Force of Fire, page 8
part #4 of Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond Series
“Do I have to go, Demon Auntie?” the girl said in her soft and tinkly voice.
Yagh! What kind of a prisoner didn’t want to be freed?
“I’m afraid so, my cockroach cupcake,” Ai-Ma said sadly. “It is not safe for me to have you here. The serpents are getting suspicious.”
“In that case, I will of course go!” Chandni said immediately, grasping Ai-Ma’s hands. “I would never want to put you in danger! You’ve been so wonderful to me!”
Again, I had to choke back a gag. This girl was worse than those dainty heroines from stories who sang opera while they scrubbed floors.
“And as a gift, a thank-you for all the happiness you have given me, I present you with—”
Before Ai-Ma could finish, I jumped in. “These precious gold and silver kathi.”
At Ai-Ma’s squawk of protest, I hissed, “You won’t need them anymore anyway! No more pets, remember?”
Ai-Ma sighed deeply, nodding. Then she took the sticks from my hands and, after reciting a shrinking enchantment, and handed them to Chandni in a smaller, manageable size. “Yes, please take my shonar kathi–rupor kathi.”
As Ai-Ma and her pet swayed back and forth in a hug fest, I gave myself a mental pat on the back. Yes, I may have promised to get Chandni to her parents, but I’d also managed to secure the golden and silver sticks without Ai-Ma getting suspicious. They were in the girl’s possession now, but I wasn’t worried about convincing her to give them to me. And if I couldn’t convince her, hey, I was about double her height and ten times as strong.
“Now, you both must go,” Ai-Ma crooned. “Don’t worry, dear lamplight girl, my Pinki will keep you safe until you get home. You will be great friends, I know it.”
Chandni said something simpering and thankful that I promptly blocked out.
“Don’t get the idea that I’m anything like my mother,” I muttered to the girl when Ai-Ma wasn’t listening. “We’re not friends, and we’re not going to be friends. In fact, I hate humans.”
“Good to know,” the girl said with a sticky-sweet smile. “In that case, we can be like sisters.”
Rotten tarantula teeth! She was the worst. As I walked away from her, I tried to forget what I’d seen reflected in her eyes. It had to be a mistake.
Eyes on the prize, Pinki, I told myself. No distractions.
But as I walked back up the slippery secret stairs, I knew that what I had seen in Chandni’s eyes. It had been nothing other than a reflection of the moon.
I feel like an idiot,” I groused, running a finger across my totally dull and square teeth. I was glad I didn’t have access to a mirror or any other reflective surface. I really didn’t want to see what I looked like without my horns, fangs, and talons. The memory of having seen it once was enough.
“You look lovely, Didi,” Chandni said again over her shoulder.
Blargh. Every time the girl respectfully used the word for older sister to refer to me, it made me gassy. I wished yet again I hadn’t promised Ai-Ma I’d keep this ninny safe until I delivered her home. Every cell in me itched to stew her up for lunch.
“Your idea of lovely is shaped by your twisted human beauty standards.” I tightened my grip around her waist. I couldn’t believe I was flying again. My head spun from airsickness. “Power is lovely. Strength is lovely. Looking like a declawed potato—not lovely.”
I was seated behind the girl on her black pakkhiraj horse, a moody animal whose name was apparently Raat. It was like the huge creature had known how much I hated flying—neighing and rearing up and trying to bite me when I went to mount him. The stupid thing had calmed right down when Chandni had approached him.
“He’s very spirited,” Chandni had explained, stroking his dark neck. “He’s not even mine but borrowed from a friend.”
“What friend?” I’d asked, but the girl had just laughed that annoying, tinkly laugh and let the flying horse soar into the sky. I almost screamed but stopped myself just in time.
To make matters worse, I was not only flying but flying disguised as a human. It had been Ai-Ma who’d insisted that I travel incognito, using my own warning to her against me. “You’re right, my Pinki; if the snakes catch a rakkhoshi and human traveling together, there will be all goobledy-goo to pay!”
