The Brothers Cabal (21 page)

Then her brow cleared and she smiled very slightly. ‘I'm a spy.'

Ginny leaned back, her old round-backed office chair creaking. ‘Poor kind of spy who admits to it.'

Alisha shrugged slightly. ‘An ex-spy.'

‘Who for?'

‘Prussian Intelligence.' There was an amused snort from Mink at that, earning her a cold scowl from Alisha. ‘Which is
not
a contradiction in terms.'

Ginny shook her head slightly and looked at their faces one by one. ‘So. We have us a soldier, an academic, and an
ex
-spy.' Amid more creaking she leaned forward and rested an elbow on her desk and her chin in her palm as she looked at Horst standing there in the wreck of his outfit. ‘I can barely wait to hear what you are.'

‘Oh, I'm a vampire,' said Horst. ‘Speaking of which, do you think we might rattle on a bit more quickly with this? The sun will be up soon, and we don't really get on very well.'

 

Chapter 9

IN WHICH ACQUAINTANCES ARE MADE AND MEASURES TAKEN

Horst slept that day in an arms locker, which was a novel experience. As they were currently in dangerous country dense with bandits, outlaws, and—as it turned out—zombies, shapechangers, and sundry forces of darkness, the weapons were not to be found in there at the moment. This left them with a welded steel safe box, perhaps a yard square, guarding some cleaning kits, empty packages, and the petty cash. These were spirited out, and Horst invited somewhat tersely to take up residence. He was disappointed but not surprised to hear the box's heavy padlock put into place and clicked shut once he was uncomfortably curled up within. Another confined space, another padlock; how history repeated itself.

Although he could not see it, he was aware of the sun rising outside and of its purifying rays driving away all evil from the hemisphere, with the exception of bankers. A few minutes later, a great weariness settled upon him and he fell rapidly into torpor. There was little air within the box, but that didn't matter; he wouldn't be using any of it.

*   *   *

Some events occurred during the day, as events are wont to do, but Horst was unaware of these and all else.

The sun moved on. It was a pleasant enough sort of day for those who were not in deadly danger, but the passengers of the train regarded the slow arc of the sun as a slowly creeping indicator of growing menace. The night would shoo away the bankers, but all other evils would be unleashed.

*   *   *

Horst awoke in the reverse of how he slept. As the sun slipped beneath the unseen western horizon, animation returned to him, and he stirred in an unnatural sleep. Through the long minutes of dusk, he slept as he had once slept when his blood was warmer and his hours diurnal until as the last glimmer passed from the sky, his eyes opened.

He was still in a box, and the blasted thing was still locked.

After some minutes of gentle pounding on the box's side with the occasional polite cry of, ‘Hello! Excuse me, hello?' he heard approaching footsteps. The lock rattled in its hasp, and the lid was flung up. He uncurled himself, cramp fortunately being a mortal failing, and raised his head slowly to look out.

One of the circus women, presumably whoever had just released him, was returning to a firing line centred around Ginny. They looked at him from above gun barrels and their intent to shoot him if necessary was perfectly evident. Horst found something to lament in that this wasn't even the worst wake-up call he'd ever experienced.

‘Good evening, ladies,' he said quietly, so as not to provoke. The carriage was swaying slightly; he wondered how long they had been under way. ‘Two things worth considering. Firstly, you could have destroyed me easily during the day. But you didn't. Many thanks for that. Secondly, you must appreciate that your guns are next to useless against me. I could probably pop out of here and…'

Hunger
, said the nagging little voice that wasn't him yet spoke with his voice.
Kill them and feed
.

‘Pop out of here and…'
Kill.
‘… defeat you.' Knuckles whitened as trigger fingers grew taut. ‘But … I'm not going to do that.' They continued to stare at him
from behind their ridiculous, useless weapons
. ‘Because'—he smiled, fighting the urge to let his fangs extend—‘I want us to be friends.'

‘He's right,' said Alisha. Horst hadn't consciously noticed her; she'd been standing alongside the box the whole time. ‘The guns are a waste of time. Believe me, I know.'

Horst nodded, hands on the edge of the box, head barely exposed. ‘She shot me.'

‘I shot him,' Alisha confirmed. ‘Twice. I knew they wouldn't kill him. I just needed to slow him down a little.'

‘Unnecessarily.'

‘I didn't know that at the time,' she said, with the tiniest hint of apology in her voice.

Ginny sighed and returned her revolver to its hip holster. ‘Put 'em away, girls,' she ordered. Hammers were thumbed down, safety catches engaged, barrels lowered, holsters filled. Ginny was obeyed without question, perhaps, but with evident reluctance. Even given the ineffectuality of firearms against a vampire, there would still have been some satisfaction in punching a few holes in him if things had become physically unfriendly. Ginny Montgomery sat on a crate and regarded both Horst and Alisha with the same air of mild hostility. ‘Waifs and strays I can deal with, but this is a new one on me. Monsters and monster hunters, and one of the hunters is a monster himself. This is just great,' she said, although whether she really thought it was great was disputable.

‘Life's strange, isn't it?' said Horst. He had decided that to take offence at the term ‘monster' would be undiplomatic. In any case, it was true. ‘May I get out of the box, please? I feel like half of a ventriloquist act in here.' Nobody said he couldn't (although nobody said he could). As he climbed out, he asked, ‘So, anything interesting happen while I was sleeping?'

‘Miss Montgomery here,' said Alisha, nodding at Ginny, ‘has agreed to take us to the next town. Then we're on our own again.'

