My Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, and Folk of All Other Persuasions.
You are about to embark on an adventure wherein risks are taken, and do not always succeed. Where danger haunts every decision, where the stakes are high and the odds are long. You, at least, are in the happy position of not being in any personal peril during this tale, despite my suggestion to the publisher that one in a thousand copies should be impregnated with dimethylmercury just to give a frisson to book purchasing. ‘You can’t just go around killing readers,’ they said.
‘Not until you’re selling more units, anyway,’ they added.
Every Cabal novel that I have written has been very different from the one before it. This is partially out of deference to you, the reader—Why would you want to read the same novel (but for cosmetic differences) time and time again?—and partially for me—Why would I wish to write the same novel (but for cosmetic differences) time and time again? Thus, you will be delighted or appalled to discover that the novel you currently hold—with surgical gloves if you have any sense—is not just the same as the one that precedes it, or the one before that, or the one before that, or—I feel compelled to say, although I’m as bored with this sentence as you—the one before that. This novel is its own creature.
It is also, however, a tying up of threads as a tapestry reaches its conclusion. It is not necessarily the last Johannes Cabal novel, although it might be. It is certainly, however, the end of a phase. In the following story, the reader who has read the previous novels (and, ideally, the short stories, although that isn’t a requisite) will see many things that are familiar: some ideas are revisited and maliciously subverted; some old characters will re-emerge. Pieces slot into place, the clockwork grates, the chimes play. The penny tableau that began with Johannes Cabal the Necromancer comes to an end of sorts, the curtain rattles down, and you may all sprint for the exit before the national anthem plays.
Zoltán Kodály started his opera Háry János with a sneeze, a nod to an old Hungarian superstition that a statement preceded or followed by a sneeze is the truth. He had an orchestra to perform an instrumental sneeze; I have a computer and an overabundance of fancy. Thus, I sneeze a cloud of electrons upon the backlit LCD screen, and the following tale’s truth is assured, just as much as the historical truth that Napoleon was captured by a lone Hungarian. We all knew that, didn’t we? Of course.
Here, then, is the fifth major undertaking of the necromancer Johannes Cabal. May you enjoy it in the knowledge that it is the absolute, unvarnished truth in every respect.