The Fifth Way: RUBRUM IMPERATRIX

 

General Klaus Fischer did not enjoy the daily briefings he was obliged to supply Her Majesty. She rarely gave the slightest impression that she was listening; more than once she had been reading while he supplied the gloss overviews of the vast number of reports that were submitted, analysed, and rendered from mere information into valuable intelligence. He would say that he was wasting his time for the vanity of a woman who liked to pretend that she maintained a finger upon the pulse of the incorporation of the British Isles. (It was always an ‘incorporation’, according to all documentation and newspapers, never something as crude and uncalled for as an ‘invasion’. After all, Britain no longer had a functional government, or anything approaching one. It was now green and pleasant real estate, available for whosoever had the means to take it.) He would say that, but for her unnerving ability to look up from her book and ask a deep question based on the meanings between the lines, or to demand that new data be ascertained and brought to her as soon as was humanly possible.

The general was a lifelong warrior and had been the right hand of Count Marechal, the Queen’s late and—by her at any rate—lamented father. Marechal had been an ambitious man, and his plans to pincer Senza, the hated northern neighbour of Mirkarvia, with an unexpected airborne assault from the loathsome but useful allied state of Katamenia might well have worked. Fischer had been left to damp down the remains of one of Mirkarvia’s occasional little outbreaks of civil disobedience while Marechal travelled to Katamenia to make sure the assault was properly prepared.

The plan never reached fruition, and Marechal returned as an urn full of ashes in the arms of what had turned out to be the count’s greatest creation—his daughter. General Fischer did not enjoy the briefings because he, a broad-shouldered man standing six feet and two inches in his stockinged feet, was afraid of Orfilia Ninuka.

She had once merely been wilful, but now she was a monster. Nobody called her mad, for she was possessed of vanity and vengefulness. Nobody called her mad, for she maintained a diffuse and effective secret police that, with the abetment of eavesdroppers, informants, and even the occasional loyal citizen, seemed to know every unguarded word. Nobody called her mad but for she herself, and surely a touchstone for true insanity was that the lunatic does not realise his or her state?

Nobody called her mad, for was she not the Red Queen who dealt in blood and abomination? Did she not hold a small army of Katamenian cut-throats in her thrall, who would die for her as eagerly as they would kill? Was she not a necromantrix, so that even death was no release for those who died in her prisons and interrogation cells and the awful glass oubliettes in which humans were observed in their faltering mortalities even as an insect may be left to die in a test tube?

With the fall of Senza, the Mirkarvian military gained easy access to Western Europe in general and the Mediterranean in particular. The fleet of warships and troopships culled from the vanquished surface navies of Senza and Poloruss sailed out towards the Atlantic. Commentators and terribly clever civil servants concluded that this was merely the new regime showing off. After all, with no clear lines of logistics it seemed incredible that there might be a brutally military point to all this. As is so often the case with commentators and terribly clever civil servants, they had failed to understand with exactly whom they were dealing.

The surface ships, after all, were not the only examples of useful materiel that had fallen into Mirkarvian hands. Poloruss’s aerofleet was justly famous. Indeed, a new flagship was midway through being fitted out prior to its commissioning voyage, when disaster struck the country. Whatever it was going to be called hardly mattered to anyone except military historians; what it was called now and its new function were far more important: the Rubrum Imperatrix, personal ship and mobile palace for the Red Queen herself.

From this flying aerie, Queen Orfilia had headed a shadowy fleet over misty northern climes and through clouded skies, unseen and unsuspected. No storms or bad weather troubled the fleet, nor did the cloud ever break to betray it to ground-based observers. Meteorologists would regard this as an unusual combination, but perhaps Her Majesty simply had the luck of the Devil on her side.

In any case, she and her ships arrived over the grey skies of Britain just as the surface fleet passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and, under the curious eyes of the Spanish and then the Portuguese, turned to the north.

By the time the invasion fleet arrived at the English south coast, the war—an inaccurate term, but ‘slaughter’ seems overly emotive—was already over. Ninuka had rained hell and damnation down upon London, cursing the metropolis using magics only whispered of since the days of the Assyrians, who had wisely never used them.

The Rubrum Imperatrix remained in London while the rest of the fleet dispersed to bring havoc down upon a country abruptly decapitated. Scattered battles and last-ditch defensive engagements still raged, but it was only a matter of time. Orfilia Ninuka sat in her study and gave orders as easily as she might once have offered chitchat at a soirée. She didn’t seem very much like the sort of person who might have soireés any more.

Fischer watched in silence as Ninuka now took up the gloss of incoming reports and read down the list, wafting herself slowly with a Chinese fan in her off hand. She paced languidly about her study-cum–throne room, once the intended day office of a flag admiral. She walked by the two great panes of thick glass joined at the prow line by a supporting girder. She would insist on doing this, parading around where anyone might see her. The glass would stop anything short of a close range shot from an elephant rifle, but such weapons and those with the skill and will to use them might very well be out there in this wounded city caught in a never-ending cycle of dusk, night, dawn, and then dusk again.

‘I see nothing of London itself here, General.’ Ninuka spoke suddenly, breaking him from his reverie. ‘Is there no new intelligence? No news?’

The general thought for a moment before speaking. ‘Your Majesty, may I be so impertinent as to ask why you remain so interested in this place? It may have been interesting enough before our arrival, but now it feels like taking residence in the rotting skull of a dead empire. The rest of the country is not yet pacified, whereas London is, if anything, overly so.’ He saw the tightening of her jaw that had led directly to the deaths of good men before his very eyes and hastened to explain himself. ‘I do not criticise, ma’am. I only seek to clarify my understanding of your strategy.’

‘My strategy.’ The idea seemed to amuse her. ‘Ah, General, if I told you exactly the point of all this you would not give it a moment’s credence. Worse, you would think me mad even if you were sensible enough to keep that thought to yourself. I will tell you this much; the pivotal act that this entire invasion was predicated upon shall occur in this city, and it will happen soon. You are a career soldier, Klaus. I know you have been wondering what possible goal can there be in bringing down an imperial power that has never shown our country anything but polite disinterest, a country that is so far from the fatherland that holding the territory would be next to impossible, especially with the army already stretched in our new Senzan and Polorussian conquests. Well, it was never about gaining territory. The Irish and French can fight over it when we leave. Oh, yes.’ She smiled at the general’s inability to hide his surprise. ‘We are not staying longer than necessary. If you must have political reasons for us being here, perhaps it was to create instability in the perceived world order from which we may profit, or perhaps it was simply to demonstrate the invincibility of our forces and our fearlessness to engage. Perhaps it is all about fear.’

The smile faded. She looked out into the lacerated corpse of dead London. ‘Tell yourself what you like. It is my will that we are here.’ She dropped the sheaf of unpinned reports to the floor, where they scattered. Doing his best to maintain some dignity, General Fischer gathered them up. ‘Now tell me, what has happened in London in the last twenty-four hours?’

‘I shall find out immediately.’ He strode to the pearl-handled electrical voice pipe and cranked the handle. ‘This is General Fischer. Bring me all patrol and intelligence reports submitted for the London area—’

‘Central London. I am only interested in central London.’

‘Correction, specifically central London in the last twenty-four hours. Deliver them to the queen’s study immediately. No, not ‘in an hour’, now, damn you, or do you want to explain your testudinal slowness to Her Majesty yourself? I thought not. Get on with it!’

The reports arrived hastily crammed into a file box twenty minutes later in the hands of a pale and sweating adjutant who dared not look at Ninuka as he handed it over to Fischer. For her part, she amused herself by crossing her arms and staring at the young officer until he backed out of her presence, bowing and saluting and ultimately falling over when he was exiting the room.

She laughed at that, and there was a startling innocence that startled the general. Then it was gone, and she was holding out her hand. ‘First report.’

He followed her around the room as she studied report after report, rarely doing more than briefly scanning the first page before dropping it to the floor and holding out her hand for the next. Back and forth they promenaded, a thickening spillage of intelligence in their wake. Then she stopped so abruptly that he almost walked into her.

‘What’s this?’

He took it from her and quickly read it. ‘The National Gallery. Foot patrol discovered six male corpses, drained of bodily fluids … Surely nosferatu, Majesty?’

‘Read on.’

He did so. ‘Webs? Some sort of giant spider? I can only guess it is one of your … one of the abominations the curse visited upon the city.’

‘No, General. I am very aware of what my curse visited upon London, and giant spiders were not invited.’ She put the report on her desk, an impressive white structure trimmed with gold, and yet largely constructed from board and aluminium to keep its weight down, presenting an air of faux solidity due to a thick desktop and bolts holding it to the deck. ‘The next report now.’ He handed it over and they continued their short, repetitive walk punctuated by littering.

Fischer was not surprised by her second halt as they were at the bottom of the box. All that remained was a short handwritten memo apologising to Her Gracious Imperial Majesty, but a patrol shadowing one of the aeroship sweeps was overdue and therefore its report was not available. Her eyes narrowed, and she looked off to one side. ‘They were supposed to be cleaning up after the MIAS Lammasu. They last exchanged signals’—she went to the window and pointed—‘just down there. I saw the Lammasu open fire just beyond the perimeter. But that was hours ago.’ She looked into the darkness again. Fischer could see little more than their own reflections in the glass, but Queen Orfilia’s gaze seemed to drive out deep into the city’s decaying heart. Perhaps it was. ‘Where are you?’ Fischer thought she was talking to him for a moment, but she was only thinking out loud. But those thoughts confused him. ‘Why are you taking so long? Hardly the first time you barged into my home.’ She noticed the general watching her in the glass and smiled at him. ‘I am expecting visitors, General. Four of them. They will attempt entry to this vessel, and they may even succeed. Do not underestimate the ingenuity of their leader.’

‘I will double the guard and put them on a high state of alert immediately, Your Majesty!’

‘No, you will not. I want them alive—ideally—but I want them in my grasp. Particularly their leader; a pale man with blond hair who habitually wears black. Oh, and he will almost certainly have a leech with him, a rather handsome man with light brown hair. You may have to destroy him; equip the men accordingly. As for the other two, I cannot guess. They are of lesser importance in any case.’

‘How do you—’ began Fischer, but he saw her smile fade instantly and the question faltered to an untidy death in his throat. ‘Yes, Your Majesty. It will be done.’

He hurried from her presence, propelled by urgency and relief at being dismissed.

She hardly cared. She placed a hand on the glass and looked out once more, seeing the corpses, the chaos, and the gutted city for what they were—stage props for a final confrontation. She would keep Johannes Cabal alive only as long as she was sure that she might need him. Once that time was gone, she would be happy to kill him herself. Her father’s pistol was in the drawer of her desk, awaiting the moment of revenge.

She saw the reflection of her father’s funerary urn in its place in a case mounted safely upon the wall where she could see it as she worked. ‘Good girl.’ She could hear his voice in her imagination, or perhaps the urn spoke. It hardly mattered which.

Cabal was out there. Soon he would be hers, the game would be over, and she would have the prize. She whispered to the night, ‘My will be done.’

*   *   *

‘Isn’t this the same plan as we had before?’ Zarenyia was down to two legs again and resenting the loss, temporary though it was.

‘Not quite.’ The remnants of the Mirkarvian patrol were now represented by only the lieutenant and a single private who walked with a slight hunch in an attempt to hide his possession of a bust. The borrowed medical officer’s uniform was in too poor a state to go without drawing attention long before the plan required it, so Horst had returned for his own clothes, and seemed the happier for it. He was not with their little pretence of two soldiers bringing in a brace of prisoners. Instead he was off trying his best to be a general of the undead and Lord of the Dead without bursting into either tears or laughter. ‘Now,’ said Johannes Cabal, ‘we have a reserve force.’

‘Doesn’t that make us the main force?’ Miss Smith had cheered up a little on finding an umbrella shop that she had looted of a nicer black lace parasol than its predecessor, which was showing signs of combat fatigue. ‘Johannes, there are four of us. What sort of main force consists of four people, three women and a man. Well, two women, something fairly like a woman, and a man?’

‘Are you being cheeky, darling?’ Zarenyia smiled delightedly at Miss Smith. ‘I love it when people are cheeky with me. Sometimes I don’t even kill them for it. Usually, but not always.’

‘Dibs, madam,’ said Cabal, trying to bring the ribaldry under control before things became any stranger than they already were. ‘You gave dibs to ensure the safety of the whole party.’

‘Technically, not for Smithy here,’ Zarenyia pointed out, ‘but don’t worry. I was just teasing.’ She leaned her head towards Miss Smith and whispered, ‘I’m sure you love being teased, don’t you?’

Miss Smith looked straight ahead and did so with a notably fixed expression. ‘I’m not even sure why I’m here any more. If Ninuka really is the fifth part of this … what would you call it? A ritual? Then what business is it of mine? I’m risking my life for nothing here.’

‘Your situation is complicated, I admit,’ said Cabal, ‘but if you require some degree of self-interest, then your isolation from the Dreamlands is surely sufficient. If you stay with us, things may improve for you. If you do not, they will surely deteriorate.’

‘Thanks, Cabal. Knew I could depend on you to bolster morale and supply pep. You’ve really put a new spring in my step.’

Her step remained resolutely unspringy.

They were closing on a checkpoint set up some hundred yards from the end of the Mall where it bifurcated into Constitution Hill and Spur Road when a complication arose. Horst suddenly halted as if hearing a loud sound, looked over to his right, and said in horror, ‘Minty!’

‘What?’ Cabal looked to the space where he assumed the child to be. ‘What’s amiss?’

‘She’s burning!’

And, to those that could see her, she was indeed aflame. She struggled back, vaporous wisps of cold blue fire wrapping around her. To those who could hear her, she was screaming, high-pitched and terrified.

‘It ’urts! It ’urts!’ She was sobbing. When all sensation has been annulled and is merely a memory, it seemed unusually cruel that its return should be of such a violent flavour.

Horst danced around in an agony of his own, seeing her, hearing her, yet unable to help directly. ‘Get on the floor! Roll around! Put it out!’

She tried, but the flame would not be diminished by such a mundane trick. She rolled hopelessly around, her screams shrill and unending, but the immolation continued regardless.

Until the flames suddenly winked out.

Cabal looked at Horst’s astonished expression, the moment marked by the cessation of his dance of anxiety. ‘What has happened? Is the girl…?’ He almost said ‘dead’, but hesitated for reasons of accuracy as much as tact.

‘They went out,’ said Horst. ‘They just … went out.’

Minty climbed back to her feet and examined her hands that, moments before, had been burning like dry sticks. To her obvious confusion, they were unmarked. ‘I was all on fire, I was,’ she said. ‘All alight like a Chrissmus tree.’

‘She’s unharmed, Johannes. What happened?’

Cabal thought about it for a moment, and then said, ‘Ask her to walk towards the palace slowly, with one hand extended. If anything happens, she should step back immediately.’

Horst turned to relay the command, but Minty was already doing it, shying away from her own pointing index finger as if it was made of dynamite. That was perhaps not such a bad simile, as—a few cautious palaceward shuffles later—it exploded.

