The Devourers (21 page)

“Overwhelmed, by the new birth. The imakhr fucks the new shape-shifter, to ease its delirium, control its wonder.”

“He was a man.”

“His first self was a man, at that time.”

“Why didn't he come with you on the migration?”

“Maybe he did. I left Paris a while ago, to explore the rest of Europe. What he has done since is not for me to know.”

“Do you miss him?” I asked.

“I don't miss anyone. That is the province of those who love, and love is a folly of khrissals.”

I clenched my teeth. That had been an obvious mistake to make, far too obvious. Somehow I thought he'd be tricked by the question, miss the implications of it, though I hadn't consciously tried to trick him. But the rote recitation of his words blatantly betrayed his guilt. I don't know if he ever loved his imakhr, but I knew, by now I knew that he loved Fenrir. And I knew, for him and Fenrir, love was a sin.

You love Fenrir,
I wanted to tell him. I let the words form on my tongue, tried to free them from my lips, but couldn't.

“You said your mother died. Was that long ago?” he asked.

I sat there shocked for a moment. I couldn't believe that he was asking me something, instead of the other way around. Something personal, something about my life as a human. It was, as far as I could remember, the first time. Perhaps he knew what I was thinking, wanted to steer my mind back to myself.

“She— Not that long ago. I haven't been alive that long. Especially compared with you, I'd think. She was a young woman still when she died. People would often mistake us for sisters: she the elder, I the younger.”

“She was very young when she bore you.”

“Barely more than a child.” I took a deep breath. “She didn't expect me. She was very poor, and she was raped, too.”

The rain fell over his head, endless, making me almost angry that he didn't cover his head. He was soaked, unmoved. A statue. I wondered if he felt any sympathy. Why was he even performing this pretense of humanity, this interest in my affairs? Why was he mimicking what I had done moments earlier, when I asked about his past?

“She left Kandahar when she found out she was with child, and a merchant traveling to Lahore took pity on her. She never was very clear about what that meant, but I think he just kidnapped her on the way, and used her as he willed. But how much of that is just my own bitterness, tainting her life?”

I felt that familiar ache of rage rise up inside me, only stoked by Gévaudan's lack of reaction. But I went on. He had asked, and I would tell. I had listened, and he would, too. Certainly we deserved that, after he had bared a part of his soul forbidden to my eyes, and I had let my blood for his tongue.

“Still, whatever it was, he took her in, and didn't care that she was a mother. In Lahore he had her trained as a tawaif, educated in song and dance and lore. He had her taught to read and write. I remember that city, though not well. Growing up in the mansion of the zamindar, playing in his gardens. Once I grew older, we left his house. Again, I'm not sure what happened, whether he got nervous and kicked us out, or whether my mother got sick of living there, or what. My mother headed east to Akbarabad, where the imperial court was, with the money he'd given her. He said she'd be a fine courtesan in the imperial harem. She never got close. She danced and whored herself out in caravans and serais, but she was no courtesan. We traveled for a time with the Bazigars, who were kind to us, and we pretended we were like them—nomads, entertainers. But friendly as they were, we could never be one of them, either, as they have their own clans. But we went with them on the roads when we could. My mother taught me what she could, what she knew. Then she died of a wretched disease.”

I heard the patter of rain on our bodies and the ground. The sounds of the camp had died down. Light still flickered in some of the tents. Many of the hired men were still awake, but they talked in hushed tones that I couldn't hear over the rain. Gévaudan's jaw was clenched. The anger bubbling in me had simmered down to a painful throb that pushed tears out of my eyes. I rubbed them away and stanched them, taking deep breaths of the cold air, heavy with the smell of wet earth. My cowl dripped on, cold drops on my nose.

Gévaudan's head snapped up. He looked past me, toward the edge of the camp.

“What?”

He said nothing, staring, his ears twitching through his soggy curls.

The sounds came to my ears as well. Shouts at the edge of camp, a wave of activity spreading outward from the distance as more people were roused from their state of rest. The blossoming lights of new lanterns and firebrands lit.

“They're dead,” Gévaudan said.

“Who is?”

“The men Courten sent back to buy a cart, and more camels. They've been killed. One got away.”

“How…”

“I can hear what they're saying. Not bandits.” He paused, listening.

“An animal. A beast. Rakshasa, he calls it.”

