The First Way: JOHANNES CABAL, THE NECROPOLITAN

 

It is traditional to explain, in great detail, the necessary preparations for a lengthy quest of any description. Supplies must be secured, routes decided, contingencies explored, dwarves fed, and so forth. Johannes Cabal, by contrast, bypassed the first largely by the use of finances transferred to banks along the way and the possession of letters of credit and cash in hand for more immediate use, while the second and third hands had already been decided in sufficient depth by Cabal himself without reference to anyone else, thereby forestalling any muddying of the organisational waters by bringing the opinions of others into the affair. As for dwarves, they could feed themselves as far he was concerned; he had no time for them or their interminable songs about gold.

There were, however, a few problems that he was unable to address until they became immediate and unavoidable.

‘I don’t wish to be the gooseberry who spoils the party,’ said Horst, ‘but Miss Zarenyia here is, by and large, a huge spider. I’m not sure they’ll let you on a train looking like that, ma’am.’

‘Won’t they?’ Zarenyia was miffed at such impoliteness. ‘Well, that’s prejudiced and barbaric of them.’ She pouted and shook her head in a sharp little motion. ‘Does this mean I shall have to pass for human?’

‘I fear so,’ said Cabal with uncharacteristic sympathy.

‘Oh, how utterly loathsome,’ she said, and adopted an expression of great concentration.

In juddering degrees, she leaned back so that the tip of the great abdomen touched the stone floor and the legs on her right side drew together, as did the legs on her left. There was no gradual metamorphosis, nor even an instantaneous change, but rather the disquieting air of two figures being there, one far more substantial than the other, formerly the spiderish in the ascendant and then latterly the human, although even that pivotal moment was impossible to judge or even to perceive.

Presently Miss Zarenyia was a fashionably dressed young lady with a small bustle where once she had sported a vast abdomen, a parasol, a hat, and even her hair had lost its gamine effect in favour of red ringlets that tumbled alongside the winsome face of the supernatural serial killer.

‘That’s how I wear my hair,’ said Leonie Barrow.

‘I know, darling.’ The devil was unabashed. ‘It’s pretty.’

Seeing no satisfaction imminent in that quarter, Leonie instead appealed to Cabal, who shrugged, and said, ‘It’s pretty.’

So the matter was settled.

‘The first two points of interest are in Abyssinia and Constantinople. Does anyone have any particular preferences?’

‘Well, obviously Horst and Leonie shall go to Constantinople.’ Zarenyia said it as a matter of indisputable fact.

‘Why?’ said Leonie, disputing it.

Zarenyia regarded her as if addressing somebody at a cocktail party who has just been introduced as the village idiot. ‘Because Abyssinia is frightfully hot and sunny and so forth, and you’re all pale and interesting. You’ll fry like a sinner, and furthermore it will bleach that lovely straw colour out of your hair. It cannot be permitted.’

Leonie looked askance at Zarenyia. ‘You’re pale, too,’ she pointed out. ‘A redhead.’

‘And—important point here that bears remembering—a devil. Not human in any sense that would delight the heart of a doctor. Denizen of Hell and all that? Everything is a warm afternoon to me, from pole to equator.’

Horst considered this. ‘Doesn’t that get boring?’

‘No.’ A thought occurred to Zarenyia, and she partially lifted her skirt to show her ankles. She regarded them with dissatisfaction. ‘I am sure that you are all thoroughly delighted to be bipedal, but really, you don’t know what you are missing out on. So wobbly.’ She dropped the hem and looked around. ‘So the scorching plains of Abyssinia for Johannes and me, and the louche pleasures of Constantinople for handsome Horst and lovely Leonie, then.’

And so that matter was settled, too.

*   *   *

It is further traditional to explain, in great detail, every footling detail of the trip from here to there. Why this should be is a mystery; one suspects it has something to do with contractual obligations with regard to the number of pages for such stories. Given that it is a novel that you are currently reading and not, for example, a travelogue or a hideously inaccurate biography of Sir Richard Burton, we shall therefore dispense with the travelling beyond the following few points.

It took Johannes Cabal and Zarenyia six days to reach a small township in the northern reaches of the country.

The trip was wholly uneventful, apart from the business with the slave traders. That all worked out well in the end as Zarenyia was given the opportunity to kill a few men, which improved her mood immeasurably, the rolling of the ship and the reduction in the number of legs she sported having combined to put her in a mild dudgeon.

There was also an attempted train robbery, but those happen all the time, so it’s hardly worth noting.

It would be remiss not to mention, albeit in passing, the affair with the tomb guardians. And now that it has been mentioned, we may pass on.

Also, a matter of some giant ants, but—given Zarenyia’s true form and some chemical ingenuity of Cabal’s part—dealing with them was a trivial matter requiring only the inflammation of some five thousand gallons of aviation spirit and the destruction of a dam.

Thus, after six days of restful travel, Cabal and Madam Zarenyia arrived at the small township in the northern reaches of Abyssinia, formerly described by some European observers as being the seat of Emperor Prester John.

This came as a surprise to the Abyssinians, who pointed out that they’d never heard of a ‘Prester John,’ and that ‘John’ was a fairly unlikely name for an Abyssinian in any case. Also, that they didn’t really have an exact term for ‘Emperor’ in the European sense, such creatures being surplus to requirements to the people of the region.* Therefore, of the name ‘Emperor Prester John,’ the first word was redundant and the last unlikely. They didn’t know what a ‘Prester’ might be, either. Nor did the Europeans, but that didn’t stop them from dismissing the Abyssinian protests as dilatory, distracting, and irrelevant. Wise heads in Europe had decided that—as it hadn’t turned out to be somewhere in Asia after all—then here lay the empire of Prester John, and the locals were too ignorant to have noticed it, or they might possibly be hiding it along with the Ark of the Covenant in a hut somewhere.

‘So is it here or isn’t it?’ asked Zarenyia. She was dressed in a summer frock of beguiling blue, unbesmirched by even a grain of dust, untroubled by any iota of feminine glow. Devils sweat when they want to, but it seemed like a lot of unnecessary work to her.

‘I thought I had explained this before.’ Cabal had, indeed, explained it before, but every explanation had been drawn down conversational side roads by Zarenyia not actually caring very much, or they had been distracted by attacking bandits, or giant ants.

‘The empire of Prester John never existed per se. It is a chimera of a place, lent form by the optimism—they might have characterised it as “faith”—of hundreds of thousands of fools.’

‘Christians?’

‘I believe I implied that.’

Zarenyia, whose view of humanity was necessarily alloyed by lengthy experience, nodded. ‘I see. So, who’s this “Percy”?’

At which point the conversation meandered once more.

*   *   *

The locals, wisely, shunned the strangers, although that wisdom was likely a function of a general distrust of a pair of white people, as if white people had ever done anything reprehensible in the continent of Africa. This suited the Caucasians in question admirably, as—in fairness—they comprised of a necromancer and a soul-devouring (albeit well-spoken) devil, and they were up to matters philosophical and bordering on nefarious, as so much philosophy does.

‘This is where the African location of Prester John’s capital was assumed to be by the gullible of Europe,’ said Cabal as they surveyed a small town, bounded by low hills on one side and an arid plain to the other. It did not seem to be much of a seat of anything, least of all government: scrubby trees, utilitarian buildings, bands of bush across the hills so darkly green as to be almost black, and a dusty pale red sand that coloured everything.

‘Scenic.’ Zarenyia seemed disinterested in the civic aspects of the place; the citizens drew her attention far more strongly. She regarded any passing man with an unwavering stare, the gaze of a praying mantis weighing up her prospects. The men started by walking by, and ended by scurrying out of sight, unsure why they felt so uncomfortable. ‘Scrawny creatures, aren’t they? Still, a soul’s a soul.’ She sighed. ‘I am making myself ever so available, and all I’m getting for my troubles is a lot of frightened looks and scuttling. Haven’t they ever seen a gorgeous woman before?’

‘Perhaps, perhaps not. But if they have, I suspect that encounter involved blinking.’

‘Blinking! I’m such a fool. I keep forgetting to do that.’ She slowly closed her eyes and opened them again. ‘There, perfect.’

‘Perfection indeed, Miss Zarenyia, if only performed approximately twenty times faster.’

