The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  King was still in disguise, in that he’d allowed his beard to grow out to a neat spade shape and was dressed in civilian clothes four or five steps below his station—jodhpurs and kurta, sash and sword belt and plain turban without an aigrette. He might have been a prosperous yeoman-tenant, or from some sort of middling rural business family; dealers in grain or hides or wool, something of that nature. He did keep a supply of his own cards in his sleeve pocket, and now he flicked one out between the first two fingers of his right hand:Athelstane King, Esq.

  Rexin Manor, Kashmir

  Captain, Peshawar Lancers

  Peshawar Cantonment

  “Sir Manfred is expecting me,” he added, and dropped it onto the silver tray the khansama extended.

  The man’s eyes flicked downward; King wouldn’t have thought that was enough time to read the small print, but the butler’s manner underwent a subtle but unmistakable shift.

  “Follow me, please, sahib,” he said, bowing. “I am sure Sir Manfred will see you directly. Your man and this woman—”

  “They come with me,” King said curtly. “Imperial business.”

  “As you wish, sahib. Sir Manfred Warburton sahib’s office is on the second floor. If you will wait here—”

  He led them down a dark corridor. Nobody else seemed to be about, which wasn’t surprising given the hour. The waiting room was either very formal, or very old: carved teak paneling below a painted dado and high, thickly cushioned furniture, plus little tables littered with knicknacks. King perched on a horsehair settee; Narayan Singh squatted comfortably on his hams; the woman—

  “I can’t very well just call you ‘woman,’ ” King said. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Yasmini,” she replied, in excellent but accented Hindi. At his surprise, she went on: “I spoke Russian so that you would not dismiss me quickly.”

  Now that they were out of the noise of the street and in better lighting he could tell that she was young, quite young—the fingers that showed beneath the long sleeves bore that out. Pale skin, neatly tended almond-shaped nails; hands as small as those of a child of ten years, but the voice wasn’t that young and when her movements pushed the fabric of the burqua against her there were fleeting hints of curves. Either she was around eighteen, or—he had a momentary flash of childhood fairy tales; her voice had a sweetness like silver chimes, and there was something more eerie still in the tone and cadence—as if she were speaking in a trance.

  “I am of the Sisterhood of True Dreamers. I have fled from my master, Count Ignatieff, to warn you.”

  The Sikh pricked up his ears at the sound of the Russian name; King did himself, with a chill feeling in his gut.

  “The fakir!” the daffadar said. “Her master must be the fakir who set the Deceivers on thee, sahib. The one who killed thy father and crippled mine!”

  King nodded, but extended a hand palm down for silence.

  “Go on,” he said to the woman.

  “They are trying to kill the man you came to see—trying now. They must not succeed, because if he dies, very likely you will as well. You will believe me when the door opens—”

  Not bloody likely, King thought to himself.

  This was getting stranger and stranger, and he desperately wanted Sir Manfred to appear and make sense of it. He felt like the mental equivalent of a man running at full speed downhill in the middle of an avalanche. The effort was enough to crack your skull, but if you hesitated you’d be swept under and ground into sausage meat.

  The door opened. The impassive khansama stood there. King waited for an instant for him to open his mouth and speak, then realized what was about to happen. The man did open his mouth, slightly, but it was blood that welled out rather than words. He pitched forward like a toppling tree, and hit with a sodden thump, lying slack. There was blood on his hands as well, and several short, finned metal darts stood out from his back. The Lancer officer didn’t recognize the darts, or know what sort of weapon threw them except that it was probably very quiet. The butler was extremely dead nonetheless.

  Narayan Singh came smoothly to his feet, the blade of his tulwar flicking out with a snap. He thrust his left hand into the pocket of his tunic; the cloth writhed for a moment, and when he pulled the hand out again he was wearing a skeletal metal gauntlet with long, curved blades over the fingers—what those who used it called tiger claws. King reached under the skirt of his kurta, pulled out the heavy pistol, and tossed it into his left hand, and drew the sword with his right. His eyes met the Sikh’s, and they gave identical slight nods.

