My voice was like thunder in the sudden silence. The city trembled.

Black Veiada stepped back, holding on to the disk more tightly, encircling it with one arm.

“Please,” I said. “Spare the life of Kodos Vion. Take my heart instead. I am not worthy. I am nothing. So there will be no loss. I
understand
what you are doing and why. I have tasted the wine of vision and seen all. I even understand why you took Kodos Vion’s heart rather than mine in the first place, because he is greater than I am, more vital. But if I gave up my own willingly, without fear, wouldn’t that make up the difference? He was afraid. I will not be.”

She smiled coldly. I could not bear her gaze. I lowered my head and looked into the giant’s wide, blind eyes. His mouth had fallen open, gaping.

Black Veiada said, “What good is your heart, when the blood that flows through it is cold as spring water? You are right. Kodos Vion was more vital than you could ever be. I needed a great heart. Yours cannot be substituted.”

“Then why am I here? Why, at the very last, am I here at all?”

“To make a contribution. That much should be clear to you.”

She spoke another word of power, and the air seemed charged, about to burst into flame. I knew that the moment had come, the single perfect instant in which all her plans could be brought to fruition. The stars were right. There was no Goddess alive to interfere.

There was only me.

Her eyes met mine, and all the strength went out of my limbs. I fell to my hands and knees, into the ashes, clinging weakly to the side of the coffin. The stars, the looming towers, the lights, the faces of the spectators all began to spin, to whirl faster and faster around me. Once more the wind found its voice, howling and triumphant, filled with raucous, signing voices.

And everything was clear:
I was there to die. That was my role. I had come of my own will, after a fashion. I had offered myself up in sacrifice. Somehow I was the final, necessary ingredient to Black Veiada’s design.

A priest handed me a dagger.

The crowd gave a great shout.

The Queen took the heart in her hands and lowered it into the coffin as I knelt with the dagger point pressed just below my breast bone, aimed upward.

And suddenly, like a man standing on the edge of a cliff about to jump, I realized that I didn’t want to die after all. It was as plain as that. I wanted to get up and say, “No, if I can’t save Kodos Vion, I don’t want any part of this.”

But my will was taken from me. There came an intensely vivid vision of the Queen taking this giant by the hand and walking with him into the sky, reaching out as a new goddess with her consort to touch the Sun and Moon and move the stars in their courses. It was as if I were a part of them both, sharing their consciousness, doing these things myself as I stood astride the world, so far removed from my former existence that to think of my time as a hack poet in Ai Hanlo was to suffer a kind of death, but only a little death, an irritant from which I could freely and easily turn away.