Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute jc-3-1

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘Is all lies,’ said one merchant, cheerfully.

  ‘We has deck quoits,’ said the other, happily.

  ‘No doubt you do,’ said Cabal, climbing to his feet, ‘and that is another excellent reason not to travel with you. Good night, gentlemen,’ he said to Shadrach, Bose and Corde. ‘I shall see you in the morning, when we shall look for a real captain who has a real chance of getting us to Dylath-Leen. If I do not see you, I shall assume you have decided to ignore my advice, have accepted the offer of these . . .’ he couldn’t bring himself to flatter them with people, given he knew full well that, beneath their robes, they were not even faintly human ‘. . . these things, and that you are bound for an interesting, if short and miserable, lunar experience.’ With that, he left.

  On one side of the table Shadrach, Bose and Corde turned to regard the two merchants with manifest suspicion.

  ‘We has deck quoits,’ repeated the second merchant, blissfully, a sweetener that had always sealed the deal in the past.

  ‘We’ll try the docks tomorrow,’ said Corde to Shadrach, and left the table. Bose followed quickly, and a moment later, with some reluctance, Shadrach.

  The two merchants sat smiling but nonplussed, looking around the room as if for an explanation as to why their infallible ruse had failed. After a few moments, two adventurers walked up to them, fine, swashbuckling types with chiselled jaws and declamatory voices.

  ‘Ho there, sirrah!’ cried one, putting a knee-booted foot upon one of the recently vacated stools and resting his forearm on the raised knee. ‘Rumour has it that if a couple of bullyboys like meself and me companion here –’

  ‘Ho-ho!’ boomed his barrel-chested companion, fists on hips.

  ‘– should seek passage to Dylath-Leen at the turn of the next tide, then you’re the swarthy coves we should be talking to!’ He grinned, and his teeth gleamed as brightly as the golden ring in his ear.

  The merchants were only swarthy by dint of a layer of preservative upon the stolen faces they wore, faces that had once graced the skulls of two previous passengers. The chemical layer contracted over time, giving the faces a manic rictus that people simply interpreted as the open smile of an honest visage.

  ‘We has deck quoits,’ said the second merchant, gleefully, the only phrase in human speech it knew.

  ‘Done then!’ roared the first adventurer, confident that good voice projection and a waxed chest would see him through every predicament. He shook the hand of each merchant in turn, failing to notice that their arms each had two elbow joints. ‘Done, and double done! We sail with the morrow’s tide!’

  ‘Ho-ho!’ boomed his barrel-chested companion, all unaware that in a week he would be giant Moon toad food.

  Next morning discovered Cabal and the others – they in a variety of moods from indifferent to disgruntled, he supremely unconcerned – negotiating passage aboard a weathered but serviceable caravel to Dylath-Leen. There was a clear advantage in travelling aboard the lean and rakish ship in that she would make significantly better time than a fat cog hybrid like Lochery’s Edge of Dusk, a coastal vessel pressed into sea-crossing journeys with a few alterations to hull and sheets that ranged from canny to optimistic. The captain of the Audaine, Wush Oleander, was short and fiery, and came with an unusual prosthetic, apparently an entry requirement for the job. In his case, it was a scrimshaw left hand, beautifully carved to show a tiny vignette of a screaming Captain Oleander dangling by the stump of his wrist from the jaws of a great sea serpent. Bose was particularly taken with it, and plied him with questions about the event, and whether Oleander was filled with an obsessive desire to pursue the sea serpent to the four corners of the Dreamlands, seeking vengeance, but Oleander just looked at him askance, and said, no, these things happened and you just had to accept them. Bose nodded sagely, digesting this shimmering truth, then asked about meals.

  After passage to Dylath-Leen had been agreed, and their few belongings secured, Cabal and Corde stood by the rail as the ship made ready to depart on the running tide. They had little to say to one another, and instead watched the docks and the other ships departing the Oriab Island. One was a large black galley that slid by, its ranks of oars working strongly, silently, and with inhuman synchronisation. On deck, two merchants, swathed in black, played quoits. As a breeze blew toward the Audaine, it seemed to carry a scrap of sound with it, a voice raised in righteous indignation, apparently somewhere below.

