THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF CABAL

 

Vlatez and Muk had enjoyed their camping holiday. Of course, as Katamenian bandits they had lived the larger part of their adult lives bivouacking in forest clearings or in handy caves. Relatively few of their nights were spent under the rooves of houses and these they regarded as novelties, sure enough, but never likely to catch on. Thus, as previously noted, any camping vacation was in the manner of a busman’s holiday for them, but at least it had been conducted in a country not their own, or just over the borders of a neighbouring state.

They had been given a good sum of money, return tickets to England, and very explicit instructions. For a period that might be as short as a few days or as lengthy as a couple of months they were to monitor any activity around the house of Johannes Cabal and to keep a watch on the railway station that served the village an hour’s walk away. In case of certain situations arising, they were instructed to do this, that, or the other. In the meantime, they were given basic rules of conduct and strongly worded warnings as to what would surely result if they failed in even the smallest aspects. Given that the orders had been personally given by Her Majesty herself, and the superstitious—and sensible—awe in which her Katamenian mercenaries held her, there was never any question that Vlatez and Muk would do their very, very best. Their honour demanded it, and their senses of self-preservation were very much in favour, too.

Their cover was simply that they had always wanted to visit the English countryside and that they were happy to simply wander the byways, admiring the flora and fauna. They were to remain at least reasonably sober at all times, they were to indulge in no criminal activities no matter how many soft targets crossed their paths, they were to maintain friendly contact with the locals as and when it was unavoidable, but should otherwise shun any company but their own.

Thus, once or twice a week, one of the bandits would wander into the village in the ludicrous ‘rambling’ outfits that had been pressed upon them after a brief read of some old magazines and a battered Boy Scout’s manual, and there they would purchase rations. The locals became familiar with the sight of either the cadaverous Muk or the apelike Vlatez appearing in the grocers dressed in baggy brown shorts or green corduroy trousers, short-sleeved shirt or tank top, and a broad-brimmed canvas hat, and buying assorted staple food items in broken English, occasionally pausing to smile brightly and comment on the weather.

The villagers rapidly came to the conclusion that the visitors could only possibly be interested in the only unusual thing to be found in the area: Johannes Cabal. Given the heavy-handed attempts at portraying themselves as nothing more than innocent hikers, they were presumably up to something clandestine and almost certainly injurious to Cabal and his interests. This was fine with the villagers; anything awful that befell him was something wonderful by their lights, he having failed to ingratiate himself with the locals. This is an understatement; on more than one occasion the locals had tried to get rid of him themselves, but failed for a variety of reasons, often by being talked down from the peak of righteous fury by the words of the local policeman, Sergeant Parkin.

Parkin, it should be pointed out, did his duty in this way for dual reasons: it was his job to keep the peace, and lynch mobs were distinctly not peaceful; and he was very happy to have his salary bolstered by regular bribes from Cabal precisely so he never forgot that duty.

Parkin was not only sharper than the Katamenians believed, but even than the locals knew. He had understood that the ‘hikers’ were a threat to Cabal the moment he clapped eyes upon them, and set about identifying them. The men were cagey about saying from exactly where in Eastern Europe they hailed, but Parkin noted both men possessed unusual tattoos of the sort associated with prison yards and memorised one in particular that both men bore. It was an ugly thing, and badly done, but the design was distinct: a skull, its crown removed, sitting in a campfire. Either the campfire was very small, or the skull very large, for the flames barely licked up past the level of the upper teeth. Propped in the skull’s open brainpan could be seen the handle of a spoon or a ladle. It seemed an impractical way to serve broth, but Parkin guessed it referred to some local legend or popular tale.

Whatever its provenance, it was distinctive. Parkin took down his copy of The Big Police Book of Criminal Organisations Around the World and spent a hair-raising morning examining the indicia of sundry gangs, mobs, and syndicates of many lands. Working his way through those of Eastern Europe in particular, he finally located a drawing very similar to the tattoos he had seen both foreigners sporting on their forearms.

EUROPE: EASTERN: KATAMENIA: KATAMENIAN BANDITS

‘Oh, dear,’ said Sergeant Parkin. He made himself a fresh cup of tea and settled down to examine the text. During the reading, he had cause to say, ‘Oh, dear’ several times more; bandits as an occupational grouping tend away from the wholesome, but the Katamenian variety seemed to go out of their way to dabble in the ghastly.

