"Hindu demons," Tir Ram said with a sad smile. "A part of our heritage. I must not scoff - Ghulam Haidar will be angry with me."
Colonel Warburton interrupted to tell us all a rambling and rather bawdy story about his early experiences in the army. The meal ground to a halt, and servants brought round betel nuts on silver trays. Holmes, O"Connor and Roxton popped them in their mouths and chewed wholeheartedly.
Bernice and I refused. I know that they are meant to aid digestion, but I am also aware of their narcotic properties. I had an orderly in Afghanistan who became addicted to them.
I felt the need to visit a cloakroom. Divining my need, Ghulam Haidar a.s.signed a white-gowned servant as my guide.
As I left the impressively marbled room, I looked around for the servant.
The corridor stretched in both directions: empty. I cursed. I had not bothered memorizing the route from the banquet, a.s.suming as I did that I would be led back.
I waited for a few minutes, then began to walk in what I thought was the right direction. Even if it was wrong, I would probably come across a servant of some description who could point me in the right direction. The only thing to be careful of was wandering into the Nizam"s harem, if Nizams had harems. If they did, the ladies would undoubtedly be attractive.
It was in this frame of mind that I turned a corner and walked straight into a ma.s.sive figure. Before I could react, a hand was clamped across my mouth and I was thrown against the wall. A red haze filled my vision. I tried to shake my head to clear the ringing in my ears, but the hand was forcing my head up the wall. I tried to take a breath, but could not. My feet left the floor. My chest felt as if a rope were being tightened around it. I tried to bite the hand, in fact I did bite it, but the pressure on my jaw increased remorselessly.
And then my eyes came level with the face of my a.s.sailant, and all thoughts of my own pain vanished.
It was Baron Maupertuis"s manservant: Surd. Seen close-up, his face was a jigsaw-puzzle of st.i.tches and glossy scar tissue. His hair, however, was full bodied and fine, hanging in a neatly coiffured fringe across his eyes. His glowing eyes.
I lashed out with my feet and caught him in the groin. He grunted, and shifted his grip. I tried to wriggle free, but his fingers were pressing into the soft flesh beneath my jawbone. The pain was incredible. I started to slip in and out of consciousness: every few seconds I would awake from a nightmare of agony only to find that it was real. The skin of my neck was pulled so taut that I expected to feel it pop at any moment and find his fingers clutching at my windpipe.
The next time I awoke it was to find myself sprawled against the cool stone wall. The agony was receding like a wave across a beach, always promising to return.
Surd was a shadow blocking out the light. From behind him, a soft caress of a voice said: "Your friend Holmes is slightly less stupid than I had a.s.sumed. You should be in Calcutta by now, searching for me in vain. I had not antic.i.p.ated that you would penetrate my alliance with the Nizam so soon."
I tried to speak, but the tide rolled over me again and withdrew, leaving me shivering.
A white-gloved hand raised my chin.
"You are pathetic," Maupertuis said. I managed to raise my eyes to gaze into his thin, impa.s.sive face. His eyes seemed to sear into me: somehow the experience of his gaze was worse than all the pain.
"We can find out everything we want from your friends. How much they know. What sort of threat they pose. Why they persist in following me, when all I want is to restore the glory of the Empire and extend it to other worlds. You, however, are irrelevant."
I could hear the rustle of a gown as somebody else joined us. For a moment I had hopes of a rescue, until Ghulam Haidar said, "The Nizam wishes you to join him. The others have been subdued."
"Very well," Maupertuis whispered.
The gloved hand released my chin. I tried to keep my head up, but failed. I could feel consciousness ebbing away with the tide.
"Surd," he said, turning away, "kill him."
Chapter 11.
In which Holmes stands alongside an unlikely companion and a villain falls for Bernice and Watson. for Bernice and Watson.
