The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) (8 page)

“I suppose that you are correct,” Berar said haughtily, finally catching on to the very real danger of criticizing Kali, whether out loud or in the supposed privacy of one’s own thoughts. “The Dark Mother knows what is best, of course.” He cast a surreptitious glance skyward, as though expecting to be struck down by a bolt of lightning flung from the heavens. The sky remained resolutely clear and blue, broken only by the occasional opportunistic carrion bird in search of its next meal.

Scindia clapped him on the shoulder and said, “It is but a few days’ march to Gawilghur, my friend. You will feel much happier when we arrive.”

“I shall make it my sole purpose in life to turn the fortress into a death trap for the British,” Berar promised, as much to himself as to Scindia. “I have already formulated plans, Scindia – and such plans, if you could only see…”

“I believe you, my friend.”

“Gawilghur shall be the graveyard of the British Army. Mark my words.” Berar clenched a fist. His eyes stared off into the far distance, Scindia noticed, no doubt envisioning wave upon wave of redcoats being slaughtered in a vain attempt to climb the fortress walls. “Death shall follow their every footstep.”

Scindia shot him a sideways glance.

And so, my “friend,” shall it follow yours…

CHAPTER SIX

A blight and a pestilence unlike any other within living memory has befallen India.

This is not the first time that we have witnessed the newly-dead rising to prey upon the living. The annals of civilized history record multiple instances in which thousands of such hungry corpses have plagued humanity, perhaps most infamously when the remnants of the Imperial legions serving under Caesar fought tooth and nail to withstand the brutal onslaught of the undead horde at the very gates of Rome itself.

These disturbing occurrences appear to be cyclical in nature, and seem to occur (on average) once or twice every hundred years. They have been reported on all continents, and have threatened the United Kingdom itself several times. Despite the best efforts of the finest scientific minds of each generation, no satisfactory explanation for these unholy resurrections has ever been discovered; whether it is a disease of the physical variety, or a supernatural malady, remains to be seen — and indeed, the answer to this most vexing of questions may never be known at all.

We must hope, however, that such pessimism turns out to be ill-founded. Driven purely by a ceaseless thirst for the blood and flesh of the living, these nightmarish creatures first emerged during the early stages of this campaign that we now wage against the Marathas, shambling forth from the streets and hovels of Ahmednuggur in the aftermath of our assault and escalade upon that fortified town. They were few in number at first, but their burgeoning ranks were soon swelled by the bodies of both the British and Indian dead who had laid down their lives on that night of blood and fire. The fiends pursued both British armies — both mine, and that of Colonel Stevenson — as we, in turn, pursued the enemy forces of Scindia and the Raja of Berar, slowly but inexorably whittling away the ranks of my redcoats and the camp followers who came along in their wake. For every living, breathing human being who fell victim to those relentlessly-snapping jaws, another shambling foot-soldier was soon added to the tally of the risen dead.

Finally, on the outskirts of a little remarked-upon township named Assaye, matters came to a head. Probing forward aggressively (perhaps a little
too
aggressively, if I am to be completely frank about it) my leading elements unexpectedly encountered the entire Maratha army, taking up a battle line along the banks of the River Kailna. Riding at the vanguard, I soon realized that few viable options remained open to me.

Simple mathematics alone dictates that this situation cannot continue for long.

From the journal of Arthur Wellesley, 1803.

Colin Campbell screamed.

“Well,” said Doctor Reed Caldwell, leaning over his patient and placing the palm of one hand against his fevered brow, “that’s an improvement.”

The orderly who was assisting him looked aghast at the doctor’s sheer callousness. Caldwell paid him no mind. Campbell’s scream was loud, clear, and piercing, born in a place of almost indescribable agony. So far as the doctor was concerned, however, it meant only that he had an intact airway, and was moving a sufficient volume of air into his lungs that he could spare it on a verbal expression of that great pain. Air meant oxygen, and oxygen meant life.

It was usually the quiet patients who caused him to worry.

The doctor and his orderly were tending to their patient as best they could, given the circumstances: bouncing along in the back of an ox-drawn wagon flatbed, one whose rudimentary shock absorbers seemed to be several thousand miles past their prime.

“Oh all right,” the doctor tutted, noting the look of discomfort still written across the orderly’s face. “Give him a bite strap, if you please. Carefully does it, now.”

Caldwell trusted the orderly (a corporal who went by the name of Wedding) to keep his fingertips well clear of the man’s gnashing teeth as he worked the tough leather strap into his mouth. Campbell’s screams became grunts, his teeth clamping down on the bite strap for dear life. He was covered from head to toe in sweat, positively drenched in the stuff, Caldwell noted; the man’s skin was burning up underneath the palm of the doctor’s hand, and he wiped his hand absently against the linen of his dirty white shirt.

By rights, he ought to be dead already.

That Campbell had survived this long was nothing short of a miracle, Caldwell mused. He removed the ornate fob watch on a chain that he kept in his pocket and flipped the lid open. It was a beautiful timepiece, a gift from his father upon his graduation from university, and remained scrupulously accurate to this very day.

A quarter past three. Remarkable.

If the truth were told, Caldwell had expected the Scotsman to die on his table before lunchtime came around. His wounds were nothing short of horrific, inflicted by the claws and jaws of a supernatural feline beast early this morning, and the man had lost a considerable amount of blood. Reed was a surgeon of fine repute, and had sewn up the brutal gashes with his typical efficiency and expertise; the injuries had swollen and turned an angry red in color, their puckered mouths leaking a slow ooze of rancid yellow and green pus from between each set of stitches.

The wounds were obviously infected; even a first-year medical student would have spotted that. Campbell was burning up, feverishly straining against the heavy leather straps buckled to his wrists and ankles. Coupled with the blood loss, Caldwell knew that the physiological insult to his patient’s system could end in only one way: defeat.

