The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘Run, you fool!’ he managed to shout at the professor. It was bad enough that he was going to die not only haplessly, but without dignity, and he surely didn’t need an audience for it. The professor, stirred into action, turned and ran. That, at least, was something, Horst thought.

  The highlight of Miss Virginia Montgomery’s Flying Circus display was to have been a lot of quite cheap fireworks made more spectacular by being dumped from altitude from the underside of Miss Virginia’s own trusty Copperhead. For the usual collections of yokels they performed for, this was something new and astonishing. It was certainly new and astonishing to the harvestman when a buzzy flying thing suddenly appeared before it and—while the monster’s quite simple brain was deciding whether to catch and eat it rather than the funny hoppy thing with no panache—dumped a load of flashy, burning, popping, explodey things in its face.

  The harvestman had never been so insulted, or surprised, or terrified. It backed away rapidly, backpedalling across the showground and so into the ruin of the general store, where it crouched within the remaining walls, making a touchingly futile attempt to hide.

  The Spirit of ’76 meanwhile performed a hard bank and decelerated hard to come to a hover directly before Horst. The rear pilot canopy slid back and Miss Virginia leaned over the side. ‘Come on, for Christ’s sake!’ she shouted at him over the deep roar of the engine. ‘That was all the fireworks I had!’

  Horst hobbled to his feet and hopped to the side of the forward co-pilot and weaponeer’s seat as the entomopter set down so gently that the landing gear barely depressed. There it stayed, ready to fly at a touch of the controls and as eager to be off as a dog in the traces. The forward part of the canopy was designed to slide forward, but he only managed to get it to slide forward six inches before it jammed. He looked back to tell Miss Virginia as much when he saw the great angular frame of the harvestman starting to rise up again, eyeing them through its several eyes with rapacious interest.

  His expression told her all she needed to know. She shouted, ‘Hang on!’ He got halfway through saying, ‘Why?’ And then suddenly they were airborne.

  Fortunately, Horst had been holding on before he had been asked to, and his enhanced strength combined with a healthy fear of hitting the ground from a height combined to anchor his hands to the inside edge of the forward cockpit with a tenacity that a crowbar would have found difficult to trouble.

  The entomopter jigged sideways, neatly dodging a jet of web that would have caused havoc if it had got onto the wings. Miss Virginia put the nose down and shoved the throttle through the gate all the way to the maximum ‘buster’ setting. The engine howled with power and the wings momentarily started to accelerate harshly, but she changed their collective setting so they were biting harder, putting their newfound energy into shifting more air rather than just fluttering faster. The Copperhead tore along the edge of the showground, picking up speed rather than altitude.

  Horst saw little of this, concentrating solely on making himself a fixture of the entomopter’s side. As he clung there, however, an unpleasant thought occurred to him. Even without the thinning of the supernatural cloud, the aircraft’s speed would soon take them out of the curious shielding effect it offered him as a vampire. As soon as they broke out from it altogether, he would become comatose after a few minutes and fall, assuming he wasn’t burning before then. He would hate for that to happen; it would make a dreadful mess of the entomopter’s beautiful paintwork.

  Miss Virginia didn’t want that, either, or perhaps she valued his continued existence. Whatever the reason, she hardened the manoeuvre to present the side of the fuselage as horizontal as she could manage. It was enough; he released one hand and used it to shove the canopy all the way open, and threw himself into the cockpit.

  He pulled the forward canopy shut as she closed the rear, cutting the engine sound to a level where they could manage a conversation in merely raised tones rather than bellowing. ‘There’s a blanket in there,’ she told him. ‘Use it to cover yourself. We’ll be out from under the cloud in a minute.’

  Gratefully, he looked around the cockpit floor and found a thick, folded Indian blanket stowed beneath the seat. It certainly looked opaque enough to do the job and he started to unfurl it as Miss Virginia stayed under cloud cover as long as she dared with an increasingly batey colossal harvestman-like monster trying to shoot her down. He glanced sideways from the cockpit, and froze.

