The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘Very good.’ She favoured him with her own half a smile. ‘And you were brought up in Hesse, although there’s provincial English in your vowels.’

  Horst’s eyebrows rose. Although technically true, nobody enjoys the slight pejorative taint inherent in provincial. ‘Yes,’ he said a little sharply to cover his discomfort. ‘I have had a chequered sort of life so far.’

  ‘Life. Perhaps not the perfect technical term for it,’ she said. ‘But it will have to do.’

  Horst gave her a hard look. According to his upbringing, there were certain subjects that it was ill-mannered to raise in conversation with a new acquaintance. With the likes of politics, religion, fatness, and house prices, it seemed reasonable to assume that ‘being dead’ was likely to be somewhere on the list.

  ‘So,’ he said when it became apparent that his hard look was not doing all it might in humbling her, ‘you’re a necromancer.’

  ‘So,’ she replied, ‘you’re a vampire.’

  An awkward silence followed, as if they had just met through the offices of a cryptic dating agency.

  ‘I believe I shall sit, after all,’ said Misericorde. There followed a few moments of silent reorganisation. A good number of cushions ended on the floor, from where she did not trouble to recover them. Finally, she arranged herself with a little difficulty but with decorum intact. Half reclining, she looked up at where he stood across the room from her. ‘I can hardly believe that you’ve come along with this so far and have no idea what it’s all about, my lord.’

  He considered asking her to call him by his name rather than the very new and, to his ear, very false title, just as he had done with Alisha. But, he considered, he liked Alisha, so he would let Misericorde continue to wrestle with the title for a while. ‘It was hardly my choice. I was just lying around, minding my own business, when some of their’—here, he gestured sideways with a jerk of his thumb in the general direction of the dining room—‘hirelings turned up.’

  ‘You didn’t have to come.’

  ‘It seemed rude not to. So … what is it all about?’

  She smiled, or—as her very next action was to avoid answering the question—possibly smirked. ‘I don’t have much experience of vampires,’ she confided. ‘There aren’t that many of them around these days.’

  ‘You probably know more about that than I do. Now, this little group we find…’

  ‘No, there aren’t. People keep hunting and killing them. Which is to say, hunting and killing you. Still, that’s what you get for trying to predate upon humanity. We don’t take it very well.’

  ‘This little group into which we find ourselves recruited … this conspiracy, it seems…’

  ‘Our little cabal. Yes?’

  The woman really was infuriating, Horst was finding. Now that she was ready to talk about the subject, she threw that needless little roadblock in the way. ‘Not the term I’d use, for obvious reasons.’ She looked off to one side, digesting his words, and Horst saw that she was honestly confused. ‘My name,’ he explained. She held out her hands and shrugged, still unilluminated. He sighed. ‘It’s nothing important, just that you said “our little cabal”, and that’s my name. “Cabal”, that is. Not the whole thing. I’m not called “Horst Our Little Cabal”.’ He grunted, exasperated at himself. ‘I’m rambling.’

  It hardly mattered. Misericorde had sat up at the revelation, eyes wide. ‘You’re a Cabal?’ she said in astonishment. ‘Does the name “Johannes Cabal” mean—’

  ‘My brother,’ Horst interrupted. ‘Yes, the name definitely means something to me. He was my brother.’

  A modicum of a new expression was colouring her surprise and Horst, who was bracing himself for the usual hatred and name-calling, had to remind himself that he was not in normal company when he saw that the expression was pleasure. ‘This is such a surprise,’ she said. ‘I had no idea. Cabal … your brother, that is, he has a remarkable reputation.’

  ‘Infamy,’ he corrected her. ‘Not especially widespread, but…’

  Misericorde waved the comment aside. ‘Most people can’t even explain electricity. Their opinion is worthless.’

  Horst laughed, though slightly troubled. ‘You sound just like him.’

  ‘That,’ she said with emphasis, ‘is a compliment.’

  ‘It is?’ It all seemed a long way from the usual reaction his brother’s name provoked. Then again, this was a very different parish. ‘I didn’t realise he was so well regarded in your community.’

