Lips Touch: Three Times(11)
Author: Laini Taylor

There was a tonic the demons brewed to keep their ancient flesh whole when they passed through the flames. More than fifty herbs and barks went into it, along with the mixed waters of sacred rivers. Once, many years ago, Vasudev had forgotten to drink his daily dose and he’d been burned passing through the Fire. Half his face had remained this vivid crimson ever since, and when he went up into the living world, children stared at him. And while he had never been overly disposed to spare their souls before, he began to become downright perverse about it, culling the young at every opportunity. Even when some more likely candidate might be lying by — an ailing grandparent flush with memories of a long life, for example — he would take the child instead, every time.

Yama, the Lord of Hell, had seen that some balance was called for, and he had appointed Estella to parley on behalf of the children. For more than forty years now she had served as Ambassador to Hell.

She calmly sipped her tea and said, "Ten." "Ten?" Vasudev chuckled. "How sentimental of you. What would people say? They’d call it a miracle." "A miracle never hurt anyone."

He thought it over. "Ten children clambering out of the rubble, white with the dust of their ruined village. Those great dark eyes of theirs … No. It’s too many. It’s too rosy. The little beasts will come to expect to survive. I’ll give you five. Or, if you’re game," he said, his small eyes glinting, "we can spice things up with a little curse."

"I despise your curses," Estella said with a shudder, then added, after a pause, "Eight."

"Eight?" Vasudev scoffed. "No, I don’t think so. Not today. You can have five, or you can let me have some fun."

Estella felt a weight settle on her heart. Vasudev got in these peevish moods sometimes, and she knew he would dig in his heels now, and tomorrow, and the next day, until he had his fun, and she never knew what form his "fun" might take. He might give her a few extra children in the bargain, but only on the condition they grow forked tails, or never fall in love, or wake screaming every night for the rest of their lives. He had endless imagination for curses.

Wearily, wearily, Estella asked, "What do you have in mind?"

Vasudev laughed and swung his little legs in his chair. His feet didn’t quite reach the ground. "I’ll tell you what I have in mind. You can have your ten Kashmiri brats …for free …"

"Free?" Estella repeated. No soul was ever free. Every child she saved she purchased in trade. It was her own dark work to select those who would die in their place, and she had an ever-changing list of the wicked from whom to choose. High up on it now were a slave trader in the Aravalli Hills and a captain in Calcutta who had kicked his groom to death because his horse threw a shoe. Heart attack, drowning, a fall from a horse, they would meet such ends as that. Estella always dealt sudden deaths, even to those who most deserved lingering ones.

This was the office she had performed since she was a young widow and had found her way down to Hell on her own, like Orpheus of myth. Unlike Orpheus, though, who had charmed his way past the three-headed dog and enchanted Persephone with his lyre, Estella had had no music at her fingertips with which to win Yama’s sympathy. He had not given her her young husband to guide back up to the world. Instead, he had given her this job to do. It was an ugly job — earthquakes, floods, pestilence, murder, souls slipping always through her fingers — and her resentful demon counterpart took every opportunity to make it uglier.

"No, really," he insisted. "Free! Ten children shall survive and no one shall die in trade for it! All you have to do is deliver a curse I’ve been dreaming up. The Political Agent’s wife, the songbird, you know the one? She’s had another brat and the christening is tonight. Were you invited? No? Well, that oughtn’t stop you. Here is what I want you to do …"

He told her his idea.

Estella blanched. "No!" she said at once, appalled. "No? No7. All right then, how about this? I’ll give you all of them. Every child in that village!" "Every … ?"

"Every last brat will live! How can you say no to that?"

She couldn’t say no, as well he knew. She would have nightmares over this curse for the rest of her life, and Vasudev knew that too, and that was his favorite thing about it. After a long, miserable silence, Estella nodded.

Vasudev chuckled and chortled and went off whistling, leaving Estella to her work. Still pale, she took a flask from her pocket and drank down her daily dose of the tonic Vasudev delivered to her, lest she too be burned passing through the Fire. Then she walked slowly into it. When she reemerged some time later, she carried the souls of two babies in her arms and the older children walked behind her in a row like ducklings. Silently, they followed her out of Hell.

And far away in the mountains of Kashmir, the rescuers, on the very verge of giving up, unearthed a pocket of air and pulled twenty-two children out of the rubble alive.

It was a miracle.

TWO The Curse

A t the British parties in Jaipur, gossip swirled wild on eddies of whiskeyed breath. The old bitch was a popular topic of. It was generally agreed that she had been in India too long. It had "gotten to her." She spoke the native tongue, and not just Hindustani but also Rajasthani and a touch of Gujarati, and she had even been heard to haggle once in Persian! It suggested to the British a grubby intimacy with the place, as if she took India into her very mouth and tasted it, like a lover’s fingers. It was indecent.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, she ate mangoes in the bazaar with the natives, juice dribbling down her chin, and was said to imbibe a tonic prepared for her daily by a dreadful little man with a burn scar over half his face. She touched beggars and had even been seen carrying rag-swaddled infants home with her in her arms. It was rumored that her handsome factotum had been one such baby, which in itself bespoke a lifetime in this land — a lifetime of rescued beggar babes grown to manhood.

He was always at her side, lordly as a raja and unsmiling as an assassin, with a dangerous gleam in his eye and odd bulges about his tailored suits that hinted at concealed knives. Plenty of whispers went round town about him — that he could speak with tigers, that he had a forked tail he wore tucked down one trouser leg (the left), that he had been seen crossing a street without his shadow, and that he would do anything for the old bitch. Even the most shameless of gossips can inadvertently hit upon truths. He would do anything for her, and had done, many times.

Pranjivan was his name, which meant "life," and Estella had given him both: his name and his life. She had carried him out of the Fire in her arms when he was a tiny brown child too young to follow on his own two feet. He alone knew all her secrets, and aside from his household duties, he spied for her. He sent out his shadow across the land — she had taught him how when he was a boy — and he maintained detailed lists of the wicked. He helped Estella decide who would die, in order that children might live. And when she emerged from Hell each day through a trapdoor in the shade of a massive peepal tree, he was there waiting for her with the rickshaw men, ready to take her home.