He wondered if he was walking in place. They made no visible progress. Now the plain was wholly featureless, covered with dust and pebbles, without even a few large boulders to mark the way.
A thought came to him: perhaps he had to die first before he would turn into a god. He would die, and Azrethemne would bury him, and then he would rise, transfigured in holy fire.
Perhaps. He doubted she would have the strength to do it. She was failing rapidly. He all but carried her.
The single thought reverberated in his mind until he forgot all else. Perhaps he was already dead, and he walked the long road out of the world, or, like Emdo Wesa, had lost his way and could not find the road.
He had not had a vision in a long time. His mind was still, like a rope once tied into convoluted knots, now left limp in a heap.
He tried to remember his father, his days of wandering, the city, the Guardian, the visions he had seen, but it was all slipping away, and his existence consisted entirely of walking, walking forever across the empty landscape, in the darkness, toward the sunrise that never came.
He tried to imagine what it would be like to be with Azrethemne back in the world he knew, the world of colors and sounds.
There was only cold, and exhaustion, combined into a single sensation.
Still, Azrethemne held his hand. At times he squeezed hers, to remind himself that she was there.
When neither could go any farther, they sank down and sat for a time, staring hopelessly at the horizon. Neither spoke. She drew him to her, and they embraced, and kissed, and her lips were cracked and rough. Then they lay down side by side, wrapped in the coat, hand in hand, staring into the darkness.
He thought that he would continue to hold her hand, so that she would come with him if he were raised up into the sky. Or else he would merely lie here forever, and she would be with him.
His mind emptied out completely. He was open, utterly vulnerable to any vision that might come. He had no memory of one second passing into the next. At the very end, his awareness seemed to be reaching out, searching for something, anything, and once more he heard, faintly but distinctly, the fading echo of the death of the Goddess.
Then he slept.
IV.
The dream found Azrethemne first.
Tamliade awoke as she thrashed against him. It was still dark. He was still weak. His insides felt like shriveled leather, but his mind was clear. Azrethemne lay beside him still asleep, her eyes open, moaning softly, rolling, kicking, slapping the ground with her hands.
He understood what was happening to her. He was filled with terror and pity. It was as if he were watching himself.
She screamed, “Blood!”
He started, looked around, saw nothing, and still she screamed. He held her arms to her sides, wrestling with her, whispering into her ear, “Let me have it. Give the vision to me.” He wanted to help her, even if what was within her tore him apart, even if he were lost forever inside some endless nightmare. He could not stand to see this happen to her.
She arched her back, nearly threw him off, and screamed again, “Blood! Blood!”
There was no time for psadeu-ma, whereby he could share her dream and perhaps take it from her. That took careful preparation.
Still she screamed. Still he held her.
“Let her go!” he shouted. “I’m the one you want!”
He shouted to the fire that ringed in the world, to the darkness.
Azrethemne went suddenly limp, and a voice from within her thundered, “You are the one I want, Tamliade. You are the one.”
He let go of her and knelt over her, gaping.
She screamed again, broke into a liquid gurgling, and vomited out an enormous quantity of blood, splattering him. He reached for her, then recoiled as she spat out blood in impossible amounts. It covered her face. It flowed over her, across the ground, splashing at his knees, pooling around her, spreading, spreading. He stared in helpless horror as the level rose, the blood surrounding her face, covering her. He stood up, stepped back, splashing. She was gone. He stood calf-deep in a lake of blood. He felt dizzy. The current slid his feet out from under him, and for a horrible instant he was submerged, his mouth filled with blood. He got to all fours, then staggered to his feet, while it rushed around him like a tide. He saw it stretching further, covering the land, until it reached the horizon, touched the fires, and burst into flame as if it were oil.
Suddenly the sky was very bright. He stood, blinded by the light as the flames roared toward him over miles of scarlet bloodscape. The heat was unbearable. He fell to his knees again, and scalding liquid splashed over his shoulders.
