Redemption in Indigo

14

a lesson in the appropriate use of power

Paama stumbled forward and was instantly aware of icy cold hammering up through the soles of her thin slippers like bolts of frozen iron. She was standing on snow. She breathed in, and it felt like a thousand tiny spikes of ice in her nose, throat, and lungs. A cloud blew out of her nostrils as she exhaled. Her eyes prickled and watered in the cold, dry breeze. Everywhere was white.

The indigo lord studied her, his eyes bleakly distant. He walked a few paces away and sat on a snow-covered boulder, apparently immune to the cold, and continued to watch her.

'Put the Stick down by my feet,’ he commanded her.

Her half-frozen fingers were clenched tightly around the Stick, but Paama managed to ease her grip, step forward, and stiffly put the Stick down in the thin carpet of snow. He looked at her suspiciously as she edged away and then bent and picked it up.

Nothing happened.

He glared at it and then glared at her. ‘You are still holding it.'

'Well, I don't know how I could be, when I'm standing over here!’ she snapped at him, frustration overcoming fear. ‘And barely standing, at that, as my feet have gone numb. If you are going to kill me, do it now before the cold does it for you!'

He ignored her and turned the inert Stick over in his hands. Without warning, he raised it in both hands and brought it down hard over his leg. It did not break, though it seemed he could not feel pain. The bafflement and annoyance in his expression increased.

Paama began to shiver violently. ‘P-please,’ she begged, ‘let us get off this mountain—'

'We are not on a mountain,’ he corrected absently, still frowning at the Stick. ‘We have merely gone south ... very far south.'

'You are killing me,’ she whispered.

His answer was to throw the Stick back to her. She caught it clumsily with hands that felt like dead weights on the end of amputated stumps.

'Give it to me again,’ he ordered.

Almost vibrating with cold, she obeyed. This time, as he closed his hand over the Stick just above her gripping hand, a sudden squall of sleet drove between them and whipped up the scant covering of snow. The sun, which had been disappearing at intervals behind fast-scudding clouds, blazed out with a brightness magnified several times over by the reflecting snow, and the air sparkled with tiny rainbows.

Paama screamed, and he flung her away from him. As she fell into the wet snow, still holding the Stick, the sleet and wind vanished, the unnatural brightness of the sun diminished, and the rainbows and sparkles disappeared.

'What is that?’ he said very seriously, reaching out to touch the Stick again.

Immediately the squall returned in full force and the sun beat fiercely through the swirling whiteness. Paama cowered on the ground, overwhelmed, and waited to die. Then something unexpected and immensely comforting happened.

'Paama!'

It was Sister Deian's voice. Somehow, even at this distance, even after all the drama of recent events, the Sisters were still watching and aware. There was still hope that she could be found. The thought made her raise her head and boldly face her enemy.

'Stop! We cannot hold it together! You will kill us both!’ she screamed at him.

He pulled his hand away, bringing the weird weather to an abrupt end, and stared at her. From the look on his face, Paama guessed that he had never been at a loss before.

'I don't want to kill you. I simply want my power back. My power, my own, that which I was made to wield.'

'Then prove it to me,’ she panted. ‘Let us leave this terrible place before I freeze to death.'

He glanced down at her feet in their thin slippers, now soaked-through with melted snow, and finally understood. With that gesture that was now becoming familiar, he cast out his bubble of time and folded it in until they were somewhere else.

It was like being thrown into an oven. Paama crouched in agony, clasping her hands and pressing her feet as the blood returned painfully to her extremities. Squinting up into the brightness of a noonday sun, she saw the branches of a date palm and felt grass beneath her. Sand dunes curved artistically along the eastern horizon with the austere beauty of deadliness, and the bones of some ruined town stood brokenly on the western horizon.

'Wait here,’ the lord said abruptly.

'No!’ she shouted. ‘Don't leave me here!'

He said impatiently, ‘I have told you I am not going to kill you. I am going to get shoes and clothes for you, that is all.'

'Then let me come, too,’ she insisted, panicked at the thought of being abandoned.

He shrugged in annoyance and turned away. She got up slowly, teetering on swollen feet, and stumbled after him over the hot, hard-packed sand and gravel.

