The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘Your guns cannot harm me. You cannot harm me.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Johannes Cabal. He slid the .577 revolver back into its holster. ‘I cannot kill you. Harm, however, is a broader category.’ He reached into an inside pocket and produced a handle rendered in steel, dark wood, and cheap ivory. With a snik, a blade snapped out into position.

  The hideous smile did not waver. ‘With that?’

  ‘With this.’

  ‘What makes you believe it will be any more efficacious than a bullet?’

  ‘For much the same reason surgeons don’t carry out operations with a pistol. I will be requiring precision in a minute.’

  At last, the smile faded. ‘You cannot hurt me.’

  ‘Hurt. As if you even know what that really means. Allow me to demonstrate.’

  He did not raise the knife or even approach Rufus Maleficarus. Instead, he started to recite in carefully moderated tones sentences that the world had only heard three times before. The language was strange, belonging to a race that was long since extinct and not especially human when it had lived.

  The effect was immediate. Maleficarus staggered as if stricken by a sudden illness, his face paling, his expression frantic. ‘Stop! What are you doing? What are you doing?’

  Cabal finished a phrase, commented, ‘Why, summoning you, of course. The ritual is pathetically simple, but that was always deliberate on your part, wasn’t it?’ and continued with the strange, alien, yet eminently pronounceable words of power.

  ‘But … why? I am here! Right here!’ Maleficarus fell to his knees. ‘Why?’

  Cabal paused. For that moment, Maleficarus rallied, but not enough. Cabal examined the blade in his hand, and flicked away some lint at the pivot. ‘Because, as you so conceitedly noted, I cannot hurt you. I can, however, inconvenience you enormously.’ He continued the ritual. With a groan, Maleficarus fell onto all fours.

  Cabal watched him dispassionately. He had little enough sympathy for Rufus Maleficarus when he was Rufus Maleficarus. Now that he was merely a convenient vessel for a monstrous otherworldly energy dedicated to control and proliferation, Cabal regarded him with less compassion than one might regard the death of a bacterium within the blood of a recovering invalid. He felt the drag within his own spirit as it pulled the Ereshkigal animus towards him, tearing it from its anchorage in Maleficarus.

  ‘Please … Cabal … don’t do this…’

  ‘Who’s talking?’ asked Cabal. ‘Not that it matters. In either case, nobody and nothing that I respect.’

  With a ripple in the air, the Ereshkigal animus lost its last fingerhold on the physical frame of Maleficarus. His eyes rolled up in his skull, and he died, yet again.

  Cabal could feel the animus drawing close, but he could see it, too, an oily disturbance in the light as if something were being dragged along behind the canvas scenery it pleases us to call ‘Reality’. Closer it came, and closer still, rendered eager to join with him by the terms of the ritual, yet reluctant, for it knew who and what he was. He said the words, the ancient words of power, and pulled it closer with every syllable.

  And when it was one yard from him, he stopped, and smiled an unpleasant smile, and he said, ‘Actually, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I’ll summon you at all.’

  The distortion wavered.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ said Cabal conversationally, ‘this is something that’s ever happened to you before, either. Previously you’ve always left this world by being evicted. Yet here you are, neither one thing nor another. That sounds like a very volatile state for something like you. Why, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if you were just to’—he waved the fingers of his free hand—‘boil away into nothing.’

  The distortion slid like butter in a hot pan straight back towards the recently abandoned body of Rufus Maleficarus. He was very dead by this time, but the Ereshkigal Working was used to raising cold, rotting corpses as its puppets. Rufus’s still warm carcass represented no sort of challenge to it. It would occupy him, murder Cabal, and work its way up from there. This time (it thought with less confidence than it had on similar occasions in the past), this time it would devour the Earth.

  Rufus Maleficarus shook as he reanimated, the baleful energies coursing through the cooling fibres of the corpse. The eyes darkened with blood, he shook once more, then started to rise.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said Cabal. While the entity had been otherwise distracted he had walked to the body and waited, knife in hand and a patient expression upon his face. He knelt, putting one knee between Rufus’s shoulder blades, thereby pinning the freshly created revenant to the floor. ‘Comfy in there? I hope so, for your sake.’

