The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Horst changed his shirt and, his hand having already healed, he applied his will to knitting the chest wounds shut. It proved tiring and, although he was able to close them, they were a long way short of healed. He obviously needed more blood.

  He made do with some gauze and surgical tape he found in a first aid box. The front wounds were easy enough, but the exit wound through his right lung proved awkward to get at and he spent a frustrating quarter of an hour puppeteering a dressing into position using far too much tape and the bathroom mirror. Not for the first time, he was relieved that the tale about vampires casting no reflection was—for his brand of bloodsucker at least—not true.

  For the first time Horst was beginning to see that the true weakness of a vampire is not all the business with bursting into flame in direct sunlight, inconvenient though it may be. Nor was it a vulnerability to stakes through the heart as, when one pauses to really think about it, that’s rather a vulnerability of all animals. Astonishing yet true. Running water did not hinder him, nor did holy water or garlic cause him any great dismay beyond ‘Oh, I’m wet’ and ‘Oh, that’s quite smelly’. In short, being a vampire was not nearly as unpleasant as it might have been but for the one great weakness that was the reliance on human blood.

  Horst had experimented with the blood of other animals, but quite apart from the inconvenience of stalking a sleeping horse or cow and the difficulty of penetrating horsehair or cowhide with fangs that aren’t all that long really, the result did not warrant the trouble. Their blood was foul, and offered little sustenance. Human vampires had evolved or been created—depending on which authority one listened to—to predate on humans only. It was a nuisance, but there it was. A very great nuisance.

  He had been able to work around it in his previous existence. The life of a travelling vaudevillian with a carnival moving around the countryside had been ideal. He had taken a little here, a little there, gently erasing memories of his semi-willing donors, women all, leaving just a pleasant and pleasurable reminiscence of some feverish canoodling with a tall, handsome man in the shadows behind the Ghost Train. Not having a carnival to hand, he was at a loss as to how to refill his veins without resorting to the kindnesses of the Ministerium Tenebrae. To do so would exacerbate the vulnerability that already troubled him. They would smile and bow and fetch him some blood from somewhere. From someone. Who knew what horrors they were perfectly delighted to commit on his behalf in the castle dungeons? However they did it, he would ultimately be responsible.

  Possible alternatives, however, seemed little better. He could haunt the corridors and take, as was his wont, a little here and a little there, endangering no one. Yet this was not a regimen he could practise for long before he was leaving everyone around the place looking terribly anaemic. Another alternative …

  He finished dressing and went out of his apartments. His path took him by the hall in which Herman had mounted his last stand and Horst paused to look down at the site of the little battle. It was predictably and, Horst found, dispiritingly clean. No sign of Herman’s blood and brains, nor the blood of the werewolf whom he had slain, nor of grave mould from Lady Misericorde’s platoon of walking dead. The cleaning staff here were clearly efficient, thorough, and unsurprised by such things.

  Thinking of the shambling, implacable horde of revenants put him once again in mind of his brother, Johannes, and the acidic disdain in which he held such things. Apparently it was relatively easy to create zombies of that ilk, but they were so mindless and divorced from the truly living that Johannes regarded them as a frippery, a silly trick to impress the peasantry. It was plain that Lady Misericorde held no such foibles. She was an impure creature in so many ways.

  Horst found his breathing had deepened and shook himself from a reverie that was loitering on the outskirts of luridness.

  He pushed himself away from the railing and wandered off with no great intention of going anywhere especially. The corridors were not anonymous, littered with distinctive bric-a-brac that made navigation easy. A suit of armour with a helmet visored with a bear’s likeness here, an occasional table decorated with a vase of only slightly dusty silk flowers there. He wandered past them all, unconsciously noting them, but otherwise steeped in thought and a growing hunger.

