Goddess of the Dead (Wellington Undead Book 2)

by Richard Estep

  Vampires, on the other hand, took a distinctly different view. They put great stock in breeding and in age, but above all respected power and, to a lesser degree, ability; all of these factors added up to help define a vampire’s station.

  In some ways, vampiric society was the ultimate meritocracy, allowing those who were sufficiently powerful and motivated to rise to the highest echelons. An individual’s gender mattered not one whit to them. All that mattered were results and, of course, one’s station. Thus had it been since the very beginning of recorded history, and having spoken with a number of vampire elders, Arthur did not expect things to change any time soon.

  Jamelia, he thought darkly, conjuring up her face in his mind once again. It seems that there is to be a reckoning between us after all.

  Somewhere, in the darkest recesses of him mind, Arthur suddenly thought he could hear Tipu’s mocking laughter.

  Did I not tell, you Irishman—my daughter comes for her vengeance...

  Shaking his head to clear it, Arthur spurred Diomed forwards towards Harness. The colonel was standing to attention in front of his massed Highlanders, who looked for all the world as though they were on a parade ground in Edinburgh rather than an Indian field of battle.

  “General.” Harness drew his claymore and saluted Wellesley, sweeping the great blade up and bringing it flatly towards his nose.

  “Colonel,” Wellesley nodded in return, looking down on the man from Diomed’s back. “You have your orders, sir. The attack shall commence whenever you are ready.”

  “I am ready now, sir.” The colonel raised his voice, amplifying it subtly via an old vampire technique that had been used during times of battle for thousands of years. “78th!” That got their attention. Across the ranks, the kilted soldiers braced to attention. “The 78th shall advance!”

  There was no quick-stepping, just the slow, methodical tread of superbly-drilled combat troops. Harness and the 78th formed the left wing of Wellesley’s attack. Their orders were to attack the section of pettah wall that lay directly to the left of Ahmednuggur’s main gate. On the opposite flank, William Wallace was stepping off smartly, leading the 74th towards their assigned target: the wall directly to the right of the gate.

  And in the middle, the men of Connolly’s 33rd were hauling the six-pounder field gun towards the gate itself, straining, pulling and heaving to overcome the beast’s sheer weight and the challenge posed by the rough, uneven ground beneath their feet. These men had arguably the hardest task – once the garrison defenders noticed the cannon, they would almost certainly draw the majority of their fire.

  Behind the King’s regiment in each column were supporting units of native infantry, sepoy soldiers who had been supplied by the East India Company in order to swell the British ranks. There were actually so few King’s regiments in India that without the contributions from the Company, the army itself would have been outnumbered and overrun years before.

  Wellesley fully expected the attack to be successful, though at what cost in the lives of his men, he really could not say. He simply hoped that the dreaded butcher’s bill would not be so hellishly dear.

  Other cannon were coming up behind the main body of infantry, bigger field guns, heavier and therefore less maneuverable. This was attested to by the fact that they were being dragged by elephants rather than bullocks, oxen, or horses. Wellesley knew the truth: by the time these artillery pieces were brought into action, the fight would probably have already been won or lost, based upon the momentum achieved by those brave souls in the three vanguard columns.

  The skirling wail of bagpipes was carrying on the calm night air. Although not overly fond of the racket himself, Arthur could not help but admit to their effectiveness as a morale booster for the men of the Highland regiments, most of whom said that they felt naked going into battle without them.

  With a dull, percussive thump, a cannon let loose from behind the pettah wall. The ball went high, zipping over the marching soldiers and losing itself somewhere in the darkness behind them.

  That appeared to be the cue for the entire Maratha artillery compliment to open fire. The front face of the wall was wreathed in smoke as a single rolling barrage thundered out. At least half of the balls went either too high or too low, but a couple managed to find their mark, plowing through the red-coated ranks.

  One was a bouncer, skimming through the files of the 74th at ankle-height. Even the most disciplined fighting man would scream when his legs were taken off at the knees by a heavy iron ball traveling at high speed, and a handful of the marching Scots duly went down, their lower extremities mangled in a welter of arterial blood.

  “Close up! Close up, I say!”

  The sergeants were now setting about their grim work, and were performing it well, repositioning the men and adjusting the files into some semblance of their normal order.

  The Maratha gunners reloaded and let loose a second salvo. More soldiers fell to the cannon-fire, not only the red-jacketed British troops, but also the sepoys marching in their wake. Some of the rounds were skimming just above the heads of the front ranks, falling to land amongst the East India Company men at their rear.

  All suffered equally at the cannon’s mouth. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do, but simply to march onwards, grit one’s teeth, and bear it.

  The very front ranks of the vanguard were carrying long wooden scaling ladders. Whenever one of their number was hit, the closest sergeant would direct another man forward to take up the place of the fallen soldier.

  Hundreds of orange flames blossomed out through the billowing smoke, spewing musket balls into the massed ranks of the attackers. More screams. A private of the 74th had his lower jaw shot away and ran shrieking from the ranks, hemorrhaging blood from the ruins of his broken face. His tongue flapped from side to side as he ran, making no more than twenty steps before finally sinking to his knees when the sheer pain overwhelmed him.

