The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  A long time—subjectively—later, they arrived at the base of the entry ramp. As Leonie took position to scan the approaches, Cabal peered cautiously up the ramp, ducking his head around the edge of a fixing stanchion at the base and back immediately for fear of sharpshooters in the beast’s belly. No bullet winged its way at his head. Indeed, he had seen no one. Cautiously he took a longer peek, and confirmed the dispersal area at the ramp’s head seemed to be completely abandoned.

  ‘We haven’t been spotted on the ground yet, Cabal.’ Distantly they heard the sound of Zarenyia whooping happily and the distinctive sound of shattering physics that accompanied the use of Miss Smith’s wand. ‘But I do not know how long that will last. How many are guarding the ramp?’

  ‘None.’

  That gave her pause. ‘None? They’ve left the door to their queen’s flying boudoir unguarded? That seems…’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘I was going to say “suspicious”.’

  ‘Also a good analysis.’

  They looked about them, but if there was an ambush in the offing, it was taking its own sweet time in materialising. Leonie made an unhappy face. ‘A trap.’

  ‘Certainly, but not here or it would already have been sprung.’ He nodded to the ship. ‘Our fate awaits us.’

  ‘Still frightened?’

  He nodded. ‘Terrified.’

  ‘Good. Not just me, then. I don’t suppose there’s a choice. Off you go. I’ll follow you up and cover our back, o Great Leader.’

  Breaking cover was hard to do; there wasn’t a scrap more to be had on the ramp itself, and they would be exposed to fire for some eighty feet until they were within the shelter of the aeroship’s belly, where there was probably an ambush awaiting them. It would not be an enjoyable ascent.

  At least the first sixty would be stable upon the ground-mounted ramp. The lowered aeroship ramp married reasonably well with the ground ramp’s upper lip, although that they weren’t connected by chains despite both lips having holes in them that would have been ideal for the purpose perturbed Cabal. Still, indecision would butter no parsnips, nor aid in likely regicide, so he put a foot on the ramp and began a fast crouched ascent that he hoped might make him less of a target for any passing Mirkarvian. Seeing he was at last committed to the climb, Leonie Barrow let him get ten or so feet ahead in an effort to avoid clumping together and offering an easy mark before starting up herself.

  They proceeded with the curious feeling that they were in a play, which—in a manner of speaking—they were. The artificiality of the Five Ways bore upon them as at no other stage of its development, now that they were surely approaching the dénouement. He had already experienced anagnorisis. Presently, there would be a confrontation, a peripeteia, catharsis, and probably some sort of coda. The one thing they could not predict was whether this was an heroic tale, a tragedy, or even a comedy. Perhaps Ninuka would prove vulnerable to a good speech and they could all dance around as the curtain fell. This seemed unlikely. It was a theatre of improvisation that came with a butcher’s bill. Well stocked with mechanicals, it also put real lives into jeopardy, or even took them. There seemed little doubt from what they had been able to glean that the core of Ninuka’s force had come from the real world along with her. These were real people and they had died real deaths in the pursuance of her grand scheme. Even Miss Smith had been dragged into the trial, and who knew who else that had simply been close enough to the upstage to be perceived. On the plus side, Ratuth Slabuth was as dead as mutton, so the stormy outlook bore at least one silver lining.

  No Imperial Bodyguards appeared as Cabal and Leonie ascended, no triumphant cackles to tell them that they had fallen into Ninuka’s cunning trap, nyahahaha, etc. They climbed to the accompaniment of the sounds of disagreement as Zarenyia and Miss Smith introduced themselves to the ground troops mopping up the vampires. The disagreements were pithy.

  Cabal reached the overlapping lips of the ramps, and hesitated. Strictly speaking, the Rubicon of the venture had been crossed when they first entered the sort-of realities of the Five Ways. There and then, however, the lines of steel across the ramp marked it more physically to his mind. With grand misgivings, he crossed the lines and continued onwards and upwards.

  He had barely taken five more paces when a shot rang out from somewhere off to their right. Cabal instinctively dropped flat onto the unforgiving surface, the horizontal tread lines cut into the metal discoloured and marred with ashes and soil trodden in by any number of soldiers’ boots tramping back and forth.

