The journey was comforting. I relished every new experience more than I had any since I was a boy. But then the melancholy thought arose that it was only because I was about to lose these things, all sensations, all perception, even my very self, that they seemed more rare and exquisite.
Tamda slept in the back of the wagon while I drove. Horses are supposed to be able to detect supernatural creatures pretending to be men, but ours behaved normally for me.
The plain was divided by a winding silver line, which I knew to be the Endless River. It was said to engirdle the world. My son said he would follow it on the way to the holy city. I stopped by the bank to water the horse and to bathe. Tamda awoke and prepared a soup with river water. Later, I took up pen and paper and began to draw.
She watched me intently.
“Is it a message from our enemy?”
It wasn’t. A bird bobbing on a reed had caught my fancy, and I made a picture of it. It was a charming little sketch, the sort some rich lady would pay well for.
Later, in a town called Toradesh, by a bend in the river, a man came to us, begging that we rid his father of the spirit which possessed him. There were many people around, and I could not refuse. Tamda and I were shown into a basement room, where an old man was kept tied to a bed. His eyes were wide with his madness. He did not blink. There was foam at the corners of his mouth. He stank of filth.
The picture I drew was of a long flight of stairs, winding down into the darkness. Once I had departed from my body, I was on those sodden, wooden stairs, descending into a region of dampness and decay. At the bottom I waded knee-deep in mud until I came to a slime-covered door. I pulled on an iron ring to open it, but the wood was so soft that the metal came away in my hand. I kicked the hole thus begun until it was big enough for me to wriggle through.
On the other side something massive and hunched over, dark with glowing eyes, sat nearly buried in the muck.
“Begone!” I said. “I command you, leave this place. Be vomited up and leave this man.”
The thing turned to me and laughed. Its voice was that of a child, but hideous, as if the child had never grown up, but lost all innocence and wallowed in cruelty for a thousand years.
“Gladly would I leave, dadar, for the soul of this man is rotten and there is not much left of it. But you have no soul, so where would I go?”
“If I have no soul, what is this standing before you?”
“It is the dadar of a dadar, the image of an image, the rippling of water made by another wave. Dadar, Etash Wesa made you, and sends you as a present to his brother, Emdo Wesa. There is enmity between them, which you shall consummate. More than that you need not know. Your actions are his, your thoughts his. From now on, he shall guide you.”
In the blinking of an eye I was back in the basement room, and the old man was mad as ever. Tamda let out a startled cry. She had not called me. The townspeople scowled and muttered something about “theatrical fake.” Tamda tried to calm them. We had failed, she told them, and thus would demand no payment. We left the town at once. It may have only been the subtle and remote workings of Etash Wesa, directing my fate, which prevented us from being smeared with dung and driven out with rods. Someone mentioned that as the traditional punishment for frauds.
* * * *
I was drifting. Sometimes in a dream I would see a hill or a bend in the road or men poling a raft along the river. Sometimes I would draw pictures of these things or awaken to find that I had drawn them. Especially in these cases, when the image was firmly in my mind, I could be sure that sooner or later I would behold those things while waking. I drove the wagon when I could, letting instinct which I knew to be the instructions of my maker be my guide.
I didn’t have any doubt now that I truly was a dadar, a thing like dust carried in the wind. I was going to confront Emdo Wesa. Then what? Would some other secret of my nature be revealed?
Once I fancied that in the presence of Emdo Wesa I would explode into flame, consuming both of us. For this purpose alone I had been created. The rest was random happenstance.
Tamda said little as the miles went by. She knew she was losing me. Sometimes when she did speak she mentioned things I could not recall at all, as if I were slipping away from myself, becoming two, real and unreal, a reflection again reflected.
* * * *
I awoke in the middle of the day, the reins at my feet. The horse had wandered to the side of the road to graze, pulling the wagon askew. How had I gotten there? I didn’t remember any morning. Last I remembered, we were travelling nearly into the sunset. Tamda was asleep in the back.
I had a vision of a man in an iridescent robe, bent over a steaming pot. I could not see his face. His back was toward me. He was missing the last three fingers of his right hand. With thumb and forefinger only he reached into the pot, immersing his arm all the way to the shoulder—and yet the pot wasn’t a third that deep—and as he did there was a scratching inside my chest, as if a huge spider within me began to stir. I gagged. It was coming up my throat, into my mouth.
Then it retreated back inside me and there was a sudden, intense pain. It had wrapped its legs around my heart, and was squeezing, until blood rushed to my temples and my head and chest were about to—
* * * *
I awoke with a scream. A flock of startled birds rose all around me, wheeling in the twilight of early dawn.
I was sitting by a campfire in the middle of the grassland. There was no sign of Tamda or the wagon.
Flames crackled. There was no other sound except that of the birds. I let out a grunt of surprise.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you know where you are?”
I looked up, regarding the speaker, saying nothing. He stood opposite me, a spear with a rabbit impaled on it in his gloved hands. He had a long beard, black hair streaked with grey, and he wore a long robe alternately striped blue and red. For an instant I feared he was the man from my vision, but by the way his hands worked, spitting the rabbit over the fire, I was sure he had all his fingers. I guessed him to be slightly younger than myself, and by his speech, a foreigner. He seemed to take my presence for granted, as if we had met before this instant. Carefully, trying not to reveal the gaps in my memory, I got him to tell me what I wanted to know.
