The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  And searching this whole great house was going to take more time than they had . . .

  “This way,” King said.

  He kicked open the door at the bottom of the stairs, ran across the room—it seemed to be fitted out as a nursery, though without any present occupants—and down another set of stairs. The door there was locked, but it was carved sandalwood, and the bolt tore out under his boot. Then he stopped for a moment, blinking in the brightness and glitter beyond. Two naked girls sat up in bed at his entry, clutching each other and screaming in high-pitched panic amid the swirling gauze curtains that hung from the bedposts. At another time he might have looked on with some interest; the girls were full-figured and very pretty, one pale cream and the other dark brown. Although they were both a bit young for his taste—around sixteen, one visibly pregnant, the other with a fading black eye.

  The room was richly furnished, with a gilt fretwork ceiling set with small mirrors, and murals in the neo-Mughal style popular nowadays—all the scenes were erotic, and he realized that this must be Allenby’s bibi-khana, his women’s quarters. There were servants scattered around, most of them screaming as well—all women, all good-looking, ranging from their late teens to their early thirties.

  The room would have been the base of the tower, but it was larger than the fifteen-by-twenty chambers above, with only thick arches at the corners to show where the weight bore down. Beyond those were light furniture, low couches and tables, rugs, cushions, and a sunken tub of blue-and-white marble set amid tiles and carved-stone screens.

  And on the opposite side a doorway, which slammed back to admit four large men with tulwars, rushing in at the women’s screams, and now breasting forward through a covey of bright saris and shrieks like fishermen wading through surf.

  “Bloody hell,” King snarled to himself. And then aloud: “Take them—but keep it quiet!”

  There was plenty of noise from the courtyard below. If his party didn’t start shooting, they might be able to get through to their objective without attracting the attention of either the occupants or whoever-the-hell it was who’d attacked the house at this extremely inconvenient moment. King crossed his arms downward, drawing his Khyber knife with his left hand and his saber with his right. There were no points for elegance in a melee; it wasn’t like a duel.

  A hysterical maidservant got in the way of his first lunge, making him twist aside at the last moment—giving her a nasty gash despite all he could do. The distraction might have been fatal if David bar-Elias hadn’t moved up and caught the foeman’s descending sword on his. King pivoted and stabbed his immobilized opponent under the arm with the chora in his left hand, in time to see Ibrahim Khan neatly trip another and hack through the back of his neck. No points for fair play, either.

  Beyond him another of Allenby’s retainers toppled backward with half his face gone and a mushy scream, blowing blood bubbles through what was left. The other two of David’s men were hacking the last man down with economy and dispatch, the inward-curved blades of their yataghans throwing streams of red drops as they flashed and turned and smacked home with dull wet sounds. The brief scrimmage of clashing steel and stamping, snarling men died down; Ibrahim silenced enemy wounded with short, brutally efficient thrusts and chaffed good-humoredly at the other men as they rifled the dead. One of the merchant’s retainers tore open his jacket and grunted at the sight of blood staining his shirt beneath from a deep stab.

  “Back,” David said. “Can you climb?”

  “Yes, sahib. For a while, at least. I will weaken, with this.”

  “Back and out. Togrul will bandage you and send you on your way home.”

  “This way,” Yasmini said, in the same dream-toned voice she had used since drinking the bhang lassi. “Through the door.”

  “Come, then,” King said to Ibrahim.

  “Shall I slay, and not scratch?” the Pathan said, but followed willing, leering at the women—now mostly huddled around the two on the bed, one binding another’s gashed forearm.

  “Down the stairs,” Yasmini said. “Below.”

  “Through here!” Henri said, increasingly desperate.

  The door was locked. He backed off to the side and pointed his pistol, covering his eyes with his sword arm.

  Crack. Bits of metal flew through the air. They pushed through, shouldering the door open, and the Frenchman whistled.

  “Death of my life,” he said; it was a big room, and fitted out like the gaudiest whorehouse in creation.

