Instead, he hung by one hand like an apple from the bough, and wondered, with a degree of objectivity that surprised him even at the time, whether panicking might help. Despite the received wisdom in such events being “Don’t look down,” he looked down, and regretted it terribly. Not because of the great height — he could barely see anything in the darkness; he might have been a few metres above a mound of mattresses for all he knew — but because his dressing gown had come undone and he had neglected to put on anything beneath it, such had been the alacrity with which he left his cabin. No, this view was not especially what he wanted for his last memory.
The slipper fell from one foot and whirled into the void and out of sight. That settled it. The thought of his corpse being found largely naked but for one slipper (should it stay on during the fall) and a dressing gown that was a definite crime against aesthetics spurred him into action. He looked up and started to swing his free hand to grab on to the handle. As the edge of the hatch was almost within range, a gloved hand reached down and slapped his away. Oh yes, thought Cabal. Somebody’s trying to kill me. I’d almost forgotten. His assailant, hidden in the shadows of the conduit, gripped the little finger of Cabal’s right hand and very deliberately started to bend it back.
This was really too much. There was nothing for it — his attacker had to die.
Currently, however, Cabal was at a great disadvantage: several, in fact. Yet, even as his shadowy attacker worked on loosening Cabal’s grip, on the rung in particular and on life in general, Cabal was quickly cataloguing his situation and his assets. He had one hand free, he had one slipper, he had one dressing gown, and — he remembered with a pleasurable frisson — he had a switchblade knife in one of the pockets of that dressing gown. Yes, between the free hand and the switchblade he felt sure he would be able to formulate a robust response.
Preparation is everything. Cabal was very much aware that to lose the knife was to lose his life, so he was careful to grip the knife firmly when he finally got his left hand into his right-hand pocket, the dressing gown having grown frolicsome in the aeroship’s slipstream. He found the release, and the blade snicked out between the gap he had left between his fingertips and his thumb. Closing his fingers and thumb to reestablish a good grip, he concluded the preparatory step of his plan. It had taken perhaps three seconds.
What the plan itself lacked in subtlety, it more than made up for in brutality. As his attacker, who seemed to be wearing coarse leather gloves, finally got a good grip on Cabal’s little finger, Cabal reached up and stabbed, aiming at the attacker’s wrist. Anatomically, you can really spoil somebody’s day with even a shallow cut there, and Cabal was very much in the mood to cause as much misery as possible. There was a cry, and Cabal’s finger was released.
He knew he had a moment’s grace. If the attacker was only scratched, he would resume with a great deal more violence in a moment. Looking to his reserves, Cabal put the knife in his mouth and grabbed the other side of the hatch with his free hand. In his teens, he would have been able to pull himself up with little difficulty, but he was now in his late twenties and exercised but little. He steeled himself and pulled. He didn’t care how many muscles he tore or how much agony he put himself through. Falling was not an option. Dying was not an option. There was too much to be done.
No muscles tore, but he knew they would be complaining bitterly in a few hours, as he clambered gracelessly into the secure darkness of the conduit. His attacker was nowhere to be seen. He waited in silence for almost three minutes before he was convinced that he was alone. Then he allowed himself the luxury of flopping forward, exhausted and half frozen, to lie on his front. Under his breath he mumbled, “Too much to be done. Too much to be done. Too much to be done …”
* * *
Leonie Barrow found Cabal at breakfast. The long dining table of the evening before had been separated into individual tables and bolted down in their customary positions. Each also had the addition of a four-headed lamp: four iron swans’ necks that rose from a central mounting curved down and then up to conclude with the swans’ heads, beaks agape, with lightbulbs stuck in their gullets. It was a typical Mirkarvian conceit: exquisite engineering merged with a barbaric aesthetic. She noticed that Cabal was sitting, probably deliberately, at one of the few tables that had no lamp. The rest of the room was almost empty, but for Herr Harlmann, who, it seemed, had struck up a relationship with Lady Ninuka’s companion, Miss Ambersleigh. He was presumably boring her with business anecdotes, though she was maintaining an air of interest that might even have been real. Whatever they were talking about, it was in low tones that would have seemed conspiratorial but for the change in atmosphere brought on by the events of the previous night. The disappearance and presumed suicide of M. DeGarre had cast a pall over the ship, and the jollity of the previous evening had entirely evaporated. Even the crew seemed subdued beyond professional impassiveness.
Leonie ordered poached eggs and toast from a steward, who seemed perplexed that anybody would want such a combination for a meal when she wasn’t ill, and sat uninvited at Cabal’s table. He paused for a moment while cutting his steak — a far more Mirkarvian choice for breakfast — to eye her suspiciously. “Good morning, Miss Barrow,” he said in a perfunctory tone, immediately forking a neat square of meat into his mouth to forestall any more speech.
“Good morning, Herr Meissner,” she replied. She had momentarily considered teasing him by almost using his real name, but she was not in the mood and she was positive that he wasn’t, either. He looked tired and somewhat distracted. “Any further thoughts about last night?” she asked when there was nobody near.
Cabal slowed his chewing for a moment. Then he took a sip of black coffee, swallowed, and said, as if it were a common subject for conversation, “Last night, somebody tried to kill me.”
