Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘You’re dead,’ said Cabal, whose professional mode employed a very different set of skills, even if they also applied to the dead. ‘Your creation pulled off your arms and legs, threw them around the place willy-nilly, then cracked your skull. Look on the bright side: it didn’t damage your head anywhere near as badly as it has those of the wamps we’ve seen around the city. I think the dreffs may have been gentler with you because you had looked after them and trained them.’

  ‘You speak nonsense, man!’ cried the head. ‘I taught them carefully! I even wore a wamp costume I’d made so . . . Oh. Ooooh . . .’ Ercusides thought about it for a moment, during which the others looked looked uncomfortable and somewhat embarrassed. Finding out that one is a decapitated head is a private sort of experience. ‘No. No! They wouldn’t misunderstand what I meant. They couldn’t . . .’

  ‘They would, they could and they did. They were probably a little bemused that you wanted them to kill you – if they even understood that that was what they were doing – but training is training. They saw a wamp, but they also saw a man, and gained the impression that you wanted both species dismantled on sight. You’re talking to me at the moment only because I am a necromancer. You can work out the ramifications of that for yourself.’

  ‘Oh, well, this is just wonderful.’ Ercusides’ tone indicated that, no, it wasn’t. ‘I left Baharna in the first place to get some peace and quiet. Sold my tower, and came here. I knew there would be wamps, but I thought, The place was stripped of its population. Without bodies to spawn from, just how many wamps can there be, anyway? Hundreds! That’s how many! Hundreds! All that fiddling about with dreffs and sinew wood and creosote and for what? So the little bastards could pop my limbs off and cave in my skull!’

  Cabal had had enough. ‘You want peace and quiet?’ he asked, then opened his bag, dropped the head inside, and closed it again. Ercusides’ complaining stopped. Cabal stood, hefting the bag to analyse its new weight, and found it acceptable. He turned to find the others looking at him with a variety of expressions, none of them admiring. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ve . . . put his head in your bag,’ offered Shadrach, after some hesitation.

  ‘So I have,’ agreed Cabal. ‘How astute of you. Now,’ he turned his attention to Holk, ‘Sergeant, we really should be getting away from this temple now that our business here is concluded. This idiot’s wamp-killing machine . . .’ here he illustrated who ‘this idiot’ was by holding up his bag ‘. . . will certainly return. Even if it doesn’t know we’re here yet, this is familiar ground to it. We must leave before it gets bored tearing up the city looking for us and comes home.’

  Given the likelihood of Cabal’s hypothesis, and the generous amounts of evidence for what they could expect if they were discovered, the general consensus was to stop being appalled at what Cabal had in his Gladstone, and to get out of the city as quickly as was safely possible.

  ‘Gesso,’ Holk called to one of his men, ‘you’re the quietest. Go out and scout the area around the breached wall. If it’s clear, we’ll head for the buildings over yonder. They’re close together and should give us enough cover to hide from it as we move.’

  Gesso did not seem pleased to be delegated to the rank of forward guard, but he was a disciplined soldier and, besides, Holk was right: he was light on his feet and could move like a cat when necessary. They moved as a group through the fallen internal walls until they were close by the outer breach. It was indeed getting dark out there; all the stumbling around inside the temple had eaten away at the time more quickly than anyone had realised. They hid in the deepening shadows around the hole in the wall, and Holk gestured to Gesso to scout the area outside.

  Gesso made to draw his sword, hesitated, as if realising how useless it would be against the man-made monster they knew was out there, then drew it anyway. If he was going to die, he could at least die with a sword in his hand. He crept close to the lintel formed by the shattered blocks and paused there, looking left and right. He scanned the visible part of the square and the buildings at its edge – the painfully distant buildings that might be their only refuge – and then moved forward, silent and graceful. He slid across the broad stone surface of the broken block like a shadow, and all those observing were in the process of being impressed when a great claw came down from above and snatched him out of sight.

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ cried Shadrach. Outside they heard Gesso shout in surprise, then roar with rage, and then he screamed, a high-pitched cry of mortal terror and disbelieving horror. A moment later, his arm fell on to the stone. The hand still held the sword.

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ cried Shadrach again, but this time it was more like a sob. ‘What shall we do? Whatever shall we do?’

