The Shattered Goddess

by Darrell Schweitzer

  “Then what is there to be afraid of?”

  The magician stopped in midstride, then pulled up a stool next to the one on which the boy sat. He leaned toward him, until his nose and moustache were uncomfortably close, and Ginna could feel his breath as he whispered intensely.

  “Listen to what I saw very carefully, and never repeat any of it. When you were found in the cradle with Kaemen, I went into a trance to find out what the thing—that is, you—portended. My spirit left my body and I could see things far differently than I can now. I saw only spiritual things clearly, with material shapes, the walls of the palace for instance, no more than vague outlines of light and shadow. I was walking through this flickering world when I came upon an intensely black, huddled shape. It was an old woman. She was crouched on the floor by the cradle. As my spirit approached her, she looked up at me and I saw how hideous she truly was. Her eyes were gouged out, and little red fires burned in her sockets. She laughed at me, and exploded into a cloud of black shapes, some of them like herself, some not human at all, many no more than puffs of smoke. They were all around me, their numbers rapidly increasing. They were the Dark Powers. I am sure of it. They clustered around that cradle like bees to sweet sap dripping from a tree. Suddenly I was no longer in that place, and I had a vision of the world covered entirely with darkness dripping like oil from the body of that woman. She loomed huge over me, chanting some prayer or invocation in a language I could not understand. And as I watched helplessly, new continents and cities rose out of the midnight sea, all of them irreparably strange and evil. It was not a place in which mankind could live. The Dark Powers were fruitful and gave birth to more monstrosities. One of them shaped like the old woman walked right through me. I was suffocating in her nearness. When I turned and looked back I saw her shiny, dog-like teeth through the back of her head, and an eye glared at me from her hair. It was then I perceived that she had no feet, but instead it seemed her body was balanced on two serpents standing upright. Her legs were ropy, scaly affairs, wriggling along. As I watched, her outline became less definite. It flickered, and melted into the blackness at my feet. I was suffocating, I tell you. I couldn’t breathe the air. I tried to rise out of my trance state, and I felt myself floating up from that level—it’s like a box within a box within a box and you have to get out of all of them to wake up. Every time I did the hag was there, pressing her frigid hand over my face. When at last I escaped, it was because she let me go. She was only toying with me. “You shall live to bear witness to the coming of my dominion,” she said at the very last. Then I found myself right here, in this room, lying on the rug, and you’ll never know how glad I was to see the place, and to be alive. But I was terrified also, because I knew that Ai Hanlo was filled with deep magic, and it hadn’t issued from the bright aspect of The Goddess.

  “Of course I thought you were the focus of it. I could never probe the nursery with a seeing spell, I was repelled. But now I understand that it was Kaemen. I was wrong. That’s obvious enough from the way things turned out.”

  For a long time the two of them sat there, digesting what had been said. The only sound in the room was the faint blast of bubbly trumpets. There was a war going on among the fish-men in the tank.

  When Ginna was at last moved to speak, he told Hadel of the experience he had had the night of the banquet. The magician listened with a grim face, and finally said. “I suspected as much. You too are magical in some way. I think I understand why Tharanodeth wanted you to live. Somehow he sensed you were like an egg, with something inside you that hasn’t hatched out yet.”

  “He—” Ginna cut himself off. He didn’t want to tell about his last conversations with his late friend.

  That is why you are able to see such things. You are sensitive to the spiritual, as I am. The ignorant would say you have witch-sight.”

  The boy thought about his past. He was not yet sixteen, and still it seemed that his life stretched behind him like an ill-defined, shadow-covered road. There was no apparent beginning. When he considered it seriously, he had no idea who he was or where he had come from.

  Hadel seemed to be ahead of his thoughts, waiting with an answer.

  “When I was unable to probe the nursery, I went up there to have a look, and I saw you in that little room they kept you in, juggling balls of light.”

  Ginna let out an involuntary yelp.

  “Yes, I know about it,” continued Hadel. “Now shut up and listen. When I was on that floor of that tower, I felt a tingling all over. That meant magic, but nothing defined or focused. I felt it even when I was in the room with you. I have a theory that the evil which is now upon us came through you, or in you.”

  “No it didn’t! I would never—”

  “Hush lad. Can’t you keep quiet when I tell you to? I only let you know any of this because I don’t think there’s any hope for any of us. So what is there to lose? Anyway, you’ll recall how the woman in your vision—I’m sure it was the same one I saw—called you her ‘empty receptacle’? I think that’s it. A spirit can’t survive outside of a fleshly body very long, and it certainly has no power outside of one. So you were created, brought to the palace somehow, and the spirit passed out of you and into Kaemen, like fluid being poured from one jar into another. That is my guess. That’s why you were found beside him. You were discarded when it no longer needed you. But then, I don’t know. The tingling may have been more than just magical residue. There were those lights.”

  “I can still do it,” said Ginna. He was not afraid to demonstrate. The whole experience had been overwhelming, to be called suddenly into the presence of someone who had always been a distant and sometimes menacing figure all his life, and now have all these things spilled out Was it truly because the world was coming to an end with evil to reign thereafter?

