chapter 4
Dense air and pregnant clouds welcome us to India, promising rain. The croak of frogs and the drone of insects sing of cycles, of hunger and need and of satisfaction also, of turning the wheel and hanging on. My hound notices the change in weather right away.
"Air wet," she says.
Yes, it’s quite humid. Much of Thanjavur is surrounded by rice paddies and the occasional banana or coconut grove. It’s into one of these groves that we have shifted, bunches of bananas hanging overhead, a few miles outside the city’s boundaries. Even so, the tether was much closer in than I thought it would be. Back in what Europe called the Dark Ages, Atticus had traveled the world the slow way and tied as much of it as he could to Tír na nóg, and once those tethers were established, Fae rangers maintained them by Brighid’s order, popping in to make sure they still worked and creating new ones as necessary when trees died or were removed by humans. Some of those rangers were working for Aenghus óg and looking for Atticus while they were at it, but all the Fae and Tuatha Dé Danann benefited from it.
The banana grove occupies a bit of high ground, and once I cast night vision, I can see a canal that winds into the city. A path or perhaps a road runs alongside, and I decide to follow it, gambling that we will find someone on the way to provide directions to the temple. Most people have already shut themselves in for the night, but I’m sure there are still a few wandering around. I cast night vision on Orlaith too, and she keeps pace beside me as I jog cross-country toward the canal, her tail communicating her joy.
"Fun! New smells!"
It is quite different, isn’t it? I say. There is mown grass or hay somewhere, and spices pepper the air, whispering of decadent homemade curries and perfumed incense. We hear strains of sawn strings groaning over the rhythm of tapped drum skins and ringing cymbals as we pass a house with its lights on and windows open. Someone sings along discordantly with the recorded voice, unconscious and untrained and clearly uncaring.
We finally see some people once we hit the canal road. Orlaith, being a very large creature moving at speed off a leash, frightens a few of them. We witness tiny squeals and cringes and hear sighs of relief when we pass.
"People afraid. Why? Good hound, right?"
You’re the sweetest hound ever, but they don’t know that and you surprised them. Don’t worry about it. Just stay close to me.
"Best human. Love Granuaile."
A few raindrops fall, and I realize we had better ask for directions sooner rather than later. My assumption that the temple must lie in the center of town might be false. I spy a couple walking and let Orlaith know that I want to slow down and talk to them.
They draw up short as they see us approach, and the man steps in front to protect his wife or sister. I don’t speak Tamil or Hindi or any of the dozens of other languages spoken in India, so I hope they will recognize enough of my English to help.
“Brihadeeswara Temple?” I say, holding out my hands in a gesture of helplessness. It doesn’t register, because their eyes are fixed on Orlaith.
Sit for a minute and look cute and harmless, I tell her, and she does. Then I repeat my question and the couple finally notices me standing there. It takes two more repetitions before the man raises his arm and points in the direction we were traveling, because now that he’s noticed me, he’s wondering if I’m a bigger threat than the hound.
Why, yes, good sir, I am.
I’ve noticed that men have difficulty maintaining eye contact or even speaking to me since I got my tattoos. The Celtic knot-work isn’t anything like what they’re used to seeing; they sense that it’s not merely decorative, and the mystery discomfits them. I think they want to ask what the tattoos mean, but something keeps them silent. In this case, maybe it’s the knives strapped to my thighs and the fighting staff in my hand.
We were headed the right way, Orlaith. Let’s go.
I deliver a shallow bow to the man and say thank you before resuming our run. The rain starts to fall with urgency, fat drops hinting at a serious shower and guaranteeing that Orlaith and I will be soaked by the time we reach our destination. The street clears of its remaining few stragglers as people dive under roofs, leaving us to slice through the dark alone—a blessing, really, that allows us to travel faster.
After ten minutes or so, the tower of the temple looms out of the dark to our left, its surface lit by spotlights from below and sheets of rain glittering in the beams. We cross the canal at a bridge and arrive shortly thereafter to discover that the tower is part of a larger compound surrounded by a high wall. The entrance is a massive stone interruption in the wall, thirty feet high or more and doubly wide; its soaring arch provides shelter from the pour. It is crested with sculptures of the Vedic gods and their deeds and makes one feel small in comparison to such a monument. A solitary figure waits there—not underneath the arch but underneath an umbrella, wrapped in a sari. As I draw near I see that it is Laksha, or at least the body that Laksha currently occupies; I never know how to think of her. She changes bodies the way Atticus and I change IDs, but for now she still wears the body of Selai Chamkanni, which she had taken years ago, after she moved out of my head.
