Chapter 4
Asha stood up with Priya cradled in her arms and Jagdish balled up in the nun’s lap. Wren stood beside her, surveying the street and the wreckage by the light of the evening stars.
“Omar!”
The cry echoed down the road.
Wren jogged across the street, her black skirts swirling around her legs, and she scrambled up onto some of the smaller blocks and beams. “Omar!”
Again the girl’s voice echoed through the dusty streets, and went unanswered.
Asha looked down at Priya and saw how the little nun’s lip had been smashed and her cheek scraped, with her long hair twisted and dirtied. There was no hint of Priya’s serenity, no lingering trace of her endless good humor and mysterious joy, no final glimpse of the woman’s wisdom or bountiful spirit. All that was left was a dirty, battered body and a once-lovely face now bruised and bloody.
She’s gone. She’s just… gone.
Asha glanced up, looking all around herself for some wisp of aether, just a shred of the white vapor that might let her see Priya’s soul, let her see her friend’s smiling face one last time. But a cold wind was blowing and there was no aether drifting about her feet, and even if there had been, Asha realized, there was no reason to think Priya’s immortal spirit would awaken and take flight now, if ever. A ghost might sleep a thousand years before waking to walk in the living world again, or it might sleep forever, until the end of the world when all of creation returned to wherever it had come from.
Slowly and carefully, Asha crossed the street and laid Priya down upon a thick wooden beam that had tumbled down from the pagoda and now lay flat on the ground. She moved numbly, trying not to think about what she had to do, what was about to happen. She brushed Priya’s hair back and then she took the folds of the nun’s red robe and gently covered her face. Then she scooped up Jagdish and cradled him in her arm as she placed her other hand on the wooden beam. It took some effort to summon up the dragon again, but all she needed were the searing ruby claws, and only for a moment. She scraped the dusty wooden beam, and the scratches blacked, exhaled a white smoke, and flickered with yellow flame. The fire quickly spread down the beam and engulfed the robed figure.
Asha watched the red robes turn to black as bright cinders fluttered away from the fire, and Jagdish shivered against her chest as she held him tightly with both hands.
“Good bye,” she whispered. Again the tears came, and her breath caught in her throat, making her whole body ache.
After a few moments, she noticed the girl Wren standing beside her, her pale little hands clasped in front of her. “Thank you,” Asha said with a rasping voice.
“For what?”
“You brought me back.” Asha petted the mongoose on her arm. “If it hadn’t been for you, I might have been lost to the dragon completely. Priya was the one who taught me how to control it, how to control my anger, and when I saw her lying there…”
Wren nodded. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to wait at the cafe, but she said we should go after you. She said that even the weakest person can help, no matter how small or how blind. I should have stopped her, I should have said something instead of just going along with her. But she seemed so confident, so certain that it was the right thing to do, and I just… I just followed her.”
Asha nodded and smiled sadly. “That was Priya’s way.”
The fire crackled and the crumbling wooden beam began to break down, breaking apart here and there as the flames transformed it and the robed body into ash and dust.
“You found no sign of your friend?” Asha asked.
Wren shook her head. “I’m not too worried, I guess. I mean, he is immortal. But he can still get hurt, or trapped. If it was just regular people who took him, that would be one thing. But those creatures were something else. They were so strong, and vicious.”
“Yes, they were,” Asha whispered. “Will you look for him now?”
Wren glanced up at the dark sky overhead. “I guess so. I don’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t know anyone here. I only just arrived in Alexandria today. Omar was the only person with me, and now, I mean, I don’t exactly blend in, do I?” She lifted her black scarf a bit to reveal her pale freckled cheeks, her curling red hair, and her tall fox ears. “Omar said I would be safe as long as I was with him. So much for that plan.”
“Don’t worry,” Asha said softly. “You’ll be safe as long as you’re with me.”
Wren smiled. “Are you sure it isn’t the other way around?”
Asha stared blankly into the fire as it began to die down, burning redder and lower. “I don’t know anyone else here myself, and I’ve only just arrived. I don’t know the city at all. But I will help you. Priya would want me to. And I want to.”
“Thank you.” Wren nodded. “I suppose we can ask people if they saw a woman with wings flying overhead. Or a dog-man running by.”
“Perhaps. But we should be discrete.” Asha rubbed her finger over Jagdish’s head as she forced herself to focus on the task of finding the missing man. “The soldiers here carry dangerous weapons. No doubt other people here do as well. It may be safest to try to track the dog-man ourselves, with Jagdish’s help. A mongoose has a very fine sense of smell.”
She picked up her medicine bag from where she had dropped it, and settled it on her shoulder. And then with Jagdish still cradled in her arms and Wren following close beside her, Asha set out into the dark streets of the ancient city and left the darkening ashes of the blind nun to settle into the shadows for the night.
Asha looked back once before turning the corner and she tried to remember that moment, the sight of Priya’s makeshift pyre in a foreign land at the foot a mountain of broken walls. But already her heart was closing in, becoming colder, becoming harder. A part of her didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to carry the pain of that day. It was too awful, too impossible, too sudden. A part of her simply wanted to keep moving, to be somewhere else, to think about something else. And she hated herself for it as she turned and walked away.
They started out in the direction that they had seen the dog-man running, and Asha began nudging and whispering to Jagdish, and leaning down to have him smell the ground, and eventually the furry mongoose began squeaking and leaning out, sniffing the air, and even pawing at whatever it was he was smelling. And so with little else to follow, Asha followed Jagdish’s nose.
They paused from time to time at a corner to ask a waiter at a cafe or an old gentleman on a bench whether they had seen a strange man run past with the head of a great black beast, but the only answer they ever received was a shrug and a blank look.
Jagdish went on sniffing and squeaking, and on several occasions he leapt across Asha’s arms and pawed at a turn in the road, and they would turn, and he would settle down, and this encouraged both of the women to think that he might actually be leading them somewhere.
More than once Asha tried to focus on the cacophony of soul-sounds bombarding her scaled ear, searching through the noise of people and animals for something new, something strange, something that might be a winged woman or an immortal wearing a sun-steel pendant. But the city was so crowded and lively that she could barely even focus on the soft chitter of Jagdish’s soul or the exotic harmony of Wren’s soul intertwined with the fox-soul and man-soul within her.
“You know,” Wren said softly, “About a year ago, a friend of mine died-”
“Hush, please.” Asha shook her head.
Not yet, please. And maybe not ever.
Wren nodded.
The city stretched on and on, and the two women walked side by side in the deepening darkness as the streets continued to empty of people and animals, of noises and smells. An hour of walking carried them through market squares all shuttered for the evening, and neighborhoods full of foreigners all babbling in strange languages in their tiny houses, and past several huge temples with wide stairs leading up to huge stone images of men and women that gazed out upon the city in immortal silence.
