The Fall of the House of Cabal (31 page)

‘No. No, that was the real Hell.'

‘Real?' She paled. ‘And … that was actually Satan?'

‘I really punched Satan.' Horst was considering getting himself an engraved pewter mug to commemorate the fact.

‘And I really killed him,' said Zarenyia. She sounded faint. ‘That will either make me a lot of friends, or a lot of enemies.'

None of them missed the waver in her voice. Horst nodded at a long building in the neoclassical style running across the north side of the square, fronted by a central columned portico flanked by two lesser examples, and topped by a short tower and dome. ‘National Gallery?'

‘It will do while we plan our next move. Help me with Madam Zarenyia.'

Moving as quickly as they might, the party headed northward to the gallery and entered through the front door, which needed only mild persuasion of the flat-footed kick sort to open.

*   *   *

They found a quiet corner in the surprisingly shallow building, and paused to ascertain their exact situation in as far as they might. Miss Barrow was still trying to take in why her clothes had changed and why she was armed with a shotgun and, she discovered to her consternation, a bayonet in her pack and a short, wide, flat knife in a boot scabbard.

‘In the Dreamlands,' said Miss Smith, ‘one arrives garbed in the manner one sees oneself.'

‘I have never wanted to go around dressed like a scruffy bandit,' said Leonie. She did not admit that, now it had been thrust upon her, she really didn't mind it so much, either.

‘This is not the same mechanism as the Dreamlands, Miss Smith. There it was an expression of passion. Here it is a function of, for want of a better term, drama. We are involved in a thespian game of uncertain rules with a hidden goal.'

Cabal spoke absently; Zarenyia seemed to be sinking into unconsciousness. If she did so fully and could not be roused, he was uncertain how they might feed her should they find a suitable source of sustenance. He revised the thought. How
he
would feed her should
he
find a suitable source of sustenance. It was hard to imagine the moralistic Miss Leonie Barrow resisting the urge to lecture him on the sanctity of life, no matter how sybaritically pleasant the sacrifice to Zarenyia's survival might find it. Usually, Cabal would simply have sneered in Miss Barrow's face, but these days she had a very large shotgun and the will to use it. He decided that under the circumstances, some discretion and artfulness would be necessary.

Miss Smith seemed very sensible and unlikely to be upset by it, and Horst was a vampire himself, after all, although he limited himself to blood and not the irresistible draining of souls and certain other bodily fluids. That said, if he'd been offered the option of something similar when he was first turned, Cabal was reasonably sure he would have accepted with alacrity. That said, he couldn't depend on both being stoic about him feeding a sapient being to Zarenyia. They might get all principled at an awkward moment. No, this was simply something he would have to attend to by himself.

‘The area should be reconnoitred,' he said, neglecting to mention what he would be reconnoitring for. He replenished the load in his Webley (noting in passing that the empty space in the ammunition box had been filled with new rounds), and set off towards the exit as if that was all settled, then.

‘I agree,' said Miss Smith. ‘I'll go with you.'

This gave Cabal pause. ‘You will?'

‘Yes. Oh, and you might as well have this back.' She passed him the Senzan pistol. ‘It's all full of bullets again. So is this.' She handed over the spare magazine. He examined it briefly and found it was indeed fully laden with live ammunition.

‘If you are to go with me,' he said, gently introducing the subtext, ‘which is by no means a certainty … oughtn't you to keep the weapon?'

‘I don't need it.' She beamed at him, reached into her dress pocket, and produced a wand. Glimmering, twisted, and black, it looked like a stout twig recovered from an oil slick. It also, he realised, had an air of the crown she had worn in the boundless burying ground and Hell. Then he saw the crown in question was once again in evidence upon her brow, apparently recovered from Zarenyia.

‘I didn't realise you had a wand.'

‘Neither did I. I just found it in the wand pocket in my dress.'

Cabal had had cause to wear trousers with such a specially sewn accessory in the past and this point did not require clarification. ‘You have a wand pocket in your skirt? Very foresighted of you.'

