The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) (6 page)

You are hereby ordered to round up every surviving British and allied soldier, camp follower, and attached supernumerary. Our goal this day is not to attrite the foul horde which assails us, but rather to ensure the survival of our army as an effective fighting force. You are therefore directed to lead such survivors as you can find to a rendezvous with Colonel Stephenson’s army, which should be encamped on a plain somewhere to the southwest of our current position.

Save such personnel as you possibly can. Abandon supplies, materiel, and any artifact of war that is not imminently necessary to effect your rendezvous. This also includes the vampire officer corps. Once night has fallen, you are to return to Assaye in force. You will then dispatch or drive off such undead as may still be found upon the field, and exhume us from our graves.

A.W.

“You will hand this to whichever officer you have located,” Arthur instructed, re-folding the paper as neatly as possible and pressing it into the Corporal’s hands. Solomon nodded vigorously.

“Yes, General. I understand, sir.”

“Good man. Now, best be about it. The enemy is upon us.”

Solomon looked up to follow the General’s gaze. A trio of Maratha infantrymen, one of whom was trailing purple ropes of gizzard from a rent in his belly, was shuffling toward the tent opening. With practiced ease, one of the four Shadows that were serving as doorkeepers brought his primed musket into the ‘present’ position. He waited until the closest creature, who from the grand feather in his turban must have been an officer or NCO of some sort, had gotten close enough for him to see the whites of its eyes, and then let loose. The Brown Bess discharged with a percussive thump, slamming it back hard into the Shadow Private’s shoulder. He was rewarded with gobs of sticky black ichor exploding from the ragged new hole, square in the middle of the thing’s face, where its nose and upper lip had once been. The thing dropped like a stone sinking beneath the surface of a pond.

The remaining three kept coming.

Satisfied that the men set to guarding the entrance would keep up the fine work, Wellesley walked back toward the Shadows who were digging, dumping shovelfuls of earth on top of the last few coffins. Colonel Harness stood patiently in the shadows, his red eyes glowing as he watched Wellesley in silence. Whatever his thoughts were, he was keeping them to himself.

“Colonel,” Arthur acknowledged, inclining his head.

“General Wellesley.” There was silence between the two men for a moment. There was little to be done now but wait for his grave to be completed. Before it had stretched out into awkwardness, Harness broke it. “A difficult night.”

“Indeed it was. But also a successful one, I think.”

“I would concur, General. We’ll not see the Marathas stand and fight for a good few days yet.” The Colonel spoke calmly, with just the trace of a faint Scottish burr. “I could not help but overhear your orders to Corporal Solomon.”

“Let me guess. You are curious as to the nature of the orders that he is to convey to whichever mortal officer he finds?” Wellesley cocked a quizzical eyebrow.

“More than a little curious,” Harness admitted, the ghost of a smile playing across his lips.

“Then pray let me enlighten you.” Arthur went on to outline his strategy, pausing here and there to fill in a detail or two. While he was not accustomed to seeking the approval of his subordinates before issuing instructions, as a professional soldier, he was also not averse to soliciting the feedback of his officers when the mood took him.

“A fine plan, if I may make so bold.”

“You do not feel that it places our senior officers at excessive risk?” Arthur glanced down meaningfully at the two remaining graves, where his own coffin and that of Colonel Harness were now being lowered by the grunting and straining Shadows.

Harness shook his head. “I do not, sir. We have little to fear from these mindless creatures” – as if to prove his point, two muskets barked in quick succession from the entryway, followed by the heavy thud of two bodies collapsing to the ground – “and with the Marathas turning tail for, I presume, Gawilghur?” Wellesley nodded, confirming the Colonel’s suspicion. “With their ragtag little band making for Gawilghur, I feel confident that we shall survive this day and emerge as a stronger, unified fighting force when the moon rises.”

“Agreed.” Arthur clapped the other vampire approvingly on the shoulder. “And then neither Scindia nor Berar shall know what has hit them…”

CHAPTER FIVE

She should have died down there. Jamelia felt it in her bones, the sure and certain knowledge being sensed on a visceral, almost primal level deep within.

Wellesley had wounded her grievously. True, she had given as good as she had gotten, raking the vampire with her claws and tearing at his flesh with her teeth, and he had been so engrossed in the fight that he had failed to notice her commanding officer, the Hanoverian named Pohlmann, swoop in to attack him with a silver blade.

They had both fallen then, she and Wellesley. Jamelia had no idea what had become of him, for she had been far too focused on trying to save herself. She remained ambivalent toward his fate. A large part of her hoped that Pohlmann’s strike had ended the vampire’s existence outright, snuffing him out as he had snuffed out the life of her beloved father, the Tipu Sultan, in the water gate tunnel at Seringapatam; but then there was another part, every bit as vengeful and fervent as the first, that hoped for his survival, so that she might have the pleasure of tearing him limb from limb with her own claws and jaws, one piece at a time.

Falling from such a great height, Jamelia had been traveling breathtakingly fast when her feline body slammed into the surface of the Kailna. As the breath left her lungs, she imagined that this must be what it felt like in the instant in which a cannonball struck, violently blasting your body into thousands upon thousands of fragments. She opened her mouth to roar, a combination of defiance and raw agony. Cold water rushed in, making her choke.

The moments after that were all gone from her memory, nothing more than an incoherent blur of pain and disorientation. The great tigress had sunk to the bottom of the river, stunned by the brute force of impact and the wounds that she had sustained during her struggle with Wellesley. She dimly recalled sinking into the shale of the riverbed, rolling to lay on her back with all four paws in the air above her.

Dimly, Jamelia could sense the life leaving her body for the last time…and found that she really didn’t care. Not one whit.

Let it be over. Let it be done.