  After some ten minutes, the unending artificiality of his surroundings began to wear on him and he sought the open air. This he gained through a door into an unoccupied suite of rooms less imposing yet more impressive than his own. Here the ceiling was at a slightly more human height although still high, with delicate renderings in blue and white set into the plaster. It all seemed very grandiose and, given the number of visitors of one hue or another that the castle was currently enjoying, a little odd that it was vacant. He walked silently amid the furniture, all of it bulky and anonymous beneath dust sheets. Still, it had what he most desired at that moment, a wide set of windows opening onto a balcony three times the size of the one in his chambers.

  The doors out onto the balcony were unlocked and the handles moved easily beneath his hands as he opened them and stepped out into the coolness of the night air. He looked up at first, at the almost clear sky, the harshly glittering stars only occasionally occluded by dashing rags of high cloud. A gibbous moon hung over the scene, soaking the world in an unhealthy blue-white glow. Then Horst looked down and was surprised to find the city below spread out before him. The river ran narrow here—no more than thirty feet across—and was crossed a little to his left by a covered stone bridge that finished in a drawbridge. This, he noted, was up. Beyond it lay a great square that must have been impressive when occupied by a crowd, or a market, or even when empty. Now, however, it was home to a shantytown of sorts. He looked down at the few figures wandering hither and yon, and the fires that glowed in front of some of the lean-tos and caravans that made up this temporary addition to the permanent fibre of the city.

  Not that permanent, Horst had to admit to himself as he looked at the buildings that bordered that square on three sides. Several seemed to have been abandoned to squatters and looters, holes poked in the rooves by ridge-walking thieves and the actions of unmitigated weather. It was a sad sight. When it was all in repair it would have been as pretty as a picture on a box of reasonably expensive biscuits, he was sure. To see it dying, the ribs poking through the skin, was horrible. Those poor people down there, living hand to mouth in the ruins of their lives.

  He watched a young woman carrying a bucket to the municipal pump. That, at least, was still working. She hung the bucket over the nozzle and started pushing down hard on the pump handle. He could hear the water rushing in short, energetic bursts into the waiting steel. Those poor people. He could see her back curve in the moonlight as she put her weight into it. Those poor, poor people. He could almost hear her heart rate increasing, could almost hear how her pulse hammered. Those poor, poor, vulnerable people …

  Horst closed his eyes and carefully released his grip on the balcony rail. The words Alisha had spoken to him barely an hour before echoed in his head. When the Ministerium were sure that they could trust him, they’d let him loose on the town to feed, and to recruit. It wasn’t that they could think such a thing appalled him now. Not nearly so much as how reasonable it all sounded to him at that hungry moment.

  He clenched the rail again until he could feel flakes of paint crackling from it. A marred coat of paint seemed a small price to pay for a moment’s stillness inside him.

  Across the night air, he could hear distant cries from the city, laughter, even some music, and this calmed him. Human durability, the knack of being able to make merry amid the ruins, was heartening and, although he didn’t realise it then, reminded him that these were not herd animals to be hunted. Once, he had not been so very different from them.

  He could hear an argument going on, too, and in his meditative state he did not understand immediately that it was not wafting up from the fragrant stews of the city below, but rather from the castle above. He leaned out a little a
nd looked upwards. Across the castle’s frontage, some fifty yards away and a floor further up, a window stood open, and through it he could make out the voices of the Ministerium Tenebrae. They did not sound angry nearly so much as worried, perhaps even a shade panicked. It was not the image they had gone to such lengths to portray earlier, as efficient, emotionless, and rational. Surely a couple of spies in their midst had not caused such disarray, he wondered. Especially given that, to their imperfect knowledge, both were dead. So, why the raised voices?

  He closed his eyes and focussed his senses, but the light wind blew their words away but for the occasional snatch of speech. ‘Inconceivable,’ he heard. ‘Loyalties lie.’ ‘Procedures.’ It was provocative to his curiosity, and for once his curiosity and his self-interest were perfectly aligned.

