The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘Yes,’ said Horst slowly, uncertain as to the relevance.

  ‘The waking world impinges upon the Dreamlands. Indeed, many physical entities may gain entrance directly to them. Ghouls, for example.’ Here a glimmer of fond remembrance passed across his face. ‘And gods.’ The glimmer vanished. Cabal stared at a cold cut of beef and its pickled red cabbage accompaniment as if he held it personally responsible for some tragedy in his life. He sighed. ‘The point is that what is not, may be, and that which is, may not.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Horst.

  They sat in silence for a minute.

  ‘You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?’ said Cabal.

  ‘Not a sausage.’

  ‘I am trying to say, in words of as few syllables as possible, that the principles of the Dreamlands hold some sway in the waking world. They may even be extrusions. This latter point I do not know, and nor do I care to find out. That they exist is all that matters.’

  Now Horst started to get an inkling of what his brother was proposing, and his expression was suitably startled at the revelation.

  ‘Hold on. Are you suggesting that there are places in the world that don’t actually exist?’

  Cabal looked at him coldly. ‘If you say, “Like Norwich,” or similar, I shall not be responsible for my actions.’

  Horst seemed insulted. ‘The very thought.’

  He had been about to moot Swindon.

  ‘As I say, I do not know whether these locations are outposts of the Dreamlands or simply called into being by a similar process. It hardly matters. They will not be found on any map, that much I know. They exist in between the here and the now, edge on like the blade of a knife. If you don’t know where to find them, you never shall.’

  ‘How did this Prester John fellow find all these places?’

  ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘He wrote a book about it.’

  ‘He didn’t exist. He never existed.’

  Horst took in this intelligence with difficulty. ‘How did he manage to write a book, then?’

  ‘You’re forgetting that of which I spoke earlier. Allegory and allusion. Have you ever heard of Prester John before?’

  Horst shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I think I have, probably. Sounds familiar. Something to do with the Crusades, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Gold star.’

  ‘I would ask you not to patronise me,’ said Horst, ‘but that would be like asking you not to breathe. Carry on.’

  ‘Simply put—’

  ‘Thanks ever so…’

  ‘Simply put, he was the great hope of Christian Europe when the Moslems were being such a threat to them in the thirteenth century. They had the Holy Lands, they had spread along North Africa and into Spain, and there was the real possibility that they would spread further still. The Crusades were partially about reclaiming the Holy Lands in general and Jerusalem in particular, but the core of their purpose was to halt the threat. It was a real threat, too. The forces arrayed under the crescent were far more coherent than those under the cross. The royal houses of Europe had spent so long bickering and warring amongst themselves, they were taken by surprise by an external threat. They were desperate.

  ‘So, when a rumour of a previously unknown Christian empire in the East started to circulate, people were desperate enough to believe in it. An empire under a Christian ruler popularly known as Prester John, who had successfully defeated the Moslem in the East, and now wished to ally himself with Europe to fight the Moslem in the West.’ Cabal drank some tea. ‘A shame, then, that he didn’t exist, and neither did his empire.’

  ‘That must have been a bit of a blow.’

  ‘You know how the Crusades turned out. Yes, I think we can safely say it was a bit of a blow. That didn’t stop people believing in Prester John, however. It didn’t stop them from wanting to believe. A letter was delivered decades later, claiming to be from the same Prester John. You see how wishful thinking starts to develop supernatural overtones? In this letter, the author describes “his” empire. It is full of the most remarkable wonders, including’—and here Cabal paused dramatically—‘the Fountain of Youth.’

  ‘So the Fountain of Youth doesn’t exist?’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘You said Prester John’s empire didn’t exist.’

  ‘I said Prester John didn’t exist. Attend more closely, Horst.’

  Horst huffed with exasperation. ‘May I just say that I am very confused at this juncture?’

  ‘That is why I am a scientist and you are a fop. Now, the Orient was becoming less of a mystery to Europeans by this time, and its lands were being mapped. Cartographers looked around and saw there was no possible place that this marvellous empire could possibly exist, and reported as such. This, again, constituted “a bit of a blow”.’

