Chandi stirred beside him.
“Warmer now?”
He lay back against the pillow and took a long, shuddering breath. Relief, edged with fear, rippled through him. He touched his lower abdomen, where metal teeth had ripped out and stolen his Agni.
“Yes,” he said.
Chandi drew her chair closer. Tired shadows ringed her eyes, but her gaze was bright and alert.
“You—”
“I know,” he said quickly. Then, in a softer voice, “I know.”
Chandi said nothing, but her eyes were still fixed on him like the sharp, dark shards of ore they found underneath the Sona mountains.
After wrapping her hand in a scarf, she took off the coals and placed them back in a metal pot. The room was so warm he could feel his skin tingle, as if every fiber of his being was drinking in the heat. Already, he could feel his strength returning.
Samson sat up. Chandi did not retie the scarf around her neck, and he could see sweat beading on her forehead. The room was too hot for her.
“You should rest—” he began.
“It took longer to revive you this time,” she said. Her mouth was pressed into a thin line, her face pinched with an inwardness that he knew,after many years of fighting together, meant she had been chewing on a topic for some time.
“How long?”
“Five hours.”
A year before, it had been one. A cold panic broke over him, gooseflesh prickling across his chest. He reached for his shirt with a forced calm.
“It’s just that I pushed too hard. That’s it. No reason for concern.”
Chandi simply stared at his chest, at the scar that scraped down his left pec to his lower abdomen. It had turned a vicious crimson like fresh blood.
Chillingly soft, she said, “At the rate you’re going, how long will it take until your Agni withers away?”
“It can be replenished,” he said, but he did not meet her eyes. “I just need fire prana. And we have the Eternal Fire now. If I sit in the flames and soak in its prana, I’ll be as good as new.”
“You’re expending your Agni far more than you are recovering it, like pouring water into a leaky bucket.” She sat forward so that he was forced to meet her gaze. “A sun’s worth. That’s what you estimated was left of your Agni before it…”
She did not say it. She did not have to.
Samson felt the panic resurface, this time with a chill that crept down the back of his neck. He touched below his navel, the point of his Agni and the most powerful chakra. Every person had seven main chakras, seven centers in which they could channel the power of the heavens and achieve somethingmore. There had been a time when gods walked the earth. A time when dragons and great creatures raced through the skies, and his people built their kingdoms in the clouds.
“But men began to desire the physical pleasures of the earth,” his mother had said. They sat before their altar of the Great Serpent, incense wreathing around them, and he had wondered then if the smoke was the very breath of the Serpent, blessing them. “They fell to the illusions of mortal life, and their chakra points closed. They forgot about the Great Serpent and Her lesser gods. So She faded. And men began to walk among men, not gods.”
The shells of her headdress tinkled softly as she turned to him. Gently, she had touched his navel.
“But you, my cursed Ruru, are blessed by Her. And your chakra hereis still open. If you focus, you can summon Agni through it. But you must keep it balanced. Whole.”
He had placed his little hand over hers, and replied solemnly, “Yes, Mama.”
He had spent suns under her guidance of opening his navel chakra until he felt an almost metaphysical spark in his body. Agni was not a physical object. It was a powermadephysical, a manifestation of the gods. He had learned to nurture and strengthen his navel chakra until his Agni flared with a sure, heady assurance that vibrated through his blood. Reminding him of his deathly, beautiful purpose.
He was a god.
But every day that his Agni grew, so did the promise of ruin.
That was his curse, and his gift.
