The Fall of the House of Cabal (44 page)

He was debating what to do when there was a dreadful concussion that made the ramp buck beneath him and threatened to fling him from it. He held on for life itself, gripping the deep ridges and wondering what new catastrophe was being visited upon him. He looked to Leonie Barrow to ensure that she had not been thrown off, either, and saw the clouds of concrete dust blowing out from beneath the lower section of the ramp. With a squeal of protesting metal, the lower ramp dropped a few feet and lay off-kilter, the side bearing Leonie's body the higher. Then there was a groaning crash, and the entire ramp fell, and Leonie Barrow fell with it.

He realised the nature of the trap too late to do anything about it. Of course he would be the first up the ramp, eager for confrontation even as it terrified him. One or more marksmen would be assigned to bring the ascent to a halt by firing at the opportune moment once he was past the join between the ramps, but anyone with him was not. Then, to ensure he was isolated, demolition charges set into the lower ramp's base and supports were detonated.

Johannes Cabal, utterly outwitted, alone, and aggrieved, could do nothing as the
Rubrum Imperatrix
's aft ramp slowly rose up into the vessel's belly on hydraulic rams.

*   *   *

We can forgive Johannes Cabal at that moment. He had rarely felt true despair in his life—it took a very great deal to make him feel even mild despair—and he was host to a mix of emotions whose potency overwhelmed his atrophied sentiments. Given a minute longer he might well have looked around and begun formulating a response, extemporising a plan, and started shooting people, which was often how these things went.

As things were, however, he did not need that minute to reaffirm his self-sufficiency for, to coin a phrase, the cavalry were on the way. An unusual cavalry—consisting of a witch, a vampire, and a devil—but a sort of cavalry all the same.

How Zarenyia and Miss Smith rescued Horst from the murderous intentions of the Imperial Bodyguard is a short tale. The guards were equipped with the curious boxy carbines previously mentioned, odd little weapons chambered to fit odd little bullets comprising a soft lead nose upon a hollow body of an unusual silver alloy that in turn contained a liquid of vile provenance and despicable modes of collection. The troops were told the liquid was holy water, but it was not water, and it was a very long way from holy. The effect of the rounds upon undead flesh (not only that of vampires) was spectacular, as demonstrated by the unwilling Johns.

Horst was keen not to be shot by such a weapon and so had resorted to skulking and hiding while he found a way out of the dense cordon of searchers looking for him and those like him. It was all beginning to look rather hopeless when a witch turned up on a devil's back and proceeded to lay into the searching guards. The bullets would certainly have killed a human should they be struck, but turned out to be singularly useless against Zarenyia's armoured lower body. Thus, she spent a lot of time rearing up to scythe and slice her way through the startled troops, and when she did lower her forebody it was to reveal Miss Smith standing on the thorax, her wand spitting havoc, and wearing an expression that indicated that she was enjoying herself far too much.

The Imperial Bodyguard were well trained by Mirkarvian standards and—if the rumour was true—certainly well motivated to do their best. Training tends to be very specific, however, and somebody had plainly blundered in failing to prepare them for situations in which they would be fighting a small number of very irregular troops, each roughly equivalent to a platoon in the ‘making a ruckus' stakes.

While they were trying to think of a sensible way to deal with a witch and a devil, they were not so concentrated upon the vampire problem, which was a shame, as the vampire problem was very concentrated upon them. Horst had not so much enjoyed being the Lord of the Dead as finding himself in the company of people with a similar lifestyle to his, and there was fellowship there. He had even begun to like a few of those he saw as his charges, especially the patrician Johns, who turned out not to be so ghastly when you actually chatted to him. Seeing Johns killed in front of him while—mark it well—he was not running for his unlife but trying to warn Horst had pushed him past a limit. A vampire is a major threat. A vampire with a personal grudge against you is a vast threat. The soldiers of Her Majesty's Imperial Bodyguard turned their collective back upon just such a vast threat, and they paid for that very quickly.

The battle, such as it was, was quite brief and spectacularly brutal. The boxy little carbines were of little use in confined quarters and the soldiers merely ended up shooting several of their own while trying to settle a sight upon the dodging, weaving, blurring in and out of existence Horst as he visited red ruin upon them. Miss Smith dismounted Zarenyia and moved amongst the soldiers, distributing eldritch ends at point-blank range, while Zarenyia took it upon herself to abscond with a few envenomed specimens on which to feed. These she lugged off behind a freestanding wall as a small nod at propriety, or at least, not being shot at while practising succubine rites upon her victims.

