The
Peshawar
Lancers

S. M. STIRLING

In Memoriam:

To Poul Anderson

1926-2001

Acknowledgments

To Melinda, Yvonne, Walter, George, Daniel, the two Terrys, Sandra and Trent, of Critical Mass.

To Harry Turtledove, for the gift of Hobson-Jobson, which was an immense help; and to Eric Flint, for recommending the Cultural Atlas of India.

To Mark Anthony, best chiropractor in the West.

For inspiration, I'd also like to thank Kipling, Mundy, Lamb, Merritt, Howard, Sabatini, Masters, Fraser, Burroughs, Wren, Kline, and all the others, the grand storytellers of adventure and romance.

Quotations from
The Golden Road
and
Hassan,
by James Elroy Flecker.

"What shall we tell you?

Tales, marvelous tales

Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest

Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales

And winds and shadows fall towards the West. . ."

Content

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Epilogue

Appendixes

Chapter One

Captain Athelstane King rinsed out his mouth with a swig from the goatskin water bag slung at his saddlebow. Even in October this shadeless, low-lying part of the Northwest Frontier Province was hot; and the dust was everywhere, enough to grit audibly between his back teeth. When he spat, the saliva was as khaki-colored as his uniform or the cloth of his turban. It made a brief dark mark on the white crushed stone of the military highway that snaked down from the Khyber Pass to Peshawar.

Looks the way I feel, he thought. Dirty, tired, pounded flat. Necessary work—nobody who'd seen a village overrun by hill-tribe raiders could doubt that—but not much glory in it.

Right now the Grand Trunk Road was thronged with the returning men and beasts of the Charasia Field Force, following the path trodden by generations of fighting men—for most of them, by their own fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Feet and hooves and steel-shod wheels made a grumbling thunder under the pillar of dust that marked their passage; camels gave their burbling cries; occasionally an elephant pulling a heavy artillery piece squealed as it scented water ahead with its trunk lifted out of the murk.

Horse-drawn cannon went past with a dull gunmetal gleam, rocket launchers like bundles of iron tubes on wheels, and machine guns on the backs of pack mules. There were even a few self-propelled armored cars. Two of them were not self-propelled any longer, and were being pulled back to the workshops by elephants. King's smile held a trace of malice. The newfangled Stirling-cycle gas engines were marvelous for airships, or the motorcars that were rich men's toys on good roads. In the field, the day of the horse-soldiers wasn't over quite yet.

Staff officers with red collar tabs galloped about, keeping order in the endless steel-tipped snake that wound down from the bitter sunbaked ridges of the Border. The right margin of the road was reserved for mounted troops, and there the Peshawar Lancers moved up in a jingle of harness and flutter of pennants and rumbling, crunching clatter of iron-shod hooves on gravel. They trotted past the endless columns of marching infantry and the wheatfield ripple of the Met-ford rifles sloped over their shoulders.

King ran a critical eye over them as they passed; the jawans had shaped up well in the hills . . . for infantry, of course. There were Sikhs with steel chakrams slung on their turbans, Baluchis with long, oiled black hair spilling from under theirs, and Gurkhas in forest green with their kukris bouncing at their rumps and little pillbox hats at a jaunty angle above their flat, brown Mongol faces. There was a regiment of the Darjeeling Rifles—young men of the sahib-log doing the compulsory service required of all the martial castes—and even a slouch-hatted battalion of Australians.

King frowned slightly at the sight. They were devils in action, but an even worse headache to the high command back in camp. And their ideas of discipline were as eccentric as their dialect of English, which they had the damned cheek to claim was the pure tongue of the Old Empire.

One of their officers answered Colonel Claiborne by saying he didn't understand Hindi! Damned cheek indeed.

His own men were in good spirits as they rode homeward; they were a mixed lot—half Sikhs and Punjabi Hindus of the Jat-cultivator caste, the rest Marathas and Rajputs for the most part. Swarthy, bearded faces grinned beneath the dust and sweat, swapping bloodthirsty boasts and foul jokes, or just glad to be alive and whole. Each carried a ten-foot lance with the butt socketed in the ring on his right stirrup iron; their cotton drill kurta-tunics and loose pjamy-trousers were stained with hard service, but the carbine before each man's right knee was clean and the curved tulwars at their belts oiled and sharp. Pennants snapped jauntily beneath the steel points that rose and fell in bristling waves above.

They'd had a few sharp skirmishes, and the usual jezailachi-sniper-behind-every-rock harassment you could expect on the frontier, but the plunder had been good, and they were returning victorious.

"Quite a sight," King murmured to the soldier riding at his side. "Fifteen thousand, horse and foot and guns—enough to give even the Masuds and Afridis a taste for peace, not to mention the Emir in Kabul. Or so they all assured us, at least, when they signed the treaty."

With a bayonet at their backs and a boot up the bum, he added to himself.

The man beside him spat into the roadside dust in turn; he was a little younger than his officer's twenty-five years, broad-shouldered, with a full black beard and sweeping buffalo-horn mustachios, and snapping dark eyes above a curved beak of nose. King had spoken in English, and Narayan Singh understood it perfectly—had he not followed the young sahib from infancy as playmate, sparring partner, soldier-servant, shield-on-shoulder, and right-hand man? Had not his father been the like to the sahib's father before him? But when he replied, it was in Army Hindi, as was fitting.

"The cobra spits, huzoor, and the Pathan speaks—who will grow rich on the difference?" he grunted. "The tribes will stay quiet until they forget men dead and captives led away and villages burning. Then some fakir of their faith will send them mad with lies about their stupid Allah, and they will remember the fat cattle and silver and women of the lowlands. On that day we shall see the hillman lashkars come yelling down the Khyber once more."

King grinned and slung the water bottle back; Narayan Singh was undoubtedly right. The lashkars—tribal war bands—would come again; raid, banditry and blood feud were the Afghan idea of being sociable, having fun with your neighbors and kin, like a polo match or tea party among the sahib-log. A razziah into the Imperial territories was more dangerous than stealing from each other, but also much more profitable.

"It could be worse; we could be in the Khyber Rifles. Comfort yourself with that, bhai," he said. "We won't be stationed in some Border fort, sleeping with our rifles chained to our wrists."

Which was the only way you could be sure, when a hillman came ghosting over the wall looking for a weapon better than the flintlock jezails their own craftsmen could make. A Pathan of the free highlander tribes could steal a man's shadow, or rustle a horse from a locked room.

Another rider came trotting down the line toward him, also in the uniform of an officer in the Lancers, but with gray streaks in his brown beard and the jeweled clasp of a colonel at the front of his turban. The regimental rissaldar-major followed him, with a file of troopers behind.

King saluted, trying not to wince at the pull of the healing wound in his right arm. "Sir!" he said crisply.

Colonel Claiborne returned the gesture and frowned, an expression that made the old dusty white tulwar scar on his cheek draw up one corner of his mouth. "Dammit, you insolent young pup, I said you weren't fit for duty yet!"

"Sir, the doctor said—"

"Dammit, I'll have you know that I know a damned sight more about wounds than some yoni-doctor from the Territorial Reserve, and I say you're unfit for duty."

King forced himself not to smile; the regiment's current medico was from the reserve and was a gynecologist in civilian life. "I just wanted to see my squadron settled in before I took leave, sir."

Claiborne let approval show through his official anger. That was the answer that a good officer would give. "I assure you," he said dryly, "that the Peshawar Lancers—yea, verily even the second squadron of the Peshawar Lancers—will survive without your services until you return from convalescent leave. Dammit, you are dismissed, Captain."

