A force opposed Ginna’s passage, but it was not quite strong enough to stop him. He moved like a vessel against a stiff current.
At the bottom of the stairs the darkness pooled on the floor of a large, circular room. Kaemen lit several lamps from his hand-held one and the darkness recoiled and diminished. The room was empty except for two larger than human-sized statues of The Goddess, one in black marble, one in white. The head of the white one had been knocked off.
They approached a massive rectangular door set in the curved wall of the place, carven out of the same marble as the statues only somehow mixed, so that the dark and light veins flowed together. Kaemen reached for the golden ring to pull the door open and paused, his hand outstretched, as if he too were meeting strong resistance. Momentary anger turned into terror on his face. He lowered his arm and staggered back as if pushed by invisible hands.
Ginna saw The Guardian’s face darkening, losing its shape as it had once before, and it seemed another body was imposing itself over Kaemen’s.
It was the black hag with the empty sockets, with fire burning inside her skull.
“No!” she shrieked. “Are you mad? He shall not come any closer. You just wanted to gloat”
At the same time, behind her wavering visage, Ginna could see Kaemen. There was a look on his face he had never imagined possible. The wide, staring eyes he would never forget. Tears ran down the cheeks. The Guardian was trapped, frustrated, both enraged and in despair, afraid and completely alone.
Their eyes met for an instant, but already Ginna was reeling back.
The witch held up her hand like a shadow of Kaemen’s.
“Begone!” she commanded, and the boy’s spirit was tumbling head over heels in a rushing wind, up the winding stairs, out of the palace, and over the open country once more. The wind was frigid. Bitter cold and darkness were all he was aware of. He was moving too fast to see anything but a whirring blur. He was falling, dizzily falling into an abyss without a bottom—
—and awoke motionless in complete darkness. The ground was solid and damp beneath him, but the icy wind was gone. He willed his eyes open, felt with his hands to make sure they were, and could see absolutely nothing. He moved his hands over his body to assure himself he was really there. He touched his right ear gingerly.
Amaedig stirred nearby.
The grass beneath him was wet and the night air was filled with the odor of its decay.
Again the night refused to end. He lay awake for he knew not how long, and there was no change. But then, there was no feature against which to measure change. Feeling and smell were the only senses left to him. When Amaedig was not shifting in her sleep, he heard nothing but the beating of his own heart.
He slept for a while, dreamlessly, then woke again. He sat up and stretched his arms to relieve a cramp in his back, and paused, terrified.
When they had first stopped here, it was an open place. Now he felt something solid and smooth, like a glass wall.
“Amaedig!”
“Huh? What—?” She sat up and also felt the strange thing which had grown up during the night, hemming them in. She began to scream. The two of them leapt to their feet, and as they stood crashed through something so light it seemed only half solid. Fragments of it sprinkled over them like sand.
Suddenly there were crashing and tinkling sounds all around them, spreading farther and farther away. He reached out and felt the barrier crumble to his touch. It was as if an enormous palace, a life-sized model of Ai Hanlo made out of paper-thin black glass, were collapsing around them. They huddled together and drew their cloaks over their heads and fragments rained upon them. Later Ginna pulled his back and looked, and caught a glimpse of distant towers and walls crumbling against the faint light of day. The northwestern sky was a dark grey, but it seemed brilliant compared to the rest.
When they began to walk in that direction, there were no fragments underfoot, only earth and stones and dead grass. Neither spoke. After what seemed like only an hour or two, the world was again wholly dark. They sat down, unwilling to venture further in that fathomless night, but afraid to sleep, lest some other fundamental change occur while they did. But at last exhaustion returned and they lay down, holding hands to reassure one another of their presence.
Again Ginna did not dream. This time he woke in complete darkness, stared into it for a while, and suddenly beheld a bright speck. He thought it a trick of his eyes. Once when he was a small child, he had wandered into a tunnel which turned out to be much longer and much darker than he had expected. As he groped his way along, red and white specks drifted before him, and he ignored them. Only the steady, unshifting rectangle of light at the tunnel’s end had convinced him of its reality.
Now there was this single point of light. It did not drift or grow indistinct around the edges. It was like a star only on the ground.
He nudged Amaedig awake. “Look at that. Do you see it?”
“Yes! A light! We’re saved!”
“I don’t know about that, but at least it’s real.”
She got to her feet, stretching stiffened limbs.
“You were thinking it was a dream. Were you dreaming?”
“No.”
“I was. I had a funny dream. It wasn’t frightening. I was lying at the bottom of a pool or a fountain, looking up through water deep enough to dip your arms in to your elbows. Somebody was moving nearby, but I couldn’t see him clearly.”
“Then how do you know it wasn’t a woman?”
“I don’t. I only saw a black shape. Flapping like a cloak.”
He decided not to tell her about his dream of returning to Ai Hanlo just yet. There was too much to be afraid of already.
“Let’s go see what the light is.”
