The Brothers Cabal (24 page)

*   *   *

A decent little crowd of perhaps fifty had gathered at two o'clock. The major, however, regarded them with an air of concerned disappointment. ‘This can't possibly be economically practical for Miss Montgomery and her girls,' he said, pronouncing it ‘ghels'.

‘It can't be cheap running an operation like this,' agreed Professor Stone. ‘How much do you expect to make from this?' he asked Becky, who was standing nearby with a collection box.

‘This? Drinking money and a few washers. The idea is we do a couple of small shows to get people talking and spread the word. Then we do the big one on market day and that should see us through until we reach the next place.'

Stone looked at the size of the crowd and asked, ‘This last big show; how many people would you anticipate turning up?'

‘More or less everyone in the area. There's not much entertainment around here, so people grab what they can while they can. I'd say'—she pulled an estimative face—‘perhaps two thousand or so.'

Haskins and Stone were visibly surprised. ‘That many?' asked the former.

‘It's true. Happens just about every time. They'll come in from all over, bringing their families. We'll have a good crowd.'

The crowd they had was therefore small, but appreciative. The ‘show' was informal to say the least, but no great buildup was necessary as the onlookers were already eager for diversion. Necks craned this way and that as they searched the cool blue sky for the entomopters, distantly audible but hidden from view.

Becky leaned closer to Haskins and Stone. ‘Hold on to your hats,' she said quietly.

Even as they were drawing breath to inquire why that might be necessary, their hats were blown off by the shockingly low passage of Mink's and Dea Boom's entomopters appearing from behind the train. They must have been approaching rapidly, close abeam, their craft almost brushing the grass beyond the line of carriages to have made such a stealthy approach, before opening their throttles and hopping over the roof of the carriage by which the professor, the major, and Becky were standing. This also brought them up behind the crowd, who, collectively bamboozled by the engine tones more easily audible ahead of them, had assumed that this would be the direction of approach.

Alisha arrived with a bag full of supplies she had just bought at the general store in time to see her colleagues chasing their headwear. She put down the bag by the fence alongside the access road and leaned against it to watch as Mink and Dea broke in opposite directions and into the area of open sky framed by their craft, two oncoming entomopters appeared, rising from behind a stand of trees. Miss Virginia Montgomery's
Spirit of '76
was plainly in the lead, its silhouette rounded and luxuriant, a lioness flanked by a jaguar. The crowd were still laughing in delighted surprise from the first approach when they realised that the two newcomers were also heading dead towards them. To their credit, they limited their nervousness at this development with some more nervous laughter and perhaps a surreptitious communal crouch that only knocked an inch or so from their individual heights, but served to make them feel a little bit safer.

They had nothing to fear, however. Miss Virginia shot over their heads with a clearance of a good ten feet, while Daisy broke right at the same moment, moving off to re-form with Dea while Mink fell in line astern to
Spirit of '76
.

Although Becky claimed that the display had been cobbled together only a few hours beforehand based on the lay of the land, it remained terrifically impressive. It was true that the ringmistress was there primarily to top and tail each sequence of barnstorming, powering through a scattering formation to punctuate rather than participate, but she was clearly no mean pilot if not nearly as impressive as those she led. They had the advantage of leaner, more agile aircraft, too, and while the Copperhead might not have been quite the flying version of a No. 24 to Pimlico that Becky had suggested, it could not hope to compete in anything but cargo capacity, and that attribute was not usually considered much of a crowd pleaser.

A small piece of genius that both Alisha and Haskins noted was the way by which the display hinted that the entomopters were capable of doing far more. They would bank so hard that it seemed likely that they would roll, but they did not. They would climb so steeply and dive so precipitously that there was always the hint that continued pressure on the yoke would finish in a loop, either upwards or in a bunted inverse finish. Yet they never quite followed through on these, but only stall turned, or pulled out. It was a tease; a great beckoning finger drawn across the sky to lure the punters on to the big show in two days' time, and to make them excited enough to talk about it. The flying display that afternoon did not last long—only perhaps fifteen minutes—but that was just long enough to whet appetites for more without overstaying their welcome.

‘Masterful,' murmured Professor Stone as the four aircraft performed a last flyby in line astern, the pilots waving to their small but highly appreciative audience as they passed before curling off towards the distance, then returning and performing simultaneous vertical landings in a neat line along the length of the field they had hired as their showground. Becky was already ahead of the crowd, collecting coins and washers while simultaneously keeping them a healthy distance from the blurred wings of the insectlike aircraft as the engines wound down, for it is a truth universally acknowledged that knocking an arm off a local will put a dampener on subsequent relations.

*   *   *

It had its effect, too. The next day (after a night in which Horst was told of the skills of Miss Virginia Montgomery's Flying Circus and spent the rest of his waking hours in a mild sulk because he would never see them at firsthand), the crowd was somewhat larger, numbering perhaps eighty, of whom the great majority of the previous day's audience constituted a part in addition to those excited enough by word of mouth to skip tasks and chores to spend a few minutes watching the flying wonderment of it all.

Nor were they disappointed, this show being different enough from the first display to excite the old hands along with the new. When they performed their flyby and synchronised landing this time, the applause was louder and there were fewer washers to be found in the collection box subsequently.

The major, professor, and Alisha were not on hand for it this time, however. They had been sitting around the telegraph office since shortly after noon, awaiting a reply from London. As the day wore on, however, they accepted one by one that it was unlikely that there would be a telegram arriving for them and returned to the train in various states of dudgeon.

