The Shattered Goddess (23 page)

His eyes watered. He twisted his face. The flame singed off an eyebrow.

And yet, his hand, which was braver than his mind, did something.

Performed an experiment.

To see if The Guardian was human.

The answer was that he was not, and had forgotten simple human devices. He had not taken Ginna’s knife away from him. It was a mere artifact, beneath contempt. Now, quicker than Ginna’s mind could follow, without conscious thought behind it, his hand whipped that knife out of its scabbard and slammed it into Kaemen’s ribs, all the way to the hilt, and drew
it out, and then the conscious volition took over. Quite deliberately, Ginna stabbed him again and again, searching for his heart.

Kaemen let out a gasp of surprise. He released his grip, swaying as he stood. Ginna took the lamp from his unresisting hand. Slowly he crumpled to the floor, spouting blood from a dozen wounds. He lay there, quivering like a beached fish. Now Ginna leaned over
and held the lamp to his face, not to burn, but merely to look.

The face began to distend, to darken, to bubble and flow. The shape of the wolf was there, snarling and snapping in agony. Rising, like a creature conjured from a cauldron, the Black Hag was there, her eyes glaring in place of Kaemen’s. Her head started to separate from his, as if she were about to pour out of him, but then
sank down, and once more his pasty-white features were visible. The eyes were wide and watery.

“Please,” said Kaemen, and the voice was his and no other’s. “Ginna. Help me. Set me free of her. She has been with me always. If I could make The Goddess dance to my will, she did the same to me. She makes me do everything I do. I don’t know how much of myself is me and how much is her, but I
don’t want it to be only her—” He broke into an inarticulate gurgle, coughed, and blood ran from his mouth. He began to scream, rolling his head from side to side, spewing out blood and spittle. “Help me! Set me free! Ginna, you have no reason to do anything for me, but please, kill me!”

Quickly, but with the deliberation of a surgeon, Ginna knelt over the writhing Guardian. He took him
by the hair to hold his head still, and cut his throat all the way around, so deeply that he felt the knife blade scrape against the neck bone.

The screaming stopped. Blood flowed from the wound and from the mouth in spurts, then slowed to a gradual ooze.

A wisp of smoke rose from Kaemen’s clothing. Ginna had set a lamp down beside him, and now Kaemen’s robe was on fire. He let the
flames spread over the body. Soon he recognized the smell of searing flesh.

Below, The Goddess stirred.

He put the knife away, and wrapped himself in his cloak, more for imagined protection than against the cold. The bums on his face began to hurt, and his chest throbbed again. He was bleeding slightly. A warm trickle ran down to his navel. Now that the fury of the encounter had passed,
he was very weak. He thought he might faint, but for a feeling of relief that the whole business of his life was over. It was too numbing a thought for him to begin to comprehend. He sat down on the couch and stared at the burning body. Around him, dark shapes recoiled at the light given off by the flames. He sat with the lamp in his lap.

As he watched, he saw that the whole business was
not over.

Two red eyes were rising over the dead Guardian. The witch was pouring out of the wound in his neck like a spurt of blood steaming into oily smoke, then puffing into fullness over him. Silhouetted against the flames, she was a totally black outline, pausing for an instant as if disoriented, then turning toward Ginna, perhaps recognizing him. She edged away. Just before she slipped
into the darkness he could see that she was running. Her legs pumped up and down, but her feet did not touch the floor. There was no sound except the crackling of the flames. She drifted like a rag in the wind.

Now he understood that the old lore on the subject was true, and that a spirit could not exist outside of a body for any length of time, unless it travelled that final road along
which Tharanodeth might still be walking. Surely the witch had no such intentions. She was going to her grave, to rejoin her own body, and he knew that only if he could follow her there and destroy her once and for all, would the long nightmare be truly over.

Beneath him, The Goddess turned in her restless sleep. The floor swayed like the deck of a ship.

Bearing the lantern now instead
of the staff to light his way, he followed the witch through corridors and down stairs, out of the palace of the guardians. She drifted ahead of him, always just out of reach, her eyes shining through the back of her head like twin fireflies. Nothing molested him as he passed. The darkness was empty. He saw skeletons on the floor, a rotting corpse nailed to an overhead beam, but there was nothing
moving or alive. His footsteps echoed. Once more the whole mountain shook and debris fell. He was thrown sideways, against a wall, and the two eyes went around a corner, out of his sight He ran after them and caught up, before the fleeing creature could escape.

