“The King-Emperor doesn’t need the sort of officer who’d abandon a loyal man to torture and death.”
“I forbid it!”
King relaxed suddenly, with a shrug and a smile. “Well, Sir Manfred, it’s debatable whether you have the authority to forbid me anything at all, since you’re not in my chain of command. In any case, we’ll take it up with the proper authorities—Colonel Claiborne, perhaps, or the C-in-C Northwest Frontier Force—after this is all over, shall we? You can demand that they court-martial me for insubordination.”
He caught Elias’s eye and held up the tessera. The old Jew nodded, rocking himself back and forth slightly.
“Madness. But a predictable madness.” He cackled, swaying a little. “Just such madness as his father showed, risking life and soul for a debt of honor to a Jew banian. Heh-vey!”
Warburton started to force himself up. Yasmini walked over to his side, kneeling by his bed, and lifted the cloth from his eyes. Leaning forward, she caught his with her moon-pale gaze and put a hand to either side of his head.
“I, too, would forbid him, if I could,” she said, smiling slightly. “But I cannot, and you cannot, and we must aid him whether we will or no. But you forget something, boyar.”
“What?” Warburton said helplessly.
“He—you—have a Sister of the True Dreaming now. And Ignatieff does not.” She nodded, looking up at King and Elias. “I will dream for you, and I will dream truly.”
Warburton shrugged—not a young man’s gesture. Half a lifetime of making the best of the cards malignant fate handed him were behind it.
“If you’re going to neglect your duty this way,” he said, “I suppose I have to do my best to see you come out of it with a whole skin.”
“I . . . can’t believe it,” Prince Charles said.
“I couldn’t either, at first,” Cassandra answered. “I still don’t want to believe it. But it fits—fits all too well.”
“I can certainly see why Warburton didn’t reveal his suspicions,” the heir said.
The two of them—and one of the elderly, near-deaf impoverished noblewomen who made a living out of chaperonage—were sitting atop one of the towers that lifted from the mass of the Palace of the Lion Throne, the Tower of Stars. Unlike most, it didn’t have a bulbous onion-dome top, but instead a hemisphere of glass in sections that ran on tracks. Back in the mid twentieth century it had been an amateur observatory for a favorite of Victoria II, until the city glow of Delhi grew too great.
Now it was a good place for a private conversation, since even the Guards officers tasked with the heir’s protection admitted nothing overlooked it and there was only one way up. The sides were a smooth, fluted, marble-and-granite column over a hundred feet high, high enough that the air bore only a faint generalized urban smell of smoke, no hint of the gardens and fountains that surrounded the tower.
Charles looked down at the documents in his lap; rumors, reports from agents in Samarkand and Bokhara, Warburton’s own experiences and analysis.
“What’s that saying?” he said, smiling crookedly. “When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains—”
“—however improbable, must be the truth. Yes; the problem is, the man who wrote that believed in faeries, himself, and that he could photograph them.”
“I remember,” the prince said. “Old Empire born, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. Came out with the Exodus, but he was never quite sane afterward.”
“I’ve always liked the detective stories,” Charles said. “Even if they were a bit escapist.”
Fiction set in a paradisiacal world where the Fall had never happened had been very popular among the survivors of the Exodus and their children. Later generations tended to regard that as unhealthy.
Charles cleared his throat. “Still, the principle is sound. So tell me, Dr. Watson.” That with a smile. “What is impossible here?”
“Honestly . . .” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I think I can be objective . . . I am a scientist, as much as a sister . . . I don’t know. There are some hints in very recent physics, speculations of Dr. Ghose and some of his colleagues, that at a very fundamental level, reality may be probabilistic rather than determinist, and even that all probabilities may actually happen . . . somewhere or—when. So . . . there’s so much about the brain that we don’t understand . . . but it must operate at or around that level to be as complex as it is and yet so compact.
