Bheem

by Jyotin Goel

  And now she stood facing the grim wall of the damned, repeatedly turning, distraught, unsure whether the bronze ghouls had slid left or right.

  ‘Staying here is not a choice, Aviva-Fein.’

  Aviva nodded, shook her head, indecisive. ‘Three paces,’ she mumbled. ‘One way or the other.’

  Bheem stepped forward. ‘I will go through. If the corridor is safe, follow me. If they attack, you will have your answer. Follow the other path to safety.’

  ‘But—but you . . . they will kill—’

  Bheem’s eyes glinted. ‘They will not find that easy,’ he said. ‘I am Bheemsen.’

  His jaw set hard; he counted three paces to his left and strode straight at the line of praitha blocking the path. They sensed his approach and swivelled aside, allowing passage through. Stonily, Bheem stepped through. The bronze ranks instantly closed behind him—and the warrior vanished from Aviva’s sight.

  Just a scratch, she thought, and he’ll have to fight them all.

  A moment of utter silence when she heard nothing but the blood pounding in her ears. And then—a swish of weapons, a clash of metal, the thud of a falling body.

  She could not see what had happened on the other side of the wall of warriors. She had not seen Bheem stride forward boldly once the wall closed behind him. He hadn’t missed a step, even when his preternatural hearing picked up the first hint of moving metal. Smoothly, he converted the stride forward into a dive to the ground, easily evading the hissing blades that sliced through the air an eye-blink later. The blades clashed, throwing off sparks, and were immediately retracted for another strike at the foolhardy trespasser. Too late. Bheem sprang up, uncoiling like a serpent, vaulting backwards. Swords slashed through empty mist as he soared over the flailing blades.

  Aviva heard everything, saw nothing. And then, heart-stoppingly—Bheem splitting the mist, somersaulting over the praitha lines, plunging directly at her! She threw herself aside, falling heavily on her midriff. Unnecessarily. The warrior spun in mid-air, landing catlike on his feet a yard and more from where she had been.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, quickly reaching for her.

  Aviva felt a shaft of intense pain.

  The baby.

  She tried to rise. The pain fell away.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said.

  He helped her up, nodded, glanced at the line of soldiers. Not a flicker—he had escaped without a scratch.

  ‘Not that way,’ he grinned.

  Aviva laughed, and regretted it at once. Pain returned, throbbing, probing. She ignored it determinedly, turned to the right, repositioned herself and counted out three paces, heading directly for a specific point in the killing line. The column waited for her, and split as she came abreast, revealing a path behind. Unhesitatingly, Aviva stepped in, followed closely by Bheem. They crossed and the line formed again, cutting off escape. There was no turning back.

  ‘. . . 210 . . . 209 . . . 208 . . .’

  The pain had eased but Aviva wasn’t sure that helped. She had ignored it, concentrating fiercely instead on the step count, on troop formations. Not allowing pain in kept her focused. She hadn’t erred. So far.

  ‘. . . 177 . . . 176 . . . 175 . . .’

  It was back. Stab . . . stab . . . stab . . .

  It’s the baby. I’m going to lose—

  ‘. . . 162 . . . 161 . . . 160 . . .’

  Don’t think of it, she thought. Don’t think.

  The pain wasn’t helping any longer. She was counting by rote now, her mind darting wildly, her will hauling it back.

  ‘. . . 119 . . . 118 . . . 117 . . .’

  Aviva’s step was steady but her distress was clear to Bheem. The columns of the cursed had parted repeatedly, letting them through—she was reading the path truly each time. And yet Bheem felt menace ruffle his skin, and held himself in readiness.

  ‘. . . 104 . . . 103 . . . 102 . . .’

  He could not talk to her, help her. Any break in her stream of thought, the count lost, could doom them utterly. Their survival, and that of humankind, depended on her—alone. She tottered; Bheem snatched at her, trying to keep her from falling on those razor-sharp blades, but she righted herself, did not lose step.

  ‘. . . 65 . . . 64 . . . 63 . . .’

  They were almost there; it would not be long now. But the mist remained as illusive as ever, distorting any view beyond the next metal phalanx. They could still go astray. Would she last until . . . ?