  ‘My community?’ Again that frown of real incomprehension. Her expression cleared. ‘Oh, of course. You wouldn’t know. You’ve been … incommunicado for a while, haven’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘That clock over there tells me the time, but that’s all I’ve been furnished with. I don’t know the day, or the month, or the year. I’m beginning to think that might be useful data to know. A desk calendar would have been nice.’ He looked around the otherwise exhaustively furnished room. ‘A desk would have been nice.’

  Lady Misericorde was pleased to bring light to his temporal darkness, although if she had been expecting an Olympian detachment to the flight of time, she was to be disappointed.

  ‘Dear God,’ he said, and perched on the end of her ottoman sofa. He put both hands over his mouth and gazed fixedly off, reconciling what he knew to the current date. After almost a minute, he lowered his hands and looked at her with disbelief. ‘That’s over two years. Over two years. It hurt, but not for long. When the end came, what I thought was the end came, the world just turned off. Over two years. Oh, my God.’ He looked away, still battling to take it in, relieving her of the stress of his regard. But it was only for a moment before he turned back and demanded, ‘I wouldn’t know what? Surely Johannes is dead?’ He licked his lips and anguish flickered across his face for a moment. ‘Dead and damned.’

  ‘I don’t know if he’s dead,’ Lady Misericorde replied in slow, careful tones. Sharing an ottoman with a distracted and upset vampire seemed to be a new experience to her, but—interesting as it was—she probably had no desire that it should be her last. ‘I only know he wasn’t a year or so ago.’ Horst did not respond, still caught in a web of memory and regret. ‘He saved us all.’

  That got Horst’s attention.

  His head snapped around to bear on her as if she had just shot a spitball in his ear. ‘He saved who?’ he demanded. ‘All the necromancers?’

  ‘No.’ She smiled as she shook her head. She had read animosity in his reactions to mentions of brother Johannes earlier, but she saw a very human concern beneath that now. ‘No. He saved everyone.’

  And then, to Horst’s increasing astonishment, she told him a tale learned at second, third, and fourth hands, from a lover’s indiscretion in speaking of the goings-on in a London gentlemen’s club, to the researches of an occult investigator seeking the truth behind an historical mystery of the Ugol hordes and of fatal red snow that fell from a cloudless sky, to an outraged exchange of letters between an archbishop and the chief of police for some little border town somewhere.

  ‘That’s an exaggeration, isn’t it?’ he asked finally. ‘That’s not doomsday?’

  Misericorde shrugged. ‘Perhaps not. But if even half of what I have learned is true, then your brother saved the world from a horror that would have left nations in chains, and a hundred battlefields piled with the corpses of those who tried to resist.’

  Horst’s mouth opened and closed several times in the manner popularised by goldfish as he tried to absorb this difficult intelligence. It was not the scale of the averted disaster that troubled him, but that his brother had been the one to deal with it. This was, for him, far more difficult to comprehend than any number of eldritch horrors from ancient centuries or inconvenienced archbishops.

  ‘Wow,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Has your little brother made you proud?’ she said, sowing mischief.

  But to her apparent mild yet pleasant surprise, the mischief fa
iled to take root. Instead, the Lord of the Dead, bane of humanity and master of evil eternal, smiled a huge beaming smile. ‘Proud? Yes. Yes! You have no idea how happy this makes me!’ Then, with sudden emphasis, he added, ‘You are sure he isn’t dead?’

  ‘I have no idea if he’s alive or not at the moment, but he was alive a year ago.’

  ‘Then he wormed his way out of trouble somehow,’ Horst said quietly to himself. He brightened up again. ‘He’d got into a situation, you see. He was going to die. No possible way out of it, one would have thought. Still, if anyone could do it, he could, slippery swine that he is!’ He rose to his feet and started pacing. ‘Just as well. There to save … or probably save … or at least save quite a bit of the world. There when it mattered. My brother.’

  He halted and looked down at her. ‘Oh, yes. I’m proud of him.’ He was smiling and, Misericorde saw, there was a little extra glimmer of light in his eyes. Horst blinked fiercely, distractedly, and the glimmer vanished.

