“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
“But guns make it so much easier. Shall we go?”
* * *
They were ready for Cabal. He was taken from the prison and smuggled into the Imperial Palace via an impressively abstruse secret route. A bathroom larger than some ballrooms he had seen had been scrubbed, disinfected, and fitted out with surgical tables and equipment. Plainly, his execution had been put off in anticipation of the emperor’s dying inconveniently. The knowledge irked him; he disliked being a pawn in somebody else’s game.
The late Antrobus II lay supine and naked on a sluice table, a trolley of instruments standing by. Sitting by them was Cabal’s Gladstone bag, and as he reached the table he realised that the instruments arrayed were his own, sterilised and ready. Out of interest, he opened the bag and found that Marechal had been as good as his word: everything was there — Principia Necromantica included — but for his gun.
He cast an eye over the dead man. By the look of him, Antrobus hadn’t been a great believer in exercise and diet. One leg looked gouty, and his gut settled about him like unset blancmange. Cabal made a swift estimate of the cadaver’s weight, counted the number of test tubes of reagent he had, and decided it wasn’t enough.
Marechal had sat down on the marble edge of a geyser and was just tapping a cigarette against his silver case when Cabal raised a cautionary finger. “No smoking. Does this place have a meat freezer?”
The count looked longingly at the cigarette before replacing it. “Yes.”
“Excellent.” Cabal drew a tiny amount of liquid from one of his phials into a five-millilitre syringe and injected it into the cold, motionless, imperial carotid artery. “This will start a catalytic reaction throughout the emperor’s cardiovascular system to slow down deterioration. The freezer will do the rest.” He took up his notebook and wrote rapidly. “While the emperor is on ice I shall be synthesising the necessary reactants. I shall require these components.” He tore off the sheet as he walked over to Marechal and placed it in his hands. The count read the list. Then he read it again, his eyebrows raising. “Time is of the essence, Count,” Cabal added sharply.
The count tapped the paper. “Two pounds of fresh human pituitaries. I don’t believe the imperial grocers stretch to fresh human pituitaries. This isn’t an easy list to fill.”
“That,” said Cabal, walking back to the emperor and taking off his jacket as he went, “is hardly my problem. If you want this vast quantity of blue-blooded lard to make his speech on schedule, fill it you will.” He hung his jacket from a wing nut on the surgical light stand and started to roll up his sleeves. “And fill it promptly.”
For a moment, the count looked as if he might say something. Then he changed his mind and stood up. “I’ll see to it you have your” — he glanced at the list again and curled his lip — “components.” He marched out, his boots making sharp clicks that echoed around the tiled walls.
Out in the corridor, Count Marechal snapped his fingers and his adjutant was at his side in an instant. The count handed over the list. “Get these together as soon as possible and have them given to Cabal.”
The adjutant, who was very much of the majority of aristocratic soldiers and maintained an apiary dedicated to the glory of his moustaches, silently mouthed the list as he read it. “I say, sir. What is a pituitary when it’s at home to visitors?”
“It nestles in the middle of the human brain, and it’s not the sort of thing one can voluntarily donate. Scour the mortuaries. We want them fresh, mind!”
“They don’t sound very big. It might take quite a few to make a couple of pounds of the blighters. What if we can’t find enough in the mortuaries?”
The count fixed him with his gaze. “Then find some donors,” he said with an emphasis that even Lieutenant Karstetz could fathom.
“Right ho!” said Karstetz, and clattered out in boots that were a lot brighter than he. He paused at the door and turned back. “Incidentally, sir. If this necromancer chappie delivers the goods and old man Antrobus sits up and does the business, d’you still want me to bump friend Cabal off?”
The count thought about it for a very short moment. “No, that’s one small change to the plan. When Cabal’s done his best, whether he succeeds or fails, you are not to kill him.” He let his hand drift to the hilt of his sabre. “I shall.”
