“Why do tell me this?” Arthur asked curiously, his interest piqued in spite of himself.
“I have grown somewhat fond of our conversations, vampire. Believe it or not, as you wish; nonetheless, it is the truth.” The Tipu’s eyes glowed a feral gold in the darkness of the tunnel. “I should miss them a great deal if they were to cease, and you must trust me when I tell you that when my daughter comes back to find you - and she will come back to find you, Wellesley — she will not stop until one of you is dead.”
“As you so astutely pointed out, Tipu, I am a vampire. I cannot die.”
“Oh, but there are far worse things than death, Irishman.” A thin smile played at the corners of the Sultan’s mouth, never reaching his eyes. “Take it from one who is in a position to know.”
“If you are attempting to frighten me, then you may as well save your breath.”
“If I were attempting to frighten you, then I would simply remind you of that which truly terrifies one such as you,” Tipu countered.
Arthur raised an eyebrow. “And that is…?”
“Do not play coy with me, Irishman. I have no time for it,.”
“Then do not ply me with riddles, Indian, and I suspect that you have nothing but time!”
Tipu narrowed his eyes. “Very well,” he began. “Let us both assume, if you will indulge me for a moment, that I am not simply a figment of your twisted imagination, vampire. Let us assume that I am real, that all which was once the Tipu Sultan of Mysore has survived bodily death and is able to talk with you now.”
“We may stipulate that, for the sake of argument. Pray continue.”
“You were a believer in the nailed god, the Christ-God, during your mortal lifetime, were you not?”
“I was. What of it?”
“May I ask whether you still believe?”
Arthur did not answer for quite some time. The silence stretched out between the two men. Tipu refused to break it, simply giving the vampire time to consider the question and formulate his response. Finally Arthur said, “I know many vampires who consider themselves to be followers of Christ, including King George himself.”
“That does not answer my question.”
“It shall have to suffice, for I am unwilling to pursue the subject further with you.”
“I suspected you might be,” the Sultan smirked. “And that is why I terrify you, is it not?”
“You? Terrify me? Preposterous!” Arthur barked out a harsh laugh.
“But it is true, isn’t it? Because I, of all those you have known who have died, or perhaps ended as you vampires like to say, have returned. And I am more than willing to answer those questions which you do not dare to ask, Irishman — questions the answer to which will give even a creature of the night such as yourself nightmares.”
“Of what questions and answers do you speak?” Wellesley demanded.
“Matters of life and death, birth and rebirth. Of what those of you who follow the Christian God choose to call Heaven and Hell.”
“You are mistaken, Tipu. Such matters concern me little, for we shall most certainly find out one way or another when we come to the end of our life, whether mortal or vampire.”
“Mortal, vampire, or tiger,” the Sultan corrected him snidely. “For your information, Irishman, I have already found out the truth. As you will recall, in life I was a Muslim. I followed the dictates of Allah, and his Prophet Muhammad. I obeyed the strictures of the Quran scrupulously.”
Arthur thought he could see where the conversation was heading, and didn’t like it in the slightest.
“I was, by all accounts, a good and devout Muslim,” Tipu continued earnestly, his gleaming eyes holding Arthur’s own and refusing to let go. “And yet, here I am. I am not sleeping until the Day of Reckoning. I have not been cast down to suffer in the eternal fires, yet nor have I been welcomed into paradise. I am simply here, Wellesley, trapped inside your mind. There is nothing else. No agony and no bliss. No fire and no garden. Here, at the end of it all, there is only…emptiness.”
The Sultan sighed.
“And I know that it must terrify you every bit as much as it does me.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Goddess Speaks
The lion’s share of the Maratha army which owed allegiance to Daulat Rao Scindia was currently encamped on the plains some ten miles to the north of Ahmednuggur. As the sun sank beneath the western horizon and the first stars of evening began to appear in the darkening sky, the soldiers and camp followers set about the business of breaking down the camp and preparing for the long night’s march ahead.