  Cabal slapped him hard. Perhaps harder than necessary, but he felt he deserved a little recreation. ‘You can stop blubbering like a child for a beginning, Shadrach,’ he snapped. ‘Sergeant, my analysis is that if we stay here, we shall all suffer the same fate . . .’ a leg fell wetly on to the square a hundred metres away, a long trail of blood splashing down after it ‘. . . as Gesso. Agreed?’

  ‘Aye, Master Cabal,’ said Holk. ‘It’s a desperate business, and we won’t all make it.’

  ‘What?’ said Bose. ‘What? What is he talking about? What are you talking about, Sergeant?’

  ‘He means,’ said Cabal, slinging his bag on to his back with the aid of a black sash he had bought in Baharna for exactly this purpose, ‘that some of us are going to die when we run for it. We must move now, while that thing is absorbed in dismembering Gesso. Get out there and scatter. Head for the buildings as quickly as you can. Well? Come on!’

  He drew his sword, and rushed at the breach.

  Chapter 10

  IN WHICH THERE IS A BATTLE AND CABAL MAKES IT QUICK

  As with many aspects of Cabal’s life, charging at a great monster that has been specifically designed to kill other monsters looked, to the untrained eye, like arrant suicide. Johannes Cabal, though, was a man who lived a life of calculated risk. He knew, more or less, what he was up against, and he appreciated that, while the wamps were dangerous foes, they were not great tactical thinkers. Holk had been impressed by their ability to organise an ambush, but ambush predators are hardly unknown even in the waking world.

  Ercusides, for all his many and varied failings, had created a device for efficiently wiping out the city’s wamp infestation, and he had based his plan on the wamps’ observed behaviours. They were cunning, but no more cunning than a fox, and foxes were regularly exterminated by fleets of horse and hound marshalled by folk with the collective wit of an umbrella stand. Wamps had three modes: hide; attack; flee. They only used the first as part of an ambush since, being towards the top of the food chain, they had no natural predators; its use as a defensive tactic escaped them. The second was the default, but so simple had they previously found killing that it lacked flexibility. Cabal had no doubt that the wamps’ nemesis carried scratches and bites about its feet, shins and claws, but this was the equivalent of trying to defeat a sequoia with one’s teeth, when one is not a beaver and when the sequoia is intent on tearing your legs off. Orphaned limbs scattered about the dead city gave mute witness to the futility of that. Finally, there was fleeing, but the nine legs of a wamp were there to allow easy climbing and not sustained running beyond that required to bring down escaping prey. Soon those nine legs would grow tired, unlike the long-striding doom bearing down upon them.

  Therefore, Cabal had decided that fleeing was pointless, and hiding would only delay the inevitable. Instead he would apply himself to the attack, the exact nature of which he would evolve on sighting the colossus.

  His forward foot coming to rest on the leading edge of the broken wall, he jumped down, landed on the ground running and jinked left, the direction he guessed the colossus to be standing, based on the angle of the claw’s descent when it had taken Gesso, and the subsequent observed trajectories of his limbs. In this he was proved correct, al
most running into a leg the thickness of a tree trunk, largely because it was a tree trunk. He ducked and dodged, whirled and looked, even as he backed away in an undignified reverse skip.

  Colossus, he admitted to himself, was probably something of an overstatement. To his mind, something would have to stand at least a hundred feet tall before it could really be termed ‘colossal’. He recalled that the Colossus of Rhodes was reputed to stand somewhere around the 110-feet-tall mark, commensurate with the Statue of Liberty, which their ship had sailed past in what already felt like a lifetime ago. Ercusides’ effort lacked that scale, measuring certainly no more than perhaps sixty feet from the base of its great flat pallet-like feet to the top of its conical watchtower head. The design was innovative, perhaps, but inelegant in the extreme. So, no, colossus was not an ideal description. Giant, though, was certainly acceptable.

  It was structured identically to a great wooden mannequin, a larger cousin of the homunculi they had discovered within the temple. The finish was crude: the bark had been sheared from the logs and treated with whatever variant of creosote Ercusides had bubbled up in his pots and cauldrons. Here and there, holes were cut into the wood, and Cabal was confident that each was the entrance to a snug little chamber containing bedding of wood shavings and a trained dreff. The head had three such holes equally spaced around its sloping sides, which must contain the cleverest specimens, for they commanded the whole by some strange binding of intellects into a single intent and impetus: a hive-mind of hamsters; a Gestalt of guinea pigs.

