Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute (27 page)

‘It doesn’t seem very friendly here, Captain,’ agreed Cabal. He was thinking of what inevitably lay ahead: there would be a slow erosion of liberties within Dylath-Leen, and then, when the inhabitants were prepared to accept anything because they were permitted to do nothing, the patrons of the black galleys would regard this little patch of ground as safe enough for them to visit from their lunar cities. They would bring with them their unholy appetites and exercise them upon an unwilling populace. After that, it could only be a matter of months at most before Dylath-Leen joined the Dreamlands’ slowly growing list of abandoned and shunned places.

By this point, the Fear Institute contingent had appeared on deck, carrying their small bags of belongings and eager to disembark. The captain and Cabal’s sour expressions gave them some small inkling that they were going to be missing out on hugs and
lei
. ‘Is there something awry, Cabal?’ asked Corde.

‘Oh, I say! Look at all those black boats!’ cried Bose, inadvertently answering the question. ‘And look! There are more coming!’

Swearing an oath salty enough to make Dagon purse his lips, Oleander ran aft and looked to the harbour mouth. Bose had spoken nothing more than the truth. Perhaps two miles off, three black galleys in line astern were heading implacably
towards Dylath-Leen. ‘What are they doing?’ he demanded of nobody in particular. ‘That’s madness! They’ll never get by the gates beam to beam like that.’ Then he understood, and his face grew pale beneath the tan. He ran to the rail and shouted down to the gossiping captains there gathered, ‘To your ships! To your ships! The devils mean to blockade the harbour!’

Abruptly all the serious standing around and muttering ominously at one another turned into a mad and undignified dash back to their vessels. Even as they did so, Cabal saw that the city guard, in full mail and faceless behind their helmets, was approaching the docks at a lumbering charge. They ran oddly, as if their knees weren’t in quite the right places for their greaves. Not for the first time, he wished he had access to something with rather more range than a rapier. ‘Captain—’ he began.

‘I see ’em, Master Cabal,’ snapped Oleander. ‘Cast off, fore and aft! Cut the lines, damn you!’

Axes thudded and the mooring ropes parted. The gangplank, forgotten in the frenzy of intent, fell into the water between the ship’s side and the dock as she started to move away, pushed back fiercely by crewmen wielding poles.

‘Herr Corde,’ said Cabal. He was watching several of the guards still heading straight for them, despite the widening gap between the ship and the quay. ‘Draw your sword.’ He drew his own, his eyes never leaving the charging guards.

Corde frowned at him, followed his gaze and scoffed. ‘You’re joking, Cabal. The gap’s twenty feet if it’s an inch. They couldn’t make it even if they weren’t weighed down in armour. Relax. They’ll end up drowning themselves.’

‘If they were men, I would agree,’ said Cabal, as the first
guard reached the quayside and, without hesitation, threw himself towards the
Audaine
.

In a cool, rational world, the guardsman would have described a graceless parabola into the harbour waters and – wrapped in steel knitting as he was – made swift progress to the sea bed. The Dreamlands, however, do not present a cool, rational world, instead favouring a sequence of events such as the guard leaping the gap as if catapulted, crashing heavily into the rail without even a grunt, and then hurdling it easily, drawing its – we can no longer dignify such a creature with
his
– longsword, and looking for somebody to carve up with it.

Cabal backed away as the guard swung its helmeted head this way and that. ‘Herr Corde? How much provocation do you need?’ Corde said nothing, but let his cloak fall from his shoulders to reveal the leather armour beneath. The sound of his sword sliding from its scabbard was enough to engage the guard’s attention.

There was another dull, gruntless thump against the rail, and then another, but this one was followed by a splash: the
Audaine
was finally out of jumping distance for even these inhuman creatures.

The first guard spoke, but it was an unconvincing attempt, full of gurglings and
basso profundo
boomings from deep within. It tried again, and this time managed to produce something like human speech, although it was as convincing a rendition as a dog saying, ‘Sausages.’

