Chapter 1 — The Last Death

  My name is Neil Abercombry, second son of Baron Johnes Alexander.

  And I am dying.

  The musket ball struck me in the chest during the chaos of Ferozeshah.

  At first there was no pain.

  Only pressure.

  It felt as if some enormous hand had pressed against my ribs and decided—calmly and without hurry—to close around my lungs.

  The Sikh artillery thundered across the plains. Smoke rolled over the battlefield in black waves. Men screamed. Horses shrieked. Officers shouted commands that vanished into the roar of cannon fire.

  My black mare, Babieca, reared beneath me.

  For a single impossible instant the whole battlefield seemed to unfold before my eyes.

  The blaze of guns.

  The torn banners snapping in the wind.

  Mud kicked high by cavalry charges.

  The red ruin of men who had been alive only a heartbeat before.

  Then the world turned upside down.

  The sky became earth.

  Earth became the sky.

  I struck the ground hard enough to drive the breath from my body. When it returned, it brought blood with it.

  Iron filled my mouth.

  Powder smoke burned my throat.

  Above me the heavens had become a gray ceiling of drifting smoke.

  So this is how Neil Abercombry ends, I thought.

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  Not in glory.

  Not with a trumpet call and some noble last charge.

  In the dirt.

  In pain.

  In a colony half a world from home.

  Someone dragged me from the field. I never learned who.

  I remember the wheels of the cart jolting over rough ground. Each bounce sent a knife of pain through my chest. I remember the hospital tent, thick with heat and the stench of opened bodies.

  Surgeons moved through the haze with rolled sleeves and red hands.

  Someone forced leather between my teeth.

  Then they began digging.

  The pain came then.

  God help me, it came.

  But the surgeons pulled the iron from my chest.

  And somehow—

  I lived.

  That was the cruel part.

  Two weeks later I was sitting upright in a narrow cot, pale but breathing, writing a letter to my mother in Edinburgh.

  My hand trembled as the pen scratched across the page.

  I told her I would return home before winter.

  I told her the worst had passed.

  I told her all the comforting lies men write when they want the people they love to sleep peacefully at night.

  I had just reached the end of the page when the pain struck.

  My stomach twisted violently.

  The pen slipped from my fingers.

  Ink spilled across the letter.

  The basin beside the cot crashed to the ground.

  Then everything else followed.

  Cholera.

  The physicians spoke the word with the calm certainty of men who had seen the disease many times—and defeated it almost never.

  Bad water during the march, they said.

  A river.

  A cup passed from hand to hand.

  A small mistake.

  Men have died for empires over smaller ones.

  There is no dignity in cholera.

  War lets a man pretend there is meaning in suffering.

  Disease strips even that illusion away.

  It empties you.

  Your body becomes less like flesh and more like a wrung cloth. The strength leaves in handfuls. Your skin grays. Your eyes sink into your skull.

  You become a thing waiting to stop.

  I spent my final hours half-awake in the dim heat of the tent.

  Flies buzzed in slow circles above the cots.

  Men groaned in the darkness.

  Some prayed.

  Some begged.

  Most simply waited.

  I thought of the Highlands.

  Heather bending in the wind.

  I thought of my brother James, who had inherited what mattered.

  I thought of my father, who had sent me to India because second sons must always go somewhere when there is not enough land to divide.

  And I thought of the girl I once loved.

  She had married a man richer than I was.

  A safer man.

  Perhaps she had chosen wisely.

  Twenty-six years.

  That was the measure of Neil Abercombry’s life.

  I did not rage.

  I did not pray.

  I was too tired for either.

  So I closed my eyes and welcomed the darkness.

  Finally, I thought.

  Finally it ends.

  But even as the thought formed, something deep beneath Neil Abercombry stirred.

  Something ancient.

  Something far older than the British Empire.

  Older than Christendom.

  Older than Rome.

  At first it came only as sensation.

  Heat.

  Stone.

  The smell of incense drifting through sunlit air.

  Bronze doors opening beneath a burning desert sky.

  Then came memory.

  A throne.

  A crown.

  The crushing weight of absolute power resting upon a younger, crueler soul.

  My breath caught.

  No, I thought.

  No.

  The darkness did not take me.

  It shattered.

  And the truth returned.