The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  The Pathan did; King freed him from the Sikh’s tight knots. “We will leave the compartment for the space of ten heartbeats,” he said. “If you are still here, you will swear. If you are gone, I will throw the knife out of the window.”

  “That I may slay thee with it later?” Ibrahim Khan asked, grinning.

  “Nay. You have come closer to slaying me than ever you will again. Think, O Ibrahim—but do it quickly! I have no need of sluggards in my service!”

  In the corridor outside, Narayan Singh began to expostulate in frantic whispers. King smiled in the swaying darkness and held out a hand.

  “That onion, bhai,” he said. “Lend it me for a moment.”

  The burly Sikh stopped in mid-word, then smiled. “Han, sahib,” he said, pulling a half-eaten one from a pocket of his kurta-tunic.

  King scrubbed the onion up and down the blade of the chora several times, and then lifted it to his nose. He could smell it—just barely. Which meant that the Pathan couldn’t take the scent at all; his nose was far more swollen and damaged than King’s.

  “Stay here for a moment, bhai,” King said, and cut off complaint by heading back into the carriage compartment.

  The Pathan was still there; he’d wet one end of his pugaree from the canteen and used it to wipe some of the blood from his face, and was in the process of rewinding it in the loose manner fashionable beyond the Border.

  “I will swear,” he said. “Although I warn you, I am likely to be a poor servant, and if you pay me in food, know that I can eat a great deal. And the horse had better be a good one.”

  King nodded, familiar with the manners of the Afghan highlands, where insolence was a way of life. “Swear, then,” he said, and laid the Khyber knife on one cushion.

  Then, carefully casual, he turned his back. He might be able to dodge if he detected the movement of the hillman snatching up the blade and hacking for his spine. Or he might not. The prickling up his back was wholly natural; the wild man was as dangerous as a wounded leopard in these cramped quarters. Still, it was courtesy, showing he trusted the other man to take the oath fairly.

  Behind him there was rap of knuckles and a flat smack, as the hillman tapped the grip and then slapped his palm down on the broad blade. “On the hilt and the steel, before the face of God and by my father’s head, so long as you keep faith with him, Ibrahim Khan is thy man and thy soldier, unto death or until you release me as you have pledged.”

  King turned and took the Pathan’s extended hand, which had a grip like a mechanical grab in a steel mill. When he released it, Ibrahim was smiling a shark’s smile. He rubbed one finger on his eyelid. Tears flowed; then he swore and rubbed it on the sleeve of his tunic before using his fingers to blow his nose free of blood clots. He did it outside the window, though, knowing the finicky nature of the sahib-log.

  “The old trick, lord,” he said, laughing in a surprisingly high-pitched giggle. “You will smell the onion juice on your fingers, even if I do not.”

  Reflexively, King brought his hand to his face. A Pathan who intended to break that oath wouldn’t touch the steel, a trick as old as the hills—but the dodge to detect that was an old one, too.

  “Come back in, Narayan Singh. We have much to discuss.”

  The Sikh pushed through the door and slammed it shut behind him. His glance told how he’d prefer to discuss things with Ibrahim Khan, but he held his anger to a scowl. The Pathan smiled back, perfectly aware of how the Sikh felt and just as obviously relishing every moment. After a moment, Narayan Singh nodded with a grudging respect.

  “Set a bandit to catch a banchut,” he said gruffly. “So, child of misbelief—where did you first see this E-rus?”

  “Veno vat, Excellency,” Yasmini said. “It is my fault, my very great fault.”

  “Oh, stop sniveling,” Count Ignatieff snapped, and cuffed her out of his way.

  He continued his pacing, throwing a glance the girl’s way now and then. Inconvenient, that only the girls of the select line showed the precious talent; it meant he had to drag a whining female about with him. The males went mad at puberty, when the girls first started dreaming the dreams—it was tricky and difficult to get the males to breed at all, and the girls were prone to madness as well, if you waited too long to put them to breeding. Ten years was about the limit. Doubly aggravating, that the girls only dreamed true while they were virgins—some nonsense about the world lines tangling after that.

