Featured image: Character designs from Magical Girl Ore.
This is a section from the draft of Rag & Muffin, my next novel to appear after Dead to Rites. This passage may or may not be in the final version in this form:
Only one spot in Godtown did not swell with the cosmic beat nor touch the underside of heaven, but remained dark—a mere part of earth or perhaps of something lower than earth. That was the Talbot Refinery, which stood near the Green Line on the edge of the Elysian-occupied West End.
In the refinery, workers—mostly outcaste marjaras unable to find decent jobs anywhere else—committed the worst blasphemy known in this world: They took the Tuaoi Stones from the mines with which the Elysians had profaned the sacred Vindhya Mountains, and they performed unspeakable deeds to alter those pure crystals into something base and ignoble in order to feed them to the Elysians’ demon-possessed automata.
More powerful than any mundane science, the magic called Runetech had made the Elysians the masters of the world, but the ghosts in their machines hungered for profaned Tuaoi Stones. Thus, in the midst of the holy city, the Talbot Refinery was an outcrop of hell, and it alone could resist the flurry of religious ecstasy and exultation that beset the rest of Godtown every morning.
Just as Meru closed, Talbot’s portal, like a mouth of the underworld, opened to swallow a long string of buses containing the workmen for the morning shift. Like giant jacks dropped from the sky, anti-tank caltrops flanked the road leading to the refinery’s heavily fortified entrance. In a booth at the gate, an underpaid and overworked human babu did his best to check the workers’ and drivers’ papers, which were handed to him—with much shouting and babbling—through half-opened windows along the buses’ sides.
Looming over it all like a colossus and casting its stark and menacing shadow across this scene was an enormous machine, vaguely man-shaped. Thick, bulky armor enclosed it, and it bristled with weapons ranging from conventional autocannons and missile-launchers to rune-powered accelerators and psi-blasters. Every once in a while, one of the intricate symbols carved into the machine’s armor glowed blue or green, letting all below know that it was alive—and that it was watching them. Somewhere deep in its guts, dangling from anti-shock suspensors, was a thing that used to be human.
In spite of this security, a mass of men and women seethed about the gate. Most of these were the poor and starving desperate for work, even work in Talbot. In Godtown, crowds were everywhere, and not even the tightest security could keep them at a distance forever. Surrounding the crowd like a cloud of smoke was the din of a hundred languages, of greetings and curses and pleas shouted all at once. The noise and the press of bodies were thickest around the babu’s booth, where the harried clerk struggled desperately to stamp the sheaves of papers handed him from the buses while ignoring the cries of “Babuji! Babuji!” coming from the people pounding against the glass.
#
In Bus 27, now third from the gate, sat Shringesh Bhuiyan. A marjara, he came from a family of zamindars—landholders—and had known wealth and prestige in his youth. When he inherited his estate, he proved more prone to gambling his assets than managing them, and a series of drought years followed by the Elysian invasion had been enough to leave him destitute. Like many who were tired of starving by trying to live from the land, he had made his way to Godtown—where he instead starved by trying to live on the streets.
In the end, he sold his soul to the refinery.
Like Shringesh, most of the bus’s other occupants were marjaras, but most, unlike him, were outcastes, their gray fur filthy and their hungry, doglike faces blank.
The outcaste Dalit lolling in the seat to his left shifted and pushed up against Shringesh’s shoulder. Shringesh’s stomach churned with indignation, and his face tensed in anger. His lips pulled back from his fangs.
But the Dalit did not move again, so he gradually relaxed. After all, he was already impure: He touched Dalits every day.
To his right sat a man who had fallen even further than he, a Brahmin with clean white fur. The Brahmin dressed like every other man in the bus, in a turban and a dingy kurta with duck overalls, but his expression was serene. His thick palms rested in his lap.
Shringesh stared at him for half a minute.
“How do you stand it?” Shringesh finally asked.
The Brahmin stirred and blinked at Shringesh as if surprised by his existence. In a low, dry voice, he said, “There is a story told of the sage Shankaracharya that once, while he was walking, an untouchable Chandala stood in his path. Shankaracharya imperiously ordered the Chandala to step aside, but the Chandala replied, ‘If there is only one God, how can there be several kinds of men?’ Realizing the truth of nonduality, Shankaracharya fell at the Chandala’s feet and worshiped him.”
Apparently thinking this sufficient, the Brahmin rolled his shoulders, closed his eyes, and returned to his repose.
Shringesh did not think it sufficient.
His eyes roamed the bus until they alighted on one of the few humans in it, a young man named Yuyutsu, who sat across the aisle. Yuyutsu was minding his own business, slumped down in his seat with his eyes closed, catching a few last moments of rest. He was dressed just as the marjaras were, though he wore a bulky coat atop his overalls.
Shringesh clenched his teeth and rose partway out of his seat. He said loudly, “What I do not understand is why we have a human among us when humans are responsible for all of this.”
Beside him, the Brahmin released a barely audible groan.