  Over on the left wing, a ladder-bearer from the 78th took a musket ball in the liver. The force of the impact blew him backwards and sideways, caroming into the private behind him and tripping them both to the ground.

  “Back on that bloody ladder!” growled a watchful sergant, trotting up from the rear and grabbing the shoulder of the second man’s jacket in a beefy fist. He hauled the stunned redcoat to his feet and shoved him back into position on the scaling ladder, then headed away to find a replacement for the squealing, mewling man who was bleeding his life away beneath their trampling feet.

  From his position at the rear of the central column, CSM Dan Nichols did what he always did when he was leading his men into the face of the enemy – dug down deep, swallowed his fear, and pulled up every last reserve of courage he possessed in order to keep putting one foot in front of another, over and over again.

  The Shadow Company had actually been placed in a relatively sheltered spot at the back of the assault, something that Major General Wellesley had probably insisted upon, Dan knew. The General had lavished a great deal of time and effort towards training the special company of the 33rd in the arcane arts of combating supernatural opponents, and it would be nothing short of stupid to employ them as cannon fodder against a defended enemy fortress.

  No, far better to keep them in reserve, and bring them forward only as the situation demanded. Every man’s Brown Bess musket was loaded with a precious silver ball. Each weapon was also tipped with a bayonet crafted from the purest silver, each one worth more than two years’ pay to the average soldier of the line – which is why they were guarded so vigilantly by the quartermaster, and were always issued only bare moments before the company was sent into action.

  Looking up at the top of the pettah walls, Dan could see fleeting glimpses of the white tunics worn by the defenders, appearing and disappearing through patches in the smoke.

  Another ragged volley rang out from atop the wall, scything down more red-coated soldiers in the front ranks.

  “Looks
like the 74th is copping a fair old beating.”

  The voice belonged to McElvaney, the dark-skinned little Scots corporal who had once fancied himself a hunter of tigers.

  “Silence in the ranks!” Dan growled without turning his head.

  He’s right though, the CSM had to admit, looking ahead and to his right; the front ranks of the 74th had made it to their intended destination, the stretch of wall immediately to the right of the main gateway. The ladder-bearers confidently planted the butts of their ladders into the ground just a few feet away from the base of the pettah walls, then began to walk them up into the air until the tips rested against the very top of the upper parapet.

  Muskets were unloaded on the Highlanders from the bastions on each side, flinging the red-coated men from the ladder and back down into the mass of their comrades who were huddled at the base, awaiting their turn to try and scale the twenty-foot high walls. Bizarrely, there was no fire raining down on them from directly above.

  Thank the good Lord for small mercies, Nichols thought, imagining how much worse the carnage would be if the men were taking fire from above their heads as well as from the sides.

  The space at the foot of each ladder was fast becoming an abattoir, as men were claimed by the enemy fire more quickly than they could clamber onto the ladder and make their way up it.

  Two hundred feet away, Jamelia could not suppress a satisfied smile. She knew full well that either Wellesley himself or more likely one of his vampire underlings would have conducted a reconnaissance of the fort and pettah from the air, and in the process have become fully acquainted with the layout of the walls.

  He would have discovered that the firestep was thin and narrow at that section of the wall, directly above the gate, and known that I could not have posted defenders there…a classic weak point. Which is precisely as I intended…

  The real question was, would Wellesley take the bait?

  The larger and firmer a firestep was, the greater the number of defenders that could stand shoulder to shoulder upon it and pour musket-fire down into the ranks of the attackers. In actuality, there had been no firestep at all in the area of the main gate when Jamelia and her battalion had first entered the city. She had given orders for a false platform to be constructed in that same area. It wouldn’t pass close inspection – indeed, anybody looking up at it from the ground below would realize that it was a flimsy wooden affair – but it might just fool an observer who happened to be flying high in the air, looking down on it from above in the dark. Enhanced vampire vision or not, she was willing to bet that the ruse would pass muster and achieve the effect she wanted it to.

  Now, they were about to find out.

  Red-coated Highlanders wearing bearskins were shrugging the straps of their Brown Besses over one shoulder or the other and doggedly climbing the scaling ladders. For each man that was shot down, falling screaming to their death, two more arose to take his place.

  Finally, a stocky little corporal of the 78th reached the top of the ladder. Triumphantly, he threw one bare leg over the rounded top of the parapet and launched himself over onto the other side.

  Sitting astride Diomed some half a mile away, Wellesley watched the bloody progress of the escalade through his telescope. His keen eye zoomed to the left of the main gateway. Fighting to maintain an appropriately detached exterior, the general forced himself not to shout out loud as the squat Scotsman hooked himself up and over the scaling ladder, then reached down with crossed hands to help the next man on the ladder come up and over the top. With a ragged cheer from the men gathered around the base of the ladder, more men joined those climbing the rungs.

  Go on, my boys! Get up there, seize the firestep, and get me that foothold!

  And then it all went to hell.

