“Damn you…” Indigo dropped to a crouch and snatched up the witchlight, holding it out before her at arm’s length. For a moment a splash of cold light from the tiny sphere illuminated her hand—and then the witchlight flickered, dimmed, flickered again and went out, plunging her into total blackness.
She bit the sides of her mouth against the scream that wanted to break from her. It was the momentary shock, nothing more; there was nothing to be afraid of…
“afraid, us.”
It came from behind her; she whirled. All she could see was the water’s faint nacre.
“us. Indigo.”
Her breath quickened until it was a harsh sawing in her throat, but this time her voice was under her control. “What are you? I tell you again: show yourself!”
“us. help us.”
It was such a small voice, she realized with a sudden inward frisson. Toneless, lifeless … and sad. And it said us. Not me; us.
She sucked dank air into her lungs, and her fist closed around the dead witchlight. “I can’t see you. I hear you, but I can’t see you.”
The voice answered, behind her again, on the islet’s bare rock. “Indigo, home, us, Indigo, want, help us. want.”
Indigo shut her eyes tightly and hissed a prayer through clamped teeth. “Great Mother, if you hear me, if you pity me, help me now! Show me what to do!”
If the Earth Mother heard, She did not answer. And the dull little voice spoke again, now from another direction.
“us home. Indigo, want home, help us. ”
There was a new sound, a peculiar, faint rustling and clicking, and it seemed to emanate from all around her. Indigo blinked in a desperate effort to force her eyes to penetrate the darkness, but it was futile. There was no light, there was nothing.
“but us. home, us home. Indigo, we want, we want.”
The rustling grew louder. Then there was movement in the black: a slow, blind sense of something stirring to each side of her, beyond the islet, beyond the gliding river.
And Indigo remembered what lay buried in the walls of this tunnel.
Suddenly, with no warning, the witchlight in her hand flared back into life. She cried out as a livid white glare burst between her fingers, and reflex made her fling the crystal sphere away. It bounced on the rock, rolled, and came to rest at the top of the shale slope, not a dim glowworm now, but a tiny, brilliant star that hurled spears of light and shadow across the islet.
The tunnel’s walls were moving. Their entire surface seemed to have come to life, shifting and seething. Lumps of clay, shaken loose by the upheaval, fell into the water like tiny avalanches, and in the pocks and scars they left behind there was a stirring and a writhing and a dull shimmering of brown bone, moist and dimly phosphorescent. In the witchlight’s cold glare, Indigo saw naked skulls emerging from the walls that had imprisoned them, and deep in their eye sockets was a glow like sullen coals, and the first flicker of a hollow and dreadful intelligence.
Horrified, and feeling her gorge rise, Indigo started instinctively to back away before she realized with an icy shock that there was nowhere to which she could retreat. The moving, shifting dead were all about her; she was trapped between their ranks, and even the river, had she dared to brave it, offered no escape, for they were there too, in the walls to either side; and if she took to the river and they came out of the walls and they fell to the water, they would be there, with her and—
“No, oh no!” She pressed her hands to her skull, twisting from side to side in frantic denial and trying to shut out the sound of the terrible rustling that now seemed to fill the tunnel, punctuated by sly splashes as more clay crumbled into the river. She wanted to shut her eyes too, not to have to see this horror, but the thought of not seeing, not knowing what was happening, was more terrifying still.
“Go back, go back!” Her voice cracked hysterically. “Please—in the Mother’s name, stop!”
“afraid. Indigo, afraid.” Through the awful clicking and slithering, the answer came small and sad and dead. The voices were beginning again.
“No—”
“us. afraid, Indigo, us. don’t.”
Forcing back nausea, Indigo tried to snatch up the witchlight, her one bastion against the horrors crawling all about her. But when her hand closed round it, she jumped back with a cry of pain, for the tiny sphere was burning hot. Gasping, she wrung her scorched fingers; then, as breath came back and the agony receded to a hard, stinging throb, she realized that the small incident had saved her from a collapse into complete and helpless panic. The mundane shock of hurting herself had diverted her senses momentarily, and her mind had snatched at the chance to reassert a measure of self-control.
