Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar (21 page)

Then, on the third night following the announcement, Shalune slipped away from the citadel.

Grimya was lying on the ledge outside the cave she shared with Indigo. The night was unusually hot and oppressive, even by Dark Isle standards. Indigo was abed, but Grimya had been unable to sleep and had moved to the ledge in the hope that the outside air might be a degree or two cooler than the insufferable interior of the cave.

When she glimpsed the shadowy figure moving quickly and stealthily from the foot of the bluff in the waning moon’s light, she sprang to her feet, alert and curious. Then, as the figure showed in clear silhouette against the lake, Grimya recognized it as Shalune.

The wolf stared hard into the darkness. The fat woman was heading toward the forest, clearly in a hurry, and clearly fearful of discovery, for she repeatedly glanced back over her shoulder as though half expecting to be challenged. Keeping low, Grimya padded along the ledge to the stairs, then paused, looking hard again to fix Shalune’s position and direction in her mind. Yes, she seemed to be making for the very spot where Yima had held her tryst. Silent as a shadow herself, the wolf dropped onto the stairway and began to descend in pursuit.

But for the sheer fortuity of a stifled cough, Grimya might have missed the clearing altogether. Shalune’s wariness and her constant backward glances had obliged the wolf to wait until her quarry had entered the forest before she dared venture across the open arena, and by the time she reached the edge of the trees, Shalune had vanished.

For some minutes Grimya stood still, listening to the susurration of night sounds and testing the air with her muzzle for a trace of Shalune’s scent. However, the powerful odors of the forest itself—moist earth and crowding trees and decaying vegetation—swamped any lingering hint that might have remained, and at last the wolf realized that she would have to rely on other means. She cast about, searching for a physical sign of someone moving into the undergrowth, and eventually she found what appeared to be a newly trampled, if faint and uncertain, trail.

Grimya liked this forest at night even less than she liked it by day. Keen-eyed though she was, the trees were haunted after dark by creatures whose eyes were keener still: hunters like herself, but born and bred to this savage region, which gave them a great and dangerous advantage. As she ventured under the canopy of a tree whose branches curved down as though seeking to bury themselves in the ground, something slithered on a bough above her head. Grimya cringed with an involuntary defensive snarl, and a voice answered throatily from the bough. Heart pounding, the wolf backed away quickly and made a detour to avoid the tree altogether—then realized that she had lost Shalune’s trail.

She stopped and looked about. Whatever had menaced her from the branches had either moved away or simply lost interest, and the forest was very still. Grimya tested first the air and then the ground, but as before, the scent of Shalune was impossible to pick out and no one sound stood out against the ceaseless background murmur to betray someone moving through the undergrowth.

Angry with herself for letting a moment’s cowardice get the better of her, Grimya wondered what she should do. To press on into the forest in the hope of finding Shalune would be foolish. The likelihood of coming on her by sheer chance was remote, and it would be all too easy to lose her own way in this unfamiliar territory. She would have to abandon her plan and return to the citadel.

Then, not far away, someone coughed.

Grimya whirled around, her ears pricking as she sought the direction of the sound. A bird shrieked in alarm, clattering away through the trees’ higher branches, and then she pinpointed it: downwind, deeper in the forest and a little to the left of the path she’d been following. The wolf hunched down into the slinking crouch that she used when hunting and began to move stealthily toward the source of the disturbance. Not forty feet on, she found them. They were in a small clearing: two indistinct shapes that even her sharp eyes might have taken for hewn tree stumps, until the shorter of the two moved and Shalune’s silhouette showed briefly as the filtered moonlight dappled across it. As she halted on the clearing’s edge, only just concealed by a rank-smelling bush, Grimya heard the fat woman’s low-pitched voice and a deeper, male answer. Tiam. So she’d been right: Shalune had come to meet Yima’s lover, and to bring him a message.

Grimya’s ears swiveled forward again, straining to pick out the two humans’ soft, urgent conversation from among the sounds of the forest. Many of the words they exchanged escaped her, and Tiam’s voice was harder to understand than Shalune’s more familiar tones, but she heard him ask a question with the word
Yima
in it, and heard Shalune’s reply. “No. No, Tiam, that can’t be.” She added something more, which Grimya didn’t catch, then: “I’m sorry, but you must understand that it’s impossible now.”

