As if he had taken root like waterweed, Go stared, mesmerized, at his captor as she rose from the river. From the neck down, she was a woman, and naked: sleek fawn skin, striped with jet. But her head was the round-eared, sun-eyed head of a tigress and she opened her mouth and roared.
The knife of sound snapped Go into movement. He sprang out of the water, scrabbling and scrambling for the bank, gripping the slimy roots of the mangroves to pull himself upright. He hauled himself clear of the river, expecting at any moment to feel the hot close of jaws on his ankle. The tigress roared again, a pleased, lazy noise. Go could not run, for the undergrowth was too dense, and there was no point in climbing: tigers can climb, too. His chest felt like a furnace, burning up in the pain of almost drowning, he tottered along like an old man, falling over the exposed roots and trailing creepers. He looked behind once, inadvertently. The tigress stood there in the water, unmoving. Waiting for her sisters, Go thought. He didn't even know whether he was still alive. If this was dead, it didn't feel much different. Unfortunately.
Night fell swiftly after that, a dense velvet shawl descending over the forest. Go had no idea where he was, or where he was going. Oddly, neither hunger nor thirst appeared to be entering into the equation, in spite of the sultry, stifling heat. The humidity was intense, even at night, reminding Go of his childhood. He breathed in experimentally: at least he seemed to be able to inhale and exhale still. But that he wasn't even sweating would seem to lend weight to the possibility that he was in fact dead. Go had, however, almost ceased to care.
At least, before the thing dropped on him out of a tree. There was no warning at all and Go had thought he'd been paying attention, paranoid as he was about the tigers. But suddenly he was facedown in the soft spicy earth, the breath knocked out of him and a vast darkness filling his vision. Go struggled and kicked, but it was hopeless. Then, as abruptly, he was released. He raised himself up on his elbows, gasping, and was seized under the arms and hauled up at terrible speed into a tree.
"What the fuck?" Go cried. "Let me go!" It wasn't a tigress: he had a confused impression of long black limbs, much too spidery to be human, and a whipping tail. Something cackled into his ear and its breath was foul, like rotting vegetation. The cackling went on: he thought the creature might be speaking, because the sound had an odd kind of cadence, but it was no language that he knew.
Then it dropped him. Go yelled, seeing the dim forest floor swing up. The thing caught him by the ankles with a jarring jolt and threw him across a branch. The impact winded him again; he croaked for breath. When he finally regained consciousness, he found that his wrists and ankles had been trussed, so that he was strung out between two of the manifold trunks of a large tree, with the initial branch under his ribs. He squinted round and saw the creature looking at him. It was black, with short fur. It had a head shaped like a coconut, with little coal-like eyes. Its jaw dropped down when it saw him watching, revealing a huge expanse fringed with long teeth, reminding Go unpleasantly of an angler fish. It had four arms, ending in a mass of arachnid fingers, and long, jointed legs, folded beneath it.
"Who are you?" Go demanded. The thing chattered away, but whatever it was saying remained incomprehensible. It spoke with some animation and enthusiasm, however. "I'm sure this is fascinating," Go said. "Please let me go." It was the teeth that had done it. Had it not been for that glimpse of jaw, Go might have felt safer with this thing, whatever it was, than down on the ground with tigers prowling.
The animal spat at him, a glutinous skein of saliva that struck the back of his head and trickled down. It smelled of shit. If he really was dead, Go thought, gritting his teeth, all this would just go on and on. Was it possible to die more than once, to keep on doing so until one was just a faded shadow? In which case, everyone might finally leave you alone. Go shut his eyes, and waited for further demise.
The creature continued to spit, until Go was firmly welded to the tree. He endured this, closing his eyes to avoid the spittle and trying to breathe through his mouth. At some point, he told himself, an end would come. He told himself this so often that it turned into a mantra and Go passed into a sort of yogic state of which, later, he was rather proud. When he came round again, the sky had softened to a haze that was neither day nor night, and there was no sign of the animal, for which Go—who had remained a resolute agnostic almost as an act of defiance—was nonetheless devoutly grateful. He was still stuck to the tree, however. He tugged, cautiously, as it was a long way to the ground and there was not a great deal between Go and it. But the bonds remained. He was sure that he'd seen something that behaved like this (nothing Go had ever seen looked like it) on a nature channel, during one of those animal documentaries that you watch when you're stoned. It hadn't made a lot of sense then, either, and he couldn't even remember what kind of thing it had been. Nor could he remember how the prey had extricated itself from its predicament. He had a nasty feeling that it simply hadn't.