In terms of pure numbers of men, horses, and artillery, Scindia’s force outmatched that of the upstart Wellesley several times over; and, one of the compoo commanders thought to himself as he stretched his long legs out lazily in front of him, this was before Scindia united his forces with those of the Raja of Berar.
Once the two armies were joined together, they would outnumber the British more than ten times over — and some reckonings put the number nearer to twenty.
Colonel Anthony Pohlmann, formerly a sergeant in the Honorable East India Company, had done really quite well for himself, he reflected while sipping from a cup of freshly-drawn blood. The young native girl who had willingly supplied it lay spent and sleeping inside Pohlmann’s tent. She made for rather lovely ornamentation, Pohlmann thought; not only that, but her blood had the sweet tang of youthful vigor that was so prized (and therefore reassuringly expensive) among vampires.
Yes, the girl was indeed lovely…but she could not hold a candle to the woman who was sitting directly in front of Pohlmann right now.
“How is the blood?” Jamelia inquired politely, sipping at a glass of heavily-watered wine.
“Quite acceptable,” Pohlmann replied with his usual understatement.
The Hanoverian liked to think of himself as being something of a connoisseur, and it was a rare cup indeed which earned anything more than faint praise from his snobbish palate. A man of initiative during his mortal lifetime, Pohlmann was a master of spotting an opportunity and seizing it before it could dissipate. Such a natural talent had led to his defection from the East India Company in order to enlist in the service of Daulat Rao Scindia. After just a few short years of quick thinking, good judgment, and no small amount of luck, Pohlmann had soon found himself rising rapidly through the ranks within Scindia’s service, finally attaining his colonelcy and being given command of a compoo, which was roughly equivalent to a brigade in British terms. He had also been given the Dark Gift along the way, becoming both a vampire and a captain on the very same memorable night.
Pohlmann’s compoo was widely acknowledged to be the best in Scindia’s army, and their owner therefore lavished the most money, personnel resources, and of course the very best equipment upon it. The compoo was comprised of eight regular battalions in total, each one officered by a European with extensive military service under his belt. But one of the biggest problems faced by Scindia was desertion. Despite the fact that he was a generous employer, providing much better prospects for advancement than either the regular British Army or its EIC counterpart, many of Scindia’s officers were British veterans, and as such they had insisted upon an agreement that would allow them to terminate their employment rather than take up arms against their former comrades.
Every man knew that war was inevitable. The British craved it, just as they craved dominion over all India. Lake, King George’s chief military puppet on the continent, would give his man Wellesley free reign to make war upon the Maratha Confederacy, or so the talk went around campfires and dinner tables. The British would have to be shown the power of the Marathas, and with upwards of 200,000 armed men under their command, it would be a very foolish man indeed who would bet on Arthur Wellesley and his tiny band of redcoats and sepoys.
Anthony Pohlmann was no man’s fool.
What he was, however, was a pragmatist. It didn’t help that the
British government was offering similar jobs with equivalent pay to any man who deserted from the Maratha army. With the seasoned British soldiers exercising their right to leave Scindia’s service in droves, there were far too many gaps in the command hierarchy for his liking. Which was why the deceptively young woman with whom he was currently enjoying a glass was of such great value to him.
When he had first met Jamelia and listened to her story, the colonel had been extremely skeptical of some of her claims. That she was the Tipu Sultan’s daughter; that she had commanded his private army in battle; and perhaps most importantly of all, that she had faced the British general Arthur Wellesley (who had been a colonel at the time) and had brought him to the brink of defeat.
Pohlmann liked to keep his ear to the ground when it came to regional affairs, and had therefore known that such a commander as Jamelia claimed to be truly had existed; her reputation truly had preceded her. But rumor had insisted that the Sultan’s daughter had died, killed on the night that Seringapatam had fallen to the British.
