Jani and the Greater Game (The Multiplicity Series Book 1) (5 page)

Experimentally she flexed her legs, stretching them as far as the opposite settee would allow. She was about to kick out at the settee above her head, in an attempt to escape from the accidental enclosure that had in all likelihood saved her life, when she heard a voice.

“Help... Please help me...” The plea was frail and heart-rending.

She turned to the gap. The first thing she saw, amid a tumble of wreckage that made no sense to her notions of order and symmetry, was Lady Eddington lying on her back and smiling up at her. The sight of her struck Jani as oddly beautiful, something triumphant about the fact of her survival.

“Jani... are you...?”

Jani struggled through the gap, lowered herself to where the old lady lay amid the debris of chandeliers, shredded carpet, and a... Jani stared at the object for some seconds before realising what it was: a severed foot and ankle, shod in a stout army boot, standing bizarrely upright beside the dowager’s disordered crinolines.

Jani cried out, clutched the boot and cast it behind her, sickened by its surprising weight. It was imperative that Lady Eddington was spared from seeing the thing.

She knelt beside the dowager and clutched her hand.

“My leg, my dear, feels as though it has been amputated...” she began, then clenched her jaw against the pain.

Trembling, Jani lifted the old lady’s dress.

The thin, ivory-white right leg was broken just below the knee, but Jani was relieved to see that the flesh was unbroken. The lower leg lay at an odd angle, and Jani knew she must set the fracture immediately.

She squeezed Lady Eddington’s hand. “It is broken, but not too badly. You’ll be fine, Lady Eddington. But I must straighten the leg.” She bit her lip, looking around her at the smouldering wreckage scattered over the sloping hillside.

Only now, as she took in the disorganised lines of the ship’s tortured architecture, did she make out the bodies. The haphazard impact of the ship had shown no reverence to the passengers: bodies and body parts – severed arms and legs, heads and torsos – occupied places where they had no right to be. She made out the bloodied corpses of men and women crushed beneath girders and impaled high up on the broken skeleton of the ship’s triple envelopes.

She had to find the surgery... but where to begin amidst such devastation? She recalled that every deck had first-aid posts, white boxes painted with red crosses. If she could find one of those... She turned in despair, and everywhere she looked her gaze was met with death and destruction.

She saw a brass rod lying amid tussocks of grass, and not far away a blood red cummerbund that no longer contained the girth of its owner. She fetched both and hurried back to Lady Eddington. She ripped the cummerbund into strips and turned to the dowager who was watching her with an odd smile on her aged face.

“This will hurt a little, Lady Eddington, but I must straighten your leg.”

She reached out, took hold of the old lady’s lower leg – the flesh cold and clammy to the touch – and pulled it forward and around. She felt bone grate and Lady Eddington gave a startled scream.

When she judged that the bone was aligned, she lay the rod beside the fractured tibia and began to wind the shredded cummerbund around both rod and shin. Five minutes later, accompanied by the occasional moan from Lady Eddington, the job was done. She mopped the dowager’s brow with the remaining material from the cummerbund and lodged a cushion beneath her head.

“I’m sure the authorities will be searching the area as I speak,” Jani said reassuringly. “We’ll be rescued in no time. When you are well,” she went on, “we must dine out at the Union restaurant on Connaught Circus.”

Lady Eddington smiled, her gaze looking beyond Jani. She murmured, “Poor Mr Gollalli... I must admit that I found his company more than a little wearing, but his... his enthusiasm for his vocation was endearing, don’t you think?”

Jani stared at her. “Mr Gollalli?”

Lady Eddington lifted a frail hand and pointed.

Mr Gollalli, in a macabre semblance of life, sat propped against a potted palm, beaming across at them. A great rent bisected his chest, parted to reveal ribs and, lower down, a spill of iridescent intestine. The strange thing was that the hideous wound seemed much less realistic than those which he had exhibited to Jani just yesterday evening. In death, his right hand still clutched his precious samples case.

Jani looked away, tears welling in her eyes.

She took in the wreckage that tumbled down the hillside, then looked back at the old lady. “There might be other survivors. I really must go and... perhaps I might be able to do something to help.”

Lady Eddington clutched her hand. “You go, child. Do what you must.”

“I’ll look for food and water, and then I’ll be back.”

She stood and, wondering where to begin – and wondering, too, what she might be able to do to help the severely injured she might stumble across – she limped through the wreckage.

It was hard to credit that the airship, vast though it had been, could occupy so much space on this lonely, deserted hillside. Everywhere she looked, near and far, she saw the wreckage of the craft. Much of the debris was unrecognisable, broken and twisted, often burning; other parts were intact and all the more poignant for being familiar: she saw a Pullman carriage on its side, and a hundred yards away a great cross-section of cabins like a devastated doll’s house, with some of the cabins occupied by dead passengers.

Over the scattered wreckage loomed the skeletal spars of the triple hulls around which the skin of the balloons had been stretched. Denuded now, with blue sky and clouds showing through the reticulations, the mighty de Havilland looked insubstantial, and Jani wondered how the gas-filled envelopes had managed to keep the many decks airborne.

The ship had come down in the saddle of a high valley slung between two lofty, snow-capped peaks. She looked for any sign of villages or townships, but saw none: the Hindu Kush was sparsely populated, and they were high up. She shivered, despite the warmth of the sun, and hoped that the authorities would locate the wreckage by sunset.

She avoided the burning corpses as she moved down the hillside, and the larger fires whose heat was like the blast from a furnace. She looked around her, hoping to come across the halt and the lame but again and again finding only the dead.

She must have walked for two hundred yards before she happened upon another section of the observation lounge, somehow parted from the area she had occupied. She saw that the subalterns had died together, their corpses piled in the angle of the floor and the outer wall; arms and legs poked stiffly from the khaki mass, and she was touched to see that many of the young men had drawn their revolvers, in a gesture of defiance as pathetic as it was futile.

