“‘Murder, rape and pillage’ hardly does the Black Cobra justice.” Major Gareth Hamilton, one of the four officers who served under Del, glanced up, his brown gaze pinning Hastings. “This reads more like deliberate terrorization of villages, which suggests an attempt to subjugate. For a cult, that’s ambitious-an attempt to seize power beyond the usual bleeding of money and goods.”

“Establishing a yoke of fear.” Captain Rafe Carstairs, seated three seats along from Del, joined Gareth in tossing the report he’d read back on the desk. Rafe’s aristocratic features showed evidence of distaste, even disgust, which told Del that the contents of the report Rafe had read were truly dreadful.

All five of them seated before Hastings’s desk had seen human carnage unimaginable to most; as a group they’d served through the Peninsula campaign in the cavalry under Paget, then been in the thick of the action at Waterloo, and had subsequently taken commissions with the Honorable East India Company to serve under Hastings as an elite group of officers deployed specifically to deal with the worst uprisings and instabilities the subcontinent had thrown up over the past seven years.

Seated between Gareth and Rafe, Major Logan Monteith’s lip curled as, with a flick of his tanned wrist, he sent the report he’d read skating to join the others on the desk. “This Black Cobra makes Kali and her thugees look civilized.”

Beyond Rafe, the last and youngest of their five, Captain James MacFarlane, still faintly baby-faced even though he was twenty-nine, leaned forward and carefully laid the document he’d perused with the others. “Has Bombay no clue as to who’s behind this? No trail-no associates, no area in which the Cobra has its headquarters?”

“After more than five months of active searching, Bombay has precisely nothing beyond a suspicion that some of the Maratha princelings have been drawn into clandestinely supporting the cult.”