‘Your somatic punctuation dismays me, Madam Zarenyia. If you wish to emphasise speech, may I suggest speaking emphatically.’
‘I could do that, yes, but I’m terribly tactile. Anyway, I wished to suggest some irony in the term.’
‘By “reconnaissance in force”, you actually mean “let’s have a look and, if there aren’t too many, wade in and kill them”, I gather?’
‘Ohhhh, darling, I love it when you spot subtext.’
‘The spider-woman is purring,’ said Miss Smith in an undertone to Cabal.
‘Spiders do purr; didn’t you know that?’ Belatedly Miss Smith realised just how acute the devil’s senses were. ‘Why, they’re just as cute as lickle puddycats.’
Miss Smith quickly and wisely changed the subject. ‘Just beyond that rise. That’s the witch’s home.’
* * *
With some difficulty, Cabal managed to talk Zarenyia into adopting a stealthier form. Grumbling, she crushed her aft body down into something more human, although this time she dispensed with the French couture and adopted a green twill suit and walking shoes.
‘You look like a Bavarian lesbian,’ said Miss Smith, purely as an observation.
Zarenyia was delighted. ‘Exactly the effect I was trying for, Liebling!’ She produced an alpine hat with a small orange feather in its band and clapped it on her head. ‘Don’t I look fiercely practical?’ She winked at Miss Smith, who coughed and looked away to hide an unexpected blush.
‘Is there anyone you don’t flirt with?’ Cabal asked as they crept to the top of the rise.
‘You, in case you haven’t noticed,’ she whispered back. ‘We’re friends, I hope. If you wish to dally in my webbed bower, you need only ask. I shan’t be dragging you off there using my usual wiles of saucy suggestiveness. Also magic. Some chemicals, too, but it’s all mainly down to how bloody good I am at what I do.’
‘You neglected to mention mesmerism,’ said Cabal, a little tautly.
‘Oh, yes. The ’fluence. Hope you’re not still upset about it? It was for the best.’
‘True.’ Logic could often mollify Cabal. ‘It was for the best.’
They reached the ridge line and paused there. Cabal took a small pair of binoculars from his bag. ‘I shall go alone. One head on the near horizon may avoid detection where three will not.’ Taking it as read that the one head would be his, and ignoring the crabby expressions Miss Smith and Zarenyia were no doubt lavishing upon him as he crawled the last few feet, Cabal crested the hill and looked down upon their new enemies.
The binoculars were hardly necessary; he was looking down a distance of perhaps five feet to where a pack of twenty or so ghouls were creeping up to meet them. The ghoul in the lead saw Cabal appear and grinned at him, its ears standing to attention like those of an inquisitive Dobermann.
‘Hello!’ said the ghoul.
‘Hello,’ said Johannes Cabal with a great deal less enthusiasm.
* * *
The ghoul pack swarmed over them, but with no obvious intent to hurt them. Instead they were bundled up in a multitude of rubbery arms and borne down the hill in the direction of the new witch’s lair.
Cabal gave Zarenyia a hard look as she allowed herself to be captured, but she just gave him a wonderfully happy smile in return and a wink so broad that they probably caught it on the Plateau of Leng that lies in desolation at the edge of everything. One or other of the creatures that frequent that damned place must surely have paused in its performance of horrors and thought, Did somebody just wink at me?
Down, down into the vale of the witch they were carried, the colours now the essence of lurid, the great fire before a tomb blazing in jagged tongues, the shadows dancing without nuance or graduation. Cabal looked about himself, his misgivings growing by the second. He had seen artificial realities before, but they had always seemed real within themselves. This was a parody of the real, a clumsy woodcut coloured by a child. He felt they were being carried into a volume of the Brothers Grimm.
Past the bonfire with its blaze of hot, papery flames they were carried in the very dictionary definition of ‘triumph’ until they arrived before the witch’s manse, an extraordinary tomb wrought in obsidian and white marble, crested in red and detailed in green. Statuary of satyrs and nymphs, cherubs and imps were caught in mid-frolic, mid-cavort in the unlikeliest combinations of imagery for a place of the dead. It was not of the real world, but wrought from the fantasies of an addled artist turning his hand to anything that might pay the rent and his exorbitant absinthe bill. It would then be entitled something along the lines of The Lair of the Witch Queen and subsequently used as the cover of a magazine for an audience whose imaginations ran hot.