  Cabal barely hesitated as he aimed his blade at the top of Rufus’s neck. Then he drove the steel between the occipital lobe and the atlas vertebra with a surety that betokened distressing quantities of practise. Rufus Maleficarus shuddered and lay still.

  No, that’s not quite true. His eyes rolled and his eyelids flickered. His jaw worked angrily, and within the stolen mouth, the wet tongue could be seen to flex and extend. Then, summoning shreds of power, he spoke.

  ‘What…’ The voice was horrible, only faintly like the bluff conversational roar of Rufus Maleficarus. This came from somewhere else, a voice from beyond the ajar door into another reality. ‘What have you done, Cabal?’ It was breathy and reptilian, and the vowels were extended unforgivably. Despite the lack of sibilants in that short sentence, it was the kind of voice that assured the listener that when sibilants became available, the sibilance would be extreme.

  ‘What have I done?’ Cabal seemed honestly nonplussed. ‘Why, I’ve forced you to occupy an unsuitable vessel as both animating spirit and animatee, and then broken the body in such a way that you are localised from the neck up. Surely that’s obvious?’ He looked around the rooftop as if seeking inspiration or, as it turned out, surgical instruments. ‘Really, the first time in ages I come out without my bag and—wouldn’t you know it?—that’s the very evening a bone saw would be handy.’ He rose and gave the corpse a friendly kick. ‘I would guess that this is an entirely novel experience for you?’

  ‘You have not won, Cabal.’

  Cabal smiled, not kindly. ‘Yes, I have.’

  * * *

  Miss Virginia Montgomery had set off enough pyrotechnics in her time to be very familiar with the way that smoke moved, and there was plenty of smoke hanging over the field of battle from guns, explosives, and burning werebeasts. As her gaze had been dragged around to break from the Medusae, she had noted the wreaths of smoke underlit by the fires started by the fuel explosion, and that it was making no effort to fill a particular volume of air that bore more than a passing resemblance to a great, flying jellyfish.

  With the commendably clear thinking earlier alluded to, married to a greater appreciation of the unlikely creatures one might find falling out of purple clouds these days, she drew a conclusion and immediately decided to act upon it.

  She reached into the cockpit’s map compartment and slid out the aviator’s sunglasses she kept stowed there. She wasn’t fond of night flying at the best of times, and was not formally qualified for it, just as Becky had once told Horst. Low flying after dusk with sunglasses on seemed like a good way to hit something hard and unforgiving like the castle, or a hill, or just about anything, but she hoped the lenses would at least reduce the effect of the Medusan lights. She shook out the spectacles’ arms and put them on, resting near the tip of her nose so she could look over them until she was ready.

  Years of formation flying had given her a pretty good idea of where her aircraft was in relation to the battlefield and the castle, and she could only hope the few seconds of strange fascination she had endured had not disorientated her. She gave her instruments one last scrutiny, checked the ‘Master Arm’ switch for the Spirit of ’76’s weapons was on, pushed the glasses up to cover her eyes, and brought the entomopter around to starboard to bear on the castle.

  Whatever curio
us frequencies the creatures generated to snare the eye foundered badly when faced by polarised glass. There was certainly still some of the Lorelei about the glimmering colours, but their power was vastly reduced, allowing Miss Virginia to blink, although her eyes were still drawn back to the Medusae if she allowed them to do so.

  But, there! Again that strange billow in the smoke. She sideswept a little further to starboard to line it up with the nearest of the three visible Medusae. Not, she suspected, that there was more than one. These creatures could apparently do very clever things with light, including letting it slide through them, and producing images elsewhere. The human weapons were not ineffective because the Medusae were somehow incorporeal, but because they were illusions.

  The nearest apparent Medusa shimmered as if seen through oil, the puppeteer’s invisibility being impressive, but not perfect. She placed the area of distortion squarely in the reflector sight, allowed for range, and opened fire.

  This time the tracers did not sail harmlessly through the target. Instead, the glittering stream hit seemingly empty air and made it shudder. A terrible cry, like an injured whale, echoed around the battlefield. The rearmost Medusa flickered as if shadows were sliding rapidly across its skin and then it vanished like an extinguished candle.

