The Brothers Cabal (36 page)

‘We don't,' said the professor ruefully. ‘We know very little about her.'

‘She's a bandit queen,' said Alisha. ‘From the north, up in Katamenia. The story is that she led her forces straight through Senzan territory to reach Mirkarvia. The Senzans tried to stop her, but when they realised she was only interested in their territory for as long as it took her to lead her brigands through it and then into Mirkarvia, they stepped back and let them pass unchallenged.'

‘Brigands,' said Cabal. ‘How very picturesque. A bandit queen. I can envisage their campfire dances now. There are a lot of tambourines involved.' He looked around the council of war, such as it was. ‘And what happened when this romantic creature reached Mirkarvia?'

‘The government was on the edge of collapse anyway,' said Atropos Straka. ‘The arrival of the barbarians caused its final dissolution. The Red Queen took over.'

‘And nobody knows her real name?'

There was silence.

Cabal snorted contentiously. ‘I am saddened. I truly am. All my professional career, I have been dogged by assorted societies, conspiracies, and interested parties such as yourselves. I feared for my life, and my work, and I took measures to protect both.' He looked at those there assembled. ‘What a colossal waste of effort. You people are dolts.'

There was a general feeling of deepening threat from his audience, for which Cabal did not give a fig, nor even half a fig. ‘All your vaunted investigative abilities, your sources, and your techniques, and you cannot find out that trifling fact?'

‘She 'as covered 'er identity well,' said Palomer, shrugging. He seemed very magnanimous about his own defeat, which was very decent of him. ‘My people could find no trace of 'er previous life in Katamenia.'

‘Well, of course they couldn't,' said Cabal wearily. ‘She isn't Katamenian. She's plainly Mirkarvian. She's highborn, which is why the establishment accepted her rule so easily, and she knows enough about the corridors of power here that she was able to immediately target and dispose of anyone who might cause any trouble.'

‘That's quite a series of deductions, Mr Cabal,' said the professor. Cabal could see the cogs of his intellect were whirring and it pleased him to see at least one other person present was thinking. ‘Unless, of course, they aren't deductions.'

Cabal smiled coldly at him. ‘And what else could they possibly be?'

‘They could be foreknowledge, just like your foreknowledge of Harslaus Castle.'

Cabal rose. ‘
Just
like my foreknowledge of Harslaus Castle.' He looked around the assembly. ‘Your “Red Queen” is, with a high degree of probability, Lady Orfilia Ninuka, daughter of the late Count Marechal, arch-manipulator and professional bastard. That description applies to both father and daughter, by the way. I thought
she
was dead, too. Obviously killing Rufus Maleficarus isn't going to be enough, after all. I shall also have to kill Ninuka.' He sighed heavily. ‘Chores just multiply, don't they? Well, I shall need my rest. Good night.'

So saying, Cabal turned his back on several semi-professional killers who loathed him, and went off to find a bed.

 

Chapter 15

IN WHICH THE RED QUEEN MAKES HER MOVE

Horst followed Cabal out. ‘You never cease to astonish me, Johannes.' It was not clear from his tone whether this was a good or bad thing.

‘How so, on this particular occasion?' said Cabal without turning.

‘You just arrive and know everything. How do you
do
that?'

‘I've had dealings in Mirkarvia before, as I think I mentioned earlier. Also Senza, and very briefly in Katamenia.'

‘Who is this Orfilia Ninuka, anyway?'

‘My description to the august gathering back there was essentially correct. Lady Ninuka is a spoilt brat, a sensualist, and utterly divorced from any moral scruples.' He suddenly halted. ‘You're giving me a look, aren't you? I can almost feel the raised eyebrow.' He turned and found Horst was, indeed, standing there with arms crossed and eyebrow raised. ‘Staggering as it may seem, Horst, I am not as single-minded—'

‘Bloody-minded…'

‘—as I was. On occasion I have been known to not do something despite it being logical, or done something despite it being somewhat irrational.'

‘That is the most grudging description of a conscience I have ever heard.' Horst unfolded his arms and instead leaned against the corridor wall. ‘So she's a spoilt brat. How did she get from having tantrums over dresses to bankrolling a supernatural empire of evil?'

