The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  “Good enough,” Henri said, and signed the man to follow.

  They left by a side door; Henri swirled a hooded cloak about his shoulders. Luckily a November evening in Delhi was cool enough to make that credible, and the variety of types in the street—even here in a respectable quarter not far from the governmental enclave—made the garment unremarkable, despite its origin in a Berber village of the High Atlas. His timing was good; the little band was just assembling in the safe house when he arrived. For once, that term of craft was literally true; the building was large, and turned a blank wall to the outside world. From the quality of the floors and mosaics and floridly ornate gas lamps, Henri suspected it had been some previous ambassador’s pied-à-terre for his mistress, slipped onto the official budget for secret-service work.

  The dark-skinned captain of detectives greeted him at the door, commendably cool, giving Marcel’s silent form only a single glance and asking no questions. Evidently the sang-froid anglais was catching.

  “Apache,” Henri said quietly, looking over the crew that Malusre had assembled.

  Cassandra King made an equally soft interrogative sound, and the Frenchman went on: “Criminals.”

  “Dacoits,” she agreed. Bandits. “Absolute goondahs, in fact.”

  Certainly they had a villainous enough look, coarse, scarred, feral faces and dusty-gaudy clothes, there and there a bit of tattered flamboyance, an ostrich plume in a turban or a hoop earring; and he could see she did not like the way they leered at her out of the corners of their eyes. Doubtless they would have done more, if they dared. Cassandra spread the plans of Allenby’s house on the table, and the three principals bent over them.

  “Merci,” Henri said. “Ah, these are most detailed. Our friend in the second-highest place?”

  “A friend of our friend,” Cassandra explained. “Plans for buildings have to be filed with the Delhi City planning office. These plans themselves are fifty years old, though. There may well have been changes since.”

  “Much better than nothing,” Henri said. “Hmmm. Of storming houses I had some experience in Sicily with the Prince Imperial’s army—the Caliph’s men fought most stubbornly for Palermo. This here is a public park?”

  “I drove by it in a tiki-ghari,” she said. “Yes, and it faces the side away from the tower.”

  “Which will still have a view of us,” Henri said. “That cannot be helped. We will—”

  When Malusre returned from briefing the men he’d hired he made a gesture of apology:

  “Sahib, memsahib—you realize that . . .”

  “You have to operate with what’s available, yes,” Henri said, watching a number of their hirelings thumbing knives, thumping knuckleduster-clad fists into an opposite palm or putting on tiger claws. One rat-faced little Bengali was pulling small tools of wire and steel and brass—rather like a watchmaker’s tools combined with those of a dentist—out of the folds of his turban and holding them up to the lamp, while a thickset hairy brute in a dhoti and impressive collection of gold chains sat beside him and stropped a curved dagger on the horny, callused sole of one foot.

  “I have shown them the gold,” the detective said. “They know they will be paid if we succeed, and that they will receive pardons.”

  That was an Imperial prerogative, and the Lion Throne didn’t need to ask permission of or explain to anyone when they were granted.

  Although what good it will do this gang one can only speculate, Henri thought. They’d undoubtedly commit new crimes immediately, not looking to be the sort of men who’d put the windfall into a safe investment and live off the proceeds. Although one or two may set up as fences, or open thieves’ dens. It would be enough if they served their purpose, creating chaos and distraction while Henri and Malusre went for Allenby’s documents or, failing that, his person.

  Malusre went on: “Sahib, I am concerned that there may be injury to innocent bystanders. These goondahs I was forced to hire—if this were Kashmir I could have gotten secret volunteers from the IIP, but I am too recently transferred here to know which honest men I could ask such a thing.”

  “My friend, we have no time for subtlety,” Henri said soothingly. “Grave matters of state are at issue here. We must be ruthless; it is needful.”

  This is a brave man, and able, but he is a policeman, not a soldier, he thought at the other’s doubtful nod, reaching over to clap the Marathi detective on the shoulder. Used to summoning his enemies to surrender to arrest, not throwing a shell in their general direction, or shooting them in the back from ambush.

