She looked down at his hands. He had not yet slid the ring onto her finger but clutched at it. She took a step back.
"Ana--" James started to say, reaching for her, feebly holding out the ring. "I'm sorry! I don't know what came over me. Please --"
She turned away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Something was happening to her. Something was building in her, rising. Her breath came faster. Her skin felt feverish. Eighteen years of calm were swept away in a sudden wild rush, like the monsoon floods that ravage mangrove islands and whisk tigers out to sea. She wrenched open the door and ran inside, across the ballroom to the piano where she closed the keyboard so quickly the pianist had to snatch his fingers out. The dancers faltered in their fox-trot and turned to her, bright-eyed, breathless, and smiling. She saw her mother, her sisters. In the doorway, with anguish on his face, was James.
Anamique took a deep breath, parted her lips, and began to sing. It was Isolde that welled forth as her voice at last burst from its cage. It was the "Liebestod," and James's eyes filled with tears. Anamique's voice was wizardry. Honey. The others had just time to register the perfection of it with a kind of stunned euphoria before, as Anamique had really always believed it would, the curse came true.
TEN A Masterpiece
Anamique's powerful voice filled the house and even reached across the garden to the servants' quarters. Not a soul survived her soaring "Liebestod." Crouched in the garden, Vasudev heard the singing and as it entered his ears, he lapsed into a befuddled fugue. But he couldn't die of it -- he hadn't been alive for centuries -- and after the singing ceased, he blinked and shook off his confusion. An incredulous smile unfurled across his face and he gave a great whoop and a caper and he skittered back down to Hell to be there to count the souls as they drifted in.
There could be no doubt about it: This curse was his masterpiece!
On the rooftop where it had been spying, Pranjivan's shadow swayed mournfully on its kite string. It drifted down to the ground to peer in the window. It hadn't heard the singing, of course, as shadows have no ears, but it had seen a white-clad khitmutgar with a full tray of sherbet dishes suddenly freeze mid-stride and crumple to the ground, dead. And the khitmutgar wasn't the only one.
Inside the ballroom the British were very still. They had sunk to the floor, some still joined in the embrace of the dance, leaning together on their knees like marionettes at rest. Others had fallen over, and the ladies' ankles, protruding from their skirts, were very pale. A fly sauntered down the bridge of a nose. All their eyes were open.
There was a small movement in the doorway -- Anamique's hand in James's hair as she cradled his head in her lap. She traced her fingertips over the planes of his face, across his jaw, feeling the roughness as she went against the grain. She touched the place where his dimples would be if he were to smile at her, which he wouldn't, she realized, ever again.
The whites of her eyes were wide rings around her irises, giving her the look of one startled from a nightmare. As Pranjivan's shadow watched, Anamique took a small ring from James's dead hands and slid it onto her finger, holding it up to the light so the tiny diamond sparkled.
Then she bent over him, pressed her face into the cooling flesh of his neck, and began to sob.
ELEVEN The Beautiful Fire
Sixty-three," Vasudev counted as the last of the partygoers and servants filed into the Fire. "Sixty-three!" He skipped around the tea table, jubilant. It had taken eighteen years, but it had been worth the wait and worth the gamble. Such finery the British had worn to their deaths! Dinner jackets and gowns, and the ladies' lacy trims and feathers had sputtered such pretty sparks as the Fire drew them in.
The demon was desperate to gloat and he thought he would have to go back up into the world and dart past Pranjivan to dance around Estella's deathbed, but as it turned out, he didn't have to go anywhere. Estella came to him.
Vasudev saw her coming down the long onyx tunnel and the sight of her momentarily robbed him of words. She could no longer walk. With its kite string trailing behind it, Pranjivan's shadow carried her in its arms as easily and as gently as the old bitch herself had cradled the many infants' souls she had gleaned from the Fire in her long, strange career in Hell. She looked so fragile. The pins had fallen out of her hair and it hung loose and dragged across the floor like a long skein of spun silver. But for all her fragility and dishevelment, her eyes burned with their old fury.
Vasudev's moment of speechlessness passed and he crowed, "My dear, how kind of you to come! Have you heard? Did you stop to see the bodies? Is it quite the talk of the town? Sixty-three! Sixty-three. I think we can all agree I win this round."
Estella hissed, "Vasudev, this cannot stand. It is out of all proportion!"
"Proportion? But what has proportion to do with anything? That's the beauty of spicy little curses such as these, Estella. You never know how they might play out. Don't get high and mighty now. You knew the rules!"
"Did Yama sanction your rules? Proportion is to be maintained. That is his rule."
"You never cared about that rule when I let you have a few extra brats now and then, did you?" Vasudev sneered. "You didn't mind a little curse so much then, when the lack of proportion was in your favor. You're just a sore loser."
Estella started to respond but there was nothing to say. He was right. She had tolerated his perverse game of curses to serve her own ends, and this was the fruit of it: scores dead, and an innocent girl turned murderer of everyone she knew. In the shadow's arms, Estella's frail body sagged with defeat. There was nothing she could do. Saving these souls was beyond her. She had walked out of the Fire for the last time. When next that beautiful inferno enfolded her, it would be to cleanse her own sins and melt away her memories, and she wouldn't be coming back out until Yama set her soul in a new body, human or beast. That was how it worked. The Fire took in souls and made them new, and Yama sleeved them into new bodies as he saw fit. Estella might be reborn as a tigress or a river dolphin or an ibex that could balance on tiptoe on a mountaintop. Or she might be born as a woman again, perhaps one who could have love all her life instead of only the memory of it.
She found herself now staring at the flames with a look of longing.
She was ready; she had been ready for a long time. Her soul craved the Fire. Only one thing had kept her in this limbo of lingering death -- a far worse death than she herself had ever inflicted on the wicked -- and that was Vasudev. For sixty years, with the power Yama had given her, she had staved off the worst of the demon's bloodthirst, but she knew it had been building up in him and that it would find its terrible release the moment he was free of her.