Jani and the Greater Game (The Multiplicity Series Book 1) (31 page)

She stood in silence and gazed up at the statue of the dead queen, then stared at the place, described over and over by her father, where she had been knocked down.

Then, squeezing Anand’s hand, she led the way across the square to the Varma Singh guest house.

A pair of green-painted doors opened onto an expanse of polished floorboards covered with faded rugs. Galleries on the first and second floors overlooked the foyer, their wrought-iron scrollwork also painted green. An air of faded antiquity hung about the place, as if the guest house was the relic of another age. Nothing seemed to have changed since her last visit twelve years ago.

Jani asked at reception for a twin-bedded room, and a grey, bent woman, looking as old as the house itself, showed her to a spacious, sparsely furnished room overlooking the lake. “The summer season is over,” she said, “and we have many rooms available on the upper floors. This is one of the finest, with views of the lakes and hills, and I will be charging you only ten rupees a night.”

“It’s wonderful!” Jani said as she stepped out onto the balcony and leaned over the rail. “We will be staying for one or two nights. I wonder if food is available?”

“We have no restaurant, but if you would like to dine in your room I will arrange for meals to be delivered. There are many fine restaurants in Rishi Tal.”

“That will be perfect,” Jani said, and watched the old woman shuffle from the room.

She took the hot bath she had been dreaming about for days, and then went down to reception and ordered dal baht with puri, and chai, to be delivered to their room.

Later, as they ate at a table on the verandah, Anand said, “You must have wonderful memories of your holidays here, Jani-ji?”

“I remember that we stayed in rooms overlooking the lake – maybe even this one. I remember my father playing chess on a balcony with the owner, Varma Singh himself, an old man with a great white turban and the biggest moustache I have ever seen.”

She imagined her mother and father renting the room on their first holiday here; she could almost see their ghosts, moving around the faded chintz bedroom like spectral actors on a stage.

“And now we wait for Jelch?”

She sipped her spiced chai. “Ah-cha. This is perfect, Anand. We have everything we need in this room. We have no need to set foot outside for anything. Although I would like to explore Rishi Tal, I would not feel safe doing so with so many police and soldiers about the place.”

She gripped the balcony rail and peered down at the promenade flanking the lake. The town was a popular holiday destination for members of the Raj, and the main street was busy with tourists – among which, Jani saw, were uniformed British soldiers. She gazed down, feeling relatively safe for the first time since fleeing Delhi.

“I have been thinking...” she said a little later, watching Anand wipe his plate clean of dal with his puri. “When Jelch comes here, he will be in disguise.”

“He will?”

“Well, I hope so. If not, then he will attract unwanted attention. Although he resembles a human, he looks very different. His face is flattened, his eyes large and grey – they reminded me of the eyes of a dead fish. And his legs...” She recalled him bounding away through the wreckage of the airship. Something about the articulation of his legs had put her in mind of a dog.

As she told Anand this, his eyes widened. “What kind of creature is he, Jani-ji? Where do you think he comes from?”

She shook her head. “The world is a mysterious place. There are many areas, to the north of here for example, that are unexplored. You have heard of stories about the yeti? Maybe Jelch is a creature like these.”

But why, then, if this were so, had he said that he came from far away, and was here in a bid to help the human race?

“Perhaps,” Anand ventured, “he is a god come to Earth?”

She smiled. “I think not. Gods exist only in the minds of those who need such things.”

He stared at her. “You are so like your father! He would not allow holy men into the house. He would have no truck with anything he thought of as superstition. This worried me, and daily I prayed for him at the shrine of Shiva on Chittagar Road. I think I should pray for you, next time, Jani-ji.”

She smiled. “You do that, Anand, if it will make you happy.”

She finished her chai, returned to the room and lay on the bed, reading a little Tagore while Anand remained on the balcony staring down at the promenading tourists. “I will tell you when a strange-looking creature approaches the guest house, Jani-ji.”

She set her book aside and closed her eyes. Minutes later, half-awake, she dreamed of a funeral pyre with her father’s swaddled corpse placed atop the stacked timbers. Tears trickled down her cheeks. Three days had elapsed since her father’s passing, and his funeral would have been held by now...

“Jani-ji!”

She felt a hand on her shoulder, shaking her.

Anand said, his face animated, “Jani-ji. There is someone at the door! Perhaps it is...”

She swung from the bed as the tapping sounded again. Arranging her hair, and checking her cheeks to ensure they were dry of tears, she hurried across the room and answered the summons. She had expected to see Jelch standing on the threshold, and was surprised to see the shrunken form of the old proprietor.

“You have a visitor, Miss. A most venerable gentleman wishes to see you. Shall I send him up, or will you be coming down to receive him?”

Debating what might be best, she said, “Please, send him up.”

“Ah-cha.” The old woman pressed her palms together before her chest and hurried off.

Anand was beside Jani. “Is it him, Jani-ji?”

“Who else can it be?” she said, stepping from the room and crossing to the gallery rail.

She stared down into the foyer. A huge holy man, his bulk swathed in a saffron robe, was climbing the stairs with considerable effort, accompanied by a thin, dark-haired youth.

Had Jelch taken on the disguise of an ash-haired sadhu? But, if so, then who was his skeletal accomplice?

Anand clutched her hand. “Jani-ji!” he hissed. “That man is not Jelch! He is a priest called Durga Das. I have heard his anti-British speeches in Delhi. The man with him is called Mr Knives – and he is a thug!”

Jani pulled Anand back into the room and locked the door. “But what can they want with us?” she said to herself.

Anand shook his head. “What should we do?” he asked.

“We should get away from here as fast as we can, Anand.”

She crossed to the balcony. Her heart was thumping and she could hardly think straight. Anand voiced her uppermost thought. “But how did they know we were here?”

