Prudence Read online

  To Rue’s cat nose Bombay was all exotic stale smells. Odours ranged from rotting vegetation, mouldy meats, and excrement, to the more pleasing scent of cut rushes, roast lamb, fragrant spices, and perfume oils. Burning kerosene and gas permeated everything, as did the undercurrent of machinery and steam technology – coal dust and motor fluids.

  Rue moved quickly through the empty streets. Faster than a horse at full gallop, not as fast as a train, or a dirigible in aetherosphere, but good enough to get her through Bombay and out to the far reaches in a quarter of an hour. The weight atop her back was no inconvenience except when it impinged upon her agility.

  She ran on through the northern reaches of Bombay, where slums gave way to the factories of industry. There she stopped, her whiskers twitching, which they seemed to do without her input. Here the air was harsh with the smell of fishing, tanning, and illness. She was glad not to be werewolf or the odour would have been near overwhelming. Here were the sanitoriums, orphanages, burial grounds, and associated livelihoods that all citys pushed to the outskirts. Even humans could smell the foulness of misery. Rue paused, tail lashing. She could see the shimmering of white above a nearby cemetery: local ghosts hoping for conversation, or poltergeists in the throes of second death. She had no time to stop and investigate which.

  “The locals call ghosts Bhoot,” said Percy, as if hearing her thoughts.

  “Just ahead there,” said Miss Sekhmet.

  Rue’s cat eyes were near solid black as she stared into the darkness. The salt smell of the sea was sharp and biting. Rue could make out a narrowing of the peninsula, a crossing only wide enough for a road and train tracks. The sky car cable stretched above, empty for the moment. This narrows was one of the Great Works, a land bridge built by the East India Company. When they selected Bombay as their port, they turned seven islands into one peninsula.

  Rue ran through the narrows, big paws silent, leaving behind Bombay and heading into the untamed countryside. The roads were rough and dirty, smelling of iron-rich clay, rust, and old blood. The vegetation to either side was untamed, the likes of which she had never scented in England. There were no neat hedgerows of holly, no oak or apple trees, no fields of heather. Monkeys and other alien creatures scampered away, leaving scent trails of fur and meat.

  At each fork in the road, Miss Sekhmet instructed her, guiding them further north, angled slightly inland. Rue could tell this from the fading ocean smells. She began to scent what must be jungle. The odour of thick green mosses, layers of leaves, and damp roots hit her well before she crested a small hill and saw a massive forest. Under the silvered moonlight, the world ahead of them seemed nothing more than a rolling nest of shadow trees.

  Percy said softly, so as not to disturb the moment, “This isn’t Tungareshwar. Believe it or not, this is a smaller forest, only a few leagues wide, unnamed on my map. Tungareshwar is on the other side.”

  Rue followed the pathway forwards and into the dark of overhanging branches. She knew that a jungle was no ordinary wooded glen of the respectable English countryside. It boasted not only huge trees, ferns, and copious undergrowth but vines that grew up and through and over everything. It lacked discipline, too much wildness, like a woman full grown who did not turn up her hair. It was unsettling, even to Rue. And Rue was one of those young ladies most disparaged by society for being wild. She put on a burst of speed, stretching her supernatural strength to the maximum, rushing through the undergrowth so fast anything that might jump out at her would only manage a mouthful of tail tip.

  She felt Miss Sekhmet and Percy tighten their legs about her waist and hunker down. Miss Sekhmet lay forward across her neck, as Prim was wont to do, her hot breath near one of Rue’s ears. It twitched in reaction.

  “Gently, kitten,” she murmured, loud enough for Rue to hear but not Percy. “There is nothing in these woods that can harm you as you now are.”

  Rue could not explain that her fear was for those who sat astride her. Her responsibility was to their mortal forms, which now seemed very fragile. Why did I bring Percy? Prim will kill me if anything happens to him. He’s not made for this. She thought of turning around and taking him back to the Custard, but it was too late, and he’d probably make a fuss if she did.

  A half-hour of running and Rue burst through and out of the unnamed forest.