She flashes white teeth at me as I approach, and I smile in return. Atticus would probably think me too trusting of her, but I doubt he fully understands what is between us. Back in the days when I was bartending at Rúla Búla, Laksha could have killed me at any time—in fact, it would have been simpler for her—but she chose not to. I know my life is safe with her, because my death would have been more expedient. And I know, too, because of the fact that she lived in my head. That requires an enormous amount of trust, and it’s a relationship very few people can grasp, Atticus included. He thinks she could change her mind at any time, and in theory I suppose that is true. I do understand why she is to be feared by others; her power is the easily abused kind, and in the past she did abuse it, and may do so again. But I also know that I personally have nothing to fear from her.
“Laksha,” I say, moving close underneath the umbrella. “I’d hug you, but I’m soaked and you’re still somewhat dry.”
“Hug me anyway. I have come to admire this custom, and it’s been too long.” I do so but feel guilty for ruining her clothes, which always look so much more elegant than anything I ever wear. She has swaths of red and yellow fabric draped around her from shoulders to ankles, in dramatic sweeps that are simultaneously modest and profoundly sensual. Her ruby necklace, which acts as both a focus for her power and a place of refuge for her spirit, rests beneath her collarbone in plain sight, and I notice that she is wearing a ruby bindi between her eyes these days.
“You look good,” I say, noticing a few deepening crinkles around the eyes that indicate she has aged. She notices that I haven’t aged at all.
“My thanks. But I do not look as good as you. What do the Druids know that I don’t?”
“How to make the right kind of tea. What happened to Idunn’s golden apple?” Atticus had gone to great trouble to get her one; she was going to use the seeds to plant her own tree and have access to the eternal youth of the Norse gods.
“I have two different trees growing, but they have yet to bear fruit. I am hoping they will flower soon.”
“You still have plenty of time.”
“I know, but this body is not so athletic as it once was. I will need to find a new body if the apples don’t come soon. The trees are magical and may take longer than normal to produce anything.”
“I can brew Immortali-Tea if you want,” I say. “Return your body to its twenties and give you more time to wait on the tree.”
“You can? Mr. O’Sullivan taught you how to do this?”
“Yes. You’ll need to set aside a block of time to get it done, because there are side effects, but it’s not insanely difficult.”
“Let us speak of it later, then. You are here for your father.”
“Yes, where is he?”
“I do not know. I cannot divine his location. The raksoyuj possessing him has defenses.”
Orlaith, who is unable to squeeze under the canopy of the umbrella, shakes herself and sprays water in all directions. "Go inside now? Under roof?" She has an excellent point, and I pet her and shoot her a quick private apology.
“Might we be able to find someplace dry to talk more?” I ask Laksha.
“Of course. This was simply a convenient place to meet. You found it easily, yes?”
“Yeah, it’s quite a landmark.”
“Good. Follow me.” Laksha begins to walk away from the entrance of the shrine, and I’m faintly disappointed that we won’t get to talk inside. But then I remember that Atticus will come here looking for me.
“Wait,” I say. “Can we leave a message somehow for Atticus? Tell him where to find us?”
She looks over her shoulder at me. “Mr. O’Sullivan will be coming?”
“Yes. I don’t know when, precisely, but I’m sure he will get here eventually.”
“You have not gone your separate ways?”
“Well, no, I never wanted that. I had a crush on him, if you remember, even before you told me he was a Druid. Turned out the feeling was mutual.”
“I see.” The rain falls uninterrupted by our voices as she digests this, the susurrus of the earth’s business always continuing, heedless of human concerns. Then, “Can you not simply call him? Text him?”
“He’s not on this plane right now.”
“Surely he will call you when he returns?”
I grin and shake my head ruefully. “Nothing is sure with Atticus.”
“There is no way to guarantee he will get any message at the shrine,” Laksha says. “Is there no other way to contact him?”
