Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (12 page)

The whole sky exploded in brilliance, and, just before his eyes were dazzled utterly, he saw the lady again cloaked in flame, her gown of purest white, astride a dolphin with the Sun in one hand and a tree in the other.

He fainted to the ground at the mouth of the cave.

* * * *

Tamliade was next aware of something warm and fluid washing over him. He opened his eyes. It was day. The sky was a dull grey above him.

He brought a wet hand up to his face and screamed aloud when he saw that it was covered with blood.

He scrambled to his feet and ran back into the cave, sick with the dread of utter disorientation. The blood flowed after him. He and the magician came out again, and climbed to the top of the hill as the cave filled up. The summit alone stood a few feet above the surface of an ocean of blood, which stretched to the horizon in all directions. The city of lights was gone. Everywhere, only the waveless, dark surface. The stench was overwhelming.

Emdo Wesa stood silently. He pointed. The boy looked and saw something floating far away. It was only a speck at first. He strained to see it. Slowly it drew nearer, carried by some inexorable current. He felt mounting terror as it approached. He ran around in futile circles like a headless chicken. He fell to his knees and covered his eyes.

“Get up,” said Emdo Wesa sharply. “Look. Have dignity.”

Startled, he obeyed. The panic left him.

The thing was nearby now. He could see quite clearly that it was a coffin, bobbing up and down gently on the sea of blood.

A voice thundered from all directions at once. He felt his bones vibrate with it.

“Brother, I have found you. I am here.”

Tamliade looked at his master’s brother. Etash Wesa was pink, wormlike, the ruined bulk of his body twisting around and around inside the lidless coffin, awash in blood. There was an empty-socketed protuberance which might have once been a head, but it seemed smashed and pushed to one side. All three openings alternately spewed gore and babbled as the thing rolled over. He couldn’t tell which had been the mouth. One stubby remnant of an arm thumped against the wooden sides.

“My brother has made many, many
dadars
,” Emdo Wesa explained. “Do not think he is helpless because of his appearance. He is far more advanced in magic than I, and almost infinitely powerful.”

“Brother, the boy touches dreams. He was your instrument once. Now he shall be mine. Give him to me and I shall spare you, Your power is gone. I do not fear you. There can be no further rivalry between us.”

Tamliade began to weep softly.

“Are you afraid?” his master asked, as if merely curious.

“No. I am not afraid anymore. It is my fate and there is nothing I can do about it. I understand that much. I have never been free, even before I was a slave.
No.
My tears are for
you.
Out of pity. You have been kind to me in your way. You have been more of a father than my father was. You awakened me to being a person again, not a thing. I don’t know…it just came out like that and in
my
way, as best I could, I came to love you. Even when you frightened me. And now…and now I see your future clearly. Call it a vision. I see what will happen if you survive this day. I see you eaten up and changed by your magic, more enslaved by it than ever I was. I do not think he means to kill you now. No, you will be like your brother someday, wretched and pathetic for all that you are terrible. So I am not afraid. I weep for you.”

Then Tamliade walked to the very edge of the blood sea. The coffin moved in closer. Blood washed over his boots.

“Master,” he said, “if I give myself up to him, and you will be able to turn aside from your magic and become a man again, then I will gladly do it, because I am nothing and you are great and wise.”

“No, my loyal servant, that will not necessary,” said Emdo Wesa. “I know a better way. Even my brother will be surprised.”

The thing in the coffin began to thrash about. Tamliade leapt back.

He watched in horrified fascination as Emdo Wesa produced a long knife from out of his clothing and stabbed himself full in the chest with it, sinking it in to the hilt. The magician cut out his own living, beating heart. The wound did not bleed. There was fire within, the gaping hole like the mouth of a furnace.

Once again, holding the heart high over his head, Emdo Wesa’s hands flared to life. He was transfigured, enshrouded in light. With a mighty heave he hurled the heart into the coffin.

Etash Wesa screamed.

From horizon to horizon, the ocean of blood exploded into a raging inferno of red flame.

* * * *

Tamliade found himself lying face down in deep snow. The cold was a shock. Sputtering, startled, disoriented, he raised himself to his hands and knees.

His master stood with his back to him, absolutely still.

Snow had been accumulating on him for some time.

“Master? Emdo Wesa? Are you all right? What happened? Was it real?”

There was no reply. He stood unsteadily on frozen legs and staggered through knee-deep snow, circling the stiff figure.

Emdo Wesa stared blankly ahead. His eyepatch was gone. Both of his sockets were empty. His mouth hung open. A pale light flickered within, as if his head were a lantern with a single candle inside. The hole in the front of his coat had somehow become glued shut.

“Master? Do you know me?
Speak to me
!”

The magician spoke without moving his lips. The voice was hollow, grating, without inflection, like that of a bronze head enchanted into an imitation of life.

“There are many things for me to do. I am weak. I must become strong again. So many projects to undertake, so many spells to master, worlds to explore. I will gather all knowledge and power to myself in the end. My brother is not dead. In the end, I shall conquer him.”

Again Tamliade wept.

“I would have…instead you did this for me.
Why?
You gave up everything you were.”

Emdo Wesa did not answer. Tamliade recalled what his master had told him once:
There is no why.

He was standing on a sloping hillside. He looked up. Through the falling snow he dimly made out the mouth of the cave. He climbed up, gasping from the exertion, and stumbled inside. His master did not follow.