  Only to find that she was at the edge of a steep cliff. Far below, a river cut along the gorge. The water was so far down her nose hadn’t warned her of its presence before her ears did. She skidded to a halt, turning up road dust and scrabbling for purchase with her paws.

  She lost her passengers.

  Percy, fortunately, weighed down by his book satchel, fell to one side, landing safely in the bushes with a cry of distress.

  But Miss Sekhmet, already leaning forward, tumbled over Rue’s head and fell down into the gorge.

  Rue’s instinctive reaction was to give the werecat back her immortality. If she could snap their tether before Miss Sekhmet hit the water far below, or worse, the rocks, she might survive. So Rue whirled and dashed back the way she had just come, leaving Percy alone at the top of the cliff.

  Though tired, Rue could move a great deal faster without the burden of riders. Her only concern was to put distance between herself and the woman whose form she had stolen. Rue hoped against all hope she was not also in danger of stealing Miss Sekhmet’s life.

  She ran with such speed even a vampire could not have caught her.

  Abruptly, between one stride and the next, Rue found herself sprawled on the dirt road. She was naked, aching from the painful suddenness of the shift, shivering in the cool of the night. The vegetation around her sharpened into focus, greens she had not seen as a cat became vibrant even under moonlight. Individual smells were lost, replaced by a mild scent of dust and jungle.

  Did it work? was her first worry. She had no way of knowing if her tether to the werelioness had been severed because Miss Sekhmet died, or because Rue had reached tether limits and lioness form rebounded, saving Miss Sekhmet from that brutal fall.

  She had no way of finding out either, for now Rue was some distance away from that fateful cliff.

  She stood, taking the scarf from about her neck and wrapping it around her body in a crude attempt to preserve modesty. She left the sparkler hanging in its lily reticule and turned, resigned to trudging back the way she had just come. She cursed herself for going so fast initially. For not checking with Miss Sekhmet as to the nature of the forest edge. For not making better use of her unfamiliar supernatural senses.

  It was a much longer walk bare-footed and without supernatural speed. Stones in the path cut her feet where the pads of her lioness paws had felt nothing. She was more afraid that the scent of her blood would attract predators than she was upset by the pain. One lucky result of shifting to wolf form on a regular basis – if one could call it lucky – was that Rue could withstand pain better than most normal genteelly bred Englishwomen. She ignored her feet and walked, occasionally calling out in the hope that Percy would hear her. One never knew with Percy. He could have decided to move towards her, or he could be attempting to assist Miss Sekhmet, or he could be walking into Tungareshwar Forest alone, or he could be sitting in the roadway reading a book about swimming hedgehogs.

  Three-quarters of an hour later, tired, dusty, bleeding, and tetchy with worry, Rue arrived back at the fateful cliff.

  Percy was nowhere to be seen.

  Rue hobbled to the edge and looked down into the gorge.

  Miss Sekhmet’s beautiful form did not lie crumpled far below. Nor was she walking along the riverbank as a lioness, looking for some convenient way to leap up.

  The werecat had vanished.

  Rue straightened and took a long look all around her, feeling very alone. Behind her lay the vast reaches of the unnamed forest she had already traversed. It would take all night for her to walk back through it. Before her lay the gorge. Across that loomed another jungle, even larger, darker, and lusher tha
n the previous one.

  Rue set her shoulders. She still had the sparkler. She could signal for aid, as unlikely as it was that anyone would respond this far from civilisation. If Miss Sekhmet were somehow behind her and alive, she could follow Rue’s trail from the bleeding of her feet. Percy was a worry. But having come so far, Rue saw nothing for it but to continue on alone.

  There were two bridges around the corner from where Rue had dumped her riders. On the left side was a railway bridge, which crossed and then veered away from Tungareshwar towards the coast. Above that stretched one of the sky cables. It headed straight into the forest, although admittedly high above it. Slumbering there, right before the crossing, was yet another of the great elephant sky trains. It hung partly suspended above the gorge, as though it had stopped for a nap mid-run. Its interior was dark, its necklace of lanterns unlit. Rue supposed it was under orders, like the rest of the country, not to work after dark. It swung gently, rocking its slumbering cargo and crew. Rue wondered if she could shout them awake and ask for aid. But what could she say? I’m an underdressed Englishwoman looking for weremonkeys? Oh, and I seem to have misplaced a professor and a werelioness. And how would she make that statement clear using pantomime, since she didn’t speak the language?

