Redemption in Indigo (15 page)

She dreamed that she was in a strange land of dry savannah and dusty winds. There were many people with her, all tired, all grieved, and they were made to march along an endless road to an unknown destination. Some fell and were dragged along by their comrades until they moved their own feet once more, preferring as yet not to die. Finally they arrived at a camp, a set of rough, ramshackle buildings made of bare, sand-scoured, heat-warped wood. It was the highest point from horizon to horizon, the only feature amid vast stretches of dry, yellow grass. Escape was made even less likely by the presence of guards whose faces showed that they blamed the prisoners as much as they blamed their superiors for their being posted to the middle of this barrenness.

The difference was that they could show their displeasure far more easily to the prisoners. Paama saw a woman pushed down by a guard for no other reason than that she was beautiful and fragile, and the guard, a hard-faced woman with the strength of a man, was tired of beautiful, fragile females who could not walk far or bear burdens without stumbling and fainting. As her husband stood powerless, held at bay by the weapons of other guards, the woman sprawled face down in the dust. The guard screamed at her and kicked the ground near her again and again, the heavy boot coming closer and closer to her flinching body. Paama could no longer bear it. She rushed at the guard, beating her down to the same dust, and stood with her heart pounding at her folly, expecting to die.

There was no reaction, only the sound of slow, firm footsteps and the snap of booted heels coming to attention. She turned to see a man in a drab but neat uniform walking towards her. He stopped and looked at the two women on the ground, the prisoner and the guard, and at Paama standing between them. There was a long silence. Then he stooped and lifted the prisoner, put his arm about her, and helped her to her husband's waiting arms. To the fallen guard he gave one uncaring glance, and with another glance he dispersed the other guards. The last look was saved for Paama, and it was a long look, and only the intensity of that look identified for her the face of the boy who had looked into the lightning and seen death??nd something else.

All right,
she thought angrily in the midst of the dream.
I understand now, I see it. Not with the beauty that you have seen, but I grant you your vision. Now leave me alone and let me rest!

The dream ended. If the remainder of the night held any more dreams, she did not remember them.

He had the nerve, the following day, to ask her how she had slept. She narrowed her eyes at him and did not answer. The taste of dust was still in her mouth, the brawling yells of the guard echoed in her ears, and the look of the man's eyes remained printed on the back of her mind.

'Wherever you plan to take me today, I do not care, but I tell you I am tired of death and crisis. If you cannot show me something lighthearted, I will kill myself and save you the trouble of ever having to convince me to return your power to you.'

He blinked, slightly startled. ‘Lighthearted?'

'Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘Entertain me. Have a thought for my sanity. Perhaps your kind can look long at the deep questions of existence, but our sort need variation in our philosophical diet.'

He pondered briefly. ‘I could show you the tricksters at work.'

'And who are they?'

'Minor adversaries. Sometimes they must be stopped, but at other times they are allowed to do their worst. I can show you tricksters who have been permitted to teach someone a lesson.'

'This will be entertaining?’ she asked doubtfully.

'Some humans find it so. There will be no death, I promise you, but there will be severe embarrassment, which is but a small death of the ego.'

Paama shrugged in resignation. It sounded as if that was the best compromise she could expect.

'Give me time to have breakfast, and then we can go.'

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The search for Paama and the indigo djombi was still on. Sister Elen watched diligently every day and sometimes at night and wrote down everything that she could see. Sister Deian hovered beside her in case there was anything to tell Paama. Sister Carmis worked the hardest, spending hours upon hours in sleep or meditation. She said she was looking at probabilities, but they had become too varied and numerous for her to find anything meaningful. Instead of following a few bright threads in the fabric, she was caught in an irregular, brilliant, dynamic web.

'Not very informative,’ she admitted, ‘but still rather exhilarating.'

