The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘They’re a cruel lot around here, aren’t they?’ she whispered to Cabal.

  ‘It is Hell. A reasonable facsimile of it, at least.’

  She accepted the point, but added, ‘I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so petty. Something more grandiose. But they seem to be content to practise the little sins of neglect that we see every day on the streets of any metropolis.’

  Cabal looked at her askance. ‘You expected better?’

  ‘Yes. It’s silly, but I was. Selfishness is the real root of all evil, but I thought we would see it grown here into extraordinary forms. Instead we have poverty and beggary while the powerful live up in the grand house and ignore it, as do their lickspittles. This is no more Hell than is London.’

  ‘Well…’ began Cabal, but the thought was lost as they arrived at the needle’s gatehouse.

  * * *

  The grand reception to the needle was situated within a huge blockhouse sufficient to contain the Royal Albert Hall, should it ever be stolen and require a place to hide it. Nor is ‘blockhouse’ an entirely undeserved description. Yes, it had columns—many columns—and buttresses and crenellations and all manner of other architectural details that most architects spend a lifetime keeping out of the same building at the same time for fear of causing some sort of aesthetic overload. Yes, it was grand and impressive. Yes, it was all of these things and yet it still felt very, very military in nature. It was a barracks for hordes of demons who—the expedition noted as De’eniroth and De’zeel greeted and were greeted in return—were of the same mind as their guides; that is, very little mind for anything at all but an easy life. These were the ranks of the easily persuaded, those of weathercock loyalties and a finger or other useful appendage kept permanently moistened for the speedy discovery of which way the wind blew.

  It was hardly surprising that Hell had an embarrassment of such treacherous riches; it was, after all, a land of opportunities for the disloyal and inconstant, and reliable unreliability is a sort of constancy in itself. What was perhaps a little more surprising was that they had thrown over any number of other opportunities to turn their coats in favour of hitching the flickering lanterns of their fidelity to a minor player such as Ratuth Slabuth. Yes, he had once been one of Lucifer’s generals, but more by dint of his accountancy and organisational skills. As unlikely successions went, it was of an order with Attila the Hun being usurped by his tailor.

  However he had managed to worm his way to the top of the pile, it was plain his was not a popular government. Lucifer had managed affairs using a sort of laissez-faire style that verged on not caring at all, enforced with occasional and terrible displays of merciless force against detractors and troublemakers. Lucifer had few rules and allowed Hell to more or less run itself, which, given how easily the minds of many of his subjects ran to chaos and turmoil, was possibly wise. If he had demonstrated any great genius for the position at all, it had been knowing the right demon for the right job, and in keeping the unaligned devils out of the main part of Hell so they might not sow resentment by the simple fact of their being.

  It had been light-touch management carried to its extreme, but given that Hell’s basic function was to be beastly to the souls of the damned and given that being beastly was very much a default position for the majority of demons, it had worked well enough. Even Lucifer’s later adoption of cribbage and macramé to the horrors of the pit had worked surprisingly well. The truth of it was that an eternity of very much anything becomes torture after a while.

  Ratuth Slabuth, in contrast, was the micro-manager from Hell in all senses. He had somehow engineered a coup (and probably done so using a lot of diagrams and a ream of graph paper) and rationalised the operations of Hell. It was probably far more efficient, but it was also hugely disruptive to creatures that enjoyed their own brands of huge disruption and didn’t care for Ratuth’s paginated, verified, and cross-checked version in the slightest. Hence the blockhouse.

  Cabal had noted no other entrance visible in the cleared area around the needle’s base and this did not surprise him. The needle was obviously a military structure predicated primarily on defence, and castles do not usually have a preponderance of entrances. Ratuth Slabuth was plainly not a popular ruler, and revolution threatened his reign of error.

  There was considerable surliness on the part of the guardian demon in the reception blockhouse, although this was as likely due to the presence of De’eniroth and De’zeel as anything else; it seemed they garnered little respect amongst their peers. That offhandedness vanished on the instant that De’zeel announced—with sufficient dropped aspirates to power a family of Cockneys for six months—that the lady with all the legs was none other than Mistress Zarenyia, Devil of the Outer Darkness and Casual Severer of Limbs.