  He’d have dismissed the tale as priestly play with words, except that no amount of torture could produce a useful word from any of the bitches once they’d been broken in.

  A pity, he thought, looking at Yasmini. She would be . . . interesting. Docile enough on the surface, but he suspected some unbroken spirit beneath.

  The Dreamers all had a family likeness, pointed chins and high cheeks, ice green eyes rimmed with blue, and flax-colored hair. Not surprising, when dam was bred to son and sibling to sibling over generations; that kept each line pure, although it meant you had to cull vigorously to get rid of the idiots and cripples. This one would have to be returned to the breeding pens soon, for all that she was the best Dreamer of them all. That was precisely the reason it was essential. It would still put a major crimp in his plans, and the Supreme Autocrat’s schemes. Perhaps it would even delay the Third Coming, the Secret Reign that was to come.

  The girl was shrinking from him, holding a hand before her eyes. “Go,” he barked. “Sleep, eat. We have work tomorrow.”

  She scurried off to the room that gave on this. Somewhere close by in the tangle of If, there must be an Ignatieff who had less control of his anger or his lust. The Okhrana agent scowled at the thought and threw himself into a chair by the narrow window; it looked down on a teeming street in Old Delhi, dusty and hot even in October. The cheap wood creaked beneath his solid weight; the only other furniture was a low table, and a cotton pallet in one corner of the whitewashed room. It was surprisingly clean, and cheap enough to suit his cover persona, although hiding the girl was difficult—women in strict purdah did not travel, even with their “father.”

  He reached into his baggage sack and drew out a bottle of arrack, pulled the cork with his teeth, and spat it out and took a long swallow of the rough spirits distilled from dates. Cold fire traced down his gullet, and he hissed with satisfaction as it exploded in his stomach. The Peacock Angel bid men satisfy their lusts—but drink and comely flesh were commonplace needs, next to power; the sort of thing an ordinary Cossack or lesser nobleman wallowed in. For power, he would renounce any amount of pleasures such as that.

  The spirits helped him control his imagination, too. It was unnerving, even after all these years of working with the Dreamers, to think of every moment as a fan of probabilities, flickering into and out of existence—his very atoms a blurred mass of might-be. When you thought about that too much, you might go mad; thinking of the world where on an impulse you stepped out the window and laughed as you plunged toward the pavement . . .

  With a complex shudder he took another swallow of the arrack, then corked the bottle with a decisive tap on the heel of his hand.

  Time to work, Ignatieff, he told himself, taking out his writing set. The ciphers were mostly in his head, but he still had to think hard as he filled two pages with the tiny crabbed script . . .

  Chapter Seven

  “Magnificent,” Cassandra King breathed. The Engine at Oxford was that—the largest Analytical Engine in the Empire, or it would be until the new one at the Imperial University was finished, and that was already six years behind schedule. She never failed to feel a prickle of awe, however familiar the thing became, at how it had grown over the generations, from notes and descriptions brought out during the Exodus, through the first small beginnings to . . . this.

  Directly ahead of her was the Primary Control Center, a great semicircle of levers and keys and activating-pulls, the handles glittering with smooth-worn ivory and turned wood. Technicians scurried about, feeding in streams of the
brass instruction cards—derived from the Jacquard principle, about twice the length of playing cards and covered in patterns of holes. They clattered and vanished down the slots, amid a clicking and ticking as the brushes read the gaps; the output rondels delivered a stream of numbers in return, to be noted down by the Exemplars or automatically printed on rolls of paper that were constantly renewed. Supervisors in old-fashioned black coats and tall stovepipe hats sat in their swivel chairs, barking an occasional order, or touching a control.

  All around them stretched the actual workings of the Engine, shafts and bevel joints and pulleys, steel and polished brass and cast-iron pillars, gears and cams and rods moving in an endless regression that made you dizzy if you looked too long. More technicians crawled through the maze on narrow catwalks, inspecting and oiling. There was a constant groaning, querning rumble of metal meshing with precisely machined metal; a sough of ventilation fans; the rattle of rail carts passing by with spare parts, or tubs of mineral oil. Sight vanished into distance in either direction, into subsidiary bays that branched off to either side from the main building.

