He didn't need any further explanation to know what had hatched from that egg: It had dark skin, a lean body with long arms and legs, a fanged mouth, taloned hands, and bright yellow eyes.
Moved by her anguish, he knelt opposite her. Gently he pulled the empty egg from her grasp and took her two hands in his.
'Tell me about it.'
'I can't.'
'You must.'
'You wouldn't believe...'
'I've already seen them. I believe. Now I've got to understand. What are they?'
'They are rakoshi.''
'I gathered that. But the name means nothing.'
'They are ancient creatures, from the dim past, long before the Vedic scriptures. Descriptions by the primitive people who glimpsed them or survived them gave rise to the myth of the raksasha, the demons used for ages to spice up stories told at night to frighten children or to make them behave. Every child in India has heard, 'The raksasha will get you!' Only a select few through the ages have known that they are more than mere superstition.'
'And you and Kusum are two of those select few, I take it.”
'We are the only ones left. We come from a long line of high priests and priestesses. We are the last of the Keepers of the Rakoshi. Through the ages the members of our family have been charged with their care—to breed them, control them, and use them according to the laws set down in the old days. And until the middle of the last century we discharged that duty faithfully.'
She paused, seemingly lost in thought. Jack impatiently urged her on.
'What happened then?'
'British soldiers sacked the temple of Kali where our ancestors worshipped. They killed everyone they could find, looted what they could, poured burning oil into the rakoshi cave, and set the temple afire. Only one child of the priest and priestess survived.' She glanced at the empty shell. 'And only one intact rakosh egg was found in the fire-blasted caves. A female egg. Without a male egg, it meant the end of the rakoshi. They were extinct.'
Jack touched the shell gingerly. So this was where those horrors came from. Hard to believe. He lifted it and held it so the light from the lamp shown through the hole into the interior. Whatever had been in here was long gone.
'I can tell you for sure, Kolabati: They aren't extinct. I saw a good fifty of them in that ship tonight.'
Fifty...he tried to blank out the memory. Poor Nellie.
'Kusum must have found a male egg. He hatched them both and started a nest.'
Kolabati baffled him. Could it be true that she hadn't known until now? He hoped so. He hated to think she could fool him so completely.
'That's all well and good, but I still don't know what they are. What do they do?'
'They're demons—'
'Demons, shmemons! Demons are supernatural! Nothing supernatural about those things. They were flesh and blood!'
'No flesh like you have ever seen before, Jack. And their blood is almost black.'
'Black, red—blood is blood.'
'No, Jack!' She rose on her knees and gripped his shoulders with painful intensity. 'You must never underestimate them! Never! They appear slow-witted but they’re cunning. And they are almost impossible to kill.”
'The British did a good job, it seems.'
Her face twisted. 'Only by sheer luck! They chanced upon the only thing that will kill a rakosh—fire! Iron weakens them, fire destroys them.'
'Fire and iron...' Jack suddenly understood the two jets of flame Kusum had stood between, and the reason for housing the monsters in a steel-hulled ship. Fire and iron: the two age-old protections against night and the dangers it held. 'But where did they come from?'
'They have always been.'
Jack stood up and pulled her to her feet. Gently. She seemed so fragile right now.
'I can't believe that. They're built like humans, but I can't see that we ever had a common ancestor. They're too—' he remembered the instinctive animosity that had surged to life within him as he’d watched them —'different.”
'Tradition has it that before the Vedic gods, and even before the pre-Vedic gods, there were other gods, the Old Ones, who hated mankind and wanted to usurp our place on earth. To do this they created blasphemous parodies of humans embodying the opposite of everything good in humans, and called them rakoshi. They are us, stripped of love and decency and everything good we are capable of. They are hate, lust, greed, and violence incarnate. The Old Ones made them far stronger than humans, and planted in them an insatiable hunger for human flesh. The plan was to have rakoshi take humankind's place on earth.'
'Do you believe that?' It amazed him to hear Kolabati talking like a child who believed in fairy tales.
She shrugged. 'I think so. At least it will do for me until a better explanation comes along. But as the story goes, it turned out that humans were smarter than the rakoshi and learned how to control them. Eventually, all
