But these were the symbols of the upper levels and Urushi is not from the upper levels. At least she wasn't.
“There was no courage and strength that was displayed that night,” a stable wife had told her once. “Only bloody screams and gory panic.”
She put away all her thoughts and willed her mind into submission as she read her prayers. She prayed for the victory of the Sinless over the Forgiven. She prayed for Vikranth’s safe return. And more importantly she prayed for the world. There was a lot on her mind. She needed a place calmer and less populated than the prayer hall.
She looked around and found the Yajna hall unlocked. Strange she thought that the Yajna hall be unlocked on the third day of the week. It was as if Lord Kalki himself had bestowed upon her a private prayer hall.
She quickly got up and entered the hall expecting the usual stone walls and the massive homa kund at the centre of the hall. The Yajna hall was a smaller cousin of the main prayer hall, which was opened by the Purohits only on the fifth day of the week. Its dark roof was coated in soot from the fumes of the homa.
Everything looked normal up until she looked into the homa mandap. Where she expected the solid stone floor was an open trap door. Concrete steps lead down from the floor into an apparently bottomless pit.
She quickly looked around, expecting some sort of explanation but none emerged. She slowly started descending the cold steps into the blackness below.
She could see a dim orange light down below and she kept descending the stairs towards the light. As she got closer to the light she could hear faint sounds that echoed in the darkness.
Sounds of clinking chains and angry grunts. She proceeded cautiously.
Now she could also hear other strange noises. Sounds of teeth. Snapping and chewing. She was almost there now. The dim orange light shone on her like a setting sun. She found herself in a long hallway of sorts, extending ahead of her. The noises came from the far end of the hallway. She squinted her eyes trying to look, but the far end was shrouded in darkness as the light from the fire torches mounted on the sides of the hallway only extended up to a few meters ahead of her.
She picked one of the torches and started walking towards the noise. Something inside her warned her that it was a bad idea. She tried to ignore it and kept walking. As she approached the noise, she could faintly see of what lay ahead. Something big and bulky was clothed in the darkness. The sound of chains clinked loudly as whatever was in the shadows grunted and shook. Urushi could swear she saw a huge, scaly clawed hand for a brief moment in those shadows.
She could feel her hand shivering. She knew it wasn’t the cold that made her shiver. The torch made sure she was warm. She tried to suppress the fear as she always did. She had been a rebel leader once. Fear didn’t suit her well, she remembered. The grunts and the sound of teeth and chains were now louder than ever.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t far.
A few feet now.
She slowly held the torch in front of her. The flame flickered. She gasped hard and covered her mouth as she saw a severed human foot on the floor. But what she saw next made her gasp harder. A scaly, clawed hand bigger than any hand she had ever seen reached out from the darkness ahead and grabbed the foot and pulled it back into the darkness.
Clink clank.
Sound of chains and then followed by sound of teeth digging into flesh and the sound of cracking of bones. She stood petrified, unable to move. Then the sound of the chewing stopped for a long time. It was as if whatever beast lay in that darkness had stopped eating and was examining her. She could hear the low grunts as the beast breathed. She took another step forward and held the torch in front of her as far as possible.
It was enough this time. The beast was no longer in darkness. It was the biggest creature she had ever seen. Urushi had never seen a kinkar in her life. She had been asleep during the Night of the Kinkars and had only heard stories of what had happened that night. But she knew what they looked like. This was not how big they were supposed to be, she thought. A giant beast with eyes red as burning coal and fangs as big as butchers’ knives, stared into her eyes growling slowly. The creature lay on all fours with chains running around its torso, hands and feet. The chains were clamped to the hallway walls. Its spines were as long as the fins of a shark. Its skin was rough and filled with dark scales. The beast looked like a huge humanoid crocodile. On the floor lay pieces of meat and severed body parts.
Unfortunately for Urushi the beast hadn’t devoured the head yet. She screamed as she recognized the face. It was one of the low priests. Her dinner escaped her stomach as she violently threw up. She wiped her mouth and looked up. The beast now seemed more angry than curious. It suddenly roared and the sound deafened Urushi. Blood and spit flew from the kinkar’s mouth and Urushi staggered backwards. She lost her balance and would have fallen to the ground, but someone caught her from behind with their thin bony hands.
A familiar, unpleasant and old voice spoke to her from behind.
“So, how do you like my pet?” Shukra whispered into her ear.
Vikranth was not sure if it was the pain or the smell that had woken him up.
He was tied to the trunk of a huge Banyan tree using thorny vines that drew blood as he moved. His wrists were tied together and so were his feet. He was stark naked and the blood from his wounds mixed with the blue paint of his body resulting in black patches of varying contrasts. The ground felt wet and muddy. The swamps around him smelled like a vile mix of faeces, blood, rotten food and hatred. If there had been anything in his stomach, he would have puked. He gagged painfully. As he pulled up his hands to cover his nose, his wrists bled more.
His head throbbed terribly. The pain was almost disorienting. He could feel blood on his left cheek. Probably running down from his left ear or whatever was left of it.
