The tigress walked over to the wall behind which Achalraj still squatted, pausing only to retrieve the throwing knife from the neck of her more distant target and the bottle of holy blood which she had used on the British sergeant.
“Extraordinary,” was all the priest could bring himself to say, though whether he referred to the reanimation of the dead bodies or to Jamelia’s skilled execution of the two survivors was left unclear. She chose to interpret the comment as meaning the latter, and responded with a curt nod of acknowledgment.
“We must move quickly, in case more British troops arrive.”
“Agreed.” Achalraj removed one of the bottles from his sack and unstoppered it, then sprinkled liberal amounts of blood on the bodies of the two murdered sepoys.
Jamelia had what she thought would be the riskier task, though it was a challenge she accepted willingly in the name of the Goddess. Taking the still mostly full bottle and one of its completely topped-off companions, she skirted the pettah wall until she reached the first body in the line of dead Highlanders.
The sergeant’s hungry corpse was still engrossed in the contents of the dead sepoy’s abdomen, and she suspected that it would pay her little mind unless she made the mistake of getting too close to it and its blood-soaked food supply.
The closer sepoy was another matter. Jamelia looked down and regarded the face, which had been torn to shreds by the Englishman’s grinding teeth. One eyelid had been completely ripped away, but as she looked closer the assassin noticed that the eyeball underneath it was moving slowly, rotating erratically in its socket.
Vijay’s body was coming back to life.
Not wanting to be the freshest and closest thing on the menu when the reanimated corpse was capable of fully moving once more, Jamelia knew she had to act quickly. Pulling the stoppers from each of the two bottles, she darted along the line of dead Highlanders, leaving a sticky trail of blessed blood splattered across the slack face of each and every one. She counted over thirty in all, more than enough to spread the glory of Kali once they were reborn.
Finished at last, she tossed the bottles aside without a second thought. The contents were no longer holy or consecrated, which made the bottles merely vessels again, of no further consequence.
From the corner of her eye, she caught a sudden movement. Turning swiftly in that direction, Jamelia was just in time to see the mangled face of Vijay open its remaining eye and mouth. It sat up, groping weakly towards her with one hand.
It was time to go.
Jamelia broke into a run, angling herself to follow the curvature of the pettah wall and cut around the two blood-thirsty creatures in the process. By the time she reached Achalraj, the priest had already retreated into one of the darkened backstreets, fearful of what would happen when the other two corpses reawakened.
“It’s high time we were away from here,” said the tigress to the priest of Kali. “The sun will be upon us before long.”
“Agreed. Though you should perhaps change first.”
“Oh, I shall be changing priest,” the tigress said slyly, flashing him a toothy smile. “But not, perhaps, in the way that you would think…”
CHAPTER TEN
A Nightmare at Sunrise
Wellesley was utterly exhausted by the time he returned to the familiarity of his coffin at sunrise.
You were not the one forced to escalade those walls, or to march into the storm of shot and shell, he told himself sternly. If this is tired, how must the men feel? Not to mention the fact that they are only human…
Much had happened in the hours since he had entered Ahmednuggur. True to his orders, CSM Nichols had taken the majority of the Shadow Company, combing the streets in search of mischief — and putting at stop to it wherever they found it. Four sepoys and a private from the 74th now dangled from ropes in the area of the main gate, a stark warning to any who might consider looting and abusing the inhabitants of the township.
“We found something odd, sir,” Nichols had reported back to him. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east, and Wellesley and his vampire officers had all returned to the British camp. A phalanx of Shadows met them there, and were busily engaged in helping the officers back into their coffins so that they could be secured in the safety of the earth once more. “By the main gate, that is.”
“Odd in what way, CSM?” Arthur stifled a yawn, thinking it unseemly in front of the enlisted men.
“The bodies of them that had been killed in the attack were all lined up next to one another underneath the inner wall, sir. Nothing wrong with that, of course. I poked around at bit. Turns out that some one of the Company’s native regiments put out a detail to retrieve our fallen and prepare them for burial.”
