The Shattered Goddess

by Darrell Schweitzer

  Sleep never came to The Lord Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess. Kaemen remained awake all night, every night, drifting through the dark hours like a shark at the bottom of the sea, restless, relentless, hating.

  He lay in his chamber alone, in the bed Tharanodeth had once occupied. The magical emblems, talismans, and charms had all been removed. Where there had been two images of The Goddess over the door, there was now only one.

  He watched the progress of Ginna and Amaedig. For a long time he had known that if he chose to put himself in the right sort of trance, he could see through Ginna’s eyes, hear through his ears, and feel what his body felt. He had never told anyone, because there was no one worth telling. When it occurred to him to taunt Ginna with it, just to frighten him, the black hag inside his head told him to never, never contemplate such a thing. Her teeth were clamped in his brain. Her jaw was a steel trap. The pain would be terrible before he died, if he dared disobey her. So he kept his secret to himself, and, before his great labor began, the keeping of it was the most important task she had set for him.

  He watched. He had been amused at the boy’s first shy caresses, that night in the tent in the square in Estad. The girl’s response disgusted him. The two of them coupled like filthy animals. They reminded him of worms wriggling in the mud.

  He heard their conversation. They would wander forever, would they? He thought otherwise. They were straying from their course. Hadn’t that drooling idiot any sense of responsibility? What about Hadel’s last, mysterious, melodramatic legacy? Oh yes, Hadel. He still moped in his chamber. A nuisance and a bore. Some exquisite and novel way to get rid of him would eventually be found.

  But enough of trivial amusements. There were important things to be done. The black hag’s words hammered in his mind over and over again, Who is the lady of the grove? You must find out. You must find out.

  Therefore he followed Ginna and Amaedig. If they found this lady, so would he. Now he sensed them among the stunted trees, asleep in one another’s arms. It was so tender, so ridiculous. He laughed, and the sound was strangled in Ginna’s throat, coming out a choking gurgle. He laughed again, still in his trance, his mind focusing on the matter at hand. Saliva ran down Ginna’s cheek.

  He heard Amaedig stirring. He felt her arms withdraw along the boy’s pathetically bony sides. Then came her voice.

  “Are you awake?”

  Concentrating, he forced Ginna’s eyes open and beheld her leaning over him in the murky twilight. She jumped back in alarm. He followed her, turning the eyes in the sockets. He couldn’t move the head.

  She leaned close. It would have amused him intensely to spit at her right now, but he couldn’t control Ginna’s mouth either. Doubtless his face was slack and expressionless. He wanted to spit, to speak an obscenity. One reason he hated everyone in the world so much was that he was always being denied these little pleasures.

  Realizing that he had learned all he could, and that if he persisted, he might wreck the delicate operation of his scheme, he closed Ginna’s eyes and withdrew, leaving him in natural sleep.

  * * * *

  Ginna rolled and moaned. He awoke, sat up, and hugged Amaedig tightly, but was bewildered when she began to scream and struggle. Almost too quickly for him to see it, her dagger was out, slashing at him. He grabbed the hand that wielded it, caught the wrist, and twisted until she let go, but not before the blade went up his sleeve. He felt a sharp pain, but he took no notice of it.

  “Let me go! Let me go!” she shrieked. He wrestled with her until he was on top over her and held both her arms to the ground.

  “What’s the matter with you? Have you gone mad?” And he felt a sinking feeling that yes, she had, and now he was alone. He might as well just fall on the dagger and end it all. He couldn’t go on without her.

  “You’re not Ginna! You’re one of them!”

  He let go of her and stood up. She rose and stared at him with wide eyes filled with hopeless terror. She did not run, but merely cowered, as the prey of some flesh-eating beast might do when the chase is over and the end has come.

  “What are you talking about? Look!” He pulled up his sleeve. His right forearm was slashed from the wrist to the elbow. It was only then that he realized how much he was bleeding. He began to feel dizzy. They don’t have any blood...”

  “Oh...” She put her hand to her mouth, as if to apologize ridiculously, and then she fell to his feet, as if all strength had drained out of her, and sobbed, “I didn’t know. Please forgive me. Please.’ Then, because her mind could bear the situation no more, she fainted.

