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The rishi says: Shumbha had watched it happen. His brother Nishumbha, dear to him as the breath in his own body, the brother beside whom he had climbed from conquest to conquest until the three worlds lay in their two hands, was cut down and gone, and the army that had marched out at their side lay hacked apart across the field. Grief and rage climbed in him together, twisted into a single thing, and the words that finally broke from him were meant to wound.

2 · The taunt

He said: You reek of the arrogance of strength, wicked Durga. Carry that pride no further. You fight the way a vain woman fights, propped up by the strength of other goddesses, and nothing on this field was won by your arm alone. He had watched Kali drink Raktabija dry, watched the seven Mothers grind his legions into the earth, and from where he stood it had looked like a horde overwhelming his house, many against one. It was the last taunt Shumbha would ever throw, and it called up from her the answer the whole Saptashati had been moving toward.

3 · The Devi’s answer

The Sri Devi answered: I alone am in this world. What second is there beside me? Look well, wicked one. What you have been calling other powers are splendors of mine and nothing more, and even now, while you watch them, they are pouring back into me. He had meant to shame her with the charge of borrowed strength. She was telling him, with the calm of someone stating the day’s weather, that there had never been anyone else on the field at all.

4 · 5

Even as the words left her, it happened. Brahmani and the rest, every Mother-power on the field, Kali of the terrible mouth among them, thinned into streams of light and sank back into her body, and where a moment before there had been an army of goddesses there was now only Ambika, one figure alone on the trampled ground. Then she spoke again. By my own splendor I stood here in many shapes. I have drawn all of them home, and I stand in this battle alone. Now steady yourself, and come. His own taunt had been turned around and handed back to him, and with it the challenge of single combat.

6 · 7

So it began, the last single combat of the Saptashati, with the massed gods on one horizon and the massed asuras on the other, and not one of them able to look away from a fight this pitiless. Arrows came down in sheets. Then the honed weapons, then the merciless divine missiles, until the duel between the two of them had climbed to a pitch that put every world in fear.

8 · 9

Ambika sent her divine missiles out in their hundreds, and the lord of the daityas met each one with the counter-weapon made to break it; strike for strike, to this point, he had matched her, and no warrior of the gods had ever managed so much. Then he loosed his own divine missiles, and Parameshvari broke them in play, with a few fierce cries of power and nothing else, her voice alone unmaking what his arsenals had taken ages to gather. The effort that drained Shumbha barely reached her.

10 · 11

The asura buried her now under hundreds of arrows. That drew her anger, and she answered by shearing the bow itself out of his hands with arrows of her own. Bow gone, he caught up the spear called shakti; her discus took it apart while it still lay in his grip. He was being disarmed the way his brother had been disarmed, one weapon at a time, and he knew where that ladder ended.

12 · 13

Then Shumbha, sovereign of the daityas, snatched up a sword and a shield bright as the sun and worked with a hundred moons; his fallen brother’s shield had carried eight. He drove straight at her. He was still closing when Chandika’s arrows, loosed in a blur from her bow, cut the sword out of the air and cut down the shield behind it, both undone before either could touch her.

14 · 15

She brought the chariot down after that, horses and charioteer with it. Horses dead, bow gone, no one left at the reins, the daitya set his whole mind on killing Ambika and came on with a dreadful mace. Her sharp arrows caught it mid-swing and cut it apart. Still he came, fist drawn back, and threw himself at her. The weapons were finished. What was left was his hands, and an emperor of the three worlds reduced to them.

16 · 17

That bull among daityas brought his fist down on the Devi’s heart. She answered with the flat of her open palm against his chest. The one blow dropped the daitya-king where he stood, and almost before he had touched the ground he was on his feet again, whole, as though nothing had landed.

18 · The sky-battle

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Then he did what none of the watchers had seen done before. He sprang from the ground with the Devi locked in his arms and rose until he stood in the open sky; and there, with no ground under her and needing none, Chandika fought him on. High in the air the daitya and Chandika closed and grappled, body against body above the curve of the world, and the siddhas and the munis in their high places watched a wrestling the like of which had never been fought before, and it left them astonished.

20 · 21

For a long time she wrestled him up there. Then Ambika got her hold, lifted him clear, swung him round and round, and threw him down the whole height of the sky onto the earth. He struck the ground and was already moving, fist up before he had fully risen, running at her again with the one wish still in him, to see Chandika dead. The fall had not touched what drove him. It was the last time he would rise.

22 · The slaying of Shumbha

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She watched him come, the lord of every daitya on the field, and this time she did not wait. The Devi ran her spear clean through his chest and put him on the ground. That was the end of Shumbha, and the end toward which the whole Final Charita had been moving: the last enemy meeting the one power that had stood behind every face he fought. Torn open on the point of her spear, the life gone out of him, he came down all at once, and the earth shook under the weight of his fall, its oceans and its islands and its mountains shaking with it.

24 · 25

The instant Shumbha’s life ended, the whole world eased. Creation came back into its health, and the sky cleared and turned pure again. The omen-clouds that had hung overhead full of fire went quiet, and with Shumbha down the rivers drew back inside their banks and ran their proper courses.

26 · 27

With him dead, joy ran full through every host of the gods. The gandharvas, heaven’s own singers, raised a sweet song, others took up their instruments, and the companies of apsaras gave themselves to the dance. Clean winds began to move, the sun came out in its full brightness, the sacred fires burned clear and steady, and the strange sounds that had troubled the sky through all of this fell silent at last. Over the whole of creation, the sign was good.