  He didn’t like collateral damage himself, but it was unavoidable if you were going to fight to win. The way to keep it to a minimum was to go in fast and rough, avoid dragging things out. With the people he had to work with tonight, that was unavoidable anyway. They weren’t soldiers either, and they had all the cohesion of a handful of lead shot poured into a bucket of camel spit; they’d be useless at anything that required planning or teamwork.

  “I shall make every effort to tell the bad people from the good people, and act accordingly.”

  The dacoits filed out ahead of Malusre, eagerly taking extra weapons from a table near the entrance. Those included revolvers, instruments almost impossible to secure without official license; buying them on the black market would take money in quantities most of these bravos would never see. Plus any crime committed while carrying a firearm was classified as attempted murder, even if there were no injuries. That sent you straight to the gallows; the judge put on the black ribbon to pass sentence, and you died at sunrise the next day.

  The gharis which would carry them were in the courtyard itself, an expanse of stone-block paving dimly lit by two covered lanterns. They were larger vehicles than most, drawn by a pair of horses each, with room for six, or rather more if the passengers didn’t mind crowding. The beasts were restive; they snorted and tossed their heads as men piled into them and the drivers brought their heads around.

  Henri relaxed and let his eyes adjust to the darkness, ignoring the smells of sweat, unwashed feet, and bad breath. Cassandra King had insisted on coming, although she’d agreed to wait outside when they actually got to Allenby’s house, and he thought he detected a trifle of nausea in her swallow and cough. Malusre was in the other ghari, to control the bulk of the dacoit-mercenaries. Which left him with Marcel, three of the same unsavory crew, and—

  The fourth man looked more like a soldier in mufti than a street-bravo. Short but broad-shouldered and muscular, his features difficult to make out in the crowded darkness of the cab, but crowned with a twist of cloth that looked more like a headband than a turban. The one beside him was short and slight, a youth perhaps—

  A glint of light came through the curtains over the windows, the vagrant gleam of a streetlamp. Henri de Vascogne began cursing, shifting with effortless fluency between French and Moghrabi-Arabic dialect.

  “. . . beshitted chicken-brained imbecilic—name of a name—expectorations of a syphilitic she-camel—”

  “Chup!” Sita said, a rather rude word for shut up! Then she dropped into French herself: “Do you want these”—she nodded at the dacoits—“to know who I am?”

  That stopped him cold, and he contented himself with glaring and grinding his teeth. Before he could call to the driver, she went on:

  “You can’t turn back. That would ruin everything.”

  “And if you are killed, petite cretin, that won’t?”

  “Why should you be able to hedge your bets, Henri? I can’t, after all.”

  The sheer effrontery of that took his breath away for a second. Then she stuck her hands under her jacket—she was dressed in trousers and high-collared coat of some plain dark fabric, perhaps something worn for sport, and a close-fitting turban—and snapped them out in a blur of motion. One hand held a light revolver, the other a little two-barreled derringer.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, as the rubber wheels ran silently on the granite pavement. “I’ve been very well trai
ned; Father insists on it for all of us. And I have the jawan here—he’s a Gurkha, Imperial Guards, seconded to the bodyguard detail.”

  “Han, that me,” the man beside her said, in very bad Hindi, opening his jacket and exposing leather harness over his shirt. A kukri hung under one arm, and a pistol under the other. He grinned, and several gold teeth shone in the gloom.

  “How on earth did you get him to go along with this . . . this beshitted imbecility?”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I gave them the slip while I was supposedly shopping—climbed through the window in the ladies’ loo and lost them in the alleys. This one was the only one who managed to catch up with me, and I threatened to shoot him if he tried to take me back by force.”

  “Work with two. One not enough, unless hit her on head,” the soldier-bodyguard said, grinning again. “Not safe, hit on head. Have to go along, keep her safe.”

  A shrug. “My oath, my salt, keep Kunwari safe. Not to make Kunwari be good girl.” His grin grew wider. “Whole regiment not enough for that.”

