“You have something to say to the contrary, Captain?” Harness snapped, the frustration that he felt suddenly emerging as boiling anger. As a professional soldier, he should be above such petty displays of emotion – and as one who had received the Dark Gift, he should be doubly so. But his men were getting massacred out there, damn it, and Harness didn’t see any other option than to retreat.
“Pardon my presumption, sir, but would you be willing to allow the Grenadier Company to attempt the escalade?”
Colonel Harness clapped a cold hand upon his shoulder, seeking both to ask forgiveness for his emotional outburst and to offer a gesture of support.
“That’s brave of you, Huddlestone, but I simply do not think—”
They were interrupted by the galloping of hooves. Lieutenant Malcolm Hunter reined his horse to a halt and leapt clumsily from the saddle. He had obviously ridden the horse hard, Harness realized, because the beast’s flanks were lathered with sweat, and spittle bubbled at the corners of its mouth.
Hunter’s gangly frame slammed to attention awkwardly and he launched a vigorous salute.
“General Wellesley’s compliments, Colonel Harness, and he regrets that he must order you to re-form your men and storm Ahmednuggur once more.”
Harness opened his mouth to speak, but Hunter went on to point out the bastion that was to be his new objective.
“Please relay to the General that his order has been understood and acknowledged.”
The lieutenant re-mounted his horse and spurred away in the direction of the 74th, determined to relay the same message to Wallace. Harness turned back to face Huddlestone.
“Well, Captain, it seems as though you are to get your wish. You may carry out the attack as soon as you are ready.”
“Yes, sir!” Huddlestone saluted and spun around, making deliberate strides towards his grenadiers.
“Mister Campbell!”
The vampire-augmented voice brought the young lieutenant to his captain’s side almost immediately. Huddlestone slid his claymore from its scabbard smoothly and pointed it towards the closest bastion.
“We are to assault that abomination forthwith,” he explained insouciantly, as though they were about to do nothing worse than take a walk in the park. “Assemble the men and follow me!”
“Yes, sir!”
If Campbell had been a puppy, thought Huddlestone, his tail would have been wagging ten to the dozen. Don’t be quite so eager to rush towards your own death, boy. You’re not a vampire yet…
The grenadiers were milling around close to the base of the ladder, trying to find some cover – any cover – and taking potshots at any white-turbaned target of opportunity which dared to raise its head above the ramparts down the line.
A dead soldier had gotten tangled up in the lower rungs of the scaling ladder, his body lolling drunkenly backwards while the brains leaked from a gaping hole above his right ear. Huddlestone watched with quiet satisfaction as Campbell reached up and grabbed the dead man by the collar of his jacket and jerked the corpse from the ladder. It landed with a sickening thud on the ground below.
“Corporal Simpkins!” Campbell bellowed, in a voice that cut through the noise of battle like a blade through silk, “Take two men and get this ladder moved. I want it up against that bastion in under a minute, or I’ll know the reason why!”
“Sah!” Simpkins roared in acknowledgment. By Huddlestone’s counting, the tips of the ladder were scraping up against the bastion wall in under thirty seconds.
“Follow me!”
Clutching his claymore in his right hand, the young lieutenant placed one boot confidently on the first rung of the already-bowing wooden ladder and began to climb, utterly sure that his fellow grenadiers would be at his back.
Gripping his own claymore tightly, Huddlestone took two steps forward and lined himself up with the top of the ladder. Campbell was only halfway to the top by the time that his vampire captain had summoned up the power to perform a standing leap, flying up and over the heads of the clambering grenadiers.
The vampire landed amidst a mass of dark-skinned soldiers dressed in white, all of whom gaped at the intruder who had suddenly appeared on top of the stone bastion. With a single sweep of his claymore, Huddlestone removed the head from the closest man, then spun on his heel and gored the chest of a second with the tip of the blade, before thrusting it forward through the man’s torso until the basketed hilt was lodged against his ribs.
