Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar (32 page)

An extraordinary, ugly sound broke involuntarily from her throat. Her attendants, who were waiting a few feet from the rock, didn’t hear; even a full-throated scream would have been drowned by the thunder of the summoning drums. But Uluye’s self-control was back within an instant, and mercilessly she crushed the feelings within her, choking back the sob, killing it, and killing the wave of utter misery that for one brief moment had threatened to overtake her.

She could have no doubts. The Ancestral Lady’s will would be done, and she would prove her fidelity, her love and her obedience. Her own hand would wield the blade that spilled Yima’s blood, and she herself would perform the ceremony that prepared Yima’s corpse for the
hushu
and summoned the soulless ghouls of the night to take her for their own. She would not falter, and she would not flinch. She had no daughter now. She had only a goddess, her mistress and her mother, and she would pass this final test and win back her Lady’s favor. She, Uluye, High Priestess, would prove her worth. She would do what must be done, and would never regret her choice. Never, she told herself ferociously.
Never
.

Movement on the periphery of her vision suddenly snapped her back to the moment. Her head jerked around and she saw that one of her attendants had come up to the rock and was trying tentatively to attract her attention. Uluye’s eyebrows rose in a sharp interrogative, and the priestess pointed toward the forest.

There was movement there, the stirring of leaves, flickers of shadowy figures among the trees. Then a small group of people emerged. They stood uncertainly on the track, looking toward the arena and the ziggurat beyond.

Uluye smiled coldly. From this distance, she didn’t recognize the newcomers, but she knew that they must be from the nearest village. Swiftly and roughly she counted their number. Well and good; they’d answered the call in force, it seemed, and that showed a proper respect for and fear of the Lady’s priestesses. More would soon follow.

She signed toward the drummers. Instantly the thundering beat ceased. The silence was shocking by contrast, and almost as deafening in its way as the drums’ rumbling had been. As the last echoes died, Uluye heard an answering beat from far in the distance, in the forest’s depths. Good, she thought;
good
. Village elders were passing the summons on; it would go out far and wide, and the gathering should be as great as she had demanded.

Now it was time for the first ceremonies to begin....

Fifteen paces. Indigo had counted them so many times, checking and checking again, that it seemed the number was engraved in her mind. Fifteen paces from one end of this miserable spit of rock to the other, and a bare seven from side to side—and within those small confines not a hummock, not a crevice, not the smallest feature to be found.

Now she sat on the shale slope with her knees hunched up under her chin and the water lapping only inches from her feet. She had thought of testing the river’s depth, but had balked at the idea. The water was so dark, so silent and oily; it had the look of corruption, and she was unwilling to even touch it. So, with no direction in which she could go, there was nothing to do but wait and try to control the helpless, futile, but savage, anger that was boiling inside her.

Fifty times now she had cursed herself for a fool. She’d allowed the Ancestral Lady to lead her a grim dance through this labyrinth, convinced that at the end would lie enlightenment, but instead, her guide had abandoned her here in this ... this... Indigo shook her head violently as words loathsome enough to describe this place eluded her. She still couldn’t begin to guess what the Ancestral Lady’s purpose had been in bringing her here, but she was growing more certain by the minute that she had been tricked. “
What comes now will come without your needing to seek it
,” the Lady had said. How much time had already passed? An hour? Two? More? Yet still there was nothing but the murky darkness, and the silence, and the sense that nothing would happen here, for nothing
could
happen here.

“
happen
...”

Indigo started at the tiny echo that seemed to whisper from behind her. She hadn’t realized that she’d spoken aloud, and she shivered, disliking the mean, dead quality that the dark tunnel gave to her voice. As the shiver subsided, she glanced down by her side, where the witchlight lay wedged in the shingle. Its feeble, glowworm illumination still spilled over the stones, but Indigo fancied it was dimmer than it had been a few minutes ago. The Lady had warned her, mockingly, that the witchlight wouldn’t last indefinitely, and she wondered how much longer it might continue to glow. The thought of being in utter blackness without even this tiny scrap of comfort was daunting, and carefully Indigo picked up the light and held it in the palm of one hand. It was like nothing she had ever seen before; simply a sphere of what looked like greenish crystal no more than an inch across, smooth and cold to the touch. Its light had no visible source, and nothing seemed to affect it for better or for worse.

The crystal flickered suddenly, like a candle guttering in a draft, and hastily Indigo set it down once more. She watched it closely for some while, but it didn’t flicker again, and at last she sighed and turned back to staring at the dark water. Surely,
surely
, she wouldn’t be forced to stay here indefinitely? The idea was insane. There must be
some
way of getting off this thrice-damned rock—

“rock.”

This time she jumped violently, for the echoing whisper had seemed much closer. Sweet Goddess, she thought, she must be starting to lose her wits if she was speaking aloud without even knowing it.

“knowing it. ”

“Ahhh...” It was an exhalation and a protest together, and Indigo scrambled to her feet, her heart pounding violently. She
hadn’t
spoken aloud that time; she knew it, she was
certain
of it. But something had answered her...

“
answered.
”

She swore aloud and spun around, peering into the dark. Dimly she could make out the gentle hump of the islet and the faintly phosphorescent glimmer of the river’s surface beyond. Nothing moved on the rock. There
was
nothing there.

Indigo licked her lips. Her instinct was to call out, challenge the voice, but she was held back by an unpleasant conviction that to do so might invite a response for which she wasn’t prepared. She wished that her knife was in her hand, rather than left behind with her other belongings in the oracle’s cave at the citadel. Better still, her crossbow and a good supply of bolts ... though how she might defend herself against an invisible assailant was a question she didn’t care to answer.

For a minute, perhaps two, she stood still, scanning the rock, her ears alert for any sound. Still nothing; and she began to wonder if perhaps she’d imagined it. Maybe if she took up the witchlight, explored the rock again—

“
rock again.
”

“Who are you?” Indigo yelled. “Show yourself!”

The echoes of her voice shouted back tumultuously from the tunnel walls, then faded away. There was no answer.

“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?”