“All of you move to the centre. Near the fire,” I growled, directing the remaining twelve humans.

Nobody moved. They continued to stare.

“Now!” I yelled – a sound that cracked like an explosion. Cries of fear and dismay from some of the men and women were followed by a mad scramble to huddle together near the fire. The child-woman stayed on her knees in her original position. She stared at me defiantly, expectantly. I grimaced…how could I make her move. She was defying me but I didn’t feel like hurting her. I decided to ignore her for the time being.

The four other younger women had also moved closer to the fire and were holding each other but still kept their distance from the remaining men and three older women.

“What in the deuces is going on here?” I mumbled. Only Ghost-Kishni heard me.

“If you don’t know, why don’t you ask?” she replied in a deadpan voice.

“Thank you, you’re such a joy to have around.”

“Hmmmm.”

While I was having a conversation with my hallucination/real ghost, one of the men had crawled forward a bit and seemed to be egging himself up to say something.

“S..sir,” he said in a hoarse, cracking voice.

I cocked an eyebrow at that. “Sir?” I asked questioningly.

He audibly gulped and withered.

“I m…mean milord,” he continued, sounding even weaker than before.

I said nothing.

“Milord. We apologise for the foolishness of our leader.” He pointed at the gory remains of the dead archer, without actually looking at the corpse.

“You were right in doing so of course. He got what was coming,” he continued hurriedly when I didn’t say anything.

Seeing that I was neither saying anything nor killing them, he went on.

“Please take everything…but I beg of you to spare our lives. We’re just poor hunters trying to survive.”

“Lies!”

A childlike yell broke the monologue of the new leader. The child-woman was glaring at the man who had spoken and pointing a quivering finger at him.

“Liar! Rapist! Murderer!” she yelled.

“Shut up! Are you trying to get us killed bitch!” replied the man angrily.

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“Silence!” I roared. This was the second time someone in the group had abused the child-woman for speaking and it was getting under my skin.

Apart from the smell of blood, the smell of urine now wafted into my nostrils and almost made me gag. My latest roar had scared someone beyond the point of control.

I sighed loudly and found a rock to perch myself on.

“I want to hear her,” I said to the group, while pointing at the child-woman. “Consider your lives forfeited if you interrupt her while she talks. And don’t even think about making any sudden movements. That also…errr… will result in loss of a life. Your life.”

“Well said,” said Ghost-Kishni.

“Shut up.”

I glared at the group daring them to defy my orders. When they looked sufficiently cowed I gestured to the child-woman.

“Why do you call this man a liar? And what did you mean that there is evil here?”

The child-woman had been near hysterics until now. From the look on her face, she hadn’t been expecting to be heard out in such a manner. As her mind processed what was going on, she slowly lowered her arm, closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

When she opened her eyes again, she focused on me and spoke with a look of steely determination on her face.

“How old do you think I am, Lord?”

The question instantly made me uncomfortable. I had once hazarded a guess about the real Kishni’s age and had received a sharp whack from her stick for it. So I took the safe route here and just shrugged.

“I am eleven years old, Lord.”

So she was a child.

“And how do you think I ended up with this group?” she asked again, pointing at the men and women gathered before me.

This time she didn’t wait for me to shrug before continuing, “These are not hunters. They’re bandits. They came to my village, killed many of our men and then carried me and my sister off along with other young women.”

A sense of horror was creeping into my heart now as I started to understand what was going on. The child-woman drew breath and continued.

“My sister was just eight years old. Her name was Aaisya. We used to play with dolls together. She liked playing hopscotch. We used to brush each other’s hair. We were children.”

Tears were starting to flow from her eyes again, but her voice held.

“These men used us,” she said pointing at them with hate in her eyes. “Not just one of them, all of them. In turns. Not just one night. Every night. When my sister became sick and weak from all the abuse and injuries on her little body, they slit her throat and threw her away like an animal!”

“Lies! Lies, you whore!” screamed one of the men near the new leader. Spittle flew from his mouth and his eyes were wild with fear and anger.

My heart was cold.

“He has broken your rule by interrupting her,” said Ghost-Kishni. But before I could do anything, the child-woman shouted again.

“Lies?” she asked loudly. “Should I show you the proof?”

She started lifting her shabby, wretched dress. I gestured for her to stop as I rose from my stone seat.

There was frightened silence as I made my way to the huddled group of men. The man who had called the child-woman a whore, whimpered as I picked him up bodily. I held him by his neck as she spluttered and struggled in vain to kick me and prise my hands apart.

I held him in front of the shocked men and women and spoke.

“I expect my rules to be obeyed.”

Then I started squeezing. The man struggled wildly as his face started swelling and turning blue. With a final squeeze I crushed his neck. His head fell backwards limply. His body looking like a chicken’s that had just been culled. I dropped the lifeless body to the ground.

The men and women drew closer together in fear. One of the men started sobbing and crying.

I turned on the remaining three men now.

“The first one among you who tells me the truth about who you are and what you’ve been doing with these women gets to live.”