The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Nor were they disappointed, this show being different enough from the first display to excite the old hands along with the new. When they performed their flyby and synchronised landing this time, the applause was louder and there were fewer washers to be found in the collection box subsequently.

  The major, professor, and Alisha were not on hand for it this time, however. They had been sitting around the telegraph office since shortly after noon, awaiting a reply from London. As the day wore on, however, they accepted one by one that it was unlikely that there would be a telegram arriving for them and returned to the train in various states of dudgeon.

  The major was used to waiting (and waiting, and waiting for something to happen, for that is the lot of a soldier), and as long as he was ready when the call came, he was content. To this end, he had bought a set of silver teaspoons from one of the farmers he had met at the general store and, after the professor had assayed the metal as being of sufficient purity, had with a cold efficiency that would have saddened the heart of the farmer who had sold him the heirloom proceeded to cut the spoons into small pieces. These he melted in the small furnace in Becky’s workshop and then poured into bullet moulds. He could not produce rounds of sufficient precision to be used in the semi-automatic weapons, nor did he have enough metal to make many, but at least it represented a full load for each of their revolvers, Alisha having found a snub-nosed .32 lying forgotten in a drawer of the Circus’s office and thus liberated it for the good of mankind.

  * * *

  Of Horst, there is little enough to say at this juncture, except for one small oddity. Since his original death and re-birth as the result of a contretemps with a vampire (in which he prevailed) and his subsequent contamination with the curse by dint of eating bits of it,* Horst had lost the ability to dream. His sleep was as abrupt and featureless as general anaesthetic: a blink with a duration of hours. He had missed it at first, but as his year with the Cabal Bros. Carnival had wound on, his memories of dreaming had faded as phantasmagorically as do the memories of dreams. Now, very unexpectedly, they were back, and yet he could never quite remember them. All he could recall on waking was a faint sense of watching trouble unfold for someone else. He felt a grudging sympathy for the hapless protagonist of the dreams, not least because he was aware that he was not the only observer and this unseen other watcher’s emotions were unreadable beyond a stark malevolence that flowed and ticked with machinations and methodicalities like a clockwork anthill.

  This was almost the limit of his recollection, but for a new tendency to awaken with a blurted exclamation. On the dusk of their day of arrival, it had been ‘Cats!’ On the evening after the first show it was ‘Crabs!’ He had no clear idea why he said these things, only that there was a fading impression of lazy malignancy with the first awakening, and of a vicious stupidity with the second. It was a mystery, and not one that he felt comfortable discussing with anyone else.

  On the evening after the second display, he awoke with the words ‘You little bastard!’ on his lips, and this time he felt something familiar about the venom with which they were spoken, as if somebody was expressing their animosity through him, somebody he knew. His first thought was his brother, but he failed to see how Johannes could or would do such a thing. Cat, crabs, and little bastards were an unlikely triumvirate for casual conversation or urgent messages. Why would his brother go to all the trouble of creating some sort of psychic link if only to communicate such disparate trivialities? It was ridiculous, but he appreciated that did not make it impossible.

  * * *

  The day of the Great Flying Circus Aeroshow arrived. ‘Great’ is a very relative term, but it would certainly be the first time any kind of real aeroshow had been held in the area, unless one counted that time five years ago when a trainee pilot flew into the windmill. That had been a very short sort of show, and memorable for only the worst of reasons. Thus, based on available metrics, Miss Virginia Montgomery’s Flying Circus was set to put on the greatest aeroshow the area had ever seen.

  It was a beautiful day for a disaster. The skies had remained cool blue throughout the circus’s stay and today was no exception. A breeze strong enough to be refreshing without being strong enough to trouble the entomopters had appeared at dawn blowing in from the east, bringing with it high scudding clouds formed over a distant sea. It was a market day, so the breeze started blowing in farmers and their families almost as soon as the sun was up, and they had spent the morning discussing prices and selling between themselves and the traders who had hired freight cars in the trains that now occupied two of the remaining sidings next to the circus train. There was some grumbling that it had the siding by the access road, meaning some creative use of boards and cargo pallets was necessary to get goods to and from the newcomers, but the promise of an unusually large gathering for the show ameliorated such complaints. The possibility of extra custom is always a balm to the heart of even the most curmudgeonly of traders.