  Corde frowned as he listened intently, then said to Cabal, ‘Did somebody just shout, “Release us at once, you varlets!”?’

  Cabal watched the black galley glide by and out past the harbour mole, a great breakwater of natural and worked stone. ‘No,’ he said, and went below.

  The journey back across the sea was largely uneventful. They happened upon the sunken city again and, as before, the crew became anxious and hastened to clear it as quickly as they could. This time, however, they crossed it at dusk, and during the night the ship was paced by something that never came closer than a hundred yards off the starboard beam, churning the sea into a phosphorescent glow as it went. Captain Oleander stood by the wheelsman for five long hours, quietly warning him to hold his heading and to change course neither closer nor further away from their submarine shadow. Eventually, whatever it was dived deep, leaving the surface to the waves and the white horses, and the Audaine as she sped away from those unhallowed waters. Oleander stayed watching until the sky started to lighten in the east, and only then did he go to his bunk.

  Cabal had little interest in such things: he was entirely of Captain Lochery’s liver here. If a sea monster attacked the ship, there would be some screaming, men falling off rigging and the other usual accoutrements of such an attack, and then they would all die and that would be that. As he would have no say in the outcome, he failed to see any reason why he should spend time fussing about it. Besides, he had a much more immediate and more intriguing happenstance upon which to apply his intellect.

  He had been waiting for Ercusides to die again, but Ercusides hadn’t, and Cabal found this perplexing in the extreme. The agent he had used to bring some sort of life back to the slightly crumpled skull had been a long shot, and he had been pleasantly surprised when it had not only worked but worked magnificently. From past experience, the best he had been hoping for was a few sepulchral sentences from Beyond the Veil, yet instead Ercusides had been loquacious to the point of actually being rather exasperating. His personality seemed to be much as it had been in life, which was unfortunate but there it was. Cabal had not even had to mutter the mandatory incantation to complete the ritual, indicating that perhaps in the Dreamlands ‘mandatory’ was not so terrifically mandatory.

  Every day or so, he would open his Gladstone bag and be unsurprised, if increasingly perturbed, that cold ghost fire was still rolling off the skull and that the spirit of Ercusides was still there, still aggravatingly chatty.

  ‘Is that you, Cabal?’ the skull demanded, as Cabal took it out of his bag and placed it on the small table in the cramped cabin the four men shared. The others were up on deck at the moment, taking the air, and – by the bye – watching out for more sea monsters, although they would never admit that.

  ‘How did you know I had opened the bag?’ asked Cabal. ‘I was very quiet.’

  ‘I could feel the light on me,’ said Ercusides. ‘Do you think I might be getting my sight back?’

  Cabal looked at the mummified eyelids over the empty sockets. ‘No,’ he said. He leaned back in his chair and regarded the flaming skull thoughtfully. ‘Whatever shall I do with you, Ercusides? Once upon a time I would have dropped you over the side and been done with you. That would have been the convenient thing to do, for me at least. These days I am minded that you are only talking now because of me, and that I am, in some tiresomely moral way, responsible for you. So,’ he leaned forward and rested his chin on his hands on the tabletop, regarding the skull, nose to gap-where-the-nose-used-to-be, ‘what am I to do with you?’

>   Ercusides was silent for a time, and then said, soberly and without resentment, as one learned man speaking to another, ‘Shall I ever know rest again?’

  ‘I do not know. You should have returned already, but the Dreamlands seemingly amplify my powers, and do so unsystematically. I could destroy your skull, but I strongly doubt it would do any good. The bone is only an anchor for the fire, and the fire is you. You would still be here, but in nowhere near as convenient a form. But tell me, you were an aesthete and a hermit in life. Is this new existence really so execrable to you?’