  ‘. . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . .’

  The praitha moved aside. And then, all at once, there was no bronze wall facing them, no line of unforgiving, undead warriors. They were out. Aviva smiled wanly, wrapping her arms around herself, trying to still the tremors that rattled her. Strength left her and she sank to her knees. Bheem picked her up, cradling her as he would a child. How young she was, as his sons had been young before they were . . .

  ‘Your parents would be very proud, Aviva-Fein.’ He smiled at her tenderly. ‘Well done!’

  She looked up at him and smiled. Abruptly, her back arched; fierce pain tore through her and an inarticulate cry rent her throat. Sweat beaded her, its sour smell tinged with an acrid, iron odour. Unmistakable . . .

  ‘Blood!’ Bheem’s eyes sharpened. ‘You’re hurt!’

  ‘No . . . I . . .’

  Another spasm jolted Aviva. Bheem’s eyes raked her. Stopped. There it was, the telltale red—faint spots starting to stain the front of her tattered lower garment. Her memories leapt into Bheem’s mind, of happiness, of worry, of indecision.

  He looked at Aviva with infinite gentleness. ‘You are with child.’

  Aviva said nothing, her breath ragged.

  A warrior feels the wind of approaching danger. Bheem grasped Aviva firmly and sped away. And then he heard the clamour he had foreseen. A great shout went up behind them, the roar of a maddened army.

  Blood . . . living blood.

  The praitha had smelt it and were coming for it. The stairway to the surface—Bheem would not have time to lower it before the entire Akshauhini descended on them with all its blood-crazed ferocity. He could not fight them all off, not with Aviva to protect. In any event the stairway had not been his intended route out. He had decided his path earlier, before they entered the Antaragata—and he had the key now! The only difference was that he would have to take the girl along. What was this decision, snake or ladder? Bheem smiled grimly even as he ran. A snake. But one with a difference. Anyway, there was no other choice. Tathastu.

  Despite their armoured form, the praitha were inhumanly swift; the distance between the pursuers and the pursued shortened alarmingly. Instinctively, Bheem sought to speed forward; consciously, he maintained his deliberate pace. He must not bring to bear his full prowess, his incredible speed.

  Aviva-Fein. She could die if I jolted her.

  The din of the charging metal army was enormous, magnified by the walls, a weapon in itself, designed to weaken the will of a quarry and force it into submission. Bheem, though, had fought a thousand battles, was inured to the clangour of war. He closed his mind to the tumult and concentrated.

  They will be upon us before we get there.

  ‘A warrior uses terrain as a weapon’—Dronacharya’s dictum flashed in Bheem’s mind. This was Bheem’s city and no one, living or undead, knew this warren of sinuous passages below the earth of Indraprastha as well as he did. A narrow cleft appeared in the rocky wall just ahead; Bheem swerved in. The crevice opened into a cramped alleyway, barely wide enough to allow the warrior through. And that was just what he needed. Bheem propped Aviva against a wall and turned to face the onrushing horde. A crash of metal against stone announced their arrival—the nightmare warriors plunged at the fissure in the wall, pounded against each other in their struggle to enter. The cleft squeezed them in, one at a time.

  Just the odds I like! Bheem thought, grinning savagely.

  He blurred forward, sweeping past a flashing blade, gripping his bronze foe and slamming
him back, impaling him on the thrusting swords and spears of the warriors trying to follow him in. But the already dead are not easily killed. The cursed soldier barely glanced at the blades projecting through his body and tried to pull free, desperate to renew his attack on the living flesh so tantalizingly near him. His thrust forward pulled another horror through the blocked fissure. Locked together by the spear, the two praitha charged at Bheem, a monstrous, four-armed killing machine. Bheem did not need to think—his warrior mind was trained to perfection, his riposte instinctive, as he slithered below the twin assailants and knocked their legs out from under them. The monstrosity crashed to the ground. Bheem was upon the two in a flash, gripping their helmets, ripping them off. But these were no helmets—Aviva gasped as the praitha’s metal heads themselves tore away in Bheem’s hands. Instantly, the grisly objects transformed, the empty sockets growing eyes, the metal faces gaining flesh. The heads shrieked in agony that was unmistakably mortal as time caught up with them. The rot of thirty centuries melted the flesh off skulls that had formed fully in moments; then the skulls themselves crumbled into dust. The decapitated bodies too were consumed, in seconds becoming one with the earth on which they lay.

