Tantrics Of Old (37 page)

‘I’ve been hearing a lot about Angels lately,’ Gray said.

Adri cursed himself. ‘Yes?’

‘You think I could meet one?’

‘They are quite well-hidden.’

‘Always wanted to meet an Angel.’

Hahaha
, the Wraith chuckled.

‘What’s so funny?’ Adri mumbled.

His innocence. He’s like a child. I would love to see his coming of age, and reality’s bite along with it
.

Adri was having a problem along the journey. The ring finger of his right hand was beginning to itch, and frightfully so. He spent half his time itching away, until the finger had become too swollen and raw to itch anymore. Even then it bothered him, but he could not find a reason why it was happening. The Wraith blamed it on the weather when he wasn’t laughing about it, and Gray and Fayne had nothing helpful to say. Fayne did act all knowledgeable once when he ground up a mixture from leaves to help stop the itching, but it did not help.

Adri was having other problems as well. He found himself looking at Maya during their pit stops. He gazed at her for long times, at her olive skin and dark hair, at her sharp features. Most of the time no perverted thoughts crossed his mind; he would simply look at all the way they had come, would think of Maya as he knew her before the Ancients took her. That always got him thinking about Maya’s secret agenda—he knew Fayne could clear some doubts, but it was useless asking the assassin. At other times, he had thoughts about Maya that he knew he shouldn’t be having. He banished them as soon as he thought of them—he did not give them time to fester in his mind. They didn’t bother him up to a point, they were natural; the Wraith, however, saw through his eyes and began to give him hell about it soon enough. It was amazing how Gray did not catch Adri gazing at his sister.

Gray was the one who had to change Maya’s bandages, and he acted very, very reluctant about it whenever he had to do it. He would comply in the end, but his reluctance became well known. Adri occasionally thought he heard Fayne snicker at Gray, but he couldn’t be sure. The assassin was always dead serious when he talked.

They started avoiding the main roads as they neared the Lake. They stuck to small alleyways and shortcuts like they had before. It took more time because of all the winding and occasional blocked path, but they were comparatively safer. The most eventful thing that happened to them was at Tangra, about eight hours away from Beleghata, which was at the outskirts of the Lake of Fire. Having travelled the whole day, they retired for the night by breaking into a boarded up house.

Fayne kicked the door open and moved inside, disappearing into the darkness. Maya was with Gray and Adri, who moved just within the front porch and waited for the assassin to return. Adri readied a revolver just in case, but he didn’t think he would need it; the area was silent and still, not a sign of life anywhere. No one wanted to live this near the war zone, and quite naturally so.

The familiar glint of the bug-eyed visor was visible soon. ‘Empty,’ Fayne said. They entered and Fayne put the door back in its place roughly. They spent some time barricading the door with furniture, before settling in their own separate places, doing their own separate things. Maya was put down on an old dusty sofa. Adri busied himself with making new bullets, Fayne sat down in a meditative posture, and Gray brandished his violin, something he hadn’t had the chance to play in quite a while.

Adri walked up to him and snatched the violin immediately. ‘Risky, the noise,’ he said, tempted to smash the unholy instrument.

‘Give that back!’ Gray shouted, angry. ‘There’s nobody listening!’

Adri did not agree, but eventually he gave in to Gray’s nagging. They were all tired and testy. They would have to be careful, but he could afford to let this one thing be. It wasn’t really necessary to take this one little thing away from Gray. It could be the only thing he had left.

Gray polished the violin for a while and cleaned the dust carefully, before he took his bow with the grace of a master and started to play. A long, thin screech.

Adri dropped a bullet. ‘What the—’ he started.

After the initial cacophony in which Gray claimed he was rusty and Fayne did not react at all, remaining in his meditative pose, Gray continued to play.

Death
, Gray thought as he played, a curious happening, rather a curious state, something one could slip towards any moment, any second. Yet, there was life. Bloody idiot, had he ever cared that his sister breathed, that she talked? There could have been more happiness, perhaps. Fewer doors slammed. Fewer angry words exchanged. Goddamn it all, all the memories, forcing themselves out now that he was weak. Now that he needed her forgiveness. For every single mistake.

