Free Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time by Darrell Schweitzer

got run over by a cart that way once. Then, one night, when I was eleven—my mother had died by then—I suddenly found myself in that other place as I was, wearing my night tunic. It was not like a dream at all. All around me, all around the city of fire, the ground was smooth and hard and cold, like glass. I was barefoot and it was like walking on ice. My feet stuck to it. I could feel the air blowing against my legs. There was a little wind and it blew from behind me, toward the city, stirring up clouds of sparkling black dust. I got so close that time that I could almost reach out and touch the walls. They were not flames, but a kind of glass, and faintly warm. The tops of the towers were so high that I could not see them above me. I looked up and saw them disappearing into the sky, and I noticed that all the stars were out of place. They didn’t make any of the usual patterns. Then the sun rose suddenly, blinding me, and the city was gone, and I stumbled into the branches of a soft hair-needle tree. When I could see again, I found myself in a forest. There were men crashing through the bushes all around me. The whole village had come to search for me. They were glad to find me. But my father was angry. He dragged me home by the ear. Then he said I was stupid and useless and he threw me out of the house. Later, bandits caught me and sold me as a slave.”
    “So your dreams have not done you much good, have they?”
    “No, Master.”
    “Do you know what they are?”
    “No, Master.”
    “I have an idea,” said Emdo Wesa. “I think they are manifestations of the Goddess, the most powerful to have touched anyone in many years. They are echoes in a cave from the shout of her passing.”
    All along, the boy had merely recited the tale of his life as if it were an abstract thing about people who had lived long ago. But suddenly there was a frightened tone in his voice. He had been shocked into the present.
    “But why me? I’m nobody important. Why should it come to me? I don’t want it.”
    “Tamliade, listen. When I was your age—and that was long and long ago—I had a master, by which I mean a teacher, who told me that I was filled up with magic, even as you are filled with dreams, that this magic whirled inside me like a storm building in fury. I was frightened. I said what you have said: Why me? And he told me that there is no why. When a river cuts a new channel, he said, the water flows through. Does the part of the bank which gave way ask, Why me? Why not six yards further downstream? No, the thing merely happens. Thus it did not matter that I was frightened. That affected nothing. My teacher next told me that I would be a great magician one day, greater than he. I was no longer frightened. I was proud. So he told me the story of Nordec Ta Haincé, the great singer who lost his songs on account of pride and wandered the world in despair for three hundred years, kept alive by his own emptiness, searching for an echo of his own voice. And hearing that I was humbled. Finally, my teacher laughed, and said it was a silly story, and I was silly to believe it. Nordec Ta Haincé would have lost his songs at the same time whether he was proud or humble, since it was his destiny to do so, pre-ordained as all things are. This was a very difficult lesson, but when I came to understand it, I knew it to be a great one. There is no why .”
    Once more the boy sat passively, silent. Emdo Wesa sat beside him, also silent. Then he got out of the wagon, made a fire in the alleyway, and set a pot of tea on it.
    After a while, Tamliade looked out, still wrapped in the blanket.
    “What are you doing, Master?”
    The magician handed him a steaming cup.
    “Drink this. It will make you sleep. When you wake you will be healed and the pain will be gone.”
    Tamliade hesitated, then drank slowly.
    Emdo Wesa took him in his arms, asleep, wrapped in the blanket, to a tailor shop and laid him out on the counter. The tailor gaped in