The Baital settles in, oddly courteous, to begin

On Vikram's shoulder, trussed once more in its shroud, the vampire stirred to life with a civility that startled the king more than any insult could have — for courtesy from that creature was itself an omen. Your majesty, it began, almost gently, there is a country called Malaya, on the western coast of Bharat — you will note I am careful to name the place — and in it stood a city called Chandrodaya, ruled by a king named Randhir. Vikram said nothing, but shifted the silent weight against his back and walked on through the moonless trees toward the distant, waiting sorcerer, while the Baital, pleased with its own opening, warmed to the tale of a king who could not leave well enough alone.

Randhir, once a pleasure-seeker, becomes obsessed with virtue

In his youth, the Baital said, Randhir had been what the wise call a sarva-rasi — a man of all tastes — who ate richly, drank freely, kept dancing girls and musicians about him, and gave more thought to pleasure than to prayer or counsel. There was nothing unusual in this; plenty of Brahma's vicegerents on earth had lived and died exactly so, and no one thought much the worse of them for it. But past the age of thirty, something turned in Randhir. He took up reform the way he had once taken up wine — with total abandon — and in an astonishingly short time became the very model of a correct Raja. Yet, the Baital added with the relish of a creature who enjoys a man's flaws, Randhir was of that unfortunate breed the old poet warned of: the unwise, who run from one extreme straight to the other. Not content with becoming merely upright, he reformed his own reformation, and did far more than virtue ever asked of him.

Gunshankar, the one honest magistrate, cannot stem the thefts

Among Randhir's officers was a magistrate of police named Gunshankar, and it was remarked as something of a wonder that he was as honest as he was just. He weighed cases with the same even hand before dinner as after it, took no bribe even to advance his own kin, leaned toward mercy with the poor, and never punished the rich for show. He did not bark at those who could not answer back, nor take offense where none was meant, and for all this the people of Chandrodaya loved him well. And yet, despite Gunshankar's good name, robberies fell upon the city thick and constant, until no householder felt his bolted door meant anything at all. At last the merchants who had lost the most came before him in a body. O flower of the law, they said, robbers have worked such tyranny upon us that we can no longer live safely in this city. Gunshankar answered evenly: What has happened has happened. But henceforth you shall have peace. I will make ready for these thieves.

New watchmen, spies, and trackers still fail to catch them

True to his word, Gunshankar summoned his deputies and set them to work. He doubled the night watch, taught them how to keep vigil through the dark hours, and ordered registers kept of every traveler entering or leaving the gates. He planted spies among the suspect and the idle, and raised a corps of paggis — trackers so skilled they could follow a thief's footprints even through shoes padded to disguise them. And he gave his patrols standing authority: any robber caught in the act was to be killed on the spot, no questions asked. For a time the city bristled with armed men at every corner. And still, night after night, the thefts continued exactly as before, as though the watchmen were shadows and the thieves alone were real. When the merchants gathered again before Gunshankar, their faces longer than ever, they no longer bothered with flattering titles. You have changed your officers, hired watchmen, set patrols on every street, they said, and yet the plundering goes on as though we had done nothing at all.

The merchants carry their grief straight to the throne

Seeing that his own resources were exhausted, Gunshankar did what an honest man does when he has failed: he took the merchants himself, and laid their complaint at the feet of King Randhir. The Raja, ever solicitous of his subjects since his great turning toward virtue, received them kindly and sent them home comforted. Be of good cheer, he told them. Tonight I will try a new plan of my own devising, and with the blessing of the Bhagwan, it shall free you from this anxiety once and for all. It was, the Baital noted dryly to Vikram, precisely the kind of promise a reformed man makes when he has decided that no servant, however honest, can do a king's work as well as the king himself. Randhir did not summon his generals or double his guard that night. Instead, when the star Canopus began to glimmer in the southern sky, he rose alone in his private chambers and began, with great care, to make himself into somebody else entirely.