  He folded his hands together, separated them, and a glowing sphere floated gently to the ceiling. Hadel watched it carefully all the way, then looked down at the boy again after it popped.

  “Remarkable. Again.”

  He made another one. Hadel placed his outstretched hand above it, directly in its path. As soon as the ball touched his palm, it winked out of existence.

  “Amazing. Now this time, you do as I just did.”

  He obeyed. He felt nothing as the thing touched his hand, rolled to the tip of his fingers, and continued upward.

  “I want to see something else. Lie down on the floor. Get as low as you can, and make another.”

  This ball slowed as it neared the ceiling, then began to drop. Ginna made another, and another, and began to juggle them, lying on his back on the thick carpet.

  “Hmmm... ” The magician tugged on his moustache, deep in thought.

  Ginna sat up.

  “I don’t know what they are,” he said. “When I was little I couldn’t understand why everyone couldn’t do it.”

  “Never mind that. Now this time, let the thing go, but catch it. Make a cage with your fingers. Don’t crush it, but don’t let it get away either.”

  When he held one of the balls captive, Ginna said, “Why is it I can touch them and you can’t?”

  “Because you’re different boy. Now be quiet.” Hadel turned as he sat, opened a trunk, rummaged through dusty books and parchments, and took out a large magnifying glass. He spat on it then wiped it clean with the hem of lids robe.

  He examined the glowing ball through it. As he watched, as Ginna watched also, the thing grew less bright and seemed to expand slightly. The boy wondered why had never tried this experiment on his own. The answer was that as a child he hadn’t thought of it. As he grew older, and became more aware of his abnormality, he was less inclined to exercise this ability, or whatever it was. He had never known what it meant and desperately hoped it meant nothing.

  He was wrong. Hadel gasped in astonishment at what he saw.

  “It’s an image of the world! I’m sure of it. I can see faint little continents and oceans coming into being. If it were bigger, if you held
it long enough, if your powers were refined and developed, it might be... real... big enough to live on...”

  The magician stood up and backed away in awe.

  Ginna, surprised, let his hands come apart. The glowing shape drifted to the ceiling and burst with an audible pop.

  Suddenly frightened, nearly weeping, he asked, “Eminence, who am I?”

  “I—I don’t know, but you’re not just an empty jar. Not a discarded receptacle. Your power is real and very great. It isn’t residue. Who are you? The question is what are you. I think if you knew what you were doing, you could become almost... a god!”

  “No! This is all crazy!”

  Before either could say more, the room began to shake. Both let out yells of astonishment and fear. Ginna staggered to a window, unbolted the shutters, and looked out. The whole palace was trembling. Plaster and stones fell. Tiles slid from rooftops. Dust rose in clouds. People were scurrying about like ants in a hill someone had kicked.

  He turned and saw the magician lose his footing and fall against his desk. The magnifying glass slipped from Hadel’s grasp and shattered. The talking skull tumbled off the bookcase and into the water tank, gurgling, crushing coral towers.

  “Stop!”

  “It’s not me! I’m not doing it!” cried Ginna. “You must believe me!”

  “Help me up, will you?”

  The floor swayed and heaved.

  He hurried over and pulled the old man to his feet

  “I know it’s not you,” Hadel said, grasping the window ledge. “It’s him, Kaemen. You are the vessel emptied. He is the one filled to overflowing with dark wine. Now—I know what makes the earth shake—he is doing something even I did not imagine him capable of. How can I say what he is attempting? He is making the bones of The Goddess stir!”

  CHAPTER 6

  Lessons

  “As long as you are here,” said Hadel the Nagéan one day, “I might as well teach you how to read.”

  “But I already know how to read,” said Ginna. “At least a little.”

  “Fine. Good. Then read this.” Hadel handed him a book. A passage in it had been marked:

  In the beginning, the seed of the Earth sat motionless in the void of Unbeing. From that seed a god emerged, and walked completely around it in three strides. With the first he created the air, with the second the seas, with the third, land. In the fullness of time this god died, and a second rose out of the scattered dust of his corpse, walking over the sea and onto the land, his head high in the air. The Earth had grown larger since the birth of the first god, and the second circled it in four strides, with which the seasons were divided from one another, winter, spring, summer, fall, as the humor of the god changed. Next came a goddess, who took the dust of the first god and the bones of the second unto herself. She set the Earth spinning; she placed the crown she wore in the sky to be called the sun, dewdrops from her hair to shine as stars; she gave birth to men and beasts, and when she died a new deity arose out of her remains, out of mankind, and out of the beasts. The world grew larger with each age in the lifetime of each god, each goddess, each one of which was both god and goddess, each cycle burying the past, until time encrusted the original seed, layer upon layer, like the skin of an onion.

  Ginna looked up when he had finished.

  “Well, do you believe it?” Hadel leaned over his desk, his moustache twitching. He had never looked more rat-like.

