Murder as a Fine Art

12

The Education of an Artist



THE ARTIST OF DEATH locked his bedroom door and placed crumpled newspapers on the floor. Anyone who improbably gained access to the room would brush against those papers. The noise would prompt the artist to roll from his cot while drawing a knife from a sheath strapped to his arm.

The cot was identical to one he had used in India. After enduring his nightly penance, he lay on the cot and hoped that he would not suffer his usual nightmares. Although the bedroom had a fireplace, he never burned anything in it, wanting winter’s chill to be another penance, just as he never opened windows during summer’s sultry nights, refusing to allow a breeze to cool his sweat.

India’s mountains had been bitterly, bone-achingly cold, while its lowlands had been oppressively, smotheringly hot.

Twenty years of cold and heat.

Of death.

Of the British East India Company.

“Two hundred years it’s been here,” a sergeant had told the artist’s unit when they arrived in Calcutta in 1830. “The British East India Company claims its profit comes from shipping tea, silk, and spices back home. And the niter that’s the main ingredient in saltpeter. Can’t have an empire without saltpeter. You!” The sergeant challenged one of the new arrivals. “What’s it used for?”

“My mother used it for pickling, Sergeant.”

“You idiot, pickles don’t make an empire great. Saltpeter along with sulfur and powdered charcoal gives you what?”

“Gunpowder, Sergeant,” the artist of death volunteered, standing at attention under the furnace of the sun.

He was eighteen. He had been in the army from when, as a tall twelve-year-old, he had walked into a London enlistment center and claimed to be fourteen. That had made him eligible for what was called boy service, first as a courier and later as a hospital helper. He preferred the hospital because while he hurried bandages to male nurses or took away slop pails, he had the chance to study the pain of injured soldiers. At the age of seventeen, he had officially become part of the regiment, but the daily routine of marches and maintenance had bored him after the fascination of the agony he saw in the hospital. Because enlistment was for a minimum of twenty-one years, the only way the artist could leave the army was by deserting, but given that the police were already looking for him, he didn’t see any point in having the army search for him also. When news spread that the regiment was sailing to India, the artist pretended to share the concern of others about yellow fever and murderous natives, but in truth the prospects made him feel overjoyed.

“Gunpowder. Yes. Very good, laddie.” The sergeant looked at the artist of death as if he meant the compliment. His sun-browned and -creased face suggested that the sergeant had been in India forever. The cynical tone with which he delivered the briefing implied that he’d given it more times than he cared to recall.

“Gunpowder,” the sergeant emphasized. “The empire can’t very well carry on its wars unless it has saltpeter to make gunpowder, right? And India has the greatest reserves of saltpeter ingredients on the planet.”

The sun was so fierce that as the artist of death stood at attention with the other arrivals, he stopped sweating. His vision paled. Spots wavered before his eyes.

“But saltpeter, tea, silk, and spices aren’t why we’re here to help the British East India Company do business, laddies. The reason we’re here is this little beauty.”

The sergeant held up a pale bulb. “This is the head of a poppy plant.”

He used a knife to cut the bulb. “And this white fluid seeping out is called opium. It dries to a brown color. When it’s powdered, you can smoke it, eat it, drink it, or inhale it to make you think you’re in the clouds. I don’t doubt one day somebody’ll figure out how to stick it directly into your veins. But if you value your life, do not—I repeat do not—ever—use this stuff. Not because it can kill you if you take too much, and too much is only a little. No, if I catch you using this devil, I’ll be the one who kills you. I can’t depend on someone whose mind drifts into the clouds. The natives hate us. If they get the chance, they’ll turn against us. When the shooting starts, I want to know that the men I’m fighting with are focused on their business and not on swirling dervishes. Do I make myself clear? You! What did I just say?”

The sergeant spoke challengingly to the artist, who fought to clear the spots from in front of his eyes.

“Sergeant, you said don’t use opium! Ever!” the artist responded.

