Ghosts of Albion: Accursed

by Amber Benson

  Before she could act, however, her brother’s voice cut through the fog, echoing all around her. He was calling her name.

  Tamara spun, searching for William, but through the fog and the darkness she could not find him. There was chaos all around the front of the palace. Byron and other ghosts were plucking Kali’s Children from the walls. With an unsettling savagery, Bodicea was hacking a Rakshasa to pieces in front of the palace gates with her spectral sword. Tamara could hear Nelson somewhere above her, in the shrouded sky, shouting commands as though he were back on the deck of the Agamemnon. And Farris was running toward her, both guns discarded and his saber raised. He had seemed bent upon the murder of John Haversham a moment ago, but he had heard William’s voice, as well, for now he slowed and began to search the night for her brother.

  Once again, she heard William call her name. This time, though, it was more distinct. She peered to the east, where just the edge of St. James’s Park was visible through the fog, and there among a group of Kali’s Children, she saw him.

  Priya Gupta was wrapped around William from behind, riding him like a child. Her legs twined around his waist, and her left arm was hooked over his shoulder. The upstart, the cruel witch, held a gleaming silver dagger against his throat. The streamers of pure crimson magic she had manifested earlier now seemed to stream from her sides, though the way she was pressed against William it was difficult to know for certain. They caressed him, those razor-sharp ribbons, and where they touched him he was cut. His clothes were dark, but blood streaked his white shirt, and Tamara thought she could smell the copper tang of it on the air.

  “Oh, no,” Farris said beside her in a low voice.

  Tamara’s nostrils flared and her jaw clenched. She took two steps toward the park.

  “Leave him be, Priya. You’ve no choice here. We’ve already won, don’t you see? The ghosts of Albion are here, and no matter how many of Kali’s Children serve you, or how many Rakshasa you may summon, the ghosts will be here. And so will the Protectors. If there were only one of us, perhaps you might still be victorious. But if you slay my brother you shall still have me to reckon with. You have the advantage over him, but I swear on the souls of my ancestors and of Albion itself that you shall not be so fortunate with me. It ends here and now.

  “His death will avail you nothing.”

  Her words resounded in the fog, and Tamara held her breath, praying that the madwoman would not see how it crushed her inside to see William so helpless. She set her chin high and tried to keep emotion from her eyes, to be cold.

  The Indian girl’s dark eyes were bright with mischief. She pricked William’s throat with that ceremonial dagger and laughed.

  “Kali whispers in my head, English whore! The goddess guides me and shows me the truth of your words. Your brother is worthless to me dead. I need his blood, you see. There is a ritual to be performed here tonight. My country has been trammeled upon by the boot of British imperial ambition for the last time. Your people have been the bane of India, a curse upon the land. Now that shall be reversed. Bharath will subsume Albion and by the will of the goddess, I shall rule the two nations as one.

  “The blood of the Protector of Albion will be the ultimate sacrifice. The ritual requires the death of your queen and the blood of the Protector . . . but not his death. Make no mistake, however, I will kill him, unless you withdraw your forces, living and dead. If you comply, I shall still shed his blood, but I will spare his life.

  “Choose.”

  Tamara could breathe only in shallow gasps. Her throat was dry and she shook her head as though she could not grasp the things that Priya had said. But she understood very well. The fog continued to swirl around her, rolling across the street that separated her from the sorceress and her brother. William’s eyes were wide, but there was a grim determination to his features.

  “Tam—” he began.

  “Hush, now, William,” Priya sneered, pricking his throat again with that blade. “It’s in your sister’s hands.”

  The battle continued around them; the monstrous sounds of the horrors that served the sorceress filled the night air. Yet their death cries were louder, as Nigel and the ghosts destroyed them one by one. Where was the rightful Protector of Bharath, she wanted to know. Where was Tipu Gupta? Had his daughter already murdered him?