“Demon,” I whispered. I had heard the word used before by the Hindus.

“He's here,” said Gévaudan.

*
Daily camp/assembly on a journey.

I
can't describe the rest of that night to you. I will try, but the terror that overcame me was like nothing I'd ever experienced before—it was the inverse of what I had felt riding across the world on the spiny back of Gévaudan's second self. That night, I was reminded that Iblis
^*1
was of the djinn, a shape-shifter like the man sitting next to me, like the man out there beyond the firelight of the maqam
.
I saw how our ancestors saw their race in the shadows and wrote the legends we now know.

Courten had sent four men back to Akbarabad; one came back, covered in blood from head to toe, foaming at the mouth from frenzied fear, struck with the immovable belief that he had witnessed something not of nature, a dread miracle, a man changing into an awful, gigantic animal. The survivor was a Jat, and for him the beast of supernature that he saw killing his companions was a rakshasa
.
For the Baluchs who looked on fearfully it was, perhaps, a djinn, a wandering ghul brought on a fell wind from the northeastern deserts. For Courten it was a large animal that had turned man-eater—a great wolf, a tiger, a lion. The survivor wept, and said their attacker was greater than all those animals.

Courten scoffed at these claims, but I saw him rubbing his crucifix in one hand.

—

It didn't matter what anyone thought, in the end.

Fenrir's roar split the black sky like a bolt of unseen lightning, so loud it felt impossible, heralding his approach. Gévaudan took my hand, unheeding of his own strength.

A chorus of terrible screams rose up all around us, and for a moment I was frozen with horror, thinking that something inexplicable was happening, that the roar we had heard had overturned nature itself, made the dead rise from the ground in pain. It took me a moment to realize it was the lowing of the oxen and camels as they stirred awake throughout the camp, all woken by the unearthly cry of our intruder.

I cried out as I felt my hand crushed in Gévaudan's grip. He didn't even notice, his eyes wide. “We need to get out of here,” he said.

He began pulling me through the crowd.

I grimaced through the pain in my hand, which I was unable to free from Gévaudan's. “Maybe it's just an animal, Jevah-dan,” I gasped, hoping that he would say yes, it probably was.

“It's Fenrir. He has spoken. He has spoken. To me.”

“What did he say?”

“I…I can't put it into your words.”

“Please, you're hurting me.” He let go, holding my wrist instead, lighter this time. My hand was numb.

I couldn't believe what I had done. In one moment, I lost all my desire to see Fenrir again, to have him make amends for what he'd done to me and take away his child from my belly. I felt like a coward, a betrayer of my own soul. I felt like a miserable little girl, cold and wet and afraid in the rain.

Another roar rumbled across the camp like thunder, turning to a bitter howl that seemed to last forever, drawing all the eyes of a woken camp to the outer edges of darkness that surrounded us. Gévaudan winced and shook his head.

“What is he saying? Please tell me.”

Gévaudan ignored me, stumbling to his knees as we reached the pile of our belongings, next to the agitated camels. The animals had stood up in a panic and were trying to escape the pull of their tethers. I grabbed the bundle that held my few meager things, slung it on my shoulder.

“I didn't think he'd do this. The city, we should have stayed in the city,” Gévaudan said.

“What are we going to do? Run? We can't, he'll just outrun us!” Screams rang through the camp. They were human. Gévaudan squinted in their direction. I looked. People were running in all directions now, some grabbing their animals, a mob forming as panic spread. Fenrir had breached the camp.

I saw flashes glisten through sheets of rain as tents collapsed in the wake of something huge, lanterns exploding and setting new fires in the night. There were splintering crashes as carts tilted to the ground and spilled their freight, some toppled by fleeing animals, others hurled aside by the advancing intruder. Rippling flags of flame sprung from the fabric of fallen tents, marking out the path of the beast in the darkness. I saw something bright leave the ground in the distance and fly through the air in an arc toward us, like a falling star in the shape of a man. It
was
a man, his clothes and flesh burning, hurled into the air with inhuman strength. I watched him soar and return to the earth, crashing into the fleeing crowd, knocking several of them down into the muck. I heard the sound of all his bones breaking even through the tumult surrounding us.

“Come on,” said Gévaudan, holding my wrist again. We left the camels (he hacked their tethers) and his fardels.

