Johannes Cabal the Detective (15 page)

“Rufus Maleficarus,” he said in quiet contemplation.

“What about him?” Leonie had heard the name before: a notorious warlock who had crossed swords with Cabal on at least one occasion to her knowledge. “I thought he was dead?”

“He is. I killed him thoroughly. That was the second time I met him, though. The first time, it wasn’t just happenstance. He blamed me for what happened to his father.”

“Was he justified in that?”

“Yes. Yes, he was. But, really, his father was a monster. I had no choice.”

“With your history, I really don’t think you’re in any position to call anybody else a monster,” she said sharply.

Cabal’s expression was unreadable. “No, I am being entirely literal, in the non-metaphorical, purest dictionary sense of the word. His father was a
monster
. He was trying to kill me, just as he’d killed others. It was self-defence. Surely that’s a reasonable justification even in your morally polarised world, Miss Barrow?”

The brief spark of warmth they had struck in the earlier part of their conversation was entirely dead now. The air between them was cold enough to condense dew.

“No,” he said finally. “It has to be something to do with DeGarre’s death.” Leonie noticed that he’d dropped the “disappearance and probable-death formula.” “If it was somebody I had … upset in the past for whatever reason, why would they go to all the trouble of sneaking after me, gloves at the ready, on the small chance that I would find a hatch in the ship’s underside, open it, and then obligingly hang halfway out of it?”

“Why weren’t they armed, you mean?”

“Not even that. You yourself, Miss Barrow, have already threatened me with exactly the same weapon that anybody with the slightest whiff of intelligence would use.” He looked around to confirm that there were no prying eyes or ears before leaning forward and whispering, “You know who I am.”

Leonie Barrow hated to admit it, but Cabal’s point was solid. Unless he was being stalked by somebody who was absolutely determined to kill him with his or her own hands, the safest and surest way of seeing him die was simply to use the Mirkarvian state as the instrument of death. They would simply denounce Cabal to the captain, and that would be that. The alternative—that this putative revenger wanted to kill Cabal him-or herself—presupposed that somebody who was organised enough to locate and then shadow Cabal onto the
Princess Hortense
would then absentmindedly forget to pack a pistol, knife, garotte, or other weapon with which to actually do the deed.

The form “him or her” made her think of Cabal’s story of his narrow escape. “In the conduit, this person who tried to kill you, was it definitely a man?”

Cabal waited a moment while a steward came over and cleared away their plates. He poured himself another coffee. “I’ve wondered about that myself. I couldn’t see, and the thick leather gloves meant I don’t even know what kind of fingers my attacker had. When they cried out, it was high, but I’ve heard men in great pain sound quite literally like a child, so that proves little.”

“I’m not even going to ask how you have heard such sounds, Herr Meissner.”

“No? You know so little of the world. You should get out more, Miss Barrow.”

Leonie made an offhand gesture that took in the aeroship. “I would say this is fairly ‘out.’ Your definition probably involves more time spent in graveyards.”

Cabal reined in his habitual desire to argue. He had an unpleasant mental image of things getting so heated that Miss Barrow would end up standing on the table, pointing at him, and screaming “Necromancer!” repeatedly. Instead, he raised his hand slightly in a conciliatory gesture. “
Pace
, Miss Barrow. This is not an ideal venue to air your views on my profession.” In the silence that followed, he realised that he had little left to talk about, so to give himself thinking time he said, “I wonder why this table doesn’t have a lamp?”

The change of tack caught Leonie by surprise. “A lamp? I thought you’d sat here to avoid having to look at one of the horrible things. It’s the only table without one.”

“No. There’s one over there without one as well.” He gestured carelessly over his shoulder without looking, and she saw that he was indeed right; another table on the far side of the room was also lampless. “I sat here because it was less cluttered. I wonder—” He lifted the plate in the middle of the table on which lay the butter dish and some small pots of preserve. Beneath it was a small neat hole in the tablecloth, its edge hemmed to avoid fraying. “It’s meant to have a lamp. That’s where it would be screwed into place and the electrical cable connected.”

Leonie watched his investigation with an impatient frown. “So? What do the table lamps have to do with anything?”

“Not the table lamps themselves. It’s the absence of two table lamps. Probably not relevant.” He said this with an air of deep distraction.

Leonie Barrow knew enough about real criminal investigations to know full well that cases rarely if ever hinged on an encyclopedic knowledge of tobacco ash or the curious incident of the butler’s allergy to spinach. Cabal’s musings seemed self-indulgent and immaterial, and she belatedly realised that he wasn’t truly talking to her at all. She was merely a sounding board for him to reflect his own ideas back to himself in a slightly different light. Her irritation showed in her voice. “To bring your attention back to the matter at hand, are you going to report the attack on you last night?”

Cabal blinked slightly, startled out of his reverie. “I haven’t made up my mind about that yet. I shouldn’t draw attention to myself.”

“I think the time for that is passed. Let’s just say that the captain’s own enquiries turn up whoever attacked you and, under interrogation, they mention they’d try to throw you out of the ship in your dressing gown and slippers? The captain comes to you and asks the obvious question: ‘Why didn’t you tell me that somebody tried to kill you, Herr Meissner?’ What would you say? You didn’t want any fuss?”

Cabal looked sourly at her, but he couldn’t refute her argument. His first instinct was always to keep his business to himself, not least because his business frequently carried a death sentence. “That
would
be an awkward interview, wouldn’t it?” He got to his feet.

“What will you tell him?”

“The truth. Mostly.”