  ‘So, that was it for the legend of Prester John…’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ Horst’s expression was of somebody trying to play a game wherein the other player keeps ‘remembering’ rules that tip things in his favour.

  ‘No. They just looked for another bit of terra incognita and stuck it in there instead. The mysterious empire of Prester John and all its marvels did a moonlight flit. Popular delusion lifted it bodily from the Orient and placed it in Africa instead. So, you see the significance of the book’s title now?’

  Horst looked like he’d been slapped with a halibut. Cabal pressed on regardless.

  ‘The One True Account of Presbyter Johannes by His Own Hand is not about Presbyter Johannes at all. His legend is used as an extended allegory to hide from the ignorant and illuminate to the wise that such places of such potentiality actually exist. The wonders listed in the letter purporting to be from Prester John are not parts of a single empire; they are all pockets of ontological happenstance. Including…’

  He looked keenly at Horst. For once, his brother did not disappoint him.

  ‘The Fountain of Youth?’

  Cabal smiled a smile of harsh satisfaction. ‘And what is youth if not vitality? What is it if not life?’ The smile faltered. ‘My tea’s gone cold.’

  * * *

  This was not the most glamorous job they had ever been engaged upon, but for the two men lurking in shrubbery just below the crest of the hill, nor was it the worst. They were encamped on the other side of the hill, and only lit a fire during the hours of darkness, its light baffled by an impromptu wall of stones, its smoke hidden by the night. They had food for a few days, and supplemented it with locally caught rabbits, roots, and berries. They were used to living rough, and the English countryside was a great deal less rugged than the Katamenian forests to which they were accustomed. It was, therefore, something of a busman’s holiday to them, used as they were to living hand to mouth, waylaying strangers, and avoiding the law. All they had to do was keep an eye on the house across the valley from their encampment and, should the owner leave, go to the nearby village and report the fact by telegram. Leave, that is, with luggage. Their leader, their employer, their owner was not interested in trips to buy a bottle of milk and a loaf. These were logged in haltingly formed letters scrawled into a notebook, but were of insufficient import for concern. If, however, he left with luggage including—probably—something coffin-sized and likely at night, they were to report this with alacrity. It did not do to fail in orders, not even in the slightest detail. Their employment was profitable, it was true, far more than they would have believed possible even a year before. But the other side of the coin was a level of discipline to which the wise had adjusted quickly.

  It was after all a dangerous, even fatal, mistake to disappoint the Red Queen.

  * * *

  ‘The book details…’ Cabal paused to reconsider his words. ‘The book implies methods by which these splinters may be located.’

  ‘Are these like pocket universes, Johannes?’ Horst had his best serious face on, and it was a reasonable question. ‘Like that one with the drizzle and the croquet?’


  ‘You remembered that? No. Not really. The Eternal Garden and its cousins—’

  ‘That place has a name?’

  ‘It does. I just coined it. The Eternal Garden and its cousins are constructs, very deliberately created by wit, wile, and a lot of mathematics. The splinters of reality to which the book refers are more natural in their creation. They are literally the stuff of legend. The creations of a mass gestalt, not necessarily—as I hinted earlier—of human intellect. They are of a feather to the hidden places of the fey, and share many of the same dangers.’

  ‘Oh, goody,’ said Horst. ‘I was wondering when we’d get onto the dangers. Come on, then. What are we likely to encounter?’

  Cabal was pleased that his brother was so engaged upon the project at hand that he easily used ‘we’ when describing the approaching travails. He gave no indication of that pleasure, however. It would never do to give Horst the impression, truthful though it might have been, that he both required and wished his brother’s involvement.

  ‘The usual. Monsters, deathtraps, riddles, plentiful opportunities for derring-do.’

  ‘What an interesting definition of “usual” you have…’

  ‘It isn’t by choice, brother. These are places created, as much as anything, by an unconscious yearning for the impossible, and the certainty that any fruit worth the taking will not be easily plucked. We shall be confronting the results of millennia of human ingenuity, wilfulness, and malice. Nor just that of humans. We shall tread in the shadows cast by campfires and their stories, of the tales of minstrels, of every idiotic blood-soaked fable told by an elder sibling to terrify the younger.’