As I looked back, I heard the sharp pop of a musket, saw its muzzle light glittering in the rain. Courten, or one of his men. The beast responded. A roar burst across the crumbling camp, so deafening it hurt my ears, and I feared the rain trickling down the sides of my neck was blood. Gévaudan's fingers tightened on my wrist again, and then remembered how frail the bones of a human were.

“Get on my back,” he said, bending low. “I can run much faster.”

He sounded calm now, but his eyes were glazed like an opium-eater's. I fell on his broad back, covered in the coarse damp fur of his pelt-raiment, and put my arms on his shoulders, my hands locking around his neck. He lifted me off the ground and ran, knocking the breath from my gut. My legs flapped limp behind his, feet kicking at his thick calves. He didn't run as fast as his second self, but he did run faster than any man could. Several times fleeing men came in the way, and I heard the crack of their bones snapping or the slap of their flesh opening as he rammed into them and sent them sprawling. I closed my eyes tight through it, feeling sick. I had brought this upon them, these poor, hapless humans. My fellow humans. I had brought this upon them by seeking Fenrir, by following Gévaudan, by hoping to use the being under me to deliver penance to his friend.

Gévaudan didn't stop running till we were in the darkness beyond the camp, his legs working through the mud. If anyone saw us, they weren't following. Most of the qafila was fleeing on the road we had made maqam around, pouring down it in a tangled wave of animals and men. Their raw cries of confusion and horror; the spit and crackle echoes of the East India Company's few muskets; the firelit slivers of arrows let loose by those hired men who tried to fight back; the sparking bonfires and boiling steam of burning tents; all of this made it seem like some manic parade churning in the rain to welcome this dark and terrible djinn from a bitter land none of us had ever seen.

And there amid the despairing flock, there he was, Fenrir of the north.

The beast I'd imagined when he appeared at my curtain steeped in moonlight and fur, now sprung free from his human form. There it was, looming huge over everything, the eye of the storm pausing to observe the swirling chaos it had created. Surrounding it were corpses of men, oxen, camels opened to the rain, running with reddened rainwater. The beast was like no animal I'd ever seen on this earth. Glowing red in the flickering light of rain-swathed fires, with its war paint of blood and tattered flesh, which hung like ragged pennants off its spines and slicked fur, it was rakshasa of the Hindus, it was asura, lord among their demons. It was glowing, infernal ifreet of the djinn, it was Iblis made incarnate, rising from cold wet earth instead of the arid sand of the desert. It was a towering impostor god of Europe resurrected in this empty stretch of Shah Jahan's empire and worshipped with fire and violence.

I let go of Gévaudan, tumbling to the ground, the cloak clinging to me like a skin of slime now in the mud and the rain. “We have to go back. He'll kill them all. What are we doing? We must go back, Jevah-dan. It's us he's looking for.”

“He'll kill you. At least I have a chance. He'll kill you, Cyrah.”

“He won't. He thinks he loves me. He would have killed me in Mumtazabad if he wanted to.”

“This is his second self. It won't hesitate like his first did. He'll rip you apart, and devour you and your soul.”

“Why do you care?” I screamed, and I actually meant it. I wanted to know why.

He was stumped by the question, but another roar from the road broke the brief stupor.

“I can't. I can't do this,” I whimpered, and my skin prickled as I felt the beast, a hundred yards away, turn its head and look at us. Or maybe it didn't, but that's what I felt. I turned, and even through rain and fire and smoke, I saw its eyes blaze like far-off suns. It howled again, making even the rain shiver in a wave that spattered my face, as if the sound were a baleful wind from this monster's dismal country.

I saw Gévaudan buckle to his knees, holding his ears. Spittle drooled in strings from his mouth, and he was saying words in a language I couldn't understand.

I started to scrabble toward the road again, blinking the rain from my eyes. I could see some of the men climbing onto the beast and plunging sharp weapons into it, and I applauded their bravery, but they looked like children clinging to a trembling giant. It plucked them from its sleeked wet fur with idle ease, using its jaws and tusked fangs, and it tossed them into the sea of bodies that swirled past it. It seemed to revel in whatever pain it received from the human weapons thrown against it. It moved slowly and then rippled with sudden speed, cleaving an ox in half with one swipe, the divided body crushing several men.

Gévaudan grabbed my cloak and pulled me back, sending me splashing back to the ground.

“Don't look at it,” he shouted.