C
aptain Schten listened with the expression of a man who goes into a striptease parlour and finds himself attending a lecture on quantum mechanics, expectation giving way to bafflement. He had particular problems with Herr Meissner’s motives for wishing to take up a section of the corridor’s carpeting.

“You excavated beneath the carpet because you had a dream that told you to?”

“No. The dream was just my subconscious mind’s way of drawing attention to something I’d seen without perceiving its significance.”

“A square of carpet?”

“A misaligned square of carpet. Yes. Which had not been so misaligned earlier in the evening when I walked by.”

The captain pursued his point with the determination of a man after the last pea on his plate. “So you
had
noticed it was not misaligned earlier?”

“Yes, but not consciously. Captain, I have a problematical relationship with the inner workings of my mind. Why, I could tell you—” He almost said he could tell of times when such submerged ideations had saved his life while dealing with supernatural entities that had come from whichever blighted netherworld they called home with the express intention of swallowing his soul, eating his brains, and using his giblets for gravy. Then he decided not to, in much the same way he might decide not to say, “Incidentally, Captain, I’m a necromancer. It would be best to shoot me now.”

Instead, he said, “I could tell you of the silliest things that lead to useful concepts, like displacement … vulcanization …” He tried to think of a third thing, and failed. “Jam. But this is all digression. The important point is that I knew the carpet had been interfered with, and I investigated.”

“And somebody tried to throw you out. Yes, I understood that part. You took a terrible risk, Herr Meissner.”

“How was I to know somebody was going to kill me?” protested Cabal. “It was hardly the most obvious course of events.”

“I’m not talking about some phantom assailant, sir. I am talking about how ill-advised it is to go wandering around the bowels of a great machine of which you know nothing. You could have been incinerated, or electrocuted, or crushed. Worse yet, you might have interfered with the operation of this vessel and brought it crashing down! Did you ever pause to consider that?”

Cabal had not, and inwardly rebuked himself. He wasn’t about to let the reference to a “phantom assailant” go unchallenged, though.

“Such catastrophic scenarios aside, Captain, I repeat: somebody tried to kill me. I did not imagine that.”

“So you said, and they just vanished. Hardly the actions of a determined attacker.”

“Only after I stabbed them!” There was sudden silence. Cabal searched the captain’s face. “I
did
mention that I’d stabbed them, didn’t I?”

“You did not.” The captain looked suspiciously at Cabal. “How came you to be wandering the corridors in the early hours in your nightwear and carrying a knife, sir?”

“I needed something to lift the corner of the carpet square. I had a pocketknife in my luggage, and went back for it. I do not habitually go to bed armed, if that is what you are implying.”

The captain didn’t seem mollified by this explanation, but he let it pass. “So this individual is injured, yes?”

“In the wrist. It was all I could reach.”

The captain seemed satisfied for the first time. He was a practical man and—while talk of hallucinatory tesseracts and shadowy assassins might irk him—a wound was altogether more concrete an entity. “Finally! Some real evidence. Very well, Herr Meissner. I shall start questioning every single person aboard ship, both passengers and crew, with the specific aim of finding a wounded wrist. Then we shall see.”

Cabal was caught between conflicting emotions. On the one hand, he was pleased that his attacker would soon be identified. On the other, he was being drawn into official scrutiny too close for comfort. He would have to arrange jumping ship in Senza to a nicety when the time came. Previously, he had only had to worry about the tenacious Miss Barrow handing him over to the Senzan authorities. An awkward bit of evasion would have been necessary, but nothing that he felt he couldn’t handle. Now he had Schten to worry about, too. This was getting complicated, and complications could get him killed.

I
n a curious way, it was perhaps fortunate that there had been a probable murder and an attempted murder aboard (Cabal’s nocturnal adventure soon became common currency), or the trip would have been stunningly dull. Low cloud choked the valleys below, and the
Hortense
had climbed to avoid any mountain peaks. As a result, there was very little to see from the salon windows, and the passengers were thrown back on reading and conversation to pass the time. It was easy to imagine that, under normal circumstances and in the absence of current newspapers, the ship’s small library would be heavily patronised. Instead, however, the salon was party to little groups of two or three people sitting together and muttering to one another in conspiratorial tones that died into watchful silence whenever anybody new entered.

Well, not quite anybody. Cabal himself was a topic of conversation already, based on what little was known about the previous night, so when he came in he was fastened upon to add meat to the thin stew of rumour. The Roborovskis were first out of the slips; specifically Frau Roborovski, her reluctant husband pulled along in her wake.

“Herr Meissner! You must tell us everything!” she demanded as soon as they’d finished the dance of courteous rising to one’s feet and offering a seat. She then sat in silence, gazing owlishly at him with an air of attentive anticipation, like somebody who once came across the word
excitement
while reading a dictionary and is interested to know what it looks like in the wild.

Cabal wasn’t inclined to for a variety of reasons, the least of which was that he felt sure Captain Schten would not appreciate the detail of his attacker’s incriminating wound becoming public knowledge. Instead, he limited himself to saying that he had noticed something amiss with the carpet and, investigating, had discovered the conduit, opened the ventral hatch, and then been thrown out by somebody. It bored him to have to retell it, but it was almost worth the effort simply for the way Frau Roborovski went pale and seemed likely to faint when he got to the murder attempt itself.

“Dangling by one hand!” she managed when her attack of the vapours had attenuated slightly.

“Yes,” replied Cabal. And then, for sheer devilment, added, “Largely naked.”

He had been expecting her to faint outright, or rush off in horror, or do almost anything except what she did do, which was to widen her eyes a little further still and look at him in such a way that he suddenly realised she was imagining it in far too much detail to be seemly.