Tiger’s Destiny (23 page)
I lifted my gourd of firefruit juice to his lips and though most of it trickled down his neck, he stirred slightly. I gave him more and soon he was able to swallow. The gray began to retreat, and finally Kishan blinked open his golden eyes.
I kissed his still stony lips and admonished softly, “Don’t scare me like that.”
He tried to speak, but I pressed my finger against his lips. “Don’t talk yet. Just drink.”
Two bottles of firefruit juice later, he seemed to be fully recovered and stood up, but Ren still draped Kishan’s arm around his shoulder and helped him walk off the numbness. I winced when Kishan grunted in pain, completely empathizing with the terrible sting he felt. Soon we were on our way again, headed down the tunnel Ren and Fanindra had chosen.
Kishan regained his strength, and, as the tunnel narrowed, he took the lead, followed by Ren and then me.
After helping me over a large rock blocking our path, Ren said, “I want to ask you something, but if it makes you uncomfortable, you don’t have to talk about it.”
“What’s your question?”
“When you sacrificed yourself to the Phoenix, we saw you burn.”
“Yes,” I answered softly.
“What happened?”
“The Phoenix asked me some questions that I had a hard time answering, and the burning was the result. There were some things I needed to learn, to admit to myself. Sunset said that my heart called out to it when we entered the forest. It . . . it wanted to heal me.”
“Its methods of healing leave something to be desired.”
“Perhaps.” We walked in silence for a moment and then I added, “The Phoenix didn’t ask more of me than it expected from itself though.”
“What do you mean?”
“When the night comet streaked across the sky, I watched it burn. Sunset gave its life so the new Phoenix, Sunrise, could be born.”
Ren’s eyes fixed on me briefly, and then he looked away. Gently, he inquired, “What did he ask you, Kelsey?”
I let out a soft sigh and walked beside him quietly for a few seconds. He didn’t press me while I considered how much to share with him.
Finally, I responded, “My heart has been hurting for a long time, and I’ve clung to the pain. The Phoenix made me face that. And now that I’ve recognized it, I’m trying to figure out my next steps. As for the questions he asked me . . .” I stopped walking and reached for his hand. “I want to keep that to myself for a while. I promise that I will tell you about it someday. Just not right now.”
Ren lifted my hand to his lips and pressed a soft kiss on my fingers. “Then I’ll just have to wait for someday.”
Six hours later the tunnel widened, and my golden snake suddenly came alive. Fanindra brushed her head against my cheek and squeezed my upper arm with her coils, an unnerving sensation I still hadn’t gotten used to. She peered into the darkness ahead of us and flicked her tongue in and out several times. When she angled her head toward the ground, I crouched down and set her onto the gritty black path.
Lifting her head, Fanindra opened her hood and swayed back and forth as she studied the terrain ahead. Then she hissed slightly and moved off in a different direction. We followed her across a rugged trail that was covered with sharp black stones. Her golden body wove between the rocks, and though we lost speed, we all agreed it was safer to follow the snake.
Soon we felt a change in our surroundings. The tunnel opened into a large cavern. Echoes of our voices bounced around us. As we progressed farther forward, I felt a cold wind brush against me and then disappear abruptly. Goose bumps fanned out on my arms, and I rubbed them anxiously.
The movement of cold air was strange enough in the fire world, but it was also accompanied by several unnerving noises. The current of air twisted through holes in the rocks, creating a soft rattling, or fluttering, noise, and the rocks slowly strangulated with dull gasping sounds. The wind continued to brush against my new skin with long intervals in between, and I conjured up the image of a dying colossus exhaling his last cold breath.
Fanindra stopped abruptly and lifted her head, sensing something we couldn’t. Not even Ren or Kishan could hear or see far beyond the light cast by the golden cobra. All of us sensed danger. Ren responded by unhooking the sword from his belt. As he grasped the hilt, it lengthened into its full span. With a twist of his wrist, the sword separated into two blades. He handed one to Kishan and by unspoken agreement, both brothers moved slightly ahead of me.
After an hour of this slow movement, I felt the energy drain from my body again. I’d just uncorked the stopper to take a sip of the firefruit juice when Fanindra suddenly coiled and elevated almost the entire upper half of her body. She spread the ribs below her head wider than she ever had before, which showed off the elaborate coloring of her hood and made her look three times larger than she was.