The king paints his face and slips into the dark

Randhir disguised himself with the patience of an artist. He smeared his features with a certain dark paint until his own mother would not have known him, twirled his mustachios sharply up toward his eyes, parted his beard at the chin and drew its ends back toward his ears, and bound a stiff hair from a horse's tail tight across the bridge of his nose, changing its very shape. He wrapped himself in a coarse laborer's cloak, cinched his waist, buckled on his sword beneath it, and slung a plain shield upon his arm. Then, without a word to a single soul inside the palace — not guard, not minister, not queen — he walked out through a side gate and into the sleeping streets of his own capital, alone and on foot, a king who had made himself, for one night, indistinguishable from the men he hunted. For nearly an hour he walked the silent back lanes of Chandrodaya without meeting a living soul.

A shape by a wall proves to be no dog at all

It was in a narrow back street of the merchants' quarter that Randhir's solitary walk ended. He noticed, low against a house wall, what looked at first like a homeless dog curled asleep in the dust. As he drew nearer, the shape uncoiled itself and rose into a man, and a low voice demanded sharply, Who art thou? Randhir did not hesitate. I am a thief, he said. Who art thou? The stranger's face split into open delight at the answer. And I also am a thief, he said, come, let us work together, then. But which sort are you — a high-toper, or a common lully-prigger? the man asked, using the gutter cant that marked a swell operator from a low sneak thief. Randhir, who as a king had made it his business to understand every corner of his own realm, including its criminal argot, answered in kind without missing a beat, adding only that a little more ceremony between coves in the trade would not go amiss, but they had best look sharp, for neither of them fancied being hanged before morning.

King and stranger become partners in a night of theft

Well, keep your tongue quiet, the thief grumbled, apparently satisfied, and let us be working. And with that the two of them — a disguised Raja and a common criminal, shoulder to shoulder in the dark — set to it in earnest. The street, Randhir found to his astonishment, was crawling with the gang: men drinking spirits to steady their nerves, others rubbing oil into their limbs to slip through narrow gaps, still others blacking their eyes with lamp-soot and muttering charms said to grant them sight in pitch darkness. Some practiced the ancient breaching arts taught by the god of the golden spear — picking out sun-baked brick, cutting through walls softened by rain or salt, sluicing mud walls with water until they gave way, boring silently through timber — and shaped their holes like lotus blossoms, suns, and crescent moons, as though housebreaking were a fine art rather than a crime. Randhir moved among them, playing his part, watching everything, and by the time the work was done, his companion's sack was heavy with another household's fortune.

The thief invites his new friend home to the den

When the bag was full and the night's plunder assessed, the thief clapped Randhir's shoulder. Now, my rummy cove, he said, we'll be off to the flash ken, where the lads and their women are waiting to wet their whistles. Randhir, his disguise apparently unquestioned, felt his pulse quicken with a colder excitement than any battle had ever given him: here, within reach, lay the very secret Gunshankar's honest officers had failed for months to uncover. Along the way his new companion, entirely convinced by his flawless cant and cool nerve, taught him the whistle, the password, and the hand-sign that marked a true member of the gang, and promised that he should share fairly in the night's takings before they turned in to sleep. Randhir listened, memorized, and said little, playing the part of a grateful recruit while, beneath the paint and the false beard, the King of Chandrodaya quietly resolved that before this night was through, he would know the whole anatomy of the plague that had humiliated his city and his crown.

Through the city gate and into a hidden forest road

The thief rapped twice upon the city gate, and it swung open for him at once — proof, Randhir noted grimly, that the corruption reached even the men who guarded his own walls. They walked some four miles from the ramparts to a lone rock rising out of a dark forest, and before entering the trees the thief halted and gave two shrill whistles through his fingers that split the silence of the glade. Long moments passed before an owl's hoot answered from somewhere in the dark, and the thief returned the signal with a jackal's shriek. At once half a dozen armed men rose up out of the grass where they had lain hidden, and one advanced to receive the sign from the newcomer before the guards sank back down into their hiding places as though swallowed by the earth itself. Randhir marked all of it — every distinguishing tree, every bend in the path — and once inside the wood, quietly scored the trunks within his reach with the point of his dagger, laying a trail only he would ever be able to follow home again.

