The Golden Leopard (45 page)

Grabbing the rifle, she took off through the fog, surefooted as a Dartmoor pony. She had navigated this territory since childhood, eluding the servants dispatched to track her down, vibrating to the rhythms of the land and the weather. All her fear was for Duran. She knew the place where he’d have exited the tunnel, but he would not remain there. Where would he have gone?

There was no answer to that. But the fog would slow him down. He’d surely avoid the road, which was the first place Shivaji would go looking for him. And she hoped he had better sense than to strike out across the moors. If he’d done that, he could be up to his neck in a bog by now. Or under it altogether.

No. He had figured out the virgin and the unicorn. He’d escaped Shivaji once before. She must not underestimate him.

He would do the unexpected, she decided. Go the direction he was least likely to go. Or not go very far at all.

It was only a hunch, but once it came into her head, it felt exactly right. On Devil’s Tor were any number of places to hide. When the fog cleared he would have a good view of the landscape for miles around, and best of all, no one could sneak up on him because there was only one way to the top.

Unless you knew the other one.

Leaving behind the rifle, which was too cumbersome for the voyage she was to take, she crossed the moorland between the house and the Tor, found her way to the narrow break between a stand of tall rocks, and stopped there long enough to knot her skirts between her legs. The last time she’d ascended the Tor from this direction, she had been considerably younger and smaller. Now the concealing fog became her ally, forcing her to climb by feel, guided by instincts that came back to her like old friends. She wriggled through tight spaces and scrambled over boulders, her hands and knees scraped raw on the rough moorstone.

Something was going to happen. Was already happening. She felt it, like electricity in the air, and drove herself harder. She must not be too late.

A clap of thunder. She paused. Listened. Then another, just like the first. Then silence.

Feverishly she scaled a steep incline, skirted a clump of nettles, and came up behind one of the Druid stones. Sunlight dazzled through the mist, which was beginning to clear, and a small breeze stirred her hair. She pressed her cheek against the stone and gazed one-eyed into the circle.

Across the way, about ten yards from where she stood, Shivaji was crouched beside a figure lying prone on the ground. The milky fog swirled around them like silk scarves. For the barest moment, light flashed off a circlet of gold and jewels on the fallen man’s wrist.

Her heart gave a lurch.

Oh, God. Oh, God. It was over.

Shivaji lifted his head like an animal scenting danger. He rose. Turned. Blotches of red stained his tunic and smeared the blade of the large curved knife he was holding. Blood dripped from its point.

Her hand dove for the pistol in her pocket, got it free, pointed it at his chest. She moved toward him. “Drop the knife,” she said. The fog blurred her target, but at this range, she could not miss. “If he is dead, I will kill you.”

Shivaji held out his arms. “I will not prevent you. But he is badly hurt. If you wish him to live, you must go for help.”

“And leave you here to finish what you started?” Was Duran still alive? She couldn’t tell, dared not shift her gaze from the assassin. Her pulse beat in her head. What choice had she now?

She steadied her hand, sighted down the barrel, saw his eyes look past her.

An arm lashed around her from behind. She cried out as the gun was wrenched from her fingers. Then, at a nod from Shivaji, she was released.

Helpless, numb with despair, she watched him kneel beside Duran and place a finger on his throat.

“What I say is true,
memsahib.
He lives, but there is great loss of blood. The bullets must be removed, and it cannot be done here.” With his knife, he began slicing strips of fabric from the hem of his tunic. “My servants may not be heeded if I send them to the house. You must go yourself. Have a litter brought here and make the necessary arrangements.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the man standing at her side. “Return the gun. The decision must be hers alone.”

She looked at the brown hand holding the barrel of the pistol, at the curve of the grip offered to her, and shook her head. “I’ll go,” she said from a burning throat.

And then she began to run.

And the horse was not, after all, on his back. Turned out he was sitting nearly upright on a bed, held in that position by pillows at his lower back and behind his neck, but more amazingly, by a contraption slung around his shoulders and attached to some sort of pulley device. He could reason it all out within a week, he was thinking when the water glass was offered him again.

“The sling holds your back clear,” Shivaji said, “permitting the wounds to receive air and be tended. I rigged it because when you were lying on your stomach, your breathing became labored. Do you remember what occurred?”

The fog in his head was more dense than the fog that had swaddled Devil’s Tor. He cast back, snagging bits and pieces of that morning. He’d got all the way to the stone circle. Lost a boot in a patch of bog on the way. He remembered that much. And the silence. Like cotton balls were stuffed in his ears. He’d come to level ground, found by feel one of the standing stones, and was just turning when the thunder . . . No. It was a blast of noise, muffled a little by the fog, echoing a little from the rocks, not like any sound he’d ever heard before. And at almost the same time, the horse kicked him.

Not a horse. That was when he’d been so sure the assassin would kill him with a knife. That’s what he was thinking when he grabbed hold of the granite spire with both hands, felt them slip, felt himself slipping, knew he’d been shot.

