Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar (33 page)

There was a hissing, as though a thousand snakes had come to life in the tunnel. At first Indigo thought it was just a mindless sound, but then she realized that the voices were repeating a word, one word, over and over again.

“
she. she. she. she. she. afraid. she, Indigo. she is afraid. we are afraid. we are her. she is us. she is afraid. we are afraid. help her, Indigo. help us, Indigo.
”

Indigo’s heart was now thundering against her ribs. She believed she was beginning to understand what the voices implied, and suddenly some of the cryptic and seemingly emotionless words of the Ancestral Lady began to weave into a pattern and form the first hint of a picture. “
We are her, she is us. she is afraid, we are afraid.
” Oh yes, Indigo thought; oh yes....

She called out to the shifting, rustling dead in their prison within the walls. “What do you fear? Tell me its name and its nature.”

Instantly all sound ceased. Silence closed in like a shroud; even the river no longer made its small lapping noises. Indigo shifted one foot on the shale, and the hiatus broke; but still the voices didn’t respond.

“Tell me,” she said again. There was something stirring within her, new strength from a source she couldn’t name but that filled her with sudden confidence. Power, she thought. The power to overcome a demon....

Her voice rang through the tunnel in an echoing peal. “I command you, and you cannot gainsay me!
Tell me the name of your fear
!”

A high, thin, bubbling wail spread up into the dark, fell away to a whimpering moan. Then, at last, a solitary whisper, a solitary word.

“
death
...”

Indigo dropped her gaze to the beach beneath her feet and stood very still as the whisper faded and silence crept down once more. For a long time she stayed motionless, and an air of tension began to build, like the stifling, noiseless hour of waiting before the breaking of a storm. Then, without looking, without even raising her head, Indigo spoke.

“I know the truth now, madam. Show yourself.”

There was a rippling splash somewhere beyond the witch-light’s reach, the creak of an oar moving in its rowlock and stirring the water. The boat emerged slowly from the dark, and the Ancestral Lady was a silhouette in the stern. Only the silver corona of her eyes glowed cold and nacreous.

And the boat carried three passengers.

Indigo sensed them even before she looked up, and when she did raise her head, there was no shock, no stab of fear. In the boat’s prow, a wolf with brindled fur and her own indigo eyes sat looking steadily at her. She met its stare for a moment; then her gaze slid past it to the two human figures who had ranged themselves on the seat between it and the Ancestral Lady. The child with the silver hair and the silver eyes smiled, showing the small, sharp teeth of a cat; its look was evil. At its side, the statuesque being with hair the color of warm earth and a cloak of green and russet smiled too; sweetly and sadly, and with an air of certain knowledge.

Animal and demon and avatar. But she herself, Indigo thought, she herself was more....

She looked past them, into the Ancestral Lady’s glittering eyes, and said: “No, madam. I am not afraid of them or of what they signify. But I believe that
you
are.‘’

The Ancestral Lady tensed. “Ah. So you have learned something from your sojourn.“ But her voice didn’t carry conviction; there was unease in her tone.

“Yes,” Indigo said. “And these ... guests ... you bring to show me aren’t yours to control. They are mine.”

She pointed at Nemesis. There was a momentary twisting of her perceptions, a looping of time and space, and for an instant she saw in her inner vision a tower cracking and burning, and heard in her memory the shrieking triumph of a monstrous child’s laugh. Then Nemesis vanished. Indigo pointed again. A cold and empty room in Carn Caille, and a girl racked with the agonies of grief, looking up at the bright being who claimed to speak in the Earth Mother’s name and stood before her in judgment. When she looked at the boat again, only the indigo-eyed wolf remained.

Wolf, Indigo, wolf
! The shock and the thrill of transformation, feeling herself running, racing, low to the ground. The taste of blood in her mouth, the instincts she shared with her wolf companion Grimya, the chill but ineffably beautiful sound of a howl rising on the air of a winter night.

Then the wolf, too, disappeared, and the Ancestral Lady stood alone in the boat.

