The Shattered Goddess

by Darrell Schweitzer

  Ginna drew his knife. All this had been like a delirious dream of a madman in a fever, but a rational thought came to him. He would cut the parasite away and free his friend, or, failing that, kill him and free him that way.

  Hadel dropped to the floor and lay still, his chest heaving. Ginna knelt down beside him, the staff in one hand, the knife in the other.

  The wings were a blur of motion. The blade flashed in the light.

  “Nahgg—” The teacher sat up and rolled over, pushing the boy away with his shoulder. Ginna fell back, off balance and surprised at the action, still holding the knife and staff. When he recovered, Hadel was under the desk, kicking wildly, burrowing into the debris like some mole dug up by a plough.

  Ginna clambered to his feet. He sheathed his knife. He couldn’t bring himself to do what he had to do. He had to get out. He ran for the door, and fumbled with the latch. His fingers knew it and worked of their own accord.

  He swung the door wide and ran into the unlighted corridor beyond. It gaped like a mouth and swallowed him.

  * * * *

  He heard a woman screaming. He had never heard screams like that before, not even from Kaemen’s burning victims. The level of fear and pain in that voice was beyond anything he could imagine.

  He followed the sound along corridors, across broad rooms, down flights of stairs, through tunnels. He had no idea where he was. He had lived here all his life but now, in the dark, he was lost.

  The place was intensely cold. His breath came in clouds. Through the thick soles of his boots he could feel the icy stones beneath him.

  He held up the glowing staff to see where he was and willed it to become brighter. To his surprise, it did, and he remembered what he had been told by Hadel—when he had still been truly Hadel—by Arshad, and by the Mother of The Goddess, about whatever he might meet but then, on reflection, that too seemed a trap. The more he developed strange abilities, the farther he drifted from being himself. He could never forget the look on Amaedig’s face when last he saw her. No, now she was Tamarel, changed by his hand. He tried to convince himself that once this was all over, things would go back to normal. But he knew he never had been a very good liar.

  The screaming came again, impossibly louder.

  He neared a wall, and the light revealed writhing, multi-colored serpents all around him, piled upon one another by the hundreds, their scales glistening. He jumped back, startled, but then saw that they only seemed to wriggle and their scales seemed to sparkle as he moved, as the light from his staff was reflected. He was in a room he had never seen before, the walls and floors of which were entirely covered with serpent mosaics made of tiny, polished bits of tile. In the middle of the room stood a pedestal, on which stood the familiar double image of The Goddess, two statues back to back, one caressed by black serpents, the other by white.

  The screaming came. He had no time to consider what the serpent symbolism might mean. Someone was suffering unspeakable torments as he stood there. So he ran, fumbling among the draperies that blocked the exit from the serpent chamber, his footsteps echoing along another hallway lined with empty alcoves. He came to another wide room and skipped gingerly among embracing skeletons which covered the entire floor. He climbed a flight of stairs, descended another, and came through an archway into an open space.

  * * * *

  There was no way he could see that he was outdoors, but the air against his face was even colder and there was a slight breeze. The smell of decay and must decreased. The place was less close.

  The screaming was right there, heart-stopping, ear-splitting, quite overwhelming any urge to rescue anyone. The screaming was a horror in itself, a tangible thing.

  He crossed the last few feet of the yard cautiously, his staff outstretched before him, and he saw the source of the hideous noise. It was a woman’s head, the eyes rolled up white, the jaw slack, the tongue hanging flaccid. It was obviously dead. It could not be screaming.

  And yet the sound issued forth like acid from a funnel. A dark hand held it above the pavement. As Ginna approached, his light gave the gloom above and around the head form and substance. The darkness trembled with ponderous motion. A dozen hulking shapes were only suggested: here an arm like carven iron, there the long, flabby face of a boneless horse with a single eye like a glistening pustule, there again the immense, toothy jaws of a crocodile on the shoulders of a man, there a blind face covered with bony plates. And again, tree-like towers of legs bent in a crouch, unseen wings flapping like sailcloth, and hard, sharp nails clicking on the pavement And here, and here, and here, eyes glowing like red coals opening all at once at a silent command, floating in the darkness asymmetrically. A putrid wind came wheezing out of a dozen mouths.

  He held the dragon staff like a burning brand. The creatures spread apart slowly before him, only the one holding the head, not moving.

  Suddenly he knew that face. It was Tuella Marzad, wife of the man who had given him aid that first morning after he and Amaedig had left the inner city. And the screaming, magnified a thousandfold, was her voice. Sick with revulsion, but angry, he charged the Dark Power holding her, swinging the staff like a club. It was a wild, unthinking action, but he was beyond thinking. The massive shapes scattered like startled toads, making no sound as they leaped beyond the range of his vision.

  He was about to bring the staff down on the unflinching monstrosity before him, when it vanished too, and all of them, no more tangible than miasmic vapor, whirled about him, laughing, hissing in his ears. The screaming reached a crescendo.

  Just as suddenly the air was empty and there was silence. He looked around, puzzled, and poked the darkness with his staff. He thought himself alone.

  And then he realized that something heavy was dangling from the front of his shirt. He brought the light close to himself and looked down.