With a twist, the captain wrenched the blade free, taking the better part of a lung along with it. Blood and gore spattered the floor beneath Huddlestone’s feet as he took three more steps and slashed at the tulwar of a third mercenary. To the man’s credit, he barely even flinched as the edge of the vampire-driven sword sliced cleanly through the metal of his own curved blade and hacked into the side of his neck, severing the carotid artery and bringing the light of blood fever into the captain’s eyes.
That split-second of distraction was all that it took.
“Hello,” whispered a silken voice in Huddlestone’s slightly-pointed ear, “and goodbye.”
Jamelia pulled the trigger of the pistol whose muzzle she had just pressed against the side of his temple, angled slightly towards the back. With a flash of gunpowder, the perfectly-crafted silver ball was propelled down the length of the barrel, exiting in a blazing-hot cloud of expanding gases and propellant.
The ball entered Captain Huddlestone’s skull at one of its thinnest points, shattering bone and severing the middle meningeal artery in an instant. Immediately upon making contact with vampire flesh, the silver projectile began to ignite and necrose the tissue surrounding it.
Huddlestone barely had time to utter a shriek before first his brain and then the entirety of his cranial vault caught fire, blazing with all the intensity of a miniature sun as the contents of his skull burned spectacularly from the inside out. The vampire’s eyes liquefied, turning to streams of glutinous black fluid that gushed down the front of his now structurally-distorted face. A geyser of angry flame exploded from his mouth.
The captain’s body was suddenly consumed in a torrent of green fire, exploding outwards from the center in all directions. Arms windmilling frantically, he flailed backwards, away from the circle of Arab mercenaries who were now shrinking towards the ramparts in order to put as much distance between themselves and the blazing torch as was humanly possible.
Jamelia looked on impassively as the vampire died, and then made her way down the wooden stairs that led into the dark interior of the bastion. Sooner or later the British were going to make their way to the top, she reasoned, and this was no place for a battalion commander to get tied up in hand-to-hand combat. She had bigger concerns to address.
Somehow finding the exposed tips of the scaling ladder, Huddlestone’s legs became entangled and caused him to trip. Still in the process of being consumed by the eldritch fire, his flailing body went head-over-heels backwards, falling straight down the length of the ladder and colliding with Colin Campbell.
The startled young lieutenant had already braced himself for the stiff enemy opposition that he was expecting to find at the top of the ladder; in no way was he prepared to be hit in the face by the burning husk of a newly-dead vampire. The falling remains of Captain Huddlestone hit him hard, forcing the air out of his lungs and knocking him off the scaling ladder. As he fell from roughly fifteen feet above the ground, Campbell’s boot struck the redcoat who was next on the ladder, causing him to slip and fall also.
Campbell hit the ground hard and lay there for a moment, stunned by the force of the impact. Ten feet away, the charred and blackened hulk of what had until moments before been his company commander began to smolder, the inferno which had consumed it already having burned itself out.
Flash burns had scorched the right side of his face and neck, raising the skin in a series of angry red welts. His ribs and flanks hurt from where he had hit the ground in a graceless mess, bu
t it didn’t feel as though anything was broken when he ran his hands down his body to check.
Feeling ever so slightly naked without it, Colin realized that he must have dropped the claymore during the fall. Casting about frantically for it, he saw the blade gleaming in the dirt some five or six paces away. With a determined grunt, Colin forced himself to his feet and limped over to retrieve the weapon. An officer without a sword would never do, after all, and Colin suddenly had the horrifying realization that he was the commander of the Grenadier Company now. The men were all looking to him for leadership, already seeming to have written off the smoking remains of Captain Huddlestone.
As if to mirror his thinking, Sergeant David Pace stepped out of the milling mass of grenadiers and asked quietly, “What are you orders, sir?” The short, dark-haired little man was one of the company’s most senior veterans, and a true lynchpin when it came to holding things together.
Campbell didn’t even stop to think about it, because to do so would be to open the door to retreat, to invite the possibility of failure in and set it a place at the table. They had lost too many good men already in the assault on the false rampart, and he be damned if they would go back to Wellesley with their tails tucked between their legs and nothing to show for the beating they had taken.
