Chapter One - Richard Lewis

Where would Dharma have taken her?
He cut the headlights. The darkness below was not absolute. Here and there in the
village the faint speck of lantern lights punctuated the blackness. Reed could hear a
cacophony of dogs barking and yapping and yowling. On the road below, headlights
suddenly stabbed the night, and the rumble of a truck drifted up the hill. In the back of
the truck stood several men carrying burning torches, the flames illuminating a dozen
other comrades. The truck stopped on the side of the road, and the men jumped out to an
greater frenzy of barking dogs. The torches' light bounced off the white wash of the
Gerwani secretariat. There rose the cry of men on the hunt, swarming the doors with
crowbars.
"Out you Gerwani whore! Out out!"
Desak. Was she in the house?
Reed snapped on his headlights and sped down the twisty road. Near the bottom,
he overran the beam and hit a pothole that ripped into the front tire. It instantly went flat,
freezing the steering. Reed cursed in frustration but neither cursing nor frustration would
fix a flat. He got out the spare and jack and placed his flashlight on a flat rock. Fifteen
minutes later, his shirt soaked with sweat, he tightened the sparel's last lug.
Fifteen minutes. Enough time for the Gerwani secretariat to be in flames, tongues
of fire licking out the smashed windows and eating up the torn doors and ceiling rafters.
A part of the roof collapsed in a shower of sparks.
The truck was no longer there.
Reed didn't waste any time looking for Desak.
The cockfights at the death temple. Dharma saying that one day they'd offer to
Durga a superior sacrifice. Of human blood.
Reed hurtled the jeep along the oxcart track toward the temple, and braked to a
stop behind the truck, parked off to the side in tall elephant grass. Jumping out, he
sprinted to the temple. The underside of the banyan tree's shaggy canopy caught the glow
of torch fires. At the edge of shadow, Reed halted.
A dozen torches were stuck on bamboo poles, ringing the graveyard, their flames
flickering to a breeze. Two ranks of women knelt nude in the dirt, their hands tied behind
their backs. They faced away from Reed. He didn't immediately see Naniek among them.
Several of the women were weeping and keening, but the others were silent. They were
loosely circled by men in black shirts, machetes and spears in their hands. Back cloth
swathed their heads. Reed recognized three of them as lads from the palace, their faces
avid with a shiny heat hotter than the torch fire. Their prince Mantera was with them,
unarmed, looking ill and uneasy. Reed dismissed him with the glance, his attention now
on Dharma. The farmer stood with spread legs facing the women, his broad thick feet
rooted deep as if he'd sprung up from the earth. His face held no heated glee but an
implacable will as he pointed a straight-bladed keris.
"One of you is Luhde Srikandi," he said in low hard voice. "You have made you
foul nest in our village. Confess. Tell us and the lives of your comrades will be spared.
Who of you is Luhde Srikandi?"
Near the center of the row, one of the women rose gracefully to her feet. "I am."
Naniek, her arms tied pinned behind her back, uncaring of her nakedness.
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