The Fall of the House of Cabal (13 page)

‘What are we intending to do when we find this interloper, anyway?' asked Zarenyia, traipsing lightly across the lurid sod upon her many pointed feet. ‘I have to say, I'm a little underwhelmed at the idea of bringing my particular brand of good times to a bunch of corpse-eating doggy boys.'

‘I feel the opportunities for murder are still many and alluring, madam.' Cabal was cleaning his blue-glassed spectacles as he walked, and then attended to the hang of his cravat. When the enemy—and enemy they were, he felt sure—were finally encountered, it would be to his advantage to be able to see them properly, and to theirs to be done away with by a man with tidy neckwear, if only from a sense of terminal satisfaction.

‘I am
not
devouring the soul of a ghoul. Heavens only knows where they've been, grubby beggars. I don't mind the soul of a double-dyed villain—those are spicy—but I have my limits.'

Cabal, whose own view of ghouls had not been dissimilar until he had endured a brief period of ghouldom himself, decided not to mention any special interest in her views one way or the other. It would only lead to the sort of face-pulling already exhibited by Miss Smith on the same subject, he knew.

‘We're almost there,' said Miss Smith, her tone determined but also betraying apprehension. ‘You do have a plan, don't you, Cabal?'

‘The immediate plan is entirely one of reconnaissance. You can hardly expect me to evolve some elaborate scheme when the very nature of what we shall face is currently unknown to me.'

‘A witch with ghouls. I
did
say.'

‘But what sort of witch? There are many. And, I begin to wonder, what sort of ghouls? There should only be one type, but from your description, they would seem different from the usual crowd. I own myself perplexed. I do not enjoy perplexity.'

‘Will it be a “reconnaissance in force”?' said Zarenyia, employing the index and middle fingers of each hand to scratch quotation marks into the air.

‘Your somatic punctuation dismays me, Madam Zarenyia. If you wish to emphasise speech, may I suggest speaking emphatically.'

‘I could do that, yes, but I'm terribly tactile. Anyway, I wished to suggest some irony in the term.'

‘By “reconnaissance in force”, you actually mean “let's have a look and, if there aren't too many, wade in and kill them”, I gather?'

‘Ohhhh, darling, I love it when you spot subtext.'

‘The spider-woman is purring,' said Miss Smith in an undertone to Cabal.

‘Spiders do purr; didn't you know that?' Belatedly Miss Smith realised just how acute the devil's senses were. ‘Why, they're just as cute as lickle puddycats.'

Miss Smith quickly and wisely changed the subject. ‘Just beyond that rise. That's the witch's home.'

*   *   *

With some difficulty, Cabal managed to talk Zarenyia into adopting a stealthier form. Grumbling, she crushed her aft body down into something more human, although this time she dispensed with the French couture and adopted a green twill suit and walking shoes.

‘You look like a Bavarian lesbian,' said Miss Smith, purely as an observation.

Zarenyia was delighted. ‘Exactly the effect I was trying for, Liebling!' She produced an alpine hat with a small orange feather in its band and clapped it on her head. ‘Don't I look fiercely practical?' She winked at Miss Smith, who coughed and looked away to hide an unexpected blush.

‘Is there anyone you don't flirt with?' Cabal asked as they crept to the top of the rise.

‘You, in case you haven't noticed,' she whispered back. ‘We're friends, I hope. If you wish to dally in my webbed bower, you need only ask. I shan't be dragging you off there using my usual wiles of saucy suggestiveness. Also magic. Some chemicals, too, but it's all mainly down to how bloody good I am at what I do.'

‘You neglected to mention mesmerism,' said Cabal, a little tautly.

‘Oh, yes. The 'fluence. Hope you're not still upset about it? It was for the best.'

‘True.' Logic could often mollify Cabal. ‘It was for the best.'

They reached the ridge line and paused there. Cabal took a small pair of binoculars from his bag. ‘I shall go alone. One head on the near horizon may avoid detection where three will not.' Taking it as read that the one head would be his, and ignoring the crabby expressions Miss Smith and Zarenyia were no doubt lavishing upon him as he crawled the last few feet, Cabal crested the hill and looked down upon their new enemies.

