The Fall of the House of Cabal (23 page)

As they progressed onward through the gatehouse and into the needle proper, so the entourage grew. Cabal was unsurprised to see that De'eniroth and De'zeel were now merely hangers-on, despite protesting their pivotal role in events to anyone who would listen, but no one would. He was more surprised and, it must be said, faintly insulted to discover that he was also very much on the edge of the spotlight. If he had been asked to explain why he, Johannes Cabal, necromancer, freelance sociopath, and lurker in the shadows, was so put out by the lack of attention being put his way, he would have laughed an abrupt, unconvincing laugh and said he was perfectly content not to be the centre of attention. It really would have been a terrifically unconvincing laugh, however, and the questioner would have to be a gullible muggins of the most credulous sort to accept it as anything but the dissembling of a peeved man. It was probably not envy nearly so much as a sense of a perturbation in the rightness of things. He, after all, was Johannes Cabal, and he had gone to pains to make himself unpopular in Hell, albeit as a side effect of other endeavours. Yet here was Zarenyia, a devil and therefore inimical to the hierarchies of Hell, being fawned over as if she were a successful young actress who had wandered into the Society of Roués.

His increasingly vile mood was not improved by the prospect of traipsing up the thousands of steps necessary to attain the tip of the needle, where Ratuth Slabuth no doubt maintained his throne room. That this burden was removed from him gave him no joy, however.

The very centre of the needle was hollow, an immensely deep shaft that started wide and narrowed in similarity to the angles of the outer wall. Running in a dizzying helix up the side of the shaft was exactly the staircase Cabal had anticipated and feared. He noted it did not seem to have a handrail, another of Hell's grotesque Health & Safety failings. He did not savour the thought of climbing it in the slightest.

He decided to start with the rhetorical, thereby giving himself the opportunity to wax wrathful subsequently. After gaining the attention of the lead behemoth with some difficulty, he gestured up into the great spiral of stairs that wound up into the gloom above. ‘Do you honestly expect us to walk all the way up those steps?' he demanded.

The behemoth looked at him as if he were an idiot, which, coming from something that looked not quite as intellectual as a side of beef in a helmet, felt understandably insulting.

‘No,' it said, and the tone it took in no way alleviated the sense of insult. ‘You'll fly.'

‘Fly?' Now it was Cabal's turn to treat his interlocutor as a dimwit. ‘Do I look like I have wings?'

‘No,' agreed the behemoth, ‘but
she
does.'

‘She?' was all Cabal had time to say before a pair of arms snaked around him beneath his armpits.

‘Relax, and let me take care of
everything,
' whispered a female voice in his ear that bore distinct similarities of timbre to certain of Zarenyia's utterances. Usually the ones just before she fed.

Abruptly, he was airborne. His startled yelp drew the attention of Zarenyia herself, whose face hardened immediately when she took in Cabal's very tactile new friend.

‘Don't you
dare,
' she said, and her voice was cold enough to coalesce carbon dioxide snow from the air. Cabal thought for a strange moment she was talking to him, but then the voice by his ear said, ‘Don't worry,
Mistress
Zarenyia. I shan't break him.' And so saying, Cabal found himself borne up into the sulphured atmosphere of the needle shaft.

‘That woman had wings,' said Miss Smith, more to assure herself she was not delusional than as a useful statement of fact.

‘Succubus,' said Zarenyia, her face thunderous. ‘I'll give her “Shan't break him”. Get aboard!'

‘Aboard?' said Miss Smith, vainly looking about for a train, or a steamboat, or possibly a balloon. She was still looking when one of the devil's forelimbs grasped her around the midriff and all but threw her onto Zarenyia's back, where the great curved spiderlike abdomen joined the distinctly humanlike torso.

‘Hang on,' said Zarenyia, and leapt to the nearby curve of the staircase. Miss Smith grunted at the impact, but barely had time to draw breath before Zarenyia set off in hot pursuit of the hapless necromancer.

She did not, however, charge up the staircase. Instead, she headed straight up the wall, the tips of the great armoured legs somehow adhering to a surface that was not merely sheer, but that angled in some degrees past the vertical. Miss Smith suddenly found herself in dire straits; angora is not the easiest material upon which to gain a grip and she was forced to find the bare skin of Zarenyia's midriff.

‘What
are
you doing back there?' said the devil, not censoriously.

