The Shattered Goddess

by Darrell Schweitzer

  As he watched, he saw that the whole business was not over.

  Two red eyes were rising over the dead Guardian. The witch was pouring out of the wound in his neck like a spurt of blood steaming into oily smoke, then puffing into fullness over him. Silhouetted against the flames, she was a totally black outline, pausing for an instant as if disoriented, then turning toward Ginna, perhaps recognizing him. She edged away. Just before she slipped into the darkness he could see that she was running. Her legs pumped up and down, but her feet did not touch the floor. There was no sound except the crackling of the flames. She drifted like a rag in the wind.

  Now he understood that the old lore on the subject was true, and that a spirit could not exist outside of a body for any length of time, unless it travelled that final road along which Tharanodeth might still be walking. Surely the witch had no such intentions. She was going to her grave, to rejoin her own body, and he knew that only if he could follow her there and destroy her once and for all, would the long nightmare be truly over.

  Beneath him, The Goddess turned in her restless sleep. The floor swayed like the deck of a ship.

  Bearing the lantern now instead of the staff to light his way, he followed the witch through corridors and down stairs, out of the palace of the guardians. She drifted ahead of him, always just out of reach, her eyes shining through the back of her head like twin fireflies. Nothing molested him as he passed. The darkness was empty. He saw skeletons on the floor, a rotting corpse nailed to an overhead beam, but there was nothing moving or alive. His footsteps echoed. Once more the whole mountain shook and debris fell. He was thrown sideways, against a wall, and the two eyes went around a corner, out of his sight He ran after them and caught up, before the fleeing creature could escape.

  His breath came in hoarse gasps. His pounding heart seemed to be tearing his chest apart. His whole body seemed to be melting like wax. At the bottom of a flight of stairs, he missed the last step and stumbled. It was all he could do to avoid spilling the lamp on himself. He thought he would never get up again, but forced himself, and saw the two specks disappearing around another comer.

  Tapestries billowed with the frigid wind. He ran to catch up with her. The flame of his lamp flickered and sputtered. An archway gaped. He followed her through and the air was colder still. He was outside. The blast was falsely invigorating, making him aware of every part of his body, but giving no strength.

  He was led out of the inner city, into the streets of the common folk, between the ruins of houses. He stalked the eyes as they tried to evade him among the alleys and pitted shells of buildings. Once he ripped aside the curtain of a stall and a young girl huddled there shrieked. He put the curtain back and went on, his quarry still in view.

  Some doors and windows he passed were shuttered. Others gaped like the mouths of the dead. His light threw huge shadows of himself against walls, making him a spidery-legged giant picking its way gingerly through the fallen structures, overturned carts, and occasional corpses. For all his haste, he had to move carefully. He was deliberately led over gaping pitfalls which were no impediment to the airborne spirit.

  At last they came to the outer wall of the city, to a gate he didn’t recognize. It was locked. He saw the two glowing points rising slowly, drifting over the wall.

  There was nothing for him to climb. He struggled to move the bar which held the gate. Slowly, with a burst of agony as his wound tore and bled freely from the effort, the bar slid to one side. The gate swung inward. He slipped through and looked up to see the witch descending from the battlements.

  She could have stayed up there or fled somewhere else, had she been a living woman or a Power, but as a ghost she was bound to make for her grave by the shortest route, and he stood in her path. Down she came, passing within arm’s reach of him, veering away from the lamp. He followed her a short ways to a barren, open part of the hillside, where talus lay heaped along with rubbish from the city. It was near the base of Ai Hanlo Mountain.

  The black hag stopped moving. She hovered above a spot of ground, then began to sink into it He watched the eyes drop lower. Then he struck out with his knife. The blade passed just beneath those eyes, but did not impede their progress. In an instant the spirit was gone.

  Now it occurred to him that he didn’t know how to put an end to the witch even if he did catch her. But he could try. It seemed to him that even a magically animated skeleton couldn’t do much if all its bones were ground to powder. If nothing else, he could grab stones and batter her. He wished he had a shovel, but dared not leave to fetch one. So he began to dig with his hands, heaving dirt between his legs.

