Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar by Louise Cooper - Indigo 06

Author:Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub

•CHAPTER•XIII•

On the night before the initiation ceremony, the citadel and the forest were rocked by a colossal thunderstorm. Grimya had sensed its approach since late afternoon and had been restless and uneasy, and those priestesses who were weather-wise predicted that the storm would be abnormally severe even by Dark Isle standards.

Uluye was grimly delighted by the prediction, pronouncing it an excellent omen, and at sunset, as the clouds gathered and the sky turned from darkly brazen to the purple-black of a fearsome bruise, she gathered a coterie of the senior women and led them down to the arena to chant a hymn of praise to the Ancestral Lady while the nightly circuit of the lake was made.

Grimya, watching nervously from the ledge outside Indigo’s quarters, heard their song rising with eerie clarity against a background of total stillness and silence; then she jumped with shock as the first searing triple flash of lightning ripped across the heavens. The following thunder obliterated the women’s voices, and as it began to fade, the sky opened and the rain came roaring down. The torches below on the arena guttered wildly for a mere few seconds and then were doused; another lightning flash showed the women pelting back toward the ziggurat, arms clasped over their heads to protect themselves from the battering onslaught as the downpour hit them like a cataract. They scrambled up stairs already treacherous with running water and ran for the shelter of the caves, their hair streaming and their garments plastered to their skin.

Last of all came Uluye, but instead of turning in to her own quarters, she walked on along the ledge toward the final flight of stairs that led to the open temple above the citadel. She passed by Grimya without so much as acknowledging her, and to the wolf it seemed as though she was in a trance. Her eyes stared fiercely ahead, unblinking though the rain was teeming in her face; her mouth was set in a triumphant smile, without the smallest trace of ease or humor, and she walked with an air of absolute purpose, oblivious to anything around her.

The lightning was by now almost continuous, the thunder a constant bawling din vibrating through the bluff. Grimya slunk back inside the cave, wishing that Indigo were here and not spending this last evening, the evening of dark moon, in vigil with Yima and Shalune. Since the night she had followed Shalune to the forest and witnessed her meeting with Tiam, Grimya had wanted to talk to Indigo and tell her what she had seen, but the chance simply hadn’t come. In these last few days before the initiation ceremony, it seemed that the oracle’s time, like Yima’s, was no longer her own.

For several hours each day, Indigo and Shalune took instruction from Uluye in the sponsors’ duties; then there were long and tedious rehearsals for the ceremony itself and for the procession that would precede it, and late into each night, small ceremonies at which,

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