Presently, when he had finished reading, Parkin closed the book. He took a long draught of hot tea and blew a sigh of steamy breath through his walrus moustache. ‘Sorry, Cabal, old son,’ he said to the empty room. ‘You’re on your own this time.’

*   *   *

It was in an early morning in the fifth week of their vigil that Muk was to be seen speeding away from the railway station upon a bicycle (the bicycle was hired as per their instructions, despite them so very much wanting to steal one instead). A study in angles, Muk arrived in an area from which they had previously been kept by their orders: the environs of Cabal’s house itself. Casting the bicycle aside, he waved like a human semaphore up at the hill that faced the house. He remembered the hour, drew a pistol from his pack, and fired it skywards, then took a red flare, ignited the fuse against the striker cap, and capered excitedly around. Some five minutes and another couple of skyward shots later, he was rewarded by the sight of Vlatez making his way at a steady jog through the gloom towards him.

The burly man arrived with a question on his lips, but it died when he saw Muk’s grim expression. Still, he had to be sure.

‘The queen … she has not arrived?’

Muk shook his head. Through their long surveillance, it had primarily been the thought of pleasing Her Majesty that had kept them keen. The conditions for ending their mission had been threefold and explicit. If nobody comes to the house in the space of three months, they were to return to Mirkarvia by the next available packet. If Queen Ninuka or one of her recognised senior ministers or advisors arrived, they were to be conducted to Cabal’s house with all possible speed, for the necromancer was dead or captured, and his house and its contents were declared bounty to the new Mirkarvian Empire. If, however, Cabal or one of his colleagues were seen to return …

They both knew this boded poorly for their beloved monarch, whom they loved more than life. With a dark hatred growing in their hearts for the probable assassin of Queen Orfilia Ninuka, they opened their packs and removed the pieces of equipment they had hoped never to need.

*   *   *

It was a tired necromancer and his subdued vampire brother who left the milk train at the station and, finding no cart to be hired, nor even any bicycles to be had, they settled down to walk the few miles to the house. ‘He was luckier than us,’ said Horst, nodding at the angular man in ill-chosen shorts haring off down the road on a bicycle. He looked to the sky and checked his watch against the station clock. ‘Oh, well. Should be back with a few minutes to spare before dawn, in any case.’

*   *   *

Cabal and Madam Zarenyia had popped back into existence in Abyssinia, Horst and Miss Barrow in Constantinople. As previously arranged by Cabal in a tortuous but ultimately sensible plan of meeting places and poste restante addresses, they rendezvoused in Venice. The plan was for them to travel on together back to England, but Leonie Barrow had said she needed a holiday to recuperate from the adventure in general and being dead in particular, so she would remain on the Continent for a few weeks more. Zarenyia had said that sounded delightful and, as she herself was probably diaboli non grata in Hell for the next few millennia, she would be honoured if Miss Barrow would allow her to be her travelling companion and bodyguard. ‘We can broaden one another’s minds, darling. You can teach me to be a little bit good … and I can teach you to be a little bit wicked.’ Madame Zarenyia said this, and smiled lazily. After securing Zarenyia’s oath not to kill people willy-nilly, extracted with a great deal of dibbing, the Cabal brothers waved goodbye from the Orient Express to the ladies on the platform as the train pulled away safely after dusk with a coffin stowed in the baggage car.

*   *   *

Thus, they found themselves back in England, walking home. They walked largely in silence (Horst being in an uncharacteristic melancholy mood), but for Cabal once saying apropos of nothing that he hoped the dose of the prize that had gone to Miss Smith had done her good.

‘What do you call “good”?’ asked Horst.

‘Returned her to life, of course. A life worth living, that is. Her last fragments of physical existence in this world are bobbing around in formaldehyde in my laboratory. If that’s what her spirit has been forced into, I would not regard that as “good”, for example.’

‘You’ve got bits of Miss Smith in bottles?’

Cabal nodded. ‘It was a courtesy of sorts. I don’t expect you to understand.’

Horst didn’t, and so that line of conversation dried up.

They were within a mile of the house, although it was hidden from view by the curve of the small valley in which it resided. Horst paused. ‘Something is wrong,’ he said with a certain gravity that impressed his brother.

‘Wrong? How so?’ He peered off into the darkness. The day was coming, and the ridges of the hills were rimed with pre-dawn light. The birds were stirring in the trees, and there was dew upon the grass. It seemed commonplace enough, but Cabal felt his hackles rise.

Horst closed his eyes and stood with his head cocked as if listening. Then he drew in a deep breath through his nose.

‘Smoke. I smell smoke.’ His eyes opened wide and he stared at Cabal with horror. ‘Fire.’

‘Run! Run!’ Cabal had no time for niceties. ‘I will catch up. Run, for heaven’s sake!’

*   *   *

Horst burnt a lot of his blood reserves to go as fast as he possibly could, and that was very quickly indeed. He tore through the intervening mile in a time more easily measured in seconds and parts of seconds than minutes, and turned the edge of the hill upon whose lower slopes Johannes Cabal had somehow shifted the house some years before. It was alight, the window of the sitting room on the ground floor and that of Johannes’s bedroom on the first both shattered, smoke and flames showing through the frames.

He ran to the house, noting an abandoned bicycle lying by the path through the valley some twenty yards from the wall. Instantly put in mind of the figure cycling away from them with such urgency at the station, he started to get a vague understanding of what might be afoot.

He hurdled the front wall into the house’s small rose garden and found the little folk of the garden engaged in a cleanup job. Assorted body parts were being dragged under the rosebushes. Horst noted a rapidly vanishing leg, extant only from the knee down, wore a bicycle clip. ‘What happened here?’

‘Is not our fault,’ chorused the tiny, cute, ineffably dangerous denizens of the garden. ‘They weren’t postmen. Johannes only said not to eat the postmen! We have been good!’

‘I said’—Horst allowed his own ineffable dangerousness to wash into his voice—‘what happened here?’

Taking the hint, the garden folk said, ‘They climbed over the wall! They had metal rocks and threw them. Poom! The metal rocks went poom! And things went on fire! We said, “Hey, you! Stop throwing around metal rocks that go poom!” And they went, “Whaaaaaat?” And then we ate them because they weren’t postmen. That is what happened here.’

Johannes Cabal arrived, panting heavily and his jacket discarded somewhere on the way. ‘What,’ he wheezed out, ‘has happened here?’

Horst reached down and lifted up the leg despite the squeaks of protest from the garden fey and tapped the bicycle clip significantly.

Cabal glanced at the fire and grimaced with open anger. ‘Ninuka! Such a poor loser.’ Now he weighed up the fire more carefully and how good its grip on the fabric of the building might be.

‘The house is doomed,’ he said almost immediately. ‘But we can still save much. Avoid opening doors when you can, keep the rooms short of oxygen.’ He nodded at the house. ‘The sitting room and my room will be lost first. Mine contains little of import, but from the front you must get all the books from the second and third shelves, and save the three boxes on the deep shelf by the fireplace.’

‘Really? You want me to save your head collection?’

‘My reasons are sound, hardly sentimental. Meanwhile, I shall fetch Dennis and Denzil. They may for once turn out to be useful.’

‘Johannes, wait!’ Horst pointed at the eastern sky. ‘The sun’s almost up. I can’t help you. I have to find cover.’

Cabal did not hesitate. ‘Drink your phial. It will make you human again, I think.’

Horst shook his head. ‘You think. And what about Alisha Bartos? No, the phial is for her. I failed her, I will save her.’

‘Miss Bartos shall have mine. You take yours now. Consider it the fulfilment of the promise I made when I first released you from the Druin crypt. You deserve life, Horst. A real life.’

Horst gawped at him. ‘Yours? But … what about—’

‘If we don’t act now, all is lost. You say you failed her. No, she understood the danger and risked it, anyway. But you, I failed you at that crypt. You had no idea into what peril I was taking us. This time, when I say, ‘Trust me,’ I mean it with every thread of my being. Use your phial. Time is against us.’

Without waiting for a reply, Cabal ran down the side of the house to the shed where he kept sundry tools, a quantity of firewood and coal, and two blissfully happy zombies called Dennis and Denzil, who found post-mortem existence very much to their liking.

Horst reached into his waistcoat pocket and fished out the small crystal phial. He regarded it with unreadable expression for a moment, his awareness of the imminent sun rounding the earth to blast him to ashes growing by every tick of his pocket watch. Then in precipitate action, he tore away the stopper and threw the contents into his mouth.

