The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Varney climbed back to his feet from the hardwood ruin and stared with disbelief back down the chamber floor. There stood Horst with one foot out. He glanced down at his extended foot and shrugged. ‘Childish, I know, but I just couldn’t resist.’

  ‘You … you’re a vampire?’ This obviously hadn’t occurred to Varney before. He glanced over his shoulder at Cabal and the women, and they all smiled at him not at all reassuringly.

  ‘I am,’ said Horst, ‘and I have been for some time now. Longer than you, certainly. Look, Vince, we came here to have you all join in the fight against the forces of a darkness much darker than anything you can wheel out, not to humiliate you. If that’s what it takes, though, well…’ He cocked his head to regard Varney. ‘Actually, in your case, I’d regard that as a bonus.’

  Varney became aware of how very bad an impact capable of smashing a heavy piece of furniture into quite small pieces could be for one’s clothes. His suit was in sad array, and flesh showed at several points. His dignity was already undermined, his honour sullied, his authority questioned. His vision bloomed into red rage.

  The charge did not surprise Horst, but the fury-inflamed energy and speed of it did, and he did not dance aside quite as easily as he had planned. In fact, he did not dance aside at all; Varney hit him hard in a bull’s rush of a charge—head down and legs pumping—and blew the breath from him as he was carried halfway down the chamber. He was thrown clear at the end of it and would have been delighted to have been gifted with a second to recover. Varney was not of a generous mind that moment, however, and a scything blow speaking more a back alley than the boxing ring hit Horst hard in the right cheek. It lifted and threw him some ten or twelve feet, hitting the Woolsack backwards and rolling over it to land in an ungainly crouch. He looked up in time to see Varney already running for him, so he grabbed the nearest heavy object—the Woolsack itself—and threw it one-handed. It had barely left him before it struck Varney and so was still possessed of a good deal of kinetic energy, which it communicated to Varney by knocking him flat.

  He rolled free before Horst could press his advantage and snatched up an impromptu weapon of his own. Horst frowned at him. ‘Isn’t that the Speaker’s mace?’

  It was, indeed, the mace of the Chamber, and another symbol of royal assent for the activities that were carried on therein. It was also a large, heavy piece of metal that, although heavily ornamented, was still at heart a weapon of the most brutal sort.

  ‘You don’t think it’s a bit, y’know, uncouth to run around using the Speaker’s mace as … well, a mace, now I stop to think of it. Still … tradition and all that. You wouldn’t…’

  Varney would, and did. He hissed in a manner so feral it would surely have disappointed his old house master, and leapt at Horst, swinging the mace in a powerful arc. Horst had better things to do than stand around waiting for it; he turned, ran at the front row of benches, jumped at them, landed on the near edge with his leading foot, twisted to face Varney once more, and extended that leading leg hard. He sailed over Varney’s head in a parabola so stylish one would have thought he’d been practising such a move, rather than the reality of vampiric reactions, strength, and reading far too many swashbuckling romances.

  Varney had over-extended himself grievously in the mace swing, and even his great strength was subject to the laws of physics, thus he could only watch his prey somersault with maddening ease over him if he wanted to keep the mace. This he was keen to do; the mace was still a deadly weapon for all its political symbolism, and a thoroughly pounded vampire is as unhappy a creature as a thoroughly pounded human.

  Maintaining possession of it therefore came with the downside of the infuriating German vampire in the stolen Mirkarvian medical officer’s uniform flipping insouciantly over Varney’s head, having the temerity to wink at him as he did so, and then finally adding injury to insult by punching him with sickening force as he did so.

  The blow would have broken a mortal man’s neck as certainly as hitting him in the face with a girder. Varney’s head snapped around, and he forgot all about Horst Cabal for a moment as he blinked away stars and comets. Horst came to rest on the western side of the floor, and braced to attack once more.

  * * *

  The City gent leapt to his feet and then dithered in a posture of possible attack, caught on the cusp of wanting to help Varney and not wishing to do it alone. He vacillated heroically there, looking significantly at his neighbours. With evident reluctance, the chamber began to rise.

