Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (33 page)

His brothers leaned over him. “Well? What did you see?”

“A fire. A child running in a field. Nothing of interest.”

Thandos and Zon looked at Kudasduin. There was a moment of silence.

“I have to go,” the youngest brother said.

“I do not understand why,” said Thandos.

“Perhaps when I return, you shall.”

“Go then,” said Zon. “Return, and we shall see.”

* * * *

First Kudasduin raised a trapdoor in the floor of the chamber, and he and his brothers descended into a cramped space, where they gathered around a stone font. Within, a blue fluid glowed, the light of it illuminating their faces. This was the very stuff of Eternity itself, which powered the chamber and kept it inviolate.

With a pair of tongs, Kudasduin lowered a glass bottle into the font, then took it out and stoppered it. The fluid did not ripple, nor was it diminished.

“If I venture deep into Time,” he said, “I will need this to get back.”

“Go only to the edge, as I did,” said Thandos. “Look but briefly, then return.”

“I will know when to return,” Kudasduin said. He left the chamber.

* * * *

The auroral light was the interface, where the chamber intruded into the world. Kudasduin walked through it as forces wrenched him, as the flow of moment into moment settled on him, indeed, like a burden. His limbs were heavy. He struggled to breathe.

But he was not afraid. These were new sensations, the first he had known in many aeons. He was, above all, a scholar, one who set out to study all things, even what it felt like to pass from Eternity into Time.

He was entranced at the feel of wind on his face, at the soft soil beneath his feet. He was slowly beginning to remember what it had been like to live in the world; before he and his brothers had set out in the chamber.

He had forgotten so much, he knew. Dazed, confused, he wandered until the pain slowly faded, and he was no longer an intruder into the time flow, but part of it. He looked up at the night sky and saw the stars, the constellations different from any he had ever known. The stars, the darkness, the chill air, the cry of a night bird all combined to bring him into a kind of ecstasy.

He came to a rolling plain, where naked ground showed between patches of snow. He stood on a rise of land and looked into the distance.

There was a fire, as his brother had reported, lurid and flickering, filling the horizon, outlining jagged shapes.

Dark, huddled figures streamed away from the flames, into the night.

And, as his brother had reported, a girl child clad in a tattered white gown ran across a field, waving her arms, her long, pale hair streaming behind.

Kudasduin hurried toward her, wondering what this could mean.

The child saw him and ran in his direction, shouting something he could not make out.

A horseman in black, scaled armor followed her, his lance lowered.

She almost reached Kudasduin. He saw the hopeless terror on her face. Remembrances stirred.

Fear was another thing he had experienced long before, when he had lived in the world.

“Help me! Help me!”

He noted all this with interest. He stood and stared, failing to understand.

The lance caught the girl between the shoulders and flung her off her feet, but it fouled in the tangle of her clothing, and the horseman collided with Kudasduin as he dragged the corpse along awkwardly, trying to shake the weapon loose. The magician was hurled aside. Then the lance came free. The horse reared, and the rider swung the lance like a club, clipping Kudasduin on the side of the head.

He caught a glance of a face between slits in a dark helmet, contorted with hatred. Then he hit the earth hard and lay still, stunned. He heard the horseman thunder off, and managed to roll painfully to one side. Beyond the corpse of the child, several cavalrymen met, slowing to a trot, circling, while one of them stood up in his stirrups, waved a gleaming sword over his head, and shouted, “Kill them all! Let no one escape!”

They galloped off across the snow, toward a dark stream of refugees.

Kudasduin lay still for a while, his head throbbing. Blood was wet on his face. He regarded the burning city in the distance. Then, quite nearby, there was a shriek, followed by incoherent babblings and deep sobs. He got to his feet unsteadily, and beheld a woman kneeling over the dead child, tearing at her hair, swaying back and forth.

“My baby…they’ve killed my baby…” Another child, a boy much smaller than the girl, tugged at his mother’s arm as Kudasduin approached.

She looked up, then rose to run, but only sat down again, resigned, hopeless, holding her son in her arms.

Kudasduin stood before her and said nothing, slowly beginning to comprehend, as more and more feelings and memories returned to him. There was a sense of urgency. He wanted to be away from there and thought of returning to the time chamber right then, of running toward the auroral light which only he could see.

He took the bottle of fluid out, held it up, and considered it. The glow was a brilliant blue, like a beacon.

Then he put it away. He hesitated. He did not want to leave the woman and the boy. He wasn’t sure why.

“You—you,” the woman gasped. “You’re not one of them. You’re not! Say you won’t kill us!”

She lunged forward, grabbed him by the knees, and knelt there, hugging him, weeping.

“They’re all around. They’re killing every one. We can’t get away.”

“I will help you,” Kudasduin said slowly.

She looked up into his face, her expression one of wild exaltation.

“Yes! Yes! You are a god, or a Power, or spirit or something! Help us! Take us away from here!”

“You’ll have to let go of my legs first.”

She let go as if she had been embracing a hot iron.

He reached down and took her gently by the hand, helping her to her feet. The boy stared at him with wide eyes, then yanked on his mother’s coat and pointed.

“Mommy, look.”

A dozen horsemen had broken off from a column and were thundering toward them, black against the snow, invisible as they crossed bare mud.

Something snapped inside Kudasduin, bringing him fully awake, fully aware, as if he had suddenly come to life and realized how dear life was. He understood that he was a part of what was going on, not a detached observer.

He hauled the boy up over his shoulder and ran, dragging the woman by the hand. There was a grove of trees ahead, in a little valley. He made for them, forgetting all else, actually afraid, his breath labored, his legs pumping, his boots splashing through mud and slush. The horsemen bore down on them.