“You may have heard of my country,” he said. “Here in the north the people say the air is so thick in Zabortash that men carry it around in buckets, into which they dunk their heads when they want to breathe. They blame our foul dispositions on this. But these things are slanderous lies. Am I not a man, like any other?” He smiled when he spoke, and I felt sure he was deliberately mocking me. This was a new terror, but I forced myself to remain calm. I allowed that he seemed a man, like any other.
“Now you, on the other hand,” he went on, “seem strange. Last night when you came upon my humble camp, you were like one walking in his sleep. ‘Who are you?’ you asked, and I said ‘I am Kabor Asha,’ but a few minutes later you asked again, and again I answered, and it seemed that your mind wandered even farther than your body did. Most strange.”
He offered me some of the rabbit. When we were done eating, he noticed that I was watching him as he wiped his gloves clean, without removing them.
“You are wondering why I don’t take them off and wash them, of course. I can’t, you see, because I am not alone. In my country no magician bares his hands in public. It’s obscene.”
“You are…a magician?”
“That’s another rumor they have here in the north, that everyone in Zabortash is a magician. It’s not true, but they are so numerous that there is no work for many. That is why I wander, you see, to practice my art.”
And again I wondered if he were mocking me, but I made no sign. An idea came to me. Another magician could help me against my enemy. At the very least, it would complicate Etash Wesa’s plans. So words poured out of me in a torrent. I was well into my story before I realized what I was doing. Then there was nothing to do but finish. I told
him all.
“I know of Emdo Wesa,” he said when I had finished. “I can take you to him. Then the whole unpleasant business will be over and you’ll be free.”
“Wait! What business? What am I supposed to do? Who are you? How do you know—?”
Before I could do anything he stood over me. He had opened his robe. Beneath he wore some sort of armor. The scales glittered blue and black, close against his skin. I had a sudden fear that it wasn’t armor at all, that he was some kind of reptile—
The cloak closed over me, covering my head as he knelt to embrace me, hugging me to his chest.
His flesh was cold and hard as iron. I couldn’t feel any heart beating.
“Help! Wait! Where is my wife? What have you done—?”
“You didn’t tell me you had a wife,” he said as he pushed me over backwards and tumbled onto me.
The ground did not catch us. We were falling off a precipice, tumbling over and over in the air, the wind roaring by us, for a long time. I screamed and struggled, and then all the strength went out of me and I hung limp. He straightened out from our hunched position and stopped somersaulting. I could see nothing but darkness beneath his cloak, but somehow I had the impression that he bore me in his arms like a bird of prey carrying off a fish.
The fish, from out of the crag, wandering into the wide ocean, bursting into the air, snatched away by a sea hawk—
—falling among faint lights, false images behind my eyelids, but then stars, as pure and clear as any seen by night over the open plain, as if Kabor Asha had all the universe inside him.
We stopped falling without any impact or even a cessation of motion. My vertigo simply faded slowly away, and after a time I felt solid ground beneath my feet.
He took his robe off me, and I saw that we stood on a little hill before a vast city which rose up tier upon tier, like something carven out of a mountain. Every stone, every wall, every rooftop of it was of dull black stone, and it stood silent and empty against a steel grey sky. As far as I could see the ground was bare and dusty grey. Every color, every trace of life seemed drained out of this place.
“Behold the holy city of Ai Hanlo,” said my guide and captor, “where lie the bones of the Goddess. But this is not the Ai Hanlo to which pilgrims flock, where the Guardian rules over half a million citizens. No, this is one of the shadows of the city, in a world of shadows. Where the bones of the Goddess lie all magic intersects, all powers are centered. All shadows come together here, branching out into separate worlds. Thus, in a sense, all practitioners of deepest magic, not that petty and shallow stuff you yourself use, the sort you can see on any street corner in Zabortash, but the deepest, most secret magic, which partakes of the inner nature of things; all who know this and immerse themselves into it—all these dwell in Ai Hanlo, alone, in some shadow or other, where ordinary men cannot follow. In this particular shadow Emdo Wesa dwells. You must go to him.”
I looked up at the city in dread. It was no city, but some monster, waiting to devour me in the labyrinths of its mouth, to dissolve me utterly.
Dadar though I was, if I had any will, I would resist.
I ran down the hill, away from the city, away from the one who called himself Kabor Asha.
“Stop! Fool!”
The spider in my chest scurried to my heart and squeezed and sank its fangs deep. I screamed once, but the sound broke into gurgling, and the pain filled me.
The next thing I knew the Zaborman was helping me to my feet. I was numb and weak. I could not fight him.
“Don’t try to run away,” he said. “Listen to me. I can still help you. I can be your friend.”
“Who are you really? You didn’t find me just by chance.”
“No, I did not. Let me merely say that I am one who wants to see you complete your mission and go free. I want to help you do what Etash Wesa has sent you to do, and get it over with.”
