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then spring back to normal size, as if flexing a huge muscle. Raj stood transfixed as the beast did this three times, meanwhile beating its wings to stay aloft. I shouted for him to come back. He ignored me, reaching down to pick up a pair of the fire-hardened sticks.
    The fourth time the creature flexed, both of the spears came loose and clattered on the ground. A dark green fluid pulsed out of it as it reared back, hovering now a few meters from Raj, who had both lances braced against his sides, pointed at the beast. Then a second one dropped from the ceiling and enveloped him from behind.
    It was hideous. He roared and struggled; twice, lance tips pierced though from inside. Green ichor and red blood sprayed in every direction. Then it slumped away.
    For one terrible year, age nineteen, I hired out on Hell as a mercenary soldier. I saw too much but nothing I saw in that year was as bad as the sight of Raj, face intact but skin flayed off from shoulders to knees, heart and lungs exposed and guts spilling out, uncoiling; beyond mortal help but not beyond realizing what had happened. He faced me and said four clear words—one of them was “Allah” but that exhausts my Arabic—then made a strangling sound and fell over, probably dead, certainly doomed. The creature that had attacked him was writhing soundlessly on the ground. The one he had speared fell flapping, splashing, into the water.
    Some basic human, or humane, instinct almost killed me then. I took a couple of steps toward him. A balaseli whispered down between me and the cave wall and enfolded me.
    I must not have been in its embrace for more than a second, but that second resonates through my life like a huge bell struck once. I think it resonated backward, weeks, as well as forward, to now and however much longer I have. That’s why I had been so jumpy.
    Mine must have been larger than the one that killed Raj. It covered me face and all. It was like being smothered by a woolen blanket soaked in animal blood.
    I froze. Thousands of tiny teeth pressed gently into my flesh, like the grains of coarse sandpaper but alive. Knife pinned uselessly between my own wrist and abdomen.
    Maybe Buddha defeated Allah in this contest. I hadn’t been to kiack in twenty years, but the Way lies deep, and in what I thought was my last act as a living being, I tried to compose myself for death. The teeth pressed harder and I surrendered…
    And was suddenly spilled out onto the cold wet rock, unharmed.
    I rolled back to the safety of the wall, burning my calf on one of the kumalis but heedless of the pain. Calming somewhat, I was surprised to see that the creature seemed not to have harmed me beyond leaving mild abrasions all over, such as you might give yourself by scratching an itch too vigorously.
    The one that had attacked me was flopping around as Raj’s was; in less than a minute both were limp, dead. Alien protein, of course. There was no way they could sense our toxicity without tasting; evidently one taste was plenty. I supposed the simple creatures mistook us for Obelobelians, which triggered the aggressive behavior. The truth turned out to be somewhat stranger.
    I hadn’t asked Raj what was to be done with his remains, should the hunter become the quarry, but assumed he was conventionally Moslem in that regard. On Qadar the ceremony goes on for days, and a lot of the ritual involves the physical corpse.
    It was an interesting problem. I’m conventionally tolerant of other people’s notions, and there was the added incentive that Raj’s relatives might not honor his debts with only my word that he had died. But there was no way in hell I was going to saunter out there and drag him away. Just have to wait until daylight, when the balaseli were dormant again. He would be a pretty sight in ten hours.
    Something touched me on the shoulder and I almost jumped out of my aching skin. It was the old host. “I watch,” it said.