The Shattered Goddess (6 page)

“What do you mean? No, you can’t...”

Two soldiers pushed their way through the crowd. They wore no finery at all, but were dressed in simple leather tunics. Long, many-thonged whips hung coiled from their belts. They seized
the helpless nurse and ripped her clothing off, until she huddled naked before the court, whimpering.

“I can’t believe this is happening? What is happening?” said one of the women standing in front of Ginna.

“We must all be drunk and dreaming,’ said the hooked-nosed man. “No son of Tharanodeth would ever do such a thing.”

“He has gone mad,” said Kardios. “The dark side of The
Goddess is in him.”

With a loud snap a whip struck the old nurse’s bony back, leaving bloody stripes when it was drawn away. This made the whole experience real, more vivid than any bad dream. Another whip, in the hand of the other soldier, descended. She grunted, then screamed, and began to crawl across the floor on all fours. She rose to a sitting position, and one of them lashed her across
the face. She screamed again, feeling her eyes, then groped about, obviously blind.

Her screams were not the only ones. The women in the crowd screamed at the sight. Some fainted. Men looked away. Others gazed at the terrible sight, the faces stoic marble masks. These, Ginna knew, would survive the longest in the days to come.

He desperately wanted to be elsewhere. He wanted to look
away, but dared not

Behind him, someone was vomiting.

He looked to one door, then another. All exits were guarded by soldiers whose pikes were not ceremonial or made of glass. He had to escape, but could not There was nowhere to go. He edged backwards until he pressed against the refreshment table. Almost without knowing it, he took a glass of punch and gulped it down, then another,
and another. He had only brief glimpses of the dying woman now. Most of the people in front of him were taller, but when a lady in a plumed headdress shrieked, covered her face, and began to push to one side, this created an opening, and he was afforded a full view of the huddled, naked form and the bloody smears on the tiled floor all around it. The whips rose and fell with mechanical precision.

He couldn’t taste the punch as he drank it. Only unconsciously did he know what he was doing. This was the only way out He usually avoided such excess, but now the alcohol was making itself felt the room reeled around him. He was very warm. The people around him seemed to have become a mass of sweating, milling, frightened animals.

He found himself studying Kaemen intensely. The Guardian
leaned forward in his chair, surveying the scene with rapt fascination. What was happening to his face? Ginna wondered why no one else seemed to see it. The pale blue eyes were gone, replaced by black pits which spread slowly across the cheeks, eating away the flesh. Eventually there was only an oval darkness where the face had been. Then there was another face, outlined in a fiery red in that
darkness, a hideous old woman who, or so it seemed to his dizzy imagining, was somehow nourished by the pain and fear, drinking it all in.

Even that face grew soft like melting wax and disappeared. The blackness extended outward grotesquely, until it was nothing human at all. It was the head of a wolf, no, a bottomless abyss, a rip in the fabric of the world in the shape of a wolf, growing
out of the front of The Guardian’s head.

All other eyes were on the two floggers and their victim, who now lay still.

Didn’t anyone else see?

The wolf was flowing up out of the boy’s corpulent body. Like a stream of black ink it poured down over his lap and onto the steps which led down from the throne. Then, finding its feet, the wolf scampered to where Saemil lay.

Again
there was a rift in the crowd and Ginna could see through. The wolf was lapping up the old woman’s blood. The executioners didn’t seem to notice and went on with their work.

On the throne Kaemen sat, his face gone, his head hollow.

Ginna’s knees buckled. He fell against the table. Grabbing wildly for support, he struck a tray and sent it clattering to the floor. For an instant he was
kneeling, his head and one hand against the edge of the table. Then he pitched forward and rolled under it, onto his back, vaguely aware of a vast forest of legs extending in three directions and a wall blocking the fourth.

* * * *

For a long time after that there was nothing but warm haze. Slowly it cleared, until he could see every detail of the great hall. It was empty now, and
dark. The crowd had departed. The corpse of the nurse lay sprawled on the stone tiles, atop, curiously enough, a mosaic of the dark aspect of The Goddess like the one on the opposite wall.