  The show was set for two o’clock, the idea being that this would give people a chance to eat and, ideally, drink in the odd, thrown-together building that passed for a tavern in what passed for a town. A slightly drunk spectator was likely to be a slightly more generous one, and slightly drunk male spectators are more likely still to be generous when the collection boxes are wielded by presentable young women in close-fitting flight suits. This was part of the wisdom of Miss Virginia Montgomery’s Flying Circus, and it had always proved true.

  While Horst slumbered in a deathlike sleep that was less dreamless than he was used to, the three Dee Society members kept themselves out of the way of the aeroshow’s preparation. A response had finally arrived to the major’s report, a lengthy telegram that must have set the Society back a few pounds to transmit. The tavern no longer being the nest of quiet corners it had previously been for them, the three retired to the compartment aboard the train that doubled as a common room and waited impatiently as Major Haskins slowly teased the meaning from the enciphered phrases with frequent reference to the code book he carried, a small leather-bound volume printed on very flammable, very edible rice paper.

  After some time during which the professor closed his eyes and waited in silent meditation while Alisha looked out of the window and fought down the urge to sigh, grunt, and possibly scream with frustration, the major laid down his pencil and took up the finished message in clear text.

  ‘Good news first,’ he said. ‘Almost all of our people in the town escaped. We lost two who were acting as sniper and spotter from a rooftop close by the front of the square. I would think it’s possible they simply missed the withdrawal signal, and may still be alive. Anyway, that’s the state of affairs there.’

  ‘Is that all the good news?’ asked the professor, his eyes still closed.

  ‘No. The Society has taken its findings and placed them before our sister organisations. There is to be a general mobilisation.’

  ‘You call that good news? We can handle this,’ said Alisha. ‘We don’t need anyone else coming in and…’

  ‘Yes, we do, Alisha,’ chided the professor quietly. ‘We rather shot our bolt at the attack on the castle, and they sent us packing. This is more than the Society can deal with.’

  ‘We’re putting ourselves in the debt of a bunch of lunatics.’

  ‘Hardly,’ said the major. ‘There are no debts being called in here, no favours asked. The threat the Ministerium Tenebrae represents is too great for point scoring. “An unassociated organisation”, it says here, is joining the effort.’

  The professor’s eyes blinked open. ‘The Templars?’

  ‘I would guess so. It’s the usual formula for them.’

  Alisha’s mood was not improving. ‘But we’ve fought the Templars. How can we work with them?’

  ‘“My enemy’s enemy”, Alisha,’ replied the major. ‘Approaching apocalypses make for strange bedfellows. We may have had our disagreements in the past, but they’re a very moral bunch and very committed to their pri
nciples. One of those principles is the hunting and killing of monsters, although they have a rather more biblical way of saying it.’

  ‘Quite,’ agreed the professor. ‘Given the choice of continuing the silly feud between us or joining us to prevent the creation of a teratarchy, they will and, by the sound of it, have opted for the latter.’

  ‘What’s a teratarchy?’ asked Major Haskins.

  ‘Government by monsters,’ said the professor complacently. ‘A neologism, freshly minted. I think the Greek works.’

  ‘We’ve been given a rendezvous point,’ said the major, reading further down the decoded message. ‘We’re to make best time there and join the rest of our people from the initial attack.’

  ‘What,’ said Alisha slowly, ‘what if this attack fails, too?’

  ‘Then it’s out of our hands altogether. Sympathetic contacts within local states have been briefed and, I hope and pray, are already mobilising. If we can’t nip the Ministerium’s grand scheme in the bud, it will turn into a war. Our strength is we respond a great deal faster than any army can hope to. The business with those flying monstrosities the other night proves they have their “Lord of Powers” already. They miscalculated with our Mr Cabal, but he was only ever intended to provide small numbers of specialised troops anyway. Between the shapechangers, the mindless undead, and whatever party tricks the new recruit brings with him- or herself, no neighbouring country is safe. Even with their armies standing ready, they have never trained to deal with this manner of threat.’