  He looked down at her, not sure what to do, but then the pain of his wound and the nauseous imbalance that bespeaks a loss of blood came over him. His head was light. He sat down. It was hard to put forth any effort. His fingers were weak and clumsy, but somehow he managed to cut strips from his cloak, and bind up the wound, using his left hand and his teeth. When he was done, he put the dagger into his empty sheath.

  Then, because he felt very weak, he lay down, his head on her lap. The semi-darkness of the grove faded. The trees became indistinct blurs. He slept. When he awoke once more it was totally dark. Night had come. He wondered if it would end, or if the world would go on like this forever. Tharanodeth had spoken of the twilight of mankind, its final night. Had he meant it more than figuratively?

  Amaedig stirred. He heard gravel shifting as she moved, then he felt her hand on his knee. She grasped tightly, then paused.

  She began to scream again.

  “You’re one of them!’

  He seized her hand and put it where she could find his bandaged right arm.

  “No, I’m not. I had to fix what you did to me, see?”

  She let out a long sigh.

  “I can’t see anything. The dark—”

  “I think it’s just night time.”

  For a long time he tried to get her to tell him what she had experienced. They sat there in utter darkness, unable to see anything but phantom spots drifting before their eyes. Only sound told each where the other was. At first she babbled, unable to form words. Then came syllables, whole words, and parts of sentences. At last with great deliberation, she was able, to say “You were like a corpse. You didn’t breathe. Your eyes were open and they moved, but you weren’t awake. It was like some evil spirit inside you, hating me. You glared as if you wanted to kill me, but... I can’t explain this... it seemed at the same time you were very far away. I was afraid.”

  “I was afraid too. Have we been anything else these days? I dreamed I was falling down into a well filled with black oil, and when I got to the bottom there was something kneeling on my chest covering my face with its soft hands. It was crushing me. I couldn’t breathe. Then I felt it reach down my throat and begin to squeeze my heart but for some reason it let go. After that I woke up.”

  “You didn’t see me? You didn’t open your eyes and watch me?”

  “No.”

  “Ginna,” she sobbed. “Will there ever be a time when we are not afraid again? I don’t see how there can be. I just want to die.”

  “Kaemen has been with us,” said Ginna slowly and carefully. “Perhaps he has been with us all along. There is only one thing to do now. We must find the lady Hadel sent me to find. There is no other hope for us.”

  “But who is she? What can she do?”

  “I don’t know. But Hadel was a wise man. And good.”

  “He really was. I don’t think he’s alive now. I miss him. I don’t see how he could be alive. Even when he knew what was happening, when he knew The Guardian was spying on us somehow, he told me to seek this lady. It was that important, as if he said it with his dying breath.”

  “How do we find her?”

  “Well, this is a grove we’re in now, and I don’t see her. There’s supposed to be a fountain too. I suppose we go north. The caravan would have reached Dotargun eventually. That’s a forest country. What else can we do?”

  “Nothing, I guess.”
>
  They waited until the darkness lessened before they set out, heading always toward the patch of grey sky in the northwest. Ginna was weak and had to rest often. Amaedig undid his bandage, applied some of the salve she still had with her, and rebound it. Fortunately she had been carrying the salve. She still had her pack. Ginna’s had been lost in the confusion at the camp. They had only her supply of food between them, which was little. Before long both were weakened further by hunger.

  While they sat by a stream, leaning against a boulder, a wild kata, frightened and separated from its herd, came there to drink. They looked at the animal, and it looked back at them for a long time before it went on its way, as if it were reluctant to part from the company of another living creature. This Ginna took for a good omen.

  * * * *

  Again The Guardian lay alone in his chamber, watching them. He did not force Ginna’s eyes open this time. The boy was awake and walking through the semi-darkness of day across the desolate country north of Estad. He could feel the rough ground through the soles of Ginna’s boots, and it seemed to him that his own forearm was bound in strips of cloth and throbbing dully. He heard Amaedig’s footsteps a few paces behind him. He heard her voice when she spoke as if she were standing by the side of the bed. The strangest sensation came when Ginna spoke. It was as if another mind controlled his vocal chords, and he felt the words rising in his throat, but he did not actually utter them. He heard them somewhat removed, as spoken by another.