Then they were among the trees, scrambling through underbrush. Behind them, the horsemen plunged into the forest. There were shouts from every direction. A horse shrieked and reared up, and a cursing rider crashed through snapping branches. The three fugitives huddled beneath an uprooted tree. A cavalryman leapt over them. Another disappeared behind the huge clod of soil that had come up with the tree’s roots.

After a while, the sounds of pursuit were farther off. When they had faded altogether, the pocket of forest seemed a little world unto itself, dark, quiet, bitterly cold. Kudasduin could not hear the sounds of slaughter. A rise of land hid the light from the burning city.

The three of them came to a hollow, where a stream flowed between rocks. They fell down, exhausted, and drank. The water was so cold it burned. They huddled together throughout the night. The ground hardened. The stream froze. A wind sent ice and twigs clattering down from the treetops.

The boy slept in his mother’s arms, the woman with her head in Kudasduin’s lap. He draped his cloak over her, and hid his hands up his sleeves. He sat awake for hours, pondering, remembering what it meant to be human. At times he was afraid, at times disgusted, in the end filled with hope.

* * * *

The morning sky was grey between the trees when the woman stirred. Kudasduin awoke.

“Thank you for helping us. Who are you? How did you come here? Are you a magician?”

She sat up beside him, cradling her still sleeping son in her lap. Her hair was tangled and matted, her face smeared with soot, and her clothing reduced to muddy tatters, but still he could tell that she was beautiful. It came to him what it meant for a woman to be beautiful.

She looked at him expectantly.

He smiled. “1 can hardly answer so many questions at once. I am called Kudasduin. I am a scholar. Yes, I am learned in those arts which are called magical. I came here…from very far away, farther away than you can possibly imagine.”

“Can you take us there?”

Kudasduin felt the bottle in his pocket. He said nothing. Above them, wind rattled the branches. The smell of wet, burnt wood was in the air.

After a while, he asked her, “What of yourself?”

“There is not much to say. My name is Sansha, My boy is Evorad. My girl is dead. So is my husband. He died when they broke into the city. They came suddenly in the night. What else can I tell you? I was a weaver, but now I am nothing. Everyone, everything in my life is gone, except my boy.”

“These soldiers, who are they?”

She looked at him in utter bewilderment. “Please,” he said. “I am from very far away. I do not know.”

“But—but, how can anyone not have heard of Etash Wesa?”

“I have not heard of him.”

“I’m almost afraid to speak his name.”

“Tell me what you can.”

Haltingly she told him of Etash Wesa, a monster who had once been a man, and was now somehow removed from the physical world. Etash Wesa began to fill the dreams of a certain king, tormenting him night after night, manifesting himself by day in horrible ways, until the king was driven mad, and was wholly the instrument of Etash Wesa, who sent the king’s armies forth to ravage all the lands, to march on Ai Hanlo, the holiest of cities, and seize the very bones of the Goddess which lie there. Etash Wesa wanted to become a god of darkness and terror and death.

Kudasduin remembered something more from his past. He remembered how one could be corrupted by the power of his arts. He knew the dangers, the temptations, and he wondered if he and his brothers had not been changed, very subtly, until they were less human than Etash Wesa.

“Can this…magician…be stopped?”

“Maybe the Guardian of the Bones can stop him. I don’t know. In the meantime people suffer and die.”

“You do not have to die,” Kudasduin said with firm certainty. He noted her puzzled expression.

The boy woke up. “Mother?”

“Hush. It’s all right.”

The boy was still. He did not complain about the cold, or hunger. Kudasduin cared for this woman and this boy. He understood this clearly now.

“If we can get across the fields,” Sansha said, “and into the greater forest, before the day gets too bright, then we’ll be safe. We can’t stay here. They’ll find us before long.”

She got to her feet. He started to rise, then paused.

She screamed.

Underbrush crashed all around. There were triumphant shouts. A dozen warriors rode down on them. He held Sansha and the boy to himself, turned this way and that, and saw that there was no escape.

“Die! Die!” the horsemen shouted.

Quite calmly, deliberately, Kudasduin the magician took out the glass bottle he had filled from the font in the time chamber, opened it, and poured a measured quantity of fluid onto the ground.

There was a flash of blinding blue light.

They were falling. There was no impact, only a cessation of motion.

* * * *

Kudasduin was the first to regain consciousness. He sat up and found himself in the same hollow by the stream. Sansha and Evorad lay beside him.

The horsemen were gone. The whole place had changed in a thousand different ways he couldn’t define. The air was fresh and warm.

Sansha awoke and shook her son awake, then looked around, wide-eyed in wonder. She grabbed a nearby branch and studied it intently, as if every leaf were a marvel.

All the trees had leaves on them. They shut out the sky. Birds sang in the branches.

Sansha’s amazement only increased. Kudasduin picked up a cavalryman’s spear. The rusted head fell from the rotten shaft.

“How—?” the woman whispered. “What did you do?”

“I cannot tell you how. I moved us forward in time a little ways, until our enemies were no longer around us.”

“How far forward?”

“Does it matter? In Eternity, all times are the same.”

When they ventured out of the woods and looked over-the plain, there were no marauding armies. The grasslands were clear of corpses. In the distance, where the city had been, were only low, grassy mounds. They examined the ruins. The tumbled stones were green with years. Birds nested in the broken shells of houses. There was a monument, a statue broken off at the ankles so that only the feet remained. The inscription on the base was nearly worn smooth.

“We are alone,” Sansha said. “I think I understand you. You are an exile. So are we all, now.”