His breath came in hoarse gasps. His pounding heart seemed to be tearing his chest apart. His whole body seemed to be melting like
wax. At the bottom of a flight of stairs, he missed the last step and stumbled. It was all he could do to avoid spilling the lamp on himself. He thought he would never get up again, but forced himself, and saw the two specks disappearing around another comer.

Tapestries billowed with the frigid wind. He ran to catch up with her. The flame of his lamp flickered and sputtered. An archway gaped.
He followed her through and the air was colder still. He was outside. The blast was falsely invigorating, making him aware of every part of his body, but giving no strength.

He was led out of the inner city, into the streets of the common folk, between the ruins of houses. He stalked the eyes as they tried to evade him among the alleys and pitted shells of buildings. Once he ripped aside
the curtain of a stall and a young girl huddled there shrieked. He put the curtain back and went on, his quarry still in view.

Some doors and windows he passed were shuttered. Others gaped like the mouths of the dead. His light threw huge shadows of himself against walls, making him a spidery-legged giant picking its way gingerly through the fallen structures, overturned carts, and occasional
corpses. For all his haste, he had to move carefully. He was deliberately led over gaping pitfalls which were no impediment to the airborne spirit.

At last they came to the outer wall of the city, to a gate he didn’t recognize. It was locked. He saw the two glowing points rising slowly, drifting over the wall.

There was nothing for him to climb. He struggled to move the bar which held
the gate. Slowly, with a burst of agony as his wound tore and bled freely from the effort, the bar slid to one side. The gate swung inward. He slipped through and looked up to see the witch descending from the battlements.

She could have stayed up there or fled somewhere else, had she been a living woman or a Power, but as a ghost she was bound to make for her grave by the shortest route,
and he stood in her path. Down she came, passing within arm’s reach of him, veering away from the lamp. He followed her a short ways to a barren, open part of the hillside, where talus lay heaped along with rubbish from the city. It was near the base of Ai Hanlo Mountain.

The black hag stopped moving. She hovered above a spot of ground, then began to sink into it He watched the eyes drop
lower. Then he struck out with his knife. The blade passed just beneath those eyes, but did not impede their progress. In an instant the spirit was gone.

Now it occurred to him that he didn’t know how to put an end to the witch even if he did catch her. But he could try. It seemed to him that even a magically animated skeleton couldn’t do much if all its bones were ground to powder. If nothing
else, he could grab stones and batter her. He wished he had a shovel, but dared not leave to fetch one. So he began to dig with his hands, heaving dirt between his legs.

If stones wouldn’t work, he could cut off her head. He would nail her into her grave with his knife, and all her evil would lie there with her—

The ground heaved up, and a solid hand emerged, glittering in the faint
light, and suddenly the lamp was knocked aside and there was no light at all. Before he could even scream the hand seized his own, and he was pulled down onto his stomach, his face over the hole he had dug, looking straight down as the witch’s eyes swam up at him out of the earth. By the light of the eyes he saw the crystalline head, the fires deep in its empty sockets.

Creaking, with a
sound like stones being ground together, the head spoke,
“Son, do you not know me? I am your mother.”

“No! No! Let me go! Leave me alone!” He screamed and struggled all the more. The grip was far stronger even than Kaemen’s. His hand was being crushed.

“I will never leave you alone, not now, not ever.”

Another hand, another arm broke free of the dirt, seized him by the shoulder,
and rolled him onto his back. It locked his neck in its elbow. The first let go of his hand and grabbed him around the body. Now both of his hands were free. He stabbed again and again with his knife at those unseen arms, and back over his shoulder at the face, until the blade broke off.

“It is useless.”

Her whole body was beneath him now, wriggling up out of the earth. She locked
her legs around his waist, her arms around his shoulders, and suddenly there was a sharp, intense pain as her teeth sank into the back of his neck.