Then the colonel smiled. "I'd hate to have to explain to your lady mother why you'd lost your sword arm, lad. Go on, and go soak away some of the frontier at the Club. You'll be spending the Diwali festival at home, or I'll know the reason why, dammit if I don't."

King saluted again. "Since you put it as a direct order, sir."

Then he touched the rein to the neck of his charger and fell out of the column. The rissaldar—senior native officer—of the second squadron barked an order; the unit reined in, wheeled right, and rode three paces onto the verge before drawing to a halt like a single great multiheaded beast. Only the tips of the lances moved, quivering and swaying slightly, catching the sun in a glittering ripple as a horse shifted its weight or tossed its head.

The maneuver went with a precision that was smooth rather than stiff, the subtle trademark of men whose trade was war. King rose in the stirrups to address his command:

"Shabash, sowar! Sat-sree akal!" he said, dropping effortlessly into Army Hindi, one of his birth-tongues, Imperial English being another, of course. Honor to you, riders! Well struck! "Go to your homes and women, and we shall meet again when the swords are unsheathed; the colonel-sahib has ordered me on leave."

The rissaldar raised his sword hand: "A cheer for Captain King ba-hadurl A cheer for the Afghan kush!"

King grinned as he waved his hand and cantered off. It was capital, to be called champion and killer-of-Afghans. A hand smoothed dust-stained mustachios. Even if it was deserved . . .

* * * *

The cave where Yasmini slept was cold; she was curled into a ball under the piled sheepskins, but it was not the damp chill of this crevice in the Hindu Kush that made her shiver. It was the words and sights that ran through her sleeping brain. She knew them all too well, these visions; they were nothing like true dreams.

Instead, they were simply true, though they might be of places and deeds far away, of things that might have been, of things that might yet come to be.

This time it was of the past —some sense she could not have named told her it was the single past that could lead to this cave in this night. . . .

A cold wind from the west flogged snow through the streets of London, piling it in man-high drifts against the sooty brick at street corners and filling the cuts made by a thousand shovels near as fast as they could be cleared. Great kettles of soup steamed over coal fires in sheltered spots, and children too young to do other work shuttled back and forth with pannikins of the hot broth. Under the wailing of the fanged wind they could hear the dull crump . . . crump where parties from the Royal Engineers tried desperately to blast a way for supply ships through the thickening ice on the Thames. The men and women who toiled to keep the streets cleared were bundled in multiple sets of clothes, greatcoats, mufflers, and improvised garments made from blankets, curtains, and any other cloth that came to hand. More pulled beside skeletal horses to drag sleds of fuel and food, or boxed cargo down to the docks.

When the horses died, they went butchered into the stewpots; hideous rumors spread about human bodies disappearing from the piles where they were stacked. . . .

The immaterial viewpoint that was her suspended consciousness swooped like a bird through the wall of a building guarded by soldiers in fur caps and greatcoats, a building where messengers came and went incessantly. In a chamber within she saw a man with long dark curls and a tuft of chin-beard dyed to a black the deep lines of age on his face belied, dressed in a sober elegance of velvet and broadcloth cut in an antique style. He turned from the window, shivering despite his thick overcoat and the blazing fire in the grate.

The face was one Yasmini recognized, long and full-lipped, with a beak of a nose and great dark eyes; a Jewish face, clever and quick and intensely human. And she could feel the being of him, not just the appearance . . .

Benjamin Disraeli rubbed his hands together, putting on an appearance of briskness. Even Number 10 Downing Street was cold this October of 1878; sometimes the prime minister wondered if warmth was anything more than a fading dream, if blue sky and green leaves would ever come again.

"I fear must beg your pardon, gentlemen," he said to the half dozen men who awaited him around the table of the White Room.

She understood the speech somehow, even though it was the pure English of six generations past, not the hybrid tongue of the second century after the Fall. It was as if her mind rode with his, a deep well full of memory and thought, where concepts and ideas rose with a darting quickness, like trout in a mountain stream,

A wave of his hand indicated the meager tray of tea and scones. "You will appreciate, however . . ."

He had never taken more than a dilettante's interest in the sciences, but it was clear that an awesome amount of talent was involved in this delegation. Stokes, the secretary of the Royal Society; Sir William Thomson down from Glasgow, despite the state the railways were in; Tait likewise from Edinburgh; Maxwell from Cambridge—

It was the Glaswegian who spoke: "We would no ha' troubled ye, my lord, but for the implications of our calculations concerning the impacts the globe has suffered. Even now, we're no sure if 'twere a single body that broke up as it struck the atmosphere or a spray, perhaps of comets . . . consultations took so long because travel is so slow, and telegraphs no better."

In his youth, Disraeli had been something of a dandy. There was a hint of that in the way he smoothed his lapels now. "I am sure your speculations are very interesting, gentlemen—"

Inwardly, he fumed. The world has suffered the greatest disaster since Noah's Flood; God alone knows how we will survive until the spring; and yet every Tom, and Dick and Harry sees fit to demand some of my time—when that commodity is as scarce as coal.

Perhaps those who crowded into every church and chapel and synagogue in London—probably in the whole world, with mosques and temples thrown in—were wiser. They were helping keep each other warm, and at least weren't distracting him.

The annoyance was a welcome relief from the images that kept creeping back into the corners of his mind, images born of the papers that crossed his desk. Fire rising in pillars from where the hammer of the skies had fallen all across Europe, so high that the tops flattened against the upper edge of the atmosphere itself. Walls of water striking the Atlantic coast of Ireland and scouring far inland, wreckage all along the western shores of England, where the other island didn't shelter it; far worse in most of maritime Europe. Reports of unbelievably worse damage on the American side of the Atlantic. Chaos and panic spreading like a malignant tide from the Channel deep into Russia as the governments shattered under the strain.

Only the supernal cold had kept plague at bay, when the corpses of the unburied dead lay by the millions across the ruined lands.

"Perhaps we could discuss the scientific implications of the Fall at some time when events are less pressing—when the weather has improved, for example."

The professor exchanged a glance with his colleagues, then cleared his throat and spoke with desperate earnestness: "But my lord, that is precisely what we must tell you. The water vapor and dust in the upper atmosphere—there will be no improvement in the weather. Not for at least one year. Possibly ..." Thomson's face sagged. "Possibly as many as three or four. Snow and cold will continue all through what should be the summer."

Disraeli stared at the scientist for a long moment. Then he slumped forward, and the world turned gray at the edges. Vaguely he could feel hands helping him into his seat, and the sharp peat-flavored taste of whiskey from the scientist's silver flask.

Moments ago he had been consumed with worry^7 about the hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring in from the flooded, ruined coasts of Wales, Devon, and Cornwall. With finding ships to bring in Australian corn. Now . . .

He came back to himself—somewhat. A man did not rise from humble beginnings to steer the British Empire without learning self-mastery. Doubly so, if he were a Jew. He hadn't asked for this burden. All that I desired was to dish that psalm-singing hypocrite Gladstone, he thought wryly. Now Gladstone was dead in the sodden, frozen ruins of Liverpool, and the burden is mine, nonetheless.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, gentlemen, but as far as I can see you have just passed sentence of death on ninety-nine in every hundred of the human race. If any survive, it will be as starving cannibals."

One of the scientists dropped his gray-bearded face into his hands. "It is not we who have passed judgment. God has condemned the human race. My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?"

