Abruptly, he became aware of somebody standing by his right shoulder a mere moment before he smelt perfume. He’d allowed his concentration to slip and, in those few moments when he wasn’t being aloof and unapproachable, he’d been approached.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” said a young woman’s voice. There was little intonation, and it took Cabal a moment to realise what she was talking about.
“The stars? Yes, I suppose they are. I’m not a poet or a painter, though, so that’s just hearsay.”
The woman made a small noise that was probably a laugh, as if he’d said something witty or profound. In a sense, he had. Then she said, “What do you think of when you look at the stars?”
He considered quickly. He’d heard about this sort of thing. If his understanding was correct, he could well be in the process of being “picked up,” currently at the “small talk” stage. This could be useful. Keeping one — ideally, fairly stupid — woman entertained for the duration of the voyage would go a long way towards avoiding the company of others. Nobody, as the saying goes, wants to be a gooseberry. It might be as well to cultivate her acquaintance.
Looking steadfastly up at the stars and assuming an expression that he had reason to believe was dreamy and romantic, he said, “Once upon a time, it was believed that our futures were, literally, written in the stars. It was called stelliscript. It was said that you should read them west to east if you wanted to know the good things in your future.”
“And north — south for the evil things?” asked his companion, ingenuously.
“Of course, it’s all nonsense; the stars are set in their paths,” said Cabal, wondering if that was a lucky shot on her part. “The future remains unknown to us, no matter how you might try to read it. There was another technique called gyromancy, for example. A practitioner of this piece of flummery would spin around on the spot until he got dizzy and fell over. The manner of the falling-over told the future of whoever had hired the gyromancer. I should think,” he added with an artful chuckle, “that the true reading would invariably be ‘You will soon be gulled by a confidence trickster.’”
There was silence for a few moments, and Cabal wondered if this would be a good time to turn and look as handsome as possible. Before he could commit himself, however, his companion spoke again.
“Gyromancy … I would have thought necromancy was more your style, Johannes Cabal.”
It went very quiet in the lounge.
Then somebody laughed, the chatter started up again, and Cabal realised that it had simply been a natural silence in a dozen conversations occurring simultaneously, the merest fluke. Or, at least, nobody had stuck a gun in his back yet, so that was probably the reason. He stopped looking at the stars — his throat tightening and his head feeling a little gyromantic in itself — refocussed on the reflections in the glass, and, just for a moment, saw a face he knew to be dead. His heart jolted. He took a sharp breath, looked again, and saw he was mistaken, but that the truth was just as shocking. Cabal was not a man given to gasping, usually, and he did not do so again. Standing at his right shoulder, her gaze balefully meeting his, was Leonie Barrow.
It can be said of a necromancer that, given his profession, there are few people he can ever truly be sure of never seeing again, even the ones he buries in shallow graves in the woods. Johannes Cabal, however, could have said in any second up to this that the last person he expected to see aboard the Princess Hortense was Leonie Barrow, a woman he’d last seen many months ago, and a considerable number of international borders away.
Cabal had on that occasion held stewardship of a diabolical carnival, committed to wandering the railway network for a year, scooping up the souls of the disaffected along the way. It was all done at the whim of a bored and capricious Satan, who had made a wager with Cabal: Cabal’s own soul would be returned to him on receipt of a hundred others, with one year in which to do so and the carnival to help him bring in the harvest.
He had loathed that year, even though he really had only himself to blame. It had been a ramshackle period of travel, perfunctory damnations, and tawdry knickknacks during which he had experienced much and enjoyed little. At the time, he thought the end had justified the means, but — a final, bitter irony on top of a year full of them — the end had made him question those means, making his small victory seem petty and ignoble.
He had met Miss Barrow and her father towards the end of the year, when things had become unexpectedly desperate. Mr. Frank Barrow, a retired policeman and redoubtable nuisance, had descended upon Cabal like Nemesis, but in the end it was Leonie Barrow who had proved the cleverer foe. Considered as a whole, it had not been a happy meeting, and they had not parted on the best of terms. In fact, if Miss Barrow had murdered him on that occasion, the prosecution would have had a hard time finding a jury to hang her.
