Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar (23 page)

The wolf moved toward the cave’s entrance. One part of her didn’t want to watch the procession as it went by; another part, though, was drawn helplessly to it, like a leaf in a fast-running stream, and its influence was the stronger of the two. She nosed the curtain aside, took a step put onto the ledge and looked down. There were lights, little more than flickering pinpoints, several levels below her, and rising on the still, humid air came the sound of voices in a dirgelike chorus. Grimya stood still, watching—and at last, as the procession reached her own level and began to move along the ledge toward her, she could see it clearly.

Uluye led the train of women. She was dressed in a dark robe that in the thin starlight looked almost utterly black, and on her head was a tall, bone-white crown that highlighted her face into; sharp relief. Behind her walked two torchbearers, and behind them—Grimya cringed in shock as she saw a figure out of nightmare, its head huge and grotesquely distorted; vast, pale eyes staring mindlessly ahead as it walked. Then suddenly rationality slipped back, and she realized that what she was seeing wasn’t a true face, but a mask, four or five times the size of a human head and carved to represent a creature that was neither human nor animal nor bird nor fish, but with elements of all those and something more. The mask flowed down over its wearer’s shoulders; multicolored ribbons shimmered in the torchlight, forming a bizarre cloak that fell almost to the ground. Glimpses of a plain white robe showed beneath the ribbons, and small bare feet, painted with sigils and adorned with anklets, moved beneath the robe’s hem as they followed a little unsteadily in Uluye’s wake.

Grimya backed a pace into the cave as the procession drew nearer. Yima—for the hideously masked figure could only be the candidate herself—was followed by her two sponsors, and though their appearance was less grotesque, they were still barely recognizable as Indigo and Shalune. Both wore veils of a fine, translucent material, decorated with a myriad of bone and wood carvings that clinked as they walked. Their robes were dark like Uluye’s; their faces, dimly visible beneath the veils, were whitened with wood ash and their eyes ringed with charcoal. After them came two more torchbearers, and then, like the tail of a comet behind its bright nucleus, the whole mass of the cult priestesses, two by two, their expressions a strange mixture of the solemn and the rapt.

Grimya, her muzzle just protruding through the curtain, watched with wide eyes as the silent file of women went by. No one so much as glanced at her—she doubted that any of the celebrants were even aware of her presence in the shadows—and as the last pair passed and walked on toward the final flight of stairs and the temple on the summit, the wolf shuddered as though a cold wind had blown from another dimension to chill her through fur and flesh to the marrow of her bones.

From above her, the great horn sounded again, a darkly triumphant clarion that was shockingly echoed by shrill blasts from the more familiar trumpets. Yima and her attendants must have reached the temple....

Grimya slunk back into the cave, her tail between her legs. A whimper bubbled in her throat, but she suppressed it. She didn’t want to see any more, didn’t want to hear any more; and above all, she didn’t want to think about what was happening on the cliff top. All she wanted was for tonight to be over, and for Indigo to return safely to the world.

Smoke rose in a dense column from the great bowl of the brazier, sulphurous yellow in the torches’ glare. The drums, which had begun a muted beat as the procession’s leaders stepped into the rectangle of the temple, were now rising to the pitch and intensity of distant thunder, and on all sides of the square the massed ranks of women swayed with the hypnotic rhythm. Their bodies glistened with sweat; their skirts swirled in a kaleidoscope of fierce colors, while the flying dark mass of their hair hurled ghastly and almost bestial shadows across their faces.

High above the heads of her followers, beside the brazier and wreathed in its smoke, Uluye stared down like some primitive and savage goddess, her arms outspread as though to encompass and embrace the wild scene about her. Her eyes blazed with joy as she surveyed the heady mayhem of the rite; she was drinking in the energies of the stamping, swaying crowd, feeding on them, drawing power from them and focusing it with the fearsome intensity of a diamond lens.

In the flickering light she looked almost as unhuman as the weird, masked figure of Yima, who stood below her in the center of the sandstone square. Indigo and Shalune flanked the candidate now, each with a hand resting lightly on one of her shoulders to signify that she was in their charge and that they, her sponsors, were also her sworn guardians.

Indigo was giddy with the intoxicating effects of the drums, the sea of movement around her, the dancing torchlight, the clouds of incense that billowed from the brazier and stung her eyes and nostrils. She had vowed that she would remain detached from this, do no more than play her appointed part, but she couldn’t control the primal excitement that rose in her as the ritual neared its climax. Civilization had been stripped away; this was raw, unreasoning energy, and she was a part of it; it flowed in her veins, thrummed in her bones, drilled deep into her soul. She felt Yima’s skin trembling under her touch, felt her own body quiver as the current of anticipation grew and grew—

Suddenly Uluye flung her arms skyward and let out a shriek that could have awakened the dead. The drums stopped. The echoes of Uluye’s voice died away, and for a time that must have been mere moments, yet seemed to Indigo like half of her life, there was silence. Uluye was smiling, that same wild rictus Indigo had seen before, as though a naked grinning skull were about to burst through the flesh of the High Priestess’s face.

With a dramatic gesture, Uluye dropped to a crouch before the brazier, and when she rose again, she was holding what looked like a gigantic, stone-headed hammer. An ululating yell went up from the women; the horns blared out in cacophony, and Uluye reared to her full height, swung the hammer above her head, then brought it hurtling down on the dais where the brazier stood. The crash of stone meeting stone dinned in Indigo’s ears, and from deep within the cliff itself came an answering rumble. The square beneath her feet shook; then there was a new sound, a grinding, grating sound, the protesting voice of ancient mechanisms creaking into life—and at the foot of the plinth, between the brazier and the oracle’s chair, a section of the temple floor moved. As though a huge hand had pushed it from below, one of the stone slabs rose on its end, teetered, then keeled over and fell with a crash that shook the floor afresh and sent a cloud of fine dust flying to merge with the scented smoke.

An awed gasp rippled through the crowd. As the dust cleared, Indigo saw the gaping dark rectangle revealed by the stone, and where the torchlight could just reach, the first few uneven treads of a flight of steps spiraling down into blackness. The Well was open.

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.

“
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?”