The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Horst danced around in an agony of his own, seeing her, hearing her, yet unable to help directly. ‘Get on the floor! Roll around! Put it out!’

  She tried, but the flame would not be diminished by such a mundane trick. She rolled hopelessly around, her screams shrill and unending, but the immolation continued regardless.

  Until the flames suddenly winked out.

  Cabal looked at Horst’s astonished expression, the moment marked by the cessation of his dance of anxiety. ‘What has happened? Is the girl…?’ He almost said ‘dead’, but hesitated for reasons of accuracy as much as tact.

  ‘They went out,’ said Horst. ‘They just … went out.’

  Minty climbed back to her feet and examined her hands that, moments before, had been burning like dry sticks. To her obvious confusion, they were unmarked. ‘I was all on fire, I was,’ she said. ‘All alight like a Chrissmus tree.’

  ‘She’s unharmed, Johannes. What happened?’

  Cabal thought about it for a moment, and then said, ‘Ask her to walk towards the palace slowly, with one hand extended. If anything happens, she should step back immediately.’

  Horst turned to relay the command, but Minty was already doing it, shying away from her own pointing index finger as if it was made of dynamite. That was perhaps not such a bad simile, as—a few cautious palaceward shuffles later—it exploded.

  ‘Ahhhhhhhhhh!’ screamed Minty, with permissible dismay. She fell backwards, and the finger was instantly extinguished and rendered unmarked. This Horst dutifully relayed to Cabal.

  ‘The area is warded,’ he replied. ‘Difficult to extend against the corporeal, but against an ethereal entity such a ghost, easy enough to cover a substantial area if you have the resources.’

  ‘Ninuka fears ghosts?’ said Leonie. ‘But why?’

  ‘Not ghosts. Miss Minty’s discomfort is a corollary effect. The warding is doubtless to prevent certain arcane forms of surveillance, scrying and the like.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to be spied upon?’

  ‘Yes. But, in all modesty, the number of persons within the ruins of London that might be expected to carry out such a practise would reasonably be considered as none. Not a one.’

  ‘This is for you?’

  ‘For us. Yes.’

  * * *

  They moved on shortly afterwards, leaving Minty in their wake. Horst looked back more than once, seeing her standing alone at the edge of the warded area, daring to come no closer, yet loath to walk away. She started to once, but dithered and came back. She watched them until they were lost from sight.

  * * *

  They approached the checkpoint. ‘Let me do the talking,’ said Cabal, as if anyone else was keen to. ‘I can do a passable Mirkarvian accent.’

  ‘I can do a perfect one,’ said Zarenyia, ‘but nobody let me dress up as a soldier.’

  ‘You would call the sentry a “poppet”, and that would be the end of the subterfuge.’

  ‘True, I probably would, but that might not be such a disaster as you suppose. That’s the thing with terribly manly men, darling: I bet they get up to all sorts of shenanigans after lights out in the barracks. Just imagine.’

  ‘I would rather not.’

  ‘Oh, go on.’ After a moment she added absently, off in a fancy of her own, ‘Baby oil…’

  * * *

  They reached the checkpoint, and it took a herculean effort by Cabal to address the sergeant there as ‘Sergeant’ and not ‘poppet’. He had been preparing a detailed explanation of why he was reporting to the wrong outpost, why his patrol was so sadly depleted, and how he had come into possession of civilian prisoners, but the sergeant was uninterested, simply pointing the way to the remains of Buckingham Palace’s northern corner for full debriefing. Thus, relieved at getting past the first trial of what threatened to be quite a gauntlet of them, yet dismayed that his rehearsed answers would go unheard, at least for the moment, they moved on.

  ‘We’re in trouble,’ muttered Leonie Barrow.

  ‘We’re in the ruins of a monster-haunted London occupied by Mirkarvian troops. You’ve only just noticed that means trouble?’ said Cabal.

  ‘Guard duty is for privates. One of the privileges of being a non-commissioned officer is delegating jobs like that to squaddies. I come from a family with a lot of police and a lot of armed services people in it. Believe me, I know.’

  ‘So why was a sergeant in sole command of a checkpoint?’ said Miss Smith.