  It was the head, clenching the cloth in its teeth.

  He let out a shriek and brought the staff down on it, but missed, for those jaws which had hung slack now worked furiously, devouring the front of his shirt, climbing up him like a ravenous rat.

  He was the one screaming when it bit into his chest. He beat on it again and again. He pushed at it with both hands, dropping the staff, and as the pain grew worse he fell to the ground, trying to crush the thing under the weight of his body. But it wriggled beneath him and continued chewing, burrowing into him. He knew its intent. It was after his heart. It would get his heart between its teeth and squeeze and squeeze...

  He rolled onto his back, screaming, flopping like a beached fish. He fumbled for his knife and drew it out, stabbing at the thing again and again. Sometimes he missed and stabbed himself, but in the agony of the attack, as his blood flowed freely, he couldn’t tell when and he didn’t care. He plunged the long blade deep into one eye, then into the other, twisted, and jiggled it sideways, till the bone between the sockets broke and there was one gouged trench.

  And still the thing’s jaws worked like a machine. He stabbed lower, through the cheeks, cutting away and around until the impossibly snapping lower jaw broke over the edge of his blade. He had hacked the teeth completely out of the mouth. The head let go and rolled off him, then exploded, showering him with blood and fragments of bone.

  He staggered to his feet, drenched, his own blood mixing with the other, and he felt the lower jaw, broken off from the rest, still stirring in his flesh. With desperation and hopeless terror, barely able to control his weak and trembling fingers, he groped for the thing, and, careful as a surgeon, extracted it from himself with the knife. He dropped the jaw to the pavement and ground it underfoot until he could feel nothing at all, not even the finest powder under his boot.

  Then the pain came back to him, and with it nausea. He fell to his knees, then crumpled forward, but caught himself before he hit the pavement. Leaning on one arm, he coughed and heaved. He felt like he wanted to vomit his whole insides out, but nothing came, and he remained there, gasping, while blood ran freely over his whole tor
so.

  He sat, and tried to pull the tattered flaps of his shirt over the wound, to stop the bleeding with cloth and with his hands. He had no idea how badly hurt he might be.

  With all his effort, he managed not to faint. After a while the bleeding seemed to stop. His hands were crusted with dried blood. He was getting stiff. He forced himself to his feet His heart was beating and he still breathed, so he said to himself, I guess I must be alive.

  He found his staff and staggered across the yard. He came to a large wooden door inset with iron. This was slightly ajar. He took a metal ring in hand, pulled, and the door swung open on greased hinges. Within, a staircase led up to a level floor. It was another corridor. On either side tapestries billowed from drafts of frigid air passing behind them.

  * * * *

  He had lost all sense of time, and space was closing in on him. The thought came that he had walked in darkness for weeks now, and always the world he had known was still around him, but veiled. He could have walked in that darkness to the horizons he had once seen, and reach Nagé, Hesh, Zabortash, Dotargun, or any of the other familiar countries. Now, for the first time, the darkness seemed different It had swallowed the world. It seemed to him that there was nothing left of the universe except the floor he stood on and the cold stones of the wall he followed with his right hand. He held the staff in his left, making a little circle of light in which he could see the clouds of his breath. That was all. When he turned a comer and came to a stair, it was as if that stair had only then come into existence, and would fade out again when he had passed. Beyond this there were only sounds: water dripping, occasional sounds of wind. The only other real things were the throbbing pain from his chest wound, his numb feet, and the lethargy which was slowly setting over him.

  He was forgetting who he was and what he was doing there, wandering lost in the corridors of Ai Hanlo, the holy mountain whose passageways and chambers, some sage once said, were as infinite as the whims of The Goddess.

  He remembered the epic recited in the square at Estad, about the hero wandering across the Land of Night at the end of the world for some obscure reason or other. He could identify with the hero now, but somehow the heroics weren’t working out.

  Spiderwebs broke over his face. They seemed frozen, like delicate traceries of ice.

  His staff glowed faintly, like the distant light of the last star in the sky.

  He shook his head to keep awake, and as he paused his changed stance tore at his wound, and a warm trickle of blood ran down his belly. The sudden pain woke him up and kept him going.

  He noticed peripherally that the corridors were narrower than they had been, the walls closer together, the intervals between doorways longer. The air was filled with ice. The stones were coated with it and slippery underfoot. His fingers ached from touching the wall. His breath came with difficulty. His throat was raw, his head spinning as the frigid air rushed into his lungs every time he gasped to inhale.

  His attention wandered from the present into the past He wasn’t in darkness anymore, but in the warm sunlight, basking beneath the sparkling midsummer sky, on a porch Ugh above the city. As a child he often came to that porch, to be alone, to read, to watch the flocks of birds wheeling over the land or the river winding its way to the hazy horizon or caravans diminishing into necklaces of tiny specks upon the desert He would sleep there sometimes on a couch, or just on the sun-warmed stones, and awaken in darkness with the stars looking down...

  ... and awaken in darkness with no stars at all, his head jerking up and down by reflex.