Cabal turned to face her, needing the proof of direct sight. She was still tall, still crowned with the tawny blond hair that matched her name so well, still very striking in a pre-Raphaelite sort of way, and, judging by her expression, still deeply pissed off with him. He tried to speak, but his vocabulary had studied the situation and taken the evening off. “Accch,” he grated slowly, for once speechless. His thumb twitched involuntarily and the cup of his glass snapped off, dumping the remains of the champagne at their feet.
A steward was at his side in an instant, mopping up and apologising for the inferior quality of the glasses; the company would certainly complain to the manufacturers for their shoddiness. “Can I get you another drink, Herr Meissner?” he asked as he gathered up the remains of the glass.
Meissner? mouthed Miss Barrow at Cabal. He barely responded, his mind finally getting up to whirring pace as the frost of surprise thawed. If she denounced him, the ship would turn right around and take him back to the waiting arms of the Count Marechal. He couldn’t let that happen. But he couldn’t see a way around it, either. He calculated possible schemes. Plan A consisted of punching her in the stomach and heaving her through the window. It was direct and effective, but there were certain practical drawbacks that mitigated against its use. He didn’t have a Plan B.
“Fräulein Barrow, perhaps you would like a freshener?” said the steward, indicating her glass.
“No, thank you,” she replied, smiling for his benefit. “I’m replete for the moment. I’m sure if I need any more Herr Meissner will be kind enough …?” This last directed at Cabal, who almost missed it.
“Of course, Fräulein, it would be my privilege,” he replied, nodding and clicking his heels, as appeared to be de rigueur.
“A military man, sir?” said the steward, impressed.
Cabal blinked. He couldn’t wipe his nose around here without committing some sort of social gaff or telegraphing the wrong thing. “Not really,” he prevaricated. “I was at the academy in my youth, but my horse — ” What do horses do that is bad for their riders? he wondered. “Fell on me.” That sounded more than a good enough reason for a medical discharge. He touched the imaginary shoulder wound the horse had caused and accidentally prodded the sabre cut that Marechal had left in him. His unfeigned grimace of pain seemed to do the trick. The steward nodded sympathetically and moved on.
Leonie Barrow watched Cabal as he watched the steward go. He was leaning back with studied nonchalance as he let his gaze wander around the room, but she knew that he simply didn’t want anybody else walking up behind him unexpectedly, especially when they started talking about what she knew they had to talk about. She waited. Finally, Cabal found words.
“Why didn’t you denounce me?” he asked, not looking at her.
She smiled, as if making small talk, but her voice was cold. “Because they’d have taken you back to Krenz and strung you up. That’s if they didn’t throw you overboard here and now. Your breed isn’t popular among the Mirkarvians.” His gaze slid to look at her. “Or anywhere,” she added with a certain emphasis.
Cabal narrowed his eyes, nettled. “So you’re preserving my lif
e for humanitarian reasons. How very kind of you. I feel redeemed already.” She still had the power to send him to his death but, somehow, that was preferable to being patronised.
“Save your sarcasm, Cabal. When we reach Senza, I’ll see you put under arrest. They don’t have capital punishment for the likes of you. It will be life imprisonment, but that’s no more than you deserve.” She spoke with a cold certainty.
Cabal wished he had a drink, just to give his hands something to do. Currently, they were keen on carrying out Plan A, and damn the consequences. “You’re your father’s daughter,” Cabal said finally. “Speaking of whom, how is he?”
“As well as can be expected after what you put us through.”
“I don’t suppose your opinion of me would be moderated at all if — ”
“No.”
“If I told you I was hardly a free agent.” He looked at her. “No, I don’t suppose it would. Not in your little world of moral certainties.”
“You really do think that you’re superior to everybody else, don’t you?”
“Don’t be absurd,” he answered, while trying hard to think of somebody he looked up to. There didn’t seem to be anybody.