“You’ll go far, laddie. Not once, everybody! Oh, you’ll be tempted to learn what the talk’s all about! You’ll want to ride the clouds! Resist that temptation, because I swear, before I kill you for using it, I’ll break every bone in your body! Everybody, am I clear about that? Do not let this devil tempt you!”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Louder!”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

“YES, SERGEANT!”

“Good. To give you an idea of the disgusting depths into which opium can lead, I want each of you to read this piece of filth that I’m holding. This foul book is called Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Its author is a degenerate named Thomas De Quincey. Those of you who can’t read will listen to someone read it out loud. You,” the sergeant challenged the artist. “Can you read?”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

“Then make certain these other men know what’s in this perverted dung heap of a book!”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

The sergeant dropped the poppy bulb and crushed it with his boot, making a dramatic show of grinding its white fluid into the dirt.

“Now let me tell all of you how the British East India Company works and why you’re risking your life for it. The company has plenty of opium from here in India, but it earns more profit from the tea in China. So which makes more sense? Does the company sell the lower-priced opium at home in England and then bring back the money to buy the higher-priced tea in China? Or does it save itself the trouble and keep much of the opium right here, trading it to the Chinese in exchange for tea? Tell me!” the sergeant demanded from the artist as more spots wavered in front of his eyes.

“Trade the opium for the Chinese tea, Sergeant!” the artist of death answered.

“You really show promise, laddie. Exactly. The British East India Company trades the opium for the Chinese tea. There’s only one small problem in this scheme. Opium happens to be illegal in China. The Chinese emperor isn’t eager for his millions of subjects to become opium degenerates. Imagine the emperor’s nerve standing up to the British East India Company and by extension the British Empire. By the way, did I explain that it’s very difficult to tell the difference between our government and the British East India Company?”

“You didn’t, Sergeant!” the artist replied. “But we wish to know!”

“You’ll be a corporal in a couple of weeks, laddie. Everybody, pay attention. All the empire’s wars need financing, and we have the British East India Company to thank for making them possible. It lent the British government millions of pounds to finance the Seven Years’ War alone. Generous, don’t you think? But then, in exchange, the government gave the British East India Company the exclusive right to trade with India and China. It’s no coincidence that the chairman of the company’s board of directors is the British government’s foreign secretary. The result of this cozy arrangement is that when you protect the British East India Company, you protect the British government. Keep that thought foremost in your minds and you’ll never wonder why we’re here.”

A recruit toppled, a victim of the sun.

Two other arrivals stooped to help him.

“Did I say you could move?” the sergeant demanded. “Leave him alone! Both of you remain at attention for an hour after everyone else is dismissed!”

The sergeant walked up and down the line, glaring at all of them. In the background, two elephants used their trunks to carry logs to a construction site. The artist feared that he was going insane.

The sergeant confronted the artist.

“If opium is illegal in China but if the British East India Company wants to trade its opium for Chinese tea, how can that transaction be managed?”

The artist thought carefully, fighting his heat sickness. “By smuggling the opium into China, Sergeant!”

“I hereby officially promote you to corporal. See that you punish the two men who broke ranks just now. Yes, the opium is smuggled into China. That is accomplished via ships to Hong Kong or via caravan through India’s northern mountains. When you men aren’t making sure the natives don’t rebel against us, you’ll guard the opium as it’s loaded onto ships and caravan wagons. It’s a busy life here, laddies, provided you don’t weaken the way that man did.”

The sergeant pointed toward the man who’d collapsed.

“Is he dead?”

“I think so, Sergeant,” a recruit answered.

“Well, what doesn’t kill us makes us strong.”


COUNTLESS OPIUM BRICKS, the color of coffee, awaited shipment to China or else home to England, there to be blended with alcohol and made into laudanum. All the warehouses had a faint biting odor of the slaked lime that was part of the water solution in which the opium paste was first boiled.

The artist became very familiar with that odor because his first assignment in India was to guard those warehouses. Each night, he and other sentries patrolled the walkways between the buildings. Ignoring the bites of insects, he focused on the shadows ahead, aware that the insects, even if they infected him, would be nothing compared to the anger of the sergeant if someone broke into the warehouses and stole any of the opium.