  There were a good dozen women huddled together on the bed—all of them terrified-looking, many weeping, one moaning over a bandaged and bleeding arm. And there were four dead men on the floor, tulwars near their hands, blood still flowing from their wounds, with an open door behind them—stairs behind it, leading upward.

  Sword work, he thought; the stink of raw blood and bowel was thick, and the rich carpets near the men were sopping. And rather well done. All hell was lose in Allenby’s house tonight, and not just the hell of his own making.

  “More of the Good People, Captain Malusre,” Henri said in frustration, nodding at the women. “Apart from these,” he added, prodding one of the corpses with the toe of his boot.

  “Pathan,” Malusre said. “Not the dead men—the killer. Look, see how the throats are cut, with an outward thrust? Very distinctive.”

  “Which helps us not at all: Where is Allenby?”

  Sita surprised him. She stepped past him toward the bed, and spoke in rapid Hindi:

  “Where is your master?” Whimpering met her gaze, and her voice sharpened—not loud, but with a tone of cold command. “Where is your lord, you foolish women? Now.”

  Half a dozen arms pointed to a door at the far end of the room. “There—down the stairs, in the chambers below the house,” one voice said. “He—he meets with his guru.”

  “The foreign guru,” another amplified.

  “It is forbidden to disturb him,” a third said, her voice shaking.

  “Get out,” Sita went on. “The polis will be here soon. When they do, run out to them. Dress for the street, gather your valuables. Obey!”

  The women were gabbling and running about as Henri led the party through the door and down a spiral staircase, down past what must be the ground floor into darkness lit only by a few gas lamps turned low.

  “Why?” he said to the princess, jerking his head upward.

  “Whoever’s loose in the house, those poor bints don’t deserve to be hurt more,” Sita said. “More of the Good People, as you said.”

  Henri smiled for a moment. Then they were in a round space around the base of the stair with four corridors leading off to each quarter. The noises of the house above were muffled here, barely perceptible; they must be even fainter in the rooms that gave off the open corridors, for the doors he could see in each were heavy and of solid metal.

  “Which way?” he said.

  “Quiet,” Sita replied, cocking her head to one side. Then: “That way. I hear chanting. If Allenby is with a ‘guru’—the man Ignatieff, that Warburton’s papers mentioned?—they might be holding some sort of ceremony.”

  “Good thinking, ma petite,” Henri said; her ears were keener than his. Well, she was eight years younger, and hadn’t spent so much time around gunshots and explosives as he.

  They jogged along the corridor, between walls of rough mortared stone. The sound came louder, loud enough for him to hear as well.

  “Back,” he told Sita.

  The Gurkha enforced that with his shoulders. Henri put his hand to the catch; the door opened inward, and the sound from behind it was loud now—voices chanting in a language he didn’t understand, and the beating of a drum. He took a deep breath—small, confined, underground places were not among his favorites—and swung the door open, cutting off the chant like an ax stroke.

  Within was a large room, its single half window bricked up. Perhaps it had been an ordinary cellar once; now it was walled with smooth black ebony on three sides, a
nd dimly lit by a single oil lamp hanging from the ceiling by chains of orilachrium. The lamp was in the form of a horned head, mouth stretched in a dolorous gape to show the flame. Over the night black glossy wood of the paneling were . . . icons, he supposed. Religious paintings at least. Some were Indian, images of the death goddess like the statue in Allenby’s office above. Others were in a stiff semi-Byzantine style. Images of Malik Nous in his aspect as the Black God—some of him fighting Christ, driving Him, slaying Him; others of his long sword cleaving the sun as he stood on a mound of ice and skulls. Yet others were of things he instantly wished he hadn’t seen, to keep the memory of them out of his head.

  On the fourth wall was a mosaic of a peacock, wings raised and tail spread in glorious color. The altar was before that, a block of black marble. The body of a girl was fastened to it with silver chains, and there were runnels in the dais to catch blood and transfer it to broad shallow pans. There was a great deal of the blood; he thought the sacrifice had been young, but it was difficult to tell, given what had been done to her before she died. The death was recent—the blood still flowing—and only a few of the internal organs had been removed to stand in the vessels set into depressions in the stone block. The smell was raw, but not as strong as the bitter herbal scent that came from the lamp in dizzying waves.