‘So critical. I do it easily enough when I’m more myself. I’m concentrating so hard on not falling over when I’m forced onto two legs, I forget those little details.’

‘Blinking.’

‘Blinking. Breathing. Bipedal locomotion. That’s just repeatedly interrupted falling over, you realise?’ She smiled suddenly, her mood mercurial but rarely melancholy for longer than it takes to say ‘melancholy’. ‘So, onwards! To adventure, excitement, and oodles of delicious murder. How do we progress from this dusty town?’

‘This dusty town is our destination, madam. I thought I had impressed that upon you many times during the journey here?’

‘Oh, probably. But you do that thing and I get distracted.’

Cabal favoured her with a blink only slightly faster than her own. ‘That thing?’

‘You know.’ He clearly didn’t, despite her flapping one hand at him impatiently. ‘That thing when you talk.’

Cabal considered. ‘When I explain?’

‘That’s it! I just go, “Ooh, another explanation!” and then…’ She passed the previously flapping hand across her face. Before it arrived, her expression was vibrant and engaged. After it had passed, her face was slack and her eyes rolled up. She held this for a moment before life returned. ‘It’s like magic! Hmmm.’ She looked at him inquisitively. ‘Are you sure that you’re a necromancer? You might be a tediumancer without realising it.’

‘Very well,’ said Cabal. The very definition of ‘a losing proposition’ was to try to imbue Zarenyia with any sense of gravity or seriousness. ‘No more explanations.’

‘Unless I ask. And then make them snappy with lots of hand gestures so I don’t suddenly pass out.’

‘That is hardly me, madam. You describe an Italian. Nevertheless, I shall be brief. You will have to imagine the hand gestures. This’—and here he indicated the town—‘is a mundane location lent arcane significance via—’

And here he was interrupted by Zarenyia’s eyes rolling up, her jaw drooping, and a loud, pantomimish snore ratcheting up out of her throat as if she’d swallowed a ripsaw.

‘It’s a magic gate,’ said Cabal.

Zarenyia smiled.

*   *   *

The necromancer and the devil processed through the court of Prester John with great aplomb born of ennui in the former case and a degree of playacting in the latter. Cabal walked steadily, his face stony, disregarding the fabulous sights of the most fabulous court the world had ever known, but that it had never been more than a phantasm of desperation. Before a stern throne of ebony curled around with what seemed to be the tusks of mastodons, Prester John looked down serried rows of lesser kings, plenipotentiaries, lords, and recanted sultans. Cabal ignored them all. Zarenyia waved, and smiled, and complimented people on their hats.

‘Well, this doesn’t seem so bad,’ she said in a stage whisper.

‘They cannot hear you,’ said Cabal in his usual tones. ‘They do not exist. They have never existed.’

‘Hush! You’ll upset them.’

But Cabal did not upset them, because they were entirely insensate to the presence of the interlopers. It was an endless moment of glory: the greatest Christian emperor—never defeated in war and bane of the infidel Mussulmen—accepted the same envoys, the same gifts, gave the same solemn nods of acknowledgement and acceptance, for all eternity, a gorgeously rendered painting from an improving book for Western children that lived and moved but never progressed.

‘Oh,’ said Zarenyia. ‘Perhaps you won’t upset them.’ She crossed her eyes and pulled a horrid face in front of an emissary of the tsars. Beneath his fur hat, which must have been uncomfortable in that environment, he did not spare her a look, nor react in any way, or even sweat. She tried patting his face, but the solid flesh flowed around her fingers like motes in a shaft of sunlight and reformed quickly and perfectly. The emissary did not seem aware his cheek and jaw had temporarily been wafted into dust, but carried on as he always had.

‘This is nothing,’ said Cabal. ‘At the always-present risk of boring you, I must emphasise that this is only a gateway. What lies beyond it will be far more solid, more reactive, and infinitely more dangerous.’

‘Good-oh!’ said Zarenyia.

*   *   *

Cabal opened his ubiquitous Gladstone bag and removed the small tripod with the telescopic legs from which depended the silver plumb upon its silver chain. He set this up beneath the gaze of Zarenyia, who regarded it all with the least possible interest, saving her attention and commentary for the wardrobes of the assembled spectres of those who had never died, having never lived.

Cabal in return ignored her notes upon that man’s novel fez with the mechanical mice peeking from it, or that bishop’s mitre of golden crystal, or that near-naked slave’s natural charms. Around the throne of the emperor, and the subordinate thrones of 7 kings, the ranks of 62 dukes, of 256 counts and marquises, 12 archbishops and 20 bishops, Zarenyia wandered, and none escaped without some comment, her well of observation proving bottomless, her expression boundless, her conclusions pointless, but diverting for all that.

It was only when Cabal produced a syringe that her interest was piqued by the business in hand.

‘Oh, narcotics! How very exciting. What will that do to you?’

Cabal regarded the syringe, then her, and decided this was going to become unnecessarily complicated. In this, he was perfectly correct.

‘The drug will dull my mind, allowing me to enter the light trance necessary to precipitate the creation of a portal to the first of the pocket realities we must explore.’

‘Dull your mind,’ repeated Zarenyia, calculation upon her mind. ‘A light trance.’ She crouched by Cabal and looked him in the eye. ‘You only had to ask, darling. You don’t have to resort to polluting your pretty little body to manage that.’

Cabal didn’t like the way the conversation was going at all. He sought respite in technicality. ‘The technique is recognised. Indeed, I have experienced entirely satisfactory effects…’

‘I’m sure you have, and now it’s time for some new satisfactory effects.’ She gently knocked the barrel of the syringe to one side with her index finger. ‘Now hush and let me take care of you.’

‘Madam Zaren—’

She lifted the same finger and placed it to his lips. ‘Hush,’ she said with a subtle change of emphasis, taking it from a suggestion to an imperative too compelling to require anything so gross as an exclamation mark.

‘—yeeuhhhh…’ managed Cabal, the last syllables of her name turning to molten butter on his tongue, a process his mind seemed to be emulating. Cabal had, upon his first acquaintance with the devil some years previously, wondered how a woman with eight legs made such an infallible seductress given the prevalence of arachnophobia amongst the common people. He had subsequently seen her practise her wiles, which—although educational in its own way—had not sufficiently clarified why her lovers and victims (a tautology) so signally failed to appreciate that physical congress with a diabolical half-spider monster might not conclude with any sort of happy ending that they could later appreciate.

Now, and accepting the point that she was currently passing for human, he understood all too well. Back in the days when he ran a carnival, one of his hellish crew had belonged to the same order as Zarenyia, and she had carried a troubling air of incipient control around with her, too. On that occasion, however, he had never had the displeasure or otherwise of having that mien exerted upon him.

‘There,’ said Zarenyia in little more than a whisper. ‘There you go. Easy to become stupid for me, isn’t it?’

Part of Cabal was outraged by this assertion. It was positing explanations for the effect he was currently experiencing. Pheromones, perhaps. A supernatural hypnogogic agent exuded from her skin, and thence through his lips into his blood. A magical effect. As he considered these, his small internal committee grew smaller and quieter, until there was near silence in his mind. It was blissful.

‘Now,’ said Zarenyia. She straightened back to a stand and looked down upon him with that habitual, small smile on her lips. ‘Now you’re all dull, just like you wanted. And no nasty drugs. Say “thank you”.’

Cabal made two small grunts that certainly sounded like ‘Thank you’ when they left the speech centres of his brain, but which seemed to have turned into syntactic porridge on the short run to his larynx, tongue, and lips.

Still, they sufficed. ‘You’re welcome.’ She gestured vaguely at the court of ghosts. ‘Now perform your wonderment, Johannes. Take us where we are supposed to be.’

Cabal lowered his eyes to the dusty stone beneath his knees, and his mind twitched in a reflexive, simple way that was far too mundane for him to cogitate in the normal run of affairs. The silver plumb weight swung violently upon its tripod, so violently that first this foot then that lifted. Then the tripod fell over as if kicked, the contraption tumbled onto its side, and the slight musical tinkle it made as metal tapped against metal seemed to raise the curtain upon an entirely new theatre.

The mirage that was the court of Prester John flicked away in that moment as if it were merely a reflection cast upon the glass of a deeper reality. A truer, hidden reality. A terrible reality.