The Analytical Engine is hopelessly coarse and crude by comparison. A strain of human beings bred to be able to sense the shifts of—”
She threw up her hands. “Charles, I went into astronomy because I loved certainty. All I can say is that there is some faint shred of a possibility.”
Charles shifted on his cushion, one elbow on a knee, the other toying with the hilt of the saber that lay across his lap. “Of course, the problem is that—like Sir Manfred—we have no proof. If we can’t really convince ourselves, what chance would we have of being taken seriously by anyone else? Not to mention that if he was right, there are highly placed traitors who’d do their best to make us a laughingstock as well.”
“He was afraid that the Service would think he’d gone doolalli,” she said.
“They’d think the same of me, they’d just be much more polite about it,” Charles said bluntly. “I don’t think they’d call for sedatives and a straitjacket, but any real influence I had—with my father, not least—would vanish.”
“And yet—”
“And yet it is about as good an explanation for all this as anything else!”
Cassandra sighed, collecting the documents and returning them to their folder, tying it off neatly with the attached tag of crimson tape.
“It makes sense knowing what I do of the people involved,” she said. “You can’t convey that, not really. People can trust you and believe your judgment of someone, but there’s no way of demonstrating it. People . . . it’s all so squishy.”
“One thing it has convinced me of,” Charles said decisively. “There’s a lot more going on here than Mr. Allenby’s reports indicate. They’re misleading; either through stupidity, or something worse. A loyal officer is missing, an important Political Service agent is missing, and there was an attempt to slander them both. Things were swept under the rug—or would have been, if it weren’t for you, the vicomte, and my sister. I’m going to get to the bottom of it, and I’m going to do my best to see that your brother is either saved, vindicated, or both.”
“Thank you,” Cassandra said quietly.
“And I’ll have a watch-and-arrest put out for this Russian that Warburton speaks of, this Ignatieff. I can do that, quietly.”
Their eyes met for a long moment, and Charles looked away with a slight flush, clearing his throat. “It might be best if I didn’t know absolutely everything you’re doing,” he said. “If, for example, you were to try and find your brother in . . . unorthodox ways. But I will notify some people that you’re not to be hindered.”
“Thank you again,” she said, and leaned over to touch his hand.
“Rajadharma,” he said roughly, rising, obviously half-mad with frustration that his position would keep him pinned to the palace. “Duty.”
“If you insist,” she replied, taking his hand and rising as well. They stood for a moment so, before Cassandra squeezed his fingers and gently went to wake the chaperone.
“So,” Ibrahim Khan said. “You will truly go on razziah to rescue the Sikh?”
“He is my sworn man,” King said patiently.
Ibrahim giggled. “Would you do as much for me, then?” When King nodded, he looked into the Lancer’s eyes for a long moment. “Bismillah, perhaps you would, being gora-log and so utterly mad. Well.”
He looked down at the plan of Allenby’s house. “It is not so difficult, huzoor.”
King controlled an impulse to snort. Apart from a little rote-learned Arabic, the Pathan was as innocent of literacy as he was of court etiquette, but
he had grown up in a very hard school of raid and ambush, and he understood maps extremely well. Better than any of the men Elias had gathered, waiting tonight around a kitchen table, although they looked formidable enough. One of them was David bar-Elias, dressed in rough dark clothes and a turban with an end that could be drawn across the face. A plain curved sword hung at his side, a dagger went in one boot, and a revolver of curious make rode his right hip under the fold of his jacket.
The others were caravan guards employed by Elias and Son; it seemed that David had shepherded caravans through some very rough places indeed. They ranged from a thick-shouldered, bandy-legged Mongol with a quiver and recurved bow over his shoulder—very good for quiet work, he said—through a very black African with no tongue and hideous scars on his back to a man with tattooed cheeks and red hair who was of no race or tribe King could recognize and who carried what looked like a jointed iron flail.
“The gate is heavily guarded,” King pointed out. “And we must be quick, and make little noise.”
Ibrahim grinned; he seemed cheerful enough, as long as his glance didn’t stray to Yasmini too often. She put his hackles up, and made him more aggressive from shame at his own fear.
