Soul of Fire (11 page)

“We should have changed,” Hanuman said, a quick
smile on his mobile face. They stood outside the Warington house, looking at the balconies above. “We should change now.”

Lalita gave him a quick appraising glance. She could see his point in a way, but she was conscious of one thing only, and that one thing overwhelmingly: she didn’t want to change in front of this stranger. Foisted on her by her king, he might be, but he still had the marks of a commoner about him—the quick glances, the impertinent looks and definitely that name. That horrible name that no real member of the monkey clan would have given their child, for fear of appearing too obvious.

“No,” she told him curtly, setting her mouth more primly than she otherwise would have done. “Monkeys will still be noticed in Calcutta. And two monkeys . . .” She shrugged. “At best, they’d bring brooms to chase us away. At worst . . . the powersticks. And while I know they might not kill us, remember they are ready for the tigers. The powersticks are likely charmed for weres. We’ll be more invisible as ourselves. Remove your earring. And your turban. It’s too fine by half for a servant.”

“Oh, I’m to be a servant, am I?” He flashed her a quick smile, even as he obeyed her instructions and stashed his finery in a fold of his tunic. The hair beneath the turban was very straight and dark.

“It would be better if you had another headdress,” she said. “Something less fine. But it can’t be helped.”

He didn’t answer and she chose not to pursue it. Instead, she led him to the back stairs. No one asked her any questions as she started up the steps. They wouldn’t. There was enough movement in and out of the house. People hired for this task or that, and sometimes just friends, countrymen or family of servants. And the last ones to notice anything would be the Englishmen.

They kept the jewel in a small room off the master’s study, on the third floor—a room warded with enough dark magic to damn an angel. But she stopped just shy of it, when she heard the voices of Mr. and Mrs. Warington and the hissed, threatening accents of the king of the tigers.

The voices came from the drawing room, which—the house having been built in some ways like a labyrinth—impeded the progress to the study. Seeing a broom abandoned by the door, Lalita seized it and thrust it into Hanuman’s hands. “Here, hold this.”

“A sweeper?” he asked, with a quirky grin. All these things seemed far too amusing to him.

“Why? Are you afraid you’ll lose caste? You only have to hold it. No one will notice you if you do.”

Hanuman’s eyes sparkled at her—in response to what thought she wasn’t sure—and he grabbed the broom then followed her into the room. Lalita, conscious that as the miss’s servant she was a little more noticeable to her employers than most others, draped her sari over her head, hiding her features without seeming to do so.

Thus, looking like two servants of no particular account, they slouched into the room. Hanuman went to the corner and shuffled—she had to grant him that—like a very convincing dispirited sweeper. He did something or other with the broom—she was sure it wasn’t actually sweeping—and mumbled to himself in the tone of a man who doesn’t even realize that the rest of the world exists.

As for her, she started toward the table where a tray with various biscuits and such was sitting, untouched. She didn’t want to actually pick up the tray because she didn’t want to leave the room, but being near the tray would give her an excuse for her presence there if she absolutely must disguise it in some way.

Once near the tray, she looked up. And her mouth dropped open involuntarily. Because the ruby was there. Right there.
Soul of Fire.
She’d never actually seen it, not close like this. She’d heard about it, and sometimes she’d sensed it, though Mr. Warington had worked very hard indeed to prevent that happening. He’d used forbidden magics, despicable ones. He’d used blood sacrifice—not human blood, she judged, but blood nonetheless—to bolster his own inconsequential hereditary power. He’d tried to keep the jewel hidden from all. Though Lalita wondered if he even knew what he was hiding. Or else, why he’d bothered to hide it so well, at the risk of his life and soul?

At the moment he held it in a trembling hand. He looked at the tiger, who was in human from—that same human form that Sofie had disdained as ugly—and who stood before him, hand held out. “I don’t even know why you want it,” Mr. Warington said. “Much less why you want my daughter with it.”

The tiger smiled. Showing huge teeth, all out of proportion with even the broad features and sharp canines, the left one broken short. “Never mind that. Give me the ruby. I know my purposes. They’re none of your concern.”

