Uluye raised her head. The hammer was still balanced in her hands, and though its weight must have been prodigious, she held it as though it were nothing. Again she smiled; again the rictus.
“Go, candidate.” Her voice rang richly over the heads of the throng. “Go down from this world and go out from this world, and go you to the domain of the Ancestral Lady. The testing is come and the time is come.”
She set the hammer aside, stepped down from the plinth and moved with lithe grace toward the motionless trio at the square’s center. Her hand reached out and touched Yima’s mask, first on the brow, then on the lips, last at the throat.
“In the Ancestral Lady’s name, I set upon you my blessing, and in the Ancestral Lady’s name, I set upon you the seal of protection. And I charge these servants to conduct you with faith and with courage to your ordeal. Fear not the dark and fear not the silence: fear not the realm of the dead, for that is our Lady’s realm, and our Lady will be your guiding light.”
At a gesture from Uluye, two acolytes came forward. Each carried a lit taper; with due solemnity they put them into the hands of Indigo and Shalune. As they backed away, fear and wonder and envy mingling in their eyes, Uluye stepped aside and indicated the Well’s black maw.
“Go in hope, my chosen daughter,” she said, so softly that only those at the forefront of the throng could hear her. “And return in triumph!”
Shalune moved to stand in front of Yima; Indigo took her place behind. They started forward, and the horns blared out once more, the deep, sonorous booming echoed by shrill fanfares, while the drums’rolled a wild crescendo. The noise dinned through Indigo’s head; she saw Shalune step down, saw Yima follow, then with a clutching and clenching of fearful excitement that threatened to suffocate the air from her lungs and throat, she took the last pace forward and began to descend into the engulfing dark.
The sudden renewed clamor of the horns and drums brought Grimya running out to the ledge once more. Craning up, she could see the fringes of a bright glow on the cliff top, and she guessed that the priestesses were reaching the climax of their ceremony. Instinctively, her telepathic senses tried to make contact with Indigo’s mind, but what she found was so chaotically tangled with images of the ritual that she could make no sense of it, and she couldn’t break through the fragmented blur of color and noise.
The horns and drums continued, a crescendo now, and aware that she could learn nothing from staring uselessly up toward the temple, Grimya made to withdraw back into the cave. What made her pause and glance down before ducking past the curtain, she would never know, but she did pause, and she did look, and what she saw stopped her in her tracks.
Someone had emerged from the bluff and was moving across the sands of the arena. For an instant Grimya thought it was a hushu, and her hackles rose as a snarl formed involuntarily in her throat. But then the snarl died stillborn as she realized that the figure’s movements were too natural and too controlled to be those of a mindless zombie. One of the children, too young for the rite? No, she was too tall. And there was something familiar in the way she walked….
The figure was quickening its pace, heading not for the lake as Grimya had first thought, but for the path that led around the shore and into the forest. With the moon no more than the thinnest of slivers, only starlight and a dim reflection from the temple illuminated the arena. Grimya’s night vision was far more acute than that of any human, but even she could see nothing clearly … until, just before reaching the path, the girl paused and looked back. For perhaps the space of two heartbeats, her face was turned up toward the ziggurat—and Grimya’s body and mind froze. She tried to tell herself that it was impossible to be sure, that she couldn’t make such a judgment from this distance and in this light.
But in her heart she had no doubt. The girl far below her, now turning again and running swiftly, urgently, away in the direction of the forest, was Yima.
•CHAPTER•XIV•
“There’s a light!”
Shalune’s voice hissed so suddenly and unexpectedly that Indigo started and almost lost her footing. The veil she wore blurred her vision, and the glimmer given off by the tapers they carried was feeble and all but useless, but she could just make out Shalune’s dim shape ahead and below her, and the figure of Yima, distorted by the mask, between them. Shalune had halted, and one shadowy arm pointed downward.
