The Fall of the House of Cabal (43 page)

Cabal peered cautiously around the corner and settled a purposeful eye upon the aeroship's entrance ramp. The top part of it was the vessel's own; a broad deployment point that would touch the earth should the ship set down, or be used for dropping rappelling lines or even at greater height yet, the use of parachutes. These were a newish contrivance, and Cabal wondered at the nerve required to bet one's life on a large sheet conducting one from hundreds or thousands of feet in the air down safely to very solid ground. He understood the science of it, but that didn't mean he had to like it.

The lower half of the ramp built to span the gap was a semi-permanent affair of sapper bridge sections raised at an angle, supported by girders, and rooted in concrete. Any sentries that were supposed to have been there had been drawn off by the action or perhaps even taken cover from the effects of the heavy guns over their heads. It seemed to have ceased for the moment at least, and he was relieved to note that every gun barrel was pointing resolutely towards the raging conflagration previously known as Buckingham Palace. He spotted movement at ground level and saw troops leaving the end of the ramp and heading in discreet sections towards the fire. Their professionalism was apparent, and Cabal lapsed into tactical ratiocination.

‘Ninuka's sending her bodyguard out.'

The others joined him and watched the figures disappear from view around the sides of the burning building. ‘That's a lot of men,' said Leonie. ‘She can't have many left aboard.'

Zarenyia regarded the aeroship with disfavour. ‘It's going to be full of little corridors, isn't it? Hardly room to swing a baby. I'm not going to have to fold up again, am I?'

‘You're assuming that I intend to board.' This was disingenuous; Cabal's distracted air as he weighed up the approach to the ramp made it perfectly clear that this was precisely his intention. ‘But, no. I am concerned for Horst and his cadre. We've seen that the Mirkarvians have access to weapons that make short work of vampires. Would you be so kind as to find my brother and any survivors and bring them to the aeroship as quickly as you can, madam? I think they would be both safer and more useful aboard the…' He squinted at the vessel's prow. ‘The
Rubrum Imperatrix
? Truly? Oh, the utter arrogance of the woman.'

‘Yes, that would be entirely alien a concept to you, of course.' Miss Barrow's smirk was distinct, but forgivable. Certainly Cabal had nothing to say to it.

‘Give us a leg-up,' said Miss Smith, holding a hand out to Zarenyia. Zarenyia looked at her with astonishment for a brief moment before it was replaced with delight.

‘You're coming with me, then, darling?'

‘Why not? I sort of enjoyed riding around on you in Hell.' The expression of Leonie Barrow, who was observing this exchange, became one of perturbed puzzlement. ‘And this time I'm armed.' She held up her wand, as proud as any child with a wonderful new toy on Christmas morning.

Zarenyia lowered herself and offered a knee, of which she had a surplus. Miss Smith clambered up easily behind Zarenyia's human torso (to distinguish it from the arachnoid thorax upon which she sat) and made herself comfortable, exposing a shameful amount of ankle as her long skirt was pushed up in the process. Ankle all the way up to the mid-thigh to be precise. Stockings exposed to what was surely a scandalised London (zombies and vampires and foreign invaders were bad enough, but just cover yourself up, woman!), she placed a hand on Zarenyia's shoulder and held her wand at the ready in the other. ‘I feel like a cowgirl,' she said.

Zarenyia laughed. ‘You just
cannot
help feeding me straight lines, can you? I like you, poppet. Shall we go and kill some people now?'

Without waiting for an answer, Zarenyia galloped out of cover.

Cabal watched them vanish in pursuit of the Imperial Bodyguard with naked irritation. ‘Wonderful. Now there are only two of us to storm an enemy warship. What could possibly go wrong?'

‘I hope that was rhetorical, Cabal, or we're going to be here for quite a while listing things that could possibly go wrong.'

Cabal said nothing, but only checked his pistol. He did it in such an offhanded, inconsequential way, however, that she realised with some surprise that he was procrastinating.

‘We are still going to try, though? Zarenyia and Smith can buy us some time, and God knows they'll provide a spectacular diversion, but if we're going to attempt this, we have to do so now.'

Cabal cocked the pistol and checked its safety was on before replying, ‘You know me, Miss Barrow. Better than most, I would say. You would not characterise me as given to irrational fancies?'