“But Sofie is gone.”

“Oh, I’ll find her.”

Now Mrs. Warington stepped to the fore. “Can’t you leave our daughter alone? Take the ruby, if you must, but leave Sofie be. She . . . she saw you. And she doesn’t wish—”

“Oh, I’m not pretty enough for the fine Miss Warington, I see,” he said, and laughed a sound like a cat hissing. “Give me the jewel, Warington. What do you think would happen if I told your own people that you’ve been using the dark magics? Do you think its stink is not all over you, visible if someone cared to look for it? Or do you think that jewel would preserve you from the death penalty, should it come?”

Mr. Warington paled, and licked his lips in an anxious gesture. “It has been in my family forever,” he said. “It’s the only jewel that came down from my father’s house. And it is not worth very much.”

“Quite the contrary, Warington. It might not be worth anything to you, but for me it is a jewel without price. And since the value is such, and so skewed, I clearly need it more than you do. Hand it over. Now.”

Mr. Warington hesitated. He stretched his hand forward, the ruby sitting on it, flashing erratically with sweeps of magical light. You could see that the jewel had suffered some injury in the past. The center of it was dark and split, like the center of jewels that have given up all their power. Only this one hadn’t. Or not quite, since it still flashed and trembled.

It wouldn’t have, Lalita thought. Since this jewel anchored the first and most primal magic of mankind, it might be impossible to harvest all of its power. It would still show the way to its twin jewel. And it might, perhaps, be able to be repaired. Maybe. She didn’t know. All she knew was the mission she’d been given by the monkey king.

“Only, I say . . .” Mr. Warington mumbled. “Perhaps . . . My wife is right, you know. We’ll let you have the jewel, but I’ve told you before to leave my daughter alone. And now the poor thing will be in enough trouble, what with the dragon and all. We’ll attempt to recover her, but you . . .” He licked his lips again. “Could you not leave her be?”

The tiger laughed. There was something very primal and lascivious to his laughter. “Oh, no, my dear Warington,” he said in impeccable English that, somehow, made him seem more terrifying and alien. “Your pretty little daughter is part and parcel of the deal. I’ll take Miss Warington
and
the jewel.”

“But the dragon—”

“Don’t worry yourself about it,” the tiger said in an impatient voice. “I’ll find her easily enough and take her home to Jaipur. The next you hear of her—if you hear of her at all—she’ll be my wife.”

Lalita didn’t like the sound of those words, and once more she wondered how the Waringtons could ever have thought to use their daughter as a bargaining chip. The jewel might be unique, but surely Sofie was, too. She was their only daughter.

As she was thinking this, and worrying for her friend who was somewhere in the hands of an unknown dragon, she heard Mr. Warington sigh. He extended his hand farther toward the tiger’s waiting hand.

“Come, release the jewel,” the tiger said. “The alternative is my denouncing you, and your execution. Surely you prize your life more than that.”

“Sometimes,” Warington said, “I prize it so little that I wish I was shed of it.” But even as he spoke, he tipped his hand, overturning the ruby into the tiger’s hand.

And in that moment, Hanuman jumped. He dropped his broom and sprang toward the tiger, hands extended.

Mrs. Warington screamed, and the tiger roared, even as he contorted and twisted and . . . changed. All of a sudden, the silks and finery the man had been wearing slipped to the floor, as the form that had supported them altered. In the place of the portly human who’d presented himself as a native raj, there was now a huge tiger, roaring with open mouth, snapping at the man who was trying to take the jewel from beneath the tiger’s paw.

Mr. Warington, pale and trembling, drew back. And Hanuman shifted, too—somehow in the merest blink of an eye—and was now a monkey, jumping and leaping and seeming to run on the ceiling itself as he taunted the tiger.

Lalita, staring, could only think the idiot was going to get himself killed. And while he was no kin of hers, and certainly none of her responsibility, her uncle had given him to her as a partner in this mission. She must take care of him.