  Here Horst scratched his jaw, and regarded Cabal from under a censorious brow. ‘You’re not still looking under the bed before retiring, are you? Anyway, given your line of work, I’d have thought that was a good habit to get into. Lord only knows what ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties you’ve stirred up in your time.’

  ‘I tend to shoot them at the time of stirring. It saves later unpleasantness.’

  ‘Never put off an unpleasantness until tomorrow when you can be unpleasant today?’

  Cabal shrugged. ‘In principle, yes. There is another consideration.’

  ‘Thank heavens. It was all beginning to sound so easy.’

  ‘The Lady Ninuka.’

  Horst sat up suddenly. ‘The Red Queen?’

  ‘I suppose she’s a de facto queen, now. Queen Ninuka of Mirkarvia. That country seems to have no luck at all. If only you had slain her while you had the chance.’

  It was an unwise thing to say. ‘I didn’t have a chance. You weren’t there. Don’t be so bloody ignorant.’ Horst sank back into a louring attitude, unusual for him.

  Cabal belatedly remembered something he’d come across once. It was called ‘diplomacy’ and it was, in principle, lying as an instrument for making people feel not quite so ill done to. This would seem to be an ideal situation on which to ply such a discipline, as it occurred to Cabal that not only had Horst failed to kill Ninuka, which was embarrassing enough, but that the woman Alisha Bartos, currently to be found occupying a barrel in the cellar, had died in that encounter, and that Horst may have harboured some sort of emotional attachment to her. Perhaps diplomacy was the correct tactic to employ at that moment, Cabal concluded. Thus steeled in his intent, he hazarded an attempt at this exciting new conversational form.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he said, and rested from his labours.

  It didn’t seem to have entirely worked. ‘I didn’t want to kill Ninuka, anyway. That’s not the sort of person I am, Johannes. I’d, y’know, sort of had vague ideas of arresting her. Capturing her. The Mirkarvians have been hurt by her far more than anyone else; they deserved to put her up on trial. If they want to string her up at the end of it, that’s their concern. I’m not some sort of executioner.’

  Cabal was hardly listening. Horst had entirely failed to appreciate the delicacy and elegance of his utterance and was instead blathering about failing to kill Ninuka. Holding down his exasperation at his brother’s arrant twittery, he said, ‘No, no. I wasn’t talking about Ninuka. I was talking about you getting the Bartos woman killed.’

  The short pause that ensued was more than sufficient to assure Cabal that there was far more to this ‘diplomacy’ malarkey than he had perhaps given credence.

  ‘Not that you did,’ he added.

  Horst’s anger flared across his face and passed in a flicker to be replaced by a dour acceptance that this was his brother he was talking to, and the lifetime of making allowances that this betokened.

  ‘That’s your idea of diplomacy, is it?’ he asked. Cabal shrugged; perhaps. ‘Let’s just skip that whole unhappy episode and get back to what you were saying, shall we?’ Cabal shrugged; yes, let us do that.

  ‘Notes. There were none. Ninuka’s scientific library was … idiosyncratic, to say the least. About a third of the books made no sense in context. Popular histories, dreadful calumnies, much the same where necromancy is concerned. They had no place there. The rest, however, were sensible choices, including a couple of rarities.’

  ‘Like the Prester John book?’

  Here Cabal paused and seemed troubled. ‘No. It is a great rarity to be sure. Indeed, the only extant copy as far as I know. But, it is not a book of necromancy. I only recognised its great utility to my researches due to a great deal of reading and peripheral references.’ He looked deeply perplexed. ‘It has taken me years to reach that point, Horst. Is she really such an extraordinary prodigy as a necromantrix that she arrived at the same conclusion so much more quickly and then was able to actually procure this rarest of texts?’

  ‘It’s … possible?’ said Horst, deploying the meanest slivers of tact under the circumstances. If he meant to sting his brother by the unavoidable implication, he was disappointed. Cabal was too wrapped up in conjecture to notice.

