Soul of Fire (27 page)

“You don’t wish for your country to rule itself, then?” Blacklock asked.

A sound like a cackle escaped from Bhishma’s throat, but he didn’t look amused at all. Instead, his eyes looked very sad. “Ah, Sahib,” he said, “I have long ago realized that is impossible.” He swallowed convulsively, as though trying to keep at bay some emotion that William could not understand. “My kind, as such, is not . . .” He shrugged. “Maybe India will rule itself one day, but if so, it won’t be achieved by killing innocents. Death will only bring reprisals and killing among my own people, and besides . . .” His voice trailed off.

William thought of the horrible reprisals after the 1857 massacres. Had some of Bhishma’s ancestors been involved in the uprising and been severely punished for it? Was that what he meant by “my own people”?

“And besides . . . ?” William asked, sharply.

“And besides, knowing the sahibs in the encampment . . . Well, one knows that not all of them deserve death. And one would grieve, as a human being, if the innocent should be killed.”

“The women and children, you mean?” William asked.

“The women and children as well.”

CONFUSION; THE ROOFTOPS OF BENARES; A HINT AT LAST

“They’re gone,” Hanuman said, shaking Lalita awake
and managing to give the appearance that Lalita had let them both down by falling asleep and by not seeing their quarry vanish.

They’d located Sofie last night—by dint of asking around until someone pointed them to the hospitality house—and they’d reassured themselves that Sofie was within. Further, they’d been told she was with only one man, a lone Englishman. This had led to spirited debate between them, and made them conclude that Sofie and the Englishman must have lost the dragons—or perhaps the Englishman had somehow rescued her from the dragons. They couldn’t really probe the man’s power and see how much he had, but he acted like the upper class, and the upper class of British society often had quite a bit of magic. It came, after all, from being descended on various sides from Charlemagne, who had originally stolen the power for himself and his descendants.

However, they couldn’t be sure that the dragons weren’t about, somewhere, watching, as the tigers were. All around, they could see people with the characteristic broad faces of the most staunch members of the Kingdom of the Tigers—those who had only mated with their own kind for generations on end. There seemed, in fact, to be some sort of patrol going on, with members of the Kingdom of the Tigers passing back and forth in front of the door to the hospitality house.

“They are afraid of doing anything open while in town,” Hanuman had said. “Any aggression against the English could bring the entire might of the British Empire cracking down on them. The revolt of 1857 is still remembered, and the reprisals against our people even more so. The tigers will wait till your friend and her escort are in a more isolated area, then they’ll take them.”

Lalita agreed. It was the only explanation for the situation. Satisfied, they had decided to bed down in one of the adjacent rooms in the same house, and after much argument, they had settled for rooms: spartan, bare rooms on the upper floor, which had the advantage of not having them bedding down elbow to elbow with untouchables—the idea of which caused them both to recoil.

But now Lalita wondered if they shouldn’t have done it anyway. Caste when you were a monkey was a slippery thing, not as easily defined as for the normal population. There were rules, yes. And none of the weres were ever low or out-caste. But they were more flexible about violations of their status. And the fact that they were following inviolable orders of their preordained king protected them from loss of caste.

So they should have slept downstairs. Instead, they had settled into a system in which each of them stayed awake half the night and went down at intervals to see that Sofie was still there, still sleeping, and still side by side with her protector—whom Lalita had verified was indeed an Englishman of most superior appearance.

“How are they gone?” she asked, grumpily, getting up from the mat upon which she’d been sleeping. “I thought you were watching, Hanuman. Did you fall asleep?”

He let forth a string of curses. “I did not let them go. I watched. I was looking from the top of the stairs as often as I could, and the last time I looked they were both there, both asleep. And now they’re both gone.”

Lalita felt a sting of irritation. “If you mean that they both have gotten up and that neither is in that room anymore, that could mean anything. She might have needed to go outside to answer a call of nature, and he would of course accompany her. I mean, I doubt she would ask—the English are odd about that—but if he rescued her from dragons, he has to know she’s threatened, and I doubt he would let her go outside alone.”

“Am I a fool?” Hanuman asked, at the same time he slapped his not-inconsiderably muscular chest. “Would I come and wake you, Princess, were I not sure they are gone from all the rooms downstairs? They have disappeared, Princess, like snow brought down from the top of the mountain will vanish on a summer day.”

“You have looked?” Lalita asked, hints of alarm creeping upon her. “Looked everywhere? And yet, you cannot find them?”

“I looked all around downstairs, and even in the streets and alleys near here, Princess!”

“Sofie . . . my friend sometimes walks in her sleep. Perhaps it is not so very bad. Perhaps it was just that she woke and walked out in her sleep and he walked out after her?”

“Not so very bad?” Hanuman clasped his hair in both hands and rocked back and forth, moaning. “Please, tell me, Princess, what your idea of very bad is. Don’t you realize, if they’re out there—if they go to a lone spot at all—the tigers will snatch them up? And then—” He stopped abruptly.

