The Fall of the House of Cabal (30 page)

Johannes Cabal, Miss Smith, and Miss Leonie Barrow had paused in the tunnel ahead, the door to the outside world—or rather,
an
outside world—just ahead of them.

Miss Barrow eyed it with suspicion. ‘I left that door open.'

Miss Smith joined her. ‘The ghouls shut it, perhaps?'

‘They didn't strike me as very tidy creatures.'

Miss Smith nodded. ‘They're not. Astonishingly messy eaters.' The two women went on to make sure the door was actually unlocked while Cabal hung back. He was pleased to see Madam Zarenyia appear around a bend in the tunnel at full flight, Horst clinging to her by an unorthodox and inappropriate manner. Cabal's lips thinned; there would be words presently. Then his peevish expression gave way to wide-eyed surprise. He had never for one instant thought that Ratuth Slabuth would press the pursuit without his demons. What could have provoked him into … Cabal noticed that the horse skull's jaw was sadly askew. He sighed. Just perfect.

Behind him he heard Leonie Barrow call to him, ‘The door's locked!' Then to Miss Smith, ‘This doesn't make sense. It was padlocked on the other side when we came in, but this time it's the door's own mortise lock. The ghouls couldn't have done it.'

‘Can you get through?' shouted Cabal.

‘I can pick it … damn it! My picks have gone.'

‘Use mine.'

He started to reach inside his jacket for the small leather case containing his own set of lock picks when Miss Barrow said, ‘No time,' and immediately followed the statement with a discharge at point-blank range of a 12-bore cartridge into the door frame where the lock's bolt shot home. Miss Smith squealed and giggled with girlish delight at such havoc.

‘Yes, that did it. Ready when you are, Cabal.'

Zarenyia was almost with them. She would need a moment to shed her passenger—possibly two moments, as he seemed very happy where he was—and metamorphose into a fully human form, or she would never be able to negotiate the doorway ahead.

Then Ratuth Slabuth stretched like the most malevolent jack-in-the-box imaginable
*
and, extending forelimbs made from rage and set squares, snagged Zarenyia's hindmost legs. She went sprawling, Horst being thrown forwards in a clumsy somersault while bearing an expression at least as disappointed as it was surprised.

Behind him, Ratuth Slabuth felt the tunnel fading away, the conceptual space of a cavern joining the true and apparent tunnels forming in its stead, a great aching space lit from below by the milky light of the Ivory Citadel.

‘I am Satan!' The loose jaw clacked hideously and a rage beyond sanity twisted the empty eye sockets into parodies of expression. ‘You are naught but dust! You
shall
be dust!'

His rear body sagged into the chasm opening beneath them, his aftmost limbs scrambling uselessly to gain tread. He tried to pull himself clear of the growing nothingness, but only succeeded in dragging Zarenyia closer to the precipice.

Zarenyia looked back and glanced downwards. The citadel seemed to be reaching up for them all. She tried kicking back at Ratuth Slabuth, but his grip on her hindmost legs was too secure, and her No. 3 legs on either side insufficiently strong and too awkwardly placed to get in any decent blows.

‘What are you doing, you maniac?' she shouted at him. ‘That place will destroy us all!'

If Ratuth Slabuth heard her, he did not react to her words. ‘Worked my way up from corporal!' he bellowed. ‘Twice!'

More of the tunnel floor faded away; two-thirds of Ratuth Slabuth's long body now hung over certain doom. Zarenyia felt herself sliding inexorably downwards. She saw Cabal run forwards offering a hand, as if a mere mortal could hope to drag two such huge creatures back by himself. That, however, was not his plan.

‘A line, madam! A line! Cast me a line of your silk!'