‘Ship . . . impounded . . . by authority of . . . impounded . . .’ It swung its head from side to side, a poor impersonation of a man looking around. Cabal’s misgivings deepened: however the guard was sensing them, it was not through eyes.

‘Ye’ll step off my ship, sir!’ demanded Oleander. He
carried a polished falchion that Cabal had assumed uncharitably was for show. Now drawn and glinting in the weak sunlight, it looked far more like a device for creative hacking.

‘Ship impounded . . . order of . . . council . . . Dylath-Leen . . .’ Without allowing even the shortest moment for a reply, it launched into the attack.

Oleander met the slashing blow with a fast parry of his falchion that struck sparks. He thrust the guard’s sword arm to one side and shoved it back with his free hand to gain a little space. Cabal, meanwhile, was weighing up the wider situation. All along the dock, the other manned ships were trying to cut loose while their crews engaged the wave of bestial guards. A swift glance over his shoulder showed that the three galleys were close by the mole and all had their tillers hard over, swinging across to block the harbour mouth. Then, to add to his rapidly populating list of concerns, he saw that some of the black galleys already in dock were moving out to engage the ships that had managed to cast off. They were in a rat trap and, his mind whirling through alternative plans, Cabal could see no way out of it. Then he noticed the second guard who had jumped, painfully hauling itself on to the rail, and noted with satisfaction that there was at least one small victory he could achieve.

‘Corde! Help the captain, you idiot!’ he shouted, as he ran for the second guard. ‘You don’t need to be invited!’

Corde, who at some deep and very English level was indeed waiting for an invitation to fight – a slap with a gauntlet or a strongly worded note, perhaps – shuddered into action. He ran forward and stood shoulder to shoulder with Oleander, jumping around a bit as if preparing to receive a serve in a
friendly game of tennis. ‘Get behind it!’ said Oleander, angrily, as Corde ate into his room for manoeuvre. ‘Stab it in the back!’

While Corde wrestled with his sense of fair play, Cabal had reached the rail at a charge. The second guard had just got its head above it when it found a rapier waiting for it. Cabal struck hard and precisely, the tip of the blade going neatly through the left eye of the guard’s helmet. Cabal doubted he could blind it, but hoped it had something precious to it stored inside its head; a brain would be lovely, but an important nerve ganglion would suffice.

The guard made a sloppy wet noise as the blade went in, but Cabal could not tell if it was the sound of important flesh being parted or a vocalisation in whatever slithy collection of dripping, slobbering and burbling sounds it pleased the guard to regard as its native language. Then the guard shook its head angrily, as if getting a length of steel through the eye was a mild irritation on par with a snapped shoelace. Cabal realised that more robust measures than merely stabbing it through the head would be necessary.

The guard managed to get both hands on the rail and said something that sounded like a blocked sink clearing, yet still maintained the tonal
je ne sais quoi
that allows one with decent linguistic skills – and Cabal’s were more than decent – to know that a frightful insult has just been uttered. Cabal did not tolerate insult, especially from burbling things that refused to die easily. Lying near at hand was a discarded axe that had been used mere minutes ago to part the hawsers. Cabal left his rapier in the guard’s eye, took up the axe and severed the guard’s wrists with two well-placed blows ’twixt gauntlet and bracer. The guard made a new bubbling sound, this time
denoting surprise, and fell backwards. Cabal snatched his rapier from where he’d left it parked in the guard’s head, and favoured the falling creature with a humourless smile as it vanished from sight, hitting the water a moment later.

On the deck, the two orphaned hands started to crawl away, presumably looking for a hiding place where they could plot their revenge. Cabal picked them up by the lames across the gauntlet backs as if handling particularly feisty crabs, and tossed them into the harbour. They could do their plotting in the mud, as far as he was concerned.

‘It won’t die!’ Corde’s shout, generously scented with more panic than rational concern, drew Cabal’s attention. Oleander was barely holding his own in a vicious exchange of blows with the first guard, while Corde stabbed it repeatedly in the back with the enthusiasm of a masochist poking a wasps’ nest. Cabal returned his rapier to its scabbard, recovered the axe from where he had left it embedded in the rail with a pool of whey-like blood around it, and went to assist.