  Rows of men kneeling with their heads to the ground filled the room before the altar; most were in saffron yellow robes that left one shoulder bare, others in ordinary street dress, a few in Imperial uniforms.

  One man stood close to the altar, a tall fair-skinned man all in black, leather and silk liberally splashed with red. He turned as the door opened; a long curved knife was held in one gloved hand, a fresh human heart in the other, and an inverted cross hung on his chest. He had been squeezing the heart into his mouth like an orange for its juice, and the lower part of his face was a mask nearly as black as his clothing in the faint light.

  “So,” the Frenchman said into an instant of stillness. “You, I presume, are not one of the Good People.”

  The eyes above the bloody mouth were wide with surprise and shock, one brown and one blue in the pale high-cheeked countenance. Henri de Vascogne thought that he would have recognized him without that; there was only one man that this could be. A figure sprang erect beside Ignatieff; Allenby, in similar robes, but as unreachable as the Caliph in Baghdad or the Mikado at the moment.

  At least as far as taking him is concerned, Henri thought grimly. But perhaps if we alter the plan to simply making him die . . .

  Henri leveled the revolver—regulation stance, body at right angles to the target, left hand tucked into the small of his back—and emptied it at the Russian nobleman and the Angrezi traitor beside him. He thought one of the bullets struck, but there was no time to be sure, because the rest of the cultists were springing up and coming at them like a wave.

  Whatever other taboos the followers of the Peacock Angel had, they didn’t prohibit weapons at a sacrifice. More than half of them were drawing long knives or flourishing rumals as they came, and their eyes and teeth shone cold in the flame light.

  He sprang back and slammed the door, but there was no way to bar it from the outside. Hands gripped it from the other side and began to pull. Henri’s head whipped from side to side; there was nowhere to go besides the way they had come . . . and then suddenly the gaslights all went out with a series of low pop sounds. A minute later the hissing of the gas started again, but there was no snap of electric starter sparks.

  His eyes went wide in the total darkness. “Too many of them,” he gasped, as the handle twisted inexorably in his hand. “We have to get out now, this place is going to explode. Allez!”

  A hand came down on the handle beside his. “Me hold,” the Gurkha’s voice said. “Go—save kunwari.”

  When the Frenchman hesitated the Gurkha pushed him roughly aside, feeling like a short living boulder of Himalayan granite. “My salt—my oath. Save kunwari!”

  Henri clapped him on the shoulder as he passed. “I will,” he said, holstering his empty revolver and drawing his sword.

  Malusre was pushing Sita ahead of him as they groped back for the stairs. “Faster,” he said. “Don’t make it for nothing!”

  She ran; all three did, caroming into the stone of the corridor as they went. Behind them the door was wrenched open at last. The lamp within cast a faint light out into the corridor, enough to make the five red flashes of the Gurkha’s revolver less blinding. The noise was very loud in the stony confines of the corridor. Then there was a rasp of steel, a nauseatingly audible wet thud, a high shrill scream. A quick look over his shoulder showed the great broad-bladed, inward-curved knife out and sweeping in long-armed cuts. The Gurkha hacked with the kukri at arms that came forward with blades as the cultists crowded into the doorway, trying to push him backward by main force. At the same instant, he drove the fingers of his free hand down into the eyes of a man who had grabbed his legs and hooked him away like a gaffed fish . . .

  “Ayo Gorkhali!” he shouted as he fought. “Ayo Gorkhali!”

  “The Gurkha are upon you!” Malusre said in a shaken voice as they reached the staircase. “Shabash, jawan!” Then in a clipped tone: “I will go first.”

  “Follow,” Henri snapped to Sita. “Cover him.” He turned to bring up the rear, sword out—a touch of light in the dimness of the night-dark cellars, where faces were blurs barely arm’s length away.

