Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (20 page)

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, seizing 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.

He was Etash Wesa, creating his first dadar, carefully whispering incantations syllable by syllable by the light of a single candle in a shuttered room, then bracing himself as he raised a cleaver and cut off half the index finger of his left hand. The pain faded as his awareness passed into the dadar itself, a shape condensed from shadows, given substance by his own flesh and blood and bone. It resembled a giant beetle, with shiny black wings. It commanded, and the remote, bleeding human body rose and opened the shutters. The dadar scurried to the windowsill and peered out into the tropical night, then took flight, its wings whirring. Overhead, the moon rippled in the thick air.

The dadar sought another window, and flew in. There, on a bed, lay a maiden beloved of his brother, naked in the heat of the night. She was intensely beautiful. For this Etash Wesa hated her. There was talk of marriage. For this, too, his enmity knew no bounds. The beetle-thing crept over her, clasped her sides with its spiny legs, and penetrated her with its huge, all too human member as she woke up screaming.

She was screaming ten days later, Etash Wesa understood, when she was swollen as if after nine months, and still screaming a week after that when she gave birth to thousands of worms and maggots and carrion beetles in a torrent of blood. She was screaming twenty years later still, when she died mad, white-haired, hideous.

All the while Etash Wesa watched, hating, triumphant, as his brother came to know fear, as the two of them raced one another in their acquisition of the lore of sorcery. Emdo Wesa had not planned to spend his life this way. That was the joy of Etash Wesa’s revenge. He had stolen his brother’s days and nights, all of them. Now he could only battle Etash Wesa.

And Etash Wesa had no life otherwise, his hatred sustaining him. He was emptiness, a malevolent void.

Slowly this void encompassed an innocent called Tamliade, as inevitably as the incoming tide encompasses a grain of sand. And Tamliade perceived this void, this vastness of Etash Wesa, but dimly. It was more than his mind could grasp. There were centuries of memory as Etash Wesa drifted into strangeness and ceased to be even remotely human. Then Tamliade saw, sharing these memories, that everything Emdo Wesa had ever told him about his brother was true, and he understood further that even Emdo Wesa had but glimpsed the barest outline of the enormity which was Etash Wesa.

Tamliade knew one thing: this ravenous void called Etash Wesa needed him to become flesh again. Etash Wesa could not connect with the physical world. He was too far gone. He had to possess someone yet living. He was himself beyond life and death. Incarnate in the body and mind of Tamliade, he could dream Tamliade’s most powerful dreams, reach back through time and touch the Goddess, binding her power to himself, animating the immense body he had made for himself, rising up, seizing the heavens and the Earth, altering the stars in their courses.

“I am the one,” said Etash Wesa. “I am the one.”

Tamliade’s only hope was to surrender utterly to his dreams, then be swallowed utterly by them, until he too failed to connect with the physical world.

Only if he destroyed himself could Etash Wesa’s power be curbed.

* * * *

He was a small child again, running in his nightgown, barefoot in the chilly night, running through the forest while the shadows called out holy names, while fragments of the feathered star rained whispering through the branches, burning as they fell, and he was burning, burning as he ran, streaming fire as he sought the clearing where he could look up in the sky and see the Goddess with the moon in her hair and the stars in her crown and—

Naked, he fell down at the feet of the Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess, beneath the golden dome of Ai Hanlo.

“Help me,” he whimpered. “Save me.”

The Guardian reached up and swung his own face open, like the door of a furnace. His head was hollow. Inside, flares roared.

Water and blood rushed over the floor, splashing over Tamliade, bearing him, whirling like a leaf in a flood-swollen river, down Ai Hanlo Mountain, through the labyrinthine streets of the lower city, out the Sunrise Gate, into the Endless River, whirling, whirling.

The waters parted and the mask of Etash Wesa rose, lighting the sky with the color of blood.

“You are mine now, Tamliade,” said Etash Wesa.

* * * *

Tamliade stood on a narrow strip of sand. Even as he stood, he felt the sand crumbling away. Hot blood washed over his ankles. To his left he saw the mask, huge, hanging in the sky above a sea of burning blood on which bobbed the open coffin of Etash Wesa, waiting.

To his right was a void of blue mist. As he watched the blood washed away the sand, ready to pour into the void, to fill it.

“Come to me now,” said the voice from within the coffin.

But he ran, splashing blood and sand, toward the blue. He felt the sandbar break up under him, the blood rush past his legs, into the abyss.

He fell suddenly into nothingness, and the mist became water at his touch. He splashed in it, face down, then instinctively struggled, gained the surface and looked up into the purest blue sky he had ever seen. In the distance a white sun hovered above the horizon.

Around him, the water darkened, mingling with blood.

He strove to concentrate, to finish what he had resolved to do. He lay face down, limp in the still sea, breathing water, forcing back the gag reflex.

Memories came: his father beside him in the night; the Guardian comforting him; Azrethemne speaking, Azrethemne walking by his side, the touch of Azrethemne as they lay together.

He dismissed them all until his mind was blank, until he sank into blueness.

The sun was down there, beneath the water, burning with holy fire. It had a face. The sun shone brilliantly in the hand of a lady clad in white, astride a leaping dolphin.

He had seen that lady before. He couldn’t remember where.

His mind went blank. He tasted blood in his mouth.

She reached up, embracing him, the sun still in her hand, and there was only fire and light and no sensation at all.

* * * *

“No!”
cried Etash Wesa.
“Come back! You must become part of me first! Then, then.…”

The voice faded, was very far away. After a while, Tamliade did not hear it.

* * * *

The blood filled the blue abyss, and the sun burned with the hue of it. The coffin floated somewhere nearby.

And Tamliade and Etash Wesa and the Goddess all were one, drifting in the light.

And Tamliade felt the power of Etash Wesa scurrying through him, like a thousand spiders exploring his body on the inside, trying to find the muscles that moved the limbs, that opened his eyes, that made him speak.

* * * *

In the end he felt his own awareness begin to disintegrate, and the mind of Etash Wesa, linked to his own, began to disintegrate too.

In the end, detached from it all, he came to an understanding. He saw things from a new perspective, and suddenly the grand schemes of Etash Wesa seemed vain, pathetic, laughable.