The Brothers Cabal (13 page)

He crept under the edge of the open window and grew still, listening while marvelling how little effort the feat of sticking to the stone like a limpet was costing him.

‘… a covey of ill-organised, inconsequential romantics.' That was de Osma. ‘Their spies were detected and dealt with in good order. And, mark you, by our generals.'

‘You're being pretty relaxed about a breach in security,' replied the dry, slow tones of the American, Collingwood.

‘I did not say I was
happy
about tonight's events…'

‘That they were dealt with is really not what concerns me,' Collingwood said over him. ‘It's that they got in here in the first place. Hell, how did those nutjobs even find out about us?'

‘Yes!' von Ziegler piped up. ‘That worries me, too. We've gone to so much trouble to keep this secret until the time is right. How did they know?'

‘And how much did they report?' added Collingwood.

‘The former we don't yet know,' said de Osma, ever the leader. ‘The latter we know a little of. Herman, the spy who killed himself rather than be taken, was detected in the act of preparing a messenger pigeon to fly from a loft of sorts he'd established in a disused tower.'

‘Pigeons?' Von Ziegler was shrill. ‘How did he get pigeons in here undetected?'

‘That is the least of our concerns,' said de Osma. Horst could almost hear the shrug in his voice. ‘Conjurors conceal birds easily. Smuggling in a few pigeons was probably a more trivial task than you think. No, how many messages he had managed to send before we stopped him,
that
is of concern to us.'

‘I would've guessed Lady Misericorde might be able to get something out of him,' said Collingwood. ‘Can't she—I don't know—use some of that necromancer hoodoo and make him talk?'

‘Apparently not,' said de Osma. ‘She tells me that the bullet destroyed the brain, so she has nothing to work with. Might even be the reason why he did it.'

‘The fact remains that they are small in number and widespread,' said Collingwood. ‘How great a threat do they represent?'

There was a pause marked by light footsteps on a carpeted floor and the
chink
of glassware as de Osma poured himself a drink. The ghost of a gulp, then: ‘If you had asked me that a week ago I would have said no substantial threat at all. Now … I am not nearly so certain. There was money and organisation involved behind this infiltration. I think the Dee Society may be more capable than we had previously believed.'

‘We've been so careful,' said von Ziegler, returning to his previous theme. ‘Everybody vetted. Everybody observed. How is this possible?'

‘We had done everything possible,' agreed Collingwood, but after an ironically measured pause he added, ‘everything
humanly
possible.'

‘You suspect one of the generals?' said de Osma in a peremptory tone. ‘Impossible. They have as much to gain by our plans as we do.'

‘That Cabal fella doesn't seem convinced,' said Collingwood.

‘Oh … No. No, we have some way to go with him yet. But the spies had entered our employ before he was even resurrected. I doubt his powers extend quite that far.'

There was a grumble of reluctant agreement from Collingwood. ‘That leaves us with Misericorde and Alsager,' he said. ‘And, no, they don't make sense, either.'

‘What about Alsager's mob?' suggested von Ziegler. ‘He gathered them very quickly, in a matter of months. How do we know he didn't sweep up somebody who doesn't agree with our aims?'

‘Because even Alsager doesn't trust them,' said de Osma. ‘He keeps a close eye on them, believe me. Gentlemen, we are going in circles. Worse, we are falling into the trap of doubting ourselves. If this evening's business has any utility to us at all, it is to make us realise that we are not unobserved, and that time is of the essence. We must move ahead. Immediately. This very night.'

There was some consternation at this.

‘But we're not ready,' rumbled Collingwood. ‘You admitted that our “Lord of the Dead” may not be all we had hoped for, and the Lord of Powers is still not with us. That means we only have two generals to count upon.'

‘But they are the two who can provide numbers,' said de Osma. ‘In military terms, we have infantry—or at least we shall when we have raided enough mortuaries and graveyards—and we have cavalry. We shall just have to forgo vampiric elite troops until Cabal either toes the line or is replaced, and the occult artillery the Lord of Powers will supply when he is finally brought here. He is overdue, I admit, but should be here shortly. The field agents' reports have been reassuring on that front—we shall have our thunder and lightning soon enough.'

