Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute (12 page)

Bose pattered along in his wake, like an anxious pug. ‘Do you think that is likely?’

‘No. Yes. Perhaps. How should I know? I am a stranger here myself.’ And so, having put Bose’s doubts to rest, or not, he fell back into a ratiocinatory silence from which he would not easily be dislodged.

As they approached the road, Shadrach commented disapprovingly, ‘Look at those sheep. They’re in among the corn. They’ll bloat and die from eating it.’

‘You seem very knowledgeable on the matter, Mr Shadrach,’ said Corde.

‘I come from a farming family,’ said the tall, thin, ascetic and thoroughly unbucolic Shadrach. ‘We kept sheep on the top moor, and Heaven help anyone who let them get into the cornfields down by the river.’

They were now only a few dozen yards from the couple by the road, and conjectures could be made without recourse to a telescope. If they were hideous monsters with a penchant for spleen, they carried it well; Cabal’s guess of ‘yokels’ seemed far closer to the truth. They were young people: he a shepherd in a blue smock and red vest, brown-booted and gaitered, a wooden flagon hanging from his belt, his hair a coarse, wiry brown, his sideburns hedgelike; she equally rustic, though apparently wearing her best red dress and white embroidered blouse. A young lamb lay in her lap, crunching sour apples.
Judging from Shadrach’s angry intake of breath, this was also something sheep should avoid. They were sitting by the edge of the road between the trees, chatting and giggling, and altogether unaware of anything else outside their sphere.

‘Excuse me,’ said Cabal, ‘how do we get to Hlanith from here?’ He did not ask if this was the right road for, on closer acquaintance, it clearly wasn’t much of a road at all, just a narrow avenue between two rows of unkempt trees. Perhaps once it had led to a great house or estate, but now it was overgrown and even pitted deeply enough in places to create small shadowed pools, one of which the girl was cooling her bare feet in.

The shepherd boy looked up at them with dull surprise, the natural stupidity in his rubicund face plainly enhanced by drink. Behind him, the girl leaned over to look at the newcomers. Her action was coy, but her expression was knowing, and Cabal disliked her for that just as much as he disliked her beau for his bovine inanity.

The boy scrambled to his feet, belatedly alive to his dereliction of duty. ‘Jus’ a moment, yer ’onours, jus’ a moment.’ He ran off to drive the more adventurous sheep from the corn, leaving Cabal’s party in an awkward silence with the girl. She, for her part, did not rise, but remained seated on the green swathe, idly playing with a strand of her russet hair and smiling slightly at them. Corde smiled back, to Shadrach’s disgust, Cabal’s incomprehension and Bose’s blithe ignorance.

‘I wonder, my dear,’ ventured Corde, eliciting a quiet snort from Shadrach, ‘if you could direct us to Hlanith. It can’t be far from here.’

She did not speak, but replied by pointing at the end of the
avenue to the south and gesturing vaguely eastwards. Then she went back to toying with her hair and smiling at him.

‘Thank you,’ said Corde, low and slowly, and there was a definite air of twiddling a thin moustache, if he had been wearing one.

‘Thank you, miss,’ said Shadrach, in a tone of subdued outrage. ‘Come
along
, gentlemen.’ And he led off to the south, followed by Cabal, Bose and, in a desultory fashion, Corde.

As they walked away, the shepherd came back, his hands cupped around some interesting insect he had found. He watched them go with a dull lack of understanding or even remembrance. Then their presence slipped from his mind altogether and he sat down by the girl again to show her this new treasure. Corde watched all this over his shoulder and laughed. ‘As pretty as a picture,’ he said to the others.

Shadrach would have none of it. ‘A particularly vulgar picture. The product of a coarse and depraved artist.’ But that made Corde laugh all the more.