The binoculars were hardly necessary; he was looking down a distance of perhaps five feet to where a pack of twenty or so ghouls were creeping up to meet them. The ghoul in the lead saw Cabal appear and grinned at him, its ears standing to attention like those of an inquisitive Dobermann.

‘Hello!' said the ghoul.

‘Hello,' said Johannes Cabal with a great deal less enthusiasm.

*   *   *

The ghoul pack swarmed over them, but with no obvious intent to hurt them. Instead they were bundled up in a multitude of rubbery arms and borne down the hill in the direction of the new witch's lair.

Cabal gave Zarenyia a hard look as she allowed herself to be captured, but she just gave him a wonderfully happy smile in return and a wink so broad that they probably caught it on the Plateau of Leng that lies in desolation at the edge of everything. One or other of the creatures that frequent that damned place must surely have paused in its performance of horrors and thought,
Did somebody just wink at me?

Down, down into the vale of the witch they were carried, the colours now the essence of lurid, the great fire before a tomb blazing in jagged tongues, the shadows dancing without nuance or graduation. Cabal looked about himself, his misgivings growing by the second. He had seen artificial realities before, but they had always seemed real within themselves. This was a parody of the real, a clumsy woodcut coloured by a child. He felt they were being carried into a volume of the Brothers Grimm.

Past the bonfire with its blaze of hot, papery flames they were carried in the very dictionary definition of ‘triumph' until they arrived before the witch's manse, an extraordinary tomb wrought in obsidian and white marble, crested in red and detailed in green. Statuary of satyrs and nymphs, cherubs and imps were caught in mid-frolic, mid-cavort in the unlikeliest combinations of imagery for a place of the dead. It was not of the real world, but wrought from the fantasies of an addled artist turning his hand to anything that might pay the rent and his exorbitant absinthe bill. It would then be entitled something along the lines of
The Lair of the Witch Queen
and subsequently used as the cover of a magazine for an audience whose imaginations ran hot.

Before the lair of the Witch Queen stood the Queen of Witches herself, less a formal title and more an excuse for fancy dress. And such a fancy dress; she was gorgeously arrayed in a great cloak of black velvet, trimmed in silver, and topped by the sort of excessive high collar that makes the matter of peripheral vision rather moot. Beneath the cloak she wore a dress of crimson silks with a décolletage that owed as much to the arts of structural engineering as couture. She herself was … very familiar.

‘You!' cried Johannes Cabal.

He was taken aback to realise he had said it in unison with Zarenyia and Miss Smith. They looked at one another with reasonable surprise. Cabal recovered first.

‘You know Ninuka?' he demanded of his comrades.

‘Ninuka?' said Zarenyia. ‘You're wrong. I know Udrolvexa. Has she been calling herself Ninuka, too? That would explain a lot.'

‘No,' said Miss Smith, ‘that's Tanith James, the hoity bitch. I'd know her anywhere. I gave her that scar myself.'

Cabal and Zarenyia looked as hard as they could, but there was no sign of a scar. Zarenyia raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, this is a rum do. We can't all be right, surely? That would be pushing coincidence with some force for my least favourite colleague from the pits of Hell—and you will appreciate that I know some real stinkers—to moonlight as the
bêtes noires
of you two as well?'

Cabal's attention had never left the Witch Queen. ‘No. We cannot all be correct, but we can all be wrong.'

The three of them were paraded before her and then secured by the wrists to a trio of great stakes around a fire. The stakes had definitely not been there when Cabal first spied the encampment, but now gave the impression that they had been there for days at least, to judge from the emerald turf grown up around their bases.

‘Oooh, bondage!' Zarenyia's smirk was quite unforgivable under the circumstances and unappreciated by either Miss Smith or Cabal.

‘Well, well, well,' said the Queen of Witches on settling herself upon her throne of bones, which also definitely had not been there a moment previous.

‘Please,' interrupted Cabal.

‘You beg for your life very easily,' said the queen, her smirk no more forgivable than Zarenyia's.

‘The only begging I was about to make was that you might save us the burden of listening to your villainous monologue, no doubt larded with icy, ringing laughter at dramatically correct intervals.'