  ‘No, and that I find execrable. But . . . I have time to think now. Nor am I totally isolated while I still have one sense left to me.’ A pause, and then, ‘Ask me in a year, Cabal. Do that for me.’

  ‘If I am still alive myself in a year,’ said Cabal, ‘you have my word.’

  Where Hlanith was virile and lively, and Baharna was exotic and vivacious, Dylath-Leen was built from basalt and made no further claims. The Audaine glided slowly into port soon after dawn, having sighted land too far to the south and hugged the coast back to the north until it found the city. Captain Oleander made no apologies for the navigational misstep, pointing out that changing course at the correct time would have made them cross paths with the thing in the sea, in which case they would probably all be dead by now. Given that as an alternative, a few extra hours afloat seemed far preferable.

  Even having arrived at the city, the event was not one of great joy for crew or passengers. Their first sight of the docks lined with black galleys drew a pall over any such positive feelings. Oleander cut a wad of Ogrothi baccy and chewed it slowly as he eyed the ships with undisguised jaundice. ‘Never seen so many,’ he muttered. under his breath. ‘I’m guessin’ we won’t be callin’ at Dylath-Leen agin fore too long.’ On the decks, they could see figures swathed in black robes, their gloved hands glinting with rare yet vulgar gems, strolling around, or conversing with one another in little gaggles, or playing deck quoits with an obvious ignorance of the rules, such was the depth of their depravity.

  He found his dock at the far end of the wharf, as far away from the ominous vessels as he could. Even as they were tying up to the broad bollards along the dockside, Oleander was already engaged in conversations with other captains who had congregated nearby. Cabal, who was leaning on the rail, was able to make out the gist of the news, and it did not make comforting hearing. The scuttlebutt – a marine term for ‘gossip’ that might amuse or bemuse the casual listener depending on personal interpretation – was that Dylath-Leen was in serious trouble. The council, which had always maintained at least a cosmetic distrust of the black galleys, had suffered a reversal when all its leading members disappeared in a single night. The lesser members, all men of luxuriant tastes and representative of the city’s trading guilds, had slid into the senior executive roles aboard a carpet of greased palms and their first act had been to revoke the limitations upon the black galleys, imposed some years earlier after a previous slavery scandal. There had been little surprise among the citizenry that the councillors’ luxurious tastes had subsequently been gratified to a disgusting level by nameless benefactors. Many people were finding excuses to leave the city, but since the captains of the guard had all been replaced with foreign mercenaries, it was becoming more and more difficult to get through the gates.

  Oleander walked back up the gangplank, scowling. He saw Cabal and said, ‘You mayn’t want to be leaving the ship at this place after all, Master Cabal.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem very friendly here, Captain,’ agreed Cabal. He was thinking of what inevitably lay ahead: there would be a slow erosion of liberties within Dylath-Leen, and then, when the inhabitants were prepared to accept anything because they were permitted to do nothing, the patrons of the black galleys would regard this little patch of ground as safe enough for them to visit from their lunar cities. They would bring with them their unholy appetites and exercise them upon an unwilling populace. After that, it could only be a matter of months at most before Dylath-Leen joined the Dreamlands’ slowly growing list of abandoned and shunned places.

  By this point, the Fear Institute contingent had appeared on deck, carrying their small bags of belongings and eager to disembark. The captain and Cabal’s sour expressions gave them some small inkling that they were going to be missing out on hugs and lei. ‘Is there something awry, Cabal?’ asked Corde.

  ‘Oh, I say! Look at all those black boats!’ cried Bose, inadvertently answering the question. ‘And look! There are more coming!’

  Swearing an oath salty enough to make Dagon purse his lips, Oleander ran aft and looked to the harbour mouth. Bose had spoken nothing more than the truth. Perhaps two miles off, three black galleys in line astern were heading implacably towards Dylath-Leen. ‘What are they doing?’ he demanded of nobody in particular. ‘That’s madness! They’ll never get by the gates beam to beam like that.’ Then he understood, and his face grew pale beneath the tan. He ran to the rail and shouted down to the gossiping captains there gathered, ‘To your ships! To your ships! The devils mean to blockade the harbour!’