The girl, for all her dubious taste in suitors, was at least a reliable guide. The avenue ended beside a road between high embankments and topped with trees and bushes. It was clear and frequently travelled; they met a tinker coming from the east who confirmed that they were on the Hlanith road, and shortly thereafter they got a lift on a wagon taking fodder into the city. The four men perched on the swaying pile of hay with differing degrees of assuredness and dignity, and even gave voice to their belief that the expedition was past its stumbling stage and was now properly under way.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Cabal. ‘Apart from the trifling facts that we have no idea where the Animus is, whether its whereabouts
are known to anyone in Hlanith, or – and this is my personal favourite – if it even exists. Apart from those caveats, yes, everything is going swimmingly.’

Hlanith, however, was no disappointment on first sight. The land around it was low and marshy, but approached from many directions by causeways both natural and artificial. These converged on a great sloping plateau no more than a few dozen yards higher than the surrounding marshland, a plateau that sloped gently down towards its seaward side. The granite walls that ran around the town proper were almost unnecessary to the defences – the approaches could be made very difficult to any enemy – but it seemed that the town architects had felt that walls were necessary, so there they were.

Their wagon clattered up an artificial causeway whose length was broken here and there by bridges to let the highest tides wash in and out of the marshes unimpeded. The illusion of reality was remarkable, Cabal admitted to himself. The sea breeze blew in and brought the smell of brine with it. Gulls, identical to the birds of Earth, as far as he could see, wheeled and cried over the hummocks of harsh sea grass growing across what seemed to be the estuary of a great river that had disappeared. He watched as a gull flipped a fish out of a shallow pool where it had been stranded, immediately starting a fierce squabble among the rest of the opportunistic flock.

The wagon paused briefly at a guard post close to the end of the causeway. The guards’ questions and search were so cursory and disinterested that it seemed Hlanith had little need of any defences at the moment, natural or artificial. The wagon was directed onwards across the drawbridge and under
the portcullis of a small keep that was built across the full width of the causeway – an artefact from a less settled time and a precaution against a dangerous future – and ten minutes or so later, they were clambering down and thanking the wagon driver outside a gate in the town wall. He, for his part, surprised them by refusing to take payment, and wished them a pleasant stay in the city before parting from them.

The guards on the gate were only fractionally more interested in Cabal’s party than the ones on the causeway had been, but only as far as discovering that they were new to the Dreamlands. They asked if they had come via the Enchanted Wood, and Cabal lied, and said that they had. He suspected that if the guards heard that their route had taken them through the far more dangerous Dark Wood, then there would be more questions, starting with ‘So, why aren’t you all dead?’

Once the guards’ initial prejudices that they were dealing with a bunch of tourists was confirmed, the expedition was allowed into the city proper. None of them were quite sure what they had expected Hlanith to look like, and this was as well for every expectation would have been beggared. The town was medieval in flavour, yet peculiar in execution. There was something very Scandinavian about the tall, peaked roofs, yet the crossbeams and plaster seemed more Tudor, and the mixture of thatching on some buildings, while their immediate and otherwise identical neighbours were tiled in the Mediterranean style, just seemed wilfully contrary. Bose looked around with hands on his hips, every inch the gormless tourist. ‘Well I never,’ he kept saying, which was both true and redundant.

‘Well, Herr Cabal,’ said Shadrach. ‘How do we proceed from here?’

‘We search, and we research. Herr Corde, you strike me as a man who would be at home gathering intelligence in a tavern. I would suggest you find somewhere busy and not too disreputable and start there. Herr Bose, there must be some form of library or university here. In your persona as a magistrate, you may be able to gain access to an archive that we cannot. Learn what you can, or at least gather lines of investigation that may prove fruitful. Herr Shadrach, Hlanith is primarily a trading centre and the mercantile guilds will surely be strong. Merchant ships criss-cross the world from here and may have brought back some useful data for us. I would suggest you make the acquaintance of the local merchant princes and discover what you can. We should all make our own arrangements for somewhere to sleep, then meet on the morrow.’

This seemed like a sensible use of their time, and none had any problems with it, beyond an understandable lack of confidence as to how well they might get on with the locals. This was quashed by a heavy implication from Cabal that they were subject to the influence of the Phobic Animus and so were behaving like – and this is not the exact phrase he used, but certainly gives a sense of it – a ‘big bunch of jessies’.

