The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘Now or never, darling! Jump!’

  Feeling like an acrobat upon a very eccentric trapeze, Horst waited until the swing was almost over and—at a moment when there was still momentum to be had before the arcing motion came to a halt—he leapt.

  Behind him he heard in rapid succession, ‘Fly, my beauty! Fly!’ then the sound of multiple machine guns opening fire in a panic of inaccuracy, and then, ‘Rude!’ He had no time to attend to any of that; the edge of the ramp was there just below him, then closer at his level, and then above him and he couldn’t see it, only the drop below him. On the far side of the anchorage, he saw one of the Rubrum Imperatrix’s anchors disengage, its flukes winding back to unhook from the great iron hoop set into the buckled earth.

  He felt his hand catch the very edge of the ramp, but all the speed and strength in the world could not help him against the simple mechanics of leverage and force. He felt his fingers slip and knew it had all been for nothing.

  It was a surprise, therefore, a very pleasant surprise when he found himself dangling from the two-handed grip of his brother, heels dug in fiercely against the last lateral gutter of the ramp’s surface.

  ‘Pull yourself up quickly!’ Cabal grunted. ‘I can’t hold on…’

  It took a moment for Horst to find the ramp’s lip with his free hand and to expend a few drams of stolen blood to take the weight off his brother. A moment later and they were sprawled together on the safety of the ramp. ‘Zarenyia…’ gasped Horst and rolled over to look down. He needn’t have worried; Zarenyia had not lived for such a long time without learning how to frustrate the efforts of those who would do her harm, a very considerable population. She had tucked her forebody up so that it was shielded by the armoured abdomen and thorax. The period of her swing was predictable, but the gunners were not trained in tracking rapidly manoeuvring bodies at close range, few bullets struck home, and those that did whined off the pseudo-chitin of her spiderish body. Then she severed her cable, soared for a brief moment through the air and snagged one of the still attached anchor cables. The aeroship was busily preparing for flight, and cable after cable was being released and drawn aboard, the anchors themselves, flukes flattened, finishing snugly against the aviatory equivalent of a sea vessel’s catheads. Indeed, even the cable Zarenyia had settled upon was released a moment after she caught it. She skimmed down it much faster than it could be drawn up, however, and she descended in a shower of sparks stuck between her legs and the steel hawser, screaming, ‘Wheeeeee!’ all the way down.

  ‘We could all learn a lot from her,’ said Horst. ‘She has wonderful joie de vivre, don’t you think?’

  ‘She is far and away the homicidal maniac with whom I most enjoy spending time,’ agreed Cabal. ‘Now, to action. We have a single goal now: to reach Ninuka. Between us and her are any number of highly motivated gentlemen with guns that can apparently kill vampires. They will undog that door over there sometime in the next minute and endeavour to demonstrate. Do we have a plan?’

  ‘Yes. You go after Ninuka, and I’ll deal with the crew.’

  Horst said it so firmly that it impressed Cabal, despite which he felt constrained to say, ‘Are you sure? You did hear what I said about anti-vampire weaponry?’

  ‘They had surprise on their side last time. This time they don’t, it’s close-quarter combat, which doesn’t favour firearms, and—I have to tell you—I am really angry with them.’

  Cabal looked away. ‘I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t even reach her.’

  ‘I know. Just for once, I’m not going to hold you responsible for when things go to hell. This is all Ninuka’s doing one way or another. We don’t have long, Johannes. I just want to say, in case things go to hell again, I don’t blame you for any of this, and I forgive you for everything else. You have always been and always will be my little brother, and I love you. No matter what happens, always remember that.’

  Cabal looked at him, vaguely appalled. ‘For God’s sake…’

  Horst shrugged. ‘Had to be said. They’re unlocking the door now; I can hear them trying to be quiet. Good luck, Johannes.’

  * * *

  The Mirkarvian marines opened the door and promptly regretted it. Thanks to the confusion spawned by having a giant spider-lady swinging around under the ship’s belly, reports had been fragmentary and inaccurate. The few observers who had noticed Horst had mischaracterised him as a hapless comrade captured by the monster or even that the creature had two forebodies, one male and one female. None had noticed Horst’s leap nor his entry into the ship.