  ‘I think there’s a marksman at the guard post,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘Lay down suppression fire until I reach cover, and I’ll do the same for you while you follow.’

  He waited, but there was no answer.

  He knew what he would see even before he craned his neck to look. Leonie Barrow lay crumpled on the ramp some five feet short of the join in the ramp. She was motionless, her rifle inches from the fingertips of her out flung arm. There was blood on the ramp.

  For a moment, he did not only not know what to do, he didn’t even know what to think. Theirs was a dangerous undertaking. They had all—with the exception of Miss Smith—volunteered for the task. There had always been the likelihood of injuries and the possibility of death. He had seen enough of it to regard it as just something that happened, thankfully relatively rare but always ultimately unavoidable. He had killed others himself and seen that role as just part of the weave of history.

  Yet this seemed wrong. Leonie Barrow could not be dead. She could not. She could not.

  The old part of him rankled with disgust at such a romantic view of life. As if anyone was proof to the inevitability of their own mortality. The new part of him, pink as new skin growing from a ruin of burnt flesh, was innocent in its own way, and it did not wish to listen. She could not be dead. She could not be.

  It struck him that he had been looking at her body what seemed like a long time, even if it were really only a few seconds. More than long enough for a marksman to chamber a new round. Should he return fire? A pistol against a rifle at range seemed a poor match. Should he try to reach her? The angle of the ramp relative to the guard post gave him a sliver of cover where he lay, but Leonie was close by the ramp’s edge. If he went to her, he would be an easy target.

  He was debating what to do when there was a dreadful concussion that made the ramp buck beneath him and threatened to fling him from it. He held on for life itself, gripping the deep ridges and wondering what new catastrophe was being visited upon him. He looked to Leonie Barrow to ensure that she had not been thrown off, either, and saw the clouds of concrete dust blowing out from beneath the lower section of the ramp. With a squeal of protesting metal, the lower ramp dropped a few feet and lay off-kilter, the side bearing Leonie’s body the higher. Then there was a groaning crash, and the entire ramp fell, and Leonie Barrow fell with it.

  He realised the nature of the trap too late to do anything about it. Of course he would be the first up the ramp, eager for confrontation even as it terrified him. One or more marksmen would be assigned to bring the ascent to a halt by firing at the opportune moment once he was past the join between the ramps, but anyone with him was not. Then, to ensure he was isolated, demolition charges set into the lower ramp’s base and supports were detonated.

  Johannes Cabal, utterly outwitted, alone, and aggrieved, could do nothing as the Rubrum Imperatrix’s aft ramp slowly rose up into the vessel’s belly on hydraulic rams.

  * * *

  We can forgive Johannes Cabal at that moment. He had rarely felt true despair in his life—it took a very great deal to make him feel even mild despair—and he was host to a mix of emotions whose potency overwhelmed his atrophied sentiments. Given a minute longer he might well have looked around and begun formulating a response, extemporising a plan, and started shooting people, which was often how these things went.

  As things were, however, he did not need that minute to reaffirm his self-suffi
ciency for, to coin a phrase, the cavalry were on the way. An unusual cavalry—consisting of a witch, a vampire, and a devil—but a sort of cavalry all the same.

  How Zarenyia and Miss Smith rescued Horst from the murderous intentions of the Imperial Bodyguard is a short tale. The guards were equipped with the curious boxy carbines previously mentioned, odd little weapons chambered to fit odd little bullets comprising a soft lead nose upon a hollow body of an unusual silver alloy that in turn contained a liquid of vile provenance and despicable modes of collection. The troops were told the liquid was holy water, but it was not water, and it was a very long way from holy. The effect of the rounds upon undead flesh (not only that of vampires) was spectacular, as demonstrated by the unwilling Johns.

  Horst was keen not to be shot by such a weapon and so had resorted to skulking and hiding while he found a way out of the dense cordon of searchers looking for him and those like him. It was all beginning to look rather hopeless when a witch turned up on a devil’s back and proceeded to lay into the searching guards. The bullets would certainly have killed a human should they be struck, but turned out to be singularly useless against Zarenyia’s armoured lower body. Thus, she spent a lot of time rearing up to scythe and slice her way through the startled troops, and when she did lower her forebody it was to reveal Miss Smith standing on the thorax, her wand spitting havoc, and wearing an expression that indicated that she was enjoying herself far too much.

  The Imperial Bodyguard were well trained by Mirkarvian standards and—if the rumour was true—certainly well motivated to do their best. Training tends to be very specific, however, and somebody had plainly blundered in failing to prepare them for situations in which they would be fighting a small number of very irregular troops, each roughly equivalent to a platoon in the ‘making a ruckus’ stakes.

  While they were trying to think of a sensible way to deal with a witch and a devil, they were not so concentrated upon the vampire problem, which was a shame, as the vampire problem was very concentrated upon them. Horst had not so much enjoyed being the Lord of the Dead as finding himself in the company of people with a similar lifestyle to his, and there was fellowship there. He had even begun to like a few of those he saw as his charges, especially the patrician Johns, who turned out not to be so ghastly when you actually chatted to him. Seeing Johns killed in front of him while—mark it well—he was not running for his unlife but trying to warn Horst had pushed him past a limit. A vampire is a major threat. A vampire with a personal grudge against you is a vast threat. The soldiers of Her Majesty’s Imperial Bodyguard turned their collective back upon just such a vast threat, and they paid for that very quickly.

  The battle, such as it was, was quite brief and spectacularly brutal. The boxy little carbines were of little use in confined quarters and the soldiers merely ended up shooting several of their own while trying to settle a sight upon the dodging, weaving, blurring in and out of existence Horst as he visited red ruin upon them. Miss Smith dismounted Zarenyia and moved amongst the soldiers, distributing eldritch ends at point-blank range, while Zarenyia took it upon herself to abscond with a few envenomed specimens on which to feed. These she lugged off behind a freestanding wall as a small nod at propriety, or at least, not being shot at while practising succubine rites upon her victims.

  There was a sudden hiatus in hostilities caused by a howl of outrage from behind the wall. Zarenyia climbed over the wall’s top, legs appearing first as she emerged holding a limp body over her head. She flung it at one of the few vaguely organised clumps of resistance, braining some and scattering the rest.

  ‘They’re empties!’ she roared in a truly diabolical rage. ‘Some little shit has got there first and taken their souls! Of all the bloody-minded, selfish, dog-in-a-manger-ish…’ And the rest of the imprecation was lost in a new welter of carnage while Zarenyia salved her hurt feelings with multiple murders.

  It will be understood that the few lingering vestiges of resistance dried up shortly after this.

  After Miss Smith fried the last of the hapless and soulless, the trio made their merry way back to where Cabal and Leonie doubtless waited for them.

  ‘Mein Gott.’ Horst saw first, and the others looked to him in confusion before they followed his gaze. He saw Leonie lying on the ramp first, saw the blood, saw his brother crouched helplessly just too far away to help. ‘No, no, no!’ The gravel spraying back from his hard acceleration, he sprinted towards the base of the ramp. He had hardly begun to run when the explosion startled him into an untidy halt. The ramp lurched, held, and then collapsed. In agonising slowness, he saw the ramp fall faster than the body of Leonie Barrow, leaving her behind as it fell through dust and concrete fragments. He accelerated again, but he couldn’t hope to reach her before she struck the now horizontal ramp. He came to a halt again, albeit a more controlled one this time. His mind burnt through possibilities as he loosened the leash on his vampiric side.

  ‘Miss Smith! Help Leonie if you can! Zarenyia! To me!’

  Neither needed a second bidding. Miss Smith drew her skirt up and ran as fast as she could towards the downed ramp. Zarenyia galloped up to Horst and, such was the urgency and the gravity of the situation that she even passed up the golden opportunity to flirt with him over how masterful he was being.

  ‘Oh, the poor poppet,’ she said, looking towards the crumpled body in a stolen grey uniform. Then, to Horst, ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Johannes is in trouble. I have to get up there and help him.’

