Johannes Cabal the Detective (8 page)

The purser’s smile turned yet more honest at his being confronted with someone who didn’t need everything done for him. “Quite right, sir.” He reached into a compartmentalised case that sat open on a low table beside him and took out a key. “Your key.” Cabal took it, they exchanged farewells for the moment, and then both turned at the distinctive sound of military boots walking determinedly up the gangway.

Cabal’s heart sank.

Approaching them was an officer in what, Cabal recognised with a deep sense of foreboding, was the uniform of the Household Guard, the imperial élite. “I’ll be getting on,” said Cabal to the purser, who was looking at the approaching soldier with open astonishment, and set off nonchalantly towards the starboard corridor.

“You!” barked the officer, making everybody—Cabal included—freeze. The officer marched up to the purser, stamped to attention, and saluted. Even at this extreme, the purser returned the salute and even clicked his heels. The guardsman opened his sabretache and produced an official-looking piece of paper. “I’m looking for somebody,” he snapped, holding the piece of paper up to the purser’s eyes for him to read. “Do you have this man aboard?”

It could be anybody, thought Cabal. A country like this, Marechal’s people must be constantly hunting down enemies of the state. There’s no need to worry. Just remain calm and await developments.

The purser read the piece of paper twice before turning and pointing directly at Cabal.

All right, thought Cabal. I may be in trouble after all.

The officer wheeled, the purser being dropped from his attention like a leprous dog, and looked at Cabal with a steady intensity that boded badly. Cabal began to regret not transferring his switchblade to his pocket earlier while he had the chance. He didn’t fancy his chances in another fencing duel against a man in a gleaming metal breastplate. Tactically, sticking four inches of blade in the guardsman’s throat as he approached would have worked much better.

The room seemed much darker with the guardsman standing over him. “Can I help you, Lieutenant?” he asked.

In a single quick motion, the guardsman thrust the piece of paper into his face. “Fourth draft, Herr Meissner!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The agricultural land-remittance discussion papers, fourth draft. I’m here on the personal orders of Baron Mitracht of the Agricultural Ministry. The papers you are carrying are to be redrafted while you are en route, according to these criteria.” He leaned closer until he was nose to nose with Cabal. “DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” he bellowed.

Cabal took a step back, realised that he wasn’t going to be dragged off in chains, after all, and nodded curtly. “Of course I understand,” he snapped back. “Tell the baron his orders will be carried out to the letter.” He twitched the paper out of the guardsman’s fingers. “You are dismissed.”

The soldier went very white, and Cabal wondered if he’d overstepped the mark there. Then, with a wheel about and a stamp, the officer marched back to the gangway, snarling “Bastard civies!” to the purser, a comrade in uniform. His bootsteps, sharp with fury, echoed down the covered bridge until they were gone.

The purser looked over at Cabal. Cabal waved the piece of paper before putting it away in his breast pocket. “A civil servant’s work is never done,” he commented, picked up his bag, and went to stateroom Starboard 6.

T
he steamer packet
Heimlin
had been held up just as she was about to leave the lakeside port, and the passengers and crew made to wait until the Count Marechal and his troops arrived. Lieutenant Hasso had stormed on board, thankfully not on horseback, and made a lot of fuss over a simple job. Finally, three quarters of an hour later, Johannes Cabal, beaten and bleeding, had been dragged across the gangway and dumped on the quayside.

Except, of course, that it wasn’t Johannes Cabal.

“It’s not him, Hasso,” said Marechal, pleased that fate was at least being consistent in its unkindness.

Hasso kicked the groaning man another couple of times before asking, “Are you sure?”

“I’ve spent some time in Cabal’s company. I think I’d recognise him. This man is of about the same age and appearance but, no, it is not him.”

“Oh,” Hasso said, pouting. The man groaned. Hasso kicked him again. “Do shut up. We’ve just had a bit of bad news.”

“I … I’m Duke Aachel’s nephew, you bastards,” moaned the man. “I know … I know you, Marechal. Uncle Günter will … will have your miserable hide nailed to the gatepost for this.”

Marechal, sitting on a mooring bollard, listened and considered. “Rough with the smooth, eh, Hasso?” Hasso grunted noncommittally. “We may have lost Cabal, but at least we located a dangerous spy and saboteur.” He drove his boot under the prone man’s stomach and used his instep to lever him over the edge of the quay. There was a cry, a splash, weak struggling, and silence. “Shame he died whilst attempting to escape.”