Hand in hand, warning one another of pitfalls, they made their way down the slope of the hill they had rested on. They followed a little valley for a while in the direction of the light. The fact that it seemed near was encouraging. They knew it was not some beacon on the horizon, but a smaller light near at hand. When they walked in the valley it was above them. When they had set out it had been on the same level. This meant it was atop a nearby hill, perhaps the next one over, or one slightly taller beyond that.
They came to a beaten path which rose slowly. Eventually it topped a rise and became a paved road. Now the light was level with them again. It was still too dark to see the landscape.
The road curved and something eclipsed the light. They groped their way to a low, stone hut and pushed the door open.
“Hello?” said Ginna, leaning inside.
Silence. He made a ball of light and let it rise to the ceiling. Before it winked out he saw an overturned chair, a table pushed aside, and broken dishes on the floor.
They found another house. It too was empty.
“Where are all the people?” asked Amaedig.
“Fled, I imagine. Or dead.”
Carefully retracing their steps, they found the road again. They walked a little ways and it straightened out and the light was visible ahead once more. It was very close. The pavement broadened out into what must have been a square or market place. In the middle was a fountain in which water still splashed out of carven figures into a circular pool. In the middle of the pavement, a dozen paces from the fountain, a campfire burned untended.
There was a definite scent in the air meat cooking.
“Food!” gasped Amaedig. She let go of Ginna’s hand and rushed forward. He ran too. Both squatted by the fire. Two sticks had been driven into cracks between the paving stones. Horizontally between them, a fowl of some kind had been spitted.
“I wonder why anyone would set this up and leave?” Ginna thought aloud.
“Just shut up and eat before he gets back!”
Both of them ate, tossing bones aside, looking over their shoulders lest someone burst upon them at any moment, furious at the intrusion. But when they had finished and still no one came, they ceased to question their good fortune. Bo
th sat in the circle of firelight, wiping grease from their faces with their sleeves.
“I don’t think anything ever tasted so good,” he said.
“No, nothing ever did.”
“If only once or twice a day someone could do us a favor like this—”
“Oh Ginna, will things ever be as they once were?” She was somber all of a sudden, almost pleading. “Or is the world coming to an end? Is this a short reprieve that means nothing when the end comes?”
“I—”
“Well, is it?”
“How should I know?” he snapped. Then she began to weep and he was suddenly ashamed. “Forgive me, please. I didn’t mean to be angry, not with you. You’re the last person in the world besides me for all I know. I’m sorry.”
“But—but—you’re magical. You should know. You’re different.”
He folded his hands together and opened them. He watched the tiny sphere of light he’d made vanish into the night sky. It rolled on a faint current of air. Because of the absolute darkness above, it was visible for a long time before it faded.
“If it had become a star,” he said, “and I could make stars, or if I could sing a secret song and make the sun rise, then you might be right. Then I probably would know. But I can’t and I don’t I don’t understand what is happening or who I am really, or why I am different. What few things I know are all terrible. I don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle. I’m not much different from anyone else, and I don’t have any special way of knowing things. Hadel said I had what some people call the witch sight, and maybe that’s why I’ve had some of my dreams, but otherwise I don’t know any more than you do.”
“Then what are we to do? We can’t go on like this.”
“I think you and I will have to find out what is happening. If there truly is no hope, then evil will overtake us wherever we are, whether we sit here and do nothing or move on. So what have we got to lose?”
“Help me! I can’t breathe!” She clutched her throat and heaved forward almost falling into the fire.
“What is it?”
“Like... drowning... smothered... No! Burning inside.” She screamed hoarsely once, then only gasped, unable to draw air into her lungs. She wriggled on the pavement like a beached fish.
“Poison?” was all he was able to say before he felt it too. His vision clouded. He opened his mouth, but could not speak. There was a fire in his chest, spreading throughout his body, as if his flesh were coming loose from his bones and running like hot wax.
Drowning? She had dreamed of being under water deep enough to get your elbows wet in.
The fountain. Suddenly it seemed to thunder like some enormous waterfall.
Almost blind, desperately weak, he forced himself to his feet, staggered the short distance to the fountain, then fell. His head was spinning. Still he drew no breath. Red haze filled his vision. With great effort he grasped the side of the fountain and pulled himself up, forcing his leaden arms and legs to move.
His throat was dry; he made a raspy, wheezing sound like sand ground between ancient parchment. He lurched over the edge of the fountain and his face splashed into the water. He tried to drink, but couldn’t swallow. He found himself staring down at a glowing white ovoid. He reached in until he felt the smooth stone bottom of the pool. His arm was wet up to his elbow. Through some trick of the water or a momentary clearing of his vision, he saw the thing below him distinctly enough to tell what it was.
It was Amaedig’s head, staring up at him, the eyes wide with terror, the mouth gaping, the lips flapping soundlessly, the skin aglow as if with fire. As he watched the features began to melt and run. Bits of flesh peeled off into the water.
By the fire, on the pavement, Amaedig moaned and coughed.
