ASH MISTRY AND THE CITY OF DEATH (10 page)

“It’s Friday,” said Ash suddenly. “This time last week I was standing in the canteen, sweating buckets and asking Gemma out. How can so much have changed in a week?” He shook his head. “Jeez, if I’d known what was going to happen I would never have even spoken to her, let alone asked her out to Bonfire Night.”

Parvati sighed. “That’s the advantage of being mortal. You only need to learn to live with the mistakes of your current life. Rakshasas remember their past lives. We’re never free of our guilt.”

“Things like giving Savage your father’s scrolls?”

“Yes, I think that would be in the top ten of ‘my bad’.” Parvati shifted uncomfortably. “He’d promised to make me wholly human, something I thought I desired.”

They’d talked about it once, how she’d wanted to be mortal, to feel what it was to belong and to be loved, something no rakshasa could ever have.

She smiled wryly. “That said, I remember some of the stupid things you did too.”

“What? Where?”

“You really want to know?”

“Of course not, but you’ve started now, so how can I not know?” Ash paused. “How bad was it? The ‘Oops, Captain, but I didn’t see that iceberg, and are you sure we’ve got enough lifeboats?’ sort of bad?”

Parvati gazed up at the stars. “I was serving Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons. We’d been summoned by Prince Paris to defend Troy against the Greeks.”

“You fought at Troy?”

“So did you. You were one of King Priam’s sons – I can’t recall which, he had fifty. Anyway, it looked like it was over. Achilles was dead and the Greeks were feeling pretty hopeless. One day we looked out across the city walls and the entire army was gone. All that was left was a huge wooden horse. An offering to Poseidon, god of the sea, for a safe journey home.”

“I’ve a bad feeling about this,” said Ash.

Parvati tapped her chin. “What was it that you said? Let me remember…” She snapped her fingers. “Ah yes. You said ‘How pretty! Let’s get it. It’ll look lovely in the city square.’”

Wow. He’d fought at Troy. Cool. “We’ve been through a lot together,” said Ash.

Parvati nodded and took his hand, squeezing it. “And we’ve always made it, in the end.” She summoned one of the rakshasas. The demon, a small whiskered boy with twitching ears, rushed forward and touched her feet. “Now get some sleep, we’ve a busy time ahead. Bhavit will show you to your room.”

he days passed with no sign of Savage. Parvati didn’t only have her rakshasas out searching; there were others helping her as well – beggars, rickshaw drivers, stall keepers. The downtrodden of the city were the ignored – and therefore the best spies. Ash watched how they came up to Parvati, touched her feet, and offered her gifts. This was a side of Parvati Ash hadn’t seen before. The noble. The commander. The worshipped. But in spite of all these eyes and ears looking out for him, there was nothing on Savage.

Had Monty lied? Maybe Savage was a thousand miles away in another country, making his plans while they rotted in the damp, mouldy heat of Kolkata.

But Ash did learn more about the Englishman. How he’d come with the East India Company in the late eighteenth century and how he’d robbed and murdered his way up and up the company’s hierarchy until he eventually met Parvati. He’d got her father’s scrolls from her, starting his career in sorcery.

Some of the rakshasas could do a little magic. Mahout, the big elephant, had two masteries, and from him and a few of the other rakshasas, Ash gained a basic understanding of the ten sorceries.

The classical elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, accounted for four. Mastery of Air, for example, allowed a sorcerer to fly, communicate with the birds, and, if skilful enough, even control the weather. Then there were the next four sorceries – the humours: Blood, Yellow Bile, Black Bile and Phlegm. Codified back in ancient Mesopotamia, they controlled the mind, body and emotions of all living creatures. Parvati was an expert in a few of those, hence her ability to hypnotise. The final two were Space and Time. A master of Space could teleport, which Ash thought would be pretty amazing. Never late for school ever again. No one could agree if you had to learn them in any order, but all concurred that Time was the most powerful, and the most dangerous.

“Has anyone ever mastered Time?” Ash had asked Mahout. “Actually used it?”

“How would we know?” Mahout replied. “How can you know if the past has been changed? Impossible, because we are trapped within the time stream of that changed past. Only someone outside of the stream would see the difference, be able to compare what is to what had been before the change. They would know there had been an alternative history that had happened, but had been deleted. But the wise, even if they have the power, do not meddle with Time. Even Ravana chose not to use that sorcery, although he had mastered it.”

“Why didn’t he go back in time and change things? Make sure he beat Rama? It would be easy.”

Mahout shook his head. “You might change one event, but that would lead to a whole new series of outcomes, potentially even worse than the ones you sought to correct. Whatever you do, destiny is inescapable, young Ash. Ravana was doomed to fail. Are you not the proof of that?”

“What about Savage? What masteries does he have?”

Another argument followed. Mahout was convinced Savage had to know the humours, balancing them within himself to extend his lifespan. The spider-woman thought he had some knowledge of the elements, learned while in the Far East. But no one knew for sure – neither what he was capable of, nor where he was.

Ash joined in the search for Savage, using it as an excuse to get out of the cemetery and discover this new city. Kolkata couldn’t be more different from Varanasi. Varanasi was a place of temples and steeped in deep, ancient Indian religion. The narrow streets teemed with holy men and pilgrims. Kolkata, meanwhile, was a memorial to the British Empire, the capital of the Raj until 1917. Whitewashed Anglican churches and stately, grand government buildings lined the wide boulevards.