This at least her No. 3 limbs were a match for. She exuded silk from the spinnerets at the end of her abdomen and fed the line forwards to her human hands. ‘Careful! The tip is very sticky!' She cast the line and Horst blurred across to intercept it, catching it neatly behind the adhesive end. The brothers Cabal drew the line up towards the door. They didn't get so very far before too much of the tunnel faded, and Ratuth Slabuth fell into space, dragging Zarenyia after him. Horst threw the end of the silk at the tunnel floor and it anchored there instantly, which was as well, for a small part of a second later it came under a great impulse as it took the weight of two warring devils.

Horst looked at the approaching precipice. It did not seem so very far from the line's anchor point. ‘Johannes? Bright ideas? Quickly?'

Cabal nodded at the silk. ‘That was my bright idea. It's up to Madam Zarenyia now. We have done all that we can.'

*   *   *

Over the Ivory Citadel, Zarenyia and the second Satan struggled. Ratuth Slabuth made to climb over her to reach the line and safety, but she fought him back with her other legs, and he ended up back where he had started, dangling from her aft legs. Zarenyia kicked and struggled, but he refused to let go. She wished fervently that he had genitals; she could generally be very persuasive when genitals were involved and, as a last resort, she could always have kicked him in them. Alas, he was utterly asexual both physically and behaviourally. It was all most vexing.

Above her the tunnel to safety was flaking away into pieces that dissolved the moment after they were formed. She knew the Cabals would not have been able to anchor the line very much further along. Her time was short. Extreme measures were called for.

She looked down. ‘I think I shall just have to do without you.'

‘What?' Ratuth Slabuth glared up at her. ‘I am Satan incarnate! You will not cast me aside easily, traitor!'

‘I wasn't talking to you, you dull creature.' She flexed her No. 3 legs and their bladed edges extended. Ratuth Slabuth had already dodged their attentions earlier and knew himself to be out of range where he was, clinging onto her No. 4 legs below their last joints and gripping hard enough to prevent them showing their own blades. He looked up past them to see Zarenyia grow dewy-eyed. ‘Bye, gals. I'll miss you.'

Without a second's further hesitation, the No. 3 legs hooked over the hindmost limbs close to where they joined what would have been the cephalothorax, if she had been a true spider rather than an infernal representation of one that carried its brain in the head of a humanlike superstructure. The legs closed sharply, scissoring through their neighbours. The rear limbs fell away, Ratuth Slabuth still clutching them hopelessly.

It would be nice to report that he said something clever, telling, or even poignant at this point, but all he managed was ‘Noooooooooooooooooooo!' all the way down, predictable to the end.

He fell into a courtyard in the citadel. There was a brief milky miasma as of a fog rising and falling in a matter of five seconds or so. And then the Ivory Citadel was just as it had been a moment before, empty and enigmatic, the colour of old bone. No ghosts wandered its corridors, for ghosts were far too alive for it to tolerate.

So perished Ratuth Slabuth, also known as Ragtag Slyboots, also known as Satan (albeit briefly).

*   *   *

Johannes and Horst Cabal watched with growing dismay the failing edge of the tunnel creeping towards them and, more immediately, the end of Zarenyia's lifeline. They were relieved when her hand appeared, gripping at the edge, but then it vanished as the edge faded into flakes of never-being. They both rushed forwards and took up the slack on the line, heaving like bargemen upon the Volga. A great spiderish leg appeared, followed by her upper body, and then more legs swung over and gripped. Cabal's relief was attenuated when he saw how uncharacteristically pale and exhausted she appeared. He and his brother helped her over the precipice and into—at least momentarily—safety. Cabal saw she was looking rather more insectoid than arachnid all of a sudden, and was appalled to see the ugly stumps of her rear legs, dribbling ichor from the almost surgical cuts through the patella analogues.

‘Madam!' His concern was unaffected. ‘What happened to your legs?'

Zarenyia smiled weakly. ‘The Devil took the hindmost.'

Another tranche of tunnel crumbled away behind them. ‘You must transform into human form, madam, and do so immediately! The door is too narrow!'

‘Not so sure I can, after all that. Sorry, darlings, I'm quite pooped. Think I might even be dying. Wouldn't that be an anticlimax after seeing off that Ratuth wotsit-uth?'

