Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time

by Darrell Schweitzer

  “My brother has made many, many dadars,” Emdo Wesa explained. “Do not think he is helpless because of his appearance. He is far more advanced in magic than I, and almost infinitely powerful.”

  “Brother, the boy touches dreams. He was your instrument once. Now he shall be mine. Give him to me and I shall spare you, Your power is gone. I do not fear you. There can be no further rivalry between us.”

  Tamliade began to weep softly.

  “Are you afraid?” his master asked, as if merely curious.

  “No. I am not afraid anymore. It is my fate and there is nothing I can do about it. I understand that much. I have never been free, even before I was a slave. No. My tears are for you. Out of pity. You have been kind to me in your way. You have been more of a father than my father was. You awakened me to being a person again, not a thing. I don’t know…it just came out like that and in my way, as best I could, I came to love you. Even when you frightened me. And now…and now I see your future clearly. Call it a vision. I see what will happen if you survive this day. I see you eaten up and changed by your magic, more enslaved by it than ever I was. I do not think he means to kill you now. No, you will be like your brother someday, wretched and pathetic for all that you are terrible. So I am not afraid. I weep for you.”

  Then Tamliade walked to the very edge of the blood sea. The coffin moved in closer. Blood washed over his boots.

  “Master,” he said, “if I give myself up to him, and you will be able to turn aside from your magic and become a man again, then I will gladly do it, because I am nothing and you are great and wise.”

  “No, my loyal servant, that will not necessary,” said Emdo Wesa. “I know a better way. Even my brother will be surprised.”

  The thing in the coffin began to thrash about. Tamliade leapt back.

  He watched in horrified fascination as Emdo Wesa produced a long knife from out of his clothing and stabbed himself full in the chest with it, sinking it in to the hilt. The magician cut out his own living, beating heart. The wound did not bleed. There was fire within, the gaping hole like the mouth of a furnace.

  Once again, holding the heart high over his head, Emdo Wesa’s hands flared to life. He was transfigured, enshrouded in light. With a mighty heave he hurled the heart into the coffin.

  Etash Wesa screamed.

  From horizon to horizon, the ocean of blood exploded into a raging inferno of red flame.

  * * * *

  Tamliade found himself lying face down in deep snow. The cold was a shock. Sputtering, startled, disoriented, he raised himself to his hands and knees.

  His master stood with his back to him, absolutely still.

  Snow had been accumulating on him for some time.

  “Master? Emdo Wesa? Are you all right? What happened? Was it real?”

  There was no reply. He stood unsteadily on frozen legs and staggered through knee-deep snow, circling the stiff figure.

  Emdo Wesa stared blankly ahead. His eyepatch was gone. Both of his sockets were empty. His mouth hung open. A pale light flickered within, as if his head were a lantern with a single candle inside. The hole in the front of his coat had somehow become glued shut.

  “Master? Do you know me? Speak to me!”

  The magician spoke without moving his lips. The voice was hollow, grating, without inflection, like that of a bronze head enchanted into an imitation of life.

  “There are many things for me to do. I am weak. I must become strong again. So many projects to undertake, so many spells to master, worlds to explore. I will gather all knowledge and power to myself in the end. My brother is not dead. In the end, I shall conquer him.”

  Again Tamliade wept.

  “I would have…instead you did this for me. Why? You gave up everything you were.”

  Emdo Wesa did not answer. Tamliade recalled what his master had told him once: There is no why.

  He was standing on a sloping hillside. He looked up. Through the falling snow he dimly made out the mouth of the cave. He climbed up, gasping from the exertion, and stumbled inside. His master did not follow.

  When next he slept—he did not know if it were night or day he saw Emdo Wesa’s death in a dream. It was not at all like that of Etash Wesa. He had been wrong. He saw the magician dissipating, drifting apart like a storm whose strength is spent, like dust and ashes on the wind.

  * * * *

  He spent all that winter in the cave. The horses were gone for want of conjuring, and there was no way he could leave. He lived precariously off the supplies in the wagon, and grew very thin.