  And John . . . Lord, she had nearly forgotten John. She spared a quick glance over her left shoulder. The diamond pattern some of the others had shown, like the back of certain snakes, ran down the center of his forehead, but he was not entirely changed. Not yet. His eyes were wide and pleading even as they darkened further. If he made a move toward her, Farris would surely behead him.

  “Help me,” he rasped, fingers lengthening into claws as he tore at his clothes, sprawled there on his knees in the road.

  Tamara could not look at him. She did not trust Priya to spare William’s life even if she did as the girl asked. Yet even if she had . . . the queen? All of Albion sacrificed simply to save her brother?

  She gazed at William now, studied his eyes as though somehow in their depths she could find the solution.

  “Will?” she whispered.

  Priya glared at her, raven hair blowing in the wind, mad eyes gleaming, and sneered.

  “Choose.”

  TIPU GUPTA WRAPPED the fog around himself as though it were a cloak. It had been conjured to hide the horrors wrought by his daughter, so that the people of London and the soldiers in service to the queen would not realize what was happening until it was too late. Yet now he turned the fog to his own purpose.

  The old man had been a master of the mystic arts long before he had been chosen as Protector of Bharath. The power of Bharath, the innate magic of his homeland, was an extraordinary weapon, but he was a skilled spellcaster even without it.

  He held his staff in his right hand and used it to steady himself as he moved through the night and the fog, working his way from the gates of the palace and around behind Priya. The moment he had seen her attacking William, the old man had withdrawn from the chaotic battle. One malformed creature more or less would not end Priya’s dark obsessions, her twisted ambitions. The dark goddess who whispered in her mind had too great a hold on her for a physical war to overcome.

  There was only one way to end this. He had to take back what his daughter had stolen.

  So even as Priya wrapped herself around William Swift and pressed that ceremonial dagger to his throat, Tipu moved through the fog as though he were invisible. His staff clacked on the street and he could not walk very quickly, but he passed unnoticed within inches of several Children of Kali, and only a few yards from a pair of Rakshasa. The monsters ought to have been able to smell him, but he had erased himself from the world, hidden within that fog. It was magic he had learned forty-seven years earlier, and that sorcerous stealth had saved his life many times.

  The spring night was cold, and yet there was a clammy warmth to the fog that sickened him. He shuddered at the way it slid over his skin. Tipu entered the park and began to work his way around behind his daughter. Images filled his mind of Priya as a child. Even as an infant her eyes were so dark and her skin so rich that she seemed somehow unreal, like a painting of a baby girl, idealized to perfection. As a toddler her laughter had been infectious, the thought of her enough to bring light to his heart even in the darkest of times. In the war against the darkness, there had been times when another man would have lost all hope, but he had held the image of her so close inside that Hell itself could not have wrung the last drop of hope from him.

  And when, as a young girl, she had discovered his library and lost herself in the study of magic, trying so hard to make him proud of her, Tipu Gupta had known such contentment as human beings were rarely allowed.

  How has it come to this? he thought, nearly faltering in both step and spell.

  More than ever, he felt his age. His muscles were slack and his bones ached, joints popping and grinding against one another. The spirit of Bharath, t
he magic that was the gift of the Protector, had given him strength and filled all the empty places, summoned from within him a vitality unusual for a man of his years. Now that had been drained from him, along with so much of the magic of Bharath.

  He was still the Protector—Priya had stolen power from him, but not his duty or the favor of his homeland. Yet he felt frail and alone.

  A grimace touched his lips. You do not feel frail and alone, Tipu. You simply are.

  A Rakshasa loomed out of the fog to his left. The thing paused a moment, seeming to sense him. Its filthy yellow eyes narrowed and it sniffed the air, growling low and ragged in its throat. The old man ignored it. The demon could not see him, even if it sensed the strange ripple in reality that was made by his passing.

  Tipu focused on the street ahead. Through the churning fog he could make out parts of the palace wall and the upper portion of the gates. The ghosts were a remarkable sight, darting across the ground and through the air, translucent shades of muted color, spectral figures barely glimpsed until they paused to attack one of the Children of Kali or a Rakshasa.

