Here he placed Cabal’s corpse carefully upon the workbench in the corner and went to the far wall where, after a little searching around the nitrous stonework, he found and released a hidden catch. An apparently effortless shove swung a heavy secret door open, revealing a hidden laboratory larger than the mundane cellar that concealed it. The man pushed the operating table that dominated the centre of the room to one side and briefly examined the floor beneath it before finding a recessed ring in the centre of a large slab of stone flooring. He glanced up at the lifting gear suspended from the ceiling usually employed to lift the slab, but decided against it. Instead, he hooked a couple of fingers through the ring and, taking a moment to get good purchase on the floor, heaved with quite literally superhuman strength. The slab lifted sideways with a splintering grating of the edge of the slab snapping off shards as it became a pivot against the surrounding floor. It ruined it as a place of concealment, but that was all right; it would never be used again. The man allowed the slab to fall past the tipping point and it crashed to the floor, but did not break further. He noted in passing that only the top surface of the slab was made of the same stone as the rest of the floor, while the underside was pumice, presumably to reduce its weight. Perhaps so, but lifting it by brute strength had still been a prodigious feat.
Beneath the slab lay the glass coffin. The man stood silently looking at the woman within for several minutes. He had known her in life, and it was horrible and wonderful to see her again. Horrible that here she was, preserved like an exhibit in a museum of natural history, yet wonderful that the preservation was so perfect that she looked like she might open her eyes any moment, and it would be a moment of joyous surprise, not of horror. But that would never happen. Not now.
The glass coffin was sealed carefully all around its upper edges to safeguard the preservative qualities of the strange colourless yet glistening liquid in which she lay suspended. To break the seal was to immediately restart the process of decay that had been halted all those years before. The man did so without further hesitation, tearing away the waxen substance that was not wax around the coffin lid and then levering it up just as he had done with the stone slab concealing it. Unlike the slab, the lid broke when he let it topple, into three large pieces. The man did not care. He was far past caring about such trivia now.
He went back out into the cellar and returned a moment later with Cabal’s body, which he laid alongside the open coffin on the fragments of glass. He stood back to look at the scene. It wasn’t enough. He knelt by Cabal and gently slid his legs off the glass into the liquid, and then his midriff. The upper body followed naturally in, and the man gently moved Cabal alongside the woman. There wasn’t enough room for both bodies to face upwards, but they finished floating face-to-face, and that was good. The man stood and looked at them. They would never be reunited in life; reuniting them in death was the best that he could do. He said their names. He said goodbye.
From the cellar shelves, the man fetched down a storm lantern, its reservoir kept filled and its wick trimmed in case the house’s electrical generator should fail. The man took it and the box of vesta matches lying by it upstairs. It didn’t take long to scatter most of the lamp’s contents around the front room of the house. With no further lingering, he walked out of the house, lit the lamp, and flung it through the front window. For some seconds he wondered if the throw had extinguished the light, but no, there, a flickering illumination appeared, making the bookshelves glow. A curl of smoke, a sudden crescendo of light as the oil caught fire. The left-hand curtain started to flutter as the heat in the room began to draw air through the broken window. The man had made a point of leaving the doors open; the fire would spread easily. A suitable funeral pyre for Johannes Cabal.
The man turned and walked away, and a ghost watched him.
* * *
‘No,’ said Cabal. He raised his aim, a wire snapped, and all outcomes were reshuffled.
Lady Ninuka stared at him as if just realising she had no idea what he truly was. She lowered her arms. ‘Why?’
‘Because I may be your enemy, but you are not mine. You may be my nemesis, but I am not yours. I grow tired of these games, Orfilia Ninuka; yours and everybody else’s. I am just a scientist, and I am conducting an experiment.’
He turned to face the urn containing the ashes of Count Marechal. Ninuka realised what he intended a second before he did it; she cried out, jumped to her feet, and reached for her own gun. It was all too late. Cabal fired once. The shot was deliberately placed off centre and the urn was untouched by the passage of the bullet. The glass shattered, leaving the urn still firmly affixed to its shelf by the locking collar around its base.