‘And what will you be doing all this while, Cabal?’ asked Shadrach, as he doled out coins to the others, mostly to Corde, who reckoned he might have to get in a few rounds of drinks, a duty he seemed very happy to be taking on.

Cabal did not answer immediately, but looked down the long avenue at whose head they stood to the defensive wall that would seal off the docks in case of seaward invasion, and beyond to the oaken wharves and ships, and still further to the great blue-grey Cerenarian Sea. ‘There are other questions
to be asked, and other sources to be questioned,’ he said distractedly. Then, drawing himself back to the present, he added, ‘We will meet here at midday tomorrow to exchange what we have discovered and to decide what to do next. Are we agreed?’

And so they parted.

Cabal did not make enquiries: experience had given him instinct. He simply followed his whims until they brought him, as they always did, to the graveyard. In this particular case ‘graveyard’ was a poor sort of term for a true necropolis, a labyrinth of lanes and alleyways bordered by tombs like stone huts, opening out into fields of grave markers, and squares where the municipal buildings were great mausolea and temples to the departed souls. It might seem strange that there was death within sleep, but the truth of it was that the Dreamlands were as real as anywhere else, at least while you were within them. Judging from this town of the dead that nestled within a city of the living, many would never leave.

Cabal had entered the necropolis at its western gate, and walked until he found himself at its heart, a great circus – in the ‘metropolitan’ rather than ‘three-ring’ sense – of white gravel encompassed by great curving kerbs of stone tall enough to sit upon, which Cabal did. The kerbs were periodically broken by the beginnings of avenues that radiated outwards to every corner of the enormous area. Cabal watched a funeral enter the circus and depart down one of the avenues, a long column of figures in all encompassing black veils fore and aft, with a much smaller group of soberly dressed men and women following an open hearse drawn by six black horses. These latter people were dignified rather than mournful, unlike the
veiled figures that sobbed and wailed and struck postures of extravagant spiritual distress. Cabal waited until the funeral had largely processed on to the avenue before getting to his feet and walking after it.

He caught up with the rearguard professional mourner and coughed until he gained its attention. ‘Excuse me, madam,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if you could perhaps help me?’

‘You can start by calling me “sir”,’ said a bass voice from within the veil.

‘Yes, quite. My mistake,’ said Cabal, after the shortest of pauses. ‘I was thinking that in your profession you must have a good knowledge of the layout of this necropolis and—’

‘Look, squire, I’m working,’ interrupted the mourner, continuing to strike attitudes of mortal grief. ‘The punters have forked out for forty mourners, not thirty-nine. If you want to talk, keep up and look mournful, savvy?’

‘I don’t have to be extravagant about it, do I?’ Cabal was watching the others, who looked like nothing so much as a dance troupe extemporising on the theme of electrocution.

‘You couldn’t if you wanted to. Takes years of practice and three guild examinations to get to this standard. No, just look as if you gave a bugger about the departed and follow along.’

Cabal doubted he was a good enough actor to manage that, but he had spent his whole life polishing sombreness to a dignified mahogany glow that looked much the same to the unpractised eye. Thus, he followed at a steady funereal pace, and that did very nicely.

‘So, what did you want to know, mate?’ said the mourner, when he was satisfied that Cabal’s presence was an asset to the procession.

‘I was wondering if you could direct me to the oldest part of the necropolis.’

The mourner almost stumbled in mid-mimed declamation. ‘You want to go where? What for?’ he said, in open astonishment. ‘That’s the bad place.’

‘It is also the interesting place and, for me, the necessary place.’

‘No, seriously, chum, you don’t want to go there. There’s ghouls up there. The gardeners only go once a month and even then under armed guard. You’re looking to get chewed if you go up there.’

‘I’m not afraid of ghouls,’ said Cabal. ‘In fact, I might even learn something of interest from them. They are not my current concern, however. Does anyone live there? Any soothsayers? Oracles? Anybody like that?’ He had the impression that the mourner was looking oddly at him.