Miss Smith could only make a startled squeal for an answer, for Zarenyia was now entirely inverted beneath the next turn of the staircase and Miss Smith's grip slid further up. She was sure that if she didn't fall to her doom, she would instead simply die of embarrassment. She prided herself on an outgoing sort of personality open to new experiences. Inadvertently touching up a spider-devil, however, was nowhere to be found on her to-do list.

‘I'm sorry!' she managed to blurt as Zarenyia flipped around the staircase's edge and brought them both the right way up once more. ‘I'm so very sorry! I didn't mean…'

‘I know you didn't, but it's sweet of you to apologise. The fault is mine, though. I keep forgetting humans can't just stick to things like a normal person. We need a different strategy if we're to keep you safe.' She looked about her on the level of the needle onto which they had emerged. ‘This way!' she cried as if Miss Smith had any say in the matter, and set off at a canter towards a double door built into a shallow archway.

‘What's through here?' she gasped out, clinging on for second life and only soul.

Zarenyia's canter broke into a gallop. ‘No idea. Let's find out, shall we?'

The doors were as massive as anything else in that dizzying tower, a construction of such Brobdingnagian scale as to make Cyclopes suck their teeth and say it was a bit much for their taste. Yet the foot-thick wood shivered under the impact of single-minded devil legs and smashed open to allow the passage of Zarenyia and her dismayed passenger. Nor was she the only dismayed one there; they were in one of Hell's many halls of records wherein sins were tabulated, tallied, assimilated, and, where applicable, marked with a gold star for a job well done. All the minor paper-shuffling was performed by a positive legion of administrative imps and several score were currently present, mainly engaged in throwing armfuls of carefully ordered documents into the air while scattering from the devil's headlong passage, all while squealing in the time-honoured manner of the swine of Gadarene.

Zarenyia honoured their presence in as far as she halloed, ‘Stand clear! Make a hole! Get out of the way, you frightful little vermin!' ahead of her, but she neither moderated her heading nor her speed by so much as a jot. Filing cabinets were flung aside, imps were accidentally speared on arachnoid legs, desks were overturned in the charge. The noise was cacophonous, the chaos wholesale.

Miss Smith realised that she was enjoying herself.

Even when she realised Zarenyia's course was taking them directly towards a wide bay window that looked out across the shanty town outside, and the blood sand plain within, she was not affrighted. Instead she tightened her grip, narrowed her eyes, and trusted to her new and unusual companion.

For her part, Zarenyia slowed a little as her spinneret and hind legs got busy. Under her abdomen they delivered to her a length of twined silk—still sticky—and this Zarenyia took by the ends in her human hands and swung the centre up and over both their heads in the manner of a skipping rope. The silk caught Miss Smith in the small of the back, and then she was drawn close as Zarenyia pulled on it with a modicum of her inhuman strength. Once she was forcibly spooned against Zarenyia's back, the devil quickly knotted it around her own waist.

‘There,' she said over her shoulder. ‘That will keep you much safer. Feel free to hang on with your arms, though. I shan't be troubled by it, truly. I don't really have a concept of over-familiarity, you see.'

Miss Smith could see, and embraced Zarenyia tightly. Devil and witch grinned fiercely at one another.

‘That's the spirit,' said Zarenyia. ‘We're having such fun together!' And then she jumped out of the window.

The imps of Satan's needle were long inured to odd noises; permanent residents of Hell get used to almost anything. There was, however, an unfamiliarity in the pace, magnitude, and variety of odd noises they were experiencing that day. The ones who happened to look from the windows stood the best chance of seeing exactly what was causing all the fuss.

Galloping up the side of the needle came a spider-devil of the succubine variety, laughing uproariously, and upon her back rode a woman in black wearing an ebon crown, joyfully whooping and using such profane language that the imps simply had nowhere to look. Up and up they raced, wrecking gargoyles
*
and smashing windows as they went. It was all probably accidental. Probably. Debris, laughter, and salty invectives were left in their wake, and the imps could only assume a hen party was in progress.

Finally, they attained the top of the needle, or very nearly the top in any case. It was clear that the needle's tip was given over to a tall throne room with open verandas about it upon which Satan and his senior management could look down upon the lesser evils. These had banister rails upon them, the safety of those who frequented such elevated heights obviously deemed much more important than those beneath them in both social and physical terms.