Cabal looked out of the window into the darkness as he considered his answer. ‘I can't say for a certainty, but I think she always had the capacity for such things, just not the opportunity. She understands how people think, and uses that to manipulate them, and I suspect she has always had great ambition. When the lines of succession were in place, I expect she had a plan to get herself the last few steps up the ladder into the topmost echelon, perhaps even the emperor's wife or mistress. Now all that structure has gone, she has used the chaos to her advantage. I would not be surprised if she envisions herself as Empress Orfilia the First. As far as I can make out, she already is the
de facto
ruler of Mirkarvia. “The Red Queen”. I wonder how much blood was spilt to give her that name?'

‘You might be wrong,' said Horst. ‘You can't know for sure that it is Lady Ninuka.'

‘I could be wrong,' admitted Cabal. ‘It pains me to confess to fallibility, but Lady Ninuka may not be the Red Queen.' He rubbed the bridge of his nose, deep in thought. ‘But it
is
her. I am sure of it.'

‘Necromancer's intuition?'

‘Would that there were such a thing. No, the ambition and the melodrama on show convince me. That, and the impatience of it. She does not merely wish to rule, she wishes to rule while she is yet still young. Risks have been taken in this enterprise that may have been avoided with a little more time. You were chosen too easily, Horst. Marechal once told me that Mirkarvia used to have a population of vampire—“
nosferatu
”, he called them. Why go to the trouble of raising a vampire in England when they had their own home-grown examples?' The rhetorical question seemed to trouble him. ‘Why indeed?' He shook his head. ‘Insufficient data with which to postulate.'

Horst smiled indulgently. ‘I'm glad you've got your soul back, and I'm very glad it seems to have come with a conscience but—really, Johannes—you're still a bit thick, aren't you?'

Cabal regarded him icily. ‘Define “thick”,' he said slowly.

‘Do I have to? Look, work it out yourself. What was your relationship with this woman?'

‘Relationship? There was none. We merely travelled on the same aeroship for a few days.'

‘Oh, and there was no interaction between you at all?'

Cabal shrugged. ‘Well, yes, but nothing extraordinary. Let me see. There was a murder, I investigated, she tried to seduce me, there was all sorts of unpleasantness, and then I thought she died.' There was no reply. Cabal looked at his brother to discover him thunderstruck. ‘Did I say something?' asked Cabal.

‘You said quite a lot. Attempted to seduce you?'

Cabal wrinkled his nose. ‘Apparently. I didn't notice at the time. That must have been galling for her.'

‘I can imagine. No. No, I can't. Why did she…? No, it doesn't matter. So, you didn't part the best of friends?'

‘No,' admitted Cabal. ‘I think she holds me responsible for the death of her father.'

‘The death of her…? I am getting such a sense of
déjà vu
. May I ask why she thinks you're responsible?'

‘I shot him.'

Horst took a moment to consider this. ‘And … he died from his injuries?'

‘I would hope so. I shot him in the head. He was shooting at me at the time, too, so don't imagine it was entirely cold-blooded.'

‘Does Lady Ninuka know that?'

‘Oh, yes. She was there at the time. It was all very aboveboard. Clear case of self-defence.'

‘Johannes … please, I'm trying to get this straight. You shot her father dead … in front of her?'

‘Yes.'

Horst slumped. ‘My God.'

Cabal's brow furrowed, as if mentally working through a particularly ferocious piece of spherical geometry. ‘Hold on. Are you suggesting that she might still be upset about that?' First Maleficarus and now Ninuka. It seemed disposing of people's fathers was more fraught with complications than he'd given it credit for.

‘I'm bait,' said Horst weakly. ‘I can't believe it. I'm bait.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘All of this, all the trouble to seek out whatever was left of me, raising me, bringing me here. All this time, I've just been a puppet.' Horst looked Cabal in the face, and Cabal was surprised to see the depth of horrified realisation he found there. ‘It was always about you, Johannes. She wanted you here.' He shook his head as if trying to disperse the growing anguish. ‘The drawbridge. She destroyed it herself to stop them sending too many monsters after us. She helped us escape. She knew I'd think of bringing you here sooner or later. All of this was to do that. All because she wanted you here.'

