The weapon, originally designed to be fired from the fighting tops of Britain's naval ships, was a cluster of seven half-inch barrels fired by a single flint. It was like a miniature cannon and only the biggest, strongest men could fire the gun without permanently damaging their shoulders. Harper was one of the strongest men Sharpe had ever known, but also one of the most sentimental and now the big Irishman looked close to tears. "Oh, sweet suffering Christ," Harper said as he crossed himself, "the living bastards."

Sharpe had already smelt the blood, now he looked past the Sergeant and felt the disgust make a lump in his throat. "Oh, my God," he said softly.

For the small house was drenched in blood, its walls spattered and its floor soaked with it, while on the floor were sprawled the limp bodies of children. Sharpe tried to count the little bodies, but could not always tell where one blood-boltered corpse began and another ended. The children had evidently been stripped naked and then had their throats cut. A small dog had been killed too, and its blood-matted, curly-haired corpse had been tossed onto the children whose skins appeared unnaturally white against the vivid streaks of black-looking blood.

"Oh, sweet Jesus," Sharpe said as he backed out of the reeking shadows to draw a breath of fresh air. He had seen more than his share of horror. He had been born to a poorhouse whore in a London gutter and he had followed Britain's drum from Flanders to Madras and through the Indian wars and now from the beaches of Portugal to the frontiers of Spain, but never, not even in the Sultan Tippoo's torture chambers in Seringapatam, had he seen children tossed into a dead pile like so many slaughtered animals.

"There's more here, sir," Corporal Jackson called. Jackson had just vomited in the doorway of a hovel in which the bodies of two old people lay in a bloody mess. They had been tortured in ways that were only too evident.