  As has been intimated earlier, the sound of a pump-action shotgun being—as the Americans put it—‘racked’, which is to say the action being pumped to place a shell in the chamber and simultaneously cocked, is distinctive and carries an ineffable menace even to those who have never heard it before. Indeed, some suggest that there is such inherent threat in the sound that it alone may prevent a confrontation before it even begins. It certainly provided a pause for thought amidst the vampiric spectators within the House of Lords.

  As one, they looked to the source of the sound and discovered Leonie Barrow thumbing a fresh cartridge into the space opened up in her gun’s tube magazine by the action of chambering its predecessor.

  ‘These cartridges contain lead, silver, salt, Lengian metal, and are blessed. I’m sure there’s something in there that will sting.’

  The gent sneered a little uncertainly. ‘You would have no chance to reload. We would tear you to pieces before you could.’

  ‘Ah, the old misapprehension.’ Cabal drew two pistols, the Webley in his right hand, the Senzan semi-automatic in his left. ‘It is not about destroying all of you, just some. The point, of course, being, who wishes to try their luck first? First in, first blown to ashes.’ He looked at the vampires. ‘No? Nobody wishes to be first?’

  ‘Only two of you are armed.’

  ‘Three.’ Miss Smith drew her wand and wagged it at the City gent. Disconcertingly, its tip seemed to leave scratches in the reality of that world that re-formed a moment after the wand had passed; the overall effect was of a malign sparkler.

  The attention of the vampires shifted to Zarenyia at the back of the group. ‘Me? Oh, I don’t have any guns or wands or anything like that, I’m afraid, darlings.’ In a sudden explosion of movement and impossible dimensions, she grew to her full diabolical proportions, her spider legs arched, and, with a snik! of moving plates, the blades appeared along her legs. ‘Despite which, I am quite confident that I will make little puddles of jam out of the majority of you, should you wish to test me.’

  Cabal nodded to the fight. ‘If any of you intervene against my brother, we shall intervene against you.’

  The City gent seemed almost to deflate, whatever loyalty he felt to Varney seeping out of him like sour air. He sat down.

  * * *

  Varney and Horst, weapons temporarily forgotten, were wrestling in the middle of the floor. Both stood with mouths agape and fangs bared, each with hands jammed under his opponent’s chin to keep those fangs away. Horst changed tactics first, apparently wilting and half dragging Varney down with him, but then immediately changing his grip, seizing Varney by the belt and waistcoat, heaving him up over his head, and then throwing him towards the northern end where Cabal and the others waited.

  Varney came to earth amidst the ruins of the Table of the House. It was nowhere near as hard a collision as the previous time, however, and he landed well.

  As he rose, Cabal standing behind him pursed his lips, considered the pragmatic approach to the situation, and began to raise his revolver. A hand caught his and he found Leonie Barrow looking him in the eye and shaking her head very seriously.

  ‘No. This has to be won fair and square or they won’t follow us. No interventions means no interventions.’

  Cabal breathed in heavily through his nostrils, but lowered his gun hand on the exhalation. ‘You are correct, Miss Barrow. If the Varney creature kills Horst, however, I shall destroy him regardless of consequence. He is my brothe
r, after all.’

  Leonie fought down an ill-mannered and undiplomatic smirk; no matter how amusing or even—very occasionally—touching she found Cabal’s clumsy forays into a meadow of emotion he had once steadfastly denied, this was a serious business, and she had no desire to diminish it. Well, perhaps a small desire. ‘I didn’t know you cared,’ she allowed herself.

  Cabal watched the fight rage around the chamber for a few seconds. ‘Neither did I.’

  Any faint pretences towards civilised conduct had long since been lost in the duel. Both combatants had reserves that they could burn at will, and part of the struggle that was not obvious to the Cabal party was victory might well hinge on whoever could husband his resources most successfully. This looked likely to be Horst; Varney was the newer vampire and had faced few challenges during his existence in that unhallowed state. He lacked experience, was led by his dignity and pride, which drew him into anger, and so to overreaching himself.

