Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute (31 page)

At least Cabal would not have to endure Bose’s whistling for long, as this leg of their journey would be a short one: according to Cabal’s maps and notes, the abandoned city lay a day’s walk into the sands and was easily visible at range, so an error in navigation was unlikely. When the distant towers of ancient Golthoth appeared, only slightly off their set course, they were only as tired as a day’s walking on sand would warrant and – since the sun didn’t seem greatly interested in the Cuppar-Nombo – barely dehydrated at all.

Golthoth was a very different city from the one they had left by the Lake of Yath. Where that had been strangely vibrant, as if all the citizenry were just hiding out of sight and waiting to leap out in an impracticably large game of peek-a-boo, Golthoth seemed to have been built as a mysterious abandoned city right from the first stroke of an architect’s stylus. As Bose commented when they first walked into its broad precincts, the place seemed very redolent of ancient Egypt, calling to mind the Memphis of the early dynastic period. Was it perhaps possible, he wondered, that the dreams of the first pharaohs had influenced this place? Cabal was quite certain it was the other way around.

The city contained a great deal of formal statuary, made from a dense stone of less scatological shades of brown than the desert. Gods and rulers they may once have been, but a
thousand generations of sandstorms had eroded their faces into little more than arrays of suggestive bumps and contours that seemed to indicate that few had begun with human physiognomies. Cabal also noted that the doorways were uniformly a good twenty inches taller than normal Earthly doors, and that the more important buildings often seemed to sport additional doors of a curious squat hexagonal design, some larger examples lacking the upper edge to become pentagonal instead. Cabal kept his counsel, but suspected that these buildings had witnessed visitors for whom the strange doors were ideally suited.

The architectural style, however, was not homogenous. Here and there later additions stood awkwardly surrounded by the eldritch opulence of the original buildings. Some seemed to have been built in an attempt to claim the city for some interloping power, a strategy that had only ever been met by failure, judging from the current state of affairs. Other – rarer – forms were more enigmatic. These were uniquely towers, dotted randomly about the place as if they had been dropped from space, or had grown up through the pavements and squares. There were not many; Cabal counted five easily visible, with two or three more tumbled and broken, the brown sand grown yards deep in drifts against the shattered stone.

‘Wizards,’ he said disparagingly. ‘The pretentious bastards just have to set up shop in towers situated in awkward places. It is a fault endemic among them.’

‘And this wizard Ercusides mentioned . . .’

‘Hep-Seth.’

‘Yes, Hep-Seth. One of these will be his, then, Mr Cabal?’ Bose allowed something like worry to travel across his beamish
face. ‘I say, though, it’s all a bit . . . dead here, isn’t it? Do you think he’s still about?’

Cabal considered opening his bag to double check with Ercusides, but decided against it. The hermit-cum-paperweight had become recalcitrant since Dylath-Leen, and every time Cabal tried to speak to him, their conversations became shorter and more cryptic to the point at which he simply did not care to try any more. ‘He should be,’ he said, but did not sound very reassuring even to himself. The city felt dead to him, and he was better equipped than most to sense such a state. He just hoped that it would not be necessary to revivify any more skulls, although the thought of Ercusides and Hep-Seth being stuck in the same Gladstone and resenting it deeply cheered him up a little. ‘It must be one of these towers. We shall work through them until we find the right one.’

Fortunately, the pretentious nature of wizards in general and the sort who raise obtrusive towers in other people’s cities, without so much as a by-your-leave or planning permission in particular, worked in Cabal’s favour. The first tower they approached was all basalt blades jutting into the air around the topmost reaches, with sinuous forms in black marble disporting themselves around the door. It was quite evident why this particular magus had got into the job in the first place. Over the door was carved a sphinx
couchant
, and when they approached, she turned her face to them and said, ‘Whosoever wishes to meet with Calon of Serpes, the Sage of the Amber Star, must first answer me riddles three.’

‘Calon of Serpes,’ repeated Cabal. ‘Wrong house. Good day, madam.’

