Now, the time for watching was over.
Once breakfast was eaten, the cooking fires were doused with dirt. It looked to Jamelia as though the British had taken virtually all of their fighting strength to challenge the Tipu’s army on the outskirts of Mallavelly, leaving just a token force behind to guard their camp and the army’s baggage train.
That was a mistake, and one that will cost them dearly, Jamelia thought to herself as she slipped quietly back into the shadowy interior of the stand of trees.
“Ready?” was all she had to say. Twenty nods of assent answered her. “Then we shall begin.” She looked around, locking eyes with each naked man individually. They all did her the courtesy of maintaining eye contact, not once glancing down at her equally exposed body. This was done not only out of respect, a virtue which was of paramount importance among the elite Tiger Guard, but also out of self-preservation – they had seen what had happened to the last man who had ogled Jamelia, and none of them wanted to lose those body parts by making the same mistake.
She held up a finger in warning. “Remember – we hit hard, and we run. There is no time for plunder, and precious little for sport. Are we clear?” Again came the nods.
A bolt of pain suddenly slammed its way up the length of her spine, exploding like lightning behind her eyes. The change was coming. Jamelia saw stars for a moment, dancing colors in front of her eyes. She arched her back; once, twice, and then a third time, the bony ridge of her spine becoming more prominent with each jerking motion that she made. Her limbs began to spasm, twitching uncontrollably as though she were in the grip of some dreadful tetany, and then her forearms and lower legs began to suddenly elongate. Muscles rippled beneath the rapidly-stretching flesh, and thick hair started to emerge all over her body. The hair came in various shades of black, orange, white, and tan; most of all, however, it came in stripes.
The men around her were all undergoing the same bestial transformation. Hands, feet, and nailbeds pushed outward to become claws. Thick, rough pads grew from the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. At what had once been the sacral region of each person’s spine, a prehensile tail was starting to emerge. Noses and mouths were fast assuming the aspect of a snout, with thick black lips coating a host of wicked-looking teeth.
Jamelia and her tiger-kin were now unrecognizable as their former selves; they were now a pride of terrible predators, enormous sentient jungle cats whose jaws could engulf the head of a man in a single bite.
And these particular cats were more than ready for the hunt.
Captain Robert Kaplan hated the honorable British East India Company, hated India, and hated the British bloody army. He hated them all with a passion for which, despite a passably second-rate education, he lacked the adequate language to convey. Short in height and lean in stature, Kaplan’s tanned skin and sandy-colored hair had faired remarkably well in comparison to those of the many other Englishmen who had been garrisoned out here alongside him.
The same could not be said of his career. Kaplan had been born with that least desirable of qualities, an instinctual desire to tell the truth, come what may. It had gotten him in hot water on several occasions throughout his life, but perhaps none more so than the time he had first assumed command of his battalion of East India Company soldiers when he had first set foot ashore in India. It was not at all unusual for East India Company lieutenants to find themselves in command of companies, and for captains to find themselves in command of battalions, so he had thought little of it at the time; but a closer inspection of the company’s ledgers had revealed that the record books, which had been kept by the outgoing commanding officer, one Captain Harding, belong more in the realm of fiction than that of fact.
Harding had been hurriedly recalled to England after a hushed-up scandal involving several pints of arrack, another officer’s native consort (or bibi) and a duel that had been carried out with pistols at dawn; although Harding hadn’t killed his man, he had divested him of a testicle with one singularly lucky shot.
Going over the ledgers by candlelight in his tent on the first evening, Kaplan had been horrified to find that the contents of the ledgers were at least fifty percent imaginary. He conducted an immediate inspection of the company stores and paraded each man, looking over their personal effects and whatever kit they had been issued by the Company. Vast tracts of equipment were either entirely absent or at best existed in significantly smaller quantities than Harding claimed in the records. Shovels, blankets, tents, picks, axes, lanterns, flints, screws, even muskets and bayonets; many of them could be found on paper, and nowhere else.
Reading between the lines, it wasn’t difficult to see what had happened. The surplus kit had been sold on the local black market, probably at a fraction of its true value, but making the crooked Captain Harding a pretty penny nonetheless. Kaplan suspected that a search of the local markets and bazaars would reveal that most of it was being sold at a hefty mark-up by some merchant or another.
Harding had been that worst sort of officer, not only lazy and incompetent, but also cruel when he was sufficiently bored and the mood had struck him. The men of the company had been delighted to see the back of him, and had warmed to Kaplan almost immediately – no surprise there, he thought, given their last point of comparison – but Kaplan had inherited a colossal headache along with the blackguard’s departure. He was, strictly speaking, on the hook financially for the missing equipment. It was his responsibility. Another man – a richer man – might simply have sighed, dug into his pockets, and stumped up for the missing kit. Robert did not have that luxury. He had bills to be paid, and certain long-standing debts to go along with them. Although he lived in relative comfort, his was by no means a life of ease and refinement. He simply could not afford it.
