I stood for a moment in the great banqueting hall, beneath the frescoed ceiling. I had been there many times, of course. It was here one night, at the height of one of his famously riotous gatherings, that Kodos Vion had directed the attention of his guests to me. Great lords and ladies were there, famous savants and poets, and even a priest or two. He commended me to them as a young man of great promise, the author of verses which would one day be ranked among the greatest of our age. I think he was laughing all the while as he said this, at them, at me, at our age. In the impossible darkness that has followed the death of the Goddess, when even signs and wonders and miracles don’t make any sense anymore, what else is there for us to do? That he had explained to me before, laughing as he did. It was his way.
“Knock their brains in, boy,” he whispered to me. “Tear out their hearts. If they have either.”
So, confused, a little afraid, stuttering somewhat—it was not my best delivery—I read my verses to all these distinguished people. They applauded only politely, but after that I was someone. I moved in the best circles of society. I never wanted for money or women or admission to the houses of the great, for I was a friend of Kodos Vion.
“Hurry,” one of the black-clad ladies said, dragging me by the arm. “Don’t just stand there. He will see you now. There isn’t much time.”
Very much in dread, I went in to see Kodos Vion. He seemed insubstantial now somehow, a pale, frail husk sunken deep into his pillows. His white hair, thinner than before, clung to his forehead as if plastered with sweat, but his face was dry, and when I held his hand, it was cold.
His breath wheezed. He lay still, staring at the ceiling of his chamber. Even after I had been there a while, he did not turn to look at me. When he tried to speak, he only mouthed the words. No sound came.
Then suddenly he reached up and grabbed me by the collar. His grip was astonishingly strong. He yanked me down until my ear was by his mouth, and then he spoke very clearly indeed.
Wailing, I ran from that place, and found myself, by confused and circuitous ways, on the threshold of Korevanos, the Inn of Sorrows.
* * * *
I came to myself, as if awakening from a dream—no, as if awaking into a dream—at the foot of a flight of wooden stairs. Up above, in darkness, wind howled. Wood creaked.
The innkeeper merely nudged me away and led me to a table, and I sat by myself in a large, darkened room, and I knew at once that I was in Korevanos.
A woman sat on a nearby bench, screaming endlessly, rocking back and forth. Her voice wasn’t loud though, more like a fierce wind blowing over the mouth of a chimney pipe. I learned to ignore her, even as one who lives beside a waterfall learns to ignore its thunder.
There were two soldiers. One of them, in a desperate attempt to drive off melancholy, danced on a tabletop, pretending to be more drunk than he really was, while singing a filthy song. With all his might he leapt into the air, as if by flapping his arms he could fly away, out of this world, out of his own despair. But he only caught hold of a chandelier, a horizontal wagon wheel with candles set around the rim. One of the spokes broke in his hand, and he tumbled down against a shelf in a crashing avalanche of candles and pots and broken crockery. He lay in a heap, sobbing. No one went to his aid.
Gradually the room filled. I didn’t see anyone come in. I heard no footsteps. I merely became aware of more presences, as if they had materialized out of smoke and shadows into my dream.
But this wasn’t a dream, of course. I was really there.
Meanwhile, the innkeeper brought me some wine. I drank, and my senses were heightened until I could hear the blood coursing through my veins like a rushing river. I thought how the blood in Kodos Vion’s veins must now be slowing down, becoming a muddy trickle.
I felt the very air on my face, every thread of clothing against my skin, rough and almost sharp. Could Kodos Vion feel as much now? No, he could not.
My purse was a stone weight in my lap. I saw every detail of the room around me, heard the slightest sound, every rustling or exhalation, smelled the sweat and wine and dust.
I looked up from my wine cup. There was a young woman seated across from me, clad in the silks and bangles and beads of a courtesan of the Inner City. Was she someone I had known from the house of Kodos Vion?
She seemed bewildered. “Why am I here?” she asked me, as if I were the only convenient person to ask, I think, not as if she really expected a sensible answer.