“They have no power over me,” Indigo said. “Rather, I have power over them. And that’s what you dread above all else, isn’t it? Power that may prove to be greater than your own. That’s why you have succumbed to the very demon you have striven to use for your own ends. You have wielded it as a weapon, yet it has fed upon you and grown strong from your weakness.”

From the boat came quiet but harsh laughter. “You know
nothing
of me!”

“Oh, but I do.” Again Indigo had heard the uncertainty underlying the Ancestral Lady’s retaliation, and she smiled, not pleasantly. “I know more of you than you dream, madam. I know that you have created this world of the dead about you as a shield, a shell within which you can hide. I know that you have fashioned all the horrors that haunt the nightmares of your worshipers, and that you send them to prowl the living world so that your people will run to appease you and make offerings to you in the hope of averting your wrath. You hold their lives in your hands, and through your oracles, you make them dance and sing and weep and grovel—and you make them
die
!”

Another faint laugh echoed in the tunnel and was answered by a renewed rustling and scraping from the walls. “But I do not take life, Indigo. That is something you already know.”

Indigo smiled again. “I didn’t claim that you take life, Lady. I said that
you make them die
. There is a very great difference.”

The Ancestral Lady didn’t reply, and after a few moments, Indigo spoke again.

“Did they create you? Is that the truth of it? Are you nothing more than an invention of your own human worshipers?”

“
No
!” The silver-fringed eyes flared savagely. “I am older and greater than anything their puny civilization can conjure. I am Mistress of the Dead, Guardian of the Portal. And they worship me because they know that in the fullness of time, they must all come to me and serve me in death as they did in life!”

Yes, Indigo thought; that much was true. This creature was far more than a cipher, more than a shell created by the power of human will. She
was
the avatar she claimed to be. Yet perhaps, in the long centuries of her existence, she had forgotten the true meaning of her origins.

“
We are her. She is us.
” And her servants, these servants whose bones formed the walls of her domain—these and all the countless others whose souls had joined with her down the ages, until there was no difference between them—dreaded death above all else. It seemed on the surface an insane paradox, but death could take many forms. Death of the body, death of the mind or heart—or the death of life itself. And there lay the crux.

Indigo said: “Shall I tell you the demon’s name, madam? Shall I tell you the name of the thing I came here to destroy, and to which you are in thrall?”

The boat rocked violently, and the Ancestral Lady’s voice snapped out. “You do not know the demon’s name!”

“But I do. Its name is
fear
. One of the greatest and most powerful demons of all ... and you are enslaved to it!”

“No!” the Ancestral Lady hissed. “You lie, oracle! What have I to fear?”

Indigo glanced to left and right. The bones were still now, the tiny voices silent. “
We are her. She is us.
”

“I believe that you fear the very power in whose name you rule,” she said softly. “You fear death.”

There was a sharp pause. Then a laugh so violent and so sudden that it sounded like the bark of a dog rang through the tunnel.

“
I fear death
? Ah, my foolish oracle! How can
I
fear such a thing?” Water lapped on the shale near Indigo’s feet as the Ancestral Lady swung her oar suddenly, and the boat began to move toward the beach. “Answer me that, if you can.”

Indigo shook her head. “You fear it, madam, because death, for you, would be to lose the hold you have upon your worshipers.”

The boat surged nearer; she moved back quickly as it touched the shore, and shingle ground under the keel. The Ancestral Lady took a pace forward, stepping over the seat.

“I will never lose my hold on them!”

“But if you did, what then? If they turned from you, turned their backs to favor another deity, or none at all, what would you become?”

The dark figure was climbing over the prow now, and Indigo retreated again, though she was aware that she couldn’t back away much farther. This was the most dangerous moment. If she miscalculated, if she made one mistake, the embryonic plan that had been forming in her mind would be wrecked.

“You rule them by fear, because fear is what drives you. Fear that they will abandon you unless they are too afraid to do so. You want their love—”

“
I have their love
!”