A slight scraping noise made him pause.

When a shadow scurried from a warehouse, he raised his rifle.

“Stop!”

The shadow ducked behind some crates.

The artist stepped closer, aiming. “Identify yourself!”

“I know that voice. Is it you, Corporal?” a man whispered.

“Step out!”

“Thank God. We thought you was the sergeant. Keep your voice down.”

Figures emerged from behind the crates, three privates with whom the artist had sailed to India.

“We was just grabbin’ a brick.” One of them grinned. “Figured we’d have a smoke before goin’ to sleep. This damned heat. These bloody insects. You want some?”

“Put it back in the warehouse.”

“You want it all to yourself, eh? Fine. Here it is. We’ll walk away. Pretend you never saw us.”

“I said, ‘Put it back in the warehouse.’ ”

“And then what?”

The artist didn’t answer.

“You’re not gonna turn us in, are you?”

The artist kept aiming.

“Damn it, the bastard’s gonna turn us in!”

When they lunged, the artist shot the first man in the chest. Pivoting with the rifle, he drove his bayonet into the second man.

The third man crashed into him, knocking him against crates. The man thrust a knife at him. Twisting to avoid it, the artist grabbed the man’s hand and bent it, forcing him to drop the knife. Ramming his elbow into the man’s throat, he heard something crack.

The man sank, clutching his throat, gasping for air.

Voices and footsteps raced toward the artist. Soldiers surrounded him.

“My God,” one of them said, holding a lantern over the bodies.

“Who fired that shot?” The sergeant pushed his way forward. “What happened?”

“That opium brick,” the artist explained. “I caught them stealing it from the warehouse.”

“So you killed them?” the sergeant asked in surprise.

“Those were your orders.”

“Yes, those were indeed my orders.”

“Plus, they tried to kill me.”

“Three,” a soldier said in the background. “He killed all three.”

“Not only three, but three of your own.” The sergeant studied him. “It’s easy to kill natives. But three of your own? Did you ever kill anybody before?”

“No,” the artist lied.

“Someone else might have hesitated.”

“Sergeant, I didn’t have time to think.”

“Sometimes not thinking is good. There’s someone I want you to talk to.”


IGNORE MY RANK. No need to address me as ‘sir,’ ” the major said. “Tell me about your father.”

“Didn’t know him. My mother wasn’t married. When I was four, she met a former soldier and lived with him.”

“Where did he serve?”

“With Wellington at Waterloo.”

“You lived with a man who helped make history.”

“He never talked about it. He had a big scar on his leg, but he never talked about that, either. Nightmares sometimes woke him.”

“My father fought at Waterloo, also,” the major confided. “Nightmares woke him. The reason I asked is, sometimes it’s inherited.”

“Inherited?”

“The ability to stare a threat in the face and not flinch. But since you never knew your father, we have no way of telling what you might have inherited from him. The fear of being killed or of killing can paralyze a man. Only twenty percent of our soldiers are able to overcome those fears. The rest provide cover for the actual warriors. It seems that you are one of those warriors.”

“All I did was defend myself.”

“Against three trained men, but you didn’t flinch.”

Beyond the major’s tent, an instructor showed ten soldiers how to tie a knot in a rope to make an effective garrote. The instructor explained that the weapon, a favorite of the Thug cult, crushed the windpipe in addition to strangling.

The artist listened with interest.

“This is a special unit I’m assembling. You speak better than your fellows. Where did you learn?” the major asked.

“Every Sunday in London, I went to a church where a teacher gave me a cookie if I learned to read Bible verses.”

“The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”

“There’s a lot of killing in the Old Testament.”

The major chuckled. “Why did you become a soldier?”

“When I was an infant, my mother carried me on her back while she gathered chunks of coal along the Thames. Until I was nine, I worked for a dustman, collecting ashes. After that, I shoveled horse droppings from the streets and put them in bins for the fertilizer makers to pick up. When I was eleven, I helped clean privies.”

“There seems to be a common denominator.”

