Goddess of the Dead (Wellington Undead Book 2)

by Richard Estep

  They would have to trust raw aggression and guts to win the day, the Highlanders flinging themselves up the ladders and spilling over the top of the walls, while the redcoats of his trusty 33rd forced the gate somehow...either a battering ram, or some sort of explosive device would be in order.

  Yes, Wellesley nodded to himself, that might actually work. Much depended upon the nature of their commanding officer, their killadar. He knew that the troops were steady enough, for the men of Scindia’s compoos were reputed to be good soldiers, trained by European officers no less; and the Arab mercenaries were also not to be taken lightly, based upon what he had heard of them. But ultimately, the man who oversaw the entire defense would be the principal deciding actor. Would he stand fast and put up a good fight of it, or would he run at the first volley of musketry?

  Arthur couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that Scindia was a man who readily forgave failure…or cowardice.

  Despite their best efforts, his intelligence operatives – which chiefly meant his exploring officers, brave men who ranged far and wide behind enemy lines wearing full regimental uniform, so that they would not be shot as spies if they were captured – had been unable to ascertain the identity of Ahmednuggur’s commander.

  Well, no sense worrying about that now. Whoever the killadar is, he shall doubtless make his presence felt soon enough.

  Council of War

  Arthur Wellesley did not wake up in a cold sweat. Indeed, as a vampire he no longer possessed the capacity to sweat, whether within the close confines of his coffin or on the hot twilight plains of the Maratha lands; but he awoke from each dream in which he encountered the Sultan with a racing heart and a troubled mind.

  Tonight was to be no exception.

  Was Tipu truly just a figment of his own imagination; a nightmare arising from the dream-state, and nothing more? Or was he real, the restless soul of the Tiger of Mysore, having taken up residence in Arthur’s own mind. If so, what did he want? If it was simply the opportunity to torment him, then he was most certainly achieving that particular goal. Rarely was Arthur’s sleep undisturbed these days. The Sultan came to visit him more and more often, and their conversations seemed always to come back to the very same theme: that there was nothing but a lonely, eternal darkness at the end of life’s journey.

  The coffin lid was removed, jolting him out of his rumination and allowing candle-light to spill inside. Arthur opened his eyes and squinted, attempting to focus. A face swam into view, peering intently over the edge of the casket.

  “Good evening, General,” said a familiar voice.

  “Good evening, CSM Nichols.”

  Daniel Nichols was the senior non-commissioned officer in charge of the Shadow Company, the 33rd Regiment of Foot’s elite special force of skirmishers. Although the company was trained for a wide variety of unorthodox missions both on and off the battlefield, perhaps their most solemn tasking was the one which they performed all day and every day: Shadow Company was entrusted with the close protection of all of the army’s vampire officers when they lay in the ground during the hours of daylight, reposing in coffins while they awaited the return of the night.

  It was a responsibility which they undertook with the utmost seriousness.

  Wellesley sat and gratefully accepted the cup of blood which the Company Sergeant Major offered to him. He sipped the coppery liquid sparingly, savoring the warm sensation as it slid smoothly down his throat. Before he had been turned, he had not been averse to the occasional glass of fine wine, and at times he had even partaken of some of the coarser, more vulgar distillations. His undead body could no longer be affected by the consumption of alcohol, which Arthur found to be both a blessing and a curse. He sometimes found himself missing the easy familiarity and camaraderie that the drink engendered, sweeping away some of the inhibitions of those within the officers’ mess.

  On the other hand, the violent aches and pains with which one must pay the price the following morning, he most definitely did not miss.

  Blood was a far better form of nourishment. Already he could feel strength suffusing his body, spreading outward from his core in a constantly-expanding wave. He returned the cup to Nichols and rose smoothly in one single, graceful motion. Had any observer happened to be watching who was unfamiliar with vampiric speed, it would have seemed that the major general had gone from sitting to standing without moving through any of the steps in between.

