The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Then something blurred by and struck a Vinz demon forcefully enough to disengage its whipcord neck and multiple legs from it spherical body.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Horst. ‘How is everyone? Look, Leonie! I’ve gone all vampirey again!’ This he demonstrated by tearing the arm from a nearby antagonist and then beating it over the head with the flopping limb.

  ‘How lovely for you.’ Miss Barrow checked her cuff and was disappointed if not surprised to discover that not only had her lock picks disappeared, but even the concealed pocket in which they had been stored had vanished, too. It seemed that her time as the Great Detective was over, and that realisation sent a pang through her. Oddly the pang centred on her shoulder and she realised that there was an unaccustomed weight there. She looked and found a khaki strap running over it that had certainly not been there a minute or so previously. A moment’s examination revealed it to be a sling, and in looking down her body to see what it was attached to, she made certain other discoveries.

  ‘I have a shotgun,’ she said, and brought the feisty-looking 12-bore pump-action weapon up to examine it with awe at its sudden appearance, wonder at its grim boding, and some undeniable glee as to its immediate utility. ‘And trousers.’ She had only ever worn trousers when helping in the garden or in the garage on her father’s car. They were not something she was used to wearing in polite company, which—she realised—entirely let out her current company.

  She considered the shotgun, pushing up the dark, broad-brimmed, and shallow-crowned hat that had also added itself to her wardrobe without permission as she did so. Despite never having held such a device before, she felt inspired to take a firm hold of the forestock grip and pull it back. The weapon made a satisfying sound of steel-on-steel, and something very similar and just as satisfying as she pushed the forestock back to its forward position. The shotgun seemed to become palpably more dangerous in her hands by that simple act. She had used double-barrelled shotguns of lower bore when shooting clay pigeons on a couple of occasions, and knew to shoulder firmly, address her target (a spiny beast that was harassing one of the ghouls unforgivably), release the safety catch with her thumb, and squeeze the trigger. She knew it, but was surprised by how reflexive it all felt to her. Even the greater recoil of the 12-bore over that which she had previously experienced seemed familiar.

  The spiny demon went all head over heels and viscera a-tangle as the cloud of pellets caught it in the midriff and ended its harassing days permanently. The roar of the gun was overwhelming in the close quarters, and the battle seemed to pause for just a moment. In that moment, Miss Barrow introduced another cartridge into the chamber to the accompaniment of the lovely positive mechanical sounds, and felt quite wonderful doing it.

  ‘Run, Ratuth Slabuth,’ said Johannes Cabal. He was not at all sure that the fight was turning, but it was a moment of optimism for his side, and he thought it reasonable that it might be matched by a moment of pessimism for the other. Perhaps a little persuasion might cause their morale to crumble. ‘Just let us go and no more of your creatures need be destroyed.’

  The creatures in question seemed to think this was a good idea, and looked to their leader. It was a vain hope on their part. Ratuth Slabuth drew himself up as much as the tunnel ceiling would allow and snarled, the bone of his face curling and creaking to accommodate the flexions of his hatred.

  ‘Never! You die here, Cabal!’

  ‘Which one?’ said Horst, unhelpfully.

  The attack was renewed, but the timbre of it had changed. Now the demons fought defensively, and were no longer trying to get past Zarenyia, only to avoid being cut or smashed or otherwise having a bad day. Leonie only had to aim her shotgun for the demon in her sights to disengage from combat and scurry back, seeking cover. She rested her finger outside the trigger guard and re-engaged the safety catch without drawing attention to doing so. She could see the enemy wavering.

  ‘You lot,’ she called. ‘We’re not interested in you. Leave now and we will let you go.’

  The demon assault instantly failed. Ratuth Slabuth was rendered speechless with disbelief and rage as his troops ran past him and back out of the tunnel. Some of the larger ones who could not avoid his eye at least had the courtesy to look embarrassed about it.

  ‘Well, well. Just you and us now, Ratuth Slabuth.’

  The arch-demon turned from watching his force slither away like draining cess and turned the full force of his regard upon Cabal and his company.

  ‘Five of you,’ he grated in a voice of rusted iron and lockjaw. ‘You are the company of the Five Ways?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Horst with insouciant bravado. ‘We might well be.’ He whispered from the side of his mouth to his brother, ‘Are we?’

