Tufts of tawny fur framed its ears, the backs of which had jagged black stripes while the inside of each was snow- white. The ears swiveled slightly to catch every sound: the distant buzzing of the bees, the occasional chatter of a bird, his own subvocal whimpering.
It was a tiger’s head, square on a thick neck and muscular body that was a man’s, save that it, too, was covered in short tawny, black-striped fur. The tiger-man pulled the Boy up by the neck until his toes barely touched the ground. The creature growled in his face. The Boy’s breath was cut off, and black dots danced before his eyes. He could feel the tips of sharp claws biting into his skin.
He thought he’d been afraid of Skreetchu, with his species’s cruelty and his baton always at the ready for an errant slave. But he’d willingly go to the kenku now and confess to losing the swarm and to a passel of other sins if only he could get free of this monstrous creature.
Just as the pressure on his neck grew intolerable, the tiger-headed creature snarled and tossed him aside. The Boy fell heavily against an inscribed slab of rock that tilted, broken, half-buried in sand. He struggled to regain his breath and wrapped his arms around his battered ribs, knowing that if the creature decided to kill him there was no defense.
He squinted up at the creature, which stood rooted in place, ignoring the Boy. The tiger-headed thing was staring at its own hands, turning them back and forth. They were strange hands, unnatural-somewhere between a human hand and a paw, elongated with claw-tipped fingers mobile enough to hold small objects, but powerful enough to wrap around the hilt of a weapon. The hand-paw was covered with fur, striped tawny and black on the back and white on the palm. As the creature turned its hand over, however, it became apparent that something was wrong: the palm faced back, and the large, clawed thumb was reversed. It was as if some clever trickster had severed the tiger-man’s hands, flipped them over, and skillfully stitched nerve, bone, sinew, and skin back into place, backward.
The Boy closed his eyes, and a small groan escaped him. He’d lived too near the Beastlands for far too long not to know what stood there; a rakshasa-a demon with the body of a humanoid and the head of a jungle cat, and most telling, those awful backward paws.
Lusk looked at his hands in baffled rage and horror.
He looked at the small human who had witnessed his rebirth, whom he had seized upon in his anger and tossed aside. A boy, he saw, grown too tall for his shabby clothing and a face too thin for his eyes. He was thirteen, perhaps; no older than sixteen, surely. The child struggled to his feet, breathing unsteadily and cradling his side as if it pained him.
Lusk’s nose twitched. His sense of smell was acute, like the predatory cat whose shape his incarnation had taken. He smelled sun-baked grass and rock, and a strangely strong, sweet musky smell.
Honey …
He remembered the bees. They were gone now, but he remembered-the blackness of the void, all his senses muffled, the only sound his own voice inside his conciousness, shrilling in terror. Then, a stab of light came through the void, tearing away his blindness, painful and unrelenting. He floated, helpless, inside that merciless light, until he felt ground under his feet and warm sun on the body that was emerging, molded like clay from the very air where nothing was before. Then came countless tiny vibrating bodies, humming insistently and covering his new, raw skin from head to foot, hurting him with their thousands of tiny clawed feet but sheltering him from that excruciating light, that too-warm sun. They cooled him with their wings until he could stand in the world without experiencing the agony of the new, raw flesh the gods had given him.
The bees had flown away and the child stood there. Lusk smelled sweat and the stables and urine, and also a trace of the dried-sugar musk of the bees. The skin of the boy’s throat was bruising where Lusk had seized him before, and there were small drops of blood where his claws had pierced. Lusk wondered if he should kill him.
He took two strides and stood in front of the boy. It would be very easy to break his neck. Or …
Lusk’s belly growled with the hunger of his new body. He could find a use for the child, skinny as he was.
The boy’s eyes widened, huge in his thin face, as the rakshasa approached him. Lusk knew the child was aware there was no use running. The boy straightened his back and faced him, looking up into Lusk’s tiger face, and steeled himself to die.
Lusk remembered a time long ago in his previous life as deva-Lusk, early in that incarnation. He remembered a farmhouse, and a family who welcomed him, however far he wandered. He remembered finding the burned-out farmhouse, and the bodies, and his soul torn away from his body.
He remembered the children of that family. He found all the bodies save one. The eldest, a girl, was about the age of this boy, and something of his height.
Lusk spoke, carefully shaping the words in the unfamiliar contours of his new mouth, lips, and tongue. Although catlike, his new mouth was sufficiently humanoid so he could speak.
“What is your name?” he said gruffly.
The human boy blinked rapidly. “I don’t-” he began, then faltered. He looked at the ground, at Lusk’s great clawed feet. “They always call me Boy.”
“Look at me,” growled Lusk.
The Boy drew in a breath, held it, and looked up into Lusk’s inhuman, golden eyes. Lusk looked back. The child’s eyes were muddy brown at the edge of the iris, lightening to hazel surrounding the pupil. It reminded him of something, a lake, with round, polished brown-green agates in handfuls on the shore.
“Tamack,” he said after a long pause. “I’ll call you Tamack.”
The child was mute, staring at the rakshasa with a terrified wonder.
“I won’t eat you, Tamack,” Lusk continued, “if you can find me something to eat. Soon.”
The Boy-Tamack-found his voice.
“Can you eat honey?” he said in a very small voice.
Lusk grinned, and Tamack flinched back from the rows of sharp, ivory teeth.
“For now,” he said. “I shall require something more substantial, but for now, honey will do.”
Someone had sheltered this boy, although not well. He was a laborer, and very likely a slave. Where there were slaves there were masters, and where there were masters there were estates of a sort, whether great or mean.
Insignificant as he was, the child Tamack was now his. The property of his former master would be his as well.
For good or for evil, the gods did nothing without a reason. That was something devas knew. It was part of their nature, part of the faith that kept them in service to the deities through the continually rotating wheel of their life and death.
For a long time, he had been warring with his deva nature, even as he tried to embrace it. With his understanding of the fickle nature of the gods, they had punished him by denying the peace of true death, and rebirthing him as this monstrosity.
Very well, he thought, following Tamack as he led him through the twilight over the foothills to the habitation that would soon be his.
If the gods had a purpose in condemning him to a lifetime as a rakshasa, doomed to be born a demon again and again, he would twist the curse into a gift. He would find his place and cultivate his Powers. He would serve no master but himself.
The gods would regret this poisoned gift.
NEAR THE SANCTUARY OF SHADRUN-OF-THE-SNOWS
1600 DR-THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES
When Lakini left the stables, she took the descending path that led away from Shadrun, not giving the buildings of the sanctuary a glance. She walked down the mountain and out into the world, paying no mind to where she went. Sometimes she walked alone. Sometimes she fell in with other travelers.
One evening, she came upon a group of horse traders stopped for the night and preparing their dinner. They