  Abruptly all the serious standing around and muttering ominously at one another turned into a mad and undignified dash back to their vessels. Even as they did so, Cabal saw that the city guard, in full mail and faceless behind their helmets, was approaching the docks at a lumbering charge. They ran oddly, as if their knees weren’t in quite the right places for their greaves. Not for the first time, he wished he had access to something with rather more range than a rapier. ‘Captain—’ he began.

  ‘I see ’em, Master Cabal,’ snapped Oleander. ‘Cast off, fore and aft! Cut the lines, damn you!’

  Axes thudded and the mooring ropes parted. The gangplank, forgotten in the frenzy of intent, fell into the water between the ship’s side and the dock as she started to move away, pushed back fiercely by crewmen wielding poles.

  ‘Herr Corde,’ said Cabal. He was watching several of the guards still heading straight for them, despite the widening gap between the ship and the quay. ‘Draw your sword.’ He drew his own, his eyes never leaving the charging guards.

  Corde frowned at him, followed his gaze and scoffed. ‘You’re joking, Cabal. The gap’s twenty feet if it’s an inch. They couldn’t make it even if they weren’t weighed down in armour. Relax. They’ll end up drowning themselves.’

  ‘If they were men, I would agree,’ said Cabal, as the first guard reached the quayside and, without hesitation, threw himself towards the Audaine.

  In a cool, rational world, the guardsman would have described a graceless parabola into the harbour waters and – wrapped in steel knitting as he was – made swift progress to the sea bed. The Dreamlands, however, do not present a cool, rational world, instead favouring a sequence of events such as the guard leaping the gap as if catapulted, crashing heavily into the rail without even a grunt, and then hurdling it easily, drawing its – we can no longer dignify such a creature with his – longsword, and looking for somebody to carve up with it.

  Cabal backed away as the guard swung its helmeted head this way and that. ‘Herr Corde? How much provocation do you need?’ Corde said nothing, but let his cloak fall from his shoulders to reveal the leather armour beneath. The sound of his sword sliding from its scabbard was enough to engage the guard’s attention.

  There was another dull, gruntless thump against the rail, and then another, but this one was followed by a splash: the Audaine was finally out of jumping distance for even these inhuman creatures.

  The first guard spoke, but it was an unconvincing attempt, full of gurglings and basso profundo boomings from deep within. It tried again, and this time managed to produce something like human speech, although it was as convincing a rendition as a dog saying, ‘Sausages.’

  ‘Ship . . . impounded . . . by authority of . . . impounded . . .’ It swung its head from side to side, a poor impersonation of a man looking around. Cabal’s misgivings deepened: however the guard was sensing them, it was n
ot through eyes.

  ‘Ye’ll step off my ship, sir!’ demanded Oleander. He carried a polished falchion that Cabal had assumed uncharitably was for show. Now drawn and glinting in the weak sunlight, it looked far more like a device for creative hacking.

  ‘Ship impounded . . . order of . . . council . . . Dylath-Leen . . .’ Without allowing even the shortest moment for a reply, it launched into the attack.

  Oleander met the slashing blow with a fast parry of his falchion that struck sparks. He thrust the guard’s sword arm to one side and shoved it back with his free hand to gain a little space. Cabal, meanwhile, was weighing up the wider situation. All along the dock, the other manned ships were trying to cut loose while their crews engaged the wave of bestial guards. A swift glance over his shoulder showed that the three galleys were close by the mole and all had their tillers hard over, swinging across to block the harbour mouth. Then, to add to his rapidly populating list of concerns, he saw that some of the black galleys already in dock were moving out to engage the ships that had managed to cast off. They were in a rat trap and, his mind whirling through alternative plans, Cabal could see no way out of it. Then he noticed the second guard who had jumped, painfully hauling itself on to the rail, and noted with satisfaction that there was at least one small victory he could achieve.