A musket shot rang out from one of the native cavalrymen riding on the left flank. Caldwell glanced up in irritation. The defense of the British column seemed to be going well; things looked much less hopeless than they had at daybreak earlier that morning. Once the last vampire officer was in the ground (Major General Wellesley, leading from the front as he always did) a mortal captain named Rice had taken command. Receiving an order written by the General and delivered by an NCO, Rice had wasted no time in organizing a hasty defense – in this case, a loose infantry square some half a mile on each side – and then set about striking the camp in preparation for travel.

Whenever smaller groups of the undead had come within musket range of the square, the closest two or three weapons had barked out, ending the threat quickly. Some clusters were larger, and those were dealt with by using that old stalwart, massed volley fire. The redcoats that formed the threatened stretch of line closed up until they were shoulder to shoulder, then on the count of three leveled their weapons and fired. The men on either side closed up ranks even further and handed their own loaded muskets to the men who had just fired, exchanging the discharged Brown Besses for fresh ones. While their comrades took their next shot, they patiently reloaded, and so on, and so on, until the threat was vanquished.

The Marathas did indeed seem to be long gone, and General Wellesley had not ordered his remaining cavalry to pursue them. There was, however, a definite method to his madness. While the camp was being struck, Rice had dispatched as many cavalry patrols as he could spare. A few – and they really were too few, Rice knew, but what choice did he really have? – formed a thin screen between the camp and the retreating enemy. The remainder had an equally important job, done at Caldwell’s urging: that of keeping the dead from walking once more.

“Look old chap,” Caldwell had said reasonably, lighting one of his precious few remaining cigars and blowing out a long stream of smoke in the captain’s general direction, “try to think of it like this: would you rather deal with the buggers now, while they’re still at their most vulnerable, or deal with them later, when they’re back on their feet again and hungry for blood?”

It had to be said that Rice hadn’t taken much persuading. Collecting up what precious few combat-effective horsemen could still be found, a mixture of both native and British cavalrymen, the captain had directed them to make sure that each and every corpse that lay sprawled across the battlefield stayed well and truly dead this time. This basically entailed the horsemen riding from body to body, and then employing a saber or lance point to pierce the brain or spinal cord.

Unfortunately, the soldiers had ridden hard and then fought for everything they were worth for most of the night before. All were tired, with most of them being pushed to the very edge of exhaustion. Tired men make mistakes, and the more tired the man is, the more serious the mistakes tend to be. Today was to be no exception.

The mens’ backs ached, along with their arms, legs, and pretty much everything else. Fatigued muscles screamed in protest when even the smallest exertion was demanded of them, and so their owners inevitably began to rein themselves in. Where at first the horsemen had leaned gracefully down to skewer a skull and sever a spine, their aches, pains, and stiffness had soon gotten the better of them, and so now each cut and thrust was pulled just a little here, softened just a little there, as body mechanics triumphed over duty.

To say that the job was done in a quick and dirty fashion would be something of an understatement, yet Captain Rice made no comment when the cavalrymen reported back in just half an hour later, stating that their assigned task had been completed. He too had fought all night, and was struggling simply to keep his eyes open long enough to get the huge British column moving.

“Good job,” Rice nodded curtly to the commander of his native cavalry, intending the compliment as a dismissal. “Now take your men out one half mile to either side of the main body and screen our flanks, if you please.”

Rice rode at the head of the long column of march. Turning in his saddle, he shielded his eyes from the sun’s merciless glare with the flat of a hand and looked back along the length of the slightly crooked red snake that stretched from horizon to horizon. Half of the infantry marched first – they looked fit to drop after their exertions of the night before – followed by the camp followers and the artillery train, with the remainder of the foot bringing up the rear. As their temporary commander, Captain Rice had but one goal: to join up with Colonel Stevenson’s column, and thereby unify the army.

To that end, he had sent a handful of his precious light dragoons on ahead, with orders to make contact with Colonel Stevenson’s force and to convey his intentions to its commander. The chances were good that Stevenson was already marching their way, for the sounds of ferocious combat at Assaye would have been heard for miles around last night; Stevenson would be all too aware that Major General Wellesley’s force had engaged the enemy, and would most likely have begun marching to the sound of the guns as soon as he heard them.

The hours and the miles ground slowly by in an interminably tedious haze of heat, sweat, and exhaustion. Although he was ashamed to admit it, Rice actually fell asleep in the saddle on more than one occasion, lulled into a fitful, dreamless sleep by the rhythmic plodding of his mount. Jolted awake after one such episode, the captain looked about him guiltily, hoping that nobody had heard him snoring, as he felt sure he must have done. If anybody had, they showed no sign of it. Each infantryman’s tanned face was slack and lifeless, and much like the captain who commanded them, many were marching like automata with their eyes closed, lost in a world of half-sleep.

It was just after a quarter past four when the light dragoons returned, four tiny dots that suddenly appeared on the western horizon. Replacing the fob watch in his pocket, Rice pulled out a brass telescope and extended it fully. Bringing it up to his eye, he swung the glass impatiently toward the specks. Even before they resolved into the discernible figures of British horsemen, the captain knew that they were friendlies: after all, they galloped through the outermost screen of native horse scouts without any attempt being made to stop them.

“Beg leave to report, sir.” The sergeant in command of the small party reined his horse to a halt alongside Rice’s. The captain simply nodded, his eyes full of unspoken questions. “We found Colonel Stevenson’s column, sir – about three miles nor-nor’east of here.” He jabbed a finger in that direction for added emphasis. Rice’s eyes followed it, tracked out to the far horizon. There was a slight dust cloud there, nothing that one would have spotted without knowing of its presence.