  It was a view he’d aired before, but previously without the possibility of them re-entering the fray. Then it had been about hopes that the conventional would be ready and capable of defeating the unconventional, with an underlying fear that it would not. Now they were in the unenviable position of being the first line of defence, civilians who would face death in an unusually literal sense so that soldiers might be spared the horrors of this new war. It was ironic, certainly, but not in any pleasurable way.

  There was no point in staying with Miss Virginia and her crew; they would be travelling in the wrong direction for the needs of the three Dee Society agents. One of the market trains, however, would take them back to the city from which they had so recently fled, and so they made arrangements to bed down amid fruit barrels in one of its freight cars.

  In the meantime, however, they would sample whatever delights market day had to offer, and enjoy the show.

  * * *

  At ten minutes past two—the carefully calculated tardiness being both to allow some anticipation to rise and also to give the slow crowd from the tavern time to show up—the aeroshow began. Unlike the in medias res openings of the previous two, this began with a single entomopter sitting in the middle of the field, Miss Virginia’s very own Spirit of ’76. It had been the object of intense observation for the forty minutes the crowd had been building, it being the closest almost all had ever been to such a machine. They admired its striking paintwork, commented upon the four thin wings, and speculated on the function of assorted struts, intakes, and flanges.

  The many conversations gave way to applause as Miss Virginia Montgomery walked onto the field and, with practised insouciance, stood by the nose of her aircraft. Here the mechanic, Becky Whitten, arrayed in her cleanest, least-frayed overalls, awaited her with an electric megaphone. Virginia took it with a polite nod, and addressed the crowd in good German, made exotic to the listeners by a discernible American accent beneath it that hinted at the moon in June and mint juleps. She thanked them for their presence, she thanked them for their patience, she told them a little of her circus’s history, and she promised them a show they would never forget.

  In the light of subsequent events, it was an unfortunate promise; not because it was unfulfilled, but because it was fulfilled all too well.

  At the conclusion of the little speech, timed to a nicety based on past experiences of slightly inebriated farmers, Miss Virginia returned the megaphone to Becky, exchanging it for a British Army surplus Very pistol. This she made a show of loading with a flare cartridge before raising it high and firing the white star shell into the heavens. Even as the parachute flare was still rising, she’d handed the pistol back and was climbing into the cockpit of the big American two-seater. The canopy slammed shut and Miss Virginia fired the engine before even strapping herself in, the pre-flight checks having been completed by Becky just before Miss Virginia made her grand entrance. Strictly, this was against protocol; the pilot should make their own pre-flight checks as it’s their life on the line and ultimately their responsibility. That, however, would have undermined the drama of the moment, and in the open spaces travelled by a wandering circus, protocols are sometimes revised. Besides, Miss Virginia and the rest of the Flying Circus routinely put their lives in Becky’s hands, and she had proved time and again that their faith was well founded.

  As the engine, still warm from a short readying session earlier, wound up, the entomopter’s four insectile wings started to sweep in their complex figure-of-eight patterns, slowly as the clutch was only in its initiator setting. Miss Virginia finished strapping herself in, pulled the cinches until they were just the right side of comfortable, and gave Becky a thumbs-up signal. Becky quickly returned the signal before raising the reloaded pistol and firing a second flare. This one exploded into a flickering green light in the clear sky, floating away on its parachute borne by a light breeze. The sense of growing immediacy conveyed to the crowd by these actions was no mere stagecraft; two miles away in either direction, entomopters waited in distant fields. On sighting the first flare, they fired their engines and stood by to lift. On the second, they rose vertically, their wings whirling. Up to a height of fifty feet they climbed, nosed down to allow the wings to provide more forward motion, and accelerated hard towards the showground. As their airspeed increased, they started to develop transitional lift, allowing them to bring the nose down still further, turning more and more of the wings’ blur into a headlong hurtle.