  ‘Exactly. Unless the job was not just to be watching it, but watching for who comes through it and not making a mess of it when somebody specific approaches. Is there any way Ninuka might be expecting us, Cabal?’

  ‘Of course she’s expecting us. I confess I was not expecting her attentiveness to be quite so prescient. You are right, Miss Barrow. We are probably detected.’

  ‘Phew!’ Zarenyia sighed a melodramatic sigh of relief. ‘Oh, good. I do so hate all this shilly-shallying. May I get all leggy and start killing people now?’

  ‘You may not, madam, but that time is drawing close.’

  She nodded sagely. ‘Deferred gratification. I’ve heard about that. So this is what it feels like. Hmmmm.’ She considered this new sensation. ‘It’s slightly irritating.’

  They continued in silence for a few seconds more before she added the observation, ‘Oh, and by the bye, there are gentlemen with guns very quietly forming a cordon around us. I do believe they think they’re trapping us.’

  Cabal took in their immediate surroundings; there was no cover to speak of, which was of course the intention of their imminent ambushers. ‘The time for you to produce six more legs and proceed to spread dismay amongst our enemies is almost upon us, Madam Zarenyia. Bear in mind that your transformation will have a profound effect upon their morale—’

  ‘Makes a change from affecting morals…’

  ‘—so wait for the apposite moment. And, here we go…’

  A major was walking out from the barracks, a squad of four men, rifles unslung, at his back. He himself had his pistol drawn and ready. ‘Halt there! You, in the uniform. Remove your cap.’

  ‘Nobody ever says “please”,’ said Cabal, which was hypocritical of him. He did, however, remove his cap.

  The officer regarded Cabal’s exposed hair for a long moment as if reading the future in it. Finally, he said, ‘You are Johannes Cabal?’

  ‘I am, yes. How do you do?’ He tossed the cap to the side, the time for dissimulation plainly passed.

  The officer was looking at the rest of the party. ‘We were told there would be another man with you.’ He nodded at Miss Barrow. ‘Is that him? What is funny?’ For Zarenyia could not repress a small laugh.

  ‘Hardly, darling,’ she said, and Cabal was irked to note her Mirkarvian accent really was perfect. Then in equally perfect English, she said, ‘Show him, Leonie.’

  ‘I can speak Mirkarvian, you know,’ she said, but took off her own cap and shook her hair loose.

  ‘I don’t doubt it. You look like you’d be terribly clever with your tongue.’

  ‘Just don’t react,’ suggested Miss Smith to Leonie. ‘She stops doing that if she can’t get a reaction.’

  ‘You are no doubt thinking of my brother,’ said Cabal to the officer. ‘Regretfully, he is not with us.’ This was technically true. ‘No doubt that intelligence was handed down from Orfilia Ninuka herself, and now you are in the awkward position of knowing that she is fallible. I wouldn’t mention that to her, if I were you.’

  The major was hardly listening. He had visibly relaxed at Cabal’s truthful yet misleading statement about Horst and was now looking at the women with curiosity. ‘So … none of you are vampires.’

  ‘Bloodsuckers?’ said Zarenyia. ‘No, no, no. I can assure you that none of us feed on blood.’ This, again, was technically true, although it did not exactly answer the question, for there are vampires, and there are vampires.

  His briefing being incomplete, the major failed to ask about
any potential witches or devils amongst their number. ‘You will disarm immediately, or you will be shot.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said Zarenyia, ‘you’re forthright. I like that. We should get to know one another, Major.’

  ‘Keep your blandishments to yourself, whore.’

  Zarenyia’s smile did not waver in the slightest. If anything, it grew broader, although there was a hint of hardening in her eyes. ‘I’ve known lots of whores, darling, and generally found their company better than that of, say, soldiers. I suspect, however, that you meant it as an insult. So, yes—you and I are definitely going to have a little time together.’

  Leonie was unslinging her rifle with slow, unthreatening movements and laying it upon the ground, before stepping away from it with her hands held up in clear view. Cabal was far less considerate of the nerves of the ring of conscripts around him, undoing his uniform belt, and tossing it and the holstered pistol upon it to one side. He held his hands away from his sides, but that was the closest he intended to come to putting them up. ‘Now what, Major? You and your men seem to have us at a disadvantage.’

