There was no reply.
Cautiously he approached. The light of the staff revealed a sleeve behind the hand, of the same pale hue and equally unmoving. Then there was a body, taller than that of a normal man. He reached out and touched the hand. It was marble. The thing was a statue. He held up his light and saw that its head had been knocked off. Using the base of this statue as a reference point, he moved in a straight line beyond it and found another, a barrel-chested warrior in full armor, also headless.
The whole room was filled with statues, all larger than life, all without heads. He sat down on the base of one, between the feet of a lady, and rested. His whole body was stiff. He wasn’t sure he could ever get up again. His resolution to do so never quite came. For the moment, he felt safe. At least he knew where he was. It had been the custom of the folk of Ai Hanlo ever since the foundation of the city to carve images of noted persons and display them in a great hall, the deeds of those person inscribed on the bases.
It was just like Kaemen to behead them all.
Ginna had seldom been in this room. Those who actually lived in the palace found the exhibit boring. It was used for impressing dignitaries, wealthy pilgrims, and sometimes officials of the lower town. But he had known how to find this room, and that meant if he could reach certain doors, certain turns of hallways, and a broad flight of stairs that spread out like a fan, he could reach Kaemen’s throne room beneath the golden dome. He knew that ultimately he must go there.
Then what? The worst thing was that he never knew what was coming next. If he were flowing with events like a cork in a river, it would have been comforting to know what lay around the next bend. But he was carried on blindly.
Then he trembled, from dread, from pain, from the cold. Great Goddess, look down upon me in my hour of trial. The old prayer came to him. He spoke it aloud. When especially done, especially frightened, he had always repeated it, even though The Goddess had died long before he was born. It never drove the fear away but it would make it loosen its grip and give him breathing space. Now he looked out into the darkness. A statue stood opposite him like a carven pillar. Now he truly knew, for the first time, that there was no one out there to hear him, that any prayer he might utter would drift and tumble through eternity like a shard of a broken mirror falling through the space beyond the world, turning over and over, glittering, never, never coming to rest. No one heard him. Throughout his life, for all he had been shunned or neglected, there had always been someone he could turn to, one of the nurses, a stable hand, Amaedig, Tharanodeth, Hadel, Gutharad, Arshad, or the Lady of the Grove. Now he was truly alone. Was the Lady watching? If so, he might appear a dim speck moving in the black water of her fountain, but she would not reach out to him, or even speak and expect to be heard.
He wept. Dignity and courage, she had told him at the very last. Empty, idiotic words for heroes who strode through epics waving swords and killing monsters. Real quests were much too grim, too full of sorrow, too miserable to be worth telling. If there ever were minstrels again, if ever they sat around campfires and sang the story of Ginna, they would not tell it as it happened, not if they wanted any supper. No one would want to hear of the pain, the loss of all his friends, the end awaiting him that was as strange as death if it were not merely death. No—
Something scurried between the statues. He rose painfully, sluggishly but alert, his knife out He turned, staff in hand. Shadows flickered as the light source moved. He saw nothing and sheathed the knife.
He started walking, sure he was being watched, through the forest of statues.
The floor trembled slightly. There was a faint rumble, little more than a vibration he could feel with his feet, but then the whole room shook violently with the full force of an earthquake. Statues crashed to the floor. Plaster and stones fell from the ceiling. He ran, one arm raised to shield his head.
Something grabbed his cloak. The arm of a falling statue had ensnared him, dragging him sideways. He was slammed onto the floor hard. Dust and pebbles rained into his face. A stone struck the side of his head. He lost his grip on the staff.
Another statue fell over the first one, breaking off the arm that held him. He sat up. Another stone hit him on the forehead, and he knew nothing more.
* * * *
It was like the dream in which his face had floated away. He seemed to rise from the rubble. His body was light. He was drifting on the air. Somehow he felt the statues beneath him as he moved, as if his body had become liquid and were flowing over them. His face was solid, though. It itched with dried blood.
