The Brothers Cabal (46 page)

‘I shall be revenged upon you, Johannes Cabal…' hissed a voice from the bloodstained bundle.

‘Oh, be quiet,' said Cabal with a peremptory wave of his hand.

‘Is that … his head?' asked Horst.

‘Indeed, now a vessel for the motivating spirit of the Ereshkigal Working. I shall have to find a box for it.'

Horst thought of the deep shelf beside the fireplace in Cabal's sitting room. Upon it were already two boxes, one containing the coldly burning skull of the hermit Ercusides and the other … well, he wasn't sure, but it whistled and sang nicely, and occasionally spoke, and the box was head-sized, so he presumed it contained another living head of some description.

‘Are you
deliberately
collecting animated heads, Johannes?' he asked.

Cabal frowned, then accepted the point. ‘Not deliberately. It just happens.' He frowned again. ‘I was talking about something else, I think, before this business about heads. Ah, yes. Alsager, the
Ministerium
, Maleficarus—all dealt with.'

‘Lady Misericorde,' said Horst. ‘Where is she? She was here at the beginning of the fight.'

‘You let her escape?'

Horst glared. ‘I was busy being speared by three shapechanging monsters. I'm so sorry for the lapse.'

Cabal wrinkled his nose. ‘She's not a hugely impressive necromancer in any case. I would just like to meet her.'

‘That sounds very calm and professional of you.'

‘I'm a very calm and professional person. I want to meet her and kill her, calmly and professionally.' He noted Horst's expression, which was much the same as it had been at the beginning of the sentence. ‘You don't shock quite so easily anymore. I do hope you're not becoming jaded by all of this.'

‘I'm not. I won't let you kill her.'

‘Ah, it was fortitude and not acceptance. Well, we shall see. We have to find her before deciding what shall become of her. I would guess she would hie herself off to her chambers when she realised the jig was likely up, gather her materials, and thence into the cloak of night.'

‘You would guess? You mean, it's what you would do.'

Cabal shrugged, and Horst—pausing to place Alisha onto a
chaise longue
and covering her with a tapestry—led the way to Misericorde's rooms.

They were empty, which surprised them not at all, and Horst knew the way to them without hesitation, which surprised Johannes Cabal not at all.

‘She's gone,' said Horst, listlessly walking the room, flicking open books that lay on the desk and side tables as if she might be hiding within them. Cabal followed him, spending a little more time studying the books. As he walked, his brow furrowed and the furrows grew more profuse and deeper with every perusal.

‘These books … they're odd.'

Horst paused to take up a volume. ‘
Hell's Antechamber: A Studie of the Works of Divers Nekromancie
. They're from a necromancer's library. Of course they're odd. Just because she's a woman doesn't mean she'd surround herself with light historical romances, Johannes.'

‘No, no, no,' said Cabal. ‘You don't understand. These books
are
light historical romances as far as a necromancer is concerned. They are about necromancers, but
not
necromancy. Nor are they accurate. Populist claptrap, by and large. If we want to hear lies and calumnies about us, we just wander into any tavern. We don't go out and buy books about it.'

Horst looked at the book in his hand, flicking through the pages. He started to develop his own frown as he read headings and the occasional sentence. ‘This one
is
a bit sensationalist, now you mention it.' He dropped it on the chair where he'd found it. ‘Maybe she finds them funny?'

‘Perhaps one or two, but there must be twenty different titles here.' He looked at Horst. ‘You say she has a laboratory?'

‘In one of the lower levels. Not sure where; I never visited it.' He looked around the room. ‘Oh.'

‘Oh?'

‘I hadn't noticed before. This chamber is a mirror image of the one they gave me. Over in the other wing.' He looked around, smiling slightly at the realisation. ‘So odd how mirroring something can make it look so different.' He stopped and pointed at a wall. ‘Except my room has an alcove there.'

They both looked at the panelled section of wall. ‘Old building like this,' said Cabal. ‘Different sections are bound to be renovated in different ways.'

‘Hmmm,' said Horst.

Both of them continued to look at the wall.