  Addressing his subordinates, the major shouted, ‘I want every one of these prisoners shackled and searched. Jump to it!’

  Four soldiers ran forwards, chains and manacles clanking in their hands. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, does Ninuka really believe that one man and three women present such a huge threat, Major? You’re behaving like a lot of frightened mice.’

  The barb stung, but the major replied with minimal snarling, ‘My orders are explicit, Cabal. You are, to quote them, “not to be underestimated”. I have no intention of disobeying them simply based on my unflattering impressions of you.’

  Cabal shook his head. ‘Still as obedient an army of marionettes as ever you were. Very well. Carry on.’ He held out his hands for cuffing. As he did so, he gave Zarenyia what he hoped was a significant look. He needn’t have worried; if there was one thing she was particularly attuned to, it was significant looks.

  She turned to the major. ‘Look, sweetness, ever since I embarked on this little adventure with Johannes here, people have been falling over themselves to put me in one or another form of bondage. Normally, I’d be delighted to oblige, but I’m afraid I have plans for this evening so, if it’s not too inconvenient, perhaps you’d be a darling and call off your little boys? They can take their chains and whatnots with them, and we can all be friends. How does that sound?’

  The major regarded her coldly. ‘Shackle that one first. And gag her incessantly yakking mouth while you are about it.’

  ‘My. You certainly have a way with the ladies.’ Zarenyia did not smile at all as she said it.

  ‘I would advise you not to aggravate Madam Zarenyia, Major,’ said Cabal.

  The major laughed. ‘Or else what, exactly?’

  ‘Well, that would be the difference between a swift, pleasurable death and a slow, agonising one. Those really are your only choices now.’

  The major nodded, and Cabal was felled from behind by a rifle butt to the kidneys. Zarenyia watched him writhe on the floor for a moment, her face expressionless. She turned her head to look at the major. ‘Slow and agonising it is, then,’ she said.

  The sudden transition of the very attractive yet somehow unsettling lady into a huge spider-woman was not something any of the conscripts had covered in basic training. A bladed leg swiped at the man who had struck down Cabal. The soldier screamed as most of him fell one way, the remainder of him falling silently the other. Of the eleven surviving men, seven swore, two squealed less manfully than they would previously have believed possible, five rifles were dropped, and three pairs of underwear filled.

  The major was built of slightly sterner stuff. Admittedly, he gawped at first, and his jaw flopped open and shut as he tried to take in what was happening. Then he remembered the pistol in his hand and brought it up to fire.

  It’s quite possible, indeed likely, that the bullet would have done Zarenyia little or no damage if it had actually hit her. She was not in the mood to give him the chance, however. She leapt forwards as a wolf spider does upon its prey, landed just short of him, and, as he was staggering back from her, she scythed his gun hand off at the elbow using the extruded blades upon her left foreleg.

  ‘Staunch that, darling. I don’t want you dying before I kill you properly,’ she told him with a smile that froze his heart. Then she was gone in another jump to land amidst the troops. There were shouts. She struck one man who was raising his rifle to his shoulder upon the head, and her leg did not stop travelling until it was down past his sternum. Leaving the dead man as a lazily drawn Y spilling offal before his legs failed, she turned upon the others, and the shouts became screams.

  Leonie Barrow grabbed Cabal’s uniform tunic by the scruff and dragged him by main force into the area shielded by Zarenyia’s armoured bulk. He grunted with annoyance at the imposition, but the pain was too great for him to find his feet with any hope of maintaining them, so he used his hands to help pull himself across the cracked paving slabs.

  To his other side, Miss Smith had produced her wand and was crouched with her free arm crooked to support her wand hand as if she were target shooting. A soldier some thirty feet away moved sideways to shoot past her, perhaps at Zarenyia, perhaps at Cabal. Miss Smith did not give him the chance; glass sparks and malenginuity spat in a spray of lethal intent from the wand’s tip. It did not strike the soldier, who jumped back from it the instant he saw the woman in black was not merely waving a stick around. The jet struck the ground before him, and for one brief, joyful moment, he thought she had missed and that the advantage was his. The muzzle of his rife swung over to glare at her. She had not missed. The pavement, doused in strange energies, buckled and rose to form a great, concrete hand, articulated at the slab edges. The private barely had time to realise all was not well when the slab hand slapped him flat as an unsqueamish man might a cockroach. Across the back of the now inanimate hand splinters of concrete flew up like champagne bubbles as the dead man’s name and epitaph appeared. She had enjoyed the novelty of the self-engraving tombstones in the Endless Cemetery and was keen to adopt it as a signature upon her works henceforth.