  He spent his time trying to understand what he had experienced. He remembered Emdo Wesa. He learned to put his body aside and open his spirit in a manner akin to psadeu-ma, although he was ignorant of the term. He had many visions. He spoke with many spirits, and with the Dark and Bright Powers, the fragments of the Goddess which still wandered across the world. And he heard the fading echo of her death more clearly than had even the holiest of men for many generations.

  In the spring he made his way to Ai Hanlo, entered the service of the Guardian, and became a priest.

  A LANTERN MAKER OF AI HANLO

  In Zabortash, all men are magicians. The air is so thick with magic that you can catch a spirit or a spell with a net on any street corner. Women wear their hair short, lest they find ghosts tangled in it. Still, they find them in their hats.

  In Zabortash, even the lantern makers work wonders: the present moon is not the first to shine upon the Earth. The old one went out when the Goddess died, but a Zabortashi lantern maker consulted with a magus, and was directed to that hidden stairway which leads into the sky. He hung his finest lantern in the darkness, in the night, that the stars might not grow over-proud of their brilliance, that men might know the duration of the month again.

  In Zabortash, a land far to the south and filled with sluggish rivers, with swamps and steaming jungles, the air is so thick that in the darkness, in the night, the face of the moon ripples.

  So it is said.

  In Zabortash, further, for all that the folk are magicians, there are men who love their wives, who look on their children with pride when they are young· and wistfulness when they are old enough to remind the parents what they were like in their youth.

  In Zabortash, people know beauty and feel joy, and know and feel also hurt and hunger and sorrow.

  So it is said.

  * * * *

  In the time of the death of the Goddess, there dwelt a lantern maker in Zabortash named Talnaco Ramat who was skilled in his art. He was a young man, and wholly in love with the maiden Mirithemne, but she would not have him, being of a higher caste than he, and he would not be satisfied with any other. Therefore he labored long on a lantern of special design. He cut intricate shapes into the shell of it, making holes for light to shine through. The lantern was like a metal box, as tall as an outstretched hand, rectangular with a domed top and a metal ring hinged onto the dome to serve as a handle. At the outset, it was like any other lantern Talnaco Ramat might make, but he inlaid it with precious stones and plated it with gold. He carved schools of fish into it, swimming around the base, and those winged lizards called kwisi, which hop from branch to branch and are supposed to bring constancy and long life. He carved hills and villages, the winding river which is called Endless, and he fashioned the top half of the lantern into the shape of Ai Hanlo, the holiest of cities and center of the world, where the bones of the Goddess lie in blessed splendor. That city is built on a mountain; at the summit stands a golden dome, beneath which the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess holds court. In this likeness was the dome of the lantern made, complete with tiny windows and ringed with battlements and towers.

  Finally, Talnaco Ramat carved his own image and that of his beloved into the metal. He depicted the two of them walking hand in hand along the bank of the river, going up to the city.

  Then he lit a candle inside the lantern and carried it into a darkened loft. Light streamed through the carven
metal, and all his creations were outlined by it. As he watched, the river seemed to flow. The images were projected onto the walls and roof of the loft. Then he was not in the loft at all, but beside Mirithemne. All around them lizards hopped from branch to branch, wings buzzing, fleshy tails dangling.

  Mirithemne smiled. The day was bright and dear. Rivermen sang as they poled a barge along. A great drontha, a warship of the Holy Empire, crawled against the current like a centipede on its banks of oars.

  They came to the holy city, entering through the Sunrise Gate, mingling with the crowds. They passed through the square where mendicants waited below the wall that shut them out of the Guardian’s palace. Once a week, he explained to Mirithemne, priests came to the top of that wall, and, holding aloft reliquaries containing splinters of the bones of the Goddess, blessed the people below. Miraculous cures still happened, but they were not as common as they had once been. The power of the Goddess was fading.