  ‘So…’ He looked seriously at her, the joy of a moment before evaporating as he re-ordered priorities and re-sorted the factors that made up his current circumstances. One large factor was still notably absent, and priorities could not be arranged without it. ‘Why are we here?’ He held up his hands, fingers spread, a gesture that—combined with a suspicious twitch of his eyes to take in the left-hand wall, ceiling, right-hand wall—indicated that he was talking about the castle rather than in any larger philosophical sense. ‘What is the business of those men?’

  ‘They call themselves,’ said Misericorde, leaning back into her nest of cushions to regard him, ‘the Ministerium Tenebrae.’

  ‘Do they? Do they indeed?’ He thought for a moment. ‘That’s not very good Latin, is it? Is it?’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  Horst considered further. ‘Something to do with shadows, isn’t it?’

  ‘That would be umbras, I think.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ He scratched his head and laughed self-consciously. ‘Johannes was always the one for languages. And sciences. And most things like that.’

  ‘The Ministry of Darkness,’ she supplied. ‘Although Tenebrarum might have been better.’

  ‘Yes, it might have,’ said Horst, nodding for no good reason. Certainly not from an informed opinion. ‘So … they sound … a bit…’ He seesawed his head as he thought, trying to find the bon mot. ‘Evil.’

  ‘That’s a very absolutist term, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘Do you feel as if you’re evil?’

  ‘Well, no. But I never really wanted to be like this.’

  ‘Nobody necessarily wants to be what they end up being. You seem very nice, my lord. A very nice man.’

  ‘I’ve always tried to be good. Decently good, anyway. Not sort of St Francis of Assisi good necessarily, but…’

  ‘But most decently good people in the world would call you a monster, and the Dee Society would kill you on sight.’

  ‘The who?’

  Misericorde waved the question aside. ‘Unimportant. It doesn’t matter how you define yourself, the point is that you have been defined. You are a leech that walks like a man, a parasite, an unnatural aberration, an abomination in the sight of man and God, a vile mockery of—’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Horst, his tone offended. He walked up and down while the wound to his feelings knitted a little.

  ‘Yet you know you are a thinking, rational individual. It is unjust how you are treated.’

  In reality, Horst had no experience of being chased betwixt pillar and post by aspiring Van Helsings. He had spent the majority of his vampirehood locked in a crypt, amusing himself down the long years with spider races, followed by a sumptuous feast of mainly spiders. On his release he had largely enjoyed a year as a showman in partnership with his brother, Johannes, who had largely hated it. They had travelled constantly, and Horst had been discreet and careful as and when he fed. Thus, he had never encountered stern-faced men with sharpened stakes and strong moral imperatives.

  The year had finished with a bit of a falling-out with his brother, and Horst had condemned Johannes to death and eternal damnation, and himself to brief agony then endless insensate and thoughtless dark.

  Except now it transpired that Johannes was not only not dead and not damned, but was actually doing things that, for lack of a better description, would have to be characterised as ‘good’. He himself, Horst, was also no longer dust, but thoroughly thoughtful and sensate. For example, Lady Misericorde’s throat looked very tempting. He was vaguely conscious of his eye teeth slowly extending in the same way an adolescent boy is vaguely conscious of a pleasing tumescence when contemplating a pretty girl. The similarity extended to the sudden embarrassment when it is realised that the effect has been observed and noted by the female in question.

  Horst turned away, putting his hand to his mouth in a pathetically chivalrous manner. Misericorde compounded his humiliation with a light laugh. ‘You see? You’re thirsty. It’s not your fault, and you don’t even need so much blood to survive, do you? If people understood you, vampires and humans could co-exist. But there is no desire for compromise. Sooner or later you will finish with a stake through your heart, and the mouth of your severed head stuffed with garlic flowers.’

  ‘Actually,’ he offered, as if it would somehow mitigate such a fate, ‘I still quite like garlic.’

  ‘Really? Well, I’m sure the garlic flowers will more than make up for the whole impalement-and-decapitation business,’ she replied. She let a silence form before saying, ‘The thing is, the day doesn’t understand the night, and the creatures of the day outnumber the creatures of the night. We are discriminated against—hated, hunted, destroyed.’