Crouching on the shale, the witchlight glaring beside her and her painful hand clenched, she stared quickly from side to side, holding down the terror, holding down the sickness of revulsion.
“I am not afraid.” She spoke the words like a litany. “I am not afraid.”
The voices answered her. “afraid, no. Indigo.”
Sweet Goddess, she could see those shattered jaws moving….
“I am not afraid. You can do nothing to me.”
“nothing. don’t, Indigo. fear. us.” A pause, a momentary silence; then, as though the voices were slowly learning—or relearning—a clearer mode of speech, there came a soft, sibilant chorus that shocked her to the marrow, “don’t fear us, Indigo, help us, Indigo. take us, Indigo. home. home. don’t be afraid.”
Indigo’s stomach contracted, and she had to struggle to breathe. For the first time, she comprehended the depth of sheer misery in that tiny choir of voices, and her terror was suddenly eclipsed by horrified pity. Very slowly she rose to her feet, her pulse pounding fearsomely, and looked wildly about.
“What is it that you want?” she called. “What is it you think I can do?”
The answer came with an awful, hollow eagerness and longing, “free. free, Indigo. us. free us.”
“I can’t free you. I haven’t that power.”
“yes. free. us. power, free us.”
“I can’t! I’m not a goddess.”
“no. no. no. no. no. no…” There was sudden agitation in the replies, and she didn’t know whether the voices were endorsing or denying what she had said. Then, as the chorus died away, one lone whisper floated across the dark water.
“afraid, we, Indigo, we. we are afraid…”
Two tiny, bright stars flared in the gloom beyond the witchlight’s reach. Indigo’s skin crawled.
“Afraid?” Her voice was uncertain, almost shaking. “What are you afraid of? What have you to fear?”
There was a hissing, as though a thousand snakes had come to life in the tunnel. At first Indigo thought it was just a mindless sound, but then she realized that the voices were repeating a word, one word, over and over again.
“she. she. she. she. she. afraid. she, Indigo. she is afraid. we are afraid. we are her. she is us. she is afraid. we are afraid. help her, Indigo. help us, Indigo.”
Indigo’s heart was now thundering against her ribs. She believed she was beginning to understand what the voices implied, and suddenly some of the cryptic and seemingly emotionless words of the Ancestral Lady began to weave into a pattern and form the first hint of a picture. “We are her, she is us. she is afraid, we are afraid.” Oh yes, Indigo thought; oh yes….
She called out to the shifting, rustling dead in their prison within the walls. “What do you fear? Tell me its name and its nature.”
Instantly all sound ceased. Silence closed in like a shroud; even the river no longer made its small lapping noises. Indigo shifted one foot on the shale, and the hiatus broke; but still the voices didn’t respond.
“Tell me,” she said again. There was something stirring within her, new strength from a source she couldn’t name but that filled her with sudden confidence. Power, she thought. The power to overcome a demon….
Her voice rang through the tunnel in an echoing peal. “I command you,
and you cannot gainsay me! Tell me the name of your fear!”
A high, thin, bubbling wail spread up into the dark, fell away to a whimpering moan. Then, at last, a solitary whisper, a solitary word.
“death…”
Indigo dropped her gaze to the beach beneath her feet and stood very still as the whisper faded and silence crept down once more. For a long time she stayed motionless, and an air of tension began to build, like the stifling, noiseless hour of waiting before the breaking of a storm. Then, without looking, without even raising her head, Indigo spoke.
“I know the truth now, madam. Show yourself.”
There was a rippling splash somewhere beyond the witchlight’s reach, the creak of an oar moving in its rowlock and stirring the water. The boat emerged slowly from the dark, and the Ancestral Lady was a silhouette in the stern. Only the silver corona of her eyes glowed cold and nacreous.
And the boat carried three passengers.