It takes a great deal to frighten a devil, and Zarenyia was frightened. ‘Johannes!’ she cried. ‘What have you done? Look where you have brought us! Pandæmonium!’

*   *   *

Angular plains crouched incipient and frangipane beneath a sky full of everything. If one took a surrealist of the first water, dosed him upon the most efficacious hallucinogens available, then took him to sit in Cthulhu’s parlour for an afternoon, and finally gave him art materials to express the resultant inner landscape, it would still have looked like Market Rasen High Street on a wet bank holiday afternoon in comparison to Pandæmonium, and surely this locale was just as pandæmonius as all that?

Yes, but no. It certainly seemed like Pandæmonium, Hell’s parliament eternally adrift in the spoil heap of the Abyss where Satan dumps his mistakes. But as awareness returned to the briefly enfeebled mind of Johannes Cabal, so did his rationality, and he was able to settle Zarenyia’s mind just as easily as she had previously dulled his.

‘No. Calm yourself. Pandæmonium possesses no natural ground, only the floors within the building proper. I grant you, there is a superficial similarity, but that is entirely due to the state of the sky, and that in turn is a result of an unfinished creation. It is a cousin of the Abyss, I admit, but it certainly is not the Abyss.’

Zarenyia looked around, trying to bring herself back under control. Cabal wondered what had happened since the last time he met her, that the Abyss had gone from a mild concern to a consuming terror.

‘You’re sure?’ She looked at him seeking confirmation as a drowning man reaches for a straw.

‘Madam, have I turned into a fish?’

She considered this. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You haven’t turned into a fish.’

At her first sight of the insane sky, she had instinctively drawn her head down, shying from the wrath of a cantankerous Lucifer. Now she straightened and looked at him and then the sky with full confidence.

‘You’re not a fish, so it isn’t the Abyss.’

‘I feel no chaotic effects upon me, and for that I am grateful and relieved. The fish business is not something I care to repeat.’

‘You made an adorable hake.’

‘Madam,’ Cabal said with great dignity, ‘I was a halibut.’*

Matters of piscine nomenclature satisfied, the subject moved onto where exactly they had found themselves.

‘I understand your concerns, madam. The sky certainly has a certain abyssal quality to it, but the rest of the environment is a very different thing.’ He looked around the blasted wasteland, a frown forming. ‘Very different indeed.’

‘That’s your “I’m having a clever thought” voice,’ observed Zarenyia. ‘I know that voice anywhere. What is your clever thought, darling?’

‘“Clever” is a very subjective thing—’

‘But you think you’re terrifically clever, so we’ll just take that for read, shall we? What’s the thought?’

Cabal gave her a sour look. For an inhuman entity, she was sometimes disconcertingly human in her views and insights. Mind you, they do say that you are what you eat.

‘I have seen somewhere like this before.’

‘Well, it is a graveyard. That’s like a social club to a necromancer, surely?’

‘Matter of the unsociable natures of necromancers aside, yes, but no. When I say I have seen somewhere—been somewhere like this before—I do not speak of generalities. There is a distinct sense of—’

He broke off, staring down the ragged vale. Zarenyia allowed her practised disinterest a pause long enough to say, ‘Whatever is the matter, Johannes? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Oh!’ She matched the direction of his gaze with excitement. ‘Is it haunted? Tell me it’s haunted!’

Cabal said nothing in reply, however. He started to walk in the direction of whatever had caught his attention, first in a distracted manner, then with determination, and then he started to run, leaving a baffled but increasingly enthused Zarenyia in his wake.

‘Is there danger?’ she called after him. ‘Is it dangerous? Should we make ready? Or something?’ He did not reply. ‘Good enough for me,’ she said to herself, and erupted into legs, and knees, and angora, her previous outfit flittering away into the gaps between realities where she kept her spare clothes. If you should be walking and, suddenly and unaccountably, smell lavender and mothballs, you may just have passed a corner of Zarenyia’s intra-dimensional closet.

Resplendent in her natural form and exultant to no longer have to totter around in that ridiculous manner, Zarenyia rose to her not inconsiderable greatest height, shouted, ‘I’ll save you!’ despite there being no obvious threat, and galloped in pursuit of her friend, the funny human Johannes.

She reached him as he stood before a small funereal building of the sort that leads down to a family crypt. Its door swung open. Cabal stood before it as if it were the most horrible thing he had ever seen.

‘Stand back!’ she cried. ‘Let me protect you from this … building…’ She pursed her lips, and added conversationally, ‘I’m not sure you’re in peril at all.’

Cabal seemed not to hear. He reached out and lifted the door’s padlock from where it dangled open on the frame’s hasp. It was in far better condition than the mouldering stone it had once been set to protect, a very practical artefact in stainless steel. He looked at it aghast, as if he held his own heart in his hand.

‘Padlock,’ Zarenyia said informatively.

‘It pays’—Cabal spoke in a low, dreadful voice, his thoughts materialising on his lips—‘to invest in quality.’ He looked up at the lintel above the door. Engraved in the stone was the name DRUIN. ‘Oh, gods. What place is this? What have I done in coming here?’

‘Oooh.’ Zarenyia found the change in Cabal’s mood unengaging. ‘Angsty. I didn’t think you were one of those necromancers.’

‘You don’t understand.’ Cabal walked a little way to lean against a table tomb, from where he regarded the crypt building with a strange mixture of disbelief and, just perhaps, fear.

‘Bingo! I don’t understand. As a word to the wise, I recommend you tell me why this ragged little stone box has put your knickers in a twist. Please don’t be enigmatic. I’ve killed people for saying “I’ll explain later”. Delayed gratification and I are not the best of chums.’

‘It’s the Druin crypt.’

‘I can read.’

‘I’ve been to it twice in my life. The first time I…’

He looked unhappily at Zarenyia. She wagged her finger at him, then used the same finger to draw across her throat while she made a horrible cutting noise. ‘That’s what being enigmatic will do for you. Fess up. What happened?’

‘You said you wouldn’t harm me.’

‘True. But, you know, I’m a devil. We’re good at the whole loopholes palaver. I hate doing that usually, but who knows what awful things I may stoop to if provoked by my little pal Johannes being enigmatic and abstruse at me?’ She lowered her voice, and the smile vanished. ‘Pretty bloody awful things, that’s what.’

‘I inadvertently abandoned my brother in there.’

‘And inadvertently locked the door? This is your brother the vampire, yes?’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Wait a moment … is this why he’s a vampire?’ Cabal did not answer, which was answer enough. She laughed. ‘Well, aren’t you the loving brother?’

‘I had no choice.’

‘I’m sure. And the second time was to let him out again? How long did you leave him to stew?’

Cabal muttered something, but Zarenyia’s hearing was as supernatural as the rest of her.

‘Eight years?’

‘Yes. I’m not proud of it.’

Zarenyia shrugged. ‘I don’t care if you are or not. My moral compass is…’ She considered. ‘I’m not at all sure I have one. I’m sure you had your reasons for abandoning your brother to eight years of frustrated vampirism in somebody else’s tomb. My main bone of contention is … what the Lucifer’s cribbage board is it doing here? I thought this wasn’t a real place.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘I thought you said these places had been created donkey’s years ago as a way of hiding the Fountain of Grails, or whatever it is you think you’re going to find.’

‘It was.’

‘Well, kindly explain to my poor womanly brain why it has a sky like the Abyss and a landscape scattered with aide-mémoirs to your family squabbles.’ She squatted back on the loom of her legs so their knees rose like the tusks around the throne of Prester John himself. ‘Have you the faintest idea what you have got yourself and—I remind you—your poor ill-done-to brother, Horst, the delightful Miss Leonie, and my very own lovely self into? Honestly, Johannes, you’re supposed to be the clever one. I’m very disappointed.’

Few things could snap Johannes Cabal back to acerbity with greater rapidity than personal criticism. ‘I do not know,’ he said slowly and deliberately. ‘Yet. This is not how the book presented matters. Yet it was so accurate in other particulars. Therefore, I must conclude that the book’s author simply never travelled through into these places—’

‘Or deliberately lied?’ Zarenyia’s eyes went wide at this revelation. Then she smiled broadly, a big, childish grin of delight. ‘Oh, I hope the latter! Don’t you see what that would mean, darling?’