Hasso walked over to the edge and looked down. “What about Cabal, sir? Are we giving up on him?”

Marechal looked out across the waters of the Gallaco Sea. “He could be anywhere by now. No, Lieutenant, we have other fish to fry. If he crosses my path again, then that’s different; he will not live to regret it. But life’s too short for vendettas.” He paled slightly as he said this, and even Hasso wasn’t fooled. From the direction of the city square, there was the crackle of gunfire. Marechal stood up and dusted off his seat. “Come on, we’ve got peasants to kill.”

E
xactly on schedule, the gyroscopic levitators whirred up to speed and the
Princess Hortense
began, in a very real sense, to ignore gravity. The huge suspension springs in her landing cradle extended gently as the aeroship started to lift. Deciding that it would be suspicious if he were not on deck for the departure, Cabal checked the forward lounge-cum-dining room and found it too heavily populated for discretion. Instead, he went back to the aft salon and leaned on the starboard rails there, the windows that would seal them in flight having been slid aside for the occasion. The great line-guide assembly was above and off to one side of him, and he watched it with interest as it angled, twisting on its mount slightly, seeking out the magnetic lines that the
Hortense
would pull herself along like a great spider on an ethereal thread. With a sharp electrical crack that filled that air with ozone and a shower of blue sparks that drew delighted cries from the spectators in the aeroport and on the field apron, it found and latched onto a likely candidate. Almost immediately, the fore starboard nacelle found one, too; Cabal couldn’t quite see it, but the flash of blue light was clearly visible on the grass around the cradle in the dying light of the day. There was an acoustic thudding through the public-announcement speakers in the lounge, and then the captain spoke to the passengers. “Ladies and gentlemen, please brace yourselves. We are about to disengage from the landing cradle and there may be some slight disturbance. Once we are clear, we shall perform one circuit of the field and then begin our journey. Thank you.” The speaker clicked into silence.

For the few people who were in the lounge with Cabal, bracing themselves seemed to consist mainly of gripping their drinks with both hands. As it happened, the disengagement was smooth and untroubled. The
Princess Hortense
rose in near-silence but for the cheers of the passengers, the answering ones of the ground spectators, the click and crackle of one of the line-guide nacelles abandoning its first setting in favour of a stronger one, and the constant hum of the gyroscopes that sang through the decks and into the inner ear. At three hundred feet, the
Hortense
slowed her ascent and started to move forwards, swinging her tail out to perform a tight circuit of the field. Below them, the city was starting to light up, with lamps in windows and angry red bonfires of houses burning as the riots spread. I suppose that’s my fault, really, thought Cabal as he watched the fires and the dimly seen crowds amongst the smoke and the flicker of rifle fire. Then he looked up into the sky and tried to make out the early stars. Politics had always bored him.

The
Hortense
completed her circuit and set course for Senza, beyond the mountains. She accelerated and climbed gently until the lights of the city were little more than speckles, like fireflies, and then they were gone altogether.

Chapter 4

IN WHICH CABAL ACTS AND THE FUTURE REMAINS DARK

Five minutes later, Cabal was politely shooed away from the windows while the glass was slid back into place and locked. As he watched the procedure with limited interest, a steward appeared at his elbow. “Good evening, sir,” he said, and smilingly handed Cabal a menu.

“What’s this?” asked Cabal, suspicious.

“The menu for the departure dinner, sir,” replied the steward. Cabal looked blank. “It’s in the itinerary,” the steward added.

Cabal pulled Meissner’s little bundle of documents from his inside pocket and quickly sorted through them. Now he thought of it, there had been some sort of ship’s timetable, but he’d assumed it was for general meals, not for anything as specific as a “departure dinner.” But there it was, the captain’s table, dinner dress mandatory. Cabal gritted his teeth very slightly; he couldn’t really worm out of it without drawing attention to himself. He just hoped Meissner had seen fit to pack a dinner jacket.

C
abal let himself into cabin Starboard 6, locked the door behind him, and sat heavily on the bed. He despised acting; the whole conceit of concealing his personality was distasteful in the extreme, and he could hardly wait until these few days were over and behind him. In the meantime, however …

He opened Meissner’s steamer trunk and had a swift sortie around its contents. Minor Meissner’s rôle in government may have been, but the salary must have been quite impressive. Either that or Meissner’s father was a rich man with plenty of strings to pull for his son. Somehow, the latter seemed more likely. Cabal found no fewer than three dinner jackets, one of which couldn’t possibly be worn except on a bet. He consigned it to the bottom of the trunk and looked at the others; they were both black and acceptable but one was cut less fashionably than the other, and this was the one Cabal hung up in the small wardrobe for wear that evening. Next, he found a pair of trousers and measured them against his leg—yes, he and Gerhard Meissner were of a height. The shirts were also suitable. The underwear, Cabal was profoundly relieved to discover, was brand-new and still in its shop wrappings. With no idea of whether Meissner was still alive, Cabal had few qualms about wearing dead man’s shoes, but he drew the line at dead man’s knickers.