‘Ahhhhhhhhhh!’ screamed Minty, with permissible dismay. She fell backwards, and the finger was instantly extinguished and rendered unmarked. This Horst dutifully relayed to Cabal.

‘The area is warded,’ he replied. ‘Difficult to extend against the corporeal, but against an ethereal entity such a ghost, easy enough to cover a substantial area if you have the resources.’

‘Ninuka fears ghosts?’ said Leonie. ‘But why?’

‘Not ghosts. Miss Minty’s discomfort is a corollary effect. The warding is doubtless to prevent certain arcane forms of surveillance, scrying and the like.’

‘She doesn’t want to be spied upon?’

‘Yes. But, in all modesty, the number of persons within the ruins of London that might be expected to carry out such a practise would reasonably be considered as none. Not a one.’

‘This is for you?’

‘For us. Yes.’

*   *   *

They moved on shortly afterwards, leaving Minty in their wake. Horst looked back more than once, seeing her standing alone at the edge of the warded area, daring to come no closer, yet loath to walk away. She started to once, but dithered and came back. She watched them until they were lost from sight.

*   *   *

They approached the checkpoint. ‘Let me do the talking,’ said Cabal, as if anyone else was keen to. ‘I can do a passable Mirkarvian accent.’

‘I can do a perfect one,’ said Zarenyia, ‘but nobody let me dress up as a soldier.’

‘You would call the sentry a “poppet”, and that would be the end of the subterfuge.’

‘True, I probably would, but that might not be such a disaster as you suppose. That’s the thing with terribly manly men, darling: I bet they get up to all sorts of shenanigans after lights out in the barracks. Just imagine.’

‘I would rather not.’

‘Oh, go on.’ After a moment she added absently, off in a fancy of her own, ‘Baby oil…’

*   *   *

They reached the checkpoint, and it took a herculean effort by Cabal to address the sergeant there as ‘Sergeant’ and not ‘poppet’. He had been preparing a detailed explanation of why he was reporting to the wrong outpost, why his patrol was so sadly depleted, and how he had come into possession of civilian prisoners, but the sergeant was uninterested, simply pointing the way to the remains of Buckingham Palace’s northern corner for full debriefing. Thus, relieved at getting past the first trial of what threatened to be quite a gauntlet of them, yet dismayed that his rehearsed answers would go unheard, at least for the moment, they moved on.

‘We’re in trouble,’ muttered Leonie Barrow.

‘We’re in the ruins of a monster-haunted London occupied by Mirkarvian troops. You’ve only just noticed that means trouble?’ said Cabal.

‘Guard duty is for privates. One of the privileges of being a non-commissioned officer is delegating jobs like that to squaddies. I come from a family with a lot of police and a lot of armed services people in it. Believe me, I know.’

‘So why was a sergeant in sole command of a checkpoint?’ said Miss Smith.

‘Exactly. Unless the job was not just to be watching it, but watching for who comes through it and not making a mess of it when somebody specific approaches. Is there any way Ninuka might be expecting us, Cabal?’

‘Of course she’s expecting us. I confess I was not expecting her attentiveness to be quite so prescient. You are right, Miss Barrow. We are probably detected.’

‘Phew!’ Zarenyia sighed a melodramatic sigh of relief. ‘Oh, good. I do so hate all this shilly-shallying. May I get all leggy and start killing people now?’

‘You may not, madam, but that time is drawing close.’

She nodded sagely. ‘Deferred gratification. I’ve heard about that. So this is what it feels like. Hmmmm.’ She considered this new sensation. ‘It’s slightly irritating.’

They continued in silence for a few seconds more before she added the observation, ‘Oh, and by the bye, there are gentlemen with guns very quietly forming a cordon around us. I do believe they think they’re trapping us.’

Cabal took in their immediate surroundings; there was no cover to speak of, which was of course the intention of their imminent ambushers. ‘The time for you to produce six more legs and proceed to spread dismay amongst our enemies is almost upon us, Madam Zarenyia. Bear in mind that your transformation will have a profound effect upon their morale—’

‘Makes a change from affecting morals…’

‘—so wait for the apposite moment. And, here we go…’

A major was walking out from the barracks, a squad of four men, rifles unslung, at his back. He himself had his pistol drawn and ready. ‘Halt there! You, in the uniform. Remove your cap.’

‘Nobody ever says “please”,’ said Cabal, which was hypocritical of him. He did, however, remove his cap.

The officer regarded Cabal’s exposed hair for a long moment as if reading the future in it. Finally, he said, ‘You are Johannes Cabal?’

‘I am, yes. How do you do?’ He tossed the cap to the side, the time for dissimulation plainly passed.

The officer was looking at the rest of the party. ‘We were told there would be another man with you.’ He nodded at Miss Barrow. ‘Is that him? What is funny?’ For Zarenyia could not repress a small laugh.

‘Hardly, darling,’ she said, and Cabal was irked to note her Mirkarvian accent really was perfect. Then in equally perfect English, she said, ‘Show him, Leonie.’

‘I can speak Mirkarvian, you know,’ she said, but took off her own cap and shook her hair loose.

‘I don’t doubt it. You look like you’d be terribly clever with your tongue.’

‘Just don’t react,’ suggested Miss Smith to Leonie. ‘She stops doing that if she can’t get a reaction.’

‘You are no doubt thinking of my brother,’ said Cabal to the officer. ‘Regretfully, he is not with us.’ This was technically true. ‘No doubt that intelligence was handed down from Orfilia Ninuka herself, and now you are in the awkward position of knowing that she is fallible. I wouldn’t mention that to her, if I were you.’

The major was hardly listening. He had visibly relaxed at Cabal’s truthful yet misleading statement about Horst and was now looking at the women with curiosity. ‘So … none of you are vampires.’

‘Bloodsuckers?’ said Zarenyia. ‘No, no, no. I can assure you that none of us feed on blood.’ This, again, was technically true, although it did not exactly answer the question, for there are vampires, and there are vampires.

His briefing being incomplete, the major failed to ask about any potential witches or devils amongst their number. ‘You will disarm immediately, or you will be shot.’

‘Ooh,’ said Zarenyia, ‘you’re forthright. I like that. We should get to know one another, Major.’

‘Keep your blandishments to yourself, whore.’

Zarenyia’s smile did not waver in the slightest. If anything, it grew broader, although there was a hint of hardening in her eyes. ‘I’ve known lots of whores, darling, and generally found their company better than that of, say, soldiers. I suspect, however, that you meant it as an insult. So, yes—you and I are definitely going to have a little time together.’

Leonie was unslinging her rifle with slow, unthreatening movements and laying it upon the ground, before stepping away from it with her hands held up in clear view. Cabal was far less considerate of the nerves of the ring of conscripts around him, undoing his uniform belt, and tossing it and the holstered pistol upon it to one side. He held his hands away from his sides, but that was the closest he intended to come to putting them up. ‘Now what, Major? You and your men seem to have us at a disadvantage.’

Addressing his subordinates, the major shouted, ‘I want every one of these prisoners shackled and searched. Jump to it!’

Four soldiers ran forwards, chains and manacles clanking in their hands. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, does Ninuka really believe that one man and three women present such a huge threat, Major? You’re behaving like a lot of frightened mice.’

The barb stung, but the major replied with minimal snarling, ‘My orders are explicit, Cabal. You are, to quote them, “not to be underestimated”. I have no intention of disobeying them simply based on my unflattering impressions of you.’

Cabal shook his head. ‘Still as obedient an army of marionettes as ever you were. Very well. Carry on.’ He held out his hands for cuffing. As he did so, he gave Zarenyia what he hoped was a significant look. He needn’t have worried; if there was one thing she was particularly attuned to, it was significant looks.

She turned to the major. ‘Look, sweetness, ever since I embarked on this little adventure with Johannes here, people have been falling over themselves to put me in one or another form of bondage. Normally, I’d be delighted to oblige, but I’m afraid I have plans for this evening so, if it’s not too inconvenient, perhaps you’d be a darling and call off your little boys? They can take their chains and whatnots with them, and we can all be friends. How does that sound?’

The major regarded her coldly. ‘Shackle that one first. And gag her incessantly yakking mouth while you are about it.’

‘My. You certainly have a way with the ladies.’ Zarenyia did not smile at all as she said it.

‘I would advise you not to aggravate Madam Zarenyia, Major,’ said Cabal.

The major laughed. ‘Or else what, exactly?’

‘Well, that would be the difference between a swift, pleasurable death and a slow, agonising one. Those really are your only choices now.’

The major nodded, and Cabal was felled from behind by a rifle butt to the kidneys. Zarenyia watched him writhe on the floor for a moment, her face expressionless. She turned her head to look at the major. ‘Slow and agonising it is, then,’ she said.

The sudden transition of the very attractive yet somehow unsettling lady into a huge spider-woman was not something any of the conscripts had covered in basic training. A bladed leg swiped at the man who had struck down Cabal. The soldier screamed as most of him fell one way, the remainder of him falling silently the other. Of the eleven surviving men, seven swore, two squealed less manfully than they would previously have believed possible, five rifles were dropped, and three pairs of underwear filled.

The major was built of slightly sterner stuff. Admittedly, he gawped at first, and his jaw flopped open and shut as he tried to take in what was happening. Then he remembered the pistol in his hand and brought it up to fire.

It’s quite possible, indeed likely, that the bullet would have done Zarenyia little or no damage if it had actually hit her. She was not in the mood to give him the chance, however. She leapt forwards as a wolf spider does upon its prey, landed just short of him, and, as he was staggering back from her, she scythed his gun hand off at the elbow using the extruded blades upon her left foreleg.

‘Staunch that, darling. I don’t want you dying before I kill you properly,’ she told him with a smile that froze his heart. Then she was gone in another jump to land amidst the troops. There were shouts. She struck one man who was raising his rifle to his shoulder upon the head, and her leg did not stop travelling until it was down past his sternum. Leaving the dead man as a lazily drawn Y spilling offal before his legs failed, she turned upon the others, and the shouts became screams.

Leonie Barrow grabbed Cabal’s uniform tunic by the scruff and dragged him by main force into the area shielded by Zarenyia’s armoured bulk. He grunted with annoyance at the imposition, but the pain was too great for him to find his feet with any hope of maintaining them, so he used his hands to help pull himself across the cracked paving slabs.

To his other side, Miss Smith had produced her wand and was crouched with her free arm crooked to support her wand hand as if she were target shooting. A soldier some thirty feet away moved sideways to shoot past her, perhaps at Zarenyia, perhaps at Cabal. Miss Smith did not give him the chance; glass sparks and malenginuity spat in a spray of lethal intent from the wand’s tip. It did not strike the soldier, who jumped back from it the instant he saw the woman in black was not merely waving a stick around. The jet struck the ground before him, and for one brief, joyful moment, he thought she had missed and that the advantage was his. The muzzle of his rife swung over to glare at her. She had not missed. The pavement, doused in strange energies, buckled and rose to form a great, concrete hand, articulated at the slab edges. The private barely had time to realise all was not well when the slab hand slapped him flat as an unsqueamish man might a cockroach. Across the back of the now inanimate hand splinters of concrete flew up like champagne bubbles as the dead man’s name and epitaph appeared. She had enjoyed the novelty of the self-engraving tombstones in the Endless Cemetery and was keen to adopt it as a signature upon her works henceforth.

For her part, Leonie Barrow snatched up her dropped rifle, wrapped the sling around her shoulder to stabilise it, worked the bolt to put a 7.62mm round into the chamber, and sighted at the backs of the more sensible Mirkarvian troops, which is to say the ones that were running away. As she discarded targets as low threats and—English as ever—a strong desire not to shoot a man in the back if it could be helped, she swung the rifle back and forth, acquiring and discarding, acquiring and discarding, until she found a man in her sights who had taken partial cover behind a lamp standard from where he was drawing a bead upon Zarenyia. Leonie aimed low, and fired. The bullet took him in the thigh, and he fell over sideways, glanced fearfully at her as she worked the bolt once more, and then half ran, half hopped away from her, leaving his rifle behind. She began looking for a new target, acquire and discard, acquire and discard.

Cabal looked around him, breathing deeply as the pain in his back slowly subsided and the desire to vomit with it. He was in the middle of a protective cordon, and the thought struck him that just how had he ended up in a situation in the space of a handful of years wherein three people were prepared to fight to defend him when once, not so long ago, being surrounded by people with weapons and the will to use them would invariably have been a very bad thing. Perhaps, he concluded, it was because he had a soul now. Perhaps—and it was a very peculiar thought that caused him a little discomfort—he had friends now. A little discomfort, but not nearly as much as the pleasure that the idea brought him.

There was little time to feel warm and wanted for something other than capital crimes, however. From the direction of the impromptu barracks building an inhuman wail grew via a slow crescendo into an ululating climax that threatened to outlast that of the average Zarenyian dalliance. Somewhere on or around the building, a soldier was cranking the handle of a siren for all he was worth.

Grimacing, Cabal clambered painfully back to his feet. ‘We must move,’ he said. ‘We cannot take on the whole Mirkarvian army of occupation. We must focus on our objectives.’

Leonie glanced at the lowering bulk of the Rubrum Imperatrix where it hung at anchor. ‘Shame they cottoned onto us so quickly. The ramp is way over there, to the rear of the aeroship. That’s got to be three hundred yards over broken ground.’

Cabal looked askance at her, specifically at the very professional way she was wielding the rifle. ‘You seem very at home with that gun, Miss Barrow.’

She half laughed, half smiled. The smile vanished. She sighted and fired. A shot ricocheted, there was a cry of dismay from the end of the Mall, and the sound of army boots in rapid retreat. Her smile returned. ‘After the first time we met, Cabal, my father made sure I knew how to handle myself in a fight. After the second time, I went off and made sure I knew how to handle a pistol. After the third time, I taught myself how to handle rifles and shotguns. My curriculum vitæ makes astonishing reading thanks to your influence.’

‘Always glad to be of service.’

Zarenyia suddenly reared up, her abdomen curling beneath her to bring her spinnerets to bear forwards. There was a wet squirting noise that, even in the middle of an armed engagement, managed to sound wholly lascivious. A corporal bringing up some sort of single-shot rocket launcher, a novelty from the Mirkarvian armouries, was hit in the chest by a cable of spider silk as thick as his thumb. He barely had time to register that he was snared before he was jerked from his feet with enough force to cause compaction injuries along the full length of his spine and neck as his body bent backwards under the impetus. The line slacked when he was mid-parabola, and he sailed down towards Zarenyia under the normal forces of gravity and forward velocity until he met her foreleg, crooked sideways, at which moment he was neatly severed atwain.

While the act of bisection itself was neat, however, the immediate aftermath was not. The top half crashed to the floor wetly spilling lungs and stomach contents, but the lower half unloaded a mass of intestines and much blood, which splashed egregiously.

‘For heaven’s sake, madam!’ snapped Cabal. He lifted first one foot than the other from a large and growing pool of gore. ‘Less extravagantly, if you please!’

Zarenyia turned to look at him, almost comically saddened. ‘I’ve got man giblets all over my sweater. I’m not sure it will wash out.’

‘If we get through this, I shall buy you a whole new wardrobe, but please, will you focus on the task in hand?’

