The tigress had been clinging to the flat roof of the closest hovel, pressing her body down in order to keep the lowest profile possible. A pebble tossed with just the right amount of force had served to lure the sergeant in, and it had taken the second being thrown with considerably more force to render the big man vulnerable. In the very same instant that the stone had slammed into the side of the Englishman’s head with an audible thwack, Jamelia sprang from the roof with practiced ease.
During her apprenticeship as part of the thug cult, she had added a multitude of new killing techniques to her already-impressive arsenal. One such method was that of the garrote, a short length of thin cord which she looped expertly over the sergeant’s head as she fell, tightening it around his neck and dragging his body to the ground within a particularly deep pool of darkness.
Fully prepared for the fall, Jamelia landed lightly, squatting on her haunches and then following through to drop onto her left side. Sergeant Brown fell much less gracefully, slamming into the hard-packed dirt with full force. His head struck first, the force of the impact denting his shako, but the dazed man had no chance to utter a cry; the garrote was slicing tightly into his fleshy neck, cutting off almost the entire flow of air through his windpipe. With beet-red face and eyes popping out of their sockets, the squirming sergeant clutched desperately at the cord with his fingertips, fighting to breathe even as his vision began to blur and darken.
Jamelia responded to his struggle by simply applying more pressure to the garrote, eliciting a hoarse rasp of air from her victim’s rapidly-constricting throat. One final exertion on her part did the trick, cutting off not only the trachea but also compressing the carotid arteries and jugular veins so severely that the entire blood supply to and from the sergeant’s brain was taken out. Brown’s eyes rolled up into the back of his head, turning them completely white, and his purple tongue protruded obscenely between his lips. His body went completely limp.
The assassin held the pressure on for another minute, and then yet another, just to be sure that the sergeant was dead.
Finally, Jamelia relaxed her death grip and rolled smoothly to her feet. Her superbly conditioned body had neither broken a sweat or was breathing hard. Coiling the garrote about itself, she replaced the weapon back inside her clothing.
None of the four native soldiers had noticed a thing. They simply carried on with their task of lining up the dead British soldiers against the wall.
Keeping a watchful eye on the sepoys, Jamelia took the bottle from where she had hidden it amongst some weeds. Unstoppering it, she poured a generous measure into the dead man’s mouth.
Now it truly begins.
CHAPTER NINE
Hearts and Minds
Although not even approaching the scale of brutality that was inflicted upon the inhabitants of Seringapatam, the victorious redcoats made it their business to ensure that the people of Ahmednuggur pettah paid a high price for daring to resist them.
With the single regular battalion of infantry that had been assigned to defend the settlement gone, the only remaining troops with any loyalty to the Marathas were the Arab mercenaries. A surprising number chose to stand and fight, trading musket-fire with the marauding British soldiers until they were overrun and put to death. Others made for the safety of the fortress, but precious few were able to get inside before the cavalrymen of the 19th Dragoons scented their vulnerability and charged them down.
Before the sun rose the following morning, Kali would have her thousand blood-sacrifices, and more besides.
Steely-eyed and with a face seemingly cast from stone, Major General Arthur Wellesley took in the scenes of looting, assault, and rapine with obvious disgust from the back of Diomed. Escorted by a phalanx of Shadows, the commander of the British combined forces slowly made his way towards the center of the pettah. He was anxious to hear news of Jamelia, though feared that she may already have fled the township; either for the open desert, or the illusory safety of the fort nearby.
He would send cavalry patrols out at first light, Arthur decided at last. It would take that long to pull the disparate elements of his army back together again, and his horsemen were currently engaged in finishing off the mercenaries who had abandoned the pettah once it became painfully apparent that it could not hold out against the British assault.
A violent crash pulled him from his reverie and back to the here-and-now. The entire street was full of East India Company soldiers and more than a few redcoats, all of whom were engaged in acts of wanton destruction and savagery.