Sometimes his head throbbed and red blobs of light drifted before his eyes. Cold air blasted his face. Vise-like hands bore him up, thumping and jolting with an awkward gait Voices whispered and tittered in something other than words. There was a smell of damp earth and filth.
Then he was drifting once more. The darkness carried him. It was thick as syrup. Slowly it shaped itself to fill the hallways. It rose to touch arching ceilings, to lift him up to higher levels.
He awoke several times from this dream, if dream it was, and felt himself being lifted. He couldn’t tell if he had any broken bones. The thought came to him that only his head was being carried. That the other sensations were ghost-remembrances of his lost body, and he wanted to cry out, to prove to himself that he still had a chest with lungs in it, but no sound came, and again the blackness was there, like quicksand closing over his face, and he was borne on the secret currents to the ultimate pinnacle of Ai Hanlo.
He opened his eyes to a faint light and saw, much to his surprise, the dragon staff glowing like a faint ember. He couldn’t make out who held it. Forcing himself to deliberation, he took stock of his situation. He was lying on rather hard pillows, perhaps on a couch. Yes, that was it. He felt its back to his right, and one arm rest above his head. It had a musty odor.
So he was alive, unhurt, and still in possession of his knife in the presence of someone who squeaked and cackled and grunted to himself, making sounds like a horde of rats, like huge and hideous night birds, sounds which were half words or not words at all, certainly nothing human.
Someone who could make the staff glow, as no ordinary person could.
Someone who, quite suddenly, broke the staff over a knee and crushed the glowing bulb to fragments between two pale hands. The light went out. The darkness was relieved only by the drift of a glowing powder from the wreck of the bulb. Then an ordinary lamp was lighted and a face emerged from the darkness, at first no more than a vague oval, but more clearly defined as it neared him.
Giggling. He knew the voice. He saw the face coming at him like a huge fish rising from the deeps: a tiny mouth set between the bulging cheeks, eyes sunken deep on either side of a pug nose, yellow hair plastered on a pale, dirty forehead. A fat hand held the lamp unsteadily.
The mouth opened, and a chattering noise came out like some tiny animal deep in a cave, and then there were words, and the voice slowly assumed human tones again. More laughter.
“Yes... it is you... how surprised I was... and yet I had always known you would come back.”
“Kaemen?”
“Indeed. You can call me Great Lord or something like that. Your presumed familiarity is shocking.” More giggling followed, shrill and wheezing. “Ginna, how good of you to stop in and see me. Forgive me if the place is untidy. Hadel told me you were coming, but, alas, there is no one to keep the palace in shape these days.”
Kaemen held the lamp up and turned slowly. Ginna could see that they were indeed in the throne room.
Light and shadow flickered among fallen masonry. A dark mass stretched from floor to ceiling in all directions. It reminded him of webs spun by enormous spiders, but this was no silky stuff. It was heavy, like flesh, like muscle growing out of the mountain itself. As he watched, sack-like masses throbbed and glistened wetly, and totally dark shapes, man-sized but not manlike, scurried up the membrane, vanishing in the darkness above.
“By The Goddess!”
“Y
es... I suppose you could say it was by her. How amusing. I didn’t think of that. Truly you are miraculous, just as Hadel says.”
Kaemen set the lamp down on a table nearby. “You must excuse me for not giving you more light,” he continued. “I’ve grown to abhor the light just like Hadel, and for the same reasons. I love the darkness, its texture, its touch, the little sounds you hear listening to its distances. It’s not the same out there. If s all new.” He ran his hands along his body, hugging himself.
“But how—?”
“How else? I hear everything Hadel thinks now, just as I used to see what you saw and hear what you heard, at least when I chose. I could do it any time before you vanished. It was... You know, you gave me quite a shock. Before I do whatever... before... you really must tell me what strange lands you have journeyed in. As long as you are telling me, and keeping me amused, you shall be my friend. I promise you.”
Ginna resolved to tell him nothing. His experience was the only unknown now, his only advantage. He sat up. The other started.
