Soul of Fire (21 page)

Not that he was doing something illegal. Just something his commanders and superiors would laugh at him for, and hold him in contempt for. Divination was the stuff of fools—the work of women at country fairs, or the work of entertainers in crowded theaters. Not in any way serious. And no business for an officer of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

But it was his talent, and after another uneasy night, it was his only hope. He’d bathed, and the sun was high in the sky—a ball of fire bathing a landscape that didn’t need any more heat—stippling brown upon every remaining bit of green and making the dirt underfoot look like clay hot from the potter’s oven.

Looking out, William longed for rain with an almost physical ache, and wondered if he would be alive to see it—if he would live to see rain ever again. In his mind was the image of a British street—the street where his club was located in London—under a gentle, drizzling autumn shower. If he closed his eyes, he could almost taste those drops falling through the gray fog of an English sky. And he wanted more than anything to melt the space between him and that cherished place and find himself there, among the well-known landscape and the things he understood. He wanted to be in his father’s study while rain fell outside and a servant laid out tea by the blazing fireplace. He longed for the smell of wool, the embrace of the encompassing leather armchairs. He longed for his father’s voice reading from the Book of Common Prayer. He longed for home.

Instead, he faced this foreign inferno, sweltering under an unkind sun, and the kind of dreams that must be used as torments for the damned in hell. He knew he had forecasting ability. He’d never questioned it. But he’d never done anything to bring it about. And none of the disasters that had inspired his premonitory dreams before had been this vivid, this unavoidable. Back then, he’d dreamed of a train coming down the tracks and then blackness for days before a train wreck in nearby Sheffield. And he’d dreamed of pain and hurt before a friend had been wounded in a hunting accident.

But never had the dreams been this long or this blood-soaked. Never had the impression of them hung upon his waking moments like a mourning wreath. So the question was: what event roiled the stream of time, casting its reflections back as well as forward, that gave William these dreams and this truly, unsettled feeling?

He closed the curtain over his desk with a brisk gesture. The curtains, thank the Lord, were heavy stuff, dark. Apparently the previous occupant of these rooms could not sleep if the slightest bit of light penetrated from outside. William wondered how he took to the suffocating heat that rose in the room as soon as he walked over to the veranda door and closed that curtain as well. He could feel the heat rise slowly, and prickled in sweat, which made him itch beneath his uniform. He could never sleep like this. But right now it suited his purposes.

He went back to his suitcase, which he’d opened on the bed. His clothes and the other things he used daily had long since been removed from the suitcase by his servants. All that remained were those items either too precious or too rarely used to need to come out. Or those things he didn’t wish his servants to see. He moved aside his last primer in magic, which he’d used at Eton and brought along with him, should any elementary formula evade him; the well-worn copy of the New Testament that his father had given him at parting; a half-dozen handkerchiefs embroidered for him by Victoria, his little cousin whom all the family hoped he’d marry someday. There in the corner, in its own wrappings of silk and satin, was the gift his grandmother had given him in parting. He pulled it out and set it on the desk, removing the layers of cloth that obscured it, one by one.

Small enough that it fit in the palms of his hands, it was white and perfectly clear. A single piece of crystal, hewn from virgin rock by magical means. It had never been melted, formed, blown, touched by metal.

He heard his grandmother’s voice in his head, telling him,
It has been a Blacklock legacy, always. Your grandfather had it from his grandfather, who had it from his grandfather. It was passed on, along with the gift of foretelling, from who knows which ancestor, lost in the mists of time. Your grandfather said the story was that an old crusader ancestor had found it in Jerusalem, and feeling a bond with it brought it home to use. But your grandfather said that didn’t feel right. That the rock feels older than that, and more closely related to the Blacklocks too. He said that touching it was like putting a finger in the stream of time.

William had used it exactly once, and he hadn’t got anything from it. It had been upon his arrival in Calcutta, after a party in which he’d heard a lot of nonsense but no good leads to where Soul of Fire might be hidden. In his quarters at the home of friends that night, he’d set the crystal ball out and tried to find the stone with it. He’d seen nothing—not even those flashes of white light that the uninformed thought was all the soothsayer could see and interpret in the reflection of the glass.

Now he set trembling fingers at the edge of the ball and stared into its depths, wishing that this time would be different, that he would see what he needed. All other questions vanished from his mind, along with all coherent thought.

He wanted to know so many things: where Soul of Fire was; what exactly Gyan Bhishma was talking about when he spoke of the danger of a were uprising—and mostly, whether William Blacklock was destined to die in Meerut, like his grandfather of the same name. But these could not be put into a clear question.

So, his hands on the cool crystal, he cleared a throat that felt much too dry and said, “Show me what I need to know that I might survive.”

For a moment nothing happened, and William took a deep breath, telling himself he’d been a fool and that there was nothing here, nothing to this hunk of crystal. His foretelling power, which came in bursts and spasms, could not be controlled, not even to the extent that other soothsayers could control theirs. The crystal would not show him even shadows or hints. He’d been a fool.

And yet, a sense of relief twined with his disappointment, and he released a deep sigh and started to stand up.

At that moment, the globe flared with a blinding light, like a magelight suddenly striking up in utter darkness. Like the sun, without warning, piercing the deepest night. It flared bright and vivid and William screamed, holding his hands to his injured eyes. Even through his hands, he could feel the light filling the room. Were it not for the fact that he felt no heat at all, he’d have thought that the room had caught fire. As it was, he was not sure what to do. He couldn’t call anyone into the room, not with this light blazing all over. What would they think? What did he, himself, think? What had he caused to happen?

