‘No need. Alone, I can slip away unnoticed. Your southern skin, and his ungodly accent, will give us away. The last thing I want is to be caught by the Mathurans alongside the Yaksha himself. If that fool Kalyavan has decided to take Mathura on his own, he will need all the help he can get.’

Unbidden, the words of the Emperor to describe Kalyavan came to Shishupal’s mind: A green boy, more like to be brave than wise. He could have laughed at how true Jarasandh’s words had turned out to be, if he was not trapped in a city that was destined to soon be blood and ashes.

I

Krishna felt he was gazing at a lurid painting, a ghastly piece on the horrors of war. Markets, statues, or anything else that had ever stood in the Third District, were gone. What was left behind were women and men, streaked in ash, struggling through the chaos, moving debris and trying to clear a path through the rubble. A few were frantically digging in the wreckage of their still smoking houses, searching for any hint of life. In the avenue ahead, healers tended to a sorry group of people, all rendered homeless by the fire.

He passed sagging mounds of charred corpses, stacked beside the avenue like yesterday’s leaves. Hundreds of them. Mostly poor refugees and farmers from the outskirts, who had fled to Mathura to escape the War but it seemed that in the end, the War had caught up with them.

Krishna paused by a building that was still burning, felt the blue kiss of its heat on his cheeks. Nothing to be done but wait for the blazebane to die out. From where he stood, the hills of debris seemed to go on endlessly. Only three walls of the building that had once been the Temple of Yamuna, still stood, its doorways gaping in an eternal moment of frozen terror. The arch of the city market, where dozens of merry stalls had once catered to the rich and the mighty, was now cracked and caked with slimy soot. It looked like a different place. It was difficult to believe this was where he had rallied the smallfolk in his rebellion against Kans. And only a few strides away, near the smoking ruins of the fountain, was where he had met Satya. Even the tavern where he had tried to convince Balram to drink ale was now reduced to a blackened relic.

A man, clutching a baby wrapped in torn fragments from a fallen Mathuran flag, caught his attention. The man gazed at Krishna in silent desperation. Uncomfortable, Krishna gave his horse the slightest suggestion of a spur. The hooves of his mount clopped obediently into the black mud. Ahead, a boy on a crutch stood up hastily to salute him. Beside him in the street, a body lay hidden under rags, only a charred hand with long, painted nails visible.