The Shotgun Arcana by R. S. Belcher

Author:R. S. Belcher
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781466842731
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2014-10-07T07:00:00+00:00

The Three of Swords

The third one was in the possession of Thug Batra, who sat hidden in a murder garden of mummified victims among sacred assassins in the bowels of Bombay. Thug Batra was not his real name, it was the name the British colonial soldiers muttered under their breaths as they tried to find him, kill him and end his reign of slaughter. “Thug” was not even correct. It was a bastardization of Thuggee, the name of his religion, his holy cause. His given name was Jangir Batra and he was born in a village outside of Bhopal. Some nights he had holy dreams of returning to the city of his birth as a cloud of evil smoke and strangling the life out of all the city’s inhabitants for the glory of the Black Mother.

He was secreted away from his birth parents by the Thuggee to thwart the British attempt to crush the religion, to become part of a new generation of assassins dedicated to the worship of Kali through the practice of ritual murder. After his decades of study and training, after he was empowered to use his mind and body to kill as easily as breathing, to move as silently as a poisonous thought, after his hundredth murder before even reaching adulthood, it had fallen into his possession, a final gift from his master—proof that he was ready to fulfill his destiny as the greatest murderer of his age, to dedicate each strangulation to the cause of forestalling the Kali Yuga, the iron age of crushing, the end of the world. In effect, each killing he and his brethren committed helped keep the world going.

He murdered his master and took it. In the years to follow he was personally responsible for 241 murders. The truth he knew in his own heart—he killed for the joy of hearing the life hiss from his victim’s lips, for the thrill of feeling them shake and convulse against him and then grow still. He did not kill to hold back the end of the world; he killed for the dark light joy of ending another’s personal world. In the fall of 1870 he dreamed of a small town in the wasteland of the American frontier. A golden god of death from the West called to him, called to it. So Thug Batra came, traveling on a ship across the seas, to America, thirsty to slay.

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