“I’m not sure … Oh! Duh. Yes, there is. Hold on a moment.” Looking down at my feet, I see that we are standing on a cobblestone path, but an expanse of grass waits a few yards away, flirting with the edges of the temple walls. “Let me talk to the elemental for a minute, and then we can go.”
“I will wait here,” Laksha says, and I nod my thanks and skip over to the grass. Orlaith follows, shaking herself again.
"What happens?" she asks.
I’m going to speak to the earth and then we can go someplace dry.
"Good plan! Talk fast?"
I will do my best.
Since I’ve never spoken to this elemental before, I feel a bit nervous about introducing myself without Atticus around. But I access my Latin headspace and speak through my binding to the earth: //Greetings / Harmony / New Druid visits//
The reply fills me with euphoria but also inspires some introspection. //Welcome / Fierce Druid / Harmony / Enjoy my lands//
I blink. Atticus told me that the elementals were calling me something like Fierce Druid, but I had yet to hear it—or feel it, I suppose—until now. Elementals don’t use words, of course, but I could feel that the image or concept of “Druid” had been modified to imply ferocity when applied to me specifically. Did they know something about me that I didn’t? Why wasn’t I Nice Druid or Mellow Druid with a Lovely Singing Voice?
//Druid comes here soon// I say, using the unmodified concept that they employed for Atticus. //Must see him / Query: Tell him my location upon arrival?//
//Yes//
//Gratitude / Harmony / Query: What shall I call you?//
//Self is of the river humans name Kaveri//
I smile in recognition. Thanjavur was in the delta region of the Kaveri River. //I will call you Kaveri / Harmony//
After that detail is attended to, Laksha leads us through a maze of narrow streets to a modest dwelling about a half mile away from the temple. Thanjavur has trees and patches of unpaved earth scattered throughout, and there is a small vegetable garden in the front of Laksha’s house, sufficient to serve as a place marker for Kaveri.
Once inside, Laksha fetches towels for us all and invites me to change into a robe while she throws my clothes into a dryer. That seems like an unnecessary delay to me.
“Won’t we be leaving soon?”
“There is time enough to get dry.” I give her my clothes, put on the robe, and get Orlaith toweled off to the point where she’s just wet instead of dripping. Laksha makes me a cup of hot chai, then takes us to a room she calls her craft room—a polite term for witchcraft. There are circles on the floor, one of salt and another painted with what I fear might be dried blood. After cautioning to avoid the circles, Laksha guides us past them to a mahogany table on the far wall and lights a few candles. Shards of pottery with raised Sanskrit letters are arranged on the table, pieced next to one another to form lines of text. Orlaith puts her nose at the edge of the table and snuffles a couple of times.
"Smells bad," she says, and then sits down.
“This vessel was unearthed not far from here,” Laksha says, pointing at the shards. “Your father was drawn to a dig north of town, and these writings are what alarmed me so. They say, ‘Keep sealed for all time. He who opens this prison will die, and rakshasas will plague the land.’ Then there are some praises to Shiva at the end.”
“That’s it? Nothing about who or what was inside?”
Laksha shrugs. “It does not say, but we can make inferences. If he has power over rakshasas, then he must either be an asura—one of the higher-powered demons that rivaled the Vedic devas—or a raksoyuj. Asuras tend to take on their own physical form, while a raksoyuj must possess others. Your father is possessed, so a raksoyuj is the most likely—”
“Wait. Why must a raksoyuj possess others?”
Laksha looks uncomfortable at my question. “How much do you know of the Hindu cycle of birth and rebirth?”
“I guess just the basics: The body dies but the spirit doesn’t. Spirits return in new bodies, and each one is trying to become pure enough to return to the source, right?”
“Precisely. And each lifetime will have few or no memories of past lives. These words suggest that the prisoner’s original body is long gone but his spirit never moved on in the cycle. It was trapped in this container instead. He was trying to prolong this particular existence by possessing others.”
I search her face for emotion and find none.
“Forgive me for saying so, but that sounds an awful lot like what you are doing.”
“I know,” she replies after a pause, her voice soft and haunted. “We are very similar. In this thing I see the end of a path I nearly walked. I am not sure the path I took is much better.”
