Goddess of the Dead (Wellington Undead Book 2)

by Richard Estep

  Vampire officers were the rarest of the Europeans in the employ of the Marathas, and cost significantly more in terms of pay and plunder. Even with such exorbitant rewards to be gained, there were still only a handful — nine, at last count, including Pohlmann himself. The British had more, and although their military doctrine allowed the use of such men as ‘exploring officers,’ who ranged far and wide throughout enemy territory while alone and wearing full uniform so that they could not be executed as spies if they should be captured, Wellesley was reputed to be cautious in their employment; he too recognized the immense value of a vampire officer in leading his companies, battalions, and regiments, and was understandably hesitant to fritter them away on a task that cavalry were well-suited for.

  It would therefore have surprised both Colonel Pohlmann and his aide to know that at that very moment, they were being watched and listened to from high up above. Major Matthew Williams was one of the Major General’s most experienced exploring officers, and was well-used to flying above the landscapes of India by night, working mile by mile to sketch out accurate and detailed maps of the terrain and local topography which Wellesley had at times used to deadly effect.

  Williams had seen the cooking-fires of the Maratha camp from miles away, their glow reflected against the base of the low-lying clouds. Flying stealthily in their direction, the major had reached Borkardan in just moments, and now levitated in the cool night air some five hundred feet above what he had shrewdly identified as the tent of the Maratha princes.

  Listening intently with the preternaturally-enhanced hearing which was just one of the reasons for which vampire officers were so highly prized upon the battlefield, Williams had been unable to make out any detail of the conversations taking place within the tent, but had heard every word spoken by Pohlmann and his aide after they had exited.

  The Maratha army may not be on the march yet, the major thought to himself as he digested the results of his eavesdropping, but their cavalry most surely are.

  General Wellesley was going to want to hear about this, and he would want to hear about it immediately.

  Borkardan

  “Borkardan,” Wellesley hissed between clenched teeth. “The Marathas are at Borkardan.”

  “The entire enemy force,” Williams confirmed, just moments after he had dropped gracefully to the ground behind the British lines. The army was camped just outside Sailgaon. He had made his way directly to the general’s tent, where he found his commanding officer contemplating one of the very maps he himself had drawn of this region only four days prior. The general was sharing a decanter of blood with Colonel Stevenson, who had flown across at sundown from his own army’s encampment at Budnapoor, some miles to the west.

  “How many?” Wellesley pressed him. “Your best estimate?”

  “I would say all of them,” Williams answered without a trace of exaggeration. “Their encampment stretched almost from horizon to horizon, sir.”

  Arthur paused in silence to digest this news.

  It is time. I can feel it.

  “You have done good work this night, Williams,” Wellesley said at last. “Know that you have my thanks. You are dismissed.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The major inclined his head respectfully to both Wellesley and Stevenson, who until this point had said nothing, and ducked out of the tent.

  Setting his goblet down carefully on a side table, Arthur turned to regard his second-in-command.

  “You are conspicuous by your silence, Colonel.”

  Stevenson looked up from where he had been seemingly contemplating the contents of his own goblet. He took a dignified sip, the coppery liquid staining his lips red.

  “I would be rather less than honest if I were to tell you that I liked these odds, General.”

  “Nor I,” Wellesley shot back. “It is not necessary for us to like them, Colonel — only for us to beat them.”

  He realized that he had raised his voice, allowed himself to grow heated. Stevenson was right; the odds were indeed fearsome. But what other choice had they? Arthur was a keen student of the military art of logistics, and had planned his army’s ability to support itself in a hostile enemy country with almost obsessive, excruciating detail, calculating the precise amount of barrels and beef, shot and shell, needed to prosecute a campaign against the Marathas. What he had not anticipated was their apparent unwillingness to engage him in battle. From what he had known of them, coyness had not seemed to be their style.