She looked around the bitter wasteland, the tumbled tombs, the festering sky as if it were the first sight of an empty beach on a summer’s bank holiday morning. ‘It’s a trap!’ She clapped her hands, all agog and gleeful. ‘So exciting!’

*   *   *

Cabal opined that it could only be a trap if it was impossible to leave the place using the route by which they had entered. This hypothesis, once mooted, was easily tested. They could not leave the place using the route by which they had entered.

Cabal swore volubly at this discovery, which served for a QED under the circumstances.

‘This is Ninuka’s doing. Possibly.’ He glared at the land of graves. Here was the one when he’d been interrupted by a nightwatchman. There was the one where the coffin had been full of bricks, resulting in a complicated few days subsequently. There was the … no, he wasn’t sure he had ever been in that tomb. Still, it looked familiar. ‘Although it seems overly complicated by her lights. How could she have known I would find the book and recognise it for its importance?’ He ruminated on this for a moment, disliked the answer that Ninuka was a great deal cleverer than he had given her credit, and ran that train of thought into a siding where it wouldn’t put his self-esteem at quite so much risk.

‘So, what to do?’ said Zarenyia. She was still delighted about the whole state of affairs, on the understanding that presently a horde of hirelings of their shadowy nemesis (i.e., Lady Ninuka) would turn up and she could kill them all, eventually.

‘There is little else we can do, except press on.’ Cabal lifted his bag from the unhealthy turf. He was unsure in which direction they should press on to, exactly. Graves, crypts, and tombs scattered the land in every direction, and all looked just as uninviting as one another. As for that tomb … he looked at it again. He never forgot a tomb, but there was something ineffably evasive about it as it refused to present itself even as he mentally combed the memories of every graveyard, cemetery, burying ground, potter’s field, bone orchard, and boot hill he had ever had cause to drive a spade into. It wasn’t even that it was a commonplace design: an ancient and weather-aged pagoda some six yards in height, its surfaces plated in slabs of jade. Less a sombre place of rest than a folly or outré statement of the occupant or occupants’ worth, a last resting place for somebody of great import—at least in the mind of their estate—to dream away eternity, even as …

There must have been some subtle message in the way Cabal stumbled backwards, gazing eye-widened at the pagoda that tipped off Zarenyia to the possibility that all was not well with her comrade.

‘Is everything all right?’ she asked perspicaciously as Cabal fell over.

Cabal raised a quivering finger to point at the pagoda. ‘That … that … I know where I have seen it before…’

‘It’s not yours, is it? Have you had some thrilling foresight of the future and seen yourself carried in state within its emerald walls? Is that it? It is, isn’t it?’ She considered the building with a critic’s eye. ‘It’s very nice, isn’t it? I must confess, Johannes, it’s not the sort of place I expected you to end up interred. I was thinking something more along the lines of a ditch.’

‘No.’ Cabal recovered his feet and a few lamentable fragments of his dignity. ‘It isn’t mine. But I remember where I’ve seen it before, and it’s impossible that it should be here. Everything else’—he gestured broadly at the tumbling necropolis—‘has some personal resonance. This … shouldn’t even exist. Not here.’

Zarenyia rolled her eyes with impolite incomprehension. ‘Sorry, poppet, but I don’t have the first and foggiest idea what you are talking about. Why shouldn’t it be here if you’ve seen it in the real world? I say “real world” to be polite, of course. I mean that pit of a world you humans swarm about.’

‘It wasn’t in the real world.’

Zarenyia showed a modicum of increased interest. ‘Hell, then? You’ve seen it in Hell?’

‘I’ve seen it in the Dreamlands, in the great necropolis of Hlanith. But the stuff of the Dreamlands and of the mundane world are entirely different. This place cannot possess both.’

‘Copies, perhaps?’

‘Not content with taking landmarks from my life, this place contents itself to copy them, too? No. It is the original, impossible though that is. Truly, this is an awful place.’

‘Johannes…’ Zarenyia spoke slowly and suspiciously. ‘Are you frightened?’

‘No,’ said Cabal, but he lied.

He had been sarcastic to demons, dismissive to Satan’s face, and called Nyarlathotep a little bastard. He had been impolite to cultists, behaved indecorously towards his fellow necromancers, and had once tried—unsuccessfully—to upset a vicar. He had not wavered in any of these endeavours. He was quite capable of feeling fear, he knew, but it was a rare circumstance and rarely—no, never—had he been so existentially threatened as he felt now.

There were rules, laws, principles that governed everything, rules, laws, and principles that controlled every falling raindrop, every whirl of an electron, every frolicking ghost. These laws he understood better than most, and those laws said this place could not be. A pocket universe containing material aspects of the mundane, mortal world was one thing, but it was the presence of an artefact of the Dreamlands in the same place that put it all awry. It was tantamount to an electrical cell having two positives, or a planet failing to generate any gravitational pull; it simply could not happen.

There were, then, principles to which he was not privy, and to which he had never guessed at, and which he did not begin even to understand how he might understand. Not only had he built his house of science upon shifting sands, so had everybody else.

Yes, he was frightened.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Where do you get these absurd ideas?’

‘Oh.’ She looked at the pagoda and added conversationally, ‘Oh, look, the door’s opening.’

The door to the jade pagoda was, in fact, a low double door, barely tall enough for the average pall-bearer to pass without crouching. The right hand of the two doors was slowly swinging inwards before them, an inky darkness—uninformative in its totality—being the only thing revealed.

‘Do you suppose this is part of the trap, too?’ Zarenyia weighed up the possibilities. ‘I must say, as traps go it’s a little bit lazy, isn’t it? Tiny bit short in the bait department. Why would we want to go in there?’ She squinted, her inhuman senses apparently able to make something out of the pervading shadow. ‘Oh, it’s all right, after all. It’s not trying to get us to go in. It’s letting something out. Much better.’

Something shapeless and dark detached itself from the blackness and covered the ground from the open door to Cabal in a confusion of flutters.

It spoke in a furious voice. ‘Cabal!’ The voice was human. ‘I trusted you!’ The voice was female. A hand rose from the tatters and wings of what the better light revealed to be a robe. The hand bore a gleaming, curved dagger.

Cabal stood too astounded to defend himself, so it was as well that Zarenyia was less impressed by the proceedings. She stilted forwards in a shimmer of legs and sent one of them rising in a sharp arc that intercepted the shadowed figure’s chest. The figure emitted a loud ‘Oof!’ of expelled breath and flew back some ten feet to land heavily, the dagger landing safely out of its reach.

The figure tried to rise, but Zarenyia wasn’t having that. In a moment she was standing over the attacker, one foot planted firmly, indeed painfully, upon the assailant’s midriff. The woman struggled, but Zarenyia wasn’t having that, either.

‘Now, now, darling,’ she chided, ‘don’t be awkward. Not when I can run you through so very easily. And I have far more interesting plans for you than something as wasteful as a dull old impalement.’ Behind her, Zarenyia’s spiderly abdomen started to pulse with a salacious anticipation.

‘No!’ Cabal ran towards spider and fly, waving with both arms as if trying to stop an oncoming train. ‘Madam! You must not kill her!’

‘Oh, what?’ Zarenyia regarded the approaching necromancer with sour disappointment. ‘Really? You said I could murder people, Johannes! I must say, this outing is proving a bit shy on souls devoured, if you can bear a little criticism?’

Cabal arrived puffing slightly. ‘Madam…’ He withdrew a notebook while he recovered his breath. ‘By my reckoning on this expedition you have so far enjoyed the vital essences of twelve slave traders, five train robbers, and eight cultists of dubious taste—’

‘You’re telling me…’

‘—and I therefore must protest that twenty-five victims in no way constitutes “a bit shy” of the opportunities I promised you.’

‘Do you have to call them “victims”? It makes it all seem so very sordid.’

‘What would you suggest?’

Zarenyia considered. ‘Playmates?’

‘Victims it is, then.’

‘Oh, Johannes.’ Zarenyia was pouting unashamedly. ‘But they were a bunch of horrid criminals with stinky souls. This girl smells much nicer. Mayn’t I just—’

‘You may not.’ Cabal crossed his arms and looked steadily up at Zarenyia.

‘Just a nibble?’

‘No.’