  Which wasn’t to say he couldn’t provide surprises. The centre of the chamber was now scattered with overturned chairs, disembowelled Woolsacks, and the remains of the great Table of the House, which was looking less like it had ever been a table every time one or other of the fighters was thrown into or through it. It was in this shattered ruin that Varney made his move.

  The coup began innocently enough, with Varney pulled from the ground by his ankle, swung around in several energetic circles much as a Scotsman throwing the hammer at the Highland Games, to be released at the moment of greatest impetus to arc gracelessly some twenty feet into the sad remnants of the great table. Horst took a deep breath, more from exasperation than necessity, and ran over to continue the debate there. As he arrived, however, matters took a new complexion. Varney, burning the last of his already scant reserves, emerged from the debris like a rocket with a strong sense of entitlement, straight at Horst. In his right hand he carried a sharp length of broken wood, perhaps eighteen inches in length. With a cry of anticipation, the vampires arose, not one of them so ignorant of their new unlives that they could not recognise an extemporised stake when they saw it.

  Varney struck hard at Horst’s chest as he ran headlong onto the weapon. Horst saw it too late to evade bodily, but early enough to throw up his left arm to ward it off. The timing was off, the execution sloppy, but the end effect successful, albeit at the cost of a stake thrust through his forearm.

  Horst pulled away from Varney, who held on hard to the stake and pulled it from the great wound it had caused. Horst looked with utter horror at the gaping wound through four layers of cloth, his arm, and the radius. He screamed. ‘This jacket is borrowed!’

  Varney smiled, offered him the address of his tailor, and struck again. This time, however, Horst was waiting. During the momentary break for smirking and the declamation of bon mots, he had burnt some of his own reserves, which were sadly depleted but still in much better supply than Varney’s. When Varney belatedly pressed his attack, Horst was ready.

  As the stake lanced towards his deliberately unguarded heart, Horst jerked up his damaged forearm to strike the underside of Varney’s hand. Deflected upwards, Varney’s wrist slapped into the palm of Horst’s right hand where it was grabbed and held tightly.

  Horst was just debating whether to break Varney’s arm or merely dislocate it when a small voice said in his mind, Let me handle this. It was a small voice he had not heard for some weeks, but he had not been placed under these sorts of pressures for some weeks, either. It was a small voice with which he had thought he had made his peace. He realised that he had managed no such thing. It had simply lain in abeyance, waiting. It was the voice of the monster he might become, if he permitted it. If he was weak. If he allowed it.

  When he wrenched Varney’s arm down, so placing the point of the stake over Varney’s own heart, it was to the horror of them both. Horst felt the muscles move in his right arm, but he had no control over them. Something hot and atavistic flowed in the thin vampiric blood there, something that was not him. Almost faster than even his own accelerated senses could perceive, he released Varney’s arm—poor, stupid, sluggish Varney—drew back his right arm, his hand opening, and then struck forwards with sickening, superhuman force, the palm striking the dull end of the stake. It shot forwards like the action of a pneumatic poleaxe, and like a well-applied poleaxe, it killed well-nigh instantly.

  Varney’s eyes widened. He gasped. He crumbled away into dust and beetles that skittered away into the crevices of the hall. The stake tumbled to the floor, dusted with remnants of aristocrat as light as talcum.

  There, said the little voice. All done. Horst sobbed and stepped away.

  Once, not so very long ago, Johannes Cabal would have congratulated his brother on an elegant and surgical removal of the obstructive Lord Varney, and moved on to the next item on the agenda. This was not quite the same Johannes Cabal, though. He walked to his brother’s side, placed a gentle arm on his shoulder, and said, ‘Come away, Horst. There is little point in dwelling upon it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to do it.’ Even by vampire standards, Horst was pale. ‘I don’t know how that happened.’

  ‘He came at you with intent to kill. You had no choice.’

  Horst looked at him sharply. ‘I always have a choice.’

  ‘I suspect this isn’t the time to go into the logic of the event, but I’m afraid I must. There was clearly no alternative. My Lord Varney’s personality was very easy to read; even if you had defeated him and shown him mercy, he would never have accepted losing his position of authority. He would have been a thorn in our side at every turn. It would not have surprised me in the slightest if he had run off to Ninuka to warn her of our presence and intentions. He would have preferred to work for the woman who crushed his country, such was his vanity, his pride. I repeat—you had no choice.’