  And there, right in front of him, was his daughter.

  The old man stood perhaps fifteen feet behind Priya. She still rode William Swift’s back, and the image cut him deeply, so reminiscent of the way he had carried her on his own back when she was a small girl. But Priya was not playing with William. If anything remained of his daughter’s mind, it was filled with malevolence. Tendrils of crimson magic stretched from her sides and whipped at the air, gently brushing against the young man, cutting his clothing and the skin beneath.

  She would not kill him that way, though. No, Priya wanted him alive for her precious ritual.

  “Choose!” she snapped at Tamara, who stood on the other side of the street with her man Farris. Another man sprawled beside her on the ground, in the midst of the transformation set upon him by Kali’s Curse.

  The memories of his Priya, his precious child, clamored to press themselves into his mind now, as if they had form and conscience and knew what he was about to do. He forced them away. Fate had chosen their path long ago, and there was no way to divert from it now.

  “For Bharath,” he whispered, even his words hidden in the fog-cloak he had drawn about himself.

  Tipu Gupta had inherited the duty and power of the Protector of Bharath. The magic was his, connected to him just as surely as he was connected to the soul of his homeland, a circuit that could not be broken. Priya and whatever demonic sponsor influenced her had leached some of that power and used it to summon horrors from the darkest realms, to spread a plague of horrors . . . but if he could catch her unaware, he might still be able to take it back.

  He took a step nearer. Clutching his staff in his right hand he raised the left and began to sketch circles in the air with his fingers.

  The fog began to swirl and quickly took the shape of a tiny tornado, a spinning white funnel that extended from Tipu Gupta out toward his daughter. When his spell touched the magic that surrounded her, the old man flinched at the contact, a shock going through him. Pain clutched his chest, but he steadied his breathing and began to draw back the magic she had stolen from him.

  So intent was she that she did not see what was happening. The air around Priya sparkled with red, as though a spray of blood drifted on the breeze. Those red flecks began to wink out, one by one, changing color from crimson to silver as they eddied in the air and were quickly drawn into the tube of fog he had created. The old man chanted silently to Shiva, keeping his pulse steady, shoring up the spell that kept him hidden.

  He could hear her screaming at Tamara Swift, but had no idea what the two women were saying to each other. The hand holding the dagger to William’s throat tensed, muscles in her arm tightening, and the old man hesitated.

  The voice that came out of Priya’s mouth did not belong to his daughter. It was a shrill, knife-edged sound, words uttered in his native tongue with an undertone like the distant shriek of the damned.

  “What do you think you’re doing, old fool?”

  Tipu held his breath, but he did not break off his silent attack. The demon-goddess within Priya had sensed him, so he could not stop now. He grunted with the effort, and fresh pain spiked through his chest and along his arms as he siphoned the stolen magic from her.

  When Priya cried out in pain, it was in her own voice. Her father thought himself the cause of her suffering, but then he heard the crack of bone, and a moist, tearing noise.

  The ribbons of magical energy that she had manifested disappeared even as a second set of arms burst from her sides just inches below those she had been born with. They were dusky gray, the color of thunderclouds and the ash from a funeral pyre. Priya screamed and her voice was in harmony with another . . . a second voice from a second mouth, as the back of her skull warped and her head thrashed and her hair was tossed aside to reveal the source.

  A face was emerging there, with blazing eyes and terrible fangs, blood streaming from the corners of that mouth.

  “What in Heaven’s name—” William Swift began to shout, whatever magic had kept him silent now broken.

  Then he was thrown to the ground.

  Priya leaped off him, dropping into a crouch, but did not turn to face her father. Instead her entire body inverted. Arms and legs reversed and her sari tore away to show the darkening of her flesh from copper to coal gray, that hideous shade of death. Her breasts were large and tipped with ebon black, and now in addition to that ritual dagger, she bore items in each of her hands, as if they had grown from her very flesh. A cleaver, a shield, and a bowl fashioned from a human skull and filled with fresh blood.

