The Shattered Goddess

by Darrell Schweitzer

  “You can confide in us. We won’t tell anyone. No need to be shy about it.”

  “But—”

  A trumpet blew, followed by a hundred more. Drums thundered. Cymbals clanged. The mumbling roar of the crowd was stilled.

  The Guardian entered the room, held aloft on a throne set on a platform on the shoulders of eight bearers, as he had the last time Ginna had seen him in this room.

  The crowd divided like water before the prow of a boat, and The Guardian passed through. Ginna caught a glimpse of him between the shoulder of Kardios and the nose of the wiry man. Kaemen was paler, more pasty-faced than before, and growing fat His almost white hair stuck to his sweaty forehead beneath the black and white peaked cap he wore. He held the golden staff of office in his right hand, as he apparently did on all public occasions.

  Ritual greetings were given. The Guardian pointed his staff at the crowd and moved it from left to right in a slow arch. All present raised a hand to acknowledge the received blessing. Ginna hid behind the bulk of the general, hoping to be as inconspicuous as possible. He was sure somehow that those pale eyes were searching for him.

  For more than an hour after this, Kaemen sat atop a dais above the heads of the multitude, surveying the room, apparently deep in thought, waiting for a certain moment, or so it seemed to Ginna.

  “He must be about to announce something,” said one of the ladies. It was obvious to everyone that they had been summoned for some purpose. People talked in hushed tones, every other glance directed at the seated Guardian. Ginna took some comfort in the way Kardios stood there, drink in hand, as ill at ease as he himself felt.

  As last The Guardian rose, thumped his staff for quiet, and every face was toward him.

  “Let the woman Saemil come forward,” he called out.

  The silence broke into whispers of “Who?” and starched clothing rustled as people milled about and stood on tiptoes, trying to see what was happening. Ginna noticed movement nearby, heads turning to his left then following something. Bodies stepped back, pressing upon one another like a rippling wave. Someone stepped on his foot and he squirmed free. Now he was in front of the massive general, behind three short ladies in feather-covered gowns, and he could see clearly.

  An elderly woman stood before the throne. She looked familiar. When she turned slightly, in a kind of twitch, he recognized her. He had known so few people in life that he never forgot a face. She was one of the nurses who had overseen his earliest years. He remembered how she approached him fearfully at first, but after a while developed a completely uncaring attitude, as if he were not more animate than a lump of dough in the hands of a cook. She was also one of the ones who had constantly dashed about, wringing her hands in worry, trying to please the infant who had grown into the boy now gazing down on her from the seat above.

  She raised her hand and made the sign of blessing received, first and fourth fingers upraised, the others held under the thumb, the hand moved in a little square.

  “A blessing indeed,” said The Guardian. “Woman, you have lived for the last three years because I forgot about you, but just this morning I remembered. I hope you will accept my apologies for the delay.”

  The Guardian made a sign none of his office had ever made in public before, that of forgiveness humbly begged, and he smiled viciously as he did.

  “Your Holy Majesty is... of course... joking... Oh, what a splendid joke!”

  She forced a weak laugh.

  “No!” He stood up and out of his seat, something else no Guardian ever did. “My Holy Majesty is not joking. I am in complete earnest, and I declare you to be a traitor, a bearer of ill will against me. There are many here who hate me, and your death shall be an example to them. By my command, you shall not leave this room until you are dead.”

  “What do you mean? No, you can’t...”

  Two soldiers pushed their way through the crowd. They wore no finery at all, but were dressed in simple leather tunics. Long, many-thonged whips hung coiled from their belts. They seized the helpless nurse and ripped her clothing off, until she huddled naked before the court, whimpering.

  “I can’t believe this is happening? What is happening?” said one of the women standing in front of Ginna.

  “We must all be drunk and dreaming,’ said the hooked-nosed man. “No son of Tharanodeth would ever do such a thing.”

  “He has gone mad,” said Kardios. “The dark side of The Goddess is in him.”