The steward’s arrival with her food and a pot of tea covered her surprise. When they could speak again, she whispered, “Tried to kill you? Who did?”
Cabal regarded her with mild amusement. “Smile when you whisper,” he advised her. “You’re supposed to be flirting with me, if you recall?”
She stared at him icily. Then suddenly her expression thawed and she smiled winsomely, her eyes dewy with romantic love. “Oh, sweetheart … somebody tried to kill you? Whosoever would do such a thing to my nimpty-bimpty snookums?”
Cabal could not have been more horrified if she’d pulled off her face to reveal a gaping chasm of eternal night from which glistening tentacles coiled and groped. That had already happened to him once in his life, and he wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.
“What?” he managed in a dry whisper.
“Smile when you whisper,” she said, her expression fixed and bloodcurdlingly coquettish. “You’re supposed to be flirting with me, remember?”
“Please don’t do that.” He wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t prefer to be dangling from the underside of the Princess Hortense again rather than endure another second of Miss Barrow’s unnerving countenance. He certainly found it a great relief when she allowed the expression to slip and be replaced by one of wry amusement.
“So, I’ve discovered what it takes to frighten a man who deals with devils.”
“Not frightened, Fräulein. More … discomforted.” He took a moment to compose himself. “Now, are you really all that blasé about somebody trying to kill me?”
She looked at him seriously. “Of course not. Tell me what happened.” She ate her breakfast as Cabal concisely related the events of the previous night. When he had finished, and was taking the opportunity to dispatch the remainder of his steak, Leonie drank her tea and considered. “There are two possibilities, I suppose. The misarranged carpet really does have something to do with DeGarre’s death. Or — ” She studied him carefully before proceeding. “Or an enemy of yours has followed you onto the ship or has recognised you.”
Cabal stopped sawing up his last bit of meat. “You’re not serious?”
“You m
ust have dozens of enemies — ” She almost said his name, but restrained herself in time. “Herr Meissner. Importantly, you probably don’t even know a few of them on sight.”
“Explain.”
“You leave a trail of destruction through people’s lives.” Cabal started to argue, but she talked through him. “Even if the ones you affect directly either will not or cannot come after you, that still leaves family and friends. You provoke hatred and revenge. You know it.”
Cabal hadn’t really thought about it in those terms, but he could see the truth in her words. He never went out of his way to damage people’s lives — not except in some very deliberate cases, anyway — but people would insist on getting in the way. Now he considered it more carefully, he began to appreciate just why quite so many bullets, knives, and the occasional crossbow quarrel had whistled past his frantically dodging head down the years.
“Rufus Maleficarus,” he said in quiet contemplation.
“What about him?” Leonie had heard the name before: a notorious warlock who had crossed swords with Cabal on at least one occasion to her knowledge. “I thought he was dead?”
“He is. I killed him thoroughly. That was the second time I met him, though. The first time, it wasn’t just happenstance. He blamed me for what happened to his father.”
“Was he justified in that?”
“Yes. Yes, he was. But, really, his father was a monster. I had no choice.”
“With your history, I really don’t think you’re in any position to call anybody else a monster,” she said sharply.
Cabal’s expression was unreadable. “No, I am being entirely literal, in the non-metaphorical, purest dictionary sense of the word. His father was a monster. He was trying to kill me, just as he’d killed others. It was self-defence. Surely that’s a reasonable justification even in your morally polarised world, Miss Barrow?”
The brief spark of warmth they had struck in the earlier part of their conversation was entirely dead now. The air between them was cold enough to condense dew.
“No,” he said finally. “It has to be something to do with DeGarre’s death.” Leonie noticed that he’d dropped the “disappearance and probable-death formula.” “If it was somebody I had … upset in the past for whatever reason, why would they go to all the trouble of sneaking after me, gloves at the ready, on the small chance that I would find a hatch in the ship’s underside, open it, and then obligingly hang halfway out of it?”
“Why weren’t they armed, you mean?”
“Not even that. You yourself, Miss Barrow, have already threatened me with exactly the same weapon that anybody with the slightest whiff of intelligence would use.” He looked around to confirm that there were no prying eyes or ears before leaning forward and whispering, “You know who I am.”
Leonie Barrow hated to admit it, but Cabal’s point was solid. Unless he was being stalked by somebody who was absolutely determined to kill him with his or her own hands, the safest and surest way of seeing him die was simply to use the Mirkarvian state as the instrument of death. They would simply denounce Cabal to the captain, and that would be that. The alternative — that this putative revenger wanted to kill Cabal him-or herself — presupposed that somebody who was organised enough to locate and then shadow Cabal onto the Princess Hortense would then absentmindedly forget to pack a pistol, knife, garotte, or other weapon with which to actually do the deed.
The form “him or her” made her think of Cabal’s story of his narrow escape. “In the conduit, this person who tried to kill you, was it definitely a man?”
Cabal waited a moment while a steward came over and cleared away their plates. He poured himself another coffee. “I’ve wondered about that myself. I couldn’t see, and the thick leather gloves meant I don’t even know what kind of fingers my attacker had. When they cried out, it was high, but I’ve heard men in great pain sound quite literally like a child, so that proves little.”