  “I don’t know.” The boy didn’t know what to say. Those strange poems he had copied said somewhat the same thing as the passage he had just read, only this was a lot clearer.

  “Well, it’s best you don’t I have a theory of my own, namely that the world festered in a dung-heap for aeons upon aeons until parts of it became animate and began to write books on the subject Which of course means that you and I and everyone in the world and everything in the world is just a piece of sh-e-e-e-i-tt and there’s not much more to be said...”

  He sat back in his chair behind his desk and laughed a dry, hoarse laugh like bits of old leather being rubbed together.

  The boy didn’t know what to say. It was a very strange moment.

  “Remember this profound truth,” said Hadel. “It’s comforting when you’re depressed.” He laughed again and waved Ginna away.

  * * * *

  “As long as you are here,” said Hadel on another day. “I might as well teach you something. Look at that”

  He pointed to his desk. Ginna saw only the usual clutter.

  “Look more closely.”

  Now he saw a tiny flower, a violet such as might be brought from the riverbank during the wet season. It was growing out of the wood of the desk top. Then there was another, and another, and grasses sprouting between them, until the whole desk had been transformed into a grassy knoll.

  Ginna looked to Hadel in amazement and saw the old magician standing in a clump of wild rosebushes.

  Something caught his eye, and he whirled about. There were trees stretching away as far as he could see.

  He was standing on damp, soft ground covered with dead leaves. He turned around again in time to see the remnants of the study waver and disappear.

  He was in the middle of a dense forest. It was the most magnificent thing he had ever seen. The greatest marvel of all was directly above, an infinity of green branches blocked out the sun. He had never before believed the tales of such forests, which travelers claimed grew to the north, beyond the borders of Randelcainé.

  All sense of direction was lost, but there came a gurgling sound from where (he thought) the window had been.

  “Is it water?” he asked Hadel, then flinched inwardly at such a stupid question.

  Yes, but if you find it, don’t drink. If you do, you’ll stay here forever.”

  “What?”

  They pushed through some underbrush. The forest floor rose into a little hill and fell into a valley beyond. Still he didn’t see any stream.

  “You’re still in my study,” said Hadel, “but if you partake of anything here, you won’t be.”

  “Huh?”

  Suddenly something slammed into Ginna’s face. The forest was gone. He was back in the study, rubbing his nose where he had walked into a wall. He felt around with his tongue to see if any teeth were loose.

  “Well, I hope you learned something. You have experienced a very important distinction. Shallow magic is illusion, but if you go too far into it, you become illusion too.”

  “Huh?”

  “Aren’t we articulate today? Ginna, I only obey The Guardian’s command, and I impart to you whatever I can, be it magical lore, history, writing, or good manners. In general I try to make a presentable human being out of you. Sometimes I fear it will be a long, hard, struggle. I’m too old for this sort of thing. That’s enough lessons for now.”

  * * * *

  “Traitor! Spy! Liar!” Hadel the Nagéan screamed one day. “The Guardian knows everything we have said. What did you do, write it all down and give him a transcript?”

  “No! You must believe me! I didn’t tell anyone!”

  The Nagéan rose from behind his desk. The boy stepped back at his approach. But there was no anger in the other’s face. It had drained out of him in an instant

  “I believe you,” Hadel said, embracing his student, trying to hold back tears. “I believe you, and because I do, I know you are in grave danger. I can educate you no longer. Somehow Kaemen knows everything we do, everything we think. I fear he spies on us by more than mortal means. If you told him nothing, how could he have known? This morning one of his men—no, his creatures—came to me. He mocked me. He repeated some of the things I have confided in you. Then he gave me this message.”

  The old man separated from the boy. He gave him a piece of paper which had been on his desk. The handwriting was a crude attempt at formal court calligraphy. The seal of The Guardian was on it. The text read:

  Hadel of Nagé, rightfully called The Rat—

  Vermin, you chatter to
o much. See to it that you never speak again.

  “He wants you to kill yourself,” said Ginna dumbly. “He is ordering you to die.”

  “He is ordering me to silence myself, which is not quite the same thing. But I’m not sure what there is to live for, except to fulfill the prophecy the black woman made in my vision and see the end come. The Dark Powers will smother Ai Hanlo before long.”

  “Is there anything we can do?”

  “There is nothing I can do, but I’m not sure about you. Seek the lady of the grove and the fountain. I wish I could be more specific, but if I were, our enemy would find out I am sure he can hear us even now. You undertake the gravest risk being with me, listening to me. Don’t do anything to anger him. Try to stay alive. Now I must obey his command.”

  “No, please don’t. There must be some way.”

  “There is. Get out.”

  “What can I do without you?”

  “Whatever is within you.” Hadel smiled briefly at the play on words. Wait till the egg hatches. Ultimately, my friend, you must rely on yourself alone. Now go.”

  Ginna wept as he left the room. He closed the door behind him and stood at the top of the flight of stairs which would take him down, out of the magician’s tower, into one of the countless courtyards. He could not bear to go. He sat down and pressed his ear to the door.