“After a year of digging out privies, I decided that the army couldn’t be much worse, so when I was twelve, I claimed to be fourteen and signed up.”

The major’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “Enterprising. Your mother and the man she lives with, did they approve?”

“They died in a fire long before I was shoveling horseshit.”

“I’m sorry for your difficult life. Did you ever consider that you were meant to join the army?”


THE HARDSHIPS OF SURVIVING on London’s streets had seemed the worst that anyone could endure, but the artist’s new training took him far beyond his former ability to withstand fatigue, heat, hunger, thirst, and lack of sleep. The strange part was, he welcomed it. He proudly developed resources of strength and determination that he hadn’t imagined were possible. He learned to ignore the threat of pain and death. Fear became an unfamiliar emotion, even as he vowed to make the enemy suffer fear in the extreme.

He was transformed into one of the warriors that the major had spoken about.

He received better food.

His lodgings were less cramped.

He was given respect.

He loved it.

“Your mission is to guard the opium caravans,” the major told the artist’s elite unit. “The land distance from India to China is less than the sea distance. In theory, the shorter distance should be quicker, but overland has these mountains”—the major tapped a pointer against a map on a wall—“where marauders attack our caravans and steal the opium. We send heavily armed cavalry to protect the caravans. It doesn’t matter. The caravans continue to vanish. Tons of opium have been stolen.”

The major directed his attention toward the artist. “We believe that the marauders are Thugs. Repeat what we taught you about the Thugs.”

The artist responded without hesitation. “Major, they’re a criminal cult that worships Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. She’s sometimes called the Devourer. That’s why she has so many arms in paintings of her. The Thugs specialize in stealing from travelers, usually killing them by strangulation.”

“Correct as always,” the major said.

The artist kept his face impassive but felt the pleasure of receiving approval.

“The British East India Company wants you to stop them,” the major commanded the unit. “No, not merely stop them. Make them understand the unspeakable consequences of challenging the empire.”


FORTY NATIVES ACCOMPANIED THE CARAVAN. They managed the oxen that pulled the twenty wagons. They herded goats that were used for milk and meat. All were trusted employees of the British East India Company.

Each day, the artist and two members of his unit walked next to the wagons and assessed the behavior of the natives. Each night, they stepped into the dark and studied the camp, looking for secret conversations.

The cavalry escort amounted to forty, its captain sending riders ahead to look for ambushes. Villages became widely separated. As the land rose, trees gave way to grassland and boulders. The higher altitude made the animals and men breathe harder. Streams rushed from the distant mountains, their water so cold that it made the artist’s teeth ache.

“Three days to the pass through the mountains,” the native guide said.

“Any risk of snow?”

“Not this time of year, but anything is possible.”

Indeed anything was possible. Two cavalry outriders galloped back in alarm. The caravan crested a plateau. Ravens and vultures erupted into the air, revealing the remnants of a caravan that had departed two weeks earlier. That caravan had included other members of the artist’s unit.

Bones lay everywhere, scattered by predators. The bones of humans only. All the oxen, horses, and goats were missing, as were the wagons and their contents. The bodies had been stripped, no fragments of garments on any of the skeletons.

Portions of foul-smelling flesh remained, but not enough to indicate wounds. None of the bones showed signs of violence from firearms or blades, however. If those weapons had been used, at least some of the bones would surely have displayed damage. That forced the artist to conclude that all eighty-three people in the caravan—cavalry, natives, and three highly trained members of the artist’s unit—had been strangled.

“I don’t see how this is possible,” he told the cavalry commander. “Granted, the natives didn’t know how to defend themselves, but our horsemen did, and they had rifles as well as swords. The members of my special unit were even more capable. Nonetheless all of them were overpowered.”

The odor of decay was strong enough that the artist and the soldiers worked quickly, handkerchiefs tied over their faces, to collect the bones into a huge pile and cover them with rocks. Normally the races wouldn’t have been mingled, but because there wasn’t any way to distinguish the bones of natives from those of the English cavalry, it seemed better to group all of them together and be certain that the English received a Christian burial. Prayers were said. The oxen, horses, and goats kept reacting to the smell of death, so to quiet them, the caravan moved a mile ahead, formed a circle, and camped near a stream.