A painted rock face hides the entrance to the den

The path ended at a sheer wall of rock rising abruptly out of a clearing, its face crowded with hand-prints daubed in vermilion by generations of thieves paying homage before entering. The chief thief walked up to it, made a low obeisance, then crouched and swept away a tuft of grass to reveal what lay hidden beneath. Together the two men heaved up a heavy trap-door, and a shaft of torchlight and a confused murmur of voices spilled up out of the black opening beneath their feet. This is the ken, the thief said, already lowering himself onto a thin bamboo ladder with his sack of loot slung over one shoulder. Follow me. Randhir followed. What waited below, when his eyes adjusted to the smoky glare of torches fixed along the rough walls, looked for all the world like his own mother's fireside descriptions of Patal-puri, the city of the underworld — an entire cavern hall, carpeted from rich tapestry to filthy rag, strewn with sacks and weapons and heaped plunder and the drinking cups of a hundred nights' debauchery.

Among the criminals, the king finds his own guards

Beyond the first cave lay a second, crowded with thieves readying themselves for the night's pleasures — some peeling off clothes torn and filthy from crawling through breached walls, some scrubbing blood from their hands and feet, some combing dust from long unkempt hair, others rubbing perfumed coconut oil into their skin. It was a rogues' gallery drawn from every dark corner of the goddess Bhawani's following: knife-men with poniards slung at their naked waists, poisoners marked by the little pouches of stramonium seed under their arms, and stranglers wearing the fatal kerchiefs of their trade knotted at their throats. And there, moving among murderers and thieves as though entirely at home, Randhir recognized face after face he knew — his own spies, his own watchmen, his own palace guards, the very men sworn to protect Chandrodaya from exactly this. He had strict cause, the Baital observed, to thank whatever good deed of a former life had sent him into that cave in so complete a disguise, for had a single one of those familiar faces recognized their king standing unguarded among cutthroats, the tale would have ended that same night.

The chief is welcomed home like visiting royalty

It was now plain that Randhir's companion was no ordinary robber but the chief of the entire gang, for the whole den rose in loud approval as he entered the robing room, and he in turn bade every man there make his salaam to the new recruit at his side. Questions flew thick and fast about the night's takings, answered with the easy pride of men who considered thievery honest work well done, and once everyone had changed and washed and oiled themselves to their satisfaction, the whole company trooped back into the first cavern to feast. They settled onto the carpets each in his accustomed place and fell to eating, drinking, and making merry with the unguarded noise of men who believed themselves entirely safe in their own kingdom beneath the earth. Randhir ate and drank sparingly and laughed at the right moments, watching everything, memorizing every face he could, while beneath his painted mustachios and false beard his mind worked over how many of these men wore, by day, the uniform of his own palace guard.

Torches gutter low and the den falls into stupor

Hour after hour the revel wore on, until the flaring torches began to gutter down and drowsiness overpowered even the hardest heads in the cave. One by one the robbers rolled themselves into rugs, drew the cloth over their faces, and slept where they lay; a few still sat propped against the rock walls, nodding and swaying, too dulled by opium and hemp smoke to do more than mumble. Randhir sat among them, wide awake behind his disguise, a king surrounded by sleeping criminals with no one left to notice or challenge him, weighing how he might slip away unseen through a den he had marked in his memory but not yet in his feet. It was at this moment of stillness, with the last torches burning low and the confused hubbub of the evening finally silenced into snores, that a servant woman he had never before laid eyes on stepped quietly into the cave and looked directly at him, her face suddenly pale with alarm at what she saw sitting there among the sleeping thieves.

A stranger's warning saves the disguised king's life

O Raja, the woman whispered, her voice trembling with a fear that told Randhir at once she had somehow pierced his disguise entirely, how came you among these wicked men? Run, and run now, or they will surely kill you the moment they wake and know you. Randhir did not waste breath denying it. I do not know the way out, he answered simply. Which direction am I to go? She showed him. Treading as softly as a cat through the tangled mass of snoring bodies, careful not to wake a single sleeper, he found the bamboo ladder, strained with all his strength to raise the heavy trap-door above his head, and at last breathed the open air of the night sky once more, free. Before he plunged back into the darkness of the wood toward home, he paused one last time to fix the hidden entrance firmly in his memory, and carefully replaced the tuft of grass over the trap-door exactly as it had lain before, leaving no sign that the King of Chandrodaya had ever set foot inside the thieves' own kingdom.

