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

by Darrell Schweitzer

  Overhead, silver ships detached themselves from rooftops, drifting like clouds.

  A great multitude gathered around him, whispering, “He can see us! For the first time since the death of our god, there is one who can see us!”

  They asked him for news of the world. Their speech was strange. He could barely make out what they were saying, but he tried to answer as well as he could. Soon he could tell by their puzzlement that too much time had passed, and the names and nations and places meant nothing to them.

  Some of them, losing interest, turned away. They pulled off their gowns, leaving them where they fell, and stood naked, men and women. Delicate, translucent wings unfolded from their backs. They took to the air, drifting, some of them still bearing lanterns. Against the dark sky, they looked like huge butterflies.

  Still the crowd pressed him.

  “Your goddess is dead too. Another shall come soon after. The fire of divinity never goes out. It may burn low for an age, but soon it flares up again. Sighted one, are you the one in which it burns?”

  Tamliade was afraid. “No,” he said, nearly weeping. “I’m not.”

  He pushed through them and ran through the streets of the city.

  “Please take no offense,” his questioners called after him. “It was wrong to speak of such holy things. Forgive us.”

  As he ran, the walls, the houses, the strangely fashioned arches all rippled like water, then filled with a lurid orange light, like molten metal. He ran breathlessly, looking for a way out. He was lost in the maze of streets. Those people he passed merely watched him go.

  Then they screamed. The city burst into flame. The people burned like paper cutouts, fragments of them rising and tumbling in the hot air.

  Tamliade couldn’t find his way out. He came to a courtyard and cowered in the middle of it. The ground shook. The pavement cracked. All around him, the city died.

  Wading through the ruin, a giant came before him clad in armor of molten bronze which flowed and changed shape constantly.

  “Where is this one who sees?” the giant thundered from behind its visor. “I am master here. He belongs to me.”

  The giant reached down and picked him up. He screamed as the armored fingers burned into his sides. He was lifted to the giant’s face. The visor rose of its own accord, and there was a blast of heat, as if a furnace door had been opened. Within was only blinding flame at first, but then a face formed. He had seen it before, on the statue in the square.

  The giant’s gaze penetrated his dreams. The visions came again, every one he had ever had, all at once. The pain of this was greater than the burning. Still the giant probed, beyond his visions, into worlds he had but glimpsed, using him as a mere eyepiece.

  In time he felt and knew nothing more than an eyepiece would.

  * * * *

  It was mid-morning when he-awoke, face down in the dust. Stiffly, he got to his feet. There was no city around him, only low mounds. He touched his sides gingerly. He was not burned.

  The contents of his bag were spilled over the ground. He gathered them up. The wine bottle had broken. He couldn’t find his staff, and realized he must have flung it away in the paroxysm of his vision.

  He left the ruin, and in another day’s walking came to the crest of a low hill. Beyond. that, he knew, the dome of Ai Hanlo would no longer be visible. So he knelt and said the common prayer of travelers, expressing the hope that what holiness still lingered over the grave of the Goddess would be enough to guide him back within sight of the city.

  In truth, if he could somehow be free of his visions, he would have been content never to look on the city again. But still he said the prayer. Then he walked down the far side of the hill, and did not look back.

  Two more days passed. He was truly alone now. For so long he had been a wanderer, but during his residence in Ai Hanlo his world had seemed to contract, until all he knew were a few corridors, and rooms filled with dust and shadows, and the universe was shut in by the wall of the inner city. Now it was strange, and a little frightening, to cross this almost featureless land beyond the limits of all he had known.

  It was a quiet time, and he savored each moment.

  He came to no more ruins. No more ghosts appeared to him. There were only occasional flights of birds far away, and a few animals that fled his approach. He had no visions. His mind cleared. He knew that he clung to his existence precariously, and without warning the wind from the grave of the Goddess might sweep him away to be consumed in holy fire, but a fancy came to him: perhaps if he continued thinking only of immediate things, he could go on forever.

  The threatening sky brought him out of his reverie. He came to a series of low, craggy hills. Where two joined, there was a narrow valley, and at the end of the valley, a cave. As soon as he saw the cave, the winter rains began in a thundering torrent. He knew it was a sign. He ran for the cave, arriving drenched and breathless. He sat in its mouth for a while, watching the rain weave shimmering curtains against the grey sky.

  He wanted to start a fire, but there was no kindling. He got his cloak out of his bag. It was reasonably dry, so he wrapped it around himself and sat, hugging his knees, thinking over what he had come here to do.

  Now that he was facing it, now that the time had come, he was afraid, but he knew there was no going back.

  For whatever reason, perhaps because a fragment of the Goddess had fallen on him that night he saw the feathered star, he could see and hear and feel things the senses of ordinary people shut out. He had heard the echo of the death of the Goddess more clearly than had anyone in generations, even those holy men who spent decades in fasting and discipline before they could make out the faintest trace of that sound in a way that was not truly hearing.

  For him, it had come without any effort.

  As the years went by and the visions increased, he was losing himself. For longer and longer periods he was no one at all, just a jumble of sensations. Often, when he awoke, he could not remember who he was, and his memories came back little by little, as if he were reborn again and again after each seizure, weaker every time.