“We form the men and we attack again.” Colin hoped that he sounded more confident than he actually felt. Muskets still banged and thudded from the bastions, each ragged volley snatching redcoats from their feet in a shower of blood.
If we stay here, we die. To retreat is utterly unthinkable. The only alternative is to go on.
He found the weight of the claymore strangely reassuring, hefting it in his right hand. Already the pains scattered throughout his body were beginning to fade into the background as the rush of adrenaline pulsed through his veins. Colin put one hand on the ladder, pressed the closed fist of the other against the side rail, and began to slide the sword hand along as he climbed, using it as another point of contact to steady his ascent.
There was no need to look down. He knew without question that Sergeant Pace would be the first man onto the ladder behind him. They were the Grenadier Company, after all; courage and professionalism under fire were their watchwords.
Where the bloody hell was the 33rd?
He risked a quick look over his shoulder, saw that the sweating redcoats of Connolly’s regiment were still struggling to manhandle their gun up to the gate. The defenders seemed to be focusing their attention on the more immediate threat, dividing the majority of the musket and cannon fire between the 74th and 78th in an attempt to defeat their escalade.
Colin returned his attention to the ladder, looking up towards his ultimate destination just in time to take a stone full-on in the face. A second one, larger this time, hit his left shoulder and bounced. The mercenaries were hurling down rubble, he realized when he caught a glimpse of a white-turbaned figure upending a bucket from the rampart. He was caught in a rain of debris, as first more stones and finally larger rocks came pelting down upon him. One smashed him squarely in the nose and he saw stars, thousands of pinpricks of blinding white light exploding across his field of vision.
Then his hands were letting go of the ladder, and he was falling.
Colin must have blacked out, because the next thing he knew, he was laying prostrate on the cold ground with blood streaming from his nose and mouth. Gingerly he raised two fingers up to his nose, and then recoiled at the lance of agony that shot through his face when he applied even the slightest pressure to it.
Nose is broken, damn it.
Blinking tears from his eyes, the young lieutenant forced his head upwards to gauge the progress of the assault. Pace was nowhere to be seen. Three other redcoats were lined up on the ladder. As he watched, the man closest to the top took a musket ball in the chest and fell, screaming, nearly twenty feet to the ground. He took the next man down with him. Then a large rock was hurled into the third man, striking his head with a sickening crack and sweeping the ladder clean once more.
The escalade was failing.
No, Colin resolved with a sudden surge of anger. He would not tolerate it. This would not stand.
Fighting his way to his feet, he staggered drunkenly for a moment as he fought to regain his balance. Flashes of double-vision painted the world as a nightmare canvas of blurred smudges, and Colin squinted repeatedly. Finally, it cleared.
Miraculously, the sword was still in his hand. He resolved to bury it up to the hilt in some bastard’s chest, or to die trying. Colin looped the cord that protruded from its hilt over his right wrist and let the weapon dangle from his arm by it, thinking that he might get up the ladder more quickly if he had the use of his right hand. He could worry about the enemy at the top if he ever actually got to the top.
Third time’s the charm, eh? He laughed manically, dimly aware that the blows to his head were making him act strangely, but he simply could not bring himself to care. His blood was up, his blood had been spilled, and Colin Campbell wanted to shed a little of somebody else’s blood in retribution.
One step. Two. Three. The base of the ladder was within reach.
“Are you alright, sir?”
It was Pace, good old reliable Pace. Colin nodded absently, a strangely detached smile ghosting across his features.
“Never better, Sergeant. Right, up and into the buggers again, eh?”
“If you say so, sir. Want me to go first, sir?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Sergeant. Follow me.”
And then he was climbing, making better time now that he was going hand-over-hand. The cold blade of the claymore occasionally banging against his bare legs, but that was little more than a minor annoyance. Colin was suddenly grinning, despite the noise and fury and death which surrounded him on all sides; for the first time in his life, he felt truly alive, and relished every single heartbeat and sweet lungful of air as a gift given to him by God.
