Paw-Prints Of The Gods (2 page)

“Glad to hear it,”
Ravana murmured, once she had deciphered the message.

“zz-yyoouur-meemooryyy-iis-aa-coonceern-zz,” intoned the first
monk, whom she assumed was the aforementioned Brother Simha.
“zz-brootheer-dhaanuus-aand-ii-muust-aask-thee-saamee-quueestiioons-eeveeryy-daayy-zz.”

“zz-haavee-yyoouu-reemeembeereed-hoow-yyoouu-goot-heeree-zz?” asked
the other monk, presumably Brother Dhanus.

“Only what I’ve been
told.” Ravana was tired and slurred her words.

“zz-whiich-iis-zz?”
said Simha.

“I was in a
virtual-reality game,” she said slowly. “
Gods of Avalon
. I
reacted badly. The nurses say it was due to an old injury,
something to do with my brain. They said I was taken to a doctor
and then brought here. To rest while my mind recovers.”

“zz-teell-mee-aaboouut-thee-booook-zz,” screeched Dhanus.

“Book?” Ravana was
puzzled, then shuddered. “There were books in the walls, closing in
on me. The pages opened and spiders burst out...” The memory made
her feel queasy. Her fear of anything with too many legs was not
something she was ever likely to forget. “Then I was in bed, being
told... something. Everything after that is a blank.”

She paused, disturbed
once again by the cloud over her thoughts. It was hard to judge the
monks’ reaction to what she was saying, but the tilt of their hoods
suggested they were listening keenly.

Dhanus leaned forward.
“zz-whyy-diid-yyoouu-coomee-too-daaoodee-zz?”

Ravana thought back to
the series of events that had led her to Hemakuta, a city on the
moon of Daode in the Epsilon Eridani system. She had jumped at the
chance to go when the Newbrum Academy band, student musicians from
Ascension in the Barnard’s Star system, chartered her father’s ship
to take them to the peace conference in the city. The trip was a
homecoming of sorts, for she had been born on Daode’s neighbouring
moon of Yuanshi, a world split by civil war. She wondered if the
peace conference had achieved its aims.

“Where is my father?”
she asked. “Where are my friends?”

“zz-yyoouur-friieends-aawaaiit-yyoouu-iin-heemaakuutaa-zz,” Dhanus
buzzed softly.
“zz-ooncee-yyoouu-aaree-beetteer-yyoouu-caan-jooiin-theem-aand-reetuurn-hoomee-zz.”

“And my father?” This
time there was an edge to Ravana’s voice.

“zz-wee-haavee-toold-yyoouu-beefooree-zz,” Simha replied harshly.
“zz-hee-iis-faaciing-triiaal-foor-heelpiing-rooyyaaliists-oon-yyuuaanshii-zz.
zz-yyoouur-friieends-weeree-luuckyy-noot-too-bee-aarreesteed-toooo-zz.”

Ravana fell silent,
sensing the underlying malice in the monk’s words. She had vague
memories of a man called Fenris and a young prince who had been
kidnapped, but could not remember where they fitted into recent
events. When she tried to think about her father’s place in the
rebellion and the war on Yuanshi her thoughts were even more
confused. Her shoulders drooped and she sank wearily into her
seat.

“zz-yyoouu-aaree-tiireed-zz,” noted Simha.
“zz-yyoouu-shoouuld-reest-zz.”

The door behind Ravana
opened and she turned to see Lilith waiting to take her back to her
room. The monks no longer looked her way and instead conversed
quietly in the impenetrable staccato language she had heard them
use before between themselves.

Ravana took this as a
sign to leave. She rose from her chair and hobbled towards the
door, her bones screaming in protest. Lilith was not a great
conversationalist at the best of times and led her back along the
corridor without a word.

Just before they
reached the entrance to Ravana’s room, an adjacent door opened and
Jizo stomped backwards into the corridor with a squirming young
boy, carrying him like a sack with her arm clamped around his
waist. The portly nurse swung her burden upright and a startled
Ravana stared into the pale and frightened face of her
previously-unknown neighbour. The boy, who wore a green gown
similar to her own, looked no more than ten Terran years old, with
tousled blond hair crowning a pale face streaked with dirt. It was
the first time Ravana had seen another patient and she attempted a
smile. The boy looked up at the bedraggled Indian girl with the
scar on her face and shrank back in alarm.