  The added weight of the second Highlander over the parapet turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. With an ominous creak that neither man heard over the intermittent fire from cannon and muskets, the false wooden platform splintered and broke, collapsing under the strain.

  Falling headlong, the first soldier lost his bearskin on the way down and hit the ground head-first, smashing in his skull and blasting an eyeball out of its socket. The second was only a little bit more fortunate. He landed on his feet, fracturing the bones in his heels along with the tibia and fibula of his right ankle, before first his buttocks and then his head impacted a fraction of a second later.

  The blow to the head concussed him, which may well have been a mercy, because one of the Arab mercenaries burst from his hiding place and hacked the man to death with his tulwar.

  What the devil has happened?

  For a moment, Wellesley thought that the two victorious climbers had been shot down by musket fire from beneath the wall, but then he watched yet another Highlander clamber atop the parapet and freeze, straddling the wall but flatly refusing to cross over onto the other side.

  There could only be one explanation, Arthur knew.

  Cunning little tigress – you have removed the firestep, haven’t you?

  Arthur slammed a clenched fist into his palm as he realized that he had been outfoxed.

  An incredibly well-aimed musket ball punched a hole in the summiting Highlander’s bearskin, sending hair, blood, and brains flying in all directions. The unlucky man’s head was snapped back with the force of the impact, and then slowly, the soldier’s eyes rolled back up into their sockets and he toppled sideways, falling out of sight beyond the far side of the wall.

  It was slowly beginning to dawn on Wellesley that he made a terrible error. He had already determined that rolling a cannon up to the main gate was going to be the central prong of his attack, but as he had glassed the pettah walls earlier that evening, he had been seriously tempted to deploy the two outer wings of the assault to parts of the wall that were a little further afield.

  The number of white turbans guarding the more distant sections of the pettah wall soon put paid to that idea; noting with satisfaction that the section directly above and adjacent to the main gate was practically unguarded, Arthur had fallen back on the comfortable and entirely believable supposition that, with only a couple of thousand troops to guard such a long perimeter of parapet, the enemy killadar had simply been forced to leave some areas lightly defended.

  Yes, he had convinced himself like a bally idiot, the foe was convinced that he would launch his attack somewhere other than the main gate, and had distributed his men – her men, he was forced to remind himself harshly – elsewhere along the ramparts.

  And now his men, those brave lads of the 74th and 78th , were dying for his blithe complacency. It wasn’t enough to have scouted the defenses from the air, Arthur now realized with a sickening sense of clarity; he should have probed them more aggressively, or asked more in-depth questions about the Maratha killadar’s disposition of her troops.

  With a vicious snarl that was directed only at himself, Arthur got a grip of himself and forced himself to snap out of it. There would be plenty of time for self-recrimination later, once the escalade was over and the dreaded butcher’s bill had been paid.

  “Lieutenant Hunter!”

  “Sir!”

  Hunter was a member of Wellesley’s small command staff. He had been sitting astride his mount in the company of two other very junior officers, keeping a respectable distance away from their commanding general, whilst simultaneously being within easy reach if he should require their services.

  “Take a message to Colonels Harness, and Wallace. Tell them to re-form their ranks and storm again – but this time, they are to assault the bastions, not the walls – do you hear?”

  “Assault the bastions and not the walls. Yes sir,” Hunter nodded earnestly. The ginger-haired lieutenant was only two weeks past his nineteenth birthday, and Ahmednuggur marked his first exposure to real combat. Nonetheless, despite his wide round eyes and trembling hands, he rode off in the direction of the pettah walls as though all the hounds o
f hell were at his heels.

  We cannot withdraw now. The men have given too much, have bled too much, for them to be asked to simply hand it right back over to the enemy again…

  CHAPTER SIX

  Escalade

  The hapless British vanguard was caught in the crossfire between the two bastions located closest to the main gate, whose defenders simply loaded, aimed, and fired repeatedly, pouring a near-constant barrage of deadly accurate shots into the redcoats who were struggling to ascend their ladders.

  “This is bloody ridiculous!” roared Colonel Harness from his position farther back with his column. Too many of his prime Highlanders were dead or wounded already, their blood-splattered corpses strewn amongst a small sea of abandoned bearskins at the base of the wall.

  “There’s no bleeding firestep on the other side, Colonel!” Sergeant Henderson screamed from the foot of the ladder, relaying the critical piece of missing information for which the 78th had already paid in blood.

  “For Christ’s sake!” the vampire colonel blasphemed. He shot a quick glance to his right, where it was obvious that Wallace’s men of the 74th was caught in exactly the same predicament. The 33rd, for their part, were still trying to manhandle their six-pounder up to the main gate.

  “What are your orders, Colonel?”

  Harness snapped his head back around. It was Huddlestone, the Captain of his elite Grenadier Company. The man was obviously waiting for a decision to be made.

  “We cannot sustain losses on this scale,” Harness said at last, though it pained him to make the admission. If it goes on like this for much longer, I shall have no battalion left. “Sound the withdrawal.”

  “Sir…”