Jani and the Greater Game (The Multiplicity Series Book 1) (45 page)

She heard a shout and turned. Mr Knives, his face a rictus of pain and rage, was a matter of yards behind her. She lashed out with the beam, screaming, and missed him by an inch. Mr Knives leapt back. Behind him she saw Durga Das emerge through the gate, holding his bloody belly as if it were an injured animal. He barrelled into Mr Knives and both men tumbled to the ground. Jani turned and ran, extinguishing the light beam as she approached the busy street.

She slowed her headlong dash lest she arouse unwanted attention, calmed herself and maintained a sedate pace as she slipped into the crowd. At the corner of the street she looked back. Das and Mr Knives appeared, frantically looking right and left.

Jani took off. She considered the blue light, which she had witnessed twice now, and then tried to dismiss it from her thoughts as she concentrated on losing herself down the warren of narrow alleys and streets of the slum area.

She headed east, using the line of the distant hills to guide the direction of her flight. She tried to maintain her poise, but was aware of suspicious glances cast her way as she hurried past impoverished families squatting in the gutter.

She passed through the sack-and-cardboard shantytown and emerged into open country. The land rose before her, a patchwork of scrubby plantations and barren fields before the treeline began some two hundred yards higher up.

She looked over her shoulder. This was where she would be most vulnerable, crossing the open land in plain sight. She could easily be seen from the hovels.

She came to the first of the trees and ran into their shade, allowing herself a relieved breath and a measure of hope. She climbed the slope between casuarina and eucalyptus trees, thinking back to her flight and wishing she had had the time, and the foresight, to cast about the alleyway for the discarded invisibility helmet. Who knew how useful it would have been in the days and weeks ahead?

She heard a sound behind her and turned. She cried out in disbelief as she saw, perhaps a hundred yards below her, Mr Knives running through the trees. He pressed the stump of his right arm to his chest, and in his left hand flashed a knife.

She sprinted. The ridge of the hill was a couple of hundred yards above her, and in the next valley – if Alfie Littlebody had managed to secure an airship – would be her salvation.

She came to the crest and hurried on without pausing to look back. She sprinted over the rise and through the trees on the other side, scanning ahead for any sign of the airship. The slope fell precipitously before her; she had a grandstand view of the shelving valley and the blue sky above, and not even so much as a cloud marred its perfection.

What to do? She looked behind her. There was no sign of Mr Knives. Should she hide behind a tree, conceal herself until Littlebody’s airship came to her rescue? But Durga Das and Mr Knives had somehow located her earlier, when she had been invisible. Perhaps they had the ability to do so again? She overruled her instinct to hide and kept on running down the wooded slope.

There was still no sign of an airship, five minutes later, when she heard a shout from further up the hillside. “Flight is useless, Miss Chatterjee. We will find you even if you flee to the ends of the Earth! Be sensible now and give yourself up. We will be lenient! All we want is the ventha-di, and we will let you go with your life.”

Gasping, she fumbled with the cylinder and brought forth the light-beam. She was in the valley bottom now, and cast about for somewhere to hide herself. She looked up the hillside and caught a glimpse of a dark suit through the trees. Mr Knives was no more than fifty yards away and sprinting towards her.

They could only pursue her to the ends of the Earth, she thought, if they were alive. She had the advantage over her pursuers in terms of weapons. Let Mr Knives do his best. Taking a breath, she stepped out into the open and faced the oncoming knifeman.

He emerged from the trees and stopped when he saw her. They faced each other on a broad swathe of grass beside a meandering river. He was perhaps thirty yards away and walking slowly towards her, a knife outstretched in his left hand, his right wrist a truncated, blackened stump.

She crouched, held out the light-beam, and prepared herself.

Mr Knives advanced, closing the distance between them. He was twenty yards away now, the expression on his face twisted, either in pain or hatred. Whichever, he was ugly beyond words.

“You choose to fight?” he called out, grimacing in pain. “A mistake. You were lucky once, but not a second time.”

“Come any closer, and this time it will not be your hand that I lop off!” she cried.

He laughed, and continued walking.

Her heart pounded and time seemed to slow. She told herself that the light-beam was far superior to the knife, but felt a rising tide of panic even so. Where was Littlebody and his airship?

Mr Knives was ten yards from her now and steadily advancing. She held her ground. The river was behind her, and it would be a mistake to back off. She had to be brave and confront him, rather than turn and run. As soon as he came within striking distance, she would lash out, attempt to kill him. She was fighting, she told herself, for more than just her life.

Mr Knives was smiling, his blade glinting in the sun. He had dropped into a crouch and was creeping towards her little by little. Jani held her light-beam upright, her heart thumping, watching his every move.

He danced forward and lashed out. His blade swooped through the air. She leapt back, the knife missing her by inches. She swung her light-blade, but he stepped back beyond its reach like a practised fencer.

He lunged again, and she cried out in alarm and stumbled backwards, swiping her weapon through the air. He took heart, his grin turning to a sneer.

She was distracted, a second later, when something blue appeared in the air above her opponent’s right shoulder. She stared in fright as she made out a devil’s mask, all fangs and stunted horns and a serpentine, lashing tongue. Mr Knives took advantage of her distraction and advanced, his blade slicing her bodice and her flesh beneath. She cried out in panic and pain and brought the light-blade down, missing him by an inch, then backed towards the river.

