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Copyright © 2014 Prakash Books India Pvt. Ltd.
Copyright Text © Krishnarjun Bhattacharya
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise (except for mentions in reviews or edited excerpts in the media) without the written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978 81 7234 527 3
Processed & printed in India
For Kolkata
Where I was born
Land of pujos, crowds, madness
Land of tales and fantasy
Land of loud stagnancy and quiet movements
Land of irresistible charm
The forgotten city never forgets
And neither will I, her lost son come back
I will seek out her mysteries, her death pangs, her kiss
In her filth, her cracks and her inky blacks
Her debri’ed embrace, her sludge-stagnant feel
My poem drinks up, piecemeal, piecemeal
PRONUNCIATIONS
Adri Sen—O-dreeSh-eyn
Aurcoe—Aww-r-ko
Ghosh—Gh-oh-sh
Sural—Shu-raal
Aman—Umm-unn
Fayne—Fay-i-n
Mazumder—Mo-joom-daar
Ba’al—Bay-l
Arshamm—Aar-shum
Kali— Kaa-li
The skies were red. The boy watched from behind the curtains, hiding. No one passing the castle could have seen his face. He could not fully understand the beauty of a sunset back then, but it mesmerised him nevertheless. Explosion. Colours. So many windows in thick stone. So many.
The boy in the castle watched the sunset and thought of escape. He thought of the other children he wasn’t allowed to play with. The children who did not belong to the castle, the ones who ran about outside. He could only watch them and suffer alone as he did. Walls. Padlocked doors. Torches burning. And the dank, musty smell that had become a part of him, the smell he had grown up with—amidst the torchlight, amidst the darkness.
He wanted answers. But most of his questions stayed just that—questions. The few people who knew him and talked to him, the people of the castle, they treated him well, though. He wondered about many things, and though having expectations was not something he was able to grasp fully then, he was aware that all the people who knew him, somehow, expected something. From him.
The books were proof enough. After he had mastered reading in the three languages—the Old Tongue being the most important, of course—giant books were deposited in his room, routinely. At first, the thickness of the books scared him—the pages old and frayed, abandoned rather than preserved, the binding hard, dark, worn. Intimidation. But the boy, with ennui threatening to grip him harder than ever before, had eventually started reading. He had started with History and Geography, but had soon moved on to extremely specific studies of the Old Tongue. He was bright. He could understand almost everything that was there in the books, picking up things and remembering them with surprising ease. If there was anything he could not understand, he would ask his father, who came in once every week, and his father would answer all his questions—except for the more daring ones, the ones whose answers evaded him the most. He had begun studying runes and call-signs dedicatedly. Symbols and figures; runes and scratchy diagrams the books called call-signs, drawing and redrawing them until he almost knew each curve and each stroke. Practice, the books urged. Learn by heart, repeat in dreams. Madness, he thought. Madness inculcated by madmen, inculcated into books with trembling hands. Shaky writing. Occasional dark stains. He forced himself to trust the books, the madness, for there was nothing else. But nothing was constant, not even the written word. When he got comfortable with his books, a new bunch of books would always find themselves in his room.
The sun had set, the evening arrived, and with it the darkness the boy did not like. While he was free to roam anywhere in the castle that he pleased, he never went where no torches burned. Thoughts occupied his mind as he wandered around the castle tonight. Thoughts that almost stopped him from seeing the tiny light at the end of the west wing. Almost. He stood at the entrance of the dark hall, looking at what had caught his attention: the light at the end of the long, stony corridor, flickering uninvitingly, like the dying breath of something in pain. A dying torch. An open doorway. A narrow flight of steps leading down, somewhere out of sight. Enough to spark his curiosity.
Descending cautiously, the boy heard sounds. Human voices, talking amongst themselves, creating a sense of urgency—things being moved somewhere, furniture being shifted, a noisy affair, yet hushed. The sounds got louder. And louder. He could discern snatches of conversation now.
‘. . . the incense, is it in order yet?’
‘The hour . . . it is almost here . . .’
The boy softly stepped off the last stair, creeping towards the door which stood ajar in front of him.
A tinkle of breaking glass. Then a high pitched cry. A voice that had long done its time.
‘Curse you, Souvik! Is this the amount of care you have for Aujour?’
With the old man bellowing and another man hurriedly muttering apologies and scooping up the pieces of whatever he had dropped, no one noticed the boy as he entered the room and crept off to stand behind a pillar. Something about the whole surreptitious nature of this—whatever this was—told him it was wisest to stay hidden. There were five people in the room, he saw, all in the familiar black robe of the castle uniform, white runes on the black. The one giving all the orders was old and wrinkled with a mane of dirty, white matted hair on his head. The others were younger, and they scurried around obediently, following his terse instructions.
The room itself, circular in shape, was quite large. A colonnaded ring surrounded the main area that stood a step lower than the pillars. Torches burned all around, making the room appear quite bright, but the secrecy of the affair lent it a very ominous touch. Something moved near the wall at the far end of the room and the boy squinted to see what it was. There, in the shadow of a pillar, was a chair and someone seemed to be sitting on it.