She brightened instantly. ‘A whole new wardrobe? Oh, you darling! You heard that, didn’t you?’ she asked of Miss Smith and Leonie Barrow. They exchanged glances, but said nothing. Zarenyia didn’t care; she returned her attention to Cabal. ‘I have witnesses!’ she said in a righteously warning tone.

‘Quite. Ninuka. Reason for us being here. Focus.’

‘Yes. Find Ninuka, kill Ninuka, take Holy Grail or whatever this is all about, get new wardrobe. See? I have my priorities all worked out.’

Abruptly, the siren died away. ‘Finally,’ said Cabal. ‘Horst and his constituency have arrived. I was beginning to think it would require an engraved invitation.’

*   *   *

In fairness, the plan had always been a little vague as to what constituted the signal by which Horst was to know when to lead his force of ill-matched vampires into battle. ‘You’ll know it when you see it’ had been Cabal’s pragmatic though unhelpful advice. This failed to take into account just how Horst was supposed to see anything when his role was to lead the vampires around to the rear of the armed encampment built within the skeleton of Buckingham Palace, and therefore had no clear line of sight to where his brother and the others were hoping to infiltrate at the front.

He had been considering the wisdom of sending one of his number—which frankly had little experience as vampires and less still as soldiers and could hardly be depended upon once out of his sight—or to go himself and risk his force engaging the enemy out of boredom or, worse still, suddenly realising that their loyalty to the Lord of the Dead lasted exactly as long as he didn’t ask them to do anything that might finish with them in dust. The Mirkarvians were, after all, notoriously adept at dealing with vampires, having famously all but exterminated their own population of nosferatu for failing to pay its taxes. One of the first acts of the occupation force when faced by the supernatural horrors their leader had cursed the city with was to capture any vampires that tried their luck with Mirkarvian troops, and destroy them in front of the Houses of Parliament, which was a known leech nest right from the beginning.*

The decision was rendered moot by the distant sound, perfectly audible on the still night air even to the dull senses of mortals, never mind those of vampires, of shouts, and then screams, and then shooting. The mournful wail of a siren was simply a confirmation.

‘Guns and screaming,’ said Horst. ‘My brother’s definitely in town. Come along, all! England expects, and all that. Tally-ho!’

Feeling more British than he had ever done before in his life—after all, what could be more British than leading a shock force of vampires on a raid into the ruins of Buckingham Palace, short of doing the same but wearing bowler hats?—Horst led the charge.

He needn’t have worried about the resolve of his force. They were sadly changed creatures, but not one of them had not examined their own futures and seen nothing but a spiritual death, picking over the bones of a dead country. Perhaps one day they would cease to think as humans, but that time was a long way off, and all had a personal purgatory stretching before them that would finish in an inhuman hell, with no heaven as even a fleeting prospect. They walked, they talked, they fed, and they feared a meaningless death as much as they had ever done, but they all knew that death had already claimed them, and that no amount of walking, talking, and feeding would ameliorate that truth one jot. Varney had told them they were the new lords of London and they would take the place as their fiefdom once the Mirkarvians left as they surely must. It was comforting, but it was a lie, as all knew but for Varney.

Now they had a new leader and he was as they, but he had more life than even the most mortal of mortals should contain. He offered them a vision as grim as it was compelling of likely destruction, but of flickering out in a moment of meaning and not inertia. Everyone dies eventually, even vampires, and while they could remember the families, the friends, the smiles, and the loves that had been taken from them, they would sell this poor counterfeit of life, this undeath, on their terms, and dearly.

It was no platoon of feral creatures that had once been humans that fell upon the Mirkarvian guards patrolling the rear wall of the palace at Grosvenor Place, nor was it a horde of ancient decadents somehow stirred to concerted action. It was a bunch of Britons with fangs and a grievance, and there is no more terrifying sight in creation.

The guards had no chance, and most fell hardly aware of how they were being killed. They were, as was so much of Ninuka’s invasion force, conscripts who had few enough chances to even let off a shot in anger, the real veterans being employed in the pacification of the rest of the country. The alarums and excursions at the front of the palace had entirely distracted them, and most weren’t even facing the attack on their line when it came. It was over quickly and, though he cavilled at the pragmatic brutality of the order, Horst had told his minions to drain whatever blood they required to be replete. The coming action would require each and every one of them to be at the limits of their capabilities and that meant being fully fed. It was this al fresco dinner that resulted in the longueur between the siren sounding and the vampires attacking the palace proper that irked Cabal so.

Once the guards were no longer anything but nourishment, the vampires easily scaled the wall and, pushing themselves to the edge of human perception, moved easily unseen through the gardens. It turned out to be an unnecessary precaution; the gardens were empty of troops, the handful of two-man patrols having abandoned their orders in favour of finding out what all the excitement at the front was. When they saw it was the sort of excitement that involves a body count (including fractions), they found sensible things to do some distance away, where they could take cover, point rifles, and give the impression that they were watching developments in a professional and soldierly manner as opposed to cowering like undertrained conscripts. Perish the very thought.

In any event, the effect was that the vampire horde easily moved to the remains of the palace, infiltrated the ruins, and split into two parties on reaching the barracks. Horst gave brief orders to the section commanded by the City gent, whose name turned out to be Johns; they were to wait within easy sprinting distance of the barracks’ rear doors (given that it had until recently been part of a larger building, there was no shortage of rear doors at assorted levels of the half-ruined building, opening out into partial rooms, corridors, and apartments). Meanwhile, Horst and his half of the force would scale the outside of the building to the roof. The silencing of the siren would be the signal for the assaults of the building’s interior from above and below to begin.

Buckingham Palace was, by any measure, a building. It wasn’t a very pretty one and, indeed, when the Houses of Parliament burnt down in the early part of the nineteenth century, the King offered it to the government as a permanent replacement with unseemly haste. Parliament thanked the King kindly for the offer, but pointed out that it was not suitable for the seating of two large assemblies. They neglected to mention that it also looked like a troll’s birthday cake, and that they would personally rather only ever have to go there for garden parties and for picking up the occasional honour. Aesthetically a disaster, the palace sat in the heart of London, fondly regarded by tourists and no one else. The Royal Family always much preferred Windsor or Balmoral to staying at Buckingham Palace, and who can blame them? That the palace had never looked so interesting as it did now, subsequent to an aerial bombardment, says all one really needed to know about the place.

Even the Mirkarvian troops stationed there didn’t like it; it was more a collection of rooms cobbled together by an architect sure that what royalty really wanted more than anything was lots of rooms cobbled together. It lacked cohesion and practicality. The troops chafed at the nearness of the former Horse Guard barracks hardly five minutes away, but their grumbling was ignored. The Red Queen wanted to station her flying palace over the ruins of the old, and she wanted her soldiers as close to hand as possible. If that meant soldiers’ boots churning up luxurious carpets, and antique furniture being broken up for firewood, so be it. The Red Queen’s will was all, and to deny it was to deny life.

The tactical downside of this location compared to a purpose-built barracks was that the soldiers were split into smaller groups rather than the higher concentrations afforded by long barrack rooms. When the NCOs went around to roust the troops at the beginning of the day, it was tiresome but necessary to visit several rooms to bellow loudly at the sleeping men whereas they would have preferred to appear at the end of a single room and practise their generic sexual insults and imaginative threats upon all the men at once. Still, this was the price of keeping Her Majesty happy, and a happy majesty was a majesty not handing out death warrants.

Now, however, the current deployment’s shortcomings were to prove fatal. As the man cranking the siren on the roof fell victim to a former washerwoman armed with the strength of ten and needle-sharp fangs, the siren’s handle turned unattended, slowing with every revolution as the warning tone grew quieter and lower until it faded into nothing.

Doors were flung open, trapdoors lifted, and the vampires were in. The soldiers within had very little warning and even less chance to defend themselves. Most were unarmed, and an unarmed man against a vampire at the peak of its energies is a poor match indeed. Soldiers fell hardly aware of what had overtaken them, cut down by cabdrivers, shop workers, a terribly conflicted vicar, a renowned West End actor, all working in concert and in awful silence, their progress marked only by the sounds of doors being violently thrown open, and the very occasional cry from those poor souls who saw their fate approaching and knew there was no evading it.

One decided he would not die that way, and threw himself from a window. General Fischer, who happened to be directing his subordinates from the base of the steel ramp that led up to the Rubrum Imperatrix’s main aft entry, watched the man fall two storeys to crash to the floor below. Instantly realising that the Mirkarvian ambush had been categorically outflanked, he ordered his men to form a defensive line protecting the ramp and the ship from attackers. But even as he was wondering what could be done to withdraw any surviving soldiers in the routed building, the problem was taken from him. Over the crackle of gunfire he had not heard the humming tones of electrical motors and hydraulic rams. Above his head, he had not seen the silhouettes of gun barrels swing ponderously from their mountings and sponsons. The first he knew of it was when they opened fire.

Explosive shells struck the last surviving wing of Buckingham Palace in a rapid salvo, the recoil from which made the anchor cables groan with stress as the Rubrum Imperatrix shifted under the impulse. A pause of a fraction of a second, and then the walls bulged outwards, inflated by the burst of the shells. Fire roared from windows, bodies vampiric and mortal were thrown out to somersault gracelessly to the hard pavement. The former struggled back to their feet, only to be stitched with raking heavy machine-gun fire from anti-personnel weapon positions studded about the aeroship’s underside. Fischer had fought vampires both here and in Mirkarvia, and knew that even that sort of weaponry would only slow a determined specimen. He was therefore astonished to see the vampires bloom in fire, burning briefly but fiercely as a magnesium ribbon burns when held in the Bunsen flame. They screamed as they died, and every vampire hit did die.

It was incredible. It was also clearly planned. Furious, Fischer ran up the ramp.

He finally found his queen on the top surface of the aeroship, watching the carnage below with the detachment of an entomologist watching ants fight.

‘You knew!’ spat Fischer, anger stripping him of diplomacy. ‘You knew this would happen!’

‘Good evening, General,’ said Ninuka without turning. ‘You have something to report?’

‘If you knew this would happen, why didn’t you warn me? Those men…’ The north end of the palace was in flames. Two more shells struck it in rapid succession and a corner of the wing fell away in a tumble of masonry. Beyond it apartments burnt out of any hope of control. ‘Those are Mirkarvians, damn it! Good men! How can you sacrifice—’

‘Every time you send your men into battle, you know you will be sacrificing at least some of them.’ Ninuka spoke sharply and the general’s sense of self-preservation finally caught up with his anger. ‘Every man in that building was as good as dead as soon as the vampires entered. This way, their deaths are not in vain.’

‘The ammunition our machine guns are using, what is it?’

‘Every creature that walks has its weakness, General. I have made it my business to specialise in weakness, to know my enemies at least as well as I know myself. It was an expensive business to find a suitable Achilles heel in vampires, and expensive to manufacture. The levy soldiers could not be equipped with it, but my Imperial Bodyguard has been. I hereby hand their command to you, General. Use them wisely. Hunt the leeches and exterminate every one of them. Every one of them, especially a handsome one with a faint Hessian accent and probably a well-tailored suit.’

‘You warned me of him once, Your Majesty, but he was not one of the four.’

For the first time, Ninuka’s equilibrium seemed shaken. She turned to him as angrily as if he had been unwise enough to personally insult her.

‘Impossible! How do you account for that pocket army of leeches otherwise? Of course he’s here!’

‘With respect, the four that attempted to penetrate the perimeter consisted of a blond man, who does fit the description you gave of one of the likely intruders, but the other three were all women.’

Ninuka looked blank. ‘Women?’

‘Yes, My Queen. One man and three women pretending to be the two survivors of the Lammasu ground support patrol and a pair of prisoners.’

The Red Queen looked off into the fires, an eyebrow cocked in intrigue. ‘My, my, Herr Cabal,’ she said to no one in particular, ‘how your social skills have come on.’ She dispelled the reverie with a shake of her head. ‘Horst Cabal is behind the attack on the barracks; only he could have led the leeches. He was always fated to become the Lord of the Dead, one way or another.’

Another staccato hammering of automatic fire, another flare. She returned her attention to the battlefield. ‘Where are Cabal and these three women throughout all this? I heard shooting.’

‘I couldn’t see, and the subaltern I sent to find out didn’t come back, Your Majesty.’

‘You couldn’t see.’ There was the slightest note of derision. ‘All can be seen if you stand in the right place.’ She walked towards the aeroship’s prow, past the covered shapes of several CI-880 Ghepardo entomopters liberated (or looted, depending on one’s perspective) from the Senzan Aeroforce inventory. Fischer glanced at them as he passed by, half longing, half loathing. Mirkarvia’s aerial forces had been a joke in the region. (‘What is the difference between a spider and the Mirkarvian Aeroforce?’ ‘People are afraid of spiders.’) Air superiority would have been impossible to impose in the wars against Senza and Poloruss. The Red Queen’s unconventional forms of warfare had rendered that shortfall moot, and the vastly superior aerofleets of the conquered powers had fallen into Mirkarvian hands.

But, it was all for show. Now Mirkarvia had the weapons that had proved useless to their vanquished enemies, and continued to prove useless in Mirkarvian hands simply because they were often surplus to requirements. Off in battles going on that moment around Britain in such exotic-sounding locales as Uttoxeter, Thetford, and Charnock Richard, such engines of war were being used in earnest. Wherever the Red Queen was, however, they were simply ornaments.

The deck jerking slowly beneath his feet in reaction to another salvo of shells fired into the pathetic remains of Buckingham Palace reminded him that this not entirely true; Her Majesty seemed to have a fondness for aeroships and their effective use. The entomopters may sit unattended and barely used but for occasional reconnaissance flights, but the vessel on which they sat was allowed the privilege of flexing its muscles in anger and of drawing blood. Every station aboard the ship was manned by Queen Ninuka’s personally chosen crew and staff. This really was her palace now she had grown bored with the crumbling heap that was Harslaus Castle in Mirkarvia’s equally faded capital, Krenz. A very special palace that could go where it was required and, if necessary, level an area the size of a small town once it got there.

Fischer was distracted enough by the entomopters that he allowed Ninuka to get a few yards ahead of him. She therefore reached the rail overlooking the ship’s prow first, and so Fischer had the dubious honour of hearing his famously imperturbable queen become perturbed for the second time in five minutes. ‘What is that?’

He joined her at the rail, and they looked down in mutual incomprehension. A badly formed and rapidly disintegrating cordon line of green soldiers was breaking up under the onslaught of a woman with a rifle, another with a wand of all things, and …

‘What is that?’ echoed the general. It was Zarenyia, but they weren’t to know that.

‘The drained corpses found in the National Gallery.’ Surprise was rapidly being replaced by calculation in the queen’s mind. ‘The webs. It cannot be a coincidence.’

‘I shall have the ship’s guns redirected upon that … thing,’ said Fischer, glad of a chance to give orders and feel like a soldier again. He would have pointed out that if the Rubrum Imperatrix had been left on its habitual alert levels, lookouts would have spotted the monster immediately after it appeared. As it was, everybody had been ordered by the queen to keep a close eye on the approaches to the ship’s aft quarter. He decided that this was neither the time nor the place to criticise Her Majesty, just like every other place and every other time. In the empire of the Red Queen, discretion was a survival trait.