  He was seated against the ice-covered wall. The staff had fallen between his knees, still held in his limp hand, glowing faintly. He shook his head to clear it and tried to stand up. But his legs wouldn’t respond. His whole body was stiff.

  He held the staff tightly and produced more light. A small, round room was revealed, filled with ice. Even as he watched, the crystals grew from the walls like some delicate tapestry of glass wrought by invisible weavers. There was ice on his clothing. The latticework touched his legs, his sides, his shoulders. Weakly he leaned forward and found that his cloak was stuck to the wall. In these few minutes the ice on the floor rose to cover his knees, encasing his legs. He could not even feel his feet anymore.

  Now fear shook him out of his stupor. He was trapped like a horse in quicksand. He wanted to writhe, to shriek, to give in to panic entirely, but with the utmost effort, he controlled himself. He drew his knife and chipped at the ice around his legs. It was useless. As soon as he broke a piece away, another took its place. The stuff healed like an invulnerable, living thing. It was condensing out of the air. Pale, silvery stalactites grew from the ceiling fast enough that he could actually see them extending downward, touching the floor, becoming pillars. Curtains of delicate flakes billowed between them. He sheathed the knife.

  He could not call for help. There was no reason. No one remained in the city who could aid him, who would aid him, who would even be likely to reach him before he was frozen solid in an enormous mass of ice.

  “Kaemen!” he called out, and the ice shivered at the sound. “I know you’re doing this...” and he paused, feeling ridiculous, unsure of what he was trying to say. He was hardly in a position to threaten anyone.

  The ice had worked its way up his chest, between the tatters of his clothing. It touched his wound and all sensation there passed away. This made his head clearer. He worked the staff loose. Ice chipped from his arms as his elbows bent. He moved them constantly to keep them free. His fingers were stiff. His hands were like cement gloves. Only the force of his arms held the staff between them: He touched the sphere containing the tears of The Goddess to the ice and, as he had half expected, the crystals vanished, like lace in a fire. Sure enough, he could “burn” little holes this way, but they filled in as fast as he did. He could move the staff from side to side, and a shower of fragments would come tinkling down. He could stop ah icicle from growing. But it wasn’t enough. The room continued to fill. The ice was up to his armpits. His lower body was completely numb, and breath came only with immense effort.

  There was only one solution. He had used it before. He remembered Arshad’s cabin, the swinging lanterns and shifting shadows, the deck rocking beneath him as the ship moved on the great river. He tried to go into a trance, as he had then, but it was hard to concentrate. He began to chant the formula Arshad had taught him, but his grip on it was like that of his hands on the staff. Syllables ran together. His attention was drifting. He was withdrawing from the world, but into sleep. He tried to think of himself as on that ship, to be on that ship, chanting.

  He let the staff drop. It went out. He closed his hands together, opened them, and a ball of light rose. A little flexibility returned to his fingers. He made another, and another, dropping many, but in time he held an enormous sphere. The ice glittered and sparkled, revealing fantastic shapes as the light filled the room, as the sphere drifted down on top of Ginna. It sank into the ice without bursting, and its soft glow increased to a blinding glare, until he could see nothing but drifting motes of brilliant white against the flaming yellow. He was rising, tumbling in the light—

  —and he fell into darkness with a thump. He sat up sputtering in six inches of frigid, muddy water. Rising unsteadily to his feet, he wrapped his ragged, soaked cloak about himself. His chest hurt more than ever. The tatters of his shirt were sticking in the wound. He couldn’t tell if he was bleeding or not. His legs burned as sensation returned to them. He tried to clear his throat and the result was a deep, liquid cough.

  His floating staff nudged his ankle. He picked it up and held it tightly against his body. The light returned.

  * * * *

  Following the corridor, his hand brushing the wall, he came to a large room. One minute he was touching the wall, the next he was groping in space. He turned, examined the spot with his light, and saw another wall receding perpendicularly into the gloom. The doorway was a stone arch carven in the likeness of a lea
fy vine. The top and the other side were too far away to be visible. Walking in what he took to be a straight line, he found the other side after ten paces. It was a very large doorway, betokening a great hall.

  He paused. He could either follow one of the walls all the way around, or strike out boldly through the center in hopes of finding a similar door on the other side. In any case he wanted to leave the corridor he was in. He suspected it went around in circles.

  He decided to go for the center of the room. He didn’t know why. He just did it. The doorway fell behind him like the ghostly shape of a wreck a diver sees on the ocean floor, dropping away as he rises. He walked slowly. His knees threatened to give out. He was very weak. He thought he was bleeding again. Somehow die world seemed even smaller, for all that he knew he was in a large enclosed space. All that obviously existed was a small patch of floor on which he stood. He could discern alternating black and white squares, one at a time. They were two paces across. There was absolute silence except for his footsteps; no echoes, even of those footsteps. If he paused and listened, he could hear the blood coursing through his veins and pounding in his head.

  A hand appeared, level with his forehead. His reflexes were ruined to the point he could only stagger back from it. He was too tired to be afraid.

  The pale, white hand hung stationary in space. The fore-finger was extended and pointed slightly downward. It did not move. He swayed where he stood, leaning on the staff.

  “I am... a friend,” he said.