“You seem to know what I must do.”
“Yes, I do. It is quite simple. You will find Emdo sleeping. Reach beneath his pillow and take out the jeweled dagger you find there. With it, cut his throat from ear to ear.”
“Why should I murder a man I do not know, with whom I have no quarrel?”
“Because you were created for that very reason. Be comforted. You have no more guilt in this than does the dagger.”
“That’s very comforting,” I said bitterly. “What happens to me afterwards?”
“In all honesty, I do not know. You could go on for a while, the way ripples do in a pool, even after the stone that made them comes to rest on the bottom. If so, take that as reward for services rendered.”
So, filled with helpless dread, like a victim led to slaughter, even though I was supposed to do the slaughtering, I let him guide me through the dark gate of this shadow Ai Hanlo, through the wide squares, up streets so steep that steps were cut in them, below gaping empty windows, to that gate beyond which, in the real city, no common man was allowed to go. But no guards stopped us, and we entered the inner city, the vast complex containing the palace of the Guardian and—in all the shadows too?—the bones of the Goddess resting in holy splendor. All the while the air was still and dry, not warm, not cold, giving no sensation at all. There was an overwhelming odor of must, like that of a tomb which had not been opened for a dozen centuries. We came to the topmost part of the palace, the very summit of the mountain, to a great chamber beneath a black dome. In the true city the dome was golden, and was said to glow with the sunset hours after the rest of the world was dark.
In that vast, empty room, by the faint light of the grey sky coming in through a skylight, I could make out two mosaics on the floor, one of a lady dressed in black, with stars in her hair, and another, of the lady’s twin, in flowing white, with a tree in one hand and the blazing sun in the other. The Goddess, in her bright and dark aspects, as she was before she fell from the heavens and shattered into a million pieces, which we know as the Powers.
Where the feet of the two images came together, there was a dais, and on it a throne. A man sat there asleep, his head on an armrest. I had expected him in a bed, the· pillow beneath his head. But, no, he was sitting on it.
We crept closer, climbing the few steps until we stood by the throne. We stood over the sleeping man. He was very thin. I could not make out his features.
“Take the dagger, and do what you must,” said Kabor Asha, and as he spoke he stepped down from the dais. “Do it!” he whispered to me. “Hurry! Fear not; it is a magic weapon, the only one which can pierce him. Now carefully draw it out.”
The hilt was sticking out from beneath the pillow. Delicately, I took hold of it and inched it away. The task was easier than I had expected. The thing slid out of a scabbard, which remained beneath the pillow. Once I froze in abject terror as my victim’s eyelids fluttered, but he did not wake.
“Do what you must!”
I felt as if I were about to slay myself, as if the first prick of the blade would burst me like a bubble. But then I told myself, well, I had been created for this. What years I had lived, I had lived. What man can avoid his appointed doom? My life is done, I thought. There are more painful ways to die than merely winking out of existence.
I took the sleeping man firmly by the hair, and quickly, savagely, before he could react, I slashed his throat so deeply that I felt the blade touch his neck bone.
I winced, and braced myself for oblivion, but nothing happened.
Nothing.
There was no blood from the open throat. Only a little dust dribbled from the wound, and the body deflated, like a punctured waterbag, until it was no more than a crumpled mass.
The one who had brought me here ascended the dais again.
“What does this mean?” I asked. “Why doesn’t he die like a man?”
“I can explain. Give me the knife.” Without thinking, I gave it to him.
He slammed it hilt-deep into my heart. There was—
—I—
—the beginning of
pain; a scream, my knees like running sand—
—stood still. He held me up, impaled on the blade, frozen forever in an impossible dance of death.
“Dadar,” he said. “I can explain. He does not die like a man because he is not a man. He is a thing like a dadar, like you. A reflection of a reflection. You have killed one of your own number. Dadar, it should be all clear to you when you understand that I am Emdo Wesa, the one my brother sent you to murder.”
* * * *
Hearing came first. Footsteps. The sound of a small metal instrument being dropped into a glass jar. Breathing. Slowly, images coalesced out of the air. Bright areas became torches set in a wall. A drifting smear became a more unified shape, and wore the face of Emdo Wesa, whom I had known as Kabor Asha the Zaborman.
Was he with me, even beyond death?
I shook my head to clear it, and was aware of my body. I was bound spread-eagled to a table, and was stripped to the waist. Emdo Wesa, holding a sharp knife, bent over me. Impossibly, because I felt no pain, there was an immense gaping hole in my chest. I felt sure he could have ducked his head into it. And yet, I was numb, and blood did not spurt out. I watched almost with disinterest, as if all were part of a remote pageant performed by spirits in some other plane of existence. In the shadows.
“You know,” laughed the wizard, seeing that I was awake, “you could say it was obvious from the beginning that my brother had a hand in this.”
He put down the knife and reached into the cavity. His gloves were off and I could see that he indeed lacked three fingers. In their place light flickered.
He drew out a severed hand, totally covered with blood. From out of my chest. He took a ring off one of the fingers, then threw the hand away like so much garbage.
Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time Page 4