  To the right of the elephant was a foot-traffic bridge made of slats of wood and rope, of the suspension type. It was designed for people, not animals or wheeled transport. Only pilgrims were permitted entrance into Tungareshwar.

  Rue put a hesitant foot on the first board. The bridge swayed under her weight.

  She was not afraid of heights. One could hardly captain a dirigible and be scared to look down. But Rue felt more in control of The Spotted Custard than this bridge, and without supernatural form it did seem a long way down and a shaky means of crossing a river.

  Rue paused, considering her situation. She had nothing more to her name than a reticule shaped like a lotus, a flint and tinder, a sparkler, and an indecently small shawl. Her feet ached something awful. Best, she thought, to devise some means of locomotion and not walk if she didn’t have to. She looked at the elephant in the sky. She was no fit company for a crew of young steam jockeys.

  Nevertheless, she damned modesty to the winds and left the bridge, heading for the nearest support tower. It was basically a tall pole sunk into the ground at the edge of the gorge. It had metal rungs all the way up. Rue took a fortifying breath and began to climb.

  The smooth metal was cold, but kinder to her feet than the rough road. It seemed not too long before she was at the top.

  Making certain the scarf was secure about her body and the reticule about her neck, Rue swung herself up, legs wrapped about the cable, and began to shimmy along towards the train. It was challenging work. I should consider taking on labour as a deckling to improve my climbing skills, not to mention arm strength. Being not so very fit, Rue had to take it gradually, otherwise her muscles might give out. Even so, halfway along, her arms began to shake. But she made it – a fact that she noticed only when her head bashed into the trunk of the metal elephant.

  The trunk disguised multiple guidance gears that fitted into tracks on the cable. It presented a bit of difficulty to Rue, who could no longer crawl dangling from the cable towards the head of the beast. And that was her objective since Quesnel had said it housed the navigation chamber.

  She twisted this way and that, finally managing to flip herself over and on top of the trunk so that she could scoot up it, legs and arms desperately wrapped around the scales of metal, moving on her belly. Her poor tummy was entirely unused to the sensation of cold rough metal, or indeed any exposure. Imagine what Mother would say, thought Rue, of me brandishing my midriff to an elephant. She didn’t have to imagine. Mother would have called her all kinds of heathen and ordered her to get dressed immediately. Rue had the whole conversation in her head as she squirmed along.

  “My daughter is a barbarian dressed in an orange peel!”

  “But Mother, I am stranded in the middle of a tropical forest.”

  “Pish tosh,” said imaginary Mother. “Trivial detail. Your reputation is a stake. What will they think of you?”

  “Who? The local grubs?”

  “How do you know grubs don’t have delicate sensibilities? Cover yourself this instant, infant,” was her mother’s illogical opinion.

  “Oh, really!” imaginary Rue said in exasperation.

  Funny that even in my fantasies I lose arguments with my mother.

  Eventually, the trunk dipped below the cable and widened enough for Rue to crawl on all fours leaving the cable above her. She found herself face to face with one elephantine eye – an eye that was really a window through which the conductor might see.

  Rue looked inside, shading out the moonlight with hands on either side of her face. The navigation chamber appeared to be empty. She supposed there was little fear of someone attempting to hijack an elephant train in the middle of an unpopulated jungle.

  Rue wasn’t certain at what point her subconscious had decided to hijack the air train – probably while the rest of her argued with her mother. With language and nudity against her, her chances of convincing the crew of her point of view were slim. Plus she was too embarrassed to turn up in front of them making demands, like a barbarian in an orange peel.

  So as she continued crawling, she began to plan a theft. She kept in mind Dama’s lessons in this regard, even though such lessons had mainly centred on objects a great deal smaller.

