Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar

by Louise Cooper - Indigo 06

  Inuss howled in terror and covered her face with her hands. Shalune started to her feet, her arms outstretched imploringly. “Lady, I beg you—”

  “Silence!” Echoes ricocheted around the cavern. “You, who have connived with a traitor, do you dare to speak? Do you think me ignorant of your deeds? Ah, Shalune my servant, I had expected better from you.”

  “No!” Shalune cried. “Lady, we are not traitors! We want only what’s best, what’s right—”

  “Right?” Novae flared in the depths of the Ancestral Lady’s eyes. “Who are you to judge what is right, Shalune? You have gone against the will of your High Priestess, who is my chosen servant. You have cheated her—and thus you have cheated me. Answer me, Shalune—who sanctions what you shall do in serving your goddess? Who is your goddess’s avatar in the world of mortals?”

  Shalune’s jaw worked spasmodically. “Ul… Uluye … is your chosen avatar.”

  “And in whose name does Uluye speak? Who judges what is right, Shalune? Who?”

  “Y … you, my Lady. You only.”

  “Yes, Shalune; I judge. Do you accept my judgment?”

  Shalune’s face was a study in agonized, adoring tragedy. She truly loved this monstrous being, Indigo realized; and though the love had its roots in terror, it was nonetheless as real as the love of a child for its mother, a woman for her lover, a foolish and helpless dog for a hard master who one day, one day, might grant unutterable joy by condescending to be kind.

  “I accept your judgment, sweet Lady,” Shalune said, and her voice broke on the last syllable. “I am yours. We are yours. Whatever your will, we shall obey.”

  For what seemed like an eternity, there was silence. Indigo wanted to intervene, but she didn’t know what she could say or what she could do; a single word at the wrong moment or in the wrong place might only make matters worse. Shalune and Inuss stood motionless. Inuss, pathetic now, still stood waist-deep in the lake, her elaborate robe clinging wetly about her. The Ancestral Lady gazed at them both, her eyes hard and her face unreadable. Then she spoke. Her voice had lost its brief edge of emotion and was cold once more.

  “I judge you an unworthy sponsor, Shalune, for you have brought me a postulant who is not of your High Priestess’s choosing. You have defied your High Priestess’s will, and in so doing, you have defied me.” She looked down. “As for you, Inuss, you have conspired with your mentor in disobedience and deceit. I do not give my blessing to such as you. You are fit neither to return to your own realm, nor to dwell within mine.”

  A pause, during which Indigo saw Shalune’s eyes grow round and blank with horror. Then the Ancestral Lady said with dire finality: “You know in your hearts that you are guilty. And you know the penalty for what you have done. Your souls are forfeit to me. And I name you among the lifeless, yet deathless ones. I name you hushu.”

  •CHAPTER•XVI•

  “No! You demon, you evil hellspawn, you can’t do that”

  Indigo’s scream echoed through the huge cavern, sending a shock wave of echoes shouting and clashing in the gloom. The Ancestral Lady’s head flicked around; she gave Indigo, one disinterested glance—and a tremendous force plucked Indigo off her feet and hurled her backward. She hit the wall and crashed to the floor, pain hammering through her and a scarlet mist flaring blindingly in her brain. Her mouth opened, but she had no breath in her lungs with which to scream again or to even make the smallest sound; all she could do was to sprawl on the hard rock, battling to hold her spinning senses together, and watch as a horror unfolded that she could do nothing to avert.

  Inuss was wailing on a high, shrill note. She turned about clumsily and made a frantic bid to flounder back toward the shore, but before she had taken two paces, the Lady tossed the mask aside, and as it hit the water with a hollow splash, she grasped hold of Inuss’s hair. The wail became a panic-stricken shriek; Inuss struggled, but she was drawn back inexorably and raised up until her feet cleared the water. Her eyes, bulging in their sockets now, met the Lady’s implacable stare—and suddenly she ceased to fight. In the space of a moment, the will to resist left her, and she simply hung limp from the dark figure’s grasp, her mouth slack as her cries died away into silence.

  The Lady’s eyes flared; she said one word.

  “Obey.”