Directly to his front, four grinning sepoys were dragging the occupant of a humble-looking hovel out into the street, along with what appeared to be his wife and daughter. The girl could have been no older than ten or eleven at most, but the way in which the native troops pawed at her left no doubt as to the nature of their vile intentions.
An example must be made.
“Halt!” Wellesley ordered, reining Diomed in. Both horse and Shadow entourage obeyed, stopping smartly on his word of command. The vampire general dismounted gracefully, and two of the redcoats parted instinctively to allow him passage through their protective circle.
He did not even bother to issue a warning. Lashing out with an open palm, Wellesley issued a stinging slap that, when augmented by the full fury of his vampire strength, propelled one of the sepoys twenty feet across the road and into the front of an opposing house. The man’s neck snapped on impact, his body falling to a jumbled heap on the ground.
The remaining three turned to face the vampire’s wrath, their mouths already beginning to form excuses. Wellesley wasn’t remotely interested in hearing them. Focusing his ire on the one who was not using the child as some kind of defensive human shield, he stepped to the side more quickly than the human eye could see, and then jerked the sepoy backwards by the scruff of his neck.
The man shrieked, reflexively losing his grip on the rag of a nightdress that barely covered the girl’s modesty. Arthur yanked his head back and sank his newly-extended fangs into the screaming man’s neck, savoring the sensation of hot coppery blood as it gushed into his throat.
He was not, however, here to feed. This was about making a point, about countering savagery with even greater savagery. To that end, Arthur bit down even more forcefully, burying his teeth to their maximum depth as he did so, and then wrenching his own head away with his jaws still clamped tightly down. A huge chunk of neck and tissue tore away with him, exposing a ragged and gaping wound through which the plane of muscle tissue was clearly visible beneath the arterially pumping blood.
Arthur spat out a large gobbet of flesh, letting the man’s spasming body collapse to the ground at his feet. His eyes glowed with a preternatural red light, an almost perfect match for the red blood which now stained his lips and ran in a rivulet down the front of his chin.
The commanding general had become a creature out of the sepoys’ worst nightmares.
With their faces now seemingly every bit as drained of blood as their mortally-wounded companion was, the two remaining sepoys hurriedly unhanded their victims and simply ran for all they were worth.
Arthur let them go. Reaching slowly into the inner pocket of his jacket, he removed a silk scarf and dabbed it around the edges of his mouth, then absorbed what he could of the blood from the rest of his face. Finally satisfied that he had cleaned up as much as the situation allowed, he turned to face the family of three. Both parents were shaking, but their daughter simply looked at him with unbridled curiosity.
No doubt this is the first time that she has ever seen a vampire.
He offered them a low bow, which seemed to astonish the girl’s father more than his transformation into a monster had. The young girl clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle.
“Please accept my most sincere apologies for the reprehensible behavior of these men,” Arthur intoned gravely, straightening back to his full height. He looked up and down the street. For the moment at least, all criminal
activity appeared to have stopped. Clearing his throat, he added a touch of preternatural augmentation to his voice and addressed them.
“These people are not the enemy. They may not be our friends either, but that is by-the-by. Most are simply caught in the middle of a conflict they did not seek to be a part of, innocent victims of the clash between us and the Marathas. You will offer them no further offence or insult; nor shall you steal their food, drink, or personal possessions. Any man caught in contravention of this order will find himself dancing at the end of a rope with a stretched neck before sunrise.”
There was grumbling, which was only to be expected from men who had had the promise of booty dangled tantalizingly before their eyes and then snatched away again, but the soldiers dispersed without any real insubordination. It had been a tenet of warfare since time immemorial that once the defenders of a town chose to resist a siege, they – and their families – would be forced to pay dearly if even a single drop of blood was spilled during the inevitable assault.
