Smidha left, her haste unseemly in one so old.
Beside her, Tara sniffed.
Nur turned to her. “You have them?”
Tara nodded, showing the circlets.
She pointed to a place between two trees to one side. “Wait there. Be ready.”
Two men emerged from the trees opposite her, swords clutched in bloody fists.
“I saw an old one come this way. She might be the one the mullah wants dead,” one said, peering into the shade. And so, from their lips, the architect of this insanity: Mohan. He persisted in using blunt instruments where a fine blade was required.
Knowing he would see her before long and detesting the idea that she should hide from the likes of them, Nur stepped from the shade and smiled demurely at the assassins.
Because Tara might want certainty to aid in the thing, she addressed the men: “So touching of Mullah Mohan, to think this dried up thing worthy of his rupees.”
Startled, both men nearly jumped out of their skins.
Her bitter laughter made them snarl and clutch their blades the tighter.
Come closer, now, this mongoose desires an end to the hissing of snakes. Nur held her arms out at her sides as if in welcome.
Reassured by her lack of weapons, they approached.
Tara’s hurled chakram caught the light as it spun across the garden. By luck or skill the steel ring slashed across one man’s neck, severing windpipe and arteries.
“Godhhhch!” the man murmured, blood drowning whatever his last words might have been.
The other turned to face the threat. Another of the spinning steel rings struck him high in his inner thigh before sticking in the earth.
He bit back a scream. Using his sword as a cane, he lurched toward Tara.
Spinning her last chakram on her forefingers, Tara launched it at the assassin.
The sharpened steel ring tore his other thigh, bouncing from the bone and away.
He fell, screams an assault on the ear.
She walked the ground between the dead and the dying, and bent to pick up the first man’s sword. It required three steps to reach the screaming man, then a slight effort to raise the sword. The blade flashed brightly as she brought it down, bringing mercy to her ears and blood to water the dry earth.
River Entrance of the Taj
“Randy, load slug.”
The young man rapidly cycled the action on his Remington, ejecting the buckshot shells. “You bet, John.”
“You and Ricky set up on the right side.” Left-handed, he would be most comfortable shooting from the right side of the opening. “When Bobby and I start in with the buckshot, you pick your targets and put ’em down.”
All the young men nodded as Randy ratcheted six heavy shells into his gun.
“Once I start up, follow me. Watch for ricochets. Don’t take any unnecessary risks.” He took a deep breath, slowly let it out. “Get going.”
A few minutes later they were set up: Dara and the emperor’s guard captain at the head of a line of men behind Bobby.
“Ready when you are, John.”
John looked around the corner and up. While he couldn’t quite ignore the corpses littering the stairs, he still made out two men crouching behind a low barricade of bricks, composite bows in hand.
One of the men at the barricade raised his bow, but John pulled back before he could loose.
John held up two fingers.
Bobby and then Randy nodded.
He took a long step away from the wall before turning around and kneeling.
Bobby, half-facing the wall, slid over to stand in his place.
John brought the shotgun to his shoulder, leaned sideways, covered the target with the bead, and pulled the trigger. The stock punched his shoulder as he sent nine .32 pellets up the stair.
Bobby’s shot hammered his ears a moment later.
He pumped, the emptied shell flying, and settled the bead again as Randy’s slug thundered.
The man he’d been shooting at reeled back.
John pulled the trigger again, just to be sure.
The man fell out of view.
With a conscious effort, John scanned across for another target.
The other man was slumped face down over the barricade.
Another man appeared behind the first two.
John fired, Bobby and Randy a split second later.
The man’s head and upper chest didn’t so much explode as dissolve under the impact of the 12-gauge slug and the lion’s share of buckshot sent his way.
Three pumps worked in near-unison, spent casings pocking on the flagstones.
John closed his eyes. Gonna have that shit in my head as long as I live.
The thunder of Randy and Bobby’s guns pried John’s eyes open.
A fourth man must have appeared while his comrade fell, because another corpse was sliding down the steps.
Silence settled as the man’s slide came to a halt a few steps short of the bottom.
“Cease fire!” John shouted, surging to his feet and mounting the stairs. Slipping twice on things that didn’t belong under foot, he made it halfway up before someone got up the nerve to step into view.
John didn’t get the shotgun couched in his shoulder before firing. The stock punched him viciously in the collarbone for it even as the redoubled roar created by the close stone walls jabbed needles in his ears. Worse yet, John’s haste made for a miss: chips flew from the bricks at the fellow’s knees.
The fellow shouted, leaping up.
Ignoring the pain, John seated the gun properly, cycled the pump and fired again.
The man fell back out of view.
A hand grabbed his shoulder, making John start. A sweating Randy stepped past, gun up, seated properly, and ready.
Shaking, John continued after, Dara and the rest of the men a flood behind.
It wasn’t until he got to the top of the stair and stood among the corpses that he thought to reload. The stair opened in the middle of a corridor, the sun-dappled river visible through the jali.
“Stairs at either end,” Dara said.
Deciding on the left-hand stair, John and Randy led the way. As they rounded the corner John was almost skewered by an arrow.