  With a loud snap a whip struck the old nurse’s bony back, leaving bloody stripes when it was drawn away. This made the whole experience real, more vivid than any bad dream. Another whip, in the hand of the other soldier, descended. She grunted, then screamed, and began to crawl across the floor on all fours. She rose to a sitting position, and one of them lashed her across the face. She screamed again, feeling her eyes, then groped about, obviously blind.

  Her screams were not the only ones. The women in the crowd screamed at the sight. Some fainted. Men looked away. Others gazed at the terrible sight, the faces stoic marble masks. These, Ginna knew, would survive the longest in the days to come.

  He desperately wanted to be elsewhere. He wanted to look away, but dared not

  Behind him, someone was vomiting.

  He looked to one door, then another. All exits were guarded by soldiers whose pikes were not ceremonial or made of glass. He had to escape, but could not There was nowhere to go. He edged backwards until he pressed against the refreshment table. Almost without knowing it, he took a glass of punch and gulped it down, then another, and another. He had only brief glimpses of the dying woman now. Most of the people in front of him were taller, but when a lady in a plumed headdress shrieked, covered her face, and began to push to one side, this created an opening, and he was afforded a full view of the huddled, naked form and the bloody smears on the tiled floor all around it. The whips rose and fell with mechanical precision.

  He couldn’t taste the punch as he drank it. Only unconsciously did he know what he was doing. This was the only way out He usually avoided such excess, but now the alcohol was making itself felt the room reeled around him. He was very warm. The people around him seemed to have become a mass of sweating, milling, frightened animals.

  He found himself studying Kaemen intensely. The Guardian leaned forward in his chair, surveying the scene with rapt fascination. What was happening to his face? Ginna wondered why no one else seemed to see it. The pale blue eyes were gone, replaced by black pits which spread slowly across the cheeks, eating away the flesh. Eventually there was only an oval darkness where the face had been. Then there was another face, outlined in a fiery red in that darkness, a hideous old woman who, or so it seemed to his dizzy imagining, was somehow nourished by the pain and fear, drinking it all in.

  Even that face grew soft like melting wax and disappeared. The blackness extended outward grotesquely, until it was nothing human at all. It was the head of a wolf, no, a bottomless abyss, a rip in the fabric of the world in the shape of a wolf, growing out of the front of The Guardian’s head.

  All other eyes were on the two floggers and their victim, who now lay still.

  Didn’t anyone else see?

  The wolf was flowing up out of the boy’s corpulent body. Like a stream of black ink it poured down over his lap and onto the steps which led down from the throne. Then, finding its feet, the wolf scampered to where Saemil lay.

  Again there was a rift in the crowd and Ginna could see through. The wolf was lapping up the old woman’s blood. The executioners didn’t seem to notice and went on with their work.

  On the throne Kaemen sat, his face gone, his head hollow.

  Ginna’s knees buckled. He fell against the table. Grabbing wildly for support, he struck a tray and sent it clattering to the floor. For an instant he was kneeling, his head and one hand against the edge of the table. Then he pitched forward and rolled under it, onto his back, vaguely aware of a vast forest of legs extending in three directions and a wall blocking t
he fourth.

  * * * *

  For a long time after that there was nothing but warm haze. Slowly it cleared, until he could see every detail of the great hall. It was empty now, and dark. The crowd had departed. The corpse of the nurse lay sprawled on the stone tiles, atop, curiously enough, a mosaic of the dark aspect of The Goddess like the one on the opposite wall.

  He was not quite alone. Kaemen still sat on his throne, still leaning forward. His face was still gone, his head still hollow. But the darkness was stirring inside, slowly rising. It began to pour out of the opening, over his chin, like an underground river suddenly emerging out of a cavern, spilling down the steps and onto the floor. There seemed no end to it. It gathered around the carcass and splashed over it in oily waves, spreading to all comers of the room. Toward Ginna. He wanted to rise and flee, but his body would not respond. In helpless terror he watched the stuff ooze toward him. He counted the squares of the tile as they were covered one by one. The floor was almost entirely hidden, and still the stuff came forth from the Guardian in great gouts.

  It was not a substance at all, but a lack of anything. A total void, a dark, limitless emptiness erasing the world.

  It touched him on one shoulder, then all along one side. He was numb and cold, so cold. The waves washed over him, covering him until only his face was above the surface.

