The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘I think you’re about done for,’ said Horst. His voice was harsh and dangerous, and he barely recognised it himself.

  The badger turned, made to stagger away, but Horst was on it in a second. He drove it to the ground, pushed its arms aside, and, jaws agape, fastened himself onto the creature’s opened throat. As the Dee Society members watched in varying degrees of horror and relief, Horst fed on the dying lycanthrope until its heart faltered and failed.

  When he was finished, he rose and faced the mortals. He could see the fear and the loathing in their faces, except for Alisha’s. She was unreadable. When she said, ‘Well. That was efficient,’ he had no idea whether it was a compliment or an irony.

  Efficient? He looked back at the creature, but it was a monster no longer. The corpse of a man lay there, minding Horst of a young farmer with dark hair cut short and ill-advised sideburns. ‘I’ve never killed before,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ It was the brusque tones of the military man. ‘Never? I thought you were supposed to be the Lord of the Dead?’

  Horst turned on him, rage billowing in his chest. ‘I have never killed before!’ he snarled into the man’s face. He was aware his face was covered in blood, he could see his reflection in the man’s eyes. It made him feel good in that moment, because that was what he was—a bloodthirsty monster—and these little people had better start understanding that. ‘They didn’t discuss the job title with me.’ Horst stepped back, collaring the rage and putting it away for when it might do some good. He was breathing heavily, with anger, with exertion, with the glorious feeling of new blood to burn. He said it once more, quietly.

  ‘I have never killed before.’

  The older man edged past him and knelt by the messenger. He didn’t need to check for life; the wounded carotid was no longer pulsing out blood. ‘Poor Redmond’s had it, I’m afraid.’

  The military man muttered a heartfelt oath, then said, ‘Deny him.’

  In response, the older man fumbled at the webbing belt that seemed to be the one piece of standard equipment among their force, and withdrew a small test tube from a pouch. Horst was irresistibly reminded of his brother’s proclivity for carrying elements of his laboratory around with him as he watched the man remove the tube’s cork and sprinkle the contents over the body of the hapless Redmond. It was a crystalline powder, but certainly a mixture as Horst could see harsh metallic glints within it.

  ‘What’s that in aid of?’ asked Horst. The man didn’t answer but rose and stepped back as the powder combusted, quietly and unspectacularly, like a diffident flambé in a shy restaurant. Horst opened his mouth, then closed it again as he didn’t know what to say about this. He especially didn’t know what to say about how Redmond burned away almost silently in strange, cold, golden flames.

  ‘Poor Redmond,’ said the older man, putting away the empty tube.

  ‘At least we’ve made sure he rests,’ answered the military man grimly. He looked at Horst a little suspiciously. ‘You don’t have many friends, do you?’

  ‘Not around here,’ Horst admitted. ‘My social skills seem to have suffered.’

  He noticed the man’s eyes were regarding the corpse of the demi-badger. ‘We seem to be in this together,’ he said. ‘We’ll worry about your motivations later. Come on.’ He hefted his pistol up to a ready position and headed out into the night. They filed out past Horst, the younger man avoiding looking at him. The last out was Alisha.

  ‘Sorry about the thing with the lungs,’ she said, and then she was gone into the night.

  Horst was suddenly very aware of the poor state of his attire, the blood on his face, the crushed cheekbone. At least he could do something about the latter. With an effort of concentration and through the agency of the werebadger’s blood, he re-formed the bone, knitting together the splinters and resetting it amid a muffled series of clicks and pops. Wincing slightly at the mild soreness with which it left him, he followed the others.

  It seemed that the badger had been the furthest end of a picket line following a stagger or lurch or whatever the collective noun is for a group of zombies. Certainly, the action appeared to have passed them by, and was now close to the far side of the common away from the riverbank. There was some desultory gunfire from that direction that died away as Horst and his group headed away, parallel to the riverbank where Horst had come ashore. They would meet the river again, he knew, as it turned away from the mountains, and he hoped that the Dee Society people had a plan that didn’t involve swimming.

