The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  King winced slightly. “Poor return for your hospitality,” he said.

  Elias cackled, stroking his beard, and David bar-Elias laughed, glanced at his father, spoke when the older man nodded permission:

  “We owe your family a debt, Captain King. And there is also a debt between us and Count Ignatieff, and the House of the Fallen.”

  His hand closed on his knee where he sat cross-legged. “My family are business folk, not nobles who think honor means to keep no count of costs. Our debts must be paid, in full. And those owed to us, collected. As Count Ignatieff will find, we collect fairly—to the last jot and tittle. He could not pay us in cash, not with all his lands; so we will take our”—a sly grin—“to coin a phrase, our pound of flesh from him.”

  Remind yourself never to get on that family’s wrong side, King told himself, searching for a half-remembered memory of the words. Sir Manfred was more current with the classical literature of the Old Empire, and snorted laughter first.

  “Now, this royal trip to France,” he said. “I suppose there’s no prospect of getting it canceled?”

  Elias shook his head. “The detective—the Marathi—said he heard from the Padishah’s own lips that he would not be turned from his path by fear.” He shook his head dolefully. “A stubborn man.”

  “Dieu et mon droit,” King quoted. “Fancier than my family’s motto, but it does mean about the same thing. Kuch dar nahin hai!”

  Elias made a guttural noise of derision at the back of his throat. “God gave men fear to warn them from folly,” he said. “A man cannot be ruled by fear, no; but he who pays it no heed is a fool, not a hero.”

  Warburton sighed. “There’s a good deal more involved than stubbornness. The alliance with France-outre-mer and the Egyptian question are matters of the first importance,” he said. “The King-Emperor and the Foreign Office have been working on this for a decade.”

  Elias stroked his beard, shifting from Hindi to Imperial English with an almost imperceptible glance at Ibrahim, who was as innocent of that tongue as he was of higher mathematics.

  “I have also heard something of that.” At King’s surprise: “Many of my people dwell in the lands of the Caliphate, in Egypt, and in France-outre-mer; many have since the Babylonian Captivity, and before. We also have an interest in these matters, and not only those of us who are Imperial citizens.”

  “The Caliph’s government aren’t such brutes as the Russians,” King said, curious. “Fairly civilized, in their . . .” he did not say woggish “. . . fashion.”

  “No. And there are those here—more in France-outre-mer—who do not love us.”

  His voice held a strain of dry, pawky understatement. “But in the Dar ul’Islam we are not citizens. Tolerated, yes, somewhat. Dhimmi they call us, People of the Book. We are allowed our faith, but on sufferance; we must pay heavier taxes; wear special clothing; build no house higher than a Muslim’s; build no new synagogue without permission; and there are many other pinpricks. And at any time the greed of a ruler, the spite of the mullahs, the anger of the mob, may fall on us. Here in the Empire we are equals before the law, one folk and faith among a hundred hundred others, and treated no differently by the sahib-log. There are even a few of us in Parliament and the House of Lords.”

  “There would be one more in the Lords, if you’d pushed for it anytime these past twenty years, sir,” Warburton said.

  “Tcheh!” Elias indicated himself. “I should sit with generals and rajas and bishops? At my age, better to read Torah and pray than play such games.”

  He smacked his son lightly on the back of the head when the younger man made a skeptical sound.

  “Show respect!” Then: “But we would not be sorry if Egypt came under the Raj, or France-outre-mer, or both,” he concluded. “And close to Egypt is Jerusalem.”

  “That’s if all goes smoothly,” King said. “I suppose the thinking is that if we and France-outre-mer are strongly linked, the Caliphate will back down when we take Egypt and rebuild the Canal? After which they won’t be able to do damn-all.”

