The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘Oh, yes. She was there at the time. It was all very aboveboard. Clear case of self-defence.’

  ‘Johannes … please, I’m trying to get this straight. You shot her father dead … in front of her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Horst slumped. ‘My God.’

  Cabal’s brow furrowed, as if mentally working through a particularly ferocious piece of spherical geometry. ‘Hold on. Are you suggesting that she might still be upset about that?’ First Maleficarus and now Ninuka. It seemed disposing of people’s fathers was more fraught with complications than he’d given it credit for.

  ‘I’m bait,’ said Horst weakly. ‘I can’t believe it. I’m bait.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘All of this, all the trouble to seek out whatever was left of me, raising me, bringing me here. All this time, I’ve just been a puppet.’ Horst looked Cabal in the face, and Cabal was surprised to see the depth of horrified realisation he found there. ‘It was always about you, Johannes. She wanted you here.’ He shook his head as if trying to disperse the growing anguish. ‘The drawbridge. She destroyed it herself to stop them sending too many monsters after us. She helped us escape. She knew I’d think of bringing you here sooner or later. All of this was to do that. All because she wanted you here.’

  Cabal frowned. ‘She’s not going to try to seduce me again, is she?’

  ‘Oh, Johannes,’ said Horst in a thin, weak voice that barely admitted any hope, and turned and left him there, astonished and uncomprehending.

  * * *

  To his credit, Johannes Cabal went looking for his brother. No one reported seeing him, however. Cabal gave up quickly; he knew that if his brother didn’t want to be found, then he would not be found. Instead he located a camp bed in the corner of one of the train’s nooks, knocked the previous occupant’s belongings onto the floor, and lay down. He didn’t much care what they might think when they came back to find him there; everybody hated him anyway, so it made few odds.

  He kicked his shoes off, arranged himself upon the khaki-coloured canvas, looked at the discoloured ceiling, and decided to think himself to sleep.

  So, Mirkarvia. A small country with a brief flicker of glorious empire a long time ago, and a subsequent history of trying to recapture that moment. It hadn’t even been a very good empire; blundered into opportunely and squandered by a ruling class that couldn’t believe its luck. Even most of the neighbouring regions that had been conquered for what was history’s equivalent of five minutes on a Sunday afternoon were faintly bemused when they happened to stumble across it in the textbooks. ‘We were vassals of Mirkarvia?’ they said, very slightly surprised. ‘Really? Fancy.’ And then they would forget about it again, usually not even being able to dredge the information up if challenged for it in a pub quiz.

  Subsequent attempts to re-establish the empire had varied in execution from the brutal to the hilarious, but all had failed because it takes more to become an empire than just national pride. They require a multitude of factors to be in accord, military, societal, and economic, and simply wishing for the essence of empire-building to fall upon them didn’t make it so. Mirkarvia was a chocolate soldier, a social maelstrom, and a busted flush.

  The populace had seemingly understood this before their splendidly oblivious leadership, an ants’ nest of petty nobles so busily playing politics that it had become an end unto itself. In truth, Cabal had not deliberately fomented a riot that became a revolt that became the death of the old order and the foundations of the rule of the Red Queen. It had been an accident. He had simply wished to create a little diversion to give himself an opportunity to escape. That the Mirkarvian public had grabbed this weak straw and brought about the current state of affairs was surprising to him. That the incipient madness of Mirkarvian politics had allowed some lunatic at the head of a band of Katamenian bandits—a breed of whom even other bandits spoke disparagingly—to take control with so little resistance did not surprise Cabal at all. A shock force of a couple of hundred such cutthroats would be enough to take the capital city of Krenz, and the Red Queen’s noble blood and inside knowledge would be enough to hold it.

  This all assumed the Red Queen was Lady Ninuka, of course. But, of course the Red Queen was Lady Ninuka. There was nobody else who fitted the bill quite so well. He had no idea how she had survived their last encounter, but he had experience of such human cockroaches before. Their resilience was as breathtaking as it was irritating. Indeed, Rufus Maleficarus was of similar ilk; actual cockroaches would probably be in quiet awe of his uncanny ability to not be dead despite being very thoroughly squashed.