  They seemed to. The military man, who did indeed turn out to be a major, or a former major, led them in Indian file through the dense undergrowth along a path that he had blazed earlier. From the far side of the common, the shooting had died out altogether. After a silence of almost a minute, there was a single shot. The young man paused to look back as if anything would be visible to him beyond the walls of briars and the darkness, but Alisha pushed him on impatiently.

  When they reached the edge of the overgrown field, they found themselves facing a swathe of open land some fifty yards wide with a dirt track running alongside the river. ‘They’ll be clearing the common now,’ said the major, terse and direct. ‘The changers will play bloodhound. They’ll find our dugout, and then they’ll find our path. We have perhaps ten minutes before they catch us.’ Horst started to comment that this wasn’t much of a plan, but the major held up a hand. ‘We shall be beyond their reach in five. Follow me.’

  He did not make for the path, but instead skirted the edge of the overgrown common, until they saw ahead of them where the dirt path joined a road that led to a wooden bridge. On the far side was what looked to be a derelict farm. Abandoning the cover of the bushes, the major led them in a run across the open swathe in a direct line for the bridge. They were still some yards from it when behind them, a howl of pure animalistic rage split the night. In seconds it was joined by others.

  ‘They’ve found their striped friend,’ said the major. ‘And there I was thinking ten minutes was pessimistic. Run! Run for your lives!’

  Chapter 7

  IN WHICH THERE ARE EXPLOSIVES AND ACID

  The boards amplified their running footsteps up to a rumbling thunder so loud that, to their ears, it might as well be a public address announcement that this was their escape route and that any otherwise unengaged werewolves or zombies should make their way to the bridge, where they would find an opportunity to rend and tear mortal flesh.

  Unhappily, in this they were essentially correct. The running Dee Society members and Horst—who was running at a determinedly human speed to demonstrate solidarity—were barely halfway across the bridge when the first of the lycanthropes broke cover from the undergrowth and headed straight for them.

  Alisha skidded to a halt, unslinging the satchel from her shoulder. ‘Keep going!’ she shouted at the others, and they did. Not Horst, however, who, being the Lord of the Dead and not a dues-paying member of the society, considered himself a free agent.

  He watched as she took a knee right in the middle of the bridge, opened the satchel’s flap, and fussed with its contents. Horst thought it an odd sort of time to go rummaging through her handbag, but kept his counsel, which was wise as he would have looked a terrible idiot if he’d said as much. Alisha looked quickly through a handful of odd metallic pencil-shaped objects, dismissed them as redundant, and dropped them into her jacket pocket. ‘Too slow,’ he heard her mutter.

  The wolf had almost reached the end of the bridge. Horst was just wondering if he should dash over and have a word with it when there was a loud percussion next to him. The wolf went down screaming. Alisha carefully placed her still-smoking pistol, doubtless loaded with silver bullets, within easy reach and carried on tinkering with the inside of the bag. Horst gave its innards a curious glance and noted that it seemed to be filled with blocks that reminded him of how tea arrived from the grocers back in the halcyon days when he drank tea. Alisha had stuck some sort of device into the side of one of the blocks an
d what they actually were occurred to him at about the same time she pulled on a cord and a fuse spluttered into coruscating life. She snatched up her pistol and headed off at full pelt after her companions. Horst let her go, watching the fuse crackle angrily as the sparks crept towards the detonator. It was November the fifth all over again, again. Whether her cry of ‘Well? Run, you idiot!’ was entirely necessary was another thing. In any event, Horst was running easily alongside her in a moment.

  ‘That’s quite a short fuse, isn’t it?’ he asked. Behind them, a mixed mass of undead and lycanthropic ill intent was surging onto the bridge. ‘Pardon me.’

  And so saying, he picked her up, slung her over his shoulder, and accelerated as hard as he dared with a living passenger. He was still a good twenty feet from the far bank when he felt the boards of the bridge beneath his feet ripple and, knowing what it forewarned, threw himself forward. The blast wave rolled across them and seemed to carry them along on its raging front like flotsam on the surf. He was surprised intellectually but not viscerally when they landed on the rough earth of the farmer’s track at the far end of the bridge. They tumbled head over heels as the bridge was torn to pieces by the angry impact of four blocks of plastic explosive turning largely to gas in a ball of heat and fury. The night sky glowed as the wood of the bridge spontaneously combusted beneath the violence of chemistry.