  There was a moment’s stillness; then a slight tremor ran through Inuss’s body, and her eyes glazed as intelligence, consciousness and life fled from her. It was simple, swift, devastating. The Ancestral Lady opened her hands and Inuss’s corpse dropped into the water. There was a splash, the glitter of fracturing reflections, and for a few moments after the sounds faded, the silence was absolute. Two feet from the boat’s side, Inuss floated. Her hair and her ribboned robe swirled around her like many-colored strands of waterweed; ripples spread out in gentle circles from her body, and her eyes stared up calmly at the cave’s roof; the expression on her face was, obscenely, utterly peaceful.

  The Ancestral Lady didn’t spare her so much as a glance. Her eyes had focused on Shalune, and the unhuman gaze held the priestess transfixed.

  “Shalune,” she said. “Come to me. Come.”

  From where she still sprawled by the cavern wall, Indigo watched in a state of frozen, silent helplessness. She had witnessed the atrocity of Inuss’s murder—there was no other word for it—through a daze of shock and pain, but her mind, still floundering in the aftermath of the Lady’s violence toward her, couldn’t accept that it had happened. Physically as well as mentally stunned, she had convinced herself that this was some mad dream, and she couldn’t unravel the skeins of nightmare frdm the harsher threads of truth.

  Passive, uncomprehending, Indigo watched Shalune start forward across the floor. There was terror in the fat woman’s eyes, yet her face was fixed in that same look of awful adoration. She knew what awaited her, but no power on earth could have persuaded her to defy her goddess. She had accepted her fate as right and just, and though she might not go gladly, she went without question and without a murmur of protest. Somewhere inside, Indigo was silently crying: Shalune! Shalune, don’t! It’s a lie, it’s a fraud, don’t go to her! But somehow her protest didn’t seem to have any meaning. To call out with her physical voice, or even to try to stagger to her feet, would be pointless; the ability was beyond her. This wasn’t happening, it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

  As if sensing what was in Indigo’s mind, Shalune turned to gaze at her. A look of ineffable sadness and sweetness had transformed her coarse and heavy features, as though the years had been stripped from her and she had become a child again, innocent, untrammeled, free of all taint. There wasn’t a spark of intelligence in the blank pits of her eyes.

  Still incapable of comprehending, Indigo watched the fat woman step into the lake. Shalune waded toward the boat, ignoring the floating corpse of Inuss, then stopped within hand’s reach of the gunwale. The water lapped at her breasts; she looked up at the Ancestral Lady but didn’t speak.

  The Lady gazed down. “Shalune, are you my servant?”

  Shalune’s voice was barely recognizable; here, too, the helpless child had taken control. “I am, Lady.”

  “Have you wronged me?”

  A pause. Then: “I… have wronged you.”

  The gaunt figure nodded. “Tell me the punishment for such transgression, Shalune.”

  The second pause was longer. Shalune seemed to be struggling with herself, striving not to speak. But at last the words came.

  “The punishment is … death.”

  The Lady inclined her head. “Obey,” she said, gently. Shalune bowed her head; again there was a moment’s stillness, again the faint tremor. Indigo saw Shalune’s body slip into the water with a quiet splash as life fled from her, but it meant nothing. The lake subsided; silence fell again.

  The Ancestral Lady’s emotionless voice said, “Do you understand a little more now, Indigo?”

  There in the dark lake beside Inuss, her hands clasped on her breast as though in a gesture
of piety, Shalune’s body rose and fell, rose and fell, on the water’s slight swell. Indigo spoke, her voice sounding peculiarly detached and dreamlike in her own ears. “They look so … peaceful.”

  “Peaceful?” There was thin contempt in the Ancestral Lady’s tone, and it made a sudden small breach in the barrier that Indigo’s mind had built around itself. “No, I don’t think so. They have only the reward they have earned, no more and no less.” She turned fractionally and looked back toward the lake’s far reaches, invisible in the dark. “They may leave now,” she said, and gestured carelessly with one hand.