“Please, Shalune!” Tiam pleaded. “I can’t simply—” But the sudden chirring of insects made the rest incomprehensible.

Shalune shook her head. “I won’t risk it. I’d do a lot for Yima, but not that; not now. It’s too late, Tiam. You
must
resign yourself to be—”

Again the insects set up their noise, drowning her words. This time, to Grimya’s intense frustration, the shrill chorus went on for a minute or more, and by the time the creatures finally fell silent again, Shalune and Tiam were making their farewells.

Tiam bowed to the priestess and pressed something into her hands: a gift or an offering, Grimya presumed, as payment for her help. Then he said, “You’ll tell her that I—”

Shalune interrupted gruffly. “Yes, yes, I’ll tell her. She’ll know, be assured of it. Now go back to your home. And remember: you must never,
never
dare to risk being seen here again. Never, Tiam—for as long as you live. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice taut with emotion. “I understand.”

“Then I wish you a long life.”

“Good-bye, Shalune. I’ll ... I’ll never forget.”

“It’ll be better for all concerned if you do. Good-bye, Tiam.”

Shalune turned so quickly and so unexpectedly toward her that Grimya could only freeze rigid behind the bush and watch, wide-eyed, as the stocky figure strode past her toward the forest’s edge. Tiam, too, was leaving, though in the opposite direction, and for a moment Grimya was tempted to follow him back to his home in the hope of learning more. Then the impulse faded as she remembered how easy it would be to lose her bearings, and on the heels of that thought came the realization that she’d be well advised to get back to the citadel ahead of Shalune if she wasn’t to risk being seen. Shalune would be sure to take the shorter route around the lake; by cutting diagonally through the trees to the waterside and then running fast in the other direction, Grimya thought she could reach the bluff first. She waited until she was certain that Shalune wouldn’t hear her movements, then set off.

As she pushed her way through the undergrowth, Grimya felt sadness well up within her. She believed that she now understood why Shalune and Tiam had met here tonight, and the knowledge had deepened the sympathy she felt for Yima in her plight. This had been Yima’s farewell to the man she loved, but delivered by proxy because the sudden change in her circumstances had made it impossible for her to leave the citadel. Yima’s every move was now under her mother’s close scrutiny; her fate had been set, and she was unable to slip away even for one final, bittersweet tryst.

Now with this final message from Shalune, the young lovers’ dreams had been buried forever, and the last exchange between Shalune and the young man echoed poignantly in Grimya’s mind.
I’ll never forget
, he had said, and:
It’ll be better for all concerned if you do
, Shalune had answered. Grimya’s heart was easily moved to pity, and had she been human, she would have wept for Yima and Tiam and for the final shattering of their hopes.

The trees had begun to thin out, and the wolf realized that she was nearing the forest’s edge. With an effort, she pushed her unhappy thoughts away, then raised her muzzle to peer ahead. She could just glimpse the dark glitter of water through the crowding trunks, and in less than a minute, she emerged onto the sandy track around the lake’s perimeter. Shalune was already on the path and walking briskly; Grimya made to turn the other way—then stopped, her hackles rising. There was something on the track ahead of Shalune, between her and the bluff. The woman hadn’t yet seen it, but Grimya’s keen eyes caught a telltale flicker of movement at the edge of the trees. Another human figure—not Tiam; this shape was too tall. It looked—
Great Mother
, Grimya thought with a jolt,
not Uluye! Not—

The fearful thought was violently truncated as she realized that it wasn’t Uluye, that it moved too strangely, too stiffly, as though unseen hands were manipulating its limbs and taking the place of a brain that could no longer control the body it inhabited. In the same moment, Shalune saw it, too. Her steps wavered; she stumbled, almost lost her footing, righted herself ... then froze rigid, transfixed as though by a cobra’s merciless, glittering stare.

The
hushu
shambled out onto the path and raised one arm. Its movements were dislocated, a series of staccato jerks, but its intention was clear. It reached toward Shalune, and the fingers of its dead hand splayed wide, like a baby’s fingers trying to grasp at some desired object. Shalune couldn’t move. The monstrosity blocked her path, and she was too paralyzed with terror to even think of turning and running back the way she had come.