He was not quite alone. Kaemen still sat on his throne, still leaning forward. His face was still gone, his head still hollow. But the darkness was stirring inside, slowly rising. It began to pour out
of the opening, over his chin, like an underground river suddenly emerging out of a cavern, spilling down the steps and onto the floor. There seemed no end to it. It gathered around the carcass and splashed over it in oily waves, spreading to all comers of the room. Toward Ginna. He wanted to rise and flee, but his body would not respond. In helpless terror he watched the stuff ooze toward him. He
counted the squares of the tile as they were covered one by one. The floor was almost entirely hidden, and still the stuff came forth from the Guardian in great gouts.

It was not a substance at all, but a lack of anything. A total void, a dark, limitless emptiness erasing the world.

It touched him on one shoulder, then all along one side. He was numb and cold, so cold. The waves washed
over him, covering him until only his face was above the surface.

All sensation faded. He lay there, staring up at the underside of the table for a long time. He had no way of telling how long. It seemed as if his body were gone, and only his face remained. He concentrated. Yes, he could feel the air on his cheeks, and something else. A tingling. A sense of floating.

His face was becoming
detached from his head. He could feel it peeling off, flapping as the fluid darkness found its way underneath. The cold was inside his brain now, stabbing, killing. His face drifted free. His awareness seemed to go with it He saw the underside of the table whirling around, or so it seemed. In fact it was he—his face only—which was turning, spinning like a leaf in a swollen stream. The waves
caressed his cheeks from beneath. His vision shifted as he rose and fell with the current.

He was in the center of the room, near the dais. The black fountain of Kaemen’s head had not slacked off in the slightest. The level of the flowing void was rising, carrying Ginna’s face with it, past the throne, toward one of the huge brass and wood doors, which stood open. He floated into a corridor,
then dropped roughly down a flight of stairs, somehow never capsizing. He was sure that if he did, if what remained of him were touched by the blackness, he would cease to exist altogether.

For an endless time he drifted through deserted rooms and passageways in the palace, until he emerged through a window into a courtyard. The level was still rising. He was lifted up, up, over a wall,
past a roof. In the periphery of his sight he could make out a featureless expanse of blackness spreading to the horizon. The sky was clear and filled with stars, but their light did not reflect off the surface. He caught a glimpse of the golden dome of the palace, the highest point of Ai Hanlo, just before it was covered over.

The whole world was flooded. He floated alone. He was somehow
aware that he would float for a time, then slowly dissolve, and blackness would rise to blot out the stars, filling the universe. No one would be there to witness the end. He was the last.

The experience of floating was vastly unpleasant, like falling slowly into a bottomless pit of cold air, but all his feelings were dulled. He blinked again and again, trying to remain aware, but the last
of his senses were slipping away.

He was conscious next of a hump of land rising above the ebon sea. On it the black wolf stood. The current drew him toward it inexorably. The wolf leaned over, ready to blend in with the greater nothingness. Just as its snout was over his face, he saw it rise on its hind legs and begin to change. It was becoming the hideous bent old woman whose face had
replaced Kaemen’s momentarily. The old woman no one else could see.

Still, like the wolf, she was not more than a black outline, a pit without a bottom, but somehow she seemed two-dimensional. Only in profile could he see the hooked nose that almost touched her chin and the wild hair that hung in a matted tangle. When she bent over him as the wolf had, her face was a blurry oval.

“Flesh of my flesh,” she tittered. “My receptacle, my useless, empty vessel through which my revenge was begun, what am I to do with you now?”

Ginna tried to speak, but no sound came out of his mouth. Instead the blackness spurted through the opening from underneath. He was sinking. The cold spread over his chin, up his cheeks, toward his eyes.

The black hag crawled to the edge of the
little island, hung on with both hands, and raised a foot to stamp him down under the surface, but paused.

The last thing he saw was the sky beginning to lighten.

She looked even darker in contrast to the dawn.

* * * *

His eyes blinked open. An overturned tray lay by a table leg, a few inches from his face. Astonished, he felt his body to assure himself it was whole. Painfully,
stiffly, he rolled over. He could see all the way across the room. The throne was empty. The corpse of the nurse was gone. The faint light of early dawn seeped through the skylight

He crawled out from under the table and staggered to his feet His head hurt as if split by an axe.

He was more disoriented now than he had been at any time before. He knew where he was and when, but was
unsure of anything leading up to that instant. How much had really happened? What had he actually seen, and what was delirium?

