1 · 2

The story of Raktabija’s death pulled King Suratha in deeper still. He had come to this forest hermitage a king stripped of his kingdom, and somewhere in the telling his own ruin had gone quiet in him; all he wanted now was the next chapter. Lord, he said to the sage Medha, you have told us this strange and wondrous chapter of the Devi’s glory, bound to the slaying of Raktabija, the demon whose every spilled drop of blood had risen from the ground as another of him. Now we wish to hear what came after. With Raktabija fallen, what did Shumbha do next, and what did the fiercely wrathful Nishumbha?

3 · 4

The sage Medha said, When Raktabija fell and the other demons died beside him in the fray, a fury without measure seized Shumbha and Nishumbha. These were the two who had thrown Indra from his throne and taken the three worlds for their own, and until this hour they had made war the way emperors do, by sending others; every champion they sent out had gone swaggering and come back as a corpse or a rumor. Now there was no one left to send. The sight of his vast army being hacked apart lit a rage in Nishumbha that he could not hold down, and with the main strength of the demon host around him he hurled himself at the Devi.

5 · 6

Great demons rode at Nishumbha’s front, at his back, and on both flanks, a moving wall of them. Lips clamped tight, shaking with anger, they closed in to kill the Devi. Then the mighty Shumbha came on as well, ringed by his own forces. His path ran through the Mothers, the powers who had stepped out of the very bodies of the gods to fight beside her, and he battled them as he advanced, wrath carrying him forward to finish Chandika.

7 · 8

Then a ferocious battle erupted between the Devi and the two brothers, and for the first time in this long war she faced the masters themselves. Arrows fell in a downpour so savage it seemed two storm clouds had burst at once in the same sky, their sheets of rain crossing in midair. Chandika’s volleys sheared apart every shaft the pair loosed before it could reach her, and her own torrent of weapons drove past their guard and hammered the limbs of both demon lords.

9 · 10

Nishumbha snatched up a whetted sword and a shield of brilliant sheen and struck at the crown of the lion, the great tawny beast, Himalaya’s own gift, that had carried the Devi into every battle of this war. The blow to her mount was answered in the space of a breath: a single razor-edged arrow, and Nishumbha’s fine sword and his shield emblazoned with eight crescent moons lay in pieces.

11 · 12

With shield and sword gone, the demon flung his shakti weapon, a missile charged with his own burning force, and the Devi’s discus met it in mid-flight and split it in two. Swollen with rage, the danava Nishumbha came on bearing a spear, and that spear, arriving at full speed, she crushed to powder with a single blow of her fist.

13 · 14

Then he raised a mace and hurled it at Chandika; her trident met it in the air, broke it, and burned it to ash. A count was running out along with his weapons: sword, shield, missile, spear, mace, each one lifted in fury and each one taken from him. When that bull among daityas came on yet again, battle-axe in hand, she battered him under waves of arrows and dropped him to the earth.

15 · 16

Seeing Nishumbha of terrible prowess sprawled on the ground, Shumbha, wild with anger for the brother he loved, came forward at last to kill Ambika himself. Standing high on his chariot he seemed to tower impossibly, beyond the scale of anything living; his eight matchless arms spread wide, each fist gripping a superb weapon, until he had blotted the whole sky out behind him.

17 · 18

The Devi watched him come and answered first with sound. Her conch blared, and her bowstring, drawn and released, gave out a note the demons could not endure. Then came her bell, the bell that had once hung on Indra’s great elephant Airavata before the gods laid it in her hands, and its tolling, a sound made to drain the whole daitya army of its fire, filled every quarter of the sky.

19 · 20

Then came the lion’s great roars, roars before which bull elephants in rut let their frenzy fall away, and they flooded the heavens, the earth, and the ten directions. At that moment Kali, the black and gaunt one who had sprung from the Devi’s own brow and had just drunk Raktabija dry, leapt skyward and struck the sky and the earth together with both hands, and in that crash every sound that had come before was lost.

21 · 22

Over it all Shiva-duti loosed a peal of harsh, unholy laughter, she who had once sent Shiva himself to the demon court as her herald and carried that audacity as her name ever since. The sounds set the demons trembling, and Shumbha passed into the far reach of his fury. The instant Ambika flung her challenge, Stop, wicked one, stop, the gods watching from their stations in the sky answered her with cries of victory.

23 · 24

Shumbha advanced and hurled a shakti weapon hideous with flames; it came on glowing like a mountain of fire torn loose and thrown, and the Devi met it with a great meteor of her own and struck it aside in mid-flight. King, said the sage, the vault between the three worlds shook with Shumbha’s lion-roar, and then a crash like a falling thunderbolt broke over it, terrible enough to drown even that roar.

25 · 26

Arrow met arrow. The shafts Shumbha loosed, the Devi cut away, and the shafts the Devi loosed, Shumbha cut away, by the hundreds and then by the thousands, until the air between them stayed full of falling splinters. For a moment the emperor of the daityas was holding her, stroke for stroke. Then Chandika, in full wrath, struck him with her spear, and under that blow Shumbha dropped senseless to the ground.

27 · 28

In that pause, consciousness crept back into Nishumbha where he lay. He rose with his bow and sent arrows at the Devi, at Kali, and at the lion as well. Then that lord of the danavas, son of Diti, the ancient mother whose children have warred on the gods since the world’s first age, conjured ten thousand arms out of his own body, and with ten thousand discuses he covered Chandika from view.

29 · 30

Then the blessed Durga rose in anger, she who destroys the anguish of hard straits, and her arrows found every one of those ten thousand discuses and cut them down, and every dart besides, until the screen he had built around her was gone. At this Nishumbha seized a mace and, with the daitya army pressed close around him, rushed once more to destroy Chandika.

31 · 32

As he bore down on her, Chandika sliced through the mace with her keen-edged sword, and his hand went straight to a spear. Nishumbha, tormentor of the immortals, the terror before whom Indra’s own host had once scattered, closed on her with the spear raised, and Chandika answered with her own spear, flung at full speed, and it buried itself in his heart.

33 · 34

One last astonishment remained. Out of that spear-split heart tore a second man, whole and armed, charged with enormous strength and valor, crying “Stop” as he came. He had barely stepped clear of the wound when the Devi laughed, a laugh that rolled like thunder across the field, and her sword took off his head; he too crashed to the ground.

35 · 36

Now the end came for the demons still left on the field, and the Mothers, each one the living power of a god, moved through them. The lion fed savagely on asuras whose necks its fangs had already crushed; Kali and Shiva-duti devoured others the same way. Some great asuras perished on the point of the shakti of Kaumari, who fights with the spear of Kartikeya’s power, and others were undone by nothing more than water, water Brahmani had made holy with her mantra and flung from her earthen pot.

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Some fell impaled on the trident of Maheshvari, Shiva’s power bearing Shiva’s own weapon, and some were pounded to dust against the earth by the blows of Varahi’s boar snout. Vaishnavi’s discus, spinning as it spins on Vishnu’s finger, cut the danavas to pieces, and the thunderbolt flying from the palm of Aindri, thousand-eyed like Indra whose force she is, brought down still more. So the field emptied: some asuras perished on the spot, others fled the great battle, and the rest went into the mouths of Kali, of Shiva-duti, and of the lion, king of beasts.