Indigo remembered the dreadful look in Shalune’s eyes in the moments before she died. “Perhaps you have,” she said contemptuously, “but that love is warped and made worthless by the cruelty and terror you inflict to keep your followers yoked to your side. Shalune and Inuss died because they believed it was a just punishment for what they had done. It was not. What crime had they committed, save to defy the will of the madwoman who calls herself your High Priestess? Yet you let them die, you
encouraged
them to die, and then you turned them into
hushu
as an example to the rest and to strike even greater dread of you into their hearts!”

She glanced quickly over her shoulder. She was almost at the highest, central point of the islet now; behind her, the rising rock blocked the bright glow from the witchlight, and she could see only intense blackness. She dared not move back any farther.

The Ancestral Lady, however, was not following her, but had stopped on the shale beach. Her dead-white face was ghastly where the witchlight fell on it; her eyes were as black as ink and, for the moment, their silver corona had faded to a dangerous glimmer.

“Do you know,” Indigo said in a low but savage voice, “what Shalune was trying to do? She was trying to bring you a fit candidate to be your next avatar in the mortal world. She was trying to replace a priestess who would not have had the dedication to uphold your worship and revere your name with one who would.”

The Ancestral Lady hissed like an angry cat. “She disobeyed my will!”

“No, she disobeyed
Uluye’s
will. Uluye is like you, Lady—she too has succumbed to the demon called fear, and it has fed like a leech on her until it has all but eaten her away. But who is the mistress and who the servant? Whose fear is the greater? Her fear that if she does not rule with harshness and cruelty, she will incur your wrath? Or your fear that if you do not keep your people under a thrall of terror and dread, they will one day forget you, and thus you might cease to exist?”

Slowly, so slowly, the Ancestral Lady raised one hand. The sleeve of her robe fell back, exposing an arm as thin and as deadly white as the arm of a bloodless corpse. Her black lips parted and she hissed again; not a cat this time, but a snake, lethal and merciless. Taking one step forward, she stamped upon the witchlight and it shattered with a tiny, shrill noise, plunging the scene into darkness. Then a new light began to glow: an aura, colorless and cold, that shimmered around the Lady’s gaunt frame. It grew brighter, until she stood haloed in a brilliance that made her own dark form awesome by contrast. Her face seemed to float like the face of a specter within the black frame of hair and robe; her eyes were black windows onto annihilation.

She said softly, and the words were caught up and echoed a thousand times within the crushing dark: “Oh, yes, Indigo. They fear me; and their terror keeps my name alive in their hearts and my will paramount in their minds. Even now my servant Uluye is preparing the ceremonies that will send her child to me for judgment, and I shall judge her
hushu
.”

Indigo was stunned.
Sweet Mother, they have Yima
!

The Ancestral Lady saw her consternation and smiled a grim smile. “Yes, they have Yima; and Uluye’s hand will wield the knife that ends her time in the mortal world, for Uluye is my faithful servant and her love for me is even greater than her love for her own child.” She took another step toward Indigo. “I do not need to teach Uluye the meaning of fear. But
you
have not yet learned the lesson she knows so well. I shall teach you now, Indigo. I shall teach you the meaning of fear, and I shall show you what true terror is and what it can do to the human soul!”

The white hand was coming closer as the Mistress of the Dead advanced up the slope. Deep within herself, Indigo felt her most primal instincts responding: the pounding of the heart, the roiling of the stomach, the sweating, suffocating surge of panic; fear of entrapment, fear of defeat, fear of demons and deities and powers; above all, the unimaginably ancient human dread of death and of what lay beyond—

No, not that! That was her one great weapon; the knife that ripped the demon open, the crossbow that shot a bolt to its heart! She drew breath, and suddenly the words came.

“I don’t fear you, Lady, for I know now that I have nothing to fear from you. You see, you have made one great mistake in the means you used to try to cow me. You showed me the dead; people from my own past, my own life, who now serve you in your realm. But among all their number, one was missing. One who, alone, might have provided you with a weapon against which I would have been defenseless. But he did not come, did he? You couldn’t use him against me, because he doesn’t dwell among your legions. That was my one terror, madam; terror that I would find my Fenran here. But he isn’t here. He isn’t dead. You have no power over him, and therefore you have no power over me. So do whatever you will—I defy you!”