Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time Read Online Free PDF

before.
    I turned inward. Indeed, the girl’s soul was far beneath the earth. I had a sensation of sinking a long way in thick, muddy darkness before I had an impression of a hunched shape, like something carven out of rough, dirty stone, embedded in her.
    I began to draw the spirit out. Literally, I drew it. By a trick known only to healers, I was both deep inside the girl’s soul and in my own body. I was aware as my hands took up drawing paper and charcoal and began to sketch the image of the spirit. When I was a child I had always had an urge to draw things in the dirt, on walls, hides, scraps of paper, any thing, and my father always boxed my ears and told me not to waste my time. But when I began to draw things he had seen in his dreams, and things others saw in theirs, he understood my talent. Everything after that, even my apprenticeship to Agda, was a refinement of technique and nothing more.
    I knew what to do from much experience. As my hand moved over the paper, I wrestled with the thing inside the girl. Soon I saw it more clearly, a frog-like king clad in robes of living marble. He had long, webbed claws like a beast, but his face bespoke vast intelligence and age. I understood him to be a creature from some earlier age of the Earth, trying to return now that the Goddess was dead. His eyes seemed to speak to me, saying, “Why should I not have this girl, and walk beneath the sky again?”
    “You shall not have her,” I said in the language of the dream, and as I spoke, my hand completed the drawing. Then my body got to its feet, stood over the girl, and with a pair of tongs reached into her mouth, pulling out first my spirit, then the other. It was like flying up out of a mountain through a little hole in the top, into my own hand.
    “Pandiphar Nen,” said my wife, and with the sound I came into myself. I was whole and fully awake. The white mist and the things in it were gone. The task should have been over. The second spirit I’d extracted should have melted into the air now that I had captured its image.
    But the stone king was standing before us. Tamda screamed. It turned to stare into my eyes, and its gaze caught me as surely as any prey is ever charmed by a snake. I was helpless.
    “Dadar,” it said. “Know that I was placed here to bring this message to you from worlds beyond the world. I am sent by your creator. Know that you are a dadar , a wizard’s shadow and not a man, a hollow thing like a serpent’s skin filled with wind, pretending to be a serpent, deluding itself. The master shall make himself known shortly, and then you shall be sent on the task for which he made you, his dadar.”
    Then, howling, the creature went through the closed door of the house like a battering ram, scattering wood and screaming at the villagers outside.
    I was in a daze, only half aware of anything.
    “Let us get away from here,” Tamda was saying. “They’ll think we’re witches. Hurry, before they regain their courage. Forget about the payment.”
    “I don’t understand,” was all 1 could say. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
    She gathered our things and bundled me into the back of the wagon. No one interfered as she drove away from the village.
    * * * *
    The wagon rattled around me. Sunlight burned through the canvas cover. I lay in the stuffy heat, thinking.
    The problem, and the reason I felt so much dread, was that I did understand what had happened. My spotty education was more than enough to include everything I needed to know. Some wizard had directed me, his dadar, into that village for his own ends. I knew full well what a dadar was. The world has never been thick with them, but they have been around since the very beginning. They are projections, like a shadow cast by a man standing before a campfire at night, but somehow the shadow is given flesh and breath and a semblance of consciousness. Hamdo, the First Man, made one. He had shaped with his hands the egg from which all