Katha plunged me back into Maya’s soul. My brief respite as Dimple was over. I was Maya again, naked and broken, being dragged by the Yamduts.

We walked for what my soul perceived as a month. Each step was a measured agony, a new memory of sin surfacing with each throb of pain. Then, we arrived at the second of the sixteen cities. Sauripur.

The city gates were not made of iron or wood, but of what looked like the blackened, fused bones of countless animals, stacked high. The air stank of old blood and a thick, musky animal fear that raised the non-existent hairs on my arms. The king of this place, a being named Sauvari, came out to greet us. His form was a shifting, unstable nightmare. One moment he was a giant with the head of a boar, tusks dripping with some dark fluid. The next, a spindly, spider-like thing with too many joints. His cruelty was the only constant thing about him.

He looked at me—at my soul—and a monstrous grin split his ever-changing face. He let out a sharp, piercing whistle that echoed off the bone gates.

And then they came.

From every dark alley and crumbling doorway, they poured out. Dogs. Hundreds of them. But these were not the dogs of Earth. They were gaunt, skeletal creatures, their black fur matted and patchy, revealing ribs and bone underneath. Their eyes were not the eyes of animals; they were pits of glowing red light, burning with a malevolent, hungry intelligence. Their teeth were not bone, but long, jagged shards of black iron that dripped with a smoking saliva.

They surrounded me, a silent, deadly ring. The only sound was a low, collective growl, a vibration that I felt in the ground beneath my feet, a sound that bypassed my ears and went straight to my heart, filling it with a terror so pure it felt like my soul was turning to ice.

“This punishment is for those who are needlessly cruel to animals,” a Yamdut’s voice whispered in my mind, a cold commentary to the horror unfolding. “And for those who act like beasts themselves.”

My own sins, and Maya’s, flashed before me. I remembered kicking a yelping street dog that had gotten too close to my new sandals. I remembered yelling at Maya to get rid of her pet hamster because its cage smelled. Small acts of casual cruelty, forgotten in an instant. And I saw Maya herself, in the depths of her grief, becoming feral. The way she would lash out, her words like teeth, biting anyone who tried to help her, snarling at me, her own mother. We had both been beasts in our own way.

The king, Sauvari, gave a sharp nod. And the pack descended.

The pain was a chaos of tearing and ripping. It was not a single attack, but a hundred at once. The iron teeth crunched on my spiritual bones with a sound I felt deep in my skull. They went for my throat, my stomach, my limbs. I was a rag doll being shredded by a pack of demons. I was being pulled apart, each part of my body screaming its own unique agony. The world dissolved into a red haze of pain and the snarling of monstrous dogs. My consciousness, my sense of self, was simply shredded into a thousand screaming pieces.

When I came back, I was whole again, lying on the ground surrounded by the panting, blood-soaked hounds. They were waiting for the king’s command to begin the feast again. This was my welcome to Sauripur. This was the toll I had to pay to enter. And this, I knew, was only the beginning of my stay in the City of Hounds.

Index of: Journey Of Hell: The Unforgotten Promise

• A Warning to the Reader
• A Mother’s Testimony
• Chapter 1 The God of Small Betrayals
• Chapter 2 The Sins of a Mother
• Chapter 3 The Soul and The Body
• Chapter 4 the Road of a Thousand Regrets
• Chapter 5 A Desert of Burning Rage
• Chapter 6 The Prison Before Birth
• Chapter 7 A River of Self
• Chapter 8 The Twelve-Day Ghost
• Chapter 9 The Refusal
• Chapter 10 The Universal Law