  “What word of the day’s events?” Arthur asked, stepping out of the coffin. A Shadow moved instantly to replace the lid, lifting it with the utmost care and respect. He had been waiting patiently at attention for Wellesley to stand clear, the major general realized with approval, and now that he had, the private worked to secure the senior officer’s place of rest for the following night.

  Looking to his left, Arthur saw that a similar tableaux was being played many times over. By long-established tradition, the vampire officers of the British Army were buried at sunrise each morning in a central location, usually shielded from the harsh light of the sun by the officers’ mess tent. Protocol dictated that the officers were interred by order of rank and seniority, with the commanding officer’s grave being placed at one end and a long line of officers being buried in order of decreasing rank to his left. At the far left end of the line lay the grave of the most junior vampire officer in the army.

  “It’s been mostly quiet sir, all told. But I’m sure that Lieutenant Campbell will have a more detailed report to present to you.”

  Wellesley nodded curtly.

  Ah, yes — Campbell. The man is so damnably efficient, I should be lost without him, I daresay.

  The officers’ mess was held in what could more rightly be called a marquee than a mere tent, a word which hardly did the scale of the huge canvas enclosure any justice at all. It was fully fifty feet across from one side to the other. A large wooden table filled the central expanse of open space, upon which the mess-servants had already laid out the regimental silver in preparation for the evening meal — supper for those officers who still drew breath, and a breakfast of blood for those of a vampiric nature.

  Milling about in informal clusters of ones and twos, Arthur watched for a few moments as his officers chatted good-naturedly with one another. Occasionally, a laugh would rise up from within one of the small groups. He firmly believed that such social interactions were good for morale and the forming of bonds between men who were expected to behave as brothers in battle, and was therefore loathe to break it up; but there was the business of the night still to attend to, and judging from what little natural light was making its way through the canvas walls of the marquee, darkness was almost upon them.

  As if to emphasize this point, the servants who were bustling around the mess table began to place candles at regularly-spaced intervals and proceeded to light them, one by one. Arthur called his officers to order. They promptly took their seats, vampire and mortal sitting next to one another by order of rank and seniority.

  Mess servants promptly flocked to their charges, pouring goblets of freshly-warmed blood and placing them in front of those officers for whom the act of eating was nothing more than a distant memory, while serving more conventional fare to those who were still among the living. Although pickings were slim in Maratha territory, one thing for which Arthur Wellesley was renowned was his painstaking, some would have said fanatical attention to detail where supply and logistics were concerned; this was the selfsame Arthur Wellesley who, as a junior officer, had weighed his footsoldiers whilst they were wearing full battle kit, and timed them over a series of forced marches in order to determine exactly how long it ought to take them to maneuver from one part of the battlefield to another. Small wonder that as the commanding general, Wellesley should have decreed that a sizeable amount of both forage and food be transported on the army’s bullock train; and so the officers and men ate tolerably well, and were not forced to earn the enmity of the local population by scavenging fro
m their lands like a horde of ravenous red-coated locusts.

  Dinner took the better part of an hour, and passed with the help of no small amount of arrack, blood, and cigars. Jovial banter was very much the order of the day, for it was frowned upon for the officers to bring professional talk to the dining table; but once the servants had cleared away the silver dishes and refilled each man’s glass or goblet, all knew that the time for business was at hand once more.

  “Gentlemen, let us recap our situation,” Wellesley said, leaning forwards and steepling his long, slender fingers upon the tabletop.

  Four years before, the war against the kingdom of Mysore had been engineered intentionally by the British in order to further the economic and political interests of the Crown, which was why General Harris had struck into the heart of the Tipu’s territory in 1799 with the intent of removing him from the throne for good, replacing him with somebody more to their liking.

  It just so happened that the somebody in question had happened to be Wellesley himself.