But he did not cover his face. He watched as the fire came weaving toward him, towering to fill the sky.
Then he saw something else: the bronze-masked man, dancing toward him through the flames, across the sea of blood, arms, stretched wide to embrace him. In an instant he was there. He took Tamliade by both hands and raised him, until he too stood on the surface of the sea, his boots barely awash. Tamliade’s hands were burning at that touch, but the flames around him did not hurt him.
“The dream is yours, Tamliade. Take it.”
His hands were lifted to the rim of the mask.
The molten metal burned as his fingers were closed around it. Globules flowed down his arm. Smoke poured out of his sleeves. He cried out, but no sound came. He could not let go. His muscles would not obey him.
The body of the dancing man fell away, and there was only the mask, its eyes dazzling with the intensity of their glare. The mask rose, lifting him above the flames. He dangled. The mask flew. He looked down once. The flames, tall as they were, looked tiny, the whole land like a caldron of burning pitch.
“Azrethemne!” he shouted, but his voice was lost in the roar of the flames and wind. He wept for her, but the heat of the mask evaporated his tears.
His hands burned.
The mask spoke, the metal rippling and flowing. “Tamliade, only a perfect dreamer would do for my purpose. Only you. Tamliade, we have met before. Do you not know me?”
Wind roared around him. The pain in his hands was too intense for him to concentrate, to form words.
“Tamliade, I am Etash Wesa.”
Once more he screamed and struggled. He tried to let go, to fall to an easy death, but his hands would not obey him. Then he hung limp, hopeless, helpless. He was beginning to understand. Etash Wesa had made many dadars in the course of his career, living projections to which he contributed a scrap of his flesh. He had made too many. He had had too many enemies, fought too many incomprehensible battles. There wasn’t much left of him. He could only act on the physical world through dreams, and for all his power, he could only seize a dreamer in such a place and in such a condition as Tamliade had been.
His whole plan had simply been stupid, he realized. He should have stayed in Ai Hanlo, and lived as he had, or he should simply have killed himself. There was no escape. To project himself into his own dreams, to follow his visions where they led, was to deliberately leap into that abyss the Guardians had spoken of, where lurks Etash Wesa.
It was his own fault that he was here now. He had dared to hope. For that, there could be no forgiveness.
The mask shrieked at him as they flew, sometimes in strange languages, sometimes wordless in maniacal hatred.
* * * *
He was no longer over the sea of burning blood.
At first, he was only aware that the pain was less. Still his hands were locked to the mask, but it no longer burned him. His hands were black and swelling.
The light from the eyes was diminishing. They glowed a dull red, like coals.
He was being lowered. There was only darkness, the mask glowing in it like a pale sun, its mouth frozen. He looked down. Gradually he could make out vast, dim shapes of treetops rising to meet him, gently rolling in every direction. Then he was among them, dropping down for hours through a forest that must have been impossibly deep, its trees miles high.
The trees were dead, leafless. The trunks of the nearer ones shone a pale white by the light of the mask, the color of corpse flesh. He could not see the ground below or the sky above, only trunks and branches, fading into distance. Slowly, huge limbs rose out of the murk, loomed close, then disappeared overhead, while trunks passed endlessly by, like vertical rivers.
He thought the descent would never end, that this was a kind of death, to be lowered forever into the corpse-forest without a bottom. But finally he made out a shape below: curving tree trunks, thick as mountains, joining together to form something vaster still, rounded, jointed, curving; the fingers of a grey, swollen hand too vast to contemplate.
The mask flickered. There was horizontal movement. The mask carried him away from the hand, until it too faded into the gloom. Far below, on the forest floor, the decaying body of a giant stretched for miles upon endless miles, half submerged in a swamp of coagulated blood. The trees were growing out of it, the entire forest like a fungus growth on this thing which in any sane universe could never, never have been alive. Curves of flesh rose like islands. The skin had collapsed between some of the ribs, leaving gaping chasms large enough to swallow cities.
