The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Fifty yards into the tunnel, she found a useful narrowing and skittered to a halt, performing a full turn as she did so. The pack leaders of the pursuing party were not far behind, but they were small and fleet rather than large and dangerous. She speared the first on a foreleg, tossed its convulsing body into the air with a careless flick, and batted it down the tunnel at its fellows with her other foreleg, forcing them to scatter or be knocked over.

  In the breath the attack allowed her, she ran up the wall, trailing silk, and then allowed herself to fall from the ceiling. It was an ugly way to build a web, but she doubted they would afford her the time to do a proper job. She was fighting under disadvantages greater than merely numbers. She was a weaver of traps of assorted forms, and the close press of the enemy prevented her from doing so. Further, her succubine abilities were of little use when confronted by so many. Ideally, she’d ask them to queue up and take a ticket while she dealt with them one by one—male, female, indeterminate, or anywhere else on the spectrum, she was confident of popping just about anyone and anything’s cork in the most terminal of ways. Demons, however, were appallingly uncouth, and this Satan was no gentleman.

  A scurvy of imps ran at her with spears, trying to overwhelm her with numbers, but she raised the bladed barbs along the ridges of her legs and scythed them down as easily as wheat in a field, the kind of bad-smelling wheat that bleeds all over the place and complains bitterly about being harvested.

  The entrée completed, the main course arrived. Zarenyia faced them with more evident confidence than she felt. She was beginning to think that lasting even a few minutes might turn out to be optimistic, for here came Grith demons, hollow-eyed spectres of misery, bearing broadswords. These were not cannon fodder by any means; Ratuth Slabuth did not care to wear her down first. Fine, she decided. If he didn’t mind losing a few elite troops simply because he was in a foul dudgeon, that would count against him, too, when the butcher’s bill was reckoned up. She would be very dead by then, but you can’t have everything.

  The first ran at her, sword trailing in both hands, ready to swing. She saw another start its run almost immediately and saw their reputation was deserved. This was no hasty attack, but rather a practised team manoeuvre. While she was dealing with the first, the second or third would already be killing her. Very well, she would just have to spoil their party piece.

  She moved to engage the first of the Grith, but instead of fighting it, she suddenly changed course and ran up the wall past it. It swung to follow her, and so didn’t realise the attack was coming from the side. Zarenyia was still trailing silk. It caught the Grith under the armpit, and it barely had time to realise the sticky cable had snagged it when Zarenyia released her end and the Grith was yanked off its feet and off towards where she had begun the frame of her apparently unsuccessful web.

  Its fellows did not hesitate at all as their comrade vanished off into the gloom with a despairing cry, but Zarenyia had not expected them to. They would already be moving to a secondary plan, and this, too, she would have to outwit. She flipped forwards and landed behind the two remaining Grith, ready to fight. One she smashed aside with a hard flick of her No. 3 Port leg. The other came at her, sword back to swing. Zarenyia feinted right, then swung back and left, the tip of the demon blade only just missing the threads of her angora sweater. She moved forwards hard, grabbing the Grith’s sword hand with her own and swinging it in a half circle so they were facing the same direction. It struggled to no avail; the demon was strong, but the devil was stronger. It was held helplessly, its sword pointing uselessly down the tunnel.

  ‘Now, now, poppet,’ she whispered in its pointy ear, ‘I like my boys to lead with their weapons. Now, show me how you use it.’

  Out of the gloom swung a frantic shape, the first of the Grith to attack and still fixed firmly to the end of the silk line. Neither it nor the one Zarenyia held had even half a moment to react before the first swung directly onto the second’s sword, the night-black blade easily piercing it to emerge in a welter of innards from its back. The sword’s tines caught on its victim’s ribs. Zarenyia released the Grith and let it swing away clinging to the corpse of its comrade. Now its rhythm was broken, it would be easy meat in a moment. In the meantime, however, she had the third to …

  The third had recovered more quickly than she had allowed. To a round of guttural cries and whinnying shrieks of delight from the rest of the demons, the third Grith landed on Zarenyia’s back. She spun, kicking like Sleipnir in a mood, but the demon grabbed her hair close to the roots with its free hand and hung on.

