Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (17 page)

He saw the Goddess clearly, as he had once as a child, when his vision had lifted him up from his sleep and led him out of his father’s house, into the forest of
ledbya
, the hair-needle trees. He came to a clearing, looked up, and there, with the Moon in her hair and a crowd of stars on her head—

The gate of the inner city swung wide, and blood poured forth, splashing down the carven steps, around the corners of the houses; swirling around Tamliade’s legs—

The spirits, whispering, their hands groping, tugging, pinching; their hands soft and warm, like animate ash—

The Goddess reached down through the trees—

The gate of the palace swung wide, and the sun, dim and red, rose out of the pooled blood in the courtyard beyond; and the sun was a mask of metal, the mouth blubbering like flesh. Blood poured from the eyes and mouth, weaving a shimmering curtain beneath the mask, like red rain, and there was a figure there, slowly solidifying, the wearer of the mask clad in a red robe, wading through the blood that splashed around Tamliade’s knees—

He heard the rain outside the cave, as loud as if it were continuous thunder, and then there was thunder, and lightning dazzled his eyes.

The rain whipped into the cave on a sudden wind. He shivered.

Then, a new sound: a footstep at the mouth of the cave, gravel rattling.

The masked one stood before him, blood streaming down the mask. He tried to get up, but his body would not obey him. The intruder reached down and took him by the shoulders, the touch of his hands burning. He screamed. Blood splashed over him like rain. He was lifted. His body felt light as smoke.

“Come with me. I shall set you free at last.”

Still he screamed and struggled. His body was burning and numb at the same time. He couldn’t tell what his limbs were doing.

And the other laughed, and parodying the voice of the Guardian, said,
“The great danger of dreaming, the danger which is greatest to you of all people, is that you will fall into that abyss, into the power of Etash Wesa.”

He closed his eyes as the mask drew near his face. Through his eyelids he saw red haze, swirling fire.

He remembered the other thing the Guardian had said. He thought of the Goddess. He saw her above the
ledbya
trees, reaching down—

There was darkness. He was falling. Then he was on the ground, on his hands and knees in gravel and mud, crawling, scrambling down a hillside in the driving rain, as water swirled around him and rose, frigid, over his knees, his loins, and numbed where his shoulders had been burned, and closed over his head.

* * * *

There was a discontinuity in memory and sensation, as if he had wholly ceased to exist, and was slowly returning to existence in stages. He was aware of the cold first, intense, all encompassing. Then motion: he was rising, drifting in frigid water. It was a while before he was aware that he could see nothing. His face was numb. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed.

Then his lungs felt like they were bursting. The pain forced him out of passivity. He struggled upward, his arms and legs stiff, kicking, crawling in the water, and broke the surface with a shock of air and relative warmth. His hoarse gasps and splashes echoed in darkness. He bobbed in the water, looked around, almost subliminally made out a shoreline of black rocks, and swam toward it.

In a minute or so he was pulling himself onto a flat shelf of stone a few feet above the water. He sat there, taking stock of his situation.

To his back was a smooth cliff. He couldn’t climb it. In front of him, the water stretched into darkness. He couldn’t see the shore on the other side, but there was a curving ridge line silhouetted against a steady glow of red-orange light. The ridge was circular. He was at the bottom of a huge crater which held the lake he had just emerged from. The most remarkable thing was that the light beyond the crater’s lip was the same in all directions, as if somewhere, far away, huge fires burned.

He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten here, but he knew that it was not a dream, but a physical place. The rock beneath him was cold and smooth and wet where he dripped on it. He shivered. Overhead, the sky was featureless, black without stars or clouds.

The only sound was the slight lapping of the water against the shore. He sat for a while, trying to wring his cloak out, but he couldn’t get it to come dry. All the while the cold seemed to grow worse. There was another sound, the chattering of his teeth.

Then he heard someone weeping. He stopped and listened. There was no question. A woman weeping, not far away to his right.

Another survey of the situation convinced him that the only way he could get anywhere was to wade along the lake’s edge, so he slid back into the water. It was waist deep. He made his way carefully over slippery stones. He bunched up his cloak and held it over his head, so that when he got to land again it would at least not be absolutely soaked.

When the source of the weeping was nearby, he slipped and fell with a splash, dropping the cloak, then groping around for it.

“Stop! You’re ruining it! I can’t see it anymore!”

He followed the voice and scrambled onto a pebbling beach. There he could barely make out a woman in the dim light. He couldn’t tell if she was old or young. Her voice merely sounded tired and full of pain.

She knelt by the water’s edge and wept.

“What can’t you see? I’m sorry if I—”

She spoke with a strange accent, explaining between sobs that if she looked very intensely at a certain place in the water, she could see her native city, from which she had come by means she did not understand, to which, she was sure, she could return only if she never averted her gaze from it.

Tamliade looked. He saw only black water. “What city is it?”

For a time, she only wept, then she spoke a name. He knew the name. He had read of it in certain ancient books, the name of a mighty capital which had vanished into dust a thousand years before his time.

He considered that the woman might be mad, but he knew that was not the case, and hurried away from her, on the threshold of terror.

The terrain was barren and strewn with boulders. He began to climb up the slope of the crater. After a while he felt wind biting through his wet, tattered clothing. He wished he had stayed longer to search for the cloak.

The woman’s weeping followed him like a beast stalking in the night. Then it slowly faded with distance, until he was hundreds of feet above the lake, climbing alone. Occasionally his passing would send rocks tumbling in small avalanches, cracking far below.