At the door, Cabal could see Miss Smith and Leonie Barrow waiting, the door held open. Beyond it was a swirling gloom. It didn't look very appetising, but it was surely better than a graceless plummet to the Ivory Citadel and eternal extinction.

‘Zarenyia.' Cabal leaned close to her and spoke in an urgent undertone into her ear. ‘Please. You must focus. Just for a few seconds. We can save you, but you must help us.'

She laughed a soundless little laugh. ‘Look at you, sweetness. If I didn't know better, I'd say you cared.'

Cabal said nothing. The silence drew Zarenyia's attention more than words could. Then she closed her eyes and grimaced with concentration. The transformation was difficult and nowhere near as elegant as the ones she had previously demonstrated, but it did the job. Even while she was still partially arachnid, her skirt still sporting the six legs and her dress itself simple and unassuming for lack of will or strength for anything more grand, Johannes and Horst Cabal were lifting her up with her arms draped over their necks and making the best speed they could for the exit.

It was barely fast enough. Cabal was the last through the door and, as he lifted his trailing foot from the tunnel floor for the last time, he felt it give way beneath him like thin ice. Then he was through and, with no human agency, the door slammed shut behind them.

 

The Fourth Way: HORST CABAL, LORD OF THE DEAD

The darkness swirled about them like liquid, flowed, and finally began to ebb.

‘Welcome to Sepulchre!' said Horst, and favoured them all with a showman's bow, as if he had built the place in his lunch hour.

‘Sepulchre?' Cabal looked about them through the thinning coils of darkness. ‘It looks remarkably like London.'

‘It is quite grand in places, true. Miss Barrow and I were at a huge theatre, quite as large as anything in London. Larger.'

‘I see. And this Sepulchre of yours also contains its own Nelson's Column?'

‘Oh, I doubt it. That would be silly.' He looked up. ‘Oh!' A reasonable exclamation from somebody who had just been successfully stalked by 169 feet of granite and bronze. They were undeniably in Trafalgar Square.

Putting the impermanence of their path from his mind for the moment, Cabal crouched by Zarenyia. Her transformation was complete, but she was plainly sorely weakened by her recent travails.

‘I've hardly eaten since we started on this quest of yours, Johannes,' she said as he propped her back against the stone wall of the strange little cylindrical police box from which they had emerged. ‘You promised murders.' She said it with a mannered pout, but the import behind it was plain.

Cabal nodded, rose to his feet, and looked around. It was a public place; there
must
be somebody expendable around. It was then that he realised something was very wrong with London, which is to say, in addition to all its more usual flaws.

‘Where is everybody?' They seemed to be at the tail end of the day, and the overcast sky was darkening. There was no conceivable reason that one of the metropolis's busiest junctions should be entirely devoid of any living people. On the nearby roadway at the junction with the Strand stood a horse-drawn tram, unattended. Cabal took a few steps to examine it more closely, and saw whitened bones lying between the traces.

‘I suspect…' He looked around at the darkened buildings. None showed the signs of extended neglect, but there was something undeniably unkempt about the scene for all that. ‘I suspect that we are not safe in the open. We should seek shelter as soon as possible. The Five Ways are working at full effect once more now that we have left Hell, and we know nothing of this place.'

‘It looks like London,' said Horst.

‘Apart from that it looks like London. Thank you, Horst. I know I can always depend upon you to state the blindingly obvious.'

‘It's a talent.' Horst looked at the sky. ‘I'll tell you something else that's a talent. Knowing just how likely the sun is to do me a mischief. I don't know what's up behind those clouds, but it isn't the sun.'

‘Of course not. It's merely a representation of the sun, in much the same way this is only a representation of London, and this Sepulchre place was only the representation of some sort of materialised metaphor.'

Leonie Barrow and Miss Smith were helping Zarenyia to her feet. ‘And that was a false Hell we just escaped from?' said Leonie.