  Not that he had really been surprised. With General Baird gone, fallen in battle against the Sultan’s forces, Wellesley had seemed like the most qualified candidate for the temporary governorship of Seringapatam and its environs. Besides, the whispers around the British officers’ mess had said, even if Baird had survived, Harris regarded him as something of a blowhard; certainly the man’s disdain (sometimes bordering on outright hatred, or so it had seemed) of the native Indian populace would have made him a prickly and capricious ruler at best, and Harris had insisted upon smooth governance of the district. He wanted no revolt, no armed insurrection. Frankly, the British had too few redcoats to police and garrison their newly-acquired lands, even if the military forces of the Honorable East India Company were added to the tally, for they were needed to face yet another threat, one which was growing its power base to the north and whose existence was beginning to garner attention in London: the Maratha Empire.

  Some called them the Maratha Confederacy, but Wellesley had no doubt as to the imperialistic ambitions of this particular band of princelings. There were five of them in all, and their fortunes waxed and waned over the years as some achieved greater prominence than others, only to fall back into a state of decline again and be overtaken by one of their rivals as fortune played her many tricks.

  Scindia was the most powerful of the princes at present, and it was hardly a secret that the man held no love for the British. His greatest rival, Holkar, also roundly detested them; an alliance between the two factions would be a cause for genuine concern, as Arthur’s brother Richard had taken great pains to point out to him.

  “Fortunately, they’d just as soon trust a cobra as each other,” Arthur’s elder brother Richard — Lord Mornington by title — had laughed over a goblet of warm blood when last they had seen one another. “The buggers’ armies have at each other on a fairly regular basis, burning and pillaging each other’s territory and essentially tearing off the scab before the wound has time to heal.”

  “Better that than a reconciliation and an alliance between them,” Arthur had observed archly, decanting himself a second draught of what was turning out to be some really quite excellent blood.

  “Quite so. All of which makes your job rather simple, brother. Restore the Peshwa to his throne, and have the man sign an alliance with His Majesty’s government. Once that little matter is taken care of, we’ll have just the reason we need to intervene in the region if the Maratha situation gets any further out of hand. I shall have General Stuart draft your marching orders forthwith.”

  Arthur had found the Peshwa to be an obsequious and odious little man. Ostensibly the most senior of the Maratha princes, something akin to a Prime Minister of sorts, Baji Rao was just the sort of political animal that he had known and loathed during his own days serving in the Irish Parliament. Nonetheless, Arthur was a man who knew his duty and adhered to it slavishly; he had duly escorted the Peshwa to the city of Poona as ordered.

  When the British force came within forty miles of the city of Poona, the traditional seat of the Peshwa’s government, word reached them that Baji Rao’s enemies were tearing the city apart. Wellesley had reacted immediately, reaching out for the steadiest troops under his command — his beloved 33rd Regiment of Foot, the 19th Light Dragoons, and a handful of native cavalry, and had led them on an overnight forced march that would have broken units of lesser quality; indeed, two men had dropped dead en route due to the blistering pace set by their commander.

  Dusty, filthy, and weary to the bone, the small ad hoc force had stormed into the city just before sunrise the next morning, and were shocked to find that rumors of its destruction had been grossly exaggerated.

  “We’ve bloody well covered nearly forty miles…forty miles…in one night, for this?” Dan Nichols had groaned incredulously. “It looks like Holkar’s men have just dropped everything and buggered off.” The streets were practically deserted at that early hour, but there were no signs of the carnage which had been rumored to have taken place. Poona was peaceful, almost tranquil, as the first fingers of sunlight began to appear above the horizon.

  “Count your blessings, CSM,” Arthur had countered archly. “History tells us that it is not often that a prince is restored to his throne without any blood being shed.”

  “Yes sir,” Nichols had replied dutifully.