Since the last glare of torchlight from the outside world had faded behind them—minutes ago? Hours ago?—Indigo had willed herself to concentrate on anything but the mechanics of this bizarre journey. She had tried to ignore the fact that the spiraling stairway had no balustrade, no rail, but was simply a flight of open steps winding around and down the vertical shaft. She had tried to ignore the knowledge that they must by now be far, far below the lowest levels of the citadel, and ignore all speculations about the shaft’s depth, refusing to dwell on the fact that when her foot had dislodged a piece of loose stone and sent it plummeting into the darkness, she hadn’t heard it strike the bottom. She simply continued on behind Shalune and Yima, step after uneven step, her shoulder pressed against the shaft wall and her gaze fixed unswervingly on the taper in her hand.
Now, though, Shalune’s sharp words snapped the mesmeric spell that the climb had begun to impose. Indigo felt momentarily disoriented, as though she’d been abruptly awakened from a sound sleep. Though they weren’t forbidden to speak on this journey, no one had found the need for words until now … or perhaps, Indigo thought, none of them had quite had the courage to break the silence.
Cautiously she leaned out from the wall to look. There was, indeed, light—faint and colorless, but definite—filtering up from somewhere far below. It created the illusion of a distant, misty pool in the Well’s depths, and Indigo quickly leaned back again, suppressing a vertiginous shudder.
The tapers created faint reflections in Shalune’s black-ringed eyes as she turned to look back. “There’s heat rising from below, too,” she said in a whisper. “I believe we must be close to the foot of the shaft.”
Indigo was too preoccupied to notice that there was a peculiarly strained note in her voice, and even if it had registered, she would have attributed it to nothing more than justifiable nervousness. They moved on, and she too began to feel the warmth, like a moist breath wafting through the Well. A fetid, decaying smell made her nostrils curl, and as they drew closer to the source of the light and as visibility slowly increased, she saw that the rock wall was gleaming with a faint, wet phosphorescence.
Yima had begun to tremble. The ornaments that hung about her grotesque mdsk clinked and rattled together, and the colored ribbons of her cloak rippled as her shoulders shook beneath them. Indigo reached forward to lay a hand lightly on her arm, silently trying to reassure her. It wasn’t Yima alone who was afraid. Shalune, too, was shivering; she slowed her pace as though suddenly afraid to go on, then abruptly stopped moving altogether. Still touching Yima’s arm, Indigo whispered, “Shalune? Shalune, what is it, what’s wrong?”
The fat women shook her head vigorously. “Nothing. I— uhh!”
The truncated hiss made Indigo’s heart skip painfully; as the shock receded, she looked down and saw what had so startled—or frightened—her companion.
Ten feet below them the shaft ended. And there, where the stairs’ final spiral curved away, was a low and narrow door, little more than a hole in the rock face, with utter darkness beyond.
This time when Shalune looked back, the sourceless light made her painted face ghastly beneath its veil, and the fear emanating from her was like a psychic shock wave. Yima whimpered, an ugly, strangled sound, and Indigo gripped the girl’s arm more tightly, trying to convey a confidence that suddenly she didn’t feel.
“Shalune!” she whispered again. Shalune, however, didn’t answer her. She’d forced herself to move on again, but she was muttering, her hands clenching and unclenching with quick and violent movements. She was praying, Indigo realized. And she was terrified almost b
eyond control.
At last Shalune stumbled down the last three steps, Yima behind her and Indigo in their wake. They stood together on a strangely and unnaturally smooth rock floor on which a thin sheen of water glimmered. The water was warm to their bare feet but felt viscous; more like oil, Indigo thought as her toes curled in faint revulsion. Before them, the dark hole gaped like a silent mouth. It was unmarked, unadorned, but there was no doubt that this was the way they must go. There was no other choice.
Shalune hung back, reluctant even to look, and Indigo asked quietly, “Shall I be first?”
Expression was hard to interpret under the veil and the paint, but she thought that Shalune flicked her a glance of intense gratitude before nodding wordlessly. Indigo drew breath. She still had her taper, and she dropped to a crouch before the hole’s maw, thrust her arm into the darkness and peered through.
