The Fall of the House of Cabal (14 page)

‘Is
this
your terribly clever plan, darling?' Zarenyia picked up a charging ghoul as she addressed Cabal. ‘Bring me along and just depend on me to kill everyone when things get fraught?'

‘In essence.'

‘I like it.' She upended the ghoul and examined its nether regions. She curled her lip. ‘These aren't proper ghouls at all. No genitalia. These are ghouls for maiden aunts. Piff. Boring old option B it is, then.' And so saying, she broke the ghoul upon a raised and chitinous knee, throwing the dying monster aside to turn her attention to its irate colleagues.

Miss Smith caught Cabal's eye. ‘Well. This is weird.'

Cabal nodded. ‘Coming from a witch whose soul inhabits a cemetery in the Dreamlands, that says a great deal, but I cannot argue with you.' They watched Zarenyia go by, bucking like a wild horse, a ghoul impaled on one leg, and another held by the scruff of the neck being used as a flail to dislodge a third that had leapt upon her back. ‘There are certainly elements of the odd about our current situation. Madam! Madam Zarenyia! Perhaps if you freed us, we might be able to help?'

‘Busy!' she called back, and she called it happily. Unrestricted violence was as cool water on a warm day to her. ‘Gotcha!'

A pair of
faux
-ghoul bodies, entangled and broken, went arcing over the stakes and into the bonfire.

‘No hurry.' Cabal dangled listlessly from his bonds. ‘I'm sure we'll find some way of amusing ourselves.'

‘That's that passive-aggressiveness thing, isn't it?' Zarenyia regarded him with a jaundiced eye. ‘I've read about that in my magazines.'

And while Cabal was wrestling with the concept of magazine subscription services that deliver to Hell, and concluding that probably narrowed it down to
The Reader's Digest,
a giant spiderish leg scythed over their heads, slicing off the tops of the stakes and through their bonds in a single action. Necromancer and graveyard witch tumbled to earth in a shower of wood chippings and undignified language.

Cabal climbed to his knees and rubbed circulation back into his wrists while shouting at his rescuer. ‘You almost had our hands off, madam!'

‘So ungrateful. They'd have grown back.' And so, blissfully unaware of the limitations of cellular regeneration in humans, Zarenyia carried on tearing the ghouls that were not ghouls into lovely, rubbery pieces.
*

By the time Cabal had recovered his bag and, more specifically, the Webley pistol of generous calibre that lay within it, there was little point in offering aid. Ghouls lay around in abandonment, some whole, most not, and all quite perfectly dead. Amidst the carnage, Zarenyia stood, scraping one of the vanquished from her leg.

‘That was fun. Brief, but energetic.' She cast the corpse aside and performed a little spidery dance of victory. ‘I didn't get to kill that Witch Queen character, though. Did you?'

Cabal and Miss Smith shook their heads; neither of them had noticed the queen's escape, either. ‘We were hardly afforded the opportunity.'

‘Oh.' Zarenyia looked around. ‘Bother. I'd say she constitutes a loose end, wouldn't you?'

‘She may also be the key to our escaping this place. We must find her, and ideally not kill her.' Cabal gave Zarenyia a significant look. ‘At least not until we've extracted any useful information from her.'

It seemed unlikely the spirit of Nemesis could have got very far, and philosophically unlikely that it would seek to go very far from them in any case. They therefore decided to search the crypts that lay within a small radius of the central structure and, since that radius permitted easy calling to one another, they would split up to do so, the quicker to be done. Agreeing that the immediate act of whosoever found the Nemesis Witch first would be to cry halloo to the others, they split the circle of their search into three sectors and went to work immediately.

*   *   *

Cabal decided to start, rationally enough, at the closest crypt, a prim box of pale sandstone. As he approached it, however, his eye was caught by one lying further away, indeed right at the edge of the search area. He could not say what drew his attention so certainly to this cottage of the dead. It was an unkempt sort of thing, asymmetric with what seemed to be half a flying buttress to the left, the base long crumbled away. The design was of the new Gothik, a style for the pretentious surburbanite. The stone itself was soot-stained, surely snatched from some bourgeois district and dumped here in splendid isolation on the slope between two low hillocks. He did not recognise it at all, yet it seemed very familiar at the same time. Perhaps even comforting.

He walked to it almost in a dream, and his steps fell faster as he approached. This was the place, he was sure. This was where he would have hidden were he to have sought refuge in the curious graveyard, he was sure, but why he
was
sure, he could not say.

The door opened easily under his hand, a well-wrought thing of oak bound in iron strips, and swung noiselessly open. With only the slightest of hesitations, he entered.

The crypt's interior was illuminated by gas mantels, which was a nice change from the usual pitch-darkness or, at best, guttering torches of his experience. Still, what sort of tomb has a gas meter? What sort of corpse can be depended upon to put a shilling in that meter when the lights grow dim?

Low alcoves to the right and directly ahead contained coffins and, unusually, he felt relief that they were whole and he could see no mortal remains. Not that he would take much glee in such a sight, it should be understood, but that corpses in every state from perfectly fresh all the way to mouldering bone and all the intermediate stages of rot and liquescence were so well-known to him as to have rendered him blasé. No, this was not a matter of squeamishness, or at least not of a merely sensual horror.

To the left a ladder leaned against the wall, and by it a grandfather clock, its glass nearly opaque with grime. Yet he could hear the steady tick of the mechanism's escapement within the case. It was, all things considered, a very homely sort of tomb. He could only conclude that the Nemesis Witch had made this place hers and had her ersatz ghouls gather domestic comforts for her, up to and including an interdimensional gas pipe. He bit his lip at this point; either the ghouls were a great deal more ingenious than he had given them credit for, ridiculous cartoon caricatures that they were, or he was not truly understanding what had happened here, what was happening here, what this place meant. He did know, however, that the Nemesis Witch was here, and she was waiting for him at the foot of the steps that opened by the grandfather clock, the steps that led down into the cold, cruel clay.

