He paused and looked directly at her. “The foundation is still there, you know. The ashes of the rest are gone, washed into the sand or blown away, but the stone foundation remains, and the rakoshi caves beneath are intact. The hills are still uninhabited. Despite all the crowding at home, people still avoid those hills. I stayed there for days in an effort to renew myself. I prayed, I fasted, I wandered the caves… yet nothing happened. I felt as empty and as worthless as before.

“And then I found it!”

Kolabati saw a light begin to glow in her brother’s eyes, growing steadily, as if someone were stoking a fire within his brain.

“A male egg, intact, just beneath the surface of the sand in a tiny alcove in the caves! At first I did not know what to make of it, or what to do with it. Then it struck me: I was being given a second chance. There before me lay the means to accomplish all that I should have with my life, the means to cleanse my karma and make it worthy of one of my caste. I saw it then as my destiny. I was to start a nest of rakoshi and use them to fulfill the vow.”

A male egg. Kusum continued to talk about how he manipulated the foreign service and managed to have himself assigned to the London embassy. Kolabati barely heard him. A male egg… she remembered hunting through the ruins of the Temple and the caves beneath as a child, searching everywhere for a male egg. In their youth they both had felt it their duty to start a new nest and they had desperately wanted a male egg.

“After I established myself at the embassy,” Kusum was saying, “I searched for Captain Westphalen’s descendants. I learned that there were only four of his bloodline left. They were not a prolific family and a number of them were killed off in the World Wars. To my dismay, I learned that only one, Richard Westphalen, was still in Britain. The other three were in America. But that did not deter me. I hatched the eggs, mated them, and started the nest. I have since disposed of three of the four Westphalens. There is only one left.”

Kolabati was relieved to hear that only one remained— perhaps she could prevail upon Kusum to give it up.

“Aren’t three lives enough? Innocent lives, Kusum?”

“The vow, Bati,” he said as if intoning the name of a deity. “The vrata. They carry the blood of that murderer, defiler, and thief in their veins. And that blood must be wiped from the face of the earth.”

“I can’t let you, Kusum. It’s wrong!”

“It’s right!” He leapt to his feet. “There’s never been anything so right!”

“No!”

“Yes!” He came toward her, his eyes bright. “You should see them, Bati! So beautiful! So willing! Please come with me and look at them! You’ll know then that it was the will of Kali!”