  If stones wouldn’t work, he could cut off her head. He would nail her into her grave with his knife, and all her evil would lie there with her—

  The ground heaved up, and a solid hand emerged, glittering in the faint light, and suddenly the lamp was knocked aside and there was no light at all. Before he could even scream the hand seized his own, and he was pulled down onto his stomach, his face over the hole he had dug, looking straight down as the witch’s eyes swam up at him out of the earth. By the light of the eyes he saw the crystalline head, the fires deep in its empty sockets.

  Creaking, with a sound like stones being ground together, the head spoke, “Son, do you not know me? I am your mother.”

  “No! No! Let me go! Leave me alone!” He screamed and struggled all the more. The grip was far stronger even than Kaemen’s. His hand was being crushed.

  “I will never leave you alone, not now, not ever.”

  Another hand, another arm broke free of the dirt, seized him by the shoulder, and rolled him onto his back. It locked his neck in its elbow. The first let go of his hand and grabbed him around the body. Now both of his hands were free. He stabbed again and again with his knife at those unseen arms, and back over his shoulder at the face, until the blade broke off.

  “It is useless.”

  Her whole body was beneath him now, wriggling up out of the earth. She locked her legs around his waist, her arms around his shoulders, and suddenly there was a sharp, intense pain as her teeth sank into the back of his neck.

  Rise. She no longer spoke. He sensed her words inside his mind. A chill numbness spread from his neck to his extremities. His body was no longer his own. When that voice commanded, his limbs obeyed. He rolled over, and painfully rose to all fours, straining under the weight of his burden. She hung on his back like a huge parasitic slug, becoming every minute more a creature of flesh than of crystal, her substance softening as she drank his blood, drooling saliva down onto his shoulders.

  Rise. See. Suddenly he could see with something other than ordinary sight. Nearby shapes were faintly outlined in red, as if etched in fire. He began to move. As her control became more complete, she ceased to issue commands. His legs worked at her will, not his own, and he rode along helplessly, a prisoner in his own body. His arms hooked under her legs to hold her more securely.

  Back into the city he went, bent and hump-backed. He saw his way in the strange light, but cast no shadow. He climbed the sloping roads up the mountain, the stairs where the way was too steep, until he came to the inner city. A horde of Dark Powers met them at the gate and followed, just out of reach, mere suggestions of shapes eclipsing the red light from stone and walls. He found he could roll his eyes as he walked and look around, and he saw them, rising and sinking like fish from a murky sea. Some seemed to have bulbous eyes and long rows of inward-curving teeth. Others were blank-faced, but their chests split apart and snake-like tongues shot out. Others hovered on whining winds.

  He came to rooms he knew, to the innermost chambers of the palace, the bedroom of The Guardian. The place was not as he had known it in Tharanodeth’s time. There was a headless corpse suspended by the ankles over the bed, and the sheets were a mass of dried blood.

  Wind whirled around him, and at least in his mind he saw faces floating in front of him, Kaemen, Hadel, Gutharad, even Tharanodeth and many others he had known
or merely met, all of them screaming wordlessly. They vanished like sparks cast out from a fire.

  He saw clearly again. His hands pressed a panel on the wall behind the bed. A door slid open, and he stood at the top of a secret stair. A draft smelling of earth and decay rushed up at him. He descended, winding around and around for more steps than he was able to count He was going deep into Ai Hanlo Mountain. He felt the whole weight of the city above him. Sometimes the passage was so narrow that his shoulders touched either side. He could not turn sideways with the thing on his back. He scraped the tunnel walls as he passed and gravel fell onto the steps with a rattle.

  The Goddess stirred once more, and far more gravel fell. The sound of her movement was muted thunder.

  His throat was made to call out a word he did not understand, and she lay motionless, waiting.

