Les Daniels - No Blood Spilled

Les Daniels - No Blood Spilled (Tor, 1991, Raven, 1996)



I should really have done these in order, but ...

No Blood Spilled is the fifth and final book in the series, and a direct follow on from the wonderful Yellow Fog (If you have Stephen Jones' The Mammoth Book Of Vampires you already own a condensed and disappointing version of Yellow Fog). Daniels was working on a sixth book, White Demon, which was to have been set in the trenches of WW1 but, sadly, indifference from his publisher coincided with his finally making it mega with his books on comix and graphic novels, and he's at pains to tell everyone that Don Sebastian will no longer be returning from the grave.

"He continued to believe it was Sarala who fondled him until blunt teeth ripped away a chunk of his left leg. The searing pain gave him the strength that the twilight had not. Sebastian heaved himself up halfway out of his coffin, knocking the lid aside... the Ghoul looked at Sebastian with idiot eyes. His fingers sank into it's flesh without effect, and it lowered it's head again to pull away the muscle of his calf ..."

No Blood Spilled begins with Reginald Callender's escape from Halliwell House - the asylum where he's been incarcerated ever since staking his fiance, Felicia Lamb, at the culmination of Yellow Fog - having tricked his benevolent cousin into unhooking his straitjacket from the wall. Two murders later and he's off to India in search of Don Sebastian whose been extremely fortuitous in reaching his destination, having survived a shipwreck which left him coffin-bound, dying of thirst and floating in the Bay of Bengal. Fortunately for him, if not India, and certainly not the English, he's rescued by a little boy in a fishing boat. Sebastian doesn't like the way this lad, Jamini, is treated by the brutal Girrsh, so his master is the first to be exsanguinated. The vampire then heads for Calcutta to seek out the few remaining devotees of Kali whom he intends to arm against the English. Meanwhile, Callender has arrived at the same destination, and has persuaded Lieutenant Hawke, his contemporary at Eton, to assist him in gaining vengeance on the undead.

Ok, let's forget the plot and concentrate on the horror and bloodshed, of which, needless to say, there is more than ample. Don Sebastian's encounter with the jelly-like Ghoul in the restored Temple occurs after he's revived the Thuggee cult to fight the English. Barbaric as he is, the Vampire's brutality is as nothing to wanton cruelty and evil of the humans. In one sequence, the English soldiers tie a man to a cannon and blast him to a pulpy mess before his sister-in-law. Even Callender thinks this is a bit off and complains to Hawke, "you shouldn't have done that in front of the woman." "Why not?", the woman intervenes, "my husband's brother would have been quite happy to burn me to death (at the Suttee). Hawke, for his part, has chosen this particular form of punishment on the grounds of the man's religious beliefs: "there is no reward for a man who goes to his grave in pieces, is there, Ramjoy Ghosh? Your Goddess will have nothing to do with a man who isn't whole ... why not turn approver and let the others in your band die instead of you? It's only sensible."