The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) (5 page)

Wellesley made the transition from rapid horizontal flight into a graceful landing look almost effortless. Ignoring the insistent burning of those harsh first rays of sunlight as they struck the exposed flesh of his face and hands, he rapidly sized up the terrain below him with an expert eye. There. There was the surgeon’s tent, no larger than a single page torn from a book when seen from this altitude.

A ring of undead that wore the uniforms of both sides was closing in on the tent. Dr. Caldwell and his orderlies were putting up a vigorous defense, Arthur observed, engaging the enemy with musket and pistol. The early-morning gloom was the limiting factor, rather than the range of the weapons themselves, particularly as none of the medical staff possessed the distinct advantage of enhanced vampiric eyesight. To mortal eyes, the shambling corpses would not even stand out from the background until they had closed to within thirty, sometimes even twenty feet. Even at those ranges, the firearms could be grossly inaccurate – particularly when they were being fired by men who were utterly exhausted. Fatigued and wavering arms meant that some of the heavy lead balls went astray, slamming harmlessly into limbs and torsos.

“The head, my boys!” Arthur called out, projecting his voice above the dull roar of the battlefield. “Aim for the head. That’s the style!”

All British heads – those that still drew breath, at least – turned to look upward. The sight of their commanding General, who some had thought dead in the course of the night’s battle, descending from the skies like some ancient god of war, heartened them immensely.

“Old Nosey’s ‘ere!” chucked one of the orderlies to himself, his shaking hands working to reload his Brown Bess just that little bit faster. “Soon put the buggers to running now!”

Altering the density of his body without giving it much in the way of conscious thought, the vampire leaned backward, bringing himself up into the vertical plane as he rapidly lost height. He still clutched the now-limp form of Colin Campbell to his chest. Blood from the Scotsman’s wounds had soaked into the right sleeve of his jacket, darkening the scarlet dye in patches.

The ground rose up to meet him. His boots hit first, kicking up two plumes of dust on impact. Arthur’s legs absorbed the bulk of the shock, so much so that the wounded man he carried was barely even jostled. Arthur had picked a spot close to where Dr. Caldwell stood; the embattled physician stood in a duelist’s stance, with one arm bracing his abdomen and the other extended full-length in the direction of a lumbering former Maratha cavalryman, pointing a heavy brass-filigreed pistol at its head. As the creature closed to within twenty paces, Caldwell closed one eye and calmly squeezed the trigger. The frizzen flashed, kicking the muzzle high and causing the doctor to blink in a vain attempt to preserve his night vision.

“A fine shot, Doctor,” Wellesley nodded in approval as the ball struck the creature just below the left eye, removing a goodly portion of its brains as it exited through the back of its skull. “My compliments.”

“Thank you, sir.” Not bothering to watch his target crumple to the ground, Caldwell had already begun the process of reloading. “It is good to see that you are safe and well. Although it would appear that Captain Campbell is rather less so…”

“No truer word. Where shall I put him?”

“Come with me, if you please.” Caldwell led the General deep into the dark interior of the tent. Wellesley fought the urge to sigh in relief, now that he was free of the hated sunlight. The physician gestured to one of the few empty cots. “Set him down here. Gently, if you please.”

Wellesley obliged, stooping to lay the Captain’s mangled body down. Campbell groaned, wincing in pain, but failed to regain consciousness.

“These are no ordinary battlefield injuries, Doctor. The good Captain was mauled by a were-tiger.”

Caldwell, who was already cutting away the wounded man’s jacket and undershirt, looked up sharply. “Then it is a miracle that he still breathes at all.”

“Can you help him?” Arthur pressed.

“It is too early to say,” Caldwell hedged, “but I tell you freely that his chances do not look good. These are grievous wounds, among the worst I have ever seen.”

Although he was by no means a medical man himself, Wellesley knew that his physician spoke the truth; simply looking at the red and glistening ruin of the patient’s shredded and lacerated chest told him that.

“I know that you shall do your very best, Doctor.” Wellesley spun on his heel and strode away, drawing the sword at his hip. “Now if you will excuse me, I have an army to salvage…”

Amongst the many tenets of command that were instilled into the gentlemen officers of the British Army from the very first day of their education, perhaps none was more highly-regarded than this: command shall never hurry.

Obviously, that particular dictum was no absolute, Wellesley thought to himself as he sprinted toward the officer’s mess tent, located in the very center of the army’s hastily-made camp; vampire officers led from the front, and were frequently known to move as fast as lightning, cutting a bloody swathe through the ranks of the enemy faster than the mortal eye could see.

No, he mused, cutting to the right of a brace of snarling undead redcoats who were closing in on a lone female camp follower, a good officer must cultivate an air of laconic insouciance…and a commander, doubly so.

A precisely-timed stroke of his blade completely decapitated the first creature, and lopped the crown of the skull from the second, spilling the contents of its brain pan down the front of its suddenly-slack face. All that the still-screaming woman saw was a human-shaped blur that left behind two properly-dead corpses in its wake, each one oozing black bile from a perfectly clean sword cut.

Arthur wore a scowl, for the sun’s disk was halfway above the horizon by now, and the pain that it caused his pallid flesh was excruciating. He held up an arm to shield his eyes, using the other to slash and spear at targets of opportunity as his path crossed with theirs. His course did not deviate, never once taking his squinting, watery eyes from their ultimate goal: the sanctuary of the officers’ mess.

Seven of the creatures had fallen to his blade by the time Major General Wellesley ducked beneath the tent’s entrance awning. The cool shadowy interior felt like a soothing balm upon his skin, which he could feel was burned an angry red on the left side. His fingertips gently traced the curvature of his left cheek, confirming his suspicions when they felt the bumpy welts beneath the eye socket.

Thrice-cursed sun.