“Don’t think you can get away from me!” Kaemen hissed. “Don’t think you are more powerful. I am. I can protect myself from any magic. The light of this lamp does not weaken me. It’s only for your benefit so you can see me. I don’t need it”
It occurred to Ginna that once he had feared this Guardian, and at another time he had absolved him of all blame, knowing him to be possessed by something vastly beyond himself. Now he feared him again, but it was a different kind of fear. It was like being locked in a room with a dangerous beast—perhaps a mad kata which could reduce him to a red smear with a single swipe of its tail. Somehow, for the moment, the beast sat there, staring at him. A sudden action would bring on the attack. He had to be very careful. It was a matter beyond moral considerations, quite apart from blaming. The danger brought him to full alertness.
“Kaemen, why have you done these things?”
“Why. Hsst! listen! Do you hear it?”
Kaemen stood poised, listening. Ginna heard nothing but their breathing. He knew that things were moving in the darkness all around him, but they were soundless. Then there was that faint vibration coming up through the floor that he had felt in the room of statues. He braced himself, but there was no violent quake.
It was like the sound of a huge serpent gliding through the earth miles beneath his feet
“Ah,” said Kaemen. “She moves now even without my bidding.”
“What?”
The Guardian winced as the voice echoed back, what, what, what...
“Hush, fool... Isn’t it odd? Isn’t it passing strange? Don’t say “what” again. Consider my question rhetorical. But isn’t it curious that we are, you and I, about the same age, give or take a little bit, and I am... myself... while you still gape there like some idiot child? Well then, child, in childish terms, all I can tell you is that sleep and death are alike in a way. The difference is dreaming. I have raised The Goddess up from one state into the other, returning dreams to her. All my magic over the years had been devoted to that end, to make her dream dreams of darkness, and now she does, and she turns restlessly in her sleep. The earth trembles. But the world shall be in balance. You know, light and dark, good and evil, all that The Goddess is... incomplete. She shall bring a different kind of balance. She has but one nature now, and when the world is wholly ruled by it, why, there shall be no forces left in contention. I trust I have made this simple enough for you to understand.”
Ginna thought only to prolong the conversation. As long as Kaemen was talking, he wasn’t likely to do anything.
“Why?”
“I fear I have overestimated you. You’re stupider than you look. Because I will be lord of this new world. The Goddess will dance for me like a puppet. The Black Lady told—” His words were broken off in a grunt, as if an invisible hand had gagged him. His eyes were wide with fear and anger. Once more Ginna saw the frightened, trapped Kaemen of his dreams. He watched intently expecting the other’s face to flow and shift. But it did not. If the Hag were there, she did not show herself.
“Why was I brought here?’
Kaemen took several deep breaths and released them slowly, in the way a stutterer does when he wants to make a long speech.
“To get rid of you. So I could decide what to do with you. I tried to kill you, not once, but several times, and things didn’t work out There is something special about you, something very mysterious. I don’t know if you are a threat to me, but I can’t allow the possibility. I can’t believe your entire existence has been a coincidence. No, you’re like the white playing opposing the black in the board game. But it’s useless. You might as well give up, because I have already won.”
“And if I do give up?”
“Then there might be some place for you in the new order of things. There are a few human beings left. I haven’t killed them all. They may continue for a while, if I choose to let them, but in a very reduced and subservient role.”
Ginna found the reference to humanity as “them” the most terrifying thing Kaemen had yet uttered.
“Kaemen, try to remember who you were. You were human once too.”
Laughter returned in a short, nervous burst “I was, yes, but now I have matured. I have risen into something else. It happens, you know.”
Yes, Ginna told himself, it happens.
“But first,” said The Guardian, “before all these great events take place, I want to try an experiment. I want to see if you are still human yourself.”
He took up the lamp. Shadows shifted around him. Something like a billowing cape with nothing inside it separated from the shadows and drifted up toward the ceiling.
He leaned over, seized Ginna by the hair, yanked his head forward, and held the flame of the lamp under his chin.
The flesh burned, but Ginna refused to give Kaemen the satisfaction of hearing him scream. He gritted his teeth and tried to pull away, but The Guardian was far stronger than he looked. Kaemen studied him with detached interest, like one cutting apart an insect to see if it has organs.