  The open door showed a stretch of hallway and a stair leading upward, dim and dark under the light of ceiling lamps covered in lacy brass fretwork. King stepped to the entrance and took a deep breath.

  Kuch dar nahin hai, he thought as he bent slightly—you were a little less likely to attract the eye that way—and moved his head out into the open, looking both ways to scan the corridor. There is no such thing as fear.

  “Clear,” he said.

  This was nothing like mounted combat, and not much like skirmishing on foot. It was quite a bit like street fighting—through the jumbled, close-packed, stone-built houses of a big Afghan village, for instance.

  Narayan Singh went first, running lightly—he might have heavy feet by Pathan standards, but not by anyone else’s. King followed, putting his back to the doorless wall and coming along behind crabwise, covering their rear. He was aware of the woman following them—the Russian woman? Yasmini was an Indian name, or Persian. The knowledge was pushed to a corner of his mind, lost in the total focus of the moment. Narayan went up the stairs in four swift bounds, crouching as he rose where an upright man would have shown above the floor of the second story. Then, very cautiously, he raised his head—

  Crack.

  The robed woman had pulled a light pistol from her garment and fired. Acrid smoke jetted from the muzzle. Narayan dropped; for a frozen instant King thought that she had shot him. Then a black-clad body toppled down toward the Sikh, thrashing. He had just enough time for a fleeting moment of astonishment; the woman was holding the pistol in a clumsy two-handed grip, and she’d fired with her eyes closed.

  Then there was no time for anything at all. A stubby gunlike thing slithered down the steps, dropped by the dying man who’d been about to shoot Narayan. Another black-clad figure vaulted the railing beside the stairwell on the second floor, dropping down toward the Sikh and slashing with a straight one-edged sword.

  “Rung ho!” Narayan Singh shouted.

  There was an unmusical skrinngg as the Sikh caught the sword on his saber and punched the tiger claws into the man’s belly, turning and throwing him down toward King. The Lancer stamped down hard on the man’s neck as he passed it going upward, using it as a fulcrum to swing himself backward. That put his back to the risers of the stairs, looking up to the rear of the stairwell— where a third black-clad figure was raising his hand to throw something, something round that glittered.

  CRACK!

  The big Webley bucked against the muscles of his left hand; his right caught his own weight. He fired twice more; the range was no more than fifteen feet. The last bullet clipped the top of the man’s head and flipped him backward as if he’d been kicked in the face by a horse. King still grimaced—he’d been aiming for the center of mass. Nothing more moved, nothing but the heels of the man he’d shot drumming for a moment on the floor, muffled by the carpet. The woman in the burqua was coming up the stairs behind him; he could hear her panting slightly as she climbed, lifting the long skirts of the tentlike garment in both hands—one of them still gripping the little Adams revolver.

  She can dress how she likes, he thought with some splinter of his mind. Her shot had saved both their lives. Not to mention doing it with eyes wide shut.

  King flipped himself back to his feet and passed Narayan Singh. The upper corridor had windows that showed an interior courtyard or light well; from the looks of it, the passageway went around all four sides, w
ith a series of doors opening onto rooms spaced against the outer wall of the building. A quick glance through a window showed that the courtyard was empty save for a few benches set on the stone pavement, shadowed and still in the dim light that shone through a few windows.

  One of the iron-framed glass panels was missing. King bent to take a quick look while Narayan Singh poised behind him, keeping the whole corridor in view as far as the corners at either end. Someone had cut a circle through the glass, removed it, and opened the simple lever-latch that held the window closed. King’s eyebrows went up; he leaned out the opened window and saw a long slender cord dangling down from the roof.

  “Well, is it the stranglers or the hashasshin, huzoor?” Narayan Singh murmured, a hint of harsh amusement in his gravelly voice.

  “Neither,” King said.

  His mind played back the brief deadly scrimmage now past, despite the tearing need for haste—it was a wonder that the shots hadn’t already brought attention; perhaps all the regular occupants of this building had gone home. They were civil servants, after all.