“All right. What’s the difference between you and this raksoyuj?”
“I possess the body only. I have no traffic with the spirit. I push the occupying spirit out and take over—simply hijack the body. But he controls both the spirit and the body.”
“Didn’t you do that with me?”
“No, I shared space in your head and found unused pathways and corners of your brain to inhabit. I did not read your thoughts unless you wished to speak to me, and with rare exceptions, I only took control of your body with your permission. What he’s doing is enslaving your father. He knows what your father knows, remembers what he remembers. In outward appearance your father will look the same. But his behavior is quite different now.”
“What is he doing exactly? You said he’s spreading pestilence.”
“Yes, this is the end of the second day. The numbers of the ill are growing, and the hospitals are already strained. Doctors are confused, but people sense that the disease is unnatural. Earlier this afternoon—outside town—a woman was burned for being a witch.”
She doesn’t smile after she says that, though I wait for her to do so. When the silence lengthens, I prompt her. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I am completely serious.”
“Oh, gods. Was she a witch?”
“I do not think so. She was poor and unmarried and therefore a target. I dress like a wealthy married woman for a reason.”
“That’s terrible. Can’t believe it happened today.”
“It is easy for me to believe. Fear ignores the pace of modernity.”
“How is he spreading the disease?”
“Do you know what a rakshasa is?”
“I have a general idea. It’s a demon of some kind, isn’t it?”
“It’s not a demon in any Judeo-Christian sense. It is the rebirth of an especially wicked human into a sort of cursed half-life. They can shape-shift at will into almost anything organic that they wish—including noxious vapors. This is maya, the power of illusion. Your father is summoning rakshasas and commanding them specifically not to eat people or yank out their hearts or any number of other things but to cause this fast-moving disease that perplexes doctors. Hundreds have fallen ill in the past two days. Those who were infected first have now died. Tomorrow this will escalate and become international news, as hundreds turn to thousands.”
“So we find him and then you can push the raksoyuj out, right, leaving my father intact?”
“If it were that simple, child, I would not have had to call you. I cannot exorcise the raksoyuj without killing your father in the process. And even if we were to sacrifice him for the greater good—which I’m not suggesting—the raksoyuj would simply possess another body, much as I would. Like me, it is a difficult thing to kill. It needs to be bound and contained again or else destroyed on the spiritual level.”
“Can you do either of those things? Because I can’t.”
“I cannot bind him. I may be able to destroy him if conditions are right. We will need help.”
“Whose?”
“We need a Shakti—a divine weapon—to counter this aggressive spirit.”
The garden of sarcasm is watered with impatience, and mine chose that moment to bloom. “Are those on sale somewhere?”
“I do not mean a sword or a spear. I mean a devi. A goddess. I speak of Durga.”
“Not sure how I can help, then. I don’t have her email and she’s not on Twitter.”
“I will take care of contacting her. It’s already begun.” Before I can inquire what she means by that, she continues, “I was hoping you would have some method to find your father.”
I think of asking Orlaith to pull a bloodhound act using the shards as a source, but she’s a sight hound, and after the heavy rains my father’s scent would be near impossible to follow anyway. “Has anyone tried to track him through his cell phone?”
“I pursued that early this morning through an acquaintance on the police force. His cell phone no longer transmits a signal. Perhaps you could ask the elemental to help?”
“That won’t work, unfortunately,” I explain. “Humans are just creatures bereft of identity to elementals—they’re part of the ecosystem. They recognize individual Druids only because we’re bound to them. Kaveri would have no way to distinguish my father from any other man in the area.”
“Divination, perhaps?”
“I can try. I’m not very skilled at it. Atticus didn’t dwell on it very much during my training, and I seriously doubt I would succeed where you had failed.”
“I see. Might you have a way to heal those who are ill, then?”
“Perhaps. Would that help me find my father?”
“Quite possibly. If you expel the rakshasas, he may seek you out.”
“Expel them?”
“Was I not clear? The illness is not viral or bacterial but a direct result of the rakshasas inside the victims. It is a supernatural cause, and medicine will have no effect. But your healing is magical and therefore may be of some use.”
“So each victim has been invaded or inhabited by a rakshasa?”
“Correct. That is why your father is still somewhat limited.”