She felt blood, warm and wet, trickle down her chest.

The airborne devil’s head, eerily blue, hissed and spat at her.

She lashed out again, but her opponent danced nimbly backwards, his grin mocking her. “You will have to do far better than that to get lucky again, Miss Chatterjee.”

He danced forward. She saw his knife move, but too late, and another cut bled into the material of her bodice. She stepped back, lashing out ineffectively with her weapon.

He was toying with her, taking his time.

The electric blue devil’s head remained at his shoulder, as if urging him on. She heard the devil say something, the words lost to her.

Then she became aware of another sound and her heart leapt. She dared not look up to confirm with her eyes what her ears told her was approaching. The steady throb of an airship’s motors beat down upon the clearing, growing ever louder. Mr Knives looked up, quickly, and did not like what he saw.

“Jani-ji!” a voice cried. Anand! “Jani-ji, grab the rope ladder!”

Mr Knives lunged again, missing her this time, and Jani chopped down with her light-beam. He howled in pain as the beam struck home and sliced through his arm just below the elbow. The severed arm, the hand still clutching the knife, dropped with a thump to the ground.

She looked up, dizzy with relief. The airship, with Anand crouching at the open hatch, was a dozen feet above her – a rope ladder dancing within reach.

She looked back at Mr Knives. He was on his knees and sobbing with pain. He was at her mercy; she could kill him now... but something stopped her. In the heat of the moment, perhaps, in the frenzy of conflict, she might have killed another human being... but she could not bring herself to do so when the man was defenceless.

She twisted the hilt of her light-beam, extinguishing the blade, reached up and hauled herself, swinging, onto the rope ladder.

“Jani-ji!” Anand cried.

She struggled up the ladder. Anand yelled again, this time in warning. She looked down; Mr Knives had leapt up at the dangling rope and grasped the lowest rung in the crook of his elbow. He lashed out at her legs with his right stump. It might normally have struck her as terrifying – but the absence of a hand at the end of his arm made his efforts blackly comical.

She kicked out and hit Mr Knives in the face with her sandal. He lost his grip with a startled cry, and Jani watched him fall fifteen feet to the ground.

She looked down as the airship gained height. Mr Knives writhed on the bank of the river, the mysterious blue devil’s head staring down at him, its tongue lashing the air as if cursing his failure. Further up the slope she saw the rotund shape of Durga Das stumble from the trees and stare up at the departing airship. She had the urge to wave at him, but resisted the impulse.

She hauled herself the rest of the way up the ladder into the airship, exhausted, and collapsed into Anand’s waiting embrace.

T
WO HOURS LATER
the airship crossed the Nepali border and headed for Delhi. Jani sat on a couch, her torso swaddled in bandages. She had dressed her wounds, which had proved to be superficial, and then Alfie Littlebody had brewed a pot of Earl Grey.

Jani finished recounting her experiences aboard the Vantissar ship, then stressed the urgency of her onward mission. Alfie and Anand had sat transfixed for the duration of her story.

“I must admit,” Littlebody said, “that if I hadn’t experienced what I have over the past few days, I would have found your story hard to believe.”

“But you do believe me, don’t you?”

He nodded. “Yes, I do. The thought of it...”

Anand said, his eyes wide, “And now we must ensure that Jani-ji gets to London!”

Alfie Littlebody sipped his tea. “Mmm. Trouble is, this crate is short haul only. Small fuel tanks, y’see. They’ll only take us so far. We wouldn’t even reach the first refuelling station at Karachi.”

“But the authorities will be looking for us!” Anand wailed. “And so will Durga Das and other Russian spies.”

Jani interrupted. “I’ve thought of that. I know how we can get out of India undetected.”

They stared at her. “You do?” Alfie said.

“First of all, Alfie, I would like to know what your plans are.”

“Mine?” He puffed out his cheeks. “Well, it looks as though I’ve cooked my goose with my superiors, don’t you know? Killing one’s superior officer is not quite the ticket, is it? So, as I’ll be a wanted man, I might as well throw in my lot with your good self, if you’d accept my meagre services, that is.”

Jani smiled. “Excellent. I accept. And you, Anand?”

He said, his eyes downcast, “I would very much like to go to London with you, Jani-ji. If you would like me to come.”

“I would hardly leave you behind, after all you’ve done for me.”

She crossed to a small bureau, found a pen and wrote an address on an envelope. “Anand and I will be unable to leave the airyard in Delhi when we arrive. We have no papers, no passports...”

“That might pose a problem,” Alfie said.

“I hope not,” she said. “As soon as we land in Delhi, I want you to go to an address with a letter I shall write. With luck, by this time tomorrow we will be on our way to London.”

She proffered her cup and saucer. “I think I will take a little more tea,” she said, then turned to the porthole and stared out. The flat plains of India passed far below, remote and silent. She considered Durga Das, the Russians, and the might of the Raj pitched against her.

The threat of the Zhell, she decided, was just too enormous a notion to contemplate, at the moment.

Her first concern was the small matter of leaving India without being apprehended.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE