Chapter 14

IN WHICH VILLAINY IS REVEALED AND LIVES ARE RISKED

Weighing the pros and cons of his current situation, Johannes Cabal had to admit that he was definitely ahead in the game. The route had proved circuitous, and the clean lines of his original plan to steal the Principia Necromantica had long been trampled under the feet of any number of interested and interfering parties. There had been two very distinct attempts upon his life along the way, although such was the nature of his calling that if nobody had tried to kill him during the project he would have regarded it as, at best, freakish or, at worse, highly suspicious.

Still, here he was with the Principia nestling happily in his Gladstone bag, with the murderous mess of bloody circumstance otherwise known as “the maiden voyage of the aeroship Princess Hortense” due to fly away from him at dawn, taking the last vestiges of menace with it. He might even go down to the aeroport perimeter and wave from behind the wire as it dwindled into the distance and out of his life.

In the meantime, he would find a small, clean, discreet locanda, have a meal that was not subject to Mirkarvian standards of machismo in the kitchen, a long bath, and sleep the untroubled sleep of a man who is tolerably sure that nobody is going to try and cut his throat in the wee small hours—which is to say, he would still lock his door and wedge a chair under the handle.

And so it went. He found a quiet little inn just by the Via Dulcis, whose proprietor was friendly but incurious. He asked Cabal if he was on holiday, Cabal agreed that he was, and that apparently fulfilled the landlord’s entire expectations for gossip. He did not even much care that Cabal had only a single small bag, but blithely showed him up to a small, clean room that had a decent view of a municipal park over the low rooftop of its neighbour. The room shared a bathroom with the three other rooms on the landing, but these were all unoccupied, so Cabal enjoyed his long bath uninterrupted. Clean, shaven, and in his only change of fresh clothing until he would have the opportunity of buying more on the morrow, he sat down to a light meal of pasta and chicken in sauce, accompanied by a glass of dry white wine from, the landlord explained, his family’s own vineyard. Cabal admitted that he was right to be proud of it; while not an extraordinary vintage, Cabal’s spectrograph of a palate found much to admire in it, and so he went to bed tired, very slightly drunk, and—at least briefly—at peace with the world. This last he managed by assiduously avoiding any thought of the past few days and Miss Leonie Barrow’s current circumstances. It was a mental trick that came easily to him, after so many opportunities to practise it in his past.

He slept through dawn, and therefore any chance to wave goodbye to the Princess Hortense, but this caused him little concern and less dismay. It was hardly his affair if Miss Barrow would insist upon sticking her head in a lion’s mouth. That thought made him consider the coincidence of the leonine Leonie putting her head in any such place, and his thoughts went off in other directions and had to be dragged back into line by the scruff of the neck and spoken harshly to.

He came down to breakfast and enjoyed a light meal in the Continental manner, with strong coffee and tart orange juice in a sparsely occupied dining room in which the other guests kept themselves, much to Cabal’s satisfaction, to themselves. When he had finished, he had another coffee to drink while he skimmed the morning newspaper. This, he was further pleased to note, contained nothing about skies full of murder, or spies turning up cold and dead. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if officials at Senzan Intelligence had already found Cacon, but they would hardly be likely to advertise it. Any suspicions they had would be ranged upon the Mirkarvian aeroship now heading for their border with Katamenia, and there it could remain with his blessings. He, in the meantime, just needed to buy some travelling clothes, and then set off in entirely the other direction. He had suffered his fill of other people for the time being, and he missed his laboratory.

Thinking of his laboratory reminded him of other elements of his life, his real life and real business, away from all the alarums and excursions people seemed hell-bent upon imposing on him. Such nonsense, so distracting. He looked at the empty chair opposite him across the small table and imagined it occupied. He sank into a brown study as he considered the vagaries of fate that had led him to this place and this time and breakfast by himself.

He would probably have been a solicitor. His father had connections with Hinks & Hinks in town, a small firm specialising in the bread-and-butter business of English solicitors—conveyancing, last wills and testaments, and bickering over property lines. His father had so wanted to be English, for his sons to lose their accents and to conform. A whole trajectory for Cabal’s life had been calculated that concluded in his sixty-fifth year, when he was to retire as senior partner at Hinks, Hinks & Cabal to a cottage with roses around the door, Sunday lunch with the grandchildren, and the autumn of his life spent with his wife.