Before the lair of the Witch Queen stood the Queen of Witches herself, less a formal title and more an excuse for fancy dress. And such a fancy dress; she was gorgeously arrayed in a great cloak of black velvet, trimmed in silver, and topped by the sort of excessive high collar that makes the matter of peripheral vision rather moot. Beneath the cloak she wore a dress of crimson silks with a décolletage that owed as much to the arts of structural engineering as couture. She herself was … very familiar.
‘You!’ cried Johannes Cabal.
He was taken aback to realise he had said it in unison with Zarenyia and Miss Smith. They looked at one another with reasonable surprise. Cabal recovered first.
‘You know Ninuka?’ he demanded of his comrades.
‘Ninuka?’ said Zarenyia. ‘You’re wrong. I know Udrolvexa. Has she been calling herself Ninuka, too? That would explain a lot.’
‘No,’ said Miss Smith, ‘that’s Tanith James, the hoity bitch. I’d know her anywhere. I gave her that scar myself.’
Cabal and Zarenyia looked as hard as they could, but there was no sign of a scar. Zarenyia raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, this is a rum do. We can’t all be right, surely? That would be pushing coincidence with some force for my least favourite colleague from the pits of Hell—and you will appreciate that I know some real stinkers—to moonlight as the bêtes noires of you two as well?’
Cabal’s attention had never left the Witch Queen. ‘No. We cannot all be correct, but we can all be wrong.’
The three of them were paraded before her and then secured by the wrists to a trio of great stakes around a fire. The stakes had definitely not been there when Cabal first spied the encampment, but now gave the impression that they had been there for days at least, to judge from the emerald turf grown up around their bases.
‘Oooh, bondage!’ Zarenyia’s smirk was quite unforgivable under the circumstances and unappreciated by either Miss Smith or Cabal.
‘Well, well, well,’ said the Queen of Witches on settling herself upon her throne of bones, which also definitely had not been there a moment previous.
‘Please,’ interrupted Cabal.
‘You beg for your life very easily,’ said the queen, her smirk no more forgivable than Zarenyia’s.
‘The only begging I was about to make was that you might save us the burden of listening to your villainous monologue, no doubt larded with icy, ringing laughter at dramatically correct intervals.’
The queen looked for a moment as if her temper was going to depart in a huff of ‘How dare you?’ and threats, but she reined it in, and the triumphant smile returned. ‘Do you even know who I am?’
‘I believe so. I believe that you are the natural sum of this place. You are the spirit of Nemesis.’
‘Tanith James is not my nemesis,’ whispered Miss Smith.
‘You either do her a disservice or think too much of yourself. The Lady Ninuka is undoubtedly mine, at least at a material level. There are certain entities to which I have caused some displeasure and whose powers are undoubtedly greater than Orfilia Ninuka’s, but I am not their main focus. She, however, has almost literally moved heaven, earth, and hell to revenge herself upon me. If I meet my death at any near date, there is a good chance it will be at her hands or those of her assigned agents. Search yo
ur heart, Miss Smith. You say you scarred this Jones woman; you think she does not hold undying enmity to you?’
Miss Smith started to speak, thought better of what she was about to say, and said, ‘But, I’m dead.’
‘But, you are also … were also a necromantrix. This Miss James you mention, what was her discipline?’
Miss Smith considered this, and her face fell, as if being tied to a stake before a bonfire by a clan of comic-book ghouls was insufficient grounds for upset.
‘My body was destroyed, though…’
‘I destroyed it myself.’ Cabal said it as if it were a gallant courtesy he had performed upon her mortal remains. In necromantic circles, it actually was. ‘But your spirit is extant, and you dwell within the Dreamlands, where you may be destroyed again, and finally, by anyone with a little knowledge and a great deal of animosity. Would that describe Tanith James?’
Miss Smith did not reply. Evidently the description fitted Tanith James to a T.
Cabal returned his attention to the Witch Queen. ‘As I was saying. You are the spirit of Nemesis. All three of us have powerful enemies, and you have embodied all of them in however it is that we perceive you. Well, now you have us. What do you intend to do now?’
