The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  The first time this was attempted, Virginia and Dea returned to find Cabal asleep with his hat over his face and the two hideous corpses slowly fighting one another over some imagined slight. Virginia Montgomery awakened Cabal a little pettishly and admonished him for not keeping an eye on his charges. He said nothing.

  The second time, they returned to find Cabal awake and watching the two hideous corpses slowly fighting one another over some imagined slight. Miss Virginia did not know what to say to that, so she kept her silence.

  Sleep was at a premium; both aviatrices slept during refuelling and restocked their thermoses with coffee before leaving. They also took tablets of what they referred to as ‘pilot’s salt’, and which Cabal quickly identified as some amphetamine or another. He was naturally appalled; he used much more efficacious drugs when he needed to stay awake and sharp for long periods. If he had but known, he would have brought some along. Naturally, extended use resulted in anything from temporary psychosis to catatonia, but sometimes it is necessary to take a few risks.

  Europe is a decently sized continent, but entomopters fly fast, and just shy of eight hours after they had lifted from outside Cabal’s house, they were almost at their destination. There was still light left in the sky as Virginia throttled back to fall abreast of the Buzzbomb. Cabal looked over his shoulder with interest as the two pilots communicated in emphatic hand signals for a few seconds. Dea Boom gave a thumbs-up and peeled away. In seconds her entomopter was lost in the gathering gloom, Denzil, strapped to the nearer stump wing, waving at Cabal all the way.

  ‘What is the plan, Miss Montgomery?’ asked Cabal through the telephonic link between the fore and aft parts of the cockpit.

  ‘I wouldn’t do this if the sun was down, but we just have enough time to fly by the castle. I guess you should get an idea what we’re up against.’

  ‘Is that necessary?’ he asked. ‘I have seen castles before.’

  ‘Lay of the land, Mr Cabal,’ she replied. Cabal noticed that she’d called Horst by his forename; he had no idea whether to be insulted or honoured that she didn’t do the same for him. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t go in too close. Those people are way too good at causing trouble if you kick their hornets’ nest. Maybe a mile away. By the time they hear our engine note, we’ll already be gone.’

  Cabal was going to insist that he wasn’t worried exactly; more expressing a rational concern, but he’d had enough of such caveats recently. At Virginia’s direction, he found a set of small but powerful ex-military field glasses in a holder built into the cockpit side, raised his tinted spectacles to his forehead, and looked in the direction that she indicated. It took a few seconds of tinkering with the focus and several more to allow for the movement of the aircraft, but he finally found the run-down little city in which the castle of the Red Queen nestled, and thence he found the castle itself.

  ‘Do you see it, Mr Cabal?’

  There was no reply.

  She let the pause grow for a while, uncertain whether he had heard her or not. Just as she decided that he couldn’t have and was about to ask again, he lowered the field glasses. He continued to look through the cockpit glass as if he could see something there that she could not, and for the first time she felt a mild shudder travel through her. That he was a necromancer had hitherto been an unpleasant piece of knowledge to have, but Horst seemed decent enough for a vampire, and had vouched for his brother, so she’d let it slide. The two dead guys were hideous, true enough, but they behaved like good-natured village idiots rather than ravening killers from the grave, so Denzil and Dennis, too, she had let slide. Now, however, there was something about the stillness of the man that made her uncomfortable. She knew, Horst had told her as much, that Johannes Cabal was a man who had seen things few others had ever seen, and fewer still with their sanity intact. He had been to places that one simply wasn’t supposed to walk away from, and yet he had. With the best will, however, she could not truly imagine what that meant. Now, she was beginning to have an inkling.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Miss Montgomery. I saw it very well.’ He put the field glasses back into their holder and took his own glasses from his forehead and slid them away into his jacket’s breast pocket. He said no more for the remainder of the journey.

  * * *

  The Spirit of ’76 set down some twenty minutes later and forty miles away, Miss Montgomery not caring to push the entomopter too hard after its long cruise across Europe. ‘There’s a tone on port that I don’t like,’ she said to Cabal, although she might as well have been talking to herself. ‘I’ll have Becky check the wing roots. If there’s a problem, she’ll find it.’