“No body was ever found,” she had replied when questioned on the subject. “My father tricked me…forced me outside and locked me out.”
“Why?” Pohlmann had asked, genuinely curious.
“To save my life. He knew that the British colonel was coming to kill him. My father had been wounded in the assault. He could never have fended off the vampire’s attack.”
“You might have been able to save him,” the vampire reasoned. “Had you remained.”
“He did not give me the opportunity,” Jamelia growled. After a moment she softened. “He insisted upon being my father to the very last. How could I possibly blame him for that?”
“Could he not have surrendered?”
“And been what? A puppet of the English, to dance to their King’s tune as and when they pulled upon his strings?” she scoffed. “My father was a proud man, and an able ruler. He would rather have died than live under the British boot.”
“Which is ultimately what happened.”
“Yes.”
“And so, here you are.”
“Yes. Here I am.”
“The question becomes, ‘what shall we do with you?’”
What they had done with her had been to put her in command of a battalion in Pohlmann’s own compoo, one of eight infantry formations within the larger brigade. Pohlmann had been given good reason to be pleased with that decision ever since. Jamelia did indeed excel on the field of battle, and knew as much about the maneuvering of troops (if not more) than any other officer he had ever met, western or eastern.
For her own part, Jamelia also held the Hanoverian vampire in high esteem. As much as she despised his particular creed of blood-sucking supernatural parasite, she was willing to make an exception in Pohlmann’s case. The vampire was not only highly capable and an outstanding leader of men, he also maintained a rigid code of honor when it came to the performance of his duties. Perhaps the worst thing that could be said of him was that his proclivities verged upon the eccentric; Pohlmann kept a gaudily-decorated personal elephant for transportation, of all things, and dressed in a flamboyant manner that seemed more appropriate for an actor than a colonel.
As vices went, it was essentially harmless.
Both Pohlmann and Jamelia were currently guests in the personal tent of their employer. Even when he was not speaking, Daulat Rao Scindia’s very presence tended to command whichever situation it was in which he found himself. Scindia had remained silent while his two underlings had exchanged pleasantries, but in truth he had little inclination towards small talk.
“Wellesley and his army have crossed into our lands at last,” Scindia began without preamble. “Considering the approximate position of their army — which we can ascertain based upon the observations of their cavalry scouts — then they must strike first at Ahmednuggur. Unless, of course, they are complete fools.”
“Wellesley may be many things, but a fool is not one of them,” said Jamelia.
“Just so,” Scindia agreed. “As things currently stand, the town and fortress are barely defended, with only a token garrison in place.”
“We do want Ahmednuggur to fall,” Pohlmann pointed out.
“Indeed we do. But our plan—”
“The plan of our Goddess!” Jamelia corrected him with surprising venom.
Scindia recoiled as if struck. In the past, he had put commanders to death for showing less insolence. Jamelia, however, was favored by Kali — he had heard that from the lips of his goddess herself, when his high priest had arranged for Scindia to commune with her. It had been the night before Scindia had ridden out from Gawilghur. The Dark Mother had left him under no illusion about the importance of the tigress to her plans for wiping out the British… and then Achalraj had taken him to the edge of the pit, and shown him the horrors which dwelt within. Scindia’s eyes had widened, fit to burst at the sight of the dead British soldiers walking again. The corpses were snapping at the air with their mouths and clawing desperately with hands that were already rotting to the bone, sloughing off flesh and tissue as the unholy creatures scrabbled hungrily at the sides of the pit in an attempt to get at the living meat that remained just tantalizingly beyond their reach.
“The plan of our Goddess, the most beneficent Dark Mother Kali,” Scindia repeated, in an attempt to placate the capricious deity. One never knew quite when she might be listening. “As I was saying, the plan of our goddess requires that most ancient type of offering to her magnificence: a blood sacrifice.”