“Only you know that,” I said, and she covered her face and hurried away.
To my right was another woman, a bit older, draped in flowing blue from head to foot. She had not been there a moment before, but I had not been aware of her arrival or her sitting down next to me. I saw that her face was painted all over with gray ash. She wept softly, her tears streaking the ash.
So it was. I might perceive a flicker at the edge of my vision, then turn to one side or the other and discover that our company had increased. Now many people sat at tables or wandered listlessly about, people of many races and nations. Many, I was sure, had never actually set foot in Ai Hanlo or in the country around it at all, but still they were here, in Korevanos.
“I want to go home! Please, let me go home!” It was a young voice shouting. I looked down.
A boy huddled under my table, clinging to one of the legs. He was richly clad, no doubt the son of some lord or high priest. He looked totally lost, helpless. His eyes stared wide. There was madness in them.
I reached my hand down to him. He whimpered and drew away.
No one else paid any attention.
I looked up. Now there was a young girl sitting across from me. She might have been a little older than the boy, fifteen or so, but I couldn’t tell, largely because was entirely covered with blood, her hair matted, the remnants of her clothing likewise soaked. Her eyes were wide too, but in them I saw only weariness. She seemed but half alive.
I looked under the table again. The boy was gone. There was a puddle of blood by the girl’s bare feet.
She stank horribly, but did not actually seem to be injured. She just sat there, staring into the air, seemingly unaware of me or of anyone around her. She rubbed her hands together slowly. After a while the innkeeper brought her wine and she drank. Then he gave her a bowl of water and towel and, very, very slowly, she seemed to recognize what these things were for, and she began to clean herself a little.
I somehow knew that she had a story to tell, that I would hear it eventually, and it would be immensely important to me. But she was not ready to speak.
So I spoke to her.
“I’ll tell you why I am here,” I said. I was only speaking to her then. If anyone overheard me, let them, but I was speaking to her. The wine must have affected my senses more than I’d thought, because soon all the room seemed to fade away into a red mist, and it was only the two of us there, closed off, as if we floated inside a bubble of blood. And I told her, haltingly at first, then in a torrent of confession, something of the actual truth, how I was actually a fraud. I had wanted to be a real poet as a boy, but I became only a liar as my youth slipped away. I became a friend of Kodos Vion. Friend, or was I his parasite? I told myself I loved him. He told me he loved me. Who was the liar then? Nevertheless I was able to flatter money out of rich men while working my way up in the world through the bedchambers of their wives, while Kodos Vion and I got drunk together and laughed at my exploits. Or was he just laughing at me, behind the façade of friendship? I went on. I did what I knew how to do, out of habit, the way a fish swims and eats other fish, because that is what fishes mindlessly do. But I was empty inside, the poet in me long dead, for all I could still contrive a pretty rhyme when there was coin or pleasure to be had in exchange. Otherwise I merely groped at my art, trying to recover what I had lost, trying to express what I could no longer say.
I don’t know if the girl heard or understood any of this.
“Can you imagine how it was?” the drunken soldier shouted,
the same one who had fallen off the table. He’d cut himself in his fall, crashing into the crockery. Now blood streamed down the side of his face, which floated disembodied in the red mist, where he had somehow managed to intrude into the bubble. “Can you imagine? I was only a little boy then. I woke up, delirious with fever in the dawn to the sound of screaming crows…everyone was dead…the plague, everyone I had ever known in the world…and all my life, ever since, I have heard those crows screaming inside my head. It never stops. It never will stop. Can you imagine?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can imagine it very well.”
He screamed, a sound of infinite rage and sorrow, but then when it had passed, like a storm, he said quietly. “I just wanted to explain. I had to explain. Excuse me.” And he was gone.
The mist thinned.
A tall man sat between two soldiers, blind, his eye sockets empty. He was a Zabortashi magus by his dress, yet as he moved, his long sleeves fell back, and I saw that he did not wear the elbow-length gloves that the magi favor. He had no hands at all. Light flickered from his wrists. He leaned over to suck wine from a shallow dish. There was a light inside his mouth, like the candle inside a lantern.