‘You fail to employ the scientific method, Herr Corde,’ he said, as he approached. ‘After sufficient experiments to confirm your initial observation – in this case, that stabbing is an ineffective strategy – one should move on to new hypotheses. This creature is concentrating entirely upon the captain, perhaps because his falchion is a slashing weapon. Does the creature regard being slashed as more deleterious to its general operation than being stabbed? Let us experiment.’ So saying, he used the end of the axe to tip the guard’s helmet forward a little, exposing flesh with the colour, consistency and wet texture of fresh blancmange. Then he drew back the axe and decapitated the guard.

The guard was definitely surprised. Not killed, or
apparently wounded to any significant degree, but certainly surprised. It turned to Cabal, the space over its neck giving every intimation of being very surprised.

‘There,’ said Cabal, pleased. It was always gratifying to see a hypothesis verified. It was less gratifying to have a headless and angry monstrosity bear down on one when its sword has twice the reach of one’s axe. ‘Some assistance here?’ asked Cabal, as he backed quickly away.

Oleander needed no second prompting. Aiming at the top of the shoulder as the guard turned away from him, he swung the falchion with great force. The links in the mail separated easily – apparently such work went to the lowest bidders even in the Dreamlands – and the blade almost reached the armpit before running out of energy. The guard’s right arm flopped down, boneless and skinless, less grown than extruded. Oleander pursed his lips, like an artist considering where to make the next brush stroke, and hacked at the thin sliver holding the arm on. It fell, the sword clattering free. After a moment, the hand started to drag the arm off behind it as it sought shelter.

Oleander and Cabal laid into the defenceless hulk of the guard, smashing it down with heavy blows until it toppled, then pounding its form until pale liquescent filth flowed from the ragged sleeve and the neck of the mail bernie, and the armour sank until it was empty.

‘What . . . what was that?’ said Corde, his eyes wide and wild. ‘What sort of creature?’

‘Something cheap and expendable,’ said Cabal, but his attention was elsewhere. The trap was still closing. The fight on the
Audaine
’s deck had taken only seconds, and the crew who had moved to help were already back at their stations,
trying to escape the wave of galleys that was nearing them. It was plainly a hopeless endeavour, however: the oars of the galleys swept mechanically and relentlessly, while the
Audaine
could make little steerage with her sails furled, despite the crew’s hard sculling.

It was for the captain to call, and he stood watching the oncoming galleys as he considered the options. ‘Captain,’ said Cabal, quietly, at his side, ‘if you give up the ship, you and your men will be slaves within the hour, and dead within a month. I intend to fight.’ He drew his rapier, and awaited Oleander’s decision.

Oleander took a moment to reach it, not least because every reasonable outcome ended in death. All that mattered now was choosing which particular path was most acceptable. ‘Men!’ he shouted. ‘Stand by to repel boarders!’

It is a strange moment when one realises that one’s life is now measured in minutes, and that whatever great plans might have been laid are now all moot and pointless and – in the great burning clarity of the instant – trivial. Cabal did not know what the others were thinking of, neither did he care. All he knew was that the course of his life had long been nothing more than a list of calculated risks, and that, finally, his luck had run out. All the work, all the hardships, all the sacrifices – both personal and of livestock – had been for naught; his work would never see fruition. He would never see her again. But that was not his fault, and he regretted nothing.

He gave the situation one last appraisal before committing to what would likely be the last decision of his life. Behind him, Shadrach tried to look dignified, but was leaning on the mainmast to support him as his knees turned to water. Bose
had given up any pretence of bravery and was huddled in the angle between the quarterdeck steps and the rail, trying to will himself into invisibility. Corde held his sword in his hand, and was looking at it with new eyes, as if realising that the skill with which he might wield it would mark the difference between a fast and dishonourable death, or one drawn out a few seconds longer. It would mean at least that he hadn’t died meekly and mildly, a sacrifice to alien gods.