"Nay, it's no quite so bad as that, sir," Thomson said quickly. His voice was steady, although the burr of his native dialect had grown stronger. "Forebye the weather will turn strange over all the world; yet still the effects will be strongest in the northern latitudes, and even there worst around the North Atlantic Basin—the Gulf Stream may be gone the while, d'ye ken ... In Australia they might hardly notice it, save that the next few years will be a trifle more cool and damp."

"But what of England, Sir William? What of her millions?"

The scientists looked at him. With a chill twist deep in his stomach, he realized that they were waiting for him to speak. . . .

Yasmini screamed and thrashed against the blankets. A hard hand cuffed her across the ear, and she shuddered awake. A flickering torch cast shadows across the rough stone of the cavern wall above her, and glittered in the eyes of the man who held it. Count Ignatieff was dressed in the rough sheepskin jacket, baggy pants, and high boots of an ordinary Cossack; but nobody who saw those eyes could ever mistake him for an ordinary man. It was more than the cold boyar arrogance, or even the fact that one eye was blue and the other brown. She suspected that he thought of himself as a tiger, but it was a cobra's gaze that looked down at her.

"Veno vat, Excellency," she said. "It was a dream—"

"A true dream, bitch?"

"Yes, Excellency. But not a vision of any use; pajalsta, Excellency. One from the past. It is the vision of Disraeli, once again. Only Disraeli, Excellency."

He struck her again, but for all the stinging pain in her cheek it was merely perfunctory, if you knew the huge strength that lurked behind the nobleman's sword-callused palm as she did.

"For that you should not disturb my sleep," Ignatieff said.

His left hand toyed with an earring in the shape of a peacock's tail; it was the sigil of initiation in the cult of Malik Nous—or Tchernobog as some called Him, the demiurge worshiped throughout the dominions of the Czar in Samarkand as the true Lord of This World.

"We must be in Kashmir within two weeks. Dream us a way past the Imperial patrols." Ignatieff kicked her in the stomach. "Why do you keep seeing that damned old Jew, anyway?" he demanded.

"I do not know, Excellency—it is my very great fault, Excellency," she gasped, trying to draw the thin cold air of the heights back into her lungs. "I most humbly apologize."

But Yasmini did know, although there was nothing of conscious control in her dreams. It was the eyes that drew her—those great brown eyes, eyes that held all the pain of a broken world.

* * * *

Peaceful, Athelstane King thought, as he and his orderly rode eastward at a steady mile-eating canter-and-walk pace; Narayan Singh had two spare horses behind him on a leading rein. With those, and swinging northeast around the military convoys that filled the Grand Trunk Road just now, they made good speed.

Peaceful compared to the tribal country, at least, if not by the standards of home.

Near Peshawar, the dry rocky hills of the Khyber gave way to an alluvial plain, intensely green and laced with irrigation canals full of olive-colored, silt-heavy water from the Kabul River. Plane trees lined the road, arching over the murmuring channels on either side to give a grateful shade; the lowlands were still warm as October faded. This close to a major city and frontier base the roads were excellent, even on the country lanes away from the main highway, and it was a pleasant enough ride on a warm fall afternoon.

Tile-roofed, fortified manor houses of plastered stone stood white amid the blossoms and lawns of their gardens, each with a watchtower at a corner and a hamlet of earth-colored, flat-roofed cottager-tenant houses not too far distant; this area had been gazetted for settlement more than a century ago, right after the Second Mutiny. An occasional substantial yeoman-tenant farm or small factory with its brick chimney kept the scene from monotony. Around the habitations lay the fields that fed them and the city beyond; poplin green of sugarcane, grass green of maize, jade-hued pasture, the yellow of reaped wheat stubble, late-season orchards of apricot and pomegranate, shaggy and tattered at the same time. Cut alfalfa hay scented the air with an overwhelming sweetness, and the neat brown furrows of plowed fields promised new growth next year.

People were about; mostly ryots, peasant cottagers, the men in dirty white cotton pants and tunics, women in much the same but with longer tunic-skirts and head scarves instead of turbans, both with spades and hoes, bills and pitchforks over their shoulders. There were also oxcarts heaped with melons or fruit or baled fodder, moving slowly to a dying-pig squeal of axles; a shepherd with his crook and dogs and road-obstructing smelly flock making the horses toss their heads and shy; a brace of horse-copers from the Black Mountain with a string of remounts for sale.

King took a close look at faces and gear as they went by, giving him the salaam and smiling, looking rather like hairy vultures with teeth. Hassanazais or Akazais, he decided.

Those were Pathan-Afghan frontier tribes in the debatable lands; beyond the settled, administered zone, but not beyond the Imperial frontier . . . not quite. In theory both were at peace, autonomous but tributary to the Sirkar, the government of the Raj. No doubt the horse-copers had kitubs—official papers—with the appropriate stamps, seals, good-conduct badges, and letters of recommendation from the Political Officers attached to their clans, all as right and tight as be-damned.

King and Narayan Singh both kept wary eyes moving until the pair jogged out of sight and for a half hour afterward, lest the officially approved traders unofficially decide on impulse to shoot the Sirkar's men in the back and lift their horses and weapons. To enliven the tedium of spying for the Emir, or half the bandit chiefs on the Border, or both and several others besides; and a modern magazine rifle was worth more than any dozen horses, to the wild tribes.

A few minutes later, a stout gray-bearded zamindar trotted by on a dappled hunter. A pair of sandy-haired Kalasha mercenaries from up in the hills above Chitral were riding at the landowner's tail with carbines in the crook of their arms, which was wise; he wore pistol and saber himself, which was also prudent. You didn't go unguarded or unarmed this close to the Border, with loose-wallahs and cattle-lifters and jangli-admis about. Nor were the local Pathans much tamer than their wild kin, even if they'd learned better than to show it over the last century.

"Good evening, Captain!" the squire called in a cheery voice, lifting his riding crop to his turban in salute. "Capital work you lads have been doing, eh, what?"

Athelstane answered in kind; in fact the Army slang for punitive expeditions of the type he'd just finished was butcher and bolt, and de-pressingly accurate.

Not quite "what the newspaper correspondents dwell an, though, he thought.

His smile was broader for the next passerby, a woman in a pony-trap with a tasseled sunshade. She was likely a wealthy man's wife, from the opulence of rings on fingers and toes and the emerald stud through one nostril, and the jeweled collar and leash on the pet monkey that climbed and chattered beside her. Her sari was of black silk shot through with silver, a fold of it over her yellow hair and the other folds showing full curves.

"Ma'rm," he said as they passed, bowing his neck and touching one finger to his brow in polite salute.

Sighing, he ignored the pouting invitation of a full lower lip and the flirting blue-eyed glance sent the tall Lancer officer's way from behind her ostrich-feather fan.

Last thing you need now is a bloody duel with a husband, he told himself sternly- And nothing could be private; there was a maid in the cart with her, and half a dozen armed retainers following behind. Dogras, he thought, looking at their blue turbans and green-dyed beards. They bristled with spears and matchlocks and knives, one resplendent in back-and-breast armor and lobster-tail helmet.

Think about the first whiskey-peg at the club instead. Think about Hasamurtis delectable rump.

"Now I know thou'rt wounded in truth, huzoor," Narayan Singh said dryly from his side, as they trotted on toward the outskirts of Peshawar town.

King cocked an eye at his companion: Huzoor meant sir, but there were ways and ways of saying it.

"What precisely did that mean, Daffadar Singh?" he asked.

Narayan Singh snorted. A daffadar was a noncommissioned man, but there was no excess of deference in his voice.

