The Fall of the House of Cabal (35 page)

Cabal considered, and then reconsidered. ‘Perhaps you're right. Very well. A quick plan to isolate and neutralise them, bearing in mind that we must keep at least one alive to interrogate.'

Everyone nodded, with one exception. Cabal sighed heavily; he now realised that the opportunity to plan had already gone. ‘Where is Madam Zarenyia?' he asked, but expected no useful reply.

*   *   *

Private Trizlo was scanning the area to the west of Horse Guards Parade when he happened to notice that Private Ulchir was not at his position. He hadn't liked the look of the buildings when they were directed there by the aeroship's searchlight; too many places for things to hide. People, and worse than people. Every member of his
Zug
said out loud that the billet was an easy one, if boring. Every member was lying; he heard the sleeping whimpers and moans of men in nightmares. This city may have been conquered before a single Mirkarvian set foot on British soil, but there was nothing easy about the job they had to do. The capital had to be cleared; cleansed of every surviving Briton and every one of the monsters the strike against the city had created. It was an ugly way to make war, but the British had started it by refusing to give Mirkarvia
carte blanche
to do as it wished in its region. They should just have minded their own business when first Senza and then Poloruss fell. With all the troops these conquests brought into the Mirkarvian Empire and the powers Her Majesty possessed, it was a foregone conclusion what would happen. It wasn't Mirkarvia's fault it had. Destiny is like that.

Still, this wasn't good soldiering. It was little more than hunting vermin, but some of the vermin could bite back. Every
Zug
had bad stories about clearances that had gone wrong. Sometimes they even lost people.

Trizlo looked around the clutter of pale stone buildings on either side of Whitehall. They could hide a dinosaur in this place, never mind a wight or a leech. Where the hell had Ulchir gone? This was just typical of him; wandering off without letting anyone know. He looked to Corporal Hesk to offer an exasperated glare. But Hesk was out of position, too.

Hesk wanted to make sergeant, and so he was by the book. He would have to have a damn good reason before he would leave his post. What was going on here? The lieutenant and the medic were still searching around the shattered hansom cab. He hated to jump past reporting to his NCO, but Trizlo didn't see what choice he had.

He opened his mouth to draw breath to call to the lieutenant, but got no further. Out of nowhere, a man in a stylishly cut suit appeared before him. ‘Good evening,' said the man, who doffed his hat, and then punched Trizlo unconscious before he could respond. Trizlo was caught as he fell and whisked out of sight. The Mirkarvian cordon continued to thin, minute by minute, by sundry means.

By the time Lieutenant Skir and Medical Officer Borus finished their examination, their protective detail had entirely vanished.

‘Where is everyone?' said Skir. His hand went straight to his holster, only to find it empty. ‘My gun!'

Borus gaped at his commanding officer's empty holster for a moment before remembering himself and going for his own gun. It, too, was absent. They looked around them in rising horror as they realised the desperate straits in which they found themselves. In doing so, they found that they were not quite alone.

‘Gentlemen,' said the man in the black suit and, inexplicably given the evening light, tinted glasses that seemed to bear amber lenses. ‘Your men are gone. Some are probably still breathing, but that can be altered very easily. If you value the remaining lives of those under your command, you would do well to mark my words carefully and answer immediately and truthfully any questions I might put to you.'

‘Who are you?' demanded Skir.

‘A bad start, Lieutenant,' said the man. Skir noticed a distinct German accent. ‘You are surrounded, and I have your men. Well, most of them. A few eggs were broken in the making of this omelette. In short, you don't ask questions for the duration of this encounter, only answer them. To demonstrate the principle, I shall start with an easy question. That question is, “Do you understand?”'

Skir bridled, but swallowed his wrath. ‘I do.'

‘Good. Then here come the more complicated ones, beginning with … why is the Mirkarvian military in London at all?'

