‘Good-oh!’ said Zarenyia.
* * *
Cabal opened his ubiquitous Gladstone bag and removed the small tripod with the telescopic legs from which depended the silver plumb upon its silver chain. He set this up beneath the gaze of Zarenyia, who regarded it all with the least possible interest, saving her attention and commentary for the wardrobes of the assembled spectres of those who had never died, having never lived.
Cabal in return ignored her notes upon that man’s novel fez with the mechanical mice peeking from it, or that bishop’s mitre of golden crystal, or that near-naked slave’s natural charms. Around the throne of the emperor, and the subordinate thrones of 7 kings, the ranks of 62 dukes, of 256 counts and marquises, 12 archbishops and 20 bishops, Zarenyia wandered, and none escaped without some comment, her well of observation proving bottomless, her expression boundless, her conclusions pointless, but diverting for all that.
It was only when Cabal produced a syringe that her interest was piqued by the business in hand.
‘Oh, narcotics! How very exciting. What will that do to you?’
Cabal regarded the syringe, then her, and decided this was going to become unnecessarily complicated. In this, he was perfectly correct.
‘The drug will dull my mind, allowing me to enter the light trance necessary to precipitate the creation of a portal to the first of the pocket realities we must explore.’
‘Dull your mind,’ repeated Zarenyia, calculation upon her mind. ‘A light trance.’ She crouched by Cabal and looked him in the eye. ‘You only had to ask, darling. You don’t have to resort to polluting your pretty little body to manage that.’
Cabal didn’t like the way the conversation was going at all. He sought respite in technicality. ‘The technique is recognised. Indeed, I have experienced entirely satisfactory effects…’
‘I’m sure you have, and now it’s time for some new satisfactory effects.’ She gently knocked the barrel of the syringe to one side with her index finger. ‘Now hush and let me take care of you.’
‘Madam Zaren—’
She lifted the same finger and placed it to his lips. ‘Hush,’ she said with a subtle change of emphasis, taking it from a suggestion to an imperative too compelling to require anything so gross as an exclamation mark.
‘—yeeuhhhh…’ managed Cabal, the last syllables of her name turning to molten butter on his tongue, a process his mind seemed to be emulating. Cabal had, upon his first acquaintance with the devil some years previously, wondered how a woman with eight legs made such an infallible seductress given the prevalence of arachnophobia amongst the common people. He had subsequently seen her practise her wiles, which—although educational in its own way—had not sufficiently clarified why her lovers and victims (a tautology) so signally failed to appreciate that physical congress with a diabolical half-spider monster might not conclude with any sort of happy ending that they could later appreciate.
Now, and accepting the point that she was currently passing for human, he understood all too well. Back in the days when he ran a carnival, one of his hellish crew had belonged to the same order as Zarenyia, and she had carried a troubling air of incipient control around with her, too. On that occasion, however, he had never had the displeasure or otherwise of having that mien exerted upon him.
‘There,’ said Zarenyia in little more than a whisper. ‘There you go. Easy to become stupid for me, isn’t it?’
Part of Cabal was outraged by this assertion. It was positing explanations for the effect he was currently experiencing. Pheromones, perhaps. A supernatural hypnogogic agent exuded from her skin, and thence through his lips into his blood. A magical effect. As he considered these, his small internal committee grew smaller and quieter, until there was near silence in his mind. It was blissful.
‘Now,’ said Zarenyia. She straightened back to a stand and looked down upon him with that habitual, small smile on her lips. ‘Now you’re all dull, just like you wanted. And no nasty drugs. Say “thank you”.’
Cabal made two small grunts that certainly sounded like ‘Thank you’ when they left the speech centres of his brain, but which seemed to have turned into syntactic porridge on the short run to his larynx, tongue, and lips.
Still, they sufficed. ‘You’re welcome.’ She gestured vaguely at the court of ghosts. ‘Now perform your wonderment, Johannes. Take us where we are supposed to be.’