  Cabal frowned. He was prepared to believe that the Red Queen was in reality Lady Ninuka purely on supposition. Maleficarus, however … could it really be him? He hadn’t seen Ninuka die, and hadn’t cared much one way or the other if she did in fact die. Rufus Maleficarus, by contrast, had been murdered by Cabal’s very own hand. There had been no possibility that he had survived. His body had not tumbled into a foaming sea or into a clouded abyss from which he might later make an unexpected return through the good offices of kindly dolphins or giant eagles. Cabal had himself checked that all life was extinguished by searching for a pulse, looking for clouding on a mirror held to the corpse’s mouth, and by kicking repeatedly. This latter was not scientific, but had served to alleviate Cabal’s own tension and bile admirably. He had not liked or been impressed by Maleficarus in the slightest; if he counted as Cabal’s arch-enemy, then clearly Cabal needed to do much better. One is often judged by the quality of one’s enemies, and Maleficarus would not have made a strong enough nemesis for a crime-solving chimpanzee, never mind a necromancer of ambition.

  Maleficarus’s ego had always outrun his competence. Only a blithering incompetent would dream of using the Ereshkigal Working, and on their second encounter, Maleficarus had fallen back on using the creation of a more ingenious if, as it turned out, not infallible wizard in an attempt to doom Cabal. Yet here Cabal was, resolutely undoomed.

  Rufus Maleficarus, therefore, was never going to trouble the list of the top ten wizards in any foreseeable future. Yet he had performed two impressive feats, neither of which Cabal would ever have expected from him. In the first place, he wasn’t dead, despite having been murdered—indeed, very much a poster boy for the extremely murdered. In the second, he had somehow become a summoner of extra-dimensional entities. This was not a simple undertaking. Summoning involved not simply opening a way through to the selected otherly place, but an opening that induced through the specific creatures one wanted, and then imposing one’s will upon them. It was a mare’s nest of conflicting magical forces and presented a conundrum commensurate to any currently troubling minds in the fields of mathematics and physics, with which magic shares so much. Maleficarus, whom Cabal believed lacking the necessary cognitive capability to button up his waistcoat correctly on the first attempt, was so surely incapable of any such feat that it was laughable.

  And yet … plus fours. Who else would consider plus fours suitable attire for unleashing eldritch horrors upon the Earth? Weren’t eldritch horrors a bad enough thing to be unleashing without the addition of plus fours?

  So Johannes Cabal passed into sleep thinking on the subject of trousers that are baggy around the thighs and their relationship with megalomania (the correlation with jodhpurs was naturally noted).

  * * *

  As he slept, matters were moving along elsewhere. Specifically in the great castle of Harslaus, overlooking the depressingly decrepit city of Krenz, capital of the depressingly decrepit country of Mirkarvia, of which the citizens were depressed by the decrepitude. Also by all the monsters that were roaming around all of a sudden. Mirkarvians as a breed were used to there being things wandering in the night that should be avoided by wise citizens. At one time it had been nosferatu and packs of wolves. Then, once the wolves and the nosferatu had been pushed to near extinction by hunters and tax collectors respectively, the citizenry found the nigh
t instead owned by rampaging nobles. Young, rich, and stupid, with vast reserves of entitlement, they haunted the taverns and byways, drunk and tumescent with poorly regulated lusts. These manifested physically in weak chins, soft skins, low alcohol thresholds, grating laughs, and jodhpurs among the younger examples, before transitioning seamlessly into long chins and noses, angular forms, silly little beards, intense gazes, beetling brows, and barking laughs among their elders. Riding crops were evident throughout this spectrum.

  Just as the population was on the point of becoming blasé about neighing laughs, inexpert ravishments (the early ‘Ha ha! My, but you’re a feisty filly, aren’t you, my girl?’ procedures were carried out with hereditary élan, but subsequently most of the nobles had little idea what was supposed to occur and were reduced to sitting at the end of the bed, head in their hands, whispering to themselves about expectations and peer pressure until the sun came up), and riding boots on the dinner table, along came the monsters. None of the monsters evinced performance anxieties; they were all very good at what they did. Theirs was a limited repertoire, but one executed with vigour.