They had been walking all day. All the buildings they passed, desolate, the candle burning behind curtains, one in a hundred. So desolate. Ghosts murmuring, eyes watching them go, they who would make no difference. He wished he could be there, among those people, with Maya, with nothing to do with the Tantric and the assassin. Nothing at all, living out their lives, in a seemingly immense struggle, perhaps, but a life lived out, with Death waiting only at the very end. Wishful thinking. Here, there was movement. They had been moving, and moving. There was nothing else, nothing but the next mission; he did not want to take another photograph in his entire life. He wanted Maya back, he wanted out. He was forgetting what they had set out to do, that somewhere, Abriti was walking on the soil of this very city. How would he face
Dada
? Would they even make it to the Lake of Fire?

He needed to focus. Adri seemed focused. The Tantric was managing somehow, he was holding on to his promise, to his word. He had not cracked yet, and Gray could not afford to crack either. Must hold on. Must hold on. Prioritise. Maya would be saved. Of course. She had to be saved. He would see to that.

Gray played slowly and mournfully, agonisingly so, with many imperfections. Adri loved western classical music, and Gray’s attempts were murder to his ears. Still, he chose not to protest anymore. Gray played for another full hour, until the first dead man broke in through a window.

Adri and Fayne were up immediately. They looked at the spectacle before them—the walking corpse, the zombie that had broken in through the window.

‘What-What-’ Gray exclaimed.

The creature was disgusting. It had been dead for quite a while now—its rotten skin hung loose, its hair had dried up, eyeballs sunken deep within the sockets. It still wore its old clothes, but they were faded and dirty and tattered. It was moving, slowly, but with extreme ferocity. It opened and closed its mouth to emit noises, but its dead throat did not function.

Adri closed his revolver’s chamber and unleashed three holy rounds into the revenant; it collapsed noisily. Fayne walked over to the window it had broken in through and peeped out.

‘More,’ he said.

Adri, who was reloading, asked how many.

‘About fifty to sixty,’ Fayne said.

The building did not have a back exit, but Fayne made one and they exited through, beating a hasty retreat from the dim-witted revenant. Gray did muster up the courage to apologise to the other two, saying he had no clue his music would wake the dead. Adri knew, however, that revenant were woken up only at graveyards—and there were no graveyards nearby to his knowledge. Where then had the living-dead come from? He decided to think about it later; either way, they were too close to the Lake of Fire, and he needed a plan. They ran across other revenant on their way to the Lake, and if there weren’t too many, Fayne summarily finished them off.

‘Tortured souls,’ Adri told Gray as Fayne hacked away at revenant who were trying unsuccessfully to surround and take bites of the assassin. ‘They cannot depart as they’re very attached to their bodies; thus they reanimate, often helped by a festering curse or a Tantric—but often just the magic in the air along with the will to live again is enough.’

‘Wasn’t that Mazumder’s thing as well? Attached to his body, wanting to live on?’ Gray asked.

Why that little—

‘Yes. But revenant are mostly everyday people without the magical training needed to go down the road of the Wraith.’

‘Sounds like a horrible fate. They’re zombies!’

‘Yes. And there’s lots of revenant out there.’

‘Okay. Take it easy,’ Adri shouted. ‘We’re not drawing any weapons.’

‘You better not,’ the Commando shouted back.

The first sign of reaching the Lake of Fire would, of course, be the Commandos, MYTH’s army of mass-produced soldiers, equipped with increasingly sophisticated armour according to rank. It was tough, almost impossible to sneak past these guys. The most logical way, Adri figured, to meet Kaavsh was to let oneself get caught by the Commandos. One didn’t want a bullet through the head from some Commando sharpshooter who caught one sneaking.

The one they were facing right now was a sharpshooter. He was sitting on the fourth floor of an abandoned four-floor building. Adri and the others were in the street next to the adjacent building, standing still.