Yuyutsu opened one eye. As a human, he was significantly smaller than a grown marjara, and he had no sharp teeth or claws. Beside the other men on the bus, he looked like a child. Nonetheless, he neither bestirred himself nor showed any sign of fear.
“Do I look Elysian to you?” he asked in an accent that marked him as a Godtown native. “I am in the same condition you are in. Have you a wife, children?”
“Of course—”
“I used to be married to a marjara woman. We had two hybrid daughters, and we were preparing to give them to temples to be kumaris. But I lost my job when the Elysians came, and then we could not afford the dowries. I was down to selling my blood for money. I was weak, sick, angry—I admit that one day I took what little I had made and spent it on drinking kallu. I drank until very late and until very drunk. When I finally made my way home, I found my youngest crying and bleeding. My wife, you see, had taken money from a drug dealer, who put a drill in my daughter’s head to pull out Heaven Seed so he could sell it on the street. My wife told me she had to do it or our girls would starve. I was drunk and angry and raving. I struck her many times. Though she was a marjara, she did not resist. I walked out. I was too ashamed to walk back.”
He crossed his arms and closed his eye again before he added, “That was years ago. They are probably dead now. If you wish to blame me for what I have done, then blame. But do not blame me for what others have done.”
Shringesh stared for a minute, jaw clenched, before slowly lowering himself back into his seat.
The Brahmin sat up, turned to the window, and peered out. Shringesh followed his gaze. People crowded the bus, and the throng made a constant din. The babu was no longer taking papers at his booth, but instead occupied himself solely with shooing away those who begged him for work.
“We are not moving,” the Brahmin said. “Something is wrong.”
The window was small, so Shringesh could not push his head out to get a better look, but by craning his neck, he could just barely glimpse one black, armored arm of the giant runemech standing sentinel above the gate.
The bus door opened with a hiss, and the front of the bus tilted downward as heavy feet clanked against its steps. The driver cowered. Everyone else in the bus sat forward and grew tense.
Through the narrow doorway stepped a monster made of metal. Heavy, squarish, painted in urban camouflage, covered in bizarre symbols, and cradling an enormous rifle in its bulky arms, it walked down the aisle with a slow, deliberate tread.
A nametag on its breastplate said, “R. Sykes,” but the thing inside the armor wasn’t human—not now, anyway, for it was linked to the dark and hungry spirits trapped in the armor’s runes.
This was runearmor, a suit of living metal encasing what was once a man. It was a miniature version of the huge monstrosity standing guard outside.
The metal monster had no eyes or portals visible on its helmet, only a flat face featureless except for the runes etched into its surface. Nonetheless, as Shringesh knew, any part of the machine’s exterior could serve as a sensor, which the un-man called Sykes could connect directly to his visual cortex with merely a thought. He could see behind himself, or he could look out through his fingertips, or he could peer at the ground under the heels of his metal boots, merely by wishing to.
The armor increased Sykes’s strength a thousandfold, but like all runemachines, it was almost silent, having no power source, no motor, no gyros, and no hydraulic system. Only the runes moved it. Every once in a while, one of the runes would glow like heated steel and emit a low, throbbing hum, but the machine otherwise made no sound.
The Brahmin, who had displayed no qualms about being surrounded by the unwashed and outcaste, now pulled his legs up into his seat and hissed under his breath.
“They’re vetalas, aren’t they,” Shringesh whispered, “haunting their machines?”
“Vetalas, perhaps,” the Brahmin murmured, “or pishachas. Either way, the Elysian runemachines are unholy.”
The vetalas were the spirits of those who had died without proper funeral rites: They possessed rotting corpses and fed on the flesh of the living. Some said the Elysian runesmiths had the power of calling up vetalas and binding them to the machines they made. Others had different theories. But even the Elysians themselves never supposed that the ghosts in their machines were anything other than malevolent.
The thing named Sykes walked slowly but purposely through the bus, which with every step groaned under his armor’s weight. Finally, he stopped between Shringesh and Yuyutsu. One of the runes on his chest sizzled, and a voice came forth:
“Our runemech has detected an unusual chemical signature on this bus.”
The voice was cold, mechanical; it was Sykes’s voice, but it wasn’t coming from his throat: Buried in the armor, Sykes could not move, not even to swallow his spit. His heart didn’t beat, and his lungs didn’t breathe; his flesh was just a corpse with the soul still in, for the armor had become his living body.
Sykes paused. Apparently having received a signal from his armor, he swiveled and pointed at Yuyutsu.
“Lift your hands above your head,” Sykes said, “and stand up.”
Yuyutsu’s face remained impassive. Without hesitation, he thrust a hand under his coat.
“May the Elysian Empire burn,” he said, “as Hanuman burned the demon city of Lanka.”
Shringesh tried to dive for him, but Sykes was in the way. With a crunch, Shringesh’s shoulder hit the armor and broke. Searing pain shot straight into his arm and down into his legs.
Then the world disappeared in a deafening roar and a flash of flame.