* * *
All over the city, causes of death were altered to allow the taking of brain samples. Men carried in with knives in their backs were pronounced dead of strokes. Some of the more principled mortuary staff saw fit to complain. “This is a nonsense!” a district coroner barked at Lieutenant Karstetz as they stood by a slab upon which lay the fresh body of a young man. “I utterly refuse to open this man’s head when the cause of death is obviously a sword wound to the chest! He may have needed his head examined before he got into the duel, but it’s far too late now.”
“No, I assure you, sir,” said Karstetz. “This man died of a seizure caused by a morbid condition of the” — he took a crumpled piece of paper from his sabretache and read from it — “pituitary gland.” He put the paper away again. “That’s in the brain, you know.”
“I know where it is! I simply fail to see how you can possibly see a sword wound and associate it with — Urgh!”
For Lieutenant Karstetz had lost patience, drawn his sword, and run the coroner through. He wiped his blade clean on a handy shroud and scabbarded it. “See?” he asked the assistant coroner, who had gone a horrible shade of frightened. “Sword wound to the chest and what did he die of?”
“A morbid condition … of the pituitary?” ventured the assistant.
“Good show! Knew you were the man for the job after poor old” — he waved vaguely at the dead coroner — “Herr Poor Old here turned up his toes. Anyway, be a sport and fish out the offending organ. Pop it in a jar when you’ve done and a little man will be around shortly to pick it up. Got to go — there’s an absolute epidemic on. Cheerio!”
* * *
Cabal worked slowly but surely as the necessary elements came in. He hardly slept, hardly ate, hardly spoke but to demand some new substance or piece of apparatus. His every move was reported to Count Marechal: every drop from every pipette; every process observed; his notes were stolen, copied, and returned every time he napped. The count studied them but found them impenetrable, some sort of personal cipher, and he passed them on to the Imperial Intelligence Section for cryptanalysis. Less impenetrable, to the count’s shrewd eye at any rate, had been Cabal’s demand for fifty pounds of freshly shaved cat hairs. The gaolers of Harslaus Castle would be wearing bandages for weeks. The sack containing the fruits of their painful labours sat, ignored, in the corner. The count knew petty revenge when he saw it, and he welcomed it here; it showed Cabal was more human than he liked to pretend, and that lurking somewhere within him was a sense of humour, albeit a cruel one. A man is known by his actions, and the count liked to know those he dealt with.
The day of the speech approached, and Cabal finally sent for the late emperor’s mortal remains. He thawed it in a circle of lamps that had been manufactured to his specifications, fuelled with a blend of oils that baffled and disturbed the small army of chemists Marechal had assembled. Cabal had Antrobus carefully placed on the cold white floor before surrounding him with a circle of five of the lamps — their glistening reflectors facing inwards — each vertex of the precise pentagon joined to its neighbours with fluorescent tubes filled with gases that, theoretically, shouldn’t fluoresce. The gas mixture had cost one of the artisans charged with their construction his sanity. Now he lay in a padded cell screaming about the infraviolet and the corners in time. Marechal deliberately left the technical report unread and ordered the destruction of all Cabal’s equipment when it had fulfilled its purpose.
The lamps and the tubes burned for exactly twenty-three hours before abruptly extinguishing themselves. All through the time Cabal had sat cross-legged, in a light tran
ce, muttering some sort of mantra beneath his breath.
“Well, I don’t know if he’s the real thing or a fraud,” Karstetz commented late that evening, “but he’s frightfully good at whatever it is he’s doing. More Bikavér?”
The instant the lights went out, Cabal’s eyes rolled back down in their sockets and he jumped inside the line of tubes. He plucked a syringe case from his pocket, drew a quantity of faintly shimmering liquid from a bottle, and began injecting the corpse at specific points — the temples, the base of the throat, the solar plexus. Marechal had the misfortune to be the only person handy when Cabal needed part of the emperor’s bulk moved out of the way so that he could get at some of the less savoury locations. “What are you doing?” asked the count, making conversation in an attempt to distract himself from what he was doing and where his hands were.