In the center of the room, before the dais, he found the brown stains of dried blood spread over the image of the dark half of The Goddess. There was also a fistful of white hair and a strip of leather which had come off one of the whips. Here and there across the
floor were broken drink glasses, a dropped veil, a trampled flume, a handkerchief, a cap, a walking stick. A large crowd had indeed been here, as he remembered it, and had doubtless departed in a hurry.

When he made his way outside, the world seemed too familiar, too real to have contained such a thing. He looked out over the lower city and the road beyond it. The sun was coming up. A trading
caravan from some remote land was approaching Ai Hanlo along the great highway that led to the River Gate.

The cool morning breeze made him shiver. His wooden-soled slippers were awkward and uncomfortable, so he took them off. The paving stones were hard and cold underfoot

He passed members of the night watch making their last rounds. He had seen them all his life, but now, for the
first time, they frightened him. They were all his enemies. He did his best to hide any emotion, but was scarcely able to prevent himself from screaming and breaking into a blind run.

When he got back to his room he found Amaedig asleep in a chair. She had tried to wait up for him.

CHAPTER 5

The Second Vision

Hadel of Nagé, the Rat, had aged more than his years. He was now very frail, very thin, with a face like wrinkled parchment. His moustache was a white-silver brush, somewhat less copious than it had once been.

He paced back and forth on the carpeted floor of his study with his head down, his shoulders hunched, the almost iridescent blue robe
of his office flapping loosely.

At any other time Ginna would have examined the study with rapt fascination. There were so many marvels in it: a large water tank containing a whole empire of half-human, half-fish creatures no larger than one’s thumbnail, stuffed specimens of curious beasts which no longer walked the earth, including the fabled glimmich which was reputed to have frightened
dragons to death, but which looked so innocuous on top of a bookcase that the boy figured that any dragon frightened by such a thing deserved to be extinct; there was a book which read itself, whispering its words and turning its pages as if alive, allegedly quite capable of driving someone mad who didn’t know the spell to close it; a stone fallen from a star; a scroll containing the names of all
the rivers of the world, with which the traveler might halt their flow or even make them go backwards if it suited his purpose; a skull that spoke; a mushroom that could never be placed in the same spot twice; and much more. It was a veritable museum of the odd, the quaint, and sometimes the terrible. The only safe tours were guided ones. Unattended visitors frequently did not leave, nor did they
remain behind in any recognizable form.

But at present the two of them paid no attention to anyone but one another.

The magician looked trapped. He constantly glanced from side to side, as if watching for spies or enemies.

“He can’t hear me,” he said. “I put a silencing spell around the room. Or he
shouldn’t
be able to hear me. But I have a feeling that somehow he can.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Who can hear you, Eminence?”

“Are you as stupid as you look, boy? Him. The Guardian. No one is safe from him. You know perfectly well who I mean, idiot!”

“Your pardon—” Ginna hastily made a sign.

“Oh, stop waving your hand at me! Did you know I wanted you smothered as an infant? I told Tharanodeth it would be for the best. But did he listen?
Did he take me seriously at all? No, no, he did not.” At this Hadel’s anger seemed to pass, and he sounded weary, defeated. “No one listened to me until it was too late. If I am to educate you—and you know why you are here, why you are my pupil, don’t you? This morning when I went to give The Guardian his lesson, he waved me away saying, “Don’t bother me anymore, you silly old fool. Give lessons
to the pigeons on the roof, or else to that creature Ginna, which was dumped in my cradle. Waste your hot air on him.” So here you are. I think you are preferable to the pigeons.

Ginna smiled slightly.

“I fear for you, young man. I really do. I’m sure he plans to make some use of you, something so vile he won’t do it himself or else he is waiting for some slip, the slightest excuse
to execute you.”

“But why, Eminence, do you care what happens to me, when you wanted me smothered?”

“Even I can be wrong, can’t I? If I am to teach you anything, and I guess I shall, since there is nothing else for me to do in these last moments of my life—no, I don’t expect to escape him for very long either—I suppose the first thing I should explain is that there are two kinds of
magic in the world: shallow magic, and deep magic. Everything I do is shallow magic. Mostly tricks, illusions, maybe a short-term prophecy, that sort of thing. Deep magic moves the whole world. It involves vast forces and powers. Yes, the Dark and Bright Powers are part of deep magic. They live by it and are controlled by it. All deep magic flows from The Goddess, and since her death there has been
little of it to speak of, and all that scattered and irregular. But like The Goddess, it is dark and light, evil and good. It’s just as well that no one controls it all, because the possibilities are endless.”