‘And which incompetent son of a vulture left the door open?’ the old man roared again. ‘Have you no understanding of simple rules?’
One of the minions hurried towards the door to shut it. He latched it and turned a giant key in the keyhole. The boy stared at the door. He knew he should not be in the room, but he had never been stopped from going anywhere in the castle. If anyone caught him here, he would just tell them who he was before trouble fell, and he’d be escorted out of the room with nothing more than a few harsh words. For now, therefore, he was safe. And curious.
‘We are done, Malik,’ someone addressed the old man. ‘The room, I believe, is set.’
The old man’s face, illuminated by the quivering light of the torches, was grim and impassive. Carved out of rock. ‘Countermeasures?’ he demanded.
‘They are ready,’ t
he man named Souvik replied, looking at the other three for a confirmation. They then withdrew strange-looking metallic devices from within their robes and pried them open with faint clicking noises.
‘Fire and light. Check, everyone,’ Souvik spoke.
‘Check,’ the others muttered in unison.
The old man’s hand now subconsciously went to his neck. The boy caught the movement and saw a tiny locket he wore around his neck. He recognised it. It was a rune sign, the one called Audakha. He did not, however, know its purpose.
‘Quite so, then. Let us begin. Suddho, draw the circle,’ the old man commanded and walked to the centre of the room, the others following him. They stood close to each other, and the one called Suddho bent down and scratched a circle all around them on the floor with chalk. When he finished, the old man inspected the circle and nodded.
‘Bring her,’ he said.
Souvik went across the room to the chair the boy had spied earlier, and yanked someone up. He pushed the person into the light and the boy saw that it was a woman. He did not understand beauty, or he would have seen that the woman was beautiful. No, what he did notice was that she was unusually pale and silent, and she staggered, losing her balance as Souvik dragged her across the room—he had to catch her twice to stop her from falling. The old man caught her as soon as Souvik thrust her at him. He caught her hair roughly and forced her to fall to the floor, keeping her well outside the circle. Souvik stepped inside the circle once more, and the old man now spoke, ‘We begin. If anyone has questions, I would like to hear them now.’
‘None, Malik.’
‘Then make sure all of you keep your mouths shut and your trigger fingers ready.’
The boy inched closer now. All the men stood inside the circle, but a little beyond the circle, he now spied something else drawn on the floor as well. And as he leaned forward to see what it was, he realised breathlessly that he had seen it before. He knew it well. He had drawn and redrawn it countless times himself. It was a call-sign, perfectly etched, right down to the sharp, confident strokes.
The old man began to speak. Old Tongue, the boy registered. He could understand snatches of what was spoken, but it did not make much sense to him. Words, invocations, greetings, everything spoken in a strange sequence. The old man’s voice echoed throughout the room—rumbling with confidence, precision, and experience, at times reaching a feverish pitch, and at others, dropping to a low steady mumble. And all the while he chanted, the old man held on to the woman’s hair in a vice-like grip. He declared and he drawled. And the boy watched, fascinated. Finally, after what seemed like an endlessly long hour, the chant slowed in pace and intensity and the old man finished off the incantation with two syllables that he screamed out loud, and with the last one, a blade flashed in his hand.
The boy did not scream as the woman’s throat was slit. Or as the old man kicked the corpse towards the call-sign and stepped further back into the circle. The boy simply froze in his place. He did not fully understand what had just happened—the taking of a life had never been explained to him—but he perceived, a little vaguely, the ungodliness of the act. The air around him seemed to throb with certain vibes he sensed weren’t good for him, and a growing numbness spread itself through his body and mind. He wanted to melt into the pillar in whose shadow he stood. Yet he stood. Watching. Everything had fallen quiet. The torches continued to burn, casting an eeriness on the picture—the five men standing inside a chalk-drawn circle, motionless but tense, and the corpse of a young woman, sprawled on the floor, just outside the circle, her blood slowly travelling across the floor, mixing with the call-sign, a star within a circle.
‘Ma-Malik?’ someone stuttered.
‘Quiet!’ the old man hissed.
The lights started to dim. It happened very slowly, hardly discernable to the eye, but the intensity of the flames slipped down steadily, and finally, one of the torches went out with a faint hiss. Another torch in the room followed suit. Then another.
The men in the room followed the torches with their gaze as they went out. No one spoke. A slight, gentle wind blew out of nowhere, and then stopped. All the torches, except for one, were in darkness now. That one still burned, feebly. The boy, still hiding behind the pillar, felt very, very uneasy in the quiet. The dreaded feeling that darkness often inspired, now crept up his spine. To his advantage though, he was still so disturbed by what he had seen that this fear could not take hold of him completely. He deliberately made himself look away from the corpse on the floor and watched the call-sign.
Long moments later, something stirred in the depths of the shadow that the call-sign lay in. It was black, pure black. It rose from within the call-sign and arranged itself in a shape, that of a tall man without any features. Even in the dim light of that lone torch, one could see that its entire body seemed to be made of something akin to black glass. It stood to its full height, towering above the tallest man in the room, and surveyed its surroundings silently. The men watched, preparing themselves. The boy watched.