Cabal said nothing as he drew a full fifty millilitres of the fluid, carefully positioned the point of the great steel needle, and pushed it in with some effort and the sound of separating gristle. “Do you know what the ka is?”
“No.”
“Ki?”
“No.”
“Chakra?”
“Ah, now that’s a sort of round throwing knife from somewhere or other on the subcontinent. Fearsome thing, in the right hands,” Marechal said with enthusiasm.
Cabal paused for half a second before carrying on. “And that’s all?”
“Yes.”
“Then I can’t explain it to you. Come back when your education includes the details of life as well as the commission of death.”
Count Marechal looked at Cabal, paling with anger. Cabal looked back at him evenly, noting both how very easy Marechal was to provoke and the scar on his cheek that seemed to be visible only when he was angry. “You duel, Count?”
The count brought himself under control. “I did, when I was at university. You mean the scar? Yes.”
Cabal seemed to have lost interest. He’d moved on to the corpse’s legs and was inserting the needle behind the patella of the right knee. “You can put that down now. Unless you’ve developed a personal attachment, of course.”
The count let that comment pass, stood up, and walked to a sink to wash his hands. “You really believe you’re some sort of obscene parody of a doctor, don’t you? Saving lives after they’re already lost for the good of humanity.”
“‘Obscene parody’?” Cabal repeated without rancour. “I’m not sure that particular phrase was in my mind when I decided on my career. As for humanity, anything I do for it is purely by accident.”
“Then why? Immortality? Perhaps you should have become a vampire.”
Cabal stopped and looked at the count very coldly indeed. “Perhaps I should,” he said finally.
“These lands used to be full of them,” said the count conversationally, having entirely missed Cabal’s look. “Tottering old castles on craggy mountaintops packed to the rafters with them. More Nosferatu than you could shake a stake at. Not anymore. They had to go. They wouldn’t pay their taxes.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“They thought that, just because they’d dodged the certainty of death, dodging the certainty of taxes somehow went by on the nod.” He snorted. “They were wrong.”
Cabal momentarily considered the sight of bailiffs armed to the teeth with stakes, garlic, and court writs. Then he stood up and stepped out of the pentangle. “Finished.”
“What?” The count was incredulous. “Just like that?”
“He’s alive. Or at least he’s doing a convincing impersonation. I need some sleep. Then I shall require the text of the speech he is to deliver.”
“Why?”
“Because,” snapped Cabal, his tiredness catching up with him, “he’s nothing more than a heap of walking offal. He can’t possibly read the speech himself — it will have to be conditioned into him, like teaching a parrot.”
The count had walked over and was looking down on the emperor. He was undeniably breathing. He shook his head; he’d only half believed all this mumbo-jumbo could possibly work. “He doesn’t look very well.”
“He’s dead. He’s hardly going to be a picture of vibrant health. Just before he delivers the speech, I’ll give him something to make him look a little less like a side of beef and more like a head of state. Now” — Cabal sighed, wilting slightly — “I’m very tired. We shall continue this tomorrow.” He started to walk out.
The count stayed where he was. The plan to resurrect the emperor had always been a desperate contingency plan. It was very hard to accept that it seemed to be coming off. “Shouldn’t you put him on, I don’t know, a saline drip? Or glucose or something?”
“He’s only performing basic respiration. I think he has enough reserves to last a few hours,” said Cabal without even turning. Then he was gone.
Count Marechal was left with the undead emperor and his grand schemes.
CENTRAL MATRICULATION BOARD: LEVEL 5 HISTORY PAPER SECTION 4: THE SECOND GALLACIAN CONFLICT
Read the following brief description of the Second Gallacian Conflict, its results and ramifications, and then answer the questions that follow it. This section is worth ten per cent of your overall mark. Show all work.