  All sensation faded. He lay there, staring up at the underside of the table for a long time. He had no way of telling how long. It seemed as if his body were gone, and only his face remained. He concentrated. Yes, he could feel the air on his cheeks, and something else. A tingling. A sense of floating.

  His face was becoming detached from his head. He could feel it peeling off, flapping as the fluid darkness found its way underneath. The cold was inside his brain now, stabbing, killing. His face drifted free. His awareness seemed to go with it He saw the underside of the table whirling around, or so it seemed. In fact it was he—his face only—which was turning, spinning like a leaf in a swollen stream. The waves caressed his cheeks from beneath. His vision shifted as he rose and fell with the current.

  He was in the center of the room, near the dais. The black fountain of Kaemen’s head had not slacked off in the slightest. The level of the flowing void was rising, carrying Ginna’s face with it, past the throne, toward one of the huge brass and wood doors, which stood open. He floated into a corridor, then dropped roughly down a flight of stairs, somehow never capsizing. He was sure that if he did, if what remained of him were touched by the blackness, he would cease to exist altogether.

  For an endless time he drifted through deserted rooms and passageways in the palace, until he emerged through a window into a courtyard. The level was still rising. He was lifted up, up, over a wall, past a roof. In the periphery of his sight he could make out a featureless expanse of blackness spreading to the horizon. The sky was clear and filled with stars, but their light did not reflect off the surface. He caught a glimpse of the golden dome of the palace, the highest point of Ai Hanlo, just before it was covered over.

  The whole world was flooded. He floated alone. He was somehow aware that he would float for a time, then slowly dissolve, and blackness would rise to blot out the stars, filling the universe. No one would be there to witness the end. He was the last.

  The experience of floating was vastly unpleasant, like falling slowly into a bottomless pit of cold air, but all his feelings were dulled. He blinked again and again, trying to remain aware, but the last of his senses were slipping away.

  He was conscious next of a hump of land rising above the ebon sea. On it the black wolf stood. The current drew him toward it inexorably. The wolf leaned over, ready to blend in with the greater nothingness. Just as its snout was over his face, he saw it rise on its hind legs and begin to change. It was becoming the hideous bent old woman whose face had replaced Kaemen’s momentarily. The old woman no one else could see.

  Still, like the wolf, she was not more than a black outline, a pit without a bottom, but somehow she seemed two-dimensional. Only in profile could he see the hooked nose that almost touched her chin and the wild hair that hung in a matted tangle. When she bent over him as the wolf had, her face was a blurry oval.

  “Flesh of my flesh,” she tittered. “My receptacle, my useless, empty vessel through which my revenge was begun, what am I to do with you now?”

  Ginna tried to speak, but no sound came out of his mouth. Instead the blackness spurted through the opening from underneath. He was sinking. The cold spread over his chin, up his cheeks, toward his eyes.

  The black hag crawled to the edge of the little island, hung on with both hands, and raised a foot to stamp him down under the surface, but paused.

  The last thing he saw was the sky beginning to lighten.

  She looked even darker in contrast to the dawn.

  * * * *

  His eyes blinked open. An overturned tray lay by a table leg, a few inches from his face. Astonished, he felt his body to assure himself it was whole. Painfully, stiffly, he rolled over. He could see all the way across the room. The throne was empty. The corpse of the nurse was gone. The faint light of early dawn seeped through the skylight

  He crawled out from under the table and staggered to his feet His head hurt as if split by an axe.

  He was more disoriented now than he had been at any time before. He knew where he was and when, but was unsure of anything leading up to that instant. How much had really happened? What had he actually seen, and what was delirium?

  In the center of the room, before the dais, he found the brown stains of dried blood spread over the image of the dark half of The Goddess. There was also a fistful of white hair and a strip of leather which had come off one of the whips. Here and there across the floor were broken drink glasses, a dropped veil, a trampled flume, a handkerchief, a cap, a walking stick. A large crowd had indeed been here, as he remembered it, and had doubtless departed in a hurry.