"When a pretty woman passes by smiling and making eyes, sahib, and we ride on, I know you are wounded indeed. Wounded and near death!"

Countryside gave way to villa-fringed outskirts and the broad straight streets of the Civil Lines—the military cantonment was on the south side of town. The streets were filled with wagons and light horse carts, pedicabs, cyclists—Peshawar had almost as many bicycle manufacturies as Ludhiana—and an occasional silent motorcar. The country scents of growth and manure and water gave way to a smell of humanity and coal smoke from the factories spreading south and east. Their horses breasted through the crowds of Peshawar Old Town itself, the narrow twisted streets near the Kissa Khwani Bazaar, the Street of the Storytellers, with the old Sikh-built fort of Bala Hissar frowning down from its hill.

The lanes were overhung by balconies shielded with carved wooden purdah screens, and below, the buildings were full of little chaikanas where patrons sat on cushions drinking tea laced with cardamom and lemon and smoking their hookahs. The streets were loud with banyan merchants selling dried fruit, rugs, carpets, hairy potsheen coats made from whole sheepskins, karakul lambskin caps, and Chitrali cloaks from little open-front shops; full of the smell of packed humanity, sharp pungent spices, sweat-soaked wool, horses. And of veiled women, an icily superior ICS bureaucrat waving a fly-whisk in a rickshaw drawn by a near-naked coolie, a midshipman in a blue jacket visiting his family on leave, bicyclists frantically ringing their handlebar bells, sellers of iced sherbets crying their wares . . .

"Good to be back to civilization," King said with a sigh.

"Han, sahib," Narayan Singh said, as they drew rein before the wrought-iron gate of the Peshawar Club. "Good to sleep where we need not keep one eye open for knives in the dark!"

King laughed and nodded, as grooms ran to take their horses.

Chapter Two

Miss Cassandra Mary Effingham King—Ph.D., F.R.S.—tilted her glasses down her long straight nose and looked over them. That gave her a view out the slanting windows that ran along the airship's side galleries, and at the ground a thousand feet below, distracting her from the knot of anxiety in her stomach.

It isn't the height that's bothersome. She had been born in Kashmir and had been an alpinist from her early teens, yet another of her eccentricities. Clinging to a cliff with a sheer drop beneath didn't worry her.

What disturbed her about flying was the knowledge that she was hanging under millions of cubic feet of hydrogen gas.

Illogical, she scolded herself, mentally reciting statistics. Air travel is safe. Safer than a railroad journey. Safer than a steamship. Considerably safer than a motorcar. Much safer than rock-climbing, for Durga's sake!

Logic seemed to have little to do with it. It never did, which was why she always took trains when she could. No matter how much she lectured herself, her stomach muscles still seemed to feel that they must strain to hold the airship up. The more so, given her responsibility for the precious cargo resting under guard in the baggage hold. Not just the cost of it—a lakh of rupees, on top of the crore for the project as a whole—but the endless niggling effort to make something on the very edge of her people's abilities.

She leaned closer to the railing and looked up at the solid-seeming bulk above her, thrown in shadow with the westering sun on the other side of the craft. The Diana was the newly launched pride of British Imperial Airways, an orca shape eight hundred fifty feet long sheathed in silver-gray doped cotton, more than two hundred feet around at the broadest point, a third of the way between blunt nose and cruciform tailfins.

Cassandra had always been given to analysis under stress; to a scientist, the firmness of numbers was soothing. Her trained memory reeled off details automatically; truss rings, laminated bamboo geodesic skin framework, radial steel wire bracing, gasbags like giant cylinders with a central hollow to pass the triangular keel; strengths, stresses, densities, useful lift.

One of the eight Stirling-cycle engines that drove the Diana was in a pod not far above the level of the gallery, humming away—more data, gas burners, heat exchanger and regenerator, triaxially opposed pistons and enclosed crankshaft in an oil bath, gases as working fluids, power-to-weight ratios. An elegant, quiet machine, with only the whirring of the four-bladed teak-laminate propellers to break the rushing wind, and beneath it a faint mechanical hum.

She took a long breath, remembered what she'd learned from yogis she'd met, made herself see. Control the breath. Slow and steady, steadying the heartbeat. Let perception flow through the senses without interruption.

They had left the rich bottomlands of the Ganges plain behind by noon. Below lay the dry sandstone ridges of the Shiwalak range, the southernmost ripple of the Himalayas, occupied by the client kingdoms of Basholi and Kangra. The Diana's shadow moved over them, across rolling cactus-speckled hills interrupted here and there by abrupt escarpments where the folded bones of the earth reared suddenly. Human habitations were the dried-blood color of the stone, huddled hamlets and tiny fields scratched from a bitter earth, with here and there the crude belligerence of a chieftain's fortlet.

Dogras dwelt here, Sikh and Hindu, men poor and proud and fierce—though their aristocrats sat in the House of Lords in Delhi, coequal with nobles whose lineage ran back through the centuries of lost Britain. The land's other export was fighting men, whose wages bought what their meager farms could not grow.

Feudal relics, she thought with a mental sniff; she was firmly on the Liberal wing of the Whig party. Backward.

The yogic technique worked, bringing her out of her funk. She became aware of the slight, pleasant chill of the air, so welcome after Delhi's heat and dust and endless crowds—four million people in one city! Nearly as many as dead London, at the height of the Old Empire. None of the other great cities of the Raj—Bombay, Calcutta, Cape Town, Singapore, Melbourne—was even half that size. No city whatsoever outside the Empire was a third as large, save perhaps Peking. It was a wonder anyone could draw breath in the capital, or think two coherent thoughts without interruption.

The Diana was working its way north into a head wind, rising gradually toward the high passes, and a slight subliminal quiver ran through its fabric. The air held a scent of glue and fresh wood from the laminations of the structure, the doping compound on the fabric, the smell of hot metal from the engines.

She sighed and pushed the glasses back up to reading position. Papers lay scattered across the rosewood-topped wicker table before her. She picked one up:

. . . impact of a small comet—600 yd. diameter icy body striking the Earth's surface at the velocity . . . mass M = 4x10 to the ninth pounds . . . kinetic energy E = 1.2 GT . . .

No, Vm too distracted to do two plus two, much less equations. The drawings of the Observatory project were as familiar as her own face in the mirror, even though construction wasn't her specialty. It would be more efficient to have specialists to handle each aspect of it, but even the Empire's scientific establishment wasn't quite that large yet. Everyone had to turn a hand to the needful; and besides, generalism was traditional.

Vm not going to get any serious work done today, she decided, and tapped the sheets back into their folders, and the folders back into the black leather carrying case. Nor have any worthwhile conversation to pass the time; or even a mild flirtation.

At the predinner hour the airship's starboard lounge held a third of those aboard, twoscore sitting or strolling or leaning on the rail to watch the landscape go by. She sighed inaudibly, looking at her fellow passengers. A good many were affluent older couples playing tourist on a trip to the Garden of the Empire; air travel was beyond the reach of all but the very well-to-do. The younger set included officials, men of business, military officers, MPs and their families returning now that Parliament was in recess. One handsome young Rajput looked like a maharaja's son from the rubies and emeralds on the hilt of his saber, and might be a student or a pilgrim or both. More than a few were scholars like herself, heading for Oxford; from all over India, and the Viceroyalties of Australia and the Cape, even a scattering from the farther colonies like Britain or North America.

