The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘For heaven’s sake, madam!’ snapped Cabal. He lifted first one foot than the other from a large and growing pool of gore. ‘Less extravagantly, if you please!’

  Zarenyia turned to look at him, almost comically saddened. ‘I’ve got man giblets all over my sweater. I’m not sure it will wash out.’

  ‘If we get through this, I shall buy you a whole new wardrobe, but please, will you focus on the task in hand?’

  She brightened instantly. ‘A whole new wardrobe? Oh, you darling! You heard that, didn’t you?’ she asked of Miss Smith and Leonie Barrow. They exchanged glances, but said nothing. Zarenyia didn’t care; she returned her attention to Cabal. ‘I have witnesses!’ she said in a righteously warning tone.

  ‘Quite. Ninuka. Reason for us being here. Focus.’

  ‘Yes. Find Ninuka, kill Ninuka, take Holy Grail or whatever this is all about, get new wardrobe. See? I have my priorities all worked out.’

  Abruptly, the siren died away. ‘Finally,’ said Cabal. ‘Horst and his constituency have arrived. I was beginning to think it would require an engraved invitation.’

  * * *

  In fairness, the plan had always been a little vague as to what constituted the signal by which Horst was to know when to lead his force of ill-matched vampires into battle. ‘You’ll know it when you see it’ had been Cabal’s pragmatic though unhelpful advice. This failed to take into account just how Horst was supposed to see anything when his role was to lead the vampires around to the rear of the armed encampment built within the skeleton of Buckingham Palace, and therefore had no clear line of sight to where his brother and the others were hoping to infiltrate at the front.

  He had been considering the wisdom of sending one of his number—which frankly had little experience as vampires and less still as soldiers and could hardly be depended upon once out of his sight—or to go himself and risk his force engaging the enemy out of boredom or, worse still, suddenly realising that their loyalty to the Lord of the Dead lasted exactly as long as he didn’t ask them to do anything that might finish with them in dust. The Mirkarvians were, after all, notoriously adept at dealing with vampires, having famously all but exterminated their own population of nosferatu for failing to pay its taxes. One of the first acts of the occupation force when faced by the supernatural horrors their leader had cursed the city with was to capture any vampires that tried their luck with Mirkarvian troops, and destroy them in front of the Houses of Parliament, which was a known leech nest right from the beginning.*

  The decision was rendered moot by the distant sound, perfectly audible on the still night air even to the dull senses of mortals, never mind those of vampires, of shouts, and then screams, and then shooting. The mournful wail of a siren was simply a confirmation.

  ‘Guns and screaming,’ said Horst. ‘My brother’s definitely in town. Come along, all! England expects, and all that. Tally-ho!’

  Feeling more British than he had ever done before in his life—after all, what could be more British than leading a shock force of vampires on a raid into the ruins of Buckingham Palace, short of doing the same but wearing bowler hats?—Horst led the charge.

  He needn’t have worried about the resolve of his force. They were sadly changed creatures, but not one of them had not examined their own futures and seen nothing but a spiritual death, picking over the bones of a dead country. Perhaps one day they would cease to think as humans, but that time was a long way off, and all had a personal purgatory stretching before them that would finish in an inhuman hell, with no heaven as even a fleeting prospect. They walked, they talked, they fed, and they feared a meaningless death as much as they had ever done, but they all knew that death had already claimed them, and that no amount of walking, talking, and feeding would ameliorate that truth one jot. Varney had told them they were the new lords of London and they would take the place as their fiefdom once the Mirkarvians left as they surely must. It was comforting, but it was a lie, as all knew but for Varney.

  Now they had a new leader and he was as they, but he had more life than even the most mortal of mortals should contain. He offered them a vision as grim as it was compelling of likely destruction, but of flickering out in a moment of meaning and not inertia. Everyone dies eventually, even vampires, and while they could remember the families, the friends, the smiles, and the loves that had been taken from them, they would sell this poor counterfeit of life, this undeath, on their terms, and dearly.

  It was no platoon of feral creatures that had once been humans that fell upon the Mirkarvian guards patrolling the rear wall of the palace at Grosvenor Place, nor was it a horde of ancient decadents somehow stirred to concerted action. It was a bunch of Britons with fangs and a grievance, and there is no more terrifying sight in creation.

  The guards had no chance, and most fell hardly aware of how they were being killed. They were, as was so much of Ninuka’s invasion force, conscripts who had few enough chances to even let off a shot in anger, the real veterans being employed in the pacification of the rest of the country. The alarums and excursions at the front of the palace had entirely distracted them, and most weren’t even facing the attack on their line when it came. It was over quickly and, though he cavilled at the pragmatic brutality of the order, Horst had told his minions to drain whatever blood they required to be replete. The coming action would require each and every one of them to be at the limits of their capabilities and that meant being fully fed. It was this al fresco dinner that resulted in the longueur between the siren sounding and the vampires attacking the palace proper that irked Cabal so.

  Once the guards were no longer anything but nourishment, the vampires easily scaled the wall and, pushing themselves to the edge of human perception, moved easily unseen through the gardens. It turned out to be an unnecessary precaution; the gardens were empty of troops, the handful of two-man patrols having abandoned their orders in favour of finding out what all the excitement at the front was. When they saw it was the sort of excitement that involves a body count (including fractions), they found sensible things to do some distance away, where they could take cover, point rifles, and give the impression that they were watching developments in a professional and soldierly manner as opposed to cowering like undertrained conscripts. Perish the very thought.

  In any event, the effect was that the vampire horde easily moved to the remains of the palace, infiltrated the ruins, and split into two parties on reaching the barracks. Horst gave brief orders to the section commanded by the City gent, whose name turned out to be Johns; they were to wait within easy sprinting distance of the barracks’ rear doors (given that it had until recently been part of a larger building, there was no shortage of rear doors at assorted levels of the half-ruined building, opening out into partial rooms, corridors, and apartments). Meanwhile, Horst and his half of the force would scale the outside of the building to the roof. The silencing of the siren would be the signal for the assaults of the building’s interior from above and below to begin.

  Buckingham Palace was, by any measure, a building. It wasn’t a very pretty one and, indeed, when the Houses of Parliament burnt down in the early part of the nineteenth century, the King offered it to the government as a permanent replacement with unseemly haste. Parliament thanked the King kindly for the offer, but pointed out that it was not suitable for the seating of two large assemblies. They neglected to mention that it also looked like a troll’s birthday cake, and that they would personally rather only ever have to go there for garden parties and for picking up the occasional honour. Aesthetically a disaster, the palace sat in the heart of London, fondly regarded by tourists and no one else. The Royal Family always much preferred Windsor or Balmoral to staying at Buckingham Palace, and who can blame them? That the palace had never looked so interesting as it did now, subsequent to an aerial bombardment, says all one really needed to know about the place.

  Even the Mirkarvian troops stationed there didn’t like it; it was more a collection of rooms cobbled together by
an architect sure that what royalty really wanted more than anything was lots of rooms cobbled together. It lacked cohesion and practicality. The troops chafed at the nearness of the former Horse Guard barracks hardly five minutes away, but their grumbling was ignored. The Red Queen wanted to station her flying palace over the ruins of the old, and she wanted her soldiers as close to hand as possible. If that meant soldiers’ boots churning up luxurious carpets, and antique furniture being broken up for firewood, so be it. The Red Queen’s will was all, and to deny it was to deny life.

  The tactical downside of this location compared to a purpose-built barracks was that the soldiers were split into smaller groups rather than the higher concentrations afforded by long barrack rooms. When the NCOs went around to roust the troops at the beginning of the day, it was tiresome but necessary to visit several rooms to bellow loudly at the sleeping men whereas they would have preferred to appear at the end of a single room and practise their generic sexual insults and imaginative threats upon all the men at once. Still, this was the price of keeping Her Majesty happy, and a happy majesty was a majesty not handing out death warrants.

  Now, however, the current deployment’s shortcomings were to prove fatal. As the man cranking the siren on the roof fell victim to a former washerwoman armed with the strength of ten and needle-sharp fangs, the siren’s handle turned unattended, slowing with every revolution as the warning tone grew quieter and lower until it faded into nothing.

  Doors were flung open, trapdoors lifted, and the vampires were in. The soldiers within had very little warning and even less chance to defend themselves. Most were unarmed, and an unarmed man against a vampire at the peak of its energies is a poor match indeed. Soldiers fell hardly aware of what had overtaken them, cut down by cabdrivers, shop workers, a terribly conflicted vicar, a renowned West End actor, all working in concert and in awful silence, their progress marked only by the sounds of doors being violently thrown open, and the very occasional cry from those poor souls who saw their fate approaching and knew there was no evading it.

  One decided he would not die that way, and threw himself from a window. General Fischer, who happened to be directing his subordinates from the base of the steel ramp that led up to the Rubrum Imperatrix’s main aft entry, watched the man fall two storeys to crash to the floor below. Instantly realising that the Mirkarvian ambush had been categorically outflanked, he ordered his men to form a defensive line protecting the ramp and the ship from attackers. But even as he was wondering what could be done to withdraw any surviving soldiers in the routed building, the problem was taken from him. Over the crackle of gunfire he had not heard the humming tones of electrical motors and hydraulic rams. Above his head, he had not seen the silhouettes of gun barrels swing ponderously from their mountings and sponsons. The first he knew of it was when they opened fire.

  Explosive shells struck the last surviving wing of Buckingham Palace in a rapid salvo, the recoil from which made the anchor cables groan with stress as the Rubrum Imperatrix shifted under the impulse. A pause of a fraction of a second, and then the walls bulged outwards, inflated by the burst of the shells. Fire roared from windows, bodies vampiric and mortal were thrown out to somersault gracelessly to the hard pavement. The former struggled back to their feet, only to be stitched with raking heavy machine-gun fire from anti-personnel weapon positions studded about the aeroship’s underside. Fischer had fought vampires both here and in Mirkarvia, and knew that even that sort of weaponry would only slow a determined specimen. He was therefore astonished to see the vampires bloom in fire, burning briefly but fiercely as a magnesium ribbon burns when held in the Bunsen flame. They screamed as they died, and every vampire hit did die.

  It was incredible. It was also clearly planned. Furious, Fischer ran up the ramp.

  He finally found his queen on the top surface of the aeroship, watching the carnage below with the detachment of an entomologist watching ants fight.

  ‘You knew!’ spat Fischer, anger stripping him of diplomacy. ‘You knew this would happen!’

  ‘Good evening, General,’ said Ninuka without turning. ‘You have something to report?’

  ‘If you knew this would happen, why didn’t you warn me? Those men…’ The north end of the palace was in flames. Two more shells struck it in rapid succession and a corner of the wing fell away in a tumble of masonry. Beyond it apartments burnt out of any hope of control. ‘Those are Mirkarvians, damn it! Good men! How can you sacrifice—’

  ‘Every time you send your men into battle, you know you will be sacrificing at least some of them.’ Ninuka spoke sharply and the general’s sense of self-preservation finally caught up with his anger. ‘Every man in that building was as good as dead as soon as the vampires entered. This way, their deaths are not in vain.’

  ‘The ammunition our machine guns are using, what is it?’

  ‘Every creature that walks has its weakness, General. I have made it my business to specialise in weakness, to know my enemies at least as well as I know myself. It was an expensive business to find a suitable Achilles heel in vampires, and expensive to manufacture. The levy soldiers could not be equipped with it, but my Imperial Bodyguard has been. I hereby hand their command to you, General. Use them wisely. Hunt the leeches and exterminate every one of them. Every one of them, especially a handsome one with a faint Hessian accent and probably a well-tailored suit.’

  ‘You warned me of him once, Your Majesty, but he was not one of the four.’

  For the first time, Ninuka’s equilibrium seemed shaken. She turned to him as angrily as if he had been unwise enough to personally insult her.

  ‘Impossible! How do you account for that pocket army of leeches otherwise? Of course he’s here!’