His ensemble for the evening decided, Cabal sat on the bed, picked up the thin bundle of documents from the bedside, and leafed through them to make sure there were no more unpleasant surprises. It seemed fairly quiet after the first evening; mainly optional events until a mandatory dinner the evening before journey’s end, in Katamenia. There was also a pamphlet about what a wonderful ship the
Princess Hortense
was, with a short and patronising section on the miracles of modern science, whose very first sentence—a lurching edifice of ill-applied technical babble made still more asinine by the addition of the ignorant hyperbole employed by the worst sort of feature writers—irked him so much that he read no more. Instead, he tore a strip from it to leave him with a square of light card, and this he proceeded to fold into an origami swan.

When he was finished and the swan was in residence on the cabin’s small writing desk, he turned off the bedside light and sat in near-darkness. Outside his porthole, there was nothing to see but stars. The earth below lay in night without even the light of a cottage to break it. Cabal watched the world—or, at least, he watched what little he could make of the horizon—go by for a few minutes. He felt deeply, profoundly miserable.

He really,
really
didn’t want to attend the dinner. On the one hand, he would have to spend the entire evening pretending to be something he wasn’t, and the forfeit for failing to be convincing was death: it simply wasn’t conducive to having a good time. On the other hand, he disliked the company of others at the best of times, and being forcibly surrounded by the well-to-do and very smug burghers and spouses of Mirkarvia intensified that dislike by a comfortable magnitude or two. Perhaps he could plead airsickness and retire early. Then he considered well-meaning matrons pestering him for the rest of the voyage with patented gippy stomach remedies, many of which would involve raw eggs. No, he’d just have to tough it out and be distant, offhand, and generally unfriendly.

He perked up slightly; the evening was looking more interesting already.

T
he dinner was to be preceded by a champagne reception. Cabal allowed himself to be fashionably late in arriving, only to discover that the fashion had become more exaggerated without anybody telling him. There were few passengers in the aft lounge, only just outnumbering the stewards. He was offered a bumper of champagne in a wide-mouthed glass rather than the flute glasses he thought were becoming the norm. Looking around, he noted that the women were receiving half-filled flutes and realised that in Mirkarvian society it was the male prerogative to get very drunk very quickly. Somehow, he couldn’t see the Temperance League making any great inroads into Mirkarvia anytime soon. He looked dubiously at his glass—it had to have the best part of a quarter of a pint in it—before walking carefully over to one of the aft bay windows that sandwiched the closed and locked gangway hatch. There he sipped slowly, endeavouring to look both aloof and unapproachable.

It seemed to work. Nobody came over to talk to him except a steward, who hovered by every few minutes to be silently appalled that Cabal was still on his first glass, not his third or fourth. In the rest of the slowly filling lounge, the men drank and drank and the women wittered. It was not humanity at its best, and Cabal was not very interested in observing them. Instead, he looked out of the window at the vault of Heaven. The cloud cover had thinned to the point that there were only a few ragged rolls of stratocumulus moving slowly across the sky, glowing blue by the light of a gibbous moon. The stars were clearer and sharper than he remembered ever seeing them—an effect of their altitude, he assumed. Astronomy had exerted a brief fascination for him in his adolescence, and he amused himself by making out the constellations. Ursa Major was, as always, childishly simple to spot, and he felt a small frisson of childish delight in doing so. He traced the line from the top of the Plough to find Polaris and watched it for a long time. He experienced a less pleasant frisson when it started to shift across the sky and he realised that the ship was turning. A few difficult seconds later, however, and it had stopped; the
Princess Hortense
was merely making a small course adjustment, not returning to the aeroport. Cabal just wished the damnable meal would start, the sooner to be done with.

Despite himself, he felt that he was settling into the rôle. He’d pulled together everything he knew about agriculture and was moderately sure that he could impress a layman on the subject of scrapie. Especially if the layman was quite paralytically drunk.