Back at the palace, the robberies have only worsened

Randhir had scarcely returned to his palace and scrubbed the paint and false beard from his face when a second deputation of merchants arrived at court, their faces even longer than before. O pearl of equity, they said bitterly, only yesterday you promised us some contrivance that would guard our houses and our coffers from theft — and yet our goods have never suffered so grievously as in these last twelve hours alone. It was, though none of them knew it, the very night the king himself had spent among the robbers, watching them work with his own eyes. Randhir absorbed the complaint without flinching, and sent the merchants home once more, swearing this time that he would either die in the attempt or utterly destroy the men responsible for such violence against his people. He no longer needed spies or trackers to find the gang — he had walked among them, eaten with them, learned their whistle and their password, and marked their secret door in the forest with his own dagger. What remained now was only the reckoning.

Randhir quietly purges the traitors within his own guard

Having settled his plan in his mind, Randhir set a company of archers on secret standing orders, ready to march the moment he gave the word. Then, one by one, as each of his own men returned from a night's work with the thieves, believing themselves undiscovered, the king had them quietly seized and put to death — for as the Baital observed with grim relish, the dead, unlike vampires forced to keep telling stories, cannot tell tales of their own betrayal. Randhir purged his household of every guard, spy, and watchman he had recognized among the robbers in that torchlit cave, cleanly and without public trial, until he was satisfied that no warning could travel from his palace to the rock in the forest. As evening fell again, and he judged the thieves would soon be gathering as usual for their nightly feast of plunder and wassail, the king armed himself in his own royal harness, mustered his soldiers, and led them out of the city gates and into the jungle, straight toward the rock he had marked so carefully with his blade.

The thieves learn of the coming attack and prepare

But the gang was not so easily caught unaware a second time. The sudden disappearance of their promising new recruit had set them asking questions, and by whatever channels criminals learn such things, word had reached them that danger was closing in. They dared not scatter by daylight, for fear of being tracked and picked off one by one; and when night came, they hesitated still, knowing that any man who fled alone would surely be run down and captured by morning. It was their chief — the very man who had walked shoulder to shoulder with Randhir through the streets of Chandrodaya, never guessing his companion's true rank — who spoke first, and spoke for resistance rather than flight. He was known through the gang for his courage, and the men respected him enough to listen. He promised them victory if they would trust his plan and hold their nerve, and one after another the robbers gave their word to follow him into whatever came, rather than run and be hunted down separately in the dark.

The chief lays an ambush as the royal troops approach

As young night spread its first thin shadows across the jungle floor, the chief mustered his men, inspected every bow and quiver, spoke words of encouragement to steady their nerve, and led them out from the cave to a chosen ambush point among the trees. He climbed partway up the rock himself to watch for the enemy's approach, while others of the gang pressed their ears and noses low to the ground, alert for any sound of the coming soldiers. Before long the full moon broke out over the King and his company of archers, marching quickly and carelessly through the forest, certain they would catch the whole gang asleep and unarmed inside their cave exactly as Randhir had found them before. The chief let them advance nearly the entire length of his hidden line before he gave the signal. In an instant the thieves rose howling out of the underbrush on every side and fell upon the royal troops with such sudden fury that the King's soldiers, taken utterly by surprise, broke and were driven back in confused disorder.

The chief taunts the fleeing king into single combat

In the chaos of the ambush even Randhir himself was swept back with his broken line, until the chief's voice rang out across the fighting, mocking and furious at once: Hola! Thou, a Rajput, running from combat? The words struck deeper than any blade could have. Randhir halted where he stood, turned, and the two men who had walked together as false comrades through the streets of Chandrodaya now faced each other as declared enemies, blades bared, in the moonlit clearing. They circled one another the way skilled swordsmen do, bent low, skipping in slow arcs, eyes locked, lips curled in matching contempt, each testing the other with feints and mock lunges, leaping forward like frogs and springing back like monkeys, beating their sabres against their shields in a rattling rhythm like war drums, neither willing to commit the first true stroke until the measure of his opponent was fully taken. Two men who had eaten from the same fire not a night before now meant, each of them, to kill the other before the moon set.

