The cloth wrenched savagely at his neck, and the two fingers of his left hand underneath it would delay death by seconds only. A knee jammed into the small of his back, and he could feel the wiry strength in the hands that held the rumal, the strangler’s handkerchief, and the enormous leverage of the tough cloth and crossed-wrist grip.
King heaved himself backward. The man on his back was strong but no giant; the Lancer officer stood six-foot-two and weighed a hundred ninety pounds of gristle, bone, and tough, dense muscle. They slammed into the plastered stone of the wall, and for a second the assassin slipped downward. The terrible pressure on his neck eased hardly at all, and blood hammered in his temples with spikes of pain. In that instant he snatched the ornamental knife out of his belt and slammed it back and up with all the strength his injured right arm could yield. A bubbling shriek half deafened him, and then the intolerable choking hold on his throat was gone.
Nobody, not even a trained strangler, pays attention to anything else when seven inches of razor-edged steel are rammed into his groin. The wounded man screamed again and again, then fell with a thud and lay thrashing and moaning.
King let himself fall to the carpet also and rolled, straining not to gasp as air flooded back into his lungs and blood into his brain, and light flared in his retinas, tinged with red and the shapes of veins. He was locked into a darkened room with a man—men, perhaps—deadly as cobras. Leopard-crawling in the darkness under cover of the sounds of the man he’d stabbed, he felt for the door and rose, crouching. Silence, save for the labored breath of a man dying. King made himself relax until he was waiting, lightly poised on the balls of his feet and open to every sensation his nerves could deliver, not straining. A whicker of air, and he let his knees go and crouched. Something went into the wood behind him with a chi-thunk of metal into wood; not a knife, but that didn’t matter, as long as it hadn’t hit him.
His crouch turned into a leap. Blind, he could only aim for where the sound hinted the thrower had been. He crashed into a body and they went over in the dark, falling together over a settee and knocking the phonograph to the floor with a sudden screech and crash. King found himself grappling with an unseen opponent, naked skin covered in some sort of grease. It made the smaller man’s limbs impossible to pin down, for he had the speed and flexibility of a mongoose and a demonic skill. They fought in silence save for grunts and snarls, hands grappling for holds and breaking them, only occasionally able to strike with fist or elbow or bladed palm or fingertips, and hitting floor or furniture as often as flesh.
King’s hands finally clamped on a wrist and elbow, but before he could break the arm, fingers came groping for his eyes. He snapped his head aside, then lunged back and sank his teeth into a wrist, but his opponent used the moment to tear his right arm free and whip the leading edge into the Lancer officer’s temple. Then he pounded his fist into the side of King’s own right arm, striking the half-healed stab wound with cruel luck and tearing himself free.
Lights shot before King’s eyes. Yet even as he gasped in pain he pivoted on his back and kicked; luck reversed itself, and his boot struck the other man in the buttocks with tremendous force, catapulting him into a stone wall like something shot out of a hydraulic piston.
King heard the crash and flipped himself back to his feet, arms outstretched to either side—he wasn’t certain where in the room he was, much less where the assassin had landed. Then he heard something from the corridor outside, muffled through thick wall and door. The clash of steel, shouts—Allahu Akbar, God is Great, the war cry of Islam—then a great bass bellow:
“Rung ho! Wa Guru-ji! Rung ho!”
“Narayan Singh—in here—more of them!” King shouted back, and made a daring leap. “Kuch dar nahin hai!”
That landed him at the corridor entrance; some distant corner of his mind gibbered in relief as his hand fell on the handle, twisted the dead bolt free, and threw the door open. In the same motion he flung himself aside and slitted his eyes against the flare of brightness from the gaslit corridor outside.
A man stumbled through backwards, steel flickering in his hand as he frantically parried the Sikh’s saber cuts. The light showed two others in the corners of the sitting room; near-naked men with skins coated in black grease, loincloths also dyed night color. Each held a weapon in his right hand, a curious thing with a blade at right angles to the haft, like a short malignant pickax; the left hand held a cord and noose. Tucked into the loincloth of each was the rumal, with a corner lapped out ready to grip.
