The Brothers Cabal (9 page)

‘That's a very absolutist term, don't you think?' she said. ‘Do you feel as if you're evil?'

‘Well, no. But I never really wanted to be like this.'

‘Nobody necessarily wants to be what they end up being. You seem very nice, my lord. A very nice man.'

‘I've always tried to be good. Decently good, anyway. Not sort of St Francis of Assisi good necessarily, but…'

‘But most decently good people in the world would call you a monster, and the Dee Society would kill you on sight.'

‘The who?'

Misericorde waved the question aside. ‘Unimportant. It doesn't matter how you define yourself, the point is that you have
been
defined. You are a leech that walks like a man, a parasite, an unnatural aberration, an abomination in the sight of man and God, a vile mockery of—'

‘All right, all right,' said Horst, his tone offended. He walked up and down while the wound to his feelings knitted a little.

‘Yet
you
know you are a thinking, rational individual. It is unjust how you are treated.'

In reality, Horst had no experience of being chased betwixt pillar and post by aspiring Van Helsings. He had spent the majority of his vampirehood locked in a crypt, amusing himself down the long years with spider races, followed by a sumptuous feast of mainly spiders. On his release he had largely enjoyed a year as a showman in partnership with his brother, Johannes, who had largely hated it. They had travelled constantly, and Horst had been discreet and careful as and when he fed. Thus, he had never encountered stern-faced men with sharpened stakes and strong moral imperatives.

The year had finished with a bit of a falling-out with his brother, and Horst had condemned Johannes to death and eternal damnation, and himself to brief agony then endless insensate and thoughtless dark.

Except now it transpired that Johannes was not only not dead and not damned, but was actually doing things that, for lack of a better description, would have to be characterised as ‘good'. He himself, Horst, was also no longer dust, but thoroughly thoughtful and sensate. For example, Lady Misericorde's throat looked very tempting. He was vaguely conscious of his eye teeth slowly extending in the same way an adolescent boy is vaguely conscious of a pleasing tumescence when contemplating a pretty girl. The similarity extended to the sudden embarrassment when it is realised that the effect has been observed and noted by the female in question.

Horst turned away, putting his hand to his mouth in a pathetically chivalrous manner. Misericorde compounded his humiliation with a light laugh. ‘You see? You're thirsty. It's not your fault, and you don't even need so much blood to survive, do you? If people understood you, vampires and humans could co-exist. But there is no desire for compromise. Sooner or later you will finish with a stake through your heart, and the mouth of your severed head stuffed with garlic flowers.'

‘Actually,' he offered, as if it would somehow mitigate such a fate, ‘I still quite like garlic.'

‘Really? Well, I'm sure the garlic flowers will more than make up for the whole impalement-and-decapitation business,' she replied. She let a silence form before saying, ‘The thing is, the day doesn't understand the night, and the creatures of the day outnumber the creatures of the night. We are discriminated against—hated, hunted, destroyed.'

‘You're not a creature of the night, though,' said Horst. ‘You can go down the shops and buy yourself a loaf and a newspaper and no one will think anything of it.'

‘True, but you can say that of Devlin and his ilk, too. We are not defined by our ability to purchase a baguette and a copy of
Le Figaro
. If I stood in a town square on market day and identified myself as a necromancer, I doubt I would leave that square alive.'

Horst thought of his brother's travails and did not argue. ‘It's always been that way, though,' he said. ‘You just have to keep a low profile.'

‘Do generals keep a low profile? They send tens, hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths, killing more in a day than we might be responsible for in a century. Do the politicians who create those wars keep a low profile?' Her gaze became intense, her words evangelical. ‘Don't you understand?
We are not the monsters
. They call us that because they have the numbers and the power, and all we can do against them is run and hide and “keep a low profile”.' She said it with a pent-up disgust that Horst had seen his brother express, albeit with different emphasis. To his brother, the denizens of the day and of the night were all equally obstructive to his researches and he gave them all short shrift—greengrocer to gorgon, showgirl to succubus, they had all been put on the Earth to get in his
verdammten
way.

She continued, ‘So, we have had enough. We shall marshal our forces and make a stand against them. We shall carve out an empire of the night for ourselves and defend it against them. We shall force them to negotiate and to compromise with us.'

Horst regarded her with astonishment. While the
Ministerium
was clearly organised, well funded, and capable, he had assumed its aims would be relatively small and focussed, albeit achieved by supernatural agency. The titles assigned to him and the others suddenly made a dreadful sense to him. They were not simply exercises in sycophancy—the intention was that they would indeed become nobles in this new nation of shadows. And to achieve that, they would first be …

‘Generals. That's what we're supposed to be, is it?' he demanded of her. ‘We're to raise armies?'

‘Very literally in our cases. Yes. Now you understand, my Lord of the Dead. I shall raise dry bones and revenants. Devlin already has a regiment of shapechangers at his back. Not just wolves but bears from Scandinavia, tigers from India, foxes from Japan, hyenas and lions from Africa. You will create more of your line to become commanders and elite troops, and—when the Lord of Powers is brought to us—he or she will summon outsiders to fight for our cause and forge nature herself into a weapon. The mundane world will have no defences sufficient to resist our army. They will negotiate a settlement or every night will bring new suffering to them.'

She was breathing hard, her passion for the cause evident in her heat and the vigorous pulse at her throat. Horst found he couldn't look away from it.

He wanted to say that their plan was abominable. He wanted to say that the forces they commanded were by their very nature difficult to control, and that many innocent lives would be lost in the chaos of such a war. He wanted to say that he wanted no part of such madness. But all he could do was watch the blood throb beneath her pale, pale skin and say, ‘What part in all this do the
Ministerium
themselves play? They all seem mundane. What do they do? How do they help us?'