Even at the time, it had been anathema to him. All but that last element. There he had plans himself. Plans that came to an abrupt halt with his brother Horst standing ashen-faced on the doorstep, the mindless run to the river’s edge where a silent crowd stood by, gathered by her where she lay on the grass, her summer dress lank with river water. The doctor had delivered the formula then—that there was nothing that could be done, that all hope had gone, that he was sorry for Johannes Cabal’s loss. He was vague with shock then, hearing without listening, but later, when the priest came and had the damnable temerity to tell him that she was in a better place, Cabal swore and raged and would have struck the man across his stupid sanctimonious face if Horst hadn’t held him back.

That night, he made his decision and, as was in his character, acted upon it immediately. That night, the baleful shade of Hinks, Hinks & Cabal winked out of existence and was replaced by a new arc, that led to here and now, sitting alone at a breakfast table under an assumed name. He noticed the landlord standing close at hand, an expression of concern on his face warring with a professional desire to avoid upsetting the customers. “Mi scusi, signor. But you said something?”

“No,” said Cabal. He got up to leave. “I said nothing. Nothing of import.”

Teeth brushed, bag packed, and bill paid, Cabal walked out into the clear Parilan morning. The sky was a brilliant blue, the buildings shone in the sun’s reflected glory, and the air was fresh, just a hint of chill still lingering from the clear night. It was a good day to be alive and did much to lift his mood. He would have been a mite happier still if his Webley revolver had been snuggling safely in his bag, but the day was otherwise as good as any day without a large-calibre handgun can reasonably be. Cabal stepped into the street busy with people going to work, and set off toward a gentleman’s tailor he had spotted the previous evening that stocked a lot of black suits and white shirts in unenterprising styles. By his calculations, he would be able to buy some fresh clothes and still reach the railway station towards the end of the morning rush. The crowds would offer him cover while he checked that nondescript men with bulges in their armpits were not monitoring departures. His acute sense of danger told him that he was probably in the clear, but, then again, his acute sense of danger had failed to tell him that somebody was about to throw him out of the belly of the Princess Hortense, so he was not inclined to trust to it, at least not until it could prove to have recovered its edge.

The tailor was most accommodating, and—once he had got over his disappointment that the gentleman was interested only in items off the peg—bustled around fetching them as Cabal reeled off his measurements from memory. “You are in a hurry, signor?” he asked from the top of a stepladder, from which he fetched down white shirts wrapped in tissue paper.

“I have to meet a boat arriving at Santa Keyna, and my train leaves in two hours,” Cabal explained, missing no opportunity to cover his tracks. Santa Keyna lay eastwards of Parila, while he would be travelling to the west. “I shouldn’t have left everything to the last minute, I know,” and he shrugged.

Out on the street again, with his new purchases wrapped in a neat brown-paper bundle under his arm, he checked his watch. The timing was slightly off, he realised; the tailor had been more efficient than planned for, and Cabal found himself slightly ahead of schedule. In an unexpected show of pleasantry, which he didn’t even attempt to rationalise, he bought a red carnation from a woman on a street corner who had a basket full of them. Furthermore, he suffered her to place it upon his jacket’s lapel, and for this he could offer no rationalization either. With the uncharacteristic splash of colour illuminating him, he strolled onwards.

As he entered the square whose northern side was dominated by the railway station’s façade, he heard the happy shrieks of children, and the sound curdled his enjoyment of the day somewhat. He had once been forced by circumstances to be vaguely polite to children for a whole year when he ran the carnival, and the experience had scarred him. When he saw that the source of their amusement was a puppet show, the day darkened still further. A detour was impossible, as the show had been mounted close by the pedestrian approach to the station’s entrance. Most of the commuters passing by smiled and tossed coins into the collection buckets, apparently unconcerned by the bottleneck created by the show’s audience.

Cabal started to edge around the crowd, but paused, distracted by the nature of the show. It was not a simple tall booth with a stage in the upper third, beneath which lurked a glove puppeteer, like the “professors” of the English Punch and Judy show. This was an altogether more massive construction of wood and canvas, the best part of two and a half metres along the front and deep enough to hold a floored stage and sufficient “backstage” and space behind the proscenium to give the puppeteers room to stand and operate the marionettes that pranced upon the stage. The play currently being performed seemed to be an old story, albeit lent a satirical edge for the adults present by passing references to local gossip and national politics. The tale’s root was something like that of “Hansel and Gretel,” but instead of a witch’s cottage the pair had stumbled upon a secret military camp in the woods, run by grotesquely caricatured Mirkarvian soldiers. The Mirkarvians—led by an idiotic captain who reminded Cabal strongly of Lieutenant Karstetz—were at a loss to know how to deal with the children, the captain having inadvisably used his orders as toilet paper in an earlier scene. Now they found themselves “in a pickle,” which led to a running joke about how the captain loved pickles, and what an extraordinarily wide variety of things the Mirkarvians enjoy pickled.