The other searchers were moving with equal blindness, arriving at places moments or hours after their quarry had left. If the djombi had pooled resources with the Sisters, they might both have gotten somewhere, but the djombi didn't think to take human abilities seriously, and the Sisters, knowing little about such beings, didn't imagine that it was even possible to collaborate with djombi, so they were both the poorer for it.

However, when humans must rely on their own powers, they can be immensely resourceful. Sister Carmis put the idea out into the open by telling the Sisters of a dream she had had of a warrior-hunter seeking Paama's trail.

'That's it,’ said Sister Jani. ‘We'll hire a tracker.'

'Not from around here,’ warned Sister Elen hastily. ‘I think we should not alarm Paama's family just yet. We need to keep our actions secret.'

'Ahani is the place to find good trackers,’ Sister Jani remarked. ‘No-one asks your business there.'

The Sisters nodded, and then an awkward silence fell. None of them wanted to go to Ahani. Makendha supplied most of their needs, and on the rare occasion that something additional was required, it was sent for.

'There is something else that concerns me,’ said Sister Carmis. ‘We saw the truth of what happened that night, a truth that no-one now seems to recall. The poet Alton appears to be content to be a lord, and Neila is willing to marry him, but what of that man, the majordomo, who once more pretends to be so ordinary? I do not trust him. I would be happier if he were out of Makendha.'

'How are we to accomplish that?’ asked Sister Elen. ‘I might Read him from a distance, but if I dared to speak to him face to face, I might lose my memories and my purpose in an instant. His master may have put protections on him, the same as he did for his poet.'

'Then we deal with him from a distance,’ said Sister Deian.

'We will send him a message threatening him with exposure,’ said Sister Jani, her eyes flashing. ‘Let him try to modify the memory of an entire town full of people after we tell everyone who he is.'

'Wait,’ Sister Carmis said, frowning. ‘He might know something about where his former master is going. Shouldn't we try to bargain with him first?'

'Who knows if these people have any sense of honour?’ Sister Elen sighed. ‘We need something to bind him to be obedient to us, at least for a while.'

If the Sisters sound rather daring in their plans, it is because they did not really know who they were dealing with. Although their memory of the evening was untouched, their perception of what had happened was awry. Both the Trickster as Bini and the indigo lord in his disguise as Alton had shown but slight signs of something changed in appearance. Alton, on the other hand, had been almost entirely controlled by the indigo lord so that he could have the demeanour of a lord to match his own gift of eloquence. He had shown so much influence and interference swirling about him that Sister Elen had Read him as the most dangerous, and Sister Deian had pronounced him the centre of the entire disturbance.

The confused scenes that had followed had been made even more obscure by the darkness and by the peculiar effect of the time bubble, which did not easily permit sight at a distance. They knew that Bini the majordomo was deeply involved in the conspiracy to get the Stick and the subsequent cover-up, but they had not yet grasped the fact that he was not human. Out of all the three, Sister Carmis was the only one who had the slightest idea of his true nature, but unfortunately she had taken her dreams of spiders to be as symbolic as her dreams of the visible web of probabilities.

Therefore the Sisters are plotting something that would work very well for a human, but that will have unexpected consequences for a djombi.

The Trickster was treating himself to a sort of holiday. He was going to establish Alton permanently as Lord Taran, preferably in a residential district just off Ahani so that Neila's nouveau riche tastes could be satisfied, and then he was going to hand in his resignation and go back to his usual haunts in Ahani. As for the real Lord Taran, the Trickster didn't spare him a thought. He had seen enough. Getting between half the host of undying ones and one fallen comrade would be going to a level of danger that he was not accustomed to. Danger for the sake of fun, that he could appreciate, but unreasonable risk taking was not part of his character.

