Way of the Wizard

by George R. R. Martin

  Copeland opened his mouth to ask how Cabal could know such a thing, before realising how foolish that would sound, so he closed it again.

  “Therefore,” continued Cabal, “in addition to the scattering of deaths that the Working caused, there are approximately another hundred and fifty five corpses around the place that will also be up and about by now. Each will attempt to kill the living. Every time that they succeed, the fresh corpse will be added to the sum of their army. If you have ever wondered what a geometrical progression looks like, you need only look out of that window. So, to answer your question, no, we cannot just ‘sit this out.’ ”

  There was a crash from downstairs that startled Copeland to his feet. “They’re out of the morgue!”

  “Right,” said Cabal with an air of getting down to work. “First things first. Avoid being killed by undead. That’s very important. Then, deal with that idiot before he inadvertently wipes out the human race. Also quite important.”

  “Wait.” The constable took Cabal by the arm. “I can’t take this in. You really mean this is . . . this could be Doomsday?”

  Cabal looked pointedly at the constable’s hand until he removed it from Cabal’s bicep. “I mean what I say, Constable. What the hoi polloi sensationally and inaccurately call the Zombie Apocalypse, professionals such as myself refer to more soberly as the Ereshkigal Working. Nomenclature aside, the results are much the same. Humanity goes down beneath a tide of its own angry carcasses.”

  Below them they could hear the sound of the building being thoroughly if violently searched by the mortuary corpses. Cabal said that these were the ones most concentrated upon by their resurrector, and that he would certainly be watching through their eyes in the periods when he wasn’t using his own through the field glasses. If they should see Cabal, the main force would be directed toward him instead of milling around the streets. Things would likely go badly for Cabal and the constable in such a case.

  Thus, instead of descending to street level just yet, they climbed to the roof. “This is the plan, constable. We shall travel along this rooftop, drop to the next, go to the alleyway on its far side, descend via the fire escape . . . ”

  “How do you know it’s got a fire escape?” interrupted the constable.

  “Because I made it my business to know. It usually pays to have at least two escape routes planned; a fast one and an evasive one. This is the evasive. Now, once we reach street level, we cut across the road behind that overturned wagon. The dead are staying this side of it so far, so we had better use it before they spread out.”

  “That’s insane. Why break cover that long? If we go in the other direction, we only have to cross two small alleyways.”

  Cabal drew a pair of dark glasses from his breast pocket, and made a small show of polishing the blue lenses. “That route has been considered and rejected.” He put on the glasses with an air of finality.

  “Rejected? But, why?” The constable scoffed incredulously. “Your route is madness. Mine is much safer, a couple of alleyways, and cut through the churchyard and . . . ” He paused, a thought occurring. “Do you have a problem with churches?”

  Cabal’s expression was unreadable behind the glasses. Without a word, he turned and trotted off in a crouch to avoid being seen from the town hall. On reaching the end of the roof, he unhesitatingly stepped off into space. A moment later, the constable heard the crunch of sensible shoes on gravel and bitumen, and knew Cabal was safely on the next rooftop. Cursing under his breath, Constable Copeland followed.

  With galling inevitability, Cabal turned out to be right about the fire escape, and the two men descended unseen to a narrow lane that opened out onto the main road. Cabal wasn’t quite so accurate on the state of the road itself, however. A lone corpse had wandered past the overturned wagon and was standing aimlessly in the middle of the way, its back to them. Once upon a time, it had been a tobacconist, but now it was just a nuisance.

  “What do we do? Can you shoot it?” The constable was trying hard to think of the figure as an object, and not Mr. Billings from whom he had bought a packet of Senior Service that very morning before going on duty. He thought of the cigarettes sitting in his locker at the police station; they seemed like an artefact of a bygone civilisation now. The Apocalypse had come, and here he was, PC Copeland, a parochial plod of the local constabulary, lurking down an alley in the company of a necromancer while avoiding the attentions of an undead tobacconist.