  He wondered: had he always been Tamliade, or was Tamliade a haphazard construct by someone who could not recall who he really was? Was he like a drop of rain, a mere transition between the sky and earth? He had read somewhere: if the raindrop has consciousness; if it feels the passage of the air and sees the ground rushing up to meet it; this does not make it fall any less swiftly.

  His plan was simple. In a remote place such as this cave, free from any distraction, he would deliberately summon up all the visions inside him. With all the concentration he could manage, he would reach out and find—he had no idea what he would find. It was as if he were tired of youth, and were forcing maturity upon himself now, rather than waiting for inevitable growth. He would make an end now. He would arrive at the cause of his visions. He would either achieve some revelation, or be transformed, or die. He could not go on as he was.

  There was a little food remaining in his bag. He ate the rest of it. If he did not succeed, he didn’t think he would need it. If he did, perhaps he would be beyond such considerations altogether.

  The rain fell, filling the cave with the echoes of its sound.

  Tamliade began to clear his mind, to concentrate according to disciplines the priests had taught him.

  He hesitated. It is one thing to be told by a magician, “You can fly.” It is quite another to jump off a cliff to test this. Tamliade was at the edge of the cliff. In his case there was the further problem that he might never be able to touch ground again.

  He waited, listening to the rain, shivering from the cold. Night fell. Still it rained. It was useless to wait any longer.

  He began an exercise known as “the string of beads.” One by one he drew “beads” out of his memory and examined them:

  Standing with his father beneath the dark sky. The chill of the air. The feathered star.

  His wandering. An old woman hobbled before him
as he sat starving and delirious at a crossroads. She led her blind husband by the hand. “Holy one,” she said. “Have you the power to heal?”

  Outside, in the darkness, the rain fell.

  His time as a slave, filled with pain and humiliation and weary hours as the slave dealer tried hopelessly to find a buyer for a boy who lapsed into dreams uncontrollably.

  The wizard Emdo Wesa, the old man who more than anything else feared his monstrous brother, Etash Wesa, who had drifted far, far into strangeness, wholly mutilated and transformed by his magic. Tamliade most clearly remembered Emdo Wesa sitting by his wagon at evening. His gloves were off for once. His hands, made of light, glowed like paper lanterns.

  Still the rain fell outside the cave mouth.

  Still Tamliade drew up the “string” of his life, each memory becoming more and more vivid, drawing him more away from the immediate reality of the rain and the cave and the night.

  He stood again before the gate of the inner city, spheres of light circling his head, while crowds of spirits pressed around him, whispering, “Are you the one? Are you the one?”

  He saw the Goddess clearly, as he had once as a child, when his vision had lifted him up from his sleep and led him out of his father’s house, into the forest of ledbya, the hair-needle trees. He came to a clearing, looked up, and there, with the Moon in her hair and a crowd of stars on her head—

  The gate of the inner city swung wide, and blood poured forth, splashing down the carven steps, around the corners of the houses; swirling around Tamliade’s legs—

  The spirits, whispering, their hands groping, tugging, pinching; their hands soft and warm, like animate ash—

  The Goddess reached down through the trees—

  The gate of the palace swung wide, and the sun, dim and red, rose out of the pooled blood in the courtyard beyond; and the sun was a mask of metal, the mouth blubbering like flesh. Blood poured from the eyes and mouth, weaving a shimmering curtain beneath the mask, like red rain, and there was a figure there, slowly solidifying, the wearer of the mask clad in a red robe, wading through the blood that splashed around Tamliade’s knees—

  He heard the rain outside the cave, as loud as if it were continuous thunder, and then there was thunder, and lightning dazzled his eyes.

  The rain whipped into the cave on a sudden wind. He shivered.

  Then, a new sound: a footstep at the mouth of the cave, gravel rattling.

  The masked one stood before him, blood streaming down the mask. He tried to get up, but his body would not obey him. The intruder reached down and took him by the shoulders, the touch of his hands burning. He screamed. Blood splashed over him like rain. He was lifted. His body felt light as smoke.

  “Come with me. I shall set you free at last.”

  Still he screamed and struggled. His body was burning and numb at the same time. He couldn’t tell what his limbs were doing.

  And the other laughed, and parodying the voice of the Guardian, said, “The great danger of dreaming, the danger which is greatest to you of all people, is that you will fall into that abyss, into the power of Etash Wesa.”

  He closed his eyes as the mask drew near his face. Through his eyelids he saw red haze, swirling fire.

  He remembered the other thing the Guardian had said. He thought of the Goddess. He saw her above the ledbya trees, reaching down—

  There was darkness. He was falling. Then he was on the ground, on his hands and knees in gravel and mud, crawling, scrambling down a hillside in the driving rain, as water swirled around him and rose, frigid, over his knees, his loins, and numbed where his shoulders had been burned, and closed over his head.

  * * * *

  There was a discontinuity in memory and sensation, as if he had wholly ceased to exist, and was slowly returning to existence in stages. He was aware of the cold first, intense, all encompassing. Then motion: he was rising, drifting in frigid water. It was a while before he was aware that he could see nothing. His face was numb. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed.