‘Although,' offered Horst, ‘they are very fond of bare walls and tapestries in this place, I've noticed. No panelling at all.'

‘Except here.'

‘Except here.'

They walked quickly to the innocuous section of panelling and started searching. Perhaps surprisingly it was Horst, raised on a diet of thrilling adventure stories, rather than Cabal with his own slightly more practical experience of hidden mechanisms, that found the secret door. With a discreet
click
, the lock disengaged, and a section of wall one panel wide and two high swung inwards.

‘Isn't this exciting?' said Horst, looking into the shadows beyond.

‘Get on with it,' said Cabal, his gun already in his hand.

With Horst leading the way, his superior senses guiding him, they descended into the darkness. Cabal quickly lost sight of Horst and was obliged to lay a hand upon his brother's shoulder. Horst, for his part, whispered warnings about uneven steps and debris from the ancient walls. Down, down they crept in cool blackness to the point where Cabal grew bored, whereupon he tried to descend a step that wasn't there, and performed an awkward curtsey at what turned out to be their destination.

‘I can't hear anything,' whispered Horst, then explained, ‘There's a door here and I'm listening at it. Forgot you couldn't see. Sorry.'

Cabal pursed his lips with contained irritation. It was so dark that it made no difference if he had his eyes open or shut, although his eyeballs felt a little warmer with them shut. ‘Is there a handle?'

‘No, but there's a lever. Just a moment.'

With barely a sound, the door swung open. Cabal was momentarily blinded by the light that came forth, but quickly recovered for it was really quite subdued. Horst entered first, Cabal close on his heels.

‘Well, this is all a bit
Phantom of the Opera
, isn't it?' said Horst.

He was not wrong in this assessment. The chamber into which they had entered was enough to send Poe skipping around, happily clapping. They were certainly below ground level, and the walls ran cold and veined with nitre. All about them, candles flickered in candelabras and torches bloomed orange flame in sconces. Ranged around the chamber, or possibly repurposed crypt, were freestanding bookshelves, tables, cupboards full of neatly labelled chemicals and insalubrious materials in jars and bottles. The focus of the room was upon, of all things, a dressing table, on which stood a very feminine admixture of make-up and papers, books and assorted tweezers of cosmetic purpose beyond the ken of mere men. While Cabal examined the books on the shelves, Horst stirred around amidst the items upon the dressing table, trying not to look in the mirror, for the state of his clothes perturbed him sadly.

‘Oh,' he said suddenly.

Cabal turned and paused. Horst looked up to discover why his brother was taking so long to attend him and noticed his attitude. He followed Cabal's eyeline past his shoulder and saw, tucked into a small alcove across the way, another door similar to the one by which they had entered. ‘Where do you suppose that goes?' he asked.

‘I don't know,' said Cabal. ‘I can only guess that it leads beyond the outer walls. Convenient escape routes are a necessity in the profession.' The nature of that guess was not immediately revealed, for instead he came to join Horst at the dressing table. ‘What is it?'

Horst handed him a small tinted photograph in a frame that he had discovered. ‘There she is,' he said.

‘Indeed she is.' It was a while since Johannes Cabal had met the Lady Orfilia Ninuka, but he never forgot a face, especially when it belonged to somebody who meant him harm. Her little empire of the Red Queen might have taken a knock that night, but he would find her and attend to her and she would cease to be a concern. Heaven only knew where she was hiding, however. Their best chance was to find Misericorde and discover whatever she knew.

‘Who's that with her?' asked Horst.

The picture had been taken in happier times for Lady Ninuka, which is to say, the days before she met Johannes Cabal. She stood, smiling archly beside an older man in military uniform. He wasn't smiling at all; indeed, he regarded the camera as if it was a piece of damn effrontery on its part to dare focus light onto emulsion that had once bounced from his countenance.

‘Her father,' said Cabal slowly. Something about the exchange of information was bothering him. Hadn't he already told Horst about Count Marechal? He looked up from the picture at Horst. The recent business with doppelgängers suddenly made him wonder if Horst had been triumphant after all.