He did not hesitate to set his foot upon the top step, even though the strong and tried sense of self-preservation that had kept him alive through a hundred circumstances that would reasonably be expected to kill him was warning him, screaming at him that this was a trap that he would not leave unscathed.

Cabal felt the forebodings burst into a dazzling flare of baleful premonition as he took the second step down. Then he took the third. Then the fourth, and the fifth, and so descended into the realm of Nemesis.

*   *   *

The Nemesis Witch, the Queen of Witches, the Red Queen, Lady Misericorde, Lady Ninuka: so many names for one woman. And there she was, waiting for him.

The underground crypt was dry and small, and there was only one corpse there. One end of the chamber was scattered with old household bric-a-brac and faggots of firewood; the other end, accessed through an open arch and up a couple of steps, was clean and empty but for a grave-sized hole dug into the dusty, dry clay. By the grave half sat, half lay Lady Ninuka. She wore something different from her brief appearance as the Nemesis Witch, now gowned in a simple dress the colour of funereal wrappings, grey, white, and a dull cream. It was folded decorously across her legs so that not even an ankle was exposed. She herself looked more purely like Ninuka than earlier, and this Cabal took to be a sure indication that she truly was nothing more than a figment. She was pale and dreadful. She did not smile the smile of an arch-villain when he stood before her. She did not even look at him. She held a bunch of flowers taken from some memorial tribute, and dropped withered petals into the grave, one after another.

‘Are you truly the spirit of Nemesis?' asked Cabal. ‘I would almost be disappointed if this all turned out to be some scheme of Ninuka's and you are her beneath cadaverous make-up.'

The spirit ignored him. Petals fluttered down.

‘Then let us assume that you are not Ninuka.' He spoke to break the silence as much as anything. It weighed upon him. It confined him. ‘Let us say that you are something else, either sent to warn me or destroy me, although a warning would be preferable.'

At this her gaze rose to meet his, and he thought he saw some awful thought signed upon her brow, but then she looked pensively aside, and the momentary sympathy was lost.

Nemesis finished plucking every petal from the dead rose stem in her hand, regarded the bare, thorned stick with equanimity, and then dropped it into the grave. She took another rose and started to strip its flower bare.

Johannes Cabal was a remarkably able man in many respects, yet his failings, too, were manifold and equally of note. One such, and one that never worked in his favour yet out of which he seemed incapable of growing, was his remarkable proclivity for growing angry with supernatural entities that could likely render him into ashes, or tear his skeleton from his flesh while he still briefly lived, or slice him thinner than a year's supply of Parma ham in the twinkling of an eye. It was in no sense a survival trait, and yet it endured in his personality.

‘When you have quite finished with the deflowering of other people's funerary offerings, perhaps you could answer me? I have travelled a long way to be here, I have travelled with a devil to do so. Which is less unappealing than it sounds, but there's a principle at stake here. I have endured hardships, difficulties, and reversals to find myself in this—and I don't use such a pejorative term lightly—
pantomime
of a synthetic milieu. You think I don't know what this tomb is? What it represents? Exactly who lies in that grave you are so assiduously filling with garden rubbish?'

Nemesis ignored him still. Cabal felt moved to express just what he had been through and his vast disappointment at how things were turning out.

‘There were
giant ants
!'

She said nothing, and he had the grace to feel ashamed.

‘This must all be for a reason, surely?' He spoke as he climbed the two steps between the halves of the lower crypt. ‘Even the most abstruse oracles must speak sooner or later. What am I to take away from this, assuming I can even find a way out of this strange lich field? What am I to deduce from looking into the grave of my…'

And here he looked down into the hole, and was silent for a long moment.

‘Self,' he finished.

Beneath withered petals and broken rose stems lay the corpse of Johannes Cabal, necromancer. He looked down upon himself with mixed feelings. Presently, the corpse opened an eye and looked up at him.

‘Cheer up,' it told him. ‘This is just a synthetic milieu.'

*   *   *

Cabal found Miss Smith and Zarenyia some little time later; the former seemed characteristically thoughtful, the latter uncharacteristically so.

‘Did you find her, too?' asked Miss Smith.

‘I did. It was … enlightening, I think.'

‘I am immortal,' said Zarenyia suddenly and with emphasis. ‘At least as far as ageing goes. Not indestructible, but immortal if all else remains equal. And yet…' She seemed almost pained at failing to grasp a comprehension that gambolled just beyond her grasp. ‘And yet, life is too short. Darlings, I know I'm a devil and everything, but I've never actually thought of myself as evil. I've put up with the label all this time, but I'm not sure that I care for it now. I want something more.'

‘I have unfinished business,' said Miss Smith. ‘There's always unfinished business, but … this, I can't stay in the Dreamlands.'

Cabal spoke gently. ‘Hardly your decision to make.'

‘There must be a way. We're necromancers, damn it.'

Cabal nodded. ‘I thought this place was a trap. In a sense it is, but there are subtleties here, too. I believe we may now move on. And I really do hope that Miss Barrow and my brother are weathering events at least as well as we. Heavens help them otherwise.'

 

The Second Way: LEONIE BARROW, GREAT DETECTIVE

One moment they were at the prophesied place on the outskirts of Constantinople; the next they most certainly weren't.

‘So,' said Horst, taking in their abruptly altered surroundings, ‘this is the fabled kingdom of Prester John, is it? It's a bit more … industrial than I'd imagined. Is it usual to have a deep-cast mine in the middle of a city?'