So comfortable was he in his vision of his likely future that the note that came down from the House of the Sisters via the postboy was quite a shock. Humans had seen him and remembered him? How was that possible? He would have to start paying closer attention to the little toys and gadgets that were so popular in the larger cities, and that now, apparently, had come to the hinterlands as well. He read the first part of the message more closely and realised that they had not, in fact, seen
him,
but that he was guilty by association with the indigo lord. He crumpled the note in his hand. There was a simple answer to this problem. He would hand in his resignation a bit earlier than planned, and Bini would disappear, his face never to be seen again in this country.

He raised the crumpled paper in his fist and laughed as he shook it in the direction of the House of the Sisters.

Grant him this one theatrical moment. It is going to be of extremely short duration.

His laughter choked off as he saw before him not a human fist, but the sharp-tipped, bristly leg of a spider. He blinked in horror and tried to reassert his image, but nothing happened. The postboy, who had been waiting in case an immediate reply needed to be sent, stared at him in frozen terror.

The Trickster pulled himself together. ‘There is nothing to worry about,’ he told the boy as reassuringly as he could manage. ‘These things happen. Just run along and deliver the rest of your letters.'

Other powers remained intact, for the postboy paused in confusion, nodded peacefully, and then went off to complete his work.

The Trickster gnashed his mandibles in irritation. The power over memory worked best when used on those whom one would rarely see. It was perfect for large and busy towns or cities, and for short interactions, but in a small village like Makendha he would end up having to destroy the short term memory of half the inhabitants to sustain his disguise.

He smoothed out the crumpled note and read it through carefully with a feeling of grudging admiration. Not many people managed to trick the Trickster, but when they did he was willing to give credit where credit was due. Well, he was not going back to Ahani without his secondary power of disguise intact. With a little less elegance than his previous employer, he waved a forelimb in the air and stepped through the crack in space and time—out of his own tent and into the House of the Sisters.

Sister Elen was the first to see him. She started to scream, but he raised a leg wearily.

'This is all your doing, so don't fuss. Who do I have to deal with to get my disguise back?'

She stared at him. ‘Deian!’ she yelled.

The Dreamer came running. On her head was a cap made of the same fabric that covered the cushion she had given to Paama. The Trickster looked at her and observed the immunity to mind tampering.

'No need to be so defensive,’ he said, trying to make soothing gestures with his forelegs, and failing miserably. ‘I realise that perhaps you didn't know what was beneath the disguise when you decided to block my power to maintain it, but now I'm sure we can both agree that it would be better for all concerned if I looked a little less??ntimidating.'

'Where's Paama?’ demanded Sister Deian.

'I honestly have no idea. I'm not really involved. Trust me, none of my kind would wish to get caught up in this matter.'

He was afraid that they would think he was lying, but, both Dreamer and Reader looked at him, their faces showed disappointment at the truth of his words.

'But that has nothing to do with me. Won't you let me have back my disguise?'

Sister Elen had the pained expression of someone who was thinking very very quickly. ‘You have to agree to leave Makendha and never return again.'

'Never?’ he said, dismayed.

'Never,’ she reiterated firmly.

He nodded, pretending to be resigned, but secretly he thought that there were always ways to get around ‘never'.

'And since you and your ... kind cannot—or will not—help us find Paama, you must go to Ahani and hire us the best tracker you can find,’ she went on bravely.

'I can do that,’ he acknowledged. ‘And you will let me have my disguise back, so that I can carry out this mission?'

'No. You can have it back only when the tracker reaches the House and is approved by us,’ said Sister Elen.

'And has found Paama,’ added Sister Deian.

'You bargain shrewdly. You must have heard about me before,’ he smiled. Unfortunately, this movement showed itself as an ominous clicking of the mandibles, which caused the two Sisters to jump back in fear.

'No, no, I will do as you say. I will find you a tracker and stay in Ahani. You can return my disguise to me from a distance?’ he asked pleadingly.

'Yes, once the terms are all met,’ said Sister Deian.

'Agreed, then.'

The spider-man backed away cautiously so that no sudden move of his might startle them, waved a foreleg gently in the air in farewell, and vanished.

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