The Fall of the House of Cabal

 

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For my sister, Paula

 

At the foot of Mount Olympus bubbles up a spring that changes its flavour hour by hour, night and day, and the spring is scarcely three days' journey from Paradise, out of which Adam was driven. If anyone has tasted thrice of the fountain, from that day he will feel no fatigue, but will, as long as he lives, be as a man of thirty years.

—From the wonderful letter of Presbyter Johannes sent to various Christian princes in 1165

 

PREFACE

My Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, and Folk of All Other Persuasions.

You are about to embark on an adventure wherein risks are taken, and do not always succeed. Where danger haunts every decision, where the stakes are high and the odds are long. You, at least, are in the happy position of not being in any personal peril during this tale, despite my suggestion to the publisher that one in a thousand copies should be impregnated with dimethylmercury just to give a
frisson
to book purchasing. ‘You can't just go around killing readers,' they said.

‘Not until you're selling more units, anyway,' they added.

Every Cabal novel that I have written has been very different from the one before it. This is partially out of deference to you, the reader—Why would you want to read the same novel (but for cosmetic differences) time and time again?—and partially for me—Why would I wish to write the same novel (but for cosmetic differences) time and time again? Thus, you will be delighted or appalled to discover that the novel you currently hold—with surgical gloves if you have any sense—is not just the same as the one that precedes it, or the one before that, or the one before that, or—I feel compelled to say, although I'm as bored with this sentence as you—the one before that. This novel is its own creature.

It is also, however, a tying up of threads as a tapestry reaches its conclusion. It is not necessarily the last Johannes Cabal novel, although it might be. It is certainly, however, the end of a phase. In the following story, the reader who has read the previous novels (and, ideally, the short stories, although that isn't a requisite) will see many things that are familiar: some ideas are revisited and maliciously subverted; some old characters will re-emerge. Pieces slot into place, the clockwork grates, the chimes play. The penny tableau that began with
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer
comes to an end of sorts, the curtain rattles down, and you may all sprint for the exit before the national anthem plays.

Zoltán Kodály started his opera
Háry János
with a sneeze, a nod to an old Hungarian superstition that a statement preceded or followed by a sneeze is the truth. He had an orchestra to perform an instrumental sneeze; I have a computer and an overabundance of fancy. Thus, I sneeze a cloud of electrons upon the backlit LCD screen, and the following tale's truth is assured, just as much as the historical truth that Napoleon was captured by a lone Hungarian. We all knew that, didn't we? Of course.

Here, then, is the fifth major undertaking of the necromancer Johannes Cabal. May you enjoy it in the knowledge that it is the absolute, unvarnished truth in every respect.

 

THE GRAND PLAN

It is a damned place, is Perkis Moor. Perched high on the spine of the country, there is little up there but sheep and the crows that feed upon the corpses of sheep fallen in gorges, trapped in gullies, tumbled down scree. The shepherds do a good enough job, but they do not enjoy their work and are happy to retire of a night to their huts of millstone grit and turfed rooves, brutal little boxes with small windows in hulking walls that seem as much defensive as simply shelters.

The wind blows across Perkis Moor; it is the only thing that wanders freely, for it is a damned place, and even ramblers show little inclination to labour across the broken, unhappy earth. Ask a local—which is to say, ask anyone who lives by the moor, for no one would claim to live upon it, only to sojourn briefly until they can return to a proper place, fit for decent souls—ask a local why the place feels so baleful, so full of mindless, lolling hatefulness, and they will tell you it is haunted. The spirits of five thousand pagan dead are trapped there, so they say, from a time before Constantine, from before Christ. A great battle, fought with weapons of wood and rough iron, took place there. The culmination of a war between nameless tribes, for unknown reasons, they met there and offered no quarter. Five thousand dead and the grass fed by gallons of their gore. A terrible thing that scarred the land itself, a festering wound that seeps spectral blood into the here and now still, after all these years.