  She glanced skyward. ‘I’m not good in confined spaces, darling—’

  ‘I know. You stay with Smith. I just need you to get me up there before that ramp closes.’

  She looked up again, weighed the odds, and nodded firmly. ‘Consider it done. Hop aboard, and hang on!’

  * * *

  Miss Smith had almost reached the collapsed ramp when she stumbled. Not badly enough to fall—although she cursed her impractical shoes as she tottered—but enough to spoil the shot that was meant for her and that creased the air just ahead of her where she would otherwise have been. Blessing her impractical shoes under her breath, she wheeled to gauge from where the shot had likely come. The checkpoint on the encampment’s perimeter seemed likely, and furtive movement there confirmed it. Miss Smith would love to have visited something especially imaginative on the rifleman who it seemed must have been the one who shot Leonie Barrow, but she didn’t have the time. She invoked raw destruction and directed it through her wand. The checkpoint and all its contents, including the marksman, disappeared in a perfunctory but staggeringly powerful explosion that startled birds in Southwark Park into the air over three miles away. Resistance overcome, Miss Smith once more hiked up her skirts and headed for the fallen Miss Barrow.

  * * *

  ‘Smithie’s having fun,’ said Zarenyia. Horst said nothing. He was too busy concentrating on not falling off an eight-legged devil dangling upside down while climbing an anchor cable up towards the lowering bulk of the Rubrum Imperatrix. It required a lot of concentration. One of the things he found himself concentrating on was how far the cable’s hawsehole in the ship’s hull was from the steadily closing ramp. Closing far too steadily for comfort. Then the ramp stopped in its tracks. Horst could make out movement close by the pivot and realised that his brother must have jammed the mechanism by some means. It probably would not buy them much time, but perhaps it would be enough.

  The best place to cling to an inverted spider-devil, the reader will be illuminated to discover, is under the thorax. Thus, to talk to Zarenyia, he found it necessary to peer past the forward edge of that chitinous surface and up (or down, she being inverted) between her forward legs to look up (or down) at her humanesque upper body. This had another effect.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ said Horst, ‘but I cannot help but see up your sweater.’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ she called back. ‘I’m proud of my body. That aside, how can I help you?’

  ‘I was just wondering
how we were going to get from the top end of the anchor cable to the ramp.’

  ‘I was thinking of walking it, but I’m not so sure now.’

  ‘Too smooth?’

  ‘Oh, please. I can stick to glass if I put my mind to it. No, I was thinking rather more about all these guns and things that are starting to take an interest in us.’

  And so they were. Not all, by any means, nor yet even a majority, but enough of the machine-gun turrets were busily buzzing on their bearings to aim at the climbers.

  ‘Oh, this is going to get terribly fraught, isn’t it? I doubt the bullets will be much bother for my lower half, but my top bit is all lovely and squishy and not as bulletproof as I might wish at this precise moment. Even if they don’t kill me, I don’t think I’ll be able to hang on.’

  ‘Then wh—’

  ‘Hold on hard,’ she called, and then, without pausing to check if he was indeed holding on hard (he was; throwing aside manners and embracing her fiercely around the midriff), she threw herself upwards off the cable. For a second time since he’d been blown out of a window of Buckingham Palace, Horst found himself in free fall, and it was only more bearable than the first occasion because, primarily, he wasn’t on fire and, secondly, Zarenyia’s top bit really was terrifically lovely and squishy.

  He was distracted from this by the distinct sensation of his legs being forced apart by Zarenyia’s abdomen curling upwards. Then over his head he saw a stream of glistening white fluid shoot past. He hardly needed an accelerated metabolism and associated sensibilities to know what would come next, and hung on for dear unlife.

  The stream hit the underside of the aeroship and stuck fast. A small part of a second later, Zarenyia strained under a great impulse as the silken cord drew tight and her shallow downward arc was halted to be replaced with a soaring upwards swing. Horst looked up and saw the narrow aperture of the almost shut ramp section approaching at dizzying speed.