  The next problem to rear its ugly head was that the Peshwa was turning out to be quite the fickle man, doing everything possible to undermine British influence in the region short of openly opposing them. Mornington had actually considered removing him from the throne and replacing him with somebody more amenable, he had confided to Arthur in a private letter, but knew that the high and mighty in London would never stand for his having used British troops to restore a supposedly friendly ruler back to power, only to have those same troops remove him again in favor of somebody else…particularly when those troops were being led by none other than Mornington’s own younger brother.

  Politics, Wellesley mused, always contain wheels within wheels within wheels. It was something he had neither the time nor the stomach for.

  Suddenly,with no forewarning, Holkar had suddenly threatened to march his own army south, launching an attack on Hyderabad, whose Nizam was an ally of the British. Naturally, such an outrage against a friend of the Crown could not be permitted, and so Arthur had marched swiftly to stop him, splitting his army in two and assigning command of the second half of the force to his old comrade Colonel James Stevenson, who had commanded his squadron of cavalry most skilfully at the battle of Mallavelly.

  Arthur regarded Stevenson as an extremely steady officer, with a natural flair for both battlefield leadership and also a talent for the less glamorous but equally vital arts of administration. Stevenson had actually replaced Arthur as the governor of Seringapatam for a time, and had performed the duty with great aplomb.

  To make matters worse, that jackal Scindia, seeing potential weakness among his enemies and perhaps sensing an opportunity, had taken up arms with yet another of the Maratha princes, the Raja of Berar. Intelligence bought with good British coin told Wellesley that the two men, who were fast becoming as thick as thieves, were assembling a massive army to oppose the British encroachment into Maratha lands.

  There had been one piece of good news. Holkar seemed to have even less stomach for a fight than Arthur had for politics. As the British army marched to engage him, Holkar’s Maratha army had simply packed up its tents and retreated. Like spoiled and sulking children, they had burned and pillaged some frontier settlements along the way, but the threat of a pitched battle had successfully driven the invaders out of the Nizam’s territory all by itself.

  Now, with Holkar’s army retreating to the north, and therefore out of the strategic picture for the foreseeable future — for Arthur would have staked his last penny on the fact that Holkar would never ally with Scindia and the Raja of Berar, so great was the enmity between them — th
at only those two princes remained for him to deal with.

  All of which explained why Major General Arthur Wellesley and his men, another motley mix of British redcoats and East India Company sepoys, had come to find themselves encamped in the sparse countryside far to the north of Hyderabad and deep inside Maratha territory, engaged in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the forces of Scindia and the Raja of Berar.

  One strategic mis-step could spell disaster.

  Wellesley was satisfied that his army had served an important strategic purpose: they had effectively prevented the combined Scindia-Berar army from launching an invasion of the Nizam’s lands. But it was a far cry from the surprise decisive knockout punch, the coup de main, that Wellesley craved so desperately.

  Unlike that of their British opponents, the Maratha army was biased extremely heavily towards the use of cavalry. That gave the Marathas the advantage of greater mobility, but Wellesley knew that, on reflection, he would much prefer the tactical flexibility afforded to him by his combined army of infantry, cavalry, and artillery any day of the week and twice on Sunday; which was a damned good thing, Arthur thought, because the British force was heavily outnumbered by their Maratha counterparts.

  We are more than capable of trouncing a bunch of bloody horsemen…but first, there is the small matter of actually finding them.

  For what seemed like an interminable age now, but in reality could have been no more than a few weeks, the British and Maratha armies had been locked in a competition of feint and deceit, a contest of guile and misdirection in which each side vied for even the slightest advantage of position over the other. Not only Wellesley but also practically his entire officer corps had grown frustrated with the constant routine of march and counter-march.

  Just let it be over, and have it be done with! Arthur had found himself raging internally more than once over the past few days, though outwardly he had maintained the studied air of impassive calmness that was expected of any British officer, let alone a senior one. None but those who knew him extremely well, such as his brother Richard, Earl of Mornington, would have detected just how much he seethed inside. To the officers assembled around this table, he seemed nothing other than his usual imperturbable self — aloof, detached, and utterly in control of all that he surveyed.