“I am not such a fool as to attempt a fortress by the front door,” he said. “Yet these windows, they give onto the dungeon?”
“The basement, yes. Four of them, really, in sort of a cross arrangement under the whole house and the court. Iron doors between them.”
“Dried meat and prisoners are best hung underground,” Ibrahim said. “That is where they will have him—depend upon it, huzoor. So, let us go in here, at the second level of windows, or from the top of this tower. Out from the dungeon itself. Horses waiting—swift departure—-cut throats and confusion behind.”
Warburton chuckled; he was still alternating between sweats and chills, but he had been able to draw the map plain enough.
“Not a bad general concept for the housebreaking. The gods know the Afghans have used it against us, often enough.”
Ibrahim Khan grinned whitely in his downy black beard at that, bowing and making a mock-salute by touching brow and lips and heart. The Political Service Officer continued:
“I wish Rabindra Das was here,” he said. “A good man—he got most of this information for me.”
“Hmmm,” King said, giving the plans a final check. “The tower does seem the best bet. All right, what’s this room here, Sir Manfred?”
“This is not respectable,” the ambassador of France-outre-mer said.
Andre Fleury carefully did not look at the bundle of explosives his military attaché had procured, and which lay on a chaise-longue by the door, as he went on:
“It is not remotely respectable for an accredited diplomat to engage in such . . . such an affair of danger.”
“No,” Henri de Vascogne agreed, puffing on a cheroot, and offering one to the other two men sitting at dinner with him.
“If this comes to light . . .”
The ambassador was a short, plump man with wide black whiskers and blue eyes; he shuddered and shrugged at once, a gesture which made his several chins shake.
“If it comes to light,” he said with ghoulish relish, “we will of a certainty be exposed to the dérision anglais. Your—the Emperor will recall me, and I shall be sent to negotiate with savage chiefs in the pestilential swamps of Senegal or the frozen north. And you yourself will—”
“Have some brandy,” Henri said. “You may plead force majeur; after all, my old, you know the authority under which I operate—direct from Algiers.”
“Authority of the highest,” the man said sourly.
“Précisément. And who can say? Perhaps all will go well. You must have another of this wonderful brandy, of a certainty, and perhaps a little of the Crème Anglese. Or perhaps this excellent marron glacée?”
Some of the ambassador’s sourness might be his digestion. They were seated around a small table littered with the remains of lobster thermidor, a salad with goat cheese, an excellent kefta—minced lamb cakes baked with a pepper sauce—and a superb poulet aux truffes, all accompanied by several bottles of very creditable Sidi Bouhai. They had moved on to the desserts and cheeses with (at last!) decent un-spiced coffee, and brandy—the latter from the ambassador’s own family estates near Méknes. Henri had eaten and drunk with great appreciation but calculated restraint. The embassy’s military attaché had stuffed himself with methodical enjoyment, but he was a tall and cadaverous sort. The ambassador had matched the soldier, without his frame or capacity, nervousness enhancing a natural gluttony.
Henri felt relaxed, sitting at his ease and toying with a morsel of cake. It had been a pleasure to eat proper French food again, good though Imperial cooking often was, and to speak his own language.
A suitable preparation for a risky evening which may end all such pleasures forever, he thought, and made a few companionable inquiries as to the state of the ambassador’s liver—there was no sense in dwelling on details now that he’d won his point. It was the military man who insisted on bringing the conversation back around to business.
“If the vicomte wishes a few strong arms who may be relied upon most absolutely,” the military attaché said, “I can provide four or five who have occupation about the embassy.”
“Who have all in their time woken to au jus and marched to Tiens, voilà du boudin, no doubt,” Henri joked.