‘No!’ She was pointing furiously into the middle of the unlikely group of attackers.

A man wearing the uniform of a Mirkarvian commissioned officer but with the air of a civilian was climbing to his feet in the middle of the triangle of forces arranged about him. He took a moment to dust himself down and then—Fischer drew his small binoculars from their case to confirm it—strolled over to an abandoned forearm that lay on the ground not far away. The forearm still wore the lower sleeve of a Mirkarvian uniform, and Fischer judged it as belonging to a major by the rings of rank around the cuff. The hand gripped a service pistol, and before Fischer’s astonished gaze, the man placed his foot on the severed forearm and wrestled the pistol free from the dead fingers. Pleased with his prize, the man rejoined the monstrous squad of women and started a conversation with them while placidly plinking 9mm rounds at the unhappy conscripts.

‘That is Johannes Cabal!’ The queen’s teeth were bared. ‘On no account is he to be killed or seriously injured, General. Any man who breaks that order will suffer my profound displeasure.’ Given the awful fates that had befallen those who merely peeved Queen Orfilia Ninuka, this was not a warning to be lightly ignored.

Very aware that he was likely exposing himself to such displeasure, General Fischer felt compelled to point out the realities of the situation. ‘Your Majesty, he is protected by a monstrous spider … woman … thing, a witch, and a woman who seems very comfortable with a rifle. Capturing him may be impossible.’ Ninuka turned on him, scenting insubordination. He raised his hands in pacification. ‘I speak only of practicalities. The troops we have to hand are green, barely out of training. It would take experienced men to do as you wish, and we have none.’

‘None? There must be a few veterans. They cannot all be dispersed around this wretched country.’

‘There were a few squads I might have trusted to mount a competent attempt to take that man unharmed, but…’ He nodded aft where the flames of the burning palace rose high into the sky.

Orfilia Ninuka looked at the glowing smoke rising from the unloved palace, and her jaw became set. For a moment Fischer was sure she was going to demand his pistol and, in all likelihood, shoot him dead. It would not have been the first time she had retired troublesome senior officers whom she felt had disappointed her. Instead she smiled. ‘Then we shall consider an alternative stratagem. Listen carefully, General.’

*   *   *

Horst did not feel at all lucky to be blown up, yet he was, which only goes to show something or another. The reader is at liberty to draw their own lesson in irony.

Even at his accelerated state wherein hummingbirds seemed slothful and sloths seemed geological, the detonation of an artillery round as it passed through the room into which he was about to enter was still an unavoidable surprise. Admittedly, he saw it as no mortal might with their own eyes—the sudden twitch in the far wall, the ripples travelling across the torn wallpaper, the glow of light around the door frame, then the hot, radiant gas of the explosion ramming in glowing planes under and over the door and even through the keyhole, the shudder in the wood, the eruption as the hinges and lock were torn from the disintegrating frame, the door shivering into smaller and smaller pieces, the floorboards lifting beneath his feet, waves rushing along the carpet as the gas got beneath it, and then the waves turning to smoke and fire as the material flashed—but he stood no chance of escaping it.

The blast picked him up, threw him back down the corridor as easily as if he were a scrap of paper, and then projected him through a window to fall thirty feet. As he lay there, burning, peppered with wooden splinters the least of which was the size of a pencil, and his suit utterly ruined, he did not feel very lucky. Yet he was, for he had been thrown out of the side of the building away from the guns of the Rubrum Imperatrix and so did not finish the moment punctured and destroyed by the arcane ammunition devised by the inventive mind of Orfilia Ninuka.

He became aware of somebody appearing over him, and then all became black. He felt some hard textile thrown over him and somehow dredged up the memory of lying on carpet offcuts in a den he had made in the woods near his home when he was perhaps nine or ten years old. Somebody was using a length of salvaged carpet to put out the flames upon him, which was kind of them, whoever they were, and probably not the actions of the enemy. This was reassuring and he allowed himself to relax a little. Presently the carpet was removed, and he found himself looking up into the face of Johns. His morning suit looked the worse for wear, and his top hat had entirely gone.

‘Are you all right, my lord?’ he was asking anxiously.

‘Oh, call me Horst.’ He said it vaguely; the blast had taken more from him than he realised. ‘What happened?’

‘They fired on their own barracks! They must be insane!’ Johns looked back at the burning building. ‘And they have some kind of special weapon, my Lord Horst. It kills those who are like us. There’s only a handful of us left who were lucky enough to be on this side of the building when they opened fire. What shall we do?’

‘Lucky?’ Horst managed to sit up, but it hurt more than anything had ever hurt him since he had become nocturnal by necessity. He made a mental note to avoid third-degree burns and blast injuries in future.

‘Wait here.’ Johns vanished into the smoke.

‘Righty-ho,’ said Horst, and waited there. Presently Johns returned dragging a terribly injured corporal, also a victim of the short-range artillery bombardment.

‘There you go, old chap. Tuck in. Got to keep your strength up if we’re to confound the Mirkarvians.’ He noted Horst’s dismay, and added, ‘I know, I know. I must admit, I’ve never really understood how some of our number can be so gleeful about feeding. But needs must and, for what it’s worth, he’s quite insensible and not long for this world in any case. Poor fella’s already lapsed into shock, and I doubt the best doctor in the world could bring him out of it. Go on … Horst. There’s still work to be done.’

Horst nodded reluctantly, muttered a few words of regret and apology to the comatose man, and fed.

*   *   *

He lifted his head some minutes later feeling physically much better, but mentally much worse. The soldier was quite dead and, even if he was technically one of the enemy, using him as a handy panacea to a vampire’s injuries seemed unfeeling at best. But it was done, and there was no point crying over spilt blood.

‘I hope the others have made some use of the distraction.’ Horst climbed easily to his feet, now as limber as a boy once more. He stepped away from the body, putting it out of sight, and proceeded to attempt to put it out of mind. ‘How many of us are left?’

‘Including us? Six.’ Horst looked at him, dumbfounded. Johns shook his head. ‘I don’t know if they fired into the barracks simply out of panic and were lucky, or if it was a very deliberate trap. Surely they wouldn’t sacrifice their own people like that?’

‘They wouldn’t. She would.’ The identification needed no further clarification than that, Ninuka’s public relations disasters being common knowledge internationally.

‘I’d heard stories of what she did to her own country—’

‘All true. She is perfectly capable of any act. Rally the few we have left. We have to make this count before they realise they haven’t destroyed all of us.’

Johns nodded, and ran off, dodging through the ruins, seeking cover as he went. He was barely gone a minute before Horst saw him running straight back in as straight a line as he could manage in the terrain. He looked terrified.

‘My lord!’ Horst couldn’t tell if he was calling to him, or sending up a prayer to an uncaring God. ‘They’re dead! They’re all dead! We have to—’

The bullet took him high in the back and went clean through, exiting from the left side of the chest. Horst, who as a vampire had been shot often enough to remove the novelty of it, was momentarily unconcerned; what could a bullet do to such as they? But almost instantly smoke began to issue from the exit wound. Johns looked down at it in uncomprehending horror. Smoke curled from around his collar, and he tore at it as if he believed his clothes were on fire. They were, but only because the body on which they hung was starting to burn. Johns tore away the collar and half his shirt, his waistcoat buttons popping under the frantic violence, and the flesh exposed beneath was already incandescent with escaping energy. Johns started to scream. It lasted barely three seconds before he collapsed in a rain of charcoal and hissing bones.

Eight men appeared seconds later, and they were very different soldiers from the majority of the Mirkarvian forces. They wore steel helmets finished in a matte carmine, and gorget patches in the same shade on the collars of their black uniforms. These were the queen’s own Imperial Bodyguard, an elite force used not only as a personal guard but frequently for special operations at the Red Queen’s behest. They were well trained, well equipped, and feared by friend and foe alike. There was also the rumour that any new recruit had to endure a ceremony during which the queen took the soldier’s soul for safekeeping and to ensure loyalty. Of course, that was just silly hearsay. As if such things were possible.

How stylishly they were apparelled was of secondary interest to Horst at that moment. That they carried ugly, squared-off carbines that could apparently kill vampires with a single shot occupied his thoughts far more acutely. His recent dismay that his feeding upon an, admittedly, already dying man had shortened a life by a few minutes was now replaced by a very pragmatic relief that he had done so; his reserves were full, and that was just as well. By the time the Imperial Bodyguard arrived, there was no hint Horst had ever been there but for a slight breeze in the otherwise still air.

*   *   *

Cabal, Leonie Barrow, Miss Smith, and Zarenyia had sought cover not long after the aeroship lowering nearby laid fire into Buckingham Palace, thereby putting the last vestige of the building out of its misery. It had occurred to Cabal that he had made a mild error in forgetting that the Rubrum Imperatrix was positively bristling with guns of assorted kinds and that it might take it upon itself to use them at some point. Thus, he led his party at a sprightly trot to cover by a tumbled wall. It would offer no protection from an artillery shell, it was true, but at least they would be invisible to the gun-aimers.

Cabal peered cautiously around the corner and settled a purposeful eye upon the aeroship’s entrance ramp. The top part of it was the vessel’s own; a broad deployment point that would touch the earth should the ship set down, or be used for dropping rappelling lines or even at greater height yet, the use of parachutes. These were a newish contrivance, and Cabal wondered at the nerve required to bet one’s life on a large sheet conducting one from hundreds or thousands of feet in the air down safely to very solid ground. He understood the science of it, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

The lower half of the ramp built to span the gap was a semi-permanent affair of sapper bridge sections raised at an angle, supported by girders, and rooted in concrete. Any sentries that were supposed to have been there had been drawn off by the action or perhaps even taken cover from the effects of the heavy guns over their heads. It seemed to have ceased for the moment at least, and he was relieved to note that every gun barrel was pointing resolutely towards the raging conflagration previously known as Buckingham Palace. He spotted movement at ground level and saw troops leaving the end of the ramp and heading in discreet sections towards the fire. Their professionalism was apparent, and Cabal lapsed into tactical ratiocination.

‘Ninuka’s sending her bodyguard out.’

The others joined him and watched the figures disappear from view around the sides of the burning building. ‘That’s a lot of men,’ said Leonie. ‘She can’t have many left aboard.’

Zarenyia regarded the aeroship with disfavour. ‘It’s going to be full of little corridors, isn’t it? Hardly room to swing a baby. I’m not going to have to fold up again, am I?’

‘You’re assuming that I intend to board.’ This was disingenuous; Cabal’s distracted air as he weighed up the approach to the ramp made it perfectly clear that this was precisely his intention. ‘But, no. I am concerned for Horst and his cadre. We’ve seen that the Mirkarvians have access to weapons that make short work of vampires. Would you be so kind as to find my brother and any survivors and bring them to the aeroship as quickly as you can, madam? I think they would be both safer and more useful aboard the…’ He squinted at the vessel’s prow. ‘The Rubrum Imperatrix? Truly? Oh, the utter arrogance of the woman.’

‘Yes, that would be entirely alien a concept to you, of course.’ Miss Barrow’s smirk was distinct, but forgivable. Certainly Cabal had nothing to say to it.

‘Give us a leg-up,’ said Miss Smith, holding a hand out to Zarenyia. Zarenyia looked at her with astonishment for a brief moment before it was replaced with delight.

‘You’re coming with me, then, darling?’

‘Why not? I sort of enjoyed riding around on you in Hell.’ The expression of Leonie Barrow, who was observing this exchange, became one of perturbed puzzlement. ‘And this time I’m armed.’ She held up her wand, as proud as any child with a wonderful new toy on Christmas morning.

Zarenyia lowered herself and offered a knee, of which she had a surplus. Miss Smith clambered up easily behind Zarenyia’s human torso (to distinguish it from the arachnoid thorax upon which she sat) and made herself comfortable, exposing a shameful amount of ankle as her long skirt was pushed up in the process. Ankle all the way up to the mid-thigh to be precise. Stockings exposed to what was surely a scandalised London (zombies and vampires and foreign invaders were bad enough, but just cover yourself up, woman!), she placed a hand on Zarenyia’s shoulder and held her wand at the ready in the other. ‘I feel like a cowgirl,’ she said.

Zarenyia laughed. ‘You just cannot help feeding me straight lines, can you? I like you, poppet. Shall we go and kill some people now?’

Without waiting for an answer, Zarenyia galloped out of cover.

Cabal watched them vanish in pursuit of the Imperial Bodyguard with naked irritation. ‘Wonderful. Now there are only two of us to storm an enemy warship. What could possibly go wrong?’

‘I hope that was rhetorical, Cabal, or we’re going to be here for quite a while listing things that could possibly go wrong.’

Cabal said nothing, but only checked his pistol. He did it in such an offhanded, inconsequential way, however, that she realised with some surprise that he was procrastinating.

‘We are still going to try, though? Zarenyia and Smith can buy us some time, and God knows they’ll provide a spectacular diversion, but if we’re going to attempt this, we have to do so now.’

Cabal cocked the pistol and checked its safety was on before replying, ‘You know me, Miss Barrow. Better than most, I would say. You would not characterise me as given to irrational fancies?’

‘Not for a second. If you did have the occasional irrational fancy, you would probably be more likable. What is this about?’

‘Well, for one thing, you have a basis for possibly finding me more likable, for I am prey to an irrational fancy.’ He looked up at the aeroship hanging impassively before them. ‘I have a bad feeling. I cannot characterise it beyond that; believe me, I have tried. I have a sickness of spirit that drains me of any desire to go forwards.’

Leonie Barrow gawped at him. ‘Are you saying you’re afraid?’

He did not deny it, did not quibble with the term. ‘I believe so. The Phobic Animus is very much at home in me at the present moment. I fear that my luck is running out. I fear I will not leave that vessel alive. I fear that I shall, at this very late pass, fail finally, totally, irrevocably. I am afraid.’

She went to crouch by the wall by him. ‘Well, I suppose that’s that, then.’ She started thumbing fresh rounds into her rifle’s magazine. ‘I should have expected it to happen under stress. I did expect it to happen under stress. And here we are.’

Cabal looked quizzical. ‘You anticipated my failure of nerve?’

‘Not exactly. I anticipated the moment when your soul finally settled back into where it’s supposed to be, and stopped misfiring every five minutes. You are afraid, Mr Cabal? I am afraid. For all of her hooting and carrying on, I suspect Miss Smith is afraid. We are in danger. Of course we are afraid. Welcome back to the human race, Johannes Cabal. We were beginning to wonder if you’d received your invitation.’

‘You are mocking me.’

‘I am. But that doesn’t mean I’m not telling the truth. Look, just do what you always do—walk in like you own the place, be sardonic, shoot people. It’s the only way that we can get out of here and back to the real world. That’s the game, Cabal.’

Cabal gave her a hard look, then glanced away while he thought. Leonie, painfully aware that any door of opportunity they had could well slam shut any second, somehow held her silence. Cabal straightened up. ‘I shall need another gun.’