  He led Mirithemne to a house at the end of a narrow lane. A wooden sign with a lantern painted on it hung over the door. He got out a key.

  “This will be our home,” he said.

  He unlocked the door and went in, only to find himself alone in the loft, with the candle of the lantern sputtering out.

  He was satisfied. The lantern was adequate.

  That night, in the darkness, after the moon had set, he spoke a spell into the open door of the lantern and it filled with a light softer than candle flame, with vapors excited by the ardor of his love.

  He climbed onto the roof of his shop and set the lantern down on a ledge. He spoke the name of his beloved three times, and he spoke other words. Then he gently pushed the lantern off the ledge.

  It hung suspended in air, and drifted off like a lazy, glowing moth on a gentle breeze. He sat for a time, watching it disappear over the rooftops of the town.

  But the next morning he found the lantern on his doorstep. Its light had gone out and its shell was tarnished. He knew then for a certainty that his suit was hopeless. A sorrow lodged in his heart, which never left him.

  The sign was very clear.

  * * * *

  So Talnaco Ramat transported himself to Ai Hanlo by some means which comes as easily to a Zaborman as breathing. The great distance was traversed, the tangled way made straight, dangers avoided, and the lantern maker come to the Sunrise Gate, dragging a two-wheeled cart filled with his belongings.

  For a moment he had the idea that he would become rich here in Ai Hanlo, since the folk there had surely never seen anything as wondrous as a finely-wrought Zabortashi lantern.

  He was wrong. There was no novelty. In fact, there are so many magicians in Zabortash that many of them go abroad in search of work. A number of them had settled in Ai Hanlo. Some of those made lanterns. He had to join a guild and pay a share of his earnings, but it was a comfort to be surrounded by men and women who spoke his own language. They found a place for him to live and work.

  It was a house at the end of a narrow lane, with a wooden sign over the door.

  He prospered in his new life and seemed to forget his old. In time he married a woman of the city called Kachelle, and she bore him three daughters, and, later, a son, whom he named Venda. His life passed peacefully as his family grew. He made lanterns of great complexity and beauty and sold them to nobles of the city, even to the Guardian himself. For all that, he was never too proud to turn out a simple oil lamp, or even to mold candlesticks.

  So his years were filled. Then his daughters married, and went to live with their husbands. Later, his wife Kachelle died, and he had only Venda, his youngest, for company. He taught the boy every facet of his craft, all the secrets of magic that he knew. He knew only little spells and shallow magic—he was not a magus who could make the world tremble at his gaze—but to Venda it was impressive.

  In time Venda married, and brought his wife to live with his father. As his sisters had done before him, he made his father a grandfather, and the house was filled with the shouts of children, and the sounds of their running feet, not to mention the clangor and crash when one of them blundered into a pile of lanterns.

  All these children were of the city. They spoke without the accent of Zabortash, as did Venda’s wife, who never seemed quite convinced that Zabortash was a real place, and that the stories about it were other than fables. Venda himself had never been there.

  So Talnaco Ramat began to feel alone, a stranger once more in a strange country. For the first time in decades he began to long for his homeland and the places of his youth.

  One day, while rummaging in the loft above his shop, he found something wrapped in an oily rag. He unwrapped it, and beheld the tarnished lantern he had made for Mirithemne, so long ago. He had forgotten about it all these years. Now memories flooded back.

  Once again he saw himself on the rooftop, watching the lantern float above the town. He remembered the songs he had composed for Mirithemne, and the letters he had labored over with uncertain penmanship. He remembered the great fairs of Zabortash, where grand magi and lesser magicians and craftsmen of all sorts came together to conjoin their magic, that the Earth might continue to follow the sun through the universe, now that the Goddess was dead, and not be lost in the darkness, in the night. There were wares displayed, feats performed. The high born women of the land were in attendance, among them Mirithemne. He smiled at her, and waved, and even spoke with her when she mingled with the crowd of common folk. She smiled back—was it out of politeness, or something more?

  Talnaco Ramat remembered what it is like to be young.

