Karen Lord - Redemption in Indigo

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.'

the sisters in charge, and the trickster in trouble

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.