*   *   *

A much-depleted
Gruppe
made its way through the deserted streets of London. The only survivors from their run-in with a nest of wights—‘deaders' was altogether too prosaic a term for the Mirkarvian military, and ‘zombies' smacked of exoticism—they now numbered only three: the lieutenant, the medical officer, and one soldier, as well as two prisoners, both women. Of these two women, one was a tall redhead possessed of a subtle beauty almost supernatural in its intimation. She was dressed perfectly in a fashionable dress, seemed to regard being arrested by the occupation force as a very jolly sort of day out, and kept having to be reminded to keep her hands on her head. The other prisoner was shorter, hair as black as midnight, with a very pale complexion. She was dressed like a fashionable widow, and carried a battered black lace parasol in one hand while keeping the other hand on the back of her head in an apparent faint nod to prisoner protocols. The soldier keeping an eye on them had his hat pulled down hard, the peak hiding his face. He carried a non-issue pump-action shotgun, and his uniform was not a very good fit. Of the officers, the medic seemed happy with his lot, but the lieutenant was thin-lipped and tended to scowl at his fellow officer's comments rather than answering them.

They were heading west by southwest long the Mall; St James's Park would have been the shorter and certainly more scenic route under normal circumstance, but in that unnatural night it was home to strange noises and movements in the undergrowth or, at least, stranger than is usual even for St James's Park. Thus, they progressed up the Mall towards Buckingham Palace, late residence of Her Majesty before her unfortunate incident.

As they approached, it was plain that it was not much of a residence these days, nor anything else but a burnt-out and exploded ruin. A wrathfulness had been practised upon it, and little was still habitable, the northern corner being the only major exception—now converted into a barracks to judge from all the soldierly activity occurring there. The new Queen of England and Wales, Scotland, the entirety of Ireland, all the little islands, and anything else she liked the look of had never intended to stay in as dull a heap as Buckingham Palace, and so she had had it reduced. It was a nice situation, however, and an enjoyable view, so she had taken up residence
en site
.

Johannes Cabal adjusted the stolen cap of his stolen uniform
*
and looked along the length of the Mall at the Red Queen's present address. Above the blackened ruin of Buckingham Palace floated an aeroship, held in position by tethering cables running from great blocks of concrete emplaced around the palace grounds. The aeroship itself hovered perhaps eighty feet from the ground, and no obvious way of gaining entrance was visible.

‘Like a spider in her web,' said Horst—the profoundly unconvincing medical officer—as the party halted to take in this new development.

‘Hardly,' said Zarenyia. ‘She has style, though, this arch-enemy of yours.'

‘It's sort of like the
Catullus,
' continued Horst. ‘Her aeroyacht. Just much bigger.'

It certainly didn't look much like the blunt weapon represented by the vessel they had seen earlier. This ship had a distinct prow, and the lethal air of a raptor about it; a great steel hawk had settled upon the capital of its enemy and eaten—if not the heart—at least a kidney from the fresh corpse of a nation.

‘How on earth are we supposed to get aboard that?' said Miss Barrow from beneath her ill-fitting cap.

The plan Cabal had evolved involved nothing more complicated than getting by a checkpoint or two using their stolen uniforms and documents, but the unusual stationing of the Queen's residence made that course seem naive and likely to end in a spectacular defeat that would doubtless take many of Orfilia Ninuka's troops with them, but not Her Imperial Majesty herself.

‘I can get up one of those cables easily,' said Zarenyia. ‘Easy-peasy. I'll need all my legs out, but spiders and threads tend to get on rather well.'

‘And can you carry us all with you?'

Zarenyia thought about it. ‘No,' she said. ‘I suppose that's important, isn't it?'

‘It is. Still, your ability to climb aboard quickly and, one hopes, unnoticed gives an extra sinew to any new plan we might hatch. As it is, I think we should turn off this road as soon as possible, and … damn it.'

An army truck was pulling away from the eastern end of Constitution Hill and clearly manoeuvring to enter the Mall. There was every likelihood that they would be questioned if spotted, and a fight within eyeshot of the hostile barracks situated in the surviving northern corner of the palace would probably not end well for them.

They were closer to the park side of the road, and Cabal led them into the trees without hesitation. The foliage closed behind them, and a few moments later the lorry rumbled by. It did not check its speed at all as it passed. It seemed that they had been unobserved.

Horst looked around the unnatural gloom of the park. ‘Minty says the park is full of nasty things.'