  At last he came to the bottom of the stairs, to a door which opened into a chamber he had never entered before, but which he recognized. It was large and circular, and empty save for a black statue of The Goddess and a white one, the latter headless. This was the place he had come in spirit, when Kaemen had accidentally dragged him along in a dream. Then the hag had banished him. Now she drove him forward. His hands took up the heavy golden ring on the door Kaemen had not been allowed to open in his presence, which swung forward on silent hinges.

  When he saw what was inside he wanted to cry out, to faint, to run away, but he could do none of these things, and so he mutely stood there, staring into the long gallery with jeweled mosaics and a carven ceiling. He beheld what the folk of the city had venerated for so long and only the guardians had ever laid eyes upon: the actual remains of The Goddess.

  Her bones were like filthy crystal, long and massive, but surprisingly delicate in appearance, translucent with a faint gleam in their cores. There was a thin flesh stretched over them, like a black gauze, but liquid and flowing.

  The floor of the room ended a short ways beyond where Ginna stood. After that there was only bare earth and stone, in which the huge corpse was embedded. Ai Hanlo Mountain had closed over The Goddess when she fell from the sky. The city had been added later, as had this room, in which the secret had been revealed to successive generations of guardians. Ginna felt himself to be an intruder, a blasphemer. He waited to be stricken dead. Nothing happened. Inside his mind, the hag laughed, and pain lanced through him.

  He gradually perceived that the gallery was long and rectangular. He could not see to the far end, but the sides were perhaps thirty paces apart. He was inside a huge coffin, like a graveworm. The head of The Goddess was toward him. He could see the skull clearly, imbedded in the ground, curving up like die hull of a capsized ship. Her eyes were vacant caverns. Her mouth hung open like the gate of a castle. Beyond, ribs arched upward like rainbows of pale white, and off to one side a hand lay, palm upward, the fingers curled like crooked, skeletal siege towers.

  Closer. Approach her.

  His legs obeyed, stumbling over debris, awkward with the burden on his back. He saw that among the fallen masonry there were many skeletons, most of them headless.

  Watch. She raised her arms, and cried out with his voice, “Come! Come! All ye shadows, all ye shades, all ye Dark Powers. Come!”

  There was a rushing of wind. Again the feint red outlines he saw with his strange new sense were eclipsed, and the Dark Powers came, flowing, crawling, drifting down the stairway like an oily wave. They emerged from the walls, from the ceiling. They brushed him as they passed. They crawled over The Goddess like a million ants, then melted into her to make way for more.

  The bones were less visible. Her flesh was being made full. The squirming, flapping things, the things which were no more than dark patches against the great darkness spread over her as a thin film.

  Behold how the godhead is reassembled and divinity is reborn.

  The Goddess trembled, her body grinding the earth which imprisoned her. Stones and dirt fell from the ceiling. Cracks appeared in the walls. The witch froze him where he stood, and debris rained all around him.

  Now, touch me to that which I am to command, and I shall set you free.

  “Free?” he said aloud, but there was no hope in the word.

  Laughter knifed him again. He made his way forward clumsily, until he could reach out and touch the skull. But he did not touch it Instead he turned his back to it, until his burden pressed against it and at that very moment he was released. Blood ran freely as the teeth were withdrawn from his neck. All his weakness came back to him, and he fell forward as she pushed him away. A jagged stone rammed into his stomach. He rolled off it, and looked up at the skull His night vision was going, but still he could see the huge, curved outline in the red of dying embers, and on it the witch crawling, wholly inhuman in her aspect, like a black insect on the head of The Goddess. He thought of an earwig seeking an entrance.

  Exactly.