It seemed to take hours for the ribs to pass beneath him, the shadows shifting, the mask weaving between tree trunks. At last the chest was gone. A long interval of darkness followed.
Then, peering down, he made out the face, or part of it, the chin, with trees growing to form a beard, then the cheekbones protruding like hilltops out of the grey flesh, and, far ahead of him, the eyes, rolled-up white, so vast he could not see over the curve of them.
The descent was rapid now. The mouth yawned wide. The air was thicker, fouler than before.
Again he struggled, trying to yank the mask from its course, but he was as helpless as an ant held in a pair of tweezers, and the cracked white lips stretched around him like the rim of a canyon, and then, in absolute darkness again, as he choked on the putrid air, the glowing mask was the only thing that was real.
* * * *
Motion had ceased long before he knew it. Sensations returned slowly. His hands throbbed dully. He no longer held the mask. As his sight came into focus, he saw it hovering, still aglow, a short distance away. He fell to his knees, breaking a crusty surface, splashing in something putrid and greasy and black. He struggled to stand again, but could not escape the repugnant touch of the stuff. It closed around him waist-deep, hardening. He stepped forward, breaking. the crust. He realized he was nearly naked. His clothing had been burned away, but for a few scraps, for all that the flames had not touched his flesh.
The mask receded, impossibly far, yet still visible, as if it grew in size as it retreated until it became as large as the sun, settling behind the corpse-flesh trees.
“Come to me, Tamliade,” it said at last. “Come into my heart.”
* * * *
The stench of congealing blood was overwhelming. He wandered aimlessly through the greasy swamp, in absolute darkness, clinging from time to time in his exhaustion against the roots of trees, which indeed felt like soft, overripe carrion.
The skin on his hands felt tight. He couldn’t move his fingers. His face was dry, cracked, almost numb.
At last he saw a point of light ahead and turned toward it. It didn’t seem to get any closer. He didn’t care. There was nowhere else to go.
He prayed to the Goddess, who was dead.
He prayed to Emdo Wesa, his former master, the brother of Etash Wesa. Emdo Wesa had treated him kindly once. Now, perhaps, if his spirit still lingered and had any power at all, he might grant Tamliade the boon of death, settling over him like smoke and smothering him.
Emdo Wesa did not appear.
Tamliade prayed, too, to the Guardian, who might stand on a scaffold before the skylight of the golden dome of Ai Hanlo, looking out over the world, and see him struggling in the darkness.
But he was not in the world any more, and the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess did not see him.
He wept for Azrethemne, and this time his tears flowed. It seemed that in all his life, his only happiness had come in that brief interval with her, the days, or hours, or few brief moments he had spent by her side.
She was gone, lost in the phantasmagorical darkness.
He was truly alone and without hope when the light led him to the ruined temple. He climbed up out of the slime and stood on rough, crumbling stone. Roofless walls and broken pillars surrounded him.
His boots were gone. A few strips of leather clung to his ankles. He stood on a cubical block, his toes curled over the edge. He wanted to stay there, to die there, but he could not.
The source of the light was before him. There was an opening in the ground. Fires burned within.
As he approached, he saw that blood had hardened around the edges of a rectangular doorway. He walked down a flight of stairs, into a sunken room, which was, flooded, deep in pure, red blood. Red flames flickered over the surface. In the center of the room, a coffin of ancient wood floated. He recognized the intricate carvings on its sides, the signs of power and the prolongation of life.
He had come to the lair of Etash Wesa.
The lid of the coffin rose noiselessly, then fell back. The coffin rocked slightly. Blood and flames rippled. A voice spoke from within.
“Come to me, Tamliade. Embrace me, as you would your father.”
It was his father’s voice. He screamed and turned away.
“Sh-sh. Don’t wake your mother.”
He staggered up the stairs, slowly, slowly, his legs refusing to obey him.