  The castle was the best maintained of all the buildings he could see, but it was old and the stonework was rendered imperfect by the actions of time and climate. A human with the privilege of walking in daylight without igniting like a perambulatory Roman candle would rightly have regarded the ascent and traverse of such a distance without climbing gear as a ridiculously dangerous undertaking. Horst, by contrast, had his shoes, socks, and jacket off in a twinkling and was already making a slow but steady assault on the wall. While he might not be able to transform into a bat or a large black dog, Horst thought to himself as he made a diagonal beeline across the curtain wall, he at least had the remarkable climbing ability ascribed to some vampires. This was a revelation to him, as he had never previously known cause requiring him to impersonate a great gecko. Now that the talent was revealed, it was actually rather fun. Possibly not as much fun as turning into a bat, but one takes amusement where one finds it.

  He crept under the edge of the open window and grew still, listening while marvelling how little effort the feat of sticking to the stone like a limpet was costing him.

  ‘… a covey of ill-organised, inconsequential romantics.’ That was de Osma. ‘Their spies were detected and dealt with in good order. And, mark you, by our generals.’

  ‘You’re being pretty relaxed about a breach in security,’ replied the dry, slow tones of the American, Collingwood.

  ‘I did not say I was happy about tonight’s events…’

  ‘That they were dealt with is really not what concerns me,’ Collingwood said over him. ‘It’s that they got in here in the first place. Hell, how did those nutjobs even find out about us?’

  ‘Yes!’ von Ziegler piped up. ‘That worries me, too. We’ve gone to so much trouble to keep this secret until the time is right. How did they know?’

  ‘And how much did they report?’ added Collingwood.

  ‘The former we don’t yet know,’ said de Osma, ever the leader. ‘The latter we know a little of. Herman, the spy who killed himself rather than be taken, was detected in the act of preparing a messenger pigeon to fly from a loft of sorts he’d established in a disused tower.’

  ‘Pigeons?’ Von Ziegler was shrill. ‘How did he get pigeons in here undetected?’

  ‘That is the least of our concerns,’ said de Osma. Horst could almost hear the shrug in his voice. ‘Conjurors conceal birds easily. Smuggling in a few pigeons was probably a more trivial task than you think. No, how many messages he had managed to send before we stopped him, that is of concern to us.’

  ‘I would’ve guessed Lady Misericorde might be able to get something out of him,’ said Collingwood. ‘Can’t she—I don’t know—use some of that necromancer hoodoo and make him talk?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said de Osma. ‘She tells me that the bullet destroyed the brain, so she has nothing to work with. Might even be the reason why he did it.’

  ‘The fact remains that they are small in number and widespread,’ said Collingwood. ‘How great a threat do they represent?’

  There was a pause marked by light footsteps on a carpeted floor and the chink of glassware as de Osma poured himself a drink. The ghost of a gulp, then: ‘If you had asked me that a week ago I would have said no substantial threat at all. Now … I am not nearly so certain. There was money and organisation involved behind this infiltration. I think the Dee Society may be more capable than we had previously believed.’

  ‘We’ve been so careful,’ said von Ziegler, returning to his previous theme. ‘Everybody vetted. Everybody observed. How is this possible?’

  ‘We had done everything possible,’ agreed Collingwood, but after an ironically measured pause he added, ‘everything humanly possible.’

  ‘You suspect one of the generals?’ said de Osma in a peremptory tone. ‘Impossible. They have as much to gain by our plans as we do.’

  ‘That Cabal fella doesn’t seem convinced,’ said Collingwood.

  ‘Oh … No. No, we have some way to go with him yet. But the spies had entered our employ before he was even resurrected. I doubt his powers extend quite that far.’

  There was a grumble of reluctant agreement from Collingwood. ‘That leaves us with Misericorde and Alsager,’ he said. ‘And, no, they don’t make sense, either.’

  ‘What about Alsager’s mob?’ suggested von Ziegler. ‘He gathered them very quickly, in a matter of months. How do we know he didn’t sweep up somebody who doesn’t agree with our aims?’