  When he was younger, the experience had fascinated him. Now, the lord of the world, a man of almost sixteen years—he was endlessly contemptuous of Ginna, a boy of the same age, no one of importance, a mere nuisance and curiosity—he had no time for such things. The black lady said the end of all things and the new beginning of all things were coming very, very soon, and he must prepare.

  So he watched in earnest to learn what he needed to learn, not for the sensation of riding secretly in someone else’s body. He saw the landscape go by slowly. He watched Ginna and Amaedig pause to dig for edible roots and he felt the earth on his hands. He felt their hunger in his own belly, and he listened to their conversation, remembering all.

  They did not know when he was there and when he wasn’t. The extension of his spirit into Ginna produced some unease, but if he didn’t force himself further there was quite enough else for Ginna to be uneasy about. So he did not laugh. He did not spit in anyone’s face. He was their invisible companion.

  * * * *

  Slowly the rocky plain gave way to gentle hills covered with grass already going white for want of sunlight. The world seemed dead. The air was still and colder than Ginna had ever known it. Only very rarely did he see any living creature, usually a single bird flapping furiously toward that part of the sky which was not wholly dark. On the ground were occasional animals used to darkness, toads and serpents. Worms wriggled up out of the soil, no longer fearing the heat of the day.

  Among the hills there were many clusters of scrubby trees with pale, drooping leaves.

  Ginna felt faint much of the time from hunger and his wound which refused to heal. At least there was enough water. Both he and Amaedig had never taken off the water bags which hung from their belts, and had had them as they fled. Streams were common in this part of the world. Once they caught a fish by hand, and having no means of making fire, ate it raw. Other than that, neither had eaten anything since Amaedig’s meager provisions had run out.

  He had no idea how long it had been. Two days, maybe three. Perhaps more. He was losing track of time. The thought came to him that perhaps the sequence of day and night had become disordered and the intervals irregular. Several days might have slipped by in a single sleeping period, presaging a virtually endless night

  Amaedig walked stiffly, deliberately putting one foot in front of another as if she could not consciously plan any action beyond the next step. Both of them had spent their lives in a city where there were no long distances to be traversed and food was always at hand. They were not accustomed to hardship. Both were completely exhausted.

  When they paused to rest once more, neither could get up again.

  “I guess we sleep here,’ he said, and she mumbled in agreement Hills were all around them. The land was rippled the way Ginna imagined the sea must be just as an enormous tempest is beginning. In the twilight the slopes seemed dark and massive, yet fluid. By some trick of the light, they appeared to move as shadows shifted, but he lacked the strength to sit up and watch. The narrow band of almost-light to the northwest was dimming.

  He could barely keep his eyes open. He surrendered to the weakness which was dragging him down.

  He slept apart from his friend. His last conscious thought was that The Guardian might be watching somehow. He could not touch Amaedig while that one looked on. The idea was obscene.

  He dreamt he stood in spirit above his body as it lay there on the dying grass. He looked down on himself, and on the girl beside him. He walked over to her and bent low to assure himself she was breathing. She muttered in some dream of her own, turning fitfully from side to side as he watched.

  Then he looked back to his body and saw a glimmering black line, like a stream of darkly shining oil, stretched from the side of the head away into the distance. He could not see the end of it. He had no rational way of knowing, but was sure that it reached southeast, all the way to Ai Hanlo.

  The night was totally dark, save that one thin strip of sky seemed slightly less so. It would have been impossible for his waking self to see the hand before his face, but his dream-self possessed some other kind of vision.

  As he looked closer, he could tell that the black fluid was pouring out of his right ear—that of his body as it lay on the ground. Then the flow stopped, and the end of the stream withdrew like a rope being dragged away from the other end. Somehow his spirit was bound to it, and he felt himself pulled along, away from the two reclining figures, as if he were no more substantial than smoke and a huge mouth were sucking him in.