  There must be crew somewhere, and the moment Rue started the engines that crew would come and stop her. She needed to uncouple the freight cars that made up the elephant’s body from the locomotive of the elephant’s head. The elephant was made to look as if it were basically dangling from the cable by its trunk but she knew that, in function, sky trains were much like a normal trains, hooked in at multiple points.

  Rue crawled up and over the top part of the noggin, wiggling around the point where the head attached to the cable. From there, she manoeuvred down between the massive leather ears.

  She lost purchase, swallowed a scream and slid down the back of the head, landing with a jarring thud at the coupling point.

  The locomotive was chained and locked with a massive hitch to the freight cars. Rue wished once again for stronger arms or supernatural strength. Barring both, she managed eventually to brace herself between the two sections, and use her legs to lever the hitch up and off its hook. She then uncoiled the massive redundancy chains.

  Rue could only hope she managed to get the elephant head moving quickly enough to break away before any crew awoke and reconnected the hitch, or jumped from the car to the locomotive.

  Turning to face the head, Rue inched around the side, balancing on a little lip at the creature’s chin, no doubt a remnant from the original construction. It was precarious and remarkably lacking in handholds, but eventually she made it to the engine room.

  No doubt the door was easy to open when one was at a station, or even on one of the pole-top platforms. It was not as easy mid-air. The door was directly below one of Ganesha’s ears. Rue leaned in and rattled the handle as quietly as she could while still clinging desperately with her free hand to the elephant’s side. The door swung open so abruptly that she lost her balance and grabbed the ear. Fortunately, the leather was riveted on and held. She dangled there like a Rue-shaped earring, breath caught in her throat. By sheer will, for it could not be ability, she managed to rock and grab the top of the door-jamb and swing inside, closing the door firmly behind her. It was unbelievably reassuring to be safe in the cabin. It took a very long time for her heart rate to subside.

  The man who had been sleeping beneath the guidance console woke up and stared at her in astonishment.

  Rue could only imagine what she looked like, wearing nothing but a dislodged orange scarf, a reticule that looked like a lily flower, and a monkey charm necklace. Her hair was wild and loose. Her feet were bare and bleeding. Her skin was particularly pale in the moonlig
ht and covered in scratches.

  The man did not yell – he merely gaped in surprise and then began to prostrate himself as if she were visiting royalty. Or possibly some religious icon brought to life.

  He kept repeating the word “Gauri,” and bowing, then occasionally he would add, “Lakshmi.” In between these, he spewed forth a long string of sentences and cries and possibly small songs or lines of poetry in his own language. His attitude was one of profound reverence. He kept looking from the ground to his own clasped hands to Rue’s face to the reticule about her neck.

  I guess I’m a goddess. How is a Hindu goddess in a sky train supposed to act?

  Rue smiled beatifically and made a gesture with both hands, a little like swimming, in a crude imitation of the dancers she’d seen at the Cloth Market. Arms like graceful noodles, she instructed herself.

  The man gasped at her movement and fell silent.

  Rue tried to convince him to rise, fanning her arms up and down in a ridiculous manner, but he seemed disinclined to do anything but kneel and bow.

  Unsure what else to do, Rue lifted up her reticule, an object of much fascination. She removed it from about her neck and took out the sparkler.

  The man moaned in fear and anticipation, eyes as wide as saucers.

  Rue carefully put the flint, tinder, and sparkler aside on the steering column. Those she might need. And then she cast about the cabin for something meaningful.

  To one side was the boiler, accompanied by the ubiquitous pile of coal. Rue picked up a small piece of the black and placed it carefully into the reticule, drawing it closed. Making several more of the dancer gestures over the bag with one hand while she held it in the other, feeling like a particularly poor conjuror, she hummed a little ditty. Her mind was so befuddled it latched upon a bawdy favourite of Paw’s pack, “Eat Bertha’s Muscles”. Fortunately, the man kneeling before her was unfamiliar with the tune. Rue twirled three times in place for good measure and then handed the bag of coal to the man, who was kneeling with his hands cupped up in front of him like a beggar.