Rise.
She no longer spoke. He sensed her words inside his mind. A chill numbness spread from his neck to his extremities. His body was no longer his own. When that voice commanded, his limbs obeyed. He rolled over, and painfully rose to all fours,
straining under the weight of his burden. She hung on his back like a huge parasitic slug, becoming every minute more a creature of flesh than of crystal, her substance softening as she drank his blood, drooling saliva down onto his shoulders.

Rise. See.
Suddenly he could see with something other than ordinary sight. Nearby shapes were faintly outlined in red, as if etched in fire. He began
to move. As her control became more complete, she ceased to issue commands. His legs worked at her will, not his own, and he rode along helplessly, a prisoner in his own body. His arms hooked under her legs to hold her more securely.

Back into the city he went, bent and hump-backed. He saw his way in the strange light, but cast no shadow. He climbed the sloping roads up the mountain, the
stairs where the way was too steep, until he came to the inner city. A horde of Dark Powers met them at the gate and followed, just out of reach, mere suggestions of shapes eclipsing the red light from stone and walls. He found he could roll his eyes as he walked and look around, and he saw them, rising and sinking like fish from a murky sea. Some seemed to have bulbous eyes and long rows of inward-curving
teeth. Others were blank-faced, but their chests split apart and snake-like tongues shot out. Others hovered on whining winds.

He came to rooms he knew, to the innermost chambers of the palace, the bedroom of The Guardian. The place was not as he had known it in Tharanodeth’s time. There was a headless corpse suspended by the ankles over the bed, and the sheets were a mass of dried blood.

Wind whirled around him, and at least in his mind he saw faces floating in front of him, Kaemen, Hadel, Gutharad, even Tharanodeth and many others he had known or merely met, all of them screaming wordlessly. They vanished like sparks cast out from a fire.

He saw clearly again. His hands pressed a panel on the wall behind the bed. A door slid open, and he stood at the top of a secret
stair. A draft smelling of earth and decay rushed up at him. He descended, winding around and around for more steps than he was able to count He was going deep into Ai Hanlo Mountain. He felt the whole weight of the city above him. Sometimes the passage was so narrow that his shoulders touched either side. He could not turn sideways with the thing on his back. He scraped the tunnel walls as he passed
and gravel fell onto the steps with a rattle.

The Goddess stirred once more, and far more gravel fell. The sound of her movement was muted thunder.

His throat was made to call out a word he did not understand, and she lay motionless, waiting.

At last he came to the bottom of the stairs, to a door which opened into a chamber he had never entered before, but which he recognized.
It was large and circular, and empty save for a black statue of The Goddess and a white one, the latter headless. This was the place he had come in spirit, when Kaemen had accidentally dragged him along in a dream. Then the hag had banished him. Now she drove him forward. His hands took up the heavy golden ring on the door Kaemen had not been allowed to open in his presence, which swung forward
on silent hinges.

When he saw what was inside he wanted to cry out, to faint, to run away, but he could do none of these things, and so he mutely stood there, staring into the long gallery with jeweled mosaics and a carven ceiling. He beheld what the folk of the city had venerated for so long and only the guardians had ever laid eyes upon: the actual remains of The Goddess.

Her bones
were like filthy crystal, long and massive, but surprisingly delicate in appearance, translucent with a faint gleam in their cores. There was a thin flesh stretched over them, like a black gauze, but liquid and flowing.

The floor of the room ended a short ways beyond where Ginna stood. After that there was only bare earth and stone, in which the huge corpse was embedded. Ai Hanlo Mountain
had closed over The Goddess when she fell from the sky. The city had been added later, as had this room, in which the secret had been revealed to successive generations of guardians. Ginna felt himself to be an intruder, a blasphemer. He waited to be stricken dead. Nothing happened. Inside his mind, the hag laughed, and pain lanced through him.

He gradually perceived that the gallery was
long and rectangular. He could not see to the far end, but the sides were perhaps thirty paces apart. He was inside a huge coffin, like a graveworm. The head of The Goddess was toward him. He could see the skull clearly, imbedded in the ground, curving up like die hull of a capsized ship. Her eyes were vacant caverns. Her mouth hung open like the gate of a castle. Beyond, ribs arched upward like
rainbows of pale white, and off to one side a hand lay, palm upward, the fingers curled like crooked, skeletal siege towers.