  She vanished over the curvature of the skull. There was a moment of absolute silence. Something flittered against his face and was gone. Visions of his life came to him in his pain. He thought of himself floating gently in a pool of his own blood, and as he floated, as he lay there and knew he was dying, he saw, first, Tharanodeth emerge from the top of the stairs, his face solemn with ritual. He tried to think of the good times, the walk into the desert when he first saw his world from the outside, and suddenly it was all there: the city crouching beneath the moon like a glittering, scaled beast, the sunrise with all its brilliant, subtle colors. He drifted through the sights and smells and shapes of die kata stables, watched the trainers trying to ride the wild beasts. He saw Tamarel, who had been Amaedig back when her shoulders were still hunched. He had been closer to her in the first days of their friendship, and innocent enough then to think that only what few people he knew, what yards he walked in day by day, what food he ate and games he played constituted the whole of the world, and everything else was a vague, far away abstraction, like mist rising from the river in the dawn. He tried to reach for those days in his mind, like a swimmer determined to attain the ocean’s bottom, to seek release there, to lie forever in the soft mud.

  He told himself it was well to die here, in sight of The Goddess, as, to his knowledge, no one ever had.

  His sight was almost gone. Only the faintest outline of her head was visible.

  There was a sound, a constant thumping like a thousand drummers drumming beneath the earth. No, he was beneath the earth, here. The travesty of The Goddess was alive, and its heart was beating;

  There seemed to be motion in the darkness. If more Powers streamed to join into her flesh, he couldn’t see them.

  He reached out. He wanted to touch that flesh, just to have done so. But he couldn’t He couldn’t get up. The rest of his body would not respond. It was hard to breathe, as if his lungs were filled with mud.

  His mind was wandering. He thought of himself sinking in an endless, red sea, all his pain dissolving away. His thoughts were all irrelevances, little memories, the image of a bird on a windowsill, the sound of the night wind among the towers of Ai Hanlo, an illustration in a beautiful old book, the first time he had worn shoes and how silly he had felt in them.

  Gutharad. Wandering on the caravan route between Randelcainé and Nagé. He sang further with an old song.

  A Zaborman who can last till dawn, I’ve never seen before...

  Suddenly The Goddess gave a great shout, and all the earth shook. His ears streamed blood, and all sound left him. He saw the stairway close like a huge jaw as a single, immense mass of stone fell to fill it.

  The Goddess moved. Her hand struck out, and walls and ceiling burst like overripe fruit, spewing the guts of the mountain upon him. He was caught like a leaf in a tempest, tossed about, slammed to the floor, raised again. He rose to his hands and knees, but something hit him between his shoulders like a battering ram. He was down again, pummeled over his entire body with showering rocks. Hundreds of pounds of boulders smashed his legs to a pulpy tatters. He tried to crawl still, pro
pelled by a frenzy beyond any sense or reasoning, and somehow the boulder was broken to powder by another, and he moved a little ways, nearer to the head of The Goddess. Earth and rock broke over her like the ocean over a whale when it breaches.

  He had come to his ending. One of his arms didn’t seem to be there. He reached up with the other. He touched something soft, something cold, something moving.

  The mouth of The Goddess rolled down to meet him.

  * * * *

  There was a flash of pain more intense than anything he had known, as if his body had been wholly consumed in fire, and then he passed through the flame and rose, like smoke, feeling nothing.

  Swimming up out of the warm, red sea.

  There was a rushing in his ears.

  A weight fell away. He was shedding his ruined body like a husk, and yet he was complete in his own flesh once more, climbing upward, out of a tunnel of throbbing flesh, into a broader space.

  He was naked. Before him were endless caverns and passageways, not of stone, but of black, dried, brittle matter like fat burned to a crisp.

  He was rising out of the earth, without motion, without vibration, but the world fell away around him, silently parting, and he swam up, up, out of the mountain like a whale breaching, die stones and dirt breaking over him like foam.

  He was in a close place.

  He was alone on a plain of black glass which stretched to the horizon.

  He rose on a column of air.

  Running.

  Swimming upward through the earth, he felt tons of stone being pushed aside like sand by his arms, his chest, by his feet as he kicked and crawled and scrambled to be free.

  He felt Ai Hanlo Mountain rent asunder with his passage, the walls and towers of the city sprinkling over his skin like delicate traceries of glass broken into dust