Indigo sensed them even before she looked up, and when she did raise her head, there was no shock, no stab of fear. In the boat’s prow, a wolf with brindled fur and her own indigo eyes sat looking steadily at her. She met its stare for a moment; then her gaze slid past it to the two human figures who had ranged themselves on the seat between it and the Ancestral Lady. The child with the silver hair and the silver eyes smiled, showing the small, sharp teeth of a cat; its look was evil. At its side, the statuesque being with hair the color of warm earth and a cloak of green and russet smiled too; sweetly and sadly, and with an air of certain knowledge.
Animal and demon and avatar. But she herself, Indigo thought, she herself was more….
She looked past them, into the Ancestral Lady’s glittering eyes, and said: “No, madam. I am not afraid of them or of what they signify. But I believe that you are.‘’
The Ancestral Lady tensed. “Ah. So you have learned something from your sojourn.“ But her voice didn’t carry conviction; there was unease in her tone.
“Yes,” Indigo said. “And these … guests … you bring to show me aren’t yours to control. They are mine.”
She pointed at Nemesis. There was a momentary twisting of her perceptions, a looping of time and space, and for an instant she saw in her inner vision a tower cracking and burning, and heard in her memory the shrieking triumph of a monstrous child’s laugh. Then Nemesis vanished. Indigo pointed again. A cold and empty room in Carn Caille, and a girl racked with the agonies of grief, looking up at the bright being who claimed to speak in the Earth Mother’s name and stood before her in judgment. When she looked at the boat again, only the indigo-eyed wolf remained.
Wolf, Indigo, wolf! The shock and the thrill of transformation, feeling herself running, racing, low to the ground. The taste of blood in her mouth, the instincts she shared with her wolf companion Grimya, the chill but ineffably beautiful sound of a howl rising on the air of a winter night.
Then the wolf, too, disappeared, and the Ancestral Lady stood alone in the boat.
“They have no power over me,” Indigo said. “Rather, I have power over them. And that’s what you dread above all else, isn’t it? Power that may prove to be greater than your own. That’s why you have succumbed to the very demon you have striven to use for your own ends. You have wielded it as a weapon, yet it has fed upon you and grown strong from your weakness.”
From the boat came quiet but harsh laughter. “You know nothing of me!”
“Oh, but I do.” Again Indigo had heard the uncertainty underlying the Ancestral Lady’s retaliation, and she smiled, not pleasantly. “I know more of you than you dream, madam. I know that you have created this world of the dead about you as a shield, a shell within which you can hide. I know that you have fashioned all the horrors that haunt the nightmares of your worshipers, and that you send them to prowl the living world so that your people will run to appease you and make offerings to you in the hope of averting your wrath. You hold their lives in your hands, and through your oracles, you make them dance and sing and weep and grovel—and you make them die!”
Another faint laugh echoed in the tunnel and was answered by a renewed rustling and scraping from the walls. “But I do not take life, Indigo. That is something you already know.”
Indigo smiled again. “I didn’t claim that you take life, Lady. I said that you make them die. There is a very great difference.”
The Ancestral Lady didn’t reply, and after a few moments, Indigo spoke again.
“Did they create you? Is that the truth of it? Are you nothing more than an invention of your own human worshipers?”
“No!” The silver-fringed eyes flared savagely. “I am older and greater than anything their puny civilization can conjure. I am Mistress of the Dead, Guardian of the Portal. And they worship me because they know that in the fullness of time, they must all come to me and serve me in death as they did in life!”
Yes, Indigo thought; that much was true. This creature was far more than a cipher, more than a shell created by the power of human will. She was the avatar she claimed to be. Yet perhaps, in the long centuries of her existence, she had forgotten the true meaning of her origins.
“We are her. She is us.” And her servants, these servants whose bones formed the walls of her domain—these and all the countless others whose souls had joined with her down the ages, until there was no difference between them—dreaded death above all else. It seemed on the surface an insane paradox, but death could take many forms. Death of the body, death of the mind or heart—or the death of life itself. And there lay the crux.
Indigo said: “Shall I tell you the demon’s name, madam? Shall I tell you the name of the thing I came here to destroy, and to which you are in thrall?”