He could see fires behind the ring of trees he was in. He could hear the distant din of the kinkars’ grunts and growls. But there was something else that buzzed in the background of all that clatter of metal and teeth.
A loud rumbling breath. A constant steady sound of something huge and living. He looked to his right towards the source of the sound and found a huge tent around hundred feet away from him, sewed together from clothes of different colours and sizes.
Whatever was inside the tent, Vikranth knew he wouldn’t like it. What great monstrosity had the kinkars bred? Whatever darkness slept beneath that tent, he knew it was something bigger than what anyone had ever seen. He thought the Priest Eater was huge, but this was something of a different scale. If the Priest Eater was a shark, this was the whale.
Vikranth sat there, tired, hurt and hopeless until he lost all concept of time. The sound of the constant breathing was about to shatter his sanity when he heard something else. The sound of wet earth crunching beneath great weight. The sound of heavy footsteps approaching. The Priest Eater had come for the prime soldier of the priests.
The behemoth blocked out the moon as he towered above Vikranth.
“Eat,” the kinkar grunted, as he threw a piece of raw meat into Vikranth’s lap.
Vikranth looked at the piece of meat and looked up with suspicion.
“I am not eating anything that you monsters eat,” he said, with clenched teeth.
The Priest Eater chuckled, baring his sharp fangs.
“Not human!” he assured.
He knelt down and pulled Vikranth’s hair forcing him to look up. He then tore a piece of the meat and shoved it into Vikranth’s mouth. Vikranth choked and spat it out.
“See? If it were human, it would have tasted a lot better,” Vikranth’s captor growled. “Now eat. I don’t want you dead.”
“I just want you to be in a lot of pain.”
CHAINS OF THE SINLESS
“You are feeding dead priests to a kinkar?” Urushi screamed.
“Not all of them. But yes, most of them,” Shukra replied. “Calm down now! No one has to know.”
“I never trusted you, you
bastard!” Urushi screamed seething with anger. “Wait till the Purohit gets wind of this.”
Shukra smirked.
“You are forgetting that I have been an Avadhani for far longer than you have ever been, Urushi. You think I would do something like this by keeping the Purohit in the dark?”
“Stop lying!” she screamed. “There’s no way he would allow this. No way would he have known.”
“He knew right from the beginning. Right from day we started experimenting with a captured kinkar.”
The truth then hit Urushi.
“Night of the Kinkars!” she gasped. “You people managed to recapture one of them that night?” she exclaimed with realization.
“Pretty smart for a rebel warrior,” Shukra teased. “But he wasn’t so huge when we got him. Just another regular kinkar. What you see now is a result of careful genetic engineering and radiation exposure. It’s surprising how much stronger and bigger they get with the right diet and the right amounts of radiation. The Priest Eater is a freak of nature, but yes, we can make these things that big.”
Urushi understood now. She wondered how she had missed it all these days.
“It’s not just dead priests that you have been feeding it with, isn’t it?” Urushi said. “It wouldn’t have been enough for so long.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Shukra said. “This is both a security measure and an opportunity to experiment. Imagine having a kinkar on our side. One that we can control. Someone who could influence other kinkars. From what we know they have a sort of hive mind. We may very well be able to prevent another Night of the Kinkars from happening.”
“You have been killing people to feed this monster. All those trials…all those judgements and death penalties you award every day to all those you capture, calling them sinners… it’s all a ruse to feed this little experiment of yours!!”
Shukra remained silent for a while.
“I am not killing anyone who doesn’t deserve to die, Urushi. I am only feeding it people who have sinned. What other use do we have of them?”
Urushi shook her head vigorously.
“This can’t go on. People should know,” she said, walking away from Shukra.
Shukra grabbed her arm forcefully.
“This stays between us,” he barked. “Down below. You have undeservedly become an Avadhani –you are forgetting that before this, you were just a stupid rebel bitch. Now do not squander what you have. Some secrets should remain buried so that we are not,” he warned.
“Do you think I would have come this far if the likes of you scared me? Your lame attempt at a threat doesn’t frighten me, Shukra. Let go!” she said and bit his arm.
She tasted blood as her teeth dug deep into Shukra’s arm.
Shukra screamed with rage and pain. He pulled Urushi’s hair and slapped her hard across the face. She fell to the floor. Her ears rang. Shukra walked up to her and kicked her hard in the stomach.
Urushi screamed. Her abdomen exploded in pain. Shukra kicked her again. He knelt down and slapped her hard across the face again. Blood trickled down her mouth.
“You would look wonderful chained in a cage. Back in the lower sections. Where you belong,” Shukra said, his face red with the blood still flooding to his face in rage. “And I think you and I are going to have a wonderful time alone in that cage. What do you think?”
Urushi wiped the blood off her chin and muttered through clenched teeth.
“You lay a finger on me, and when Vikranth is back with his army, you and your religious dictator of a boss are going to wish that you are the ones who were in chains and in cages,” she said.
Shukra’s eyes twinkled.
“Oh, so you do accept it. You think I didn’t know about you and Vikranth’s sad little affair?” he mocked.
“An Avadhani and a Dalapathy in love. How romantic?” he said. “And how utterly stupid,” he added.