  ‘Possible, of course. Probable … its probability concerns me. What I understand of Ninuka’s intelligence is that, while she is by no means stupid, her nous is not of the academic variety. Indeed, before she was—’

  ‘Provoked?’ offered Horst.

  ‘—inspired to take up necromancy by—’

  ‘You murdering her father?’

  ‘—circumstances, she seemed to have no scientific interests at all. Apart from a very specific branch of biology, at any rate.’ He glanced at Horst, whose left eyebrow had risen on a tide of curiosity. ‘You would have liked her then.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Horst, to whom all had become clear.

  ‘From Lady Bountiful to an evil fairy-tale queen in a single bound seems prodigious.’ He nodded, conceding the point. ‘But not impossible.’

  ‘You should be proud, Johannes.’ Horst’s tone was hardly conciliatory. ‘She is your creation, after all.’

  At this, Cabal coloured slightly, but then subsided quickly. ‘Unkind, but true, I regret to say. Most of my more malignant creations are more easily dealt with, too.’

  ‘I doubt she’s going to succumb to a few sharp blows with a retort stand, no.’

  ‘Oh, she probably would. Getting within a country mile of her with a retort stand is the issue. I digress. The point I was making is that her notes were nowhere to be found in her laboratory. Whatever she had culled from her books and her researches is contained within them, and those notes represent the nucleus of the threat she represents.’

  ‘Threat? What threat? She’s in Mirkarvia, we’re in England’s green and pleasant land. She’s a long way away.’

  Here Johannes Cabal furnished his brother with a look that spoke of disappointment largely with himself at trying to talk to Horst when he could be talking to some lichen, which would probably understand the situation better.

  ‘She’s very rich, ruthless, and motivated. Mirkarvia really isn’t that far away when one has access to at least one fast air vehicle. I doubt the Catullus is the only thing she appropriated from the Mirkarvian aeronavy, either. If she bu
t knew of this house, a stick of bombs descending upon it from a cloudless sky would be a likely outcome. And don’t tell me that she wouldn’t risk the ire of the Royal Aeroforce by doing so; losing a ship would be a small price for her as long as she was not aboard.

  ‘I don’t believe revenge is her main concern at present, however. She must know I have Presbyter Johannes, and that will inform her actions. She knows I shall attempt to seek out the Fountain of Youth, be it actual or figurative. She will attempt to beat me to it. I am sure of it.’

  ‘But you don’t know where it is.’

  ‘I know several places where it might be. They will have to be investigated until the correct one is found.’

  ‘How many is “several”?’

  ‘Five, scattered across Europe, Asia, and Africa.’

  Horst blanched. ‘That will take years!’

  ‘Months, but too many months. Given her resources, Ninuka will almost certainly find the majority before us.’

  Horst rose and paced up and down. ‘Well, here’s a pretty problem.’

  ‘Not at all. If the sites are explored sequentially, yes. If, however, two expeditions go forth, then I think that tips matters back in our favour.’

  Horst stopped in his pacing. ‘We split up? I’m not sure that is a very good idea, Johannes. For one thing, there’s the way I tend to burst into flames in daylight. That’s limiting. And, to be honest, I’m not sure I’d recognise a knife-thin sliver of a conjectural reality if it bit me.’

  Cabal smiled at him or, at least, the furthermost point of his mouth rose. ‘Trust you to do this by yourself? Ever the joker, Horst.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Horst said it without a reciprocating smile.

  ‘No, there will be physical danger, and there will be challenges of an intellectual nature. You can surely handle the former, but with all due respect…’

  He did not finish the sentence, nor did he need to.

  Horst sat down heavily and crossed his arms.

  ‘In truth, I have the opposite problem. There are things in this and others worlds that are unimpressed by even a Webley .577. What I propose, therefore, are two teams of two. We shall procure the services of somebody able to look after themselves and me into the bargain for one duo, and somebody with perspicacity, wit, and intelligence to make up for your shortcomings in those attributes to join you in the other.’