  ‘You’re not a creature of the night, though,’ said Horst. ‘You can go down the shops and buy yourself a loaf and a newspaper and no one will think anything of it.’

  ‘True, but you can say that of Devlin and his ilk, too. We are not defined by our ability to purchase a baguette and a copy of Le Figaro. If I stood in a town square on market day and identified myself as a necromancer, I doubt I would leave that square alive.’

  Horst thought of his brother’s travails and did not argue. ‘It’s always been that way, though,’ he said. ‘You just have to keep a low profile.’

  ‘Do generals keep a low profile? They send tens, hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths, killing more in a day than we might be responsible for in a century. Do the politicians who create those wars keep a low profile?’ Her gaze became intense, her words evangelical. ‘Don’t you understand? We are not the monsters. They call us that because they have the numbers and the power, and all we can do against them is run and hide and “keep a low profile”.’ She said it with a pent-up disgust that Horst had seen his brother express, albeit with different emphasis. To his brother, the denizens of the day and of the night were all equally obstructive to his researches and he gave them all short shrift—greengrocer to gorgon, showgirl to succubus, they had all been put on the Earth to get in his verdammten way.

  She continued, ‘So, we have had enough. We shall marshal our forces and make a stand against them. We shall carve out an empire of the night for ourselves and defend it against them. We shall force them to negotiate and to compromise with us.’

  Horst regarded her with astonishment. While the Ministerium was clearly organised, well funded, and capable, he had assumed its aims would be relatively small and focussed, albeit achieved by supernatural agency. The titles assigned to him and the others suddenly made a dreadful sense to him. They were not simply exercises in sycophancy—the intention was that they would indeed become nobles in this new nation of shadows. And to achieve that, they would first be …

  ‘Generals. That’s what we’re supposed to be, is it?’ he demanded of her. ‘We’re to raise armies?’

  ‘Very literally in our cases. Yes. Now you understand, my Lord of the Dead. I shall raise dry bones and revenants. Devlin already has a regiment of shapechangers
at his back. Not just wolves but bears from Scandinavia, tigers from India, foxes from Japan, hyenas and lions from Africa. You will create more of your line to become commanders and elite troops, and—when the Lord of Powers is brought to us—he or she will summon outsiders to fight for our cause and forge nature herself into a weapon. The mundane world will have no defences sufficient to resist our army. They will negotiate a settlement or every night will bring new suffering to them.’

  She was breathing hard, her passion for the cause evident in her heat and the vigorous pulse at her throat. Horst found he couldn’t look away from it.

  He wanted to say that their plan was abominable. He wanted to say that the forces they commanded were by their very nature difficult to control, and that many innocent lives would be lost in the chaos of such a war. He wanted to say that he wanted no part of such madness. But all he could do was watch the blood throb beneath her pale, pale skin and say, ‘What part in all this do the Ministerium themselves play? They all seem mundane. What do they do? How do they help us?’

  ‘They are rich, and they are ambitious. De Osma is an occultist, as well as landed gentry. I think he was the one who formed the Ministerium in the first place. Collingwood is a businessman; von Ziegler is some minor noble seeking to re-establish his family’s estates by gambling everything on this.’

  ‘Investors. This is just about money and power to them.’

  ‘De Osma has a scholarly interest in drawing together the darkness into one place where it can be more easily studied and classified. But yes. When were those worthy people who live in the light ever interested in anything more than money and power?’

  Horst was raging, furious that these men were rallying forces that they must know would cause untold death and terror, yet there was not a tremor of that fury on his face. Horst seemed to be sinking away from control of his own body. There were other impetuses that were rising in importance, and none of them required rage for expression. Only cold, rational thought, so cold it lay like ice upon the surface of his reason. He saw how the ranks of those he would turn stood before him in his imagination, subordinate, obedient, and his. He felt how individually powerful they would be, and how all that power ultimately belonged to him. He saw the day running from him, the solar terminator fleeing like a routed army, and the world turning to eternal night in its wake. He saw Lady Misericorde removing the locket and choker from her throat and running the tip of her finger down the line of her jugular vein as she looked him in the eye.