De Osma started to speak, but he was interrupted by raised voices beyond the room's door, which was suddenly flung open.

‘Alsag … My Lord Devlin!' said von Ziegler. ‘What is the meaning of this?'

Horst suddenly had a very bad feeling. He crept in a tight circle and started making his way as quickly as he dared back to the balcony from which he had sortied. It did him little good. There was a clatter of the window being opened more widely and Alsager's triumphant cry: ‘There!' Horst stopped and performed a clockwise half turn so he could look back. Alsager was leaning out of the window, pointing at Horst for the benefit of the
Ministerium
, who were crammed behind him in the window, as if they might need assistance in noting a man clinging to a sheer wall not twenty feet away.

‘Lord Horst! What is the meaning of this?' cried de Osma, astonishment losing ground to an outrage so acute that he was reduced to shouting people's names and demanding what the meaning of this was.

‘Oh, you know,' said Horst noncommittally. They evidently didn't know, so he clarified. ‘Just getting some air. Such a nice evening I just thought I'd just … have a bit of a scuttle.' He left it there, hoping that they'd accept this as perfectly normal behaviour for vampires.

‘I think we need to have a talk,' said de Osma. ‘Please join us here. And use the stairs.' He and his colleagues disappeared back into the room, but it did not require the acute hearing of a vampire to know that they were muttering suspiciously among themselves the instant that they were out of view. Only Devlin Alsager was left, and he took the opportunity to smirk like the class snitch who has successfully contrived to get somebody into trouble with the teacher.

‘I can't wait to hear what you come out with to explain spying on them,' he said. Then his eyes flicked away and the smile faltered, dimmed by surprise and curiosity. ‘What's going on down there?'

Horst followed his gaze off onto a large area of scrubland beyond the river that might have been a common at some point. A few tents clustered in the corner closest to the town, but otherwise it was tangled and wild with brambles and thistles. Rising from its far side was a thin vaporous trail of pale smoke that caught the moonlight strongly as it drifted slowly in the slight breeze. Horst followed the track into the sky to its end just in time for it to suddenly erupt into a brilliant green light that floated slowly back to earth, illuminating the broken land beneath in a stuttering, eerie glow that threw long, shifting shadows. Horst's first thought was somebody had shot off a firework, but he immediately corrected that. It was a signal flare. How odd, he mused. Who might they be signalling, and why?

He was answered in the next moment by a high-pitched
chink
as stone above him cracked and flaked away, accompanied by a momentary whine like an angry hornet flying by to cause mischief elsewhere. Such was his surprise at all these entertainingly unusual events occurring so closely together that he was, by his own later admission to himself, ashamed that he did not immediately divine what was happening.

That took Alsager's cry of anger as he ducked away from the window in the same instant that another passing hornet dealt the glass a shattering impact.

Oh
, thought Horst with all the calmness of the utterly surprised.
Those are bullets.

He looked around and saw flashes down amidst the shanties of the town square and spread around the common. Distant cracks of rifles firing floated to him, sounding so unthreatening as to be almost pleasant. A bullet ricocheting from the wall close enough to his head to make him wince disabused him of that notion and he started to scuttle as quickly as a vampire might horizontally. When he was over the balcony, he allowed his grip to fail and fell some twenty feet onto the hard stone, a landing he achieved gracefully. He snatched up his jacket and shoes from where he had left them and was about to dash into the safety of the abandoned apartment when he saw a flash on the common that illuminated what seemed to be ripples spreading from its centre, as if from a pebble tossed into a pond. His curiosity was such that it did not occur to him that this might presage a bad thing, until said bad thing turned out to be a mortar shell striking the castle wall. Then the window behind him shattered from the blast and he was thrown onto his back, stone chippings peppering his clothes and skin.