Maupertuis"s footsteps echoed like the knell of some huge bell as he walked away. Surd bent to take my head in his huge hands. I tried to look away, but I was fascinated by the twin sparks glowing deep in his eyes. I swear that I could feel the heat emanating from them. I made my peace with G.o.d. Surd, seeing my acceptance of my fate in my expression, smiled twistedly.
I wrenched my head downwards as the fire in Surd"s eyes reached out for me. Heat seared the top of my head and I heard a ma.s.sive crack! as the wall exploded. Chips of marble stung the back of my neck. Surd fell backwards, clutching at his face. Blood seeped between his fingers. I scuttled crab-fashion away from him and climbed precariously to my feet.
The last things I saw before I staggered away were a scorched pit in the wall where my head had been resting, and Surd wiping the blood from his eyes and looking round for me.
I ran. I ran until my lungs were heaving and my legs would not carry me any more. I ran until I no longer knew where I was. I ran until I could no longer avoid the question that pounded in my brain to the exclusion of all else. What could I do now?
My funk lasted for a few minutes, and left me shaking and soaked with perspiration. What pulled me back from the brink was the thought of my friends in danger.. I could not allow anything to happen to them. I am not a brave man by any stretch of the imagination - I have seen too much pain and suffering in the lives of others to face it with equanimity myself - but there is a code that transcends all else, and its name is honour. I had to help.
I slipped quietly through the whited sepulchre of the Nizam"s palace, looking for some stretch of corridor or ornamental feature that I recognized.
The coolness, the silence and the marble all reminded me of the Diogenes Club back in London. I found the comparison strangely calming. The sweat dried on my brow and a warm glow of courage spread through my limbs.
Perhaps I could achieve something after all.
A sound! I hesitated, then flung myself flat against the wall as a small group of people emerged from an adjoining corridor ahead. I was as invisible as a fly on a bedsheet, but fortunately they turned and walked in the other direction.
Three burly servants dressed in dhotis and turbans were carrying the unconscious bodies of Holmes, Roxton and the redheaded O"Connor over their shoulders. Four others were attempting to carry Bernice, who was swearing and struggling in their grip. My mind raced to piece together the evidence. If Bernice and I were conscious and the rest were not . . . The betel nut! It must have been drugged, and the absence of Warburton, his wife and secretary, and the Nizam would suggest that they were implicated in the scheme. I cursed bitterly. How could Warburton, a fellow officer, have allowed himself to fall amongst thieves in this way?
I followed the group for a few minutes. Watching Bernice"s face, I noticed when she caught sight of me over the shoulder of one of her captors. To her credit, she made no sign. In fact she twisted more furiously in their grip, slowing them down so that the other three bearers trudged on ahead with their unfeeling loads. We were pa.s.sing a junction at the time, and she caught my eye for a fraction of a second and flicked her head. What did she want? I frowned in an exaggerated manner. She rolled her eyes, then flicked her gaze quickly towards one branch of the corridor and back to me.
Did she want me to go by a different path, overtake the bearers and somehow rescue her?
Flattered as I was by her confidence in my skills, I could not see it working.
And surely she was no more familiar with the layout of the palace than I was. I shook my head.
"Hide round the corner, you d.a.m.n fool!" she yelled in the middle of her stream of profanity, then carried on blaspheming without drawing breath.
I nipped back to the corner and turned to the right, halting a few yards down. Hopefully the bearers were unfamiliar with English. Or perhaps Bernice a.s.sumed that they were as stupid as I was.
Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield After Watson finally got the hint and hid round the corner, I managed to twist my body around and push against one wall with both legs. The guys carrying me were thrown off-balance, and staggered towards the other wall.
It was easy for me to deliberately catch my head against the marble. A spike of sick pain shot through me. I went limp. It was all I could do to keep myself conscious.
The guys stopped and had a little conference. One of them tried yelling after the ones up ahead, but they were too far away and didn"t respond.