Randy grunted beside him. There was a clatter.
“Shit!” John shouted. Scrambling to safety around the corner, he realized Randy wasn’t with him.
John turned.
Randy lay against the wall, an arrow through his chest and shotgun on the floor.
He wasn’t moving, not even to breathe.
“Jesus H. Christ!” he screamed, kicking the wall in frustration.
The pain brought him back, made him think through the hurt: “Bobby, Ricky: pull him in while I cover you. Then we’ll dig these ticks out.”
Tears made aiming difficult, but he managed to cover the boys as they collected Randy.
West, Temporary Gate
Gunshots floated in the air as they left their horses.
A lone eunuch stood in the gateway that would be a mosque once the complex was completed, but was currently being used to bring building materials into the site.
“Hear me! You cannot enter!” the eunuch shouted as they approached.
“No, you listen to me: I’m about ready to tear your fucking arms off and beat you with them,” Rodney said. While he used English, his tone and mallet-sized fists certainly carried his meaning across the language barrier, as the eunuch clutched his weapon tight in one fist.
Gervais held up a hand to forestall Rodney carrying out his threat, and said in Persian: “I understand that you are alone, left here while your comrades enter and put down the disturbance, but we must be granted entry. You see, you may have heard that we are up-time doctors, skilled in healing. So you must allow us entry in order to treat the wounded inside. If you do not, imagine the Sultan Al’Azam’s wrath when he learns you prevented us aiding his children in their time of need.”
More gunplay, followed
by a scream, floated in the air.
The eunuch’s round shoulders slumped. “Merciful God, do as you must.” He stepped aside. “I am surely dead anyway, killed for the failures of others. What’s one more thing to take the blame for?”
The party rushed through the gate, following the clash of blades and screams.
They ran along a wide stretch of red sandstone, temporary jalis erected some distance to their right, the tops of trees visible above the screens, and the raised plinth foundation of the Taj directly ahead.
“The stairs up to the top of the plinth are around to the right,” Gervais panted, struggling to remember the layout from the mock-up in Shah Jahan’s quarters. “The entrance to the harem will be there as well.”
“More damn eunuchs?” Rodney grunted.
“We’ll at least learn from them whether the women—” Gervais stopped speaking as the wreckage—human and otherwise—came into view at the garden entrance.
“Pris!” Rodney screamed, sprinting now.
Putting his head down, Bertram managed to lose only a little distance on the big up-timer while Gervais lagged behind.
Garden of the Taj
Jahanara, Priscilla, and Ilsa stood between the women and children of the harem and three bloody-handed killers, the only weapons among the ladies a few branches and a knife more suited to carving lamb than combat.
Monique appeared beside her, a brick in hand.
All three of the assassins came to a halt, half-mad eyes drinking in the forbidden sight of another man’s women.
Jahanara twitched the silken scarf from her shoulders, revealing more flesh and drawing their eyes to her. She would die before they touched the children. Die before they defiled any of Father’s wives.
A rattle of gunfire drove them all from the stillness of the moment.
“We want only the witch, Nur Jahan. Give her to us and the rest of you will not be harmed, I swear it!” the shortest of the men shouted.
Jahanara shook her head in confusion.
He mistook the gesture for denial, stepped forward and made his sword cut the air. “I have no wish to kill women and babes. Give us the witch and the rest of you can go on living.”
They have no idea what she looks like.
“She is not here,” she said. Truthfully, Smidha having reported Nur’s refusal to join them just moments before.
He pointed his sword at her. “Lying bitch! We saw the old woman come this way.”
Jahanara drew herself up to her full height, hissed: “I am no liar. I am no bitch. I am Jahanara, daughter of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, daughter of emperors reaching back to the mighty Timur, and I am here to pay the proper respects to my mother, you filthy pig!”
“I see her there behind you, lying bitch!” he repeated, sword point moving to point over her left shoulder at Smidha.
A blood-covered Atisheh limped into view some distance behind the men.
She looked away from hope and met the man’s eyes. Forcing laughter from a throat made tight with fear, she mocked him: “You name my servant a former empress?”
Trying to keep their attention, she breathed deeply enough to strain her silks and half-turned, presenting her profile. “What think you, Smidha? Should Nur Jahan relinquish her former titles to you, my servant?” she asked, voice heavy with every bit of contempt she could muster.
Smidha sniffed. “I think not, mistress.”
Close enough, Atisheh started her charge.
“Nor I.”
“Lying, filthy-minded whore!” the man shrieked, advancing.
Chapter 40
Garden of the Taj
“Again with the whore-calling!” Atisheh grunted, bringing her blade down on the short bastard’s back just as he started his charge. The powerful, if clumsy, blow severed several ribs where they joined the spine. The man fell face down at her feet, writhing in silent agony.
For her part, Atisheh stumbled to a halt, blood loss and pain drawing the color from the world.
She blinked stupidly, saw his companions turn to face her.
“Good,” she mumbled. Raising her blade one more time.
The blonde ferenghi reacted with admirable speed, charging one man from behind, finger-thick branch in hand.