“What planet are you
from?” he asked, scrutinising her carefully.

Ravana thought about
this. “I’m from a moon,” she said at last. “A hollow moon.”

* * *

She evidently arrived
back at her room sooner than expected, for a trolley-like laundry
robot was still busy changing her bedding. Ravana went to sit on
the chair next to the bedside table, aching more than ever and glad
to get the weight off her feet. When Jizo returned to the room, the
wary look she gave Lilith was that of a fellow conspirator. By the
time the robot completed its duties and trundled away, Jizo had
reinvigorated herself with a swig from a pocket flask and was back
to her usual chirpy self. The lopsided smile she gave Ravana when
she came to help her back into bed was weird but oddly genuine.

Ravana rose from the
chair and with a grimace faltered under a spasm of pain. She
grabbed the table to steady herself, then cringed as her hand fell
against the pot of flowers and knocked it from its perch. She made
a grab for the toppling pot, but it fell too quickly and she
watched in dismay as it smashed upon the floor. The smile on Jizo’s
face was short-lived.

“Whoops,” Ravana
murmured. She looked down at the crumpled blooms, scattered amidst
lumps of soil and shattered remains of pot. There was something
about potsherds that prodded a recent memory, but it was gone
before it had time to surface. “I’ll clear it up.”

“No need,” Lilith
snapped. “I’ll call the janitor robot.”

“Hey janitor, you’re a
robot!” Ravana joked weakly, then saw the nurse’s expression and
decided it was not the time for silly quips. “Sorry for being
clumsy. I just feel so weak and heavy, like something’s weighing me
down.”

The nurses gave her an
odd look and helped her into bed without another word. While Ravana
busily rearranged her pillows in a half-hearted attempt to get
comfortable, Lilith disappeared briefly from the room and then
returned with a canister of protein drink and Ravana’s usual second
dose of pills for the day. Behind the nurse trundled a squat and
very battered janitor robot, which after bouncing off the wall
several times extended a brush on a spindly arm and started to
sweep the mess from the floor.

“Drink this,” said
Lilith, handing her the canister.

“We’ll get you on
proper food in a day or too if all goes well,” Jizo reassured her.
“We don’t want you getting so hungry you start eating rats!”

“Jizo likes to keep
the vermin for herself,” Lilith murmured icily.

Ravana frowned, but
took the drink and idly sipped at the straw. She watched the
industrious robot retrieve the last of the broken pieces of pot,
which had hit the floor with some force. The aged robot was not
doing a very good job and kept halting with a faint electronic
murmur of ‘Reboot me!’, prompting Jizo to give it an over-zealous
kick to start it moving again. Ravana’s thoughts however dwelled
upon the brief meeting with the little boy who had asked her what
planet she was from. Oddly enough, it was word-for-word what she
used to ask people in far-flung spaceports on early trips with her
father, especially when she saw someone struggling to cope with the
local gravity.

“Your medication?”
reminded Lilith, interrupting her thoughts.

Ravana scooped the
pills into her hand, aware that both nurses watched her closely.
The notion of gravity stuck in her mind. She had lived the last
nine years on the
Dandridge Cole
, an abandoned asteroid
colony ship in the Barnard’s Star system, which spun on its axis to
create pseudo-gravity roughly twice that felt on the moons of
Yuanshi and Daode. Upon their arrival in Hemakuta, she remembered
being pleasantly surprised at how light she felt. She certainly did
not feel as she did now, where every clumsy movement of her aching
bones was like trying to wade through custard with a sack of bricks
on her back.

“Is everything okay?”
asked Lilith, eyeing her curiously.

Ravana gave her a
puzzled stare, then looked at the pills in her hand.

“I’m fine,” she said.
She gave a weak smile and popped the tablets into her mouth.

The nurse nodded,
satisfied. Ravana leaned back into her pillows, sucked thoughtfully
on her drink and watched as the nurses left the room and locked the
door behind them. It was only when she could no longer hear the
footsteps in the corridor outside did she put her hand back to her
lips and gently spit the tablets out of her mouth. Placing the
tablets under her pillow, she settled back into bed and tried to
get some sleep.