‘
Town
is putting it strongly,' said Mink. When Alisha looked questioningly at her, she expanded with, ‘It's a farming centre. Calls itself a town, but really it's just a place for the farmers to come in to buy supplies. Maybe a couple of hundred people there.'

This was not the sort of news Alisha was hoping for. ‘There'll be a telegraph office, though? Other trains coming through?'

Mink shrugged.

Alisha raised her hands in frustration, her tension apparent. ‘You've seen what's going on around here,' she remonstrated. ‘They know their security's compromised, they're moving ahead more rapidly already. Unless we stop them, this whole region will become a living nightmare.' She examined her words and shook her head with a slight disbelieving smile. ‘That's not even a fanciful way of describing it. That is exactly what it will be like.'

‘Tell it to the Marines,' said Miss Virginia ‘Ginny' Montgomery wearily. Nobody seemed to have had much sleep. ‘It's not like we're kicking you off the train at Hicksberg or whatever it's called when we get there. We're doing three days of shows there, maybe some agricultural work if we can find it.'

Agricultural work?
mouthed Horst, but nobody minded him.

‘It's our job. We don't fight bogey men 'less somebody brings 'em to our door,' Miss Montgomery said pointedly. ‘There are authorities, aren't there? Tell them. It's their country after all. Their country, their problem.'

Alisha took a step forward, her anger growing. ‘The authorities? For this place? Don't you understand? They're in the
Ministerium
's pocket. We'd have to go to the neighbouring states. By the time we've convinced them of the threat…'

‘If you ever do,' said Horst quietly.

Alisha shot him a glance. ‘We can be very persuasive. We have connections you know nothing about. You think private citizens can just lay hands on field mortars and shells if they get a sudden urge to siege a castle? Do you?' She turned her attention back to Miss Montgomery. ‘By the time we can convince them and they mobilise, it will be far, far too late.'

‘What were you planning on doing by yourself, then? There's the four of you.' Miss Montgomery rose from her crate and walked over to where Alisha stood, almost palpably fuming with angry frustration. ‘Look, darlin', I have no idea if this is all you say it is. I'll be honest with you—this whole place is in such a state of disarray that I don't know if the citizens will even notice if they're being ruled by vampires and goblins and the Lord only knows what. The bottom line of the account reads that there's not a thing you can do by yourself. No matter what, your best chance is to persuade the neighbours to get involved. Yes, yes, I heard you. That'll be too late to nip this thing in the bud. Maybe so, but it's the only game in town. The place we're going to, we organised where we're going to be putting on the show by wire, so you can rest assured they've got a telegraph office there. Get your message out. That's all you can do, so you better get comfortable with the idea.'

*   *   *

Alisha could
not
get comfortable with this, but she relayed the intelligence to Major Haskins and Professor Stone and, after a very short discussion—because really, what alternative was there?—they committed to do what little they could. ‘There comes a point where you can charge around all you like, but there's nothing to be done about it. It's the nature of war,' said the major, shrewd though disconsolate. ‘We shall call it in and wait.'

Alisha paced around. She had called herself a ‘spy', but this had only been marginally true. She had been mainly involved as an agent of sabotage and assassination during her eventful time with Prussian military intelligence, but she wasn't about to communicate that willy-nilly. The whole ‘blowing things up and doing people in' milieu would only upset people. Thus, patience in the face of the enemy was not one of her fortes. She would much rather have been off putting silver rifle rounds through lycanthropic heads and putting enough gelignite in the cellars of the Red Queen's castle to put the whole sorry bunch of them beyond the orbit of the moon. You knew where you were with gelignite; ideally, running away from it while the fuse burned down. All this not-blowing-things-up-or-shooting-people palaver, however, was wearing thin for her. ‘And what if we're needed?'

‘They also serve,' said the professor, ‘who only stand and wait. I'm afraid the major is right, Alisha. We can do more good relaying what we know and awaiting the call to action that will surely follow.'

*   *   *

The train reached its destination in the early hours. Everybody but Becky on the footplate and Horst, who went to assist her, were sleeping as they approached an unassuming little conglomeration of clapboard buildings in the middle of a broad river valley, situated by a broad and shallow river that ran over a rocky bed. There were no curious onlookers, and the only greeting they received was from an official at the wooden box of a station, who wandered out in his nightshirt, made a note of the locomotive's number, was singularly uninterested to see that one of the crew was a woman, and told them to put the train ‘over there' while indicating a field into which ran five sidings, all overgrown. It was clear that the settlement must have seen a lot of rail traffic at some time to make such a facility necessary, and now it was equally clear that those days were long since gone.

His duty discharged, the stationmaster turned his back on them and shuffled back across rough boards in slippered feet to return to his rest. The impression received was that he got a lot of that.

The train's stopping and starting, and its slow entry onto one of the sidings accompanied by the unavoidable clanks and bangs of a train manoeuvring without benefit of somebody in the guard's van helping with the brakes awoke some aboard, and they woke the others. By the time the train was fully off the through line and the points closed behind it, Miss Montgomery and the rest of her party were up, dressed, and ready to work.

Horst, who had previously travelled up and down the train by corridor where possible and across rooves where it was not, was still vague about the nature of Miss Montgomery's circus, beyond the fact that there was sufficient machinery involved for them to include a dedicated mechanic among their number and a small workshop in the guard's van. Nor had the subject really had a chance to come up in conversation, what with all the chat about Forces of Darkness and the End of Civilisation having taken up so much time.

Now he had the luxury of jumping down from the locomotive and walking back to take in the hoardings mounted on the sides of the two mysterious freight carriages.