From behind the fingers clenched in front of his insufficiently shuttered eyelids, he felt the light diminish, slowly, till he dared to pull his hands down and look, between half-open eyes, at the globe. He expected it to be cold and dead again. It was not.

No longer flaring, and not exactly luminous, it glowed with a subdued light, and showed . . . He made a sound like a half-suppressed laugh. The globe showed him the features of the most perfect male he’d ever seen. Possibly the most perfect one anyone had ever seen. The man’s chiseled features seemed to have been hewn by a skilled sculptor—even his skin, the color of light honey, and his crown of wild curls. Only one injury marred the otherwise perfect face—a patch hid the left eye. But the eye that remained uncovered, it was bewildering, and the most perfect of all the features, with a deep green-black iris, in which, if one looked closely, he might find hints of gold or traces of the sea or perhaps the ice of the never-ending glaciers.

William had barely recovered his breath, and his ability to think—and to wonder what exactly the Greek god might have to do with his dilemma and why the crystal thought this was what he needed to see and know right now—when the scene changed. The man didn’t exactly disappear. It was more like the colors of a kaleidoscope shifting positions and twisting till a different picture emerged. The colors ran and shifted, and suddenly William was looking at a picture out of his memory—the beautiful Sofie Warington, with hair loose down her back, with shining eyes and moist lips, wearing the sort of white muslin dresses favored by girls of her age and station. Her lips were parted in an “Oh” of confusion and bewilderment.

But what could Sofie have to do with all this? Well, clearly she did, because the Queen herself had wished for William to marry her. She thought that the ruby was in Sofie’s family and that this would be the easiest way of obtaining it. But Sofie was safely in England, and if her family had the ruby in Calcutta, not all of William’s powers nor all of his social connections had been able to find it.

He blinked as the scene changed yet again, and it was now the inside of his father’s study, with the fire blazing in the grate and the tea set out, and his mother sitting in a chair by the fire, embroidering while his father sat in another and read. A servant came in with a letter on a silver tray. His father opened the letter, then dropped it with an exclamation. And then there was William’s mother—her horrified face, her disbelieving eyes filling the crystal globe.

So I am to die in India,
William thought, and with a hoarse cry swept his fingers so that they backhanded the globe, rolling it off the desk. The globe flared again with white light, and William knew, even as he closed his eyes and felt the light diminish, that it would show him more, that it
was
showing him more. With his eyes half-open, protected from the flare by his hand, he fell to his knees and crept toward the globe.

His damn temper. His damn intemperate lack of control. He could have been able to see more if he had not lost his patience. But the grief and horror in his mother’s eyes had goaded him, as though the crystal was showing him her suffering to mock him. No, he couldn’t have held back. He couldn’t have controlled himself.

He fumbled for the globe, feeling the light die down as he approached it. When he got close, the globe was filled with the image of a tiger, its mouth open in a roar, its teeth stained red with blood. And behind it, after the colors swirled and changed, came two monkeys.

They looked like normal monkeys, swinging from tree to tree, except that one was wearing golden earrings—although, he didn’t know, that might not be too unusual among the sacred monkeys of India—and the other held a bright ruby flaring with red light.

Behind them came—William recoiled, jumping back. It was this outpost, this cantonment, the barracks and buildings he’d see if he looked just out the window. But everywhere there were dead bodies. The roar of a tiger could be heard, and William felt as though he could smell the stench of death. He looked—desperately looked—for his own body amid the bloodied, twisted remains, and found nothing.

And then the image shifted again and he saw an elephant filling the crystal. A large elephant, with a European man held limply in its trunk, heading for the line of trees in the distance.

He couldn’t tell who the European was that the elephant was carrying, and he leaned closer, trying to see.

“Sahib,” came a voice, and a door opened suddenly.

William jumped and gave a horse cry, and the crystal was filled with the face of Gyan Bhishma, looking anxious, and in the next minute dismayed.

Looking over his shoulder, William saw the sepoy, looking just as dismayed as his reflection in the crystal. Bhishma managed to collect himself into an appearance of military posture, and swallowed hard. “Pardon, Sahib, but your carrier said you were alone in your room and I heard you scream, and he had heard a thunk, and I thought . . .” The dark eyes looked toward the crystal, but he gave no impression of wishing to laugh at William or mock his exploits into foretelling.

William picked up the crystal, scooping it in one hand, and set it on the desk, amid its wrappings. “Well,” he said. “I was . . . trying to see my way through this. Done now. You may open the curtains. As you see, I had an accident and the crystal fell.”

Bhishma walked past William, and opened the curtain to the veranda, then backtracked to close the room’s door and reached past William to open the curtain over the desk. The crystal was dead and quiet; it now looked no more arcane than it had when William’s grandmother had handed it to him.

“That is a very old instrument you have there,” Bhishma said.

“Yes. It’s been in my family for generations. Perhaps for millennia.”

“Then everyone in your family has the gift of the sight?” Bhishma asked.

William shrugged. “Something like that. Only the men but . . . Though sometimes it is more a curse than a gift.”

“It is always so for those who can see the future. Seeing it is one thing, averting it another. What did the crystal show you, Sahib?”

THE MONKEYS OF DURGA; A SUDDEN ALARM