“Princess!”
The shout came from the lane leading to the temple precinct. Karni looked up, trying to see through the foggy darkness. When had this fog set in? For that matter, now that she was aware of it, when had the night grown so dark? Where was that large, brilliant moon that had shone down on her when she descended the temple steps? It had been high in the sky at the time, and that could not have been more than an hour earlier. Even if it had set by now, which was unlikely, why was the sky filled with that strange hue? Why were there dark clouds boiling over the city? What were those strange screams and shouts and cries from all around?
She had no time to ponder all these questions. A new one was posing itself to her as she sought and found the source of the shout.
“Princess Karni!” cried Adran, her charioteer, as he came running down the path. She had never seen him look and sound so agitated before. He was normally a very reserved and dignified man, as befitted any charioteer. It was most unlike him to be so upset, running and shouting like a wild man, in a temple precinct of all places.
“Princess, you must leave here at once! We must return to the palace. Please, come with me now!”
Karni rose to her feet. She had a moment of unsteadiness when she was aware of her empty belly and the supper she had missed that night. She had fasted in anticipation of her darshan. It pleased her to offer the prayers after fasting, made her feel sincere in her offering. One must offer something before one could expect something in return. Then she regained control of her body and her senses with a small effort of will, and she stood firmly on both feet.
“What is the matter, charioteer?” she asked. “Is there some trouble with the horses?”
He halted before her, his mustached face creased with anxiety, and joined his palms in respect. “There is something amiss in the city, my princess. I must take you home now.”
“Very well,” she said.
They began walking back up the path. He glanced at her once or twice, curiously. Karni realized her wet garments were making a sound. Adran took in her state and frowned.
“Princess, are you well? Your garments . . .”
“I am wet, that’s all,” she said. “It’s only water.”
Jeel water, she reminded herself. A benediction from the goddess herself, blessing me with her sanctified elixir. People travel thousands of miles for a sip of this sacred water. I have been bathed in it from head to foot! I can die and go straight to heaven now.
A horse whinnied loudly from ahead, and Adran reacted.
He began jogging, picking up speed. Then realized that Karni was still walking at the same pace. She was genuinely unable to run very fast at present, partly because of her fasting condition, and partly because of her wet clothes.
“Go ahead, Adran. I’m right behind you.”
Just as he began sprinting, the sound of a horse screaming jarred Karni’s nerves. Poor creature! What was happening? She had only heard horses cry out that way when under extreme duress, usually when injured in a battle or a violent accident.
Adran disappeared up the forested pathway, and for a moment Karni was alone. The path was desolate, the area remote. She knew there were some wild creatures in the woods, but they were all harmless ones, the kind that one hunted, not the likes that hunted you. If there were any such predators about, they would have ravaged the elephants and horses in the royal stockades. Yet even though she knew the place was safe, Karni began to feel a sense of great dread. She had the feeling that she was being watched.
Up ahead, at the end of the dark pathway, the horse was still screaming, and now Adran’s hoarse voice began to speak, saying something she could not fully comprehend.
“Daughter of Karna Sura . . .”
She exclaimed. That was Adran’s voice, but was it really Adran speaking the words?
The woods around her were dark. Even the sky above was barely visible. What little of it she could glimpse was obscured by dark seething clouds driven by a great demonic wind. The slashes of sky visible through the rents and rips in these driven clouds were sometimes blue, sometimes red, sometimes jet-black. The moon itself seemed to be still there, still high, but eclipsed by some other body. It made no sense because there was no eclipse predicted for tonight, yet something was eclipsing the moon. She wished she had a light by which to see. As it was, she couldn’t even make out the path on which she walked.
“Sister of Vasurava . . .”
She tried to walk faster.