He had long since forgotten what it had felt like to become contaminated by the taint of vampirism, or so he told himself. It was not true; he had felt the corruption flood every cell, felt his humanity come under a spiritual assault unlike anything he could ever have imagined, felt his very body change as it prepared him for an existence that made him both the most alpha of predators, and the most wretched of parasites. He had felt all these things, and then he had spent the subsequent years of imprisonment assiduously wiping every conscious memory of it away. All he had was that he was Horst Cabal, who was so very human, and people liked him. This was the stanchion to which he clung while the world turned upside down, and it had worked. When he finally emerged, he was not the thing of whispered horror he might have been. He was still Horst Cabal—good old Horst—and if it was only an act, it was good enough to fool even him.

That pretence was stripped away now, as the shadow was lifted from him, the corruption burning from his cells, and as it did so, he plaintively realised that, to an extent, he had enjoyed being a vampire. The strength, the blurring into motion so rapid as to be almost invisible, the mesmerism, the psychical invisibility, it had all been useful one time or another and, he had to confess, often a great deal of fun. He would miss all of that. Now he would just be himself again, he would age, and he would die. That was fine, he supposed, but he would really miss being something extraordinary.

He was shocked by how much he had become habilitated to the taint, however; his mortality returned to him like a golden flood of true, actual life. It was ecstasy without a hint of the accursedness that had troubled his feeding as a vampire. He fell to his knees and shuddered under the impact of life.

Cabal returned a minute later with Dennis and Denzil pottering along good-naturedly hideous and dead in his wake, each clutching a bucket. ‘Go to the stream, fill your bucket, bring it back, throw it’—Cabal realised he was just setting them up for Saturday morning matinee antics unless he was painfully specific in his orders—‘throw the water from the bucket onto the fire, and then return to the stream to do the whole thing again. Keep doing it until I tell you differently. Go on! Off you go!’ He watched the wretchedly preserved pair totter off in the direction of the stream. ‘And don’t fall in!’ he shouted after them, more in hope than expectation.

Glancing at the state of the house—the fire had become noticeably more entrenched even in the minute or so he was away—Cabal helped his brother back to his feet. ‘Well?’ He looked to the east. The sun was almost cresting the hills. There would just be time to get Horst to the shed and away from the sun’s rays if the contents of the phial proved to have failed. ‘Did it work?’

His brother looked at him. Cabal realised something he never had until that moment; just how much of the colour had left Horst since his unfortunate change in lifestyle. When he had first seen him as a vampire, Horst had been trapped underground for over eight years, and Cabal had unconsciously rationalised his changed complexion as something akin to prison pallor. Then he had grown used to it, not least because the practicalities of vampiric life meant that he had only seen him by artificial light, by candle or fire, and occasionally by the light of the moon subsequently.

Now there was colour in his face, pinkness in his cheeks, and the gleam of his eye was less unnatural, less feral and feverish.

‘I think it did, Johannes.’ Horst said it slowly, as if waking from a dream. ‘I think it worked. I feel different.’

‘Human?’

Horst shrugged. ‘I don’t know. My memory’s not that good.’

The acid test was upon them a moment later. The sun finally spilled its light over the horizon and bathed the pair of them in its brilliance. Cabal squinted against it and regretted having dumped his jacket in the run to the house; it might have done to shield Horst and give him an extra few seconds if necessary. But Horst was standing there, looking at his hands in the full onslaught of the new day and, wonderfully, there was no smoke leaking from them. He turned to face the sun, and the only shield he needed was his hand to his brow.

‘Mein Gott,’ said Cabal. ‘It worked, Horst. It actually worked!’

Horst turned back to him, looking perplexed. ‘There is one thing, though.’

‘Which is?’

Horst opened his mouth to show his teeth. Nothing seemed unusual. Then, presumably as the result of a small act of effort on Horst’s part, his fangs extended. ‘Wha’s all this abou’, eh?’ he asked, as of one having a conversation with the dentist.

Cabal looked at him, little short of aghast. He looked at the sun, which was definitely up, definitely real, and definitely sprinkling its purifying rays all over his brother. He looked again at Horst, who was definitely alive, definitely befanged, and definitely not bursting into flames. It was a conundrum.

‘Horst,’ he said, theorising frantically yet failing to settle on any specific conclusion, ‘I’m not entirely sure, but I think we may have inadvertently disturbed the natural order of things.’

Horst closed his mouth and made a sour face. ‘What? Again?’

‘In any event, we have no time to discuss your newest and most baffling change in taxonomy. The house is afire and’—they watched as Dennis, soaked to the skin, padded past, threw a half-filled bucket of water into the flames, stood admiring his work for a few seconds, turned, and padded happily back off to the stream—‘and I have no great hopes of bringing it under control. Come on!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hope?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cabal pointed. ‘That is no small feat.’