They hesitated a single instant, blinking against the pain of light in dark-adapted eyes, then skittered forward with the vicious quickness of weasels.
“Rung ho!” Narayan Singh shouted again. A tremendous overhand cut knocked his opponent back on his heels; the Lancer took the instant to pull a Khyber knife from his girdle and flip it through the air toward King.
“Here, huzoor—for you!”
It flashed through the air; a genuine Pathan chora, a pointed cleaver two feet long with a back as thick as a man’s thumb and an edge fit to shave with. King snatched for the hilt—almost missed, with the pain and weakness in his right arm, but forced his hand to steadiness. The solid weight of the weapon was inexpressible comfort, and the assassins checked their rush. King didn’t stop his own, pivoting with the momentum of his catch and attacking in the same motion. One down cut struck the haft of a pickax, and smashed it out of the smaller man’s grip. The backstroke shattered and cleft his jaw, sending him staggering aside in a spray of blood and teeth; turning, King kicked the other killer in the stomach. Not too hard, because he struck in haste and the footing was awkward, but enough to keep him from interfering.
Then the last strangler was left with a short pickax to face a bigger, stronger man with twenty-four inches of straight razor in his hand and nothing but pure murder in his expression. Blood ran down King’s arm from the reopened wound, but he scarcely felt the stabbing pain of it.
Narayan Singh’s fight ended in the same instant. Another yell of Rung ho!, an unmusical scrinnng of steel on steel and the edge of his tulwar slammed into his opponent’s arm. The heavy saber cut halfway through it with a thick wet sound of cloven muscle and a crack of parting bone. The Sikh shouted in exultation, brutally efficient blows reducing his enemy to something that looked more like a carcass hung in a butcher’s stall than a man.
Then he screamed in fury as the blade jammed between two vertebrae, and he had to spend seconds wrenching it free with one foot on the dead man’s body.
The last assassin wasted none of the time bought by his comrades’ death. He threw his pickax at King in a snake-swift movement and darted for the door that led to the suite’s bedroom. The windows there were covered with a lattice of iron bars, but they gave onto the street. King dodged the flying weapon; he knew the window bars must be cut through and that the killer could dive out and lose himself in the alleys—might have confederates waiting for him. Useless to pursue that greased speed. Instead he whipped the chora in an overarm throw, hard and fast.
It turned twice, glinting in the light streaming through the open door, then struck point first at the base of the fleeing man’s skull, with a sound like an ax thunking home in seasoned hardwood. The assassin’s body arched for an instant in a spastic rictus, then dropped as limp as an official explanation.
King staggered, panting and clutching at the reopened wound with his left hand, feeling blood seeping through the cloth.
“Doctor’s going to hate me,” he muttered, then turned the gaslights back on.
The bright yellow light showed a slaughterhouse scene of tumbled bodies and blood spreading on marble floor tiles and soaking into Sikunderam rugs. King ignored it—and the unpleasantly familiar stink of violent death—to kneel by Hasamurti’s side. There was no obvious wound, but she was bleeding from nose and ears, her eyes wandering. His exploring fingers found a spot on the side of her head that gave unpleasantly as he touched it, despite the lightness of that touch a
nd the swiftness with which he jerked his hand away. She cried out once, then rolled her head to look at him.
“I . . . tried . . .” she whispered. “Hurts . . .”
“You saved my life, chaebli,” he said, gripping her hand and leaning close. The banchut must have hit her with the hammer end of one of those pickaxes. “Don’t try to—”
Her face grimaced and went slack. He put his fingers to her neck for an instant, then swallowed past a thickness in his own throat and pulled her eyelids down over staring eyes. Bone splinters driven into the brain; he’d seen enough head wounds to recognize it.
“Huzoor,” came Narayan Singh’s voice. “Sahib, you must look. Huzoor—”
King shook his head violently, squeezed his eyes shut for an instant, and pressed the heel of a blood-sticky hand to his forehead. There were tears pressing at the back of his eyelids, and he couldn’t remember weeping since his father’s death, when he was six.