‘It certainly is now. I pity the zombie that crosses our path.'

Buoyed up by the bravado engendered by such—not unreasonable—thoughts, they pressed into the darkness.

*   *   *

Cabal's opinion of their chances of passing through doom-haunted St James's Park unmolested turned out to be entirely reasonable and not the piece of bravado it may have seemed. There were indeed creatures and entities lurking in the shadowed places that would have done a common or garden gang of humans to death or thereabouts in a twinkling. But the senses of the uncanny can perceive the uncanny, and—while the flickering spirit of a young girl might not have given them great pause—the presence of something cheerfully devilish, something engagingly vampirical, something stoically witchy, and something peevishly necromantic proposed more pain than gain for any predatory observers. Even the sole figure untouched by strange energies carried a bloody big shotgun. The dangerous forces within the park decided there were easier ways to amuse themselves than mixing it up with this particular covey, nor did any of the Mirkarvian troops stationed at the ruins of the palace notice five figures surreptitiously cross the bridge over the park lake.

They emerged from the park at the eastern end of Birdcage Walk and made their way towards the river. The Palace of Westminster was hardly in any better state than Buckingham Palace. The body of the structure looked to have been bombed, and the northern clock face of St Stephen's Tower was bisected at a jagged angle a few degrees from the vertical where the tower's top had been shorn away as if by a blow from a giant's axe. The remains of the great bell Big Ben lay in shattered curves at the tower's base in Bridge Street. Only the southern end of the complex where the House of Lords lay was relatively untouched. It seemed the bomb-aimer's mark had been the tower; this had been the surgical destruction of a symbol.

Horst looked to the south and frowned. ‘There's something going on here.' His voice was uncharacteristically serious. ‘Can't you feel it?'

Cabal went to stand by him, removing his cap as he did. He did not care to be in military uniform of any kind, but chafed at the sheer showiness of grey. He felt like a fashion model. ‘What sort of thing do you mean?'

Minty drifted by. ‘You don't wanna go in there. It's all full of leeches. That's where they 'ide. The soldiers don't know it, though, 'cos the leeches are really careful 'bout bein' seen around 'ere.' Having delivered this report, she drifted away again.

‘How many?' called Horst after her.

‘Loads,' she replied, enigmatic and unhelpful.

When Cabal was apprised of this intelligence, he grew thoughtful. ‘We haven't run into any of the supernatural horrors spawned by Ninuka's assault with the exception of the girl—'

‘Oi!' said an otherworldly voice possessed of outrage and poor diction.

‘—but perhaps we should make the acquaintance of a few.'

Horst regarded him quizzically. ‘I'm waiting for the wisdom of that idea to come to me, but it's taking its time. Why would we wish to pay a house call upon a bunch of vampires? They're not all as couth as me, you know.'

‘I'm rather hoping that they're not.'

Leonie Barrow pushed her cap back on her head. She didn't like the uniform nearly as much as the adventuress outfit with which this reality had seen fit to gift her on leaving Sepulchre. ‘Is this another of those ideas of yours that only seems to be insane, Cabal, but that when put into operation actually turns out to be suicidal?'

‘You really
do
know my brother, don't you?' said Horst.

‘Only too well, and I have the scars to prove it.'

‘Oh?' said Horst with unfeigned interest. ‘Where?'

Cabal grimaced. ‘Largely psychological, Horst.' Ignoring his brother's expression of disappointment, Cabal turned and pointed at the dark building that had once housed the lords and bishops whose great wisdom and imagination had never been anything but an unparallelled boon to the empire. ‘That hall is apparently home to a horde of bloodsucking leeches that have been forced to maintain a very low profile due to the proximity of the centre of Mirkarvian power in the British Isles, or whatever Ninuka calls them these days. I doubt they enjoy that. Let us test that theory.'

‘And if you're wrong?' said Leonie.

‘Then we fight our way out and think of something else, assuming the first part of that sentence comes to pass.' He nodded at her shotgun. ‘I would have thought that would make you happy, Miss Barrow. You have barely had a chance to use that ostentatious weapon yet.'