The Architect and Her Assistant

“Have you ever killed a Rakshasa?” the boy said, his hands lingering above the fire.

She looked at him with ancient eyes and mouth gummed half shut. “No.” Around them, the desert wind howled in cacophonous unison with the hyenas.

“Then why did you join us?” Bronze tipped arrows glimmered in the firelight as restless shapes moved in the corners of her vision. The boy leaned against his bow, coppery skin swallowed by the darkness. 

“I used to make weapons. Terrible, awful weapons. Things you could never dream of.”

“Will you make them for us?”

She closed her eyes. Dark curls hung loose to her shoulders. Her feet twisted in the sand. “No, I will not.”

“Then you’re not much good, are you?” The boy grinned. “I hear you have to dip weapons in blood before you kill them.”

“Half a truth, twice a lie.” She chewed on a mint leaf, the taste sharp and rich, reminding her of times long gone. “Their magic stems from human blood.”

The boy studied her for a moment. “How do you kill a Rakshasa, then?”

“You steal their magic.” 

He frowned. “How do you steal it?”

She rubbed the scarred flesh on her wrists. “Die a bloodless death.”

✶

Maya was once an architect of the city Indrithpur. She had built a palace for the great king Zeravan which was the envy of all the civilized world. “Your illusions,” people would say, “are dazzling. I would walk into pools where I thought they were mirrors, and urinate on mirrors I thought were pools. The walls shimmered lacquer and gold, and your use of obsidian – simply enchanting.” 

Maya would nod. “Yes, the best architecture is meant to make a mockery of its denizens.”

And how they laughed, how they professed to adore her style, her artful way with magic. They would offer her blood wine – cultivated only from pure southern humans, the sweetest of all, tempered in their four seasons – and invite them to their revelry. But it was never for her. Her place was the shop, where a steaming cup of mint tea was always waiting for her.

Maya the architect grimaced as she crouched behind a thicket of creosote, overlooking the abyssal edge of some jutting mesa in the desert. Vultures skittered on the rocks nearby as lizards and beetles bandied through the reddish sand. There were no more galas, no cavorting, no gilded age of hedonistic overtures. 

There was the indignity of pissing behind a creosote bush in a wasteland.

She walked to her campsite and poured rocks over the ashes. Her reddish hair hung in tangled mats around her wide green ears and her fangs grew longer by the day. Maya could not remember the taste of blood. 

The Rakshasa laid her hand against the cold black stone of a shattered obelisk, its script scratched away by the passage of time. “Once upon a time,” she whispered into its unflinching countenance, “you were beautiful.” She looked around. “And yet, you were ordinary.” For it was a world of pretty, carelessly made things, taken for granted until it was broken.

✶

The woman nudged her mule along behind the chain of nobles and soldiers, all chattering about a hundred variegated subjects. Like flowers in bloom, they elicited her momentary interest before wilting into mulch for the bugs. “I’m the best hunter in my village,” the boy said, puffing his chest out. “I shot a buzzard from a half mile away, in flight.”

The woman tugged at the reins. “A Rakshasa is no buzzard.” 

“Shoot, I know. But that’s why they picked me. What I can’t figure is why they chose you, if you don’t intend to kill nobody or smith nothing.”

She looked over the rolling sand dunes. “This was farmland once. Green as the eye could see.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, I remember. Beautiful forests and lakes with water as blue as the sky. You could walk for miles and miles and never get lost. The roads wound through city streets where the houses were made of gold.”

The boy whistled. “How do you know that?”

The company came to a halt as the trackers examined the remnants of a campfire. She sniffed the air. Mint leaves and salt. “I built it.”

✶

Maya ran like she did as a child. Her feet rose wild out and flaying, kicking sand behind her in clouds as she sank with every step. She could smell humans, their musky scent tempered by the saccharine saltiness of that syrup within their veins. Her mind twisted, fighting against its own natural instincts. Fear and desire dueled one another, bare knives tearing at her soul like she had ripped open Yaro’s flesh, again, and again. 