Averting her gaze, she passed on. She stepped over the sprawled corpses of servants and bartenders; she recognised the young Tamil whose turban the subalterns had used as a rugby ball. Nearby she saw a boy and a girl, the six-year-old blonde twins she had spoken to on the first day of the voyage; they had been going to India, accompanied by their nanny, to visit their mama and papa... She felt a strange emotion then, a burning that seemed to rise through her chest to overwhelm her. She felt anger towards the men who had done this, the Russian military who had so casually brought down a ship carrying almost a thousand innocent men, women and children.

She moved on through the debris. Evidently the airship had ploughed into the hillside nose-first and scored a deep furrow for five hundred yards towards the head of the valley, shedding bits of itself as it went. She passed a wide pit where the nose of the gondola must have hit first, with scattered cabins to either side.

It was in one of these cabins that she found a survivor. A young Englishwoman sat hugging herself in the lee of a wall. She appeared catatonic, and hardly registered Jani as she approached. The front of the woman’s dress was soaked with blood from a gash to her forehead, but Jani thought the wound minor. She knelt and laid a hand on the woman’s arm.

She looked beyond the woman, and saw the reason for her grief: a young man – her husband or beau? – lay on the slope, decapitated. His head, a yard away, regarded the blue sky with open eyes.

Jani gasped and whispered, “Come with me. You’re safe now. We’ll find food and water. A rescue party will soon be here.”

The woman stared at her, then pushed Jani away with surprising strength. “Leave me alone! Go! Chalo!” she cried in Hindi, dismissing Jani as if she were a servant girl.

“I’ll be back with food and water,” Jani murmured.

She limped through the wreckage. She passed more corpses, hundreds of them, men and women who had been on the threshold of their own unique futures, with hopes and dreams to lighten their days. She grimaced at the thought, almost word-for-word a line from a scrap of poetry she had written in her last term at school.

At last, lying beside what looked like a crushed wardrobe spilling assorted clothing, she made out a gleaming, white-painted first-aid box, dented into a parallelogram with the impact of the crash. She sorted through its contents, creating a bag from a nearby dress and stowing bandages, sticking plasters, antiseptic salve, ampoules of diamorphine and intravenous needles.

Slinging the makeshift bag over her shoulder, she moved up the slope and veered right, towards where she thought she might find the restaurant and kitchen.

Ahead she saw a Pullman carriage, its stencilled name plate reading:
Lady Antonia Eddington
. The carriage had lost its cambered roof, and every window along its length was shattered. She climbed aboard and found an unbroken bottle of Malvern spring water amid the tumble of possessions. She took a long drink, stoppered the bottle, then climbed back down.

She came to another carriage, this one lying on its side, the grease of its undercarriage catching the light of the sun. She gasped at the corpse of a soldier, his legs and lower torso crushed beneath the coachwork. She recognised Sergeant Stubbs, drew a shocked breath and hurried on.

The chamber housing the Pullman carriages had buckled outwards and split vertically so that it resembled a Chinese lantern – although light cascaded
in
through the rents, not out. Jani moved through the chamber, passing from columns of bright sunlight to areas of dark shadow. There was a strange hush in the air, a cathedral calm, which made the experience of coming upon the next lot of corpses all the more shocking. She stopped when she made out the first of the guards: the private had evidently been thrown across the chamber and had impacted with the bulkhead, his skull shattered so that little now remained of his head. All around him, she saw, were his compatriots, each one dead through impact with the same wall.

She recalled the grey cell they had been guarding, and wondered at the fate of the prisoner.

She looked around the sun-pierced gloaming of the chamber. A hundred yards away was the blocky shape of the cell. It had fetched up at an angle like a rolled die against the far wall. Jani made out a dark rent – in the shape of forked lightning – in the front wall of the cell.

She wondered whether she should hurry from the chamber, attempt to locate the restaurant and kitchen and then return to Lady Eddington – or obey her instinctive curiosity and approach the cell. She wanted to know who the soldiers had been guarding, and whether or not the prisoner had survived the crash. Certainly, confined in the box, he would have suffered broken bones and concussion at least.

Her step slowed as she came to the split in the leaden grey wall. She drew a breath, paused before the cell, and peered in through the rent.

The cell was empty.

She stepped back. She had expected to see the prisoner within, dead or badly injured.

She turned and looked around her. To her relief she appeared to be alone in the chamber.

Then, just as she had decided to move on and continue her search for provisions, she heard a voice.

“I am here,” it said.

Her first thought, once she had recovered her wits and calmed her breathing, was to wonder how he had known of her presence.

The voice had issued from around the far side of the cell. She wondered whether to turn and run, but had second thoughts. She carried with her medical supplies; what if the prisoner were in need of aid?

As she moved with purpose towards the corner of the cell, she thought what an irony it would be if the prisoner turned out to be Russian.

She began quickly, “I have medical supplies with me, should you need them...” and stopped when she made out the prisoner squatting before her.

She had seen many terrible sights that day – a catalogue of horrors it would take her years, if ever, to expunge from her consciousness – but not one was equal to what she set eyes on then.

The man sat on his haunches, his back against the wall. At least, she thought it was a man, and then revised her opinion.

The creature was naked but for the tattered blue trousers of what might have once been a uniform. It was long and thin, its skin deathly white. In fact, had it not spoken, she would have assumed it dead, as it sat with its head tipped back against the wall and its eyes closed.

The head was skull-like, with white skin drawn over the bone – as tight and pale as canvas stretched around a frame. Its features were almost human, in that it had two eyes, a nose and a mouth, but the mouth was almost lipless, the nose flattened and splayed, and the eyes huge.