“Azrethemne,” the bloody girl said. “I remember that my name is Azrethemne.”
The blind magus raised his head turned from side to side, as if trying to locate her. Then he went back to his wine.
Somehow it seemed to matter if I could make the girl understand. I told her how I had loved Kodos Vion. I was no mere parasite. I loved him, truly, as we drank and whored together. He called me his little son, though I was neither little nor his son. He led me on, yes, but there was something different, something miraculous, by which he, just as truly, loved every woman he bedded and every one of the innumerable bastards he fathered. And I loved him. I was part of his huge family. We all were. That was my place in the world.
Without him, I went back to being nothing. A shadow, cast by Kodos Vion, and, when he was gone, no longer cast. I had only come to realize this recently, as he was dying. As he spoke to me for the last time.
“What did he say?” the girl Azrethemne asked.
I paused, startled, and then answered her carefully.
“He was afraid. Imagine that. Him afraid. But he was. His fear had given him that final burst of strength. What he said was, ‘It is Black Veiada, the Night Hag. She has been at my side for a long time. You must help me. No one else can. No one else would believe. I couldn’t get away from her, and now she has stolen my heart!’ And I put my ear to his chest and knew that it was so. Kodos Vion still breathed, yet he had no heartbeat.”
* * * *
“That’s why I am here!” I shouted to the whole room. “I am not like the rest of you! I did not stumble in here in utter despair. No, mine is a mission, something heroic, a quest. I am here to save my friend. I am looking for Kodos Vion’s heart, which has been stolen, but I don’t know…” My voice broke. I sobbed. I failed to convince even myself, especially myself, of my singular heroism. I felt helpless as the boy under the table. Only after a while could I speak at all, and it was like a child’s confession. “I don’t know what to do. How can I help him? I have no idea? Who is this Night Hag anyway? How do I confront her? My friend is dying and, I confess, I haven’t a clue.”
“You don’t know that he’s dead yet,” said Azrethemne softly.
I reached across the table and took her hand, holding tight. I had begun by pitying her. Now I wanted her to comfort me. Suddenly I was ashamed. I let go.
“But he will die,” I said. I rested my head in my folded arms and cried like a child.
Then the innkeeper was standing over me, his hand on my shoulder. “Perhaps you will find what you seek. But now, get ready. It is time to go.”
I looked up. “Who are you? What are you? Where are we going?”
He paused, his long, pale face expressionless. “As for who I am, I merely came here, as you did. I have no memory of anything else. Therefore I am myself, nothing more. As for what I am, I can only speculate. I remember a philosopher who was here once. He said that the Goddess created me and this place both out of her own sorrow as she died, forgetting the purpose even as she completed the act. Or else she never completed it. Maybe I was meant to be something more. But I am not.”
He reached up and removed his face like a mask, revealing only formless, waxen stuff behind it.
The mask continued speaking. “As for where you are going, I do not know that either. I have seen thousands come here and thousands depart. They all go…somewhere. This is only a brief meeting place, a stopping point at the beginning of such journeys. Perhaps some of those travelers come to understand after a while. But I never go with them. They never come back and tell me. Now it is time for you to go.”
Azrethemne reached over and took my hand in hers, even as the inn began to dissolve around us. Sounds from above grew louder, the wind, the creaking, the moaning of desolation and darkness. Subtly, all changed into the rhythmic surge of surf. The air was clear and very cold. The last of the walls faded away as mist, and a rolling, sandy landscape stretched away in every direction. Absurdly, the wagon-wheel chandelier hung in the air.
Then benches we sat on were gone. Azrethemne and I rose, still holding my hand in her blood-sticky fingers. Now the wheel overhead vanished too, though a couple candles had fallen from it onto the ground.
People began to wander away over the sand. One or two upright beams of the inn remained, and an occasional table or bench, half buried, vanishing even as I watched, like shapes of sand dissolved by the wind. The blind magus drifted like a cloud over an ashy-gray dune and disappeared, beneath a nearly black sky.