She had never been proud. Always professed regret. Hugged her friend every time she did it. Promised her it would never happen again. They were friends. Slave was such an ugly word, wasn’t it? It did not define the relationship between two women of singular artistic genius.  

Exhausted, she took shelter beneath a dead palm tree as dark rolled in across the eastern sky. The cracks in the riverbed reflected the fractures in her mind as she ran her hands through her tangled hair, tugging at it like weeds in the dirt. “How did it come to this?” she mumbled to herself. “I was Maya. The architect. She was the assistant. The smith. Raw materials, blood. For my ideas. They were mine. They were mine.” The words became a mantra, mumbled over and over as though warding off the gods with their hands outstretched to rip her from this world.

It had all gone wrong when the new queen came to Indrithpur. “Zarani,” she whispered. “Zarani. Zarani. Zarani!” Her nails slashed out across the bark of the palm tree, sending splinters of wood flying in a pulpy shower. She screamed into the darkness, answered by the jackals and hyenas wise enough to stay away from her. Even weakened, no wild beast would come within a hundred yards of a Rakshasi.

✶

“She was not beautiful,” Yaro said. The boy looked back enraptured as she chewed on roast lizard. She spat juices onto the sand and wiped her mouth. “Zarani was a sturdy woman. Hard around her cheeks and mouth, and twenty-seven. Looked like some goatherd’s daughter. Comely enough, but no one knew why the Rakshasa king wanted her as his bride.”

“You met the Prophet,” the boy said. “You’re a blessing in a person.”

“Damn that, boy. There are no blessings. Prophet was a woman like any other. A woman with a vision.”

“She killed them all.” The boy took a swig from his waterskin. “She and Rudra. They slaughtered the Rakshasa. It’s true.”

“Not all of them.”

The boy hunched his shoulders. “Not all, yeah.” He stared at her. “You worked for one. Slaved, anyhow. She must’ve drunk your blood.”

“She did, yes.”

“And she was evil?”

The assistant hunched her shoulders together as the caterwauling of some wounded beast rang out into the vastness of the night. “She was a Rakshasi. Does that answer your question?”

He looked into the fire. “You helped them kill the Rakshasa. Wiped them out. Burned their gold city into a river of blood and shine.”

“Yeah.” Her chest ached with the memories of dead faces, images of people she’d once called friends.

“Was that evil?”

She didn’t answer. 

✶

The Prince of Suchinrat was descended from a long line of Rakshasa hunters. There were rumors that his ancestors had painted some drunks in green and red, glued horns to their heads and chins, and proclaimed them to be Rakshasa after peppering them with arrows and javelins. “Utter nonsense. Slander and bilious lies,” the Prince said, wheeling his horse about by the dry riverbed. “My ancestors marched with the Prophet. To doubt me is to doubt her.”

Protestations and contrition were offered for the most ignoble offense against the Prophet. The boy slicked back his dark hair and counted the arrows in his quiver astride his mare. “You figure he’s ever killed anything but farmers with pitchforks?”

“If he’s killed even a farmer, I’d be surprised,” Yaro replied. She surveyed the dead palm tree, its desiccated insides torn apart by the claws of some beast. The shape of the lacerations matched the scars that trailed down Yaro’s wrists. “She’s close.” She laid her hand on the wood. “Shallow cuts. Weak and tired.”

“They said she ripped open a child’s heart, on some farmstead around here. Drank his blood straight from the chest, tongue smacking and all.” The boy shivered. “Don’t get more evil than that.”

“Tell me this, boy,” the smith said. “What if someone took away your skill with the bow? Cut off your fingers. What would you do to get it back?”

He bit his lip and glanced over the arid wash, punctuated only by rocky escarpments and the occasional thorny shrub. “I suppose I’d do just about anything.”

She placed a mint sprig in her mouth and wondered if she’d been the same as him in her youth. Haughty and thirsty to prove himself, certain of her skills. “See that crow?” It circled over the bluffs to the east, at least a half mile off. “Shoot it down.”

“If I shoot it,” the boy said, chewing on his words, “will you forge me an arrowhead that can kill the Rakshasi?”