  “We cannot sustain this army in the field for much longer, as you are quite aware.” Arthur was giving voice to his fears now, exposing them to the only man that he reasonably could inflict them upon. “It is either do battle, here, now, over the next few days, or march back to Mysore in ignominy and failure.”

  “I understand,” Stevenson agreed solemnly. “But if the Marathas do indeed outnumber us by ten to one, their cavalry by almost twenty to one…”

  “You compare apples to oranges, Colonel. Most of their horse and the majority of their foot are irregulars, little more than an ill-disciplined rabble. Numbers count for something, yes, but not everything. They do not tell the whole story.” Arthur sighed, taking a deeper draught of blood this time. It helped to calm his nerves, something which he felt was sorely needed this night. “It has always been my firm belief that a smaller, professional fighting force of well-trained men can defeat a horde many times its size, if handled competently by a skilled commander.”

  “You are most certainly that, sir.”

  “You flatter me, Stevenson, and for that I thank you. But it is entirely possible that you shall be the one to strike the first blow against our enemies, and I have every bit as much confidence in your abilities as you have expressed in mine.”

  “I shall endeavor to conduct myself in a manner worthy of the general’s trust, sir.”

  “Of that, I have no doubt. Now, we are going to attack. It is decided. So let us be about the business of planning it.”

  The two men went over to the map that was already spread out upon the general’s table, Arthur bringing a candelabra and setting it down atop the table so that its glow illuminated the rivers, hills, and plains of the Deccan.

  Wellesley pointed at the village of Sailgaon. “We are currently here,” he said, and then moved the tip of one sharply-pointed fingernail westward to hover over the town of Budnapoor. “Your army is encamped just here. And here,” he traced a line northward towards a location on the River Kailna, “is Borkardan.”

  Stevenson nodded slowly. He had the experienced mind of an old campaigner, and it was already reading the terrain between Budnapoor and Borkardan, visualizing every defile and rise in three dimensions. It was something every senior officer could do without consciously choosing to, simply the way in which a commander’s brain worked — no, had to work — in order to appreciate a potential battlefield.

  There was a ridge of hills running between the two tiny British armies, separating them from one another. Stevenson saw straight away that they were going to be an obstacle. So much of their logistical train, not to mention the artillery, was wheeled, and therefore reliant upon roads in order to move. Roads did lead north from both Sailgaon and Budnapoor, and they were the only thing that made the hills passable to carts, wagons, and cannon.

  “I suspect that I know exactly what you are thinking,” Arthur said. Stevenson looked at him askance. “Oh, this is no psychic eavesdropping,” the general laughed, its uncharacteristic bray betraying his underlying nervousness. “You are a fine commander, and as such you are going to suggest that we reunite both halves of our army now, and only then advance north upon Borkardan.”

  Colonel Stevenson’s eyes widen in surprise. That was precisely what he was going to suggest.

  “Is that really such a terrible option, sir?”

  “Under normal circumstances, no. The problem is, the circumstances under which we find ourselves are anything but ordinary. You see, if we amalgamate now and then march north, it will ta
ke us twice as long. We shall not only have to bring one army across to join the other, but then we shall be sharing one single road, which means that our column will advance at half the speed it would take if we each advance northward from our current respective positions.”

  It was hard to argue with that kind of logic, Stevenson saw. But did it outweigh the risk of the enemy attacking them first, of dividing and conquering their forces piecemeal?

  Wellesley apparently thought not.

  “Speed is of the essence now, Stevenson.” He rapped the tabletop with his index finger for emphasis. “Speed is everything. You know how jittery these Marathas are, how they hardly like to stay in one place for more than a few days. We should have brought them to battle before now otherwise. We must hit them hard, and we must hit them now.”

  The colonel had been performing the calculations in his mind while Wellesley made his case. “I would estimate that it is still a good two days march to their position, General — perhaps three.”

  “All the more reason to begin immediately.” Wellesley’s voice was impassioned, and the colonel saw that there was going to be no changing the man’s mind.

  “Very well, sir.”

