Horst looked at the approaching precipice. It did not seem so very far from the line’s anchor point. ‘Johannes? Bright ideas? Quickly?’
Cabal nodded at the silk. ‘That was my bright idea. It’s up to Madam Zarenyia now. We have done all that we can.’
* * *
Over the Ivory Citadel, Zarenyia and the second Satan struggled. Ratuth Slabuth made to climb over her to reach the line and safety, but she fought him back with her other legs, and he ended up back where he had started, dangling from her aft legs. Zarenyia kicked and struggled, but he refused to let go. She wished fervently that he had genitals; she could generally be very persuasive when genitals were involved and, as a last resort, she could always have kicked him in them. Alas, he was utterly asexual both physically and behaviourally. It was all most vexing.
Above her the tunnel to safety was flaking away into pieces that dissolved the moment after they were formed. She knew the Cabals would not have been able to anchor the line very much further along. Her time was short. Extreme measures were called for.
She looked down. ‘I think I shall just have to do without you.’
‘What?’ Ratuth Slabuth glared up at her. ‘I am Satan incarnate! You will not cast me aside easily, traitor!’
‘I wasn’t talking to you, you dull creature.’ She flexed her No. 3 legs and their bladed edges extended. Ratuth Slabuth had already dodged their attentions earlier and knew himself to be out of range where he was, clinging onto her No. 4 legs below their last joints and gripping hard enough to prevent them showing their own blades. He looked up past them to see Zarenyia grow dewy-eyed. ‘Bye, gals. I’ll miss you.’
Without a second’s further hesitation, the No. 3 legs hooked over the hindmost limbs close to where they joined what would have been the cephalothorax, if she had been a true spider rather than an infernal representation of one that carried its brain in the head of a humanlike superstructure. The legs closed sharply, scissoring through their neighbours. The rear limbs fell away, Ratuth Slabuth still clutching them hopelessly.
It would be nice to report that he said something clever, telling, or even poignant at this point, but all he managed was ‘Noooooooooooooooooooo!’ all the way down, predictable to the end.
He fell into a courtyard in the citadel. There was a brief milky miasma as of a fog rising and falling in a matter of five seconds or so. And then the Ivory Citadel was just as it had been a moment before, empty and enigmatic, the colour of old bone. No ghosts wandered its corridors, for ghosts were far too alive for it to tolerate.
So perished Ratuth Slabuth, also known as Ragtag Slyboots, also known as Satan (albeit briefly).
* * *
Johannes and Horst Cabal watched with growing dismay the failing edge of the tunnel creeping towards them and, more immediately, the end of Zarenyia’s lifeline. They were relieved when her hand appeared, gripping at the edge, but then it vanished as the edge faded into flakes of never-being. They both rushed forwards and took up the slack on the line, heaving like bargemen upon the Volga. A great spiderish leg appeared, followed by her upper body, and then more legs swung over and gripped. Cabal’s relief was attenuated when he saw how uncharacteristically pale and exhausted she appeared. He and his brother helped her over the precipice and into—at least momentarily—safety. Cabal saw she was looking rather more insectoid than arachnid all of a sudden, and was appalled to see the ugly stumps of her rear legs, dribbling ichor from the almost surgical cuts through the patella analogues.
‘Madam!’ His concern was unaffected. ‘What happened to your legs?’
Zarenyia smiled weakly. ‘The Devil took the hindmost.’
Another tranche of tunnel crumbled away behind them. ‘You must transform into human form, madam, and do so immediately! The door is too narrow!’
‘Not so sure I can, after all that. Sorry, darlings, I’m quite pooped. Think I might even be dying. Wouldn’t that be an anticlimax after seeing off that Ratuth wotsit-uth?’
At the door, Cabal could see Miss Smith and Leonie Barrow waiting, the door held open. Beyond it was a swirling gloom. It didn’t look very appetising, but it was surely better than a graceless plummet to the Ivory Citadel and eternal extinction.
‘Zarenyia.’ Cabal leaned close to her and spoke in an urgent undertone into her ear. ‘Please. You must focus. Just for a few seconds. We can save you, but you must help us.’
