Beneath the mahal, in the prison cells, a priest awaited them.
“General,” the priest said. “Come. She is prepared.”
Santosh bowed his head. For once, he was quiet. In the presence of a priest of the mothers, he finally showed proper respect.
The priest had pale eyes, green-brown, and a mark of ash upon his forehead and his chin. He was a true Parijati priest, and accordingly, he had arranged the assassin on a slab of stone, swathed her in white cloth, and marked her skin with resinous perfume. He had put right the worst of her fall: All her limbs were where they should have been, which Vikram gathered had not been the case when the guards had first found her, at the foot of the Hirana. A garland of flowers, half-wilted from the heat, was piled at her feet.
Priests showed respect to the dead, whether they deserved it or not. And Parijati priests showed special respect to women who had passed on. It was their way.
In the lantern light of the cell, Vikram looked at the body. At the face.
He turned away quickly. Not quickly enough.
No amount of drink would blot out the image of that skull. No fall had pulverized it. It looked as if it had… melted.
“The mask she wore has power in it,” the priest said tranquilly. He held his hand before him, and Vikram saw that the skin was burned. “Take it with this cloth, if you wish to look upon it,” the priest added, holding the mask toward him. “Carefully.”
Vikram held the mask of wood, stained with blood and gristle, in the glove of perfumed cloth the priest had offered him. He looked at the eyeholes, the gape of a mouth. He could feel the heat of the thing through the cloth, warmer than flesh.
“You call it power,” he murmured.
“Yes.”
“The rot?”
The priest shook his head. “The woman’s body is clean of impurities.”
“What is this, then?” Santosh asked. Vikram startled. He had forgotten that Santosh was there. The Parijati lord’s face was gray. “Some kind of Ahiranyi witchcraft? I thought their cursed power died with their yaksa.”
“No,” Vikram replied, shaking his head. “Likely just a product of the forest. The wood there has always been—unusual.”
Even before the rot, he thought.
With weariness, he realized so much had gone wrong during his reign. The rot had begun. The temple children had grown more powerful. They and their elders had burned. The rebel unrest had swelled unceasingly, rising as the rot spread hunger and death and displaced villagers from their ancestral homes. And now… this.
“There will need to be justice,” Santosh demanded. “Witchcraft—whatever it may be, it is acrime. These Ahiranyi think they can bring back the Age of Flowers. They need to be punished. They must learn that Emperor Chandra is not weak.”
Vikram nodded. “Rebels will be interrogated and executed,” he said. The rebels who were likely behind this would be nigh on impossible to capture. The most violent of them, masked and therefore faceless, were too good at vanishing into the forest, where no sensible man would follow. But the poets and singers, who recited forbidden Ahiranyi poetry in bazaars and daubed mantras on walls, who offered visions of a free Ahiranya—they would be an easier target. A suitable scapegoat.
Even as he spoke, he knew it would not be enough. And sure enough, Santosh’s mouth firmed. He shook his head.
“They owe us more, General Vikram,” said Santosh. “They owe the emperor a sacrifice.”
What would be enough justice—enough blood, enough death, enough suffering—for an emperor who sought to burn his own sister to death?
What must I do to ensure that my rule survives this night’s work?
Vikram thought, grimly, of his young Ahiranyi wife, her placid eyes, her foolish, kindhearted nature and the child in her belly. His wife—who collected orphans and rot victims with a kind of mania—who had perhaps brought the assassin into their home, however unwitting…
She wouldn’t be happy with what he had to do. But she would accept it. She had no other choice.
He looked at the bones of the assassin on the stone slab before him, the open husk of her face, the bare vulnerability of the jawbone devoid of meat. The room was filled with the stink of death, despite the garlands and perfume.
Vikram lowered the mask down upon the table.
“Have her last rites,” he said. “With all due reverence. Scatter the ashes. She has no family to take them.”
The priest inclined his head. He understood the ways of the dead.
