Soul of Fire (15 page)

But the mild blue eyes looked Blacklock over with almost a hint of amusement. “Now, boy,” he said, softly, making William feel as though he were about three years old, “how long have you been in India?”

“Three . . . three months,” he said, a stammered response, which he knew sounded infantile. He was talking to a man who had been in India for twenty years, a man who knew everything about India.

The general didn’t improve on William’s frame of mind by laughing. He leaned across and grabbed a sandwich, which he ate in three precise bites before answering. “Listen, you’re young, and I don’t doubt you’re as sharp as they come. Your father always was, when we were both at Eton. Sharper, in fact, than I. But the thing is, India is not like England. It is not at all the same thing. If you are going to put much faith in the words of your subordinates, you’ll find yourself hoaxed more often than not. Melodramatic, the natives are.” He spoke in a big, booming voice that could be heard all over the dainty tearoom, with its elegant white-covered tables and its occupants—English officers and their wives and daughters, and countless native attendants.

Reflexively, William looked to the man standing behind the general. His face remained quite impassive. Blacklock tried to convince himself that perhaps the man did not speak English, but this was hardly probable. Everyone who worked at the club and was brought in daily contact with the Englishmen there understood at least enough to encompass the theme of the general’s remarks. So what did he think of them?

“But, sir . . .” he said, and in a reflexive gesture that he hadn’t repeated since he’d been teased for it at Eton, he swept his raven-dark fall of hair from his forehead and back, to stare with seemingly too young and innocent eyes at the experienced general. “But sir, you know the Blacklock men—all of us—have the gift of premonition.”

The general nodded, but his mouth twitched just a little in the beginnings of a frown. William was familiar with this reaction. It had followed him all through his public schooling and his career in Her Majesty’s service. Foretelling, premonition, prophecy. Oh, they’d first recruited him because of it, but when it became clear he wasn’t always right, they stopped listening. And they never trusted soothsaying. Whatever you called it, it was considered somewhat less than respectable. The great mages of the last few centuries—Locke, Lavoisier, Descartes, and Hume, whose quantifying of the laws of magic and their application to reality had taken magic from the secret mutterings passed from master to apprentice to an exact science—had changed all of magic except prophecy. That alone remained uncontrolled and unquantifiable. Better men than William, finding themselves possessed of that gift, had kept quiet about it for fear of being thought crazy. His own father rarely spoke of it—though when William had visited home, just before shipping out to India, he’d caught his father opening the Bible and reading a passage within (in a clear act of bibliomancy) then closing both the Bible and his eyes and looking very pale. He’d parted from William as if he’d never see him again. Which might be true, or it might simply be William’s imaginings.

General Paitel shook his head slightly, as if relegating the whole idea of prophecy to that realm about which no decent man should talk. “A great pity, I say,” he said. “And I always thought it was because your great-grandmother had Irish blood. Or at least I remember her portrait in your father’s house—all milky skin and blue eyes, with pitch-black hair. Yes, very attractive and all that, I’m sure, but these curses come into English blood from mingling with other races, and there’s no getting away from it. And the Irish are as full of mad prophets as—” Perhaps catching William’s eyes and the plea in them, which had nothing to do with his ancestry and all to do with his dark dreams of blood and roiling massacre, the general sighed and dabbed at his moustache with the tip of his linen napkin. “But I know you have a gift of prophecy, at least if you’re like your father, who would often wake screaming in the night before some tragedy or other.

“I remember this one time when three boys drowned while swimming in the stream—before it happened, for days on end, Arthur would wake up screaming that he lacked for air. But you see, it is always like that. I found it marvelous that he could have such a gift, and yet that his gift should be of no help whatsoever. Because he never dreamed the results to a test, or even the results of a roll of dice in those games we held after hours.”

William smiled, despite himself. It was a taut and controlled smile, more dismissal than amusement, but still he smiled. “No, sir, they never reveal that. And even what they do reveal is often occluded and hard to interpret. But . . .” He paused as the servant filled his cup. The aroma of fragrant China tea tickled his nostrils. “But, sir, ever since I landed here at Meerut, I’ve had blood-soaked dreams every single night.”

“Eh? Blood-soaked?”

“Dreams of blood, of . . .” William waited while the server backed away from the table. In the lull, he could hear the clink of teacups and, behind him, a loud discussion of someone’s hunting dog, a fine bitch. From the other end of the dining hall, a female’s voice sounded, saying something about sleeves. The native stepped back and William spoke just above a whisper. “I have dreams of riots, like the ones in 1857.”

“Pshaw. A morbid imagination, my boy,” the general said, then gave the younger man a kindly look that did nothing to calm William. “Your grandfather died in those, did he not? I remember your father telling me that.”

“Yes, sir. Here in Meerut.”

“And you’re named for him, are you not? Your father told me that, too.”

William nodded. “But—”

“Doubtless enough to get anyone’s dander up. I mean, same name and you find yourself in India? My boy . . . sympathetic magic is a strange thing, and your being here, same blood with the same name . . . Has it never occurred to you these might not be premonitions at all? That it might be no more than your grandfather’s . . . memories?” Warming to his idea, the general’s voice gained impetus and enthusiasm. “Wouldn’t surprise me at all. You know, with the memories being his last in life. And there was so much death here at that time.”