A duel of equals rages until fortune tips the scale

Randhir struck first, wheeling suddenly to cut low at the thief's legs with a fierce cry — but the chief sprang clean into the air and the blade hissed harmlessly beneath his feet. An instant later the robber's own sword, whirled three times overhead, came down like lightning toward the king's left shoulder; Randhir caught the blow full on his shield and staggered under its force, though he took no wound. So the fight went on, stroke answered by stroke, parry by parry, until both men's arms grew numb and their breath came in ragged gasps, and still neither could win the smallest advantage over the other — so evenly were they matched in courage, strength, and skill. It was chance, not skill, that finally decided it: the robber's right foot caught upon a loose stone in the churned earth and slid from beneath him, and he went down hard, entirely at his enemy's mercy. The rest of the gang broke and scattered into the trees the moment their captain fell, and Randhir threw himself upon his prize, bound his hands behind his back, and marched him at swordpoint all the way home to Chandrodaya.

The captured thief is bathed, dressed, and paraded in disgrace

The next morning Randhir went to see his prisoner with his own eyes, and ordered him bathed, washed, and dressed in fine new clothes before being mounted upon a camel and led on a full circuit of the city he had plundered for so long. A crier walked before the procession, calling out at every corner: Who hears! Who hears! The king commands! This is the thief who has robbed and plundered the city of Chandrodaya. Let all men gather this evening in the open ground outside the gate that leads toward the sea, and behold the penalty of evil deeds, and learn to be wise. Randhir had already passed sentence: the thief was to be crucified, nailed and bound with his hands and feet stretched to their fullest length, held upright until death claimed him, and given whatever food he asked for so that his life, and his suffering, might be prolonged as long as possible. When death drew near at last, molten gold was to be poured down his throat until it burst from his neck and body — a punishment as deliberate and thorough as the king's own reformation had been.

A sheltered merchant's daughter watches the procession pass

That evening, as the condemned man was led toward his cross, the procession happened to pass close beneath the house of a wealthy landowner. He had a beloved daughter named Shobhani, a girl in the full flower of her youth, growing lovelier and more graceful with every passing day — and yet a girl the world outside her father's garden walls had never once been permitted to see. Her old nurse, a woman much trusted for her wisdom, had given a solemn warning on her deathbed years before: that Shobhani would become the admiration of the whole city, and would die a widow before she had ever truly become a wife. From that hour her father had kept her like a pearl locked in its casket, forbidden even the sight of the street below, and had vowed to himself never to outlive her — going so far as to fix, in his own mind, the manner and place of his own eventual death, long before any of it seemed remotely necessary.

Fire in the house forces the hidden girl into view

But Fate, the Baital observed to Vikram, strikes down the vulture soaring above the clouds and follows the worm into the earth and finds the fish at the bottom of the sea — how then should any mortal expect to escape its reach? As the condemned chief passed beneath the old householder's windows on his way to the cross, a fire broke out suddenly in the women's apartments of the house, driving every terrified inmate, Shobhani among them, into the rooms that looked directly down upon the street. Below, the crowd's massed voices rose like a single living thing: This is the thief who has robbed the whole city — let him tremble now, for Randhir will surely crucify him! And so, for the first time in her sheltered life, the girl who had been hidden from the world found herself staring straight down into it, at the very moment the world's cruelest spectacle was passing directly beneath her window, no more than a few feet from her face.

The condemned man's proud face breaks Shobhani's heart

In beauty and bravery of bearing, in strength and simple courage, no man in Chandrodaya could match the captured thief, who, magnificently dressed for his own execution, looked despite the disgrace of his cavalcade like the son of some proud king. He bore the mob's jeers with an unmoved face, calm and steady while the whole city around him seethed with excitement at his fall — until the single word tremble reached his ears, and something in him broke: his lips quivered, his eyes flashed with sudden fire, and deep lines gathered between his brows. It was at that exact instant that Shobhani, watching from her window not six feet above his upturned face, felt his look of wrath strike through her like a bolt of lightning. She marked every line of his handsome features, and something in her that had never before been permitted to look at any man gave way entirely. She tore herself from the window and ran, breathless, straight to her father. Go this moment, she told him, and get that thief released!