‘Ah, ah,’ warned Cabal, swinging his aim to Ninuka as he walked to the urn. She froze, her hand over her pistol. ‘Good. I am tired of killing, but not so much that I will not kill to preserve my own life.’
‘Save me, Orfilia!’ implored the urn in the voice of Count Marechal. ‘Cabal means to steal me!’
Cabal raised his eyebrows. ‘Your Majesty, amongst all your other myriad talents, do you happen to include ventriloquism?’ She did not answer, but her face told him all he needed to know. ‘I thought it unlikely. And, yes, to clear away any uncertainty on your part, I did hear that urn speak to you. This is unusual behaviour for urns, you may be sure, and bears investigation. Step back from your desk, please. I would hate to have to shoot you before this business is concluded.’
Ninuka stepped away from the desk and watched him stonily, her arms crossed. Satisfied, he released the locking device from the urn’s base and took it down from its place. He regarded it thoughtfully. ‘You realise how unlikely it is that your father’s body was recoverable from the wreck of the Princess Hortense? I watched it burn. I cannot know for sure, but I think somebody has been playing a game with you for a long time now. Don’t let that upset you; I have been a pawn in it, too. I hope this is the end of it.’
Resting the urn on an occasional table by the wall, he removed the urn’s lid and looked inside. A brief smile passed over his face, equal in parts sardonic, relieved, and sad. He reached in and extracted a small crystal phial filled with a dram of colourless liquid, its cap sealed with white wax. He replaced it and tilted the urn to show the inside to Ninuka. Within there were no ashes, and never had been. Instead there was a bed of black velvet into which was embroidered a golden pentagram. At each vertex was a small padded well into which a phial lay embedded.
‘The Five Ways,’ said Ninuka. There was a longing in her eyes, a hollowness in her tone.
‘I am told that they are cursed articles of the “Be careful what you wish for” variety, but the entity that told me is not always reliable. We shall see. And by “we”, I do not include you. You have lost.’ He extracted his cigarillo case from his pocket, opened it on the table, and stowed the five phials there, using the cigarillos as bumpers to keep them safe. As he closed the case and returned it to his pocket, he said, ‘The trial is at an end, I think. I advise you to return to the mundane world with alacrity, along with whatever remains of your force. This world will soon collapse like a house of cards.’
As he retreated towards the door, she walked slowly to the table, took up the urn, and examined it. ‘I don’t think so. You’re right, Cabal. The game is over, and I do not care to be drawn into another.’ She dropped the urn carelessly. ‘I am retiring from the field the only way I know how.’
Cabal was at the door. ‘That is your prerogative.’ He knew there was no point in asking her to consider the lives of her men. She hadn’t considered them when she had dragged them as auxiliaries into the Five Ways; why would they trouble her now?
Just before he left, she said, ‘You say you don’t hate me.’
‘I do not, Your Majesty. I dislike you as a damnable nuisance, but hate is a strong emotion, and I have little time for such. No, I do not hate you.’
She crossed her arms. ‘I’m sure I shall manage to stir such an emotion even in your f
rozen sarcophagus of a heart, Cabal. I shan’t say farewell. I hope that you encounter all kinds of misfortune.’
Cabal decided he had wasted enough time upon her, and left without another word.
Ninuka looked at the dropped urn, turned her heel upon it, and walked to her desk. She took up the revolver and looked at the crest of the House of Ninuka in Marechal upon the white grip. As slowly as an image developing upon a photographic plate in the chemical bath, a smile formed upon her mouth.
‘I know you will encounter all kinds of misfortune, Cabal,’ she murmured. ‘I know that you shall hate me.’
* * *
The bridge door of the Rubrum Imperatrix was flung open, and the officers swung around in astonishment to see the door’s guard slide at great speed across the floor to finish with a solid hit upon the binnacle, making both his skull and the brass casing ring.