Cabal lowered his eyes to the dusty stone beneath his knees, and his mind twitched in a reflexive, simple way that was far too mundane for him to cogitate in the normal run of affairs. The silver plumb weight swung violently upon its tripod, so violently that first this foot then that lifted. Then the tripod fell over as if kicked, the contraption tumbled onto its side, and the slight musical tinkle it made as metal tapped against metal seemed to raise the curtain upon an entirely new theatre.
The mirage that was the court of Prester John flicked away in that moment as if it were merely a reflection cast upon the glass of a deeper reality. A truer, hidden reality. A terrible reality.
It takes a great deal to frighten a devil, and Zarenyia was frightened. ‘Johannes!’ she cried. ‘What have you done? Look where you have brought us! Pandæmonium!’
* * *
Angular plains crouched incipient and frangipane beneath a sky full of everything. If one took a surrealist of the first water, dosed him upon the most efficacious hallucinogens available, then took him to sit in Cthulhu’s parlour for an afternoon, and finally gave him art materials to express the resultant inner landscape, it would still have looked like Market Rasen High Street on a wet bank holiday afternoon in comparison to Pandæmonium, and surely this locale was just as pandæmonius as all that?
Yes, but no. It certainly seemed like Pandæmonium, Hell’s parliament eternally adrift in the spoil heap of the Abyss where Satan dumps his mistakes. But as awareness returned to the briefly enfeebled mind of Johannes Cabal, so did his rationality, and he was able to settle Zarenyia’s mind just as easily as she had previously dulled his.
‘No. Calm yourself. Pandæmonium possesses no natural ground, only the floors within the building proper. I grant you, there is a superficial similarity, but that is entirely due to the state of the sky, and that in turn is a result of an unfinished creation. It is a cousin of the Abyss, I admit, but it certainly is not the Abyss.’
Zarenyia looked around, trying to bring herself back under control. Cabal wondered what had happened since the last time he met her, that the Abyss had gone from a mild concern to a consuming terror.
‘You’re sure?’ She looked at him seeking confirmation as a drowning man reaches for a straw.
‘Madam, have I turned into a fish?’
She considered this. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You haven’t turned into a fish.’
At her first sight of the insane sky, she had instinctively drawn her head down, shying from the wrath of a cantankerous Lucifer. Now she straightened and looked at him and then the sky with full confidence.
‘You’re not a fish, so it isn’t the Abyss.’
‘I feel no chaotic effects upon me, and for that I am grateful and relieved. The fish business is not something I care to repeat.’
‘You made an adorable hake.’
‘Madam,’ Cabal said with great dignity, ‘I was a halibut.’*
Matters of piscine nomenclature satisfied, the subject moved onto where exactly they had found themselves.
‘I understand your concerns, madam. The sky certainly has a certain abyssal quality to it, but the rest of the environment is a very different thing.’ He looked around the blasted wasteland, a frown forming. ‘Very different indeed.’
‘That’s your “I’m having a clever thought” voice,’ observed Zarenyia. ‘I know that voice anywhere. What is your clever thought, darling?’
‘“Clever” is a very subjective thing—’
‘But you think you’re terrifically clever, so we’ll just take that for read, shall we? What’s the thought?’
‘I have seen somewhere like this before.’
‘Well, it is a graveyard. That’s like a social club to a necromancer, surely?’
‘Matter of the unsociable natures of necromancers aside, yes, but no. When I say I have seen somewhere—been somewhere like this before—I do not speak of generalities. There is a distinct sense of—’
He broke off, staring down the ragged vale. Zarenyia allowed her practised disinterest a pause long enough to say, ‘Whatever is the matter, Johannes? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Oh!’ She matched the direction of his gaze with excitement. ‘Is it haunted? Tell me it’s haunted!’
Cabal said nothing in reply, however. He started to walk in the direction of whatever had caught his attention, first in a distracted manner, then with determination, and then he started to run, leaving a baffled but increasingly enthused Zarenyia in his wake.