“I’m not even going to ask how you have heard such sounds, Herr Meissner.”
“No? You know so little of the world. You should get out more, Miss Barrow.”
Leonie made an offhand gesture that took in the aeroship. “I would say this is fairly ‘out.’ Your definition probably involves more time spent in graveyards.”
Cabal reined in his habitual desire to argue. He had an unpleasant mental image of things getting so heated that Miss Barrow would end up standing on the table, pointing at him, and screaming “Necromancer!” repeatedly. Instead, he raised his hand slightly in a conciliatory gesture. “Pace, Miss Barrow. This is not an ideal venue to air your views on my profession.” In the silence that followed, he realised that he had little left to talk about, so to give himself thinking time he said, “I wonder why this table doesn’t have a lamp?”
The change of tack caught Leonie by surprise. “A lamp? I thought you’d sat here to avoid having to look at one of the horrible things. It’s the only table without one.”
“No. There’s one over there without one as well.” He gestured carelessly over his shoulder without looking, and she saw that he was indeed right; another table on the far side of the room was also lampless. “I sat here because it was less cluttered. I wonder — ” He lifted the plate in the middle of the table on which lay the butter dish and some small pots of preserve. Beneath it was a small neat hole in the tablecloth, its edge hemmed to avoid fraying. “It’s meant to have a lamp. That’s where it would be screwed into place and the electrical cable connected.”
Leonie watched his investigation with an impatient frown. “So? What do the table lamps have to do with anything?”
“Not the table lamps themselves. It’s the absence of two table lamps. Probably not relevant.” He said this with an air of deep distraction.
Leonie Barrow knew enough about real criminal investigations to know full well that cases rarely if ever hinged on an encyclopedic knowledge of tobacco ash or the curious incident of the butler’s allergy to spinach. Cabal’s musings seemed self-indulgent and immaterial, and she belatedly realised that he wasn’t truly talking to her at all. She was merely a sounding board for him to reflect his own ideas back to himself in a slightly different light. Her irritation showed in her voice. “To bring your attention back to the matter at hand, are you going to report the attack on you last night?”
Cabal blinked slightly, startled out of his reverie. “I haven’t made up my mind about that yet. I shouldn’t draw attention to myself.”
“I think the time for that is passed. Let’s just say that the captain’s own enquiries turn up whoever attacked you and, under interrogation, they mention they’d try to throw you out of the ship in your dressing gown and slippers? The captain comes to you and asks the obvious question: ‘Why didn’t you tell me that somebody tried to kill you, Herr Meissner?’ What would you say? You didn’t want any fuss?”
Cabal looked sourly at her, but he couldn’t refute her argument. His first instinct was always to keep his business to himself, not least because his business frequently carried a death sentence. “That would be an awkward interview, wouldn’t it?” He got to his feet.
“What will you tell him?”
“The truth. Mostly.”
* * *
Captain Schten listened with the expression of a man who goes into a striptease parlour and finds himself attending a lecture on quantum mechanics, expectation giving way to bafflement. He had particular problems with Herr Meissner’s motives for wishing to take up a section of the corridor’s carpeting.
“You excavated beneath the carpet because you had a dream that told you to?”
“No. The dream was just my subconscious mind’s way of drawing attention to something I’d seen without perceiving its significance.”
“A square of carpet?”
“A misaligned square of carpet. Yes. Which had not been so misaligned earlier in the evening when I walked by.”
The captain pursued his point with the determination of a man after the last pea
on his plate. “So you had noticed it was not misaligned earlier?”
“Yes, but not consciously. Captain, I have a problematical relationship with the inner workings of my mind. Why, I could tell you — ” He almost said he could tell of times when such submerged ideations had saved his life while dealing with supernatural entities that had come from whichever blighted netherworld they called home with the express intention of swallowing his soul, eating his brains, and using his giblets for gravy. Then he decided not to, in much the same way he might decide not to say, “Incidentally, Captain, I’m a necromancer. It would be best to shoot me now.”
Instead, he said, “I could tell you of the silliest things that lead to useful concepts, like displacement … vulcanization …” He tried to think of a third thing, and failed. “Jam. But this is all digression. The important point is that I knew the carpet had been interfered with, and I investigated.”
“And somebody tried to throw you out. Yes, I understood that part. You took a terrible risk, Herr Meissner.”
“How was I to know somebody was going to kill me?” protested Cabal. “It was hardly the most obvious course of events.”
“I’m not talking about some phantom assailant, sir. I am talking about how ill-advised it is to go wandering around the bowels of a great machine of which you know nothing. You could have been incinerated, or electrocuted, or crushed. Worse yet, you might have interfered with the operation of this vessel and brought it crashing down! Did you ever pause to consider that?”
Cabal had not, and inwardly rebuked himself. He wasn’t about to let the reference to a “phantom assailant” go unchallenged, though.
“Such catastrophic scenarios aside, Captain, I repeat: somebody tried to kill me. I did not imagine that.”
“So you said, and they just vanished. Hardly the actions of a determined attacker.”
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