She could not say how long she had lain there, her battered and tortured body buffeted by the passing current. Water filled her lungs. She was drowning, and it felt almost pleasant, the overwhelming urge to simply drift away from this life and never come back.

Jamelia wasn’t precisely sure what secrets lay beyond the veil of this life, but she knew that there had to be something. She was an instrument of the goddess Kali, and knew for certain that there were greater things in the world than this painful and undignified existence. Jamelia’s deity had offered her tantalizing glimpses of the afterlife, visions that flashed past almost as quickly as they arrived; they usually came when she was acting as a vessel for the goddess, when the Dark Mother Kali would infuse Jamelia with her divine essence, speaking through her mouth and seeing through her eyes. Each time that Kali came forcibly to the forefront of her mind, Jamelia’s own personality was forced to the back, feeling as though she was being repeatedly punched in the head. Lights flashed before her eyes and she would suddenly perceive another place, or perhaps more accurately, she felt, another state of being; one in which she could be free of the shackles of the body, and all the limitations of her physical incarnation.

Then it was gone, snatched away when Kali left, leaving Jamelia with a pounding headache and more questions than she had answers.

Jamelia had the same pounding headache now, but as her consciousness began to fade, she realized that it was for an entirely different reason: her lungs were full of fluid, and her brain was no longer getting enough oxygen.

She was dying.

Perhaps she would be reunited with her father.

O mighty Kali, please let it be so.

The thought pleased her, for it was not an unpleasant prospect with which to be faced at the end of one’s life. Jamelia’s heart, which until now had been pounding in her chest to the beat of some deranged drummer, began to slow and weaken.

That’s it, she soothed herself, just drift away. Just let go…

The glow took her by surprise at first, but Jamelia quickly reasoned that it must be the doorway opening between worlds: it would be her means of passing between this life and the next. Her body was surrounded by it, suffused with it, a pale golden aura that lit up the water as though it were somehow on fire.

A face began to form in the murky darkness in front of her eyes.

“Father,” she gasped, releasing a final few precious air bubbles from her lungs.

It was a face that she knew well, yet it was not the one she had been hoping for…not that of her father. This was a feminine face, breathtakingly beautiful and possessed of a cruel, somewhat mocking affect.

Kali, Goddess of the Dead.

“Not yet, my little tigress.” Kali smiled, though it contained little in the way of warmth or compassion. “Your work here is not yet done, I am afraid.”

The face wavered with the current, yet floated directly in front of Jamelia’s eyes, which were heavy-lidded and tired.

“Cannot…go on…” the tigress sighed, swishing her long tail lazily. “Please…it is…so hard…”

“Oh, but you can,” Kali disagreed. “But first, it is necessary for you to die.”

Jamelia smiled, relieved to have the permission of her goddess to lay down this heavy burden of life once and for all. Closing her eyes for what she knew must surely be the final time, the tigress let out one last shuddering breath, and then went completely still, all life leaving her body. All that remained was the cold water of the Kailna washing over her corpse, causing her limp limbs to waft back and forth in the current.

Kali’s face slowly faded away, leaving behind nothing other than the self-satisfied laughter of a plan moving perfectly toward its desired outcome.

What was the expression so favored by the English?

No rest for the wicked.

Jamelia was utterly shocked to find herself not only alive and conscious, but also back in her powerful feline body once more.

The sun was riding high in the noonday sky above the plain of Assaye, illuminating the cool, clear waters of the River Kailna below. She opened her eyes, then squinted at the harsh glare refracting from the surface into countless rays and shafts that highlighted most of the riverbed in the most minute detail. Here, a rock; there a strand of leafy green weed. The sunlight dappled across her striped fur, and Jamelia could pick out the wounds inflicted during her melee with the vampire General.

They were severe enough to be fatal, Jamelia knew. She ought to be dead; in fact, she had been dead. And then her Goddess had intervened.

Like all were-tigers, Jamelia possessed the advantage of hyper-acute senses. Although her sense of smell did not function underwater, her keen sense of hearing did. Straining to hear for all she was worth, it took only seconds to confirm what she had first begun to suspect with dawning horror when she had first opened her eyes: her heart was no longer beating.

I am dead, then.

So be it.

“If you are to lead my army of the dead, little tigress, then you must first join them.” Kali’s voice resonated directly inside her mind, answering her last unspoken thought. “I have bestowed upon you such powers as you could only ever have dreamed of before now…powers that your father would have killed thousands to attain.”

My father?

“Trust me on this. He watches over you even now.”

A wave of – what? Relief? Happiness? Something of that nature, at any rate, washed over her at those words. Her father was with her still. If the vampire Wellesley was still alive, he might yet witness her revenge.

“Oh, yes. Wellesley lives. If lives is indeed the right term.” The voice in Jamelia’s mind snorted derisively. “And you, my dear one, shall be the instrument of his final demise.”

Joy burned hotly in her breast at the mere thought of crushing and humiliating Wellesley. Moreover, Jamelia could sense Kali’s approbation, knew that her goddess was fully aware of the hatred she possessed toward the vampire and fully approved of it. She chose her next thought carefully.

What must I do, O mighty and magnificent Kali?

“Return to the field of battle. You will find that most of the British and their lickspittle allies are marching away to unify with their secondary army, but not all.”

It is daylight. What of the vampire officers?

“Safely beneath the ground,” Kali explained, “and relatively unguarded.”

Then I shall finish every single one of them, saving Wellesley for last!

“Hold, Jamelia. There are limits to even my powers. I could only bestow upon you so much at a time. Your body is now undead, like those whom you shall soon lead. It is not possessed of the same level of strength that it once had. Today, your best stratagem is to run and to hide – not to fight”