Her father refuses, and Shobhani threatens her own life

Her father stared at her in disbelief. That thief has been pilfering and plundering the whole city, he said, and by his doing the king's own archers were defeated in the field. Why, then, at my asking, should our gracious Raja Randhir release such a man? But Shobhani, nearly beside herself, would not be reasoned with. If giving up everything you own could persuade the Raja to release him, then do it now, this instant, she said. And if he will not come to me freed, then I have no choice but to give up my own life. She covered her head with her veil and sank into the deepest despair a girl who had never before wanted anything from the world could feel, while her father, hearing what she had said, burst into a cry of grief himself and hurried at once from the house to throw himself before the king — a wealthy man reduced, in a single afternoon, to begging for the life of a condemned stranger to save the daughter he had guarded his whole life for exactly this kind of ruin.

Four lakhs of rupees cannot buy the thief his life

O great king, the old householder cried, prostrating himself before Randhir, be pleased to accept four lakhs of rupees, and release this thief. But the king, who had crawled through filth and fought for his own life to bring this criminal to justice, was not a man to be moved by gold. He has robbed my entire city, Randhir answered flatly, and by his hand my own guards were destroyed in the field. I cannot, by any means, release him. The old man saw at once that the Raja was exactly as inexorable as he had feared — unmoved by tears, unmoved by bribes, and unmoved even by the cruel and inexplicable fate now closing around his own daughter. He returned home with something like fire burning in his chest, and found Shobhani waiting. Daughter, he told her, I have said and done everything that could be done, and it has availed me nothing with the king. Now, then — we die. She said nothing back, only listened, and understood exactly what he meant, and did not try to talk him out of it.

Nailed to the cross, the thief hears strange news

While the girl and her father spoke their last words to one another, the guards had already led the thief the full round of the city and out through the gates to stand before the waiting cross. The messengers of death arrived from the palace, and the executioners began driving the nails into his limbs one by one. He bore the agony the way a brave man bears anything unavoidable, in silence, his jaw set — until word reached him of what the old householder's daughter had done and offered on his behalf, a stranger willing to surrender everything she owned, and finally her own life, for a man she had glimpsed for a single instant from a burning window. At that news the condemned thief threw back his head and wept bitterly, as though his very heart were bursting inside him — and then, almost in the same breath, while the nails were still being driven into his flesh, he broke into open, hearty laughter, as though at some private feast rather than his own execution.

The dying man's laughter leaves the whole crowd baffled

Every soul gathered to watch the execution fell silent with astonishment at the sound. A man could weep at such a moment and no one would think it strange — but to laugh, freely and heartily, with the iron already piercing his flesh and death only hours away, seemed to defy every reason a crowd could invent for it. No one standing at the foot of that cross could account for it, and the whispering that ran through the assembled thousands carried no answer, only bewilderment, as the thief's laughter faded and the long, cruel business of his dying continued exactly as Randhir had decreed it should — slow, deliberate, and drawn out for as many hours as his body could be made to endure. It was, the Baital told Vikram with evident satisfaction at having reached the heart of his riddle at last, a mystery that would outlast the thief's own death by a considerable distance, and one that not a single onlooker that evening had been equal to solving.

Shobhani declares herself the dead man's wife in spirit

When the thief died at last, Shobhani, who considered herself married to him in spirit though they had never exchanged a single word, began reciting to herself the old sayings of a faithful wife. There are, she told herself, thirty-five million hairs upon the human body, and a woman who ascends her husband's pyre shall dwell that many years in paradise; and as the snake-catcher draws the serpent bodily from its hole, so does a devoted wife draw her husband up out of hell itself, rejoicing beside him even if his crimes have sunk him into torment and dreadful bondage. No other duty remained open to a virtuous woman after her lord's death, she reminded herself, except to cast herself into the same flame that consumed him — and any woman who declined that fire, through all her future rebirths, would never be spared from returning to life again in the body of some lesser female creature. And so the beautiful Shobhani, virgin and self-declared wife both at once, resolved to burn, and so make her husband's next life certain.