The attaché nodded, with a remarkably evil and reminiscent smile. He was a vielle moustache himself, with a long white scar across his sun-bronzed face ending in a ruined eye socket covered by a patch and an equally white bristling head of hair. Just the sort to hold a commission not in the Regulars but in the Legion, a mercenary command with its ranks full of converted cannibals from Europe and other barbarian foreigners. The institution was supposed to spare precious French lives and yield, after a decade or so, suitable new citizens from the survivors, to be settled as military colonists on troubled frontiers. Unfortunately, sometimes the assimilative process worked the other way, as well. Henri remembered reading about that scar, in his briefing files—courtesy of an Iberian-Berber corsair’s scimitar, during the campaigns up the Valencian coast a generation or so ago.
What had happened to the corsair afterward had made him wince, even in the antiseptic language of an official report.
That had been a worthwhile war, though; once recivilized, colonized, pacified, and settled, the region yielded both useful revenues and several formidable regiments. Henri had seen them in operation during the war against the Caliphate in Sicily, and had been thankful for their élan and discipline.
“But no,” Henri went on; the man plainly longed to come along himself, years and wounds or no. “I regret infinitely, but we cannot risk having anyone so obviously French involved. My local friends will make the arrangements. Or . . . wait. I have one task for which I need a completely reliable man, but in a position of relative safety. Unlikely to be captured, as one of my Imperial friends might be in the event of a catastrophe.”
“They could still implicate us if they were caught,” the ambassador said, patting his lips with a handkerchief to hide a belch.
Or if you were caught, wellborn cretin, impeccably connected imbecile, powerful fool, went unspoken and unspeakable. The diplomat continued:
“And where, by the Merciful, the Compassionate Lord Jesus, would we be then? Where the alliance? Where the Imperial marriage? You know as well as I, Vicomte, how badly we need that alliance against the Caliphate.”
“The marriage will be in better suit than it would be if I did not fall in with my . . . new friends . . . in this matter,” Henri explained patiently.
“Yes, it will delight the heart of the young princess,” the ambassador grumbled. “Such dashing and romantic gestures do. But this is an alliance between two states, n’est-ce pas?”
“In the person of the princess,” Henri said. It was worthwhile to soothe the man; and he had done his best to help, whether or not
he thought the move wise. “The safe house is only a thing of concern if it can be traced to the embassy. I assume it cannot.”
“Not easily,” the ambassador said. “I handled the paperwork myself, through suitable intermediaries—these Imperials are charmingly naive in some respects.”
“Just so; perhaps because they have not had until recently a power of comparable strength on their very frontiers, as we have had for generations. My most humble thanks for your esteemed assistance. And now, if you gentlemen will forgive me? Major, a moment?”
He rose, the military attaché coming with him, leaving the ambassador sitting and brooding over the remains of dinner—he plunged his fork into the remains of the marron glacée with morbid relish even as the other two men left the chamber.
“Only one man, Vicomte?” the attaché said, hinting broadly at an invitation.
“Only,” Henri said firmly. You are past sixty, my friend, and to bring you would be to emplace a sign reading MADE IN FRANCE above my head. “Someone reliable, taciturn, and a good shot with a pistol.”
“I have just the man.”
The attaché went to the door of the antechamber, spoke through it, waited a second. When he turned, another man was with him, somewhat younger but still middle-aged, in the local dress of sashed jacket and loose trousers and soft boots. He had a stringy muscularity, a tuft of graying chin-beard, and very bad teeth when he smiled and saluted with fingers to brow. His eyes were a pale blue; noticeable, but by no means outlandish in Delhi.
“Marcel Dutourd,” the attaché said. “Sous-officier, second battalion RE. Detached duty with me in Provence. Speaks good Hindi, as well.”
“Un peu,” Marcel said, and switched to that language: “As the vicomte commands.”
He had an accent in both languages, a little nasal and sharp. From the resettled provinces near Marseilles, or the port city itself—France-outre-mer had kept an outpost there even in the immediate aftermath of the Fall. At the attaché’s gesture he opened his jacket to show a holster against his belly holding an Imperial-made revolver, then twitched his right hand. A slim-bladed knife appeared in it for a moment, then disappeared.
The Peshawar Lancers Page 26