‘Is there danger?’ she called after him. ‘Is it dangerous? Should we make ready? Or something?’ He did not reply. ‘Good enough for me,’ she said to herself, and erupted into legs, and knees, and angora, her previous outfit flittering away into the gaps between realities where she kept her spare clothes. If you should be walking and, suddenly and unaccountably, smell lavender and mothballs, you may just have passed a corner of Zarenyia’s intra-dimensional closet.
Resplendent in her natural form and exultant to no longer have to totter around in that ridiculous manner, Zarenyia rose to her not inconsiderable greatest height, shouted, ‘I’ll save you!’ despite there being no obvious threat, and galloped in pursuit of her friend, the funny human Johannes.
She reached him as he stood before a small funereal building of the sort that leads down to a family crypt. Its door swung open. Cabal stood before it as if it were the most horrible thing he had ever seen.
‘Stand back!’ she cried. ‘Let me protect you from this … building…’ She pursed her lips, and added conversationally, ‘I’m not sure you’re in peril at all.’
Cabal seemed not to hear. He reached out and lifted the door’s padlock from where it dangled open on the frame’s hasp. It was in far better condition than the mouldering stone it had once been set to protect, a very practical artefact in stainless steel. He looked at it aghast, as if he held his own heart in his hand.
‘Padlock,’ Zarenyia said informatively.
‘It pays’—Cabal spoke in a low, dreadful voice, his thoughts materialising on his lips—‘to invest in quality.’ He looked up at the lintel above the door. Engraved in the stone was the name DRUIN. ‘Oh, gods. What place is this? What have I done in coming here?’
‘Oooh.’ Zarenyia found the change in Cabal’s mood unengaging. ‘Angsty. I didn’t think you were one of those necromancers.’
‘You don’t understand.’ Cabal walked a little way to lean against a table tomb, from where he regarded the crypt building with a strange mixture of disbelief and, just perhaps, fear.
‘Bingo! I don’t understand. As a word to the wise, I recommend you tell me why this ragged little stone box has put your knickers in a twist. Please don’t be enigmatic. I’ve killed people for saying “I’ll explain later”. Delayed gratification and I are not the best of chums.’
‘It’s the Druin crypt.’
‘I can read.’
‘I’ve been to it twice in my life. The first time I…’
He looked unhappily at Zarenyia. She wagged her finger at him, then used the same finger to draw across her throat while she made a horrible cutting noise. ‘That’s what being enigmatic will do for you. Fess up. What happened?’
‘You said you wouldn’t harm me.’
‘True. But, you know, I’m a devil. We’re good at the whole loopholes palaver. I hate doing that usually, but who knows what awful things I may stoop to if provoked by my little pal Johannes being enigmatic and abstruse at me?’ She lowered her voice, and the smile vanished. ‘Pretty bloody awful things, that’s what.’
‘I inadvertently abandoned my brother in there.’
‘And inadvertently locked the door? This is your brother the vampire, yes?’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Wait a moment … is this why he’s a vampire?’ Cabal did not answer, which was answer enough. She laughed. ‘Well, aren’t you the loving brother?’
‘I had no choice.’
‘I’m sure. And the second time was to let him out again? How long did you leave him to stew?’
Cabal muttered something, but Zarenyia’s hearing was as supernatural as the rest of her.
‘Eight years?’
‘Yes. I’m not proud of it.’
Zarenyia shrugged. ‘I don’t care if you are or not. My moral compass is…’ She considered. ‘I’m not at all sure I have one. I’m sure you had your reasons for abandoning your brother to eight years of frustrated vampirism in somebody else’s tomb. My main bone of contention is … what the Lucifer’s cribbage board is it doing here? I thought this wasn’t a real place.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘I thought you said these places had been created donkey’s years ago as a way of hiding the Fountain of Grails, or whatever it is you think you’re going to find.’
‘It was.’
‘Well, kindly explain to my poor womanly brain why it has a sky like the Abyss and a landscape scattered with aide-mémoirs to your family squabbles.’ She squatted back on the loom of her legs so their knees rose like the tusks around the throne of Prester John himself. ‘Have you the faintest idea what you have got yourself and—I remind you—your poor ill-done-to brother, Horst, the delightful Miss Leonie, and my very own lovely self into? Honestly, Johannes, you’re supposed to be the clever one. I’m very disappointed.’