Most were men, and she flattered herself that she was reasonably pleasant to the eye. Tall certainly, five-foot-eight. A trifle athletic, but shapely with it, eyes pale gray in a regular straight-nosed, bow-lipped face. Quite satisfactory, especially in the outfit she was wearing, the height of daring Delhi fashion and calculated to set off her long-limbed build. The women's-style shaltvar qamiz had a black silk tunic embroidered with gold rosettes along the edges of its knee-length skirts, gold buckled belt, billowing sequined pantaloons, and tooled kidskin shoes with upturned toes; a transparent shawl was fastened with emerald-headed gold pins to her piled chestnut hair, and fell past it to her waist.

Plenty of men here, and every one of them convinced Tm a bluestocking freak of nature, a man-hating Sapphist, or both, and terrified of me. Another sigh; the freak of nature was debatable, but a dismally unexciting experiment had convinced her she wasn't a Sapphist. The man-hating I might manage, if this nonsense continues. Her own close colleagues were mostly more accepting; the problem was that they were also mostly decades older, married, or both. Usually both.

A white-jacketed steward came through, tapping at a xylophone. "Sahibs, memsahibs, dinner. Dinner is served."

"At last," she murmured sarcastically, and finished the glass of white wine that sat before her.

* * * *

Count Vladimir Obromovich Ignatieff wore a patch over one eye—the blue one. Here in the Imperial territories he was passing as a trader in raw lapis from the Wakan highlands, come to sell to Oxford's numerous jewelers, with papers that included a meticulously forged border-crossing stamp and customs payment. The Wakan Tadjiks were fair enough that his Slavic complexion—much weathered by the Asian sun—was unremarkable. Blue eyes were uncommon but not outlandishly rare there, too—some said it was a legacy of Alexander's Macedonians passing through.

But the combination of light and dark would be too likely to attract attention. The patch would not; one-eyed men were many.

The persona was one that had served him a score of times and more among the teeming millions of the Raj; the Empire's sheer size could be a boon to its enemies. The loose trousers, hairy sheepskin jacket, dirty pugaree-turban, and truculent walk with one hand on his knife hilt were similarly nondescript.

As with any mission beyond the Czar's domains, before he left a priest had given him dispensation to remove his sigil of initiation at need and bear the defilement of eating with Deniers. Okhrana secret-police funds covered the necessary gold and gifts and sacrifices, and the rites of purification always made a pleasant homecoming. Long training altered his stance, the way he held his shoulders, the movements of his hands, and the manner of clearing his throat... so many things that it was easy not to spit when he saw a fain of the Traitor Christ. Or even not to lash out when some underling jostled him.

This was his first time in Oxford—even the natives did not call it Srinagar anymore—and he had to admit that it was a pleasant-looking town, worthy of its setting in the mile-high valley, surrounded by white-tipped peaks rearing into heaven. Less beastly hot than the cities of the lowland plains to the south, for a beginning; less crowded, too, and not so foul with the effluent of smokestacks and factories. The air was cool in early October; the smells were mostly of woodsmoke, humans, horses, often of the flowers that the Anglichani so loved.

Most of what he saw had been built in the last century or so. According to the Okhrana background files it had been very bad here in the dark years, three freezing-cold summers one after another. All who could walk had joined the desperate attempt to mass-migrate into the warmer low country, where some crops ripened even in the worst seasons right after the Fall; that had been part of what the histories of the Raj called the Second Mutiny, along with the Afghan invasion and general revolt. Here in Kashmir reprisals by the equally desperate sahib-log mostly finished what little the famine left.

Even the Anglichani were hard then, Ignatieff thought. But they refused the Truth, and so their souls grew infected once more.

Resettlement by the Raj had brought in a new population, but a few landmarks remained. Beside Nagin Lake reared the gleaming white marble dome and spires that had been the Hazratbal mosque and were now St. Kelvin's Cathedral; a rise bore the fortress of Hari Parbat, built four centuries ago by the Mughal Padishah Akbar; and atop the hill called the Throne of Solomon the great Shiva temple of Sankaracharya brooded over the valley as it had for a millennium and more, while the empires and rulers came and went.

Most of modern Oxford, however, was built in New Empire styles along a gridwork of streets, two- and three-story houses of reddish stone with carved wooden balconies and steep-pitched tile roofs. Crisp yellow leaves fell from the trees that arched overhead, to scritch under his boots on the brick sidewalk, and stone troughs full of nasturtiums separated the walkway from the street like a barrier of cool fire. Folk in the streets lacked some of the raucous intensity he remembered from other Imperial cities, street vendors and beggars were few, and beyond the end of the avenue he could see a park that gave onto the blue waters of Dal Lake and floating houseboats.

He turned past a Christian church, past a shrine with a statue of Shiva dancing creation and destruction, and into an eating house thick with cooking smells and tobacco smoke. It had amused him to set the meeting here, where wine and meat were served—the men he awaited were fiercely orthodox high-caste Hindus, Brahmins who would feel defiled even to see another touch the forbidden. His sense of humor stopped short of using a place that the sahib-log were likely to frequent. This catered to craftsmen, shopkeepers, upper servants; mostly Christians, and English was the commonest tongue you heard. He ordered barra kebabs on saffron rice—saffron was a cash crop here, less of a luxury than in most places, and Kashmiri rice was famous—and a squat flask of indifferent local red wine.

The two who came to join him were slight, fine-boned brown men, clean-shaven, dressed in fawn jackets and dhotis and sandals, and little boat-shaped caps on close-cut black hair; they hid their distaste for their surroundings well, even when he waved at his plate and glass:

"Plenty for you, brothers," he said, in coarse lower-caste Hindi with a strong Tadjik-Persian accent. "Bahut acha! Bahut achal Very good! Very good!"

He smacked his lips over a mouthful of the garlic-laden grilled meat and rolled rice into a ball with his fingers, offering it to the others.

"No—no—" The older of the two Bengali Brahmins swallowed and visibly restrained himself from leaning backward. "Dhanyavad, many thanks, but it is against our religion."

"Against my religion, too!" Ignatieff said, swilling wine noisily. Fortunately, pretending to be a Muslim didn't require that you pretend to be a pious Muslim. "But Allah will forgive me, if I strike a blow in the Holy War."

The younger man whispered to his companion in Bengali: "How can we trust this cow-murdering wine-bibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile."

The older man nicked a look at Ignatieff's face to make sure he hadn't understood—Bengali and Hindi were closely related—and the Okhrana agent beamed uncomprehending friendship.

He spoke both languages perfectly, of course.

"Peace," the older Bengali said. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Damascus has suffered from the aggressions of the sahib-log, too."

He repeated the last part in Hindi, and Ignatieff nodded sagely. Perfectly true; a friend until the time of the knives, he thought. In the last generation or two the Angrezi Raj had taken Zanzibar from the Caliph's Omani vassal-sultans, sunk and burned Arab slave-dhows in the Red Sea, and it was extending naval patrols into the Red and Arabian Seas. Against pirates and slavers, Delhi claimed . . . but where the Empire's foot trod, there it stayed.

"Here," he said, shoving a scrap of paper and a large brass key across the table under the cover of a napkin. "As we agreed; here is the address of the godown with the weapons—and the gold."

Coined in those beautifully calligraphic dinars minted in Baghdad. The Indians took both and left. Ignatieff smiled broadly and waved for a dish of the peach ice cream that was also a Kashmiri specialty.

We can discuss the details when we meet again in Hell, he thought. Which they would—everyone left in the Fallen world would, sooner or later—but he wouldn't be surprised to arrive there.

* * * *

I might as well get something out of this damned chivalry nonsense, Cassandra King thought.