‘That’s my boy.’ Leonie clapped him on the shoulder and smiled far too broadly to be ladylike at the vile look he gave her in return. ‘Can’t go in there with only one gun; there might be lots of people to shoot.’

*   *   *

It took an unconscionably long time to run the length of the Rubrum Imperatrix. Cabal was aware that much of the subjective time was simply down to how very uncomfortable it is to run beneath a massive flying artefact whose underside is liberally laden with ways of swatting humans into sticky little red puddles. As they ran, he could hardly help but glance up now and then to see if an inquisitive turret had noted them as they scuttled beneath the colossus, and swung its maw to bear upon them. In truth, there were so many turrets bearing machine guns, he could hardly keep an eye on them all, but their run was not interrupted by a rain of lead falling upon them to smash their bones and puncture their internal organs, so he supposed the gunners were still far too interested in the last throes of the burning palace, its walls falling around the inferno, to look straight down.

A long time—subjectively—later, they arrived at the base of the entry ramp. As Leonie took position to scan the approaches, Cabal peered cautiously up the ramp, ducking his head around the edge of a fixing stanchion at the base and back immediately for fear of sharpshooters in the beast’s belly. No bullet winged its way at his head. Indeed, he had seen no one. Cautiously he took a longer peek, and confirmed the dispersal area at the ramp’s head seemed to be completely abandoned.

‘We haven’t been spotted on the ground yet, Cabal.’ Distantly they heard the sound of Zarenyia whooping happily and the distinctive sound of shattering physics that accompanied the use of Miss Smith’s wand. ‘But I do not know how long that will last. How many are guarding the ramp?’

‘None.’

That gave her pause. ‘None? They’ve left the door to their queen’s flying boudoir unguarded? That seems…’

‘Unlikely.’

‘I was going to say “suspicious”.’

‘Also a good analysis.’

They looked about them, but if there was an ambush in the offing, it was taking its own sweet time in materialising. Leonie made an unhappy face. ‘A trap.’

‘Certainly, but not here or it would already have been sprung.’ He nodded to the ship. ‘Our fate awaits us.’

‘Still frightened?’

He nodded. ‘Terrified.’

‘Good. Not just me, then. I don’t suppose there’s a choice. Off you go. I’ll follow you up and cover our back, o Great Leader.’

Breaking cover was hard to do; there wasn’t a scrap more to be had on the ramp itself, and they would be exposed to fire for some eighty feet until they were within the shelter of the aeroship’s belly, where there was probably an ambush awaiting them. It would not be an enjoyable ascent.

At least the first sixty would be stable upon the ground-mounted ramp. The lowered aeroship ramp married reasonably well with the ground ramp’s upper lip, although that they weren’t connected by chains despite both lips having holes in them that would have been ideal for the purpose perturbed Cabal. Still, indecision would butter no parsnips, nor aid in likely regicide, so he put a foot on the ramp and began a fast crouched ascent that he hoped might make him less of a target for any passing Mirkarvian. Seeing he was at last committed to the climb, Leonie Barrow let him get ten or so feet ahead in an effort to avoid clumping together and offering an easy mark before starting up herself.

They proceeded with the curious feeling that they were in a play, which—in a manner of speaking—they were. The artificiality of the Five Ways bore upon them as at no other stage of its development, now that they were surely approaching the dénouement. He had already experienced anagnorisis. Presently, there would be a confrontation, a peripeteia, catharsis, and probably some sort of coda. The one thing they could not predict was whether this was an heroic tale, a tragedy, or even a comedy. Perhaps Ninuka would prove vulnerable to a good speech and they could all dance around as the curtain fell. This seemed unlikely. It was a theatre of improvisation that came with a butcher’s bill. Well stocked with mechanicals, it also put real lives into jeopardy, or even took them. There seemed little doubt from what they had been able to glean that the core of Ninuka’s force had come from the real world along with her. These were real people and they had died real deaths in the pursuance of her grand scheme. Even Miss Smith had been dragged into the trial, and who knew who else that had simply been close enough to the upstage to be perceived. On the plus side, Ratuth Slabuth was as dead as mutton, so the stormy outlook bore at least one silver lining.

No Imperial Bodyguards appeared as Cabal and Leonie ascended, no triumphant cackles to tell them that they had fallen into Ninuka’s cunning trap, nyahahaha, etc. They climbed to the accompaniment of the sounds of disagreement as Zarenyia and Miss Smith introduced themselves to the ground troops mopping up the vampires. The disagreements were pithy.

Cabal reached the overlapping lips of the ramps, and hesitated. Strictly speaking, the Rubicon of the venture had been crossed when they first entered the sort-of realities of the Five Ways. There and then, however, the lines of steel across the ramp marked it more physically to his mind. With grand misgivings, he crossed the lines and continued onwards and upwards.

He had barely taken five more paces when a shot rang out from somewhere off to their right. Cabal instinctively dropped flat onto the unforgiving surface, the horizontal tread lines cut into the metal discoloured and marred with ashes and soil trodden in by any number of soldiers’ boots tramping back and forth.

‘I think there’s a marksman at the guard post,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘Lay down suppression fire until I reach cover, and I’ll do the same for you while you follow.’

He waited, but there was no answer.

He knew what he would see even before he craned his neck to look. Leonie Barrow lay crumpled on the ramp some five feet short of the join in the ramp. She was motionless, her rifle inches from the fingertips of her out flung arm. There was blood on the ramp.

For a moment, he did not only not know what to do, he didn’t even know what to think. Theirs was a dangerous undertaking. They had all—with the exception of Miss Smith—volunteered for the task. There had always been the likelihood of injuries and the possibility of death. He had seen enough of it to regard it as just something that happened, thankfully relatively rare but always ultimately unavoidable. He had killed others himself and seen that role as just part of the weave of history.

Yet this seemed wrong. Leonie Barrow could not be dead. She could not. She could not.

The old part of him rankled with disgust at such a romantic view of life. As if anyone was proof to the inevitability of their own mortality. The new part of him, pink as new skin growing from a ruin of burnt flesh, was innocent in its own way, and it did not wish to listen. She could not be dead. She could not be.

It struck him that he had been looking at her body what seemed like a long time, even if it were really only a few seconds. More than long enough for a marksman to chamber a new round. Should he return fire? A pistol against a rifle at range seemed a poor match. Should he try to reach her? The angle of the ramp relative to the guard post gave him a sliver of cover where he lay, but Leonie was close by the ramp’s edge. If he went to her, he would be an easy target.

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.

‘We could all learn a lot from her,’ said Horst. ‘She has wonderful joie de vivre, don’t you think?’

‘She is far and away the homicidal maniac with whom I most enjoy spending time,’ agreed Cabal. ‘Now, to action. We have a single goal now: to reach Ninuka. Between us and her are any number of highly motivated gentlemen with guns that can apparently kill vampires. They will undog that door over there sometime in the next minute and endeavour to demonstrate. Do we have a plan?’

‘Yes. You go after Ninuka, and I’ll deal with the crew.’

Horst said it so firmly that it impressed Cabal, despite which he felt constrained to say, ‘Are you sure? You did hear what I said about anti-vampire weaponry?’

‘They had surprise on their side last time. This time they don’t, it’s close-quarter combat, which doesn’t favour firearms, and—I have to tell you—I am really angry with them.’

Cabal looked away. ‘I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t even reach her.’

‘I know. Just for once, I’m not going to hold you responsible for when things go to hell. This is all Ninuka’s doing one way or another. We don’t have long, Johannes. I just want to say, in case things go to hell again, I don’t blame you for any of this, and I forgive you for everything else. You have always been and always will be my little brother, and I love you. No matter what happens, always remember that.’

Cabal looked at him, vaguely appalled. ‘For God’s sake…’

Horst shrugged. ‘Had to be said. They’re unlocking the door now; I can hear them trying to be quiet. Good luck, Johannes.’

*   *   *

The Mirkarvian marines opened the door and promptly regretted it. Thanks to the confusion spawned by having a giant spider-lady swinging around under the ship’s belly, reports had been fragmentary and inaccurate. The few observers who had noticed Horst had mischaracterised him as a hapless comrade captured by the monster or even that the creature had two forebodies, one male and one female. None had noticed Horst’s leap nor his entry into the ship.

The upshot was that the marines entered the ramp’s staging area with caution sufficient to deal with one untrained civilian with a handgun. This had all begun swimmingly when they saw him waiting for them on the far side of the chamber, the stolen army tunic thrown aside, and his hands held up in a position of surrender. ‘I surrender,’ he lied at them.

They moved quickly forwards to cover him, and so did a very poor job of examining the rest of the area, specifically the wall above the door through which they entered. When they were all deployed in an arc, bristling with weapons all bearing on the unthreatening man in the blue-glass sunglasses, the rearmost marines started dropping silently. Five were down before somebody noticed the form of a fellow marine fall in his peripheral vision. He turned his head, and started to shout a warning that was abruptly curtailed by being punched so hard his jaw entirely dislocated.

The marine made a pained sound at this treatment, which attracted the attention of the rest of them, encouraged to do so by Cabal pointing and saying with mountainous disingenuity, ‘Oh, what’s happened to him? Is he well?’

The sharper marines realised there was a threat behind them and turned their attention in that direction. Even sharper marines might have thought that perhaps there were threats on either side, but none were present.

A pistol going off at close quarters behind them unsettled the marines badly, and by the time they had settled on some form of response, they were largely dead or unconscious. The sole conscious survivor was a corporal who now found himself disarmed and held up against the chamber’s forward bulkhead by an angry vampire and a necromancer who was examining one of the discarded carbines of famously boxy design.

‘Ninuka,’ demanded Horst. ‘Where is she?’

*   *   *

When the Brothers Cabal emerged from the staging chamber, Horst was strong with new blood and Johannes was carrying two stolen pistols, a stolen carbine, and stolen ammunition for all of them. He looked back at the pile of dead and unconscious men in the chamber before slamming the door shut and dogging it locked from the outside. He glanced momentarily at the ramp lever on the outside of the doorway, the corresponding one within having been disabled as part of the trap. Horst watched this and read possible intent there.

‘Those men are all on the ramp. Pulling that lever would be a cruel thing to do to men who are already having a bad day.’

‘I know.’ Cabal looked at the lever for a moment more, then shook his head. ‘Once I would have done it without hesitation, to cut their numbers, but they’re just puppets in all of this. I hold no animus towards them and, let’s be honest, their chances of survival are likely thin enough already. Let those of them still alive dream on a little longer.’

Somewhere an alarm began to squall. Cabal smiled sourly. ‘In any case, our imposition seems to have been discovered. Attend to the crew, Horst. I shall find Ninuka and bring matters to a conclusion.’ He hesitated. ‘And Horst…’

‘Yes?’

‘What you said earlier. That thing you said…’

‘Yes?’

Johannes Cabal smiled. ‘You really are a sentimental fool, you know that?’

Horst Cabal smiled. ‘I do, and I consider it one of my best character traits.’

‘Fare you well, brother.’

‘Good fortune, brother.’

And so, like characters in one of the bloodier Grimm’s fairy tales, they parted.

*   *   *

Of Horst’s progress, little needs to be said. He wandered the corridors until he began to understand how the ship’s architecture worked and so began to recognise recurrent features, especially the hatches that led into the ventral gun positions. These he would enter. If he found them unoccupied (as was invariably the state of the larger guns, their work done for the moment), then so much the better. When he found them manned, he subdued the occupants by mesmerism where possible and by force when they proved too unimaginative to take the less painful path. Turrets ornamented by sleeping gunners dreaming of summer days and pretty girls or bedewed with the blood of the recalcitrant were left in his wake. In either case they grew quiet and unresponsive to the increasingly frantic calls for status from the ship’s bridge.

Horst had read enough magazines of popular mechanics to know that the practical necessities of an aeroship meant that its vitals were sited on the uppermost decks. This was where one would find the engineering sections that tended to the gyroscopic levitators and the etheric line guides that both harvested energy (probably from a dimension several over from the one he called home, that had more energy than it knew what to do with) and provided forward motion by dragging the ship along the lines of ethereal force that penetrate the world in a complex and unpredictable weave.

Also on the upper decks would be access to the main bridge, at the apex of the surface-ship-like prow, to give a good view of the land beneath. Horst had already discovered the smaller landing bridge in the middle of the lowest deck wherein a pilot would guide the ship in for field landings. It had been empty, but he took a moment to wreck the steering gear so it could not be pressed into service in the emergency the ship would shortly be suffering, if he had anything to do with it.

Occasionally he encountered ship’s troops responding to the ‘Hostiles Aboard’ alert sounding in every corridor. They were noisy, even in the soft-soled deck boots they wore, and he was never surprised by them. Contrariwise, they were always surprised by him. In a single encounter was he wounded, but the bullet barely skimmed his flesh of his left tricep and failed to discharge its fatal contents into his body. That aside, he blurred and dodged, and punched and broke hands and arms in an attempt to disable rather than kill. He left patrol after patrol groaning and weeping in his wake as he made his irresistible way towards the master bridge.

*   *   *

Acting on the information received from the corporal they had interrogated in the staging chamber, Johannes Cabal made straight for the quarters of the Red Queen. His path was relatively short, and he was untroubled by the attentions of the ship’s marines. This hardly surprised him; it was necessary for the conclusion of the Five Ways that they meet, for what adventure does not conclude with the protagonist and antagonist face-to-face? Which of them was which was a matter for minds of a more literary bent than his. Every man and woman is the hero of his or her own story, striving for something better. Ninuka’s probably lay in the re-creation of the Mirkarvian Empire, an entity seen here in prototype. This was undoubtedly a good thing for Mirkarvians—empires usually are for whosoever gets to put the name of their country before ‘Empire’ in the title—but unusually awful for everyone else if this was how things were intended to turn out. A vision of men in shiny boots stamping around from the ruins of Albion in the west to humbled Poloruss in the east was deeply unpalatable for all but the Mirkarvians and their queen to strive for. Still, it was always nice to have a hobby.

And for Cabal? He could not even begin to guess how many lives he had caused to be lost or ruined directly or indirectly since he had begun his great project. On the other hand, he had certainly saved the world at least once so, on balance, he was fairly sure that made him the hero. Flawed, certainly, but he seemed to recall that both Ulysses and Jason of ancient legend could be utter arses when the mood took them; he was probably some sort of paragon in comparison.

He discovered Queen Orfilia Ninuka at her desk, waiting patiently for him as was only right. It had all the makings of a set piece; he swept open both of the double doors to her quarters in what he assumed would be the appropriate manner. She was behind the great white-and-gold desk, her back to him in one of the new style of swivel chairs, a sensible choice given the great vista of doom-haunted London spread out below them.

‘Ninuka.’

A heartbeat’s pause, and the high-backed chair rotated slowly to face him, as perfectly staged as anything upon the West End.* She sat there regarding him with the icy malevolence of a cobra with expensive tastes in couture.

‘Cabal.’

There was silence, broken only by the distant sound of the alarm and the universal hum of the levitators thrumming through the hull. The silence drew out, and Cabal began to wonder if he was supposed to have been issued a script, because he was damned if he could think of anything else to do but raise his pistol and kill her. Then she spoke, and he was saved the anticlimax.