A wind rose from nowhere, carrying a foul stench. It was surprisingly warm, smelling of strange, exotic odors: sand, sun, salt, and corpses—the rank battlefield reek of putrid carcasses. She covered the lower part of her face with the end of her garment, the damp cloth helping to mask the awful stench. The wind assaulted her from all sides, driving dust and dried leaves into her face. From whence had this ghastly wind risen? She could not hear any leaves rustling, see no trees bowing, yet here on the ground, she was being assailed relentlessly.
“Wife of Shvate . . .”
She could not make out where the voice was coming from. One time it seemed to originate from the right, then from behind her, then directly above her. She was shivering again, despite the warm wind. The wind driving against her cold garments was causing her to shiver, the foul stench and strange whispers adding to her distress. She tried to walk faster, knowing she must be close to the chariot now, knowing it could not be much farther.
“Mother of bastards . . .”
She cried out as if physically struck.
This time the whisper had sounded just behind her shoulder, spoken almost directly into her right ear. She turned and flailed with her right hand, but her hand met nothing but air and driven dust.
Karni stopped running.
Stopped walking.
Came to a complete halt.
Both her fists were clenched, her legs spread slightly apart in a fighting stance, her eyes furious. Her belly might be empty, but her spirit was full of strength.
“Enough!” she cried out. “I am not just a daughter, sister, or wife. I am a woman. I exist in my own right. My name is Karni, and I take abuse from no one—mortal, god, or demon. If you want to speak with me, then show yourself. Show yourself and speak to me, person-to-person, face-to-face. Coward!”
A brief moment of silence.
Then a hissing sound that echoed all around, nowhere and everywhere at once, susurrating through the woods, filling the night with the sound of a thousand serpents.
Then, silence again.
The wind died down as suddenly as it had risen.
The foul stench dissipated.
The miasma surrounding her—she was still not sure whether it was fog or just the lack of sufficient light—cleared to reveal the pathway, the silhouettes of the nearest trees, and on the trail just ahead, the shape of the chariot and horses and a man.
“Princess!” shouted the familiar hoarse voice of Adran. “Make haste! We must not tarry here.”
Karni lifted up the wet hem of her garment and ran the last several yards. She reached the chariot and leaped onboard, her bare feet slapping loudly against the metal-plated wooden floor. Adran was standing in his driving position, reins in hand, head turned to watch her climb aboard. She saw a horse lying on its side nearby, and noted that only one horse was now hitched to the chariot, whereas there had been two earlier.
“The horse?” she asked, unable to coherently string words together in a complete sentence.
“Attacked,” he said grimly. “Wounded too badly to survive. I had to put it down. Shall we go, my princess?”
“Yes!” she said.
He urged the single horse forward, driving it with a whinny and a thumping of hooves. The familiar sound of the chariot wheels rumbling on the dirt path, the familiar motion of the vehicle as it began to move through the dark woods, carrying her back homewards, toward the main palace precinct—all of these things comforted and eased Karni’s anxiety. She glanced back as they passed the
fallen horse, and she grimaced as she glimpsed the poor beast’s belly ripped open, intestines strung out. What manner of creature could have attacked the horse? There were no predators here in these woods. Were there? Then who was it that whispered to her in the darkness? Who—or what—was it that attacked and killed the horse so brutally?
The chariot raced through the night, toward the city, toward home, toward safety.
Jilana
As the final syllables of the mantra faded, the air rippled and Vessa appeared, looming over Jilana’s bed.
The twisted locks of his matted hair spread out from his head like the rays of light from the corona of the sun. His lean, hard body was taut from years of subsisting on the bare minimum required for sustenance, his muscles and bones hard from constant feats of endurance, his eyes enormous blazing orbs in the dark sky of his face. His features, shocking and ugly to most women, were as familiar to Jilana as the jungle itself. The wildness of his features; the piercing, intense glare of his eyes; the crow black skin and raven dark hair; the dirt encrusted beneath his nails, his long, gnarled fingernails and toenails; the thick wildwood staff in his fist; the large hands and knobby knuckles . . . to her these were simply the way he had always looked. He was her son; she had birthed him from her own womb, and to her, and her alone, he was beautiful and perfect. Never more beautiful and perfect than he was right now, in her moment of need.