She laughed a soundless little laugh. ‘Look at you, sweetness. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you cared.’
Cabal said nothing. The silence drew Zarenyia’s attention more than words could. Then she closed her eyes and grimaced with concentration. The transformation was difficult and nowhere near as elegant as the ones she had previously demonstrated, but it did the job. Even while she was still partially arachnid, her skirt still sporting the six legs and her dress itself simple and unassuming for lack of will or strength for anything more grand, Johannes and Horst Cabal were lifting her up with her arms draped over their necks and making the best speed they could for the exit.
It was barely fast enough. Cabal was the last through the door and, as he lifted his trailing foot from the tunnel floor for the last time, he felt it give way beneath him like thin ice. Then he was through and, with no human agency, the door slammed shut behind them.
The Fourth Way: HORST CABAL, LORD OF THE DEAD
The darkness swirled about them like liquid, flowed, and finally began to ebb.
‘Welcome to Sepulchre!’ said Horst, and favoured them all with a showman’s bow, as if he had built the place in his lunch hour.
‘Sepulchre?’ Cabal looked about them through the thinning coils of darkness. ‘It looks remarkably like London.’
‘It is quite grand in places, true. Miss Barrow and I were at a huge theatre, quite as large as anything in London. Larger.’
‘I see. And this Sepulchre of yours also contains its own Nelson’s Column?’
‘Oh, I doubt it. That would be silly.’ He looked up. ‘Oh!’ A reasonable exclamation from somebody who had just been successfully stalked by 169 feet of granite and bronze. They were undeniably in Trafalgar Square.
Putting the impermanence of their path from his mind for the moment, Cabal crouched by Zarenyia. Her transformation was complete, but she was plainly sorely weakened by her recent travails.
‘I’ve hardly eaten since we started on this quest of yours, Johannes,’ she said as he propped her back against the stone wall of the strange little cylindrical police box from which they had emerged. ‘You promised murders.’ She said it with a mannered pout, but the import behind it was plain.
Cabal nodded, rose to his feet, and looked around. It was a public place; there must be somebody expendable around. It was then that he realised something was very wrong with London, which is to say, in addition to all its more usual flaws.
‘Where is everybody?’ They seemed to be at the tail end of the day, and the overcast sky was darkening. There was no conceivable reason that one of the metropolis’s busiest junctions should be entirely devoid of any living people. On the nearby roadway at the junction with the Strand stood a horse-drawn tram, unattended. Cabal took a few steps to examine it more closely, and saw whitened bones lying between the traces.
‘I suspect…’ He looked around at the darkened buildings. None showed the signs of extended neglect, but there was something undeniably unkempt about the scene for all that. ‘I suspect that we are not safe in the open. We should seek shelter as soon as possible. The Five Ways are working at full effect once more now that we have left Hell, and we know nothing of this place.’
‘It looks like London,’ said Horst.
‘Apart from that it looks like London. Thank you, Horst. I know I can always depend upon you to state the blindingly obvious.’
‘It’s a talent.’ Horst looked at the sky. ‘I’ll tell you something else that’s a talent. Knowing just how likely the sun is to do me a mischief. I don’t know what’s up behind those clouds, but it
isn’t the sun.’
‘Of course not. It’s merely a representation of the sun, in much the same way this is only a representation of London, and this Sepulchre place was only the representation of some sort of materialised metaphor.’
Leonie Barrow and Miss Smith were helping Zarenyia to her feet. ‘And that was a false Hell we just escaped from?’ said Leonie.
‘No. No, that was the real Hell.’
‘Real?’ She paled. ‘And … that was actually Satan?’
‘I really punched Satan.’ Horst was considering getting himself an engraved pewter mug to commemorate the fact.
‘And I really killed him,’ said Zarenyia. She sounded faint. ‘That will either make me a lot of friends, or a lot of enemies.’
None of them missed the waver in her voice. Horst nodded at a long building in the neoclassical style running across the north side of the square, fronted by a central columned portico flanked by two lesser examples, and topped by a short tower and dome. ‘National Gallery?’