‘Wait a moment!’ demanded the sphinx. ‘I’ve been lying
here all
couchant
for three hundred years waiting to ask somebody my riddles.’

‘Then your wait isn’t over. Good day,’ he repeated, a little firmly, and walked away, the sphinx’s enraged shouting fading in the sigh of the desert wind behind them.

Bose looked at him, eyes wide with fright. ‘The door spoke to us!’ he managed eventually.

‘Strictly, the door frame spoke to us, but yes. Now our next port of call.’

The next tower was oddly proportioned, in a way that would appeal to a student of Freud, and Cabal didn’t have to make many guesses as to this magus’s inner motivations either. Fortunately his name was on a sand-scoured brass plate upon an iron door, ancient but readable, and they were able to exclude it from their enquiries and move on.

The third tower belonged to Ukuseraton the Destroyer – at least, according to the animated stone dog that guarded the place, a glistening spire of woven glass and crystal. Then the dog attacked them, but it was only constructed from common sandstone and the desert storms had blasted it thin, so a well-placed kick decapitated it. It charged at Cabal, or where Cabal had been a moment before, and so completed its destruction by running into a wall and reducing itself to aggregate.

The fourth tower was as black as ebon night, and encouragingly bore the inscription ‘HEP-SETH’ over the doorway in Lorphic hieroglyphs that Cabal was able to enunciate with dismissive ease. Less encouragingly, the door stood open, swinging slightly in the low, endless desert wind.

‘Perhaps he has an open-door policy?’ said Bose, with optimism verging on delusion.

‘Yes, of course. That will be it,’ said Cabal, as he eased the
door a little further open with his foot. ‘He raised a tower in this distant damned place, wringing the very matter of it from the footnotes between quanta, and then he left the door ajar because he’s so very sociable, really.’ In the low afternoon sun, the ground-floor room of the tower could be seen to be several inches deep in fine sand. ‘And he sacked his cleaner.’

He looked at Bose, but the little man was obviously trying to reconcile all these facts into a whole. Cabal sighed. ‘Sarcasm, Bose. It was sarcasm. I’ll hold a sign up next time,’ he added, but as he wasn’t holding a sign up at the time, Bose believed him, and nodded with a grateful smile.

They tracked cautiously through the entry hall, but if it had ever contained any defences, magical or mechanical, they had long since manifested or sprung. Round the curved wall stood a solid staircase of the same black stone that rose in a clockwise spiral, much like that of a lighthouse. Up this stair Johannes Cabal slowly climbed, followed at a judicious distance by the pallid Bose. The first floor consisted of an antechamber of sorts, the stair to the next floor being behind an elegant but sturdy door of suggestively molten forms, all rendered once more in the smooth glossy black stone. Fortunately it was not locked, and they were able to climb further upwards to what seemed to be an audience chamber or even a throne room. ‘They never lack for egos, do they?’ said Cabal, as they moved up to the third floor. This was the living quarters, informed with the decadent luxuriance so common among top-end wizards. There was a bathing chamber beside the bedroom that contained a great sunken bath, and beyond that a discreet privy, whose drainage plumbing appeared to be a transdimensional interface of some sort. ‘Presumably waste is thereby conducted to some distant place where raining
excrement is not regarded as unusual, like Tartarus,’ he guessed. ‘Or Ipswich.’

Cabal had already made some rough guesses as to the dimensions of the rooms, and he could not help but notice that they were growing steadily larger, unlike the external dimensions, which apparently tapered to a small lookout on the highest floor. Apparently, playing merry-hob with dimensions had been Hep-Seth’s major stock-in-trade, and based on this conjecture he had already made a guess as to what the next floor would reveal.

Neither was he incorrect, as they climbed up into Hep-Seth’s laboratory. It was a large room, some hundred feet in diameter, windowless yet illuminated by good, unwavering lights that seemed simply to emanate from the air close to the ceiling. In the centre of the chamber was an iron spiral staircase that seemed likely to re-enter the normal dimensions of the exterior at its peak and open into the small lookout deck. Cabal walked a few yards into the laboratory and looked around, uncertain what he should be searching for. Looking back, however, he spotted Bose’s head from the nose up just peeping out of the stairwell.