“But there are already hundreds of victims, you said.”
“Yes. He calls more rakshasas every day. Grows stronger every day.”
“Gods, all those people. How long before you can get Durga involved?”
“I am practicing austerities and making offerings. When she will appear is of course up to her. But I am confident she will come. This raksoyuj is ruining dharma, and the devi will wish to restore balance.”
“She’ll show up in the middle of Thanjavur on a lion and she’ll have extra arms and everything?”
“I imagine she would prefer to manifest out of sight of the general population. We should attempt to draw your father out to a rural area.”
“Fine. Can we go now? Take me to someone sick on the edge of the city. I can’t stand doing nothing.”
Laksha nods. “Yes, we can go.” She pats the folds of fabric draped over each hip and then gives an embarrassed smile at my raised eyebrows. “Still have my knives. It is a nervous thing—I always check before I go out, even though I know they are still there. I need a couple more things.” She grabs sticks of incense and small jars of unguents and two miniature gongs with mallets, and all of those disappear into the folds of her sari. I begin to think she might have pocket dimensions in there.
My clothes aren’t completely dry, but neither are they dripping wet. I shiver at the chill and resign myself to getting cold and wet again, bidding farewell to the robe as a brief interlude of warmth and comfort. Laksha gives me an extra umbrella and we step back into the rain, Orlaith trotting along beside us.
Laksha leads us in silence through the rain. Water pounds our umbrellas and sluices underneath our feet as we follow a sinuous path through the city. We continue on muddy trails along the ridges of rice paddies to a sad collection of hovels that struggle to live up to the name of shelter but completely own the word ramshackle. The people who live here work too hard for too little comfort.
Laksha knocks and a tired, worried woman opens the door, blessing us with a whiff of incense before the rain sweeps it down to the ground. Moans of pain arise from the darkness behind her, only a hint of candlelight ameliorating the gloom. Her eyes take in Laksha and they widen somewhat before she bows and clasps her hands and a stream of musical language bubbles forth from her lips. Laksha responds, gestures briefly to me, and then the woman opens the door wide and steps aside, inviting us to enter.
The modest living area stretches unbroken into the kitchen on the back wall. A battered couch that was once orange hunches against the wall to our left, hoping we won’t notice it, and two doors to our right probably lead to a small bedroom and a smaller bathroom. The moans are coming from one of them.
I ask Orlaith to wait on the floor by the couch, and we follow the woman to the bedroom. A teenage boy writhes there on the sheets, his brow clammy and his breathing labored. Incense battles with the stench of illness, and the storm pounds the roof.
Laksha puts her hand to the boy’s forehead, and he twitches. She holds it there for a few seconds and then moves her hand to the center of his bare chest, over his heart. Nodding, she glances at the rain-spattered window and withdraws. “The storm is good. It dampens the spirit like it would dampen mine. And the noise is annoying. We need to increase both the water and the noise.”
“I understand how noise can be a nuisance, but what does the rain outside have to do with anything?” I ask.
“The rakshasa in this form,” she says, pointing to the boy, “is a thing of the air—or, more properly, the ether. It drowns in water. We need to get him into a bath.” She turns and speaks in Tamil to the woman—presumably the boy’s mother—explaining what needs to be done. Together, we lift the poor thing out of bed and support him as we stagger into the bathroom. He’s wearing a pair of shorts, and we just leave those on as we try to tumble him gently into the tub. He’s so out of it, he can barely function.
Laksha kneels next to the tub and turns on the water. The boy jerks and then spasms intermittently, whimpers once, but his eyes don’t open. The mother and I hover behind, and the helplessness I feel in this situation can be only a fraction of what she must be going through.
While the tub fills, Laksha begins to pull out all the items she stowed in her sari. She has the mother light incense and rests the miniature gongs and mallets on the side of the tub. Her voice rolls out of her in a chant as she removes the lid from a small jar with a sweet-smelling unguent in it—sweet, but so powerful and cloying that it makes me cough. Laksha dips a finger in the paste. While the water rises to cover the boy’s abdomen, she writes on his forehead and continues to chant. That causes a convulsion and elicits a little cry of alarm from the mother. Laksha frowns, as if the boy’s reaction disappoints her. Perhaps she had been expecting something more; regardless, she keeps chanting, then picks up one of the miniature gongs and indicates through gesture that the mother should do the same. They start to bang the crap out of them, and the din is enough to set my teeth on edge.