“Son,” she cried, “save me from this monster!”
But he was already looking in the direction of her verandah, at the place from where the vile stench and even viler threats had come, at the tall dark shadow that stood there, terrorizing her.
With a flash, he vanished from her bedside.
She turned her head, her senses spinning as she moved too quickly, and looked at the balcony just in time to see Vessa reappear there, his staff already raised to strike, his voice booming with an unearthly echo.
“Urrkh, I shall tear you asunder! You dare threaten my mother. Be gone!”
A flurry of wind, a blaze of blue fire spewing forth from Vessa’s eyes, and the shadow screamed and withered before her son’s maya and fury. Jilana caught a glimpse of a dark oval that hadn’t been there a moment ago, like a tear in the fabric of the night itself, and beyond it, a strange alien vista: a desert landscape with more than one moon in the sky, each a different color. The shadow slipped through the portal, fleeing like a snake into its burrow, and then the alien vista vanished and the night was whole once again. The wind died out, the bedchamber returned, slowly, to a state of calm.
Jilana sat up, blinked, held her head; the fever heat of her forehead was now diminished. The churning in her belly too. And the reeling of her senses had reduced sufficiently to allow her to sit upright without feeling as if she was about to fall. The nausea that had been threatening her also receded.
“Mother.” Vessa was by her side again. “Are you well? Did he harm you?”
She started to shake her head, then thought better of it. “No. He kept his distance and threatened. Like a coward. But I feel . . . I felt . . . ill. Could he have poisoned me somehow?”
He looked at her with eyes that saw far more than any mortal eyes. “No. It was a miasma caused by his foul presence. It will pass.”
He raised a hand and gestured, muttering a phrase in the ancient tongue. At once, she felt her head clear, the fever fade, her belly settle, and her nausea disappear. She sat up, scarcely able to believe that only a moment ago she had thought she would collapse from her ailment.
“Who . . . what was he?”
Vessa stared in the direction of the verandah, as if ensuring that the threat would not return. “Jarsun. The Reygistani seeks vengeance for Shvate’s invasion of his territories and Vrath defeating him at the Battle of the Rebels.”
“By attacking me?”
“Not just you, Mother. All Hastinaga is his target tonight. He has eclipsed Krushan law in the city.”
Eclipsed Krushan law? What does that even mean? she wondered. Her head reeled, not with illness now, but with a thousand conflicting thoughts and possibilities. Then she remembered what the urrkh had said. “My father, my mother. He threatened to attack them.”
Vessa raised his head, as if listening to sounds that Jilana herself could not hear, that no mortal ears could hear. “That may well be his aim.”
“Then you must aid them! Go to them now. Assist them against this demon. Keep my family safe.”
Still, he did not move. He raised his head and frowned. “What of Hastinaga?”
“I shall see to Hastinaga. Go save my family. Remember: they are your family too! Once you are done, you can return to help us here.”
He tilted his head, acknowledging her command.
“If I go now, Mother, I must stay on his trail. It is still fresh. If I follow him through the portal corridors, I may be able to intercept him and stop him before he attacks our clan.”
“Do it,” she said.
Vessa tilted his head again.
“And, my son . . .”
He waited.
“Kill him.”
Vessa smiled at her, displaying a mouthful of terrible, misshapen yellow teeth. And with a flash, he was on the other side of the bedchamber, striding toward the verandah. He called out a mantra as he strode, and without hesitating, he walked off the edge of the balcony and into emptiness, fifty feet above the ground. She saw the portal she had glimpsed earlier reopen, revealing the baleful triple eye of those alien moons and desert landscape. Vessa stepped through and was gone from sight. The blue oval hissed shut behind him, and now all that remained was the dark sky and the single blood moon of Arthaloka.