The shepherds say sometimes at night they hear the cries in strange languages long lost from the throats of living men, the screams, the clash of weapons. The shepherds know better than to look out of the small windows in the hulking walls of their millstone grit huts on such cursed nights or storm-threatened days. What they may see can do them no good, and an immortal soul is worth far more than assuaging a moment's curiosity.

The locals say no merchant travelling with his wares will cross the moor, not even in daytime, for fear of making poor progress and still being upon it when the sun dips below the distant horizon. Once, an itinerant tinker did, they say. He scoffed at the legend and set out upon the dreary sheep path with liquor in him when he really needed wit. The shepherds found him the next day, cold and dead by the path, staring up at the grey clouds, eyes and mouth open to gather the drizzle. All the rain in the world could not wash away that expression of terror, though, the outward signifier of an experience that froze his blood and stopped his heart.

The archaeologists say ‘Bollocks' to all that. There isn't a shred of empirical evidence that such a battle ever took place. They say that it's a myth and the old tales of a great spectral battle fought periodically upon Perkis Moor are simply the product of bored people in a boring place making things up to entertain themselves. In this, they are largely correct.

But not entirely.

*   *   *

The tall, pale man in the black suit and walking boots caused a huge sensation amongst the locals of the Perkis Path Inn, which is to say they went a little quieter when he entered, nodded covertly at him to their drinking partners when his back was turned, and marvelled at his accent, which was as alien to them as Ancient Assyrian. That the accent was German says little for the cosmopolitan nature of the locals.

‘You'll be wanting a room, then?' The landlord leaned heavily upon the counter and glowered at the strange stranger, with his fancy spectacles and gloves. The locals didn't hold with such fripperies; if the Good Lord intended one to be terribly myopic, then it was not given to man to correct this defect. Much better that man wander around tripping over things. He might fall down the stairs or use bleach for flour, but at least he wouldn't die horribly in a graceless state.

The man removed the blue-tinted spectacles, and it became apparent to the landlord that they were intended to protect the man's eyes from the glare of daylight. He himself had never seen the glare of daylight, but his grandfather had once told him that the sun was actually a fiercely radiant object in the sky and not merely one area of the permanent overcast that glowed slightly more strongly than the rest. In some distant, foreign places like Egypt or China or Barnoldswick, it was said that sometimes the cloud cleared away and you could see the sky above, and the sun, and—at night—bright objects that defied rational explanation. The landlord had always been of the opinion that his grandfather had been making a joke. As if such things might be in a godly world.

Looking at the stranger's strikingly blue eyes, eyes that hinted at an incisive mind and a calloused soul, it occurred to the landlord that there might be many ungodly things in a godly world, after all.

‘I shall,' said the man in his ungodly accent, removing his ungodly gloves, and casting an ungodly eye upon the regulars, who returned their attention to their dominoes rather than suffer it for longer than necessary. He turned and looked through the mullion window, the road beyond distorted by the bullseye panes and thereby rendered far more interesting than the reality. ‘The moor is in that direction, isn't it?'

‘It is. Thinking of going for a walk there later?'

‘I was considering it.'

‘Don't,' said the landlord, with a great satisfaction that echoed around every local's heart in the public bar.

‘You don't want to go up there,' said a drinker. ‘Not good to go on the moor if you don't need to.'

‘Perhaps,' said the stranger, ‘I need to.'

‘Don't look much like a shepherd t'me,' said a dominoes player, and there was much amusement at this
bon mot,
the merriest thing ever said within those walls since they were raised 234 years earlier.

‘Why?' The stranger's tone was neutral. ‘Is it haunted?'

The landlord leaned yet more heavily upon the counter. It would have groaned under the stress if it had been some profane, foreign wood, like Norwegian pine from a profane fittings showroom. But it was good English oak, and it was used to the meaty forearms of stout English yeomanry leaning heavily upon it.