Below them, The Goddess turned again in her dark, dream. Plaster fell from the ceiling.
All right, he wanted to say, you’ve proven your point. Now take it away. But Kaemen did not take it away. The pain increased. The pain moved down to his throat. The fat face floated in the darkness inches away from his own. He looked into the pale eyes. Within the pupils, tiny scarlet flames burned. They brightened. He thought of torchbearers approaching from out of a tunnel.
Kaemen was pulling his face down. The flame touched his cheeks. He gagged as it shot into his nose, and he twisted and pulled harder than ever when his eyes recognized the danger to themselves. Kaemen was in a reverie, fascinated with the very act he was performing. Ginna pounded on The Guardian’s arms with his fists, to no avail. He was in the hands of a living, iron statue in the guise of the corpulent son of Tharanodeth. The force was irresistible. His mind told him that all was hopeless, that there was no escape from this single force which would overwhelm the universe without opposition. He cursed the lady of the grove for sending him oh this futile mission. He cursed Amaedig for keeping him alive long enough to set out on it He cursed whoever and whatever had ultimately been responsible for his coming into being.
His eyes watered. He twisted his face. The flame singed off an eyebrow.
And yet, his hand, which was braver than his mind, did something.
Performed an experiment.
To see if The Guardian was human.
The answer was that he was not, and had forgotten simple human devices. He had not taken Ginna’s knife away from him. It was a mere artifact, beneath contempt. Now, quicker than Ginna’s mind could follow, without conscious thought behind it, his hand whipped that knife out of its scabbard and slammed it into Kaemen’s ribs, all the way to the hilt, and drew it out, and then the conscious volition took over. Quite deliberately, Ginna stabbed him again and again, searching for his heart.
Kaemen
let out a gasp of surprise. He released his grip, swaying as he stood. Ginna took the lamp from his unresisting hand. Slowly he crumpled to the floor, spouting blood from a dozen wounds. He lay there, quivering like a beached fish. Now Ginna leaned over and held the lamp to his face, not to burn, but merely to look.
The face began to distend, to darken, to bubble and flow. The shape of the wolf was there, snarling and snapping in agony. Rising, like a creature conjured from a cauldron, the Black Hag was there, her eyes glaring in place of Kaemen’s. Her head started to separate from his, as if she were about to pour out of him, but then sank down, and once more his pasty-white features were visible. The eyes were wide and watery.
“Please,” said Kaemen, and the voice was his and no other’s. “Ginna. Help me. Set me free of her. She has been with me always. If I could make The Goddess dance to my will, she did the same to me. She makes me do everything I do. I don’t know how much of myself is me and how much is her, but I don’t want it to be only her—” He broke into an inarticulate gurgle, coughed, and blood ran from his mouth. He began to scream, rolling his head from side to side, spewing out blood and spittle. “Help me! Set me free! Ginna, you have no reason to do anything for me, but please, kill me!”
Quickly, but with the deliberation of a surgeon, Ginna knelt over the writhing Guardian. He took him by the hair to hold his head still, and cut his throat all the way around, so deeply that he felt the knife blade scrape against the neck bone.
The screaming stopped. Blood flowed from the wound and from the mouth in spurts, then slowed to a gradual ooze.
A wisp of smoke rose from Kaemen’s clothing. Ginna had set a lamp down beside him, and now Kaemen’s robe was on fire. He let the flames spread over the body. Soon he recognized the smell of searing flesh.
Below, The Goddess stirred.
He put the knife away, and wrapped himself in his cloak, more for imagined protection than against the cold. The bums on his face began to hurt, and his chest throbbed again. He was bleeding slightly. A warm trickle ran down to his navel. Now that the fury of the encounter had passed, he was very weak. He thought he might faint, but for a feeling of relief that the whole business of his life was over. It was too numbing a thought for him to begin to comprehend. He sat down on the couch and stared at the burning body. Around him, dark shapes recoiled at the light given off by the flames. He sat with the lamp in his lap.
The Shattered Goddess Page 20