Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar

by Louise Cooper - Indigo 06

  The Ancestral Lady inclined her head. “As you like. It’s of no moment to me.”

  “It seems that little is of any moment or interest to you,” Indigo replied with irony. “So I presume that it’ll make no difference to you whether my courage prevails or falters; and if I can’t anticipate your help, at least I needn’t anticipate your hindrance.”

  The Lady shrugged for the third time. “As you say.” Her wrists twisted, stirring the oar, and, rocking a little, the boat began to drift back toward the shore. The sound as the prow tapped against the rock seemed preternaturally loud, and the Lady held out one hand. Indigo moved forward, grasped the proffered fingers and stepped over the gunwale. For a moment their eyes met, and the Lady regarded her with cool assessment.

  “Well, now,” she said. “We shall see….”

  She released Indigo’s hand, took the oar once more. Slowly the boat went about; then, with barely a disturbance on the surface of the water, it moved off from the empty shore and away into darkness.

  On the cliff top, Grimya and Uluye had reached an uneasy truce. For several hours the wolf had roamed the citadel and the lakeside, unable to rest, unable to think of anything but Indigo and the dangers she might be facing. Several times a sudden disturbance in the lake had sent her running to the shore to peer across the water in the starlit darkness. Rationally, she didn’t know what she could have expected to see, but hope was a powerful goad. Each time, though, there was nothing, and she returned to her restless pacing, unsatisfied and unhappy, until at last, acknowledging that this could achieve nothing, she climbed the long zigzag of stairs to the top of the bluff.

  The great brazier was still alight, its bowl glowing sullenly, and the smell of incense hung heavy on the air. Uluye sat on the oracle’s carved throne, her shoulders hunched in a way that gave her the look of a giant preying bird or insect, her eyes moody and smoldering with anger as she stared out across the lake toward the forest. Hearing Grimya’s claws on the stone square, she turned her head, and her mouth set in an ugly line. She didn’t speak, but she made as though to rise from the chair and clenched her fist in a threatening gesture. Grimya flattened her ears and showed her fangs; Uluye paused.

  “I will st…ay,” Grimya said throatily, the words blurring with a growl deep in her throat. “If you trrry to drive me away, I will bite you!”

  Uluye sank back and jerked her body around so that she was facing away from the wolf. “Stay or go as you please,” she said coldly. “Though what good it will do you, I neither know nor care.”

  Grimya’s head dipped, and, fangs still bared, she padded around the temple’s perimeter to a place where she could see the slab that covered the Well, whilst keeping as great a distance as possible between herself and the priestess. Trying to ignore the incense’s smell, she settled down, muzzle on front paws, the brazier light reflecting in her eyes and turning them a feral red. Uluye resumed her brooding posture, staring out at the forest, and silent, umoving, they waited.

  As dawn broke, the babble of agitated voices in the distance stirred Grimya from a restless half-doze, and she jerked her head up in time to see Uluye, too, react with a start. The priestess sprang to her feet and ran to the ziggurat’s edge, and hastily Grimya followed.

  The light was growing rapidly, and down below, in the early grayness, the wolf saw that a number of people were approaching the bluff along the lakeside path. Suddenly Uluye turned and strode toward the stairs. As she reached the top of the flight, Grimya called out, “What? What is it?” She received no answer, but Uluye paused long enough to glance back, and the wolf had a brief glimpse of her face before she vanished. Her expression was granite-hard and murderous.

  Hastily Grimya ran after her and reached the edge in time to see Uluye jump down the last three steps and race away along the ledge to the next flight. The figures below were clearer now, the distant voices resolving into clarity; Grimya heard Uluye’s name called, then what might have been a muffled cry of pain.

  She glanced back at the great slab that marked the entrance to the Well. There was no point in continuing her vigil. Indigo wouldn’t return that way; it wasn’t possible. Better to return to the lakeside and see what news the searchers had brought, in the hope that it might give some help to her own dilemma.

  Quelling a whimper of unease, uncertainty and fear, Grimya turned back to the stairs and followed in Uluye’s wake.