  “Tonight is the Twenty-First,” Arthur consulted his pocket-watch, “although not for much longer, for it is almost midnight. We shall strike camp and begin the march in one hour, with the cavalry leading the way…the dragoons, I think. My army shall arrive here in two days, three at the absolute latest, but two if all goes well. That puts us at the Twenty-Third, at worst the Twenty-Fourth.” Arthur was pointing to a village named Naulniah, which sat on the banks of the River Purna. “We shall make camp there and attack the following evening.”

  “Then I shall make for Hussainabad, General Wellesley. I shall make every effort to reach it by the Twenty-Third and shall camp there for what remains of the evening.” Stevenson indicated a village that was roughly ten miles to the west-southwest of Naulniah as the crow (or the vampire) flew. Both villages were perhaps three or four hours’ march from Borkardan, which would lie to the northwest of Arthur’s intended campsite and northeast of Stevenson’s.

  “Excellent, Colonel. Then, at dusk on the Twenty-Fourth, we shall decide this damnable affair once and for all.”

  On that note, the two senior officers shook hands and parted company, Stevenson flying west to chivvy his own force on the long road northward. Calling for his newly promoted adjutant, Wellesley issued a flurry of orders intended to mobilize his portion of the army to do the very same. When he had vacated his command tent, men of the Shadow Company scuttled about it, efficiently striking the poles and rolling the canvas up so that it could be packaged and stowed for the march.

  Arthur stood in the light and warmth of one of the campfires, enjoying the comforting feeling until a private from the 78th apologetically doused it. Looking up at the cold, clear night sky, with the finely speckled band of stars arching above his head, one thought was foremost above all others in the vampire general’s mind.

  If only they will remain at Borkardan…

  A Medical Opinion

  Wellesley’s army marched north in column until sunrise on the morning of the Twenty-Second, and then made camp for the day on an open plain. Arthur slept a dreamless sleep until sunset, and for once was more disconcerted than relieved when the Tipu Sultan did not intrude on his repose. The mysterious dark-skinned woman who had made such veiled threats to him would have been intriguing under any other circumstances, but Arthur had written her off as little more than the vampire equivalent of a nightmare or phantasm, a description that he still wasn’t entirely convinced should not extend to the Sultan as well. He had the business of running an army to occupy his mind — not least of all was getting to the bottom of just what had happened to the feral redcoats in the square at Ahmednuggur — and such responsibilities left no room for anything more fanciful.

  And yet…when Arthur closed his eyes and entered that twilight world between sleeping and wakefulness, he found her image drifting back into his mind. He could easily conjure her appearance in his mind’s eye, paradoxically both so close and yet so far from reach at the very same time. She had reminded him of something, but he could not think of precisely what.

  Then it came to him.

  Kali.

  The Hindu Goddess of the Dead.

  He had seen shrines and statues to Kali at several places during his time in India. She seemed to be venerated throughout the land, particularly by the poor and the dispossessed, for whom death was always but a heartbeat away. Arthur searched his memory for some of the stories that he had heard, finally recalling that Kali was said to be the wife of Shiva, and was always pictured with several sets of arms in the icons that he had seen; each arm was usually holding an object of some kind, such as a dagger, a trident, a serpent, and sometimes a severed human head.

  The woman in his dream had somehow grown a second set of arms.

  She had also dispatched the Tipu Sultan as though he were nothing more than an afterthought.

  When Company Sergeant Major Nichols unearthed him from the ground at sunset, it was not the logistics of moving an army or the tactics of opposing a vastly superior enemy that kept Arthur’s attention — it was the enigmatic woman.

  He accepted the obligatory cup of warm blood gratefully, sipping it to restore his strength and vitality. Arthur noticed that his senior NCO appeared to be something less than his usual, cheerful self.

  “Is something bothering you, CSM?”

  “There have been some…unusual developments today, sir.”

  Arthur cocked an eyebrow curiously. “Unusual in what sense?”