“Why do I have to disguise myself? Why can’t we dress her up as a rakkhoshi?” I’d griped, pointing at Chandni.
“That’s a good one, cousin-lady!” Mawla laughed. “But Miss Chandni don’t look scary!”
Deembo and Kawla giggled in agreement, annoying me even further.
“What do you want me to do, dumpling butt?” Ai-Ma spread out her hands. “Stick some glued-on horns and fangs upon Chandni? Don’t be silly, fairy fart! You’re excellent at human transformation. And you have the top grades in Honors Transformation to prove it!”
My mother was right, of course. I was downright spectacular at human transformation. But that didn’t mean I enjoyed looking like some round-faced, fangless, hornless person.
But there was no way for me to convince Ai-Ma that I wasn’t in any real danger from the serpent patrols, not without admitting that I was working on the sly for Sesha. So I’d transformed into a human and set off into the sky with her pet. Or ex-pet. Or whatever. I’d also decided to leave Kawla, Mawla, and Deembo behind at Ai-Ma’s. Deembo had been acting stranger than usual—which was saying a lot—since the day we’d met Sesha in the woods, and I wondered if a long weekend with her wacko but loving auntie wasn’t exactly what she needed. Besides, I had no real desire to travel around the countryside anymore with the little ones, putting them at risk.
“I’ll be back by the end of the weekend, and we’ll all go back to school together, okay?” I’d told the sobbing Deembo. The tiny terror was attached to my knees again with a death grip and was so upset she was making the ground under our feet wobble and sway. “You’ll have so much fun here catching rats with Ai-Ma!”
But all the girl did was wail. She didn’t even calm down when Kawla and Mawla blew snot bubbles from their noses and batted them around like they were playing volleyball. Finally, Ai-Ma just scooped Deembo into her long arms and let her keep crying.
It was an awkward and earsplitting departure. “I’ll come back soon, as soon as I … uh … make one quick stop and then get Chandni to her family,” I shouted over Deembo’s wails.
“Miss Chandni, please fly true,” Mawla had said, his gaze so full of admiration for Ai-Ma’s wispy pet that he looked like his eyes had been replaced with hearts. “With all our souls, we will miss you!”
“You’re stho good, you’re stho sthweet! I totally want to eat your feet!” Kawla had lisped, beaming with pleasure as Chandni bent to kiss each of the little ones on the head.
Even Deembo stopped crying long enough to hand the girl an egg from her pocket, which Chandni took with great gentleness. “Thank you, and I’m sorry for separating you from your cousin-sister,” the girl had singsonged. “I hope to see you all very soon.”
I already hated Chandni—that delicate glow, that tinkling laugh, those luminous eyes. But she made me hate her even more during the flying-horse ride to the bazaar. I’d had to tell Chandni at least part of the actual truth of my mission—that the Merchant of Shadows wanted the shonar kathi–rupor kathi in exchange for information important to the resistance.
“The resistance?” Chandni had breathed. “Of course! I’m happy to give up Ai-Ma’s gift if it will help the cause of freedom!”
It had been too easy. The girl was so good, she made me want to puke.
“Didi, your mother is wonderful—kind and funny,” Chandni told me over her shoulder. Her voice was delicate, yet it carried remarkably well on the wind. “I couldn’t have asked for a better captor.”
Why the suck-up girl should have been asking for any kind of captor, I couldn’t tell you.
“She used to be a normal rakkhoshi, once.” I moved my head to avoid getting a nose full of Chandni’s rose-and-honey-scented hair. “But two years in serpent jail for revolutionary activities kind of scrambled her brains.”
“Your father died in prison too.” Chandni was stating a fact, not asking me a question. Clearly, she’d heard all this already from Ai-Ma.
I stared for a minute at Raat’s muscular black wings beating hard and fast through the air, tiny specks of human and rakkhosh villages below. I gulped, trying not to calculate how far we were from the ground or how fast we must have been flying. I closed my eyes but could still see the ground in my mind. I tried to calm down, telling myself this was my country. My home. The place for which one of my parents had given his life, and the other, her sanity. I let the rushing wind flick away the traitorous water from my eyes.