  To the citizens of Mirkarvia in general, and those of Krenz in particular—for here the monsters were barracked and therefore concentrated—life continued as usual, i.e., they were constantly oppressed. At least, however, the new oppressors were consistent in their manner, and staying off the streets after dark was a good way to avoid their attentions. That was the shapechangers, at least. The zombies were rarely let out, and when they were they merely pottered about the place good-naturedly. When it transpired that brain-eating, contagious undead were of a greater rarity than the cinema might suggest, and that the variety raised by Lady Misericorde were of a more traditional ilk, the common folk of Mirkarvia grew almost fond of them. While the walking dead and the werewolves, kitsune, and rakshasa that haunted the land may occasionally frighten or, in the case of the shapechangers, eat those caught on the highways and the byways when the moon hung high, at least they didn’t have painful laughs or undeveloped senses of humour, and nor did they run up bar bills that they had no intention of paying. The Mirkarvians preferred this arrangement.

  Admittedly, the new sensation of unnatural clouds that disgorged assorted creatures patently not of this Earth was not met with such sang-froid. The clouds manifested over the city were few and small, but even so created unreasonable fuss. The much larger cloud that had unloaded great towering harvestmen and killer woodlice the size of bison, for example, had essentially destroyed the small settlement over which it had been deployed, and the worthies of that place, on returning to find the place shattered and littered with corpse pieces and shards of aliens, had written a sharp note to central government asking them not to do such a thing again.

  The note formed part of the minutes of a meeting that evening by the Ministerium Tenebrae, who were now Mirkarvia’s de facto government. The citizenry noticed little difference in administration except for the aforementioned substitution of nobles for better-behaved monsters. The man in the street was still downtrodden, disenfranchised, and disregarded. He was also—if not off the street much after sundown—eaten. The common folk found this tolerable.

  The Ministerium met in the same great room where they had first been introduced to Horst Cabal, although none of the lords were present. They had little interest in the political minutiae of the land, and were happy to absent themselves. The table did have one notable addition, however; at its head sat a veiled woman in a dress the colour of poppies on a war memorial. The others, even the avowedly republican Mr Burton Collingwood, referred to her as ‘your majesty’. She spoke little as they discussed policy and preparations for the re-creation of Mirkarvia into a land of shadow and base for expansion. This suited the men there present perfectly, not only because it meant that they could get on with the manly business of applying power, but because this woman, the Red Queen, frightened them, and they were not used to being frightened.

  On the rare occasions when she did speak, her voice was a whisper that nonetheless silenced the company. There was something ophidian about it, which made them fear what lay behind the veil. By their own inquiries (and as wealthy businessmen, they appreciated the importance of reliable information), they had arrived at the same conclusion as Johannes Cabal; that she was almost certainly Lady Orfilia Ninuka. In which case, she had survived a terrible disaster, and who knew at what physical cost? She had once been considered beautiful, but now she veiled her face, and her voice betokened the huskiness of a damaged larynx. It was easy to imagine that Lady Ninuka had died, and the fire that had killed her had birthed this creature, this Red Queen.

  She knew all the highways and byways of Mirkarvian politics, certainly. The surviving great families were in thrall to her, for she knew where the bodies were buried, both literally and figuratively, and through the offices of Lady Misericorde had set several of the former striding into the homes of the few recalcitrant families. She knew their secrets, she had the forces of darkness at her beck, and she still had a substantial shock force of Katamenian bandits as her loyal and eager imperial guard. These she had wisely billeted outside Krenz in a small town that was suffering badly under such a toxic privilege. She also had the keys to the Mirkarvian exchequer, and that wealth equalled their fortunes combined. Still, it was insufficient by itself for the future they envisioned and plotted for, and so they were bound together by money and ambition.