A gentleman gave place to an unaccompanied gentlewoman as a matter of course. Normally it annoyed her no end; a pedestal was a very bad starting place in the race of life. Today she took ruthless advantage, cutting in near the head of the line filing out of the lounge into the airship's dining room. That let her pick a single table with a window; better honest silence than strained chitchat and glances.

The decor of the dining section was light and airy in the modern style—teak and ebony tiles on the floor, sandalwood chairs carved into fanciful lacework and cushioned in white cotton, chiseled brass tables with inlay and enamel, murals of colorful jungle birds on the exterior walls between windows. It soothed her slightly as she considered the menu. The Diana's kitchen had a rather Central Provinces bent, which was a pleasant change from the Mughal cuisine of Delhi: She ordered baffla wheat cakes rich with ghee and ate them with pungent lentil dal soup and sweet laddoos dumplings, followed by spicy rogan josh, shami-kebab, and sheermal bread. Waiters brought bowls of rosewater to clean the hands, and crisp fluffy towels to dry them.

Squares of iced mango and watermelon on skewers and Assamese tea came after the main courses. She nibbled, sipped, and wondered the while who had had the bad taste and sheer gall to ruin the dining room's effect by picking a reproduction of Lord Leighton's Martyrdom of St. Disraeli as the mural for the interior wall.

She'd seen the original at her coming-out, when she was Presented at court in Delhi twelve years ago; that one was twenty feet high and done in gold, coral, ivory, faience, and semiprecious stones. It was the backdrop to the Lion Throne, after all, staring each generation of young gentlewomen in the face as they were led up and made their curtsey to the King-Emperor and Queen-Empress.

This was an excellent rendering in oils, on the canvas partitions that made up the interior structure of the Diana. Leighton had taken his inspiration from the Exodus Cantos of Kipling's epic Lament for the Lost Homeland; the burning dome of St. Paul's looming behind, "stark flame against a sleet-filled August sky," as the poet had put it and generations of schoolchildren had memorized ever since; the red-coated Foot Guards struggling with the snarling cannibal mob in the foreground and being butchered and devoured even as they fought; Disraeli himself standing alone, draped in a fur cloak as the ice fell about him, looking southward to where the last ship of the Exodus would wait in vain. The great Martyr, dying like Moses without setting foot in the new homeland which he'd prepared for his people.

Heroic. Inspiring. Great art, no doubt. But for a dining room} Whatever could they have been thinking of?

Her generation was less obsessed with the Fall and the Exodus than those before it, in any case. It was ancient history, though she remembered how shocking it had been to hear her grandmother talking of actually meeting Kipling when she was a young girl, a man born before the Fall.

There was a slight hissing sound as the airship's heating system came on, and a rumble as water ballast valved out from the tanks along the keel. Attendants stood by discreetly with oxygen cylinders and masks, in case some lowlander was overcome. They were rising above dense pine forests now, two-hundred-foot Himalayan firs below, then over naked rock above the tree line and the saddle of the Banihar Pass. Below, the railway looked like a child's toy, a puffing locomotive disappearing into the Jawahar Tunnel—she could remember the celebrations when that was finished, not long after her sixth birthday. Snow peaks shimmered ahead and all about, floating in infinite blue and trailing banners of glittering windborne frost as the great airship went sailing silently along the roof of the world.

Cassandra smiled as they crested the heights, and gasps broke out from others at the sight of the Vale of Kashmir below. Garden of the Empire indeed, she thought. And the province of her own birth.

It was supposed to be like the lost Homeland—although from what she'd read, she doubted that terraced vineyards and rice fields had been all that common in pre-Fall England. Certainly this was green and lovely enough in the glowing long-shadow light of sunset; thickly forested mountain slopes surrounding a mile-high patchwork quilt of plowed land, pasture, prosperous farmsteads, the regular lines of apple and peach orchards, almonds and apricots, roads lined with great poplars and chinars and oaks. Parkland and garden surrounded the country seats of landowners and the boarding schools that were almost as numerous—the climate was famous for healthfulness. Some of those schools bore names like Eton and Winchester, United Services and Cheltenham, and they drew children from all over the Empire.

Rexin was there, the King estate near Avantipur. Not really home anymore, she thought, with a trace of sadness, although she was always welcome on visits. Athelstane's, really. I’m an Oxford girl now. The eldest son inherited, and the siblings had to make their own way in the world, by marriage or career.

The city brought further murmurs from the other passengers; Cassandra ignored the ancient monuments, the famous racecourse, polo fields, botanic gardens, and Lord's cricket grounds, even the lakes and the Jehelum River where Cambridge came to row against Oxford and usually be soundly thrashed, which was a high point of the Empire's social year. Her eyes were on the mellow stone of the university's quadrangles, glimpsed among the trees and ivy. The ships of the Exodus had borne books and instruments and scholars, as well as weapons and machinery and hungry refugees crammed into every nook and cranny—more of St. Disraeli's foresight. Work had begun on the university in the fourth year after the Fall, and continued even during the terrible years when survival hung by a hair. The workaday city had grown up around it in the generations that followed.

Now there was a considerable airship port on the lakeside as well, with great arched sheds and another huge silvery shape curving up from the water even as she watched, off south to Delhi and Madras, perhaps even to Singapore and Perth. Sunlight remained on the mountain peaks, tingeing the snow with crimson, but night was falling on the lake and city below. Lights appeared and twinkled, the blue-white of the airship port's electric arcs, the softer yellow and yellow-white of lamp flame and gaslight in the streets and houses beyond.

The Goan steward with the xylophone came through again. "Prepare for landing, memsahibs and sahibs. Prepare for landing, please."

Part of Cassandra King's stomach unclenched. Fairly soon her feet would be on the ground, away from this flying bomb. Another part of her nerves thrummed yet more tautly. That meant she'd have to oversee the priceless cargo that was in her trust, as well.

* * * *

Yasmini lay still on the narrow bed, for the moment simply enjoying the sensation of space around her. Most people would have considered the little attic room of the Kashmiri inn to be strait quarters. But it was all hers; even the Master had to knock to gain entrance, for appearance sake. None watched or spoke or shouted; there was only the low murmur of sound from below, smells of curry and garlic from the kitchens, wheels and feet from the street outside. Compared to the pens at home, it was a palace. Space and quiet and . . .

Her mind shied away from freedom with an automatic reflex, as mindless as the flinch before a Master's upraised hand. The time lines where she failed to do that were—How are they worse than what I see? she thought suddenly.

True, they mostly ended in death. Often death by torture. But she was twenty-four years old; she had been Active for nearly ten years. Soon it would be her daughters the Master would want, not her visions.

Unbidden, a face from the dreams. An Anglichani face; a man, young—only a few years older than herself. Dark brown hair, brown eyes, a square jaw, and a thin scar along one cheek. The vision had a sharp outline; only a few paths led to it, then. An overtone that meant the vision was close and personal, something that might happen to her, yet with overtones of weight—enormous, crushing weight.

Her breath came faster, and her hands felt clammy with fear. That meant that whatever it was concerned both her and a huge number of other world lines; instinctively, she strained to see more. The lines twisted. There were glimpses of fire, of a floating sensation unlike anything she had ever known. The clash of sabers, and a body falling into infinite blue space—

No. That way lay death. A wash of no-thought went through her; she controlled her breathing, concentrating instead on an unvarying hum at the back of her mind.