  A new ripple spread to the lake’s edge, and the two corpses began to move. Slowly, but surely, with no visible force to propel them, they turned about until they were perfectly aligned together, then started to drift away, past the boat, beyond it, out toward the deeper regions of the lake. An unseen current caught and snared them; they twisted suddenly on an eddy, then gained speed and, side by side, floated away into the blackness and vanished in the direction of the far, invisible shore.

  The boat rocked slightly as the Ancestral Lady turned again. She picked up her discarded oar, and her eyes, with their white-hot corona, focused upon Indigo.

  “Now,” she said, “what is to be done with you?”

  Indigo blinked, then frowned. For a moment her mind continued to flounder midway between the trancelike state in which it had been locked and the dawning shock of reality. Then the barrier cracked, and crumbled. Dream fled, and the full impact of what had happened hit her like a tidal wave.

  “Oh, no…” Her voice was soft, but it carried the seeds of the most violent rage she had ever known. “Oh, no…. You demon, you murdering monstrosity!” Her body began to shake; she couldn’t control it, didn’t try. And suddenly she screamed with all the shrill fury bursting within her: “They were innocent of any crime!”

  The Ancestral Lady’s dead-white face was implacable. “Who are you, that you count yourself fit to judge innocence?” she asked indifferently. “You are no better than the ones you pretend to champion. You are all my servants, and in the end you must all come to me.”

  “To a demon!” Indigo spat. “I think not, Lady! And I tell you now, I am no servant of yours, and never will be.”

  The Ancestral Lady smiled an old, weary smile. “So you have said before, Indigo, and you are wrong now, as you were wrong then. Haven’t you learned that lesson yet, my oracle?”

  The silver-fringed eyes flared momentarily, and as the Lady uttered the word oracle, Indigo’s mind seemed to twist in on itself. Darkness and silence, the cloying smell of incense. Someone breathing; a steady hush-hush of sound. A figure moving in the dimness, desperately, horribly familiar. And a voice inside her head said, “I am here….”

  It was the trance dream again, the dream into which she had been plunged at the lakeside ceremony on Ancestors Night. At the time, it had been wiped from her memory, but now it came back with terrible clarity and she remembered all that the voice in the darkness had said to her.

  “No!” She shook her head violently, flinging the images away. “I am not your oracle!”

  “But you are. I made you so; I chose you, and I have spoken through you.”

  “Not at my behest!” Indigo said searingly.

  “Do you think not?” the Ancestral Lady replied. “Then it seems that still you don’t know yourself. A pity. I had thought you would learn greater wisdom in all your years of wandering, but it seems that the old flaw is still there.”

  On the verge of a further furious rebuttal, Indigo suddenly stopped, tensing. “What do you mean?” she demanded. “What flaw?”

  “The flaw of self-delusion, among others.” The Lady shrugged her narrow shoulders. “You came here to seek a demon, but you haven’t the wisdom to know its name or its nature. Now something else has diverted you from your search, and that in its turn has brought you to me. It was inevitable.” She looked up. “I wonder, will you recognize your demon when you find it—or perhaps I should say, when it finds you? For if you do not, I think that all your brave words will be of little value to you, for you will be enslaved to me as surely as your luckless companions were enslaved.”

  “Oh, no.” Indigo smiled grimly. “You’ve made a mistake, Lady. You can’t kill me. For good or for ill, I’m not capable of dying—and if you were what you claim to be, you’d know that as well as I do.”

  “Who speaks of dying?” The Ancestral Lady’s dark eyebrows rose faintly. “No one needs to meet death in order to serve me.” She paused, her expression suddenly thoughtful. “Though what, I wonder, is the difference between being incapable of dying and being forbidden to die?”

  Indigo’s lip twisted. “Don’t waste your riddles on me, madam! The Earth Mother’s power is the only power to which I am bound, and She decrees my fate, not you.”

  “Ah,” the Lady said, “but if you serve the Earth Mother, Indigo, then you also serve me. Don’t you yet realize that? Are you so very set on following the wrong road that you still can’t recognize the truth when it confronts you?”

  “I know the truth,” Indigo said, savagery in her voice.

  “I think not.” The Lady turned her head to look down at the lake’s black surface, and her gaze traveled slowly to the soft edge of the darkness that had taken Shalune and Inuss.

