The Brothers Cabal (23 page)

‘This is nice,' said Horst on seeing them. ‘Is somebody going to read me a bedtime story?'

‘Mr Cabal,' said the major. ‘We need to know where you stand.'

‘
Mr
Cabal,' Horst echoed. He went to the locker, opened the lid, and started rearranging the dusty old blanket he had been given as an afterthought the night before. He would have preferred to have stripped before getting in to avoid creasing the clothes Miss Virginia had found (which is to say stolen, although she characterised it as ‘commandeering') among the belongings of the errant train crew. It seemed unlikely that they would have got far with a tide of zombies and frustrated werecreatures stalking the area after the train's escape, she had explained. Horst found her logic irrefutable, if ethically questionable. Still, as his clothes had been torn, soaked, muddied, burnt, and corroded to a state where it took a brave man to call them clothes at all, he had decided that practicality and modesty were of greater moment than the property rights of the two men, missing, presumed eaten.

‘“Mr Cabal” was my father. These days he's my younger brother, assuming he's still alive. I'm just Horst.' He looked at them, but they seemed in no great hurry to leave. It seemed likely that he was going to be wandering around in crumpled clothes the following night. ‘Where I stand is next to my box. It's not as nice as my old box, but you have to make do, don't you? The sun will be up soon, so if this is going to be an involved conversation, can it wait until the evening?'

‘What we would like to know, Horst,' said the professor, ‘is if we can count upon you as an ally in the coming war?'

‘War?' Horst slouched against the box. ‘Look, I know the
Ministerium
is made up of bad people, but do you really see a war happening here? As a country, this place is already dead. Did you see the locals get involved the other night? They just locked their doors and let it happen. Monsters running loose all over the place and nobody even tried to stop them. There'll be no war here.' He lofted a leg over the side of the box and started to climb in. ‘There's no elegant way of doing this,' he said with a slightly embarrassed smile.

None of the others seemed to care so very much about the deportment of vampires. ‘Mr Cabal,' said the major, ‘is that honestly what you think is all the
Ministerium
have in mind? A safe haven for poor, hapless monsters to escape the prejudices of humans?'

Horst was now inside the box, both hands on its edge as he faced them. He felt like a defendant in court. ‘Yes?' he said, a little uncertainly.

‘The country is in a state of collapse and anarchy,' said the professor. ‘It is useless in all respects to the needs of the
Ministerium Tenebrae
. All but one.'

‘They'll kill everyone, Horst,' said Alisha. ‘They'll make them into new monsters. Everybody.'

Horst could not reply. Dawn was so close now. He wanted to rest, to sleep. He did not want to reply.

‘So,' said the major. ‘Where do you stand?'

An Interlude

‘I note,' said Johannes Cabal, while making notes, ‘that there is a certain warmth in your tone when you refer to Fräulein Bartos.'

‘No, there isn't,' said Horst a little too abruptly.

‘There is. Even when you recounted how she shot you in the lungs, it was described in much the same mode one would expect if she'd sent you a poem of poor scansion and cloying sentimentality such as the ones that Greta Thorndike used to send you.'

Horst looked offended. ‘You read Greta's poems?'

‘You used to read them to yourself, sigh happily, and leave them littering the place like dandruff. Of course I read them. You obviously intended them to be read, so I indulged your ego by doing so.'

‘I'm sure I intended no such thing,' protested Horst, not at all sure he intended no such thing.

‘Execrable poetry aside—the one likening you to a robin redbreast and herself to a turtledove in particular still causes me to flinch involuntarily when it comes to mind, not least because of the biological unlikelihood of it all—that aside, you have a mooncalf air about you at such times. I see elements of it when Alisha Bartos is mentioned.'

‘Honestly, Johannes, you really say…'

‘Don't,' said Cabal peremptorily. ‘Simply don't.'

Horst rocked his head in indecision between moral outrage and gleeful agreement, and gave in to the inevitable at speed. He smiled. No. He grinned.

‘She is a bit wonderful,' he said.

‘She's a trained killer, practised dissimulator, and a sworn enemy of necromancers.'

‘I know, and she's really pretty, too!' He looked at Cabal with uncharacteristic nervousness. ‘I say, Johannes. You don't think … you know … a fellow like me, and a lady like that might somehow…'

‘A monster and a killer of monsters. Oh, yes, Horst. Romance is certainly on the cards.'

Horst's enthusiasm waned a little. ‘You think that might be a problem?'

‘Honestly? Yes, I think it might put a few brass tacks in your path.'

‘Oh,' said Horst. His shoulders sank. ‘Oh.'

Cabal looked at Horst and sighed. ‘Do you recall the offer I made you when I first liberated you from the crypt?'

‘The crypt you locked me in for eight years?'

‘The same,' said Cabal, unperturbed. ‘Eight years and thirty-seven days, as I recall. Do you remember the offer?'

‘That you'd try to cure me.'

‘It still stands.'

Horst crossed his arms. ‘Why should I believe you?'

‘Why shouldn't you? You did then…'

‘I wouldn't put it that strongly.'

‘… and you have far more reason to do so now. Horst…' He lowered his voice, ashamed. ‘I've done things since then. Things you don't know about.' The confession almost choked him, but somehow he forced the words out. ‘I've done
good
things.'

Horst feigned astonishment. ‘Good Lord.'

Cabal was distracted, lost in terrible memories of altruism. ‘Awful, selfless things. Sometimes I commit sensible, rational acts and I get a pain in my chest. And then
undoing
what I've done makes me feel better. Sometimes it even makes me feel good.