The guys patted my face a couple of times but I didn"t react. When one of them raised my eyelids I had rolled my eyes so far up that I could almost see the roots of my hair. They talked a bit more, then four of them turned and headed back along the corridor while the fifth sighed deeply and picked me up again. I almost laughed in relief: it had worked! Gazing through my eyelashes at the departing Indians, I suddenly realized why. There was a very convincing streak of fresh blood marring the stonework of the corridor, and I suddenly became aware of something warm trickling down my neck.
There is such a thing as being too convincing.
When the four who had left vanished around a corner - not the one that Watson had gone around, thank G.o.d - I went into action.
A continuation of the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.
I watched with a palpable sense of relief as the four bearers turned the corner and walked away from me. Emerging into the main corridor, I saw Bernice standing over the body of the fourth man. There was blood everywhere. As I got closer I realized that it was hers, not his.
"Let me have a look at that," I said in tones more suitable for my Kensington surgery than Mughal India.
"No time," she hissed. She was obviously in pain.
"It won"t do any of us any good if you pa.s.s out through lack of blood."
I gave her a quick once-over. The blood was issuing from a shallow sc.r.a.pe on her scalp, and was coagulating as I watched.
"You"ll have a headache for some time, but apart from that you"ll be all right."
"A headache. Thanks for warning me: I"ll be sure to watch out for it."
"What now?"
She looked around.
"Well, there"s not much option, is there? We have to follow to find out where they"re taking Holmes. If we"re really lucky, the Doctor might be there as well"
The path taken by the three Indians was quite clear. The damp marks of their bare feet on the marble flagstones had not yet evaporated, and we made good time. We turned a corner to find them some yards ahead of us, at a point where the corridor opened out into a large open s.p.a.ce. Sunlight glared on stone, and the heat and stink of the outside world suddenly a.s.sailed us. In the centre of the s.p.a.ce, a large circular pit seemed to absorb the light. I could make out the first few steps of a stairway which spiralled around its edge before the shadows lapped over it like black water.
The Indians carrying Holmes, Roxton and O"Connor did not hesitate, but plodded down the stairway into the pit.
With barely a hesitation, Bernice and I followed.
Stale air drifted up from the dark heart of the pit. The steps were almost invisible beneath our feet. Three times I wandered too close to the edge and would have fallen had Bernice not grabbed my sleeve. Gazing upwards I could see birds wheeling across the deep blue circle of the sky. I started to count steps, and got up to several hundred before I gave up. The comforting light above us receded to the size of a guinea, then a farthing and then a sixpence. My feet fell into a pattern - step, step, step and my mind wandered free. I suppose that I had fallen into some kind of hypnotic state, a dream land where logic is conspicuous by its absence. I seemed to be standing in a familiar city of tall buildings. There were people thronging the pavements and buckboard carriages manoeuvring through the refuse-laden streets. I was trying to warn pa.s.sers-by of the danger they were in - although I did not know what that danger was myself - but they were ignoring me. I screamed to them to take cover, to beware, but it was as if I was invisible to them. And then a huge crack opened up across the street, and buckboards fell into it, their occupants" faces contorted in terror.
Buildings around me wavered and crumbled. Chunks of masonry fell and buried themselves in the dusty ground. I stared at the devastation, knowing that I could have prevented it but uncertain how.
A hand tugged at my sleeve and woke me from my day-dream. I was in darkness. The stairway continued on as before. Bernice"s face was lit by a flickering orange light.
"Are you all right?"
"I"m not sure . . . I think I blacked out for a while," I replied.
"Can"t say I blame you: She grimaced. "I think we"ve arrived somewhere."
She indicated downwards. A few steps past where we had stopped, the pit seemed to open out into a vast conical cave with us at its apex. I crept down a few steps. The stairway hugged the sides of the cone, descending in a spiral to a rocky floor some half-mile across its base.
The three Indian bearers carrying Holmes, Roxton and O"Connor were trudging down the sides of the cave like ants on the inside of a flower pot.