  The upshot was that the marines entered the ramp’s staging area with caution sufficient to deal with one untrained civilian with a handgun. This had all begun swimmingly when they saw him waiting for them on the far side of the chamber, the stolen army tunic thrown aside, and his hands held up in a position of surrender. ‘I surrender,’ he lied at them.

  They moved quickly forwards to cover him, and so did a very poor job of examining the rest of the area, specifically the wall above the door through which they entered. When they were all deployed in an arc, bristling with weapons all bearing on the unthreatening man in the blue-glass sunglasses, the rearmost marines started dropping silently. Five were down before somebody noticed the form of a fellow marine fall in his peripheral vision. He turned his head, and started to shout a warning that was abruptly curtailed by being punched so hard his jaw entirely dislocated.

  The marine made a pained sound at this treatment, which attracted the attention of the rest of them, encouraged to do so by Cabal pointing and saying with mountainous disingenuity, ‘Oh, what’s happened to him? Is he well?’

  The sharper marines realised there was a threat behind them and turned their attention in that direction. Even sharper marines might have thought that perhaps there were threats on either side, but none were present.

  A pistol going off at close quarters behind them unsettled the marines badly, and by the time they had settled on some form of response, they were largely dead or unconscious. The sole conscious survivor was a corporal who now found himself disarmed and held up against the chamber’s forward bulkhead by an angry vampire and a necromancer who was examining one of the discarded carbines of famously boxy design.

  ‘Ninuka,’ demanded Horst. ‘Where is she?’

  * * *

  When the Brothers Cabal emerged from the staging chamber, Horst was strong with new blood and Johannes was carrying two stolen pistols, a stolen carbine, and stolen ammunition for all of them. He looked back at the pile of dead and unconscious men in the chamber before slamming the door shut and dogging it locked from the outside. He glanced momentarily at the ramp lever on the outside of the doorway, the corresponding one within having been disabled as part of the trap. Horst watched this and read possible intent there.

  ‘Those men are all on the ramp. Pulling that lever would be a cruel thing to do to men who are already having a bad day.’

  ‘I know.’ Cabal looked at the lever for a moment more, then shook his head. ‘Once I would have done it without hesitation, to cut their numbers, but they’re just puppets in all of this. I hold no animus towards them and, let’s be honest, their chances of survival are likely thin enough already. Let those of them still alive dream on a little longer.’

  Somewhere an alarm began to squall. Cabal smiled sourly. ‘In any case, our imposition seems to have been discovered. Attend to the crew, Horst. I shall find Ninuka and bring matters to a conclusion.’ He hesitated. ‘And Horst…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What you said earlier. That thing you said…’

  ‘Yes?’

  Johannes Cabal smiled. ‘You really are a sentimental fool, you know that?’

  Horst Cabal smiled. ‘I do, and I consider it one of my best character traits.’

  ‘Fare you well, brother.’

  ‘Good fortune, brother.’

  And so, like characters in one of the bloodier Grimm’s fairy tales, they parted.

  * *
*

  Of Horst’s progress, little needs to be said. He wandered the corridors until he began to understand how the ship’s architecture worked and so began to recognise recurrent features, especially the hatches that led into the ventral gun positions. These he would enter. If he found them unoccupied (as was invariably the state of the larger guns, their work done for the moment), then so much the better. When he found them manned, he subdued the occupants by mesmerism where possible and by force when they proved too unimaginative to take the less painful path. Turrets ornamented by sleeping gunners dreaming of summer days and pretty girls or bedewed with the blood of the recalcitrant were left in his wake. In either case they grew quiet and unresponsive to the increasingly frantic calls for status from the ship’s bridge.

  Horst had read enough magazines of popular mechanics to know that the practical necessities of an aeroship meant that its vitals were sited on the uppermost decks. This was where one would find the engineering sections that tended to the gyroscopic levitators and the etheric line guides that both harvested energy (probably from a dimension several over from the one he called home, that had more energy than it knew what to do with) and provided forward motion by dragging the ship along the lines of ethereal force that penetrate the world in a complex and unpredictable weave.

