The Fall of the House of Cabal (48 page)

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 frozen 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, standing 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.'

‘Darling.' Something in Zarenyia's tone made Miss Smith look over. Zarenyia was facing the direction where the stolen entomopter was setting down, but that wasn't where her gaze led. The sky was vanishing. The city was vanishing. Belatedly, Miss Smith realised that the Mirkarvians weren't running from her at all.

The Cabal brothers climbed from the entomopter and ran towards them, Horst leaping the sandbags and Cabal rolling over them in his haste to join the women. He almost fell on the covered body. He stepped back, startled, and demanded, ‘Is this Miss Barrow?'

‘I'm sorry, Cabal.' Miss Smith abandoned the gun and went to him. ‘There was nothing we could do. She was already gone when we reached her. I'm sorry.'

Cabal looked at her with genuine perplexity. ‘Why are you sorry? You didn't shoot her, I trust?'

‘Of course not. But I know what she meant to you.'

Cabal shook his head irritably as if dissuading a determined fly. ‘What she means to me? She's a colleague. A reliable ally.' He started checking his pockets for no discernible reason.

Miss Smith glanced at Horst, who shrugged, and Zarenyia, who pulled a face and offered, ‘Are all humans so bloody abstruse?'

Cabal produced a cigarette case or similar. Miss Smith held out a hand. ‘If you're going to spend the last few minutes before the world ends puffing on a gasper, I want one, too.'

But instead of a cigarillo, Cabal removed a tiny crystal phial, sealed with white wax. He snapped the case shut, dropped it back into his pocket, and whipped away the blanket. Feigning ignorance of the ragged bullet wound in her side or its larger exit wound, ignoring the great deal of blood she must have lost as she haemorrhaged to death with no one to save her, he lifted her head, opened the sealed cap of the phial with his thumb, and poured the contents into her open mouth.

‘What is that?' asked Miss Smith, fascinated.

‘A miracle. I hope.' Cabal regarded Leonie Barrow's face closely, but there was no flicker of muscle action, no change in the dull, corpse pallor. ‘Come on,' he whispered. ‘Come along, Miss Barrow. I went to a great deal of trouble to get this. Kindly oblige me by not being dead any more. Come on…' He slapped the corpse across the face. ‘Come on!'

‘Johannes!' Horst snapped. ‘What do you—'

Cabal's hand was already back ready for another blow when the body's hand reached up and grabbed his wrist. Leonie Barrow's eyes flew open. ‘If you slap me again, Cabal, I will break your bloody nose.'

‘Well,' said Zarenyia, ‘there's something you don't see every day. Or, indeed, at all.'

Leonie was glaring at Cabal, sparing some ire for all these people gathered around her. ‘I was just knocked out. I was climbing up the ramp and I slipped, that's all. I am perfectly well, thank you. Never felt better.'

‘Actually,' said Miss Smith in the confidential tone of a friend who is going to broach the subject of an unexpected personal hygiene problem, ‘no. You were stone dead.'

Leonie looked at her sharply. ‘I was not.'

‘Take it from a professional, Leonie—yes, you were.'

Leonie Barrow's anger fell away. She glanced at Cabal. ‘Was I?'