  Miss Virginia Montgomery came on, grim as a Fury, and her entomopter’s rocket pods stuttered with vengeance. Rocket trails split the night sky, tearing lines of lights and smoke across the air like magical telegraph wires being drawn to the receiver of what was to be some very bad news. Most missed their marks, but two struck the void in the smoke and exploded violently. Both of the remaining Medusae vanished, and in their place a single new one appeared, dripping yellowish blood. Its attention was entirely focussed upon its tormentor, and lights swam across its surface with brilliant intensity.

  ‘Good God! There! There!’ cried Professor Stone. ‘Fire upon it! Fire!’ Given new heart, the ground troops focussed on the true enemy and poured lead into it.

  This assistance, unhappily, was coming too late to help Miss Virginia. The Medusa’s redoubled efforts to snare her seemed to be working. Even through the medium of her sunglasses, the light was working upon her. She couldn’t blink, couldn’t look away, could barely move, could barely breathe. Oddly, her eyes seemed to be growing hot in her skull. She had an intimation these would be her last moments, and she met them with a snarl.

  ‘Fine,’ she whispered. ‘Me for you, you beautiful son of a bitch.’

  With her last iota of will, she opened the throttle to full and thumbed the reburn control, dumping fuel into the hot rear exhaust. The Spirit of ’76 surged forward, accelerating hard.

  The agents watched as the entomopter drove into the great bulk of the Medusa, not hitting it quite squarely but with the root of the port wings. They stopped moving quickly in a spray of yellow blood as they slid cleanly halfway through the glowing mass. The Medusa spun a quarter rotation to the clockwise, keening in agony. The entomopter’s wreck slid from it, and yellow gore and entrails gushed from the great wound. Entomopter and otherworldy offal fell into the river.

  The Medusa, its light failing, tried to retreat to the top of the castle tower, as if hoping to return to its home dimension to die, but there was no strength left in it. It wavered, tracking haphazardly across the far side of the river for a hundred feet, and then dropped lifeless to the grassy bank.

  Many of the assorted secret agents and secret soldiers there gathered heaved sighs of relief and gave throat to cries of reprieve and triumph. Melkorka ‘Korka’ Olvirdóttir, however, was already throwing off her outer clothes and boots before diving into the river and swimming strongly to where one forlorn wingtip broke the surface.

  * * *

  Johannes Cabal found Horst some twenty minutes later. The room was a chaotic mess of wrecked furniture, torn-down tapestries, and paintings bespattered with blood. In the centre of it, amidst the ruined corpses of three things that had once passed for members of the Ministerium Tenebrae, knelt Horst Cabal by the body of Alisha Bartos.

  Cabal paused in the doorway, a battle axe liberated from a wall display over his shoulder, a knotted tablecloth from a small occasional table dangling from the base of the axehead. The blade was smeared with blood, and more was soaking through the cloth, dripping slowly onto the stone floor. The overall effect was of a gentleman of the road who was not used to taking ‘no’ as an answer.

  ‘She’s dead.’ Cabal could barely hear Horst’s voice. ‘I couldn’t save her.’

  Cabal dropped the axe and its bundle onto an overstuffed armchair near the door, irreparably staining the soft furnishings with gore. He was by Alisha in a few long strides.

  ‘She’s still warm,’ he said, crouching by her and looking for a pulse in her throat. The cause of death was obvious enough; she was riddled with ragged puncture wounds, four that he could see and possibly more hidden amidst the blood. ‘What happened?’

  Horst waved his hand listlessly to take in the destroyed bodies of creatures with flesh like veal cooked in milk. ‘The Ministerium … they were monsters. I mean real monsters. As in … not metaphorical monsters.’ Cabal bit back the desire to say, yes, he understood what his brother meant. There was something in Horst’s manner that disturbed him. It was a small surprise when he identified it; Horst was in shock and adrift. Part of him felt a glow of triumph—at last the perfect Horst falters—but it was an old part and he disregarded it as one might any artefact of one’s callow youth.

  ‘They attacked us,’ said Horst. All this while, he hadn’t looked away from the face of Alisha Bartos. There were bloody smudges on her eyelids that Cabal knew had been placed when Horst had closed her eyes, his fingers still red with the blood of her killers.