  When he made his way outside, the world seemed too familiar, too real to have contained such a thing. He looked out over the lower city and the road beyond it. The sun was coming up. A trading caravan from some remote land was approaching Ai Hanlo along the great highway that led to the River Gate.

  The cool morning breeze made him shiver. His wooden-soled slippers were awkward and uncomfortable, so he took them off. The paving stones were hard and cold underfoot

  He passed members of the night watch making their last rounds. He had seen them all his life, but now, for the first time, they frightened him. They were all his enemies. He did his best to hide any emotion, but was scarcely able to prevent himself from screaming and breaking into a blind run.

  When he got back to his room he found Amaedig asleep in a chair. She had tried to wait up for him.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Second Vision

  Hadel of Nagé, the Rat, had aged more than his years. He was now very frail, very thin, with a face like wrinkled parchment. His moustache was a white-silver brush, somewhat less copious than it had once been.

  He paced back and forth on the carpeted floor of his study with his head down, his shoulders hunched, the almost iridescent blue robe of his office flapping loosely.

  At any other time Ginna would have examined the study with rapt fascination. There were so many marvels in it: a large water tank containing a whole empire of half-human, half-fish creatures no larger than one’s thumbnail, stuffed specimens of curious beasts which no longer walked the earth, including the fabled glimmich which was reputed to have frightened dragons to death, but which looked so innocuous on top of a bookcase that the boy figured that any dragon frightened by such a thing deserved to be extinct; there was a book which read itself, whispering its words and turning its pages as if alive, allegedly quite capable of driving someone mad who didn’t know the spell to close it; a stone fallen from a star; a scroll containing the names of all the rivers of the world, with which the traveler might halt their flow or even make them go backwards if it suited h
is purpose; a skull that spoke; a mushroom that could never be placed in the same spot twice; and much more. It was a veritable museum of the odd, the quaint, and sometimes the terrible. The only safe tours were guided ones. Unattended visitors frequently did not leave, nor did they remain behind in any recognizable form.

  But at present the two of them paid no attention to anyone but one another.

  The magician looked trapped. He constantly glanced from side to side, as if watching for spies or enemies.

  “He can’t hear me,” he said. “I put a silencing spell around the room. Or he shouldn’t be able to hear me. But I have a feeling that somehow he can.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Who can hear you, Eminence?”

  “Are you as stupid as you look, boy? Him. The Guardian. No one is safe from him. You know perfectly well who I mean, idiot!”

  “Your pardon—” Ginna hastily made a sign.

  “Oh, stop waving your hand at me! Did you know I wanted you smothered as an infant? I told Tharanodeth it would be for the best. But did he listen? Did he take me seriously at all? No, no, he did not.” At this Hadel’s anger seemed to pass, and he sounded weary, defeated. “No one listened to me until it was too late. If I am to educate you—and you know why you are here, why you are my pupil, don’t you? This morning when I went to give The Guardian his lesson, he waved me away saying, “Don’t bother me anymore, you silly old fool. Give lessons to the pigeons on the roof, or else to that creature Ginna, which was dumped in my cradle. Waste your hot air on him.” So here you are. I think you are preferable to the pigeons.

  Ginna smiled slightly.

  “I fear for you, young man. I really do. I’m sure he plans to make some use of you, something so vile he won’t do it himself or else he is waiting for some slip, the slightest excuse to execute you.”

  “But why, Eminence, do you care what happens to me, when you wanted me smothered?”

  “Even I can be wrong, can’t I? If I am to teach you anything, and I guess I shall, since there is nothing else for me to do in these last moments of my life—no, I don’t expect to escape him for very long either—I suppose the first thing I should explain is that there are two kinds of magic in the world: shallow magic, and deep magic. Everything I do is shallow magic. Mostly tricks, illusions, maybe a short-term prophecy, that sort of thing. Deep magic moves the whole world. It involves vast forces and powers. Yes, the Dark and Bright Powers are part of deep magic. They live by it and are controlled by it. All deep magic flows from The Goddess, and since her death there has been little of it to speak of, and all that scattered and irregular. But like The Goddess, it is dark and light, evil and good. It’s just as well that no one controls it all, because the possibilities are endless.”