The Brothers Cabal (15 page)

The coldness without was coupled with the cancerous cold in his mind; he blinked once in the torrent and then his senses swept out to show him the curving tunnel ahead. The flow was fast, but not fast enough. As easily as if he were considering a game of chess in a warm and quiet study, he analysed his situation both immediate and pending. Of the two, the former was simpler; he would follow the tunnel to its exit, which must surely be into the river. There he would breathe again and stop consuming his limited inner resources with such speed. What might be waiting for him, however, was of concern. Ahead of him was the Dee Society, who likely wanted him destroyed. Behind him was the
Ministerium Tenebrae
and its soldiers, all of whom definitely wanted him destroyed. Of the two factions, the former was probably the lesser threat, which was handy as it allowed him to press forward rather than falling back. He would gain the town and lose himself in its back alleys and abandoned houses. From there he would …

The next thought looked a little like ‘feed', but Horst couldn't allow it to be so and quickly slammed it behind a mental door labelled ‘To Be Attended To'. It might not have been ‘feed', he told himself. It might have been ‘feel'. Or ‘feet'. Certainly, swimming in shoes was no fun. ‘Feet'. It was definitely ‘feet'. Nothing vampiric at all.

The grating loomed up in front of him a few seconds later, and he was glad to be necessarily distracted from the necessity of distracting himself. In the submerged gloom afforded him through the few lunar rays penetrating the water and the agency of his inhuman senses, he could see the bars, slimy with ancient filth, some scraps of cloth caught at the welds and wafting mournfully in the flow like the battle standards of a defeated army, and—jammed against one of the frame struts—what looked a lot like a human femur. More important for his immediate needs, the hasp by which it was normally locked had broken free and the whole assembly was swaying slightly on its simple pin hinges. One good shove was enough to open the gap wide enough for him to pass, and he did so, sliding into the more sluggish flow of the river and freedom, or at least a greater freedom by a few small degrees.

He rolled over onto his back and sculled slowly a few inches beneath the surface. Above him, he could make out the outline of the covered bridge, its roof aflame. Through the medium of the water, he was still aware of the muffled concussions as the castle walls were struck again and again by shells, but it was a wasted effort, he knew. The thinnest part of the castle walls would still be far too deep for the mortars to do more than scar them. This Dee Society had acted with haste, presumably fearing that the discovery of its spies would provoke the
Ministerium
into precipitate action. In this they were perfectly correct, but that had not made their own assault any more effective. Horst wondered what carnage Misericorde's walking dead and Alsager's petting zoo of doom was currently wreaking in the ranks of the Society.

He rolled back over and swam for the far bank of the river. Here he emerged against the dank stone of the riverside wall and gratefully took his first breath in almost three minutes. As he inhaled, he felt the surge of strange energy settle back with the air of a panther returning to its lair. It did not go entirely willingly.

Horst quickly analysed his situation; Alsager would be back up from the dungeons by now and Horst doubted that even the posturing wolfman would be so foolish as to believe that being dunked in a well was a certain end for a vampire. Once he had discovered where the stream emerged, he and his—for lack of a better word—minions would be combing the far riverbank at just about the point where he was indeed to be found. Horst decided not to be there by the time they got themselves so organised. Swimming against the current was more than he cared to do, but Alsager would expect him to travel downstream. Luckily, Horst's recent discoveries in vertical travel might stand him in good stead, he hoped. Removing his shoes, knotting the laces together, and stringing them around his neck, Horst rose from the cold, black water like a primeval amphibian with aspirations towards dapperness assaying a first journey onto land to spread the word about good tailoring. That his current ensemble had not suffered the indignities of mortar attack and submergence unscathed had not escaped him.

Once clear of the river surface, Horst turned himself to the horizontal and crept into the shadows beneath the bridge. Above him he could hear the crackle and crash of burning wood as the bridge's palisade was consumed, and some exasperated moaning from zombies that found themselves afire. The stone part of the bridge was still standing firm, but the heavy timbers were starting to smoke and char even beneath. Anything that slowed Alsager was a bonus, Horst concluded, and kept creeping.

