LITMIR.BIZ

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      COPYRIGHT

      Copyright © 1980, 2014 by Darrell Schweitzer.

      All rights reserved.

      Cover art by © breaker213 / Fotolia.

      *

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidepress.com

      DEDICATION

      For John Sevcik, who never had to buy the Meaning of Life from me for a quarter.

      OPENING QUOTATIONS

      I think that all gods were men once, and, further, that they did not choose or seek out their divinity, but were swept along by events like twigs in a flood-swollen river, until at last the current became holy, and they lost sight of the shore of human mortality, and came into the light.

      —Telechronos of Hesh, To Himself

      A secret birth at midnight, and all the world shook.

      —Othelredon, Miraculous Songs

      All truth is revealed in dreams.

      —Hadel of Nagé, On Fears

      CHAPTER 1

      His Name Shall be Mystery

      It was in the time of the death of The Goddess that the thing happened, when the fragments of her godhead were beginning to assume those unstable shapes called the Dark and Bright Powers. It was in an age of prodigies, of miracles, of signs and wonders in the heavens, when the Earth rolled blindly through those same heavens with no hand to guide it, that the old witch feigned death and caused herself to be buried. She had long since given up her name to the darkness because of her hatred for the holy city of Ai Hanlo, and for all the folk of Randelcainé. And so absolute was that hatred that she had forgotten the cause of her quarrel; malice grew in her like a living, consuming thing, until she was but an instrument in its vast and unknowable design.

      No one mourned her passing. Priests were sent from The Guardian himself, the emperor of the country thereabout, to drive away what evil might linger over her corpse. Most citizens stayed in their houses and bolted their windows when the coffin was carried through the winding, narrow streets, down Ai Hanlo Mountain and through the Desert Gate. A very few looked out, and fewer still spoke, and a mere handful spoke against her, rejoicing in her demise. It had long been noted that this witch must have been a kindly old lady despite her dire occupation, for she had so few enemies among the living.

      She lay in the darkness, listening, remembering. She smiled.

      She noted the length of her journey, the incline of the way which banged her head against the inside of the coffin, the constant heaving and shaking as the bearers stumbled down a rocky hillside. As she expected, she was being taken to no cemetery within the city, but to a spot of unclean ground beyond its walls, away from any road, where those who drove refuse wagons through the streets at dawn were wont to dump their loads.

      When her revenge was complete, they would pay for what they thought to be their last insult.

      The grave was dug. She felt herself lowered into it, and then clods of dirt fell on the coffin lid with continuous thuds. A few incantations were muttered by the priests, and a reliquary containing a splinter of a bone of The Goddess was passed back and forth overhead. She could sense a tinge of its power, like centipedes scampering across her face, but she was resolute and did not stir.

      After a time there was silence. She waited, feeling in her mind the turning of the Earth, the rising and setting of the sun and moon, until she knew that the appointed hour had come. Then she called out the name of a certain thing that dwelt somewhere beneath her. It was not even a Dark Power—no splinter of the evil aspect of The Goddess this—but merely an echo, a stirring embodiment of some vileness which crawled underground. She spoke its name, and it came to her.

      The silence gave way to a sound like running water, but then it was more like the distant roaring of a furnace. The coffin shook. The earth around her trembled and grew hot.

      There followed a stifling, acrid pause, after which something was scraping against the wood on which she lay.

      The coffin bottom was pulled away in a series of furious yanks, and she was falling down, down, in a funnel of absolute darkness, but not alone. The burning, lightless presence was at her side.

      She came to rest in a grotto. Dimly glowing blue stones stood in a circle about an oily pool.

      Something crouched at the edge of that pool. In part its form suggested a massively muscled man, but the whole was nothing at all human. The lower half of the body was a riot of useless, misshapen limbs. The thing moved slowly, like a slug, its outline flickering all the while as if it were an illusory disguise the wearer was unsure of. Only the face was clearly outlined. Little bands of red fire glowed from every wrinkle and furrow in the creature’s flesh, and there were many.

      “I—have come—”

      “For the reasons mentioned when last you summoned me.” The voice was faint but clear, like a wind issuing up from the hidden depths of the Earth.

      “Yes, for those reasons,” the witch said, “and for the fulfilment of our covenant, as agreed aforetime.”

      “So be it then. Give me what is my due.”

      Without hesitation, using her long, sharp nails, she gouged out both her eyes. She only gasped briefly—”Ah!”—at the act, but she could not help but recoil as the payment was taken from her. Other hands touched hers in the semi-darkness, and she felt an intense pain, like fire but with less heat, as if acid had been poured over her outstretched hands.

      “Now go,” said the thing, “and all will be accomplished.”

      But before she could make a move the hands touched her ears, and the burning was inside her head. She could not even hear herself scream, but by the exertion of her lungs she knew that she was indeed screaming.

      In absolute darkness and silence and agony, she crawled on her knees and her ruined hands back up the long, sloping shaft down which she had been carried. At last, when she feared that even the power of her hatred would fail her, she touched the wooden bottom of the coffin, where it had been discarded among some stones in a bend in the tunnel. She dragged it with her the rest of the way until she came to the splintery remains of the coffin, itself. She turned this on its side, so she wouldn’t tumble out of it, and crawled back in. But the added weight dislodged it from its precarious position, and the whole mass, witch, coffin, and bottom slid downward a hundred feet or so in a shower of gravel until it came to rest in the bend in the tunnel. Satisfied, lying on her side, she edged the bottom over the opening as a kind of lid. Then she fumbled among her garments and drew out a little metal box. Within was a wafer. With delicate, desperate care, her fingers stiff with pain, she laid this wafer underneath her tongue.

      At last able to relax, she shut her eyelids over the bloody sockets and exhaled one last breath.

      Even as she did the change came over her. The effect sparkled brilliantly as it spread over her puckered cheeks and across her whole face, encompassing her head and racing down her body. She was turning into crystal. In scarcely a minute she was stiff and glittering inside her incongruous, ragged clothing, like some huddled sculptural grotesque wrought out of luminescent quartz.

      These things happened in the time of the death of The Goddess, when the Powers began to form, in the reign of The Guardian called Tharanodeth. They would not have been possible in a more ordered age.

      * * * *

      It was somewhat later in the reign of Tharanodeth the Good that a child was born in the holy city of Ai Hanlo, in the imperial nursery, no less. Perhaps it is inaccurate to say that the child was born, for no one saw the act, and there was no mother to be had.

      What actually happened was that a nurse came in one morning to feed the infant prince, whose fortuitous and much-prophesied birth had relieved much anxiety so late in The Guardian’s life, and found two babies in the jewel-studded cradle. One offspring meant

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