‘Horst, I think I may have a conscience.'

His brother bursting into laughter did not help Cabal's metaphysical suffering in the slightest.

 

Chapter 10

IN WHICH BIRDS FLY AND DEATH COMES TO TOWN

As dawn arrived and Horst slipped into a deep sleep from which only the next night would rouse him, the small community awoke to find Miss Virginia Montgomery's Flying Circus among them.

The locals were moderately excited by this development, and a great milling throng of perhaps eight people gathered at a respectful distance from the train and the row of gaudy entomopters that stood before it along the access road, gleaming and so out of place in the determinedly bucolic setting that they may as well have just set down after a long migration from Mars.

Miss Virginia herself approached the worthies and spoke to them of aerial thrills, adventures, excitement, and very good crop-dusting rates. This last raised most interest and, along with a few courier requests to carry reasonable loads for reasonable distances, represented the first part of the Circus's trade for the day. The afternoon would feature a display, providing the media blitz represented by a foolscap-sized poster placed within the covered town notice board a fortnight before proved sufficient to provide a viable audience. The town, for all its profound failure to whelm, was still the centre of a substantial farming area and should, according to Miss Virginia's calculations, provide enough financial reasons to linger for three days. She had been wrong before, though.

Deals were made between the exotic visitors and the locals. All seemed workable enough, but for one request to send a spiced ham to an émigré family in Chicago and another to transport a prize heifer sixty miles. After brief explanations of just exactly how far away Chicago was, and how unhappy a heifer would be strapped to the underside of an entomopter as it gamely hopped hedgerows and rivers for sixty miles because there was no way it could hope to fly with that much weight, business was concluded and jobs assigned. Three of the entomopters would be carrying packages distances of up to a hundred miles, while Miss Virginia's own
Spirit of '76
with its relatively capacious cargo capability would be sporting spray wings and flying the stars and stripes over several fields of cabbage threatened by caterpillars, leaving a vapour trail of DDT in its wake.

The major had seen plenty of entomopter flights in his time so, while Alisha and the professor watched the aircraft lift and depart on their sundry missions, he busied himself with encoding a detailed message and then standing over the telegraph operator at the station as it was sent. He rejoined his colleagues and said, ‘Well, it's out of our hands now.'

‘How many of the others do you think survived the assault?' asked Professor Stone.

‘I'm reasonably optimistic about that,' replied the major. ‘The enemy focussed their efforts upon us, and we were the smaller part of the force. I think the mortars may have antagonised them somewhat. In any case, I didn't see them attempt to attack any of our people in the square. It would have meant rousting out all the poor wretches in the shanties, and we were far more obvious. Unless the
Ministerium
and its minions performed some sort of follow-up action of which we are unaware, then our people should have had ample opportunity to fade into the night. We'll know within a few hours in any case. They should have fallen back to the rendezvous points and reported in to London as I've just done. When the committee sends their reply, we should have a better idea how things stand.'

‘Did you mention Horst Cabal to them?' asked Alisha, her indifference a little too studious to be convincing. The major looked at her oddly.

‘Of course I did. How could I fail to mention that the Lord of the Dead has come over to our side?'

‘What do you think they will say?'

‘That it's a bloody good thing, I would expect.'

‘You're sure of his sincerity?'

‘As sure as I can be. Look, Miss Bartos, there is always the chance that this is all some sort of devilishly clever plot to make us deliver the rest of our forces into a cunningly laid trap. I've racked my mind over it, though, and I can't see how such a plan could have been created in the time they had. Unless Mr Cabal is entirely committed to their cause and is busking his way towards betraying us, I cannot believe there is such a plan.'

‘What,' asked the professor, ‘if that is exactly what he is doing?'

‘Then we're doomed,' said the major. ‘Obviously.' He nodded to where they could make out the distant shape of Miss Virginia's Copperhead performing tight turns and swoops as it rained a fine mist of insecticide across cabbages and dismayed caterpillars. ‘She's good in that thing, isn't she? It looks about as manoeuvrable as a coal barge, but it's actually quite nippy.'

*   *   *

Midday brought the return of the couriers, Daisy with a story of having to fight off the advances of a station agent at her destination who apparently harboured a secret lust for cowgirls, inspired by cheap novels bearing ridiculously romanticised renderings of Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley upon their covers. ‘He kept saying, “I lof der cowgirls”. I was telling him that was all very flattering, but would he just sign for the damn package? Then he got grabby, so I drew on him.'

‘You
drew
on him?' asked the professor, imagining something involving pen and ink, and having difficulty seeing how this was an appropriate response.

‘Sure,' she said, laughing, and tapped a finger to the grip of her revolver where it showed in the shoulder holsters all the women wore, presumably because it was easier to reach the weapons there when in a cockpit.

‘Oh,' said the professor, both relieved by the explanation and embarrassed by his slowness.

‘I bet that quieted him down,' said Dea Boom of the explosive name that, disappointingly, only meant ‘tree' in Dutch.

‘You'd have thought so, wouldn't you? But, no. Having a cowgirl draw down on him was about the most exciting thing that had happened to him since his voice broke.'

‘So what happened then?'

‘He signed. Thanked me, signed, thanked me again, proposed, took it like a trouper when I said no, and waved when I went.'

‘He proposed?' interrupted the professor. ‘On a first meeting? He actually proposed marriage?'

Daisy grinned at him. ‘Marriage? Heck, no, Prof. He didn't propose
marriage
.'

And she and her colleagues left the professor in his slowly deepening scandalisation to go and ready their aircraft for the afternoon's show.