‘She tried to stab you.’ Zarenyia rather spitefully leaned a little more weight on her prisoner, making the pinned woman cry out.

‘Lots of people have tried to stab me. It doesn’t mean I killed them all.’ He took a moment to think about that. ‘Actually, that’s a bad example. I did kill them all. But I don’t want you to kill her.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Two reasons. She was communicated to this place during its creation and may be able to offer us vital intelligence about it. And secondly’—he crouched by the prone figure and drew back the ragged black hood to reveal a woman in her mid-twenties, pale of skin, raven black of hair, a stark tiara or crown in deepest ebon upon her brow—‘because we are acquainted. Hello, Fräulein Smith. An unexpected pleasure.’

With a little chivvying, Zarenyia finally lifted her foot, and she stood by in a sullen silence as Cabal helped Miss Smith to her feet. Once she was vertical, he left her to recover her dagger and returned it to her, hilt first. ‘I forgive your first instinctive reaction to seeing me, Miss Smith; the situation is unusual, and one can easily be forgiven for being a little fraught. I would ask you not to attempt my murder again, however. It would be counterproductive to both of us.’

Miss Smith gave Zarenyia a dirty look, which the devil accepted with a prim smile. ‘Did you do this, Cabal? Did you destroy the Dreamlands?’

‘I fear you overstate my influence, Miss Smith. If I have inadvertently damaged any of the Dreamlands, it is only your corner of the old cemetery of Hlanith necropolis. Believe you me, I am as astonished by your presence in this place as you are. You are, in the vernacular, collateral damage.’

He was interrupted in his explanations by a mannered cough delivered from on moderately high. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but introductions are in order. Miss Smith, allow me to introduce the succubine devil Zarenyia.’

‘Don’t tell her that right off the wicket,’ said Zarenyia pettishly. ‘We’ll have nothing to talk about.’

‘And, Zarenyia, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Miss Smith, former necromantrix and lately the Witch of the Old Cemetery of Hlanith—’

‘Ooh, career change,’ said Zarenyia with faux warmth.

‘—with whom I’m sure you’ll get on famously.’

Miss Smith regarded the octopodal Zarenyia with cool hostility. ‘And you trust a devil, do you, Cabal?’

‘I do. We have an understanding. Madam Zarenyia has undertaken not to harm me or my friends.’

‘I undertook not to harm you, your toothsome brother, or that handsome lady with the troublesome morals. Not your “friends” in general.’

‘True, in which case I must ask you to extend your forbearance to Miss Smith. We are old acquaintances.’

Zarenyia inhaled and sighed out the breath with bored disgust. ‘You realise she’s another deader, don’t you? I’m not quite sure how she’s walking around, but that’s not the mortal coil she was born into. Although … it sort of is. How is that?’

Cabal briefly explained that the body she currently wore was her dreaming form, her actual physical body having been inopportunely hanged by a rampaging mob while she was spiritually elsewhere, and her corpse subsequently used experimentally by another passing necromancer.

‘I told you we were old acquaintances,’ said Johannes Cabal.

‘What a sweet story,’ said Zarenyia. ‘I welled up at several moments. Very well, darling, very well. I don’t much enjoy feeding upon the double dead at the best of times, and you seem nice enough, so yes, consider yourself proof from my devilish wiles.’ She solemnly raised the three middle fingers of her right hand, thumb across the little finger and intoned the sacred oath, ‘Dib, dib, dib.’

Smith looked quizzically at Cabal. ‘What?’

‘It’s complicated. Just accept the dibbing.’

Miss Smith returned her attention to Zarenyia, and bowed. ‘Your dibbing is appreciated, and accepted.’

And so, their fellowship increased by one, they considered whatever to do next.

‘This is a deeply arcane situation in which we find ourselves,’ said Cabal. ‘I hope Horst and Miss Barrow are faring better than we.’

*   *   *

There was an awkward pause, eventually broken by Miss Smith. ‘You’re just standing there,’ she said to Cabal. ‘Are you waiting for something?’

Cabal seemed surprised by her comment and then confused. He looked around as if expecting to find an explanation for that confusion written in the air. Finding that an unrewarding avenue of inquiry, he turned back to his companions.

‘That was a peculiar sensation. I had a distinct idea that our concerns would be put into abeyance, for a while at least. Yet, no. They are as pressing as they were a moment ago. How very strange.’

‘You want strange? I can do you strange,’ said Zarenyia, already happy to regard their presence in a mosaic of existential ‘graveyards I have known’ fragments as perfectly normal. She pointed at the ground a little way ahead of them. ‘I think they’ve got mice.’

A grave lay open, hastily and brutally excavated and the coffin disinterred with vigour rather than care. Bones lay scattered, scraps of meat still adhering to some of them. With the easy lack of repugnance or propriety those who deal regularly with the dead exhibit, Miss Smith took up one of the bones and examined it closely. ‘Teeth marks,’ she said immediately. ‘Ghouls.’

‘Oh.’ Cabal was thoroughly blasé at the prospect. ‘I thought we might be in trouble for a minute. Both Miss Smith and I have had extensive dealings with the ghouls. I doubt we’ll have much trouble from them.’

‘I cannot agree,’ said Miss Smith. ‘The ghouls of this place are not like the ones of the necropolis, nor any others I have ever met. Look, Cabal, see how clumsily the grave is opened, how thoughtlessly the traces are scattered.’

It was true; ghouls are fastidious eaters for purposes of self-preservation if nothing else. They eat what they need and no more, and they always tidy up after themselves. They see no profit in drawing attention to themselves, for that way lies outraged humans, and all ghouls really want is a quiet life and moderately gamy meat. This foresightedness has, through generations, become more instinctive than habitual. They would as soon leave blatant clues of their presence as they would boil their heads, leave off breathing, or take up Morris dancing.

‘Make up your mind.’ Cabal nodded at the gory bone. ‘Those are either ghoul teeth marks or they are not.’

‘They are, but their behaviour is distinctly inghoulish,’ replied Miss Smith, deploying a technical term unique to the profession of necromancy. ‘I have always had an easy relationship with them, as you know. But ever since I was brought here … I thought they had been transported along with me. I heard them, snickering and glibbering, and was relieved at first. At least I would have allies. But they would not speak. Not only to me, but even to one another. I was forced to take refuge in the pagoda.’

‘From the ghouls?’ Cabal was aghast; for the ghouls to menace her was equivalent to being threatened by … by …

The simile foundered in his mind—nothing should be less threatening to Miss Smith than ghouls.

‘I never saw them clearly, but their outlines were wrong, their voices wrong, everything they did, so very wrong. And’—if she had seemed distressed by her recitation of the shortcomings of these ghouls, it was as nothing to the awful thing she found she must now report—‘there’s another.’ Her voice sank. ‘Another witch. I’ve seen her, with them. The nights here are short, but so are the days. On the first night I was here, I thought I heard something in the distance, so I crept out from the pagoda, and went to see. Johannes, they were having an orgy. An actual graveyard orgy.’ She looked thoroughly perturbed at the memory. ‘It was horrible.’

Zarenyia made a dismissive noise. ‘I’ve been to oodles of orgies. You’re just a prude.’

Miss Smith glared at Zarenyia. ‘I am not.’

Zarenyia lowered her forebody so she could look Miss Smith in the eye, rested her chin in one palm, and smiled a little triumphantly. ‘Really? Do tell.’

‘I should point out that the orgies Madam Zarenyia attends subsequently fill the obituary columns for weeks afterwards,’ offered Cabal.

Zarenyia favoured him with a dirty look, but didn’t deny it.

Miss Smith shook her head. ‘No, you don’t understand. The orgy … it was trite. That’s why it was horrible. Honestly, I’m a witch who lives in a graveyard. You think I haven’t seen orgies before? This one looked like it had been planned by a vicar based on overhearing the sexual fantasies of the choir. It was asinine.’

‘I confess I am having trouble imagining an asinine orgy,’ said Cabal.

‘Oh, I’m not.’ Zarenyia crossed her arms and grimaced, a devil of the world. ‘I’ve seen some bloody awful ones. Really, the most fun for the attendees was when I had them. Also their last fun, but that’s the price for my favours.’

‘A steep price.’

‘I’ve had no complaints.’