  ‘No hair pulling, you dirty little bastard! Ow!’ Then she felt the blade touch her throat and realised she was not going to even last a few minutes. It saddened her; she’d hoped her last stand might have been something legendary, but she’d been in literary disagreements with higher body counts. It was very disappointing.

  There was a sharp little sound and the blade swung away from her throat. She braced for the blow, wondering a little why the Grith didn’t simply draw the edge across her throat, then she wondered what cunning ruse the Grith intended by falling from her back, and then she wondered how one gets Grith brains out of angora.

  Miss Smith watched the tumbling body with some satisfaction. ‘You’re right,’ she said to Cabal. ‘It seems easy enough. I wonder if that was a fluke, though.’ She turned and shot the second Grith from the swinging corpse of the first as it tried to free its sword. ‘No. No fluke.’

  Zarenyia was, by turns, delighted and horrified. ‘You’re back! You idiots! Run!’

  ‘I shall not, madam. Miss Smith may, if she cares to, but speaking for myself’—here he paused to put a .577-calibre hole in the face of a belligerent cacodemon—‘I do not care to abandon one of the very few entities in whose presence I am content.’

  ‘Kill them!’ cried Ratuth Slabuth, borrowing his imperatives from The Big Black Book of Obvious Utterances for Megalomaniacs. ‘Kill them all!’

  His horde of demons surged forwards, driven less by obedience to—as far as Satans went—the lesser of two evils, and more by a general appetite for violence.

  ‘There’s no point in us all dying,’ said Zarenyia, backing once more into the throat of the tunnel to limit the attackers’ options.

  ‘There’s no point in any of us dying,’ said Cabal. ‘There’s no need to cover our backs. An orderly fighting retreat will take us out of here.’

  ‘Just out of interest, do you have very many more bullets for these guns, Cabal?’ Miss Smith’s own pistol ran dry as she spoke, the slide locking in the rear position to tell her she was in trouble.

  ‘Ammunition. Of course. Here.’ Cabal tossed her an extra magazine, realising as he did so that her pre-skirmish briefing could have been more detailed.

  ‘What do I do with this?’ she said, brandishing the caught magazine and confirming his realisation.

  ‘Release the empty box, slide in the new one sharply until it engages, release the slide catch, and that should chamber the next round ready to fire.’

  The explanation was short, clear, cogent, and entirely wasted on anyone who didn’t know what a slide catch was.

  The demons pressed close. Cabal revised his tactics. ‘When I said, “Orderly fighting retreat,” perhaps I meant we should just run with the utmost urgency. Starting about now.’

  He quickly swapped his Webley for Miss Smith’s semiautomatic, although he was a little dismayed that she took this as permission to start firing with it in a two-handed grip.

  ‘Jumps around a lot more, doesn’t it?’ she said, shattering the sternum of an onyx demon into shards and splinters. ‘Must feel very bad for your wrists if you shoot it for very long.’

  Cabal didn’t trust himself to reply; he wasn’t used to casual acquaintances playing with his Webley. He focussed on returning the Senzan pistol to firing condition as quickly as he could that he might recover his pistol. They once more swapped weapons.

  ‘I used all your bullets,’ said M
iss Smith, without the grace to say so apologetically. She returned to plinking demons.

  Lips pursed, Cabal emptied the brass casings from the revolver and stoically thumbed in fresh rounds. All around, the demons pressed closer yet, and he felt the balance of probabilities swing firmly away from simply running away being a viable strategy and towards them all dying in a tunnel in Hell.

  He checked his pocket and discovered only a handful of rounds left. There were more in his bag, but he doubted he would have the opportunity to recover them. He would expend the rounds he had, then he would draw his sword cane, and perhaps pink a couple of the distressingly large and muscular-looking creatures that were working their way forwards through the press. Then he would be torn limb from limb. Not exactly how he had hoped the expedition would end, but there were never any guarantees. Zarenyia looked back at him as she dismantled some lesser creatures and she smiled. Miss Smith had run out of bullets again and seemed to be attempting to call down damnation upon the horde with her witchcraft, but—as Cabal had feared—it was of little use in a place where all were damned already. That avenue proving unfruitful, Miss Smith started smiting about her with her parasol, her expression furious and her language unsavoury. Cabal smiled a small smile, too. At least he would die in good company.