  “Best that I let Dr. Caldwell explain, General.”

  Knowing better than to pry something out of Nichols when he was being uncharacteristically reticent, Arthur simply gestured for him to lead the way. The medical tent had been pitched some four or five hundred yards from the officers’ mess, just far enough away that the stench of human effluvia and the cries of the wounded would not carry that far.

  To the casual observer, Doctor Reed Caldwell might have seemed young for a surgeon; yett his relative youth belied an encyclopedic knowledge of medical practice and a total unflappability under even the most trying of conditions. The son of a wealthy and influential barrister, Caldwell had eschewed the traditional avenue of private practice following the completion of his medical schooling, choosing instead the far riskier — but equally more rewarding — alternative of signing on as the 33rd’s regimental surgeon. A life of adventure and hardship on campaign held far greater appeal for the adventuresome young man than the staid family estates in Sussex. Tall and lean, the harsh Indian sun had tanned the still-mortal man’s face a deep brown. The doctor kept his dark hair trimmed neatly, the better to keep it out of his eyes when the blood was flowing and the sweat stung during the brutal grappling that was battlefield surgery.

  It was not unusual to hear screams originate from within the medical tent, but this time Wellesley realized that there was something a little…off about them. There was also no guard posted on the tent’s entrance when Dan led the way inside. The tent was unusually busy, crammed almost to capacity with not only patients lying down on makeshift beds and trellis tables, but also a swarm of red-coated soldiers milling around them. Arthur soon realized precisely where the two guards who should normally have been manning the entrance had gone; they were restraining a prostrate figure on one of the wooden trellis tables, wrestling the man face-down.

  “Hold him! Hold him!” Caldwell ordered, and although his voice was raised, the command was delivered with the doctor’s characteristic gentility of manner which so endeared him to his staff. The assisting redcoats struggled to obey, but the patient was thrashing and struggling for all that he was worth. It was from him the moaning and screaming came, and yet on closer inspection, Arthur realized to his bemusement that the surgeon wasn’t actually doing anything to the man to elicit such a response. Screams were only to be expected duri
ng an amputation, when the agony of the bone-saw was blunted only by the strongest of alcohol and a rubber bit placed in the patient’s mouth to prevent him from biting off his own tongue; but this particular patient appeared to be entirely whole, his only visible wound seeming to be a bandage tied around his lower right forearm.

  Nichols rushed in to lend some muscle to the struggle, and that gave Caldwell the opportunity he needed to apply thick leather straps to each of the writhing patient’s wrists, cinching them tightly through a metal buckle and fastening them securely. Each brown leather strap was heavily discolored in patches, a result of the blood of hundreds of former table occupants soaking into them. The doctor repeated the restraint procedure at the patient’s ankles, then stepped back and wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of one blood-stained forearm.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” Caldwell said to the two redcoats, each of whom was still watching the patient warily despite having stepped away. Although face-down, the man still fought against his restraints like a caged beast, but the tough straps were winning the battle…for now. “You may return to your duties.”

  “Bastard bit me,” grumbled one of the soldiers, holding one hand inside the other. Blood oozed from between the man’s clenched fingers, and Arthur swiftly crushed the sudden thirst that sprang up unbidden within him. Nevertheless, the uninjured soldier must have caught some sign upon his face, some flash of the eyes or change of expression, because he shrank away into the shadows of the canvas wall.

  “Let me see.” The doctor was all business, prising open the wounded soldier’s grip and assessing the injured hand. He turned it this way and that, searching for the best view in the candlelit gloom of the medical tent. He had indeed been bitten, Arthur saw, on the back of the right hand. Although it did not look particularly bad — no muscle, bone, or connective tissue was visible — Caldwell searched around in his pockets for a linen dressing, which he pushed against the open wound in order to staunch the venous bleeding. “I shall be with you in just a moment, General,” he apologized, rummaging inside a plain wooden chest set on a nearby folding table.