Johannes Cabal the Detective jc-2

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Marechal grimaced. “What is your association with this man? Public relations or something?”

  “I loathe him,” she said with sudden venom. Then, more quietly, “And I admire him. You’re right; he didn’t have to come back. He’s taken a big risk, but I know he’s taken bigger. I can’t tell you whether he’s a monster or playing the hero right now, but I know one thing. You made the biggest mistake of your life when you made an enemy of him.”

  Cabal raised an eyebrow and smiled a smile at Count Marechal so dry that you couldn’t have dragged a molecule of water out of it with fuming sulphuric acid. “I sound quite mythical, don’t I, Marechal? What wonders shall I perform next?”

  “You can perform them from beyond the grave, Cabal. You’ve made a mistake.”

  “Oh?” said Cabal, mildly curious. He drew out his pocket watch and checked it. “And what would that be?”

  “You’ve told us that the other bombs have long timers. Soon we shall be across the border. There are cleared areas there. We can set the ship down and the engineers can deal with your bombs without fear of crashing out of the sky. Not that you’ll be there to see it. Checkmate, Cabal.” He drew back his pistol’s hammer slowly, with every sign of enjoyment.

  “You would have a point, except that you have made an assumption. That I told the truth about the bombs.”

  Marechal narrowed his eyes. “There are no more bombs, are there?”

  “Oh, there are bombs. Just no anti-tamper fuses. I mean to say, as Miss Barrow so kindly intimated, I am terribly talented, but rustling up mercury switches out of thin air is beyond even my admittedly extraordinary abilities.”

  “Even better,” Marechal said, smiling. “My only concern was that a heavy landing might trigger them. Thank you for removing that last lingering anxiety.”

  “Oh, my pleasure. Really. But … I also lied about the timed fuses.”

  Marechal’s smile slid off his face like a stunned monkey from a buttered banyan. “What?”

  “They’re not actually very long.”

  At which point the second bomb exploded.

  CHAPTER 17

  in which there is danger, disaster, and death

  The detonation was that much closer and that much more violent, throwing Cabal and Marechal off their feet. The large windows on the starboard side of the salon exploded inwards, and suddenly the room was home to a howling gale and tumbling fragments of glass. The clouds outside seemed to buck backwards and forwards as the Princess Hortense yawed wildly. Miss Barrow and the other passengers were hurled from their seats, Lady Ninuka sent sprawling over Colonel Konstantin’s body. Her screams mingled with the other cries of surprise and terror.

  “Cabal!” bellowed Marechal, climbing to his feet and standing with his legs well apart, braced against the rolling deck. “You’re insane! You’ll kill us all!” He looked around, and caught sight of Cabal taking refuge behind a sofa. It was no sort of cover; Marechal aimed and fired, the heavy slug tearing clean through it. The lurching deck had spoilt his aim, however, and the bullet hole went through the MirkAir antimacassar on the sofa top.

  “Two bullets left,” called Cabal. “This is one of the many reasons you would make a bad ruler, Marechal — poor resource management. Also, you show appallingly weak anticipatory skills.”

  “Oh? And how would anybody guess that you would be mad enough to do this?”

  “Not this,” said Cabal, his tone dismissive. “This.” He leaned out suddenly. Marechal barely had time to register that Cabal had a gun in his hand before it fired. The swaying of the deck saved him, too, the round going high and punching a hole in an aft window, and he ducked low and scuttled away. “You think a city as close to a bunch of rabid dogs as Parila is to Mirkarvia wouldn’t have a good supply of gunsmiths?” Cabal called after the scampering noble.

  He weighed the gun in his hand; the man behind the counter had looked at him quizzically when he’d enquired whether they stocked the Webley.577 revolver. Thwarted, Cabal had settled on a Senzan revolver, but at least had the mild pleasure of finding one in an equally untidy calibre — 10.35 mm. His mind was usually quite pristine, but — O secret sin! — he had always taken a perverse joy in dangling decimals.

  “The ship’s going down and you two are having a gunfight?” shouted Herr Roborovski. “You’re both mad!”

  “Sir, this may not be the best time for this,” agreed Fräulein Satunin, grimly holding on to the carpet. Behind her, the ground was briefly glimpsed through the aft windows as the ship’s tail dipped and swung.