  Not for a moment, though, was Bheem distracted by their horrific fate. He crashed into the next ghoul to make it through the crevice, his bare arm warding off a fierce sword strike. Gripping the metal warrior, using him as a battering ram, Bheem muscled the soldiers behind out of the passage. He hurled his captive into the melee beyond the crack and made a lightning assessment of the battle situation. The ghoul’s slashing strike that would have sliced effortlessly through steel had barely scratched Bheem’s arm, Samay’s flames having tempered his skin into living armour. But the stony barrier to their cramped tunnel was giving way and it would be only a matter of moments before the horde burst through. Bheem could not defend the position indefinitely—but then he had no intention of doing so. He had gained a few vital seconds; hopefully, that would suffice. He scooped Aviva up and slithered through the corridor, racing to stay ahead of the bronze army. Within moments, the praitha broke through the restraining gateway, resuming their pursuit. Bheem could hear them, the pounding metal feet, the baying of maddened bloodlust. He snatched a look behind; the vanguard of the nightmare army was visible, a corridor’s stretch behind. A flung spear clattered to the ground scarcely an arm’s length short of its target; another impaled itself in the corridor’s wall as the warrior swerved. Bheem’s staccato breaths were frosting now, the intensifying cold a sign that he was nearing his goal. There was a new sound too, a hissing that grew louder every second. And then Bheem saw it: a blue glow! He was there . . . almost . . . it would be a close-run thing. The warrior darted into a tunnel, its end lost in a dancing, blue mist.

  Bheem smiled fiercely. The snake . . . just a few steps more.

  Suddenly, with no warning, the warrior went down on his knees. The pursuers were taken completely by surprise. Their frenzied momentum carried them forward; they cannoned into him, stumbled over, crashed to the ground. A heartbeat, and Bheem was up again, racing for the sparkling mist, the enemy strewn on the ground behind. Grasping Aviva close, the warrior leapt blindly through the azure curtain and plunged into a gorge. Aviva caught her breath as they plummeted; a hundred metres below was the globe-girdling, gaseous river.

  Sesha Nag! she thought. Of course!

  ‘Focus on me, Aviva-Fein!’ Bheem’s voice rose above the river’s hiss. Their thoughts had to come together, flow as one before they entered Sesha Nag.

  Marooned on the ledge above, the praitha howled in frustration, futilely hurling weapons as their prey disappeared into the blue mist rising from the abyss. The serpent seethed and foamed, swelling until it filled Bheem’s sight.

  ‘Krishna Dvaipayan!’ he shouted.

  An ill-omened spear lanced into Aviva’s leg. She screamed; her thought-link with Bheem snapped.

  And Sesha Nag uncoiled and devoured them.

  Sher Mandal

  6.32 a.m.

  Where the fuck have they gone?

  Only professional pride prevented Talwar from bellowing that thought out loud. Sher Mandal was ablaze with light. Talwar could see that someone had been there recently: footprints in the dust (two sets—one unusually large . . . the girl had an accomplice!) led to an area of the floor a few metres from a doorway to the upper floors. But there the marks stopped—and there were no prints leading away! How could they just vanish? Talwar sent his men scurrying upstairs to the higher reaches of the tower—nothing. And they had already combed through every other section of the fort fruitlessly.

  ‘Put off the damn lights!’ he snapped into his headset.

  The sun was rising. He no longer needed the lurid lighting.

  ‘The van, sir,’ a voice squawked in his earphone. ‘It’s moving off.’

  ‘What? Stop him! Wait . . . The Israeli, is she with him?’

  ‘No, sir. He’s alone.’

  Talwar thought for a moment. Should he pick up the reporter?

  No.

  ‘Scratch what I said,’ he rapped into his mike. ‘Let him go. But don’t lose him!’