The night sky was brilliant. With so much natural illumination, the wagons were already exposed, so there was no reason not to build cooking fires.

The cavalry commander assigned sentries. As the natives and the soldiers prepared food, the artist and the two members of his unit hoped that so much activity would conceal them from anyone watching. They crawled from camp and established their own sentry posts at three equal compass points, northeast, northwest, and south. They each took a packet of biscuits and a canteen filled with stream water.

Away from the fires, the night was bitterly cold. The artist lay among rocks and used force of will to keep from shivering. I can withstand anything, he told himself, remembering the sergeant’s words. What doesn’t kill me makes me strong.

The fires didn’t last long, their fuel coming from grass, animal droppings, sparse bushes, and the branches of a solitary, long-dead tree.

The artist kept scanning his surroundings.

A shadow moved among the wagons, perhaps a guard coming back from his watch while another man took his place. A later shadow might have been a native relieving his bladder beyond a wagon.

The camp settled into sleep.

Another shadow appeared, detaching itself from the circle of wagons. Close to the ground, it came in the artist’s direction.

As the artist drew his knife, the moon cast a shadow of someone behind him.

The artist rolled an instant before a figure leapt toward him. The moon’s illumination was enough to reveal that the figure had a rope with a knot in it and that the figure looped it over where the artist’s throat had been. The artist stabbed him, stifling his moans. He surged up to meet the second figure, surprising him, thrusting under his rib cage while pressing a hand against his mouth.

The artist didn’t allow himself even a moment to exult in his victory. What he felt now were the tightened nerves and compacted muscles of an animal confronted by an enemy. Something terrible was happening to the camp, and he had the even more terrible sense that he might not be able to stop it.

He crawled silently in that direction, then stopped as he realized that just as he had seen the shadow crawl toward him, so an enemy in the camp could see him approaching. That shadow had been a decoy, drawing his attention while the true assassin had come from behind him.

Are there others behind me? he thought.

He hugged the ground, trying to assess which direction posed the greater threat. Three clangs from an oxen bell puzzled him. Soon, he noticed silhouettes moving among the wagons. They bent and tugged at various objects. His stomach hardened when he realized what they were doing—stripping clothes from corpses. The silhouettes put the clothes in the wagons, along with various objects that had been unpacked to prepare the night’s meal. They hitched the oxen to the wagons. They herded the goats together and tied the horses to the backs of the wagons.

The artist had no doubt that everyone in the camp was dead.

He had no doubt about something else as well. The silhouettes moving among the wagons would soon want to know why the two men sent to kill him hadn’t returned.

He crawled away from the camp, scanning the horizon for threats. The two members of his unit who had established their own sentry posts—had they possibly survived? When he judged that he was far enough away, he moved in a circle, searching for where the other men had taken their positions.

Now he again saw moving shadows—two silhouettes tugging clothes from a body that could only belong to one of his comrades.

Loyalty fought against common sense. So far, he had counted at least twenty silhouettes. He knew that one man in his special unit was dead. What were the odds that the other man had survived? If so, what would that man decide to do? There was no way to save the caravan. The mission now became to determine how the caravan had been overwhelmed and to pass that information to the next caravan that would come through here in two weeks.

The artist knew that his comrade wouldn’t be foolhardy. If the man was alive, he would back away and hide, as the artist now planned to do. They were trained to be self-reliant. They would survive to defeat this enemy another day.

Hide? Where? The landscape was barren, except for boulders and the stream. Using the cavalry horses, the marauders who overwhelmed the caravan would easily be able to search the area for miles in every direction.

The artist made a wide semicircle. Staying low, he retraced the route that the caravan had used to arrive here. He didn’t know if the attackers had the skill to follow his tracks. To eliminate the risk, he walked backward where the animals and wagons had crushed grass and torn up the ground.