  As had been the case with De’eniroth and De’zeel, this was all that was required to turn demons that looked like huge tripedal rhinoceroses crossed with praying mantises, armoured in pitted iron and carrying swords the size of windmill sails, into oleaginous waiters on discovering a crown prince with generous tipping habits has taken a table in their section. Cabal and Miss Smith tried not to look too embarrassed by all the inexpert fawning going on. Zarenyia, however, was very much in her element.

  ‘Boys, boys, boys!’ she laughed, in this case a mild admonition rather than a declaration of her diet. ‘Don’t crowd a girl. Such rude boys. It may come to spankings if you carry on like this much longer.’

  ‘Sorry, miss,’ muttered the largest of the behemoths, somehow managing to blush through eighteen inches of armour plate. ‘We’re just really excited to see you.’

  ‘She gets that a lot,’ said Cabal, but no one was paying him any attention at all.

  The behemoth was still talking. ‘Satan ordered your presence weeks ago, and will be very happy that you are here.’

  ‘Weeks ago? But, poppet, even I didn’t know I’d be here weeks ago.’

  The behemoth frowned, causing some of its skull armour to bend such was the puissance of even its facial muscles. ‘No, Mistress Zarenyia, we are surprised to find you here. Satan sent search parties to the outer darkness.’

  ‘He did?’ Cabal noticed even Zarenyia’s natural ebullience faltered in the face of this intelligence. ‘That’s very … satanic of him. You must have lost a lot of demons doing that.’

  The behemoth shrugged. It was like watching a hillock during a highly localised seismic event. ‘All of them. But you’re here now, so that doesn’t matter! Huzzah!’

  Zarenyia cast an uncertain sideways glance at Cabal. ‘Yippee,’ she said.

  * * *

  As they progressed onward through the gatehouse and into the needle proper, so the entourage grew. Cabal was unsurprised to see that De’eniroth and De’zeel were now merely hangers-on, despite protesting their pivotal role in events to anyone who would listen, but no one would. He was more surprised and, it must be said, faintly insulted to discover that he was also very much on the edge of the spotlight. If he had been asked to explain why he, Johannes Cabal, necromancer, freelance sociopath, and lurker in the shadows, was so put out by the lack of attention being put his way, he would have laughed an abrupt, unconvincing laugh and said he was perfectly content not to be the centre of attention. It really would have been a terrifically unconvincing laugh, however, and the questioner would have to be a gullible muggins of the most credulous sort to accept it as anything but the dissembling of a peeved man. It was probably not envy nearly so much as a sense of a perturbation in the rightness of things. He, after all, was Johannes Cabal, and he had gone to pains to make himself unpopular in Hell, albeit as a side effect of other endeavours. Yet here was Zarenyia, a devil and therefore inimical to the hierarchies of Hell, being fawned over as if she were a successful young actress who had wandered into the Society of Roués.

  His increasingly vile mood was not improved by the prospect of traipsing up the thousands of steps necessary to attain the tip of the needle, where Ratuth Slabuth no doubt maintained
his throne room. That this burden was removed from him gave him no joy, however.

  The very centre of the needle was hollow, an immensely deep shaft that started wide and narrowed in similarity to the angles of the outer wall. Running in a dizzying helix up the side of the shaft was exactly the staircase Cabal had anticipated and feared. He noted it did not seem to have a handrail, another of Hell’s grotesque Health & Safety failings. He did not savour the thought of climbing it in the slightest.

  He decided to start with the rhetorical, thereby giving himself the opportunity to wax wrathful subsequently. After gaining the attention of the lead behemoth with some difficulty, he gestured up into the great spiral of stairs that wound up into the gloom above. ‘Do you honestly expect us to walk all the way up those steps?’ he demanded.

  The behemoth looked at him as if he were an idiot, which, coming from something that looked not quite as intellectual as a side of beef in a helmet, felt understandably insulting.

  ‘No,’ it said, and the tone it took in no way alleviated the sense of insult. ‘You’ll fly.’