* * *
Some four hundred years ago in Eastern Europe, Mirkarvia made significant inroads into the territories of two of its neighbours: Senza and Polorus. These conquests were accompanied and succeeded by a series of atrocities, mostly carried out under the pretext of counterinsurgency actions. Over the following decades, these acts settled into a pattern of ethnic discrimination and violent suppression. Finally, Senza — newly resurgent after the discovery of major gold deposits in the southwest and a generally burgeoning economy — militarised its border with Mirkarvia. The Mirkarvian emperor, Dulcis III, listened to the council of his hawkish generals, armchair strategists all, and declared war. This was exactly what the Senzans had anticipated; several secret treaties were triggered that ultimately resulted in Senza and Polorus, with support from their neighbouring states of Ruritania and Graustark, forming an alliance against Mirkarvia. The antiquated Mirkarvian army was quickly routed, and the captured lands recovered.
Polorus argued for the occupation of the Mirkarvian capital of Krenz, with the implied erasure of Mirkarvia as a state. Senza, however, had no desire to control lands containing ethnic Mirkarvians. Therefore, the Mirkarvian exchequer was emptied, large quantities of art treasures and transportable wealth were seized, and swingeing trade concessions were taken as reparation.
It took Mirkarvia generations to recover financially from these humiliations, and the scars still run deep in the national character. The days of the Mirkarvian Empire are domestically regarded as a golden age for all, the terrible crimes of that period expunged from Mirkarvian schoolbooks. Politically, the ramifications of the empire’s collapse are still evident in Mirkarvia’s dealings with its neighbours. Her only local ally is the notoriously backward Katamenia to the north. They share no borders, however; travel between them must go through a mountainous isthmus of Senzan territory extending from the bulk of the country off to the west, where strict customs inspections are the rule. The only other route would require travelling over the Gallaco Sea, but Katamenia has no coastline. Thus, any such journey would still require some travel through either Senza or Polorus.
* * *
(A) In what year did Mirkarvia invade Senza?
(B) I) With hindsight, what was Dulcis III’s most serious error?
II) And without hindsight?
* * *
(C) Discuss any two (2) of the following statements:
I) Mirkarvia behaved like a right bunch of bastards.
II) Polorus behaved like a right bunch of bastards.
III) All countries behave like right bunches of bastards.
* * *
(D) Write a political treatise — not to exceed 250,000 words or 500 sides, whichever is less — detailing your solution to stabilising relations in the region
. Military force above brigade level is not permitted, nor is divine intervention. You may include diagrams.
CHAPTER 2
in which a speech is delivered and there is a falling-out
“I should like my own clothes back,” said Cabal. “And my cane.” He was setting up an odd device consisting of a small diamond-shaped mirror on an armature over the recumbent emperor’s head. Cabal spun it experimentally with the tip of his finger and the reflected light flickered rapidly across the emperor’s eyes. The eyes, which had shown no inclination to cooperate, or even an acceptable job of tracking objects individually, twitched crazily before finally settling their gaze on the mirror.
Count Marechal watched, his arms crossed. “Your cane?” He remembered seeing it among Cabal’s possessions: an elegant ebony stick topped with an ugly silver skull headpiece, the high sheen of the smooth surfaces contrasting strongly with the tarnish in the eye sockets and between the teeth. “Sentimental value?” he said, sarcastically.
“As it happens, yes.” Cabal walked over to the count and took the emperor’s speech from him. “I bludgeoned my first failed experiment back to death with it. Thank you.” He returned to linking the mirror to a small electrical motor.
The count walked over to where Lieutenant Karstetz waited. “Get him what he wants, Lieutenant,” he said. Then he added softly, “We won’t have to put up with him for very much longer.”
“Good thing, too,” whispered Karstetz. “The people are getting very troublesome. We’re having to put down little demonstrations almost constantly.”
“That will all change in a few hours when the emperor gives his greatest — and last — speech.” He nodded in Cabal’s direction. “It would be a useful trick to be able to trot dead people out when necessary. Has any progress been made on Cabal’s notes?”
“All a bit technical for me, I’m afraid,” said Karstetz, who found getting dressed unassisted all a bit technical for him. “The cipher boffins are very impressed that he does it all in his head, though. They said something about a rolling key, but they lost me after that.”
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