  “Shut up!” spat Marechal, his black hair askew and his composure shattered, from the end of the bar furthest from Cabal. “You, Satunin! You’re supposed to be a trained killer! Get him!”

  “Sir,” she replied forcefully, “he has a gun. I have a knife. He has cover. I have open ground. Worst of all, you’ve told me in his hearing what you want me to do. Tactically, this is a very unsound proposition, sir!”

  “I don’t give a flying pfennig for your damned tactical propositions, you stupid bitch! Just kill him!”

  “No! You’re not listening to me!” interrupted Roborovski with urgent passion. “We’re all in dreadful danger!”

  “Nice attempt, sir,” called Cabal from where he lay in moderate comfort behind the sofa. He was glad all the furniture was bolted down. With the Princess Hortense’s current perturbations, he would otherwise have been forced to chase his place of concealment around the salon. “But the line guides provide only forward motion, not lift. As long as the gyroscopic levitators continue to spin, we will not crash. We will just drift. Shortly, the Senzan airforce will come in pursuit of my stolen entomopter, and they will find us.”

  “Oh, God,” said Miss Barrow, and Cabal had a sudden intimation that he may have made a miscalculation. “Cabal, the line guides are the ship’s main source of power! Didn’t you know that? It’s in the pamphlet!”

  Cabal twitched. “Pamphlet?”

  “The one about the ship! The one you got with your travel documents and itinerary!”

  Cabal thought of an origami swan and swallowed.

  “Not so mythical now, eh, Cabal!” Marechal started laughing — a coughing, barking laugh that contained little humour.

  “She’s right!” Herr Roborovski was hanging on to a table support for dear life as the deck pitched violently beneath him. “With two of them destroyed, there’s barely enough to keep the levitators running! We need to land! We need to land immediately before the reserves are depleted!” He was interrupted by a shuddering groan that juddered through the entire fabric of the vessel. It ran through their bodies and shook their hearts in their chests. Roborovski swore something in a Mirkarvian dialect, a desperate and pleading jumble of words. “It’s the ship’s spine! She’s not designed to be thrown around like this! If we don’t set down soon, she’ll break her back!”

  But beneath them was nothing but forest and steep hillsides.

  * * *

  Johannes Cabal was, though it pained him sorely to admit it, only human, and it is human to err. In his chosen profession, however, to err was to risk lynching, immolation, or ingestion. Cabal had so far kept his errors mainly on the small side — a singed eyebrow here, a deranged imp with a meat cleaver there — but overlooking the intimate connection between the etheric line guides and the gyroscopic levitators was beginning to look like one of the more final variety.

  Furthermore, there was naught he could do about it while pinned down in the salon. While he and Marechal maintained their standoff, there was little chance of anybody getting out of there alive. He could bet that the crew members were too busy trying to restore trim to the ship to bother him for the moment, but this was an imperfect state of affairs. They would either succeed, and then he would have a lot of angry Mirkarvians after him, or they would fail, and Cabal would finish his life and career cremated on some anonymous Senzan hillside.

  He considered his options. How much of a threat was Marechal? Assuming he had the sa
me sort of revolver that Cabal had stolen from him back in Harslaus, it was a six-chamber design. Assuming, further, that he wasn’t the cautious type and therefore carried a round under the hammer, that left him with two rounds. Might he have reloaded? Possible, but unlikely; given the softness of Cabal’s cover, it would have been an obvious tactic to place three or four rounds in judiciously chosen points through the sofa with a guarantee of at least one hit. Even if not fatal or debilitating, it would give him an advantage. That Marechal had not done so suggested that he had come out unprepared to shoot more than six peasants. Cabal had five rounds remaining, and was bitterly regretting not having brought some more with him. Like Marechal, however, he had not been anticipating a gunfight. So, he had a small advantage, but time was wasting. He risked a peep along the side of the sofa away from the bar and saw Miss Barrow and the others clinging to the furniture.

  Not so long ago, he thought, I would have been safe on a train at this point. Harlmann could have said what he liked, and I wouldn’t have cared a fig.