Thunder will bring you down.
Well, he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned.

Then more thunder, a blow to his side, and the fog took him altogether.

Again, water to his lips. He kept forgetting what he’d known just a moment earlier. His body, hurting like the devil was sticking pitchforks in it, now suspended in space. Not quite. His bottom and legs solid on the bed. Bits of him against pillows. Other bits wrapped up and strung out with ropes. Where was Jessie? She wasn’t here, which told him quite a lot.

He wanted to have this conversation with his killer some other time, when he was more than a mole in a black tunnel. But he’d been brought awake for a purpose. He honed his brain, flint against mush, to a semblance of awareness.

“You knew of the stone circle because we met there,” he said to the assassin, standing loose haired and solemn at the foot of the bed. “I take it you knew of the tunnel that got me away from the house. You made the thunder yourself, damn you. What I can’t figure is how you predicted the fog. And why, after your sworn declaration to carry out my execution, you appear to have been keeping me alive.”

“A puzzle,” Shivaji said from the table, where he was emptying a packet of something green into the mortar. “I will tell you what I can. But of the tunnel and the fog, I knew nothing save for my dream. I claim no gift for interpretation. The confluence of what I dreamed and what transpired surprises me as much as it does you.”

“You seemed to believe it when you told me about it.”

“Yes. It was . . . startling. So vivid that I understood it clearly, until I awoke. After that, I remembered only the images. As for the thunder, it was not I who shot you. Two bullets hit you in the back. I arrived shortly after.”

“Talbot, then.” Duran dropped the words like two lead balls. In the great scheme of things, he no doubt deserved what he had got. Unpardonably arrogant, he had been so sure he’d outwitted Talbot. And he had kept assuming, against all evidence to the contrary, that his opponent was a gentleman, a principled man who would fight with swords if he declared swords. Who would not, after agreeing to an honorable duel, shoot a man in the back.

Anyone else would have expected treachery. Come prepared for it. But Hugo Duran, longtime cynic, had wandered onto the killing field like a woolly lamb, betrayed by his own unsuspected idealism.

“Sir Gerald was observed leaving the house and approaching the Tor,” Shivaji said, “but that did not appear significant until we learned of your departure. At that time I followed. When I arrived, he had reloaded his pistols and was moving toward you. My knife cut him down.”

“Why not let him complete the job? Save you the trouble?”

“He was not, it appeared, called for you.”

“That, or he was a shockingly bad shot. So, I was down and you were there, blade in hand. Why didn’t you finish me yourself?”

Shivaji shook the powder he’d ground into a cup, added what looked like oil, and followed it with a brownish liquid. “It seemed the killing of you had been taken from my hands,” he said quietly, “and the healing of you put there instead. To know one’s duty is not, perhaps, so simple as tradition and experience would have it. But I cannot say what I would have chosen to do, had not the Lady Jessica at that moment come into the stone circle. When she stood before me and demanded your life, I was unable to refuse her.”

At the sound of her name, Duran’s heart had jumped. The room was so absent of her. So empty without her. But she had wanted him to live. Might she, then, one day forgive him? Well, too soon to start hoping for another miracle. “Did she trick you,” he asked, “like the princess tricked the Lord of Death in the story? The real story, not the self-justifying version you told her.”

“Lady Jessica was not so devious as the princess. She brought a gun.”

Duran started to laugh and instantly regretted it. The horse stampeded across his back, leaving him a puddle of sweat and pain.

“I advise you to be cautious,” Shivaji said, blotting his face with a damp towel. “You have been so near to death that more than once I believed you to have stepped upon the moon. Indeed, perhaps you did. For you have died to your former life, I think, and rekindled a new one. Now you must take care to preserve it, and to live more virtuously than you did before.”

“I could h-hardly live worse,” Duran managed to choke out. Shivaji was leaning over his back now, doing something that hurt even worse than laughing. “Did you burn that concoction under my nose so that I’d be awake while you tortured me?”

“An interesting idea, but no. When asleep, you cannot control your movements, and you must keep perfectly still when I remove the bracelet. Tell me when you feel ready for me to attempt it.”

Attempt?
That sounded ominous. And just thinking of those poisoned needles gave him a case of the shivers. His arm, a little elevated by the sling, rested on a pillow at his side. He looked down at it, at the bracelet, and released the breath he’d been holding. “Whenever you like,” he said. “The nizam wants it back?”

“It is marked as proof I have carried out your death sentence. I am ordered to return it, still wrapped around your wrist.”

“You were supposed to lug my body all the way back to Alanabad?” He had a mental image of Admiral Lord Nelson preserved in a brandy barrel after Trafalgar.

“Only your arm, Duran-Sahib.” Shivaji had returned to the bedside table and was removing something from his cabinet of drawers. “But if you have no objection, I shall use Sir Gerald’s instead. The Star of the Firmament will not know the difference, and it will spare me a good deal of trouble. Amputations on the living are usually bloody affairs.”