Miw-Sher gasped and Acorna caught her thought. (She can keep her cat form during the day!)
The creature on the throne beckoned languidly and growl/purred to Acorna, "So you are the one who He said was coming."
Becker, who had not been in on the change in conversation and wasn"t sure if the high priestess was friend or foe, stepped in front of Acorna. "Who said she was coming and what did he say about her? Did he tell you she would heal all the sick cats? Because she did. Did he tell you she outsmarted the Mulzar of Hissim, otherwise known of the King of Everything? She did that, too."
The cat priestess stretched out her paw-hand and ran a single claw along Becker"s jaw, drawing a thin line of blood. RK suddenly reached up a paw and smacked at the hand. "Mine!" he said clearly in his own tongue.
The priestess s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand back. "Excuse me, little brother. I didn"t realize he had a guardian. He seems to think he is one himself."
Becker stooped down and scratched RK"s ears, whispering, "It"s okay, big fella. It"s not her fault. I seem to have this animal magnetism for cat ladies. You remember how Nadhari was about me when we first met."
Acorna said, "He"s right. I don"t know what has been said about me before I arrived and I would like to find out. But first, since your cats are all well, I must tell you that there is a "gift" shipment of food and medicines coming from Hissim. You mustn"t accept it. It"s contaminated with an organism that will kill your guardians-and maybe you, too. I made a vaccine that could give you some protection, but there"s not enough of it for all of these cats. The ones in Hissim all died except these few that came with us."
The boy set the basket containing Grimla and kittens at the high priestess"s feet and Pash, Haji, and Sher-Paw stepped forward as if they were characters in some feline creche pageant.
The spotted light from the holes in the walls dappled everyone so that they resembled the large cats. The heat made the air shimmer in a way that caused Acorna to feel as if the whole thing was one of Hafiz"s holograms.
The cat lady returned her attention to Acorna. "There is something you must see. Perhaps then you will understand."
Flowing from the throne, the high priestess stepped to one side of the platform and beckoned. "You may use this if you wish," she said, gesturing to a column with steps carved in a spiral around it, descending into darkness. She murmured something else Acorna didn"t catch and then dove headfirst into the hole.
Miw-Sher translated. "She said she"d take the shortcut."
"I believe I"ll use the stairs," Acorna said.
"You"re still lookin" puny, Princess," Becker told her. "You think you can go down that thing without getting dizzy and falling off?"
"There"s a handhold," Miw-Sher said, pointing out a groove carved into the column. It ran at about waist height and parallel to the stairs. "And I"ll go first. You can hold on to my shoulder, Amba.s.sador, if you feel faint."
"Thank you, Miw-Sher," Acorna said. "I believe I"ll manage going down."
And she did.
As she descended lower and lower, gripping the handhold with the tips of her fingers and occasionally touching Miw-Sher"s shoulder for balance, she became aware that it was not entirely dark below. Thousands of gold coins with slots in the middle glittered up at her until suddenly, as the light from above grew too dim to see their feet, the s.p.a.ce below was lit by one torch after another.
She had the sense that a few of the priests holding the torches had hastily covered their private parts, after transforming from their feline state. Of the felines large and small that lay in every imaginable att.i.tude up and down the length of the room, she could not have said if they had declined to transform or were unable to.
Their eyes no longer glittered but blinked lazily in the light, or slitted, or in some cases showed the milky inner membrane that protected the eyes. There was no catty smell at all. In fact, it smelled fresher down here than it had in the open, with the jungle vegetation hemming the Temple so closely.
The high priestess beckoned them. "This way," she said, and Miw-Sher continued translating. "We are now in the most sacred part of the Temple. Ours was the place where first the Star Cat and the Companion landed to save our people and transform them from the refugee rabble they once had been."
Their shadows and those of the cats stretched, danced, and gyrated ahead of them, long and deeply black.
This s.p.a.ce felt ancient, filled with secrets sealed with the deaths of many defenders and foes for generations reaching far back into time. The feeling was far more threatening, more mysterious, than the caves of the early Ancestral Attendants on Vhiliinyar, where Acorna had uncovered part of the buried history of her own people, but all the same she was reminded of those caves.
As Acorna followed, noting that even the layout of these caves was similar, the high priestess turned into a side pa.s.sage that narrowed until they had to stand sideways to slip through it. This was not made any easier by all the feline bodies that suddenly simply had to come along. Cats flowed under kneecaps and over feet, leaped upon shoulders, plastered themselves against faces, greatly impeding breathing, then pa.s.sed to the other side and leaped off. In the tight quarters, it became a rather chilling sensation in spite of the cats" warm fur, until one of the furry intruders suddenly spoke inside her head: (Excuse me, pardon me, oops, sorry, coming through.)
(RK!).
(Acorna! Oh, sorry, "scuse me, I"ll just get my paw out of your ear. There. Better?)
(Much.)
(I had to come down and check out my roots, didn"t I? If anybody knows, I have a feeling it"s this lady. Besides, Haruna pushed me. Spirited female.)