  The ship pitched upwards amidst shouts and screams. Everybody who could, clung on for their lives. Unattended, Konstantin rolled heavily back and up against the base of the bullet-damaged window in a half-sitting position. With a hollow musical tone, a long crack formed between the hole and the base of the window. It held for a second longer, then shattered, great shards of glass falling down to the treetops. Konstantin lolled like a rag doll with nothing to support him, and slipped backwards out of the window. Cabal watched the old soldier vanish, and ground his teeth together. So, this is what a conscience does for one, is it?

  He’d had enough. Precipitate action would kill him just as surely as indecision, but at least he would be doing something. He quickly analysed his situation, recalled that almost everything aboard an aeroship is built to save weight, and decided that the wood panels of the bar could not be as substantial as they appeared to be. In the moment between the Princess Hortense swaying this way and that, he stood up and put three judiciously aimed bullets through the side of the bar. The scream of rage from behind it told him his gamble had paid off, thus far at least.

  Moving quickly towards the huddled group of passengers, he tried to get an angle on Count Marechal — a clear shot that would finish all this now. The wind roaring through the two broken windows whipped through his clothes and made his tie flutter like a black pennant as he strode forwards, gun aimed at the bar edge, waiting to see his target.

  He never heard the metallic hiss of the blade being drawn; there wasn’t the faintest possibility that he ever could, in that maelstrom of sound and whirling newspaper sheets and napkins. He would have died there and then but for Miss Barrow calling, “Cabal! Behind you!” He didn’t look at her first, which also saved his life. He simply turned immediately, gun leading, and found Fräulein Satunin standing behind him with a stiletto in her hand, the same blade she had used to kill Cacon. It wasn’t raised dramatically high — she was a killer, not an actress — but out to her right, blade pointing in, ready for her to step close behind Cabal and grab him with her free hand over his mouth or throat as the blade drove in just below the sternum and up into his heart. But even the coldest killer may balk a second when her target turns and she finds herself facing a gun barrel at mouth level. In that second, Lisabet Satunin looked over the gun into Cabal’s eyes and, in them, she saw … nothing at all.

  Cabal fired, and turned away.

  Marechal, believing he was being shot at again, leaned out of his bullet-riddled cover and fired at Cabal. It was an impulsive shot, but still a narrow miss, and Cabal shied to his left, away from the path of the bullet. It was a sudden movement that caught him as much by surprise as it did Marechal, and took him clear past the end of the bar, leaving both him and the count entirely without cover.

  Suddenly, it was no longer a gunfight. They faced each other, both armed with heavy revolvers containing but a single round apiece and — in a shared thought that occurred to each man simultaneously — they realised that this was a duel. It was the same duel they had started with swords three days ago, and this was where it would finally end. Their guns barked, a fraction of a second apart.

  Count Marechal was swift, but Cabal was sure.

  He lowered his gun as Lady Ninuka threw herself wordlessly across her father’s body.

  Cabal reached down and took Miss Barrow by the upper arm. “We should leave now,” he said in a terse undertone.

  “No! Cabal, we can’t. I can’t.”

  She was looking at the surviving passengers: Herr Roborovski pushed back up against a chair, unable to look away from Satunin’s body; Miss Ambersleigh, hands to her mouth, trapped in incomprehension; Lady Ninuka, her dark lace cuffs darkened further by blood as she held her father tightly. “What has happened?” she asked nobody in particular. “What has happened?”

  For his part, Marechal lay with his eyes open and with the calmest expression Cabal had ever seen him wear, his brow now troubled only by a dark hole a mite over 10.35 mm wide, the brain behind it forever stilled by the addition of 179 grains of lead.

  Cabal grimaced. “They can look out for themselves. Come on. Every second wasted narrows our chances.” It seemed unnecessary to expound upon the fact that their chances were already as narrow as the leg of an emaciated giraffe.

  Miss Barrow was having none of it. She shook off his hand. “Why did you come back?” she demanded through taut lips.

  “It wasn’t for you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you coming or not?” They glared at each other.

  Coming to a decision, she turned to the others. “If we stay here, we’ll die. Come on.”