They stood in awkward silence for a few moments. “So,” said Cabal, fractionally less irritated by the presence of words than by their absence. “What brought you to a pit like Mirkarvia?”
“My degree,” replied Miss Barrow, grudgingly. She volunteered no more.
“Your degree? What sort of degree, precisely?”
“Criminal psychology,” she replied, and looked squarely at him.
Cabal sighed. “You really are your father’s daughter. What is your intended career? A plodding police officer, or the proprietor of an asylum for the criminally insane? I’d suggest you plump for the latter; the hours are better.”
In reply, she simply tilted her head and looked more keenly at him. It was a look that, he realised, closely mirrored his own when a likely corpse happened his way. Usually under a tarpaulin on the back of a cart at three in the morning.
“Tchah,” he tutted. “You think I’m a criminal, don’t you? One of your grubby little perpetrators from a troubled family background who commits outrages because a cousin told him horses have five legs when he was an infant and it scarred him for life. Is that it?”
“You are a criminal, Cabal. But there’s nothing common or garden about you. Do you know I decided on taking this degree in the first place after meeting you?”
Cabal frowned. “If you’re trying to endear yourself to me, you’ve chosen an odd way of setting about it.”
“Your behaviour was criminal, but your motivation … I didn’t understand your motivation at all. Most of your colleagues — ”
“I don’t have colleagues. It is not a profession that encourages union activity or glee clubs.”
“ — are a bunch of shallow megalomaniacs. They’re easy — I can spot a power-crazy, corpse-raising nutcase — ”
“Ah, now you’re trying to lose me with jargon.”
“Stop interrupting me. I can spot one of those pathetic creatures at ten paces.”
“You must have met dozens,” muttered Cabal.
“I’ve met a couple,” she said. Cabal looked at her with surprise. Having secured his attention for the moment, she continued more sedately. “In an asylum for the criminally insane, as it happens. Sad, lonely men, they took up necromancy in the same way madmen might take up knives to revenge themselves on a society that they don’t understand and that makes no effort to understand them. You, though. You can fit in. It’s no mean feat to pass yourself off as one of this bunch.” She indicated the gathered Mirkarvians with a nod of her head. “I don’t see you leading an army of zombies into the fray.”
“Zombies are so passé.”
“Don’t be flippant with me, Cabal. Your life’s mine. I want to do the right thing but, my God, it wouldn’t take much provocation — not much at all.”
Cabal scowled. “What’s this? Psychoanalysis by coercion? ‘Tell me about your childhood, or else?’ I didn’t realise psychiatry had become so two-fisted.” He smiled at her for appearance’s sake, but his eyes were sharp and dangerous. “Don’t think you can quantify me and put me in a thesis. A census taker once tried to test me. I let my front garden eat him.”
“Your front garden?”
He wrinkled his nose. “You didn’t expect me to do it, did you?”
Miss Barrow’s eyes flickered to one side, and suddenly she smiled broadly and became the very spirit of vivacity. “You told your gardener he could eat it! Oh! That’s simply too precious!” She laughed full-throatedly.
Cabal was caught off guard, but only for a moment. He looked to his side and pretended to realise that they had company. “Well,” he said with ersatz joviality, “you just can’t get the staff these days, can you?”
The couple to whom he spoke allowed a moment’s bewilderment before laughing politely. “No, no, you can’t,” said the man, plainly wondering with what he was agreeing.
There was a short embarrassed pause during which Cabal wondered why they wouldn’t go away, and the couple desperately tried to formulate a polite plan for getting away.
“I’m Roborovski,” said the man, having run out of ideas. “Linus Roborovski. And this is my wife, Lisabet.”
They did not seem to be especially well suited to each other. He was in his late thirties to mid-forties, careworn and starting to bald, and he exuded an air of being in a state of permanent harassment. He wore a good, but not very good, bespoke suit in brown-green twill which he looked forced into despite its having been made to measure. Cabal decided that he was a small businessman who had unexpectedly become successful and wasn’t quite sure how to deal with the trimmings that came with it.
