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Authors: Darrell Schweitzer

Tags: #fantasy, #horror, #wizards, #clark ashton smith, #sword and sorcery

Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (9 page)

BOOK: Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time
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The street urchins had a lot to talk about.

* * * *

Near mid-morning, Emdo Wesa pulled the wagon over to the side of the road, got down, went around to the back, and looked in over the tailgate. The interior of the wagon was divided into two compartments by leather curtains tied firmly shut. The boy was sitting with his back to them, surrounded by wicker crates.

“Are you awake?”

Tamliade stirred.

“Then get out of there.”

The boy climbed down, walking unsteadily, looking down at his clothing. He felt himself gingerly, unsure he was really healed. The magician led him a few yards back the way they had come, to a bend in the road.

Far away, across tilled fields, the golden dome of Ai Hanlo shone on the horizon like a sunset.

“It is a custom of travelers,” said Emdo Wesa, “to take one last look and pray that they might one day see this sight again.”

“Master, when I was little I heard of the holy city, and like everyone else I wanted to visit it, but when I was brought there in chains to be sold, I saw it differently. I don’t know if I want to see it again, ever.”

“Either you will pray or you will not, as the river flows and the bank gives way.”

Tamliade did not pray.

* * * *

A week passed. To Emdo Wesa, Tamliade was more puzzling than many of the mysteries of magic. He observed the boy as he would some new creature kept in a cage. In the end, he confessed to himself that he simply did not understand him. And yet, he had been young once, too, and had been alone in the world more often than not, and he knew what it was to be frightened, to be mistreated. More than that, he knew what it was to have a vision so overpowering that it drives away all other concerns. Yet he had been isolated so long, with his art for lover, for kin, for master, that he felt nothing. He knew this was not good, but there wasn’t even a struggle toward emotion. He was hollow inside. Therefore he merely noted things:

Tamliade was always eager to please, and distinctly unhappy when there was nothing for him to do. So the magician let him prepare the camp at night and perform whatever chores he could, whether necessary or not.

When they came to a town, he bought the boy a book, a long romance “filled with magicians, wizards, heroes, monsters, and all sorts of extravagant things,” the storekeeper had said. Tamliade read it slowly, with apparent difficulty, but without asking for help. He seldom spoke.

In another town, he left the boy to mind the wagon while he went for supplies. When he came back, he found him cowering in the seat, surrounded by a flock of young girls who would reach out to touch him, then dart away in a storm of giggles. One of them stood a distance away, blew several kisses, and began to unlace her blouse. The boy gaped and blushed, frozen where he sat. All of them shrieked in merriment.

When they saw the magician, they ran off.

Wesa noted all this. It occurred to him upon reflection that it was very sad how the boy did not seem to know how to express himself, to feel, to reach out and touch the world. Perhaps his spirit was broken. Or else it was the dreaming. Still he did not understand.

* * * *

“Tamliade, do you like music?” the magician asked one night as they made camp.

“Yes…I suppose so.”

“Then play this.” He gave the boy a flute.

Tamliade played, every third or fourth note a false one, and the magician danced, awkwardly. He laughed and clapped his hands. His laughter was coarse, grating. He tried to sing, but this, like his laughter, was more like something he had forgotten and was trying to imitate than like real song.

The boy only stared at him.

* * * *

“Master, where are we going?” Tamliade finally asked one night.

An image flashed into Emdo Wesa’s mind, of a tortoise coming out of its shell, very slowly. He made a smile, remembering how to do it. Then he grew grim.

“We are going to that city you have seen in your dream. We must find this manifestation of the Goddess and gain the power of it. Has that not been obvious all along?”

“But how can we go into a dream by riding on a road?” Then the boy put his hand over his mouth and looked down, afraid he’d said too much. “I mean—Master—I know you can do much magic—”

“Ah—well asked. I will tell you this much about the art. We do not move because we will come to the city that way, but so that my brother cannot see us. Did I ever tell you about my brother? No, because you did not ask. But now I shall. His name is Etash Wesa. He is a monster. He does not see as men do. He can reach out and know where everyone is, but his vision is like a fog and it takes time to settle. So when I move around, it takes him time to find me again. He is my enemy and seeks to destroy me. Do not ask the cause of our enmity. It is long and deep and more than you could understand. Not even I can comprehend all that he has become, but believe this: the world would be better off without him. He has drifted far, far into strangeness. Magic has that effect, changing the magician slowly, subtly, but inevitably. Often he must take parts of his own body and make
dadars
, living beings which are extensions of his will. This must be done with great care and a minimum of times, or the magician loses all that he once was. My brother has not remembered to be humane and compassionate, and the strangeness has devoured him. It has cost me much to fight him, all this time. You may wonder how you figure into all this, why you should be a part of our deadly quarrel. Yes, you are a part. Almost certainly the overseer who beat you was one of his
dadars
, perhaps the bandits who sold you also. I am sure that his design was to kill you before I could find you, so I would not be led to this thing we seek. I am sure the man would have beaten you to death had I not snatched you away suddenly.”

“He looked surprised.”

“Even my brother can be surprised. That is why I am still alive. I have eluded him many times. But he grows stronger, and I think that he could cover up the whole world like a cancer if left to himself. Therefore I must have you with me when this dream comes again.”

The boy was silent. They sat down and ate an evening meal together. Then, as they were ready to go to sleep, he asked another question, unbidden. It was a curious thing. Emdo Wesa noted it.

“Master, if magic changes the magician, but you are not the way your brother is, then what has it done to you?”

“Ah…again, well asked. You grow bolder—”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“No, be still. It was well asked, and I shall answer. I have remembered to be humane and compassionate, unlike my brother. Therefore I have not changed as he has. But I have paid a great price. Look.”