  ‘I believe we are,’ Cabal told Ratuth Slabuth and, in passing, his brother.

  ‘Who’s the scaffolding with a cow skull on it?’ put in Horst as a supplemental question.

  ‘Cow skull?’ Great was the wrath of Ratuth Slabuth.

  ‘That?’ Cabal pulled a face as if smelling something unpleasant. ‘That’s what passes for Satan these days.’

  The clearing of the lines of battle cast the conflict into a new light. The ghouls did not mind spoiling the plans of man and monster alike, but they preferred to do so from the shadows. Having a bit of a barney with a bunch of demons was all fun and games, but when the guv’nor got involved, it was time for a prudent withdrawal. They crept back and, making excuses to Miss Smith about the hour, the venue, and just-remembered dental appointments, into the shadows they once more faded. The sound of glibbering diminished with the rapid patter of ghoulish feet.

  Leonie Barrow looked at the shotgun in her hands. It did not seem such a panacea for demonic problems any longer. ‘We should be going, I think. That would seem to be a wise course of action.’

  ‘Johannes, be a sweetheart and accompany the ladies back along the tunnel, would you?’ said Zarenyia. She manoeuvred slightly, bringing herself to face Ratuth Slabuth squarely. ‘Horst, you seem usefully dangerous. You stay with me.’

  ‘We can fight,’ said Miss Smith, waving her halberd in a manner potentially injurious to friend and foe alike.

  ‘We can.’ Miss Barrow regarded her shotgun, and then the curiously geometrical Satan doubtfully. ‘But I don’t think we would do much good. Trust the spider-lady. Let’s go.’

  The three backed away slowly until they were firmly disengaged from the scene of combat. Then—Miss Smith pausing to drop the halberd and take up her poor, misused parasol—they turned and ran.

  ‘Think we can take him, sweet Horst?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Horst as he settled into a boxer’s stance. ‘We can give it a jolly good try, though.’

  Ratuth Slabuth viewed him with disgusted disbelief. ‘Are you seriously intending to fight Satan using Marquess of Queensbury rules?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ Horst experimentally shuffled his feet and tried dodging and weaving. ‘We’re both gentlemen, aren’t we?’

  ‘I…’ Ratuth Slabuth had to think about that. ‘I suppose I’m meant to be. I didn’t realise that extended to engaging in fisticuffs with fops.’

  Horst stopped dodging and weaving on the instant. ‘Steady on now.’ He waved an admonishing finger in Ratuth Slabuth’s face. ‘I’m sorry about the cow skull comment, but that was an honest mistake. I’m not a veterinarian, you know. But that’s no excuse for casual name-calling, I’m sure.’

  ‘You’re quite right. I was speaking out of … Where’s that wretched spider-devil gone?’

  It was a minor feat for a large spider/human hybrid woman with a sunny disposition to disappear in such a small area, but a major one for anyone claiming to be the devil of devils to have lost sight of her. It was not a state of affairs that lasted long, however.

  Zarenyia landed on Ratuth Slabuth’s back with a cry of, ‘Peep bo!’ and swathed his skull (of a horse, for specificity’s sake) in silk before leaping clear. Ratuth Slabuth roared in maleficent
rage and struck after the direction he gauged her to be in, overbalanced, and fell lengthways down the tunnel. Lying thus, his head was brought closer to the ground than was usual for him. Something else unusual for him was being punched a resounding blow in the face, strong enough to dislocate his jaw.

  ‘A hit!’ Horst danced pugilistically around the prone body of Satan. ‘A very palpable hit!’*

  ‘Time to go.’ Zarenyia plucked Horst up and threw him onto her back.

  ‘I punched Satan!’ Horst was all a-bubble with boyish enthusiasm, she noted. She also noted that he embraced her about the midriff to prevent himself falling off with far more willingness than his brother had ever shown.

  ‘Yes, you did, darling, and I’m sure we’re all enormously proud of you. But now, you see, Satan is coming after us, and I fear he will be in a frightful bate.’

  ‘Yes, true. Still, pow!’ Enthusiasm worked out, Horst sobered a little at the proposition of a cross Satan being terribly Satanic on his person. ‘We should leave.’ Zarenyia hardly needed the suggestion; they were already galloping headlong down the tunnel back in the direction from which Horst and Leonie Barrow had first appeared.