Neither was simply burying his head in the sand and hoping for the best a viable option. The Company was known to conduct audits of its many and varied accounts and interests, seemingly at random. If he were found to be covering up these discrepancies, not only would his career as an officer in the East India Company be over for good, he would find himself utterly ruined in both Indian and British social circles. He would simply have to kill himself if that happened, or desert and join that rogue, the Tipu Sultan. Neither prospect appealed, and so on a blindingly-bright Monday morning (after a weekend spent feverishly sifting and weighing his options, and finding none other to be satisfactory) Kaplan had gone to the regional headquarters of the honorable East India Company.
Respectfully taking off his hat and tucking it under the crook of one arm, Kaplan had found himself being shown through to the office of a considerably senior officer, where he had been offered a seat across from the great bear of a man’s huge mahogany desk and given a glass of wine that was heavily cut with water. Placing the first of several ledgers on the desktop, the earnest Captain had begun to walk his sweating superior officer through the tale of corruption and petty larceny that he had uncovered in the company’s books.
Incredibly, the man would have none of it. No, no, no – he knew Captain Harding personally, and more importantly, had gone to school with his father, who now happened to hold high office at Horse Guards. The duel had been…unfortunate, he had to admit, particularly as it had been fought over a bloody bibi of all things; they were ten to the penny, and Harding would have been well advised to simply get one of his own, rather than try and snag one from a fellow officer. But it could all be put down to the indiscretions of youth, and Harding was now out of the picture, probably bound for the family estates in England, and who knew what thereafter? But there was to be no more scandal, Kaplan was told; of that, he could be sure! The matter was over and done with, Robert would simply have to make good on his company’s inventory out of his own funds, and that was to be an end to it.
Unless, the man had said with just the vaguest hint of menace, Kaplan would care to take this higher?
Captain Kaplan would indeed care to do so.
That, perhaps above all else,
had been his single biggest mistake. The muckety-mucks in the upper ranks all stick together, he reminded himself bitterly as he looked out across the bleak plains of Mallavelly. I never stood a bloody chance.
Which was how such a competent – many would have said skilled – officer now happened to find himself in charge of the dregs of the British East India Company’s contribution to the Grand Army. Although no actual demotion had taken place, Kaplan had swiftly found himself in receipt of new orders, laterally transferring him to a position of command over what had to be the most awkward company on the continent. Composed primarily of the fat, feeble, and unfit castoffs from other companies, Kaplan’s new command was assigned the plum job of guarding the British wagon train.
While all of the real soldiers are off fighting the Sultan. Proper soldiering, that. Not this guarding cooks, blanket-stackers, and bottle-washers.
Kaplan walked out to the edge of the camp, passing a native man and a younger boy whom he took to be the man’s son, who were leading a goat on a length a rope tied loosely about its neck. The army had gone to battle late last night, and marched out of the camp as if its collective arse was on fire. He had carried out his due diligence, doubling the size of the perimeter guard, but all had remained quiet in and around the camp. The rumble of distant cannon-fire had been followed shortly thereafter by the even fainter sound of massed musketry.
Harris is a damned fine general, by all accounts. He’ll have given the Hindus a right proper hiding by now.
The growl took him by surprise. At first, he thought that his ears might be playing tricks on him. Then it occurred to him that the throaty rumble could have been yet another round of artillery fire, echoing from the far-off distance. Sound carried further at night and sounded different somehow, as every soldier who had ever stood his night watch could tell you.
But then it came again, seemed much closer than before, and this time the noise was unmistakable. It was an animal – had to be. Kaplan frowned, looking out into the greyness of the pre-dawn plains as he tried to pin down the source.
Then there came another, and another, and a fourth after that. The growls were both longer and more frequent now, and seemed to be coming from all around him. This wasn’t just one animal out there; no, this was a bloody pack. His hand went instinctively to the hilt of his sword, found its solidity reassuring. Kaplan hadn’t drawn his blade in anger since he had arrived in India. Now, he slid it slowly out of its scabbard, testing the weight in his right hand. Like a fool, he hadn’t brought a pistol with him when he had made the rounds of the camp this morning. He had told himself, and quite reasonably, he thought, that if the Sultan’s army were to beat General Harris and then descend upon the British camp afterward, the presence of a single musket ball was hardly going to make much of a difference.
He was beginning to regret that line of thinking now.
He regretted it even more when the mass of glowing yellow eyes appeared out of the murk of the gathering dawn. The tigers were huge, much larger than normal ones, or so it seemed to him. Perhaps his eyes and his mind were playing tricks, what with the tiredness and the gloom?
Kaplan raised his blade defensively in front of him, and was more than a little dismayed to see that his sword arm was shaking; well, trembling really. This was fear, not fatigue. He began to back slowly away, re-tracing his footsteps in reverse, heading back towards the camp.