  “Yes,” Warburton said. “But if the alliance were to fall through, or even be seen as weak, they’d fight and fight hard. The Caliph is technically the religious overlord of a substantial percentage of our population, too; and he has influence in Afghanistan. He could declare a jihad against us. And then very likely Dai-Nippon would come in, attacking us in Southeast Asia when we were tied down in the Middle East—the Caliphate is a bloody enormous place, a lot of it as bad to campaign in as the Pathan country. Egypt is one thing—anyone who controls the Nile owns the place. Trying to take on an empire that runs from the Danube to Khorasan is another entirely. Oh, we could beat them easily enough in pitched battle, but that’s not the same as winning a war. What’s more, Dai-Nippon is nearly as strong as we are at sea and in the air, too. With them involved, it could be a very nasty business.”

  “Yes,” Yasmini said again. They all looked at her. “I have . . . dreamed it. War over all the world, cities burning and bombed from above, both sides building new and terrible weapons, and uprising within the Raj stamped out in rivers of blood. Everywhere hatred and death, the Great Powers fighting until they are exhausted, and then the Czar holding the balance.”

  She shivered. “Vast would be the domains of Samarkand, and the cold glee in the House of the Fallen. Much feasting before the altars of Tchernobog. And then, a hundred years from now, death from the sky—”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen,” King said stoutly, as she raised her eyes to the heavens and shivered.

  Not if I can help it, he thought. We soldiers hold the Border and keep the peace, and that lets people like Cass make the world better while ordinary folk get on with their lives.

  War was necessary now and then; war waged by professionals like him, men of the martial castes, born to the sword. War to put down barbarians and pirates, to keep the peace between the Empire’s sometimes-fractious peoples, to add a province or adjust a border. Ugly enough, but not the sort of struggle Warburton and Yasmini hinted at, whole nations wrecked and beaten into dust. The Gods knew the Empire had its faults, but what was it for, if not the Imperial peace that held half mankind in order under the rule of law?

  Which, stuffy though it may sound, it’s my duty to uphold, in whatever small way I can, he told himself.

  “Well, then, to work,” King said. “They obviously plan to strike at the King-Emperor, the royal family, Cass, and the special emissary from France-outre-mer. Probably they and their tame traitors—their moles—have got some cock-and-bull story ready to put in place once the dirty deed is done, to set us all at each other’s throats and bring on this general war, this . . .”

  “World War,” David bar-Elias said.

  “Yes, World War. Merciful Krishna, what a ghastly concept!”

  “It is,” Warburton said. “If there hadn’t been a Fall to throw back progress, we’d be beyond the possibility of such things already. Probably the Empire would have united the world by now.”

  King saw Yasmini stir out of the corner of his eye, then subside. Ask later, he thought. Aloud:

  “Well, what is His Royal and Imperial Majesty doing about it?”

  “Not all that much, I’m afraid,” Warburton said.

  “Oh, bugger,” King said with quiet conviction.

  “That’s the hell of it. He can’t. Not if the rot’s spread as far as we think.” He looked at Yasmini. “If this were an ordinary conspiracy, I’d say to hell with it, and advise emergency measures. But if we did that, Ignatieff would simply withdraw and—with the aid of talents like this young lady’s—try again.”

  Narayan Singh spoke for the first time: “But if we follow, we can catch this E-rus at his work, and then—” His hand made a gesture, like the drawing of a sword.

  “Hey-vey, do you think you can solve all problems with a tulwar, Sikh?” Elias asked.

  “Most of them, Jew,” Narayan said, showing white teeth in his dense black beard.
“What we need is a plan to put us within striking distance when the time comes.”

  King nodded. “My daffadar is right.”

  Warburton made a frustrated gesture of agreement. “The problem is that the very structures set up to protect the King-Emperor are the ones most likely to be penetrated,” he said. “That means that not only can they not be trusted to do their job, they can’t be told about us—even to the extent of being told not to notice us!”

  “Which means we have to genuinely penetrate Imperial security,” King said. “A nice dilemma.”

  Ibrahim Khan spoke: “Why do you not share your thoughts?”

  “Oh. Sorry,” King said absently, dropping back into Hindi. “Our problem is this, man of the Hills. We think the E-rus plan to strike at the Padishah as he flies in one of our ships of the air—”

  “Dirigibles, yes,” Ibrahim said. “Some of the tribes in the west of our country, in Uruzgan and Ghowr, use them—smaller than yours, but they learn—as my tribe has been learning to make better weapons, like your mortars. The western tribes buy the engines and hire learned hakims from Isfahan and Baghdad—even Damascus itself—to teach them how to use and care for them.”