“Makes perfect sense,” Wellesley replied, wondering just what exactly the CSM was getting at.
“Yes, sir. But what doesn’t make any sense at all is that the detail has disappeared. Just upped and gone.”
“That is strange. Could they have deserted?”
“Maybe. There was five of them though, sir, and one of them was a British sergeant by the name of Brown.”
“What do we know of this Sergeant Brown?”
“I asked around, General. Knew you’d want to know, see?” Dan gave a wry smile. “According to some of the other NCOs in his regiment, he was a pretty solid bloke, sir. Solid, but lazy, if you take my meaning?”
Wellesley did take his meaning. Solid, but lazy. That description fit far too many of the men serving in the ranks of the East India Company, and more than a few of the officers too. Something about Indian service seemed to do that to a man — perhaps the heat, or quite possibly the ready availability of arrack. It was less of a problem in the King’s Army, of course, where discipline was more readily enforced, but there were still far too many miscreants among his own ranks for Wellesley’s liking.
“Not the sort to run, then?”
“Doesn’t sound like it, sir. His colonel’s concerned about the disappearance. Wonders if perhaps the Indians deserted and killed their sergeant, then hid the body before they scarpered.”
Wellesley raised an eyebrow. “It’s certainly possible. I want you and the Shadow Company to get some rest, CSM — at least, those of you not engaged in guarding the officers while we sleep. But before you turn in for the day, please speak with the officer of the day and ask him to notify the cavalry patrols. Inform them that they are to bring any rogue sepoys in for questioning.”
“I shall take care of it, sir. But that’s not all, General. You see…” Nichols paused, unsure of how to proceed.
“Out with it, CSM. We haven’t got all night.”
“The bodies of our soldiers, sir…they seem to have disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Yes sir. Hard to believe, I know; but every last one of them is gone.”
“How could the bodies have been snatched so quickly?” Arthur struggled to wrap his mind around the concept. “And perhaps more to the point, why would anybody want to?”
“Could be the locals, sir,” Nichols said dubiously. Wellesley shook his head.
“Hardly. Those poor unfortunates who were not being dragged from their homes by the more barbaric elements of our army were all hiding behind closed doors, waiting for the situation to blow over — not scurrying about dragging off the corpses of our deceased. Looting them, maybe, which is another reason that a work party was assigned to put them in order and keep a watchful eye on them; but actually taking the bodies is a very queer thing indeed.”
“It beats me too, sir.”
“Thank you, CSM. See if you can get to the bottom of this little conundrum once you have gotten some sleep, and be ready to give me a report by nightfall. Will there be anything else?” Arthur looked pointedly at the canvas roof of the tent, through which the first light of dawn was already beginning to filter.
“Just one last thing, sir.” Nichols was apologetic. “The tigress and her battalion.”
&nbs
p; “What of them?”
“No sign of ‘em inside the pettah, General,” the CSM prompted.
“Nor is there likely to be,” sighed Wellesley. “Which means that she is either holed up in the fortress with her precious white-jackets, or on the run back to rejoin Scindia’s main force. Knowing her experience with the outcome of a certain siege in the past, I tend to suspect the latter rather than the former.”
“If only the army weren’t in such a bloody shambles last night, we could have cut them off with our cavalry, sir.” The regret was apparent in the CSM’s voice, but Wellesley waved it away.
“In an ideal world, I would agree with you, CSM; but the truth is that our cavalry were engaged with the mercenaries attempting to get into the fortress.” That much was most definitely true. There had been a huge carpet of dead bodies ringing the area of Ahmednuggur fort at the end of the night, several hundred of the Arabs choosing to make a futile last stand rather than surrender to the British dragoons, whose sabers and carbines had made damned short work of them. “All that remained were the native squadrons, and we are all very aware of their level of competence.”
