The Fall of the House of Cabal (51 page)

And so saying, he ran to the front door, tested the handle to see if it was hot, and entered, Horst close on his heels.

They cleared the burning sitting room first. Horst gathered up armfuls of the indicated books and journals while Cabal stood on a chair to recover the three head-sized wooden boxes from the deep shelf by the fireplace.

The work progressed quickly, punctuated by the occasional sprinkle of water as Dennis or Denzil flung the remaining contents of their buckets through the smashed window. Cabal also noticed, but did not comment upon, just how many books Horst could carry at a time, ferry them out, and return for more, all without even breaking a sweat. The prize of the Five Ways truly was staggeringly powerful. Returning Leonie Barrow to life exactly as she had been before she was shot had demonstrated its extraordinary capabilities, but if Horst truly had been turned into a creature with the advantages of a vampire but with all the marked disadvantages removed, that was perhaps an even greater miracle. Had such a creature ever existed before?

The upper stories of the house were in the greatest danger, so they headed upstairs for their next job. Cabal had next to nothing he couldn't live without in his room or anywhere on the first floor, and he was in and out the former to grab his backup travelling bag, a hidden bag of cash garnered from the year of the Carnival of Discord's operations (he had a feeling he would be needing a lot of money in the near future), and—somewhat to Horst's surprise and pleasure—a framed picture of their mother and father. That was it for the first floor.

The topmost floor consisted of Cabal's main attic laboratory. Here Cabal flung a shelf full of notebooks and journals into an old Gladstone bag, and then moved along the shelves rapidly and without vacillation choosing those things that would be very hard to replace. These were dropped on top of the notebooks, those things that he did not require being left to burn.

There was one point where he paused before a row of jars half filled with a clear liquid, almost colourless but for a hint of yellow. That he stood staring at them for more than a few seconds was enough to draw Horst's attention, busily loading a tea chest with pieces of equipment his brother had asked him to save.

‘What's in those jars? Something important?'

‘It's what's
not
in those jars that astonishes me, and gives me hope.'

‘Hope?'

Cabal turned his head, and Horst saw he was smiling slightly. ‘Miss Smith.'

Horst looked to the jars as understanding dawned. ‘Ohhh … Well, fingers crossed for a happy outcome there.'

‘Indeed so.' Cabal returned to selecting those things to be saved with a new vigour. ‘Indeed so.'

The attic laboratory scoured of all that was useful required three journeys. Cabal was sweating and dishevelled at the end of it, but Horst was still disgracefully unruffled. Cabal began entertaining thoughts that the phial had magically imbued his brother with the power to be more irritatingly perfect than even he had previously believed possible. On the last sortie, the stairwell had been difficult to negotiate, both in terms of the smoke noticeably thickening since the last one, and the choking effects it had as it gathered at the head of the well. Cabal glanced up at the skylight that illuminated the stairwell; as and when the fire broke it, then it would become beyond any hope of control. Between the broken windows and an open window at the top of the house, a convection flow would surely develop, feeding the flames with fresh oxygen and turning the building into an impromptu furnace.

‘We don't have long left,' he told Horst as they put down the last load of salvage from the attic by the garden gate.

‘Put out the fire! Burney fire! Ouchey fire!' chanted the garden folk as Denzil and Dennis ambled past, bearing buckets. They lined up in front of the sitting room window and attempted to fling water through the broken glass. Denzil underdid his swing of the bucket, and watered the base of the wall. Dennis overdid his, and ended his swing with the bucket on his head. Denzil regarded him for a moment, put down his own bucket, and tried to dry Dennis off with his hands, a hopeless venture given both of them had already fallen in the stream a half dozen times each. Finding his fingers wet, Denzil tried flicking water droplets from them at the fire.

The Cabals watched them, paragons of firefighting. Johannes Cabal shook his head. ‘There's no point in trying to sort them out. It would take hours. The fire will spread very soon and threaten the fabric of the house. The cellar; nothing is more vital now.'

Cabal wetted his handkerchief on a passing zombie and tied it over his nose and mouth. Horst demurred to do the same; he apparently felt few ill effects from the heat and smoke. Then they entered the house in which they had grown up together for the last time.