  Also on the upper decks would be access to the main bridge, at the apex of the surface-ship-like prow, to give a good view of the land beneath. Horst had already discovered the smaller landing bridge in the middle of the lowest deck wherein a pilot would guide the ship in for field landings. It had been empty, but he took a moment to wreck the steering gear so it could not be pressed into service in the emergency the ship would shortly be suffering, if he had anything to do with it.

  Occasionally he encountered ship’s troops responding to the ‘Hostiles Aboard’ alert sounding in every corridor. They were noisy, even in the soft-soled deck boots they wore, and he was never surprised by them. Contrariwise, they were always surprised by him. In a single encounter was he wounded, but the bullet barely skimmed his flesh of his left tricep and failed to discharge its fatal contents into his body. That aside, he blurred and dodged, and punched and broke hands and arms in an attempt to disable rather than kill. He left patrol after patrol groaning and weeping in his wake as he made his irresistible way towards the master bridge.

  * * *

  Acting on the information received from the corporal they had interrogated in the staging chamber, Johannes Cabal made straight for the quarters of the Red Queen. His path was relatively short, and he was untroubled by the attentions of the ship’s marines. This hardly surprised him; it was necessary for the conclusion of the Five Ways that they meet, for what adventure does not conclude with the protagonist and antagonist face-to-face? Which of them was which was a matter for minds of a more literary bent than his. Every man and woman is the hero of his or her own story, striving for something better. Ninuka’s probably lay in the re-creation of the Mirkarvian Empire, an entity seen here in prototype. This was undoubtedly a good thing for Mirkarvians—empires usually are for whosoever gets to put the name of their country before ‘Empire’ in the title—but unusually awful for everyone else if this was how things were intended to turn out. A vision of men in shiny boots stamping around from the ruins of Albion in the west to humbled Poloruss in the east was deeply unpalatable for all but the Mirkarvians and their queen to strive for. Still, it was always nice to have a hobby.

  And for Cabal? He could not even begin to guess how many lives he had caused to be lost or ruined directly or indirectly since he had begun his great project. On the other hand, he had certainly saved the world at least once so, on balance, he was fairly sure that made him the hero. Flawed, certainly, but he seemed to recall that both Ulysses and Jason of ancient legend could be utter arses when the mood took them; he was probably some sort of paragon in comparison.

  He discovered Queen Orfilia Ninuka at her desk, waiting patiently for him as was only right. It had all the makings of a set piece; he swept open both of the double doors to her quarters in what he assumed would be the appropriate manner. She was behind the great white-and-gold desk, her back to him in one of the new style of swivel chairs, a sensible choice given the great vista of doom-haunted London spread out below them.

  ‘Ninuka.’

  A heartbeat’s pause, and the high-backed chair rotated slowly to face him, as perfectly staged as anything upon the West End.* She sat there regarding him with the icy malevolence of a cobra with expensive tastes in couture.

  ‘Cabal.’

  There was silence, broken only by the distant sound of the alarm and the universal hum of the levitators thrumming through the hull. The silence drew out, and Cabal began to wonder if he was supposed to have been issued a script, because he was damned if he could think of anything else to do but raise his pistol and kill her. Then she spoke, and he was saved the anticlimax.

  ‘Fate is a curious thing, is it not, Cabal? If we had never crossed paths, my father would still be alive, I would still be happy in my blinkered little world of sensuous excess, and Mirkarvia would still be a rotting backwater where history used to happen. Now look at me. I discovered that the position in society that was my birthright could be used for more than luxury and indulgence; that the social skills of gentle persuasion and the powers of subtle coercion I seemed equally born into could be utilised to bring greater prizes than expensive gifts and bedmates.’

  ‘You will recall that those powers failed to work upon me.’

  ‘I do recall, but that was because you are so thumpingly stupid, Cabal. Don’t ever try to congratulate yourself on resisting any wiles I may have employed upon you. They only count as wiles if the subject isn’t so stunningly dull as to not even notice.’