  ‘There’s a man down there,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll be a dead ’un,’ she replied. ‘Nothing livin’. Well, nothin’ human and livin’.’

  That’s not what it looked like at all to Horst. He looked hard, enhancing his sight to the point where a kestrel would have requested binoculars.

  It was a man, and a living man, he was sure. He was dressed properly, not decked out in rags or shroud, although ‘properly’ was a very relative term; Horst found little to approve of in the man’s choice of wardrobe. He was also walking rather than shambling or staggering around. The zombies ignored him, he noted. Even when one of the strange statue creatures leapt out from the wheat at him, it fell short in a frantic windmilling of limbs as if it had changed its mind at the point of jumping. It shied away from the man, as if frightened by him, or at least cowed by his presence. It stepped back from him a little way, then jumped on a zombie instead.

  ‘I know him,’ said Horst slowly. ‘I’ve seen him … where have I seen him? In pictures? Somewhere. Where have I…? Oh. Oh, dear God.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It can’t be. It just can’t be.’ He looked as hard as his inhumanly sharp senses would allow. ‘You…’ he said beneath his breath. ‘It’s you. But … you’re dead!’

  A Short Interlude

  Johannes Cabal had been leaning back on a small hill of plumped-up pillows, his eyes closed throughout the recitation. ‘What?’ Now they opened and he looked testily at his brother. ‘What?’ He sat upright, any lingering weakness lost in a sense of effrontery. ‘You mock me,’ he said.

  ‘I swear, Johannes. Those were my exact words. I would have laughed when you said much the same—’

  ‘Exactly the same thing…’

  ‘Much the same thing when you saw me. I didn’t laugh, though. I didn’t think you’d appreciate it.’

  In this, Horst was correct.

  Johannes Cabal settled back again, but hardly in the best of moods. He really was feeling much more like his old self.

  Chapter 12 (Continued)

  IN WHICH A FACE IS RECOGNISED

  Horst knew the man. He had seen newspaper images, wanted posters of him. He had seen his corpse, for heaven’s sake, brought into town of an evening when, bizarrely, his brother was proclaimed a hero for killing that very man.

  The man looked up, shading his eyes, watching the Spirit of ’76 as it circled him. Then he waved. Horst had to fight the impulse to wave back.

  ‘It can’t be,’ he shouted back to Miss Virginia. ‘It simply can’t be!’

  ‘You know that feller?’ she demanded. It was impossible to tell if her tone was curious or suspicious. Horst thought she had reasonable grounds for both.

  ‘Yes! But it’s impossible. That’s Rufus Maleficarus!’

  A Slightly Longer Interlude

  Johannes Cabal was sitting bolt upright once more. ‘What?’ he snapped. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, quite,’ said Horst mildly. ‘I was surprised, too. I thought you’d killed him. You did say you’d killed him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course I said it! I did kill him. I shot him. I shot him repeatedly. With a Webley .577. I shot him repeatedly with a Webley .577 until he was quite, quite dead.’

  Horst regarded him a little too sincerely to be entirely sincere. ‘You seem very emphatic about that.’

  ‘Because I killed him very emphatically. It is impossible. He cannot be alive. His body was recovered. The town’s people gibbeted him, by all that is holy and much that isn’t. He cannot be alive. Are you sure?’ />
  Horst considered. ‘Well, I’m fairly sure. I saw his picture, and I saw his body.’

  ‘This man on the showground. Describe him.’

  ‘Not much to say, really. He just looked a lot like Rufus Maleficarus. Big man. Mad hair.’

  Cabal sighed, just for once more from relief than exasperation. ‘That could be anyone.’

  Horst nodded, conceding the point. ‘You could be right. Oh.’ He raised a finger to indicate a remembered detail. ‘He was wearing plus fours.’

  The effect upon his brother was terrible. He blanched a horrible grey, reminiscent of unsatisfying pancake batter. ‘Ach du lieber Gott!’ he managed in an awful whisper. ‘It is him.’