Miss Smith interrupted. ‘It looked staged, is what I’m trying to say. It was like a novelist’s portrayal of a witch’s orgy, sporting with monsters. That sort of thing.’

‘Never done anything like that yourself, then?’ asked Zarenyia with professional interest.

‘With ghouls? Eew. No. I mean, they’re sweet beasts, but they’re a bit … eew. If I feel the need for a little companionship, I leave the necropolis and visit the taverns.’

‘I feel we are getting off the subject,’ said Cabal, thoroughly out of his depth and far from matters he found comfortable. ‘Still, we have at least established a distinct oddity in this place. The tombs and graves are real enough, and it even had the option of a real graveyard witch. Yet instead we find a form of playacting in progress. This warrants investigation.’

‘Why?’ said Zarenyia.

‘Because the nature of the place seems to be formed based on those who visit it. Mortal remains, witches, and orgies. These are our concerns, are they not? All are materialised here, and one hopes there is purpose in that, because finding that purpose may be our only way out.’

*   *   *

The trees became weird and eccentric in their growth, the grass a brighter yet more toxic green as they progressed. None of them commented on the matter, but it was apparent to them all that the place of graves was becoming distinctly more melodramatic as they grew closer to the home of the new witch and her cohort of fantastical ghouls, as opposed to the more workaday ghouls with which Cabal was all too familiar.

‘What are we intending to do when we find this interloper, anyway?’ asked Zarenyia, traipsing lightly across the lurid sod upon her many pointed feet. ‘I have to say, I’m a little underwhelmed at the idea of bringing my particular brand of good times to a bunch of corpse-eating doggy boys.’

‘I feel the opportunities for murder are still many and alluring, madam.’ Cabal was cleaning his blue-glassed spectacles as he walked, and then attended to the hang of his cravat. When the enemy—and enemy they were, he felt sure—were finally encountered, it would be to his advantage to be able to see them properly, and to theirs to be done away with by a man with tidy neckwear, if only from a sense of terminal satisfaction.

‘I am not devouring the soul of a ghoul. Heavens only knows where they’ve been, grubby beggars. I don’t mind the soul of a double-dyed villain—those are spicy—but I have my limits.’

Cabal, whose own view of ghouls had not been dissimilar until he had endured a brief period of ghouldom himself, decided not to mention any special interest in her views one way or the other. It would only lead to the sort of face-pulling already exhibited by Miss Smith on the same subject, he knew.

‘We’re almost there,’ said Miss Smith, her tone determined but also betraying apprehension. ‘You do have a plan, don’t you, Cabal?’

‘The immediate plan is entirely one of reconnaissance. You can hardly expect me to evolve some elaborate scheme when the very nature of what we shall face is currently unknown to me.’

‘A witch with ghouls. I did say.’

‘But what sort of witch? There are many. And, I begin to wonder, what sort of ghouls? There should only be one type, but from your description, they would seem different from the usual crowd. I own myself perplexed. I do not enjoy perplexity.’

‘Will it be a “reconnaissance in force”?’ said Zarenyia, employing the index and middle fingers of each hand to scratch quotation marks into the air.

‘Your somatic punctuation dismays me, Madam Zarenyia. If you wish to emphasise speech, may I suggest speaking emphatically.’

‘I could do that, yes, but I’m terribly tactile. Anyway, I wished to suggest some irony in the term.’

‘By “reconnaissance in force”, you actually mean “let’s have a look and, if there aren’t too many, wade in and kill them”, I gather?’

‘Ohhhh, darling, I love it when you spot subtext.’

‘The spider-woman is purring,’ said Miss Smith in an undertone to Cabal.

‘Spiders do purr; didn’t you know that?’ Belatedly Miss Smith realised just how acute the devil’s senses were. ‘Why, they’re just as cute as lickle puddycats.’

Miss Smith quickly and wisely changed the subject. ‘Just beyond that rise. That’s the witch’s home.’

*   *   *

With some difficulty, Cabal managed to talk Zarenyia into adopting a stealthier form. Grumbling, she crushed her aft body down into something more human, although this time she dispensed with the French couture and adopted a green twill suit and walking shoes.

‘You look like a Bavarian lesbian,’ said Miss Smith, purely as an observation.

Zarenyia was delighted. ‘Exactly the effect I was trying for, Liebling!’ She produced an alpine hat with a small orange feather in its band and clapped it on her head. ‘Don’t I look fiercely practical?’ She winked at Miss Smith, who coughed and looked away to hide an unexpected blush.

‘Is there anyone you don’t flirt with?’ Cabal asked as they crept to the top of the rise.

‘You, in case you haven’t noticed,’ she whispered back. ‘We’re friends, I hope. If you wish to dally in my webbed bower, you need only ask. I shan’t be dragging you off there using my usual wiles of saucy suggestiveness. Also magic. Some chemicals, too, but it’s all mainly down to how bloody good I am at what I do.’

‘You neglected to mention mesmerism,’ said Cabal, a little tautly.

‘Oh, yes. The ’fluence. Hope you’re not still upset about it? It was for the best.’

‘True.’ Logic could often mollify Cabal. ‘It was for the best.’

They reached the ridge line and paused there. Cabal took a small pair of binoculars from his bag. ‘I shall go alone. One head on the near horizon may avoid detection where three will not.’ Taking it as read that the one head would be his, and ignoring the crabby expressions Miss Smith and Zarenyia were no doubt lavishing upon him as he crawled the last few feet, Cabal crested the hill and looked down upon their new enemies.

The binoculars were hardly necessary; he was looking down a distance of perhaps five feet to where a pack of twenty or so ghouls were creeping up to meet them. The ghoul in the lead saw Cabal appear and grinned at him, its ears standing to attention like those of an inquisitive Dobermann.

‘Hello!’ said the ghoul.

‘Hello,’ said Johannes Cabal with a great deal less enthusiasm.

*   *   *

The ghoul pack swarmed over them, but with no obvious intent to hurt them. Instead they were bundled up in a multitude of rubbery arms and borne down the hill in the direction of the new witch’s lair.

Cabal gave Zarenyia a hard look as she allowed herself to be captured, but she just gave him a wonderfully happy smile in return and a wink so broad that they probably caught it on the Plateau of Leng that lies in desolation at the edge of everything. One or other of the creatures that frequent that damned place must surely have paused in its performance of horrors and thought, Did somebody just wink at me?

Down, down into the vale of the witch they were carried, the colours now the essence of lurid, the great fire before a tomb blazing in jagged tongues, the shadows dancing without nuance or graduation. Cabal looked about himself, his misgivings growing by the second. He had seen artificial realities before, but they had always seemed real within themselves. This was a parody of the real, a clumsy woodcut coloured by a child. He felt they were being carried into a volume of the Brothers Grimm.

Past the bonfire with its blaze of hot, papery flames they were carried in the very dictionary definition of ‘triumph’ until they arrived before the witch’s manse, an extraordinary tomb wrought in obsidian and white marble, crested in red and detailed in green. Statuary of satyrs and nymphs, cherubs and imps were caught in mid-frolic, mid-cavort in the unlikeliest combinations of imagery for a place of the dead. It was not of the real world, but wrought from the fantasies of an addled artist turning his hand to anything that might pay the rent and his exorbitant absinthe bill. It would then be entitled something along the lines of The Lair of the Witch Queen and subsequently used as the cover of a magazine for an audience whose imaginations ran hot.

Before the lair of the Witch Queen stood the Queen of Witches herself, less a formal title and more an excuse for fancy dress. And such a fancy dress; she was gorgeously arrayed in a great cloak of black velvet, trimmed in silver, and topped by the sort of excessive high collar that makes the matter of peripheral vision rather moot. Beneath the cloak she wore a dress of crimson silks with a décolletage that owed as much to the arts of structural engineering as couture. She herself was … very familiar.

‘You!’ cried Johannes Cabal.

He was taken aback to realise he had said it in unison with Zarenyia and Miss Smith. They looked at one another with reasonable surprise. Cabal recovered first.

‘You know Ninuka?’ he demanded of his comrades.

‘Ninuka?’ said Zarenyia. ‘You’re wrong. I know Udrolvexa. Has she been calling herself Ninuka, too? That would explain a lot.’