  For her part, Leonie Barrow snatched up her dropped rifle, wrapped the sling around her shoulder to stabilise it, worked the bolt to put a 7.62mm round into the chamber, and sighted at the backs of the more sensible Mirkarvian troops, which is to say the ones that were running away. As she discarded targets as low threats and—English as ever—a strong desire not to shoot a man in the back if it could be helped, she swung the rifle back and forth, acquiring and discarding, acquiring and discarding, until she found a man in her sights who had taken partial cover behind a lamp standard from where he was drawing a bead upon Zarenyia. Leonie aimed low, and fired. The bullet took him in the thigh, and he fell over sideways, glanced fearfully at her as she worked the bolt once more, and then half ran, half hopped away from her, leaving his rifle behind. She began looking for a new target, acquire and discard, acquire and discard.

  Cabal looked around him, breathing deeply as the pain in his back slowly subsided and the desire to vomit with it. He was in the middle of a protective cordon, and the thought struck him that just how had he ended up in a situation in the space of a handful of years wherein three people were prepared to fight to defend him when once, not so long ago, being surrounded by people with weapons and the will to use them would invariably have been a very bad thing. Perhaps, he concluded, it was because he had a soul now. Perhaps—and it was a very peculiar thought that caused him a little discomfort—he had friends now. A little discomfort, but not nearly as much as the pleasure that the idea brought him.

  There was little time to feel warm and wanted for something other than capital crimes, however. From the direction of the impromptu barracks building an inhuman wail grew via a slow crescendo into an ululating climax that threatened to outlast that of the average Zarenyian dalliance. Somewhere on or around the building, a soldier was
cranking the handle of a siren for all he was worth.

  Grimacing, Cabal clambered painfully back to his feet. ‘We must move,’ he said. ‘We cannot take on the whole Mirkarvian army of occupation. We must focus on our objectives.’

  Leonie glanced at the lowering bulk of the Rubrum Imperatrix where it hung at anchor. ‘Shame they cottoned onto us so quickly. The ramp is way over there, to the rear of the aeroship. That’s got to be three hundred yards over broken ground.’

  Cabal looked askance at her, specifically at the very professional way she was wielding the rifle. ‘You seem very at home with that gun, Miss Barrow.’

  She half laughed, half smiled. The smile vanished. She sighted and fired. A shot ricocheted, there was a cry of dismay from the end of the Mall, and the sound of army boots in rapid retreat. Her smile returned. ‘After the first time we met, Cabal, my father made sure I knew how to handle myself in a fight. After the second time, I went off and made sure I knew how to handle a pistol. After the third time, I taught myself how to handle rifles and shotguns. My curriculum vitæ makes astonishing reading thanks to your influence.’

  ‘Always glad to be of service.’

  Zarenyia suddenly reared up, her abdomen curling beneath her to bring her spinnerets to bear forwards. There was a wet squirting noise that, even in the middle of an armed engagement, managed to sound wholly lascivious. A corporal bringing up some sort of single-shot rocket launcher, a novelty from the Mirkarvian armouries, was hit in the chest by a cable of spider silk as thick as his thumb. He barely had time to register that he was snared before he was jerked from his feet with enough force to cause compaction injuries along the full length of his spine and neck as his body bent backwards under the impetus. The line slacked when he was mid-parabola, and he sailed down towards Zarenyia under the normal forces of gravity and forward velocity until he met her foreleg, crooked sideways, at which moment he was neatly severed atwain.

  While the act of bisection itself was neat, however, the immediate aftermath was not. The top half crashed to the floor wetly spilling lungs and stomach contents, but the lower half unloaded a mass of intestines and much blood, which splashed egregiously.