The queen looked for a moment as if her temper was going to depart in a huff of ‘How dare you?' and threats, but she reined it in, and the triumphant smile returned. ‘Do you even know who I am?'

‘I believe so. I believe that you are the natural sum of this place. You are the spirit of Nemesis.'

‘Tanith James is
not
my nemesis,' whispered Miss Smith.

‘You either do her a disservice or think too much of yourself. The Lady Ninuka is undoubtedly mine, at least at a material level. There are certain entities to which I have caused some displeasure and whose powers are undoubtedly greater than Orfilia Ninuka's, but I am not their main focus. She, however, has almost literally moved heaven, earth, and hell to revenge herself upon me. If I meet my death at any near date, there is a good chance it will be at her hands or those of her assigned agents. Search your heart, Miss Smith. You say you scarred this Jones woman; you think she does not hold undying enmity to you?'

Miss Smith started to speak, thought better of what she was about to say, and said, ‘But, I'm dead.'

‘But, you are also …
were
also a necromantrix. This Miss James you mention, what was her discipline?'

Miss Smith considered this, and her face fell, as if being tied to a stake before a bonfire by a clan of comic-book ghouls was insufficient grounds for upset.

‘My body was destroyed, though…'

‘I destroyed it myself.' Cabal said it as if it were a gallant courtesy he had performed upon her mortal remains. In necromantic circles, it actually was. ‘But your spirit is extant, and you dwell within the Dreamlands, where you may be destroyed again, and finally, by anyone with a little knowledge and a great deal of animosity. Would that describe Tanith James?'

Miss Smith did not reply. Evidently the description fitted Tanith James to a T.

Cabal returned his attention to the Witch Queen. ‘As I was saying. You are the spirit of Nemesis. All three of us have powerful enemies, and you have embodied all of them in however it is that we perceive you. Well, now you have us. What do you intend to do now?'

‘Do?' The Witch Queen laughed, and did so in an icy, ringing peal of malevolent amusement. ‘Why, destroy you, naturally.'

A stage whisper floated to Cabal from the direction of Zarenyia. ‘This is all part of your terribly clever plan, isn't it, Johannes?'

‘Alas, no,' he admitted. ‘I was not expecting this person to be a material metaphor. It's very disappointing. So, unless my plan was for us all to die in the most embarrassingly asinine way imaginable—and it was not—then no, this is not all part of my terribly clever plan.'

‘Asinine,' said the queen. ‘What do you mean, asinine?'

‘To be brief, madam (for your theatricality wears upon me), you are a conceptual embodiment of undying, personal animus. You currently represent in your uncertain way the three current banes of the lives of two of us, and the afterlife of the third.'

‘I know all that, Cabal (for your didacticism wears upon me).'

‘
Touché,
I am sure. I promised to be brief, and so I shall. You are a damp squib, madam. A foreshortening of expectations. A bathetic failure. You are Nemesis incarnate, yet you do not hate us. Instead you take the targets of real hatred from real people—'

‘And a real devil.'

‘Thank you, Madam Zarenyia. And a real devil, and dispose of them mechanically. For all your posturing, you feel no passion. For all your stagecraft, you experience no malefic desire. You take the
raisons d'être
from real people for no real purpose. You are a failure.'

‘Yes,' said Zarenyia, taking up the theme and warming to it, ‘you're nothing more than a big premature ejaculation. Mind you, where I'm concerned, it's always a bit premature in a sense, if you take my—'

‘
Madam
.'

‘Sorry,' said the devil. ‘Ever so.' She made a gesture as if locking her lips with a key.

‘I do not care for your sophistries, necromancer,' said the Queen of Witches. ‘You shall die here and now for…' She paused, and looked to Zarenyia with puzzlement. ‘How did you make that gesture? Your hands are tied.'

Zarenyia lowered both hands, and the hempen bounds swayed in their wake. ‘
Were
tied, dear heart. If you'd been paying attention you'd have gathered I'm not human; rope bonds are a little insulting. So, past tense. My hands
were
tied. In much the same way your arms
were
attached to your shoulders.'

The Witch Queen looked like she was about to state the obvious, but that was the moment that Zarenyia decided that two legs were bad, eight legs were excellent, and any statements about the current locations of other limbs was lost in the sudden excitement.