‘Is it safe?’ asked Bose, a waver in his voice.

‘That I cannot say. If you specifically mean,
Is there an ancient sorcerer up here who is outraged by our intrusion and means us harm?
the answer is no. Neither is there a body. The signs are that the tower is abandoned, just like the rest of the city. Hep-Seth either didn’t need this place any more, or died elsewhere and never returned. I cannot say which.’ He grunted irritably. ‘Do come out from there, Bose. I feel like I’m talking to a mole.’

As Bose crept up the remaining steps, like a man entering a
maiden aunt’s sick room, Cabal turned his professional eye upon Hep-Seth’s arcane paraphernalia. He was inwardly disturbed by how little of it he could recognise. There were several things whose function he couldn’t even guess at, and his ignorance chafed at him. Nor were they even comfortable to examine visually, their edges, angles and vertices behaving in ways so strange and ill-mannered that Euclid would have been brought to tears.

‘This is the work of a man who was obsessed with reaching the Island of Mormo,’ he said, half to himself, this being the half from which he expected a sensible conversation.

‘Eh?’ said Bose, the half from which Cabal expected nothing, so he ignored him.

‘A genius, judging by his work here. A genius of dimensional engineering. If he wants to go somewhere, he doesn’t call a taxi. He wants to go somewhere none can go, because nobody knows where it is. And he speaks of a . . .’ He had been turning, slowly, as he talked, his eye sweeping around the room, and now he stopped and stared. ‘A seven-sided gate.’

‘Yes, he did,’ agreed Bose, standing by a structure that, to the unjaundiced eye, looked a great deal like an asymmetric seven-sided gateway standing by itself some twenty feet from the nearest wall. It was made from thin, lath-like girders of a brass-like metal that was not brass but a strange alloy that Cabal had encountered once before in unenjoyable circumstances. ‘That’s what your head in the bag said, anyway. But what does it mean?’

Cabal walked over to him, grasped him firmly by the back of his collar, and twisted him to look at the structure. ‘Count,’ he commanded.

‘One!’ squeaked Bose. ‘What’s got into you, Mr Cabal?
There’s one frame sort of thing! Should there be more?’

Cabal gave up and let him go while he himself stepped away to weigh up the next move. The gateway was as ambivalent to reality as anything else in the room, seeming to change form within flashes of perception, as if unable to decide whether to be two faces talking or a vase. In this case, however, the choice was between being one asymmetric seven-sided gateway and being any of a vast number of similar but different seven-sided gateways. Looking upon it for even a minute was very uncomfortable, as if the intellect was firmly and methodically unplugging and replugging the cables on the switchboard of the mind into new and ontologically challenging configurations. With difficulty Cabal managed to look away from it, and instead found himself gazing at the cheerfully gormless face of Bose, thereby going from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The work of creating the necessary gate of dubious physicality within the gateway built for it was not going to be a sudden great revelation any time in the next few minutes, so Bose repaired to the sorcerer’s bedchamber to snore gently upon grey-silver samite sheets miraculously untouched by the passage of time, another boon of the tower’s curious reality. Cabal, meanwhile, settled down in the laboratory with what writings of the great man he could find, and started sorting them into piles of graduated usefulness. Even for a man of Cabal’s voracious intellect, this proved difficult. He was a long way from his specialities, and his problems were compounded by the growing realisation that Hep-Seth was not only a leading light in his field but that he was the only light. His notes used forms and nomenclature that were unique to him because he had originated this whole thaumaturgical subset of theory. So,
Cabal not only had to evaluate the notes, but he also had to learn a new and novel lexicon in which to do it. Muttering sourly to himself, he began to pore over the papers in the full knowledge that he might be days or weeks about it. Happily, they had discovered a large store of fresh food that was as fresh as the day the fruit had been plucked or the animal slaughtered. It was another of Hep-Seth’s innovations, like the privy, applying the extraordinary to the mundane; neither had he overlooked a seemingly boundless supply of fresh, cool water. They would not starve here, at least.