  Two of them looked at her with eyes like hunted animals, but Lady Ninuka’s hunt was over. Her eyes were as glassy as a vixen’s in a museum. “Daddy,” she said with faint certainty. “Daddy will make everything right.” She hugged Marechal’s corpse more tightly yet, a still point in a shattering world.

  Miss Ambersleigh moved to follow her, but Miss Barrow stopped her. “I have to go to her,” said Miss Ambersleigh. “I have a duty.”

  “Your duty is discharged. She has made her choice. Come with us.”

  Miss Ambersleigh started to protest, but paused, looking regretfully at Lady Ninuka. “Orfilia?” she said, querulously. Her voice was lost in the winds that were singing over the edges of broken glass. Then, more firmly, “Orfilia! You must come with me! Come at once!”

  Lady Ninuka did not respond at all. She simply held her father and stared into nothingness.

  “It would be kinder to leave her here,” said Cabal, noting that — just for once — it was possible for the best course of action also to be the most convenient.

  “Such a wilful girl,” Miss Ambersleigh said in an undertone. Then, to Miss Barrow, “Very well, I shall go with you.” She turned to Herr Roborovski. “Sir? You must come, too.”

  He shook his head. “This is all my fault. It was my idea to disguise the ship. I never expected all this to happen. I swear.” The words tumbled out of him, thick with despair. “DeGarre, he was a great man, a hero to me. I had no idea what they would do to him. It was barbaric. It’s all my fault.”

  “That’s settled then,” said Cabal. “Can we go now?”

  Miss Barrow waved him to silence, much to his irritation. “Herr Roborovski, can you fly an entomopter?”

  The unexpected question confused him out of his desolation. “What? Yes. Yes, I can.”

  Cabal understood immediately. “Ideal. Both Marechal’s machine and the trainer I stole are two-seaters. His isn’t as damaged as I suggested; I just said that to aggravate him. Two pilots. Two passengers. This should work. We just need to get to the flight deck before impact.”

  Ascending to the flight deck was both easier and harder to achieve than expected. Cabal had come down from there to the first-class deck via an access spiral stairwell that ran through all the decks. The doors from the circular well to each deck were secured by a door that opened easily going from the
well to the deck, but which required a key to enter from all the passenger decks. Cabal had taken a minute to disable the lock when exiting the stairwell, and this foresight saved them a lot of time. The actual ascent, however, was accomplished in a claustrophobic metal tube, standing several storeys high, that was swinging violently, the bulkhead lights flickering on and off, sometimes leaving them in darkness for minutes at a time. Miss Ambersleigh faltered once, telling them to go on without her, but a remark from Cabal on the ephemeral nature of “British pluck” caused her to suddenly start climbing again in a stony, uncomplaining silence. Miss Barrow was going to congratulate Cabal on his grasp of psychology when she realised that he’d meant it.

  At least they had not had to contend with crewmen running from deck to deck; the men were already at their emergency stations, and it would take a direct order from a superior to make them leave. Besides, even though most probably knew the ship was doomed, there was nowhere to run; Mirkarvia subscribed to the view that providing parachutes would only encourage indiscipline and the giving up of the ship when the situation was not yet irrecoverable. Even an experienced crew weighed less on the balance sheet than a combat aeroship.

  It was a relief to reach the small room at the top of the stairwell. In its narrow confines, bad-weather gear swung on coat hooks, and equipment clanged heavily against the inside of wall-mounted lockers. On one side, a shallow metal staircase rose upwards, where twin doors were set into the ceiling. Cabal climbed quickly up to them and undogged the handles, before pushing upwards hard. The doors swung open and clanged down onto the flight deck, revealing a great blue rectangle of sky above.

  The little party climbed out into a howling gale. The crew had managed to stabilise the Princess Hortense’s wild pitching and yawing, but the levitators were barely keeping the ship airborne. A crash landing on the forested slopes with who knew what exposed boulders and rocky outcrops beneath would be like driving a frigate onto a reef. She was a strong ship, but she had never been designed to suffer that sort of punishment. The only alternative was to run her for the Katamenian border in a headlong rush, hoping to clear the forest and put her down in the pasturelands beyond. Without full power, however, she was caught in a slow, blundering, onward wallow. The Hortense was drawing to disaster as surely as any storm-torn galleon caught with a rocky coast to leeward.