  As for Horst, he was reliving yet again how it feels to be hit in the head by an irate badgerman. This time at least, no bones were broken, but he was terribly disorientated, and could only think of bonfires and toffee and clung to the belief that there had been an accident with a Roman candle. A face appeared over him and he said, ‘Vati?’ even though part of him was saying that this was a question that would never receive the answer ‘Ja’ ever again.

  ‘Afraid not, son,’ said the major. He looked away, towards the bridge. ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s—’ began the young man’s voice, but was interrupted by an impatient ‘Get off me! I’m fine!’ Alisha appeared in Horst’s eyeline a moment later, beating out areas of her jacket that were smoking.

  ‘Smoking jacket,’ said Horst, and laughed weakly.

  Alisha looked down at him, and wiped away blood trailing from her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Again. You were right; that was a very short fuse.’

  Horst struggled upright. His head spun, and his back felt as if he’d been given a playful whack with an oak tree. He flexed his shoulders and there was a visceral crack that sounded serious. He could sense warmth there as his injuries rapidly healed in the offhand way they did these days. He had a feeling that if he wasn’t undead, he’d be very thoroughly dead by now. For lack of any other conversational gambits, he said, ‘Did you blow up the other bridge, too?’

  Alisha frowned. ‘What other bridge?’

  Somewhere nearby, Horst heard an engine turn over. He clambered to his feet with the catlike grace of a drunken orang-utan to witness an ageing open-bed lorry drive out from the farm buildings and wait, engine idling. The older man of academic mien threw open the door and called at them, ‘Could we get a move on, please? They’re coming across!’

  A quick glance showed the truth of it; while the bridge was destroyed across two of its three pilings, the lycanthropes were massing to make their way along the surviving lengths of shattered wood to jump the gaps, while the zombies—with a forgivable air of long-suffering—were attempting to cross the river in the manner of army ants. By sheer numbers and the bloody-mindedness of those who are past the point of having anything to live for by dint of being dead, they were walking into the river and clinging to one another in an effort to form a bridge that, if not living, was at least animate. There were those that were carried away by the flow, and did so slowly thrashing the water and pedalling their legs as if demonstrating how to drown. Some, semi-skeletal and holed below any waterline one cared to draw, sank from sight to walk the riverbed as if it were the surface of the moon. Unhappily, having poor navigational skills, this availed them little and they were as likely to walk to the sea as anything else. Others at least slightly bloated with the gases of putrescence bobbed on the surface like inflatable beach toys intended for children whom one wishes to traumatise. Examples of these who failed to join the bridge were to be seen floating off with expressions of dull-witted embarrassment, while those who had been incorporated into the bridge found themselves used as pontoons, which was scarcely better. However inefficient their efforts, it was clear that the barrier offered by the river would be breached in a matter of minutes.

  Quickly, therefore, Horst and the Dee Society members gained the lorry and departed that hellish scene in a dense cloud of exhaust fumes that coincidentally made them all think ‘carburettor’ without actually saying it.

  Horst rode in the back with the young man, whose name turned out to be Richard. ‘Well,’ said Horst as they bounced around in the flatbed, ricocheting from the metal sides, ‘this is travelling in style.’ Indeed, the lorry was making along with a vigorous enthusiasm to be away from the environs of the castle, and the ridged farm track did much to amplify this vigour into vertical motion as they bumped their way towards putative safety.

  ‘Do you think we’ll be all right now?’ said Richard, apparently already blasé to the joint threat of being in a badly driven vehicle with a vampire.

  ‘Frankly?’ said Horst. ‘I have no idea. I wouldn’t put anything past the Ministerium.’ He glanced back at the castle and what he saw did little to undermine his misgivings. ‘Mein Gott! What are they doing?’