  The demeanour of the three men suggested tension; they had no idea why the Red Queen had so abruptly and imperiously demanded a meeting, and both the suddenness and high-handedness of it had put them on edge. Despite being very nearly positive that they knew her true identity, that thin ribbon of doubt chafed. It is in human nature to expect the unlikely to be true, to build castles in Spain on the strength of a lottery ticket, and so they all harboured a tiny niggling suspicion that she was in reality some unknown quantity, and therefore unpredictable and potentially that much more dangerous. Human nature and human foolishness, for if they had delved beneath the ‘poor little rich girl’ patina of Orfilia Ninuka as presented in their reports, they would have appreciated that the only way that she could have been more dangerous would have been to have had nitroglycerine for blood, had sticks of dynamite for bones, and been fond of hopscotch.

  Still, she was a lady, and they were gentlemen, so they rose when she entered the chamber, the more old-worldly of them offering at least a nod in deference as she took her place, and then sat. There was a silence of a minute or so while the servants filled wine glasses for the men, although not for her crimson majesty, of course—the veil mitigating against it.

  ‘So,’ said de Osma, as the pause threatened to become indecent. ‘Why did you call this meeting, your majesty?’

  The figure in red did not reply immediately, nor even move for a long moment. The stillness was unnerving in itself. Then she said, ‘We have come to a pivotal moment in the campaign, gentlemen. We decided that this was some grounds for celebration.’

  De Osma frowned. ‘What pivotal moment? We … or at least, I was not aware of any new part of the plans to be put into operation this day.’

  ‘Not everything is in our hands, Vizconde,’ she said. Her voice was thin, barely more than a whisper, but it travelled well in that stone-walled room. ‘Certain events must occur before we may proceed.’

  ‘Certain events?’ said Mr Burton Collingwood. He sipped from his goblet while he thought, then added, ‘Have you been holding out on us, ma’am? I’m with de Osma on this; I didn’t know of anything that we had to wait for.’

  ‘True, Mr Collingwood, but our plans are subject to a form of astrology. If certain bodies are in certain places, then it is propitious. We are in receipt of intelligence that indicates that today is such a propitious day.’ She said nothing for a moment, but despite the veil, there was a sense of great satisfaction, and that behind the veil, she was smiling. ‘Cabal is here.’

  ‘Here?’ said von Ziegler, growing pale. ‘Here in t
he castle?’

  ‘Mr Cabal was nothing but a disappointment,’ said Collingwood. ‘I thought he had scooted, and good riddance.’

  ‘No,’ whispered the Red Queen. ‘Not Horst. Johannes Cabal is in Mirkarvia.’

  The three men looked at one another. De Osma spoke for them all when he said, ‘Who?’

  ‘The sponsor of our feast. Without him, Mirkarvia would not be the place it is today. We owe him so very much.’

  De Osma glanced once again around the faces of his colleagues, but received nothing but blank looks, and slight shakes of the head. ‘This … Johannes Cabal … he is an ally, then?’

  ‘He is a necromancer.’

  ‘We already have a necromancer, though. Do we need another?’

  The Red Queen made a stifled noise that could as easily have been a laugh as a sob. ‘We do not. My Lady Misericorde is all the necromancer we need.’

  ‘Then…’ De Osma looked at the others and shrugged, nonplussed.

  ‘You may consider him superfluous to your concerns, gentlemen. You are primarily here to mark another important phase in our great undertaking. Specifically, that our financial advisors inform us that the monies that you promised are finally all in place and accounted for.’

  Collingwood grunted impatiently. ‘Are you serious, ma’am? You’re cracking open a bottle because our cheques cleared?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. There was an amusement in her whispers that was icy enough to chill the air. ‘We feel that what this signifies is, however, worthy of some celebration.’

  ‘Which is…?’ said Collingwood, a little weary at the queen’s circumlocutions.

  ‘None of you could transfer capital directly for reasons of legality and discretion,’ she said. ‘All of you had to enact certain financial instruments to leak considerable monies to Mirkarvia.’

  ‘Yes,’ said de Osma slowly. ‘We discussed all this months ago.’

  ‘And now these instruments are active, and the flow of money is unhindered,’ continued the queen.