Yaro patted her mule’s mane as the trackers ran out into the riverbed. “Yeah,” she said, after a while. “This world doesn’t need the both of us.”

“Us?”

“Me and the Rakshasi.” She squinted at the crow, little more than a black speck. “Better loose now, lest he gets away.”

The boy slid down from his horse and set the longbow’s hard knot on the ground. He set a bronze tipped arrow with a cottonwood shaft and goose feather against the string. He placed his cheek close to the string and drew it back. The boy exhaled for a moment and a dread calmness settled into his deep black eyes. The arrow was silent as it rose, only screaming as it drew closer to its target, an arc wide over the vast and oceanic desert. 

The crow flew straight and fell straight, its dying squawk hanging over the land like a hoarse lament. Yaro kneed her mule’s sides and trotted into the wash. “Why do you want to kill the Rakshasi?”

He followed her, sweeping a leg over his horse in a smooth motion. “She gave you those.” His eyes lingered over her scars.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t, I guess.”

They cantered after the company of soldiers and nobles, the Prince baying like a hunting dog. Yaro paused for a moment and reached for her waterskin. “I will forge you an arrowhead. Stronger, more powerful, than any you have ever seen. If you shoot straight as you did with the crow, you will kill her.”

✶

They rode through canyons and alongside buttes. There was the glimpse of a figure over the horizon, flashing and disappearing with the sun and emerging once more in the mornings. She would appear from the sand and disappear, a reddish speck like the crow. They camped out in the shadow of a solitary dead tree or menhir and in the nights Yaro would work on the arrowhead. She held it over the fire and breathed in its scent as it melted under the forceful tug of her fingers from inches away. Yaro did not speak as she worked, nor did anyone speak to her.

On a morning of monotonous heat not unlike the others, there was the sound of a horn from far away. “We have her within our sights,” the Prince announced, rearing his horse. “She is in a sink not two miles east.” He was answered by a resounding charge of affirmation and chest thumping, the rituals of men about to die.

Yaro and the boy rode at the rear. “You know where we’re going?” he said.

She wrapped her fingers around the arrow in her satchel. “Yeah.” Her last weapon, meant to kill her first friend. They rode across the plain and up the dunes and looked down into the sink, the remnants of a dried lake and its floating buildings rising like bones from a grave.

Yaro stared out over the fallen palace. She could trace with her unassuming eye the places where towers and crenels and illusionary pools had stood, where hedgerows and everblooming flowers grew in patches and neatly curated rows. The angles remained where walls rose sharp from the flooded sand and her heart swelled with a tug of pride and nostalgia. 

“Is this the end for you?” she said, as her eyes noted a solitary figure in the ruins. Horsemen gathered on the dunes, arms raised and whoops rising as they prepared for the holy business of killing. “You were once my friend, Maya.” Her jaw stiffened and she reached into her satchel. “And yet you must die.”

✶

Maya dragged herself over boulders that sparkled like gemstones in the shadow of a collapsed building. Remnants of gilded spikes lay half-shattered in the shifting sands. “My King,” she whispered, straining sand through her fingers. “All that I built for you, crumbled to dust and bones. Where are your glories now, the might of our people? My illusions that bewitched the senses, touched the hearts of people, all for naught.”

Bitter tears leaked from her eyes as she staggered onwards, her bloody feet leaving a road for her pursuers to run her down and stick her full of pikes and swords. They were close now. Hoofbeats pulsed dully through the packed sand.

She came to the marble outline of a pool, now burgeoning with scuttling beetles and overgrown thistle. Maya crouched and ran her hands through the dirt, still wet from the old water pumps. She looked up and around the sand dunes that rose around her, boxing her in. A horseman appeared, solitary and dark against the blue sky. He was joined by another, and another, until she was beset on all sides by men with swords and spears bristling with grim certainty.

Her nails lengthened into claws and her skin hardened as the first rider bounded into the depression. “I was once an architect of Indrithpur. The greatest,” she snarled in her Rakshasi tongue. She swiped at him, knocking his sword aside.