'Where is this place?’ she asked, not expecting to be answered.

'A desert east of the country you know,’ he replied vaguely. ‘There is treasure?’ he paused and thumped a foot down on the hard sand ‘...?own here.'

He reached out and took her hand without warning, and they fell through the solid ground as if they had suddenly become ghosts. Paama tried to scream but found herself unable to breathe until, with a slight splash, they landed in darkness, ankle deep in gently running water. It was mildly cold and soothing to her burned feet, and the air was moist and cool on her sun-scorched face, but she could not see. He dropped her hand, and she snatched desperately at the air to find where he was standing.

'I cannot see!’ she wailed.

'Stop it,’ he said, sounding more tired than annoyed.

There was a sizzling noise, and then a flash curved up into the air and froze in a banner of slowly blossoming sparks. He had taken a firestar and thrown it up into the vaulted roof of the vast underground cavern, and now it hung there, somewhat dimmer than usual, but still giving plenty of light for Paama to see around her. Ages of water had carved out this place, and the trickle that now wet her feet was the last remnant of the ancient torrent. The desert above would soon take even that as the sand dunes on the horizon marched on and covered the date palms and the grass.

Then, as she looked a little more closely, she saw evidence of human presence high on the banks of the underground waterway. There were edges in the ground that suggested half-buried crates or boxes, an unnatural colour sticking out of the earth that at a closer glance proved to be cloth dyed purple. She stepped up and out of the water, and there, plainly, were human bones, the long bones of a leg still dressed in the fragments of a half-decayed leather garment, the remainder of the skeleton scattered, as if carried along by random surges of water at the seasonal flood peak.

A clinking noise distracted her from the bones. There was the djombi, very pragmatically filling a sack with gold coins extracted from one of the boxes. Its lock remained intact, but it had been driven against a rock and was split open so that its contents spilled out into the mud.

'What is this place? Who were these people?’ she asked.

He stiffened, and then continued to gather up coins as he answered. ‘Thieves. Mercenaries. Murderers. They raided and destroyed that place whose ruins you saw above.'

'Why?'

He tied off the sack and said coolly, ‘Wars are expensive. Their master had sent them out to get their own wages. The town was not his, and he did not care what happened to it.'

'Then what happened to them?'

He looked around the cavern. With his superior sight, the view must have been more terrible; all the bones below the mud were visible to him, and he could glance back in time to see how they had settled there, where they had swept in from, how they had been crushed by rocks and tumbled by water while still in living bodies screaming for help and for mercy.

'I might have got a little carried away,’ he murmured.

He seemed to feel Paama's horrified stare, for he turned to her and looked at her sternly. ‘I was assigned a very heavy duty. A request had been made that the wealth of this town would never be put to any use that would destroy human life. There was a chance of a thousand-year flood—well, such a flood will not be seen again in this region for tens of thousands of years—and the raiders happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the waters broke through an ancient dam. Chance again brought them and their spoil underground so that now their final tomb is within sight of the town they plundered and desecrated.

Paama transferred her shocked gaze to the Stick. ‘Is that the sort of thing this can do?'

'Yes. Hardly the kind of power to be placed in human hands, is it?'

She looked at his alien eyes and the expression of mild contempt in them which had become as constant as a habit, and she felt the need to defend humanity.

'I used it to save a boy from drowning. You used it to drown an army of men.'

As a jibe, it failed to have any effect. He walked towards her with the sack of gold in one hand and took hold of her wrist with the other. His gaze was not contemptuous but compassionate, as if he did not expect her to be capable of understanding, and recognised that this was not her fault.

'I am sure that they all, boy and army, got exactly what they deserved,’ he said.

The firestar woke up from its slow-motion death and gave one last, brilliant splutter before going out for good. Paama felt herself rising, light as air, until the ground was once more under her feet and the blinding sunlight in her face. Before she had a chance to blink twice at the searing brightness, he had released her wrist and was once more making that gathering motion of his hand that warned of another jump to another place.

'I know now what I need to do to you to make you return my power to me,’ he remarked almost casually.

And then they were gone again before Paama had time to begin to feel frightened at his words.