  ‘There’s a whole city back there,’ Horst told her as they clattered along in hasty escape.

  ‘I know. The Ivory Citadel.’

  ‘The Ivory what? No, no, it’s called Sepulchre.’

  ‘It is the place of final death. To go there is to be snuffed out of the now, then, and forevermore.’

  ‘It wasn’t that bad.’

  Behind them, Horst became aware of a curious noise. It put him in mind of a rake drawn over gravel combined with the sense of imminent arrival one gets on the platform of an underground station upon the London Tube when the train is still just out of sight.

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  Zarenyia did not trouble to look back. ‘A frightful bate,’ she said under her breath, and pushed herself harder.

  She ran as quickly as she dared for some seconds, which was a very decent speed under the circumstances. She did, however, wonder where the others had got to. The tunnel did not split and so offered no alternative routes, yet—based on past experience—she should certainly have run down three blundering humans by now. Then again, the tunnel should have been heading downwards, but it was clearly rising.

  ‘This isn’t right. The Ivory Citadel is beneath Satan’s throne. We shouldn’t be heading upwards. We’ll end up in lava at this rate.’

  ‘No, this is right,’ said Horst. ‘This is the way we came, and it sloped down for us the whole way.’

  ‘Sepulchre, you said?’

  ‘Yes. A great big industrial city. I think it’s in the North. Odd I haven’t heard of it before.’

  Zarenyia was confident that the reason he hadn’t heard of it was not because his usual concerns rested squarely in the contents of dresses. She reached out her senses and perceived at once that the tunnel through which they travelled had not existed ten minutes before, and would not exist ten minutes hence.

  ‘We’re in the Five Ways. We can still escape!’

  ‘What is this Five Ways thing people keep going on about? Well, I say “people”, but I suppose I mean Satan, and now you. So, what is this Five Ways thing devils keep going on about?’

  She ignored him—she was sure his brother would be delighted to explain things to Leonie and him in inordinate detail later—and concentrated on not thinking about the inconstancy of the floor upon which she ran. She had to believe more strongly in it than the real tunnel, or she would end up on the wrong one and find herself with Horst trapped between a fatal location and a batey Satan.

  Horst looked back and, ignorant of the importance of believing the lie in such circumstances, said, ‘How queer. The tunnel behind us is sort of falling apart.’

  And it was, but not in drifts of rock dust and plummeting stalactites. There was a peculiar tearing occurring in Horst’s perception of the tunnel, and two nearly identical tunnels were becoming separated. Oddly, there was also a sense of the living rock being torn open into a cavern as the tunnels grew apart. He felt he could almost see through the tunnel walls, and no sooner had that thought occurred to him than it was true.

  Beneath her feet, Zarenyia saw the tunnel floor become translucent. Some two hundred feet or so below them, she could see the real path running like an open road directly to a great castle of domes and minarets, all the colour of old bone. The sight of it filled her with a fear she had never felt before. ‘Stop thinking!’ she snapped at Horst. ‘You’re wrecking the illusion!’

  ‘I can’t help thinking!’ It was an admission he had never had cause to make before.

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud.’ Zarenyia took Horst’s hands and moved them further up, a sovereign cure for men thinking, in her experience.

  ‘Oh. I … Oh, my goodness,’ he said, thoroughly distracted. Beneath her feet, the way grew more solid.

  It was an improvement, but not a resolution. The false if preferable path was still merely a thing of whims and fancy, and as fragile as a dream. Behind them it sheered away from the real path like a split twig, and crumbling into nothing from the sheer point to the tip at, presumably, Sepulchre. And also behind them, on came Ratuth Slabuth.

  He was prone and his angles were extended so that he gave the impression of nothing quite so much as the living skeleton of a great snake over a yard wide and thirty long. Tatters of silk hung from his skull where they had been torn free of his eye sockets, and his jaw hung at an uncomfortable angle, clacking rhythmically like a loose door to the beat of his run. On his lower surfaces a multitude of limbs created for the purpose scooted him along at distressing speed, yet the sense was still ophidian rather than of a hideous millipede (though there were certainly elements of that, too). His very-nearly-feet things on the end of his will-do-for-legs things slid and tripped at the edge of the fracturing realities, but he was faster to the line of transition if only by a whisker, and more and more of his forebody was gaining the relative safety of the Sepulchrean tunnel.