Cabal watched the soldiers whirling and dancing around, their wooden feet clacking across the boards of the little stage. He had to admire the skill of the puppeteers, even if the script played a little too strongly to the Senzan appetite for scatological humour. Still, it was easy enough to ignore the words and just watch the varnished arms wave and the varnished boots stamp.

The realisation came upon him suddenly and violently, not as a light of revelation but as a dreadful hollowing. For a moment, it seemed as if nothing existed within his chest but cold vacuum, freezing the inside of his rib cage.

It was so clear. It was all so clear. And it had always been so clear, right from the beginning, if he had only opened his eyes and ears, if he had not only looked but also seen, not only heard but listened.

It meant Leonie Barrow was in terrible danger. No phantasm of peril but true, real, and immediate danger. It also meant that it was none of his concern. He could just walk away.

So he did.

Miss Leonie Barrow had not expected Johannes Cabal to see the Princess Hortense off on her final leg, so she had no grounds for feeling disappointed when she was proved right. Being right, however, is not always the recipe for good humour, and she felt hers deteriorate as the aeroship cleared the landing cradle, realigned the etheric guides, and set course for Katamenia. Part of the reason was simple annoyance with herself. She felt somehow gulled, as if he had made a fool of her. Cabal had been entirely in her power right from the moment she’d laid eyes on him that first evening, and—despite great provocation—she had never used it. It had seemed that there was a greater or at least a more immediate evil to contend with, and she had let him keep his liberty and his life. Yet when she needed his coldly analytical mind he had turned his back at the first sign of trouble. Well, the second sign of trouble. Being shoved out of the ship while in flight could reasonably be regarded as the first.

The other part of the reason she didn’t like to think about. Cabal had been very emphatic in his warning to her, that she was risking her life by rejoining the ship. She had to acknowledge that his was a career path littered with greater hazards than redundancy and insufficient pension contributions. Cabal had lived as long as he had by having a very keen sense of danger and a very simple strategy for dealing with it; turning a full 180 degrees and running. It was not a very valorous lifestyle, but he liked the way that it kept him off ducking stools, clear of bonfires, and safely away from nooses. Thus, it seemed likely that if Cabal said there was terrible danger before performing one of those turns and running, then there was very likely to be danger.

She had little idea how she would deal with danger. Her father had taught her the bare essentials of self-defence—when in real, unalloyed fear for your life, fight to maim and kill, because you will get no second chance—but the assumption there was of an unplanned attack in the street. A calculating killer or, worse yet, killers, was not something she or her father had ever considered. Cabal must certainly have performed his 180-degree manoeuvre in the past and found himself facing a wall but survived somehow. That was what he was, a survivor. Though she hated even to think it, a survivor was what she needed on her side right now. Somebody who could spot the dagger before it was drawn or the pistol before it was aimed, and find a way out.

But then, wasn’t that exactly what he had done? Worse still, wasn’t that exactly what he’d told her to do, too?

So, between feeling like a fool because her kindness had gone unrewarded and feeling like a fool for not running while she had the chance, it is unsurprising that Leonie Barrow watched the new day dawn with all the enthusiasm of a prisoner on the morning of execution.

“Ah, you poor dear. Left all alone, my poor sweet.”

The voice at her shoulder did not lighten her mood. In the normal run of things, Lady Ninuka would merely have been irritating. If Cabal’s suspicions had any grounds, however, Ninuka was perfectly capable of walking up to somebody, sticking a dagger into their vitals, and looking them in the face the whole time as she twisted the steel. So Miss Barrow found herself in the unfamiliar territory that lies between peevishness and fear, an uncomfortable place filled, figuratively, with disease-carrying flies whose whining wings put one’s teeth on edge.

Unaware of her companion’s inner conflict, Lady Ninuka continued, “I heard that Herr Meissner was called away on urgent business at the embassy in Parila. He’ll just have to catch up with his luggage in Katamenia, I suppose.”

“You heard that?” replied Miss Barrow in a neutral tone. It didn’t surprise her. Cabal wouldn’t have jumped ship without some sort of story to prevent awkward questions.

“Yes. And dear Herr Cacon apparently has family in Parila, so he’s gone, too. I suppose he’ll just have to make his own way onwards after he’s said hello.”

Miss Barrow turned sharply and looked at Lady Ninuka. Apart from being slightly startled by the sudden movement, she looked very much as a monied and landed simpleton dispensing gossip might. Or, just possibly, a monied and landed stone-cold killer passing herself off as an ingénue might.