  The castle was aglow. Not simply the windows, but the walls around the upper reaches of the structure, the towers and battlements, and even some way into the night sky throbbed with a violet glow that was just short of invisible, flickering at the edges of perception. It was a strangely vivacious effect, as if the light was in some sense alive and aware, and the suspicion grew in the mind of the observer that the glow was not so much emanating from the castle as squatting upon it like a ghastly, ghostly toad.

  Richard pounded on the glass in the back of the lorry’s cab. ‘Professor! Professor! Oh, stop! Look!’

  The professor obligingly stopped by stamping on the brake and clutch pedals simultaneously, sending Horst and Richard up against the back of the cab with uncomfortable momentum. While they were untangling themselves, he flung open the driver’s-side door and leaned out to look back at the castle.

  ‘Madness!’ he said. ‘They’ve rushed into some work of great power, and trebled the danger in so doing!’

  ‘What sort of thing?’ asked the major as he leaned out of his side. Alisha, in the middle of the bench seat, looked back through the glass.

  The professor shook his head as much in disbelief as in answer. ‘Truly, I cannot say. They are dabbling in rituals that have not been practised in centuries or even millennia. No living eye has seen them, and no reliable accounts of them survive. But all I can say is, just look at that bugger. It bodes ill, can’t you feel it in the very marrow of your bones?’

  ‘You know,’ said Horst in a conversational tone, ‘they might not have done it if you hadn’t provoked them.’

  ‘Oh, good point,’ conceded the professor. ‘You’re right, of course. We should have just left them to conquer the region and cast its mortal inhabitants into slavery and worse. Why didn’t we think of that? So much easier. Thank you for pointing that out, my lord.’

  ‘Sarcasm,’ said Horst.

  ‘Yes,’ said the professor.

  ‘Thought so,’ said Horst. ‘My brother employs it often. I’ve grown rather good at spotting it.’

  The unearthly glow was shuddering in waves across the parapets, and even the most insensitive of them could feel some terrible inchoate energy upon the air, and somewhere within it, a definable emotion.

  ‘It feels … joy,’ said Richard. ‘Some sort of horrible joy.’

  ‘Exultation, I was about to say,’ said the major. ‘I think we’ve lost this round.’
He climbed out and walked around to the driver’s side. ‘Shove over, Professor. I’ll drive.’

  Grumbling a little, the professor complied. As the major climbed in behind the wheel, Horst felt sharp pains in the pads of his thumbs that made him gasp where, for example, being pasted across the face by a werebadger had not. On each thumb, drops of blood stood out in sharp contrast to his pale skin. The pain faded quickly to be replaced by a deadening numbness and the left thumb started twitching spastically. He regarded them with disbelief, then heard an oath muttered with feeling behind him. He looked over his shoulder to find the professor looking at the drops of blood on Horst’s thumbs, too, but where Horst was bemused, the professor was horrified.

  ‘Drive, man! Drive!’ he snapped at the major. ‘Something wicked this way comes!’ He looked at Horst. ‘You didn’t think Shakespeare was being anything less than literal, did you, my lad?’

  The major slammed the lorry into gear and pulled away almost as violently as the professor had braked. Over the sound of the engine, Richard shouted to Horst, ‘Do you know what they’re doing?’ and jerked his head at the castle. Horst shook his head, but he had suspicions. Perhaps the Lord of Powers had been closer at hand than even the Ministerium had guessed. Certainly from his knowledge of necromancy gleaned from Johannes, this seemed too gross a manifestation of arcane energies by several magnitudes for a necromancer’s liking. Lady Misericorde’s little army of the unwilling dead was impressive enough, but there was a personal touch to it; every one of them had been raised with personal attention from the necromantrix herself. The great lowering cloud of malevolent violet light, however, was the very embodiment of impersonal potency, as unconcerned of the individual as a naval bombardment. Horst knew the professor had been right to say it boded ill, as had the major when he said they’d lost this round. Whatever the Ministerium had conjured, it moved on their agenda in no uncertain fashion.