Shobhani proves her resolve before the funeral pyre is lit

To prove that her resolve was no passing grief but true and settled purpose, Shobhani thrust her own finger into a torch's flame and held it there until it charred to a cinder without so much as a tremor crossing her face, and then bathed solemnly in the nearest stream to purify herself for what was to come. A pit was dug and a bed of green logs laid across it, heaped high with hemp, pitch, dry faggots, and clarified butter to build the pyre. The thief's body, anointed, washed, and dressed in new clothes, was laid upon the mound. Shobhani prayed that she might dwell in paradise with her husband for as many years as there were Indras yet to reign, attended there by the dancers of heaven. She gave away her ornaments and small gifts of grain to those gathered around her, tied cotton thread about both wrists, set two new combs in her hair, painted her forehead, and knotted parched rice and cowrie shells into the end of her cloth to distribute as she walked seven slow circles around the waiting pyre.

A blessed, easy death claims the merchant's daughter

When her seven circles were complete, Shobhani climbed the heap of wood herself, sat down upon it without needing cords or levers or any man's help to hold her there, drew the thief's head into her lap, and calmly ordered the pile lit. The crowd surrounding the pyre set the fire in several places at once, beat their drums, blew their conch shells, and raised the great triumphant cry of Hari bol! Hari bol! as straw, pitch, and clarified butter were poured freely onto the flames. But Shobhani's death, the Baital noted, was what the old texts call a blessed and easy one: not one part of her body was seen to move after the fire caught, and in truth she seemed to have died in that same instant before the flame itself ever reached her, as though her spirit had simply chosen to leave rather than wait to be taken. The girl who had never once been permitted outside her father's garden walls in life had, in death, become the single most public spectacle the city of Chandrodaya had witnessed in years.

The old householder follows his daughter into death

News of his daughter's death reached the old householder soon after, and by what the Baital called the blessing of her decease, he resolved at once to keep the vow he had made so long before — never to outlive her. He had, over the years, prepared exactly the instrument for it: a blade shaped like a half-moon, honed to a razor's edge, fitted precisely to the curve of the back of his own neck, with a chain fastened to each end like the beam of a balance scale. He sat down, closed his eyes, had his body rubbed with the purifying clay of the sacred river Vaitarani, and murmured the proper final incantations over himself without a trace of hesitation. Then, placing his feet upon the far ends of the two chains, he gave a single sudden, violent jerk of his neck, and his severed head rolled from his shoulders onto the ground before him. A happy death, the Baital pronounced with evident approval, for a man who had spent his whole life dreading exactly this ending and had finally arranged it entirely on his own terms.

The Baital falls silent, then poses his riddle to Vikram

The Baital fell quiet after this, as though turning over in its own mind the fortunate rebirth the old householder had thereby secured for himself through so deliberate and calm a death. It was young Prince Dharma Dhwaj, walking at his father's side through the dark, who broke the silence first, unable to hold back his curiosity any longer. But what could the thief have been laughing at, sire? the boy asked. King Vikram, still turning the whole strange tale over without any great care, answered almost without thinking. At the prodigious folly of the girl, my son, he said. It was, though neither of them yet knew it, exactly the kind of careless answer that always cost Vikram his hard-won prize — and the Baital, sensing its opening at once, seemed to hum with satisfaction from within its wrapping of cloth, already anticipating the pleasure of correcting a king twice over: once for missing the truth, and once more for the escape that missing it was about to buy.

The vampire declares Vikram's answer wrong once again

I am indebted to your majesty once more, the Baital burst out, its voice bright with mockery, for releasing me from this uncomfortable position slung across your back — but the Raja's penetration, I fear, is once again entirely at fault. It would not do, the vampire continued, to leave the young prince and heir laboring under so false an impression of the matter; and so, before making its own departure, it would explain properly why the brave thief had burst into tears at the very moment the nails were driven into him, and why, in almost the same breath, he had laughed. Vikram said nothing, but his jaw set, and he did not slow his stride through the dark trees, already half-suspecting what silence and patience were about to cost him this time, while the Baital, in no hurry at all now that the trap was sprung, savored the telling of its answer exactly as much as it savored watching a king's face when he heard it.

The Baital reveals why the dying thief wept

He wept, said the Baital, because he reflected, even as he stood nailed to his own cross, that he could never in this life or any other requite the kindness of a girl willing to surrender everything she possessed in the world, and finally her own life besides, to save a stranger she had glimpsed for a single instant from a burning window. That thought — that so complete a gift had been offered him with no possible way for him to repay it before he died — grieved him more deeply, in that moment, than the iron driven through his own flesh. A man may bear great pain for himself well enough; it is the debts of the heart he cannot discharge that break him. And so the thief, brave enough to take his own execution without a single cry, wept like a child at the thought of a devotion he had done nothing whatsoever to earn, and could never now, in the little time left to him, find any way on this earth to answer.