His wife had a good six inches on him and was younger, no more than thirty. She was wan rather than simply pale, and she wore her loosely coiled strawberry-blond hair like an affliction. She had an unlovely dress in mustard yellow hanging about her that in no way complimented her complexion. She stood beside and a little behind her husband, and they looked like the makings of a poultice. They served to remind Cabal — should a reminder ever be necessary — why his social skills were so poor: people were loathsome and not worth the practise.
“Meissner,” he said, shaking hands with Roborovski. “Gerhard Meissner.” He hadn’t even let Roborovski’s hand go before his wife was offering hers, palm down. Hoping he successfully suppressed the weary note that would surely colour his voice should he let it, he clicked his heels and kissed her hand. “Enchanté,” he added, for want of anything sensible to say. In his experience, it was possible to talk any sort of rubbish in a foreign language and so sound sophisticated.
As he looked up in straightening, he noticed a glimmer in her eye that he didn’t altogether like. There was something calculating there, and the fact that he had no idea what she was calculating caused him a twinge to his sense of self-preservation. In an instant, the glimmer was gone and she was looking at him with the glassy expression of a bourgeois hausfrau, or a head of livestock.
Herr Roborovski was looking enquiringly at Miss Barrow. “And your friend is …?” he asked Cabal.
Miss Barrow, however, was not going to be spoken for, no matter what passed for etiquette in Mirkarvia. “Leonie Barrow,” she said, and held out her hand. That she held it out thumb upwards, for shaking, may have been lost on the Roborovskis, for they both shook her hand with polite smiles and the ghost of a curtsey from Frau Roborovski.
“You’re English, aren’t you?” she asked Miss Barrow. “I’ve always wanted to visit England, but Linus is so busy, we never seem to get the chance to have a holiday.”
“Oh? Why, what do you do?”
She addressed the question directly to Herr Roborovski, but he just looked blankly at her like a rep actor who was considering what to have for supper instead of watching for his cue. After a moment, Frau Roborovski said, “He’s a cabinetmaker.” Her
husband jumped slightly, like a rep actor who has finally decided to have Welsh rabbit for supper and returns to the here and now to discover a stage full of his fellow actors glaring daggers at him.
“Oh, yes,” he said, as if the statement was so astounding that it required confirmation. “I’m a cabinetmaker.”
“And that keeps you busy, does it?” asked Cabal, seeking to reconcile cabinetmaking, extreme busyness, and journeys on luxury aeroships to his satisfaction.
“Ah, um. Yes?”
“Linus,” interjected his wife with the mildly acidic tone of someone who suspects that they’re being made sport of but isn’t quite sure, “is very successful. He runs one of the most respected workshops in the country!” The end of the sentence was punctuated with a sharp nod of the And don’t you forget it, buster variety.
“Running a cabinet manufactory.” Cabal activated the muscles that careful research had revealed would create a supercilious smile. It was one of his more convincing ones. “How fascinating.”
Herr Roborovski beamed, a happy hamster. His wife did not. “What do you do, Herr Meissner?”
“Me? Oh, I’m just a cog in the Mirkarvian civil service, I’m afraid. I neither sow nor do I reap, in all but the most figurative way. Making things with your hands, though, that’s something to be proud of.” To illustrate the point, he held out his own hands, palms upwards. They hadn’t seen any serious manual work in the past four months, at which time they had been calloused from unofficial nocturnal exhumations — the necessity of bludgeoning several recalcitrant revenants back into an inanimate state, and then the resulting unofficial nocturnal cremations. Now they looked like the hands of a pencil-pushing administrator who might occasionally do a little gardening in a window box.
Herr Roborovski unconsciously mimicked Cabal’s action, holding up his hands. Cabal noted that they showed some signs of labour but, like his own, not recently. While coming to the conclusion that, boringly enough, the little man and his irritating wife were just what they appeared to be, Cabal distractedly added, “I mean, all that arcane business with G-clamps, shellac, dovecote joins, lathes, and suchlike. Always nice to actually make things with your hands.”
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