‘It will do while we plan our next move. Help me with Madam Zarenyia.’
Moving as quickly as they might, the party headed northward to the gallery and entered through the front door, which needed only mild persuasion of the flat-footed kick sort to open.
* * *
They found a quiet corner in the surprisingly shallow building, and paused to ascertain their exact situation in as far as they might. Miss Barrow was still trying to take in why her clothes had changed and why she was armed with a shotgun and, she discovered to her consternation, a bayonet in her pack and a short, wide, flat knife in a boot scabbard.
‘In the Dreamlands,’ said Miss Smith, ‘one arrives garbed in the manner one sees oneself.’
‘I have never wanted to go around dressed like a scruffy bandit,’ said Leonie. She did not admit that, now it had been thrust upon her, she really didn’t mind it so much, either.
‘This is not the same mechanism as the Dreamlands, Miss Smith. There it was an expression of passion. Here it is a function of, for want of a better term, drama. We are involved in a thespian game of uncertain rules with a hidden goal.’
Cabal spoke absently; Zarenyia seemed to be sinking into unconsciousness. If she did so fully and could not be roused, he was uncertain how they might feed her should they find a suitable source of sustenance. He revised the thought. How he would feed her should he find a suitable source of sustenance. It was hard to imagine the moralistic Miss Leonie Barrow resisting the urge to lecture him on the sanctity of life, no matter how sybaritically pleasant the sacrifice to Zarenyia’s survival might find it. Usually, Cabal would simply have sneered in Miss Barrow’s face, but these days she had a very large shotgun and the will to use it. He decided that under the circumstances, some discretion and artfulness would be necessary.
Miss Smith seemed very sensible and unlikely to be upset by it, and Horst was a vampire himself, after all, although he limited himself to blood and not the irresistible draining of souls and certain other bodily fluids. That said, if he’d been offered the option of something similar when he was first turned, Cabal was reasonably sure he would have accepted with alacrity. That said, he couldn’t depend on both being stoic about him feeding a sapient being to Zarenyia. They might get all principled at an awkward moment. No, this was simply something he would have to attend to by himself.
‘The area should be reconnoitred,’ he said, neglecting to mention what he would be reconnoitring for. He replenished the load in his Webley (noting in passing that the empty space in the ammunition box had been filled with new rounds), and set off towards the exit as if that was all settled, then.
‘I agree,’ said Miss Smith. ‘I’ll go with you.’
This gave Cabal pause. ‘You will?’
‘Yes. Oh, and you might as well have this back.’ She passed him the Senzan pistol. ‘It’s all full of bullets again. So is this.’ She handed over the spare magazine. He examined it briefly and found it was indeed fully laden with live ammunition.
‘If you are to go with me,’ he said, gently introducing the subtext, ‘which is by no means a certainty … oughtn’t you to keep the weapon?’
‘I don’t need it.’ She beamed at him, reached into her dress pocket, and produced a wand. Glimmering, twisted, and black, it looked like a stout twig recovered from an oil slick. It also, he realised, had an air of the crown she had worn in the boundless burying ground and Hell. Then he saw the crown in question was once again in evidence upon her brow, apparently recovered from Zarenyia.
‘I didn’t realise you had a wand.’
‘Neither did I. I just found it in the wand pocket in my dress.’
Cabal had had cause to wear trousers with such a specially sewn accessory in the past and this point did not require clarification. ‘You have a wand pocket in your skirt? Very foresighted of you.’
‘No.’ She smiled as if she and a very shaky progression of cause and effect had conspired to snare him in such an error. ‘I like to think I look ahead, but the pocket and the wand are none of my doing.’ She slashed the air experimentally with the black thorn. The air seemed to distort the light travelling through it in a halo at its tip, like the meniscus of water dimpled beneath the foot of a pond skater. The edge of the dimple seethed with momentary darkness, causing Cabal to step back.
‘You should be careful, madam. Wands have a nasty habit of going off at inopportune times.’