Cabal frowned. ‘She's not going to try to seduce me again, is she?'

‘Oh, Johannes,' said Horst in a thin, weak voice that barely admitted any hope, and turned and left him there, astonished and uncomprehending.

*   *   *

To his credit, Johannes Cabal went looking for his brother. No one reported seeing him, however. Cabal gave up quickly; he knew that if his brother didn't want to be found, then he would
not
be found. Instead he located a camp bed in the corner of one of the train's nooks, knocked the previous occupant's belongings onto the floor, and lay down. He didn't much care what they might think when they came back to find him there; everybody hated him anyway, so it made few odds.

He kicked his shoes off, arranged himself upon the khaki-coloured canvas, looked at the discoloured ceiling, and decided to think himself to sleep.

So, Mirkarvia. A small country with a brief flicker of glorious empire a long time ago, and a subsequent history of trying to recapture that moment. It hadn't even been a very good empire; blundered into opportunely and squandered by a ruling class that couldn't believe its luck. Even most of the neighbouring regions that had been conquered for what was history's equivalent of five minutes on a Sunday afternoon were faintly bemused when they happened to stumble across it in the textbooks. ‘We were vassals of Mirkarvia?' they said, very slightly surprised. ‘Really? Fancy.' And then they would forget about it again, usually not even being able to dredge the information up if challenged for it in a pub quiz.

Subsequent attempts to re-establish the empire had varied in execution from the brutal to the hilarious, but all had failed because it takes more to become an empire than just national pride. They require a multitude of factors to be in accord, military, societal, and economic, and simply wishing for the essence of empire-building to fall upon them didn't make it so. Mirkarvia was a chocolate soldier, a social maelstrom, and a busted flush.

The populace had seemingly understood this before their splendidly oblivious leadership, an ants' nest of petty nobles so busily playing politics that it had become an end unto itself. In truth, Cabal had not deliberately fomented a riot that became a revolt that became the death of the old order and the foundations of the rule of the Red Queen. It had been an accident. He had simply wished to create a little diversion to give himself an opportunity to escape. That the Mirkarvian public had grabbed this weak straw and brought about the current state of affairs was surprising to him. That the incipient madness of Mirkarvian politics had allowed some lunatic at the head of a band of Katamenian bandits—a breed of whom even other bandits spoke disparagingly—to take control with so little resistance did not surprise Cabal at all. A shock force of a couple of hundred such cutthroats would be enough to take the capital city of Krenz, and the Red Queen's noble blood and inside knowledge would be enough to hold it.

This all assumed the Red Queen was Lady Ninuka, of course. But,
of course
the Red Queen was Lady Ninuka. There was nobody else who fitted the bill quite so well. He had no idea how she had survived their last encounter, but he had experience of such human cockroaches before. Their resilience was as breathtaking as it was irritating. Indeed, Rufus Maleficarus was of similar ilk; actual cockroaches would probably be in quiet awe of his uncanny ability to not be dead despite being very thoroughly squashed.

Cabal frowned. He was prepared to believe that the Red Queen was in reality Lady Ninuka purely on supposition. Maleficarus, however … could it really be him? He hadn't seen Ninuka die, and hadn't cared much one way or the other if she did in fact die. Rufus Maleficarus, by contrast, had been murdered by Cabal's very own hand. There had been no possibility that he had survived. His body had not tumbled into a foaming sea or into a clouded abyss from which he might later make an unexpected return through the good offices of kindly dolphins or giant eagles. Cabal had himself checked that all life was extinguished by searching for a pulse, looking for clouding on a mirror held to the corpse's mouth, and by kicking repeatedly. This latter was not scientific, but had served to alleviate Cabal's own tension and bile admirably. He had not liked or been impressed by Maleficarus in the slightest; if he counted as Cabal's arch-enemy, then clearly Cabal needed to do much better. One is often judged by the quality of one's enemies, and Maleficarus would not have made a strong enough nemesis for a crime-solving chimpanzee, never mind a necromancer of ambition.