Indigo - Inferno Part 17

The harp was real. The strings gave off a sweet, melancholy sound when she touched them, and as the echoes of the chord rang softly among the mountains she knew that this small miracle was a sign and a tribute from the Earth Mother's emissary, a symbol of hope in a place that had known only desolation.

As the harp's last notes died away, Grimya's anxious face appeared above her, peering into the gloom.

"In-digo?" the she-wolf called aloud.

Indigo couldn't answer her. She was hunched over, the harp cradled in her arms and her tears falling on the polished wood and the s.h.i.+ning strings as she wept, for Jasker, for Chrysiva, for so many others whose names and faces she had never known. Grimya watched her with anguished pity, but quieted the instinct to run to her and try to bring her comfort. For a little while, she knew, Indigo needed to a.s.suage her grief alone. The she-wolf whined softly, then withdrew into the cave and lay down with her muzzle on her front paws, gazing out with unfocused eyes and trying not to think on all that was past and gone.

At last, Indigo raised her head and knew that the storm within her was over. Her tears were drying, and though her throat and lungs were stifled and her heart felt drained, she was strangely tranquil. As she rose to her feet, gathering the harp carefully in her arms, she thought that perhaps, like the ravaged land around her, she, too, had been cleansed, and that in the wake of pain there might be peace, of a kind.

She looked up to the cave, and at her soft mental call Grimya appeared and ran down the slope to her. The she-wolf pressed her head against Indigo's thigh, not speaking, conveying with her touch a feeling she could not express in words.

The dim shadows were growing longer; behind the canopy of cloud the sun was beginning to slip toward the western horizon. Indigo put a hand to her breast, feeling the familiar shape of the lodestone in its pouch, and recalled the words of the Earth Mother's emissary. This dream is over now, and it is time for a new dream to begin....

She drew out the pouch and laid the little pebble on her upturned palm. Tiny, vividly luminescent in the gloomy daylight, the fleck of gold s.h.i.+mmered at the stone's heart and pointed eastward. Along the track and over the final ridge, away from the mountains and the devastation and the unmarked graves of so many souls, toward the distant sea and another quest.

How long would it be this time? she asked herself. How many more years of wandering and searching, before a new evil cast its shadow on another land and she must again face the consequence of her own foolish, reckless deed?

Even the Earth Mother, in Her wisdom, didn't know the answer to such a question. Indigo sighed, and s.h.i.+vered as though casting off a shadow of her own. Then she looked down at Grimya. The she-wolf's golden eyes met hers, and Grimya said softly, in her mind, There is no reason to linger.

Better that we should go on our way, and leave this place to its healing.

Yes. Indigo, too, communicated in silence, not wanting to sully the quiet that had descended, andturned to look down for the last time on the ravaged landscape below. Ash clouds still drifted across the wasted vista, and the glowing veins of lava, arteries carrying the lifeblood from the now quiescent hearts of Old Maia and her sisters, moved slowly and seemingly without purpose through the valleys that had once shuddered to the racket of human toil.

A victory? Perhaps. But the victor's crown was a bitter one, and there would be no glory in her dreams.

Indigo whispered, so softly that not even Grimya heard her, "Farewell, Jasker. May you find the peace that was denied to you while you lived." Then she shouldered her harp and, with the wolf pacing beside her, turned away from the desolated land and began to walk slowly, wearily, along the gently rising track toward the first, distant glimmer of the eastern stars.

The ash that still fell steadily, silently from the sky filled their footprints like sand trickling implacably into an hourgla.s.s. Within minutes there was no trace of any living soul having pa.s.sed that way, save for one last sign that all but the most vigilant observer might easily have missed. And gradually the soft, dark, implacable rain was burying even this tiny artifact, as though granting it, finally, its own eternal and lonely grave.

A crudely fas.h.i.+oned pewter brooch...

INFERNO.

For centuries the Tower of Regrets stood alone upon the plain, and no man or woman dared turn their face to it, for fear of the curse that lay within. And so it might have remained -but for the recklessness of a king's foolish daughter...

Her t.i.tle was the Princess Anghara Kaligsdaughter; but now she has forfeited the right to her name and heritage. For she broke the one law that had endured since her people's history began when she breached that ancient tower in a bid to learn its secret. Now its curse is loosed upon the world, and upon the soul of Anghara Kaligsdaughter.

Anghara is Anghara no longer. Her name now is Indigo, color of mourning-and her home is the wide world, for she has no other. She cannot die, she cannot age, for until she lifts the Tower's curse, she is doomed to immortality. She has one friend, who is not human. And she has one enemy that will dog her footsteps wherever she goes. It is Nemesis, created from the darkest part of her own soul. Wherever her wanderings lead her now, her Nemesis shall follow...

A Tom Doherty a.s.sociates, Inc. Book ISBN 0-812-50246-9.

TK Proofed. I think I got most of the errors, started getting tired of Inferno I hate doing proof jobs on books I have reread within the last couple months. November 9, 2002.