  Their dead enemies had been dressed in black cloth jackets and breeches, with hooded masks that covered all of their faces save for a slit across the eyes. He didn’t recognize their gear or weapons, either.

  Yet another team in on the kill-the-Kings-and-their-friends tournament, he thought. Now, which of these doors gives on Warburton’s—

  “Here,” Yasmini said. She wavered a little. “Here, quickly!”

  The door was closed, and thick; there was a chance that nobody within had noticed the sounds from outside, that they were relying on their trio of killers to guard the entrance.

  King hesitated for a second. There’s a time to be subtle, and a time to bloody well smash things up, he decided. If Warburton was alive, he needed to be kept that way, and there was no known method of bringing a dead man back to life. This is the latter sort of occasion—speed and impetus, Athelstane, like a good Lancer.

  Narayan Singh braced himself against the wall opposite the door, and King put his hand to the latch.

  “Wait a second . . . a second more—” Yasmini’s voice was a half chant. “Now!”

  “Chalo!” King said. Go!

  In the same motion he flung the heavy teakwood portal inward, throwing his shoulder against it with all the power of his legs and weight behind it. There had been a man standing on the other side, waiting where the opening door would hide him and let him strike at the back of anyone innocently coming through. That would have been the plan; in fact, he wasn’t going to be doing anything of the kind. The door had struck like a giant flyswatter, slamming him into the plastered stone of the office wall and rebounding.

  King followed the door with smooth speed, stepping in and to the right with his sword poised across his chest ready to parry, thrust, or make a backhand cut. The door guarded his back, and his pistol fanned across the room, looking for targets. Narayan Singh followed on his heels, breaking left and poised to attack.

  The outer part of the office had been separated from the interior by a carved screen; from the two desks, it had served as working space for secretaries or assistants. The screen was lying across one of the desks now, giving an excellent view of the inner room. One man was kneeling there, right hand pressed to his right side where blood leaked onto his white high-collared jacket; his turban had been knocked off, and there was more blood on his face.

  Above him on the wall a painting—it was either a very good copy of Alma-Tadema’s last work, Sita and Ravanna, or the priceless original—had been swung back to reveal a safe.

  Two other men stood beside him, one holding his collar—an Imperial by his looks, sahib-log, in expensive civilian clothes, including a natty cloth-of-gold turban. The other man was big but nondescript—until you saw his face, and the eye patch turned up above his blue left eye. Three more of the black-clad men stood closer to the door, already wheeling and bringing up short thick-bodied weapons vaguely like shotguns.

  “Go!” King said crisply.

  Narayan Singh obeyed like a sprinter coming up out of the starting blocks. King leveled his revolver and fired, working the stiff double-action, letting the weight of the weapon bring the muzzle down again to aim. His second shot hit the dart-throwing weapon one of the black-clads held and ricocheted away with a murderous wasp-buzz, spinning the man around; the third punched into his throat.

  The Sikh was on the other before he could shoot; the enemy blocked a tulwar slash with the dart-thrower, skipped backward, and drew the sword slung across his back with both hands. King fired twice more before the Webley clicked empty. Neither bullet struck the black-clad bringing his dart gun to his shoulder and taking careful aim.

  Damn all pistols! he thought, beginning a doomed charge. Morituri te salutamas.

  Another, lighter pistol went crack-crack-crack! And then click!

  The burqua-clad woman was just behind him, firing two-handed and blind again. All three shots punched into the man who’d been about to kill King, and all three struck his chest within palm’s width of each other. He fell limply forward, like a sack of grain thrown from a wagon.

  The two men who’d been standing over Warburton threw him aside. One—the Imperial—drew himself up and spoke:

  “Stop this immediately, in the King-Emperor’s name! I am Richard Allenby of the Political Service, and I require you to lay down your arms at once!”

  “You sodding traitor!” King roared.