‘Not for a second. If you did have the occasional irrational fancy, you would probably be more likable. What is this about?'

‘Well, for one thing, you have a basis for possibly finding me more likable, for I am prey to an irrational fancy.' He looked up at the aeroship hanging impassively before them. ‘I have a bad feeling. I cannot characterise it beyond that; believe me, I have tried. I have a sickness of spirit that drains me of any desire to go forwards.'

Leonie Barrow gawped at him. ‘Are you saying you're
afraid
?'

He did not deny it, did not quibble with the term. ‘I believe so. The Phobic Animus is very much at home in me at the present moment. I fear that my luck is running out. I fear I will not leave that vessel alive. I fear that I shall, at this very late pass, fail finally, totally, irrevocably. I am afraid.'

She went to crouch by the wall by him. ‘Well, I suppose that's that, then.' She started thumbing fresh rounds into her rifle's magazine. ‘I should have expected it to happen under stress. I
did
expect it to happen under stress. And here we are.'

Cabal looked quizzical. ‘You anticipated my failure of nerve?'

‘Not exactly. I anticipated the moment when your soul finally settled back into where it's supposed to be, and stopped misfiring every five minutes. You are afraid, Mr Cabal? I am afraid. For all of her hooting and carrying on, I suspect Miss Smith is afraid. We are in danger. Of course we are afraid. Welcome back to the human race, Johannes Cabal. We were beginning to wonder if you'd received your invitation.'

‘You are mocking me.'

‘I am. But that doesn't mean I'm not telling the truth. Look, just do what you always do—walk in like you own the place, be sardonic, shoot people. It's the only way that we can get out of here and back to the real world. That's the game, Cabal.'

Cabal gave her a hard look, then glanced away while he thought. Leonie, painfully aware that any door of opportunity they had could well slam shut any second, somehow held her silence. Cabal straightened up. ‘I shall need another gun.'

‘That's my boy.' Leonie clapped him on the shoulder and smiled far too broadly to be ladylike at the vile look he gave her in return. ‘Can't go in there with only one gun; there might be
lots
of people to shoot.'

*   *   *

It took an unconscionably long time to run the length of the
Rubrum Imperatrix
. Cabal was aware that much of the subjective time was simply down to how very uncomfortable it is to run beneath a massive flying artefact whose underside is liberally laden with ways of swatting humans into sticky little red puddles. As they ran, he could hardly help but glance up now and then to see if an inquisitive turret had noted them as they scuttled beneath the colossus, and swung its maw to bear upon them. In truth, there were so many turrets bearing machine guns, he could hardly keep an eye on them all, but their run was not interrupted by a rain of lead falling upon them to smash their bones and puncture their internal organs, so he supposed the gunners were still far too interested in the last throes of the burning palace, its walls falling around the inferno, to look straight down.

A long time—subjectively—later, they arrived at the base of the entry ramp. As Leonie took position to scan the approaches, Cabal peered cautiously up the ramp, ducking his head around the edge of a fixing stanchion at the base and back immediately for fear of sharpshooters in the beast's belly. No bullet winged its way at his head. Indeed, he had seen no one. Cautiously he took a longer peek, and confirmed the dispersal area at the ramp's head seemed to be completely abandoned.

‘We haven't been spotted on the ground yet, Cabal.' Distantly they heard the sound of Zarenyia whooping happily and the distinctive sound of shattering physics that accompanied the use of Miss Smith's wand. ‘But I do not know how long that will last. How many are guarding the ramp?'

‘None.'

That gave her pause. ‘None? They've left the door to their queen's flying boudoir unguarded? That seems…'

‘Unlikely.'

‘I was going to say “suspicious”.'

‘Also a good analysis.'

They looked about them, but if there was an ambush in the offing, it was taking its own sweet time in materialising. Leonie made an unhappy face. ‘A trap.'

‘Certainly, but not here or it would already have been sprung.' He nodded to the ship. ‘Our fate awaits us.'

‘Still frightened?'

He nodded. ‘Terrified.'

‘Good. Not just me, then. I don't suppose there's a choice. Off you go. I'll follow you up and cover our back, o Great Leader.'