  King’s brows went up; he looked at Warburton, who shrugged in an embarrassed fashion. “You can’t keep a law of nature secret forever,” he said. “And the Russians have passed on data and copied machinery from Dai-Nippon to the Caliphate, to hinder us. Nothing Damascus makes is anywhere near as good as ours, and I doubt the Afghans will even equal them.”

  Ibrahim gave him a hard look, then went on: “They’re dangerous and tricky and sometimes they burn, but you can take an enemy by surprise—land warriors where your enemies least expect—carry away plunder. You Angrezi taught us that trick, these last twenty years.”

  If you play chess with good players long enough, you learn to play good chess. King winced behind an impassive face, stroking his mustache. He remembered something from his course in the Ancients at school, a poem of the ancient Spartans, saying that it was unwise to fight the same enemy too long, for just that reason. The Pathan went on:

  “Well, if your Padishah is going to fly, either the E-rus fakir-who-isn’t will attack them with other ships of the air, or he will try to put his own men on them.”

  A predatory grin. “What a ransom, to take captive the Padishah of the Angrezi! A crore of gold mohurs . . .”

  “Yes,” said King grimly. “And then a crore of blades come riding to take the money back, and burn your villages about your ears.”

  “Well, there is that. You lowland infidels have no appreciation of artistry.” The Pathan scratched in his beard. “So. You must track the trackers—do as they do, and enter the dirigible in disguise. When they strike—you strike at their backs. And when we take the false fakir’s head, forget not the two hundred gold mohurs you owe me. Half of which should have been given in advance anyway,” he added.

  “And you have me to help you with that tracking,” Yasmini said.

  It does certainly seem to take it out of her, though, King thought. I thought we were going to lose her for a while there.

  “I will not chance the drugs again, unless it is very necessary,” she said, seeming to sense his doubt. “But if it is necessary, we will.” She looked at King, and smiled—the first time he’d seen her do that wholeheartedly. “I would not wish to live in the world that will be, if we lose.”

  The sunny feeling he’d had at the beginning of the day left King abruptly. It’s one thing to have a small part of the Empire as your responsibility, he thought. The whole thing is too bloody much.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Count Ignatieff had switched to a fresh set of his robes and put the other in its sealed box. The rotting blood of the old was holy, but—he confessed to the weakness in the privacy of his mind—too uncomfortable to bear for more than an hour or two, and it could literally betray him with its stink at half a mile in the open air. The ruined temple a day’s ride from the south-western outskirts of Delhi would do for now as a hiding place; he had several servants from the followers of Kali with him. It was actually easier to move without the Dreamer . . .

  One of the Deceivers sent to serve him flinched away from his face, and he mastered himself. He would recover the Dreamer or kill her; he must. Ignatieff did not deal in self-delusion. He knew exactly what was in store for him from the Okhrana if he betrayed the unprecedented trust that had been given him—and the worse things that the Hierarchs of the Fallen could deal out. Nor did the Peacock Angel pardon failure, in this life or the next. The thought brought anger, not fear; but he strove to master that as hard as he would have with terror, pacing steadily across the uneven surface, steady as if it had been the floor of his hereditary castle where the Tien Shan peaks rose above Fergannah.

  The temple had been very old when the Afghan warlord Mahmud of Ghanza sacked it more than a thousand years before. Little was left now but a pyramidal mound of stone, here and there a carved lotus or a hand held in a curious gesture. The outside was overgrown with scrub, for this was the center of a doab, the—slightly—higher ground found here and there on the Ganges plain. If you climbed to the top of the fallen tower, you could see the geometric glint of moonlight on irrigation canals in the distance, the dark shadows of a village surrounded by mango trees. Distance hid the manor that held this land, through air dry and chill with the nighttime coolness of the North Indian winter.