  Under the working of the Engine could be heard a rumble of waters: Unlike the smaller Engines in use elsewhere, Oxford’s was driven by water-powered turbines, rather than steam or Stirling-cycle engines. The same dams and spillways provided the coolant that coursed through hollow steel and bored-out alloy; not so long ago a disastrous series of errors had crept in when heat softened crucial gears. Far overhead sunlight poured through an arched ceiling of yellow glass; the quiver of the giant mechanical mind came up through the metal latticework and shivered from her feet through her bones to her teeth, the same eternal motion that made dust motes dance in the golden rays of light.

  Some thought the Engine even grander by night, under the harsh blue-white glare of the arc lamps. She preferred practical daylight. This might be the most complex machine ever made by the hands of man, and certainly the largest—although it was half-underground, the Engine Works were about the same size as the main train station in Delhi, or the Imperial Palace. It was still a machine, a tool, and she tried to keep that in mind.

  Far too many tended to worship it as if it were an oracle like Delphi of the ancients. Her maid, Patni—present because of the absurd convention of chaperonage; did anyone think she was going to burst into a fit of fornication here?—was frankly terrified, and making gestures of aversion while she silently mouthed prayers.

  “What’s going through now?” Cassandra asked in a whisper.

  “Biochemical analysis,” Saukar Patel said; the Gujarati was an Assistant Executor in his own right. “Part of the malaria vaccine program.”

  Cassandra snorted—quietly. That had been in the works for decades, and she considered it a waste of time. Artemisinin drugs cured the disease handily enough. But biology was all the rage these days, had been since Angleton’s discovery of the molecular structure of genes a generation ago.

  One of the men in frock coats came up and bowed.

  “Dr. King,” he said. “I will take your entries, if you please. You will receive the output within no more than two months.”

  For a moment shock held her speechless. “Two months?” she said, her voice clipped. “I was assured by the dean that it would be two weeks.”

  The alloy-steel gearwheels of the Analytical Engine showed more feeling than the face of the Engine’s functionary. “I regret, Dr. King, that an Imperial request has downgraded your priority.”

  “What sort of an Imperial request?” Cassandra snapped.

  Imperial request could cover a multitude of bureaucratic sins. It was probably some idiotic shuffling of the census data, or someone wanting to know trends in the tonnage of shipping clearing Melbourne for the South American ports. Whereas her project was something which affected the whole future of the Empire, of humankind for that matter.

  The Executor unbent a little to a specialist in his own field. “From the Political Service. A matter directly from the Lion Throne.”

  “Oh,” Cassandra said. Some of her colleagues looked a little daunted: Her Whig backbone stiffened at the sight.

  “This is a country ruled by law, not some benighted despotism,” she said firmly. “I require that you furnish me the name, rank, and department of whoever it was who dared to interfere in academic affairs, in order that I may register a complaint!”

  “Very well,” the Executor said, and handed her a card.

  Cassandra studied it before tucking the square of pasteboard into her reticule. Whoever this Sir Manfred is, he’ll be getting a piece of my mind, and soon!

  “Magnificent,” Henri de Vascogne said, the cams and gears moving still in his mind’s eye. “I thank you for the opportunity to see it—and the Engine in Kashmir is greater still, you say? Magnifique.”

  Sir Manfred Warburton laughed as he leaned back in his swivel chair. A tea-wallah brought in a pot and left it on the curve-legged stand by the window. He went through the small ceremony of pouring, offering a lump of sugar; his guest managed the whole thing very well for a non-Imperial, even to the casual gesture with which he produced his handkerchief and snapped it out to drape over his knee.

  “The Engine—Engines, now that we have more than one—are magnificent,” he said. “With them, we can do things that were only theoretical potentials before. Unfortunately, they’re not quite the Delphic oracles”—he paused, and his guest nodded, showing that he caught the reference—“that popular superstition believe.” He scowled slightly. “In fact, whatever the Russians use seems to work as well, or better.”