A glow over the eastern hills warned that the sun would soon rise. No matter how low he stayed as he ran, he would soon be visible. Horsemen could easily catch him. He needed to conceal himself.

He suddenly realized where he was—near the mound that contained the bones of the previous caravan. As the light increased, the artist sprinted toward the rocks, removed some, made a tunnel among the bones, crawled in, pulled the rocks back into place, and arranged the bones so that they concealed him.

The stench of the rotting flesh made him vomit the biscuits he’d eaten while watching the caravan. Willpower wasn’t enough to keep him from throwing up. The odor was so disgusting and visceral that his body took charge. Buried by death, he fought not to shiver from the cold of the rib cages and skulls above and below him and all around him. Tense, he listened for the sound of approaching horses and voices.

They came soon. Although the artist didn’t understand their language, their tone was urgent and angry. Evidently the marauders had found the bodies of the men who had tried to kill him. They knew that at least one member of the caravan remained alive, and they were determined to find him.

The majority of the horses galloped past. Some did not, however. The artist heard the animals shy from the stench, making it difficult for their riders to control them. Someone seemed to suggest that they pull the rocks off the mound and search through the bones. The others protested in disgust. The horses became more upset.

The horsemen finally galloped on, following the caravan’s tracks down the slope. The artist assumed that other searchers pursued in other directions.

Feeling crushed by the bones, he took shallow breaths, working to control his nausea. His muscles ached from tension and cramps because of not being able to move.

He thought about the knotted rope with which an attacker had tried to strangle him. The weapon was favored by the Thug cult. But that didn’t explain how they’d been able to overwhelm forty cavalry soldiers, forty natives, and one, if not two, members of his highly trained unit. Surely one of the soldiers could have fired a shot before being strangled, or else one of the natives would have cried in alarm. But all of them had died silently.

How was that possible?

The artist lay among the bones, shivering and brooding, trying to understand how the attack had occurred. Presumably the Thugs had watched from a distance and approached the wagons after dark.

But how had they soundlessly overwhelmed so many so quickly? Had some of the natives rebelled? But those natives had worked for the British East India Company many years. Why would they suddenly have become traitors?

The artist’s mind retraced the route of the caravan. At one point, they had allowed a one-legged old man to join them so that he could travel to reach his son’s family in a mountain village. Later, a wizened grandmother with a little girl had also joined the caravan. The little girl had needed a doctor’s attention, and now they were returning home.

The artist had objected, but the natives had told him that it was customary to allow the helpless to join a caravan, and after all, how could a one-legged old man, a wizened grandmother, and a little girl be threats?

Rethinking the decision to let them come along, the artist couldn’t disagree with that logic. There was no way that those weak people could have overcome so many natives and soldiers.

That took him back to his initial thought, that some of the natives had betrayed the caravan.

The vibration of hooves brought his mind to attention. He heard the rumble coming closer. Returning, the attackers sounded even more angry and frustrated. How he wished that he could understand what they were saying. Had they decided to stop hunting him? What were their plans? If he survived, he swore, he would learn as many local languages as he could.

They galloped back in the direction of the wagons. Soon, the artist heard the distant clatter of the caravan departing. Wary, he didn’t move. Even after he could no longer hear the animals and wagons, he didn’t move. Someone might have been left behind to study the landscape and see if he crept from cover.

The morning became silent. His arms and legs demanded to be allowed to move, but he remained immobile beneath the cold bones and the heavy rocks. The small amount of sunlight that reached him changed direction as morning turned to afternoon.

But he didn’t move. He occupied his mind by trying to understand how the caravan had been overwhelmed.

The specks of light dimmed as the sun changed direction, afternoon turning to twilight.

Then everything was dark.

The artist had long since urinated on himself. His mouth was so dry that his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

He remained in place.

When he realized that despite his discipline and determination, he had fallen asleep, he bit his lower lip, drawing blood to rouse himself, and decided that if he didn’t take the chance of leaving his burrow he might lapse into unconsciousness there.