‘No,’ said Miss Smith, ‘that’s Tanith James, the hoity bitch. I’d know her anywhere. I gave her that scar myself.’

Cabal and Zarenyia looked as hard as they could, but there was no sign of a scar. Zarenyia raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, this is a rum do. We can’t all be right, surely? That would be pushing coincidence with some force for my least favourite colleague from the pits of Hell—and you will appreciate that I know some real stinkers—to moonlight as the bêtes noires of you two as well?’

Cabal’s attention had never left the Witch Queen. ‘No. We cannot all be correct, but we can all be wrong.’

The three of them were paraded before her and then secured by the wrists to a trio of great stakes around a fire. The stakes had definitely not been there when Cabal first spied the encampment, but now gave the impression that they had been there for days at least, to judge from the emerald turf grown up around their bases.

‘Oooh, bondage!’ Zarenyia’s smirk was quite unforgivable under the circumstances and unappreciated by either Miss Smith or Cabal.

‘Well, well, well,’ said the Queen of Witches on settling herself upon her throne of bones, which also definitely had not been there a moment previous.

‘Please,’ interrupted Cabal.

‘You beg for your life very easily,’ said the queen, her smirk no more forgivable than Zarenyia’s.

‘The only begging I was about to make was that you might save us the burden of listening to your villainous monologue, no doubt larded with icy, ringing laughter at dramatically correct intervals.’

The queen looked for a moment as if her temper was going to depart in a huff of ‘How dare you?’ and threats, but she reined it in, and the triumphant smile returned. ‘Do you even know who I am?’

‘I believe so. I believe that you are the natural sum of this place. You are the spirit of Nemesis.’

‘Tanith James is not my nemesis,’ whispered Miss Smith.

‘You either do her a disservice or think too much of yourself. The Lady Ninuka is undoubtedly mine, at least at a material level. There are certain entities to which I have caused some displeasure and whose powers are undoubtedly greater than Orfilia Ninuka’s, but I am not their main focus. She, however, has almost literally moved heaven, earth, and hell to revenge herself upon me. If I meet my death at any near date, there is a good chance it will be at her hands or those of her assigned agents. Search your heart, Miss Smith. You say you scarred this Jones woman; you think she does not hold undying enmity to you?’

Miss Smith started to speak, thought better of what she was about to say, and said, ‘But, I’m dead.’

‘But, you are also … were also a necromantrix. This Miss James you mention, what was her discipline?’

Miss Smith considered this, and her face fell, as if being tied to a stake before a bonfire by a clan of comic-book ghouls was insufficient grounds for upset.

‘My body was destroyed, though…’

‘I destroyed it myself.’ Cabal said it as if it were a gallant courtesy he had performed upon her mortal remains. In necromantic circles, it actually was. ‘But your spirit is extant, and you dwell within the Dreamlands, where you may be destroyed again, and finally, by anyone with a little knowledge and a great deal of animosity. Would that describe Tanith James?’

Miss Smith did not reply. Evidently the description fitted Tanith James to a T.

Cabal returned his attention to the Witch Queen. ‘As I was saying. You are the spirit of Nemesis. All three of us have powerful enemies, and you have embodied all of them in however it is that we perceive you. Well, now you have us. What do you intend to do now?’

‘Do?’ The Witch Queen laughed, and did so in an icy, ringing peal of malevolent amusement. ‘Why, destroy you, naturally.’

A stage whisper floated to Cabal from the direction of Zarenyia. ‘This is all part of your terribly clever plan, isn’t it, Johannes?’

‘Alas, no,’ he admitted. ‘I was not expecting this person to be a material metaphor. It’s very disappointing. So, unless my plan was for us all to die in the most embarrassingly asinine way imaginable—and it was not—then no, this is not all part of my terribly clever plan.’

‘Asinine,’ said the queen. ‘What do you mean, asinine?’

‘To be brief, madam (for your theatricality wears upon me), you are a conceptual embodiment of undying, personal animus. You currently represent in your uncertain way the three current banes of the lives of two of us, and the afterlife of the third.’

‘I know all that, Cabal (for your didacticism wears upon me).’

‘Touché, I am sure. I promised to be brief, and so I shall. You are a damp squib, madam. A foreshortening of expectations. A bathetic failure. You are Nemesis incarnate, yet you do not hate us. Instead you take the targets of real hatred from real people—’

‘And a real devil.’

‘Thank you, Madam Zarenyia. And a real devil, and dispose of them mechanically. For all your posturing, you feel no passion. For all your stagecraft, you experience no malefic desire. You take the raisons d’être from real people for no real purpose. You are a failure.’

‘Yes,’ said Zarenyia, taking up the theme and warming to it, ‘you’re nothing more than a big premature ejaculation. Mind you, where I’m concerned, it’s always a bit premature in a sense, if you take my—’

‘Madam.’

‘Sorry,’ said the devil. ‘Ever so.’ She made a gesture as if locking her lips with a key.

‘I do not care for your sophistries, necromancer,’ said the Queen of Witches. ‘You shall die here and now for…’ She paused, and looked to Zarenyia with puzzlement. ‘How did you make that gesture? Your hands are tied.’

Zarenyia lowered both hands, and the hempen bounds swayed in their wake. ‘Were tied, dear heart. If you’d been paying attention you’d have gathered I’m not human; rope bonds are a little insulting. So, past tense. My hands were tied. In much the same way your arms were attached to your shoulders.’

The Witch Queen looked like she was about to state the obvious, but that was the moment that Zarenyia decided that two legs were bad, eight legs were excellent, and any statements about the current locations of other limbs was lost in the sudden excitement.

‘Is this your terribly clever plan, darling?’ Zarenyia picked up a charging ghoul as she addressed Cabal. ‘Bring me along and just depend on me to kill everyone when things get fraught?’

‘In essence.’

‘I like it.’ She upended the ghoul and examined its nether regions. She curled her lip. ‘These aren’t proper ghouls at all. No genitalia. These are ghouls for maiden aunts. Piff. Boring old option B it is, then.’ And so saying, she broke the ghoul upon a raised and chitinous knee, throwing the dying monster aside to turn her attention to its irate colleagues.

Miss Smith caught Cabal’s eye. ‘Well. This is weird.’

Cabal nodded. ‘Coming from a witch whose soul inhabits a cemetery in the Dreamlands, that says a great deal, but I cannot argue with you.’ They watched Zarenyia go by, bucking like a wild horse, a ghoul impaled on one leg, and another held by the scruff of the neck being used as a flail to dislodge a third that had leapt upon her back. ‘There are certainly elements of the odd about our current situation. Madam! Madam Zarenyia! Perhaps if you freed us, we might be able to help?’

‘Busy!’ she called back, and she called it happily. Unrestricted violence was as cool water on a warm day to her. ‘Gotcha!’

A pair of faux-ghoul bodies, entangled and broken, went arcing over the stakes and into the bonfire.

‘No hurry.’ Cabal dangled listlessly from his bonds. ‘I’m sure we’ll find some way of amusing ourselves.’

‘That’s that passive-aggressiveness thing, isn’t it?’ Zarenyia regarded him with a jaundiced eye. ‘I’ve read about that in my magazines.’

And while Cabal was wrestling with the concept of magazine subscription services that deliver to Hell, and concluding that probably narrowed it down to The Reader’s Digest, a giant spiderish leg scythed over their heads, slicing off the tops of the stakes and through their bonds in a single action. Necromancer and graveyard witch tumbled to earth in a shower of wood chippings and undignified language.

Cabal climbed to his knees and rubbed circulation back into his wrists while shouting at his rescuer. ‘You almost had our hands off, madam!’

‘So ungrateful. They’d have grown back.’ And so, blissfully unaware of the limitations of cellular regeneration in humans, Zarenyia carried on tearing the ghouls that were not ghouls into lovely, rubbery pieces.*

By the time Cabal had recovered his bag and, more specifically, the Webley pistol of generous calibre that lay within it, there was little point in offering aid. Ghouls lay around in abandonment, some whole, most not, and all quite perfectly dead. Amidst the carnage, Zarenyia stood, scraping one of the vanquished from her leg.

‘That was fun. Brief, but energetic.’ She cast the corpse aside and performed a little spidery dance of victory. ‘I didn’t get to kill that Witch Queen character, though. Did you?’