And then, the vampire explains, why he laughed

Then, the Baital went on, it struck him as passing strange that a woman should begin to love him only when the last grains of sand in his life had very nearly run out — that the ways of the turning heavens are wondrous indeed, bestowing wealth upon the miser who cannot bring himself to spend it, wisdom upon the wicked man who will only turn it to some worse purpose, a beautiful and devoted wife upon the very fool least able to protect or deserve her, and fertilizing rain upon barren, stony hills that can never grow so much as a blade of grass in thanks for it. And thinking over the sheer, absurd unfairness of it all — that such a gift should fall to him, of all men, at the one moment in his life when it could do him no earthly good whatsoever — the gallant and doomed thief could not help himself, and laughed aloud, freely and honestly, at the great cosmic joke being played upon him even as he died of it.

The vampire's parting words, then a sudden vanishing

Before I return to my siras-tree, the Baital continued, its tone turning light and pleased with itself now that its true answer had been delivered, as I am about to do, thanks entirely to your majesty's unenlightened reply just now — let me observe that men may laugh and weep, or weep and laugh, over anything at all in this world: over their neighbors' deaths, which as a rule concern them not in the least, right down to their own final ends, which concern them very much indeed. For my own part, I make a habit of laughing at everything, since laughter enlivens the brain, exercises the lungs, improves the countenance, and — Here the vampire's voice sharpened with sudden, gleeful mischief. — for the moment, good-bye, Raja Vikram! This time the king was ready, forewarned by long and bitter experience, and he had already shifted the bundle from his back to beneath his own arm, pressing it there with all the strength he had, determined that this once, at least, the creature would not simply slip away into the dark.

Even a crushing grip cannot hold the vampire fast

It made no difference at all. Grip it as tightly as he might, Vikram felt the shape beneath his arm thin, twist, and simply flow out and away from him like smoke escaping a closed fist, and in the space of a single heartbeat the Baital was gone — flown back to its siras-tree exactly as it always did, leaving behind only an empty length of cloth hanging limp and weightless across the king's shoulder, precisely where a corpse's dead, cold weight had been pressing down on him not a moment before. For one long moment Vikram simply stood there in the dark forest, saying nothing at all, his son beside him, the empty wrapping swaying slightly in the night air where a demon's body should have been. There was no anger in his stillness, and no despair either — only the grim, wordless recognition of a man who has failed at the exact same task in the exact same way more times now than he cared to count, and who understood perfectly well what came next, because it always came next.

Without a word, the king turns back into the dark

Vikram did not curse, and he did not sink down onto the forest path in weariness, though he had earned the right to both. He simply turned, without speaking a single word to Dharma Dhwaj, and began retracing the long route back the way they had come — back past the same trees, the same turns in the same black path, the boy following close at his father's side in a silence that had by now become its own kind of ritual between them. When they reached the siras-tree once more, Vikram climbed it exactly as he had climbed it every time before, found the Baital already hanging back among its branches as though it had never left at all, cut the vampire down a second time with the same patient, unhurried strokes of his blade, and wrapped it once more in the cloth slung across his back. Then, without complaint, without so much as a sigh, he set his face back toward the sorcerer waiting in the distant charnel-ground, and began the long walk over again from the very beginning.

The vampire, already talking, begins a brand-new tale

He had scarcely gone a dozen paces back down the dark path, the empty night pressing close around him and his son once more, when a voice sounded behind him from the bundle on his back — the same dry, mocking, endlessly talkative voice, already warming up for more. The Baital, restored to its accustomed perch across Vikram's shoulders as though the whole business of vanishing and being caught again were merely the polite preliminary to its real business, wasted no time at all in beginning something new. Your majesty, it said, with every appearance of relish, as if the two of them were simply resuming a conversation interrupted rather than starting a night's ordeal all over again from nothing — and Vikram, saying nothing back, walked steadily on into the darkness with the weight of the demon once more settled against him, bound now for whatever fresh riddle waited at the far end of this next telling.