And that, of course, is the point. The noise, the smells, the rising water—all of it is supposed to force the rakshasa to leave the boy. But this particular rakshasa is strong and doesn’t want to let go. Still, the clamor of gongs and chanting has its effect: The boy shudders, seizes up, and his eyes snap open, except the pupils have rolled up into his head and all we see are the whites. An inchoate roar surges out of his throat, and it’s not merely the sound of a teenage meltdown. His arms, suddenly imbued with strength, grip the sides of the tub, and he attempts to get out. Laksha pushes him back down and flicks a glance at me, suggesting that keeping him in there is now my job. She has a gong to bang and chants to yell. She can’t do it all.
"Granuaile all right? Very loud."
I’m okay. Stay in there no matter what you hear.
"Okay."
Stealing a glance at the mother as I kneel down and set Scáthmhaide aside, I see that she’s crying. I would be too. And I remember that the thing that has my father is much worse than what has the boy. If we can’t handle this rakshasa, how can we hope to prevail against the raksoyuj?
Keeping the boy in there is more challenging than I thought it would be. He fights me actively, and I get slapped as well as splashed. The water level is up to his chest now, and he doesn’t like it at all. Laksha interrupts her chant to explain why he’s suddenly so animated when he was such a dead fish before.
“The rakshasa was attacking his heart chakra and slowly divorcing him from life. We have forced it up into the head. It’s now possessed the boy. It’s here, at the sixth chakra,” she says, pointing at the bindi placed just slightly above the spot between her eyebrows.
We couldn’t very well submerge the boy up to that point. We had annoyed the rakshasa significantly, but it wasn’t sufficient to drive it out.
“See what you can do to heal him now,” Laksha says, but I am unsure how to proceed. I have not done much direct healing of others, and I am cut off from the earth here. Healing his symptoms would not cure him of the possession, in any case. Anything I did to help his body now would simply be undone by the rakshasa as soon as I stopped, and I would have to stop soon without an energy source. I have some stored in the silver end of Scáthmhaide, and I use that in an attempt to relieve him directly. His breathing clears up, but that’s about all. He’s still very much in the grip of the rakshasa. We need something more to address the possession, and I realize it is hanging from my neck. Cold iron is the antithesis of magic, and though Laksha might call it maya, what the rakshasa is doing is still magic, regardless of its flavor.
I remove my necklace and wrap the gold chain around my fist before slapping the cold iron amulet against the boy’s forehead and holding it there. The reaction is immediate and terrifying.
His roar becomes a screech, and his hands lock around my wrist and try to pull it off, but this boy’s weakened body is no match for me. His mother boils over with worry and she begins to scream behind me. Oily smoke belches out of his mouth, nose, and ears, forming a cloud above the boy’s head, and this is what Laksha had been waiting for.
“Yes! It’s leaving him! Once it’s all out, thrust the iron into the middle of the cloud!”
My amulet is not made of an overwhelming amount of iron. I can cast around it, after all, though it always requires extra energy. I’ve tried casting with the amulet off, and it’s far more efficient to do it that way. It’s undeniably a damper on magic, and combined with the noise and smells and the water, it’s enough to break the rakshasa’s hold.
The cloud of greasy vapor slithers above me—toward the mother, who’s blocking the exit and making all kinds of noise—and once it stops billowing from the boy and he slumps back into the bath, Laksha urges me to move. Rising to my feet, I thrust the cold iron into the cloud, and it reacts with a sort of jellyfish ripple, then it curls in on itself, like a spider in water, cold tendrils of it closing around my fist. Abruptly, it gushes toward the floor in front of the toilet—directly to my right—and the vapor solidifies from the ground up into a humanoid form sheathed in black. Then the face appears—a nightmare made flesh, with bloodshot eyes and an obscene red tongue lolling over a gaping maw of sharp teeth. It is the rakshasa’s true form, a portrait of corruption like Dorian Gray, temporarily robbed of its ability to shift or cast illusion by cold iron.