“Be quiet and come with me…a feathered star…it drifts across the sky, burning with holiness…settles, touches…that’s what…I didn’t understand it all.…”
Something in that voice drained him of all will. He could not help himself as he turned back toward the coffin, and waded almost to his armpits in the blood, which was hot, but not quite scalding. The flames did not harm him. He came to the side of the coffin and looked in. There he saw the ruin of a man, a thing without limbs save the stump of one arm, without face or feature, slowly rolling over in blood. What must have been a mouth opened and closed, spewing gore, gurgling.
Tamliade spoke with resignation.
“Why am I here? What do you want of me?” Steam hissed out of the mouth of Etash Wesa, and took shape.
Tamliade saw Azrethemne standing in the coffin, clad in her ragged dress. Startled, he called her name and reached up for her, but his hand passed through her calf as if through smoke. She was a wraith. Through her, he could see flames flickering behind the coffin.
The thing spoke, thundering with the voice of Etash Wesa.
“I have made too many dadars. But where my fleshly body diminished, my other one grew. I have grown it, out of dreams, out of the fears and deaths of men of many places and times. I have reached out through dreams, seizing what I might use…Tamliade. I AM THE ONE who shall come after the Goddess. When my new body lives, stands, holds the world in its hand, there can be no other. That is what my brother feared more than anything else. He knew that I am inevitable. Tamliade, when you were born, I felt you. When your visions began, you burned like a beacon in my mind; and I knew that here, at last, I had found the gateway, the path.… So I reached out for you. So I created this one you call Azrethemne, to lead you to me.”
“No,” said Tamliade, trembling.
“No?”
“She is not a…thing. I love her. She is real.”
“But a minor instrument in my grand design. She gathered like smoke in her mother’s womb.”
“No.”
“Many shadows think they cast shadows. You are my instrument, Tamliade. You too.”
“No.…”
“Your task, the purpose for which I have directed most of your life, Tamliade, is simply to dream. Dream of the Goddess, Tamliade. More clearly than anyone else, you can hear the echo of her death, see the reflection of her life. I shall flow through you, sei
zing the remnant of her power, drawing her to me, into this body which I have created. Through her, united with her, I shall live, and rise up. My brother was too much of a coward to have dared such a thing. It is a brilliant plan, fully worthy of me.”
“No.…”
“It no longer matters what you think or will or try to do, Tamliade.”
He looked around for escape, as hopeless as that was. He looked for a way to destroy Etash Wesa, to break him with his hands, to drive a knife into the shapeless blob of his body again and again. He looked, once more, for his own death. He would fall down and drown himself in blood.
But he knew Etash Wesa would prevent him.
Think of the Goddess. The Guardian had told him that so many times. But before he had always been afraid of losing himself, like a drop of water splashing in a great wave.
Now he welcomed it. He desperately sought oblivion.
The wraith of Azrethemne settled over him, choking him. He thrashed about. The room seemed to dim, to sway. The flames roared up. Blood closed over him, hot and wet, and the consciousness of Etash Wesa touched his mind—awesome, infinite, hating; hating in a tangle of emotions, of vast currents of thoughts he could not begin to grasp, swelling with malevolence beyond any scale of comprehension.
Out of darkness the great vision came upon him, more intensely than ever before, wringing him out like a rag, burning, burning.
He tried to scream. His mouth filled with hot blood.
There was only darkness, the absence of all sensation.
* * * *
The memories of Etash Wesa were his:
He was Etash Wesa, very young, running after the other children in some muddy street of Zabortash, gasping for breath, falling behind because he was too weak, because one of his legs was crooked.
—hating.
As a youth, he watched his brother Emdo Wesa dance with the maidens of the town at the Festival of the Blood of the Goddess. Emdo Wesa, who was tall, who was straight, who was beautiful; who drew the smiles and applause of the young women with his tricks and illusions.
Etash Wesa, short, ugly, crippled within and without.
—hating.
Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time Page 14