Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

asking?”
    A young man stepped forward. “We do not want to anger Kali by depriving her of her sacrifices.”
    “You’re kidding, right?”
    “Kali is the bringer of destruction, without which there can be no rebirth. She is the remover of the bondage that ties us to the material world. If we anger her, she will deprive us of her divine destruction.”
    I looked at Joshua across the crowd. “Do you understand this?”
    “Fear?” he said.
    “Can you help?” I asked in Aramaic.
    “I’m not good at fear,” Joshua said in Hebrew.
    I thought for a second as two hundred eyes pinned me to the sandstone on which I stood. I remembered the red-stained gashes on the wooden elephant statues at the altar of Kali. Death was their deliverance, was it?
    “What is your name?” I asked the man who had stepped out of the crowd.
    “Nagesh,” he said.
    “Stick out your tongue, Nagesh.” He did, and I threw back the cloth that covered my head and loosened it around my neck. Then I touched his tongue.
    “Destruction is a gift you value?”
    “Yes,” said Nagesh.
    “Then I shall be the instrument of the goddess’s gift.” With that I pulled the black glass dagger from the sheath in my sash, held it up before the crowd. While Nagesh stood, passive, wide-eyed, I drove my thumb under his jaw, pushed his head back, and brought the dagger down across his throat. I lowered him to the ground as the red liquid spurted over the sandstone.
    I stood and faced the crowd again, holding the dripping blade over my head. “You owe me, you ungrateful fucks! I have brought to your people the gift of Kali, now bring me what I ask for.”
    They moved really quickly for people who were on the edge of starvation.

    After the Untouchables scattered to do my bidding, Joshua and I stood over the bloodstained body of Nagesh.
    “That was fantastic,” Joshua said. “Absolutely perfect.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Had you been practicing all that time we were in the monastery?”
    “You didn’t see me push the pressure point in his neck then?”
    “No, not at all.”
    “Gaspar’s kung fu training. The rest, of course, was from Joy and Balthasar.”
    I bent over and opened Nagesh’s mouth, then took the ying-yang vial from around my neck and put a drop of the antidote on the Untouchable’s tongue.
    “So he can hear us now, like when Joy poisoned you?” Joshua asked.
    I pulled back one of Nagesh’s eyelids and watched the pupil contract slowly in the sunlight. “No, I think he’s still unconscious from me holding the pressure point. I didn’t think the poison would work quickly enough. I could only get a drop of poison on my finger when I loosened my sari. I knew it would keep him down, I just wasn’t sure it would put him down.”
    “Well, you are truly a magus, now, Biff. I’m impressed.”
    “Joshua, you healed a hundred people today. Half of them were probably dying. I did some sleight of hand.”
    My friend’s enthusiasm was undeterred. “What’s the red stuff, pomegranate juice? I can’t figure out where you concealed it.”
    “No, actually I was going to ask you about that.”
    “What?”
    I held my arm up and showed Joshua where I had slashed my own wrist (the source of blood for the show). I had been holding it against my leg and as soon as I removed the pressure the blood started spurting again. I sat down hard on the sandstone and my vision began to tunnel down to a pinpoint. “I was hoping you could help me out with this,” I said before I fainted.

    “You need to work on that part of the trick,” Joshua said when I came to. “I might not always be around to fix your wrist.” He was speaking Hebrew—that meant for my ears only.
    I saw Joshua kneeling above me, then beyond him the sky was blotted out by curious brown faces. The recently murdered Nagesh was in the front of the crowd. “Hey, Nagesh, how’d the rebirth go?” I asked in Sanskrit.
    “I must have strayed from my dharma in my last life,” Nagesh said. “I have been reincarnated, once again, as an Untouchable. And I have the same ugly wife.”
    “You challenged master Levi who is called Biff,” I said, “of course you didn’t move up. You’re lucky you’re not a stink bug or something. See, destruction isn’t the big favor you all thought it was.”
    “We brought the things you asked for.”
    I hopped to my feet feeling incredibly rested and energized. “Nice,” I said to Joshua. “I feel like I just had one of those strong coffees