She’d thought fast, and risked her own life for his . . . When he opened his eyes again they were as level and hard as agate, and he went to the Sikh’s side. Whoever was behind this is going to pay, he thought. And pay full measure.
The daffadar had peeled back an eyelid on one of the half-naked stranglers. On the pink skin was a tattoo, a crude representation of a spider . . . or a figure with many arms.
“Thug!” the Sikh swore; he pronounced it thaag. “One of the brotherhood of the Deceivers.”
“Krishna,” King swore to himself, softly.
The cult had been nearly wiped out back in Old Empire times—there were statues to Colonel Sleeman in half a dozen cities. Then it had revived on a vastly larger scale with the Fall and the chaos and famine afterward—this time not only murdering and robbing travelers in the name of Kali, but devouring them also to the glory of the Dreadful Bride. Evidently the repressions since the Second Mutiny hadn’t gotten them all.
“Surgeons cut out cancers, but there’s always a little left to grow again,” he said grimly.
“There will be a reckoning,” the Sikh said, his face equally hard. “But sahib, look here also. I saw them in the corridor, lounging about as if they were nothing save idle servants—but when I sought entry they drew steel on me.”
He indicated the hacked body of the swordsman he’d killed. The process had removed much of the outer clothing, and beneath it the man wore linen bands tightly wrapped around his limbs—a winding-sheet, such as some Muslims were buried in. Another body similarly clad lay outside the corridor entrance to the suite, dead eyes staring at the ceiling. Only one type of Muslim wore such before burial; Shia fanatics on a mission they expected to end in their own deaths. The corpse could have been Arab, Persian, Afghani, or northwest Indian—dark hair and eyes, olive-brown skin turning gray with blood loss and morbidity.
“Krishna,” King muttered again. Deceivers and hashasshin—that doesn’t make any bloody sense at all! Hindu fanatics in the service of the death goddess; Muslims convinced that dying while killing enemies of the Faith was a ticket to Paradise. “This is madness.”
Singh grunted again. “Madness that slays, huzoor.” He looked at the body that lay half in and half out of the bedroom door, still twitching, with the chora upright in his skull like a boat’s mast. “A good cast, by the Guru!”
King shook his head. “My arm was weak and my aim was off,” he said, with bitter self-accusation in his voice. “I was aiming for his thigh, so we could take one alive for questioning.”
When all was said and done, when the police had come and gone, when a doctor had put stitches in his arm and strapped it up and strictly forbade any motion, a Club servant brought him a note on a silver tray.
It was Warburton’s. This time the message read: Meet me in Delhi on the third week after Diwali. In the interim, remember that official help may not be conducive to continued health.
Slowly, Athelstane King crumpled the square of pasteboard in his hand.
Chapter Five
The gracious smile on the face of Princess Sita Mary Elizabeth Jandeen Victoria Saxe-Coburg-Gotha lasted a full fifteen seconds after the rosewood-and-ivory door of the small audience chamber closed behind the Franco-Mahgrebi emissary. Then it ran down into a snarl.
“No!” she yelled.
The scream gained force from her overarm throw as she rose from the jeweled throne and pitched the silver-framed photograph at the door panels of rare woods and ivory. One of the ladies-in-waiting hastily intercepted it with her fan, to protect the priceless carvings of scenes from the Mahabharata—ironically, those were of the Pandava brothers and their joint wife Draupadi.
“No, no, no! I will not marry the foreign pig! I’d rather marry an untouchable, a diseased pariah sweeper with no nose! No! Never! Never!”
She dropped from the dais and began to stride angrily back and forth across the marble floor with its inset designs of tigers, peacocks, and jungle flowers in carnelian, lapis, and tanzanite. Energy crackled from her slight form; the princess was just eighteen years, rather short, and willowy-slender in a blouse of sheer Kashmiri wool and kanghivaram sari of gold-shot indigo silk sewn with a tiger-stripe pattern in tiny garnets and jet. A tiara was bound around her brows, diamonds and gold with a dangling fringe of Madras pearls shimmering like polished steel. The long hair looped in an intricate pattern beneath it was raven black, and her eyes a blue almost as dark. On her the rather bony features of the Imperial dynasty were muted to delicately regular good looks trembling on the verge of beauty. The fashionable red tikal mark between her feathery black brows stood out vividly against the pallor of her anger.