  He was carried over the way he had come so far, over the hills and the rocky plain, past the ruins of the caravan’s last camp. He tried to look away, but there were corpses all around him. Finally he found the power to shut his eyes, and he drifted on, hovering above the stream or oil or tentacle or whatever it was. When he looked again the city of Estad was behind him. No torches or lanterns burned among its towers and walls. No voices of the watch called out

  He began to move faster, as if the limb which had fetched him had grown impatient. He raced over a countryside increasingly familiar, along the bank of a river he knew, over fields of failing crops and still puddles of irrigated water. Then Ai Hanlo loomed before him, silent and forbidding, a ghostly silhouette of a city, save for the golden dome which seemed to glow slightly with its own unnatural light. Shuttered houses and empty streets whizzed past, and he was moving up, up into the inner city, into the palace, through courtyards, rooms, and corridors which had once been the whole of his world. The black stream reminded him of a tongue now, and he imagined some toad-like monstrosity crouching in the depths of the palace and reaching out windows, around towers, over walls, across miles and miles of midnight terrain to ensnare—what?

  Suddenly he found himself in a dimly lighted room which he recognized. He had not been there since the day Tharanodeth lay dying on the bed now occupied by an obese, pale form.

  Kaemen sat up, spoke a word, performed a motion with his hands, and came out of his trance. He seemed to see Ginna standing at the foot of the bed. At first there was alarm on his face, then surprise, and this gave way to a malicious grin,

  “So you followed me home. Are you really there? You must have been dreaming just as I—no, I won’t tell you anything more than you already know.”

  The Guardian wriggled to the edge of the bed and dropped to the floor. He moved more like a festering, boneless mass of flesh than a person. He approached Ginna, reached out a hand to touch him, and the hand passed through. Ginna felt a cold intr
usion in his chest.

  “Very interesting. The soul cannot exist outside the body except in such extraordinary instances as these. Otherwise there must be a receptacle. But you already know about that. Come with me. I haven’t got all night.”

  Kaemen reached out again. His hand came no nearer than an arm’s length away, but somehow he seized him. Ginna felt himself dragged along as surely as if he’d been collared. He drifted lightly. Often his feet didn’t touch the floor. The Guardian led him like a kite on a string along many empty, soundless corridors past doors which were either tightly barred or broken open. The open ones revealed empty rooms, sometimes in disarray. Once he thought he saw someone lying on the floor in one of them, twisted into a position no living person could assume, but he wasn’t sure. The shadows were so thick. He was past it so quickly.

  They came upon a woman dressed in the gown of a high caste of nobility. She had been running stealthily along a hallway, hiding in comers and behind pillars, looking to see if the way were clear, then scurrying on again. She had a small oil lamp to light her way.

  She didn’t seem to be aware of Kaemen’s approach until he was almost upon her. Then, by the faint light of the lamp the look of horror on her face as she recognized him was clearly visible. She screamed briefly, threw up her hands, and Kaemen pointed a finger at her. At once she fell to the floor, dead.

  The lamp handle was still hooked around her thumb. Oil spilled out when it hit the floor, burning in a little puddle. This Kaemen stamped out, taking up the lamp. It was still lighted.

  “I am not wholly of the darkness yet,” he said. “We’ll need this to see where we are going.”

  They came to chambers Ginna had never seen before. Huge metal doors opened to The Guardian’s touch, leading to a long, winding staircase descending into darkness. A cold, earthy draft blew, and there were voices, many faintly whispering voices like a million leaves rustling over a dry floor. It seemed to Ginna that the mortar between the stones of the walls glowed a faint, bloody red, while the stones themselves flowed and changed in the familiar pattern of darkness, as Kaemen’s own face had, as the things atop the golden dome had. Darkness poured out of the walls and rippled down the stairs over the feet of Kaemen and Ginna. It bubbled and rose up in flabby, half-formed shapes which reached out with feeble hands, which stared with randomly spaced eyes, which croaked and gibbered with lips that flapped and melted back into the overall mass.