The native horse meant well, and were decent enough riders, but when it came to a fight they tended to lack the discipline of the British cavalrymen; for the enemy, it was more like being attacked by a howling mob of disorganized bandits, rather than a well-trained unit that operated as a single weapon. No, Wellesley knew that sending the native horse after Jamelia’s battalion would have been a bloody fiasco, and that assumed that they could even have found the Maratha troops in the first place, out in the vast expanse of wilderness which they would have needed to search in the darkness. No vampire officers could be spared, for they were all busily engaged with the assault and subsequent pacification of the pettah.
“We shall just have to skin that particular cat on another day,” Arthur said firmly, laying his head down against the velvet cushion and closing his eyes. “Excellent work today, CSM. Now get some rest. You are dismissed.”
“Thank you, General.”
With that, the CSM lowered the coffin lid gently but firmly into place. He placed his palms flat on the edge of the hole in the earth that he was standing in, which came up to the level of his chest, thrust with his feet and hauled his body back up to ground level.
Two red-coated Shadow privates stood at attention in front of the grave, with bayonets affixed to the muzzles of their primed muskets. On Dan’s order, other men who had been standing by stepped forward with long-handled shovels and began to ladle soil from a neat little mound on top of the coffin, sealing their commanding officer in for the remainder of the hot Indian day.
The Shadow Company ran like clockwork for the most part. Fully a third of their number had remained behind in camp when the night attack took place; they would be required to guard the vampire officers during the day. After checking in briefly with the oncoming duty sergeant and finding that the oncoming day watch was already formed up and assigned to their posts, Nichols made his way back to the 33rd’s lines. Most of the regiment was still streaming back in from Ahmednuggur, handing over the reins to the 1/8 Native Infantry, but a few had returned to camp already. Weary but seemingly in good cheer and apparently famished, the first cooking fires were already lit. The CSM made his way over to the closest, where a clutch of NCOs from the Sixth Company invited him to share in their supper.
As the sun rose higher in the cloudless blue morning sky, the air began to grow warmer. A gentle breeze sprang up out of the east, stirring the mens’ uniforms and hair. Tilting his head back, Dan closed his eyes and enjoyed the warmth of the sun and the contrasting cool breeze upon his face. He took another swallow of tepid water and sighed, feeling something very close to contentment.
“Sergeant! Sergeant!”
Trust some bugger to spoil it…
He turned and saw Corporal McElvaney running towards him. The man was out of breath, which drew a frown. The little Scotsman wasn’t exactly lazy, but his attitude was usually somewhere along the lines of: never run when you can walk, never stand when you can sit, and never sit when you can lay down. McElvaney had never been big on exertion. In fact, when the CSM thought about it, he didn’t think that he had ever seen the man in a hurry, short of being under attack by the enemy.
“What’s the matter, Corporal?” Dan got slowly to his feet, after draining the last of the water and setting the empty mug down with a grateful nod.
“Spot of bother in the town, Sarn’t. Well, more than a spot, to tell you the truth.”
“What kind of bother? I was just about to turn in.” It had been a bloody long night, and the CSM was developing the sinking feeling that it wasn’t over yet.
“Best you see it for yourself, Sergeant. You’ll never believe it else…”
"The head, lads!"
Clutching his musket firmly to his chest as though in an attempt to ward off some great evil, the little Scots corporal led his Company Sergeant Major through the maze of streets and alleyways that lay within the Ahmednuggur pettah. The loud crack of a cannon sounded in the middle distance, followed by the thud of its payload hitting home. General Wellesley had given orders before retiring for the day that the artillerymen were to site their weapons on the walls of the fort and to pound them, day and night, in an attempt to make its commander capitulate. The place would be a proper bastard to assault, Nichols knew; there would be none of the relative ease of an assault by escalade where the fort was concerned. The damned place, while not impregnable (for no fixed defenses ever truly could be) would cost a much greater price in blood than the pettah which it overlooked.