  The anger faded from Horst’s eyes. ‘You’re not helping, you know.’

  Cabal lowered his voice a little, but in the quietness wherein all listened, all heard. ‘I know what you’re battling with, Horst. I know it frightens you. If I succeed’—he looked at Miss Barrow, Miss Smith, Madam Zarenyia—‘if we succeed, I have great hopes it is a burden that may be lifted from you. The prize is inestimable, but these trials placed before it are unavoidable. I am sorry.’

  ‘At least you didn’t try to tell me that he was never a real person, so I shouldn’t care.’

  Cabal shrugged. ‘These splinters are self-contained, and we are merely contingent upon them. All is as if it were always so. I do not understand the mechanism; perhaps they truly were always so and are sifted to find one that fits our requirements. If the trial of the Five Ways really was the invention of the first Satan, then anything is possible. He was a creature of quite literally unimaginable power. Anything is possible.’

  Cabal stepped away from Horst and addressed the chamber. ‘Varney is dead. Destroyed, and good riddance. You have a simple choice: either accept our leadership and stand once more for your country and principles, or regretfully we shall have to destroy you all. I believe there are rules of fealty that run through your … subspecies. Do you pledge loyalty to us, or will there have to be more violence here?’

  The City gent rose to his feet. He seemed calmer and more reassured now that the surprise of the battle was over. ‘We are patriots here, I think, and yes, we are compelled by laws of fealty that draws us by the sinew, even against the will. I believe I speak for us all, then, when I say, we shall not follow you, sir.’

  Cabal’s shoulders drooped. ‘After all this and we have to have another fight? This is very inconvenient.’

  ‘You will permit me to finish, sir. We shall not follow you, but you’—and here he pointed at Horst—‘we shall follow to the ends of this miserable, blighted earth. We are at your disposal, my Lord Horst, I think you said your name is?’

  ‘Lord?’ Horst put up his hands and shook his head with evident dismay. ‘No, no, no. I am no lord.’

  ‘You are, sir. You are Lord
of the Dead, and your word is our law.’

  Horst looked around as the vampires rose to pay obeisance to him. He looked aghast. ‘The Lord of the Dead?’ He looked at Cabal. ‘That was what Ninuka wanted me to be. Her general of the undead. I can’t, Johannes. I cannot.’

  ‘You must. This is a game, and those are the rules. We have each been tested and awarded laurels that we have or have not enjoyed. Now it is your turn.’

  ‘Great Detective,’ said Leonie Barrow. It sounded like a moan. ‘Oh, I’ve been an idiot. Of course. Now it makes sense. I thought they were very swift to hand out the superlatives.’

  ‘My own future is misted, and I do not think I exactly fitted the bill in the great necropolis.’ Cabal took his brother by the arm and led him back to the group. ‘I may not have triumphed precisely, but I finished far from being a failure, and that apparently sufficed. Besides, I think that experience was telling me something else.’

  ‘But, Johannes, sweetness,’ Zarenyia was considering his words, ‘I was offered a principality of Hell as my very own, and I turned it down.’

  ‘Surely you see that this was the test? Giving in to temptation is easy. Resisting it for the sake of others, there lies the triumph.’

  ‘And I became the Witch Queen,’ said Miss Smith. She shook her head. ‘But that was almost by accident. How is that a trial?’

  Cabal lowered his head and was silent for a long moment. When presently he raised it again, his expression was somber and perhaps even sad. ‘Miss Smith. You are not part of this undertaking. I am sorry, but the trials were never meant for you.’

  She flinched as if he had spat in her face. ‘What? But this Five Ways thing … there are five of us. What are you talking about? Of course I’m part of it.’

  ‘You were drawn into it by forces of association, specifically your association with me. Your necropolis in the Dreamlands is part of my life and experiences now, but—unusually—one that comes with an occupant. Your presence in the unfolding events is the merest accident.’