It wasn’t the narrow tunnel that she’d feared. Instead of reflecting closely on rock, the taper’s small glow diffused into emptiness, suggesting that there must be a wider space beyond the gap. Beckoning encouragement to her companions, Indigo eased herself into the doorway. She could just get through without dropping to hands and knees, and she emerged into an unlit space that—though it was impossible to be sure—felt large enough for her to at least stand upright. Cautiously, she rose. Her head didn’t strike the roof, and when she extended her arms before her and to both sides, she touched nothing. The air was hotter and closer here, the smell stronger.
Indigo turned carefully and called out, “It’s all right. I’m through, and there’s space enough for us all.”
There was some urgent whispering on the far side of the hole, and a long pause. Then at last Yima appeared. The extra height the mask gave her forced her to crawl, and Indigo crouched to help her through as the light of the taper dimly illuminated the girl’s struggling figure. Shalune followed, crouching as Indigo had done, and the three of them stood, a little breathless, taking in their new surroundings.
There was little to assimilate. Shalune’s taper had been extinguished as she came through the gap, and though Indigo tried to light it again from her own, it refused to glow back into life. The remaining taper gave so little light as to be all but useless; and though they waited, hoping that their eyes might grow accustomed to the dark, the Stygian gloom remained impenetrable.
“Yima, hold my hand,” Indigo said at last. Her voice fell away flatly into emptiness. “And Shalune, take Yima’s other hand. We daren’t risk becoming separated.”
Shalune muttered something that sounded like “Lady, help our souls,” and Indigo felt Yima’s fingers entwine tightly with her own. In the last few minutes it seemed that the emphasis of leadership had shifted; Shalune had lost confidence and courage, and by unspoken agreement, the mantle of seniority now rested on Indigo’s shoulders. She wasn’t sure that she welcomed the burden, but someone had to take the responsibility or their quest would founder.
She didn’t want to speak again, for the timbre of a human voice in this unknown place had a quality that chilled her to the core. All the same, she forced herself to say what must be said.
“We’ll move forward, but very slowly. We’ve no way of knowing what lies ahead. I’ll hold the taper at arm’s length and pray that it’s enough to show us any pitfalls in good time.”
Shalune murmured assent; Yima said nothing. Slowly, and with the utmost caution, Indigo slid her foot forward. The floor, like the floor of the shaft itself, seemed level, and the taper gave some little light, but the veil hampered her and she would have thrown it back but for the memory of Uluye’s warning that to venture into the Ancestral Lady’s realm with their faces uncovered would bring disaster. Only the dead, Uluye had told her, might enter in such a way, and whatever her feelings toward Uluye, Indigo wasn’t about to risk flouting the stricture.
At a snail’s pace they moved on. After perhaps five yards or so, they came to realize that they were in a tunnel, high-roofed and wide enough to allow them to stand side by side. By contrast to the oddly smooth floor, the walls were rough and unfinished, and embedded with small, sharp-edged fragments that Indigo guessed might be quartz. Shalune, who was feeling her way along the wall to maintain some sense of orientation, swore suddenly and nursed a cut finger; Indigo held the taper to look at the wound, and Shalune said with feeling: “Great Lady, if we only had more light!”
“Little chance of that.” Indigo examined the finger closely. “It’s bleeding slightly, but it’s only a graze. I think you should—” and she stopped, staring at the wall beyond.
Shalune frowned and started to say, “What—?” but Indigo had turned from her and was holding the taper close to the wall’s surface. Then Shalune saw what Indigo had seen, and she choked her exclamation back to a throaty gasp.
Embedded in the wall was a human skull. Its cavities were almost filled with sand and rubble, but enough of it protruded to make the thing unmistakably recognizable. Beneath the sockets of eyes and nose, a row of rotting teeth grinned maniacally at them, and on the broken and ragged hinge of the jaw, a small, bright-scarlet smear showed where Shalune had cut herself.
“Great Mother …” Indigo stared in horrified fascination. As she moved the taper from side to side, she saw that there were more bones: the long, smooth outlines of a femur, a symmetrical curve of ribs, the delicate but crumbling imprint of hands—dozens of bones, hundreds of them, all human, all jumbled together in a macabre confusion, fused into the tunnel’s wall. A child’s cranium leered emptily at her feet. A desiccated hip joint thrust toward her at eye level. And when she moved forward, there were more, and yet more, and yet more.