  Cabal looked over at the nearest monstrous corpse, mentally subtracted the terrible injuries wrought upon it, presumably by Horst, added his arcane reading and experience and concluded, ‘Doppelgängers. Specifically shape-eaters. The Ministerium men were devoured, and I think we can guess at whose behest.’ He nodded at Alisha. ‘It was too late by the time you reached her?’

  Horst looked up at him, uncomprehending.

  ‘To save her,’ explained Cabal. ‘To…’ He tapped his own canines with the tips of his index and middle fingers, then gestured vaguely at Alisha’s neck.

  Horst shook his head. ‘She said no. She didn’t want to be like me. Even the horrible little voice in my head was silent, wasn’t telling me to do it anyway. I think it’s gone.’ He looked down at Alisha’s still face. ‘I had to watch her die.’

  The pause turned to a silence, and the silence drew out. Cabal drew in a breath and said slowly, ‘There are other ways.’

  Horst laughed humourlessly. ‘You want me to end up like you, Johannes? Chasing smoke? Leaving misery?’

  Cabal let the implied dismissal of his life’s work slide over him. People had said worse. People had done worse. ‘What else did you have planned? Another morning stroll in the sun?’

  Horst rose and looked his brother in the eye. ‘I’m not sure it’s what she would want. Have wanted.’

  ‘No. No, of course not,’ said Johannes, looking down at the body. ‘She really had her heart set on being murdered by doppelgängers.’

  Horst wavered, then shook his head. ‘It’s not a decision I can make.’

  ‘Well, somebody has to make it, and soon if she’s to be preserved effectively.’ Cabal looked at his brother and saw the torture within him. When he spoke again, his tone was softer. ‘Horst, let me make the decision. I’m the real monster here. I’m used to people thinking the worst of me.’

  ‘She’s not some experiment, Johannes…’

  ‘I know, I know.’ He laid a hand upon Horst’s shoulder. ‘She’s special to you, I can see that.’ He looked down at her again, his jaw moving slowly from side to side as he cogitated. ‘Only when the procedure is thoroughly understood and tested, yes?’

  He looked sideways to find Horst looking at him warily. Johannes Cabal
realised the one thing he could say to reassure him. ‘Second. When it comes to it, I shall raise her second.’

  Horst’s eyebrows rose in consternation. ‘After…?’

  ‘Yes. After. Then will you be convinced of the procedure’s safety?’

  Horst’s face showed his indecision. ‘We can’t just go around resurrecting people, Johannes. It’s against nature.’

  ‘Says the vampire. Truly, Horst, nature lets all sorts of awful things through on the nod. What I propose doesn’t constitute awful in the pejorative sense to my mind.’

  ‘What gives us the right…?’

  ‘I’m a necromancer. I claim the right.’ He sighed. ‘This is hardly the time for an ethical debate. I’m doing it. If she doesn’t like it when I have her whole in body, mind, and spirit again, she can kill herself with my blessing and that will be the end of it. There; I’m making it her decision. Happy?’

  Horst didn’t look especially happy, but Cabal was no longer prepared to indulge his vacillations. ‘Time is pressing. The Ministerium—or at least the members who were foolish enough to come here—are polymorph fodder, Alsager will have led out his troops and burned with them—assuming that all went to plan—and the troublesome thing that was steering Rufus Maleficarus is contained and thereby rendered harmless…’

  ‘I shall be revenged upon you, Johannes Cabal…’ hissed a voice from the bloodstained bundle.

  ‘Oh, be quiet,’ said Cabal with a peremptory wave of his hand.

  ‘Is that … his head?’ asked Horst.

  ‘Indeed, now a vessel for the motivating spirit of the Ereshkigal Working. I shall have to find a box for it.’

  Horst thought of the deep shelf beside the fireplace in Cabal’s sitting room. Upon it were already two boxes, one containing the coldly burning skull of the hermit Ercusides and the other … well, he wasn’t sure, but it whistled and sang nicely, and occasionally spoke, and the box was head-sized, so he presumed it contained another living head of some description.