  “They’re dead, not deaf.” Cabal took the switchblade from his pocket, and snapped out the blade. He searched around in an eddy pool of litter by the base of the wall and found a bottle top. “No, this calls for subtlety.” Holding the knife so the blade was angled down, much like one might hold an ice pick, Cabal set off to demonstrate his personal definition of subtlety. Walking quietly but upright, trusting to the wagon to hide him from the main mass of walking dead, he approached the former Mr. Billings from the rear. On reaching him, Cabal paused and flipped the bottle top so it landed in front of Billings with a distinct musical ting, all glittery and eye-catching in the midday sunshine. Mr. Billings, who found the smallest things of infinite wonder ever since Mrs. Billings, about fifteen minutes earlier, had torn out his throat with her teeth, looked down at it and in so doing obligingly exposed the nape of his neck. Without the slightest hesitation, Cabal drove the knife in with an expertise that should worry any casual observer. Just as in the morgue, the spinal cord was transected between the occipital and the atlas—the strings were cut—and Mr. Billings’ body fell forward heavily to lie in the middle of the High Street on carnival day.

  Cabal leaned down, and Copeland momentarily thought he was going to check that the job had been done properly, but Cabal only wiped the blade on the back of Mr. Billings’ coat before snapping it shut and dropping it back into his pocket. “Come on,” said Cabal. “And bring my bag.”

  They made their way down the alleyway, across the High Street, and continued some little way down there until Cabal paused at the back door of a shop and forced his way in. It was a hardware store, which he seemed to expect, making Constable Copeland realise just how meticulous his unusual companion’s reconnaissance had been. Cabal paused to steal a coil of half-inch rope, and Copeland didn’t even bother to tut disapprovingly; things had moved beyond worrying about petty larceny. They reached the top floor where Cabal opened a locked skylight with the crowbar from his bag, and then they were on the rooftops again. They moved along a little way and then, from the shadow of a chimneystack, they observed the man on the town hall roof once again. He was still about a hundred feet away, but they could see him far more clearly now. This was not necessarily a bonus. The man wore a suit cut from the sort of tweed that weavers devise for a bet; brown lines against a yellow field, making the wearer look like an Ordnance Survey map of custard. He was a big bear of a man with a fine, Jovian beard and a collar-length mane of thick red hair of a shade too ruddy for any to call “ginger” and live.

  “Are you that good a shot?” whispered Copeland.

  “I’m not going to shoot him,” replied Cabal. “Worst thing I could possibly do. Despite the brutal, painful, and lingering death that this idiot so richly deserves, I have to keep him alive for the moment.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Since they don’t teach necromantic theory at the police college, I’m hardly surprised. Very well—a crash course. You will notice that the undeads’ behaviour falls into three categories. There are the very focussed examples in the morgue; these are the only ones that saw me, and so their master is keeping much of his attention on them, for the moment at least. Then there are the ones who are moving around as a flock; these are his secondaries and his attention upon them is vague. He has moved them up towards the mortuary in reserve should he still find me there. Finally, we have the vast majority, who stand around like that example in the road. They are at the edge of his awareness. He is overwhelmed by complexity here—he has far, far more subjects than he ca
n effectively control. So, most are forgotten and are being fed no commands by the psychic links he has with the whole ugly crowd of them.”

  “How are they dangerous, then?”

  “Because the force that animates them is atavistic and feral. Whenever an opportunity to kill is presented to them, they slip the vague control of this nominal puppet master until the killing has been done. The force is greedy—it craves more bodies to occupy.” Cabal turned his telescope upon the man on the roof once more. “He is the means by which this animating force came into our world, and he holds its leash. That leash can never be more than a range of twenty-three tirum, an obsolete unit of measurement once used by the culture that created the Ereshkigal Working. Twenty-three equates to just under three miles. Twelve yards, seven point one six inches under, to be exact.

  “But, what he is doing is mentally exhausting. Sooner or later, he will have to sleep. That is when they will kill him. The leash will evaporate, and the animating force will have free rein to extend its activities as far as it likes. Did I mention how greedy it is for more bodies? I believe I did.”