  Henri groaned and pummeled his temples. “What would I tell your father? Or my Emperor?” he said.

  “What would you tell the prince I’m supposed to marry?” she asked him, an edge of taunting mischief in her voice.

  “That he is a man not to be envied and will know no peace,” Henri said leadenly, ignoring Sita’s hurt look. “But that he knows already. The, how do you say, the hue and cry will be up for you by now!”

  “Not if I know the officer in charge of that detail,” she said. “I left a note for him in the loo—said I’d be back before morning, and if he kept quiet about it, I wouldn’t say anything about his losing me and earning a one-way trip to prison-guard detail in a camp on the Andaman Islands.”

  Henri stared at her. “You will stay by me and obey every order, or I will turn back now—on my honor, I swear it.”

  Sita ducked her head. “Yes,” she said, sounding abashed.

  A tense silence fell in the ghari; Cassandra was glaring at Sita with a venom nearly a match for Henri’s own. He forced himself to ignore it, controlling his breathing and bringing his mind back to focus—he couldn’t go into deadly action distracted. That would be a certain way of getting everyone with him killed.

  Try another time? he thought. Then: No. There will be no other opportunity.

  If it were merely a matter of King’s life, it might be best simply to call things off—King was a brave man and a good soldier, but the Empire he served was not de Vascogne’s. The ambassador was right that weighty interests of state were involved.

  Yet this mysterious canker must be plumbed, he mused. For the alliance we need, the Raj must be strong.

  And—he admitted to himself, suppressing a smile—he hadn’t had this much fun since Sicily.

  Yasmini prodded curiously at the skewer of grilled meat.

  “That is lamb,” Elias said reassuringly.

  “I have never eaten meat before,” the tiny blond girl said. “The Sisters are not permitted, so, ever.”

  King raised his brows as she took a dubious bite or two and then confined herself to the vegetable curry and rice, washed down with draughts of fruit juice. Something within him relaxed. If he had to trust his life—perhaps even the life of the Empire—to this weird little being . . . well, he was reassured by the fact that she’d never dined on fresh human hearts and livers.

  The others in the arched courtyard ate as he did, sparely, watching the stars shift in the clear night air, talking quietly among themselves in an array of languages. It was a good idea to eat an hour or two before going into action, if you could, but lightly. King made himself gnaw down a few strips of chicken, swallow a little of the curry, and eat a flaky sweet pastry for the energy. Then he checked over his weapons again, and saw David doing the same. The middle-aged Jew flashed a smile and tossed his head, setting the curls on either side of his face bobbing; his dark baggy pants and long jacket looked dusty, as if they had come out of storage.

  “I have been respectable too long,” he said. “Too settled here in Delhi. It is not that I am foolish enough to enjoy this breech of the laws, but—”

  He shrugged with enormous expressiveness, flipping up his hands—one of them full of pistol cartridges. His father looked at him sourly and spoke in a language King didn’t recognize—there was a haunting tint of familiarity to it—a kinship to French, which he did speak, and Latin, which he’d studied—but not enough to catch more than a word here and there.

  The older man caught King’s puzzlement: “Ladino,” he said. “Our family lived in Tiberias, once—and in Sepharad, long before that, before the Inquisition. In Spain, you would say. Come,” he went on to David. “If you must, I must. At least you have sons of your own, now.”

  The son came and knelt before his father.

  “Abba,” he said.

  The older man put a hand on his head and spoke in still another language, guttural and Semitic-sounding but not Arabic:

  “Baruch ator Adonoi, Eloheinu melech hor-olam . . .” he began. When he was finished he sighed and rose.

  Hebrew. King thought. Let’s see: Adonoi and elohim, that would be God, and Lord. A prayer of blessing.

  The sight gave him a small pang of sadness; he’d never really had a chance to know his father, the memories few and fleeting. For an instant he wondered what it would be like to have a son himself—he’d always assumed he would, someday, but abstractly. Another King to carry on the family name, serve in the Peshawar Lancers, hold Rexin manor. The thought of a boy that was his, looking down into a small face that bore his stamp, playing in the fields where he had, laughing with delight as his father lifted him onto his first pony . . . it was a little odd. There was nothing like the prospect of death to put a hand on your shoulder and say: Hurry. He’d been thinking more and more of that these last few years.