  The wild part of this holding was seldom visited; the natural scrubland was the zamindar’s hunting preserve, and the estate was currently managed by a widow with no grown children. Even when it was used for the chase, few would bother to ride into the dense thorn-thickets around the temple—ruins were many in this land, where history lay layer on layer. The central part was clear enough to hold a fire that the walls hid, and over the generations the local lodge of the Deceivers had made discreet improvements—natural-seeming pathways and tunnels into the stone bulk. It was a place to plan, to store booty, to hide travelers favored by the Dreadful Bride, to leave secret signs telling of Her votaries’ plans. So it had been for six hundred years.

  A shank of mutton roasted over the fire, and a pot seethed with rice and dates. After a while he crouched by the spit, cutting off slices of meat with a folding knife from his belt and scooping from the pot with a horn spoon. The meat was dry—nothing like the melting tenderness of a roast suckling Uzbeck from his own lands—but it and the rice were fuel. As he ate he considered, shifting elements of plans in his head, conscious of the men slowly arriving and gathering, one by one, behind him. The servants withdrew themselves, lest they see that which was forbidden.

  All things are thrown into confusion, he thought at last. Good. A plan too stiff to change with circumstance will shatter.

  At last he turned and rose, a black outline against the dying red coals. Six men waited for him to speak. One was in the dress of a babu in the labyrinthine lower levels of the Imperial bureaucracy—not the Imperial Civil Service, of course, which was another thing altogether. Another wore the blue uniform of the Raj’s Navy, with a branch-of-service flash from one of the technical branches on his arm. Next to him stood a stringy near-naked ascetic with the three yellow ash-marks of Shiva on his brow. The others were likewise disguised—disguised in the lives they drew about themselves from infancy on. Those who could not live the double life did not live at all past childhood; not for nothing were they called the Deceivers.

  The votaries of Her rarely wore their own garb. And the century-old link between them and the cult of the Peacock Angel was the deepest of their secrets. The men were motionless, save when a bat flew through the fading fire glow; that brought an infinitesimal relaxation. Ignatieff sneered inwardly; bats were merely a symbol, in themselves nothing more than an animal of the vile material world, for all that the ignorant Cossacks called them Tchernobog’s Chickens. Still, it was a useful touch. His hold over them was shaken by the loss of the Dreamer, badly shaken.

  Richard Al
lenby also stood before him. His garb was plain street dress, and there was despair in his eyes. Ignatieff smiled at him, then smashed a gloved fist across his face. As the man folded to the ground he kicked him once with savage precision. The other watchers leaned closer at the scream, their eyes intent.

  “Shall I give you more gold, Allenby?” Ignatieff said softly, in the Hindi that was the common tongue of those watching. “Shall I hide for you once more the evidence of the girl-child you slew, being overhasty in taking your pleasure?”

  “But—” Allenby had managed to lever himself up to his knees. “We had a bargain—I did everything you asked, everything—”

  Ignatieff laughed. “Did you think you could make a bargain with Malik Nous, Allenby? That is superstition. The Black God never buys human souls. There is no need. They give themselves to Him.”

  He struck again, with a precision that could inflict a great deal of pain without much damage. “You are not my partner. You are not even my accomplice. You are my serf, my slave, the slave of my slaves, less than the least of the Deceivers here. Or will you run to the Sirkar, with the taste of His meat upon your lips?”

  Allenby broke completely at that, groveling on the shattered stone of the temple and weeping. Ignatieff smiled benignly, and the six watchers nodded. That was an ancient truth—once a man had passed initiation, he was lost to his former life, for he had committed the sin for which there was no forgiveness. There was no company for him then but his brothers in the cult. So the Deceivers had known for centuries, and so the Grand Duke and the first of the High Priests had found in the days when the heavens themselves revealed who ruled this universe.

  For Your gift of wisdom I thank You, Black God, Ignatieff thought. Angel of the bottomless abyss, spread Your wings over Your servant’s head.

  “Get up,” he said aloud. Allenby obeyed. “Command yourself, or I will know that your only usefulness is as blood and meat. There is still work for you to do.”