  Johannes Cabal, Miss Smith, and Miss Leonie Barrow had paused in the tunnel ahead, the door to the outside world—or rather, an outside world—just ahead of them.

  Miss Barrow eyed it with suspicion. ‘I left that door open.’

  Miss Smith joined her. ‘The ghouls shut it, perhaps?’

  ‘They didn’t strike me as very tidy creatures.’

  Miss Smith nodded. ‘They’re not. Astonishingly messy eaters.’ The two women went on to make sure the door was actually unlocked while Cabal hung back. He was pleased to see Madam Zarenyia appear around a bend in the tunnel at full flight, Horst clinging to her by an unorthodox and inappropriate manner. Cabal’s lips thinned; there would be words presently. Then his peevish expression gave way to wide-eyed surprise. He had never for one instant thought that Ratuth Slabuth would press the pursuit without his demons. What could have provoked him into … Cabal noticed that the horse skull’s jaw was sadly askew. He sighed. Just perfect.

  Behind him he heard Leonie Barrow call to him, ‘The door’s locked!’ Then to Miss Smith, ‘This doesn’t make sense. It was padlocked on the other side when we came in, but this time it’s the door’s own mortise lock. The ghouls couldn’t have done it.’

  ‘Can you get through?’ shouted Cabal.

  ‘I can pick it … damn it! My picks have gone.’

  ‘Use mine.’

  He started to reach inside his jacket for the small leather case containing his own set of lock picks when Miss Barrow said, ‘No time,’ and immediately followed the statement with a discharge at point-blank range of a 12-bore cartridge into the door frame where the lock’s bolt shot home. Miss Smith squealed and giggled with girlish delight at such havoc.

  ‘Yes, that did it. Ready when you are, Cabal.’

  Zarenyia was almost with them. She would need a moment to shed her passenger—possibly two moments, as he seemed very happy where he was—and metamorphose into a fully human form, or she would
never be able to negotiate the doorway ahead.

  Then Ratuth Slabuth stretched like the most malevolent jack-in-the-box imaginable* and, extending forelimbs made from rage and set squares, snagged Zarenyia’s hindmost legs. She went sprawling, Horst being thrown forwards in a clumsy somersault while bearing an expression at least as disappointed as it was surprised.

  Behind him, Ratuth Slabuth felt the tunnel fading away, the conceptual space of a cavern joining the true and apparent tunnels forming in its stead, a great aching space lit from below by the milky light of the Ivory Citadel.

  ‘I am Satan!’ The loose jaw clacked hideously and a rage beyond sanity twisted the empty eye sockets into parodies of expression. ‘You are naught but dust! You shall be dust!’

  His rear body sagged into the chasm opening beneath them, his aftmost limbs scrambling uselessly to gain tread. He tried to pull himself clear of the growing nothingness, but only succeeded in dragging Zarenyia closer to the precipice.

  Zarenyia looked back and glanced downwards. The citadel seemed to be reaching up for them all. She tried kicking back at Ratuth Slabuth, but his grip on her hindmost legs was too secure, and her No. 3 legs on either side insufficiently strong and too awkwardly placed to get in any decent blows.

  ‘What are you doing, you maniac?’ she shouted at him. ‘That place will destroy us all!’

  If Ratuth Slabuth heard her, he did not react to her words. ‘Worked my way up from corporal!’ he bellowed. ‘Twice!’

  More of the tunnel floor faded away; two-thirds of Ratuth Slabuth’s long body now hung over certain doom. Zarenyia felt herself sliding inexorably downwards. She saw Cabal run forwards offering a hand, as if a mere mortal could hope to drag two such huge creatures back by himself. That, however, was not his plan.

  ‘A line, madam! A line! Cast me a line of your silk!’

  This at least her No. 3 limbs were a match for. She exuded silk from the spinnerets at the end of her abdomen and fed the line forwards to her human hands. ‘Careful! The tip is very sticky!’ She cast the line and Horst blurred across to intercept it, catching it neatly behind the adhesive end. The brothers Cabal drew the line up towards the door. They didn’t get so very far before too much of the tunnel faded, and Ratuth Slabuth fell into space, dragging Zarenyia after him. Horst threw the end of the silk at the tunnel floor and it anchored there instantly, which was as well, for a small part of a second later it came under a great impulse as it took the weight of two warring devils.