  Cabal’s lips thinned; his vanity was a small thing by most standards, but where it stood its ground was on the subject of his intelligence. ‘Perhaps—’ he began.

  ‘No.’ Ninuka raised a hand to stop him. ‘If you intend to tell me that perhaps you were playing the innocent the whole time, no. I am very familiar with what ‘playing hard to get’ looks like, and it was utterly absent in your guileless, clueless face. No. That will not do.’

  Cabal considered. ‘Are you suggesting that if I had blithely fallen into bed with you on our first meeting, we would not now be flying over a phantasmal representation of the ruins of one of the world’s great cities, and many, many of your troops would still be alive?’

  She shook her head, then hesitated, her chin tilted up in thought. ‘I had not considered matters that way. Perhaps so. Your celibacy may well have consigned thousands to death or the threat of death. Really, Cabal, it’s only a dick. Why did you have to be so damned possessive?’

  Cabal’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. He blinked foolishly, his eyes denoting confusion and discomfort. ‘I admit, madam, I was not expecting this interview to unfold in quite such a manner.’

  ‘Nor was I, but I’m glad we’ve had a chance to clear the air on the matter.’ Her hands had been folded in her lap throughout the conversation, but now she extended her right hand towards him, and he saw she held a pistol in it. ‘This is my father’s pistol. It survived the crash of the Princess Hortense. My new friends in the Katamenian banditry recovered it along with his body from the wreck before the Senzans could land rescue parties nearby. The bandits built a funeral pyre for him.’ She nodded at the urn in its case, ebony with the Marechal crest in gold upon it. ‘There he is. He goes everywhere with me. I talk to him. Sometimes he even talks back.’ She smiled cynically at the expression Cabal was trying unsuccessfully to keep entirely off his face. ‘Oh, yes. I’m quite mad. I’m sure of that much. I hold you responsible for that, too.’

  She weighed the pistol in her hand, holding it almost casually, but Cabal could see her finger was upon the trigger and that the muzzle never wavered away from him. ‘I wonder if this is how this is meant to end, Cabal. Another aeroship, another pistol fight. That seems a little pro
saic to me. Banal, even. I was of the impression that the Five Ways might be a little subtler than that.’ She raised the pistol, lowered the hammer with her thumb, and tossed the weapon onto the desk. ‘If you’re going to shoot, Cabal, then shoot. I’ve seen you kill a woman at point-blank range. I know you can do it.’ She spread her arms. ‘Murder me, Cabal.’

  Cabal levelled his pistol, and centred the barrel upon the plain of her pale forehead.

  ‘That’s it,’ she whispered, yet still he heard her. ‘Shoot me in the brow, just as you did my father. Go on. Fire.’ He hesitated. He knew he was entering a trap when he first started up the ship’s boarding ramp. Why did he feel that the real trap was only just closing upon him now?

  ‘Shoot. Shoot, you fucking coward.’ She said it quietly, without rancour: a benediction rather than a curse.

  The steel of the trigger felt warm beneath his finger. He squeezed almost without realising it.

  * * *

  ‘She’s only a simple girl. I think she’s telling the truth in most respects,’ said Frank Barrow, father of Leonie. Cabal looked at him blankly. He was reasonably sure that Barrow had not been there a moment ago. He wasn’t even sure what Barrow was talking about.

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘She came to this carnival last night. The very same night she concocts a poison and uses it. I don’t think she could have become Lucrezia Borgia at such short notice without professional help.’

  Barrow looked meaningfully at Cabal, and Cabal was fairly sure that he was insinuating something. Exactly what he had no idea, so he asked.

  ‘What are you insinuating?’

  The sergeant coughed, startling Cabal by the very fact of his presence. There was a British police sergeant and two constables, all uniformed. The damnedest sense of déjà vu settled upon him. The sergeant spoke. ‘The arcade, sir, if you would. We would like to look at the machines.’

  ‘Very well, but you’re wasting your time.’ Cabal said it with the greatest confidence, although he was profoundly unsure what the police hoped to find in the arcade. The sense of familiarity troubled him; it was as if a memory was being held from him.