“I thought the Senzans were going to spend a long time searching the ship? They waved it through very quickly, didn’t they?”

Lady Ninuka shrugged. “You should have seen them, my dear. The ship was absolutely heaving with Senzan soldiers. I think the captain was just expecting a few grubby little customs men. Instead, we must have had a whole regiment tramping around the place!” Her animation suggested that she was very enamoured of large numbers of young men in uniform marching back and forth in front of her. She frowned unhappily. “They were finished so quickly.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Searching the ship. Military efficiency, I suppose.”

“Didn’t the deaths aboard concern them?”

“Not as far as I know,” said Lady Ninuka a little tartly. “I’m sure they were only too glad to leave poor Gabriel alone. The captain told us at the same time as he did the Senzan captain. Gabriel was Mirkarvian, aboard a Mirkarvian ship, who died within Mirkarvian borders. Poor Gabriel.” She dabbed quickly and delicately at her eyes with a lace handkerchief as if drying soap bubbles. “Poor, stupid boy. Please, forgive me. I must—” And she fluttered away.

Miss Barrow watched her with mixed emotions, though none were sympathy. Even if Lady Ninuka was all that she seemed, that just made her a callous sensualist who hadn’t killed anyone, as opposed to a callous sensualist who had. It hardly made her a figure worth pitying in either case.

From the salon window, she watched Parila dwindle into the distance until finally it was lost in cloud and haze as the Princess Hortense gained height. With it went Cabal and, unhappy circumstance, the only person she’d trusted in the game of death she’d rejoined. Despondent and perhaps a little scared, she ordered a pot of tea—a drink she enjoyed all the more since realising that the Mirkarvians disliked it even conceptually as having too little alcohol or caffeine to be trustworthy.

An hour or so later, and on her third cup, she was reading a book on Mirkarvian history (a dismal study of a country that never learns from its mistakes, akin to watching a baby play with a revolver; something dreadful is sure to happen, and only the exact timing is in question), when there was some commotion.

Colonel Konstantin, still prickly after the Senzans had questioned him closely and been impudently thorough in searching his luggage on the basis that he was the most obvious manifestation of Mirkarvian militarism aboard, was looking out of the aft windows while smoking a foul cigar when he took it from his mouth with an expression of surprise and stared steadily through the glass. “What’s that fella doing, hmm?”

The Roborovskis came over to join him. “It’s one of those flying machines,” said Frau Roborovski.

“It’s an entomopter!” added her husband, in an enthusiastic tone at odds with his usual demeanour. “How wonderful!” When the Senzans sent a squadron of the machines to shadow the Princess Hortense toward Parila, he was the only person aboard who regarded them with anything but suspicion and trepidation. “They must have sent one to escort us out of their skies.”

The colonel, always prepared in a way that many Boy Scouts frequently are not, had already pulled a set of small prismatic binoculars of the Daubresse pattern from his pocket and was observing the distant aircraft. “No,” he said definitely, “it’s nothing like the other ones. I don’t see any weapons. I think it may be a reconnaissance model. Coming on damn quick.”

Miss Barrow joined them in squinting at the black dot against the white cloud. Amidst the speculation that murmured around her, she had trouble keeping a straight face. It was difficult not to be a little smug; not for the first time, she had read Johannes Cabal better than he knew. For a man with a stated hatred of the dramatic, she knew that he wouldn’t be able to leave the mystery of the Princess Hortense alone, and here he was, riding to the rescue aboard what was doubtless a stolen entomopter. She didn’t flatter herself for a second that he was doing this for anyone but himself, but the sense of knowing his mind before he did gave her a proprietorial sense of warm regard, like the owner of a well-trained dog.

After a few minutes, it was apparent to all with or without binoculars that the entomopter was of a design different from the Senzan fighters’, and that it carried no obvious weapons. It gained height until it was some little distance above the aeroship, and the last they saw of it was it slowly vanishing overhead until the salon ceiling got in the way.

Colonel Konstantin put his binoculars away. “That machine landed on us.” He looked towards the doors as if hoping a member of the crew would enter and make an explanatory announcement, but the crew was notable by its absence. Even the bar was unattended. “Just what is going on here?” He marched off to find out.

Just what was going on there was not immediately forthcoming. Indeed, the remaining passengers gravitated towards the salon and were eventually reduced to helping themselves to drinks from behind the bar. Colonel Konstantin returned in a bad humour, having been given short shrift by what few crew members he had been able to find. Apparently, the arrival of an unexpected visitor had caused quite an upset, and neither the captain nor any of his senior officers were available. Almost an hour passed before Captain Schten appeared in the door, just as Herr Roborovski was filling a stein.