Chapter Three

Duty calls, chaebli," Athelstane King said over his shoulder to the naked woman behind him. One of the Peshawar Club's discreet manservants had slipped the calling card under the door. As King read, he fended off the soft rounded warmth that pressed to his back, and the hands that reached teasingly around his body and tried to undo the bath towel wrapped about his waist.

The card was severely plain, printed in black-on-beige:

Sir Manfred Warburton, Bart.

Imperial Political Service

Metcalfe House, Chandi Chowk

Delhi

On the back was a scribbled: requests the pleasure of your company at dinner, at 7:15, to discuss matters pertaining to the King-Emperors service.

He turned to give the young woman a kiss and then a firm smack on the backside. Seven o'clock already, dammit! Ganesha alone knew how long the card had lain ignored. The Club had telephones since year before last—no expense spared here. Why couldn't the man have called up?

He hadn't planned on going downstairs at all. In fact, he'd planned on having something sent up for dinner and spending the rest of the evening the way he'd spent the afternoon; it had been a long four months of involuntary celibacy on the frontier. Then when he was exhausted enough and Hasamurti was crying for mercy, there would be time to read accumulated letters from his mother and twin sister and younger siblings, and then sleep for eighteen hours. But. . .

The Political Service?

Politicals served as advisors at the courts of the Empire's client states; they supervised the Tribal Agencies beyond the frontier; they adventured far into the barbarian lands, sniffing out troubles to come and staking claims; they ran the Intelligence departments . . . and they fought the Great Game with the Czar's agents, and the Mikado's, and the Caliph's, and assorted subversives.

The Army and Navy were the Empire's sword and fist; the Political Service was its eyes and a goodly part of its brain besides.

"Not now, chaebli," he said again, grabbing the wrist of an exploring hand as it crept around his waist.

Hasamurti pouted despite the endearment—darling, roughly— and flounced off to sit poised beside the sunken marble tub, still full of steaming water with wisps of foam on its surface. She leaned back on one hand and tossed her hair.

"Wouldn't you rather be with me than with some moldy old book-monger kitub-wallah from the capital?" she said.

He chuckled and nodded as he finished toweling himself off. Good to be clean again, he thought. And to smell slightly of rosewater and musk, rather than horse sweat and his own unwashed hide.

"If it were mine to say, I'd stay," he said. "But needs must."

Quite a change from squatting to scrub in a chatti of ice water, -waiting for an Afridi to pop out from, behind a rock waving a knife, he thought. And Hasamurti makes a pleasant change of scenery, too.

The troopers of the Peshawar Lancers were good lads one and all, but not much aesthetically. His mistress was a classic Kashmiri beauty of nineteen, strong-featured, with wavy raven hair falling past her full breasts to a narrow waist and hips that completed the hourglass figure. A cross on a silver chain dangled between her breasts, and tooled-leather bands sewn with silver bells were clasped about her ankles. Altogether a pleasing sight. . . She tried one more time as he tied on his loincloth and dressed.

"But chaebli, I want you to make my new bells ring again!" she said, shaking one long slender leg amid a sweet chiming.

"The things I do for the Sirkar," he sighed, and grinned at her. His arm was a little sore, but a gentleman always showed consideration. "Later, my sweet."

She subsided, grumbling and pulling on a robe and flouncing off to the bedroom, there to entertain herself with sweets and a trashy novel. It was the usual arrangement; she was a shopkeeper's daughter in Avantipur, a market town near Rexin, the King estate. King had met her when he dropped into her father's place to dicker over a saddle. He'd see that she got a husband and a substantial going-away present for a dowry, when his mother finally managed to shackle him to some horsy deb; in the meantime, they jogged along very well with friendship and honest mutual lust. He wasn't a harem-keeper—that sort of thing was out of fashion anyway in these enlightened times, when there was even serious talk about giving women the vote. And he wouldn't have wanted the type who adored his shadow; that would be cruelty, when he'd be bringing home a wife someday.

A thrill of a different sort gripped him as he turned to look again in the mirror, settling his indigo-colored turban and tugging at his jacket. He was in civilian mufti, high-collared tunic-jacket of midnight blue silk trimmed with silver braid at neck and cuffs, worn over a white cotton blouse; loose trousers of the same dark silk tucked into half boots; and a crimson sash under a tooled-leather belt. It set off broad shoulders, narrow waist, long legs; he smoothed down one of his sleek brown mustachios and contemplated a face tanned to oak color, high in the cheeks, straight-nosed and square-chinned, with level dark brown eyes flecked with green and a thin white scar from a sword slash along the right side of his jaw.

That had hurt like blazes when a frothing Ghazi administered it with a chora-knife, but it gave a certain gravitas and distinction to a face still a few years short of thirty, he decided. And considering that he'd blown the man's brains out with his Webley a second later, he didn't really have grounds for complaint.

The modest silver-and-enamel aigrette on his turban showed the family crest, pistol and pen quartered with a crown and the King motto: Kuch dar nahin hai—There is no such thing as fear.

Altogether the sort of outfit a well-to-do zamindar's son from Kashmir might wear, or an Imperial cavalry officer on leave; since he fitted both categories precisely, it was appropriate enough. Even if he had also taken a double first at Oxford.

He hesitated a moment before he picked up a knife and pushed it through the sash, a seven-inch curved blade of wootz steel, with checked ebony handle and silver sheath. A formality, these days; barbarians, cannibals, bandits, and rebels were a lot less likely to swing through a window or come down the chimney than they had been in his great-grandfather's time. Even the Border country was peaceful in this Year of Grace 2025, by those standards.

There were other challenges and dangers, though, even if they were less physical. And he was going to meet them. It never hurt to be prepared.

* * * *

"Thank you, Lakshmi, Patni," Cassandra King said.

Oxford's airship port bustled about her. One more young lady disembarking with her maids juggling the luggage behind was nothing to remark. The heavy dolly that followed, with four well-paid and extremely careful porters about it, decidedly was. So was her anxious care for the square timber box on it.

She looked about. Passengers were flooding off the Diana through the connecting corridor, meeting their personal attendants from the steerage deck, and those were hailing uniformed porters as luggage was brought in and placed on long tables. Turbans and head scarves and hats in a hundred different colors waved against the rows of ticket offices along the walls, and swirled through the pointed-arch doorways to waiting cabs or restaurants or shops. Families and friends greeted each other with cool reserve, or glad cries and embraces—her lip curled a little in scorn at that. Some of the servants were holding up signs with names on them, to guide arriving guests to the carriages of their hosts, or in a few cases to their motorcars.

Voices and unintelligible clunks and clanks from the machinery elsewhere filled the air along with the scent of jasmine in the man-high stone jars that stood here and there on the marble of the floor. The last light of sunset speared down from the high clerestory windows, off the bright gilding that covered the arched ceiling; then the floods came on with a pop and flare of brightness that turned it to a shimmering haze of gold.

Interesting, she thought, looking up as she always did here. The building was five years old, and the spiderweb complexity of gilt, groined vaulting above her was all laminated wood, the latest thing— everything from teak to bamboo, in precisely calculated gradients. With scientific tree-breeding and modern resins, it was almost as strong as steel girderwork, and much lighter. Not to mention cheaper. And the mathematics had been done here in Kashmir, at the university's own great Engine.

The rest was not much different from a railway station, even to the murals of Work and Sacrifice and Duty and other uplifting sentiments lining the upper walls. Bronzed sahib-log engineers in dusty turbans laying out irrigation canals, with grateful peasants invoking the gods in the background; missionaries in some godsforsaken ruin (probably Europe, by the vegetation) reclaiming hairy savages who crouched in awe at their feet; noble soldiers heroic on rearing steeds, trampling cringing enemies beneath their hooves.