Well, that’s a problem for another day. It’s in the lap of the gunners until then.
McElvaney led them into an open square at the intersection of four dusty streets. A throng of redcoats some thirty strong were clustered around what looked to be four or five other men. Nichols couldn’t see clearly from his particular angle of approach, but it looked as though some of the soldiers were prodding at someone with their bayonets. As he drew nearer, it became apparent to the CSM that the targets of that prodding were also British soldiers.
“What the bloody hell is going on?” he demanded, elbowing his way through the crowd of men to get a better look. “Well, bugger me.”
Corporal McElvaney had spoken the truth. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he may very well not have believed a word of it.
The four men now standing in the center of the square were quite obviously dead. They had to be. Setting aside for a moment the fact that each man’s skin had taken on the waxy, grayish pallor that came over the body in the hours after its heart stopped beating, Dan Nichols had seen a great many wounds during his many years spent in the service of the King, and all four of these snarling, growling redcoats had injuries that, in his professional judgment, simply were not survivable. One had a hole of such depth in the right side of his skull that brain matter was exposed, glistening slickly in the bright sunlight of mid-morning; another had no mouth at all, simply a long, spit-covered tongue that protruded obscenely from the space beneath the nose from where his jaw had been shot away. A third had suffered a gaping wound to the chest, affording a glimpse of three gleaming white ribs through a jagged rent in his red jacket, while the last man, who bore the stripes of a corporal, seemed relatively intact — save for the musket ball-sized holes punched into his upper thigh and pelvis. Based upon the sheer size of the dark brown stain which covered the front of the corporal’s uniform trousers, Dan suspected that the man had probably bled to death through the two wounds…yet now here he was, standing on his own two feet and groping desperately at the closest British soldiers, fended off only by their bayonets.
“They’re our men, Sarn’t Major,” McElvaney exclaimed excitedly, “our dead men. That bald bloke there is Jason Fellon, from the 78th’s Light Company. We used to play cards every now and again.”
“The one with no jaw?”
The little Scot nodded. “That one,
yes. He got shot dead in the escalade, Sarn’t Major — I got it from one of his mates this morning…dunno if you know him, Sean Rice from Limerick?” Nichols shook his head, watching in horrified fascination as the one with the exposed brain was bayoneted in the guts and kept on straining towards the incredulous redcoats. “Took a shot to the face, so he told me when I seen him in the town earlier this morning,” McElvaney continued. “Proper upset he was, too.”
“I’ll bet he bloody was,” Nichols grunted. At least we know now where those bodies got off to. Some of them, at any rate.
Catching sight of Dan’s rank insignia, one of the sweating redcoats turned his head for a split second and said, “They’re bloody dead men, Sarn’t Major!”
“Well, make ‘em even bloody deader then, lad! Get stuck in with that bayonet!”
Dan could fully understand why the men were hesitant. The fact that these were somehow resurrected dead bodies was difficult enough to swallow, at first — at least, until Dan reminded himself that most of his commanding officers technically met that same description — but equally disconcerting was the realization that these were their own comrades, and in some cases, their friends. Short of a firing squad, it somehow felt just fundamentally wrong to be having a go at a man wearing the same uniform as you were, even if he was trying to take your throat out with his teeth.
What was needed here was a bit of order. They could sort out the whys, the wherefores, and the whatnots afterward. Nobody else was stepping up to take charge, so…
“Listen in, you men!” the CSM roared at the top of his lungs. The dead creatures paid him no attention, being absolutely focused on trying to get past the hedgehog-like wall of sharpened bayonets, but most of the men risked a sideways glance in his direction at the very least. “Form two ranks! Smartly now.” There was a pause during which a great deal of nothing took place. Drawing in a chestful of air, Dan bellowed, “ISAIDFORMTWOBLOODYRANKS—NOW!”
Goddess of the Dead (Wellington Undead Book 2) Page 13