  “We found them in Hoto’s village.” The hard-faced, middle-aged priestess who had led the northward search stared down at her party’s two captives with a mixture of pity and disgust.

  Tiam lay unconscious on the sand; he’d tried to resist and had been felled by the wooden club that now hung at the priestess’s belt; a livid bruise was spreading across one side of his face, and one eye was swollen. Yima sat beside him, her hair in disarray and her robe ripped and stained. She had covered her face with her hands and was rocking back and forth in wild but silent grief.

  Uluye looked at her for a few moments, then turned her head away. “Was Hoto sheltering them?” she demanded.

  “He says not. He says he didn’t know that they were runaways or that Yima had anything to do with us. It’s possibly true—certainly the boy isn’t from his village—but it’s more likely that he was well paid to give them refuge and is now lying to save his own hide.”

  “Then he and his family will suffer the consequences.” Uluye’s voice was clinically detached, but there was something in her tone that hinted at vast emotions under ruthless control. “How did you find them?”

  “We’d searched the village and were about to leave when a woman approached us without Hoto knowing and told us where they could be found.”

  Uluye nodded. “I’m thankful to hear that there are still some who know their duty. We shall see to it that she’s suitably rewarded for her diligence.”

  “She has a young daughter, and harbors ambitions for her,” the middle-aged woman said. Her look conveyed her opinion that the betrayal had been a matter of self-interest rather than of duty, but Uluye only shrugged.

  “The Ancestral Lady will decide what is fitting,” she said, then looked at the captives once more. “Now, as to these—”

  As though the violent intensity of Uluye’s stare had penetrated her private misery, Yima suddenly stopped rocking. Her hands fell away from her face and, slowly, she raised her head, revealing red-rimmed eyes and cheeks stained with tears.

  “Mother—” There was an agonized plea in her voice, and the second syllable broke into a sob.

  “Silence!” Uluye said viciously. “You are no longer fit to address me!”

  Yima started to climb unsteadily to her feet. “But Mother, please, if you’ll only let me—”

  “I said, silence!” Uluye’s arm swung out and down so fast that the girl had no chance to evade the blow, and she sprawled back onto the sand, where she lay sobbing bitterly. Uluye stared down at her, her eyes wild, almost mad.

  “I have no daughter!” she said through tightly clenched teeth. The veins and muscles in her neck worked violently. “The treacherous blasphemer I see before me is no child of mine!”

  Abruptly she turned on her heel, and those priestesses closest to her flinched at the sight of her face. “Take them into the citadel and set a guard over them,” she snapped. “Give them no water and no food. I shall return to the temple and conduct the proper ceremonies to ask the Ancestral Lady to make her will known to me. She will decree their fate; they have offended against her, and she will decide what punishment will be exacted.”

  Obedient to her order, two of the priestesses moved to drag Yima to her feet, while two more bent to gather up the unconscious form of Tiam. But before they could take hold of their charges, there was a sudden sound of water bubbling and churning in the lake. The women straightened with startled exclamations; Uluye, who had begun to walk away, swung around in consternation, and they saw the disturbance near the lake’s center. The water heaved, glittering in the pale morning light; gre
at ripples spread rapidly in a circle, creating waves. And suddenly a shape emerged from the turbulence and drifted toward the shore as though the lake had disgorged it.

  Two of the priestesses ran toward the lake’s edge. Several others followed them, but Uluye stood motionless, staring at the approaching object, her face rigid. The shape reached the shore and beached gently, rolling in the shallows where the sand sloped down to meet the water. One of the women dropped to a crouch—and her scream of horror tore the air apart as she reeled back, covering her face with her hands.

  In a single surge, the remaining women ran to the shore, and the uproar as they too saw for themselves seemed to snap Uluye out of her paralysis. She reached the water’s edge in seven long strides, and the women’s cries and exhortations fell away as she shouldered past them and looked down.

  Arms entwined and hair tangled together, Shalune and Inuss lay on the sandy slope in three inches of water. Inuss’s mask was gone and her upturned face was stark; Shalune’s countenance was a grotesque piebald where the ashes and charcoal with which she had been painted had been smeared by the water. Their eyes, open but unseeing, stared back at their High Priestess like the mindless gape of dead fish.