  In their wakes, grass bowed and boughs shook violently. On and on they came, Mink and Daisy from the northwest, Dea Boom from the southeast, flying hard and sharp, the nap of the earth flashing below them reflected in the gleaming gloss finishes of their fuselages, smooth now the landing gears had all been retracted within seconds of launch. Ahead of them they could see the showground growing so large, so quickly, the green flare still falling off to the west beyond the crowd’s left flank. There would be no place for any ‘seat of the pants’ flying here; their lives depended on everyone staying exactly to the plan. No extemporisation and no showboating while a sister pilot was in the same arena.

  Every entomopter had its reflector sight up and active, all the better to focus the pilot on their craft’s heading. The sights—angled panes of glass onto which a targeting reticle was projected via the offices of an optical collimator, beam splitter, and a little engineering ingenuity, thereby allowing a true sighting without parallax problems—were artefacts of the CI-650’s operational past but, being slightly superseded by the CI-880’s model, they had not been stripped out when the entomopters were decommissioned. It almost felt like a kindness for the old warhorses.

  Now, where once bandit entomopters would have filled the sights’ graticulated fields, now they centred on an ally, in this case Miss Virginia, that they might better avoid her at the last moment.

  Avoid her they did, to screams of shock and horror from the crowd who only saw the closing aircraft at the last moment and barely had time to fear a four-way collision before the moment had passed and the fright was washed away by relief and laughter and applause.

  The three members of the Dee Society had some of the best seats in the house, having climbed onto the roof of the train’s sleeper carriage to watch. The rhythmic tightening of fearful anticipation followed by the release of the tension as stunt after stunt was performed with the almost supernatural panache of the highly practised professional also served to take some of the Society members’ own te
nsions, and they found themselves able to forget the Ministerium Tenebrae for a little while at least.

  ‘Just as well they started when they did,’ noted the major. ‘The weather’s closing in. Probably start raining in an hour or two.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Professor Stone. He looked into the slight breeze, but all he could see were a few high clouds. ‘Looks clear to me.’

  ‘You’re looking the wrong way, professor,’ laughed the major. ‘Over there.’ And he pointed to the west.

  The professor looked, and then climbed to his feet. ‘How extraordinary,’ he said under his breath.

  There did seem to be a storm coming after all. An angry thunderhead, so dense it appeared almost black, was rolling in from the west. It was vast, yet still seemed dwarfed by the even greater extent of clear sky around it. As they watched, a curious effect could be discerned around its edges; a violet miasma seemed to follow the cloud yet not necessarily be part of it, as if there was an afterimage around it, or the cloud was overlaid upon a slightly larger coloured version of itself.

  ‘That,’ said Professor Stone with certainty, ‘is not natural.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Major Haskins as he and Alisha joined the professor on their feet, ‘it’s moving against the wind. Look at the other clouds.’ He was right; the other strands of cumulus, too reedy to suggest rain, were at a similar altitude to the storm head, yet they were running dead against its direction of travel. Indeed, the storm head seemed to be bringing its own winds with it; they watched as one of the pale natural clouds ran close by the dark mass and was progressively torn into nothing by violent yet thoroughly localised turbulence.

  Over the showground, Dea and Mink were engaged in a mock dogfight while their two comrades flew in a wide circle around the conflict. Dea had just performed a textbook rolling-scissors manoeuvre to come in on Mink’s tail while Becky bellowed out a commentary through the megaphone for the benefit of anyone who wasn’t just staring, eyes wide and jaw loose, at the display. Dea was intended to trigger a pyrotechnic roughly equivalent to a string of very large firecrackers in a trick box attached to her fuselage at this point to suggest the rattle of mini-cannon, to which Mink would respond by firing a smoke cartridge clipped to the tail boom to represent damage, after which she would limp pathetically from the field hors de combat before setting up her approach for the next set piece.