“And then?”

“And then I saw a dragon, downstairs.”

“A dragon?” Lalita asked, starting to wonder whether her confederate was, in fact, hallucinating, or perhaps prey to vivid dreams. “A dragon, here?”

“In the central courtyard.” He waved vague fingers in the general direction. “When I arrived there to look for her, there was a dragon, just taking off.”

“That’s impossible, Hanuman!” she said. “A dragon? Why, his wings by themselves would take up almost all of the central courtyard.”

“I know that. I am not a fool. I’m sure he was not in dragon form when he came in. And even if he is from China, in this holy city Chinese people are not altogether unseen. And it is nighttime. And who would deny them entrance to the hospitality house, provided they didn’t try to get access to the upper floors?”

Lalita, barely awake, tried to think through all this new information. So the dragons had tracked down Sofie and whoever the Englishman might be who had accompanied her. But Sofie had left before that. Or had she?

“Did they leave before you saw the dragon?” she asked Hanuman, sharply.

He shrugged, a mobile gesture. “As to that, I can’t swear to anything,” he said. “You see, the dragon’s wings were spread. For all I know, they were on its back.”

Sometimes, Lalita reflected, it was very hard to keep from screaming and throwing things at Hanuman’s head. She knew part of the reason her uncle had chosen her to go to London with Sofie was that Lalita was one of his closest relatives and therefore trustworthy. And though Lalita had been only twelve—just two years older than her charge—when she was sent to London, she remembered the speech her uncle had made to her. All about how if the royalty of monkeys had one abiding fault, it was their volatility. They lost their temper, or were amused, incensed, enraged, happy—all at the slightest of provocations. This defect of character caused them to not be taken seriously by the rest of the world—weres and not—and gave them a reputation of tricksters and jesters.

Her uncle had hoped that, in London, Lalita would learn to control herself. The English were, after all, so restrained, and she would be taking a servant position, which called for yet more restraint.

Now Lalita pressed her closed fists on either side of her head, and wondered if pairing her with Hanuman had been a further test. The gods alone knew that this man—or monkey—in either form could tempt the patience of the most devoted mystic. “You’re telling me,” she said, slowly and dangerously, “that you failed to observe them get up. That you don’t know where they are, only that they are not anywhere near the building, and that, having seen a dragon take off from the courtyard, you did not stay around long enough to see if the dragon had anyone on its back.”

“I couldn’t have seen it anyway,” he said coolly. “The dragon was too near, the courtyard too confined for me to get a view of the beast flying away.”

“But how are we to find them?”

Hanuman’s gaze played amusedly over her, as though this were all a big joke that she had, so far, failed to get. “Well, Princess, we’ll assume that they are with the dragon. Your friend was with the dragon before, and it was never fully clear whether she was held captive or she went with him of her own free will. So we’ll assume the Englishman is just someone who joined their traveling party. We’ll assume that the dragon came and collected them by arrangement.”

“What about the other dragon? The Chinese one?”

“We’ll assume he’s watching their backs.”

“And after we’re done assuming all that,” Lalita said tartly, “will we be any nearer to finding her and making up your appalling error in letting her disappear from under your nose?”

She expected him to take offense, which was probably stupid. After all, she’d been traveling with this man for a few days now, and she should have known better. Offense and other reactions that might result from pride and honor were quite unknown to him. He was all mobile and ethereal, like the smile that flitted across his lips at her words. “Hardly under my nose, Princess,” he said. “More under my feet, since they were on the floor below. However, take heart. We found them before and we can find them again.”

“If they’re traveling dragon-back?” she said, hesitantly.

“No matter how they’re traveling,” he said. “You forget that here in Benares, there are monkeys everywhere, though mostly centered in the colony in Durgas’s temple. They’ll be all over the rooftops, even at this time of night. We can ask information as we go.”

Lalita hesitated only a moment, then said, “We’ll go in changed forms, I presume?”

“Of course.” He was already doing something to the belt around his waist, which held the ruby. Adjusting it, she thought. So it would stay put when he shifted shapes. As she thought this, she started unwrapping her sari, while Hanuman, more efficient at his task—as though changing in and out of monkey form was a far more common activity for him than it was for her—took off his loose pantaloons and his tunic and wrapped them neatly in a bundle, which he tied at his back, using the pants legs as a tie. Lalita followed suit with her sari, tying it, bundled, around her shoulders. It would slow them down, of course, but in a city this crowded it was easier to be able to put clothes on at an instant’s notice, should the situation call for it.

Hanuman had already shifted when she finished tying her bundle on her back. He shifted quickly and painlessly. Lalita shifted painlessly, too, right after Hanuman, but with more of a struggle.

When she managed to become a monkey, Hanuman was at the window, looking at her with a very good imitation of his human grin. She bared her teeth at him, regretting that in this form she lacked the eyebrows and the expressiveness of facial muscles for a really good scowl.