But this situation was different, Wellesley knew. For one thing, he strongly suspected that the people of Ahmednuggur had not wanted to resist at all – that choice had been made for them by Scindia, something for which the citizens could hardly be blamed. For another, allowing their persons and property to be defiled by a pack of ravening beasts would hardly further the British cause in India .What hope was there to be of a lasting peace once the Marathas were defeated, if Wellesley’s army had a reputation for little more than rape, murder, and theft?
“Nicely put, sir, if I may make so bold.” Dan Nichols said quietly. He had spent the entire duration of the encounter standing back and holding Diomed’s reins with one hand, not only securing the General’s mount, but also scanning their surroundings for potential trouble.
“Thank you, CSM. Take the Shadow Company into the township, if you please. Hang the first five troublemakers you encounter that are up to anything more than some minor mischief. Do it visibly, perhaps from the main gates. Let us see if that gets the message across.”
“Sir,” the Company Sergeant-Major nodded obediently. “If it’s all the same with you, General, I’ll leave a few of the lads in your keeping. Just in case, like.”
Wellesley suppressed a smile. The CSM was a mother hen at the best of times, always fretting after Wellesley’s safety when he was out of sight.
“Very well, CSM. No more than five.”
Nichols was plainly unhappy at what he thought to be a pitifully small number of guards, but knew better than to argue.
“Sir,” he said again, more neutrally this time, and moved off to detail the men.
Arthur sighed and re-mounted Diomed, patting the grey horse absently at the base of its long neck. As the grumbling sepoys and redcoats went their separate ways, he returned his attention to the bigger picture. Closing his eyes for a moment, Arthur let his sensitive hearing dominate over his other senses. There was still the occasional gunshot, and more than a few screams, but based on the overall pattern he was hearing there was little that might be called organized resistance any more.
Ahmednuggur’s back had been broken, he thought; but then his gaze traveled across and upwards towards the fort, where – unless he missed his guess – more garrisoned soldiers or mercenaries of some description were still holed up. They would need to be ferreted out, and damned quickly, lest he lose the initiative and get bogged down in an interminable bloody siege, for the walls of the fort were much too high to be carried by escalade as the pettah’s had been.
On that cheerful thought, Arthur circled Diomed about and rode off to determine where best to site his artillery against those blasted walls.
The Seed is Sown
Jamelia and Achalraj had chosen their hiding place with great care. They both crouched behind a low mud-brick wall which was far enough away from the pettah walls that they were unlikely to be seen by the sepoy burial detail, and yet close enough to afford them a good view when the reanimated corpse of Sergeant Brown shambled across the stretch of broad wasteland towards them.
The four men noticed nothing amiss until their supervisor was within ten feet of where they were still dragging the bodies of dead redcoats into a relatively straight and even line. The closest was named Vijay; his ears were the first to pick up on the pained moan that was emanating from the sergeant’s mouth, and he straightened up after releasing the ankles of a Highlander who was missing the right side of his head.
The startled sepoy caught a glimpse of a bright purple face, fronted with two rows of gaping teeth, and before he had time to react, Vijay’s face was suddenly inside the creature’s mouth. The thing that still wore the body of Sergeant Brown clamped its jaws down on its victim’s nose and tugged, tearing away cartilage and gristle in a spray of blood.
Vijay let out a bowel-loosening squeal, staggering backwards away from the creature with both hands pressed to his face in a desperate attempt to ease the pain and staunch the bleeding. It was no use, for blood simply poured through the gaps between his fingers.
Chewing hungrily, the creature stumbled forwards again, its gait looking eerily similar to the many redcoats who were even now staggering drunkenly through the streets of Ahmednuggur with plundered bottles of arrack clutched in their hands. Vijay felt something hard and unyielding behind him, and realized through the miasma of pain and terror that the sergeant had backed him into the pettah wall.
There was nowhere left to run.
Brown’s reanimated corpse fell on him, gnashing and clawing at his face and neck. Fueled by panicked desperation, Vijay brought one knee up and buried it as hard as he could manage between his attacker’s legs. The blow would have folded any mortal man in half, crumpling him to his knees in a shuddering, vomiting mess. The monster did not so much as flinch: rather, it took the sepoy’s left ear between its teeth and began to worry at the soft flesh, tearing the tissue away in chunks.