Behind her, Shalune made another choking sound. “This is …” she said, then gagged, collected herself, tried again. “We’re in the Lady’s catacombs … oh, sweet life, preserve us, we’re in the Lady’s catacombs!”
Indigo took hold of her wrist and squeezed it hard. Perhaps she too should have been frightened by the grim discovery, but somehow such a reaction was beyond her. She felt no trepidation, no terror, only a faint but deep-rooted sense of excitement as she realized that they were indisputably following the right path.
Shalune’s arm was quaking in her grasp, and the fat woman had begun to mutter. “All of them … they all come here, they all end here, all the dead, all those she doesn’t cast out—”
“Shalune!” Indigo’s sharp reprimand stopped the priestess’s slide toward hysteria and silenced her. They stared at each other in the dimness, and Indigo said, “Shalune, we mustn’t lose our nerve. This … this catacomb, as you call it, may be a macabre and unpleasant place, but the bones of the dead can’t harm us. We must go on, as we pledged. We owe it to Yima.”
Shalune glanced apprehensively in Yima’s direction and saw the girl standing rigid beside her. Either Yima was unaffected by their gruesome surroundings or—far more likely, Indigo thought—fear had reduced her to passive helplessness. Shalune licked her lips and nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, we … must go on.”
“Take hold of Yima’s hand again.” Indigo released Shalune’s wrist and moved to resume her place at the head of the trio. “Don’t touch the wall; don’t even think about what’s there. Watch the taper and walk slowly forward.”
They resumed their slow, careful progress. Shalune seemed calmer now, but the gruesome find had taken its toll on her courage—and, Indigo was honest enough to acknowledge, on her own as well. It wasn’t the nature of what they had found that had shaken her confidence, though that in itself was unpleasant enough; it was the ramifications. The thought that among those myriad fleshless remains there might be, might just be, the bones of the man she loved….
No. She mustn’t think about that, mustn’t even consider it a possibility. It wasn ‘t possible, for Fenran wasn’t dead. What she had seen by the lake on Ancestors Night had been an illusion, for the Ancestral Lady was a trickster, nothing more. A player of games, a manipulator of minds. A demon. Indigo had learned much a
bout the ways of demons, and she should know better by now than to be intimidated by the mere trappings of their craft.
Very well, demon, she thought. If that was your first ploy, it hasn ‘t intimidated me as you might have hoped. What do you have in store now?
There was no answering voice in her mind, no abrupt shift of consciousness to the trance state in which the Ancestral Lady had made her desires known. There was just the taper’s pale glow in the darkness, just the soft sound of their padding feet and the quick susurrus of their breathing against the silence. For now, the Ancestral Lady was keeping her own counsel, and she offered no clue as to what they might find at their journey’s end.
But Indigo believed that they wouldn’t have much longer to wait….
When the glimmer of light showed ahead, it seemed at first to Indigo that it must be an illusion. Her gaze had been unswervingly fixed on the taper in her hand for so long that her eyes had difficulty in adjusting to the change; afterimages of the taper’s pinpoint danced before her when she tried to refocus, and it was only when Yima tugged on her hand and pulled her to a halt that she realized she wasn’t deluded.
Ahead of them, the tunnel came to an end. The thin, cold light flowed up from the floor to show a solid wall barring their way, and Yima whimpered and turned aside as she saw the grisly mosaic of human remains illuminated by the glow. Indigo, however, was gazing at the floor. There, where the tunnel ended, was the source of the light: a rectangular trap door set into the floor, which glowed as though it were made of some phosphorescent material. Loosing her hold on Yima’s fingers, Indigo walked forward to the strange door. There was a ring set at one side; crouching, she grasped it and pulled. The door opened easily, and by the light reflecting from its underside, she saw a flight of wide, shallow stairs leading downward into blackness.
Softly she called out to Shalune. The fat woman came forward very reluctantly; she stopped two feet from the edge and peered down.
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