The Devourers by Indra Das Read Free Book Online Page B

Pesh-kabz, *4 you took a thin thread of hairs and placed it between your teeth, and with a wrench of your neck you severed three inches from yourself, deft as a seamstress dividing the string. Quick in my shadow, so no one would see. Your teeth were sharp stones dulled by civilization. You tied the lock into a circle and gave it to me, a knot of yourself in my hand, damp still from your strong bite. In my hand, your dead self, your spit, your skin, for a few coins in yours.
    “One question, foreigner. How do you speak my language so well?” you asked.
    “A dead man taught me, after I ate him, just as the Christ taught his disciples the love of their God after they ate him.”
    “You’re a strange people, you white folk. But your dead man taught you well.”
    “Yes. He had little else to do, once he was in my stomach. I thank him every day for making my travels through your land easier.”
    “And I thank you for the coins. Farewell, foreigner,” you said and walked away, unaware of the value of our transaction, unaware that I held you in my hand as a wolf holds a crippled hare under its great paw.
    A hunt:
    A man, his face whittled by starvation to woody gnarl of cheekbones and sticky pebbles of teeth, jaundiced marble of bloodshot eyes, lean body wrapped in moldering cloth and goatskin.
    He was not attractive prey, no. But we were hungry, and he was enough. He walked by the shore of the Yamuna, breathing heavy with sorrow of some sort, leaving a trail of oily scent. His stave of hacked branch etched little holes in the fragrant mud, which also reproduced in all their divine symmetry the impression of his feet across time.
    We followed these tracks from afar, I slicing the water, my companions slouching across the land as shifting hills in the dusk, their fur the whispering thatches of coarse grass. It was too dark for this man to see us, so we let the wind rattle through our great throats and teeth, let him run in fear so that we had some mild sport at least. But still it was no effort.
    He saw dancing lamps flare in those hills in the distance and realized some immense reckoning had come upon him, and he said words of prayer loud in the evening, tripping and smearing his knees with the soft ground. He ran straight into my jaws as I leaped from the water, drenching him in a final blessed rain before his death. He fed the water and the mud a deep and rich red of holy dread. I drank, the meat and bone between my fangs, the soul trapped, making my entire second self bristle in waves.
    A meal:
    Enough of the past.
    Now here we sit, for all the world like three men camped under the starlit sky. Between us is another man, human to the bone and dead. We light our gathering with the dead man’s soul. The moon is bright enough by far, but it pleases Makedon to show his mastery over ritual.
    He spits in the wounds, anointing the litany of red trenches left on face, throat, chest, and sides by the fangs of our second selves. He cuts the body open from cock to throat with his dagger. The heat of the soul, condensing in cold air. He speaks our words until pale flame dances on the Hindu’s violet insides as if he were a split skin-sack of kindling.
    “Rise, Will o’ the wisp,” Makedon says, blowing on the false smoke of steam rising from the fresh kill, like a man coaxing fire from wood, “and name yourself chir batti instead, for in this empire no man, woman, or corpse is called Will. Be gone, Saxon tongue!”
    With that he pries the corpse’s creaking jaw open and cuts the still-slippery tongue from the mouth with his blade. He eats it raw. *5 Beside me, pale Gévaudan sticks his thin-fingered hands through the corpse fire and touches his face, rubs his hands. I do the same. The corpse light feels like nothing to the touch, but its glow calms me, reminding me of the burning of northern night skies many lifetimes in my past.
    We sit on our haunches and take from our prey with bare hands. Soft iron from the man’s liver