There was a sudden hiatus in hostilities caused by a howl of outrage from behind the wall. Zarenyia climbed over the wall's top, legs appearing first as she emerged holding a limp body over her head. She flung it at one of the few vaguely organised clumps of resistance, braining some and scattering the rest.

‘They're empties!' she roared in a truly diabolical rage. ‘Some little shit has got there first and taken their souls! Of all the bloody-minded, selfish, dog-in-a-manger-ish…' And the rest of the imprecation was lost in a new welter of carnage while Zarenyia salved her hurt feelings with multiple murders.

It will be understood that the few lingering vestiges of resistance dried up shortly after this.

After Miss Smith fried the last of the hapless and soulless, the trio made their merry way back to where Cabal and Leonie doubtless waited for them.

‘
Mein Gott
.' Horst saw first, and the others looked to him in confusion before they followed his gaze. He saw Leonie lying on the ramp first, saw the blood, saw his brother crouched helplessly just too far away to help. ‘No, no,
no!
' The gravel spraying back from his hard acceleration, he sprinted towards the base of the ramp. He had hardly begun to run when the explosion startled him into an untidy halt. The ramp lurched, held, and then collapsed. In agonising slowness, he saw the ramp fall faster than the body of Leonie Barrow, leaving her behind as it fell through dust and concrete fragments. He accelerated again, but he couldn't hope to reach her before she struck the now horizontal ramp. He came to a halt again, albeit a more controlled one this time. His mind burnt through possibilities as he loosened the leash on his vampiric side.

‘Miss Smith! Help Leonie if you can! Zarenyia! To me!'

Neither needed a second bidding. Miss Smith drew her skirt up and ran as fast as she could towards the downed ramp. Zarenyia galloped up to Horst and, such was the urgency and the gravity of the situation that she even passed up the golden opportunity to flirt with him over how masterful he was being.

‘Oh, the poor poppet,' she said, looking towards the crumpled body in a stolen grey uniform. Then, to Horst, ‘What do you want me to do?'

‘Johannes is in trouble. I have to get up there and help him.'

She glanced skyward. ‘I'm not good in confined spaces, darling—'

‘I know. You stay with Smith. I just need you to get me up there before that ramp closes.'

She looked up again, weighed the odds, and nodded firmly. ‘Consider it done. Hop aboard, and hang on!'

*   *   *

Miss Smith had almost reached the collapsed ramp when she stumbled. Not badly enough to fall—although she cursed her impractical shoes as she tottered—but enough to spoil the shot that was meant for her and that creased the air just ahead of her where she would otherwise have been. Blessing her impractical shoes under her breath, she wheeled to gauge from where the shot had likely come. The checkpoint on the encampment's perimeter seemed likely, and furtive movement there confirmed it. Miss Smith would love to have visited something especially imaginative on the rifleman who it seemed must have been the one who shot Leonie Barrow, but she didn't have the time. She invoked raw destruction and directed it through her wand. The checkpoint and all its contents, including the marksman, disappeared in a perfunctory but staggeringly powerful explosion that startled birds in Southwark Park into the air over three miles away. Resistance overcome, Miss Smith once more hiked up her skirts and headed for the fallen Miss Barrow.

*   *   *

‘Smithie's having fun,' said Zarenyia. Horst said nothing. He was too busy concentrating on not falling off an eight-legged devil dangling upside down while climbing an anchor cable up towards the lowering bulk of the
Rubrum Imperatrix
. It required a lot of concentration. One of the things he found himself concentrating on was how far the cable's hawsehole in the ship's hull was from the steadily closing ramp. Closing far too steadily for comfort. Then the ramp stopped in its tracks. Horst could make out movement close by the pivot and realised that his brother must have jammed the mechanism by some means. It probably would not buy them much time, but perhaps it would be enough.

The best place to cling to an inverted spider-devil, the reader will be illuminated to discover, is under the thorax. Thus, to talk to Zarenyia, he found it necessary to peer past the forward edge of that chitinous surface and up (or down, she being inverted) between her forward legs to look up (or down) at her humanesque upper body. This had another effect.