  Cabal didn’t even grunt. He was looking out of the side of the cockpit at nothing in particular. She could see his distorted reflection in the canopy’s bullet-resistant glass, his pale skin showing clearly against the darkening world outside. He was so deeply in thought he seemed entranced. She could almost smell the workings of a dangerous mind in the confined space of the cockpit. Not for the first time, Miss Montgomery wondered how she had got herself and her girls tangled up in such a mess. Then she thought of the alternative, and remembered.

  * * *

  The Copperhead found the train in a secluded spur line running into a wood. Cabal recognised it as the site of the abandoned mine that Horst had mentioned during his narrative. Of the train or, indeed, any sign of activity he could see none, but the sky was empurpled with dusk in the west, and the shadows ran long and deep. Virginia brought the entomopter gently to a full halt over a clearing and descended below the treetops, coming to rest on the bumpy leaf mould beneath. Even as the engine was winding down, the shadows around them started to move.

  Cabal reached for his pistol, but Miss Virginia said, ‘Hey, easy on the trigger, there, Joe. They’re on our side.’

  It certainly seemed to be the case. A couple of women whom Cabal guessed to be Mink and Becky led a group of about six men equipped with a hook on a cable. This they connected to the nose of the Copperhead, and used it to pull the entomopter across the uneven surface until it was under the tree cover.

  Cabal waited for the wings to slow to a halt before he released the catch on the front section of the cockpit and shoved it forward. He climbed out as Miss Virginia Montgomery was standing up behind him, and clambered with less dignity than he would have liked out of the entomopter, dropping the last bit of the distance and almost toppling over on the forest floor.

  ‘Mr Cabal?’ said an approaching man. ‘Mr Johannes Cabal?’

  Cabal gave him a swift appraisal and placed him immediately as an academic abroad. ‘Professor Stone, I presume?’ he said, stretching out the kinks in his neck and shoulder.

  ‘Indeed so! Indeed so, sir!’ Stone seemed delighted to see him. ‘It’s a delight to meet you.’ He took Cabal’s hand, despite him not proffering it, and pumped it enthusiastically.

  Cabal looked at him more suspiciously than was his wont. ‘It is?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. I was so afraid that when we finally met, it would be to kill you. This is much more agreeable.’ He considered. ‘Perhaps that’s the wrong term to use for an occult conspiracy raising an army of monsters. Still, it’s an ill wind. At the very least, I shall have the pleasure of your acquaintance and, I hope, your cooperation, without the necessity of shooting you.’ He smiled throughout this, and it was an honest, open smile, not the leer of somebody given to the more melodramatic end of the threats market.

  ‘You have the better of me,’ said Cabal.

  ‘You’re a necromancer, Mr Cabal. If the law found you—and by law I mean people who actually mean to uphold it rather than that tame police sergeant you have on your payroll—they would hang you. If they were to fail, we would probably take on the role of the entire judiciary, right up to the position of executioners.’

  Cabal thought this was all remarkably menacing for a friendly chat. ‘And what of the defence?’

  ‘Alas, any defence is considered before we sally forth. Still, the
practise seems to work. You’re alive, aren’t you?’

  ‘Evidently,’ said Cabal, although there had been circumstances in his history where ‘alive’ and ‘evidently’ would not have set well together. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, I have not been troubled by your society to any great degree. Why would that be, Professor?’

  ‘The business with Maleficarus and the Ereshkigal Working garnered you a great deal of tolerance, you know. Saving the world, no matter how selfish your motivations, will do that. Don’t think the business with Umtak Ktharl went unnoticed, either. These, taken along with your general discreet profile and lack of the megalomania that so often distinguishes others of your profession, have made you a very low priority for us.’

  ‘And if I’d had a higher “profile”…?’

  ‘We would have put you down like a dog, yes.’ The professor was still smiling, all throughout, as if telling somebody that they weren’t marked for death was the most considerate thing he’d done for days.

  Horst appeared, very literally.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said to the professor and his brother, ignoring the small jump the professor had made at the unexpected materialisation. Horst ruffled his hair, rendered unruly by the trip. He looked back at the Copperhead, where a couple of the new people were quickly and efficiently rolling up the tarpaulin in which Horst had travelled. They put it neatly back into the cargo space and closed it up, under Miss Virginia’s assiduous eye. Satisfied, she lit a cigarette and headed off to discuss developments with her crew.