When next he slept—he did not know if it were night or day he saw Emdo Wesa’s death in a dream. It was not at all like that of Etash Wesa. He had been wrong. He saw the magician dissipating, drifting apart like a storm whose strength is spent, like dust and ashes on the wind.

* * * *

He spent all that winter in the cave. The horses were gone for want of conjuring, and there was no way he could leave. He lived precariously off the supplies in the wagon, and grew very thin.

He spent his time trying to understand what he had experienced. He remembered Emdo Wesa. He learned to put his body aside and open his spirit in a manner akin to
psadeu-ma
, although he was ignorant of the term. He had many visions. He spoke with many spirits, and with the Dark and Bright Powers, the fragments of the Goddess which still wandered across the world. And he heard the fading echo of her death more clearly than had even the holiest of men for many generations.

In the spring he made his way to Ai Hanlo, entered the service of the Guardian, and became a priest.

A LANTERN MAKER OF AI HANLO

In Zabortash, all men are magicians. The air is so thick with magic that you can catch a spirit or a spell with a net on any street corner. Women wear their hair short, lest they find ghosts tangled in it. Still, they find them in their hats.

In Zabortash, even the lantern makers work wonders: the present moon is not the first to shine upon the Earth. The old one went out when the Goddess died, but a Zabortashi lantern maker consulted with a magus, and was directed to that hidden stairway which leads into the sky. He hung his finest lantern in the darkness, in the night, that the stars might not grow over-proud of their brilliance, that men might know the duration of the month again.

In Zabortash, a land far to the south and filled with sluggish rivers, with swamps and steaming jungles, the air is so thick that in the darkness, in the night, the face of the moon ripples.

So it is said.

In Zabortash, further, for all that the folk are magicians, there are men who love their wives, who look on their children with pride when they are young· and wistfulness when they are old enough to remind the parents what they were like in their youth.

In Zabortash, people know beauty and feel joy, and know and feel also hurt and hunger and sorrow.

So it is said.

* * * *

In the time of the death of the Goddess, there dwelt a lantern maker in Zabortash named Talnaco Ramat who was skilled in his art. He was a young man, and wholly in love with the maiden Mirithemne, but she would not have him, being of a higher caste than he, and he would not be satisfied with any other. Therefore he labored long on a lantern of special design. He cut intricate shapes into the shell of it, making holes for light to shine through. The lantern was like a metal box, as tall as an outstretched hand, rectangular with a domed top and a metal ring hinged onto the dome to serve as a handle. At the outset, it was like any other lantern Talnaco Ramat might make, but he inlaid it with precious stones and plated it with gold. He carved schools of fish into it, swimming around the base, and those winged lizards called
kwisi
, which hop from branch to branch and are supposed to bring constancy and long life. He carved hills and villages, the winding river which is called Endless, and he fashioned the top half of the lantern into the shape of Ai Hanlo, the holiest of cities and center of the world, where the bones of the Goddess lie in blessed splendor. That city is built on a mountain; at the summit stands a golden dome, beneath which the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess holds court. In this likeness was the dome of the lantern made, complete with tiny windows and ringed with battlements and towers.

Finally, Talnaco Ramat carved his own image and that of his beloved into the metal. He depicted the two of them walking hand in hand along the bank of the river, going up to the city.

Then he lit a candle inside the lantern and carried it into a darkened loft. Light streamed through the carven metal, and all his creations were outlined by it. As he watched, the river seemed to flow. The images were projected onto the walls and roof of the loft. Then he was not in the loft at all, but beside Mirithemne. All around them lizards hopped from branch to branch, wings buzzing, fleshy tails dangling.

Mirithemne smiled. The day was bright and dear. Rivermen sang as they poled a barge along. A great
drontha
, a warship of the Holy Empire, crawled against the current like a centipede on its banks of oars.

They came to the holy city, entering through the Sunrise Gate, mingling with the crowds. They passed through the square where mendicants waited below the wall that shut them out of the Guardian’s palace. Once a week, he explained to Mirithemne, priests came to the top of that wall, and, holding aloft reliquaries containing splinters of the bones of the Goddess, blessed the people below. Miraculous cures still happened, but they were not as common as they had once been. The power of the Goddess was fading.

He led Mirithemne to a house at the end of a narrow lane. A wooden sign with a lantern painted on it hung over the door. He got out a key.

“This will be our home,” he said.

He unlocked the door and went in, only to find himself alone in the loft, with the candle of the lantern sputtering out.

He was satisfied. The lantern was adequate.

That night, in the darkness, after the moon had set, he spoke a spell into the open door of the lantern and it filled with a light softer than candle flame, with vapors excited by the ardor of his love.

He climbed onto the roof of his shop and set the lantern down on a ledge. He spoke the name of his beloved three times, and he spoke other words. Then he gently pushed the lantern off the ledge.

It hung suspended in air, and drifted off like a lazy, glowing moth on a gentle breeze. He sat for a time, watching it disappear over the rooftops of the town.

But the next morning he found the lantern on his doorstep. Its light had gone out and its shell was tarnished. He knew then for a certainty that his suit was hopeless. A sorrow lodged in his heart, which never left him.

The sign was very clear.

* * * *

So Talnaco Ramat transported himself to Ai Hanlo by some means which comes as easily to a Zaborman as breathing. The great distance was traversed, the tangled way made straight, dangers avoided, and the lantern maker come to the Sunrise Gate, dragging a two-wheeled cart filled with his belongings.

For a moment he had the idea that he would become rich here in Ai Hanlo, since the folk there had surely never seen anything as wondrous as a finely-wrought Zabortashi lantern.