  Chapter 12 (Continued Further)

  IN WHICH A STRATEGY IS ADVANCED

  ‘Rufus who?’ said Miss Virginia.

  ‘Maleficarus. He was … well, is it seems, a wizard. His father was a stage magician, I think, rabbits out of hats and so on, but then he started dabbling with the real thing, and fils followed père.’

  ‘How’s it impossible to be him if you’re so damn sure that it is him?’

  ‘Because he’s dead. My brother shot him to death, and believe me, when my brother puts his mind to something, he follows through. Maleficarus was threatening a town, and my brother stopped him.’

  ‘Yeah? Your brother sounds okay.’

  Horst decided not to expand on his brother’s motives for protecting the town, which were less altruistic than they might seem. It had been less an heroic intervention and more the fighting of predators over a tasty scrap. Instead he said, ‘He has his moments,’ without actually saying that this had been one of them, for that would have been a lie. Still, Johannes did have his moments. ‘If the Ministerium has somehow resurrected Rufus, then their power is enormous. This is too much for a handful of Dee Society agents to deal with.’

  ‘I thought they were getting governments involved?’

  ‘They’re trying, but it will be too late. They need something very dangerous on their side to even their odds and they need it now.’

  ‘More dangerous than a vampire?’ Even over the engine noise, the amusement in her tone was obvious.

  ‘Oh, but I’m lovely. And I’m really not much into the whole “Prince of Darkness” business. No, they need something … somebody … much more dangerous than me.’ He swallowed. He could hardly believe he was going to suggest this. ‘We need my brother, Johannes.’

  A Quite Long Sort of Interlude

  ‘Seriously?’ said Johannes. Being irked was doing wonders for returning some small hints of colour to his face. ‘You seriously posited me as some sort of weapon too dreadful to use? I don’t know whether to be flattered or not. Ah, a resolution is coming to me. No. I’m not flattered.’

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ scoffed Horst. ‘You’ve been needled ever since I told you about the Ministerium needing a pet necromancer, and they didn’t come to you.’

  ‘I would have told them their project did not interest me.’

  ‘Liar. A whole country where you could operate legally and in the open. You would have jumped at it. All you have to do is rustle up an army of zombies and—’

  ‘I abominate zombies. Every one of them is by definition a failure. I haven’t risen one deliberately since my first experiments.’

  ‘I like the use of “deliberately” there…’

  ‘They are a necromantic dead end, and don’t dare think that pun was deliberate. The principles involved are simple and well understood. I could grind out those things until the cows came home, and were likely eaten alive by the zombies. If that is this Misericorde’s limit, she is no necromancer. Merely a dabbler.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Horst nodded in mock sympathy. ‘Galling when some piker comes along and gets the job you should have had, isn’t it?’

  Cabal looked at Horst angrily. ‘Mayhap being dead repeatedly has affected your hearing. I would not have accepted the role if all it entailed on my part was something as facile as getting a cemetery or two on the move.’

  ‘Liar. Liar. Liar. Ends and means, Johannes. You’d have swallowed your pride for the time it took to put together an army of the dead for them, if it meant a free hand and unlimited resources for research afterwards.’

  There was a tense silence, but Cabal’s anger was abating. He chewed it and swallowed it with difficulty, for they both knew Horst was right.

  ‘And the monsters,’ asked Cabal at last, ‘these pets of Maleficarus—what became of them?’

  ‘I understand they … died. Just died. Fell over and passed away.’

  ‘As the cloud dissipated?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Horst. ‘When the cloud faded away. The last to die was the big harvestman spi … thing. Made an awful mess as it fell. Dea Boom and Daisy Hewlett circled the area to make sure everyone was out.’

  ‘Very public-spirited of them,’ said Cabal, his thoughts elsewhere.

  ‘Daisy didn’t come back.’

  Cabal looked over at his brother to find Horst looking intently at him. Somewhat disquieted by this, he asked, ‘What happened?’