  ‘Fly?’ Now it was Cabal’s turn to treat his interlocutor as a dimwit. ‘Do I look like I have wings?’

  ‘No,’ agreed the behemoth, ‘but she does.’

  ‘She?’ was all Cabal had time to say before a pair of arms snaked around him beneath his armpits.

  ‘Relax, and let me take care of everything,’ whispered a female voice in his ear that bore distinct similarities of timbre to certain of Zarenyia’s utterances. Usually the ones just before she fed.

  Abruptly, he was airborne. His startled yelp drew the attention of Zarenyia herself, whose face hardened immediately when she took in Cabal’s very tactile new friend.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ she said, and her voice was cold enough to coalesce carbon dioxide snow from the air. Cabal thought for a strange moment she was talking to him, but then the voice by his ear said, ‘Don’t worry, Mistress Zarenyia. I shan’t break him.’ And so saying, Cabal found himself borne up into the sulphured atmosphere of the needle shaft.

  ‘That woman had wings,’ said Miss Smith, more to assure herself she was not delusional than as a useful statement of fact.

  ‘Succubus,’ said Zarenyia, her face thunderous. ‘I’ll give her “Shan’t break him”. Get aboard!’

  ‘Aboard?’ said Miss Smith, vainly looking about for a train, or a steamboat, or possibly a balloon. She was still looking when one of the devil’s forelimbs grasped her around the midriff and all but threw her onto Zarenyia’s back, where the great curved spiderlike abdomen joined the distinctly humanlike torso.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Zarenyia, and leapt to the nearby curve of the staircase. Miss Smith grunted at the impact, but barely had time to draw breath before Zarenyia set off in hot pursuit of the hapless necromancer.

  She did not, however, charge up the staircase. Instead, she headed straight up the wall, the tips of the great armoured legs somehow adhering to a surface that was not merely sheer, but that angled in some degrees past the vertical. Miss Smith suddenly found herself in dire straits; angora is not the easiest material upon which to gain a grip and she was forced to find the bare skin of Zarenyia’s midriff.

  ‘What are you doing back there?’ said the devil, not censoriously.

  Miss Smith could only make a startled squeal for an answer, for Zarenyia was now entirely inverted beneath the next turn of the staircase and Miss Smith’s grip slid further up. She was sure that if she didn’t fall to her doom, she would instead simply die of embarrassment. She prided herself on an outgoing sort of personality open to new experiences. Inadvertently touching up a spider-devil, however, was nowhere to be found on her to-do list.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she managed to blurt as Zarenyia flipped around the staircase’s edge and brought them both the right way up once more. ‘I’m so very sorry! I didn’t mean…’

  ‘I know you didn’t, but it’s sweet of you to apologise. The fault is mine, though. I keep forgetting humans can’t just stick to things like a normal person. We need a different strategy if we’re to keep you safe.’ She looked about her on the level of the needle onto which they had emerged. ‘This way!’ she cried as if Miss Smith had any say in the matter, and set off at a canter towards a double door built into a shallow archway.

  ‘What’s through here?’ she gasped out, clinging on for second life and only soul.

  Zarenyia’s canter broke into a gallop. ‘No idea. Let’s find out, shall we?’

  The doors were as massive as anything else in that dizzying tower, a construction of such Brobdingnagian scale as to make Cyclopes suck their teeth and say it was a bit much for their taste. Yet the foot-thick wood shivered under the impact of single-minded devil legs and smashed open to allow the passage of Zarenyia and her dismayed passenger. Nor was she the only dismayed one there; they were in one of Hell’s many halls of records wherein sins were tabulated, tallied, assimilated, and, where applicable, marked with a gold star for a job well done. All the minor paper-shuffling was performed by a positive legion of administrative imps and several score were currently present, mainly engaged in throwing armfuls of carefully ordered documents into the air while scattering from the devil’s headlong passage, all while squealing in the time-honoured manner of the swine of Gadarene.