  “I didn’t kill your friends,” she said. “I merely claimed what they had already forfeited. I do not take life, Indigo; that isn’t my way and it holds no interest for me. Their killer was the demon you came here to seek.”

  Indigo stared at her. Inwardly, she reached for the rage that had driven her—but it was no longer there. Her fury had gone without her knowing it, like a cutpurse slipping away from his victim, and in its place, subtle as yet, but growing stronger with every moment, was a sense of acute uncertainty and consternation.

  Suddenly and unaccountably defensive, she said sharply: “Don’t try to deceive me with your pretenses. I know what you are.”

  The Ancestral Lady shook her head and uttered a sound that might have been taken for a sigh. “Still you persist in your mistake …” she said wearily; then her terrible eyes focused intently on Indigo’s face. “I am not your demon. But I know what your demon is. And I don’t think that you are capable of conquering it.”

  Sweat had broken out on Indigo’s forehead, but before her lips could form a protest, the Lady went on.

  “The demon has already claimed one victory,” she said. “That die was cast when your friends accepted their fate.”.

  Indigo stared back at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Only that if you had known the demon’s name, it is possible that your companions might not have died.‘’ Again the cold little shrug. ”It hardly matters. They would have come to me anyway, in time.“

  “Are you telling me that I might have saved them?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

  Indigo’s teeth clenched. “That is a vile lie! What could I have done? You murdered them, and I couldn’t stop you.”

  The Lady sighed. “Think what you please. It is nothing to me.” She picked up the long oar and with a gesture that was almost listless, swung it over the boat’s stern. Then, without another glance for Indigo, she turned away. Water splashed faintly; the boat began to move.

  Indigo’s throat felt as though she’d swallowed glass. “Where are you going?”

  The Ancestral Lady paused and looked back. “To do my work. To patrol my realm. What more have we to say to each other?”

  “You mean to leave me here on this shore?”

  “You are free to stay or go as you wish.” The boat’s movement ceased, and the Lady leaned on the oar, regarding Indigo without a flicker of expression. “Whichever choice you make, I have no doubt that the thing you are seeking will find you in time.”

  So saying, she turned away, and the heavy mantle of her hair swung as she began to ply the oar once more. The boat had traveled some ten yards or more, and the thick curtain of darkness was b
eginning to encroach upon it when Indigo called out in a voice sharp with tension.

  “Wait!”

  The oar stopped sculling; the boat slowed again. Icy pinpoints of light showed in the gloom as the Ancestral Lady looked over her shoulder.

  Indigo said: “You claim that my demon will find me in good time, no matter what I do.”

  A nod, nothing more.

  “I have no wish to wait for it. I mean to seek it out. How best might I do that?”

  There was a long pause while the Ancestral Lady appeared to be considering this. At last she spoke.

  “You could come with me, Indigo. If, that is, you have the courage.”

  “I think, madam, that I’m courageous enough,” Indigo said acidly.

  “You may be.” The black lips curved with faint languor. “Although what you might find should you choose to journey in my company would, perhaps, try you even beyond your ability to endure.”

  Though the Lady spoke with the same cold disinterest that tainted all of her words, Indigo knew that she was issuing a clear challenge. She felt an angry instinct to reject it and refuse to be manipulated; but then she paused, remembering the impulse that had prompted her to speak out in the first place. She knew she might well be making a mistake that would cost her dearly. But she had to follow it, and the Ancestral Lady’s mockingly cryptic words were an additional goad.

  There was more to this than the matter of the demon. There was Fenran, and die doubts that the vision by the lakeside had implanted in her mind. She had to face the question that haunted her. She couldn’t leave it unresolved, and the Ancestral Lady alone could provide her with an answer. If she turned away now and retraced her steps back through the catacomb, back through the Well, her journey unfinished and her quest unfulfilled, she would never know a moment’s peace from now on. If this coldhearted creature offered to show her the way, she must take it, and meet the challenge.

  She said: “Very well, madam, I accept your invitation. Prove your claim, if you can. Take me with you—I’m not afraid.”