  ‘Boom lost sight of her. Some of the smaller monsters were still falling from the cloud. Smaller than the harvestman. Still massive. Then she saw fire on the ground.’ He took a deep breath before he continued. ‘It was the Queen of the Desert. There was a lot of debris, with one of those woodlouse things in the middle of it. Already dead by the look of it. Boom reckons it must have hit Daisy while she was looking for stragglers.’

  Cabal tightened his jaw. ‘She should have stayed out of the cloud’s shadow.’

  ‘That’s where stragglers were in danger, Johannes. It’s where Miss Virginia flew to save me. Daisy Hewlett died trying to help people.’ Horst was looking intently at his brother. ‘Can you say it was a foolish death?’

  Cabal said nothing, then abruptly, ‘So. What do you want from me? Assuming that your tale is done?’

  Horst nodded. Once his brother would have called Daisy stupid, and discounted her life and death as a trifle. He decided not to draw attention to this observation.

  ‘Pretty much done, yes. We joined up with the train, although I don’t remember much about it. As soon as Ginny Montgomery was out from underneath the cloud, I passed out. Thank God for the blanket. Still, that night, we made plans, sorted out a schedule, decided on rendezvous points, and so on. It was all very military.’ He sighed. ‘Haskins would have approved. As for what we want from you: your experience and knowledge.’

  ‘Well, it’s lovely to be wanted,’ said Cabal. ‘The type of wanted that doesn’t involve bounties, dead or alive. I should warn you, my last advisory role did not go very well.’

  ‘I know. I was the one who found you dying, remember? Occupational hazard, though, surely?’

  Cabal nodded, then fell into deep thought for a minute or two until his brother, slightly impatiently, said, ‘Well?’

  Cabal looked at him, mildly curious. ‘Well what, pray?’

  ‘Will you help us?’

  Cabal frowned at such a stupid question. ‘Of course I’ll help you.’

  ‘There’s no “of course” about it, Johannes. Just because a great occult evil is rising on the Continent, just because the lives of millions are threatened with a dictatorship of the dead, just because your brother asks you nicely, none of these are enough for an “of course” from you. I know you too well. So … why?’

  ‘You need to ask?’

  Horst nodded. ‘I do.’

  ‘First and foremost, Rufus Maleficarus. I don’t think you realise what a great threat he is.’

  ‘You told me he was an idiot in big trousers.’

  ‘He is a powerful idiot in big trousers, although the trousers represent only a small part of the threat. This is a man who used the Ereshkigal Working in an ill-considered revenge plot.’

  ‘The what?’

  Cabal grunted with irritation. ‘Your ignorance appalls me.’

  ‘Almost everything about me has appalled
you sometime or another.’

  ‘True. In fairness, there’s no good reason why you should know of the Working. Briefly, it is a ritual that allows an animatory power into our world. Its subjects of choice are freshly dead humans. These rise and kill more, which rise and so on and so forth.’

  ‘Is that what Lady Misericorde used?’

  ‘Emphatically not. The Ereshkigal Working is a trap. The ritualist who summons this power has control over it, but that control fails permanently when they fail to exert it. By falling asleep, for example. The animating power then does whatever it likes, such as killing the ritualist and then carrying on as it sees fit.’

  ‘More killing and raising undead?’

  ‘Exactly so. The Ereshkigal Working is a cancer in which the corrupted cells are walking dead. Left to its own devices, it will continue to spread indefinitely. It has been used twice in antiquity, and was fought to a halt on both occasions, although at great cost. It has been used once in modernity, by a loud idiot in big trousers who couldn’t be bothered reading the relevant texts to see how badly things worked out the last times it was used.’

  ‘How did it fail this last time?’

  ‘Oh.’ Cabal sniffed dismissively. ‘I was there. I dealt with it.’

  ‘You were there?’ Horst looked at him askance. ‘That was quite a coincidence.’

  ‘No coincidence at all. I was the subject of the half-baked revenge attempt whereby Maleficarus performed the ritual. Murder by apocalypse.’ Cabal stretched and rested his hands behind his head. ‘Oh, Horst, he is such a Scheißkopf, you wouldn’t believe.’