Pools of brackish water littered the plain like malignant sores. In between them, a host of men were sitting, lined up in rows with kit bags at their feet and rifles across their shoulders. There were larger weapons in evidence as well: Gatling guns, elephant rifles and the like. Some of the soldiery were British, some were Indian, but they were all wearing uniforms of bright blue and silver, but looked uncomfortable and self-conscious in them: more like dressed-up apes than soldiers. This, I presumed, was Maupertuis"s army.
Around the edges of this ragtag invasion force, groups of Indian men of the type known as fakirs were sitting in groups around fires, staring vacantly into s.p.a.ce. They were singing.
"I-ay, I-ay," their voices echoed through the shadows, "naghaa, naghaighai!
Shoggog fathaghn! I-ay, I-ay tsa toggua thola-ya! Thola-ya fathaghn! I-ay Azathoth!"
The chant soared through the vacant s.p.a.ce, filling it and echoing back upon itself in a complex web of sound. Sometimes the song reverberated in a single pure note loud enough to make the stairs beneath my feet tremble: moments later I could distinguish individual voices raised in sweet harmony. I had heard this before. I racked my mind trying to remember where, and then it came to me. Mrs Prendersly had repeated those words to the Doctor and I in her house in Deptford just before she had burned to death, having heard them from the lips of her husband. It was also what Maupertuis" mysterious hooded companion had been singing in the brothel in Euston.
I caught sight of a movement in the centre of the cave. There amidst the singing wise men, Maupertuis, Tir Ram, Colonel Warburton, Gloria Warburton and Smithee were making their way towards a raised dais which contained three ornate chairs. The gigantic Surd was following his master. I nudged Bernice.
"I"m way ahead of you," she said. "Look over there."
She gestured to the bottom of the stairway, where the three Indians with their captors had just reached the ground. A fourth man had been waiting for them. He was holding the Doctor by the scruff of the neck.
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party," I murmured.
"What?"
"We have to rescue them!"
Bernice sighed.
"I"m open to suggestions," she whispered.
By this time the Doctor, Holmes, Lord Roxton and Mr O"Connor had been dumped at the foot of the dais upon which Maupertuis, Warburton and Tir Ram sat. Mrs Warburton and Smithee stood behind the chairs. The Doctor, still clutching what was by now a rather battered umbrella, gazed up balefully at them. The other three prisoners seemed to be recovering from the effects of whatever narcotic drug the betel nut had been adulterated with. Holmes was pulling himself painfully to his feet, whilst the other two were holding their heads and groaning. Maupertuis leaned forward to stare at them.
"You have each tried to interfere in my plans," he said. "You have crept on your bellies into this country and followed me here to the country of my friend Tir Ram, ready to stop me in my grand venture." His voice was as quiet as wind in dry gra.s.s, and yet I could hear him clearly above the background chanting.
Mr O"Connor removed a small notebook from his jacket and began making notes: of what I could not guess.
"I do not understand," Maupertuis continued. "My only aim is to extend British influence to the stars, bringing more dominions under the control of the Queen."
He gestured to the regiments lined up in the shadows.
"My army, drawn from the ranks of the poor and the powerless in the slums of England"s great cities, trained and commanded by my brave general..."
Warburton preened himself.
". . . will march through the portal created by the wisdom of my ally, whose land is best placed to be the launching point for this glorious enterprise. . ."
Tir Ram smiled slightly.
". . . and place this virgin territory, its goods and its chattels, its spices, oils and minerals, its people and their treasures, under British dominion. Yet you try to stop me. Why?"
The Doctor stepped forward.
"You will be spreading death and destruction across the cosmos," he cried.
"The British Empire is based upon oppression and slavery. You offer not the hand of friendship but the jackboot of tyranny! I shall prevent your plans!"
"Ah," said Maupertuis, "a liberal. There are always those whose hearts bleed for the underdogs. You fail to understand: there will always be underdogs.
You cannot prevent it."
He turned to Holmes.
"And you, Mr Holmes. What interest has a private detective in my affairs?"