  An archaeologist, a scientist, a reporter . . . and a stranger with a giant footprint. A massacre and a disaster. More than a hundred dead. This thing was big, and getting bigger. There was something crazy going on here, something he hadn’t even begun to understand.

  4

  Safe House

  7.21 a.m.

  ‘Alex Nimbalkar?’ It was the same number from which Aviva had called earlier, but the voice was a man’s.

  ‘Yes!’ Alex forced himself to remain calm. ‘Who’s calling? Is Aviva there?’

  ‘No,’ the man said. ‘It’s not good news. Aviva is missing.’

  ‘What? What d’you mean? Who is this?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. I’ll call again if there’s any development.’

  ‘But—but . . . I must meet you!’ Alex was frantic. ‘Tell me where you are!’

  The phone went dead.

  Outside the Clarion Building

  7.:22 a.m.

  Talwar blew smoke into the interior of the unmarked police van and glowered at the glowing end of his cigarette, his mind turning over the tapped conversation he had just heard.

  She’s gone—even her accomplices don’t know where. Or is that just misdirection?

  His men had sent drones up the sides of the Clarion Building, cameras discreetly shooting through the eighteenth-floor apartment’s sheet-glass windows, the subjects of the surveillance visible clearly on the van’s video screens. But he wouldn’t pull them in just yet. He would wait. They would make a mistake, of course. Unlike the Israeli, her collaborators weren’t professionals.

  Bannerjee’s Apartment, the Clarion Building

  7.22 a.m.

  ‘Alex was shaken, poor man.’ Vineet handed back Nishi’s phone.

  Bannerjee snorted impatiently. ‘But what happened back at the fort? You haven’t—’

  ‘The cops,’ Vineet said quickly. ‘They knew they were there. Don’t know how. Luckily, they didn’t see me parked outside the zoo.’

  Nishi looked at him incredulously. ‘You think the police have Bheem? After what you told me about those gunmen in the cave? The way he dealt with them?’

  ‘He may have allowed the cops to take him,’ Vineet said stubbornly. ‘He knows what he’s doing. I’ve a lot of confidence in the big man.’

  Nishi wasn’t satisfied. ‘He wouldn’t have allowed them to take Aviva! She was to come back with you.’

  Vineet’s eyes evaded hers. ‘Not necessarily. I was to wait for her only until dawn. Obviously, Bheem had a plan B.’

  Nishi studied him; her expression softened. ‘You’re worried—and trying to shield me. Don’t.’

  A moment of silence—and then Vineet turned to her, troubled. ‘All right. There was no other plan. Bheem needed Aviva for a reason. She was to get back before daybreak—unless things went wrong. If that happened, she wante
d me to tell Alex . . .’

  Nishi looked at him steadily. ‘And?’

  Vineet slumped on to a couch. ‘If she didn’t get back, she said it would be up to us.’

  Nishi grimaced, and turned to Bannerjee. ‘The woman who was killed in Aurangabad—the third saviour—would they have disposed of her body?’

  ‘No. It’s a murder investigation. Even after a post-mortem, the police procedure would be to preserve the body.’ Bannerjee could see that there was a purpose behind the question. ‘Why?’

  ‘The immunity gene. I need to analyse her DNA.’

  Vineet sat up, suddenly hopeful. ‘I’ve read about this—you could harvest her stem cells, recreate her blood!’

  ‘Even if one could do that, it would take months, perhaps years—time we don’t have.’ Nishi shook her head. ‘No, I was thinking of decoding her genome, discovering the specific gene responsible for her immunity. When I examined Valsamma’s blood, I noticed antibodies had proliferated enormously, wiping out the Z-6 virus. If we identified the gene, we could search genome databanks, try and find a match. Perhaps another saviour.’

  Bannerjee looked unconvinced. ‘But decoded genomes . . . How many are there in databanks?’

  ‘Too few,’ Nishi agreed. ‘But it’s the only chance we have.’

  Bannerjee clicked on the intercom. ‘Shaumit, my cabin in two minutes.’ He hurried to the private elevator.

  ‘Huh!’

  Bannerjee stopped and turned. Nishi also swivelled around, surprised. Vineet glanced at the others, embarrassed by the sudden grunt that had erupted from his lips.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just thought of something.’