Few things could snap Johannes Cabal back to acerbity with greater rapidity than personal criticism. ‘I do not know,’ he said slowly and deliberately. ‘Yet. This is not how the book presented matters. Yet it was so accurate in other particulars. Therefore, I must conclude that the book’s author simply never travelled through into these places—’
‘Or deliberately lied?’ Zarenyia’s eyes went wide at this revelation. Then she smiled broadly, a big, childish grin of delight. ‘Oh, I hope the latter! Don’t you see what that would mean, darling?’
She looked around the bitter wasteland, the tumbled tombs, the festering sky as if it were the first sight of an empty beach on a summer’s bank holiday morning. ‘It’s a trap!’ She clapped her hands, all agog and gleeful. ‘So exciting!’
* * *
Cabal opined that it could only be a trap if it was impossible to leave the place using the route by which they had entered. This hypothesis, once mooted, was easily tested. They could not leave the place using the route by which they had entered.
Cabal swore volubly at this discovery, which served for a QED under the circumstances.
‘This is Ninuka’s doing. Possibly.’ He glared at the land of graves. Here was the one when he’d been interrupted by a nightwatchman. There was the one where the coffin had been full of bricks, resulting in a complicated few days subsequently. There was the … no, he wasn’t sure he had ever been in that tomb. Still, it looked familiar. ‘Although it seems overly complicated by her lights. How could she have known I would find the book and recognise it for its importance?’ He ruminated on this for a moment, disliked the answer that Ninuka was a great deal cleverer than he had given her credit, and ran that train of thought into a siding where it wouldn’t put his self-esteem at quite so much risk.
‘So, what to do?’ said Zarenyia. She was still delighted about the whole state of affairs, on the understanding that presently a horde of hirelings of their shadowy nemesis (i.e., Lady Ninuka) would turn up and she could kill them all, eventually.
‘There is little else we can do, except press on.’ Cabal lifted his bag from the unhealthy turf. He was unsure in which direction they
should press on to, exactly. Graves, crypts, and tombs scattered the land in every direction, and all looked just as uninviting as one another. As for that tomb … he looked at it again. He never forgot a tomb, but there was something ineffably evasive about it as it refused to present itself even as he mentally combed the memories of every graveyard, cemetery, burying ground, potter’s field, bone orchard, and boot hill he had ever had cause to drive a spade into. It wasn’t even that it was a commonplace design: an ancient and weather-aged pagoda some six yards in height, its surfaces plated in slabs of jade. Less a sombre place of rest than a folly or outré statement of the occupant or occupants’ worth, a last resting place for somebody of great import—at least in the mind of their estate—to dream away eternity, even as …
There must have been some subtle message in the way Cabal stumbled backwards, gazing eye-widened at the pagoda that tipped off Zarenyia to the possibility that all was not well with her comrade.
‘Is everything all right?’ she asked perspicaciously as Cabal fell over.
Cabal raised a quivering finger to point at the pagoda. ‘That … that … I know where I have seen it before…’
‘It’s not yours, is it? Have you had some thrilling foresight of the future and seen yourself carried in state within its emerald walls? Is that it? It is, isn’t it?’ She considered the building with a critic’s eye. ‘It’s very nice, isn’t it? I must confess, Johannes, it’s not the sort of place I expected you to end up interred. I was thinking something more along the lines of a ditch.’
‘No.’ Cabal recovered his feet and a few lamentable fragments of his dignity. ‘It isn’t mine. But I remember where I’ve seen it before, and it’s impossible that it should be here. Everything else’—he gestured broadly at the tumbling necropolis—‘has some personal resonance. This … shouldn’t even exist. Not here.’
Zarenyia rolled her eyes with impolite incomprehension. ‘Sorry, poppet, but I don’t have the first and foggiest idea what you are talking about. Why shouldn’t it be here if you’ve seen it in the real world? I say “real world” to be polite, of course. I mean that pit of a world you humans swarm about.’
The Fall of the House of Cabal Page 8