Louise Cooper - Indigo 06 - Avatar Read Online Free Page A

understand a few snippets of the native language. She knew the words for no , for quiet and for sleep , and could glean meaning from a voice’s inflection, and she surmised that the woman was trying to say that Indigo was sleeping and there was no more to be done for the present. The wolf licked her hand—it was the only way she knew to show her gratitude for the family’s kindness and persistence—then looked hopefully toward the doorway and whined an interrogative. The woman smiled, though sadly, and nodded, lifting the curtain back so that Grimya could enter.
    Grimya could hear Indigo’s saw-edged breathing as she approached the bed. She probed tentatively for any sign of recognition, or even life, from her friend’s mind, but there was nothing. Indigo was deeply unconscious, and clearly very ill. The flush on her face had flared into two patches of high, hectic color on her cheeks, her skin was lined and papery, and her eyes had sunk deep in their sockets, giving her a chillingly corpselike look. For a long time Grimya stared at her, her own amber eyes filled with misery. Then, railing at herself because she knew she must accept that there was nothing she could do to help Indigo, or even to communicate with her and try to bring comfort, she lay down at the foot of the low bed frame to take up the vigil that the women had abandoned.
     
    That morning seemed endless to Grimya. The sounds of human activity filtered through the kemb’s thin walls from the storeroom, mingling with the soporific background hum of the jungle that surrounded the outpost like a soft blanket. One of the children brought a dish of food and a bowl of water, but though she drank a little, the wolf had no appetite and the meat remained untouched.
    Indigo was muttering in her unnatural sleep, turning from side to side as though trying to escape from the private hell of her fever. Twice she screamed out in the tongue of her old homeland, calling to her father and mother and brother, who had been dead for more than half a century, and calling, too, the name of Imyssa, her old nurse. The young woman came in at the sound of her cries and succeeded in calming her, but when she was gone, Indigo began to weep in long, racking, mindless sobs, and her dry lips and swollen tongue whispered another name that Grimya knew all too well. Fenran . The lover Indigo had lost, the man whose soul and body were held in a world between worlds, and whom she dreamed of freeing.
    The wolf closed her eyes and turned her head away when the whisper shivered through the stifling room, feeling that she was intruding on a place where she had no right to venture, and her tongue lapped at the simmering air as she tried to cool herself a little and think of other things.
    Grimya couldn’t judge the hours in this alien latitude, but‘ she thought that it must be nearing noon when she heard the clamor of new arrivals at the kemb . The sounds of feet clattering on the wooden steps alerted her; then came exclamations, hastily muted, and new voices—three, perhaps four—in the storeroom. Grimya raised her head, ears pricking forward to catch the nuances of the unfamiliar sounds. She had the distinct impression that the newcomers were people of some importance, for the kemb family sounded deferential and it seemed that some kind of interrogation was taking place. Then the door at the end of the passage opened with a sharp jerk and four strange women appeared.
    Grimya instantly sprang to her feet, goaded by two separate but violent instincts that slammed simultaneously into her mind. These were strangers, an unknown quantity, and therefore potential enemies. And at the same moment, her acute psychic senses had registered an emphatic sense of power.
    The group’s leader saw Grimya and held up a hand, halting the small procession. She was a woman of middle years, mahogany-skinned, black-haired and squat, with rolls of spare flesh on her bare arms and scantily clothed torso. A leather