Atisheh staggered toward the other man.
Their blades rang together.
Exhaustion drained her sword arm of strength, made her slow to counter. His second blow cut across her lowered guard and into her chest, shattering mail links and biting flesh beneath.
Dropping her sword, Atisheh closed hands around his wrist.
Yanking him off balance, she bit at him.
Mouth full of beard instead of the flesh she desired, she fell, dragging him with her.
“Bitch!” he grunted, struggling to get his hand free and keep on top of her.
She held on.
The face that appeared over his shoulder made Atisheh smile.
The blood of her enemies spattered her face, a warm and welcome rain.
Garden of the Taj
“Lying, filthy-minded whore!” someone shouted off to Salim’s right. He ran in that direction.
A few ragged breaths later Salim broke from cover to see a beauty in silks straddling a man’s back. Her left hand was in his hair, pulling his head back. Beneath them both lay the still, bloody form of another.
A few steps away, a blonde woman and another, possibly up-timer woman, were attacking another assassin with sticks.
“Die, filth!” the beauty screamed. Salim looked back in time to see her cut the man’s throat.
Legs leaden, he moved to join the assault on the last assassin. He made it all of two steps when someone to his right bellowed: “Down!”
Salim threw himself flat.
Chapter 41
The Taj
Dara’s men charged past John as they emerged into the sun.
Trying not to think about Ilsa, Randy, or the dead at his feet, John looked around. The stair came up through one corner of a broad expanse of red sandstone. Just to his front right was the corner of the platform that formed the base of the mausoleum.
“Around front. To the stairs!” Dara called, pointing with his sword. His men formed up around their prince and moved out.
“Reload if you haven’t already,” John said, moving to follow. He heard someone reloading, shaking hands making a chore of it.
They rounded the corner of the plinth without incident and charged toward the stairs.
“Damn them!” Dara cried, coming to a halt near the stairs.
Catching up, John saw the ruins of the jali that protected the garden from prying eyes and the dead men littering the ground.
“They are in the garden with the women, my wife among them!”
John looked at the prince, hoping for an order.
“Die, apostate!” someone shrieked above. An instant later a brick crashed into Dara’s head, driving him from view. Those of his guards who carried shields raised them overhead, trying to protect him from any additional missiles.
“Shit!” John yelled again. He was still raising his shotgun when one of the boys fired.
The man who’d thrown the brick fell from the plinth.
Silence descended.
“Dara?” John called.
Dara Shikoh, Prince of Mughals, shoved his men aside and stood. Blood streaming from a cut over his eye and unsteady on his feet, he pointed with his blade: “Kill them! Kill them all!”
Growling, they charged up the stairs en masse. John followed the blood-maddened prince without conscious thought. Together they stampeded through two assassins trying to hold the stairs, hacking them to pieces, then three more at the entrance to the mausoleum, only to come to a staggering halt beneath the half-completed entrance.
Dara’s men moaned.
John edged through the bodyguards, came upon Dara Shikoh kneeling before his father.
The Ruler of the World lay among the corpses of four men. His sword arm was missing below the
elbow, as if he had flung it up in a last defense of life.
“Father,” Dara choked.
Impossibly, Shah Jahan’s eyelids fluttered open. “Dara.”
“Father?”
His gaze wandered, his words were slow, but Shah Jahan made himself understood: “Let…me…with…her…all time…”
Dara bent, struggled with his father’s limp weight.
Tears leaving fresh trails in the blood on his face, Dara Shikoh carried his father into his mother’s tomb.
John turned, pushed his way through Dara’s guards, “Boys?”
“Here,” they chorused.
They met him at the top of the stairs.
“Going to get my wife and avenge Randy, boys.”
“Damn straight.”
The distinctive, mechanical shick-shack sound of the pump action of a Remington 870 was Ricky’s only answer.
A single shot rang from the depths of the garden.
John started running.
Garden of the Taj
Monique threw her brick at the man Priscilla and Ilsa were trying to brain, but came up short. She reached down in search of another missile, but Guaharara, her face a study in calm, dropped another brick into her hand.
“Kill the bad men,” the little princess commanded.
“Yes, Shehzadi.”
“Down!” someone bellowed off to the right.
She needed an instant to translate the word and therefore remained standing while Ilsa and Priscilla threw themselves flat.
A gun barked, shot taking the assassin square in the chest, dropping him in a bloody heap.
“You all right, baby?” Rodney panted, still-smoking weapon up and ready still.
“God, Rodney!”
Bertram burst from cover behind Rodney.
Monique felt such a rush of relief at the sight of him she could barely think.
“You all right, baby?” Rodney asked again.
“Yes, I’m all right. Atisheh’s hurt, though!” she said, moving toward the woman.
“There more?” Rodney asked, clearly reluctant to put up his weapon.
“I—I don’t think so.”
“I doubt any remain in the garden,” Salim agreed, slowly standing up.
He reached down and helped Jahanara off the man she’d killed. She overbalanced, came to rest against him, cheek and a delicate hand on his muscled chest. One of his bloody hands automatically found the small of her back, steadying her.