“It’s not just them who had it bad, you know,” I snapped, hating myself for all these darn feelings. “I don’t know why Babu and Ai-Ma ever even adopted me from that well of dark energy. They didn’t have time for me. They didn’t care.”
“That can’t be true,” Chandni began.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” I growled.
“Your parents were arrested during that raid—on the serpentine armory? The one that went so terribly wrong?” Chandni kind of tilted her head, and the horse changed direction midair even as the animal’s reins lay limp in her hands. It was like the pakkhiraj and she had a telepathic connection. Gag. She probably talked to bluebirds too.
“Their freedom-fighting friends took turns to make sure I didn’t starve. But they weren’t exactly substitute parents.” The memory was still sharp and painful this many years later. “Let’s just say it’s not nice to realize your parents love a cause more than they love you.”
Chandni was quiet for a moment before speaking. When she did, her voice sounded a little choked. “It is hard when your parents’ lives are larger than you, when they make choices different than you would. But it doesn’t mean you can’t find your own way. Anyway, you must be proud of the choices they made. I mean, you’re following in your mother and father’s footsteps.”
“Oh, right, no, sure. Of course!” I backpedaled quickly. I’d almost forgotten to keep up my lie about working for the revolution. I’d gotten so caught up in all those memories and gooey feelie-weelies, I’d almost blown my entire cover as a freedom fighter. Honesty was the absolute worst. “No doubt they did so many things right. So right! They were great role models. Just took me a while to realize it. That’s why I’m joining the revolution, after all!”
That was anything but the truth, naturally. When Babu died, and Ai-Ma came home so damaged, I’d become even more resentful of anything to do with the struggle for liberation. Nothing good came of thirsting for some big, noble cause like freedom. I figured it was better to keep my head down and look out for myself. But I didn’t need to open up my giant mouth and tell this human-ling any of that.
Then, out of nowhere, there was a jerking in the atmosphere that almost threw us both out of the saddle. It was as if the very air around us was reacting to my upset emotions.
“What was that?” Chandni exclaimed. “A storm?”
“Couldn’t be, there are hardly any clouds in the sky.” I gripped her waist a bit tighter. “It was nothing. We must have both been falling asleep.”
But then it happened again. The air felt like it was shaking all around us.
“I’m not asleep now,” Chandni said. “And I wasn’t before either.”
“No.” I felt bile rising sharply in my throat. “Neither am I.”
I could see nothing but some egrets flying by, but still I shouted out, “Who’s there? Who’s doing this? Come out where we can see you!”
But our enemy wasn’t anything visible. Or anything that could answer us. Yet again, the atmosphere shook, and with a ripping sound, everything around us seemed to shift.
“What’s happening?” Chandni yelled, keeping it together tolerably well for a human. “How can someone be tearing the sky?”
I didn’t know either. It was as if some giant rakkhosh were shaking a globe inside which we were only play figurines. Raat whinnied in panic, skittering a hard left, his legs flailing as his wings tried to catch purchase on the wind. Chandni started to slip off the side of the horse, but I grabbed her elbow, helping her re-secure her hold on the horse’s reins. But even as she cooed to the pakkhiraj, trying to steady him, the horse fell more out of control, plummeting downward in a free-fall death spiral!
“We’re gonna die!” I wailed. I’ll admit, I was not at my coolest or most collected.
“Raat! Boy! Up!” Chandni screamed. “It’s all right, be calm and listen to my voice! Up! UP!” That last up was shrieked so loudly, I didn’t think anyone hearing her voice could feel particularly calm. I certainly didn’t.
Raat had barely regained some altitude, at least coming out of his free fall, when there was an earsplitting ripping sound, like a giant piece of paper being torn. It was as if everything around us were getting rent apart. As if the universe itself were a crudely painted stage backdrop now tearing under a callous actor’s toes, and we mere stick figures drawn on it.
“What is going on?” I shouted. For whatever illogical reason, I felt furious at Ai-Ma’s ridiculous houseguest, like this were her fault. Before I’d met the girl, the sky had never torn apart.
“It’s got to stop soon!” Chandni cried. “It’s got to!”
But she was wrong. Whatever was happening wasn’t stopping. Right in front of our eyes, a flock of panicking kingfishers seemed to get caught by something in the air. They screamed like they were being ripped apart by invisible claws, and then they were gone. The place they disappeared was but a few feet from us, a magical tear in the sky. One by one, as each colorful bird flew into the atmospheric hole, it got decimated. Feathers and beaks flew everywhere. The death screams of the birds were seriously disturbing, as I knew that mere chance separated our fates from theirs.
I tried very hard not to bellow in terror again. I can’t guarantee that I succeeded.
The horse too had no ears for anything but its own panic. He whinnied and cried, losing and then gaining altitude, frothing at the mouth and rolling his panicky eyes. As he—and we—half flew and half fell, I felt the air around us trembling more. Below, on the far-closer-than-before ground, brown blobs of land and blue bodies of water seemed to be shifting, like marbles on a giant checkers board. I watched as dots of land slid past each other and rearranged themselves into different patterns. But how could that be? How could any of this be?
“The land itself shifts!” I screamed. “As if it’s adrift!”
The fact that I was rhyming was a true testament to how freaked out I was. I was lucky there weren’t any snake spies around to hear.
Then, as suddenly as everything had begun shifting, it all stopped again. With a zipping sound, the air around us moved and settled, coming back together in a different pattern than it had been in before. Raat was able to regain control of his flying and was soon flapping his wings as normally as he had before. The ground below, which only seconds ago had seemed to be in motion, now was again still. Only, everything seemed to be in a slightly different place than it had been.
“What kind of magic was that?” I hissed. I’d never seen anything like it in all my days. My stomach churned with acid, and my chest burned with terror.
“I don’t know.” Chandni’s voice was shaky. “Nothing good, that’s for sure.”
Raat just whinnied pathetically, which wasn’t much help at all.
“You’re all right, boy,” cooed Chandni, patting the beast’s sweaty neck. “It’s all over now.”
But was it? I wasn’t sure at all.
That’s when, out of absolutely nowhere, another one of those serpentine decrees appeared in midair.
“Unfixed and moveable?” I breathed, trying to wrap my head around what that meant.
“It wasn’t enough to come up from their undersea kingdom and invade our land, then take its treasures and natural resources.” Chandni sounded more serious than I’d ever heard her sound. “Now they want to turn the land itself against those who live on it.”
“But how can they do it?” My stomach was still halfway up my throat. “That kind of magic is so advanced.”
“Rulers afraid of losing their power will do any sort of dark magic to keep the reins of control,” Chandni said in her overly wise way.
I thought about how the land and water below us had shifted, how the air around us had seemed to tear apart and then repair itself in a slightly different orientation. If this kept happening, how would anyone move from one part of the kingdom to another? I remembered what Chhaya Devi had said about snakes wanting to keep rakkhosh and humans apart. Maybe she was right.
“I wonder if this moving-land stuff is the snakes trying to control the movement of rakkhosh and people,” I said. “Maybe they’re trying to divide and conquer those who live in the Kingdom Beyond, make sure we don’t band up against them.”
“Why would you care?” Chandni asked. “I thought you hated humans.”
“I do,” I said, remembering my words to her when we were still at Ai-Ma’s. After what we’d just been through together, it seemed like a long time ago. Still, it wasn’t my brand to back down. “I hate you all.”
I was incredibly annoyed when Chandni just laughed at my words.
There it is!” Chandni pointed down toward the ground. “The bazaar!”
“Finally.” After our near-death experience, I was pretty relieved to be landing on solid ground.
Raat landed to the side of Chhaya Devi’s stall, and I leaped off his muscular back before Chandni could even settle the animal.
“I got this.” I grabbed the golden and silver sticks from the girl, muttering the enlarging enchantment so that they grew long like swords again. I crisscrossed them over my back, where they magically attached, without need for any scabbard or holder. I had to admit, they looked very cool.