‘No.' She smiled as if she and a very shaky progression of cause and effect had conspired to snare him in such an error. ‘I like to think I look ahead, but the pocket and the wand are none of my doing.' She slashed the air experimentally with the black thorn. The air seemed to distort the light travelling through it in a halo at its tip, like the meniscus of water dimpled beneath the foot of a pond skater. The edge of the dimple seethed with momentary darkness, causing Cabal to step back.

‘You should be careful, madam. Wands have a nasty habit of going off at inopportune times.'

‘You're telling me,' muttered Zarenyia, drifting at the edge of consciousness. ‘Johannes has one, you know. Terribly clever with it. He got me my sweater. Lots of fish. So many fish.' Her voice faded into sub-vocalised semi-words.

Everybody looked at Cabal.

‘She seems very impressed with your wand, Cabal.' Leonie Barrow stood arms crossed, head cocked, and eyebrow raised.

Miss Smith made no bones about it and smirked nakedly. ‘Tell you what, let me play with yours and you can play with mine.' She inadvisedly gave her wand a last little wave before sliding it back into its pocket.

‘Like school all over again, isn't it?' said Horst. ‘Girls teasing you and you standing there with a face like thunder.'

‘Shut up,' said Cabal.

‘As you wish, although the cat's out of the bag on that score now. Anyway, what I was going to say was, “Yes, good plan. I'll go with you, too.”'

Cabal let out a sigh. This was very typical of his life; he would evolve a simple plan and it would fail at the first hurdle thanks to people taking an ungratifying interest in his affairs.

‘Am I to understand that nobody thinks I can conduct a brief reconnoitre of the area and so everyone wishes to come along to oversee me? I'm sure three of us will obviously make a fraction of the noise of one. If only there were another twenty of us; we would pass silent and invisible.'

Horst wrinkled his infuriatingly handsome countenance with unfamiliar thought. ‘Does it really work like that? I was sure it would go the other way.'

As was so often the case, Cabal was not sure if his brother was sincere or playing the goat. Rather than wander into that bogland, he changed the subject. ‘What about Madam Zarenyia?'

Miss Barrow looked down on the semi-comatose devil where they had bedded her on a bench. ‘I'll stay with her. I have a ridiculously large gun and more blades than Sheffield. I'll watch over her and guard her.'

‘There, that's sorted out, then,' said Horst. ‘A map would be handy, wouldn't it? There'll be offices and a decent chance one of them will have a London street map. I'll go and have a look.' He paused at the door and looked back at his brother with an agreeably self-satisfied look upon his face. ‘See that? I had a good idea. It does happen.'

Miss Smith went to help him search the offices more quickly, leaving Cabal alone with Leonie Barrow and Zarenyia for a moment.

He coughed a little awkwardly. ‘It's good of you to watch over her, Miss Barrow.'

‘It's the human thing to do, Cabal. I must admit, when you talked me into this, I was not expecting to end up babysitting a monster.'

‘You once called me a monster.'

‘I did. And you are.' She looked at Zarenyia. ‘It seems some monsters are people, too.'

‘Oodles of fish,' mumbled Zarenyia in her dreaming.

‘In any case, thank you.' Cabal nodded curtly and walked away.

He paused as Leonie spoke. ‘You like her, don't you?'

He didn't answer for some moments, because he did not have the answer to hand. ‘Yes, I do.' He reached the door, paused, and looked back at Leonie. She waited for him to speak, but he did not. Instead, he gave another nod and was gone into the gloom.

Leonie settled herself on the end of the bench and looked over her sleeping charge. ‘If my dad could only see me now,' she said in an undertone. She settled the shotgun across her lap. ‘He'd be bloody furious.'

*   *   *

Cabal's little party of three—three times larger than he really wanted—headed out of the darkened gallery some little time later, clutching the only map they could find; a somewhat fatuous document intended for tourists showing the more famous landmarks towering over the surrounding city, and the myriad smaller streets off the main byways were notable for their absence. They concluded it would have to do until they found better, and decided to loot a newsagent as and when they happened across one. Horst said he hoped it was one that sold sweets as he would like some Victory V lozenges, and would leave a sixpence on the counter for them even though the proprietors were likely as dead as the rest of the city. Then his brother reminded him that he was dead himself, and a vampire, and that Victory Vs were not really an option for somebody of his situation. Horst accepted this, although it made him sad, and he spoke little subsequently, focusing instead on trying to recall exactly what a pleasant sensation it was to suck a Victory V.