  On her four arms were circlets fashioned from human bones. Her tongue lolled lasciviously from her mouth. As he watched in awe, her skin shifted from ash to indigo, the deep blue of evening, and a third eye opened in the center of her forehead.

  Of his daughter, there was no sign. Only the goddess, this thing that had corrupted her.

  “You are not Kali. The goddess is cruel, but not evil. What are you?” he demanded.

  The demon brought her cleaver down and cut away his siphoning magic as if it were a limb. The funnel dissipated, and he felt a tug in his heart as though she had set a hook there.

  “Dakshina Kurukulla, two faces of the goddess in one . . . and soon greater than Kali herself!” the thing hissed, black tongue spattering blood from her lips with every word. “With the magic of the Protector in this body, this frail human girl flesh, I shall become Bharath’s soul myself.”

  Tipu Gupta sneered now. Full of sorrow and rage and love, he raised his staff and summoned that same siphoning magic. Even as he did, he sent a tiny spell along the length of the wood—and its tip sharpened.

  The old man stepped forward suddenly and ran the goddess through with his staff. Her expression became one of surprise, then pain. He shuddered where he stood, rocked by the power of the demon-goddess and by the return of his own energies. The magic of Bharath had been siphoned from him, and now he stole it back. It raced up the staff and poured into him, his muscles painfully rigid as it filled up those hollow places inside him once more.

  “I am the Protector of Bharath, deceitful godling! Hear me, Kurukulla, the power is rightfully mine, and I shall—”

  Suddenly he stopped, as he looked upon the creature that had been his daughter. Her red, rolling eyes cleared, and for just a moment it was Priya looking out at him from that monstrous face.

  “Father?”

  Once more he remembered the smile and grace of the little girl she had once been.

  Then the four arms of the demon-goddess were in motion. The dagger punched through the side of his neck. Tendons split and veins burst, but it was merely to hold him in place while Kurukulla brought the cleaver down upon his skull.

  TAMARA SAW PRIYA release William and hope sparked within her. Then she saw him begin to rise, pushing himself up on his hands and knees. She called his name and he looked up. He was obviously weak,
and had been injured, but he gave her a small wave to indicate that he would be all right. Relief flooded her, but then she forced herself to focus. William would live.

  That knowledge left her free to see to John Haversham, whose fate seemed far less certain. He had already risen to his feet, and there was little trace of the human left in his face. His flesh was patterned with rough scales and tinted green and yellow, and his fingers had curved into wicked talons.

  Yet he was resisting. She saw it in his eyes and the way he held back. His every motion was a struggle, a jerking, staggering progression as the human in him fought the Curse of Kali, laboring against the metamorphosis and the monstrousness of Priya’s magic.

  “If you cannot . . . help me . . . ,” he said, gazing at her with eyes that seemed lost, as though he peered at her from a cage in Hell, “then you . . . must . . . kill me.”

  Farris was beside her, then, black bile and blood on his clothes from the creatures he had already slain. He raised his saber and started for John.

  “Do as he says, miss! You’ve no choice. The evil’s in him already. He’ll have your heart out in a moment.”

  The stout, courageous man swung the blade in an arc and it whickered toward John’s neck.

  “No!” she cried, and already her hands were moving, her fingers twisting. There was no spell that she had studied that would accomplish her intent, but she was the Protector of Albion. She had magic in her veins, in her flesh, and now she collided several spells into one and felt the power rush up from the fiery core of her.

  “Claustrum articulus!”

  The fog around Farris and John evaporated, and the air grew still, trapping them both, frozen in that very moment. Frozen, until Tamara could figure out what to do with them.

  Then she heard a terrible cry and Tipu Gupta began to shout. She spun and watched in horror as Priya’s body bucked and her flesh shifted and the god pushed out from within her.

  Tamara had no words.

  HIS THROAT STUNG with tiny wounds and was warm with the trickle of his own blood, his body covered with long, searing cuts. William forced himself to stand.