They made their way with the surety of long familiarity through the smoke in the hallway, across the black-and-white tiles of the corridor, across the parquet from the base of the stairwell, and so to the kitchen. There Cabal opened the door to the cellar and flicked the light switch. Electric lights glowed slowly into life, draining the last few minutes from the emergency storage batteries even as the automatic generator was coaxed into life by the demand for power. By the time they were halfway down the stairs, the generator had coughed a few times and was now chugging along quite contentedly. The light strengthened, and they looked around the first cellar, neatly arrayed with shelved assorted household oddments, storage boxes, fuel cans, and boxes of tinned food. They ignored them all, but for a large barrel. Here, they hesitated.

‘It's bigger than I remember,' said Horst.

‘We got it down here easily enough. We just reverse the process. You are more than strong enough to—'

‘I
was
strong enough. That was before I swallowed the contents of the phial.'

Cabal stared at him. ‘But … you still have your fangs. You've been carrying around great piles of books and equipment without obvious effort. I thought—'

‘No. I've changed.
Something's
changed. I can feel it. I'm not as strong as I was.' He looked around, found a large sack of potatoes, gripped it by the neck with one hand, and hefted it up.

Cabal pointed. ‘That is no small feat.'

‘Any decent circus strongman could do this.' Horst gasped with exertion. ‘This would have been nothing to me an hour ago. Now I'm really labouring to manage it.' He dropped the sack. ‘I'm not even half as strong as I was. That barrel, plus all the liquid in it, plus poor Alisha, how much is that going to weigh? I can't do it, Johannes.' He nodded towards where the hidden laboratory lay behind its secret door, his evident despair deepening. ‘And this thing is a feather's weight compared to the glass coffin.' He looked helplessly at his brother. ‘What are we going to do?'

He may not have been possessed of fangs and fashion sense, but Johannes Cabal was not without notable qualities, too. One of them was that he was rarely caught at a loss for more than a moment, no matter how dreadful the situation, no matter what the possible repercussions. In the house of his mind, the servants of his personality had permanent standing instructions that, not only was Herr Cabal never at home to Mr Panic, but that Mr Panic should be afforded a good larruping and sent away with a flea in his ear.

Thus, with no more time to think than was necessary for him to look away, sniff, and nod, a scheme was hatched and committed to wholeheartedly.

Cabal went to an old workbench in the corner, sorted through a small crate sitting on the corner of the bench's top, and returned with a short crowbar of the sort known as a jemmy. He handed it to Horst. ‘You can do this more quickly than I. Open the barrel.'

‘We're doing this now?'

‘We have little choice.' Above them, something thudded heavily to the floor, making them both glance up. They looked at one another, their thoughts the same. Cabal nodded at the barrel. ‘Quickly, please.'

Horst required no further assurance. He drove the bar's beak into the edge of the lid and levered violently. Perhaps too violently; the topmost hoop strained against the forced stave and threatened to snap. Horst paused, but Cabal said, ‘Break it,' so he did. Without requiring direction, he shifted his attention to the band around the barrel's equator. This refused to break, but the stave Horst was levering against moved in, and a curious fluid escaped, colourless and transparent, but seemingly flecked with tiny motes of light, pouring to the floor. Cabal joined in then, taking up a lump hammer from the workbench and smiting the neighbouring staves until they, too, loosened.

The liquid was escaping rapidly now, and the pressure against the inside of the barrel was diminishing. Horst loosened more staves from where the hoop had dug into them and was finally able to get a good grip on it and pull it up and off the barrel altogether. Without the metal band to hold them in place, the staves required little persuasion to disengage from the barrel's bottom and fall outwards like the petals of a wooden flower. The brothers leapt back, but were still soaked from the thighs downwards. In the centre of the flower lay the naked corpse of Alisha Bartos, former Prussian spy, former agent of the Dee Society, and victim of a
döppelganger
ambush.

‘I'm glad at least one of us has a jacket,' said Cabal, kneeling by her in the pool of thaumaturgical liquid. ‘She's going to get very cold otherwise.'

‘Johannes, what about…?' Horst nodded at the secret laboratory.

‘Berenice will be safe. I constructed her resting place with a mind to possible disasters, especially fire. The ceiling is heavily reinforced, as is the cover of her tomb, and I diverted a brook to run through around the walls of the glass coffin to keep it cool. She will be safe. She has to be safe.'