  De Vascogne’s eyebrows rose. “Forgive me, but I thought that they were relatively primitive.” A slight grimace. “From those reports you showed me, of a certainty their customs are. Barbaric.”

  Warburton sighed slightly and sipped at the tea. “No doubt, old chap—although espionage has always been one of their strong points. Some of my colleagues think I’m a bit of an old woman where the Czar’s men are concerned. However, I don’t think so in the least—and the Oxford Engine itself agrees with me.”

  He tapped the printout. “The thing is, they should be exactly what you said, a gang of primitives whose forebears were driven mad by the Fall, and what they did to survive it.”

  The other man nodded. That was one of the fundamental distinctions of the modern world, the gap between those whose ancestors had come through the great famines by eating men, and those who hadn’t. Perhaps it was a trifle hypocritical; taking away other men’s food killed them just as much as eating the flesh from their bones directly. A prejudice didn’t have to be rational, of course; even today, after a century of recivilizing missions, natives of Britain were looked on a little askance by the descendants of the Exodus.

  The Russians were different. Like many of the tribes of Europe, the Muscovite refugees in Central Asia had made virtue of necessity, and developed a religion of abominations that continued cannibalism as ritual long after it ceased to be necessity. De Vascogne supposed that back in the terrible years of universal death it had even seemed reasonable that Satan was loose in a world seized from a defeated God.

  But most groups who’d taken that route were bone-through-the-nose savages, beyond the Stone Age only insofar as they pounded pre-Fall metal into crude knives rather than chipping them from flint. Poetic justice, in a way; when men hunted each other to eat for a generation or two, it destroyed even the memory and concept of trust—and mutual trust was what let human beings live at a level beyond skulking misery. Perhaps the Russians who’d set up around Samarkand were a special case, because they hadn’t eaten each other—they’d survived by culling their Asian subjects, until the great cold relaxed its grip. They still did, for ceremony’s sake, and to maintain the terror of their rule.

  “But they are not savages,” Warburton went on. “Or rather they are very sophisticated barbarians indeed. In fact, they have matched many of our technical advances. The question is, how? According to our best intelligence, they have no real com
munity of scholars—a few engineers of sorts from the beginning, and more of late, but no real science. They shouldn’t be able even to copy what we do these days. Yet according to this statistical study from the Engine, they’ve been anticipating our developments, as often as not. More and more over the past two generations.”

  De Vascogne sipped at his tea in turn, the little finger of his right hand delicately curled—he had been given a thorough briefing on upper-caste Angrezi manners. He suspected that Warburton knew, and found that amusing. He also suspected that Sir Manfred knew several other things about him, including a few he would have preferred remain his possessions alone.

  “Did you not mention that the Dragon Throne of Dai-Nippon has aided them?”

  Warburton poured another cup. “Biscuit?” he said. Then: “Yes, and that’s also a bit of a puzzle. The Mikado’s men aren’t charitably inclined. Much of what they’ve shipped to Samarkand and Tashkent over the last generation is both expensive and of a quality that the Russians could not possibly have made it themselves—precision gauges, jigs, machine tools, catalysts for chemical plants. The sheer expense! A good deal of that had to go by camelback across the Talimakan Desert.”

  “Camels can be surprisingly efficient,” de Vascogne pointed out.

  “They have to be, there. Talimakan means You go in, you don’t come out. And as I said, very expensive indeed. The Czar must be giving them something in return. The Nipponese aren’t what you would call humanitarian chaps, but they’re nearly as disgusted with the Russki as we are.”

  Warburton shook his head and sighed. “I’m afraid that if you thought the Political Service was omniscient, this must be a sad disillusionment.”

  De Vascogne laughed. “On the contrary. The scale of affairs is intimidating, here. Our little Mediterranean world seems very provincial.”

  “Quality and quantity,” the Political Service agent said, stirring a spoonful of sugar into his tea with a sad chuckle. “The Russians . . . their acumen seems almost supernatural at times. Why, I’ve had reports that their Black Church maintains a cult of seeresses who can foretell the future, or at least the possible consequences of an action.”