  Then his lungs felt like they were bursting. The pain forced him out of passivity. He struggled upward, his arms and legs stiff, kicking, crawling in the water, and broke the surface with a shock of air and relative warmth. His hoarse gasps and splashes echoed in darkness. He bobbed in the water, looked around, almost subliminally made out a shoreline of black rocks, and swam toward it.

  In a minute or so he was pulling himself onto a flat shelf of stone a few feet above the water. He sat there, taking stock of his situation.

  To his back was a smooth cliff. He couldn’t climb it. In front of him, the water stretched into darkness. He couldn’t see the shore on the other side, but there was a curving ridge line silhouetted against a steady glow of red-orange light. The ridge was circular. He was at the bottom of a huge crater which held the lake he had just emerged from. The most remarkable thing was that the light beyond the crater’s lip was the same in all directions, as if somewhere, far away, huge fires burned.

  He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten here, but he knew that it was not a dream, but a physical place. The rock beneath him was cold and smooth and wet where he dripped on it. He shivered. Overhead, the sky was featureless, black without stars or clouds.

  The only sound was the slight lapping of the water against the shore. He sat for a while, trying to wring his cloak out, but he couldn’t get it to come dry. All the while the cold seemed to grow worse. There was another sound, the chattering of his teeth.

  Then he heard someone weeping. He stopped and listened. There was no question. A woman weeping, not far away to his right.

  Another survey of the situation convinced him that the only way he could get anywhere was to wade along the lake’s edge, so he slid back into the water. It was waist deep. He made his way carefully over slippery stones. He bunched up his cloak and held it over his head, so that when he got to land again it would at least not be absolutely soaked.

  When the source of the weeping was nearby, he slipped and fell with a splash, dropping the cloak, then groping around for it.

  “Stop! You’re ruining it! I can’t see it anymore!”

  He followed the voice and scrambled onto a pebbling beach. There he could barely make out a woman in the dim light. He couldn’t tell if she was old or young. Her voice merely sounded tired and full of pain.

  She knelt by the water’s edge and wept.

  “What can’t you see? I’m sorry if I—”

  She spoke with a strange accent, explaining between sobs that if she looked very intensely at a certain place in the water, she could see her native city, from which she had come by means she did not understand, to which, she was sure, she could return only if she never averted her gaze from it.

  Tamliade looked. He saw only black water. “What city is it?”

  For a time, she only wept, then she spoke a name. He knew the name. He had read of it in certain ancient books, the name of a mighty capital which had vanished into dust a thousand years before his time.

  He considered that the woman might be mad, but he knew that was not the case, and hurried away from her, on the threshold of terror.

  The terrain was barren and strewn with boulders. He began to climb up the slope of the crater. After a while he felt wind biting through his wet, tattered clothing. He wished he had stayed longer to search for the cloak.

  The woman’s weeping followed him like a beast stalking in the night. Then it slowly faded with distance, until he was hundreds of feet above the lake, climbing alone. Occasionally his passing would send rocks tumbling in small avalanches, cracking far below.

  There was a small fire burning in the mouth of a cave, far off to his right, near the top of the ridge. He made his way along the curving slope, then up, until he came to a ledge before the cave.

  He half expected to see himself inside, still occupied with the rite of the string of beads. It made a certain sense in the logic of a dream. Such a thing had happened to many adepts,
when they sent their souls wandering. But this was not a dream. He stood, exhausted and cold, before that cave. The firelight flickered on stone, glistening where water seeped from the cave wall. He smelled smoke, and meat cooking. He realized how hungry he was, how cold. He walked into the shallow cave and stood before the fire, warming himself.

  In the darkness beyond it, something stirred. He stood still.

  “Spirit, be gone!” came a shrill voice.

  “I’m not a spirit,” he said slowly. “Please don’t send me away.”

  “Then sit by the fire while I decide what to do with you.” The tone was more irritated than threatening. He sat cautiously. On the other side of the fire he could make out a huddled form. The smell of meat was very strong. There was also the faint stench of something rotten.

  A hand grabbed him by the knee. The grip was firm, the touch dry and cold. He leaned forward, peering into the gloom. The hand let go. The other shuffled back from the fire. He got an impression of tangled hair and beard.

  “You’re not a spirit. Not yet.”

  “What do you mean—?”

  A snort. “That when you die, you’ll become a spirit, like everyone else. What do you think I meant?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was no response, only a long, uncomfortable silence. The flames crackled.

  “You came here because you’re hungry. They all do. No one has come in a long time. I’ve been alone for so long. Here, take this.”

  A stick poked his knee. He took it. There was a piece of meat on it. He tore into it, the grease running down his chin.

  “You wonder why you are here. You wonder where here is. They always do. I always explain. Not that it matters. Do you want to know?”

  Tamliade nodded, and mumbled, his mouth full. “There are dreamers who travel far in their dreams. There are those whose dreams are so vast they get lost in them, and never find their way back to waking. Then there are those whose dreams burn holes in the fabric of the world. They dream. They fall through, out of the world, sometimes leaving the husk of the body behind, sometimes not. You’ve heard of them. I know. You’re one.”