  One of the women had begun to weep, grief and horror and fear mingling in her wailing voice. Slowly, Uluye backed away, the others moving hastily aside to clear an aisle for her. Someone shook the weeping woman’s shoulder, and the sobs subsided into ugly hiccups. No other sound broke the silence.

  Five paces from the shore and the lake’s grisly gift, Uluye’s eyes suddenly flickered back into focus.

  “Sound the summoning drums,” she said in a deathly cold voice. “I want every inhabitant of every village within reach to be here by sunrise.”

  Even in the throes of her shock, the hard-faced priestess seemed taken aback by the order. “What do you mean to do, Uluye?” she asked uneasily.

  Uluye’s terrible expression didn’t change. “The Ancestral Lady has made her will known,” she said. “She has cast out Shalune and Inuss from her realm and sent them back to us to become hushu. Therefore she has decreed the fitting punishment for all who blaspheme against her name and seek to defy her.”

  Uluye turned her back on the lake, and her next words were spoken with ritualistic formality. “The people must be summoned to witness the proper rites. We will begin the ceremonies of purification. We will make offerings to the Ancestral Lady, and we will propitiate her spirit servants in the time-honored ways. At sunset the sinner Yima and her paramour will die—and we will call upon those spirits who have not won the favor of the Ancestral Lady to carry away their bodies and devour their souls, so that they too will become hushu in their turn.”

  Yima had been crouching over Tiam, striving in vain to wake him, but as Uluye uttered her grim pronouncement, the girl froze. Slowly, so slowly, she raised her head, and her eyes focused on her mother’s rigid figure in stunned disbelief.

  “Mother… Mother, no…”

  Uluye looked back over her shoulder. She didn’t speak.

  “You can’t…” Yima started to get to her feet. She was shaking violently, and shock seemed to have drained the life from her face. “Mother—Mother, please, I’m your daughter, you can’t—”

  “Silence that child,” Uluye said coldly, “and if she will not be silenced, cut out her tongue. I have nothing more to say. The Lady has commanded me, and in her name justice will be done.” She jerked a hand toward the ziggurat in an imperious gesture. “Sound the drums and begin the preparations.”

  “No!” Yima screamed. “Mother, no, no!”

  But Uluye was already stalking away across the arena toward the stairs. Her women stared after her, some in sorrow, some in admiration, but all of them shocked by the depth of their leader’s implacability.

  Only Grimya, who had witnessed the scene from the shadow of a rock near the foot of the bluff, saw the High Priestess’s face as she went by; saw the granite-hard set of her features, the bitter blaze of fury in her eyes—and the tears that streamed helplessly down her cheeks like cold diamonds.

  •CHAPTER•XVII•

  Time, it seemed, had no place in the realm of the dead. They might have been sailing for an hour, a day or a year, with nothing to mark the passage of the journey but the quiet rhythm of the sculling oar and the gentle slap of water under the boat’s keel. Darkness hung about them like black velvet, blurring sight, muffling sound. A tiny witchlight, no brighter than the dim, blue-green shimmer of a glowworm, burned at the prow but gave almost no illumination; when Indigo held up her hand before her, it was gray and insubstantial, the hand of a ghost.

  Neither of them had spoken since the voyage began. The boat had sailed out into the lake until the faint glimmer of rock warned Indigo that they were approaching the far shore, and there ahead, the mouth of a tunnel had become faintly visible, gaping like the maw of some blind beast. As they sailed under its arch, the timbre of the water’s sound changed subtly and the rhythm of the oar took on a hollow echo, and now, though she sensed their presence, Indigo could barely glimpse the endless walls slipping past them in the dark.

  She felt keyed up, nervous, and was oddly reluctant to even turn her head and look at the gaunt figure in the stern behind her. She had an irrational fear that if she did dare to glance back, she would see not the dead-white face in its cowl of black hair, but something else. Something that, though she couldn’t predict its nature, would be far, far worse.