Horst frowned with exactly the tone of ‘My puzzlement is great' that Cabal had known all his early life, and it did a lot to reassure him. It was true that shape-eaters absorbed much of their prey, but whether that included every foible and mannerism, he didn't know. Still, it seemed unlikely that a wily doppelgänger would deign to look quite so clueless.

‘Is that a guess?' said Horst. ‘You can't
know
it's her father. You said you'd never heard of her.'

Suddenly Cabal understood. He looked at the picture of the smiling Lady Ninuka and her very deceased father and felt cold. ‘Horst. Tell me, who is in this picture?'

Horst looked baffled again and slightly suspicious. ‘That's Misericorde,' he said. ‘Lady Misericorde. The necromancer woman. Good grief, Johannes I've told you about her enough times.'

Cabal blanched, although a pale man growing paler in a dark room is a barely perceptible phenomenon.

Horst, however, saw. ‘What's wrong, Johannes? You look awful.'

Cabal's mind was racing, trying to put pieces together and failing. ‘She's played me for a fool,' he said, then shook his head. ‘No. She's played
us
for fools, you and me, Horst. This is Orfilia Ninuka. The Red Queen. She's manipulated us. And … the
Ministerium
. They would never have agreed otherwise. They would never…' He looked around, a maniacal gleam in his eye. ‘Why? What does she want?'

Horst had taken the picture from Cabal and was studying it. His air of bafflement was in no way lifting. ‘The woman whose father you killed? Misericorde was the Red Queen all along…? Well, revenge, I would have thought.'

‘Revenge?' Cabal turned on him with a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Revenge? All this for revenge? Horst, wouldn't it have been cheaper and more direct to just hire some competent assassins and send them after me rather than, say, suborning your own country and declaring it an open house for all available monsters? Seeking the aid of a powerful secret society specifically for the purpose of having its senior members eaten? Calling down the wrath of a handful of assorted other secret societies who just don't agree with such tomfoolery?'

Horst thought about it. ‘You may have a point,' he conceded finally.

Cabal was hardly listening. He was rifling the shelves in something like a bibliographical fury. ‘I will
not
be manipulated,' he muttered under his breath.

Horst forbore to point out that, in fact, he
had
been manipulated, and instead asked, ‘What are you looking for?'

‘She's gone. Nothing is more certain, but we saw her off in a panic. That door over there undoubtedly leads into an escape tunnel. She couldn't have known about the Ereshkigal Working—that cannot have been part of her plan—but the doppelgängers were supposed to see us both off. I think. Probably. In any case, she may have left something she didn't mean to.'

He paused. ‘Why does she have two copies of the same book?' He slid a handsomely bound volume from a series, and a much tattier and larger example from another shelf and placed them side by side on a reading table.

‘They look nothing alike,' said Horst. ‘The titles are different.'

‘The individual volume was collated into a series of essays. It's the same book, albeit revised.' He flipped open the older book.

Inside, it was gutted. The heart of the book had been cut out to create a hiding place, and within it was a smaller book and a bundle of papers. Cabal barked a laugh of triumph and flicked quickly through the papers. As he did so, however, he slowed, a growing astonishment becoming apparent.

‘What is it, Johannes?' asked Horst. ‘What's in those?'

Wordlessly, Cabal passed him a slip of newspaper, cut from some archive somewhere, and watched his brother's face. The reaction was near instant. ‘Father's obituary,' said Horst in a very small voice. ‘Why would she have this? Why would she want it?'

Cabal didn't answer. Instead he laid out further cuttings and transcriptions from a dozen sources. A tragic drowning. A missing brother. A churchyard desecration. A disaster at a seaside town. Cabal unfolded a piece of parchment and read it slowly. Horst could see the document was old and could not even hazard a guess at the alphabet in which it was written. Finally, he could contain his curiosity no longer and demanded to know what it meant.

‘It is a short treatise on the dangers of the Ereshkigal Working, emphasising the means and motives for the ritual existing at all.' He dropped the parchment to the table. ‘She even knew about Rufus. She knew what he was. She didn't even care. She knew everything, Horst. Everything.' He drew up a chair and sat heavily. ‘I feel so
used
. She's worse than Nyarlathotep.'