‘Fate is a curious thing, is it not, Cabal? If we had never crossed paths, my father would still be alive, I would still be happy in my blinkered little world of sensuous excess, and Mirkarvia would still be a rotting backwater where history used to happen. Now look at me. I discovered that the position in society that was my birthright could be used for more than luxury and indulgence; that the social skills of gentle persuasion and the powers of subtle coercion I seemed equally born into could be utilised to bring greater prizes than expensive gifts and bedmates.’

‘You will recall that those powers failed to work upon me.’

‘I do recall, but that was because you are so thumpingly stupid, Cabal. Don’t ever try to congratulate yourself on resisting any wiles I may have employed upon you. They only count as wiles if the subject isn’t so stunningly dull as to not even notice.’

Cabal’s lips thinned; his vanity was a small thing by most standards, but where it stood its ground was on the subject of his intelligence. ‘Perhaps—’ he began.

‘No.’ Ninuka raised a hand to stop him. ‘If you intend to tell me that perhaps you were playing the innocent the whole time, no. I am very familiar with what ‘playing hard to get’ looks like, and it was utterly absent in your guileless, clueless face. No. That will not do.’

Cabal considered. ‘Are you suggesting that if I had blithely fallen into bed with you on our first meeting, we would not now be flying over a phantasmal representation of the ruins of one of the world’s great cities, and many, many of your troops would still be alive?’

She shook her head, then hesitated, her chin tilted up in thought. ‘I had not considered matters that way. Perhaps so. Your celibacy may well have consigned thousands to death or the threat of death. Really, Cabal, it’s only a dick. Why did you have to be so damned possessive?’

Cabal’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. He blinked foolishly, his eyes denoting confusion and discomfort. ‘I admit, madam, I was not expecting this interview to unfold in quite such a manner.’

‘Nor was I, but I’m glad we’ve had a chance to clear the air on the matter.’ Her hands had been folded in her lap throughout the conversation, but now she extended her right hand towards him, and he saw she held a pistol in it. ‘This is my father’s pistol. It survived the crash of the Princess Hortense. My new friends in the Katamenian banditry recovered it along with his body from the wreck before the Senzans could land rescue parties nearby. The bandits built a funeral pyre for him.’ She nodded at the urn in its case, ebony with the Marechal crest in gold upon it. ‘There he is. He goes everywhere with me. I talk to him. Sometimes he even talks back.’ She smiled cynically at the expression Cabal was trying unsuccessfully to keep entirely off his face. ‘Oh, yes. I’m quite mad. I’m sure of that much. I hold you responsible for that, too.’

She weighed the pistol in her hand, holding it almost casually, but Cabal could see her finger was upon the trigger and that the muzzle never wavered away from him. ‘I wonder if this is how this is meant to end, Cabal. Another aeroship, another pistol fight. That seems a little prosaic to me. Banal, even. I was of the impression that the Five Ways might be a little subtler than that.’ She raised the pistol, lowered the hammer with her thumb, and tossed the weapon onto the desk. ‘If you’re going to shoot, Cabal, then shoot. I’ve seen you kill a woman at point-blank range. I know you can do it.’ She spread her arms. ‘Murder me, Cabal.’

Cabal levelled his pistol, and centred the barrel upon the plain of her pale forehead.

‘That’s it,’ she whispered, yet still he heard her. ‘Shoot me in the brow, just as you did my father. Go on. Fire.’ He hesitated. He knew he was entering a trap when he first started up the ship’s boarding ramp. Why did he feel that the real trap was only just closing upon him now?

‘Shoot. Shoot, you fucking coward.’ She said it quietly, without rancour: a benediction rather than a curse.

The steel of the trigger felt warm beneath his finger. He squeezed almost without realising it.

*   *   *

‘She’s only a simple girl. I think she’s telling the truth in most respects,’ said Frank Barrow, father of Leonie. Cabal looked at him blankly. He was reasonably sure that Barrow had not been there a moment ago. He wasn’t even sure what Barrow was talking about.

‘Meaning what?’

‘She came to this carnival last night. The very same night she concocts a poison and uses it. I don’t think she could have become Lucrezia Borgia at such short notice without professional help.’

Barrow looked meaningfully at Cabal, and Cabal was fairly sure that he was insinuating something. Exactly what he had no idea, so he asked.

‘What are you insinuating?’

The sergeant coughed, startling Cabal by the very fact of his presence. There was a British police sergeant and two constables, all uniformed. The damnedest sense of déjà vu settled upon him. The sergeant spoke. ‘The arcade, sir, if you would. We would like to look at the machines.’

‘Very well, but you’re wasting your time.’ Cabal said it with the greatest confidence, although he was profoundly unsure what the police hoped to find in the arcade. The sense of familiarity troubled him; it was as if a memory was being held from him.

Cabal led the way for the little entourage of three police officers and Barrow to the arcade. He felt in his right-hand jacket pocket for the bunch of keys he knew would be there and unlocked the big, good-quality padlock that sealed the entrance and stepped aside. ‘Be my guests.’ The party entered and stood in a huddle near the door while Cabal went around and opened the shutters. As each shutter opened, bars of daylight lanced in, but there was something theatrical about the way they illuminated the airborne dust within the arcade. Why was the inside of a travelling carnival’s arcade dusty at all?

A travelling carnival. The Cabal Brothers Carnival, less widely known as the Carnival of Discord. This place had occupied a whole year of his life. How could he have forgotten that? Through the unshuttered windows he could see the countryside of Penlow on Thurse, looking surprisingly like artfully painted theatrical flats.

Barrow’s eye lit upon the penny tableaux and he went to investigate, followed by the policemen. Cabal leaned against the wall and affected a nonchalance that he did not feel. It was more like hitting his mark. Barrow studied the row, reading the titles as he moved along it. ‘“The House of Bluebeard,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Court of Ivan the Terrible,” “The Haunted Bedroom,” “Tyburn Tree”. Very Grand Guignol, Mr. Cabal,’ he said disapprovingly.

‘It’s what people like, Mr. Barrow.’

Barrow had arrived at the end of the row, a machine covered with a tarpaulin and with a sign fixed to it. ‘“Out of order”? What’s wrong with it?’

Cabal had not the first nor foggiest idea. He looked at Barrow and Barrow looked back, tilting his eyebrows interrogatively in a manner not so much inquisitorial as supportive. Cabal glanced around, but there was no worried assistant in the wings clutching a tatty copy of the script, ready to offer a prompt at a beseeching glance. There was just Cabal, Frank Barrow, the sergeant, and two extras dressed as constables. Cabal ventured an ad-lib.

‘I don’t know. Something mechanical. Quite beyond me.’

There seemed to be an almost imperceptible sigh of relief from the others.

‘We’d like to have a look at it if we may, sir,’ said the sergeant.

‘I don’t think that would be wise.’ He wasn’t just saying it, he realised. It really would be unwise to look at the machine. ‘You have my word there is no machine like the one that you have described. Isn’t that enough?’ He said it with too much emphasis. Surely he had been more reserved the last time he had been here?

‘We’d like to see for ourselves, sir. The tarpaulin, if you please.’

‘I really don’t think I ought.’

‘That’s as may be, sir. But if you’ll pardon me…’ The sergeant quickly undid the tarpaulin and pulled it away.

The penny tableaux machine was stuck in mid-action. In a cunningly wrought representation of a large and luxurious stateroom-cum-office aboard some grandiose aeroship, a blond man wearing blue-glass spectacles was pointing a pistol at a woman. She was young and attractive, though her face was marked with a calm, sardonic distance, and she wore a gorgeous red dress that made her seem very pale. She was sitting behind a massive white-and-gold desk before a great window made of two large sheets of glass. Upon the desk’s top lay a military revolver.

From the tip of the man’s gun barrel an almost invisible length of wire ran in a straight line to the woman’s forehead. Not even a quarter of the way along the wire, a bullet was represented with a small length painted black, followed by an explosion of red and orange, and then the rest of the bullet’s track was marked in white. The mechanism was not functioning correctly, however; the ‘bullet’ kept travelling forwards perhaps an inch only for it to be jerked spastically back with a small metallic ping of protest.

The four men watched the bullet fly forwards and twitch back in silence for some seconds. ‘What’s wrong with it?’ demanded Barrow.

Cabal did not know, but he knew it mattered. ‘Something mechanical,’ he echoed his own words.

‘Fix it.’

‘Yes, of course.’ It mattered more than anything. ‘I’ll fetch the mechanic.’

‘No.’ Barrow stepped close to Cabal and glared at him with full loathing. ‘You fix it.’

This seemed unreasonable. ‘I don’t know how.’ Cabal glanced at the cabinet. Carefully but not entirely professionally painted, the title ran across the wooden frame above the glass front; The Necromancer’s Tragedy. ‘I don’t know how,’ he said, wondering at what tragedy this might be even as he defined it.

‘You broke it. You fix it.’ Barrow was pale with anger, almost shuddering with it.

‘Of course. Of course. Right away.’ Cabal fell to his knees on the grimy boards of the arcade floor and took hold of the side of the case. The mechanism cover, a piece of wood two feet by three, didn’t seem secured at all, but came away easily when he pulled on it.

A chaos poured out. Blood and wire. Springs and sinews. Bones and cogs. It fell into Cabal’s lap, covered it, and yet more came. It was impossible; he gazed at the ruin and could see no way to start a repair, never mind finish it. He looked up at Barrow. ‘I don’t know how.’

Barrow towered over him, the police officers behind him merging to become a wall of dark blue serge, soaking up the light of an artificial day. ‘She’s dead because of you. Fix it!’

The red flood was burying him. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘Fix it!’ Barrow was shouting at him, spittle raining on the gore and the gears. ‘Fix it, damn your eyes, Cabal! Damn you to hell! Fix it!’

*   *   *

The gun kicked in his hand, and he realised he must have shot Lady Ninuka. Odd that there seemed to be an echo to his shot. Except, no; his shot was the echo to another.

Count Marechal was fast, but Cabal was sure.

Somewhere a wire slid forwards a little further, the painted representation of a bullet upon it that much closer to the painted brow of a painted woman in red.

He turned away as Lady Ninuka threw herself wordlessly across her father’s body.

He reached down and took Miss Barrow by the upper arm. ‘We should leave now,’ he said in a terse undertone. There was something wrong, something out of kilter with the situation, but he wasn’t sure what. He should get away, and take Leonie Barrow with him. Although, hadn’t he been talking with her father a moment before? And wasn’t Leonie Barrow …

‘No! Cabal, we can’t. I can’t.’

She was looking at the surviving passengers: Herr Roborovski pushed back up against a chair, unable to look away from Satunin’s body; Miss Ambersleigh, hands to her mouth, trapped in incomprehension; Lady Ninuka, her dark lace cuffs darkened further by blood as she held her father tightly. ‘What has happened?’ she asked nobody in particular. ‘What has happened?’

For his part, Marechal lay with his eyes open and with the calmest expression Cabal had ever seen him wear, his brow now troubled only by a dark hole a mite over 10.35mm wide, the brain behind it forever stilled by the addition of 179 grains of lead. For a moment Cabal thought he saw a length of wire, almost invisible, extending from the wound.

He grimaced at the image, and saw it was just a trick of the light. There was no wire. ‘They can look out for themselves. Come on. Every second wasted narrows our chances.’

Miss Barrow was having none of it. She shook off his hand. ‘Why did you come back?’ she demanded through taut lips.

‘It wasn’t for you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you coming or not?’ They glared at one another.

It was a moment of the purest horror for both of them. Cabal found himself impulsively leaning forwards and, before he was even truly aware that he was moving at all, he kissed her.

‘I’m lying,’ he said, although he didn’t know why. ‘I did come back for you.’

She looked at him as if he had just slapped her, eyes wide, mouth open in astonishment. ‘What…? What do you…?’

Then she slapped him, hard enough to rock him back on his heels.

‘Daddy,’ Lady Ninuka said with faint certainty. ‘Daddy will make everything right.’ Cabal looked at her. He was the only one to look at her. He was the only one that saw. She rocked back and forth, hugging her father, but he was no longer a corpse. Tightly held in her arms was the funerary urn of Count Marechal, ebony with the family crest in gold upon its neck.

The aeroship lurched harshly to one side, almost knocking Cabal from his feet. ‘The ship is out of control!’ cried Roborovski.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Miss Ambersleigh pointed forwards through the broken window of the salon. ‘We shall crash!’

Cabal somehow regained his balance, even though the deck was canted over to starboard by some thirty degrees. ‘What? No, this isn’t what happened.’ Yet there it was, clearly visible through the cracked glass, a cliff of exposed rock where the side of a hill had been undermined by a river running by its base.

Travelling at very nearly full speed, the Princess Hortense drove headlong into the cliff, crumpled, dropped, and exploded as it crashed heavily to earth.

*   *   *

The fire engulfed Cabal as he was tumbled around the aeroship’s salon like a pea in a can. I truly do not remember dying this way, he thought as he tumbled, peevishly.

Presently, he stopped tumbling and settled down to death. It was cooler than he had expected, and darker. Also, death smelled slightly musty with a distinct note of burning crab oil.

‘Well,’ said the voice of the afterlife, ‘how’d you like those apples, eh?’

Cabal’s eyes opened wide in unpleasant surprise. He was where he had no right, no reason, and no desire to be. He was in the cavern of the Phobic Animus upon the inconstant island of Mormo, a chamber roughly hewn from part of an ancient cave system. Before him was a stone throne, and upon it sat the source of much evil and even more irritation, a thing that sometimes pretended to be a pleasant but dull solicitor called Gardner Bose, Esq., commissioner for oaths, conveyor of houses, destroyer of worlds.

Cabal could do little but stare at it for an incontinently long time. Then he looked at his hands. They were clean, unsullied by gunpowder residue, grime, or burns. He looked back up at Bose.

‘Nyarlathotep,’ said Cabal, more calmly than he felt. ‘You little bastard.’

‘Hello, Johannes,’ said Bose, otherwise known as Nyarlathotep, otherwise known as the Crawling Chaos, otherwise known as the Stalker Amongst the Stars, otherwise known as the Eater of Grey Lilies, otherwise known by at least 995 other names and appearances, and likely more. ‘Learned to pronounce my name correctly, I hear. Good for you!’

‘I thought,’ said Cabal, crushing down the great and negative emotions he felt at that moment on the basis that it doesn’t do to get into a shouting match with an entity that can obliterate one from the very fabric of space-time with a thought, ‘I hoped you said you were done with me and that we would never meet again.’

‘Yes, well’—Bose shrugged—‘what can I say? It was hardly my decision. As far as I was concerned, we were done, you and I. But then—who would have thought it?—you go and get yourself involved with the Five Ways. Now, be fair, old man, even I couldn’t have known that would happen. I could have asked Yog-Sothoth, but it gets all mystical about telling the future, which is—of course—the now as far as it’s concerned, and then it won’t give you a straight answer, which usually doesn’t bother me because, you know, I have quite a subtle mind, and I’m terribly good at the cryptic crossword, but it all gets so very time consuming and, anyway, Yog-Sothoth cheats at cards, too, so I’m not inclined to ask as even I’ve got my limits, and I think I’m getting a little off the subject. Hello!’ Nyarlathotep clasped his hands in front of him and smiled winningly. ‘It is so nice to see you again.’