Grimya, too, was terrified, but she didn’t allow herself the time to let fear get the better of her. A primal instinct, a sense of loathing that was rooted even more deeply in her psyche than her fear of this unholy travesty, surged to the surface, and she launched herself forward, racing down the track and baring her fangs in a savage snarl.

A thin, whistling shriek—whether from the
hushu
or from Shalune, Grimya would never know—set the forest birds squalling and cackling as the wolf’s lean, gray shape barreled past Shalune, skidded to a halt in front of her and snarled again in furious challenge. The
hushu
rocked on its heels, its arms flailing, and Grimya saw the half-rotted, half-mummified face, the fleshless jaw revealing black and decaying teeth in shriveled gums, the two white pinpoints of light that flickered deep in the empty eye sockets and betrayed the mindless half-life within the skull. The wolf’s flesh seemed to burn, then to turn as cold as a glacier, but she stood her ground, her face twisted into a mask of rage and hatred, her lips drawn back with saliva drooling in ropes between her teeth.

The
hushu’s
jaw dropped open with an audible crack, and a foul stench erupted from its throat. “
Unnnng
....” It couldn’t truly speak, for the vital cords and muscles and airways had rotted away; but the abysmal noises the creature made were almost,
almost
, words and gave the hideous impression that it knew what it wanted to say. Again the vile breath swept over the wolf, and the monstrosity croaked: “
Unngri.... Unnngggrreeee
....”

Behind Grimya’s back, Shalune gagged, the sound almost as ugly as the mouthings of the
hushu
. The thing waved its arm again, the fingers clawing and clenching. “
Eeee
...” it grated. “
Hhh ... hhf ... hfeee
....” Then suddenly the ghastly voice rose to a wail so dismal that a violent shock coursed through Grimya’s entire body. “
Feeee—uh, uhh, feeeeEEED
!”

If she’d paused for one instant to think, Grimya would have turned tail and fled. But there was no time to be rational; instinct, and instinct alone, took over, and she hurled herself at the
hushu
in a flying leap as fear and revulsion and fury combined and goaded her into attack. The
hushu
crashed to the ground under her weight, chittering like a demented bird; Grimya’s fangs snapped on air, and a fetid blast like something from an ancient tomb bowled her backward as the
hushu
howled in her face.

Grimya snapped again and again, slavering, nearly hysterical as she tried to bite the warped and screaming skull out of existence. Then hands gripped her scruff and a violent force pulled her back, and she heard Shalune’s voice yelling in her ear.

“No, Grimya, no!
Leave
it, let it
go
! Run away!
Run
!”

The
hushu
lay thrashing at the edge of the path. It couldn’t rise, couldn’t coordinate its limbs; it only kicked and Hailed, wagging its misshapen head and uttering gargling noises that sounded both piteous and angry. Grimya stared at it in horror as her own spinning senses came back to earth; then Shalune pulled at her again with renewed strength. “Grimya! Come away. Run!”

She ran, Shalune beside her as together they pelted down the path. Neither had any thought for the risk as they ran across the lakeside arena to the bluff wall, and it was only when they reached the staircase and Shalune collapsed, gasping, onto the bottom step that Grimya thought to look up at the ziggurat towering above them. But there were no flickering torches, no voices, no agitated figures emerging from the network of caves. No one, it seemed, had heard anything untoward.

Shalune was sprawled on the stairs, her face pressed against a stone tread, her torso heaving as she sucked air painfully into her lungs. Grimya looked back beyond the arena to the path and the dark forest. She knew where the
hushu
must be, but a cloud was creeping over the moon now and she could see nothing moving. The forest murmured, as strange and secretive as a distant sea; mingling with its sounds she thought she heard a faint hooting and whistling that was not a night bird, but she couldn’t be sure.

Shalune’s breathing eased and steadied, and at last the priestess raised her head. Her gaze and Grimya’s met, locked briefly; then Shalune rubbed Grimya between the ears and looked away. She was neither curious nor suspicious about the wolf’s presence in the forest; she simply assumed that Grimya must have been hunting, and there was nothing unusual in that: she was, after all, simply an animal. But Grimya had seen both gratitude and admiration in the priestess’s eyes, silent recognition of the likelihood that the wolf had saved her life. Shalune wouldn’t forget that, and her gesture had been a mute but emphatic acknowledgment of her debt.