He was almost clear when he glanced back and noticed, in the gloom beneath one of the stone piles supporting the castle end of the bridge, a small flickering light. At first he thought it was a match, but there was a vivaciousness in the way it flickered and danced that suddenly tickled a happy memory back to life from the depths of his lost life.

All of a sudden he was a boy again, it was November the fifth, and he was in the back garden of their home. He had a sparkler in his hand and was waving it back and forth, taking pleasure in the afterimage it burnt into the air while his father marshalled the other invited children away from the bonfire and his mother nervously doled out treacle toffee to the guests, unsure if she had got the recipe
just so
. It was a peculiarly British celebration, this Guy Fawkes Night, and
die Familie
Cabal had adopted it with enthusiasm in an attempt to become more British. Horst loved it. Not just for the fire and the fireworks, the treacle toffee and baked potatoes, although he adored those, too, but for the odd sense of paganism about it. Guy Fawkes had died (horribly) back in the time of James I, and had died (horribly) in a multitude of effigies ever since, yet the ritual felt much, much older than the era of the Stuarts. It felt ancient, primal, atavistic, and there was toffee. Horst recalled the taste of it, the smell of the bonfire and the smell of gunpowder, the stony expression on his brother's face (‘It seems ridiculous to me that the British should celebrate a failure,' Johannes had said, thereby demonstrating a basic lack of understanding for their new home), and the white star of his sparkler as he waved it before him against the backdrop of an autumn night.

Somebody appeared to have attached a sparkler to the underside of the bridge, a rum sort of conceit. The misapprehension only lasted a moment before Horst was scuttling away along the wall like a startled spider. He had barely progressed fifty feet before the explosives planted beneath the bridge detonated.

Once again Horst found himself in the river, the blast wave having overwhelmed his grip on the greasy stonework. It took a few seconds to re-orientate himself, a few more to clear the ringing from his ears and the flash from his eyes, and by then the river's flow had taken him back beneath the bridge. Frustration as much as mild concussion kept him in the river; it seemed Fate had no desire for him to work his way upriver and he had grown exasperated with trying. Instead he allowed himself to slip back beneath the surface and be carried towards the heath from which the mortar shells rose. There he could simply crawl ashore up the shallow bank instead of having to contend with more filthy, slippery stone.

He burned a little more of his valuable reserves to remain submerged for the next five minutes, although as he wasn't exerting himself but was allowing the river to do all the exhausting ‘escaping' business, it was a small price and well worth it. Indeed, he had almost forgotten that there was a battle in progress when he washed up on the shallow sand and clay beach of the open common. He lay there for an interval, and then sighed. It was no good; all the shooting was too distracting.

Inwardly disappointed that he had once again to become more active in the whole procedure of fleeing, and seeing that this was as good a place to come ashore as any rather than be taken further downstream and perhaps be caught out by the rising sun, he gained his feet and ran for cover in a crouch. By the shade of a rowan bush, he emptied his shoes of water, wrestled for a few minutes with the sodden knot with which the laces were joined, inwardly decried the state of his clothes and the loss of his socks now bound seaward within the triumphant river, and finally wondered just how he might proceed hence.

There he lay, conscious of the slow turn of the world and the sun creeping gently around the eastern horizon to say, ‘Peep-bo! I incinerate you!' and no plans of action occurred to him.

A zombie walked by at one point and, on seeing him, paused. Horst told it to do something that would have involved a novel new take on necrophilia; the zombie took the hint and moved on, bearing with it an ineffable air of hurt that made Horst feel a little guilty. Presently it returned, an arm and half its skull missing. Hopelessly disorientated, it walked into the river, and was shortly borne away by the waters, demonstrating that merely being dead does not preclude having bad days.

Horst looked in the direction from which the unfortunate corpse had first come and saw it was a forerunner. Or forewalker. Or foreshambler. A force of perhaps forty more, obviously deployed before the destruction of the bridge, were heading roughly in his direction en route to engage the attackers, and he wondered if they would be as astute in telling living from undead as their scout had been. He decided that the night had been fraught enough without having to battle better than three dozen zombies in a case of mistaken mortality, and broke cover, heading off at an angle to try to reach the riverbank on the far side of the next meander about half a mile away. The ground was broken and cluttered with undergrowth so, given the nocturnal limitations of human senses and the perennial limitations of zombies in all senses, he calculated he would probably make it without interference.