Slowly, silently, he pushed rocks away from the bones. His arms didn’t want to work. With small, careful movements, he emerged from the massive grave, but no matter how deeply he breathed, he couldn’t clear the odor of decay.

The night sky was again brilliant. Crawling so slowly that he hoped his movements would be imperceptible, the artist moved toward the stream. He plunged his head into it, the icy water shocking him into alertness. Like an animal, he looked cautiously around to make certain that he wasn’t being stalked. He took a deep swallow. Another. And another. The cold water pained his tongue and throat, and made him more alert.

Scanning the area for moving shadows, he reached into his pockets and nibbled the remainder of the biscuits that he had taken with him the night before. His stomach protested, but he forced down the food, needing strength.

The departing wagons had gone to the west. His own direction needed to be southeast, toward the caravan that would reach this area in two weeks. Staying low, he followed the stream down the slope.

And stopped.

The bodies of the soldiers and natives he had traveled with beckoned him. As much as he wanted to leave, the dead men insisted. He hadn’t been able to protect the caravan. That left him with the obligation of learning how so many men had been overwhelmed.

Mustering grim resolve, he turned and approached where the wagons had stopped the previous night. He was ready with his knife, expecting that at any moment a shadow would attack him. In the moonlight, he saw long objects on the ground. Some were pale.

They were bodies stripped of their clothing. Vultures had torn off parts of them. A wolf raised its head from eating, sensed how dangerous the artist was, and skulked away.

Perhaps one of the attackers had remained and pretended to be a corpse. The artist doubted it. The night was so cold that he couldn’t imagine anyone being able to lie naked on the ground for hour after hour.

He would know soon enough. Ready to defend himself, he examined each body, eighty of them, plus his two comrades whose bodies he discovered at their sentry positions.

Eighty-two.

He assumed that the raiders would have taken the bodies of the two men who’d attacked him. But even so, there should have been eighty-five corpses, including the one-legged old man, the wizened grandmother, and the little girl. The latter three were nowhere to be found.

They’d been Thugs.

But it didn’t make sense. How could a crippled old man, a bent-forward grandmother, and a little girl have silently overpowered so many people, including soldiers with combat experience?

The beginning odor of death hung over the moonlit field as the artist inspected the corpses to determine what had killed them. But in only two cases was the cause of death obvious—his two compatriots all had marks on their throats that indicated they’d been strangled. As for the others, except for what the wolves and the vultures had started to do, there weren’t any injuries.

How is this possible? It’s almost as if eighty people fell asleep and never woke up.

Fell asleep? At once, the artist understood what had happened. The crippled old man, the wizened grandmother, and the little girl had poisoned the food that was being prepared, probably adding powder to the pots of water that were boiled for tea. They must have been trained to do it so they wouldn’t be noticed. After the poison had its effect, they had rung the oxen bell three times, signaling for the rest of their band to enter the camp and collect their spoils. The only reason that the artist and his two comrades hadn’t been poisoned was that they’d put biscuits in their pockets and left while the meal was being prepared, wanting to use the activity in camp to conceal their stealthy movements as they chose their sentry positions.

Poison.

Yes.

The artist crept from the field of death. He ran southeast in a crouch for several miles, then felt safe enough to straighten. By then, the sun was up, adding its warmth to the heat generated by his urgency. Eventually he was forced to moderate his pace, eating a few biscuits from his pockets as he moved. Soon he ran again. When he slept, it was only briefly. At all costs, he needed to reach the next caravan. He couldn’t take for granted that the Thugs would wait until the caravan reached this area. They might change their tactics and attack earlier.

He pushed himself to his limit. On the second day, he reached a farm, where he paid for food and a robe. All the while, he kept his wary attention on the farmer and his family, suspecting they might be Thugs.

He hurried on, watching for anyone who might follow him from the farm. He reached a village, but instead of entering, he veered around it during the night, suspicious that Thugs might live there. He descended relentlessly.

On the seventh day, he staggered across a field and found the next caravan. By then, he looked so haggard, windburned, and wild that a cavalry patrol challenged him, believing him to be a native.