‘But all this was
for
Berenice, really! I mean, wasn't it? If you use that phial on Alisha—'

‘Zarenyia may still have her prize,' said Cabal. ‘There were five ways. If she no longer has her phial, then I shall find a sixth somewhere, somehow. Now hush. Necromancer at work.'

He took his cigarillo case from his trouser pocket and opened it. Snuggled safely between a pair of the black cigarillos was his share of the prize. He extracted it, lifted the corpse to a sitting position by him, and leaned back her head so the dead mouth flopped open.

‘Oh, gods.' Horst turned away. ‘I can't look at her like that.'

‘My brother the squeamish vampire,' said Cabal in an undertone. He flicked off the phial's lid and, with no ceremony whatsoever, dashed the contents into the cold, lifeless mouth and throat.

They waited expectantly. After a few moments, Cabal rolled back one of the corpse's eyelids for something to do in what was becoming a fraught silence. The exposed eye bore the unpromising blue-white glaze of the very dead.

‘Any signs of life?'

Cabal shook his head. ‘I admit, I'm very disappointed. Miss Barrow regained life with great promptitude. Perhaps being within the weave of the Five Ways was part of that effectiveness, or perhaps the length of time
post
-
mortem
may—'

He was interrupted by Fräulein Bartos's eyelid snapping shut as she reared up in his arms and vomited a spectacular quantity of clearish fluid speckled with silvery glowing motes. ‘That was a third possibility I was considering,' he told Horst.

Horst was crouching by her in a second. ‘Alisha! Are you all right? Can you speak?'

‘What…?' She stared wildly at them. ‘What happened?' She looked around. ‘Where are we? The monsters—'

‘The monsters are dead. You're safe.'

‘A very relative statement, given the state of the house,' muttered Cabal.

‘Safe? They speared me, Horst! Straight through me, here!' She looked down to indicate a place over her heart, and paused.

‘Why am I naked? And wet?'

‘That,' said Horst cautiously, ‘is a long story.'

‘And we do not currently have the leisure to explain it to you,' added Cabal. ‘Here's a jacket. You're welcome. May we cut along now?'

‘Wait, wait.' She looked narrowly at Cabal. ‘This is your doing, somehow. You've done something.'

Cabal sighed. ‘We are in a burning building. May we cut along now?'

She looked around her again. ‘What?'

‘You've been … ill, Alisha. A … coma! Yes, you were in a coma, we've been looking after you, you're all better now, and the house is on fire. We really had better go.'

‘A coma?'

Cabal sighed. ‘My brother's new euphemism for “dead”. But he's right about you being all better and the house being on fire. May we cut along, now, before we're all dead? Please? Yes? Splendid.'

Alisha Bartos's legs were weak under her, but Horst was more than delighted to carry her out, at first in an heroic cradle lift and then, after he managed to crack her head on a support beam, in a less heroic but far more practical fireman's carry, and crabbing his way up the stairs.

Behind him, Johannes Cabal hesitated and looked across to the unassuming section of wall that hid the entrance to the second laboratory. ‘It's a setback,' he whispered to the dead, ‘but it was the right thing to do. You would never have forgiven me if I'd let Fräulein Bartos boil in her barrel. So close. I will never give up.'

He followed Horst out of the cellar.

*   *   *

The hallway was impassable to mere mortals, so they went the back way and out into the small garden and paved yard there, and thence down the side passage to the front of the building. There they found Dennis and Denzil still engaged in throwing pitiful amounts of water through the broken window, despite Denzil himself being on fire. It was only a small patch of his ancient and horribly stained Casey Jones hat, but it promised to spread over him as surely as the fire was claiming the house, so Cabal told them to desist from fighting the fire and confine themselves to trying to put out Denzil's hat. This proved challenging until Dennis hit upon the happy strategy of using soil rather than water, the former being more immediately to hand. Denzil sat and patiently waited while Dennis threw handfuls of soil and clods of earth in the general direction of his head. Remarkably, the fire was doused by a lucky hit quite early on, but by then Denzil had forgotten why it was necessary to have soil thrown at him, and Dennis had forgotten why he was throwing soil at his colleague, but as both remembered it pertained to something important, they continued to do so with stolidity and perseverance.