Horst Cabal entered, smiled, and waved. ‘Hello, everyone! Here’s the thing: in all the rush to get airborne and everything, my brother and I have been separated from our friends who are still at what’s left of Buckingham Palace. I don’t really fancy walking, so I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to turn the bus around and go back?’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘I should point out that, although I phrased that as a request, it’s more in the way of an order, really.’
The captain stepped forwards, a hatchet-faced man with a goatee sharp enough to stab a badger. ‘My authority comes from Her Imperial Majesty, Queen Orfilia Ninuka, and I obey her orders and those of my lawful superiors only, sir!’
Horst nodded. ‘I can understand that, but one of your vermin shot a friend of mine, and I’m just about out of sympathy. So, I’ll use whatever particles of it I still have to reiterate. Turn this ship around, or I will kill every single one of you Mirkarvian bastards one after another until somebody realises that perhaps turning around is actually a terrific idea. I am going to start with you, Captain, because your goatee offends me.’
‘You would not.’ The captain said it defiantly, but stepped back all the same.
‘I would, you know. In case you haven’t been keeping up with current affairs aboard your ship, you’ll find none of your gun positions respond. I’ve left the engineering section alone, because they seem rather important to keeping us in the air. More important than you by a long chalk.’
‘Impossible,’ said the captain. Then to his first officer, ‘Get on the telephone; check the gun positions.’ He turned his attention back to Horst. ‘You’re lying, of course. It would require a full boarding party to achieve what you claim. No single man could manage it.’
‘Ah, well, in that case, I think I’ve spotted the flaw in your thinking.’ He bared his teeth and allowed his fangs to extend.
The captain paled. Unaware, the first officer called over from command station, ‘None of the guns are responding, sir! I can’t get any reply from the security details, either.’ He belatedly realised his captain was staring fixatedly at the interloper, looked himself, and then swore.
‘Turn the ship around,’ said the captain. ‘Return to our last anchorage.’
‘Captain…’
‘Do as I say!’
‘There we go,’ said Horst, clapping his hands once and smiling winningly, like somebody who has just reconciled a silly dispute over a neighbour’s property line. ‘Now I don’t have to break anyone’s neck. I don’t enjoy it, you wouldn’t have enjoyed it … Now everyone’s happy, yes?’
‘Happy’ was overstating matters, but nevertheless, orders were given, and the vast edifice of the Rubrum Imperatrix turned to the starboard until its heading was steadily back towards the exciting redevelopment opportunity formerly known as Buckingham Palace.
The sound of movement behind him made Horst spin, only to find Johannes Cabal coming towards him along the corridor in a dogtrot. ‘Hail and well met, brother!’ said Horst.
‘We’re done here,’ said Cabal. ‘We need to leave as quickly as possible.’
‘All in hand. I’ve prevailed upon the captain to take us back. We’re making best speed now. Quick enough for you?’
Cabal entered the bridge to stand by his brother. He looked out through the great panes in the flying bridge cockpit, and did not like what he saw.
‘Not nearly quickly enough.’
The navigator cried out, ‘Captain!’ He rose from his position and pointed towards the horizon.
The bridge crew and the Cabals saw a darkness there, a great black smudge that seemed to be growing. ‘What is that? A storm cloud? I’ve never seen the like.’
‘No storm cloud, Captain,’ said Cabal. ‘Look at the city beneath it.’
As the blackness expanded, the buildings of London seemed to fall into pieces at the edge of the void. The blackness deconstructed them, the rear of the buildings being stripped down to girders and floorboards while the face remained intact, the component parts falling away to be lost in an infinite distance. Soon enough, the wave stripped away the rest of the building and even the very earth on which it stood. Sewers, gas lines, and water lines were exposed beneath the disintegrating pavements and roads before they, too, tumbled into oblivion.
‘This world of shadows was never intended as anything more than a temporary stage for us to play our roles,’ said Cabal.
Horst eyed the billowing void with growing concern. ‘It isn’t half shifting. Johannes, I don’t think we can outrun—’
‘Not in a bloated flying fortress like this, no. Happily, there is an alternative. Come with me. Smartly now!’