Instinctively, I draw back, but there’s hardly any room to maneuver—the tub is directly behind me. The rakshasa lunges for my face, but a flash of steel darts between us and slides across skin that is quite solid and real, opening a slit that splashes blood onto the floor. The demon clutches its throat and turns those horrible eyes to my left in time to see Laksha drive her knife blade into one of them. It topples backward, its knees buckled by the toilet, and dies, gurgling, in a sitting position—an image that I file under THINGS I NEVER WOULD HAVE SEEN IF I HAD KEPT BARTENDING.
The boy regains consciousness with a gasp and asks for his mother. She rushes to him in relief and shields his view of the room; with an exchange of gestures, Laksha and I silently agree to remove the body. I put my necklace back on but realize I’ll have to leave my staff here for the moment. As we enter the living room, cradling the corpse, it occurs to me that we might be violating some kind of taboo—we may have made ourselves untouchable. I’m not an expert on the caste system or to what extent it’s observed anymore, so I ask Laksha about it.
“Is it all right for us to handle the dead? I mean, are we tainting ourselves somehow in the eyes of others?”
“I think she will overlook it,” Laksha replies, tossing her head back to indicate the mother. “And no one else will see. Which is vital. The sight of a real rakshasa will cause panic and draw the attention of the authorities.”
Seeing that we are headed for the door, Orlaith gets up and moves out of the way. You’re a good hound, I tell her. Aloud, I ask Laksha the all-important question.
“What are we going to do with him? It’s still raining.”
“That’s a blessing. Everyone is indoors.”
“There’s no convenient burial ground.”
“He should be burned far away from here, but that’s not an option. We will choose a place where no one will try to grow anything.”
That place is a well-worn path between houses, a sort of alley, now a muddy trench. I contact the elemental Kaveri and ask her help in burying the rakshasa’s body, explaining that we might be doing this sort of thing all night to help people. She parts the mud for us far more quickly than I could do it myself, and we drop the dark corpse of the demon into the resulting grave. The mud flows back over him and the problem is solved—no witnesses.
Orlaith, who had followed us out of the house, is struck with the procedure’s practical application for dogs. "So fast! Bury bones like that?"
Your paws do the job admirably on their own, I tell her.
“One down,” Laksha says. “Now that we know what works, perhaps we can do the next one a bit quicker. It won’t be long until we draw your father out. And in the meantime we are saving people. This is good karma.”
A tight smile on Laksha’s face suggests that the last point is perhaps the most important to her. I cannot blame her for wishing to do others well, but I do wish there was a quicker way to find my dad.
“What did you use as a focus when you tried to divine his presence?” I ask her.
“The shards of the canister that held the raksoyuj. It was the object he most recently touched.”
“Ah, but that wasn’t really his. It was a thing of the raksoyuj. Might a different object be more effective, one that was more closely tied to him?”
“It might,” Laksha agrees. “Do you have such an item with you?”
“No,” I say, “but I might be able to get one. Let me think about it.”
Laksha darts into the house to retrieve what I suppose must be called her exorcism kit, along with my staff, and to offer a hurried farewell to the family. I squat down next to my wet hound and scratch behind her ears, trying to think of something that might hold a stronger psychic signature of my dad than the shattered remains of that clay vessel.
When I was growing up, he’d send me little trinkets and cards for my birthday and Christmas from wherever he was, and I’d go into my room and open them in private and cry because he was always so sweet and loving, albeit from a distance; to me, that was infinitely preferable to the coldness of my stepfather up close. He continued doing this even into my adulthood, never forgetting me, always letting me know that he was thinking of me and that he loved me. From a distance.
I still had some of his gifts back at the cabin, but the most recent one was more than twelve years old now. The gifts had stopped coming, of course, when I’d faked my death to disappear and begin my apprenticeship in secret. Would any of them have a psychic signature strong enough for Laksha to find, when so much time had passed and he was possessed by something with its own magical defenses? Emotionally I wanted the answer to be yes, but rationally I could not imagine that the odds would be good. Laksha’s approach of killing rakshasas to lure the raksoyuj would probably work better. And it would keep me busy while I worried.
When Laksha reappears with Scáthmhaide, she asks if I’ve thought of anything useful.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Let’s go play exorcist.”