‘Do?’ The Witch Queen laughed, and did so in an icy, ringing peal of malevolent amusement. ‘Why, destroy you, naturally.’
A stage whisper floated to Cabal from the direction of Zarenyia. ‘This is all part of your terribly clever plan, isn’t it, Johannes?’
‘Alas, no,’ he admitted. ‘I was not expecting this person to be a material metaphor. It’s very disappointing. So, unless my plan was for us all to die in the most embarrassingly asinine way imaginable—and it was not—then no, this is not all part of my terribly clever plan.’
‘Asinine,’ said the queen. ‘What do you mean, asinine?’
‘To be brief, madam (for your theatricality wears upon me), you are a conceptual embodiment of undying, personal animus. You currently represent in your uncertain way the three current banes of the lives of two of us, and the afterlife of the third.’
‘I know all that, Cabal (for your didacticism wears upon me).’
‘Touché, I am sure. I promised to be brief, and so I shall. You are a damp squib, madam. A foreshortening of expectations. A bathetic failure. You are Nemesis incarnate, yet you do not hate us. Instead you take the targets of real hatred from real people—’
‘And a real devil.’
‘Thank you, Madam Zarenyia. And a real devil, and dispose of them mechanically. For all your posturing, you feel no passion. For all your stagecraft, you experience no malefic desire. You take the raisons d’être from real people for no real purpose. You are a failure.’
‘Yes,’ said Zarenyia, taking up the theme and warming to it, ‘you’re nothing more than a big premature ejaculation. Mind you, where I’m concerned, it’s always a bit premature in a sense, if you take my—’
‘Madam.’
‘Sorry,’ said the devil. ‘Ever so.’ She made a gesture as if locking her lips with a key.
‘I do not care for your sophistries, necromancer,’ said the Queen of Witches. ‘You shall die here and now for…’ She paused, and looked to Zarenyia with puzzlement. ‘How did you make that gesture? Your hands are tied.’
Zarenyia lowered both hands, and the hempen bounds swayed in their wake. ‘Were tied, dear heart. If you’d been paying attention you’d have gathered I’m not human; rope bonds are a little insulting. So, past tense. My hands were tied. In much the same way your arms were attached to your shoulders.’
The Witch Queen looked like she was about to state the obvious, but that was the moment that Zarenyia decided that two legs were bad, eight legs were excellent, and any statements about the current locations of other limbs was lost in the sudden excitement.
‘Is this your terribly clever plan, darling?’ Zarenyia picked up a charging ghoul as she addressed Cabal. ‘Bring me along and just depend on me to kill everyone when things get fraught?’
‘In essence.’
‘I like it.’ She upended the ghoul and examined its nether regions. She curled her lip. ‘These aren’t proper ghouls at all. No genitalia. These are ghouls for maiden aunts. Piff. Boring old option B it is, then.’ And so saying, she broke the ghoul upon a raised and chitinous knee, throwing the dying monster aside to turn her attention to its irate colleagues.
Miss Smith caught Cabal’s eye. ‘Well. This is weird.’
Cabal nodded. ‘Coming from a witch whose soul inhabits a cemetery in the Dreamlands, that says a great deal, but I cannot argue with you.’ They watched Zarenyia go by, bucking like a wild horse, a ghoul impaled on one leg, and another held by the scruff of the neck being used as a flail to dislodge a third that had leapt upon her back. ‘There are certainly elements of the odd about our current situation. Madam! Madam Zarenyia! Perhaps if you freed us, we might be able to help?’
‘Busy!’ she called back, and she called it happily. Unrestricted violence was as cool water on a warm day to her. ‘Gotcha!’
A pair of faux-ghoul bodies, entangled and broken, went arcing over the stakes and into the bonfire.
‘No hurry.’ Cabal dangled listlessly from his bonds. ‘I’m sure we’ll find some way of amusing ourselves.’
‘That’s that passive-aggressiveness thing, isn’t it?’ Zarenyia regarded him with a jaundiced eye. ‘I’ve read about that in my magazines.’
And while Cabal was wrestling with the concept of magazine subscription services that deliver to Hell, and concluding that probably narrowed it down to The Reader’s Digest, a giant spiderish leg scythed over their heads, slicing off the tops of the stakes and through their bonds in a single action. Necromancer and graveyard witch tumbled to earth in a shower of wood chippings and undignified language.