Jilana turned back to her nightstand. She was relieved to see the bell that she had sought earlier. It was right there, only a few inches farther back on the stand than its usual place. She picked it up and rang it loudly, insistently, repeatedly. The sound rang out through the silent palace, echoing and reverberating. The sound of running footsteps came from outside her doors, then the doors flew open and her maids and guards began to pour in all at once. They all seemed dazed and disoriented, some clutching their bellies, some their heads, all seeming out of sorts but recovering. She guessed that they had experienced the same debilitating symptoms she had suffered before Vessa came and chased the devil away.
“Sound the alert. The city is under attack by evil forces. Call out the entire city guard and reserves. Do it at once.”
As they rushed to obey her orders, Jilana slumped back in her bed, drained. Her hand fell on something wet and hard and she stared down, confused. She picked up the object that was soaking her bedclothes and stared at it, dumbfounded. It was the fish. It was no longer flopping or gasping. Its sightless eye stared up at her. She prayed all she cared about and loved would not share its fate.
Karni
As the chariot approached the first main street of the city, Karni saw a crowd ahead. Adran had already spotted it and slowed the horse, turning his head to search for another route. The crowd was at a crossing point where a larger avenue intersected with a smaller side street. The only other way was to go back, but that would return them to the reserve and the temple of Goddess Jeel.
“The only way out is onward,” Adran said.
And then he handed her a bow.
She looked at the weapon, surprised. She knew there was a cache of weapons kept in the well of the chariot, for use by the occupants as well as the charioteer in case of threat. But ever since coming to Hastinaga, she had never had to touch a weapon. There had simply been no need.
She looked at the crowd of people on the crossroads ahead, perhaps a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards away. They appeared to be ordinary Krushan citizens, judging from their garb and the way they were milling about without any sense of order. What threat did Adran anticipate from them?
“We are in the city, the city guard is there to protect us,” she said.
He looked at her, an expression on his face that she could not read. “P
rincess . . . the horse, the one that was killed by the temple, she was attacked by the soldiers who were accompanying us. They were city guard too. But there was something wrong with them. They were acting like madmen, like beasts. I have never seen anything like it before. By the time I reached the clearing, they had attacked the horse and wounded her terribly. The poor animal, my beloved Chhatri, a fine strong young mare who has served me well for the past three years, was still alive, fallen onto her side, screaming in agony while these men, these monsters . . .” He passed a hand over his face, reliving the horror of the moment. “They were feeding on her vitals, literally eating her with their bare mouths, their teeth, their hands.”
Adran shook his head. “It was the most horrible thing. I shouted at them to stop, demanding to know what they were about. They stared back at me with eyes like blood moons, full of madness and evil. I had already picked up the sword in my hand, and I raised it and cut them both down as they squatted there, filthy with the fresh blood of Chhatri. But my princess, they did not die! They made such terrible sounds as I have never heard from any creature, human or beast, and then they scampered into the woods to escape. I did not know what else to do. I used the sword to end Chhatri’s misery. Then, just as I took up the reins, you arrived.”
She stared at him, horrified by the story. The thought of men, her own guard, acting in this manner, eating a living horse, was unbearable. She knew the men he spoke of. They were healthy, happy men, with families and children. What madness would possess them to do such a thing, to out of nowhere behave like beasts?
With sudden understanding, Karni looked down at the bow in her hand. “You expect . . . more of such behavior?” she asked slowly.
Adran looked pointedly at the crowd ahead. “There is strange evil about tonight. There is a miasma in the air, foul odors, strange occurrences. Earlier, when you were in the temple, the moon was occluded by a strange phenomenon. Something unnatural is happening in Hastinaga, my princess. My responsibility is to escort you home safely, but I have to drive the chariot.” He looked at the bow in her hand. “You are familiar with its use?”
Upon a Burning Throne Page 42