He took off his gloves for the first time in Tamliade’s presence, revealing that he had no hands, but instead flickering lights, like soft, sculpted flames, replacing flesh and bone up to the elbows.

The boy let out a scream of terror, got up, and ran.

“Tamliade! Where are you going?”

He stopped running and came sheepishly back to the campfire.

“I don’t know.”

The hands glowed like paper lanterns.

* * * *

The dream came to Tamliade again among the hills, on the borderlands of Hesh. It was in the autumn of the year. They had been travelling for more than a month, and had left the plains behind. The forested slopes around them were filled with brilliant colors by day. But night, leaves rustled, the wind chanting the dry litanies of the death of summer. Among the stars, the Stag fled across the sky, the Winter Dogs at its heels.

The magician and the boy sat in a clearing on a cloudless, brisk night, waiting for a pot of stew to come to a boil. Suddenly Wesa was aware that the boy was staring up, but not at the stars. His eyes were unfocused.

“Tamliade?”

There was no response.

He snapped his fingers in front of Tamliade’s face. Again, nothing.

He knew what to do. At once he carried the boy to the back of the wagon, then went around to the front and got in, huddling in the compartment behind the leather curtain. There he preformed
psadeu-ma
, opening his soul to Tamliade’s vision, becoming one with him.

Through the eyes of the boy and with his feelings and memories, he first sat in a puddle of rainwater, viewing things there which were not reflected, his leaf boats drifting forgotten across the image. Then darkness, drifting, and finally sharp sensation. He was cold all over. He felt the night air on his bare shoulders and back. His knees were sunk in mud. A stick figure moved before him on a gray field, then fleshed out into a puffy-faced man dressed in a dirty smock and round skullcap.

Naked, the boy knelt before the tethering post to which his wrists were bound.

“A good slave,” the man was saying, “obeys and obeys and obeys. He does not question. He has no will of his own, no feelings. He may only anticipate his master’s wishes, and never displease him. His mind is inferior. Remember that. You are stupid! You are scum!”

The overseer’s cap was that of a freedman. He hadn’t had it long. He waved his hand to signal someone standing behind the boy. A whip cracked across Tamliade’s back, again, again, again. He screamed. He tried to stand up. The whip caught him around the legs and yanked him down into the mud. He let himself sink there, trying to escape the pain, the shouting, the screaming. He curled around the post, glancing up one last time to see the overseer begin to fade, to darken, to melt into a black mass, more of a silhouette cut out of the air than a living man.

Then Tamliade’s spirit was drifting from his body. It was someone else who whimpered, far away. He felt nothing. The sound of the whip reminded him of a village tanner beating hide.

Another sensation: Again, the night was cold, and his bare feet sank ankle-deep in mud, but this time a soft, long-needled branch brushed against his face. It was the branch of a ledbya, the hair-needle tree. Little winged lizards fluttered higher up, invisible but noisy.

He emerged into a clearing where the forest floor was made of smooth, black glass. He turned to look back the way he had come, and the trees were gone. There was only the black glass, vanishing into the murky distance. The sky overhead was dark, with less than a dozen stars in it.

He walked a long way, and with every step the glass grew colder. The soles of his feet stuck to it. He was afraid that all his body’s warmth would be drawn out and he would freeze solid, standing there forever. He skipped and jumped, and shivered with the cold.

Then something glowed red on the horizon, a flickering, like distant flames. He ran toward it.

A dome of pale light rose, and there were towers around it, a half-seen reflection of a ghost of the city of Ai Hanlo.

Somehow, next, he was
there
, inside the city, among the towers, in a kind of maze. He wandered for hours through corridors and courtyards, through galleries and narrow streets. The transition between indoors and outdoors was more subtle than he could fathom. He crossed a wide square and suddenly found himself in a room no larger than a closet and hung with draperies in which luminous threads seemed to shift and form ever-changing patterns as he watched. For a time he stood there, hypnotized, but a feeling of excitement came over him, of dread and expectation and indefinable longing. He pushed the curtains aside and forced his way into a vast hall filled with incomprehensible machines, some of them only made of flickering fields of light, others of multi-colored, glistening metals. There was a transparent column in which spheres the size of houses drifted up and down, passing through one another again and again, like no solid thing. A dark hemisphere of rough metal occupied much of the middle of the floor. It remind him of a turtle shell, but this would have to be a turtle large enough to devour horses. Inside it, hammers beat. In time they found a rhythm, which became a harmony, which became a kind of song.

Then he was in a corridor again, long and dark, with light at the far end. Up ahead, he heard the faint sound of weeping. He hurried toward it, toward the light.

Something he had taken for drapery suddenly turned around, and for an instant he beheld a beautiful lady veiled in blue the color of dawn, clad in a robe streaked with purple and dark orange like the last moments of sunset; and the horned Moon gleamed in her hair and the stars trailed behind her like a cloak. The scene was all a jumble. He was with this lady in the corridor. From a clearing in the forest of ledbya trees he saw her drifting across the sky, silent as a cloud. He felt in her presence the vivid, unmistakable nearness of the power of the Goddess. His body shook with it. In this realization, the minds of Emdo Wesa and Tamliade began to separate. The magician understood. The boy did not.

The lady wept. Rain fell down on Tamliade. He lay naked and whimpering in the mud, his wrists tied to the post. Men were crashing through the bushes all around.

Emdo Wesa felt his hold on the dream slipping. He struggled to submerge himself again. Once more he became Tamliade.

His father had him by the ear. They were in the smithy.

“You are mad. You are an imbecile,” his father shouted, his face only inches away, spittle flying. “You wander off after whatever drips into your hollow head.”

BOOK: Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time
10.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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