Breaking cover was hard to do; there wasn't a scrap more to be had on the ramp itself, and they would be exposed to fire for some eighty feet until they were within the shelter of the aeroship's belly, where there was probably an ambush awaiting them. It would not be an enjoyable ascent.

At least the first sixty would be stable upon the ground-mounted ramp. The lowered aeroship ramp married reasonably well with the ground ramp's upper lip, although that they weren't connected by chains despite both lips having holes in them that would have been ideal for the purpose perturbed Cabal. Still, indecision would butter no parsnips, nor aid in likely regicide, so he put a foot on the ramp and began a fast crouched ascent that he hoped might make him less of a target for any passing Mirkarvian. Seeing he was at last committed to the climb, Leonie Barrow let him get ten or so feet ahead in an effort to avoid clumping together and offering an easy mark before starting up herself.

They proceeded with the curious feeling that they were in a play, which—in a manner of speaking—they were. The artificiality of the Five Ways bore upon them as at no other stage of its development, now that they were surely approaching the dénouement. He had already experienced anagnorisis. Presently, there would be a confrontation, a peripeteia, catharsis, and probably some sort of coda. The one thing they could not predict was whether this was an heroic tale, a tragedy, or even a comedy. Perhaps Ninuka would prove vulnerable to a good speech and they could all dance around as the curtain fell. This seemed unlikely. It was a theatre of improvisation that came with a butcher's bill. Well stocked with mechanicals, it also put real lives into jeopardy, or even took them. There seemed little doubt from what they had been able to glean that the core of Ninuka's force had come from the real world along with her. These were real people and they had died real deaths in the pursuance of her grand scheme. Even Miss Smith had been dragged into the trial, and who knew who else that had simply been close enough to the upstage to be perceived. On the plus side, Ratuth Slabuth was as dead as mutton, so the stormy outlook bore at least one silver lining.

No Imperial Bodyguards appeared as Cabal and Leonie ascended, no triumphant cackles to tell them that they had fallen into Ninuka's cunning trap, nyahahaha, etc. They climbed to the accompaniment of the sounds of disagreement as Zarenyia and Miss Smith introduced themselves to the ground troops mopping up the vampires. The disagreements were pithy.

Cabal reached the overlapping lips of the ramps, and hesitated. Strictly speaking, the Rubicon of the venture had been crossed when they first entered the sort-of realities of the Five Ways. There and then, however, the lines of steel across the ramp marked it more physically to his mind. With grand misgivings, he crossed the lines and continued onwards and upwards.

He had barely taken five more paces when a shot rang out from somewhere off to their right. Cabal instinctively dropped flat onto the unforgiving surface, the horizontal tread lines cut into the metal discoloured and marred with ashes and soil trodden in by any number of soldiers' boots tramping back and forth.

‘I think there's a marksman at the guard post,' he called back over his shoulder. ‘Lay down suppression fire until I reach cover, and I'll do the same for you while you follow.'

He waited, but there was no answer.

He knew what he would see even before he craned his neck to look. Leonie Barrow lay crumpled on the ramp some five feet short of the join in the ramp. She was motionless, her rifle inches from the fingertips of her out flung arm. There was blood on the ramp.

For a moment, he did not only not know what to do, he didn't even know what to think. Theirs was a dangerous undertaking. They had all—with the exception of Miss Smith—volunteered for the task. There had always been the likelihood of injuries and the possibility of death. He had seen enough of it to regard it as just something that happened, thankfully relatively rare but always ultimately unavoidable. He had killed others himself and seen that role as just part of the weave of history.

Yet this seemed wrong. Leonie Barrow could not be dead. She could not. She could not.

The old part of him rankled with disgust at such a romantic view of life. As if anyone was proof to the inevitability of their own mortality. The new part of him, pink as new skin growing from a ruin of burnt flesh, was innocent in its own way, and it did not wish to listen. She could not be dead. She could not be.

It struck him that he had been looking at her body what seemed like a long time, even if it were really only a few seconds. More than long enough for a marksman to chamber a new round. Should he return fire? A pistol against a rifle at range seemed a poor match. Should he try to reach her? The angle of the ramp relative to the guard post gave him a sliver of cover where he lay, but Leonie was close by the ramp's edge. If he went to her, he would be an easy target.