She spat a loud series of hisses in warning, either for us or to try and scare off whatever was frightening her. Her mouth opened and closed several times as if tasting the wind. Her forked tongue tickled the air over and over, waving vertically like a loose ribbon in the breeze as she tried to get a sense of her surroundings.
A pop on our left, like that of a rock falling, echoed through the cavern, startling us. Not a moment later, we heard the quick skittering sound of something being dragged across rocks. It continued to move, circling closer, and the noise reminded me of a child carelessly dragging a heavy toy down stairs. The rhythmic thumps fell in sequence on the landscape, and I felt like something evil was tapping a jittery rhythm down my spine. My vertebrae pinged in sequence with the noise.
Kishan tensed. “Do you smell that?”
“Smell what?” I whispered.
Grimly, Ren nodded. “The stench of death.”
Ren reached behind him and took my hand. He nestled me between his strong back and Kishan’s. That’s when the smell hit me. I gagged immediately, and my eyes began watering. A vapor of decay encircled us, and I had to cover my mouth and nose with my hand. Ren’s nostrils flared, but that was the only sign that either brother was uncomfortable.
The smell was worse than a ripe garbage dump. A dead animal would be a pleasant perfume compared to it. It was almost tangible. I could even taste the stench on my tongue and feel it permeate my clothing and my hair. It was a smoldering, caustic, corruption—a sticky, biting tang that was somehow both toxic and sickly sweet at the same time.
The thumping noise came closer and suddenly stopped. The thick air made my eyes sting from the gassy vinegar smell. Fanindra’s body waved briefly and then she struck at something in the darkness. She hissed and struck again. I peered into the blackness ahead of her and felt Kishan tense.
A ghostly gray shape shuffled slowly toward us. The hairs on my body stood on end as I realized it was a corpse. The body moved stiffly. The belly was grotesquely distended, and the mouth gaped open slackly. Where there should have been gums was the white jaw of a skeleton. I shuddered when I saw that the skin around the rotting flesh was bloated around the face and was blackened, as if bruised.
Hair hung limply from what remained of the scalp, and I quivered and moved closer to Kishan’s back as the creature scratched its forehead, and the scalp slipped, exposing part of its white skull.
Ren spoke first. “What are you? What do you want from us?”
The creature hesitated briefly but began moving toward us again. It seemed fascinated with Fanindra. The snake struck at the creature several times, but it was either unaffected by the poison of her bites or couldn’t feel them. When it reached down to take hold of her, she quickly slithered out of its grasp and wound back toward me, wrapping around my leg.
I picked Fanindra up, and she immediately coiled into her jeweled armband shape. Placing her on my arm, I noticed the walking corpse straighten its body and move toward us. Its rheumy white eyes were fixed on Fanindra and me.
Ren raised his sword. “Stop! If you continue to approach, we’ll injure you.”
The walking corpse didn’t even look at him. Ren raised his sword and hacked violently at the creature, slicing cleanly through its right arm. The moldering limb fell to the ground but the lifeless being was only slightly hindered by the lost appendage as the arm slid away from its body. It obviously felt no pain.
Kishan leapt forward then and drew his blade across the corpse’s distended belly, splitting open its midsection with a liquid pop. Biting fumes and a thick liquid gushed out. The smell of putrefaction and raw sewage eddied through the air, and as I raised my hand to blast it with lightning power, the corpse clamped its hand on my wrist.
With a strong tug, I escaped its grasp. But to my horror, its skin peeled off and stuck to my wrist. I screamed and flung my arm about, trying to dislodge the fluttering gray epidermis. Calmly, Ren took my arm and peeled off the glove of skin that had slipped cleanly from the gleaming white bones of the corpse’s hand.
I, for one, had had enough. With Fanindra’s eyes aglow, I turned and ran. I heard Kishan and Ren following behind me, and we quickly distanced ourselves from our pursuer.