“Let your love come back. I’ll make sure both of you are hanged in public and burnt for your sins. Look at the bright side. Both of you will be dying together.”
Urushi was seething with rage.
“I will make sure we rip you open and feed you to your own pet,” she chuckled. “Vikranth should already be on his way.”
Vikranth felt he had become a part of the tree to which he was bound. His arms and hands ached with a burning pain. The vines cut deeper with each passing day. It had been three days since he had been captured by these godforsaken monsters. He had kept his count. Watching the sun rise and set was the only thing a man bound to a tree in a foul swamp could look forward to. The kinkars seemed to obey their leader diligently. None of them had tried to kill him yet.
One of the kinkars would crawl up to him once a day and throw a piece of slimy, foul–smelling meat reluctantly at him to eat. Vikranth could see the hunger on the kinkar’s face every time one of them came up to him. A deep hunger held back only by the fear of their leader. The kinkars would leave after delivering his food to him, drooling and grunting sharply, clearly unhappy with the fact that they couldn’t tear open his skin and eat his insides.
Vikranth tried shouting and screaming the first day, to let him move from the tree. “I need to pee, you hell beasts!” he would shout. No response except for the sharp hisses and grunts from the kinkars that were in the range of hearing his screams. He was naked, surrounded by the wet swamp, now growing wetter by his own piss and shit. His skin grew itchy and sore from all the damp mud and nastiness around him. He was sure even if the kinkars wouldn’t eat him, he would soon die of some or the other kind of infection.
Vikranth still hadn’t figured out why he was being kept alive. He sometimes wished he wasn’t, but then he remembered Urushi. He had promised her he would be back and that when he was back, things would be different. He wondered if the surviving Ashvins had reached the towers. What had they told Urushi? He hoped she hadn’t cried. He hated seeing her in tears. Would there be a rescue party? Urushi would make sure there was. He hoped she was in good health and strong in her spirit as ever. If he died in this unholy place, he wanted her to be the guiding light to the Sinless as an Avadhani and achieve the salvation which he himself couldn’t as an Ashvin.
The slow rumble of breath from the tent hadn’t died down for a single moment. It was the only thing that distracted him from the grim thoughts of death and despair that otherwise plagued his imaginative mind. He wanted to know what was in the tent. It piqued his curiosity but sometimes he wondered if he wouldn’t like the answer. He finally resolved to ask the Priest Eater next time he visited him. As if the world had read his mind, Vikranth could hear the giant footsteps of the Priest Eater approaching him.
The Priest Eater walked towards the tree, swinging his heavy club with his spiny muscular hand. He bent down near Vikranth and put down his club.
“Seems like the boys are taking good care of you,” he grunted in his deep voice. “Still alive,” he grinned.
Vikranth looked at the giant leader with visceral hate.
“Why?” he asked through clenched teeth.
He knew he wasn’t being kept alive because they pitied him.
“A piece of bargain,” the Priest Eater replied. “A hostage to show to the Sinless when the time comes. A dead body to send in case they don’t agree,” he said.
“Agree to what?”
“Free reign of the wastelands. Plus, plenty of fuel and weapons.”
“We don’t have any fuel.”
“You’ll find some to exchange for a precious warrior… won’t you?” the Priest Eater sneered. “And more importantly, we want the Sinless to leave us in peace. Your lot has tried to hunt us before and has paid the price. And Vikranth, I am a fair dealer. I only took you hostage, because your people have one of my own as a captive.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The little pawn doesn’t know then,” the Priest Eater laughed.
“Never mind. If they agree, we have a body to exchange. If they don’t, we have a bo
dy to sacrifice,” he smiled looking at the tent.
“What’s in the tent?” Vikranth asked. He had to know.
The Priest Eater looked at him intensely for a moment with his deep-set eyes and smiled, baring his yellow fangs.
And then he answered with a single chilling word.
“GOD!”
The Purohit was examining the emblem of the Sinless on the wall, when Kaling –the fourth Avadhani walked into his chamber. The Purohit stood facing the wall behind his throne with his hands joined behind his muscular back; his long hair fell to his shoulders, with strands of grey peppered across in the otherwise black mane.
“Your Holiness,” Kaling said as he bowed and knelt.
Kaling was a gentle man with a small face and sparkling eyes. He kept himself to the study chamber most of the time. He was the one who reported any event which involved change in financials and inventory. His loyalty to the Purohit was rivalled only by his devotion to Lord Kalki.
The Purohit didn’t turn back to face him. “How many?” he asked, still studying the emblem.
“Eighty-Nine forgiven in total, my Lord.” Kaling replied. “Twelve women and three children” he added.
“What about the rest?” There was a hint of surprise mixed with disappointment in the Purohit’s wise voice.
“Maharshi, all of the Forgiven were captured,” Kaling mumbled. “But it seems the Ashvins ran into a problem on the way!” Kaling’s voice shook.
The Purohit now turned back to face him.
“What kind of problem?” His deep eyes met Kaling’s.
“Kinkars, Maharshi. The party was attacked in Nallamala.”
Sinners- The Dawn Of Kalki Page 12