  ‘Because even Alsager doesn’t trust them,’ said de Osma. ‘He keeps a close eye on them, believe me. Gentlemen, we are going in circles. Worse, we are falling into the trap of doubting ourselves. If this evening’s business has any utility to us at all, it is to make us realise that we are not unobserved, and that time is of the essence. We must move ahead. Immediately. This very night.’

  There was some consternation at this.

  ‘But we’re not ready,’ rumbled Collingwood. ‘You admitted that our “Lord of the Dead” may not be all we had hoped for, and the Lord of Powers is still not with us. That means we only have two generals to count upon.’

  ‘But they are the two who can provide numbers,’ said de Osma. ‘In military terms, we have infantry—or at least we shall when we have raided enough mortuaries and graveyards—and we have cavalry. We shall just have to forgo vampiric elite troops until Cabal either toes the line or is replaced, and the occult artillery the Lord of Powers will supply when he is finally brought here. He is overdue, I admit, but should be here shortly. The field agents’ reports have been reassuring on that front—we shall have our thunder and lightning soon enough.’

  De Osma started to speak, but he was interrupted by raised voices beyond the room’s door, which was suddenly flung open.

  ‘Alsag … My Lord Devlin!’ said von Ziegler. ‘What is the meaning of this?’

  Horst suddenly had a very bad feeling. He crept in a tight circle and started making his way as quickly as he dared back to the balcony from which he had sortied. It did him little good. There was a clatter of the window being opened more widely and Alsager’s triumphant cry: ‘There!’ Horst stopped and performed a clockwise half turn so he could look back. Alsager was leaning out of the window, pointing at Horst for the benefit of the Ministerium, who were crammed behind him in the window, as if they might need assistance in noting a man clinging to a sheer wall not twenty feet away.

  ‘Lord Horst! What is the meaning of this?’ cried de Osma, astonishment losing ground to an outrage so acute that he was reduced to shouting people’s names and demanding what the meaning of this was.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ said Horst noncommittally. They evidently didn’t know, so he clarified. ‘Just getting some air. Such a nice evening I just thought I’d just … have a bit of a scuttle.’ He left it there, hoping that they’d accept this as perfectly normal behaviour for vampires.

  ‘I think we need to have a talk,’ said de Osma. ‘Please join us here. And use the stairs.’ He and his colleagues disappeared back into the room, but it did not require the acute hearing of a vampire to know that they were muttering suspiciously among themselves the instant that they were out of view. Only Devlin Alsager was left, and he took the opportunit
y to smirk like the class snitch who has successfully contrived to get somebody into trouble with the teacher.

  ‘I can’t wait to hear what you come out with to explain spying on them,’ he said. Then his eyes flicked away and the smile faltered, dimmed by surprise and curiosity. ‘What’s going on down there?’

  Horst followed his gaze off onto a large area of scrubland beyond the river that might have been a common at some point. A few tents clustered in the corner closest to the town, but otherwise it was tangled and wild with brambles and thistles. Rising from its far side was a thin vaporous trail of pale smoke that caught the moonlight strongly as it drifted slowly in the slight breeze. Horst followed the track into the sky to its end just in time for it to suddenly erupt into a brilliant green light that floated slowly back to earth, illuminating the broken land beneath in a stuttering, eerie glow that threw long, shifting shadows. Horst’s first thought was somebody had shot off a firework, but he immediately corrected that. It was a signal flare. How odd, he mused. Who might they be signalling, and why?

  He was answered in the next moment by a high-pitched chink as stone above him cracked and flaked away, accompanied by a momentary whine like an angry hornet flying by to cause mischief elsewhere. Such was his surprise at all these entertainingly unusual events occurring so closely together that he was, by his own later admission to himself, ashamed that he did not immediately divine what was happening.

  That took Alsager’s cry of anger as he ducked away from the window in the same instant that another passing hornet dealt the glass a shattering impact.

  Oh, thought Horst with all the calmness of the utterly surprised. Those are bullets.