Cabal (25 page)

‘Fuckhead?’
somebody shouted.

She looked up to see Narcisse at the other end of the passage between the mausoleums. He’d clearly caught Decker’s attention. The hold on her neck was relaxing. It wasn’t enough for her to squirm free, but if Narcisse could only keep up his distraction he might do the trick.

‘Got something for you,’
he said, and took his hands from his pocket to display the silver hooks on his thumbs.

He struck the hooks together. They sparked.

Decker let Lori’s neck slip from his fingers. She slid out of his reach and began to stumble towards Narcisse. He was moving down the passage towards her, or rather towards
Decker
, on whom his eyes were fixed.

‘Don’t –’ she gasped. ‘He’s dangerous.’

Narcisse heard her – he
grinned
at the warning – but he made no reply. He just moved on past her to intercept the killer.

Lori glanced back. As the pair came within a yard of each other the Mask dragged a second knife, its blade as broad as a machete, from his jacket. Before Narcisse had a chance to defend himself the butcher delivered a swift downward stroke that separated Narcisse’s left hand from his wrist in a single cut. Shaking his head, Narcisse took a backward step, but the Mask matched his retreat, raising the machete a second time and bringing it down on his victim’s skull. The blow divided Narcisse’s head from scalp to neck. It was a wound even a dead man could not survive. Narcisse’s body began to shake, and then – like Ohnaka, trapped in sunlight – he came apart with a crack, a chorus of howls and sighs emerging, then taking flight.

Lori let out a sob, but stifled anything more. There was no time to mourn. If she waited to shed a single tear the Mask would claim her, and Narcisse’s sacrifice would have been for nothing. She started to back away, the walls shaking to either side of her, knowing she should simply run but unable to detach herself from the sight of the Mask’s depravity. Rooting amid the carnage he skewered half of Narcisse’s head on the finer of his blades, then rested the knife on his shoulder, trophy and all, before renewing his pursuit.

Now
she ran, out of the shadow of the mausoleums and back onto the main avenue. Even if memory could have offered a guide to her whereabouts all the monuments had gone to the same rubble; she could not tell north from south. It was all one in the end. Whichever way she turned the same ruin, and the same pursuer. If he would come after her forever and forever –
and he would
– what was the use of living in fear of him? Let him have his sharp way. Her heart beat too hard to be pressed any further.

But even as she resigned herself to his knife the stretch of paving between her and her slaughterer cracked open, a plume of smoke shielding her from the Mask. An instant later the whole avenue opened up. She fell. Not to the ground. There was no ground. But into the earth –

‘– falling!’ the child said.

The shock of it almost toppled her from Boone’s shoulders. His hands went up to support her. She took fiercer hold of his hair.

‘Steady?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

She wouldn’t countenance Ashbery accompanying them. He’d been left to fend for himself in the maelstrom, while they went looking for Lori.

‘Ahead,’ she said, directing her mount. ‘Not very far.’

The fires were dying down, having devoured all they could get their tongues to. Confronted with cold brick all they could do was lick it black, then gutter out. But the tremors from below had not ceased. Their motions still ground stone on stone. And beneath the reverberations there was another sound, which Boone didn’t so much hear as
feel:
in his gut and balls and teeth.

The child turned his head with her reins.

That way,’ she said.

The diminishing fires made progress easier; their brightness hadn’t suited Boone’s eyes. Now he went more quickly, though the avenues had been ploughed by the quake and he trod turned earth.

‘How far?’ he asked.

‘Hush,’
she told him.

‘What?’

‘Stand still.’

‘You hear it too?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘What is it?’

She didn’t answer at first, but listened again.

Then she said:

‘Baphomet.’

In his hours of imprisonment he’d thought more than once of the Baptiser’s chamber; of the cold time he’d spent witness to the divided God. Hadn’t it spoken prophecies to him? whispered in his head and demanded he listen? It had seen this ruin. It had told him Midian’s last hour was imminent. Yet there’d been no accusations, though it must have known that it spoke to the man responsible. Instead it had seemed almost
intimate
, which had terrified him more than any assault. He could not be the confidant of divinities. He’d come to appeal to Baphomet as one of the newly dead, requesting a place in the earth. But he’d been greeted like an actor in some future drama. Called by another name, even. He’d wanted none of it. Not the auguries; not the name. He’d fought them, turning his back on the Baptiser; stumbling away, shaking the whispers from his head.

In that he’d not succeeded. At the thought of Baphomet’s presence its words, and that name, were back like Furies.

You’re Cabal
, it had said.

He’d denied it then; he denied it now. Much as he pitied Baphomet’s tragedy, knowing it couldn’t escape this destruction in its wounded condition, he had more urgent claims upon his sympathies.

He couldn’t save the Baptiser. But he could save Lori.

‘She’s there!’ the child said.

‘Which way?’

‘Straight ahead. Look!’

There was only chaos visible. The avenue in front of them had been split open; light and smoke poured up through the ruptured ground. There was no sign of anything living.

‘I don’t see her,’ he said.

‘She’s underground,’ the child replied. ‘In the pit.’

‘Direct me then.’

‘I can’t go any further.’

‘Why not?’

‘Put me down. I’ve taken you as far as I can.’ A barely suppressed panic had crept into her voice.
‘Put me down,’
she insisted.

Boone dropped to his haunches, and the child slid off his shoulders.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

‘I mustn’t go with you. It’s not allowed.’

After the havoc they’d come through, her distress was bewildering.

‘What are you afraid of?’ he said.

‘I can’t look,’ she replied. ‘Not at the Baptiser.’

‘It’s here?’

She nodded, retreating from him as new violence opened the fissure ahead even wider.

‘Go to Lori,’ she told him. ‘Bring her out. You’re all she has.’