* * *

The grey shapes at the
end of the bed were not as blurry as the previous morning, but that
was not what held Ravana’s attention. She had awoken with a
terrible headache, one that gripped her head like a vice and when
she closed her eyes again caused dancing shapes to jump gaily
across the back of her eyelids. What was more, she was so hungry it
hurt and her stomach was rumbling in a most undignified manner. Yet
though still groggy, she felt more alert than she had in days and
was shuffling into a sitting position even before Jizo had time to
offer her the usual tablets and glass of water.

“Did you sleep well?”
the nurse asked.

There was something in
Jizo’s tone that suggested the nurse already knew the answer to her
question. A pot of fresh blooms had appeared to replace the one
that had smashed, which meant someone had returned to the room
whilst Ravana was asleep.

“I think so,” Ravana
replied. The response came easy and her words did not sound so
slurred. She relieved the nurse of the pills and water, then winced
as another roll of pain crashed through her skull. “I had some very
strange dreams.”

“Dreams?” asked
Lilith, far too quickly for Ravana’s liking. “You’ve not mentioned
having dreams before.”

“No,” Ravana mused. “I
don’t remember dreaming before. Not here.”

The nurses waited for
her to take her morning tablets. Ravana fumbled with her pillow
with the air of someone ready to lie back down, changed her mind
and slid out of bed. Still holding the pills and water, she
stumbled across the floor to the mirror. Her reflection gazed
unblinking back, slightly sharper than normal and she was struck by
how thin she looked, but not in a good way. The hole in her mind
seemed to taunt her from behind her reflected gaze, a blackness now
haunted by the ghosts of her dreams.

“Mirror, mirror, on
the wall,” murmured Ravana. “What is it I can’t recall?”

Despite her headache,
she decided she looked slightly less worse than yesterday. Behind
her, Lilith noisily cleared her throat.

“Have you taken your
medication?”

Ravana put the pills
to her mouth, then paused. “What will these do to me?”

“Restore your
vitality!” declared Jizo.

“They help you sleep,”
said Lilith, glaring at her colleague.

“Vitality and sleep?”
asked Ravana. “Is that possible?”

“I must apologise for
my fat friend, for she is an idiot,” Lilith replied tartly. “What
she should have said, if she knew her arse from her elbow, is that
it’s vitally important you get plenty of sleep. You can’t expect to
run before you can walk.”

“But I can walk,”
Ravana pointed out.

Keeping her back to
the nurses, she raised a hand and then the glass to her mouth and
swallowed. As she turned, her aching legs wavered and she grabbed
hold of the table to steady herself. Her elbow brushed against the
replacement plant pot.

“Sorry,” she murmured
and caught the hard stares of the nurses as she quickly put a hand
to the pot to stop it falling. “Maybe I do need to work on my
walking, after all.”

“Has she been at your
flask?” asked Lilith, glaring at Jizo. “She looks drunk.”

“Don’t blame the demon
drink,” Jizo said cryptically. “Blame the demon king.”

Puzzled, Ravana handed
back the empty glass to Lilith, who gave a satisfied nod. There was
something in the air that made them dispense with any further
barbed banter and she allowed herself to be led away to the
washroom without another word.

Neither nurse gave the
plant pot a second look, otherwise they may have noticed the fresh
indentations in the soil where a finger had pushed two sets of
tablets deep out of sight.

* * *

There was only one
monk in the interview room that morning. His red sash was decorated
with lions and it took her a while to recall this meant it was
Brother Simha.

“zz-raavaanaa-zz,”
rasped the hooded figure. “zz-hoow-iis-yyoouur-meemooryy-zz?”

The momentary jolt of
panic that greeted her every time she was in the presence of the
monks this time failed to ebb away. Ravana sat nervously before the
desk and tried hard to remember where she had seen the figures
before. The seaside scene through the window had lost its calming
influence upon the strange fears building up within her. The
dreadful inhuman screech of Brother Simha invoked an image of
spindly grey fingers reaching out to suffocate consciousness at the
merest touch. Ravana gave an involuntary shiver and dropped her
gaze to the monk’s own hands resting upon the desk before her.

Startled, she froze.
Emerging from the sleeves of the monk’s robe, clear as day, were
twelve skinny digits, six to each hand. She was so surprised she
had to count them twice. It seemed incredible she had never noticed
it before, but after missing two doses of medication her mind was
becoming clearer by the hour. Simha still awaited an answer and she
forced her stare away from the monk’s strange hands.