‘Demon,’ the old man spoke. The Demon, as addressed, stopped surveying the room, and slowly turned its neck to face the old man.
‘Accept your sacrifice, creature of Shadow,’ the old man spoke further, addressing the form. ‘Satisfy your hunger, and then we will discuss things further.’
The Demon said nothing. It looked down at the body at its feet. A shadow from within its self reached out, like a stream of water, and enveloped the body, and when the shadow retreated back into the Demon, the woman was no longer there.
The old man nodded, acknowledging the acceptance and began again, ‘Your task is an assassination. The target is none other than the famous—’
‘Wrong,’ the Demon spoke for the first time, interrupting the old man. Its voice was barely a hiss, an inhuman hiss that crawled up the boy’s body and made him shudder.
‘What do you mean?’ the old man asked, mildly surprised.
‘She did not satisfy my hunger.’ Its words, though in a sentence, were disjointed, as if it was trying to learn to speak.
‘Oh very well,’ the old man spoke, and grabbing Souvik by his collar, threw him out of the circle. Souvik screamed as he hit the floor near the Demon.
‘Take him,’ the old man said, gesturing to Souvik, who was fumbling desperately with the metallic device in his hands.
The Demon bent down in front of Souvik, hiding him from the boy’s view. The next instant, a sound was heard, something like a sharp rip. A scream. Silence. Then the Demon stood up again, facing the old man. ‘I’ve seen this since a long time. Your kind trying to be Summoners, thinking they can command our kind. Necromancer,’ the Demon spoke, ‘you forget your place.’
‘Do not try to judge my abilities, Demon,’ the old man said. ‘Tell me of your hunger.’
A pause. One of the men behind the old man fidgeted.
‘My hunger yearns for the taste of your old flesh, Necromancer,’ the Demon replied in a low drawl.
A sharp intake of breath. The old man moved his fingers in the air in a pattern. ‘Away with you!’ he spoke in the Old Tongue. The Demon did not react. The Necromancer looked at the creature with unbelieving eyes, repeating the gesture, chanting the words, a little frantic now.
The Demon laughed, and the boy felt his blood run cold at the sound. He covered his eyes and pushed himself deeper into the shadow of the pillar.
Loud slashing noises. Men screaming. Tissue tearing, bones snapping softly. And then, silence.
The boy slowly removed his hands from his eyes and peeked out from behind the pillar. Everyone was dead and the Demon, the Demon was hunched in front of the old man’s body, right inside the circle.
‘I can see you, you know?’ it spoke slowly.
The realisation that it was addressing him was terrible and merciless. It hit the boy like a hammer, and heart pounding, he watched as the Demon turned around to face him.
And Adri Sen woke up with a start.
Adri was swe
ating. It was the first thing he noticed, the cold sweat all over his body. The second was that it was morning and the sun had been up for quite a while now. The third was Death, sitting at the edge of his bed.
Adri’s apartment, tucked away in one of the busiest and most crowded neighbourhoods of New Kolkata, was easy to miss if one didn’t know where to look. It lay somewhere in the midst of a labyrinth of stalls and small shops, an area of the city where one wouldn’t come looking for anything. It was also the only part of the city that couldn’t be called perfectly clean; New Kolkata, as claimed by its makers, was an example of a completely controlled, clean city. It was also white. From the wide streets of white concrete, the white walls of the houses to the giant white walls that ran all around New Kolkata, everything was white. Within these giant white walls, everything ran with immaculate order and precision, something MYTH had done properly, as far as the role of rulers was concerned; the people, well-protected from the rumoured terrors outside the walls, functioned with full efficiency; they had almost everything they desired—the economy was in great shape, they were happy in their existence, and were free to do what they wanted. Good pay for good work.
Except for the forbidden arts. But then again, when most people were content being bankers and engineers, making themselves useful to society, why would anyone want to dabble in the supernatural? Curiosity in the forbidden arts, after all, could hardly be generated, leave alone sustained, when the alternative was a safe, well-paying job. No, let MYTH handle the Necromancers, the Tantrics. Isn’t that what the government was all about anyway? Protecting the people from magic. With magic. No one was complaining.
Adri wasn’t one to complain aloud either. All these years he had kept a low profile, living among the everyday people—people scared of magic and of the supernatural. One look at his apartment, and anyone would’ve known that he, Adri Sen, was a Tantric. It was a one-room flat with an attached bathroom, crammed with all kinds of oddities. Books fought for space everywhere—not just the old leather-bound volumes holding myriad secrets, but also bestsellers, cookbooks, and medical journals. In the middle of the room lay a shelf, crudely dividing the space into two parts, stacked with vials and vessels and bottles. Some had old, tired-looking plants growing within them, some were filled to the brim with strange powders and liquids, and odd vapours swirled inside some. A lamp made out of human skulls conjoined together hung surprisingly low, casting light out of the eye sockets and open mouths. On the free space available on the stone floor, etched with a sharp object, was a pentacle, and a few hundred candles, now put out, littered the area around it. Snakeskin dried along the windowsill of the single window in the room, and next to it was a small bed. Two figures currently occupied this bed—one half prostrate, and the other sitting on the edge, watching the first, intently.
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