‘Stand still,’ Adri said. ‘He’s packing a modified Sharps carbine. One false move and he’ll blow our heads off. Commando snipers are good.’

‘Hey, tell me something, Fayne,’ Gray said. ‘How do you face such an enemy? As in a sniper or something similar? Your blades can’t reach him in this scenario.’

‘He has to see me before he hits me,’ Fayne grunted.

‘Okay, supposing he’s seen you,’ Gray said.

‘I’m too fast for a sniper,
myrkho
,’ Fayne said. ‘He cannot possibly take me out while I’m moving.’

‘Supposing you’re still,’ Gray said blankly.

‘Why would I be still?’ Fayne asked. He sounded insulted.

‘Supposing you are,’

‘I wouldn’t be.’

‘Say it’s a hypothetical situation. You’re still and a sniper has you in such a standoff. What do you do then?’

‘
Khabashud
. Such a situation is against my training,’ Fayne said stubbornly.

‘And why do you call me
myrkho
? What does it mean? Would you like it if I call you Aladdin?’

‘Here they come,’ Adri interrupted.

A group of Commandos, about ten of them, were on their way. Gray looked at them and realised, almost immediately, that he had seen them before, in New Kolkata. Dressed in military green suits with protective jackets and helmets, they cautiously made their way towards the four of them, rifles raised.

‘Identify yourselves!’ a Commando shouted as they neared.

‘I am a banished Tantric,’ Adri said. ‘This here, is an Assassin of Ahzad, and this is a citizen of New Kolkata. The girl with us is in urgent need of medical attention.’

‘This is not a hospital, it’s a freaking war zone! You got the wrong address, Necromancer!’ the Commando replied.

Adri had hoped the Commandos would be more charitable; evidently not. Fine, he would have to take the chance of naming the Angel. They would obviously not recognise his false name, nor would they care for Gray’s possible revelation.

‘We have work with Kaavsh. He will know us by face,’ Adri said.

The Commandos froze. ‘Kaavsh?’ one of them asked.

‘Are you sure? If this is a ruse—’

‘Just take us to him,’ Adri said.

‘Who the hell is Kaavsh? They will know Dada—’ Gray began.

‘Quiet,’ Adri hissed.

Now the Commandos seemed massively unsure; all they did was stare. The leader snapped them out of it all of a sudden. ‘Search them and confiscate their weapons!’ he barked. The other Commandos nodded and started moving closer.

Fayne, who had been carrying Maya, tried to put her down.

‘Watch it!’ a Commando roared.

‘Oh no, no. He’s just keeping her down. She’s in a coma, man,’ Adri explained hurriedly.

Adri’s revolvers and Gray’s shotgun were the most visible weapons and were taken by the Commandos immediately. They ran into a snag when they told Fayne to empty out his weapons. Fayne had scores of daggers in his body and there was no point in emptying them out anyway—they would simply grow back. The Commandos panicked, however, and they made him empty out his daggers nevertheless. It took the better part of a quarter of an hour, and by the end of it, everyone except Maya was staring at the huge pile of red daggers, knives, and a couple of red short swords on the floor. Fayne was taking long, deep breaths. His patience was being tested. Obviously, he could not lose focus; but these Commandos were irritating him. Normally, he would not put up with such trivial issues, but being with Gray had helped him deal better with irritation. Finally, when the Commandos were done searching them, they were escorted down the road towards the MYTH camp.

A change from the usual silence that Old Kolkata had got them used to—distant gunfire, frequent, along with muffled explosions. The buildings were not too high this side of the city; apart from the few skyscrapers which were choked with snipers, all structures were partially or wholly destroyed by magical damage. They walked down a road, then through alleyways and more roads. They ran into yet more Commando patrols as they walked towards the camp, the place was filled with them. Everyone looked tired and grim, though they did not see any wounded—then again, this was just the outer circle of the Lake of Fire. This was where the MYTH camp was. This was where Kaavsh would most likely be found.