  ‘It’s the only way to travel,’ said Horst perhaps just a little absently. He watched Miss Virginia walking away for a second before turning back to Cabal and the professor. ‘Unless there’s almost any other way available, of course.’ He sighed through his nose. ‘I miss my coffin.’

  ‘I gather all these people are your reinforcements,’ said Cabal to the professor. ‘I didn’t think the Dee Society was so large.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ said Stone. ‘We’ve called upon every similar organisation that we dared. There are Templars, Yellow Inquisitors, Sisters of Medea, the Daughters of Hecate … are you all right, Mr Cabal?’

  This he asked because Cabal’s face had been growing more tight and ashen as the list was recited. ‘I am better than I have been,’ he said. ‘I’m just a little dismayed, given that the last time I met representatives of those organisations, there was some friction.’

  ‘They tried to kill you?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Four of them.’

  ‘I only mentioned four.’

  Cabal looked around. More than a few of the shadowy figures under the trees seemed to be watching him quite intently. ‘All of them, then.’

  The tension was, if not dissipated, at least ameliorated by the reappearance of Miss Virginia and her crew. ‘Becky!’ said Horst. ‘You’re limping! Are you all right?’

  ‘Two zombies turned up on my footplate,’ she replied. ‘They came in one way, I fell out the other. A word of warning next time, if that’s possible? I almost started shooting.’

  ‘My mistake,’ said Dea, smirking slightly.

  ‘I gave Mr Cabal the four-bit tour,’ said Virginia, cutting off any further badinage. ‘Eyeballed the castle at a safe distance.’

  While she said it, she was eyeballing Mr Cabal, too. For her efforts he looked sideways at her, and said, ‘It used to be a motte and bailey about a thousand years ago, but that didn’t last too long. Reduced three times, each subsequent design being of contemporary castle-building philosophy, and eventually rebuilt as an early example of a concentric castle. From then on it evolved. No longer necessary as a defensive position but simply a seat of power, each iteration of construction concentrated on making it grander rather than any more secure. It was, after all, by now an imperial residence rather than a military redoubt. Ballrooms, audience chambers, and several dining rooms, all of which sport long tables upon which one may conduct sword duels should that prove necessary.’ He seemed exasperated and even a little desperate as he said it.

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Professor Stone. ‘You could tell all that just by looking at it?’

  Miss Virginia seemed more wary than astonished. ‘And all from a mile away through binoculars.’ She was watching him closely now.

  ‘I have been here before,’ said Johannes Cabal wearily. He seemed like a man run to ground. ‘It’s Harslaus Castle, isn’t it? We’re in Mirkarvia.’

  ‘Mirkarvia, is it?’ said Horst. ‘I suppose I should have asked where I was at some point.’

  Cabal could not bring himself to chide his brother, a man who cultivated wilful ignorance so as not to take all the surprises out of life. He was too busy berating himself inwardly for not making sure of the facts. Early on in Horst’s narrative he had got the impression that Horst was talking about one of the Germanies—probably somewhere like Bavaria or the far east of Prussia—and he had clung to that notion without confirmation. This he put down to his recent illness dulling his faculties, rendering him unable to penetrate the caul of reluctance with which the subject of Mirkarvia was cloaked in his mind.

  ‘You’ve been here before, you say, Mr Cabal?’ asked Stone.

  Dull Cabal’s wits may have been before, but they were sharpening up again nicely now, and the professor’s question—delivered with no detectable casuistic intent—furnished him with the reassuring revelation that the Dee Society did not know every single thing about him after all.

  ‘Yes, briefly. That was before the revolt, of course.’ This was technically true. That Cabal had been instrumental in provoking the revolt was something he decided not to burden the company with. He had done this for entirely self-serving purposes, specifically to cause a distraction while he saved his own neck, yet he had felt it was something that Mirkarvia both needed and deserved. It was a ridiculous little country with ridiculously grandiose dreams, and a nice revolution with a subsequent clearing-out of the calcified ranks of its vicious and inbred aristocracy was the perfect thing to give the place a dose of modern realities.