William said, “But . . .” even as his eyes strayed again to the native standing behind the table, and he wondered if the man’s ancestors, or his relatives, had been part of the massacre. Had they been among those servants and sepoys who had remained loyal? Were they among the ones who had never broken faith with their British masters? Who could tell? More than a generation had passed. Perhaps more than two, in this land where people married early.

“No, depend upon it,” the general said, reaching for an apple from an artfully arranged tower of fruit, and peeling it with a little silver knife. “That’s all it is. Your grandfather’s memories, poor sod. You know, without being papist . . . Well, it might benefit you to say a prayer in his memory, maybe visit his grave. I’m sure your father would tell you the same.”

“I’m sure, too,” Blacklock said, then hesitated. “But, sir . . . it can’t be memories.”

“Eh?”

Blacklock realized that his words, instead of a semi-whisper, had come out as almost a scream. He saw that the general was looking at him and waiting for an explanation. He managed to lower his voice. “There were weres in this dream, sir. Elephants and . . . and tigers. And monkeys and . . . dragons.”

The general’s laugh pealed out like a bell, startling the club into silence. “Dragons? Now I know you’re simply imagining things. What would a dragon be doing here? Now? We’re not in China. And even in China, since the Arrow War dragons have been scarce enough.”

William wanted to talk of the English were who was somewhere with that jewel the Queen wanted, but he could not. It was not his secret to betray. And yet, an English were would certainly not be a dragon. The most exotic creature he’d ever heard mentioned in his books was born of the soil of Albion: Richard the Lionheart, who shifted to lion form. And given how long ago that had been and what a mingle of nationalities royalty was, he supposed it wasn’t so surprising.

But then . . . if the jewel in play truly was everything the Queen thought, and if Soul of Fire—which William hadn’t been able to see in his visions at all—was truly in India, then what pieces would that attraction not bring to the game?

For a moment, for just a moment, William Blacklock had a flash of premonition, something that rarely happened to him when he was awake. He saw himself on elephant back, while all around him, animals and humans fought, and blood and corpses piled high, and in the middle of it all, the girl he knew from London—Sofie Warington—and a flying dragon.

It was all too quick for him to understand what it meant. The vision happened between one breath and the next, and left him tasting bile and gasping for breath.

“Are you well?” the general asked. “You look white as a sheet.”

William nodded. He couldn’t explain, any more than he could avert a doom that he didn’t understand, a doom that was headed for him.

THE DRAGON WAKES; WORSHIP AND PANIC; WHERE THE EARL OF ST. MAUR REALIZES HE’S LOST HIS MIND

There was a feeling like a spiderweb being dragged
behind Peter’s eyes as he turned in his sleep, but he did not wake. Instead, his mind followed the web, silver bright, through a dream where he tripped—he wasn’t even sure in which form—blindly through a landscape shrouded in amorphous wrappings. Trees, bushes and—he would swear to it—wildlife were all swathed in the sort of covers that people used for furniture in abandoned houses.

He stumbled through the shrouded landscape, searching . . . And then, suddenly, he stood on a slight rise and looked below, at his ancestors’ home—Summercourt, with its untidy garden, its neglected fields, its ivy-grown walls. But there was something about it, a glow, a feeling—and he knew this time he was coming home for good and no one would ask him to leave again.

“Home,” he said. And the word startled him awake, having come out of his lips in something like a moan. He blinked awake to green-filtered light, and realized he was in human form, lying beneath the low-hanging boughs of a tree.

Almost everything around was the blinkered dun that people who had been in India far longer than he assured him was normal during the season of drought before the monsoon. But this little clearing, where he’d chosen to spend the night, was green from a brook running at the periphery, like an oasis in thirst-parched lands. Peter looked at the sky through the boughs, trying to order his mind. There had been the dream . . . but that was foolishness.

He didn’t turn to look behind him, where Miss Warington should still be asleep. From the look of the sky, turning rosy-pink but not quite bright yet, it was very early, and they’d lain down late. They hadn’t lit a fire. There was no point lighting a fire. No creature in its right mind—or even in its wrong mind—would come near Peter.

Only humans, with their foolish disregard of instinct, would be silly enough to come near the dragon—at least in his human form. But Peter had lain down as a dragon, something he rarely did. It was strange, but he hadn’t felt right, laying beside Sofie as a man. Not alone like this, in Darjeeling. Sometimes, lying with the dragon could be dangerous—though since Peter had allowed the beast to feed just out of Calcutta, he didn’t think there would be any danger at all. And strangely, the dragon behaved to Sofie as he’d never behaved to a human being before. Around Sofie, the creature went all mellow and biddable, and allowed Peter to control it better than it ever had before.

To be honest, though the thought seemed strange, Peter trusted the dragon better around Sofie than he trusted himself in his human form. Last night, she’d ducked behind some bushes to change into a white nightgown not so different from the muslin dress she’d been wearing when he met her. But by the light of the moon and the eyes of the beast, Peter had seen that the nightgown lacked a collar and sleeves. It exposed her shoulders and the base of her neck, and that space at the base of her throat, where a little hollow looked as though some enamored divinity had lingered his finger too long upon the clay.