One of Vijay’s incredulous comrades had finally recovered his wits. Despite hands that were shaking fit to drop it, the sepoy nevertheless managed to bring his musket up into his shoulder. The muzzle bobbed and weaved as he tried to aim at the living dead corpse of his former sergeant; the problem was that as Vijay struggled, he kept obstructing the line of fire.
Terror of the monstrous creature finally overcame the sepoy’s fear of hitting Vijay, whose screaming face was now saturated with blood, more of which continued to pump from a dozen ugly-looking bite wounds, and the man jerked back clumsily on the musket’s trigger.
From ten feet away, the shot could hardly miss. Entering the creature’s upper back just to the left of its spine, the heavy lead ball disintegrated two ribs before plowing through the chest cavity and lodging inside the left lung. Blood gushed from the entrance wound, and the sepoy was even more horrified to discover that far from taking the creature down, all that he had achieved was to draw its attention towards himself.
Releasing its grip on Vijay, Sergeant Brown’s body whirled drunkenly towards its assailant. Cold, dead eyes widened as they somehow seemed to recognize the significance of not only the smoking musket but also the man wielding it. The creature lunged for him, and the sepoy suddenly wished with all his heart that he had shown the forethought to fix his bayonet before taking the panicked shot. Knocking the musket aside as though it was little more than a toothpick, the reanimated corpse locked its arms around the sepoy’s body and drew him into a bear-hug. The man kicked and yelled in a desperate attempt to free himself, but his cries and struggles were both cut short when ravenous teeth were sunk into his throat in what looked like a grotesque, even more vicious mockery of the act of vampirism.
The dying sepoy’s cries for help were lost in the noise and violence of Ahmednuggur’s capitulation, the wails of those unfortunates who were suffering the brutality of being beaten, raped, or murdered. Vijay’s body had ceased moving by now, having bled out as much of its precious life-blood as it could afford to lose.
Not even thinking
to use their muskets on the creature, the remaining two sepoys decided that their best chance of survival was to flee. The pair took to their heels like men possessed, splitting up and running with no particular direction in mind other than simply away.
As events transpired, neither man would get far.
Jamelia’s right hand flicked outward with the speed and force of a striking cobra. A streak of light flashed briefly through the air, terminating abruptly when the blade of the throwing knife thudded into the neck of the more distant sepoy. His body continued to run for five more steps, until the man’s central nervous system finally took note of there being a length of sharpened steel embedded in between the first and second cervical vertebrae. Then the body dropped as though poleaxed, landing with a hard thump in the dirt.
The sepoy was already halfway to death’s door, unable to breathe due to the transection of his spinal cord; the only bodily functions that could still be performed happened next, as muscle tone in bowel and bladder were lost simultaneously, voiding their unpleasant contents into the seat of the dead man’s trousers.
For his part, the final surviving sepoy was running directly towards the roof on which Jamelia had concealed herself.
“Do not let him get away,” Achalraj urged her pointlessly from his hiding place. Had she actually been able to hear his condescending remark, the female assassin would have almost certainly shot him a look which could have curdled milk at fifty yards.
Before the words had finished leaving his mouth, the priest saw Jamelia’s dark shape fly through the air, landing directly on top of the runner. No garrote for this one, he realized as a long blade cleared its sheath between her shoulder blades and slashed the man three times. With a strangled cry that was suddenly cut off by a final stroke of the blade, the sepoy finally lay motionless.
Keeping a wary eye on the walking corpse of the British sergeant, Jamelia wiped her sword blade clean on the dead sepoy’s tunic and returned it to its sheath. The creature had somehow managed to rip open the abdominal cavity of its second victim, and appeared quite content to be devouring the rope-like contents, one loop of intestine at a time.
Goddess of the Dead (Wellington Undead Book 2) Page 12