He looked back at her, absurdly, to see if she still had a head. She did. He stood up, looked at the thing in the water, glimpsed something to the left in the corner of his eye, lurched in that direction, lost his balance, and fell into the fountain. For an instant he seemed to float and the pain ebbed away. Then he was sinking, and the bottom of the pool was rising to meet him. Something else, glowing: his own head, the eyes wide more in confusion than fear. The mouth was shouting. A gurgling sound passed through the water. This head also glowed with its own light and it too was slowly melting. Pieces of it broke off, drifted a short ways, and dissolved into nothing.
He flailed about, caught the edge of the fountain with one hand, the bottom with the other. Steadier, he grabbed the image of his head by the hair and forced himself up out of the water, onto his knees.
He placed the head on the lip of the fountain. Scarcely able to make his body obey him, he moved along the edge, still on his knees, and retrieved Amaedig’s head. He put it by the first. Even as he watched the two of them melted, their substance dripping into the water and down onto the pavement. The features were hardly recognizable. Hair fell out as the scalp ran and oozed. The eyes dropped out of Amaedig’s sockets, adhering to her cheeks briefly, then falling off into darkness.
He was dimly aware that Amaedig lay still by the fire. It was her head he had there. He couldn’t think of it as merely a copy. Indeed, he watched his cheekbones collapse, his face fold in on itself. He put a numb hand on his cheek, his real face, he tried to tell himself, and felt nothing.
The two heads were as real as anything. He understood, dimly. It was sorcery of some sort. He had no idea how it worked, but had heard of such things.
Even as he knelt there in the water, hanging onto the edge of the fountain...
His life and hers, running away like hot wax...
Burning with the fire of death...
One of the eyes in his head dropped out of its socket, into the skull. Suddenly, he was half blind.
He wondered if it might not be possible to destroy the heads by another means, to avert the spell. If not, he would merely die more quickly. A matter of seconds ago he had been saying to Amaedig, what have we got to lose?
He never knew where he got that last reserve of strength which enabled him to take the heads in either hand, to stand up. As he stood his legs slipped from under him, and he fell forward, out of the fountain, all his weight atop the heads.
They smashed on the flagstones like clay jars. There was a burst of foul-smelling steam. He rolled away, his face and hands already scalded, and lay still, his chest heaving, sucking in die cold night air. Then he felt nothing at all.
He must have been unconscious only a minute or two. Suddenly while the remains of the heads were still fizzling, he was awake and aware of hard-shod footsteps approaching him steadily, then pausing. Someone stood over him.
A half-remembered voice: “Very clever. I hadn’t thought of that.”
He looked up—both eyes were unclouded and saw a man draped in black bending down. The magician. The one who had banished his roses. The magician from the caravan.
He sat up, but did not rise when he saw that the man held a dagger which was pointed at him.
“You... how did you get away?”
“Yes, it is I,” the magician said sourly. “The Zaborman your friend made such fun of. You are surprised that you did not kill me with the others. Since you are about to die, I can tell you my secret I folded space around myself like a cloak. I ceased to exist in this world for a while, and thus escaped the massacre you brought about”
“But I didn’t kill anyone! I barely got away myself.”
“Do you take me for a fool? Reason thus: You are clearly magical. It takes a magician to know. Your tricks with the balls are no mere illusions, but something deeper. You come from Ai Hanlo. The darkness started there. As you move, the darkness spreads. Well you shall move no more!”
The magician lunged with the dagger. Ginna rolled out of the way, fumbling for Amaedig’s knife, which was still in his scabbard. He got clumsily to his feet. The man came at him again, and even as he did another familiar voice cried out
“Stop! That’s quite enough of this!”
The
magician paused, turned, and confronted his challenger. Ginna stepped back and off to one side, then leaned forward to get a better look. They were a good ways away from the campfire, which had burned low, and there was no other light. He saw little more than a silhouette, but by the clothing, the build of the newcomer, and his voice, he knew who it was and was faint with terror.
It was Gutharad, headless, both arms hanging limply at his sides; his voice came from knee level; his head dangled by the hair, held in his left hand.
“What are you?” demanded the magician, his voice quavering but slightly.
“Do not harm them. Let them go.”
The Zaborman shouted a word of power and began to conjure. But before he could do more than raise his arms and point the dagger at the sky, the apparition rushed forward and, expert as a boxer, slammed a fist into his stomach. As it did the whole of its body flowed out through the sleeve and into the magician’s abdomen. Empty clothing dropped to the ground. The magician clutched his belly, threw his head back to let out a gurgling scream, and then his mouth was a fountain of blood and pulped flesh. While he was yet standing a black, oily mass forced its way out of him and shot up into the night sky. While he was yet standing he was little more than a ruined, bloody, hollowed-out husk. But he only stood for a second before crumpling to the pavement.
Ginna, still in a daze, thought to look for Gutharad’s head. There was nothing, only the empty clothing which had definitely belonged to the minstrel.
He stood for a while, breathing deeply, letting his senses clear. Then he went to rouse Amaedig. He understood more fully now that a game was being played. He was a piece moved across the board without any choice of his own. Everyone, even his dire enemy, wanted him to find the lady of the grove. Whoever she was. Whatever powers she might have.
The Shattered Goddess Page 12