  All the talk of an apocalypse had seemed like so much hyperbole up to now, but now Constable Copeland could see the awful mechanism at play. “Won’t . . . won’t he stop if he gets you? Won’t he send this force back where it came from?”

  Cabal had been wondering how long it would be before a cloaked version of What happens if I throw you to the zombies? was aired, and he was ready for it. “The ritual is irreversible. He either doesn’t realise that yet, or he just assumed he’d have a use for an army of the dead afterwards. As I said, the man’s an idiot.”

  Copeland considered Cabal’s words. “So you’re saying, we only have a few hours before this all becomes unstoppable?”

  “Exactly so.” Cabal was looking around the square through his telescope. He considered the remains of the parade in front of the town hall; he considered the hydrogen-filled cartoon characters looking cheerfully down upon the scene of carnage; he considered the undead turning away from the mortuary as presumably the search there was abandoned; he considered the church across the way. “That church has a weathervane, so at least the wretched building is good for something.”

  “It has a clock, too," Copeland retorted without thinking, a feeling of guilty apostasy immediately settling upon him.

  Cabal did not reply, but was looking at the bridge over the local river, just visible where the road in front of the town hall curved. “This town has a small harbour, does it not?”

  “We’re at the neck of the estuary here. The sea’s less than a mile away. Why?” he said, then added a little bitterly: “Are you going to steal a boat?”

  Cabal lowered the telescope and looked at him. It was an unreadable look, and Copeland had a strange sense that behind the blue-glass spectacles and behind the eyes themselves, there was something disarranged, something missing. “Perhaps I have not made my intentions clear, Constable. There is a brief period before this plague will spread, and the world as we know it is lost forever. I need that world, and I will not stand idly by or run while there is the slightest chance of preserving it.”

  Copeland grimaced. “How do you make something heroic sound so selfish?”

  “You cut me to the quick,” Cabal replied evenly. Then he said, “You’re a policeman. I assume that means you carry useful pieces of equipment as well as that comedic helmet we left in the morgue? A truncheon? Handcuffs? A notebook? That sort of thing?”

  Copeland narrowed his eyes—he liked his helmet—but nodded.

  “Excellent. Well, if it is so necessary for heroism to save the day, and given that I am such a selfish person, then by a process of deduction . . . ”

  And Johannes Cabal smiled.

  Being a mighty sorcerer was turning out to be a great deal easier than he had imagined. The hardest part of the whole plan had been tracking Cabal to this town, but after that it had been plain sailing. Admittedly, he had only intended the dead in the morgue to rise, and the resurrections in the carnival crowd had been a surprise—it seemed that the Ereshkigal Working was a more of a blunderbuss than he’d anticipated—but he had shrugged, taken it in his stride, and it all seemed to be going very well now. By allowing his consciousness to blur, he had put out a ring of drones to keep the area contained, and he was positive that it had not been breached. Now he just had to search every building within the cordon, and soon he would have his revenge. He hoped it was soon; all the extra work involved in controlling so many carcasses was astonishingly tiring.

  It turned out to be even sooner than he’d expected. As he leaned on the town hall parapet and marshalled his forces to tear through shop after office, a voice spoke behind him, quiet and with a faint Teutonic accent.

  “So,” it said. “You are the one behind this ham-fisted attempt on my life, are you?”

  He turned to see Cabal himself, the loathed object of his every waking thought for years past, standing before him, arrogant and unconcerned. “Johannes Cabal. You should be dead by now, and one of my meat puppets.” He laughed, a very declamatory laugh of the kind normally associated with cloaks, thin moustaches, and a battered top hat. “Well, I’m glad that you have survived this long. I wouldn’t want to miss the pleasure of your final destruction!”

  “I haven’t come to confront you, whoever you are. I’ve come to parlay. See?” Cabal took his switchblade from his pocket, showed it, and dropped it to the gravelled surface of the roof.