“And no meager sacrifice either. We must neither stint nor hold back, Scindia. We—”
Jamelia stopped in mid-sentence, then suddenly began to choke, screwing her eyelids tightly shut. Her teeth clenched down hard, drawing a thin line of blood from her tongue in the manner of one suffering from fits. Pohlmann and Scindia exchanged a confused look as the tigress reached out and gripped the arms of her chair, her knuckles turning white with the sheer pressure she was applying.
“What is happening, Pohlmann?” Scindia asked. The vampire merely shrugged, completely at a loss for words.
With her entire body both rigid and simultaneously trembling, Jamelia snapped her eyelids open. The pupils were gone, rolled back into their sockets so that only the whites remained.
A sinister smile spread slowly across her lips, which the empty white gaze somehow only made more disconcerting. Jamelia flicked out her tongue, now red with blood, and licked her lips slowly, almost suggestively.
“Jamelia is correct,” said Jamelia at last. “The amount of power that you are asking for from me is far from a trivial thing, even for a goddess. The recompense that you offer must be of a comparable magnitude. Otherwise, I shall be most…displeased.”
“Dark Mother?” Scindia asked intently.
Jamelia simply inclined her head, her smile becoming a fraction more twisted. “None other. This one is simply a vessel. And you are correct. One never does know when I might be listening.”
“Forgive me, almight Kali. I meant no disrespect.” Scindia abased himself on the ground, touching his forehead to the cool earth.
“This I know too,” Kali answered through Jamelia’s mouth, though the voice had a different timbre than that of the tigress, an ethereal quality that Scindia found difficult to describe. “You may rest assured that had it been otherwise, you would already have felt my displeasure.” She turned to look at Pohlmann, who sat with his usual quiet stillness, his eyes taking in everything. “You do not bow down before me, vampire. That is brave, after a fashion. It might also be considered extremely foolish.”
Pohlmann seemed to consider this. After a moment, the colonel got out of his chair and went down on one bended knee, bowing his head so that his chin touched his chest. “I, also, meant no disrespect, madam. In truth, I regard the mistress of my master as my own mistress.”
Kali laughed, clapping her hands together in delight. “Such a pretty way with words,” the
goddess cooed. “I can see why this one” — she indicated Jamelia’s body with a sweep of her own hands — “holds you in such high regard.”
“As I do her,” Pohlmann replied gravely, keeping his gaze fixed on the ground before him.
“I will keep this brief, if only because Jamelia’s body could not long tolerate the sheer power of my manifestation without sustaining permanent damage. Scindia, look at me. Look at me.”
Startled, Scindia obeyed. Kali was smiling at him, but it was the kind of smile that threatened to turn his blood to ice. Her eyeless gaze felt as though it was boring straight through him to his core, reading every last secret and lie he had ever kept or told.
“I know many things, Daulat Rao Scindia. I know what drives you — yours hopes, your dreams, and above all, your fears. You are so very proud of your toy soldiers, are you not? The white-coated little darlings of your compoos…”
“Yes, Magnificence. I am proud of my men,” he answered truthfully. What sense was there in lying to a deity that seemed able to read your every thought, to know every word before you spoke it? “I swear to you that they will give their all in your most honored service.”
“Indeed they shall,” Kali nodded in agreement, “and some shall give more than others. Here is my price, Daulat Rao Scindia. My magic is blood magic. Give me the blood of one thousand men. Not all must be yours, but all must be spilled on the same night, and in the same place.”
The same place? Scindia couldn’t help but think that it was going to be more than a little difficult to get a thousand soldiers onto the same stretch of ground and then kill each one.
“Not literally,” the goddess replied, as though talking to a simpleton. “The dark magic only requires that they die within the same walls. All else is simply detail.”
“It shall be done, O Magnificence.”
“See that it is. It is better that these offerings are made in the blood of the British, but as long as they are not made in the lives of those who bow down before me, I care little.”
Goddess of the Dead (Wellington Undead Book 2) Page 4