‘They are rich, and they are ambitious. De Osma is an occultist, as well as landed gentry. I think he was the one who formed the
Ministerium
in the first place. Collingwood is a businessman; von Ziegler is some minor noble seeking to re-establish his family's estates by gambling everything on this.'

‘Investors. This is just about money and power to them.'

‘De Osma has a scholarly interest in drawing together the darkness into one place where it can be more easily studied and classified. But yes. When were those worthy people who live in the light ever interested in anything more than money and power?'

Horst was raging, furious that these men were rallying forces that they must know would cause untold death and terror, yet there was not a tremor of that fury on his face. Horst seemed to be sinking away from control of his own body. There were other impetuses that were rising in importance, and none of them required rage for expression. Only cold, rational thought, so cold it lay like ice upon the surface of his reason. He saw how the ranks of those he would turn stood before him in his imagination, subordinate, obedient, and his. He felt how individually powerful they would be, and how all that power ultimately belonged to him. He saw the day running from him, the solar terminator fleeing like a routed army, and the world turning to eternal night in its wake. He saw Lady Misericorde removing the locket and choker from her throat and running the tip of her finger down the line of her jugular vein as she looked him in the eye.

‘That glass wasn't enough, was it, Horst?' she said. ‘You must be so very thirsty.'

He was astride her before he knew it himself. She gasped in surprise at the suddenness of his actions, but then laughed the delighted girlish laugh of getting a long-sought pony for her birthday. He was hardly aware of it; the coldness in his mind was turning to a single icy need and he no longer knew how to control it.

‘So eager, aren't you? So needy…' She turned her head to expose the vein, coquettishly veiled in skin. ‘Just a little, darling. Just a goblet's worth. We both need to be ready for tomorrow night.'

She sighed as the fangs penetrated, and held his head as he drank. She lay, complacent and aware as Horst fed. Beyond the obvious, even an astute onlooker would have been hard put to decide exactly who was taking what from whom.

Certainly, watching through a small gap where the door to the antechamber had been left ajar, it wasn't at all clear to Alisha.

An Interlude

Johannes Cabal lightly touched the side of his neck. A close examination in good light might have revealed two small scars as from punctures, fractionally paler than the already pale surrounding skin. The gesture was unconscious, but Horst pulled a sour face when he noticed it.

‘Once,' he said. ‘I did that once. And, to be fair, it was at least in part because you were being such an arse.'

‘As I recall, I was running away,' said Cabal, lowering his hand to join the other on the counterpane. ‘In what way does that fit your recollection?'

‘You were running away like an arse.' Horst maintained an aggrieved face for some seconds before giggling.

‘You are the least suitable “Lord of the Dead” I can imagine,' said his brother. ‘Still, this “
Ministerium Tenebrae
” of yours…'

‘Very distinctly
not
of mine…'

‘This conspiracy of darkness, I don't suppose I should be surprised. They tend to pop up every few centuries when the not-entirely-human of the world finally have enough of being chased around by ubiquitous mobs, all equipped with burning torches and pitchforks as if there's a retail chain somewhere that supplies all their lynching needs. God knows I've had to put up with enough incidents like that in my time. I can almost sympathise with this
Ministerium
.'

Horst looked at him askance. ‘Almost?'

‘Of course. Except they do a poor job of learning from history. Every time somebody tries to do something like this, it ends in early victories quickly followed by a mass extermination of the supernatural rebels. It's like that statistical cycle they teach in schools about foxes and rabbits. It serves to shove them back into the misty coils of myth so the nice people can pretend such things never existed.' He ruminated for a moment. ‘Although this is different. I don't recall it being backed by human agencies right from its onset, helping the legions of darkness as an investment opportunity. Still, free market capitalism and elemental evil have so much in common, I suppose the marvel is that it's never happened before. The other interesting detail is that the intention is to make limited gains. To create a new state and defend it instead of just galloping along as a horde, trying to take over the world. That shows foresight and a lot of common sense.'

Horst's look grew ever more askance. ‘Does it?'

‘Surely a regulated nation of assorted vampires, werewolves, necromancers, warlocks, witches, and the usual bump-in-the-night suspects is better than the alternative? A bogey man who's a citizen of Teratolia is…'

‘A citizen of where?'

‘“The Land of Monsters”. You really are weak at classical languages, aren't you? As I was saying, a monstrous citizen of that shrouded land is, by definition, not under one's bed. He's at home, reading the paper, because he
has
a home. I imagine many governments, specifically the ones far away who wouldn't be losing any territory, would find that a very equitable solution.'

Horst shook his head. ‘There's more to it than I've told you so far.'

‘I thought there would be.' Cabal tilted his head back and breathed through his nose as he changed trains of thought at Cognition Junction. ‘Misericorde. Never heard of her. While as a profession, we're not friendly with one another, we are wary, and that means we tend to be aware of one another's existences at least. A female necromancer—necromantrix?—is a rare creature indeed. In fact, with the exception of the dead yet delightful Miss Smith, I can think of none who are currently practising. Even she's more of a witch these days.'

Horst, however, had caught on to something else in Johannes's words that attracted his attention. ‘The delightful Miss Smith?' he asked with a roguish smile. ‘Does my little brother have a crush?'

Cabal started to deny it, but then instead blushed a little, and a small, perhaps even shy smile appeared on his own face. He leaned towards Horst and said in a lowered voice, ‘She told me where to find the fifth volume of Darian's
Opusculus
.'

‘Did she now?' Horst straightened up, his smile broadening. ‘You old dog, you. Sharing occult books is like a dirty weekend to necromancers, isn't it?' He looked at the clock on Cabal's bedside and his amusement abated. ‘I'd better crack on. I still have a lot to tell you, and dawn won't wait.'