  She forced the thought away, but still the crawling unease remained, for she couldn’t banish the fear that lurked at the back of her mind. Where would this bizarre journey lead, and what would she find at its end? For fifty years she had clung to the belief that Fenran was alive, and both in her dreams and in strange and short-lived moments of reality, she had seen her love and spoken to him across the appalling gulf that separated them. Fenran had no place in this realm where death reigned unchallenged and life was an alien intruder, and yet in cryptic ways and through subtle mind-play, the Ancestral Lady had planted the doubt in her mind, the fear that, perhaps, death had truly claimed him and he now dwelt here with the Lady, her servant and her prisoner for eternity.

  Indigo still believed—and wanted to go on believing—that it was a lie. The demons she had faced in her years of wandering had been masters of illusion, and this creature, this enigmatic being, goddess or monster or something in between, was surely yet another such manipulator. But something the Lady had said to her, one careless sentence, haunted her. “What you might find should you choose to journey in my company would, perhaps, try you even beyond your ability to endure.” What those words meant, what they implied, Indigo didn’t know; but the memory of them was like a spear of ice in her heart.

  The boat sailed on, swathed in quiet darkness, and Indigo sat fighting with her churning, contradictory thoughts. She couldn’t choose between the twin pulls of hope and fear, for whichever way she turned, there was always the specter of doubt to cloud her choice, doubt that was embodied in the creature in whose hands she had placed herself.

  She thought again of Shalune and Inuss, and the appalling fate to which the Ancestral Lady had condemned them. Cast out from the underworld to become hushu. She shuddered as, unbidden, her imagination conjured an image of their bodies floating across the dark lake in an obscene parody of peace. Perhaps even now they were drifting along this river, close by … or had they already returned to the mortal world, and at this very moment were their dead eyes opening to a new and terrible existence as hungering zombies?

  “I do not take life,” the Lady had said. “I merely claimed what they had already forfeited.” How had they forfeited their lives? What immutable law decreed that they must accept—even look for—death, and an afterlife far worse than death, as the punishment for what they had tried to do? Blind belief, and blind acceptance. What is the difference between being incapable of dying and being forbidden to die? Could that be what the Lady had meant? Had Indigo’s two companions died because they
couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see beyond the rigid mind-set of their cult, and was that the difference: will eclipsed by obligation?

  Or by terror. …

  Suddenly, her earlier reluctance forgotten, Indigo’s head whipped around.

  “You tricked them!” she hissed accusingly. “You led them to believe that they had no choice but to die!”

  The Ancestral Lady still stood impassively in the boat’s stern. She hadn’t metamorphosed into something monstrous and grotesque; only a faint nacre seemed to shine from her white skin, a luminescence tinted nightmarishly by the witchlight.

  “Your hapless friends?” she said calmly. “No. I had no interest in tricking them. The deception—if there was a deception—stemmed from a less obvious source.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing of any import. It was merely an observation.” Her hair stirred, though there was no breeze; then the silver corona about her eyes flared momentarily. “You should look to your own trials now, not to theirs.”

  As she spoke, Indigo felt a hand clamp on her arm.

  She gasped and whirled back. There was nothing there. Yet she could still feel the pressure, and in the dim light, the faint indentation of fingers showed clearly on her flesh.

  Then, slowly, like a baleful star coming out as the sun set, a face formed in the air, hanging disembodied beyond the boat’s prow and just beyond reach. A girl’s face, young, but haggard with the ravages of misery and disease. Her skin was as white as the Ancestral Lady’s own, and it had shriveled on her bones as the flesh beneath desiccated. Her eyes, little more than pinpoint pupils in a sea of bloodshot white, stared at Indigo and through her into an unimaginable world of nightmare, and what once had been a cloud of soft and pretty hair was now falling from her scalp like rain.

  Indigo wanted to wrench her own gaze away, but she couldn’t. The vision transfixed her, and from the deepest sink of her mind, from a place that for more than forty years she had striven to keep shut away from the light of consciousness, memory surged like a foul, polluted tide.