  Allenby—if that was his name—skipped back just in time to avoid a backhand chop that would probably have lifted his head from his shoulders, and would most certainly have killed him. He drew his own sword, but it was a flash out of the corner of his eye that drew King around. Training for the melee saved him, the sort of engagement where you had to watch all around or take a blade in the back of the neck. Steel rasped on steel as he made a frantic parry and gave ground across carpet littered with fallen papers and bodies and inkwells.

  It was the man with the turned-up eye patch—the eye it would have covered was a cold light blue in a high-cheeked, snub-nosed face. It lit as the man recognized King.

  “So,” he said. “Spacebo for the gift of your presence. My name is Count Vladimir Obromovich Ignatieff, Captain King. Now I will kill you myself—and save the Czar much gold!”

  This is the man who killed my father, King realized with a sudden thrill. And killed poor brave little Hasamurti, and threatened his sister, and sent hired murderers to invade his home. Rage flashed through him, not hot but cold and chill.

  It calmed him, and he met the whirlwind attack with an economical set of parries. He backed, careful on the cramped uncertain footing, taking the man’s measure as the blades swung and glittered in the lamplight. Feeling for him through the ringing impacts of steel on steel, and the way the blows shivered up through the hilt and into his wrist. The Czar’s agent was a good aggressive swordsman, experienced, fearless, very strong, and quick—but King was at least twenty years younger, a little taller, with an edge in reach and speed.

  Right, you swine, he thought, and went in to kill.

  The Russian’s eyes went a little wider as King cut right and left from the wrist, the blade of his curved tulwar a horizontal silver-blue blur. Ignatieff parried with a ting . . . tang of steel, backing as King came in foot and hand, lunging to take advantage of his reach. That parry turned into a corps-à-corps, the hilts of the sabers locked as they strained against each other. Ignatieff combined it with a knee to the groin and a left-handed punch to the face, but Ranjit Singh and the master-at-arms of the Peshawar Lancers had been well up to those tricks—neither had been concerned with academic niceties. King caught the knee on his thigh and the fist in his left hand, gripping and squeezing as he pushed back.

  The locked blades bent back toward the fixed snarl on the Russian’s sweat-slick face, and King could smell the vodka on his breath as the two men pushed against each other like rams in rutting season, feet skidding and churning. His own brea
th came in long gasps; his enemy was horse-strong, and their straining was exerting enough force to uproot young trees. Then Ignatieff gave way all at once, pitching himself backward in an acrobat’s roll. King launched off the coiled spring of his left leg, forward to run him through as he recovered . . . and had to turn that into a cat-agile upward leap as the Russian came to one knee and slashed horizontally in a hocking stroke. The steel hissed beneath the soles of his boots; he cut downward at the older man’s head as he landed.

  Ignatieff caught the sword on his, but the backs of the crossed blades struck his head glancingly, knocking off his pugaree. Close-cropped gray-blond hair showed beneath as the Russian leapt back again, landing in a crouch, then lunging forward immediately with a running thrust.

  King pirouetted like a dancer, knocking the sword aside with his own blade and looping the motion over into a cut at his enemy’s spine as he went by. Ignatieff turned it with a sweep of his blade behind himself as he passed, then pivoting and backing—content to defend for now. The Lancer saw Allenby behind him. Somehow Warburton had grabbed the traitor around the legs, hanging on doggedly as the other man pounded at him with fist and sword hilt, only releasing his grip when the saber slashed at him.

  Warburton slumped to the floor. Allenby ran out, heedlessly pushing Yasmini aside; she fell also, bonelessly limp. Ignatieff hadn’t seen her until that moment; he started when he did, almost dropping his guard and taking a slash on his forearm as he recovered.

  “Bitch!” he hissed in Russian.

  Outside, Allenby’s voice rose to a bawling yell, calling for a daffadar and his squad, which must mean for police or troops; that was an official rank. They wouldn’t know who was the honest man here; Allenby could have told them anything.

  Ignatieff heard, and smiled despite the panting effort of the fight. “I will eat your liver while you still live to see it,” he bit out. “And the bitch’s, too. Here, and then again forever in Hell.”