  Zarenyia honoured their presence in as far as she halloed, ‘Stand clear! Make a hole! Get out of the way, you frightful little vermin!’ ahead of her, but she neither moderated her heading nor her speed by so much as a jot. Filing cabinets were flung aside, imps were accidentally speared on arachnoid legs, desks were overturned in the charge. The noise was cacophonous, the chaos wholesale.

  Miss Smith realised that she was enjoying herself.

  Even when she realised Zarenyia’s course was taking them directly towards a wide bay window that looked out across the shanty town outside, and the blood sand plain within, she was not affrighted. Instead she tightened her grip, narrowed her eyes, and trusted to her new and unusual companion.

  For her part, Zarenyia slowed a little as her spinneret and hind legs got busy. Under her abdomen they delivered to her a length of twined silk—still sticky—and this Zarenyia took by the ends in her human hands and swung the centre up and over both their heads in the manner of a skipping rope. The silk caught Miss Smith in the small of the back, and then she was drawn close as Zarenyia pulled on it with a modicum of her inhuman strength. Once she was forcibly spooned against Zarenyia’s back, the devil quickly knotted it around her own waist.

  ‘There,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘That will keep you much safer. Feel free to hang on with your arms, though. I shan’t be troubled by it, truly. I don’t really have a concept of over-familiarity, you see.’

  Miss Smith could see, and embraced Zarenyia tightly. Devil and witch grinned fiercely at one another.

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Zarenyia. ‘We’re having such fun together!’ And then she jumped out of the window.

  The imps of Satan’s needle were long inured to odd noises; permanent residents of Hell get used to almost anything. There was, however, an unfamiliarity in the pace, magnitude, and variety of odd noises they were experiencing that day. The ones who happened to look from the windows stood the best chance of seeing exactly what was causing all the fuss.

  Galloping up the side of the needle came a spider-devil of the succubine variety, laughing uproariously, and upon her back rode a woman in black wearing an ebon crown, joyfully whooping and using such profane language that the imps simply had nowhere to look. Up and up they raced, wrecking gargoyles* and smashing windows as they went. It was all probably accidental. Probably. Debris, laughter, and salty invectives were left in their wake, and the imps could only assume a hen party was in progress.

  Finally, they attained the top of the needle, or very nearly the top in any case. It was clear that the needle’s tip was given over to a tall throne room with open verandas about it upon which Satan and his senior management could look down upon the les
ser evils. These had banister rails upon them, the safety of those who frequented such elevated heights obviously deemed much more important than those beneath them in both social and physical terms.

  Upon one such rail, a silken cord as thick as a man’s thumb yet strong enough to garrotte Mount Eiger suddenly wrapped and gripped. Upon the other end of the cord swung upwards and into view Zarenyia and Miss Smith, Zarenyia’s legs rapidly working as she drew the cord back to her. They swung up past the horizontal, and had attained the veranda before they had time to fall back. The cord detached, and they thundered into the presence of Satan with rather less than a ‘by your leave’.

  They got there moments after Cabal, whom they discovered staggering around in a state of great agitation, his face grey, and dangerously close to hyperventilation. Zarenyia’s delight vanished at the sight of him. She snapped the cord binding Miss Smith to her in a single furious spasm.

  ‘Get down, darling,’ she said. ‘Things are going to get messy.’

  ‘We’ll take them all on.’ Miss Smith glowered at the shocked ranks of hellish aristocracy arrayed thereabouts.

  ‘A sweet thought, but I’m only interested in one presently. And she is mine.’

  Cabal was walking in roughly their direction, but his legs were weak beneath him, and the line of his walk was desultory and wandering. He pointed back at the succubus who had carried him to the needle’s apex.

  ‘That … woman … took liberties. With … with…’ Cabal, for once, found himself unable to express his feelings. ‘All the way up the … up here … she touched … she did…’

  ‘Hush, hush, sweetness.’ Zarenyia had, in the many years of her existence, destroyed many lives, devoured many souls. She was sure she was inured to suffering, having been the author of so much of it herself. Yet from somewhere in her, the sweet tones she had so often employed as a weapon were here used softly and with sympathy and, for once, without simulation. ‘You don’t have to say anything. I know exactly what she did.’