Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar (24 page)

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 beyond 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 about 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.

“Ah ...” she whispered. “Ah, no ...”

Indigo looked at her in surprise as she moved back hastily. “Shalune, what’s wrong? This is no worse than anything we’ve encountered so far—better, in fact, for at least we’ll be away from this tunnel.”

Shalune shook her head, her veil ornaments clinking rapidly. “No,” she said harshly. “It isn’t that.”

“What, then?”

“I... I can’t... oh, Lady, help me!” And to Indigo’s astonishment, Shalune flung back her veil. Her face was clear in the light from the trap door, and a hard, bright challenge glittered in her eyes as she looked directly at Indigo.

“It’s no use,” she said. “I didn’t intend to tell you, I meant you to find out only when it was too late to argue, but I see now that that would be madness. You
have
to know before we go any farther, or you may well put us all in danger when we face the Lady. I daren’t risk that.”

Beside her, Yima started to protest, her voice muffled by the mask, but Shalune snapped, “
No
! Be quiet. Indigo has to be told. And it’ll make no difference. It’s still right.”

An unpleasant suspicion was beginning to crawl to the forefront of Indigo’s mind. She asked, “What haven’t you told me, Shalune? What’s going on?”

Shalune looked speculatively at the hole and the staircase. “I think,” she said, and suddenly she sounded peculiarly calm, “that those steps are the last stage of our journey. So it’s best that we’re shriven now. It’s too late to change matters anyway.” And she turned to the tense figure at her side. “Take off the mask.”

The girl hesitated, and for a few moments it seemed that she might disobey. Then, slowly, she raised both hands to the wooden contraption. There was a faint click as she unfastened it, and then the whole front of the mask swung aside.

And Shalune’s young protegee, Inuss, looked out at Indigo with frightened but defiant eyes.

Grimya had lost the trail. Caution had been vital, for her quarry was more nervous than a hunted deer, glancing back every few seconds and stopping time and again to listen for any sound of pursuit. The wolf had hung back as far as she dared, but now she realized that she’d made the mistake of being overcautious, for the forest had swallowed Yima’s fleeing figure and suddenly even her scent was lost in the pungent smells of the undergrowth. But although she railed at her own failure, Grimya knew that in one sense, her ability—or lack of it—to track the girl hardly mattered anymore. She’d come close enough to identify Yima beyond any doubt, and she knew enough to guess, also beyond doubt, what was afoot.

She’d been a fool, she told herself bitterly. She had seen a little, heard a little, and had presumed that her surmise was the truth. Now she knew better. Now she knew that Shalune hadn’t been simply a messenger carrying Yima’s last sad farewell to her lover; instead, she’d been an active conniver, perhaps even the prime mover, behind Yima’s plan to escape the future her mother had decreed for her, and elope. Snatches of the conversations she had overheard—first between Shalune and Yima, and later between Shalune and the young man Tiam—crowded into Grimya’s memory. She could put a very different interpretation on them now, and some missing pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The mysterious
she
was still unidentified, but the wolf was certain now that whoever she was, she had taken Yima’s place at the cliff-top ceremony and at this very moment was descending through the Well with Indigo and Shalune, to meet the Ancestral Lady.