Campbell realized with a shock that he was running out of rungs to climb. Three, two, one, and then his hands closed on empty air. The top of the parapet loomed into view, and without conscious thought Colin threw himself up and over the top of the ladder, landing with an undignified stumble on top of the bastion.
Dignity counts for nothing now, he told himself as he scrambled to clutch the claymore’s hilt between his fingers once more, all that matters is that you have made it up.
The defenders seemed every bit as surprised as Colin was, momentarily stunned at the sight of the broken-nosed, bloody-faced young officer clambering over the parapet to stand before them. Hands in the small of Colin’s back shoved him forwards rudely, and he risked a quick look back to see that Sergeant Pace had landed behind him and was trying to create enough room to bring his weapon to bear.
Calmly, Pace brought the Brown Bess up to his shoulder, aimed the bayonet-tipped muzzle at one of the several white-uniformed defenders, and pulled the trigger. The blast half-deafened Colin, but he was willing to forgive the sergeant when he saw his target’s chest gout bright red blood. The man collapsed backwards against the inner rampart, a look of confused disbelief on his face.
The well-placed shot seemed to have jolted the defenders back to life. Three mercenaries wielding vicious-looking curved blades advanced on the lieutenant and his sergeant, while a fourth brought a pistol up and fired. Neither man dared look back, but the lighter ball cut through the air between both of their heads and elicited a scream from Corporal Simpkins, who had been gamely struggling to climb off the ladder and onto the bastion. His right femur shattered from the ball’s impact, the luckless corporal was thrown off-balance and pitched backward into the empty air.
Colin lashed out with the sword, locking blades with a swarthy mercenary whose angry dark features stood out in stark contrast to the white of his apparel. Both men grunted with exertion, trying to overpower one another with brute force alone. In an attempt to break the deadlock, the mercenary aimed a kick at the
Scotsman’s crotch. It missed its target, but the sandal connected with Colin’s inner thigh instead, driving him backwards a step.
Seeing an opening, Pace fired the musket from his hip. It was a showy move rather than an elegant one, but it did the trick, planting the heavy lead ball directly into the swordsman’s belly. He uttered a high-pitched squeal and fell heavily backwards onto his rear end, reflexively dropping the tulwar in order to press the fingers of both hands against the gushing entrance wound.
Not one to rest on his laurels, the stocky NCO pivoted smartly on the balls of his feet and thrust the bayonet towards the next closest man. The point slipped past the mercenary’s guard by mere inches and penetrated into the man’s exposed throat, causing him to gurgle up a fountain of bubbling arterial blood.
“Always wanted to do that,” Pace grunted with satisfaction, referring to the golden opportunity to fire from the hip rather than the more traditional shoulder-aim. “Look out, sir!”
Campbell brought his sword up just in time to block a wildly-swinging overhand cut. The momentum drove his blade downwards and to the right, but in the process opened his attacker up to a kick from the lieutenant’s boot, which by happy chance planted itself firmly between the mercenary’s legs. Pain of that nature tends to elicit a very special cry, and this was no exception. Capitalizing on his success, Colin reversed the course of his blade into a backhand counterstroke, hacking the sharpened edge into his adversary’s flank. The man went down hard and lay there squirming until Pace finished him off with an efficient thrust and gore of the bayonet into his chest.
More Highlanders were clambering over the parapet wall by the minute, filling the upper bastion until the sea of red uniforms easily outnumbered the white. Within moments it was over, and Colin stood there panting amidst the dead bodies of their vanquished foes, his sword arm drenched with blood up to the elbow.
Propped wide open and secured by a heavy stone, a wooden trapdoor beckoned the redcoats down a darkened stairwell into the bastion’s interior. Campbell made towards it, but was stopped in his tracks when a commanding voice bellowed:
Goddess of the Dead (Wellington Undead Book 2) Page 9