It could only be the Dee Society, he was sure. So much for the tiny gathering of concerned academics that the
Ministerium
had posited. Any society that could field upwards of fifty armed souls with supporting light field pieces was not a very polite society.

He felt the thud of a distant concussion travel through the land, through the castle walls, and into his back with a swiftness that the airborne sound lacked, and was thus warned of another incoming shell while it was still in transit. He rolled onto his front and thence to his feet in a blur of accelerated motion that left stone chippings that had been lying on his chest still in the air by the time he attained the safety of the room.

The detonation was closer this time, and he didn't feel quite so happy with said attained safety as the gorgeous plasterwork cracked and rained down on his head and shoulders. Hoping to attain somewhere that actually
was
safe, he dashed for the door and so out into the hallway.

There he was, jacketed and lacing his second shoe, when his most recently attained safety was rendered anything but, although not on this occasion by a kilogramme of explosive but by the appearance of the far too ubiquitous Lord Devlin Alsager. He appeared at the base of a flight of steps to Horst's right in a flurry of collarless linen and frills, Byronic and uncalled-for. He fixed Horst with a furious glare, and cried, ‘You!'

‘Obviously,' said Horst, concluding the business of tying his shoelace.

‘You didn't kill her, did you?'

Horst straightened up. He had a distinct sense that things were going to get very unfriendly in the next few minutes. When he was rested and fed, he was literally faster than the human eye could follow, could force himself from the perception of mundane folk, and had the strength of ten. Unhappily, he was neither rested nor fed, and he had consumed much of his reserves in repairing assorted pieces of damage he had suffered that night—rope burns, bullet holes, et al.

He looked at Devlin Alsager, a man better suited to propping up hotel bars in search of lonely divorcees, yet given the rank of general, the title of lord, and
carte blanche
to feed—quite literally—upon a population who looked to have enough problems without being further victimised by a twat.

It didn't seem right to Horst, it didn't seem fair, and he was a man who had a problem turning his back on things that were neither right nor fair. No more duplicity, he decided. No more going along with this charade.

‘By “her”, I assume you mean Alisha?'

‘First-name terms, eh?' sneered Alsager, a man whose upper lip looked bereft without a sneer, a smirk, or a curl to disfigure it.

‘Of course first-name terms. She was a maid. It's traditional.' The strange alien part of Horst was playing around with ways of killing Alsager in the most exquisite of agonies amid a concerto of cracking bones and snapping sinews. For once, Horst let such fancies run.

‘Yes, of
course
it is,' said Alsager, giving the impression that he was making a noble concession in admitting the point. ‘Yes, the maid. You didn't kill her, did you?'

‘The maid who shot me? Twice, that is. Once through each lung. That maid? Just trying to be sure. Wouldn't want to end up talking about a different one.' Horst could feel his patience with the preening idiot slipping. The cold part of his mind was wondering if he could keep Alsager alive long enough to make him eat his own spleen, having first pulled it directly from the abdomen before driving it down that yakking mouth and sealing the gullet.
Possibly
, thought Horst.
Why don't we give it a go?

Alsager looked as if he'd just about done with the dance before the big event, too. ‘Of course her. You let her go, didn't you?'

And there Horst was, his last chance to dissemble before him. He simply could not be bothered.

‘Yes,' he said clearly. ‘I let her go. This whole thing, this conspiracy, it sickens me. Alisha and poor Herman, God rest him, there's more to admire in them, more bravery in their little fingers than in this whole debased fiasco.' His words were punctuated by another shell striking the castle ramparts. ‘Yes, I let her go. Now, what do you propose to do about it, you mutt?'

Alsager advanced a step, his posture arcing forward a little as he did. Horst could hear bone and cartilage creaking and re-forming as Alsager began his metamorphosis. It sounded injurious to health if practised frequently, and Horst could only assume old werewolves resorted to walking sticks. It also sounded painful. As he watched Alsager sweat and grunt and tear at his clothes, he sincerely hoped so.

‘You think you're so much better than me, don't you?' said Alsager, more in a snarl than a human voice.