  ‘With respect, the four that attempted to penetrate the perimeter consisted of a blond man, who does fit the description you gave of one of the likely intruders, but the other three were all women.’

  Ninuka looked blank. ‘Women?’

  ‘Yes, My Queen. One man and three women pretending to be the two survivors of the Lammasu ground support patrol and a pair of prisoners.’

  The Red Queen looked off into the fires, an eyebrow cocked in intrigue. ‘My, my, Herr Cabal,’ she said to no one in particular, ‘how your social skills have come on.’ She dispelled the reverie with a shake of her head. ‘Horst Cabal is behind the attack on the barracks; only he could have led the leeches. He was always fated to become the Lord of the Dead, one way or another.’

  Another staccato hammering of automatic fire, another flare. She returned her attention to the battlefield. ‘Where are Cabal and these three women throughout all this? I heard shooting.’

  ‘I couldn’t see, and the subaltern I sent to find out didn’t come back, Your Majesty.’

  ‘You couldn’t see.’ There was the slightest note of derision. ‘All can be seen if you stand in the right place.’ She walked towards the aeroship’s prow, past the covered shapes of several CI-880 Ghepardo entomopters liberated (or looted, depending on one’s perspective) from the Senzan Aeroforce inventory. Fischer glanced at them as he passed by, half longing, half loathing. Mirkarvia’s aerial forces had been a joke in the region. (‘What is the difference between a spider and the Mirkarvian Aeroforce?’ ‘People are afraid of spiders.’) Air superiority would have been impossible to impose in the wars against Senza and Poloruss. The Red Queen’s unconventional forms of warfare had rendered that shortfall moot, and the vastly superior aerofleets of the conquered powers had fallen into Mirkarvian hands.

  But, it was all for show. Now Mirkarvia had the weapons that had proved useless to their vanquished enemies, and continued to prove useless in Mirkarvian hands simply because they were often surplus to requirements. Off in battles going on that moment around Britain in such exotic-sounding locales as Uttoxeter, Thetford, and Charnock Richard, such engines of war were being used in earnest. Wherever the Red Queen was, however, they were simply ornaments.

  The deck jerking slowly beneath his fe
et in reaction to another salvo of shells fired into the pathetic remains of Buckingham Palace reminded him that this not entirely true; Her Majesty seemed to have a fondness for aeroships and their effective use. The entomopters may sit unattended and barely used but for occasional reconnaissance flights, but the vessel on which they sat was allowed the privilege of flexing its muscles in anger and of drawing blood. Every station aboard the ship was manned by Queen Ninuka’s personally chosen crew and staff. This really was her palace now she had grown bored with the crumbling heap that was Harslaus Castle in Mirkarvia’s equally faded capital, Krenz. A very special palace that could go where it was required and, if necessary, level an area the size of a small town once it got there.

  Fischer was distracted enough by the entomopters that he allowed Ninuka to get a few yards ahead of him. She therefore reached the rail overlooking the ship’s prow first, and so Fischer had the dubious honour of hearing his famously imperturbable queen become perturbed for the second time in five minutes. ‘What is that?’

  He joined her at the rail, and they looked down in mutual incomprehension. A badly formed and rapidly disintegrating cordon line of green soldiers was breaking up under the onslaught of a woman with a rifle, another with a wand of all things, and …

  ‘What is that?’ echoed the general. It was Zarenyia, but they weren’t to know that.

  ‘The drained corpses found in the National Gallery.’ Surprise was rapidly being replaced by calculation in the queen’s mind. ‘The webs. It cannot be a coincidence.’

  ‘I shall have the ship’s guns redirected upon that … thing,’ said Fischer, glad of a chance to give orders and feel like a soldier again. He would have pointed out that if the Rubrum Imperatrix had been left on its habitual alert levels, lookouts would have spotted the monster immediately after it appeared. As it was, everybody had been ordered by the queen to keep a close eye on the approaches to the ship’s aft quarter. He decided that this was neither the time nor the place to criticise Her Majesty, just like every other place and every other time. In the empire of the Red Queen, discretion was a survival trait.