  A flash of steel and brightness brought him around, parrying barely in time.

  Name of a dog, Henri thought, as he felt the terrifying strength in the blow; his wrist jarred painfully, and then again and again as he parried. Instinct guided him; conscious thought would have been far too slow to block the tiger speed of the assault.

  “Down here,” Yasmini said. “At the bottom of the stairs, turn right, and seek the last door at the end of the corridor. Your man is held prisoner there.”

  “Move!” King said.

  The spiral staircase went from marble elegance to rough mortared fieldstone as they descended. According to Warburton’s information, the whole mansion and courtyard were underlain by cellars, divided into rooms by thick stone walls and the heavy arches that upbore the house. He could almost feel the massive weight above him, a quasi-physical oppression as they came to the foot of the stairs and turned right down a corridor dimly lit by two small gaslights.

  “This way,” Yasmini said. She paused for an instant, those eerie eyes turning behind them. “That way is a place where they worship the Black God. And where they feast. I can . . . hear . . . the chanting. It creeps through the world, like mold through bread.”

  “I should have spent less time at the ledgers and more outdoors,” David bar-Elias puffed beside him.

  But he was keeping up well enough, and he’d been strong enough to haul himself up a three-story height nearly as fast as fit young fighting men. King suspected the older man was remembering his own imprisonment in the dungeons of the House of the Fallen in Bokhara, and that was what squeezed heart and lungs. He didn’t blame Elias’s son for that at all. Enduring a nightmare when you had no choice was bad enough. Going back into it, of your own free will . . .

  “All the better,” King said. “They won’t be paying so much attention to us, then.”

  “This door,” Yasmini said after a silent minute. “He is within. There is a window to the outside—small, and barred with iron.”

  “Right—” King began.

  Then there was a fusillade of shots—not close, but somewhere in the cellars with them. A chorus of yells, the clash of steel, more shots, and a shout:

  “Ayo Gorkhali! Ayo Gorkhali!”

  King’s head whipped around. The Gurkha battle cry; he’d heard it more than once. Ibrahim Khan recognized it, too, wheeling, ducking, and bringing up his long Khyber knife in a single motion, eyes flickering around in automatic wariness. The mountaineers from Nepal furnished many regiments for the Raj, and they were the only men the Border tribes real
ly feared on their own ground.

  “That’s only one man,” King said.

  Whatever in the ten thousand names of God he’s doing here. Gurkhas were popular as bodyguards and armed retainers for the wealthy, as well as serving in the Imperial forces. Retired soldiers from their regiments might enlist in the police. Could be any of a dozen reasons.

  “One man, and he’s fighting many. Ibrahim—get that door open and get Narayan Singh out. Mr. bar-Elias, we’ll see what’s going on and hold the corridor if we must.”

  Just then the lights went out, leaving only a dimming red glow for a few seconds as the mantles cooled.

  “Merciful Krishna,” King swore, sheathing his chora and pulling the bull’s-eye lantern from his belt. This is getting beyond bloody enough, he thought, feeling increasingly harassed—how was he supposed to keep all this straight?

  He opened the lantern’s slit only a touch—any light right now was going to make him a sitting duck—as they ran back toward the stairwell. The run turned into a silent lunge as he saw an armed man at the base of the stairs.

  The man turned, smooth and very quick. The swords clashed, met, clashed again in the near-total darkness, only an occasional glint on the steel itself showing where death walked. The ugly wind of a sharp blade passed before his eyes, and then the swords locked at the hilt and the two men were wrestling . . .

  “Name of a dog!” An accented half scream. “You!”

  “De Vascogne!” King blurted, skipping backward. “What in the name of the Gods are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you, imbecile! Or evidence of you—we found Ignatieff, and Allenby, and half a hundred others; they’ll be on us in seconds.”

  King swore: “Shiva’s dong, you blew the door in—no time—tell them they can contact me through Elias bar-Binyamin—there’s a plot to kill the King-Emperor, and my family, and—go, man, go! I have my own way out!”