As we moved through the cavern, we found other bodies in various states of decomposition. A woman lay over the rocks as if she had fallen in a swoon. Moist flesh still clung to her bones, and her liquefied brains were oozing from her ears and nose. The syrupy smell of musty blood and rotting flesh stayed with us long after we left her behind. We found bleached skeletons with some sort of vegetation growing in the bones and a skull that had had some kind of rodent gnawing on it.
Most of the bodies weren’t moving enough to bother me too much, though every once in a while we came across one with rupturing cells, sloughing skin, and the smell of ammonia. When we saw them, we skirted them widely. Still, their heads, when able, turned to watch us.
After passing one particularly ghastly looking fellow, I asked, “What do you think they want?”
Ren answered, “They seem interested in Fanindra. Perhaps they crave the light she casts.”
I shivered and clung to his arm as we made our way through the cavern.
Kishan mused thoughtfully, “The Phoenix said this was the Cave of Sleep and Death.”
“I’ll have to thank him for his literal translation,” I remarked.
We skirted another woman who was reaching toward us with an almost motherly expression on what was left of her face. As we moved past, she lowered her arms and her long hair covered her ghostly countenance.
“I’m not afraid of them anymore,” Ren said.
“What? Why not?” I asked.
“I think . . . I think they could be us.”
Kishan replied, “What do you mean?”
“When the two of you fell asleep, your skin turned gray. If you had never awakened, perhaps either one of you might’ve shared their fate. They can’t help what is happening to them. I feel sad that they are somehow aware enough to experience the decay of their own bodies.”
I added softly, “If I was trapped in the dark for years, I’d want some light too.”
“Perhaps it is better for them to be spared from seeing their flate,” Kishan said.
We moved through the cave quietly. The once frightening feeling of being surrounded by decaying zombies had been replaced with a somber melancholy, and as I passed around the gray bodies, I whispered the quiet words of respect I would have said in the cemetery where my parents were buried, knowing every moment that the difference between one of them and me was simply the slight gesture of closing my eyes.
A
small light appeared far ahead of us and, for a time, I thought it was an illusion. The brothers headed in that direction though, so I assumed they could see it too. Fanindra had decided to remain safely wrapped upon my arm and only gave us the eerie viridian-green light from her eyes, muting her golden luminosity after it had attracted too much cave-of-death-zombie attention. Without her bright glow, we stumbled on our way through the blackness a bit more, but we also remained blissfully ignorant of our surroundings.
Despite the creepy knowledge that I was surrounded by death, and that the smell of rotting corpses had permeated my clothes, hair, and skin, I became numb enough from my exhaustion to not only ignore it, but also to start thinking that laying down next to a rotting skeleton for a brief snooze was a pretty good idea. Ren caught me closing my eyes as I walked, took my hand, and began pulling me along. Kishan moved into a position behind me and gave me a pushy nudge on my back every time I started to slow.
We finally neared the cave opening and peered through to the other side. Thick fire trees stretched ahead of us as far as I could see. Ren and Kishan scanned the fire forest for movement while keeping us hidden in the darkness.
“What is it?” I whispered. “Why aren’t we headed for a long nap in the forest?”
Kishan answered, “We have to look out for the Rakshasa. The Phoenix warned us. Remember?”
I glanced out at the trees, looking for scary demons. “I don’t see anything.”
“That’s what worries me,” Ren answered.
“Well, what’s the big deal? We’ve faced demons before and survived. They can’t be worse than the Kappa, can they?”
“Rakshasas are hunters,” Ren explained. “They’re night-walkers, blood drinkers. Their hunger is insatiable.”
Kishan added, “They’re demons from Indian mythology. It’s said that they were vile, evil humans cursed to live for eternity as monsters. They can only be destroyed by using special weapons or with a wooden arrow through the heart. They’re tricky and use mental powers to confuse their victims and draw them out of their homes.”
I blinked and said quietly, “You’re talking about vampires.”
Ren nodded. “They are much like the European version of vampires.”
Kishan snorted. “Kelsey convinced me to watch a vampire movie with her fairly recently, and I have to say that Rakshasas are about as much like the brooding American vampires as the Kraken is like an octopus. These vampires not only drink blood, but also consume flesh, especially rotting flesh.”
“Oh,” I stammered lamely. “And right now we smell particularly . . . fragrant.”