What could he hope to gain by playing these tricks? This was not just a tiger. It was the king of all were-tigers. She did not doubt he had as much power as their own king. After all, the reason he was their king was not hereditary only. He had the magic of their clan. He could even call their magic to him.

As she thought this, the tiger seemed to get tired of the monkey taunting him. He looked up to where Hanuman was now screaming and puffing his cheeks at him, and Lalita could feel him gathering magic, ready to let it go.

It had been years since she’d changed quickly. In London, she’d changed a few times only, and under very controlled circumstances, careful that no one would see her. Or, if they did, that they would assume her to be some lady’s pet monkey, momentarily loose. And she and Sofie had been back in India only a very short while. She’d had neither the time nor the opportunity to change shapes.

But she found that, when needed, she could do it with very little trouble. There was a trembling, a fluttering, a brief, painful wrenching, and she let her monkey-self toss aside the clothes, and jumped upward at the same time that she felt the tiger let go a bolt of raw magic.

Hanuman shrieked and went stiff. He fell. And the tiger waited, mouth open.

One of the good things about this state, Lalita thought, was that she could pick up weights she wouldn’t otherwise have been able to. Also that Hanuman weighed not much more than she did. She got hold of him with a single arm, even as he started to fall, and swung herself from the ceiling with another limb.

Once, in London, she had accompanied Sofie to a variety show and been amused at how the acrobats duplicated what came naturally to her while changed. Now, with the natural ability of her race, her unconscious comrade held by one long arm, she swung from one ceiling beam to the other, while the tiger roared below.

Doubtless, the tiger would get help. He was a king and he would have to be particularly stupid not to already have infiltrated this house, and to not have his emissaries in every nook and cranny of it, ready to do his command. Though Lalita could not see them, she could almost feel tigers shifting shape all over the house. She could hear subdued roars.

But then, valor was knowing when you were outnumbered and not staying to fight a battle you already knew was lost. She ran along the ceiling beam toward the open door, and then, shifting the burden of Hanuman, prepared to jump.

The tiger roared, what he doubtless meant as an order for the Waringtons to close the door to the balcony outside, but fortunately he could not speak in a human voice while in tiger shape. Lalita calculated the jump and swung. The tiger ran into position and snapped.

She’d overestimated her ability while holding a burden. For a moment, she felt the tiger’s breath on her fur, but then her hind hands touched the balcony railing and she swung, letting her somersault carry her and her burden to the lower rail, where the branches of a tamarind tree almost touched it. She swung onto the tree and ran along the branch, and then swung again, farther off, to another tree.

Behind her, she could hear the roars of the tiger, and wondered how long he would pursue them. It wasn’t till she was quite far off—past the edge of the garden, past a multitude of roofs and in a distant alley, that she set Hanuman down and allowed herself to become human once again—a naked girl standing in the shadows of the alley. She would have to find clothes. She would have to find Sofie. If the tiger was so determined to find her, then Sofie must be protected.

But right now none of it counted so much as making sure that Hanuman was well, that he was alive. She wasn’t sure how much magic the tiger had loosed in that burst, and she very much feared that her companion was dead.

But as she looked down at the long-limbed furry body she’d deposited on the ground, its eyes opened, the broad mouth made a very good imitation of a human grin and the left eye winked impudently at her.

She almost screamed, but controlled it just in time. This area of town was relatively quiet, and people must be within the tall, dark, stone houses, possibly even asleep. But she could hear a conversation somewhere overhead, and she didn’t want to call the speaker’s attention to her. Instead, she looked down at Hanuman as he shifted, and once he had changed shapes, she glared at his mobile face. “How long were you awake?” she asked.

“Only the last few roofs,” he said, and tried to look regretful, or at least serious. Neither worked very well. Hanuman’s face was not made for gravity, and his dark eyes sparkled with unholy mischief. “I thought,” he said, as he put his earrings back in his ears, and how had he managed to get them from the pile of his clothes? “that if I’d moved or given a sign of being awake, it probably would have thrown you off your stride, and it might have been very painful for both of us.”