‘Can you give a straight answer to a simple question?’

Bose/Nyarlathotep rocked his/its head from side to side. ‘It’s happened, now and then. Go on, try me.’

‘Is the Trial of the Five Ways your creation?’

‘Straight question. Straight answer … yes. I devised it a long, long time ago for some pre-human race or another, and just left it running. It simply is the most terrific fun.’

‘For you.’

‘Obviously.’ He laughed. ‘You’re wondering if the prize is genuine, aren’t you? Of course you are, I can see the thoughts swirling around inside your comically tiny ape brain. “Oooh, Nyarlathotep big fibber. Maybe Five Ways big fib, too. Oooh.” Well, no. For reasons that must be painfully plain to even the meanest intellect’—here Bose pointed at Cabal with both index fingers and mouthed, Like yours—‘it makes more sense for the prize to be real. Word of mouth, you see? So important. But, it’s a poisoned chalice. Of course it is. Get your dearest wish? No, no, no. It’s got “monkey’s paw” written all over it.’

‘I do not recognise the allusion.’

Bose seemed slightly startled by the admission. ‘Really? Perhaps I haven’t released it into the world yet. I really must get a diary. In any case, take it from me, it’s a stinker. Dearest wishes and utter curses have a lot in common.’

Cabal glared at him; it was the most he dared. ‘Nevertheless, I shall have that prize.’

‘You see?’ Bose clapped his hands in delight. ‘I’ve told you it’s heartbreak and damnation, yet still you’re going for it. I do love humans. They are so stupid. I shall tell you something else, old bean, I’m rooting for you—yes, you!—to win. Ninuka is an open book to me, I’ve seen thousands like her. She’ll use the power to destroy her enemies (which means you, right at the top of her list), bring her daddy back (who will get in the way and mess up her plans because they will both want to be in control), and consolidate her corporeal power (and fail to notice when the rot sets in to whatever governmental structures she sets up and the whole farrago falls down).’

He feigned a yawn. ‘Tedious, isn’t it? I really could not care less. You … I don’t know. I think you have a secret project that even I haven’t been able to spy. Probably somebody close to you who’s dead? Your father, too? Hmmm, no. That isn’t it, I think. In any case, secret project aside, you have brought along the most interesting people. Ninuka’s original plan was to do it all herself, but she couldn’t crack The One True Account of Presbyter Johannes by His Own Hand. So she tinkered with it a bit, forged a new copy that removed any of the hints that five was an important number in connection with the rite, laid a simple enchantment of geas, as the Irish say, upon the thing so you would decide you needed four little helpmates along when you attempted it, and then left the book in a place she trusted you to be clever enough to find.’ Bose nodded appreciatively. ‘I have to say, I quite admire her as humans go. You certainly fell for it.’

‘It was hardly an obvious trap.’

‘You wouldn’t have fallen for an obvious trap. Well, apart from that one that got Miss Barrow killed—’

‘Shut up.’

Bose cocked his head and regarded Cabal with a speculative smile. ‘Yes. I thought so. You poor chap. Must pain you to lose her. She reminds you so very strongly—’

‘Shut up!’

Bose leaned back on his throne. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it’s time to conclude our business once more. I doubt we shall meet again, but I’ve been wrong before. To err is human, eh? Good luck, Johannes. I truly hope you win.’

The lights in the crude clay oil lamps and fluttering from the torches grew dim as all the flames in the room slowly died away. In the moment after the room was plunged into total darkness, Cabal thought he saw Bose’s eyes glowing in a colour that had no satisfactory name in any human tongue. Then the darkness was absolute.

Cabal waited, but he seemed alone once more. He took a match from the little metal matchbox in his pocket and struck it, but the light seemed hardly to travel at all. He watched in bafflement as the flame shrank quickly, and then he gasped in horror as his strength left him at the same rate. He tried to keep the match burning as long as he might, but it was hopeless. Soon it was gone, and he fell to his knees. He started to fall forwards, but there was something stone or perhaps concrete right before him, and he leaned gratefully against it. Above him, the cave grew brighter, and he looked up, only to see he was no longer in a cave at all, but beneath a starry night.

*   *   *

Ill unto death, he had returned to his strange little isolated house to recuperate, yet could not enter since his front garden was conspiring to kill and eat him. He saw then that his was to be an ignominious death, to slowly shuffle off the mortal coil while propped against the gatepost of his home, mere yards from salvation. It did not surprise him—it is the lot of a necromancer to die, in all likelihood, an ignominious death, and he could only sigh a small sigh of relief that it didn’t involve zombies, because that would have been tiresome. So, necromancer that he was, he settled down to rattle out his last breath in as much comfort as he could.

There he expired.

Too late did a potential rescuer arrive, a taciturn figure that stood over the body of Johannes Cabal, and sighed his name with true grief. The figure leaned upon the gatepost in silence for some minutes, then effortlessly lifted Cabal and walked up the garden path with the dead necromancer carelessly slung over one shoulder. At this new presence, the starving unseelie of the garden scattered in fear, because that which is supernatural and nasty knows supernatural and nastier when it sees it.

The front door was a hefty artefact of English oak and triple locked with a London bar device to resist kicking and battering attacks. The figure, a man, kicked it clean out of its frame without even troubling to put down the body, and entered. He stood for some seconds upon the black-and-white chessboard tiling of the hallway, taking in the ambience of the house. It was not the curious glance of an intruder he turned upon the mundane details of the visible house, but the slow, absorbing regard of nostalgia and memory; this had once been his home. Then, with the resolve of one on familiar ground, he made his way through the hall to the kitchen at the rear of the house, and thence down to the cellar.

Here he placed Cabal’s corpse carefully upon the workbench in the corner and went to the far wall where, after a little searching around the nitrous stonework, he found and released a hidden catch. An apparently effortless shove swung a heavy secret door open, revealing a hidden laboratory larger than the mundane cellar that concealed it. The man pushed the operating table that dominated the centre of the room to one side and briefly examined the floor beneath it before finding a recessed ring in the centre of a large slab of stone flooring. He glanced up at the lifting gear suspended from the ceiling usually employed to lift the slab, but decided against it. Instead, he hooked a couple of fingers through the ring and, taking a moment to get good purchase on the floor, heaved with quite literally superhuman strength. The slab lifted sideways with a splintering grating of the edge of the slab snapping off shards as it became a pivot against the surrounding floor. It ruined it as a place of concealment, but that was all right; it would never be used again. The man allowed the slab to fall past the tipping point and it crashed to the floor, but did not break further. He noted in passing that only the top surface of the slab was made of the same stone as the rest of the floor, while the underside was pumice, presumably to reduce its weight. Perhaps so, but lifting it by brute strength had still been a prodigious feat.

Beneath the slab lay the glass coffin. The man stood silently looking at the woman within for several minutes. He had known her in life, and it was horrible and wonderful to see her again. Horrible that here she was, preserved like an exhibit in a museum of natural history, yet wonderful that the preservation was so perfect that she looked like she might open her eyes any moment, and it would be a moment of joyous surprise, not of horror. But that would never happen. Not now.

The glass coffin was sealed carefully all around its upper edges to safeguard the preservative qualities of the strange colourless yet glistening liquid in which she lay suspended. To break the seal was to immediately restart the process of decay that had been halted all those years before. The man did so without further hesitation, tearing away the waxen substance that was not wax around the coffin lid and then levering it up just as he had done with the stone slab concealing it. Unlike the slab, the lid broke when he let it topple, into three large pieces. The man did not care. He was far past caring about such trivia now.

He went back out into the cellar and returned a moment later with Cabal’s body, which he laid alongside the open coffin on the fragments of glass. He stood back to look at the scene. It wasn’t enough. He knelt by Cabal and gently slid his legs off the glass into the liquid, and then his midriff. The upper body followed naturally in, and the man gently moved Cabal alongside the woman. There wasn’t enough room for both bodies to face upwards, but they finished floating face-to-face, and that was good. The man stood and looked at them. They would never be reunited in life; reuniting them in death was the best that he could do. He said their names. He said goodbye.

From the cellar shelves, the man fetched down a storm lantern, its reservoir kept filled and its wick trimmed in case the house’s electrical generator should fail. The man took it and the box of vesta matches lying by it upstairs. It didn’t take long to scatter most of the lamp’s contents around the front room of the house. With no further lingering, he walked out of the house, lit the lamp, and flung it through the front window. For some seconds he wondered if the throw had extinguished the light, but no, there, a flickering illumination appeared, making the bookshelves glow. A curl of smoke, a sudden crescendo of light as the oil caught fire. The left-hand curtain started to flutter as the heat in the room began to draw air through the broken window. The man had made a point of leaving the doors open; the fire would spread easily. A suitable funeral pyre for Johannes Cabal.

The man turned and walked away, and a ghost watched him.

*   *   *

‘No,’ said Cabal. He raised his aim, a wire snapped, and all outcomes were reshuffled.

Lady Ninuka stared at him as if just realising she had no idea what he truly was. She lowered her arms. ‘Why?’

‘Because I may be your enemy, but you are not mine. You may be my nemesis, but I am not yours. I grow tired of these games, Orfilia Ninuka; yours and everybody else’s. I am just a scientist, and I am conducting an experiment.’

He turned to face the urn containing the ashes of Count Marechal. Ninuka realised what he intended a second before he did it; she cried out, jumped to her feet, and reached for her own gun. It was all too late. Cabal fired once. The shot was deliberately placed off centre and the urn was untouched by the passage of the bullet. The glass shattered, leaving the urn still firmly affixed to its shelf by the locking collar around its base.

‘Ah, ah,’ warned Cabal, swinging his aim to Ninuka as he walked to the urn. She froze, her hand over her pistol. ‘Good. I am tired of killing, but not so much that I will not kill to preserve my own life.’

‘Save me, Orfilia!’ implored the urn in the voice of Count Marechal. ‘Cabal means to steal me!’

Cabal raised his eyebrows. ‘Your Majesty, amongst all your other myriad talents, do you happen to include ventriloquism?’ She did not answer, but her face told him all he needed to know. ‘I thought it unlikely. And, yes, to clear away any uncertainty on your part, I did hear that urn speak to you. This is unusual behaviour for urns, you may be sure, and bears investigation. Step back from your desk, please. I would hate to have to shoot you before this business is concluded.’

Ninuka stepped away from the desk and watched him stonily, her arms crossed. Satisfied, he released the locking device from the urn’s base and took it down from its place. He regarded it thoughtfully. ‘You realise how unlikely it is that your father’s body was recoverable from the wreck of the Princess Hortense? I watched it burn. I cannot know for sure, but I think somebody has been playing a game with you for a long time now. Don’t let that upset you; I have been a pawn in it, too. I hope this is the end of it.’

Resting the urn on an occasional table by the wall, he removed the urn’s lid and looked inside. A brief smile passed over his face, equal in parts sardonic, relieved, and sad. He reached in and extracted a small crystal phial filled with a dram of colourless liquid, its cap sealed with white wax. He replaced it and tilted the urn to show the inside to Ninuka. Within there were no ashes, and never had been. Instead there was a bed of black velvet into which was embroidered a golden pentagram. At each vertex was a small padded well into which a phial lay embedded.

‘The Five Ways,’ said Ninuka. There was a longing in her eyes, a hollowness in her tone.

‘I am told that they are cursed articles of the “Be careful what you wish for” variety, but the entity that told me is not always reliable. We shall see. And by “we”, I do not include you. You have lost.’ He extracted his cigarillo case from his pocket, opened it on the table, and stowed the five phials there, using the cigarillos as bumpers to keep them safe. As he closed the case and returned it to his pocket, he said, ‘The trial is at an end, I think. I advise you to return to the mundane world with alacrity, along with whatever remains of your force. This world will soon collapse like a house of cards.’

As he retreated towards the door, she walked slowly to the table, took up the urn, and examined it. ‘I don’t think so. You’re right, Cabal. The game is over, and I do not care to be drawn into another.’ She dropped the urn carelessly. ‘I am retiring from the field the only way I know how.’

Cabal was at the door. ‘That is your prerogative.’ He knew there was no point in asking her to consider the lives of her men. She hadn’t considered them when she had dragged them as auxiliaries into the Five Ways; why would they trouble her now?

Just before he left, she said, ‘You say you don’t hate me.’

‘I do not, Your Majesty. I dislike you as a damnable nuisance, but hate is a strong emotion, and I have little time for such. No, I do not hate you.’

She crossed her arms. ‘I’m sure I shall manage to stir such an emotion even in your frozen sarcophagus of a heart, Cabal. I shan’t say farewell. I hope that you encounter all kinds of misfortune.’

Cabal decided he had wasted enough time upon her, and left without another word.

Ninuka looked at the dropped urn, turned her heel upon it, and walked to her desk. She took up the revolver and looked at the crest of the House of Ninuka in Marechal upon the white grip. As slowly as an image developing upon a photographic plate in the chemical bath, a smile formed upon her mouth.

‘I know you will encounter all kinds of misfortune, Cabal,’ she murmured. ‘I know that you shall hate me.’

*   *   *

The bridge door of the Rubrum Imperatrix was flung open, and the officers swung around in astonishment to see the door’s guard slide at great speed across the floor to finish with a solid hit upon the binnacle, making both his skull and the brass casing ring.

Horst Cabal entered, smiled, and waved. ‘Hello, everyone! Here’s the thing: in all the rush to get airborne and everything, my brother and I have been separated from our friends who are still at what’s left of Buckingham Palace. I don’t really fancy walking, so I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to turn the bus around and go back?’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘I should point out that, although I phrased that as a request, it’s more in the way of an order, really.’

The captain stepped forwards, a hatchet-faced man with a goatee sharp enough to stab a badger. ‘My authority comes from Her Imperial Majesty, Queen Orfilia Ninuka, and I obey her orders and those of my lawful superiors only, sir!’

Horst nodded. ‘I can understand that, but one of your vermin shot a friend of mine, and I’m just about out of sympathy. So, I’ll use whatever particles of it I still have to reiterate. Turn this ship around, or I will kill every single one of you Mirkarvian bastards one after another until somebody realises that perhaps turning around is actually a terrific idea. I am going to start with you, Captain, because your goatee offends me.’

‘You would not.’ The captain said it defiantly, but stepped back all the same.

‘I would, you know. In case you haven’t been keeping up with current affairs aboard your ship, you’ll find none of your gun positions respond. I’ve left the engineering section alone, because they seem rather important to keeping us in the air. More important than you by a long chalk.’

‘Impossible,’ said the captain. Then to his first officer, ‘Get on the telephone; check the gun positions.’ He turned his attention back to Horst. ‘You’re lying, of course. It would require a full boarding party to achieve what you claim. No single man could manage it.’

‘Ah, well, in that case, I think I’ve spotted the flaw in your thinking.’ He bared his teeth and allowed his fangs to extend.

The captain paled. Unaware, the first officer called over from command station, ‘None of the guns are responding, sir! I can’t get any reply from the security details, either.’ He belatedly realised his captain was staring fixatedly at the interloper, looked himself, and then swore.