“I don’t know. Might they have found Jelch, and somehow forced our whereabouts from him?” She stared at the boy. “And this Mr Knives? I don’t like the sound of him.”

“He is a criminal. He does the holy man’s dirty work. Some people even say he is a murderer. The police do nothing to arrest him because he works for Durga Das, who bribes them to look the other way.”

She peered over the balcony rail. The street was thirty feet below them and there was no way down, aside from a tall poplar tree whose feathery branches brushed the wrought iron scrollwork of the balcony. For a desperate second she considered jumping into the tree and trusting her safety to blind luck, but baulked at the thought.

“Jani?” Anand cried.

“We will simply refuse to answer the door,” she said.

“But if they attempt to break it down?”

“Then... then we will attack them, push our way past the pair and flee from the guest house.”

Anand looked far from convinced. “Ah-cha,” he said.

A loud rapping sounded at the door. Jani shrank back, her heart pounding.

“Shhh,” she exhorted, though Anand needed no telling.

The tapping came again, followed by silence.

A voice called out, “Janisha Chatterjee?”

The knocks started up again, more insistent this time.

“Janisha Chatterjee, I know you are within the room. Now please answer the door. We need to speak on a most urgent matter.”

She turned again and stared over the rail. There was no way down, other than the tree.

The rapping upon the door became an urgent hammering. “Miss Chatterjee! I must insist!”

This was followed by an interval of silence in which Jani was aware of her thumping heart. “Jani?” Anand was wide-eyed.

Then the door shook as someone applied their shoulder to it.

Jani ran into the room, Anand beside her, and paused before the door. “Just as soon as the door bursts open,” she hissed, “charge past them and sprint down the stairs. I will be right behind you.”

“And then?”

“Then we will make for the hills and hide.”

The door shook again and timber splintered, but held. She stood a yard from the door, watching it bulge in the frame with each blow. She looked desperately around the room for something to use as a weapon, but saw nothing – by which time, anyway, it was too late.

The door sprang open in an explosion of timber shrapnel and bounced back off the wall. The young man, Mr Knives, tumbled into the room. Anand cried out and dodged past the intruder, but at that second the corpulent holy man filled the threshold and Anand bounced off his belly. Mr Knives grabbed the boy, forcing his right arm up between his shoulder blades. Anand cried out as Mr Knives threw him to the floor. Jani pulled the boy to her and together, defiant, they faced their captors.

Behind Mr Knives, the holy man had to turn sideways in order to squeeze his great belly through the doorway. He shut the ruined door behind him and stared at Jani and Anand with gloating delight.

Mr Knives pulled a long blade from inside his jacket and began, casually, to pare his nails, an expression of supreme satisfaction on his rat-like face as he leaned back against the door.

Jani stared at Durga Das. Everything about him, she thought, was revolting, from the long, greasy curls that hung on either side of his overfed face, with its hooked nose and full, sensuous lips, to the pendulous sack of his belly, down to the big hairy toes that protruded from his worn sandals. He exuded a malign intent as he stared at her, the reek of sweat barely concealed by rosewater.

His voice, when he spoke, was high and sweet, like a nautch girl’s. “Delighted to make your acquaintance, at last, Janisha Chatterjee,” he said in Hindi.

She stared at him. “What do you want with us?”

Das stared at her. “I think
you
know very well what we want, Janisha.” The way he spoke the long form of her name, with cloying familiarity, turned her stomach.

“We want,” he went on, “the same as the Russians want. We want the tithra-kun̄jī.”

The word tithra meant nothing to her; the second word, kun̄jī, was Hindi for key.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Das’s cupid’s bow lips puckered in mock disappointment. “Oh, but I know you do. The monster gave it to you. Or has the trauma of the Russian attack wiped that from your memory? I rather think not.”

Jani shook her head. “I don’t...” she began. The coin, she thought...

Das stepped forward, his gut rolling. “Now, I am a servant of my goddess,” he interrupted. “My presence on Earth, the very reason for my being, is to expedite the will of Kali. My every action, my every intent, is but a manifestation of the desire of beings so much greater than ourselves that we are mere amoebas by comparison. My destiny, ordained by Kali, is to succeed in uniting the sacred realm with the mundane, this Earth with the exalted, in bringing my goddess to wreak her work on this benighted world. Nothing will stop me, nothing will stand in my way. It is written in the fates that I will succeed, that Kali will, through me, descend and destroy this evil age and renew creation...” His eyes opened wide as he stared at her. “Now where is the tithra-kun̄jī!”

She shook her head, slowly, and said, “I honestly, honestly, don’t know.”

His eyes narrowed. “But the monster gave it to you?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about!”

Anand was staring up at her. She smiled at him and gripped his shoulder.

“You make an unconvincing liar, Janisha Chatterjee,” Das purred.

“It’s the truth!”

Das sighed. “I have been lenient with you so far. You have been defiant, sinful even. You defy the will of the gods. But then you are but a lackey of the Raj, educated by their lie-mongers in London... You are a traitor to your nation, your people. What should I expect but defiance, and ignorance, from the daughter of a heathen like Kapil Dev Chatterjee? Now, I will give you one more chance, and if you persist in lying then I shall be forced, against my better judgement, to prevail upon Mr Knives and his trusty steel to make you see the error of your ways.”

“I am telling you the truth. I know nothing about a...”

“Mr Knives!” Das barked. “Not the girl. She is too... precious. I would like to keep her alive, for a little while at least. I think you should concentrate your considerable skill on killing the boy. And Mr Knives, do it quickly.” He smiled at Jani. “We will see then, as his blood flows like an offering to Kali, whether fear of death will loosen your tongue and the truth will issue from your lips. Mr Knives...”