It was fairly clear—both from Zhu Irzh's comments and his own observation—that this was indeed Hell, or a realm of it. Go's father had been a firm believer in reincarnation, maintaining that if one had not lived a good life, then one would, in time, be reborn as something unwholesome, probably a beetle. Go wondered whether this was happening now: whether the black being was some kind of middleman, dispatching souls between the realms. Maybe the web in which Go was partially encased would act as some kind of cocoon, dissolving him into a soul-soup before his regurgitation back into the world of Earth.
These theological ruminations were disturbed by a whisper.
"Who are you?" someone said.
Go turned his head and was confronted with someone a lot more appealing than the black entity. Also female, also naked, but with—yes!—no betraying sign of feline ancestry. Yet.
"My name's—" Go hesitated. There were all sorts of reasons, both magical and practical, for not telling her. Besides, he'd only got into this situation through an uncharacteristic bout of honesty. Then again, what had he got to lose? Trapped in a tree, possibly dead, certainly screwed. "My name is Pauleng Go," he said.
The girl bobbed her head in greeting and placed both palms together. "Namasté."
"Hi. And who are you?"
"My name is Sefira."
"You look human," Go said. And how.
The girl burst out laughing. "How funny! Of course I am not human. I am a deva."
"I see." Go ransacked his memory for information on devas. Not goddesses, not demons. Created by Vishnu as handmaidens of Heaven. They had always been one of the more appealing aspects of Hindu mythology, to Go's way of thinking.
"If you're a deva," he said, "what are you doing here?"
"I fell in love," the deva said. She looked down, interlacing her fingers in her lap; Go tried and failed not to stare. "With Prince Agni, and he had me brought to the palace. Then he turned me into stone and a demon rescued me. A Chinese demon."
"Aha," Go said. Things were beginning to fit together. "His name wouldn't have been Zhu Irzh, would it?"
The deva's eyes widened. "You know him? There was a spirit with him, a beast."
"Yes, I do know him," Go said. "You might call him a friend." Risky, but if Zhu Irzh had rescued this girl, she was presumably grateful. Go had almost given up making assumptions, however.
"Then you are a friend, too," the deva said. Right decision! Go thought. For once. Maybe his luck was changing.
"Look," he said to the deva. "You can see I'm stuck here. Can you help me? A black being imprisoned me up here."
"Oh yes," the deva answered. "They do that. They suck out your essence, later." She pointed to the surrounding trees. "Can you see? There are the husks of the others. Their spirits are still here, but the essence is gone." Now that it was light, Go could see that, indeed, there were faint shapes dangling from the branches, fragile as shadows.
"You know, I'd rather that didn't happen," Go said. "Can you cut me free?"
"I'll try," the deva said. She moved closer, enveloping Go in a cloud of musky perfume. Even under the current duress, his head swam. She began tugging at the webbing with surprisingly sharp fingernails. Soon, Go's hands were freed enough for him to be able to help her; then he was able to swing himself up onto the branch.
"I need to get down," he said. "Do you know a way out of here? Out of this realm of Hell, I mean? If you helped Zhu Irzh—"
"Yes," the deva said. "I do. But only if you'll take me with you. Zhu Irzh couldn't, and now Agni knows I was involved, I think. There are things after me." Her face crumpled. "I don't want to be a statue again and there are worse things he can do. If I help you, will you take me to Earth?"
It was at this point that Go decided, once and for all, to give up self-sacrificing, noble behavior. Look where it had got him. It was time for a personal agenda to reassert itself. "Baby," Go said. "If you help me get back to Earth, I'll not only take you with me. I'll make you a star."