Then she was gone, two legs becoming four as she fled, leaving Boone to the pit.

Lori’s consciousness flickered out as she fell. When she came round, seconds later, she was lying half way up, or down, a steep slope. The roof above her was still intact, but badly fractured, the cracks opening even as she watched, presaging total collapse. If she didn’t move quickly she’d be buried alive. She looked towards the head of the slope. The cross tunnel was open to the sky. She began to crawl towards it, earth cascading down on her head, the walls creaking as they were pressed to surrender.

‘Not yet
…’ she murmured.
‘Please, not yet …’

It was only as she came within six feet of the summit that her dazed senses recognized the slope. She’d carried Boone up this very incline once, away from the power that resided in the chamber at the bottom. Was it still there, watching her scrabblings? Or was this whole cataclysm evidence of its departure: the architect’s farewell? She couldn’t feel its surveillance, but then she could feel very little. Her body and mind functioned because instinct told them to. There was life at the top of the slope. Inch by wracking inch she was crawling to meet it.

Another minute and she reached the tunnel, or its roofless remains. She lay on her back for a time, staring up at the sky. With her breath regained she got to her feet and examined her wounded arm. The cuts were gummed up with dirt, but at least the blood had ceased to flow.

As she coaxed her legs to move something fell in front of her, wet in the dirt. Narcisse looked up at her with half a face. She sobbed his name, turning her eyes to meet the Mask. He straddled the tunnel like a grave-digger then dropped down to join her.

The spike was aimed at her heart. Had she been stronger it would have struck home, but the earth at the head of the slope gave way beneath her backward step and she had no power to keep herself from falling, head over heels, back down the incline –

Her cry gave Boone direction. He clambered over upended slabs of paving into the exposed tunnels, then through the maze of toppled walls and dying fires towards her. It was not her figure he saw in the passage ahead, however, turning to meet him with knives at the ready.

It was the doctor, at last.

From the precarious safety of the slope Lori saw the Mask turn from her, diverted from its purpose. She had managed to arrest her fall by catching hold of a crack in the wall with her good hand, which did its duty long enough for her to glimpse Boone in the passageway above. She’d seen what the machete had done to Narcisse. Even the dead had their mortality. But before she could utter any word of warning to Boone a wave of cold power mounted the slope behind her. Baphomet had not vacated its flame. It was there still, its grasp unpicking her fingers from the wall.

Unable to resist it, she slid backwards down the slope, into the erupting chamber.

The ecstasies of the Breed hadn’t tainted Decker. He came at Boone like an abattoir worker to finish a slaughter he’d been called from: without flourish, without passion.

It made him dangerous. He struck quickly, with no signal of his intention. The thin blade ran straight through Boone’s neck.

To disarm the enemy Boone simply stepped away from him. The knife slid through Decker’s fingers, still caught in Boone’s flesh. The doctor made no attempt to claim it back. Instead he took a two-handed grip on the skull splitter. Now there was some sound from him: a low moan that broke into gasps as he threw himself forward to despatch his victim.

Boone ducked the slicing blow, and the blade embedded itself in the tunnel wall. Earth spattered them both as Decker pulled it free. Then he swung again, this time missing his target’s face by a finger length.

Caught off balance, Boone almost fell, and his downcast eyes chanced on Decker’s trophy. He couldn’t mistake that maimed face. Narcisse; cut up and dead in the dirt.

‘You bastard
!’ he roared.

Decker paused for a moment, and watched Boone. Then he spoke. Not with his own voice, but with someone else’s; a grinning whine of a voice.

‘You can die,’ it said.

As he spoke he swung the blade back and forth, not attempting to touch Boone, merely to demonstrate his authority. The blade whined like the voice; the music of a fly in a coffin, to and fro between the walls.

Boone retreated before the display, with mortal terror in his gut. Decker was right. The dead
could
die.

He drew breath, through mouth and punctured throat. He’d made a near fatal error, staying human in the presence of the Mask. And why? From some absurd idea that this final confrontation should be man to man; that they’d trade words as they fought, and he’d undo the doctor’s ego before he undid his life.

It wouldn’t be that way. This wasn’t a patient’s revenge on his corrupted healer: this was a beast and a butcher, tooth to knife.

He exhaled, and the truth in his cells came forth like honey. His nerves ran with bliss; his body throbbed as it swelled. In life he’d never felt so alive as he did at these moments, stripping off his humanity and dressing for the night.

‘No more
…’ he said, and let the beast come from him everywhere.

Decker raised his machete to undo the enemy before the change had been completed. But Boone didn’t wait. Still transforming, he tore at the butcher’s face, taking off the mask – buttons, zipper and all – to uncover the infirmities beneath.

Decker howled at being revealed, putting his hand up to his face to half cover it against the beast’s stare.

Boone snatched the mask up from the ground, and began to tear it apart, his claws shredding the linen. Decker’s howls mounted. Dropping his hand from his face he began to swipe at Boone with insane abandon. The blade caught Boone’s chest, slicing it open, but as it returned for a second cut Boone dropped the rags and blocked the blow, carrying Decker’s arm against the wall with such force he broke the bones. The machete fell to the ground, and Boone reached out for Decker’s face.

The steep howl stopped as the claws came at him. The mouth closed. The features slackened. For an instant Boone was looking at a face he’d studied for hours, hanging on its every word. At that thought his hand went from face to neck and he seized Decker’s windpipe, which had funded so many lies. He closed his fist, his claws piercing the meat of Decker’s throat. Then he pulled. The machinery came out in a wash of blood. Decker’s eyes widened, fixed on his silencer. Boone pulled again, and again. The eyes glazed. The body jerked, and jerked, then started to sag.