  Therefore he took up the lantern and carefully polished it, until it shone as it had on the day of its completion. He oiled the hinges of its door.

  He waited for evening with barely controlled excitement, speaking to his son and his son’s family about trifling things, his mind far removed in time and space.

  High up Ai Hanlo Mountain, a soldier blew a curving horn that hung from an arch, announcing that the sun had set.

  Talnaco Ramat went out into the cool evening air, bearing the lantern. The dome of the Guardian’s palace still glowed with the last light of day. He came to a courtyard he knew, which was filled with trees. It was the autumn of the year, and dead leaves rustled underfoot. He sat down on a stone bench and looked up at the dome, waiting for it to grow dark.

  He was alone. The night was quiet, but for occasional distant noises of the city.

  When the time came, he did not hesitate. He lit a candle and placed it inside the lantern with a steady hand, speaking as he did the most powerful spells he knew. The candle burned more brightly than it would have with mere flame. He closed the door of the lantern and at once the intricate carvings in the metal shell were outlined in fire. He set the lantern down on the bench and knelt before it, entranced by the shifting shapes. The glowing fishes swam in the air before his eyes. The Endless River flowed around him, its fiery waters splashing over the walls of the courtyard, swirling between the tree trunks. Everywhere, spirits of the air were suddenly visible in the magic light: glowing, stick-legged things wading in the earth like impossible herons; an immense serpent beneath the ground, engirdling the world, its gold and silver scales polished bright as mirrors. He saw turning at the world’s core that great rose, half of fire, half of darkness, where dwell the Bright and Dark Powers, the fragments of the godhead.

  He turned away from all this, drawing his awareness back into himself, into the courtyard. He concentrated on the lantern before him. It seemed to float in the air. The light grew brighter, brighter; the door opened and he was blinded.

  When he could see again, he was by the side of the river called Endless, at a spot he knew well. Mirithemne was with him. He could not see her; but he sensed her presence. She was just beyond the periphery of his vision. He spoke; she did not answer; but he knew she heard.

  He was still kneeling, as he had been in the courtyard. He got to his feet, expecting every joint to ache with the strain, but he found that, al
though he still wore the clothes he had as an old man, and his tools were still in the pockets of his apron, he was young again. He got up easily. He looked at his beard and saw that it was no longer white.

  When he walked, he heard Mirithemne’s footsteps beside him, but when he turned, she was not there. He continued walking. The sky was clear and the day warm.

  He came to the mouth of a cave in the side of a hill which sloped down to meet the river. From within he heard a voice crying, “I am burning!”

  He rushed inside and there found an anchorite writhing on the floor of the cave. The man was dressed in rags. His beard and hair were matted with dirt. His skin was brown and wrinkled, like old leather, but there was no fire.

  “I prayed for it. Long I prayed for it. Now I have it, and I am burning,” the anchorite said, his voice frenzied.

  “What have you prayed for? You don’t seem to be burning,” Talnaco said, puzzled. He turned to Mirithemne, sure that she would understand, but she was not there.

  “I prayed,” said the anchorite. “I prayed that a fragment of the Goddess would settle on me, that I might be made as holy as she. Oh, it was an arrogant wish! But now it is fulfilled, and I am burning with the spirit. Soon I will be completely consumed.”

  Before the lantern maker could reply, the other began to babble. He prophesied in tongues, but there was no one to understand his prophecies, except perhaps Mirithemne. He spoke the thousand names of the Goddess, first the common ones, then those known to sages, then those which only the greatest of Guardians may apprehend but dimly, and finally all the rest, which never before had been spoken.

  Talnaco waited patiently while he was doing all this.

  At last the holy man sat up, and stared at the lantern maker in a distracted way.

  “You too are burning,” he said. “No, it’s not like that at all.”

  The holy man fell down once more, writhing. He babbled. Then he was calm and lay with his eyes closed, as if he were sleeping. Slowly, with apparent deliberation, he spoke the name of Mirithemne.