‘I am very sorry,' said Horst, ‘but I cannot help but see up your sweater.'

‘Don't apologise,' she called back. ‘I'm proud of my body. That aside, how can I help you?'

‘I was just wondering how we were going to get from the top end of the anchor cable to the ramp.'

‘I
was
thinking of walking it, but I'm not so sure now.'

‘Too smooth?'

‘Oh, please. I can stick to glass if I put my mind to it. No, I was thinking rather more about all these guns and things that are starting to take an interest in us.'

And so they were. Not all, by any means, nor yet even a majority, but enough of the machine-gun turrets were busily buzzing on their bearings to aim at the climbers.

‘Oh, this is going to get terribly fraught, isn't it? I doubt the bullets will be much bother for my lower half, but my top bit is all lovely and squishy and not as bulletproof as I might wish at this precise moment. Even if they don't kill me, I don't think I'll be able to hang on.'

‘Then wh—'

‘Hold on
hard,
' she called, and then, without pausing to check if he was indeed holding on hard (he was; throwing aside manners and embracing her fiercely around the midriff), she threw herself upwards off the cable. For a second time since he'd been blown out of a window of Buckingham Palace, Horst found himself in free fall, and it was only more bearable than the first occasion because, primarily, he wasn't on fire and, secondly, Zarenyia's top bit really was terrifically lovely and squishy.

He was distracted from this by the distinct sensation of his legs being forced apart by Zarenyia's abdomen curling upwards. Then over his head he saw a stream of glistening white fluid shoot past. He hardly needed an accelerated metabolism and associated sensibilities to know what would come next, and hung on for dear unlife.

The stream hit the underside of the aeroship and stuck fast. A small part of a second later, Zarenyia strained under a great impulse as the silken cord drew tight and her shallow downward arc was halted to be replaced with a soaring upwards swing. Horst looked up and saw the narrow aperture of the almost shut ramp section approaching at dizzying speed.

‘Now or never, darling! Jump!'

Feeling like an acrobat upon a very eccentric trapeze, Horst waited until the swing was almost over and—at a moment when there was still momentum to be had before the arcing motion came to a halt—he leapt.

Behind him he heard in rapid succession, ‘Fly, my beauty! Fly!' then the sound of multiple machine guns opening fire in a panic of inaccuracy, and then, ‘Rude!' He had no time to attend to any of that; the edge of the ramp was there just below him, then closer at his level, and then above him and he couldn't see it, only the drop below him. On the far side of the anchorage, he saw one of the
Rubrum Imperatrix
's anchors disengage, its flukes winding back to unhook from the great iron hoop set into the buckled earth.

He felt his hand catch the very edge of the ramp, but all the speed and strength in the world could not help him against the simple mechanics of leverage and force. He felt his fingers slip and knew it had all been for nothing.

It was a surprise, therefore, a very pleasant surprise when he found himself dangling from the two-handed grip of his brother, heels dug in fiercely against the last lateral gutter of the ramp's surface.

‘Pull yourself up quickly!' Cabal grunted. ‘I can't hold on…'

It took a moment for Horst to find the ramp's lip with his free hand and to expend a few drams of stolen blood to take the weight off his brother. A moment later and they were sprawled together on the safety of the ramp. ‘Zarenyia…' gasped Horst and rolled over to look down. He needn't have worried; Zarenyia had not lived for such a long time without learning how to frustrate the efforts of those who would do her harm, a very considerable population. She had tucked her forebody up so that it was shielded by the armoured abdomen and thorax. The period of her swing was predictable, but the gunners were not trained in tracking rapidly manoeuvring bodies at close range, few bullets struck home, and those that did whined off the pseudo-chitin of her spiderish body. Then she severed her cable, soared for a brief moment through the air and snagged one of the still attached anchor cables. The aeroship was busily preparing for flight, and cable after cable was being released and drawn aboard, the anchors themselves, flukes flattened, finishing snugly against the aviatory equivalent of a sea vessel's catheads. Indeed, even the cable Zarenyia had settled upon was released a moment after she caught it. She skimmed down it much faster than it could be drawn up, however, and she descended in a shower of sparks stuck between her legs and the steel hawser, screaming, ‘Wheeeeee!' all the way down.