  At which point it may be instructive to see what was happening more or less at the same time elsewhere.

  * * *

  The dogs were a surprise. As Miss Leonie Barrow, the Great Detective, and her faithful sidekick, inveterate foil, and slightly dim comic relief, Herr Horst Cabal, strolled through the streets of Sepulchre, they found themselves passing one of the mighty metropolis’s great necropolises. The city apparently housed five of them, spread equidistantly around the outer suburbs. Some were grander than others, some more aesthetic. This particular one was the Leosh Street Municipal Cemetery, a bleak sort of place arranged around an imposing if hideous neo-Gothic chapel of rest that stood tall in the centre of the grounds.

  Despite it being barely dawn, the gate stood unlocked and swinging in a slight breeze. That in itself was enough to draw Miss Barrow’s attention. The sudden appearance of perhaps twenty mutts and strays of the parish rushing towards the entrance from all directions, squeezing through the gap offered by the unsecured gate to run at full pelt towards the chapel, was another.

  Horst was just saying, ‘Well, they seem in a hurry,’ when the clear sound of a shot rang through the chill air to them. Then another, and another.

  ‘The game’s afoot!’ cried Horst, and then he made a mild cry of pain as Miss Barrow punched his upper arm.

  ‘I say that, Horst. You just follow me around, stating the obvious. Come on!’ She gripped the lap of her skirt, lifted it far enough to give her feet clearance, and was off while Horst was still formulating an unobvious reply. He gave up quickly—it transpired she was right—and followed her lead.

  ‘Why are the dogs running towards the shooting? Are they gun dogs?’ Inwardly he cursed himself for saying the obvious thing. The dogs were all manner of breeds and mongrels, as a moment’s attention would have told him.

  ‘They didn’t all emerge from the same point. They’ve come from all over. That’s interesting in itself,’ called Miss Barrow over her shoulder.

  What was also interesting was that the dogs were all gathering at a short set of descending stone steps in the chapel’s shadow that seemed to lead down to its cellar. The dogs were wildly enthusiastic at the prospect of whatever lay behind the door at the base of the steps and danced around yapping happily and wagging their tails at the approach of Leonie and Horst.

  ‘They seem friendly enough, don’t they?’ Horst patted the head of a red setter. It skittered away from his touch, but did not seem otherwise put out by his attention. It made a short run down the steps at the door and then bounced back, looking at Horst expectantly. ‘What do you suppose is in there? Some sort of sausage hoard or something?’

  ‘I have no idea, but it may be meat of another kind.’ She was about to elucidate when the sound of another shot stopped her words. The shot was close, yet far away, oddly attenuated, as if it were the memory of a sound. Whatever it was, it plainly emanated from the far side of the door. Deciding that further discussion was a waste of time and breath when the answer was only the turn of a handle away, she crouched by the padlock that secured the door.

  ‘What a piece of rubbish.’ She was confident that, as a master detective, she would have lock picks stored away in her cuff, just so, and just so she did. She didn’t need to force the skill to use the picks into being; her father had shown her the knack one summer when she grew bored of pressing flowers and painting watercolours. ‘This padlock might as well be made of soap for all the good it is.’ She applied pressure through the torsion pick and set to work with the hook. ‘It’s an insult,’ she muttered. Five seconds’ work and the shackle sprang free. She threw it dismissively to one side. ‘It pays to invest in quality, you cheapskates.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Horst suddenly had the oddest feeling that things were a little awry. Not necessarily threateningly so, but just wrong in some respect. ‘I have the strangest feeling.’

  ‘Déjà vu?’ Miss Barrow released the hasp on the door.

  ‘That, yes, but what’s that thing when you realise a pug has grown to the size of a Shetland pony in the last thirty seconds?’