A courtesan stumbled beside us for a moment, saying, her hands covering her face. Then she wasn’t there. My attention wandered, lost focus. The woman who had been screaming fell silent, so that the only sound was that of the surf, nearby, on a shoreline I still could not find.
There was another sound too. Azrethemne’s teeth chattered with the cold.
I looked around for the innkeeper. I wanted to call out to him. But he wasn’t there. I could only step forward, carefully leading the barefoot girl around the heap of broken pottery the drunken soldier had crashed into.
For a while there was still one round table in the sand, surrounded by chairs, a little group that somehow refused to fade away. But then, by some means the eye could not follow, they did.
A bent old man leaning on a stick made his way slowly along the crest of a dune, singing a dirge of some kind. But only for a moment. Then he was gone too, and there was, again, only the sound of the invisible sea.
I looked up at the sky, and saw dark clouds passing before one another. But the air felt dry. I doubted it ever rained in this place. I doubted, too, that time passed normally here or that the sun rose and set, or that there even was a sun in the sky behind those clouds. The sky was just suffused with faint light somehow, leaving an endless twilight.
I was about to remark on this to Azrethemne, when she whispered to me, very intently, “No. Be brave. You said you were a hero. Don’t lie about it. That’s all you have left.”
Then it was she who was leading me. I followed her to the top of the dune. From there we could behold the ocean, dark, almost oily, its waves smearing sluggishly onto the shoreline, never breaking into white foam. Cold wind blew.
Hundreds of people had gathered on the beach, far more than I’d seen at the inn, the mass of them spread out, scattered across the sand like the stumps of tree trunks in a drowned forest. Some stood out in the water, the waves washing between their legs or over their shoulders. I strained to see in the poor light, and could not be sure, but it seemed that thousands more stood even further out, motionless as statues, their heads black specks against the dark sky and the even darker water. The only motion was of a few newcomers, who arrived at the edge of the beach, found their places, and then stood still.
I made no attempt to understand. I was beyond understandi
ng now.
“Look,” Azrethemne said, pointing.
It took a while for my eyes to adjust, to make any sense out of what I saw. I wanted to cry out, but did not. I felt only an abstract, resigned terror.
A huge, black barge rose and fell on the slumberous waves, its sails filled with wind, a floating mountain, more vast than any vessel ever build by man, a craft for giants, surely. But now the giants had died and the vessel drifted, torn rigging and sails streaming in the wind. A groaning came from the depths of it, like a hurricane blowing over the mouth of a cave.
And yet the barge drew no nearer. It hung like a painted backdrop on the sky.
Azrethemne squeezed my hand. She trembled.
Without realizing what I was doing, I began to walk down toward the beach.
She pulled me back. “No.”
Numbly, like one half-awakened from a dream, I appreciated that she had just saved me from some terrible danger, for all I didn’t know what that danger was. I could only react. I could only let her lead me. I didn’t know if she understood better than I, was more than merely afraid, but she had a certain strength, a direction. I could only follow.
We turned our backs on the ocean and the black barge. I looked back over my shoulder once and caught sight of what might have been either a man or a woman so tall, so immense, that the pale face rose in the sky higher than the sun at noon. Gorgeous robes flapped on the wind and covered the darkness, filling the sky. But the eyes were closed and the figure’s arms were folded upon its breast like those of a corpse laid out; and this apparition stood in the sea or beyond the sea, dwarfing even the great barge; and I could not have turned away from that face, ever, if Azrethemne had not yanked me once more and said, “Come on!” most urgently.
We made our way back the way we had come, over the crest of the dune, out of sight of the sea, wandering for a long time between further dunes, then between hills, keeping our gaze firmly upon the ground, watching our feet, always avoiding the ridge lines, lest we glance back over the distance, and behold, and be affixed by what we saw and drawn back down to water’s edge, into the oily sea.
Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time Page 16