Upon one such rail, a silken cord as thick as a man's thumb yet strong enough to garrotte Mount Eiger suddenly wrapped and gripped. Upon the other end of the cord swung upwards and into view Zarenyia and Miss Smith, Zarenyia's legs rapidly working as she drew the cord back to her. They swung up past the horizontal, and had attained the veranda before they had time to fall back. The cord detached, and they thundered into the presence of Satan with rather less than a ‘by your leave'.

They got there moments after Cabal, whom they discovered staggering around in a state of great agitation, his face grey, and dangerously close to hyperventilation. Zarenyia's delight vanished at the sight of him. She snapped the cord binding Miss Smith to her in a single furious spasm.

‘Get down, darling,' she said. ‘Things are going to get messy.'

‘We'll take them all on.' Miss Smith glowered at the shocked ranks of hellish aristocracy arrayed thereabouts.

‘A sweet thought, but I'm only interested in one presently. And she is
mine
.'

Cabal was walking in roughly their direction, but his legs were weak beneath him, and the line of his walk was desultory and wandering. He pointed back at the succubus who had carried him to the needle's apex.

‘That …
woman
 … took liberties. With … with…' Cabal, for once, found himself unable to express his feelings. ‘All the way up the … up here … she touched … she
did
…'

‘Hush, hush, sweetness.' Zarenyia had, in the many years of her existence, destroyed many lives, devoured many souls. She was sure she was inured to suffering, having been the author of so much of it herself. Yet from somewhere in her, the sweet tones she had so often employed as a weapon were here used softly and with sympathy and, for once, without simulation. ‘You don't have to say anything. I know exactly what she did.'

For hadn't she done much the same herself a thousand times?

She glared at the recalcitrant succubus, a creature of opulent form and licentious lines dressed in something that looked like she had made it herself from a borrowed spool of red satin ribbon, and returned the spool almost untouched. ‘I said—and I mark it quite clearly—
don't you dare
. It seems you dared.'

The succubus smirked. It was a salacious smirk. ‘I said I wouldn't break him. He's still alive, isn't he?'

Presently, the succubus sailed out into the brimstone sky, before arcing gracelessly (with a lot of limb thrashing and screaming due to a sudden lack of wings) downwards, and ploughing through the ceiling of a lean-to containing a dishevelled long-legged owl wearing a crown made from stained parchment. Stolas, formerly a Prince of Hell and commander of no less than twenty-six demoniacal legions, was not handling unemployment well. He watched the succubus groaning in the shallow crater she had made upon impact.

‘Ugh,' said the succubus, rather less alluring for the moment.

‘I used to be somebody, you know,' said Stolas. The succubus didn't say anything to that so he prodded her a few times with a talon until she groaned again. Accepting this as sufficient to count as a dialogue, he continued, ‘I don't get many visitors.'

*   *   *

Zarenyia flung the succubus's wings, torn out by the roots, over the balcony edge and watched them flutter down into the shadowed mass of the shantytown. ‘
Frightful
rudeness,' she said, turned in a clatter of chitinous footfalls, and clicked her way indoors.

In the midst of the great council of Satan rose a throne, albeit a sensibly sized one, with a small table by it and, in the opposite arm, what appeared to be a horizontal loop of stone in which a goblet sat. The throne's occupant took up the goblet, took a sip or two while it considered these new persons, and then returned the goblet to the loop where, sensibly, it couldn't be knocked over. This was a very sensible sort of Satan.

‘I feel reasonably sure I know to whom I speak,' he said, for his voice was that of a male, even if his body was a mass of strange angled bones and struts that both gave a topological hint of terrible ontological truths that would shred the intellect from any who might try to broach them whilst also resembling homemade Christmas decorative chain made by folding and plaiting paper until one forgets where one is up to and accidentally creates a topological hint of terrible ontological truths that would shred the intellect from any who might try to broach them, much as happened with Aunt Julie.
*
This non-Euclidean (of course it was non-Euclidean) mass was topped with a horse's skull, and the skull wore a helmet of Greco-Roman design and splendid aspect, all gold and silver with a crest of horsehair that swayed so beautifully with every movement of the skull beneath it that psychic impressions of it might settle into the dreams of advertising copywriters and inspire the most extravagant claims for shampoos.