There was a small fire burning in the mouth of a cave, far off to his right, near the top of the ridge. He made his way along the curving slope, then up, until he came to a ledge before the cave.

He half expected to see himself inside, still occupied with the rite of the string of beads. It made a certain sense in the logic of a dream. Such a thing had happened to many adepts, when they sent their souls wandering. But this was not a dream. He stood, exhausted and cold, before that cave. The firelight flickered on stone, glistening where water seeped from the cave wall. He smelled smoke, and meat cooking. He realized how hungry he was, how cold. He walked into the shallow cave and stood before the fire, warming himself.

In the darkness beyond it, something stirred. He stood still.

“Spirit, be gone!” came a shrill voice.

“I’m not a spirit,” he said slowly. “Please don’t send me away.”

“Then sit by the fire while I decide what to do with you.” The tone was more irritated than threatening. He sat cautiously. On the other side of the fire he could make out a huddled form. The smell of meat was very strong. There was also the faint stench of something rotten.

A hand grabbed him by the knee. The grip was firm, the touch dry and cold. He leaned forward, peering into the gloom. The hand let go. The other shuffled back from the fire. He got an impression of tangled hair and beard.

“You’re not a spirit. Not yet.”

“What do you mean—?”

A snort. “That when you die, you’ll become a spirit, like everyone else. What do you think I meant?”

“I don’t know.”

There was no response, only a long, uncomfortable silence. The flames crackled.

“You came here because you’re hungry. They all do. No one has come in a long time. I’ve been alone for so long. Here, take this.”

A stick poked his knee. He took it. There was a piece of meat on it. He tore into it, the grease running down his chin.

“You wonder why you are here. You wonder where here is. They always do. I always explain. Not that it matters. Do you want to know?”

Tamliade nodded, and mumbled, his mouth full. “There are dreamers who travel far in their dreams. There are those whose dreams are so vast they get lost in them, and never find their way back to waking. Then there are those whose dreams burn holes in the fabric of the world. They dream. They fall through, out of the world, sometimes leaving the husk of the body behind, sometimes not. You’ve heard of them. I know. You’re one.”

“Yes, I am.”

Tamliade felt strangely resigned, as if he had always known that such a thing would happen to him.

The other let out a shriek. Tamliade jumped back.

“You came here to rob me!”

“No, I didn’t!”

“Yes you did. You came here of your own free will,
didn’t you?
Deliberately! Deliberately!”

There followed howls, incoherent babblings, snatches of chanting in some language he didn’t know.

He rose to a crouch, ready to spring away. The other continued screaming, slapping the palms of his hands on the cave floor. He could see the face dimly: pale, with watery eyes, a ragged beard, matted hair.

“I don’t know what you mean! I didn’t do anything to you! I didn’t even know you were here!”

“Lies! Lies! Lies!”

Bewildered, afraid, Tamliade scrambled back further.

Then the voice was calm. “No, forgive me. Come back. I’m so alone here. I forget how to behave.”

He paused, then slowly came back and sat by the fire. He took another bite of the meat. It had a sharp, salty taste. He couldn’t tell what it was.

“This is a half-created place. Their dreams…deposit them here, like debris left on shoals by waves of the sea. This place is outside of space and time, perhaps begun by some god or goddess too feeble to complete it, or else abandoned as a bad start. You must understand…I think you do…the ability to see visions, to have deep dreams—this is not an ability at all, in all but the very greatest. It’s a weakness. You lose your grip on your place in the world. You tumble down, down…here. This place is downhill from all the worlds. The Goddess being dead, there is nothing to hold you, me, or anyone in place if we start to fall.…”

Tamliade nodded and continued eating.

The stranger’s voice became more intent, lower. “I am one of those very rare, great dreamers. In me, dreams are an active thing. I
seize
them. I seek the secret at the bottom of dreams, and when I have it—the Goddess being dead—a new divinity will arise soon; forming out of the chaos of the universe like a swirling storm—
I am the one.
”

Tamliade grunted in astonishment and dropped the meat in his lap.

“You are surprised, boy? It interferes with your own aspirations, does it? It’s so simple. All I have to do is wait. It isn’t possible for anyone, even for you to live here very long… Nothing lives here. Nothing grows. That stick I gave you. It’s part of the staff of someone who came before you. I wait. I wait until they perish from hunger and thirst. The fire. I know a spell to make rocks burn. No one else does. The cold gets them. I wait, until the power of divinity settles on me, until it
must
settle on me, here, in this abyss: where gods and goddesses are formed and have their beginnings. These others have all come—you have come—to find what is beyond the reach of your inner vision, the dream beyond the dream. The beauty of my plan is this: I alone survive. When you die. When the rest of them die, there is only me. In the end I shall rise from this place, transfigured in my glory.”

Tamliade held the stick up to the fire and turned it slowly, filled with a dreadful suspicion. There was still a bit of meat on it.

He had to know. He put down the stick. He took off his jacket.

“What are you doing, boy?”

He put the corner of the jacket into the fire. The cloth burned. The fire flared up, lighting the cave.

The wild-haired man screamed and lurched forward.

“Come to me! You’re mine!” His voice broke, became a grating squeal.

Tamliade screamed—

—Stumps, legs gone below the knees, ragged, putrid flesh, bones sticking out like white twigs—

The other lurched forward, scattering the fire—behind him, the cave floor littered with bones, with shattered skulls, scraps of clothing, jewels, swords, shoes—

The fire flared up again, as the old man’s clothing caught fire, and Tamliade could see, very clearly, that he had teeth like those of a shark, filed down to points.