  Irritatingly, it also gave the giant a full 360 degrees of vision, and when Cabal saw a beady-eyed little face peering down at him from the aft hole, he knew he could expect trouble in the immediate future. He still had a few seconds’ grace, however. The giant was just tearing loose Gesso’s remaining leg, the right, and seemed a slave to procedure. It would finish removing the leg, toss it away, deliver the coup de grâce to Gesso’s head, drop him and then, finally, it would apply itself to providing the same service to Cabal.

  He was just formulating a response to this state of affairs when Holk and his two remaining men burst out of the temple, swords drawn, and immediately split up, running for the edges of the square and shouting like maniacs. Cabal was impressed by their professionalism; they had been hired as, essentially, bodyguards and here they were, doing their best to distract the giant from their clients even though it would probably result in their deaths.

  Tellingly, they were visible to two of the three head holes, and therefore two thirds of the fuzzy little committee that directed the giant. The other was the only one that had seen Cabal, but it was promptly outvoted in the ‘Who shall we kill next?’ stakes. Gesso was reduced to a torso and his skull punctured with a sharp jab of a great wooden index finger, whittled to a stake at its tip, in a hurried perfunctory way, and tossed aside, a broken toy.

  The giant seemed to consider Holk and Thirsh as equally likely or, at least, one third of its mind wanted to go after Holk and another wanted to go after Thirsh. Since both options were known directly to those thirds, these were the only options they would willingly consider, and the remaining third was left lamenting a lost opportunity to kill the four-legged wamp that lurked just behind it. The outvoted dreff withdrew its head and disappeared back into its snug little chamber, presumably to play music loudly and write bad poetry about how nobody appreciated it.

  Cabal saw the situation changing and immediately rubbed the current list of plans off his mental blackboard in preparation for some revisions. As he did so, he slipped the baldric over his head and left his bag at the base of the wall, his jacket joining it a second later. The best defence was looking to be an offence, and he did not wish to be encumbered when the moment came. That moment was delayed for a few more seconds as the two thirds of the giant’s brain psychically bickered, the shoulders of the great homunculus shuddering from facing Holk, then Thirsh and back again, as the dreff repeatedly failed to arrive at a consensus. Cabal had already arrived at his own decision, proving that two heads are not always better than one. With no apparent trepidation, he stepped on to the heel of the giant’s flat right foot, wrapped his arms around the shin, and waited for the inevitable. At last, one of the command dreff capitulated, and the foot lifted, swung forward in a great arc at unexpected speed, and slammed down again, several yards closer to the fleeing figure of Sergeant Holk than it had been a few seconds before.

  Cabal saw the giant’s intent and committed himself to preventing it if at all possible. A year or two before, he would not have cared, but then he had been a soulless creature. Now he found himself very occasionally making decisions that were not entirely logical. It was easy enough to rationalise attempting to save Holk: he was a useful soldier who might prove useful again subsequently. Beneath that, however, there was the hint of a shadow of a faint possibility that Holk had impressed him with his professionalism and competence, and that Cabal did not care to see such a man die while there was any chance of saving him.

  Then the leg was rising again, and all of Cabal’s concentration was required just to hang on to the dizzying rise, swing and fall. He had the presence of mind to use the fall as an opportunity to shin his way a little further up the leg as it descended faster than he would drop. In that moment of freefall, he was able to shift himself almost a yard up the shin. Then the foot slammed down and, once again, he had to hang on hard to avoid losing this gain. He looked back, and saw Shadrach, Bose and – with a notable lack of swashbuckling bravado – Corde sneaking out of the temple and quickly around its edge while the giant was fully engaged in heading away from them. Cabal permitted himself a curled lip before looking up. He was glad he was climbing up a giant and not a colossus. Better yet, a giant with insensate legs, or he would have been scraped off by now and would probably be adjusting to life as a sticky patch under one of the giant’s feet. The knee was a tad over four yards from the base of the foot, by his reckoning; easily attainable in most situations, but not when he was swinging up and down as if he were on a demented carnival ride. Cabal, who had briefly run a demented carnival, knew this to be a reasonable simile. By his reckoning, he could reach the knee in two more strides providing he exerted himself and did not fall off. Unhappily, Holk was no more than two strides away.