She snorted slightly; they'd left out the traders with crates of gin and beads and cheap muskets, and the prospectors. Whenever her brother saw official military art, he tended to laugh. Or curse, if he'd had a gin and tonic or two, and swear at how many young subalterns got killed trying to act out nonsense like that before they learned better.

"Dr. King!" a voice called.

She craned her neck, then saw him. "Dr. Ghose!" she replied happily.

The little Bengali beamed at her, a wide white smile in the dark brown face; he was a plump man in his early forties, in white shirt and pantaloons, black waistcoat and canoe-shaped hat. He gave a nod and a word to King's two attendants; Dr. Chullunder Ghose was a kindly man as well as one of the Empire's foremost physicists and astronomer-mathematicians.

Although it didn't hurt that his family was fabulously wealthy with jute mills and shares in Orissan coal mines; he could have dropped the purchase price of the King estates across a gaming table with a laugh. Not that a Bengali bhadralok—respectable one—would go in for high-stakes gambling. Behind him came Lord Cherwell—Earl Cherwell of Rishikesh—looking sour, his white mustachios working and bushy brows frowning under a crisp, conservative turban of snowy linen, the tail of the pugaree coming almost to his belted waist in the back, and an egret plume nodding from the aigrette in front.

Damned old fool. I know what you're thinking, Cassandra said to herself. First natives, then women, what's the university coming to ... He did good work once, they say. God, that must have been in Arjuna's day! Or Victoria Vs, at least.

It was Ghose who'd shown flaws in the basis of the Kelvin-Maxwell synthesis, the existence of the luminiferous ether; and he'd won the Salisbury Chair in Theoretical Physics by sheer ability. He should be head of the Project.

Then, reluctantly: Well, be fair. Lord Cherwell's still a good academic administrator. Why waste a first-rate theorist on that?

A half dozen others followed, mostly sahib-log except for a Gujarati whose field was Babbage engineering, and male, apart from one painfully shy but brilliant young specialist in Darwinian Geological Catastrophes; she was a Parsi girl from Bombay with buckteeth. They all crowded around the dolly, looking at it with awed reverence. One reached out and touched the rough planks of the box gently.

"Thirty-four inches . . . what a mirror!

Cassandra nodded, throwing the right end of her dupatta—head shawl—over her left shoulder. "Thirty-four inches and perfect," she said. "Smythe wasn't drawing the longbow."

"Oh, my, yes indeed," Ghose crooned. "Very much so, yes."

"Rather a feather in our caps, what?" Cherwell said, for once sounding cheerful. "Do a deuced good job at reflector-grinding, those Imperial University chappies. Pity they don't have a mountain to put a machaan on themselves, eh, what?"

He snorted and rubbed his hands together. "Thorns suggested the Nilgiri Hills, for God's sake—right down in the jungle country, and barely a few thousand feet. Kiang! I brought the chancellor's motor-wagon down for it. Ladies, gentlemen, chalo! Let's go!"

Cassandra paused to wave the porters forward again. There was a commotion a little way off, but she ignored it until someone shouted.

Then she did look up, frowning. Men were pushing their way in, against the flow of the crowd. Several of them, young men; Bengalis by their looks and dress. Not many wore the dhoti up here in the northwestern provinces, especially in the mountains; the big wraparound loincloth was just too cold for the climate, particularly in October.

One of them shouted again: "Bande Materam!"

Hail Motherland, she translated automatically. Why, that's—

Then she saw the pistols, and for a moment simply gaped. Revolvers, big and heavy and clumsy-looking, with long barrels. Why, that's illegal! she thought. The slogan only mildly so—she'd read Tagore's poetry herself. The pistols were violently illegal for anyone but the military and police; private licenses were extremely rare.

She had time for one thought before the first weapon boomed. Assassins—

Time slowed. The men came toward the knot of scholars, shouldering the crowd aside amid shouts and gasps of surprise and indignation. The pistols barked, deep and loud, with long spurts of smoke and flame. Cassandra saw her maid Patni turning, astonishment on her plain middle-aged face, a suitcase in either hand. Then she spun, catching at herself and crying out.

That brought the scholar out of her daze. She had been a King of Rexin, with all the responsibilities toward dependents that involved, much longer than she'd been a gentlewoman of science. Without another thought she dived, catching both her maids around the waist and throwing them to the ground, her own body over them and sicken-ingly conscious of blood soaking through the fabric of her clothes, wet and warm over the hands she clamped down to stop its spurting.

That gave her a view of what happened afterward. A third man carried something besides a pistol, a cloth bundle that trailed a hissing and plume of smoke . . .

Dr. Chullunder Ghose recognized it as a bomb sooner than she. It was pitched to fall under the dolly; the explosion would shatter the metal and wood into lethal shrapnel and kill everyone within a dozen yards. He grabbed the parcel out of the air with the skill of the fast-bowling cricketer he'd been, and curled himself around it. Cassandra squeezed her eyes tight, but she could not shut out the horribly muffled thudump of the explosion, or the feel of what spattered her, or the smell.

She forced her eyes open; there were still the men with revolvers—and men willing to set off bombs under their own feet would be horribly dangerous with firearms as well. There was one more shot, and something crashed and tinkled in the middle distance. Half the crowd was stampeding in terror, some trampling those ahead of them.

The young Rajput prince she'd seen on the promenade deck of the Diana drew his blade and began a lunge, staggered as two lead slugs struck him, lunged again with his scimtare, a murderously sharp length of fine Jawahdapur steel. It rammed through coat and ribs to emerge dripping red from the gunman's back. Lord Cherwell was a step behind him, big blue-veined hands outstretched.

Then the four young men disappeared beneath a wave of men wielding swords, knives, walking sticks, fists and feet and a wrought-brass cuspidor stained with betel juice. Despite the nausea that clogged her throat, despite screams and cries and horror, Cassandra thought she saw brief bewilderment on the faces of the terrorists; and that puzzled her itself. What else would men of the martial castes do, when they saw a crowd attacked by assassins?

After the explosion and the brief deadly scrimmage things moved by in a blur; doctors, one putting a pressure bandage on Patni's wound and setting up a plasma drip, stretchers carrying away the wounded. Police came running up, men in blue-and-yellow uniforms with long lathi clubs. Hands helped her to the rim of a fountain, where she sat staring.

"Memsabib. "

The voice was firm; she looked up. A thirtyish man in plain crimson-and-green civilian clothes, but with two uniformed policemen behind him, a notebook in his hand and a pistol in a shoulder holster under his red jacket. He was too dark for a Kashmiri, with sharp, brown, clean-shaven features and weary eyes so black the pupil disappeared.

"Detective-Captain Tanaji Malusre, memsahib" he said gently—in good English but with a strong Marathi accent. "My apologies, but we must take statements before memories fade and change. Now—"

During the questions someone thrust a mug of hot sweet tea into her hand. She lifted it, swallowed at the sight of what was drying on her hands, then forced the porcelain to her lips. A little strength returned, enough for her to ask in her turn:

"Why? Captain Malusre, why? Who are these people?"

"Subversives—Bengali secessionists—enemies of the Raj. We think we know who, but this group has never operated outside Bengal province before. One may live long enough to answer questions, if we are lucky. Very strange."

"But . . . but none of us are political people! Poor Dr. Ghose—" She squeezed her eyes shut again.

I will not vomit. I am Cassandra May Effingh