This new disaster had handily focussed the attention of the bridge officers forwards, so none noticed their erstwhile hijackers leave the bridge, find an access stairwell, and quickly climb the narrow spiral stairs to the uppermost part of the ship.
‘If you’re expecting me to sprout bat wings and fly us to safety, I’ve told you before—I can’t do that. I wish I could, but y’know, even vampires only get to be just so wonderful.’
‘Hardly,’ said Cabal. He had reached the top of the staircase inside what appeared to be a large letter box. He opened the hatch and climbed out. Horst followed to find his brother already going along the row of parked entomopters. ‘I shall be the one flying us to safety. Let me see, interceptor … interceptor … ah! A reconnaissance variant with two seats. More comfortable than having to strap you to a weapons wing.’ He detached the covers and flung them aside. ‘I’m fairly sure I can remember how to fly one of these things. Much like a bicycle. Probably. Are you coming, Horst?’ He nodded at the nothingness that was devouring London. It was barely half a mile to the aft of the running ship and steadily catching them. ‘I’d advise against dawdling.’
The entomopter was fuelled and ready for a rapid scramble alert. As Horst strapped himself into the forward seat of the tandem cockpit, Cabal cast his eyes over the controls. Its systems were noticeably more advanced than the basic Symphony trainer that was his only flying experience to date, but he was sure he would pick up the niceties of its handling soon enough. Given that the alternative consisted of being dismantled by an oncoming cloud of nothing, he appreciated that he had better. The lack of a cartridge ignition system baffled him for a moment, and there was an agonising thirty seconds of him searching through the unfamiliar panels while Horst said, ‘Johannes…’ repeatedly every few moments, each rendition slightly higher than the last, but then he found an ignition chamber system, took a few seconds to work out how to use it (‘Johannes…’ ‘Johannes!’ ‘JOHANNES!’), charged, pressurised, and fired it.
It worked first time.
‘Well, that was easy enough,’ he commented as the entomopter lifted and sped forwards, even as the aft rudders of the Rubrum Imperatrix were devoured by the blackness.
Throttle opened as far as he dared with a cold engine and with the airspeed indicator rising satisfactorily, Cabal risked a glance back through the aerocraft’s high-visibility bubble canopy. His last sight of the great aeroship was of the prow windows directly below the bridge. There, s
tanding in the angle of the glass, he saw Orfilia Ninuka, resplendent in red, her arms crossed, and unafraid. Momentarily, Cabal wished that there could have been some other resolution. Momentarily, he thought she was magnificent. Then he turned away.
* * *
Zarenyia and Miss Smith had retired to the relative safety of a gun position on the former perimeter line for the Rubrum Imperatrix’s anchorage, now rendered a perimeter line for a lot of smashed and burning buildings since that vessel’s precipitate departure. Zarenyia had been forced to readopt a trimmer body so that the sandbag walls were actually high enough to shield her, and Miss Smith—who had belatedly discovered that throwing around vast magical energies was severely taxing upon the constitution—had discovered the joys of support weapons while she recovered her strength. The heavy machine gun she was currently manning was tremendously noisy, but also good fun, not least because of the not entirely kind commentary that Zarenyia—who was keeping the gun’s ammunition belt feeding smoothly into the breech—kept up about the hapless Mirkarvian soldiers who we trying to assault their position.* It was all high jinks of a homicidal sort, and it helped distract them from the body under a blanket behind them.
They were further distracted by the approaching distinctive engine tone of an aviation engine overlaid by the vicious buzzsaw-like hum of entomopter wings. Miss Smith was just hauling over a light machine gun to provide anti-aerocraft fire when Zarenyia cried, ‘It’s the boys! They’re alive and not dead! Isn’t that nice?’
Miss Smith returned to the first gun. ‘It would be nicer if they could drop some bombs or something on this lot.’ She sighted down the barrel, then lifted her head in bemusement. ‘Oh, that flying machine has scared all the soldiers off. Look, they’ll all running away. Feels wrong to shoot them in the back.’ She shot one just to check. ‘Yes, I didn’t enjoy that at all.’
The Fall of the House of Cabal Page 36