“Ah,” Roborovski began apologetically, “we’ve been keeping a record of what’s been drunk, Captain.” But the captain just waved him to silence. It seemed that bar accounts were the least of his concerns at the moment.

“Exactly what has been going on, Captain?” asked Miss Ambersleigh. “There’s been a very queer atmosphere aboard this vessel ever since we arrived at Parila, and things just seem to be getting worse.” She would have expanded upon this theme, but Lady Ninuka shushed her sharply, and she sank into an aggrieved silence.

“The lady is correct,” said Konstantin, referring to Miss Ambersleigh and not Lady Ninuka, which is to say, lady is as lady does. “What in blazes is wrong with this voyage?”

Captain Schten looked at them all unhappily. Then, at the sound of boots on the floor behind him, he stepped to one side.

The man who walked into the salon was an utter stranger to Leonie Barrow, but she disliked him instantly. Perhaps it was the way that he looked at the passengers, with the disdain of a chess grandmaster faced with an opponent who refers to his pieces as “prawns,” “castles,” and “horsies.” He was a lean man in a black uniform that, despite clearly belonging to someone of high rank, bore few decorations and was all the more impressive for it. In truth, since he wore the Imperial Star at his throat it could pretty much be taken for granted that he already had all the others.

He carried a shako under his left arm, while in his right hand he held a typewritten sheet of paper. Lady Ninuka started to say something, but he quelled her with a glance. Once he had silence, he studied the paper, then slowly looked around the salon, checking every face. His brow clouded, and Miss Barrow had the very distinct impression that this was a man inclined to violence with very little provocation.

“Where is he, Captain Schten?” he said in a voice low with threat.

“Sir?” Schten looked at the newcomer as if they had previously been rehearsing a drawing-room comedy yet he’d just been given a cue from Macbeth. “I thought I explained. We—”

“Two … scheduled departures. One … disappearance,” grated the man. “One … suicide. But there are five people missing here.” The violence in him was bubbling to the surface as surely as a geyser. “Where is he?”

The captain finally understood the specifics, if not the animosity, and quickly said, “You mean Herr Meissner? He stayed behind in Parila, but—I assure you—he is a loyal servant of Mirk—”

“Herr … Gerhard … Meissner …” spat the man, “is in Harslaus Military Hospital, Captain. In a coma.” As he said this last word, he spun on his heel to glare at Captain Schten. Schten had two inches in height and better than forty pounds on the stranger, but he quailed before the man’s anger, and Miss Barrow saw that she wasn’t at all overdramatising his power. Schten was terrified of him, and that terrified her.

“The man who so easily pulled the wool over your eyes, Captain, is called Johannes Cabal. He is an agent provocateur. A saboteur! He assassinated our glorious emperor! He is the despised enemy of every Mirkarvian!” He was bellowing in Schten’s face by now, and Schten seemed to shrink with every shouted syllable, with every fleck of foam the raging man spat into his face. “And you, Captain … you have allowed him to escape justice and run off into his rat hole! If I didn’t need you, you moronic piece of garbage, I would kill you now.”

There was a horrible silence. Then Lady Ninuka said in a very small voice, “Hello, Daddy.”

“Hello, Orfilia,” said the man offhandedly, not turning his head.

Miss Barrow’s eyes widened. This, then, was Count Marechal, of whom even the bloodless Johannes Cabal was wary. Now she understood his reluctance to continue the journey. Indeed, she now shared it.

The count spoke quickly and emphatically, his mind already planning ahead. “How far are we from the Katamenian border?”

“About ninety minutes, sir.”

“At flank speed?”

“Less than an hour.”

Count Marechal grimaced. “It will have to do. See to it.” Captain Schten saluted, clicking his heels, and left the salon, apparently very happy to do so.

“Excuse me?”

Marechal looked over at the passengers and saw that a young woman with rather unruly blond hair had her hand up. “Who are you?”

“Leonie Barrow. Would I be right to think you’re Count Marechal?”

“You would. What do you want?”

“I was just wondering, really. What on earth is going on?”

“What is going on is none of your concern, Fräulein. We shall be reaching our destination a little earlier than scheduled, you will all disembark, and that will be the end of your involvement in this affair.”

“Yes, but—”

“That,” he barked, unused to women doing anything other than answering when spoken to, “will be the end of it.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” said a voice from behind Marechal.

Marechal spun on his heel to face the speaker and was both astonished and delighted to see Johannes Cabal leaning nonchalantly against the wall by the door.