“English,” he managed to say past his swollen tongue as they aimed rifles at him.

“That’s right. We’re English. Put your hands in the air.”

“No, I’m English.” His raw throat made his speech indistinct.

“The beggar can barely talk. Search him for weapons.”

“Wait. I think I recognize him. Robert? Is that you, Robert?”

The artist strained to get the words out. “You’re Jack Gordon.”

“It is Robert! I trained with him! He’s part of my unit!”

“You’re… attacked.”

“I can’t understand what you’re saying, Robert. Drink this water.”

“You’re going to be attacked.”

Gulping from a canteen, the artist staggered along the caravan. He suddenly pointed at the same one-legged old man, wizened grandmother, and little girl who had joined his own caravan. After soldiers grabbed them, a search revealed that the man was neither old nor one-legged. Makeup made him look elderly. The seemingly absent leg was bent back and up from the knee, strapped in place beneath his robe.

The stooped, wizened grandmother turned out to be a middle-aged woman of excellent strength. As with the old man, makeup had aged her. The little girl was indeed a little girl, but she was so well trained that she might as well have been an adult. A bag of poison was under her robe.

The artist rested only briefly, then tortured the captives, wishing that he didn’t need to rely on a native translator. Again, he vowed to learn the area’s languages. He confirmed the signal the Thugs used to tell the rest of the band that everyone in camp was dead from the poison: three clangs from an oxen bell.

Where would the next attack occur?

They resisted telling him.

He inflicted more pain. The little girl finally couldn’t bear it any longer and revealed everything.

He shot them.

The caravan reached the area where the attack was supposed to occur. They formed the wagons in a circle for the night, took care of the animals, made an evening meal, and pretended to go to sleep, presumably to die from the poison. The artist rang the oxen bell.

When twenty Thugs snuck through the darkness, the artist killed five of them himself while the rest of the command took care of the others. He made sure that one Thug was kept alive, and promised to set him free if the Thug would teach him the cult’s methods of disguise. The captive endured unimaginable pain before he finally revealed secret after secret: about makeup, about blackening teeth to make it seem that some were missing, about applying wigs and fake beards and thickening eyebrows, about putting a pebble in a shoe to create a convincing limp. The Thug also revealed various places where his band of marauders camped.

When the Thug no longer had things to teach, the artist shot him.

The artist led cavalry to the various Thug campgrounds, destroying everyone there: men, women, and children.

He was promoted to second lieutenant. Most officers were gentlemen of means who paid to be given authority in the military, sometimes with disastrous results. But the artist received his commission based on merit and reputation.

Soon he was a full lieutenant.

The Opium War with China provided even more reasons for him to be promoted. The English government was determined to earn millions of pounds by flooding China with opium. The Chinese emperor was determined to prevent his millions of subjects from becoming mindless. Thus, there needed to be a war that lasted four brutal years, from 1839 to 1842, and the artist needed to kill increasing numbers of people.

Opium. The lime odor of the countless bricks of it stacked in warehouses made him nauseous. Even the coffee-colored look of the drug affected his stomach. He could no longer drink coffee because of that color. Or tea—after all, tea was what the opium bricks were traded for. He drank increasing quantities of alcohol, however.

Nightmares woke him, images of bones and corpses swirling as if he were under opium’s influence. The faces of his victims resembled poppy bulbs that exploded with white fluid gushing from them instead of blood.

A loud noise shocked the artist out of his night terror. He pulled the knife from the scabbard on his wrist, tumbled from his cot, and braced himself for an attack.

The loud noise was repeated.

Someone was outside on the street, pounding on the door.

With visions of the hell of India still turning in his mind, the artist crept around the cot, stepped over the crumpled newspapers, and approached the small window to his bedroom, so small that not even a child could squeeze through it. The window had bars as a further protection.

The artist pulled a drapery aside and saw darkness beyond the glass. As the pounding on the door continued, he unbolted the window, swung it out, and peered down toward a fog-shrouded man standing under a gas lamp.

“What do you want?” the artist shouted.

“You’ve been summoned!”