‘Turn the ship around,’ said the captain. ‘Return to our last anchorage.’

‘Captain…’

‘Do as I say!’

‘There we go,’ said Horst, clapping his hands once and smiling winningly, like somebody who has just reconciled a silly dispute over a neighbour’s property line. ‘Now I don’t have to break anyone’s neck. I don’t enjoy it, you wouldn’t have enjoyed it … Now everyone’s happy, yes?’

‘Happy’ was overstating matters, but nevertheless, orders were given, and the vast edifice of the Rubrum Imperatrix turned to the starboard until its heading was steadily back towards the exciting redevelopment opportunity formerly known as Buckingham Palace.

The sound of movement behind him made Horst spin, only to find Johannes Cabal coming towards him along the corridor in a dogtrot. ‘Hail and well met, brother!’ said Horst.

‘We’re done here,’ said Cabal. ‘We need to leave as quickly as possible.’

‘All in hand. I’ve prevailed upon the captain to take us back. We’re making best speed now. Quick enough for you?’

Cabal entered the bridge to stand by his brother. He looked out through the great panes in the flying bridge cockpit, and did not like what he saw.

‘Not nearly quickly enough.’

The navigator cried out, ‘Captain!’ He rose from his position and pointed towards the horizon.

The bridge crew and the Cabals saw a darkness there, a great black smudge that seemed to be growing. ‘What is that? A storm cloud? I’ve never seen the like.’

‘No storm cloud, Captain,’ said Cabal. ‘Look at the city beneath it.’

As the blackness expanded, the buildings of London seemed to fall into pieces at the edge of the void. The blackness deconstructed them, the rear of the buildings being stripped down to girders and floorboards while the face remained intact, the component parts falling away to be lost in an infinite distance. Soon enough, the wave stripped away the rest of the building and even the very earth on which it stood. Sewers, gas lines, and water lines were exposed beneath the disintegrating pavements and roads before they, too, tumbled into oblivion.

‘This world of shadows was never intended as anything more than a temporary stage for us to play our roles,’ said Cabal.

Horst eyed the billowing void with growing concern. ‘It isn’t half shifting. Johannes, I don’t think we can outrun—’

‘Not in a bloated flying fortress like this, no. Happily, there is an alternative. Come with me. Smartly now!’

This new disaster had handily focussed the attention of the bridge officers forwards, so none noticed their erstwhile hijackers leave the bridge, find an access stairwell, and quickly climb the narrow spiral stairs to the uppermost part of the ship.

‘If you’re expecting me to sprout bat wings and fly us to safety, I’ve told you before—I can’t do that. I wish I could, but y’know, even vampires only get to be just so wonderful.’

‘Hardly,’ said Cabal. He had reached the top of the staircase inside what appeared to be a large letter box. He opened the hatch and climbed out. Horst followed to find his brother already going along the row of parked entomopters. ‘I shall be the one flying us to safety. Let me see, interceptor … interceptor … ah! A reconnaissance variant with two seats. More comfortable than having to strap you to a weapons wing.’ He detached the covers and flung them aside. ‘I’m fairly sure I can remember how to fly one of these things. Much like a bicycle. Probably. Are you coming, Horst?’ He nodded at the nothingness that was devouring London. It was barely half a mile to the aft of the running ship and steadily catching them. ‘I’d advise against dawdling.’

The entomopter was fuelled and ready for a rapid scramble alert. As Horst strapped himself into the forward seat of the tandem cockpit, Cabal cast his eyes over the controls. Its systems were noticeably more advanced than the basic Symphony trainer that was his only flying experience to date, but he was sure he would pick up the niceties of its handling soon enough. Given that the alternative consisted of being dismantled by an oncoming cloud of nothing, he appreciated that he had better. The lack of a cartridge ignition system baffled him for a moment, and there was an agonising thirty seconds of him searching through the unfamiliar panels while Horst said, ‘Johannes…’ repeatedly every few moments, each rendition slightly higher than the last, but then he found an ignition chamber system, took a few seconds to work out how to use it (‘Johannes…’ ‘Johannes!’ ‘JOHANNES!’), charged, pressurised, and fired it.

It worked first time.

‘Well, that was easy enough,’ he commented as the entomopter lifted and sped forwards, even as the aft rudders of the Rubrum Imperatrix were devoured by the blackness.

Throttle opened as far as he dared with a cold engine and with the airspeed indicator rising satisfactorily, Cabal risked a glance back through the aerocraft’s high-visibility bubble canopy. His last sight of the great aeroship was of the prow windows directly below the bridge. There, standing in the angle of the glass, he saw Orfilia Ninuka, resplendent in red, her arms crossed, and unafraid. Momentarily, Cabal wished that there could have been some other resolution. Momentarily, he thought she was magnificent. Then he turned away.

*   *   *

Zarenyia and Miss Smith had retired to the relative safety of a gun position on the former perimeter line for the Rubrum Imperatrix’s anchorage, now rendered a perimeter line for a lot of smashed and burning buildings since that vessel’s precipitate departure. Zarenyia had been forced to readopt a trimmer body so that the sandbag walls were actually high enough to shield her, and Miss Smith—who had belatedly discovered that throwing around vast magical energies was severely taxing upon the constitution—had discovered the joys of support weapons while she recovered her strength. The heavy machine gun she was currently manning was tremendously noisy, but also good fun, not least because of the not entirely kind commentary that Zarenyia—who was keeping the gun’s ammunition belt feeding smoothly into the breech—kept up about the hapless Mirkarvian soldiers who we trying to assault their position.* It was all high jinks of a homicidal sort, and it helped distract them from the body under a blanket behind them.

They were further distracted by the approaching distinctive engine tone of an aviation engine overlaid by the vicious buzzsaw-like hum of entomopter wings. Miss Smith was just hauling over a light machine gun to provide anti-aerocraft fire when Zarenyia cried, ‘It’s the boys! They’re alive and not dead! Isn’t that nice?’

Miss Smith returned to the first gun. ‘It would be nicer if they could drop some bombs or something on this lot.’ She sighted down the barrel, then lifted her head in bemusement. ‘Oh, that flying machine has scared all the soldiers off. Look, they’ll all running away. Feels wrong to shoot them in the back.’ She shot one just to check. ‘Yes, I didn’t enjoy that at all.’

‘Darling.’ Something in Zarenyia’s tone made Miss Smith look over. Zarenyia was facing the direction where the stolen entomopter was setting down, but that wasn’t where her gaze led. The sky was vanishing. The city was vanishing. Belatedly, Miss Smith realised that the Mirkarvians weren’t running from her at all.

The Cabal brothers climbed from the entomopter and ran towards them, Horst leaping the sandbags and Cabal rolling over them in his haste to join the women. He almost fell on the covered body. He stepped back, startled, and demanded, ‘Is this Miss Barrow?’

‘I’m sorry, Cabal.’ Miss Smith abandoned the gun and went to him. ‘There was nothing we could do. She was already gone when we reached her. I’m sorry.’

Cabal looked at her with genuine perplexity. ‘Why are you sorry? You didn’t shoot her, I trust?’

‘Of course not. But I know what she meant to you.’

Cabal shook his head irritably as if dissuading a determined fly. ‘What she means to me? She’s a colleague. A reliable ally.’ He started checking his pockets for no discernible reason.

Miss Smith glanced at Horst, who shrugged, and Zarenyia, who pulled a face and offered, ‘Are all humans so bloody abstruse?’

Cabal produced a cigarette case or similar. Miss Smith held out a hand. ‘If you’re going to spend the last few minutes before the world ends puffing on a gasper, I want one, too.’

But instead of a cigarillo, Cabal removed a tiny crystal phial, sealed with white wax. He snapped the case shut, dropped it back into his pocket, and whipped away the blanket. Feigning ignorance of the ragged bullet wound in her side or its larger exit wound, ignoring the great deal of blood she must have lost as she haemorrhaged to death with no one to save her, he lifted her head, opened the sealed cap of the phial with his thumb, and poured the contents into her open mouth.

‘What is that?’ asked Miss Smith, fascinated.

‘A miracle. I hope.’ Cabal regarded Leonie Barrow’s face closely, but there was no flicker of muscle action, no change in the dull, corpse pallor. ‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘Come along, Miss Barrow. I went to a great deal of trouble to get this. Kindly oblige me by not being dead any more. Come on…’ He slapped the corpse across the face. ‘Come on!’

‘Johannes!’ Horst snapped. ‘What do you—’

Cabal’s hand was already back ready for another blow when the body’s hand reached up and grabbed his wrist. Leonie Barrow’s eyes flew open. ‘If you slap me again, Cabal, I will break your bloody nose.’

‘Well,’ said Zarenyia, ‘there’s something you don’t see every day. Or, indeed, at all.’

Leonie was glaring at Cabal, sparing some ire for all these people gathered around her. ‘I was just knocked out. I was climbing up the ramp and I slipped, that’s all. I am perfectly well, thank you. Never felt better.’

‘Actually,’ said Miss Smith in the confidential tone of a friend who is going to broach the subject of an unexpected personal hygiene problem, ‘no. You were stone dead.’

Leonie looked at her sharply. ‘I was not.’

‘Take it from a professional, Leonie—yes, you were.’

Leonie Barrow’s anger fell away. She glanced at Cabal. ‘Was I?’

‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘You were shot and bled to death.’

‘I thought … I thought you couldn’t resurrect the dead perfectly, Cabal. I thought…’ Her eyes widened. ‘Oh, God. I’m not a zombie, am I?’

‘If you are, you’re chattier and more introspective than any I’ve met before.’ Seeing her expression, Cabal added, ‘No. I am confident that you are completely restored to us. Ladies, Horst, we have won. The prize of the Five Ways is ours. Your share, Miss Barrow, is why you are no longer dead.’

‘Johannes.’ Horst pointed to the darkness. It was no longer a linear wave, but seemed to have broken around the area at the end of the Mall, sweeping around as a wave does upon a rock. The horizon turned dark all about them. ‘I don’t wish to spoil the party, but what are we going to do about the imminent end of the world?’

‘Nothing. It is not necessary; when this reality fails, we shall be spat out into our own. We are the victors here. To destroy us now would spoil our benefactor’s joke.’

‘Benefactor?’

‘You truly don’t want to know. In any event, we are safe’—he turned to Miss Smith—‘but for you.’

Her face grew taut. ‘What do you mean, Cabal?’

‘You were never intended to be part of the trial. You were dragged along as scenery. There are no guarantees for you. You don’t even have a body to return to. If this world ends and you cannot reach the Dreamlands—and I shall be frank, I see no mechanism by which you might—you will be destroyed in the dissolution.’

Miss Smith sat heavily by the sandbag wall and slumped back against it. Her eyes flickered about distractedly as she sought solutions and failed. ‘It hardly seems fair to die twice when it wasn’t my fault either time.’ She looked at Cabal. ‘Well, fuck.’

Cabal crouched before her, opened his cigarillo case and produced another phial. ‘Orfilia Ninuka shall not be needing hers. I cannot be sure it will help you, but given the alternative…’

Miss Smith leaned forwards and snatched it from his hand with a speed and precision that would have made vipers applaud, if only they had hands and a sense of graciousness. She tore off the stopper and swallowed the contents in a second. Only after she had ingested the fluid did she find pause to look abashed. ‘I’m fed up of dying,’ she said.

‘Well, I hope it goes well by you, Miss Smith. If it…’ Cabal frowned. ‘Madam, you are becoming less substantial.’

‘What?’ She held up her hand to study it. There was indeed something of the translucent about it. ‘Is this right? Is this supposed to happen? Am I dissolving or becoming invisible? Invisibility will not help me right this moment, Cabal! Not with that coming!’ She waved a decreasingly apparent finger at the oncoming void. As she spoke, despite her excitement raising her voice, there was an ineffable yet definite sense that it was simultaneously draining away, as if she was being upset at a distance.

‘I cannot say,’ admitted Cabal. ‘Every phial may have a different effect, depending on the recipient. Oh, Miss Smith!’

But there was nobody to talk to. In mid-harangue at an implacably bloody-minded destiny that seemed set on dissolving her by one means or another, her voice dwindled to nothing, and her presence with it. Her clothes collapsed by the sandbag wall and the empty phial clattered to the ground.

‘Did … she just die? Again?’ asked Horst.

‘No.’ Cabal was certain. ‘I strongly doubt she did. But bear in mind that she was never truly with us, but merely a dreamer’s body gathered from the Dreamlands. And these’—he prodded the very solid seeming dress—‘are Dreamland clothes, yet they remained here. I think Miss Smith may well have returned to the corporeal world. Whole and well, I hope.’

‘And naked!’ said Zarenyia cheerfully.

‘All the best people are resurrected from certain doom naked,’ said Horst, also cheerfully. ‘Well, I was, and that turned out all right.’

A sudden sense of presence at his elbow made him look down. At his right elbow stood the ghost of a frightened little girl.

‘Oh, Minty…’ In all the excitement, he had quite forgotten about her, and the inattention stung him with guilt.

‘Wha’s ’appening?’ she said. ‘Where’s London goin’?’ Her eyes were wide, her speech hurried and panicked.

Horst knelt to look her in the eye. How could he tell her that she was nothing more than a shadow of a shadow, a facsimile of a phantom, a stage prop in a murderous theatre?

‘We’ve undone what happened here,’ he told her. ‘The Red Queen is dead. It will be as if none of this ever happened.’

She blinked at him. ‘Will I be alive again?’

Horst nodded. He could see that motes of pale light were starting to stream away from her towards the darkness as London died.

‘But … bein’ alive ’urt,’ she said. ‘Bein’ like this’—she held up her hands—‘nothin’ ’urts. Nothin’.’

The motes had become a stream. She was diminishing, emptying away before his eyes. Miss Smith’s vanishing had been a far less cruel thing than this.

‘Minty, I’ve been alive, and I’ve been dead. Being alive is better, believe me. When you return to life, you won’t remember any of this, but perhaps you’ll remember this much. To have a good life. It’s brief. It’s often troublesome, but it’s a great deal better than the alternative. We’re all a long time in the grave, we poor creatures. Make what you can of those years when the spark is in you.’

She turned then, and saw her essence being drawn away. She looked back at him. ‘Take me wiv you, Horst! Please!’

And she was gone.

The void was almost upon them. ‘Here,’ said Cabal with urgency. ‘It would be as well if you all had your share of the prize when the void reaches us.’ He quickly handed a phial to Zarenyia and one to Horst. Horst took it from him silently, still looking into the darkness where a small light faded.

Cabal returned the case containing the last to his pocket. ‘You are already your own proof, Miss Barrow.’

‘Should we hold hands or something?’ she asked, the gun redoubt rapidly becoming the only point of reality left in an infinity of nothing.

‘Oh, let’s!’ Zarenyia grasped Leonie’s hand and Cabal’s. ‘Everyone hold hands! We can sing a song!’

‘I’d rather we didn’t…’

‘Ging gang goolie goolie goolie goolie watcha…’

At which moment, the last world of the Trial of the Five Ways was snuffed out, and that was probably just as well.