The tigers followed. There must have been – what, fifteen? Perhaps even twenty? He shook his head in disbelief. Why hadn’t they heard about packs of beasts like this, hunting the plains around them? Surely the cavalry should have said something, or the general’s exploring officers…
Something was strange about those eyes – about all of them. The bizarre glow was part of it, though Kaplan attributed that to the first rays of sunlight which were beginning to stream across the lightening sky. No, this was something else. There was a cold fury visible in those eyes, not simply the primal, animalistic stare that one might expect to see in the eyes of any beast, particularly those of a hunter. He frowned, tried to figure out what it was. Then it came to him.
There was an intelligence to be found there, behind those black-flecked eyes. It was the queerest thing, and he had never encountered anything quite like it before, had—
In a flash, they were upon him. He was so stunned by the tigers’ pounce that he did not have time to even utter a scream. As the sharpened claws and powerful jaws tore chunks from his body and ripped him limb from bloody limb, the last thought that crossed Captain Robert Kaplan’s mind was a simple one:
At least I’ll never have to worry about those God-damned books again.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When he first felt the skin beginning to redden and scald on the side of his neck and face, Wellesley knew that it was time to leave. He felt cold inside, cold and dead, ironically enough – even more so than usual.
I should have ended; would have ended, had it not been for Baird.
And there it was, in a nutshell. Baird had not liked him, Arthur was well aware of that. The Scottish general had made known to practically anybody who would listen, his beliefs that the young Colonel had been promoted far beyond his station, and far beyond his years, and all because his brother Richard Wellesley, Lord Mornington as he was perhaps better known, had pulled the necessary strings for him.
Ever since his arrival in India, Arthur had never been entirely able to shake off the faint whiff of nepotism. Always there were the whispers, uttered when they thought that his back was turned. Baird had been bitter and angry, and in some ways he could almost understand the reasons why – as the fifth most senior general in the entire British Army, how else would Baird be expected to react at having to share the glory with some upstart young colonel? Arthur had always turned the other cheek, had never risen to bite back at one of the general’s sly jibes.
Yet when it mattered – when it truly mattered – and Arthur’s very existence was at stake, David Baird had not only recognized the danger, but he had acted without hesitation, exchanging his life for Wellesley’s in an act of such staggering bravery that it deserved to be recorded in the annals of British military history for all future generations to appreciate. Because that is what Baird had given up, Arthur knew – eternity, or a very close approximation at least.
Although vampirism had been a constant companion to humanity since time immemorial, nobody was yet sure what happened when a vampire truly “died.” Come to think of it, nobody was entirely sure what happened after a mortal human died either. Why else did they cling to the old tribal religions and ceremonies, other than that fear of going alone into the empty darkness that lay at the end of every short, short life? But when a vampire met his end, they were giving up hundreds, if not thousands of years of a potential future. Although the elders could be extremely secretive upon such matters, credible stories were told of vampires still walking the earth today that had known life during the time of the Caesars.
Assuming that he or she was not killed by one of the many traditional means, a vampire might conceivably live forever; and forever is exactly what David Baird (for he could no longer think of him in terms of just his rank) had given up for Arthur Wellesley.
In the aftermath of the engagement, General Harris and his officers realized that they had stayed aboveground for just a little too long. “Blast,” Harris cursed when he opened up his fob watch and checked the time. “We must hurry, gentlemen. I am afraid that the dawn is now upon us.”
Leaving the battalions in the charge of their respective senior lieutenants, the general and his vampire staff substituted their amorphous forms for the heftier physical bodies. It took mere moments for them to return to the camp, and when they arrived, pandemonium ruled.
It was the screaming that struck Arthur first upon his arrival, but the aroma of freshly-spilled blood was not far behind in vying for his attention. Dead bodies were liberally scattered as far as the eye could see; a few wore the uniforms of the East India C
ompany, which marked them out as belonging to the assigned camp guard detail, but the vast majority of the corpses wore civilian clothes.
“I recognize this man, or what remains of him, at least. His name is Kaplan; a captain, if I recall correctly.” Arthur turned to see General Harris kneeling at the side of what at first appeared to be a heap of blood-soaked rags.
“Kaplan, yes,” Shee confirmed. “He had command of the baggage train guard.”
“Then it appears as though he has discharged his duty as an officer, even unto death,” replied Wellesley gravely.
The large section of the camp which had housed the baggage train looked as if a typhoon had ripped through it. Shredded tents and fragments of canvas had been scattered to the four winds. Upended cooking pots were strewn everywhere. Wooden carts had been smashed into matchwood, their contents rifled through haphazardly and tossed aside.
Worst of all were the bodies. Everywhere the officers looked, dead eyes stared sightlessly up into the pink clouds of the early dawn sky. All bore horrific wounds, which upon closer inspection turned out to be slashes and gouges, far too deep and jagged to have been made by even the largest of blades. Nor had the beasts of burden been spared; dead pack animals lay sprawled next to the ruins of their shattered wagons. A number of elephants and camels had had their throats torn out, with huge chunks of flesh ripped from their hide.
The Beast of Mysore (Wellington Undead Book 1) Page 16