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

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

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

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

‘We’re doing this now?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Any signs of life?’

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

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

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

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

‘The monsters are dead. You’re safe.’

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

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

‘Why am I naked? And wet?’

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

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

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

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

She looked around her again. ‘What?’

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

‘A coma?’

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

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

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

He followed Horst out of the cellar.

*   *   *

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

As Dennis slowly but surely proceeded to bury Denzil (hardly prematurely), Johannes and Horst Cabal stood and watched their home burn down, while Alisha Bartos sat naked but for a gentleman’s jacket and still with no clear understanding of how she came to be there.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Horst, the sun’s up. Why are you … not—’

‘Bursting into flames? Ah, well, now, that’s quite the story.’ He tried to look wise and failed. Alisha looked to Cabal for elucidation.

‘My brother has experienced a transfiguration akin to your own, Fräulein, but whereas yours has brought you cleanly and perfectly back to full life and health, even your injuries healed in their entirety, it has done something rather different to him.’

Horst nodded. ‘Transfiguration,’ he said to Alisha. He still didn’t look wise.

‘I will need to conduct a few experiments upon him,’ continued Cabal, causing Horst to give him a hard look, ‘but my belief is that his mental state affected what happened to him. I do not believe he entirely wished to give up the perks of being a vampire. Would that be true, Horst?’

Horst looked shamefaced. ‘It’s not all bad,’ he admitted. ‘Actually, most of it’s pretty good. It’s just the daylight thing and all the business with the blood makes it a bit off-putting.’

‘So, the effects were moderated in him. Instead of becoming merely human like you or I, he has become something that has aspects of what the Albanians call a dhampir, which is to say, a vampire without all the usual problems.’ He looked at Horst, who was smiling brightly at this diagnosis, dispassionately. ‘The dhampir are also associated with unbridled sexual habits, so that will suit Horst very nicely.’

Horst’s smile vanished. ‘Don’t listen to him,’ he told Alisha.

She hugged the jacket more closely around herself. ‘Nobody’s told me why I’m naked yet.’

The brothers had returned their attention to the burning house. ‘Oh, because I took your clothes off,’ said Cabal with regrettable offhandedness.

‘Why?’

‘Because they would have contaminated the preservative fluid.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Horst. ‘My brother’s seen lots of naked women.’ They watched the fire a little longer. ‘Admittedly, mainly dead naked women, but still…’

‘Whereas my brother has seen plenty of living naked women, usually while naked himself.’

‘Don’t listen to him.’

‘Lacrosse team.’

‘Johannes.’

*   *   *

The remainder of the day was absorbed in storing the books and paraphernalia away in the woodshed and warning Dennis and the recently disinterred Denzil not to touch anything. As to the matter of putting a roof over their own heads, Cabal had applied a little thought to the matter, and led Horst—carrying Alisha Bartos to protect her feet from sharp stones and her legs from brambles more than anything—up the hillside overlooking the house. There they found the well-established encampment of Vlatez and Muk, recently re-provisioned and with a store of freshly washed clothing, a Katamenian bandit regarding cleanliness as being next to beastliness. Vlatez was about the same height as Alisha, and so she appropriated his garments.

Cabal and Horst decided to sleep under the sky, the weather being clement enough, leaving the two-man pup tent to Fräulein Bartos, at least for the time being. The daylight was beginning to fade as Cabal busied himself making a meal of bacon and eggs, washed down with tea. Alisha, recovering slowly from her recent resurrection, commented that she was surprised that he could cook so assuredly, to which Cabal replied that making three plates of bacon and eggs was hardly testing, and that, in any case, cookery and chemistry are very much the same thing.

Three plates of food were required because, to his amazement and pleasure, Horst found himself salivating as his brother made the food, requested a morsel, ate it, and ate some more. ‘This is wonderful!’ he said, laying into his fourth rasher. ‘I’m not dependent on blood any more.’

‘You may still be,’ warned Cabal, ‘simply in smaller amounts. I suspect that it is necessary for your more superhuman feats. That said, it makes your life a great deal more practicable.’

After they had eaten, Alisha Bartos began to fade with fatigue, and Horst suggested that she had endured quite a day, all things said, and that she should get some rest. They would make plans for how to reinsert her into her old life with minimal fuss, even if it meant concocting some story about only being in a coma and having been abducted by the notorious Johannes Cabal for nefarious, nebulous reasons. He was, after all, a necromancer of some little infamy.