His lacerated throat belched blood as his horse screamed and ran off into the ruins, the master hanging from one side, head dragging across the sand.

She licked his blood off her fingers and her nostrils flared. She had forgotten the taste of sweet, intoxicating blood. 

The Rakshasi saw the smith. She let out a snarl half rage and half grief and extended her arms wide as the surge of horsemen surged towards her, harbingers of time’s corrosive fingers. 

✶

She held an arrow out to the boy. “Forged from Rakshasi iron,” she said.

He looked at it, the black metal still rough and hacked around the edges. “I never heard of it.”

“Imbued with magic. The only way to kill a Rakshasi.” She rubbed her arms. “I forged it over the coals of a hot fire, with my own magic. You can’t fail to kill her. But wait until the right moment.”

He descended and nocked the arrow. The Prince and his men circled the beast, her reddish mane rising like spikes, hunched back splattered with that first misfortunate soul’s blood. Claws moved faster than the eye could follow, and man after man wheeled back clutching severed limbs and eye sockets where vitreous humor soaked their faces like egg yolk.

She met Maya’s eyes. Yaro’s lips hardened and she pulled back the sleeves of her shirt so the scars glowed in the reddish sun. The Rakshasi bared her teeth and hissed at her in that tongue she had once known so well. “I miss you, too,” the smith whispered.

Yaro’s body shrunk. The Prince yelled from the back of the line, urging his soldiers onward. Her claws snapped and fell off. She looked much like a normal woman now, albeit with fangs and grey skin. Her blood red eyes bulged. “Now, boy,” Yaro said.

The boy drew back his bow and let the arrow fly.

✶

Maya remembered the day Yaro had left. With the city burning, a river of molten gold consuming everything in its path, Yaro had run out into the chaos and bloodshed and never returned. Through the war, whenever a dear friend had fallen, a great general, or even some petty soldier in the Rakshasa ranks, it had been one of Yaro’s weapons that had done them in. Maya remembered feeling a mix of pride and scorn.

The arrow took her in the chest and she staggered backwards. Her cheeks grew slack and she felt something well up inside of her. Was this what it was like to be a human? Your life snuffed out, crushed in the swiftest turn of fate. The Rakshasi sat down, ignoring the black fluid pooling at her feet, the dead and wounded strewn about her like pieces on a discarded chessboard.

She looked down into the wreckage of the reflecting pool. If she looked hard enough, she could see the city of Indrithpur looking back at her. Yaro stood behind her now. “Real or illusion?” she said, looking up at her friend.

“Real.” The smith stroked her hair.

Maya sighed and her head fell forward. “I preferred the illusion,” she whispered. 

✶

The boy laid his hand on the Rakshasi’s neck. “She’s kind of pretty, huh?”

“She was pretty, once upon a time.”

He wiped the blood off on his lungi. “What’d you do to that arrowhead, really?”

“Nothing. It’s crap iron I took from a rusty sword.” The smith laid the Rakshasi down in the pool. “Help me bury her.”

“Didn’t need no magic?” He began to shovel sand down into the depression with his hands. The soldiers who could still walk gathered around. Even the Prince was silent, head bowed as the boy and the smith buried the Rakshasi.

“No magic.” Sweat and tears intermingled trickled through the lines of her face. “There’s no art to making a weapon. They all kill the same.”

He was silent for a moment. “Was she a smith too?”

“She was an architect. The best.” She ripped the arrow from her breast.

He looked out across the ruins. “What was this place?”

“The palace of a city whose name no one remembers, built by its greatest architect,” Yaro said. She closed Maya’s eyes and laid the sand over her face. “And her lowly assistant.”

Yaro placed a fragment of marble banister in the sand to mark the grave. She sat down beside it and the boy sat next to her. “It smells like mint and salt,” he said.

“Yeah.” Yaro turned the arrowhead around in her hand and threw it into the desert. It landed in the sand and quivered for a moment before it disappeared, swallowed by the earth.

THE END

Originally published April 30, 2021 in The Common Tongue Magazine