He was delighted to see that the command tent was by no means empty. Fearing the rising of the sun, his cadre of vampire officers had each reluctantly left their regiments behind and congregated here, beneath the thick canvas roof. Ten soldiers of the Shadow Company were hard at work, shovels in hand, digging holes in the earth. Those holes may not have been deep – Arthur put them at barely half of the six feet that British Army tradition dictated – but they would be enough, he judged: enough to keep the worst of the day’s heat from incinerating each and every one of them while they slept.

As the ten shirtless men worked, sweat-soaked and stripped to the waist, five more Shadows stood in the entryway and picked off any approaching threats. This was not the volley fire used by most groupings of British soldiers on the battlefield, but rather, a series of individually-aimed shots. The five were doing a superb job of keeping the tent clear, but Arthur wondered just how long it would last.

Then again, he realized with a jolt, maybe we’re going about this all wrong…

It took an effort of will for the vampire general to keep from smacking himself on the forehead, so foolish did he suddenly feel. It had suddenly dawned on Arthur that he had been missing something…something fundamental. And it was all down to that tired old and faithful old chestnut known as “because we’ve always done it that way.”

The Shadow Company’s raison d’etre was twofold: to act as a specially-trained counter-force for supernatural threats on the battlefield, and to serve as a private security force for the army’s vampire officers during their only vulnerable hours: when they were resting in their coffins. With that being the case, whenever the army made camp for the day, everything was based around protecting the officers’ mess tent, which provided shade and a screen against the lethal sun overhead. Although there were mortal officers serving at the lower levels of the rank structure, anybody who was anybody in terms of importance had accepted the Dark Gift. The army was therefore effectively hamstrung, tied to one central location by the need to defend its officer corps.

But – and here was the crucial point that had eluded him until now – the horde of slavering undead which roamed the British lines at will, was no threat to a vampire in his coffin. For starters, they lacked not only the intelligence to dig, but also the muscular coordination to do so. Oh, they might stumble and swipe with their arms, but actually digging required a degree of bodily finesse that had left them at their first death, never to return.

Nor did the vampires provide an attractive prospect for sating the creatures’ blood-lust and hunger. Arthur had noticed this time and time again over the past few days, but had failed to consider the ramifications – more fool him. Although the vampires required fresh blood for sustenance, it did not seem to perfuse their cells as it did those of a living human, for reasons that still eluded even the best medical minds of the age. The vampiric heart still beat, yes, but not in the same manner as that of a mortal, and the vampire’s skin was ice-cold and had exceptional healing properties.

Arthur’s brain thought quickly, running through the possible permutations that the new day might bring. Scindia and Berar’s combined army had been roundly beaten, thanks to his well-considered gamble of the night before. Beaten? Actually, routed might be a better term, and a routed army rarely regained cohesion within a day or even two, particularly with an enemy force constantly at their backs. No, he would have bet a year’s pay that the Marathas would keep on running, perhaps all the way back to their fastness at Gawilghur.

Perfect. Let it be so.

Now it was time to consider the greater and more immediate threat: the undead creatures. Arthur knew that the Maratha army had been badly mauled on the plain of Assaye, and that his own force had paid a substantial price in doing the mauling. Each and every dead man from either side (unless he had taken a grievous wound to the head or spine) would become a threat, further swelling the ranks of the undead swarm and harrying the redcoats.

The good news, however, was that Colonel Stephenson’s army had remained separate from Wellesley’s own, shadowing the main force on a parallel track. Their absence had made things harder for Arthur’s men during last night’s assault, but now they presented him with a relatively fresh reserve force; with them, he could maintain constant pressure on the fleeing Maratha troops, snapping at their heels overnight, dogging their every step and preventing them from re-forming into anything that even remotely resembled a threat to Wellesley’s now-smaller British army.

If they could only survive until nightfall…

And therein lay the genesis of Arthur’s sudden epiphany. The Marathas were no longer an imminent threat. The undead creatures were a very real threat to the mortal redcoats, but the same could not be said for the vampire officers: they would be safe and sound three feet beneath the ground. It would be a little hotter than they were accustomed to, granted – but as the old soldier’s saying went, nobody ever died of discomfort. Let the foul creatures roam the plain above until darkness fell, and then there would be a reckoning. The first of many…

“You. Corporal Solomon.”

“Me, sir?” asked the only Shadow whose sleeve bore stripes, turning away from the entryway to face him.

“Yes, sir. You, sir.” Arthur was almost smiling now, his famously-dry sense of humor starting to return. “I presume that you are in charge here?”

Solomon nodded vigorously. “I am, sir. Least, there ain’t nobody more senior here. Don’t know where any of the Sarn’ts are, sir, or CSM Nichols, sir.”

“They shall have to look out for themselves.” Wellesley’s manner became suddenly grave once more. “Here are your orders, Corporal. I want you to detail three of these four private soldiers to assist the burial party in securing the officers” – with a nod of his head, he indicated the Shadows who were digging for all that they were worth, just behind him – “while you and one another continue to secure the door.

“Once the last officer is in the ground – and make no mistake about it, the last officer to be buried shall be me, Corporal – you shall then lead all fifteen of you to locate the most senior officer still remaining on the battlefield; doubtless it shall be a Captain, perhaps even a Lieutenant, but it matters not either way.”

Arthur removed a small bundle of paper from the inner pocket of his jacket, along with a small nub of a pencil. The paper had been folded four or five times until it was compressed into suitably tiny squares. It seemed to have survived immersion rather well, though it was a little damp and soggy in places.

“Turn around.” Obediently, Corporal Solomon did so, and Arthur used the man’s broad back as a makeshift writing desk, spreading the paper out between his shoulder blades and scribbling rapidly across one of the unfolded sheets.

To whom it may concern,