Then Miss Smith mentioned that she preferred Fisherman's Friends herself, at which Cabal commented that this did not surprise him at all, Miss Smith fell into an aggrieved silence of her own, leaving Cabal to enjoy the subsequent quietude, untroubled by people airing opinions that did not tally with his own and that were therefore merely noise.

If they had been communicating, perhaps they would not have become separated. A little quiet chatter is useful simply as a way of keeping a group coherent, and without it, neither Johannes Cabal or Miss Smith noticed when Horst thought he saw something down a side street off the Charing Cross Road and went to investigate without troubling to mention it to his companions. By the time Cabal glanced back and saw Miss Smith in his wake and no other, Horst had already been gone for more than two minutes, although Cabal had no way of knowing that.

‘Well, don't ask me,' said Miss Smith when Cabal gave vent to his understandably hypocritical complaint that she should have kept an eye on Horst. ‘If you're not your brother's keeper, then I'm damn'd
*
sure I'm not, either.'

‘He could be anywhere.' He looked up and down the road, but it was empty but for the debris of a sudden and indeterminate apocalypse. They had passed many abandoned carts and omnibuses, the skeletons of horses and a few humans. Too few humans. Cabal racked his mind, trying to think what might distract Horst sufficiently for him to wander off like this. ‘We're not near Hamleys toy shop, are we?'

Miss Smith, a Londoner before her unfortunate discorporation and exile to the Dreamlands, shook her head. ‘That's right over there.' She pointed roughly westwards. ‘We haven't been near it at all.'

‘We might have found him playing with a train set there. As it is, I am at a loss. We shall have to retrace our steps.'

As they started southwards, Miss Smith said, ‘What do you think happened to London? Where is everyone?'

‘I cannot begin to guess. The lack of human remains suggests some sort of evacuation, but it must have occurred very quickly. You notice all the horse skeletons are still in harness? They were abandoned where they stood, and they starved there, unable to find food because they were blocked in and unable to pull their loads out of the stationary traffic. After a while they grew weak, and we see the results.'

Miss Smith looked at the bones of a dray horse, but couldn't quite bring herself to say, ‘Poor thing.' Its resemblance to a recent acquaintance of horrid memory was simply too marked. She contented herself with a shake of the head. ‘We're not going to find your brother like this. He was definitely still with us when we were this far south, but we've looked down every side street along the way, and there's no sign of him. He seems able to look after himself; we shall carry on looking around and go back in half an hour or so. He'll be waiting for us, I'm sure he will.'

‘Probably.' The streets were growing gloomy by painfully slow degrees. It seemed this particular toy theatre of a world loved its dusks too much to let them fly by. ‘Very well. Let us strike north until we reach Tottenham Court Road, thence westward and south until we reach Trafalgar Square once more via Soho and Leicester Square. It will be dark by then.' He looked around at where the bluing sky limned the rooftops and ridges. ‘Or not. This is a curious sort of day.'

*   *   *

Now that Horst was no longer—by strict definition of dictionary, anatomy manual, or holy book of choice—a human being, his senses functioned in new and exciting ways. They were not simpler sharper, although that was much of it. They functioned differently, and his awareness was now a more complicated place. He could smell a faint but not unpleasant acrid smell from Zarenyia, for example, that no human should exude in much the same way that Miss Smith's scents were exotic, speaking of some unimaginably distant place, yet were attenuated by her unusual status of conditional vitality while still distinctly those of a mortal woman. He could hear the very faint sighs his brother gave when he glanced at Miss Barrow while he thought no one else was looking. He could see the blush just too controlled to show on Leonie Barrow's skin when his brother passed by, or when Zarenyia said something risqué. The invisible blush was there much of the time, to be honest.