His calculations were wrong. It transpired that even his enhanced sight could still be fooled by an artful piece of camouflage right up until he fell through it and found himself in a dugout shelter surrounded by very tense people with guns.

‘It's not a revenant!' a male voice cried to one side. ‘It's a man, not undead!'

Horst was just beginning to feel relieved when a gun barrel was applied with unseemly force to his temple. He was wondering if he had sufficient strength to be up and out before they could react, when the bearer of the gun said, ‘No. He's both.'

Horst managed a weak smile. ‘Oh. Hello, Alisha.'

‘Hello, my Lord Horst. Of the Dead.'

‘Oh, God,' said another man, younger than the first. ‘That's one of them?'

‘It is.' The pressure of the muzzle against his skull increased a little, and then it was gone. ‘He's the one who helped me escape.'

‘After you shot me,' said Horst. ‘Twice. Which I think was very patient of me.' He eyed the circle ranged around him, more than one gun still bearing on him. ‘May I get up, or will that get me shot again? I'd prefer not to be shot again. It's been a rough evening.'

Alisha gestured peremptorily with her pistol, a military .38 rather than the discreet semi-automatic she had punctured his lungs with earlier. ‘Get up.'

Horst clambered to his feet rather more slowly than he had to, but thought that seeming slow might be a good ruse. That said, in mid-clamber he began to realise that it was not such a charade after all; his reserves were perilously low. He recalled how he had spent the first years of his vampiric existence trapped and with only the footling life forces of insects, spiders, and the very occasional small rodent to survive upon. It had been a hellish time and his humanity had suffered. He had no desire to see what another enforced blood fast might do to him.

On his feet, he looked at the faces ranged around him, some grim, some frightened. In all of them he could hear the hearts beat. In all of them he could sense the blood pulse. In any of them he could take what he needed and kill or maim the others so they could not prevent him. ‘I need blood,' he muttered under his breath.

‘Yes, you're a vampire. I think we know that,' said a third man, a hard-faced creature with a military bearing. His pistol hand was down, but the arm was tensed to bring it to bear again quickly.

Not quickly enough
, thought Horst. He could see the man's Adam's apple over his collar and wondered how good it would feel to punch it hard enough to crumple the cartilage of his windpipe.
Step aside, step forward, punch the throat, break this circle, attack from without.

He gasped, surprised at the coherence of the idea, the vividity of it, the casual horror of it. He didn't like these thoughts. He didn't like that they were expressed in his own inner voice. Sometimes they were hard to tell apart from his own thoughts. Hard to tell apart, and becoming harder.

‘Is he all right?' It was the older man, the one who had spoken first after Horst's unexpected entrance through the ceiling. He was bespectacled, bearded, and could not have been more obviously an academic if his trench coat had borne elbow patches.

Further conversation was interrupted by a man appearing at the entrance to the dugout, dishevelled, bloody, and near hysterical with fear. ‘The mortars have been overrun!' he sobbed. ‘They're dead! They're all dead! We have to run!'

The hard-faced man swore under his breath. ‘It's a washout,' he said. ‘We're done here. Maybe done for good.'

‘We're running?' said the young man.

‘We're making a fighting retreat. It's that or a pointless death in this hellhole. Come on.'

He made to move towards where the messenger stood shaking, but had not even taken a step when the attack reached them. In a flicker of motion, something furry inside and out took down the messenger in a mass of limbs and screams. The Society members stopped and stared as they tried to assimilate what had just happened, but for Horst, the moment was already old and he was already responding. He did not consciously decide to burn the last dregs of Lady Misericorde's blood that remained to him; the situation had decided it for him, and he felt them flame inside his body as he accelerated hard past the startled mortals, angled his torso forward, and hit the lycanthrope hard in the ribs, producing a satisfying
cr-crack
nearby his ear as a couple of them snapped in his target's chest.