(Yes, and big enough to eat you in one bite.)
(Well, I always think a little danger adds to the excitement of a pursuit.)
Suddenly the way widened, the air freshened, and they could walk freely again. Acorna saw something gleaming wetly in the high priestess"s torchlight. As the other priests unfolded from their feline forms and stood to light torches again, she saw that the room"s center contained a small, perfect lake, its dark waters glinting in the dim torchlight.
But the lake was not what the priestess had brought them to see. She flourished her torch to illuminate the walls.
Like the Ancestral caverns of Vhiliinyar, where the walls were covered with complex hieroglyphics, these caves, too, were heavily embellished, but the markings here were very different from those back on Vhiliinyar.
These cave walls were covered with crude drawings, simple boxy line figures scratched into rock, some with a few vestiges of paint still adorning them, but most were simply ghostly white lines against the dark surface. The further back in the cave the priestess walked, the fainter and more primitive the drawings became.
Finally the priestess pointed the torch at a single panel of drawings on the cave"s wall. Acorna examined the images lit by its glow. A tall boxy thing with triangles on either side of it dominated the picture, but next to the tall boxy thing stood several people. The person standing to the left of the center drawing seemed to be quite tall, standing on what were clearly human feet, but wearing two triangles atop his head - cats" ears, it appeared - and something long and thin was coming out from his legs. Acorna supposed that the thing could be meant to be an exaggerated male member, but judging from the context of the image she felt that it was more probably a tail. Next to this person sat a largish but nonetheless fairly normal-looking cat, also distinguishable by its ears and tail. Next to the cat stood a stylized figure of a man the same size as the cat man, but with a round head, unadorned by pointy ears, and with no tail.
The figure on the far side of the ship was more difficult to see. Here the sacred lake"s water lapped close to the side of the cave. Acorna slid her hoofed feet around the rim of floor and leaned in, gesturing to the priestess that the torch be shoved further forward, too.
When she finally was able to see the figure clearly, she realized she had been expecting something of exactly this sort. Yet the surprise that it was actually there was so great that she almost fell into the lake. As her mind reeled and her balance faltered, however, a clawed hand grabbed her arm and pulled her back upright.
The crude, dimly lit humanoid figure had one elongated triangle on its head instead of two. The triangle was located squarely in the middle of the person"s head. Like a horn. The entire mural was a petroglyph of her dream.
Emerging from the underworld of the Temple was like emerging from another dream. Acorna felt as if she were awakening. She knew that the figure in the cave drawing was a Linyaari. In fact, she was sure that it was Aari. Involuntarily, her hand went to Aari"s birth disk. It was him. That was why everyone on this planet seemed to believe that she had some special significance in their--what? History? Religion? Myth cycle?
"You okay, Princess?" Becker asked as he helped her up the last step and onto the platform beside the throne, where the cat woman was already lounging. "You look like you"ve seen a ghost."
"Very astute, Captain. I almost have. I think-no, I"m sure that Aari has been here."
"When? How? Why didn"t anybody say anything?"
"They have said something-to me. And as for when, it was a very long time ago. They just showed me an ancient petroglyph of a Linyaari. It had to be Aari-he"s the only Linyaari we know of who has done a lot of traveling through time and s.p.a.ce. And that petroglyph definitely depicted a Linyaari."
Miw-Sher popped her head out of the hole. "Yes, Amba.s.sador. You saw the Companion of the Star Cat, who alone was privileged to call him by his most sacred name, Grimalkin. Tagoth says the Companion was a being like yourself, and personally foretold your coming. I saw the glyph long ago, when I was small, before my capture."
The priestess"s guards, human and feline alike, glared at the newcomers chattering away so near the throne of their ruler, and Acorna quickly led her friends down the steps to a respectful distance. The priestess had not answered Acorna"s questions or offered comments of her own. She simply smiled her enigmatic, catty smile and led them back from the cavern with a "there, you see?" air, as if the petroglyph explained everything.
Acorna was very shaken; in fact, she was "worried that she might even be broadcasting her feelings. Miw-Sher put her hand on Acorna"s arm and said, "Surely you understand that this is your fate. You are the one we knew would come. Surely you knew that, too?"
"Prophecy doesn"t always work that way," Acorna told her.
The high priestess spoke then, and Miw-Sher interpreted her words for Acorna. "Shabasta is puzzled that you are so disturbed by what she has shown you. She says that the Companion and the Star Cat foretold that you would come and save us. The prophecy was a true one, since here you are. She now asks when you are planning to save us."
Before Acorna could think of any reply to that, a sleek tawny cat with red ears, tail, and paws came bounding up the stairs, as if on cue. Its message was simple. "Come."
The high priestess, no doubt for dramatic effect, gathered her legs beneath her and from her sitting position leaped over the heads of her guests and a quarter of the way down the steps. Her court, or flock, or whatever the other tribal members were considered, followed after her, as did all of the cats except Grimla and the kittens.