  “May the strength of Him who smote the hosts of Nineveh be with you, who go to fight wickedness,” Elias said quietly in Hindi—the common tongue of most there—and left.

  King shook off thoughtfulness and looked at the tall antique clock. “Time?” he said.

  “Nearly,” David said. He inclined his head to the doorway his father had taken. “Before that, the Ladino? Father told me I was too old and had too much gray in my beard to keep playing silly goy games.”

  Another shrug. “When I’m his age, I’ll spend six days a week reading Torah and sitting in the synagogue—which I notice he doesn’t himself, usually three at most. Until then, fighting the Eaters of Men is a mitzvah, too.”

  “I’ve heard yogis say the same,” King observed. “More or less, with a few differences in the terminology.”

  “Details, He is in the details,” David said, grinning and raising his eyes to heaven. “And He is confounded jealous about them, too.”

  Damn, but I rather like this chap, King thought.

  A blacksmith’s hammer had been sounding in the background for some time. It stopped, more conspicuous now that it was gone, and presently a servant came out with a contraption of linked, swiveling iron bars and chains, bowing as he handed it to David bar-Elias. Ibrahim Khan rose from his crouch; he’d been putting a new edge on his chora, working with quiet competence as he stroked it with a small hone he kept in a pouch by the scabbard, and whistling a song.

  King knew the tune: it had a chorus that went—“My blade upholds the Afghan fame

  And Kushul Khattuck is my name—”

  When the Pathan was satisfied—knife-sharp, but not a thin razor edge that would turn on bone—he tucked the sharpening stone away and wiped the surplus oil off the steel with the dangling tail of his pugaree.

  “So,” he said, standing and flipping the weapon up into a blurring circle. His hand darted into the silver disk like a hairy spider striking, and the hilt smacked into his callused palm. “Let us go pay a call on Shaitan’s bum-boys.”

  They all glanced at Yasmini. She rose as well, a glass of the yellow-white bhang lassi in
her hand. She closed her eyes for a moment, exhaled, and then drank it off in a long draught. Her throat worked, and when she opened her eyes the pupils had already begun to dilate.

  “It is begun,” she said quietly. “We go . . . now.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  King found Allenby’s house more intimidating as a squat black bulk across the road than as plans on a well-lit table. It had been built in the 1920s, when the need to design your dwelling place for defense was past in the settled provinces around Delhi, but the memory of the terrible years remained fresh. In appearance it was rather like a fortified frontier manor, a hollow rectangle with a square three-story tower at one corner and two-story walls all around, and a single gate at the front leading into a court. Trees showed over the top of that, hinting at gardens within.

  Unlike the homes of the Border zamindars that were its model, it had exterior windows, genuine square ones with glass panes instead of narrow firing slits, in wall and tower both. They were small, though, and their outsides were covered by checkerboard grillwork of wrought-iron bars. The neighborhood was affluent, middling-wealthy and up, businessmen and lawyers of several castes with a solid sprinkling of Imperial Civil Service upper-rogers.

  Broad streets were lined with trees, acacia and jacaranda, and there were brick sidewalks with planters and occasional stone benches, but no gas lamps save an occasional domestic model over a gate. The light was enough for outdoorsmen’s eyes, even though the moon was a silver sliver of a boat on the horizon; the sky was very bright with stars in the clear air of winter, and the houses were neither tall enough nor close-built enough to turn the streets into canyons of darkness.

  The neighborhood’s respectability meant it was mostly quiet on an ordinary weekday toward midnight, although several blocks to the north the glow and noise of a large evening party or ball provided a background hum of sound and gaiety, with carriages and a few motorcars parked by the sides of the street. After that there was little traffic to dispute the road with the covered mule-drawn goods wagon Elias had furnished for the night’s work.