Abruptly, he became aware of somebody standing by his right shoulder a mere moment before he smelt perfume. He’d allowed his concentration to slip and, in those few moments when he wasn’t being aloof and unapproachable, he’d been approached.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” said a young woman’s voice. There was little intonation, and it took Cabal a moment to realise what she was talking about.

“The stars? Yes, I suppose they are. I’m not a poet or a painter, though, so that’s just hearsay.”

The woman made a small noise that was probably a laugh, as if he’d said something witty or profound. In a sense, he had. Then she said, “What do you think of when you look at the stars?”

He considered quickly. He’d heard about this sort of thing. If his understanding was correct, he could well be in the process of being “picked up,” currently at the “small talk” stage. This could be useful. Keeping one—ideally, fairly stupid—woman entertained for the duration of the voyage would go a long way towards avoiding the company of others. Nobody, as the saying goes, wants to be a gooseberry. It might be as well to cultivate her acquaintance.

Looking steadfastly up at the stars and assuming an expression that he had reason to believe was dreamy and romantic, he said, “Once upon a time, it was believed that our futures were, literally, written in the stars. It was called stelliscript. It was said that you should read them west to east if you wanted to know the good things in your future.”

“And north–south for the evil things?” asked his companion, ingenuously.

“Of course, it’s all nonsense; the stars are set in their paths,” said Cabal, wondering if that was a lucky shot on her part. “The future remains unknown to us, no matter how you might try to read it. There was another technique called gyromancy, for example. A practitioner of this piece of flummery would spin around on the spot until he got dizzy and fell over. The manner of the falling-over told the future of whoever had hired the gyromancer. I should think,” he added with an artful chuckle, “that the true reading would invariably be ‘You will soon be gulled by a confidence trickster.’”

There was silence for a few moments, and Cabal wondered if this would be a good time to turn and look as handsome as possible. Before he could commit himself, however, his companion spoke again.

“Gyromancy … I would have thought
necromancy
was more your style, Johannes Cabal.”

It went very quiet in the lounge.

Then somebody laughed, the chatter started up again, and Cabal realised that it had simply been a natural silence in a dozen conversations occurring simultaneously, the merest fluke. Or, at least, nobody had stuck a gun in his back yet, so that was probably the reason. He stopped looking at the stars—his throat tightening and his head feeling a little gyromantic in itself—refocussed on the reflections in the glass, and, just for a moment, saw a face he knew to be dead. His heart jolted. He took a sharp breath, looked again, and saw he was mistaken, but that the truth was just as shocking. Cabal was not a man given to gasping, usually, and he did not do so again. Standing at his right shoulder, her gaze balefully meeting his, was Leonie Barrow.

It can be said of a necromancer that, given his profession, there are few people he can ever truly be sure of never seeing again, even the ones he buries in shallow graves in the woods. Johannes Cabal, however, could have said in any second up to this that the last person he expected to see aboard the
Princess Hortense
was Leonie Barrow, a woman he’d last seen many months ago, and a considerable number of international borders away.

Cabal had on that occasion held stewardship of a diabolical carnival, committed to wandering the railway network for a year, scooping up the souls of the disaffected along the way. It was all done at the whim of a bored and capricious Satan, who had made a wager with Cabal: Cabal’s own soul would be returned to him on receipt of a hundred others, with one year in which to do so and the carnival to help him bring in the harvest.

He had loathed that year, even though he really had only himself to blame. It had been a ramshackle period of travel, perfunctory damnations, and tawdry knickknacks during which he had experienced much and enjoyed little. At the time, he thought the end had justified the means, but—a final, bitter irony on top of a year full of them—the end had made him question those means, making his small victory seem petty and ignoble.

He had met Miss Barrow and her father towards the end of the year, when things had become unexpectedly desperate. Mr. Frank Barrow, a retired policeman and redoubtable nuisance, had descended upon Cabal like Nemesis, but in the end it was Leonie Barrow who had proved the cleverer foe. Considered as a whole, it had not been a happy meeting, and they had not parted on the best of terms. In fact, if Miss Barrow had murdered him on that occasion, the prosecution would have had a hard time finding a jury to hang her.

Cabal turned to face her, needing the proof of direct sight. She was still tall, still crowned with the tawny blond hair that matched her name so well, still very striking in a pre-Raphaelite sort of way, and, judging by her expression, still deeply pissed off with him. He tried to speak, but his vocabulary had studied the situation and taken the evening off. “Accch,” he grated slowly, for once speechless. His thumb twitched involuntarily and the cup of his glass snapped off, dumping the remains of the champagne at their feet.