  “You . . . don’t know who I am?” The man’s face twisted in an ugly admixture of fury and sneer. “I have hunted you for years, Cabal, and you didn’t even know it. You fool!” Ideally there would have been a crack of thunder at this point.

  “Fool is a strong term to be used by somebody who does such a thing to kill one man,” said Cabal, nodding at the crowded corpses below them.

  “You don’t deserve a clean, quick death, Cabal. Not after what you have done.” The man threw out his chest and drew himself up to his admittedly impressive full height. “You murdered my father!”

  “Did I?” Cabal was glad that they had arrived at some sort of conclusion, although it didn’t actually help him that much. “Oh.”

  Despite his profession and his laissez-faire attitude to the mortality of others, Cabal had not actually had cause to kill very many people who hadn’t previously been dead anyway, and he doubted whether putting down an uppity revenant such as the very, very deceased Mr. Billings, to take a recent example, was technically murder at all. Then again, people often developed emotional attachments to sides of meat that had once been relatives, so who was to say that some experimental subject or another had not once been this buffoon’s father?

  “Well,” Cabal continued, “obviously I’m very sorry about killing your father, whoever he was, but don’t you, whoever you are, think causing the destruction of the human race for purposes of personal revenge is at least mildly disproportionate?”

  “Whoever I am?” roared the man, the perceived insult rating far more highly in his world than accidental genocide. “I am your nemesis, Johannes Cabal! I am the architect of your destruction! I am . . . Rufus Maleficarus!”

  “Who?”

  “You dare? You killed my father!”

  Cabal rolled his eyes. “So you keep saying, Mr . . . ” And then the penny dropped. “Maleficarus . . . As in Maleficarus the Magnificent? The conjuror?” He laughed. This was simply too ludicrous. “You have the wrong man, sir. I didn’t kill your father. He killed himself. Twice in fact, which shows a certain stoicism.”

  Maximilian Maleficarus “the Magnificent” had been a stage illusionist with delusions of magical competence beyond the vanishing of rabbits and the sawing in half of obliging young ladies. After an encounter in his early career with the lively, if technically dead, Maleficarus senior, Cabal had walked away with a broken scapula, and Maleficarus had not walked away at all. Given that the elder Maleficarus spent a considerable time dead before resurrecting himself, it seemed
unlikely that his son could have known him as more than a blurry figure from childhood.

  But, in much the same way that feuds and vendettas can run for generations without troubling themselves to find a decent cassus belli, it seemed to the outraged family pride of Maleficarus junior, a planet full of undead was a small price to pay for hurt feelings.

  Or was it? Maleficarus’ heavy brow folded with suspicion. “What did you mean just then, the destruction of the human race?”

  “The Ereshkigal Working. You must remember it? That thing you did with the chalk circle and the incense? Well, all these dead people walking around, the two things are actually related. Did you know that?”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot, Cabal!”

  “You are an idiot, Maleficarus! Have you the vaguest idea why the Working has not been used in over four millennia? See! Over there on the far side of the square! See what you stupidity has created!”

  Maleficarus looked, and saw nothing. Cabal was furious. “It is right there! Use your binoculars if you have to, but look!”

  Maleficarus raised the binoculars to his eyes, and so he did not see Cabal’s high passion fade instantly away, to be put into his inner jumble room of false emotions until it was next needed.

  “I don’t see anything unusual,” muttered Maleficarus, already grown blasé to zombies. “What am I looking at?” For a reply, something narrow and metallic suddenly encircled his wrist. He tried to jerk his arm away, but not nearly quickly enough to stop Cabal from closing the ratchet on the handcuff. “What? What is this? What are you doing?”

  “Saving the world. I can’t take all the credit, mind you. Just most. Of course, a lot still depends on how capable the local police are.” As he spoke, Cabal was backing away to the parapet over the town hall’s rear courtyard. As he reached the edge, Cabal turned and looked down. “I hope you’re ready, Constable,” he shouted, “or we are all going to die.”