When she was abed and asleep, Johannes Cabal and his brother, Horst, settled on the hillside and admired the view, marred though it was by a house in the latter stages of burning down. The bandits had chosen an excellent lookout point that gave them a perfect view of the House of Cabal without being too obvious themselves.

Cabal had avoided looking at the house more than necessary, but Horst saw he did so now in the manner of a man grasping a nettle. For all his words of assurance, Cabal could not be entirely sure that his precautions would prove sufficient, and that the hidden laboratory’s ceiling or door might not be breached by the fire or collapsing masonry. But, there was nothing to be done now. Not until the fire burnt down and the ruin cooled.

‘Awful to see the old house go like that,’ said Horst. ‘I have so many happy memories of the place. I’m surprised nobody from the village has come out to see what’s going on; the smoke must be visible for miles.’

‘They are fractious creatures, the villagers, and Sergeant Parkin is probably keeping them from investigating until he has had a chance himself. We shall see him on the morrow, I have no doubt. Without his intervention, there would be a party down there even as we speak. Yokels roasting potatoes in the ashes of the necromancer’s house.’ He nodded in the direction of the village. ‘The tavern will be doing very good business this evening. They think they have something to celebrate.’

‘And do they? What will you do now, Johannes?’

His brother was silent for a long moment. Horst looked across and thought he saw a tear at the corner of his eye, but that might just as easily have been an effect of the light of the low sun. That was how he decided to interpret it, at any rate.

Johannes Cabal took a long breath, exhaled, then said, ‘I shall rebuild. The same site, I think—I like it—but something perhaps a little larger this time.’

‘That will take time and money, won’t it?’

‘Less than one might suppose. I shall use the same methods to construct a new house as I used to bring the old one to that place. The employees work remarkably quickly and do not require payment.’ He took out his cigarillo case, offered one to Horst—who demurred—selected one himself, and lit it up. He smoked in silence for a while. ‘Not in money, anyway.’

Treading carefully, Horst said, ‘What … just playing devil’s advocate here, brother, but what if the cellar—’

‘Then it is all moot.’ Cabal said it with finality.

Horst didn’t know how to reply to that. So much depended upon what they would find in the morning, but fretting would not bring the hour a whit closer. Yet for all his apparent phlegmaticalness, Horst could see every passing second until that moment of discovery dripped upon his brother like acid.

A crow settled upon a nearby tree. ‘Kronk!’ it said in an over-familiar tone. Both of the brothers ignored it.

They sat in silence as the house burnt dully, the sun kissed the horizon, and Cabal lit another cigarillo.

‘And you, Horst,’ he said suddenly, startling his brother. ‘What are your thoughts?’

Horst grimaced a little, home to a disagreeable consideration. ‘I wonder how awful a life must be for death to be more enjoyable.’

Cabal glanced across at him. ‘You speak of the ghost girl.’

Horst nodded. ‘Do you think Minty really exists, or was she just something fabricated by the Five Ways?’

‘It seems likely everything we saw in that London was a reflection of the real world, such as it is. Even Lord Varney, should you wish to reacquaint yourself.’

Horst’s grimace returned. ‘In his case, I’d rather not. She was so bright, though. Could we do something to help her?’

Cabal blew smoke out of his nostrils. ‘A well-dressed man wandering the stews of East London enquiring after a young girl. I am sure that your intentions couldn’t possibly be misconstrued.’

‘There has to be something we can do. I know this world’s Minty has no idea what the ghost version of herself did in the false London, but I still feel we owe something to her. She deserves a better life. Can we do that?’

‘Let us rebuild the house first; building materials will still have to be bought, even if the labour is cheap. Then I shall examine my … our finances, and see what we can do for her. You’re right; there is a debt there, and I dislike feeling indebted.’ He blew a smoke ring, which travelled a full yard before an errant breeze tore it to wisps. Cabal watched it disappear with equanimity. ‘Any other thoughts?’

Horst considered the glowing eastern horizon before them. He leaned back upon the hillside, his hand behind his head. It looked altogether too louche a posture for Cabal, who remained sitting upright upon the grass.

‘I was thinking how beautiful the sunset is, and how nice it is not to burst into flames while watching it.’

Cabal considered this, and assented with a thoughtful nod. He turned his face also to the setting sun, and his pale skin glowed in its light.

‘You were ever the poet, Horst,’ said Johannes Cabal.