  Another sweep of the leg, and Cabal was so close to the knee that he bared his teeth with frustration. There was his goal. Bored into the leading face of the laboriously smoothed barrel hinge there was another dreff hutch hole. He could almost reach it. Just one more . . .

  The leg lifted again, but instead of performing a full walk swing, only came as far as its neighbour. The giant was going into a stand, and even as it did so, the torso was rotating on the hips, the right arm was swinging out, and Cabal realised he was too late. ‘Holk!’ he shouted. ‘Dodge, man! Dodge it!’

  Holk was a calm, focused, exemplary warrior right to the end. Of their charges, he had long since identified Cabal as the only one to trust in crisis, and on hearing Cabal’s cry he did not look back or falter, but immediately dodged. If he had dived to the left, he might have got away with it, but he dived to the right and straight into the palm of the wooden hand that was swooping down to capture him. He realised his mistake at once, and tried to roll out again, but the fingers curled quickly and he was held firmly.

  The giant took no pause for gloating, for what it did it did through training, not inclination. It derived no pleasure, except that of fulfilling a function, as the left hand swung up in a practised arc and grasped the first limb it reached, Holk’s right leg. With a sharp tug, like a farmer’s wife plucking a dead chicken, it tore the leg off, and threw it sharply over its shoulder to whirl away into the darkening sky. Holk screamed, a hoarse roar that faded into sobs when he wanted to scream more but could not draw breath. The great left hand, dripping with his blood and Gesso’s before his, swept forward again.

  For all their practice at hunting and killing, the dreff were still essentially shy woodland creatures, albei
t of an unusual wood in a strange land. Thirsh’s furious battle cry startled the whole ambulatory warren – nothing they had yet encountered had prepared them for such a thing – and the giant jumped as if another giant had stealthily approached before exploding a paper bag the size of a pup-tent behind it. Cabal hung on for life itself as the giant leaped some ten feet into the air, but loosened his grip as it fell, sliding up its shin and grabbing the splayed upper front of the lower leg attached to the barrel hinge. The impact slapped his face and body hard against the wood, and he felt something give in his shoulder that ideally should not, but he was alive, and he was in position. He snorted blood out of his nose, and felt hatred blossom deliciously in his heart for small furry woodland creatures. Retribution was at hand.

  Thirsh rushed at the giant, his sword held high. Cabal could see that he must have almost reached safety when the sound of Holk’s agony had reached him. He had exchanged survival for peril purely out of loyalty, and in doing so had bought Cabal an extra few seconds. Thirsh would probably be dead at the end of those seconds, but that – Cabal concluded – was none of his concern.

  Thirsh made the most of those seconds. He arrived at the giant to find it still in a state of nervous paralysis analogous to a skittish terrier being rushed by an unexpectedly aggressive rat, and capitalised on this by hacking fiercely at the giant’s left leg while swearing furiously, like a lumberjack with coprolalia. A real giant of flesh and blood would have been mightily discomforted by such attentions, but this giant, being more like a collection of diligently murderous telegraph poles than anything else, only regarded them with mute incomprehension until the initial surprise dissipated and it noticed that Thirsh had more limbs than was permitted locally. Ercusides had considered the possibility of too many targets to deal with concurrently, and had provided the dreffs with a simple but useful tactic to give themselves a little leg-plucking time when challenged. With a fast sideswipe, the giant’s left arm swept down out of a darkening sky and Thirsh was suddenly travelling backwards much faster than he had charged, and doing it a yard off the ground to boot. Its immediate situation thus simplified, the giant was returning its attention to the fitfully struggling Holk when part of its group consciousness reported that something was peering into its chamber and asked what the standard operating procedure was for such an occurrence. The three head dreffs were considering how to respond to this, when the reporting dreff added a slightly panicky addendum to the effect that the face had gone and now a snake or possibly a limb, yes, definitely a limb, one of the ones without the foot on the end, was in through the entrance hole and was tipped by something shiny and PAIN! PAIN! PAIN! At which point the report stopped, and the dreff Brains Trust was left fairly sure that this was a good thing as obviously the problem had gone away, until they noticed that the group consciousness was definitely a member short – and why were they tilting dramatically to one side?