“It wants—he wants
me,
” I said, clambering up again. “Let me go to him. How can I run now? After all this? This is what I wanted. Those people are dying because of me.”

“No, no,” Gévaudan snarled, and returned to the babble of different languages he had sometimes dipped into, as if arguing with himself, his eyes darting in their sockets. He looked like he had when he was about to change shapes.

The beast had changed direction, tearing through the humans and oxen and camels, the stinging stampede writhing at its legs. It was leaving the road. It was coming toward us.

I got up, my heart hurting, swollen with terror. I would meet it. This was what I had traveled with its kin for. To meet the devil again. I ran toward it, but Gévaudan grabbed me.

Gévaudan's hand lashed out so quickly I didn't see it. But I felt his hand slap my neck, just by the throat. I heard it in my head like a thunderclap, and for a moment I couldn't breathe and I felt spit gush into my mouth and I felt my gut coil and I thought I had to vomit and I felt my heart stop its frightened drumming in my ears and the whine of silence flooded them instead. And then the world vanished, and darkness burst in like a great tide released by that approaching monster.

—

The rest I felt as if in a dream, rising in and out of darkness. I felt Gévaudan carry me in the arms of his second self (for the first time), felt the speed of his flight across the rainswept plains, the winds lashing at both of us as Fenrir remained always at the horizon behind us, a following storm; the ground shaking with the galloping of these two beasts, the burning caravan receding to a wavering line. I was paralyzed, whether by the blow or by some infernal glamour I didn't know. I felt Gévaudan slit my arm open with one long claw, lapping and sucking at me as Fenrir approached from afar.

They stopped then, far from the caravan.

I hung from Gévaudan's arms like one dead, he poised over me leechlike, his mouth daubed in my blood, which dripped in ruby lines down the slit in my arm. I don't know which shape he stayed in when he stopped to face his pursuer. Fenrir slouched in the distance, wary, the mud around him steaming with his heat, the rain boiling off his back. In the distance, the sounds of the fleeing survivors, the white men under Courten emptying the last of their gunpowder into the night air in panic, small lightning in the distance.

Did they both change back into their first selves? I can't say. But one way or the other, Fenrir said to Gévaudan, his eyes flooded with tears of rage: << What have you done, you traitor? >>

<< I have done nothing. Come no closer. >>

<< Leave her be, or die like those khrissals back there. >>

<< So you can kill her, feast upon her, and have her for yourself, because she'll never come to you of her own accord? >>

<< You've sullied her, haven't you? In your jealous fit, you've done what I did. >>

And Fenrir's tears landed on the ground sizzling and spitting, and his claws dug into his palms to raise blood, his growl rolling across Gévaudan in a fearsome wave.

<< No. I've done no such thing. >>

And Fenrir looked at him and saw the truth. His tears ceased, and his growling slowed.

<< I see you. Makedon called you whelp, and whelp you are. I see you drink her blood, suck from her soul the memories of her night with me. You pretend to be her companion, but you just want what lies in her. You care nothing for the flesh itself, or the person it holds. >>

<< As you care only for the idea of a human lover, and for the idea of the child she carries. >>

<< You're so young. I see right through you, whelp. You wanted to devour Cyrah, and undertake the long sleep of ekh'du, to shape your first self into her form. That's why you took her with you on this journey—you were preparing to molt. You wanted to
be
her, so that I might love you back. You wanted to give Cyrah to me, in you, so that I might love her, and you. >>

And Gévaudan said nothing.

<< A bold idea and a beautiful sentiment, Gévaudan. If you'd had the courage to actually do it instead of merely wanting to, I might even have come with you. I might have seen past your betrayal and loved the shards of Cyrah's soul made manifest in yours, and in so doing nurtured your own sickly love. But you wouldn't have held a child for me. You wouldn't have sacrificed your second self for nine months. And that alone would reveal the falsity of your new flesh. Even if it looked like Cyrah, it wouldn't have been. >>

<< You are the mightiest of all hypocrites in this world, Fenrir. How dare you lecture me, as if you were not the one who started this great fucking drama?
You
are the one who claimed to love a khrissal, and raped one. I had no great bond with Makedon, but we were a pack, Fenrir. We shared the ghost fires, and we ate of man and woman together. He was one of us. And it is because of you that he is dead, and by my forced hand. >>