Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar (28 page)

“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 beginning 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.”

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.”