The first stop on this tour was the Victoria Memorial with John. The memorial symbolised Britain’s two-hundred-year rule over India. At dawn the vast domed roof of the memorial hall shone with a soft eggshell glow, and the gardens surrounding it filled swiftly with day-trippers and picnics and tourists and touts. Kites rose up among the trees, crowding the sky with multicoloured diamonds made of tissue paper and bamboo.

Ash took a viewpoint up on the shoulder of a huge lion statue, watching the multitude come and go, vainly hoping he would catch a glimpse of Savage. He must have been here once. This was his sort of place, a centre of power. The building looked a lot like the Capitol building in the United States: huge dome, wide wings, a colonnade and statues of the great and the good everywhere. When Ash said this out loud, John scoffed and spat some nutshells at the feet of the statue of the governor. The statues were all of Englishmen, he said. From their point of view, Indians could be neither ‘great’ nor ‘good’.

The rest of the day was spent hopping on and off the rattling tin trams that still served as the main mode of public transport. The vehicles were invariably packed with people hanging off the railings and handles by their fingertips, scuttling on or dropping off whether the tram was moving or not. At first, Ash was amazed there weren’t mangled bodies on every street, but by evening he was doing the same, swinging on to the back of any passing carriage, then leaping off as it slowed round the corners.

The next day of searching was similar: heat, astounding sights and no Savage. And so it went. Ash’s days were spent exploring the city, and his nights were…

His nights were haunted by dreams. Each morning Ash awoke exhausted. Unlike before, when the dreams had been a single memory, now they came in their broken hundreds: snatches and glimpses of his past lives, lasting a few seconds before rushing to another with no sense or order. He lived them, smelling the corpses, tasting the blood, relishing the slaughter. The dark dreams filled his sleeping hours, then fled like cowards by sunrise. He overflowed with bloodlust. Once he woke up from a dream so clear, so vivid, that he rushed out, expecting to see dead rakshasas scattered all around. He washed his hands afterwards, desperate to rid himself of the blood that was only spilled in his nightmares.

He needed help, that was for sure.

Maybe he shouldn’t have come. Kolkata was Kali’s city. Legend had it she had been dismembered and her toe had fallen in the river here, at a place called Kali-ghat in honour of the story. From Kali-ghat came the name Kolkata.

The worship of Kali soaked the bones of the city. Her image was everywhere, with plenty of statues and temples dedicated to her. Ash had passed by the nineteenth-century main temple of her cult, where a goat was beheaded over her shrine daily, washing the statue of Kali in blood. A century ago they’d sacrificed humans in the same spot.

So, on the fourth day in Kolkata, Ash woke in a bad mood. He slipped on his sandals as he got out of his hammock and gulped his water bottle down to empty.

“John?” he called. They’d planned to head down to Fort William today and search another cluster of red dots on Mahout’s map.

“Not here,” said Parvati. “I don’t think he likes sleeping among us rakshasas. Can’t imagine why.” She sat atop the mausoleum Ash used as a bedroom.

“How long have you been up there?”

She jumped down and frowned as she approached him. “You do not look well.”

“Thanks,” Ash replied. Parvati was different too, more demonic with her body covered in light green scales and her eyes huge, her fangs clearly visible. Maybe she was letting her hair down, in the demonic sense. “It’s getting harder,” he admitted. “Can’t sleep at night.”

“Your past lives, yes? What is it like?” Parvati shifted up close and put her hand on his.

“It’s like I’m standing in the rain,” he started. “A total downpour. I’m getting drenched, but each drop that hits me is another memory. There are so many I can’t make sense of them. I see castles and cities that are now just dust in history. Some are my homes, places I’ve grown up in and fight to protect. Others I burn. Then the faces. Faces of people I’ve fought and defended. Of people I’ve tried to save and didn’t. Parvati, I wish I could cut it all out of my head. I’ve done terrible things.”

“Anyone you recognise?”

“Rishi, a couple of times. It’s as though he’s been after me throughout history. Him, and you.”

“You see me?”

“Your age changes, but there can’t be too many half-human, half-cobra girls in the world. Sometimes we’re friends and sometimes… we’re not.” Ash sighed. “I wish Rishi was here. He’d know what to do.”

Parvati sat for a long time, doing nothing but holding his hand. Then she took a deep breath, like she had made some decision. “He did. That is why he sent you to train with Ujba.”

“Yeah, not one of Rishi’s better ideas. I don’t think I learned anything with Ujba except how to get punched. A lot, and very hard. What sort of teacher is that?”

“He taught you how to fight. That involves taking hits as well as giving them out.”

“Some days I was beaten up so badly I could hardly walk. He let his cronies terrorise everyone else, he made John’s life hell and he
hated
you. Ujba was nothing but a thug.” He remembered those days, trapped in the stifling heat of the training hall of the Lalgur, deep underground.

“An interesting term to use for Ujba, but most correct,” she said.

“I called Elaine last night,” said Ash. He held out his mobile phone. “I had to. She told me Rishi had spoken to her and given her the names of people who could help me, if things got bad.”

Parvati let a scowl slip, then her gaze narrowed with curiosity. “And what did she say?”

“Nothing, it went straight to voicemail. But I got a text this morning. An address. You know it?”

She looked at the screen and nodded. “It’s not far from here.”

“I feel like I’m losing myself. There are so many people in here –” he tapped his head – “all shouting. The dreams are so real, so violent. They’re getting worse and I’m worried I’m going to wake up one day and find out I’ve done something… extremely homicidal.”

Parvati shivered and the scales sank under her skin. Her fangs retreated and she drew out a pair of sunglasses, returning to her human guise. She took his hand. “Let’s go.”