  All this he had told himself as he left the country burning behind him. He had never troubled to open a newspaper subsequently to discover the current state of affairs there. Turning the place into a testing ground for some sort of absurd magocracy funded by foreign venture capitalists of the most despicable kind was a surprise, a very unpleasant surprise. Ever since recovering his soul, he suffered occasional prickles of mental pain that he had learned to characterise as his conscience making itself felt. Now he felt a spiritual sickening and he knew it was guilt. This was indirectly his fault, and the knowledge clung to him like clay.

  Still, there was no need to go around telling people about it.

  ‘You seem to know a lot about the castle for somebody who was just passing through,’ said Miss Virginia Montgomery.

  ‘I was here to secure a book that was not available elsewhere.’

  ‘That’s Johannesese for “I came to steal it”,’ explained Horst.

  ‘Exactly so,’ agreed Cabal. ‘It did not quite go to plan and, subsequently, I was briefly a guest of Harslaus Castle.’

  Horst started to translate that, too, but Virginia waved him to silence. ‘It’s okay, I know what he really means.’

  ‘It appears that the revolution left a power vacuum that this Ministerium Tenebrae has sought to fill.’

  Professor Stone shook his head. ‘Not quite. Our information is that they were invited in.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘It’s getting chilly. We should retire to one of the carriages to continue this conversation. I think representatives of some of our allies would like to talk to you, too.’

  ‘I came here to help,’ said Cabal. ‘I will not be interrogated.’

  ‘Nor shall you,’ said the professor quickly. ‘Some of the others were a little … circumspect about you being upon the strength. Excluding them from discussions will only breed distrust.’

  Cabal looked at Horst a little truculently.
‘This would be politics, then?’

  ‘I know, Johannes, I know.’ Horst patted him on the shoulder. ‘You came out here spoiling for a fight with arcane powers and things man was not meant to know, but before you get to the juicy stuff you have to sit on a committee. Life’s cruel. I know.’

  ‘Do shut up,’ said Cabal.

  * * *

  The meeting was held in the train’s guard van around an impromptu table constructed from crates and the seating consisting of a fine variety of chairs, none of which was a brother to another. Cabal took pains to choose a decent office chair of the swivelling type, and manoeuvred it to the head of the table before the other attendees arrived. If he were to be examined by the sort of reactionaries and Luddites that had dogged his steps for years, he would at least suffer it from a position of authority and in the nicest chair, distressed though the leather of its seat and back were.

  Horst sat at his left and Professor Stone at his right as the table filled. It did not take great powers of deduction to place most of those present within their assorted secret societies. The Templars sent their regrets, but they were currently engaged in saving the world in North Africa where a great terrible evil had emerged from the sands. They were sure that, whatever the situation in Mirkarvia, the other societies would prove sufficient in dealing with it. The note was polite, elegant, and carried a beautifully crafted subtext that the terrible evil in North Africa was inestimably more dangerous and serious than anything likely to occur in Mirkarvia, but that such a kindergarten level of menace was within even the limited capabilities of the dim-witted bumblers of the Dee Society et al.

  Professor Stone read out the decoded note, and it was greeted with a withering silence. The professor coughed and tossed the note into the open grate of the stove, an action met with unspoken appreciation by all those there gathered.

  Thus, there were only four secret societies around the table. The languid man sitting opposite Cabal could have come from anywhere on the Mediterranean coast from the boot of Italy westwards to Gibraltar and thence around the Bay of Biscay, and gave the impression that his standard state of facial hair was an eternal five o’clock shadow. If he had been picking his teeth with a stiletto, he could hardly have looked more crooked. Cabal made an educated guess that he was likely to be a Yellow Inquisitor, a creature of one of the Vatican’s less clever ideas for freelance counter-heresy operations of which they had lost control within a year of institution. Rather than admitting to fallibility, the Vatican simply cut them loose and, when pushed, made indistinct noises about rogue Jesuits before noticing something amusing out of the window. If one ever wants to have a cardinal suddenly become fascinated by a passing squirrel, one need only mention the Yellow Inquisition. Cabal had little personal experience of their operations, since he mainly confined his activities to the British Isles, and the Yellow Inquisitors preferred warmer climes.