The major was used to waiting (and waiting, and waiting for something to happen, for that is the lot of a soldier), and as long as he was ready when the call came, he was content. To this end, he had bought a set of silver teaspoons from one of the farmers he had met at the general store and, after the professor had assayed the metal as being of sufficient purity, had with a cold efficiency that would have saddened the heart of the farmer who had sold him the heirloom proceeded to cut the spoons into small pieces. These he melted in the small furnace in Becky's workshop and then poured into bullet moulds. He could not produce rounds of sufficient precision to be used in the semi-automatic weapons, nor did he have enough metal to make many, but at least it represented a full load for each of their revolvers, Alisha having found a snub-nosed .32 lying forgotten in a drawer of the Circus's office and thus liberated it for the good of mankind.

*   *   *

Of Horst, there is little enough to say at this juncture, except for one small oddity. Since his original death and re-birth as the result of a contretemps with a vampire (in which he prevailed) and his subsequent contamination with the curse by dint of eating bits of it,
*
Horst had lost the ability to dream. His sleep was as abrupt and featureless as general anaesthetic: a blink with a duration of hours. He had missed it at first, but as his year with the Cabal Bros. Carnival had wound on, his memories of dreaming had faded as phantasmagorically as do the memories of dreams. Now, very unexpectedly, they were back, and yet he could never quite remember them. All he could recall on waking was a faint sense of watching trouble unfold for someone else. He felt a grudging sympathy for the hapless protagonist of the dreams, not least because he was aware that he was not the only observer and this unseen other watcher's emotions were unreadable beyond a stark malevolence that flowed and ticked with machinations and methodicalities like a clockwork anthill.

This was almost the limit of his recollection, but for a new tendency to awaken with a blurted exclamation. On the dusk of their day of arrival, it had been ‘Cats!' On the evening after the first show it was ‘Crabs!' He had no clear idea why he said these things, only that there was a fading impression of lazy malignancy with the first awakening, and of a vicious stupidity with the second. It was a mystery, and not one that he felt comfortable discussing with anyone else.

On the evening after the second display, he awoke with the words ‘You little
bastard
!' on his lips, and this time he felt something familiar about the venom with which they were spoken, as if somebody was expressing their animosity through him, somebody he knew. His first thought was his brother, but he failed to see how Johannes could or would do such a thing. Cat, crabs, and little bastards were an unlikely triumvirate for casual conversation or urgent messages. Why would his brother go to all the trouble of creating some sort of psychic link if only to communicate such disparate trivialities? It was ridiculous, but he appreciated that did not make it impossible.

*   *   *

The day of the Great Flying Circus Aeroshow arrived. ‘Great' is a very relative term, but it would certainly be the first time any kind of real aeroshow had been held in the area, unless one counted that time five years ago when a trainee pilot flew into the windmill. That had been a very short sort of show, and memorable for only the worst of reasons. Thus, based on available metrics, Miss Virginia Montgomery's Flying Circus was set to put on the greatest aeroshow the area had ever seen.

It was a beautiful day for a disaster. The skies had remained cool blue throughout the circus's stay and today was no exception. A breeze strong enough to be refreshing without being strong enough to trouble the entomopters had appeared at dawn blowing in from the east, bringing with it high scudding clouds formed over a distant sea. It was a market day, so the breeze started blowing in farmers and their families almost as soon as the sun was up, and they had spent the morning discussing prices and selling between themselves and the traders who had hired freight cars in the trains that now occupied two of the remaining sidings next to the circus train. There was some grumbling that it had the siding by the access road, meaning some creative use of boards and cargo pallets was necessary to get goods to and from the newcomers, but the promise of an unusually large gathering for the show ameliorated such complaints. The possibility of extra custom is always a balm to the heart of even the most curmudgeonly of traders.

The show was set for two o'clock, the idea being that this would give people a chance to eat and, ideally, drink in the odd, thrown-together building that passed for a tavern in what passed for a town. A slightly drunk spectator was likely to be a slightly more generous one, and slightly drunk male spectators are more likely still to be generous when the collection boxes are wielded by presentable young women in close-fitting flight suits. This was part of the wisdom of Miss Virginia Montgomery's Flying Circus, and it had always proved true.

While Horst slumbered in a deathlike sleep that was less dreamless than he was used to, the three Dee Society members kept themselves out of the way of the aeroshow's preparation. A response had finally arrived to the major's report, a lengthy telegram that must have set the Society back a few pounds to transmit. The tavern no longer being the nest of quiet corners it had previously been for them, the three retired to the compartment aboard the train that doubled as a common room and waited impatiently as Major Haskins slowly teased the meaning from the enciphered phrases with frequent reference to the code book he carried, a small leather-bound volume printed on very flammable, very edible rice paper.

After some time during which the professor closed his eyes and waited in silent meditation while Alisha looked out of the window and fought down the urge to sigh, grunt, and possibly scream with frustration, the major laid down his pencil and took up the finished message in clear text.

‘Good news first,' he said. ‘Almost all of our people in the town escaped. We lost two who were acting as sniper and spotter from a rooftop close by the front of the square. I would think it's possible they simply missed the withdrawal signal, and may still be alive. Anyway, that's the state of affairs there.'

‘Is that all the good news?' asked the professor, his eyes still closed.

‘No. The Society has taken its findings and placed them before our sister organisations. There is to be a general mobilisation.'

‘You call that good news? We can handle this,' said Alisha. ‘We don't need anyone else coming in and…'

‘Yes, we do, Alisha,' chided the professor quietly. ‘We rather shot our bolt at the attack on the castle, and they sent us packing. This is more than the Society can deal with.'

‘We're putting ourselves in the debt of a bunch of lunatics.'

‘Hardly,' said the major. ‘There are no debts being called in here, no favours asked. The threat the
Ministerium Tenebrae
represents is too great for point scoring. “An unassociated organisation”, it says here, is joining the effort.'

The professor's eyes blinked open. ‘The Templars?'