The boat rocked violently, and the Ancestral Lady’s voice snapped out. “You do not know the demon’s name!”
“But I do. Its name is fear. One of the greatest and most powerful demons of all … and you are enslaved to it!”
“No!” the Ancestral Lady hissed. “You lie, oracle! What have I to fear?”
Indigo glanced to left and right. The bones were still now, the tiny voices silent. “We are her. She is us.”
“I believe that you fear the very power in whose name you rule,” she said softly. “You fear death.”
There was a sharp pause. Then a laugh so violent and so sudden that it sounded like the bark of a dog rang through the tunnel.
“I fear death? Ah, my foolish oracle! How can I fear such a thing?” Water lapped on the shale near Indigo’s feet as the Ancestral Lady swung her oar suddenly, and the boat began to move toward the beach. “Answer me that, if you can.”
Indigo shook her head. “You fear it, madam, because death, for you, would be to lose the hold you have upon your worshipers.”
The boat surged nearer; she moved back quickly as it touched the shore, and shingle ground under the keel. The Ancestral Lady took a pace forward, stepping over the seat.
“I will never lose my hold on them!”
“But if you did, what then? If they turned from you, turned their backs to favor another deity, or none at all, what would you become?”
The dark figure was climbing over the prow now, and Indigo retreated again, though she was aware that she couldn’t back away much farther. This was the most dangerous moment. If she miscalculated, if she made one mistake, the embryonic plan that had been forming in her mind would be wrecked.
“You rule them by fear, because fear is what drives you. Fear that they will abandon you unless they are too afraid to do so. You want their love—”
“I have their love!”
Indigo remembered the dreadful look in Shalune’s eyes in the moments before she died. “Perhaps you have,” she said contemptuously, “but that love is warped and made worthless by the cruelty and terror you inflict to keep your followers yoked to your side. Shalune and Inuss died because they believed it was a just punishment for what they had done. It was not. What crime had they committed, save to defy the will of the madwoman
who calls herself your High Priestess? Yet you let them die, you encouraged them to die, and then you turned them into hushu as an example to the rest and to strike even greater dread of you into their hearts!”
She glanced quickly over her shoulder. She was almost at the highest, central point of the islet now; behind her, the rising rock blocked the bright glow from the witchlight, and she could see only intense blackness. She dared not move back any farther.
The Ancestral Lady, however, was not following her, but had stopped on the shale beach. Her dead-white face was ghastly where the witchlight fell on it; her eyes were as black as ink and, for the moment, their silver corona had faded to a dangerous glimmer.
“Do you know,” Indigo said in a low but savage voice, “what Shalune was trying to do? She was trying to bring you a fit candidate to be your next avatar in the mortal world. She was trying to replace a priestess who would not have had the dedication to uphold your worship and revere your name with one who would.”
The Ancestral Lady hissed like an angry cat. “She disobeyed my will!”
“No, she disobeyed Uluye’s will. Uluye is like you, Lady—she too has succumbed to the demon called fear, and it has fed like a leech on her until it has all but eaten her away. But who is the mistress and who the servant? Whose fear is the greater? Her fear that if she does not rule with harshness and cruelty, she will incur your wrath? Or your fear that if you do not keep your people under a thrall of terror and dread, they will one day forget you, and thus you might cease to exist?”
Slowly, so slowly, the Ancestral Lady raised one hand. The sleeve of her robe fell back, exposing an arm as thin and as deadly white as the arm of a bloodless corpse. Her black lips parted and she hissed again; not a cat this time, but a snake, lethal and merciless. Taking one step forward, she stamped upon the witchlight and it shattered with a tiny, shrill noise, plunging the scene into darkness. Then a new light began to glow: an aura, colorless and cold, that shimmered around the Lady’s gaunt frame. It grew brighter, until she stood haloed in a brilliance that made her own dark form awesome by contrast. Her face seemed to float like the face of a specter within the black frame of hair and robe; her eyes were black windows onto annihilation.
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