Cabal and Miss Smith shook their heads; neither of them had noticed the queen’s escape, either. ‘We were hardly afforded the opportunity.’

‘Oh.’ Zarenyia looked around. ‘Bother. I’d say she constitutes a loose end, wouldn’t you?’

‘She may also be the key to our escaping this place. We must find her, and ideally not kill her.’ Cabal gave Zarenyia a significant look. ‘At least not until we’ve extracted any useful information from her.’

It seemed unlikely the spirit of Nemesis could have got very far, and philosophically unlikely that it would seek to go very far from them in any case. They therefore decided to search the crypts that lay within a small radius of the central structure and, since that radius permitted easy calling to one another, they would split up to do so, the quicker to be done. Agreeing that the immediate act of whosoever found the Nemesis Witch first would be to cry halloo to the others, they split the circle of their search into three sectors and went to work immediately.

*   *   *

Cabal decided to start, rationally enough, at the closest crypt, a prim box of pale sandstone. As he approached it, however, his eye was caught by one lying further away, indeed right at the edge of the search area. He could not say what drew his attention so certainly to this cottage of the dead. It was an unkempt sort of thing, asymmetric with what seemed to be half a flying buttress to the left, the base long crumbled away. The design was of the new Gothik, a style for the pretentious surburbanite. The stone itself was soot-stained, surely snatched from some bourgeois district and dumped here in splendid isolation on the slope between two low hillocks. He did not recognise it at all, yet it seemed very familiar at the same time. Perhaps even comforting.

He walked to it almost in a dream, and his steps fell faster as he approached. This was the place, he was sure. This was where he would have hidden were he to have sought refuge in the curious graveyard, he was sure, but why he was sure, he could not say.

The door opened easily under his hand, a well-wrought thing of oak bound in iron strips, and swung noiselessly open. With only the slightest of hesitations, he entered.

The crypt’s interior was illuminated by gas mantels, which was a nice change from the usual pitch-darkness or, at best, guttering torches of his experience. Still, what sort of tomb has a gas meter? What sort of corpse can be depended upon to put a shilling in that meter when the lights grow dim?

Low alcoves to the right and directly ahead contained coffins and, unusually, he felt relief that they were whole and he could see no mortal remains. Not that he would take much glee in such a sight, it should be understood, but that corpses in every state from perfectly fresh all the way to mouldering bone and all the intermediate stages of rot and liquescence were so well-known to him as to have rendered him blasé. No, this was not a matter of squeamishness, or at least not of a merely sensual horror.

To the left a ladder leaned against the wall, and by it a grandfather clock, its glass nearly opaque with grime. Yet he could hear the steady tick of the mechanism’s escapement within the case. It was, all things considered, a very homely sort of tomb. He could only conclude that the Nemesis Witch had made this place hers and had her ersatz ghouls gather domestic comforts for her, up to and including an interdimensional gas pipe. He bit his lip at this point; either the ghouls were a great deal more ingenious than he had given them credit for, ridiculous cartoon caricatures that they were, or he was not truly understanding what had happened here, what was happening here, what this place meant. He did know, however, that the Nemesis Witch was here, and she was waiting for him at the foot of the steps that opened by the grandfather clock, the steps that led down into the cold, cruel clay.

He did not hesitate to set his foot upon the top step, even though the strong and tried sense of self-preservation that had kept him alive through a hundred circumstances that would reasonably be expected to kill him was warning him, screaming at him that this was a trap that he would not leave unscathed.

Cabal felt the forebodings burst into a dazzling flare of baleful premonition as he took the second step down. Then he took the third. Then the fourth, and the fifth, and so descended into the realm of Nemesis.

*   *   *

The Nemesis Witch, the Queen of Witches, the Red Queen, Lady Misericorde, Lady Ninuka: so many names for one woman. And there she was, waiting for him.

The underground crypt was dry and small, and there was only one corpse there. One end of the chamber was scattered with old household bric-a-brac and faggots of firewood; the other end, accessed through an open arch and up a couple of steps, was clean and empty but for a grave-sized hole dug into the dusty, dry clay. By the grave half sat, half lay Lady Ninuka. She wore something different from her brief appearance as the Nemesis Witch, now gowned in a simple dress the colour of funereal wrappings, grey, white, and a dull cream. It was folded decorously across her legs so that not even an ankle was exposed. She herself looked more purely like Ninuka than earlier, and this Cabal took to be a sure indication that she truly was nothing more than a figment. She was pale and dreadful. She did not smile the smile of an arch-villain when he stood before her. She did not even look at him. She held a bunch of flowers taken from some memorial tribute, and dropped withered petals into the grave, one after another.

‘Are you truly the spirit of Nemesis?’ asked Cabal. ‘I would almost be disappointed if this all turned out to be some scheme of Ninuka’s and you are her beneath cadaverous make-up.’

The spirit ignored him. Petals fluttered down.

‘Then let us assume that you are not Ninuka.’ He spoke to break the silence as much as anything. It weighed upon him. It confined him. ‘Let us say that you are something else, either sent to warn me or destroy me, although a warning would be preferable.’

At this her gaze rose to meet his, and he thought he saw some awful thought signed upon her brow, but then she looked pensively aside, and the momentary sympathy was lost.

Nemesis finished plucking every petal from the dead rose stem in her hand, regarded the bare, thorned stick with equanimity, and then dropped it into the grave. She took another rose and started to strip its flower bare.

Johannes Cabal was a remarkably able man in many respects, yet his failings, too, were manifold and equally of note. One such, and one that never worked in his favour yet out of which he seemed incapable of growing, was his remarkable proclivity for growing angry with supernatural entities that could likely render him into ashes, or tear his skeleton from his flesh while he still briefly lived, or slice him thinner than a year’s supply of Parma ham in the twinkling of an eye. It was in no sense a survival trait, and yet it endured in his personality.

‘When you have quite finished with the deflowering of other people’s funerary offerings, perhaps you could answer me? I have travelled a long way to be here, I have travelled with a devil to do so. Which is less unappealing than it sounds, but there’s a principle at stake here. I have endured hardships, difficulties, and reversals to find myself in this—and I don’t use such a pejorative term lightly—pantomime of a synthetic milieu. You think I don’t know what this tomb is? What it represents? Exactly who lies in that grave you are so assiduously filling with garden rubbish?’

Nemesis ignored him still. Cabal felt moved to express just what he had been through and his vast disappointment at how things were turning out.

‘There were giant ants!’

She said nothing, and he had the grace to feel ashamed.

‘This must all be for a reason, surely?’ He spoke as he climbed the two steps between the halves of the lower crypt. ‘Even the most abstruse oracles must speak sooner or later. What am I to take away from this, assuming I can even find a way out of this strange lich field? What am I to deduce from looking into the grave of my…’

And here he looked down into the hole, and was silent for a long moment.

‘Self,’ he finished.

Beneath withered petals and broken rose stems lay the corpse of Johannes Cabal, necromancer. He looked down upon himself with mixed feelings. Presently, the corpse opened an eye and looked up at him.

‘Cheer up,’ it told him. ‘This is just a synthetic milieu.’

*   *   *

Cabal found Miss Smith and Zarenyia some little time later; the former seemed characteristically thoughtful, the latter uncharacteristically so.

‘Did you find her, too?’ asked Miss Smith.

‘I did. It was … enlightening, I think.’

‘I am immortal,’ said Zarenyia suddenly and with emphasis. ‘At least as far as ageing goes. Not indestructible, but immortal if all else remains equal. And yet…’ She seemed almost pained at failing to grasp a comprehension that gambolled just beyond her grasp. ‘And yet, life is too short. Darlings, I know I’m a devil and everything, but I’ve never actually thought of myself as evil. I’ve put up with the label all this time, but I’m not sure that I care for it now. I want something more.’

‘I have unfinished business,’ said Miss Smith. ‘There’s always unfinished business, but … this, I can’t stay in the Dreamlands.’

Cabal spoke gently. ‘Hardly your decision to make.’

‘There must be a way. We’re necromancers, damn it.’

Cabal nodded. ‘I thought this place was a trap. In a sense it is, but there are subtleties here, too. I believe we may now move on. And I really do hope that Miss Barrow and my brother are weathering events at least as well as we. Heavens help them otherwise.’