‘You’re telling me,’ muttered Zarenyia, drifting at the edge of consciousness. ‘Johannes has one, you know. Terribly clever with it. He got me my sweater. Lots of fish. So many fish.’ Her voice faded into sub-vocalised semi-words.
Everybody looked at Cabal.
‘She seems very impressed with your wand, Cabal.’ Leonie Barrow stood arms crossed, head cocked, and eyebrow raised.
Miss Smith made no bones about it and smirked nakedly. ‘Tell you what, let me play with yours and you can play with mine.’ She inadvisedly gave her wand a last little wave before sliding it back into its pocket.
‘Like school all over again, isn’t it?’ said Horst. ‘Girls teasing you and you standing there with a face like thunder.’
‘Shut up,’ said Cabal.
‘As you wish, although the cat’s out of the bag on that score now. Anyway, what I was going to say was, “Yes, good plan. I’ll go with you, too.”’
Cabal let out a sigh. This was very typical of his life; he would evolve a simple plan and it would fail at the first hurdle thanks to people taking an ungratifying interest in his affairs.
‘Am I to understand that nobody thinks I can conduct a brief reconnoitre of the area and so everyone wishes to come along to oversee me? I’m sure three of us will obviously make a fraction of the noise of one. If only there were another twenty of us; we would pass silent and invisible.’
Horst wrinkled his infuriatingly handsome countenance with unfamiliar thought. ‘Does it really work like that? I was sure it would go the other way.’
As was so often the case, Cabal was not sure if his brother was sincere or playing the goat. Rather than wander into that bogland, he changed the subject. ‘What about Madam Zarenyia?’
Miss Barrow looked down on the semi-comatose devil where they had bedded her on a bench. ‘I’ll stay with her. I have a ridiculously large gun and more blades than Sheffield. I’ll watch over her and guard her.’
‘There, that’s sorted out, then,’ said Horst. ‘A map would be handy, wouldn’t it? There’ll be offices and a decent chance one of them will have a London street map. I’ll go and have a look.’ He paused at the door and looked back at his brother with an agreeably self-satisfied look upon his face. ‘See that? I had a good idea. It does happen.’
Miss Smith went to help him search the offices more quickly, leaving Cabal alone with Leonie Barrow and Zarenyia for a moment.
He coughed a little awkwardly. ‘It’s good of you to watch over her, Miss Barrow.’
‘It’s the human thing to do, Cabal. I must ad
mit, when you talked me into this, I was not expecting to end up babysitting a monster.’
‘You once called me a monster.’
‘I did. And you are.’ She looked at Zarenyia. ‘It seems some monsters are people, too.’
‘Oodles of fish,’ mumbled Zarenyia in her dreaming.
‘In any case, thank you.’ Cabal nodded curtly and walked away.
He paused as Leonie spoke. ‘You like her, don’t you?’
He didn’t answer for some moments, because he did not have the answer to hand. ‘Yes, I do.’ He reached the door, paused, and looked back at Leonie. She waited for him to speak, but he did not. Instead, he gave another nod and was gone into the gloom.
Leonie settled herself on the end of the bench and looked over her sleeping charge. ‘If my dad could only see me now,’ she said in an undertone. She settled the shotgun across her lap. ‘He’d be bloody furious.’
* * *
Cabal’s little party of three—three times larger than he really wanted—headed out of the darkened gallery some little time later, clutching the only map they could find; a somewhat fatuous document intended for tourists showing the more famous landmarks towering over the surrounding city, and the myriad smaller streets off the main byways were notable for their absence. They concluded it would have to do until they found better, and decided to loot a newsagent as and when they happened across one. Horst said he hoped it was one that sold sweets as he would like some Victory V lozenges, and would leave a sixpence on the counter for them even though the proprietors were likely as dead as the rest of the city. Then his brother reminded him that he was dead himself, and a vampire, and that Victory Vs were not really an option for somebody of his situation. Horst accepted this, although it made him sad, and he spoke little subsequently, focusing instead on trying to recall exactly what a pleasant sensation it was to suck a Victory V.
The Fall of the House of Cabal Page 23