“Why me?” she asked—just on the smooth edge of a shriek; even then the training of her high contralto showed. “Why me?”
One of the ladies-in-waiting picked up the picture. She was the sister of the Maharana of Udaipur, taller and a few years older than the one she served, with boldly handsome Rajput features that she was visibly schooling to sweet reason:
“Sita—Kunwari—Imperial Princess—he seems a handsome man. And you will be a queen, and your sons will be kings.”
“Then you marry him and bear a whole litter of kings. I give you leave!” Sita snarled.
She kicked at the confining hem of the sari as she strode, her glittering sandals clicking on the inlaid stone beneath. “I am daughter to the Lion Throne, and they expect me to marry this . . . this . . .”
“Heir to the ruler of France-outre-mer,” her brother finished for her. He looked around. “Leave us!” he said, clapping his hands together sharply.
Courtiers and ladies and servants filed out; not many, for it had been a private audience. The Rajput lady-in-waiting handed him the picture as she stalked by in affronted dignity. Gurkha guardsmen shouldered arms to a brisk order from their officer, with a smack of hands on wood and metal, then moved back to the farther walls, discreetly out of earshot for anything but a shout; only a direct order from the King-Emperor himself would have sent them out of sight.
The audience chamber was part of the summer rooms of the palace, a twenty-foot-high roof supported by tall columns of polished crimson stone with gilded capitals. The outer edge had no wall, merely a series of staggered screens of ivory carved into fretwork as fine as lace.
“Come, let’s take a walk,” Prince Charles said. The tone was friendly, but the glance that went with it bottled his sister’s fury.
They walked between the screens, along a path that gave out onto a courtyard garden, centered on a tall fountain of dazzling white. Paths of colored stone wound between green lawns, flower beds, tall trees, manicured shrubs, man-high jars of polished stone with sprays of bougainvillea tumbling down their sides. Tiny antelope the size of cats moved fearlessly through the garden, and strutting peacocks with silver rings on their claws spread their tails and screeched; fish with fins like multicolored veils of gauze swam through pool and channel.
“Why don’t you stop the hysterics, Sita? They’ll probably expect me to marry his sister, after all, and I’m
not complaining.”
The eldest son of the King-Emperor was in the walking-out uniform of a colonel in the Gurkha regiment of the Imperial Foot Guards, forest green kurta and trousers, plumed long-tail pugaree-turban and polished boots. The hilt of his tulwar was as plain as regulations permitted, and he carried the Gurkha kukri-knife as well. Both showed use; the Guards had been in action on the northwestern frontier only weeks ago, and Charles Saxe-Coburg-Gotha didn’t regard his colonelcy as an honorary one.
“You don’t have to leave home,” Sita said sullenly.
“Wish I could,” Charles said frankly. “It isn’t a life fit for a dog, the way Father’s tied up in ceremony. I’d rather sail off to the Straits to start a rubber plantation, or go to Borneo and fight pirates.”
He was a strong-featured young man in his mid-twenties, of medium height and slender, clean-shaven save for sideburns of dark glossy brown. He went on:
“In any event, you know the pater will get his way. Bad form to kick up such a fuss. Duty, and all that. Rajadharma .”
Sita sighed and took the picture back. It showed a dark young man in an ornate uniform of antique cut—long-tailed buttoned blue coat, red trousers—well slathered with medals, his beard and mustaches trimmed to points. Beside him was a woman of her own age, dressed in a low-cut dress—that would be the sister.
“Is she wearing a corset?” Sita asked incredulously. “That dress looks like something Victoria I would have worn!”
“Well, they’re old-fashioned in France-outre-mer, I grant you,” her brother said. “But for Pravati’s sake, Sita, you’ll be the queen, there, soon enough. And one from the Raj—the Empire—at that. You’ll set the fashions; have ’em all dressing civilized in saris or shalwar qamiz in no time.”
“Are they civilized?” Sita asked, suddenly serious and quiet.
The Peshawar Lancers Page 7