“Then what is there to be afraid of?”

The magician stopped in midstride, then pulled up a stool next to the one on which the boy sat. He leaned toward him, until his nose and
moustache were uncomfortably close, and Ginna could feel his breath as he whispered intensely.

“Listen to what I saw very carefully, and never repeat any of it. When you were found in the cradle with Kaemen, I went into a trance to find out what the thing—that is, you—portended. My spirit left my body and I could see things far differently than I can now. I saw only spiritual things clearly,
with material shapes, the walls of the palace for instance, no more than vague outlines of light and shadow. I was walking through this flickering world when I came upon an intensely black, huddled shape. It was an old woman. She was crouched on the floor by the cradle. As my spirit approached her, she looked up at me and I saw how hideous she truly was. Her eyes were gouged out, and little red
fires burned in her sockets. She laughed at me, and exploded into a cloud of black shapes, some of them like herself, some not human at all, many no more than puffs of smoke. They were all around me, their numbers rapidly increasing. They were the Dark Powers. I am sure of it. They clustered around that cradle like bees to sweet sap dripping from a tree. Suddenly I was no longer in that place,
and I had a vision of the world covered entirely with darkness dripping like oil from the body of that woman. She loomed huge over me, chanting some prayer or invocation in a language I could not understand. And as I watched helplessly, new continents and cities rose out of the midnight sea, all of them irreparably strange and evil. It was not a place in which mankind could live. The Dark Powers were
fruitful and gave birth to more monstrosities. One of them shaped like the old woman walked right through me. I was suffocating in her nearness. When I turned and looked back I saw her shiny, dog-like teeth through the back of her head, and an eye glared at me from her hair. It was then I perceived that she had no feet, but instead it seemed her body was balanced on two serpents standing upright.
Her legs were ropy, scaly affairs, wriggling along. As I watched, her outline became less definite. It flickered, and melted into the blackness at my feet. I was suffocating, I tell you. I couldn’t breathe the air. I tried to rise out of my trance state, and I felt myself floating up from that level—it’s like a box within a box within a box and you have to get out of all of them to wake up. Every
time I did the hag was there, pressing her frigid hand over my face. When at last I escaped, it was because she let me go. She was only toying with me. “You shall live to bear witness to the coming of my dominion,” she said at the very last. Then I found myself right here, in this room, lying on the rug, and you’ll never know how glad I was to see the place, and to be alive. But I was terrified
also, because I knew that Ai Hanlo was filled with deep magic, and it hadn’t issued from the bright aspect of The Goddess.

“Of course I thought you were the focus of it. I could never probe the nursery with a seeing spell, I was repelled. But now I understand that it was
Kaemen
. I was wrong. That’s obvious enough from the way things turned out.”

For a long time the two of them sat
there, digesting what had been said. The only sound in the room was the faint blast of bubbly trumpets. There was a war going on among the fish-men in the tank.

When Ginna was at last moved to speak, he told Hadel of the experience he had had the night of the banquet. The magician listened with a grim face, and finally said. “I suspected as much. You too are magical in some way. I think
I understand why Tharanodeth wanted you to live. Somehow he sensed you were like an egg, with something inside you that hasn’t hatched out yet.”

“He—” Ginna cut himself off. He didn’t want to tell about his last conversations with his late friend.

That is why you are able to see such things. You are sensitive to the spiritual, as I am. The ignorant would say you have witch-sight.”

The boy thought about his past. He was not yet sixteen, and still it seemed that his life stretched behind him like an ill-defined, shadow-covered road. There was no apparent beginning. When he considered it seriously, he had no idea who he was or where he had come from.

Hadel seemed to be ahead of his thoughts, waiting with an answer.

“When I was unable to probe the nursery,
I went up there to have a look, and I saw you in that little room they kept you in, juggling balls of light.”

Ginna let out an involuntary yelp.

“Yes, I know about it,” continued Hadel. “Now shut up and listen. When I was on that floor of that tower, I felt a tingling all over. That meant magic, but nothing defined or focused. I felt it even when I was in the room with you. I have
a theory that the evil which is now upon us came through you, or in you.”