  Leonie hesitated, her hand on the handle. ‘A delusion? Whatever are you talking about, Horst?’ She turned and saw a pug the size of Shetland pony at the edge of the pack of dogs. Nor it was it the only noticeable member of the group. The red setter Horst had tried to pet was now up upon its hind legs. Its hair seemed to be retracting into its body. ‘Oh,’ she said at the sight, a little faintly. ‘That’s unusual.’

  Beside her an Alsatian had also reared up. It nodded urgently at the still closed door. ‘Quickly,’ it said in tones liquid and guttural by turns. ‘We must hurry.’

  ‘This is all becoming remarkably Alice in Wonderland all of a sudden.’ Horst looked around him as the pack transformed en masse into things that were like bipedal dogs, but were not dogs. He looked at Miss Barrow, at something of a loss. ‘I suppose you’d better open the door for them.’

  Deciding that doing what the hairless rubbery dog-men wanted was probably a better stratagem than not doing what the hairless rubbery dog-men wanted, she turned the handle and swung the door in. She was not able to see what lay beyond for a moment because the dog-men ran past her in a flowing torrent of grey flesh the colour of cold clay. When they had gone by, only the one who had been an Alsatian for a while hung back. ‘Come on,’ it said in those strange tones. It ran through the door, paused to beckon Horst and Leonie to follow. ‘The matter is urgent!’ Then it was gone, down into the depths beneath the chapel.

  ‘That is an odd sort of cellar,’ said Horst. He climbed down the steps to join Leonie. Together they peered into the gloom. There was no cellar there, or any sort of chamber at all. Instead, the door opened into a tunnel some ten or so feet wide, roughly hewn into what looked like igneous rock. It ran off at a slight downwards angle, gently curving to the left.

  ‘A door into adventure,’ said Leonie.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be so literal about it. After you.’

  ‘On this occasion, I shall throw your chivalry in your face, Mr Cabal. After you.’

  * * *

  The demons were thinning, but this was less good news than one might hope, as it allowed the larger abominations at the rear of the crush to move forwards. The battle had slowed to a straight exchange of blows between the sides coloured by the certainty that the demons must prevail by simple weight of numbers. To all present, the battle no longer truly felt like a battle, but merely a stubborn avoidance of the inevitable.

  Even the sound of combat had become desultory, with demons not actually engaged standing mostly silent apart from the occasional supportive whoop when one of theirs fought well and, far more frequently, a sympathetic groan when a disen
gaged limb or new corpse hit the ground.

  For her part, Zarenyia wasn’t enjoying matters much, either. Her usual method of dispatch was more intimate than a skirmish in a tunnel really allowed for and, while she wasn’t averse to numbers, she preferred them scattered around a bedchamber. At her sides, the humans fought well enough, but they were only humans and weariness was setting in. Miss Smith had abandoned her black parasol in the demonic eye socket in which she had placed it, and taken up a dropped halberd that she wielded with more enthusiasm than skill. Cabal had some practise with his sword-cane, but as the scale of the antagonists grew, it became of diminishing utility. The minute when the defence of their position was no longer tenable was upon them, and they could only congratulate themselves that it had not happened sooner.

  Then Johannes Cabal said, ‘I hear glibbering,’ Miss Smith responded, ‘About fucking time,’ and then they were attacked from behind. Except they weren’t. The fleet rubbery forms—sometimes like men, sometimes like hounds, sometimes upon four legs, sometimes upon two—flowed past them like water past stones in a stream bed and onto the demons in a second. The battle took a new complexion as the demon horde found itself abruptly facing a ghoul pack.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ roared Ratuth Slabuth from the executive director’s position at the back. Nobody had the leisure to tell him, so he continued, ‘Ghouls! This is Hell! You have no right to be here! Begone!’

  The ghouls replied to this as they fought and tore and bit at the demons. ‘The Witch Queen of the Necropolis called us. Johannes Cabal whose fate is entwined with ours needs us. And you’re just an interim Satan until they get somebody who knows what they’re doing, anyway, so…’

  And here, the precise terminology became terrifically rude, for ghoulish glibber is a language flexible and satisfying when it comes to invective, and English may only hint at it.