Cabal climbed to his knees and rubbed circulation back into his wrists while shouting at his rescuer. ‘You almost had our hands off, madam!’
‘So ungrateful. They’d have grown back.’ And so, blissfully unaware of the limitations of cellular regeneration in humans, Zarenyia carried on tearing the ghouls that were not ghouls into lovely, rubbery pieces.*
By the time Cabal had recovered his bag and, more specifically, the Webley pistol of generous calibre that lay within it, there was little point in offering aid. Ghouls lay around in abandonment, some whole, most not, and all quite perfectly dead. Amidst the carnage, Zarenyia stood, scraping one of the vanquished from her leg.
‘That was fun. Brief, but energetic.’ She cast the corpse aside and performed a little spidery dance of victory. ‘I didn’t get to kill that Witch Queen character, though. Did you?’
Cabal and Miss Smith shook their heads; neither of them had noticed the queen’s escape, either. ‘We were hardly afforded the opportunity.’
‘Oh.’ Zarenyia looked around. ‘Bother. I’d say she constitutes a loose end, wouldn’t you?’
‘She may also be the key to our escaping this place. We must find her, and ideally not kill her.’ Cabal gave Zarenyia a significant look. ‘At least not until we’ve extracted any useful information from her.’
It seemed unlikely the spirit of Nemesis could have got very far, and philosophically unlikely that it would seek to go very far from them in any case. They therefore decided to search the crypts that lay within a small radius of the central structure and, since that radius permitted easy calling to one another, they would split up to do so, the quicker to be done. Agreeing that the immediate act of whosoever found the Nemesis Witch first would be to cry halloo to the others, they split the circle of their search into three sectors and went to work immediately.
* * *
Cabal decided to start, rationally enough, at the closest crypt, a prim box of pale sandstone. As he approached it, however, his eye was caught by one lying further away, indeed right at the edge of the search area. He could not say what drew his attention so certainly to this cottage of the dead. It was an unkempt sort of thing, asymmetric
with what seemed to be half a flying buttress to the left, the base long crumbled away. The design was of the new Gothik, a style for the pretentious surburbanite. The stone itself was soot-stained, surely snatched from some bourgeois district and dumped here in splendid isolation on the slope between two low hillocks. He did not recognise it at all, yet it seemed very familiar at the same time. Perhaps even comforting.
He walked to it almost in a dream, and his steps fell faster as he approached. This was the place, he was sure. This was where he would have hidden were he to have sought refuge in the curious graveyard, he was sure, but why he was sure, he could not say.
The door opened easily under his hand, a well-wrought thing of oak bound in iron strips, and swung noiselessly open. With only the slightest of hesitations, he entered.
The crypt’s interior was illuminated by gas mantels, which was a nice change from the usual pitch-darkness or, at best, guttering torches of his experience. Still, what sort of tomb has a gas meter? What sort of corpse can be depended upon to put a shilling in that meter when the lights grow dim?
Low alcoves to the right and directly ahead contained coffins and, unusually, he felt relief that they were whole and he could see no mortal remains. Not that he would take much glee in such a sight, it should be understood, but that corpses in every state from perfectly fresh all the way to mouldering bone and all the intermediate stages of rot and liquescence were so well-known to him as to have rendered him blasé. No, this was not a matter of squeamishness, or at least not of a merely sensual horror.
To the left a ladder leaned against the wall, and by it a grandfather clock, its glass nearly opaque with grime. Yet he could hear the steady tick of the mechanism’s escapement within the case. It was, all things considered, a very homely sort of tomb. He could only conclude that the Nemesis Witch had made this place hers and had her ersatz ghouls gather domestic comforts for her, up to and including an interdimensional gas pipe. He bit his lip at this point; either the ghouls were a great deal more ingenious than he had given them credit for, ridiculous cartoon caricatures that they were, or he was not truly understanding what had happened here, what was happening here, what this place meant. He did know, however, that the Nemesis Witch was here, and she was waiting for him at the foot of the steps that opened by the grandfather clock, the steps that led down into the cold, cruel clay.
The Fall of the House of Cabal Page 10