“No it didn’t! I would never—”

“Hush lad. Can’t you keep quiet when I tell you to? I only let you know any of this because I don’t think there’s any hope for any of us. So what is there to lose? Anyway, you’ll recall how the woman in your vision—I’m sure it was the same one I saw—called you her ‘empty receptacle’?
I think that’s it. A spirit can’t survive outside of a fleshly body very long, and it certainly has no power outside of one. So you were created, brought to the palace somehow, and the spirit passed out of you and into Kaemen, like fluid being poured from one jar into another. That is my guess. That’s why you were found beside him. You were discarded when it no longer needed you. But then, I
don’t know. The tingling may have been more than just magical residue. There were those lights.”

“I can still do it,” said Ginna. He was not afraid to demonstrate. The whole experience had been overwhelming, to be called suddenly into the presence of someone who had always been a distant and sometimes menacing figure all his life, and now have all these things spilled out Was it truly because
the world was coming to an end with evil to reign thereafter?

He folded his hands together, separated them, and a glowing sphere floated gently to the ceiling. Hadel watched it carefully all the way, then looked down at the boy again after it popped.

“Remarkable. Again.”

He made another one. Hadel placed his outstretched hand above it, directly in its path. As soon as the ball
touched his palm, it winked out of existence.

“Amazing. Now this time, you do as I just did.”

He obeyed. He felt nothing as the thing touched his hand, rolled to the tip of his fingers, and continued upward.

“I want to see something else. Lie down on the floor. Get as low as you can, and make another.”

This ball slowed as it neared the ceiling, then began to drop. Ginna
made another, and another, and began to juggle them, lying on his back on the thick carpet.

“Hmmm... ” The magician tugged on his moustache, deep in thought.

Ginna sat up.

“I don’t know what they are,” he said. “When I was little I couldn’t understand why everyone couldn’t do it.”

“Never mind that. Now this time, let the thing go, but catch it. Make a cage with your fingers.
Don’t crush it, but don’t let it get away either.”

When he held one of the balls captive, Ginna said, “Why is it I can touch them and you can’t?”

“Because you’re different boy. Now be quiet.” Hadel turned as he sat, opened a trunk, rummaged through dusty books and parchments, and took out a large magnifying glass. He spat on it then wiped it clean with the hem of lids robe.

He examined the glowing ball through it. As he watched, as Ginna watched also, the thing grew less bright and seemed to expand slightly. The boy wondered why had never tried this experiment on his own. The answer was that as a child he hadn’t thought of it. As he grew older, and became more aware of his abnormality, he was less inclined to exercise this ability, or whatever it was. He had never known
what it meant and desperately hoped it meant nothing.

He was wrong. Hadel gasped in astonishment at what he saw.

“It’s an image of the world! I’m sure of it. I can see faint little continents and oceans coming into being. If it were bigger, if you held it long enough, if your powers were refined and developed, it might be...
real
... big enough to live on...”

The magician stood
up and backed away in awe.

Ginna, surprised, let his hands come apart. The glowing shape drifted to the ceiling and burst with an audible pop.

Suddenly frightened, nearly weeping, he asked, “Eminence, who am I?”

“I—I don’t know, but you’re not just an empty jar. Not a discarded receptacle. Your power is real and very great. It isn’t residue. Who are you? The question is
what
are you. I think if you knew what you were doing, you could become almost... a
god!”

“No! This is all crazy!”

Before either could say more, the room began to shake. Both let out yells of astonishment and fear. Ginna staggered to a window, unbolted the shutters, and looked out. The whole palace was trembling. Plaster and stones fell. Tiles slid from rooftops. Dust rose in clouds. People
were scurrying about like ants in a hill someone had kicked.

He turned and saw the magician lose his footing and fall against his desk. The magnifying glass slipped from Hadel’s grasp and shattered. The talking skull tumbled off the bookcase and into the water tank, gurgling, crushing coral towers.

“Stop!”

“It’s not me! I’m not doing it!” cried Ginna. “You must believe me!”

“Help me up, will you?”

The floor swayed and heaved.

He hurried over and pulled the old man to his feet

“I know it’s not you,” Hadel said, grasping the window ledge. “It’s him, Kaemen. You are the vessel emptied. He is the one filled to overflowing with dark wine. Now—I know what makes the earth shake—he is doing something even I did not imagine him capable of. How can I
say what he is attempting?
He is making the bones of The Goddess stir!”