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So the necromancers were all besmirched with the same gory brush, and Cabal, who just wanted to be left to his research, found himself in a profession proscribed in the most capital terms. It was very galling. Especially when you got caught.
He could only stay calm, wait for any small opportunity to escape, should one arise, and hope that, if all failed, and he was to die, the entry procedures for Hell had at least been rationalised since his last visit.
I’m at the mercy of a demented chain-smoker, thought Cabal. Oh, happy day.
“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” “But guns make it so much easier. Shall we go?”
“They thought that, just because they’d dodged the certainty of death, dodging the certainty of taxes somehow went by on the nod.” He snorted. “They were wrong.”
If he didn’t arrive in Katamenia on schedule with the incredibly important “Agricultural Land Remittance Discussion Papers (Third Draft)”—currently safely tucked away in his documents folder—well, it hardly bore thinking about. Unable to have the latest draft of the papers, civilisation would be at a loss to discuss the remittance of agricultural lands. The result … catastrophic.
With no idea of whether Meissner was still alive, Cabal had few qualms about wearing dead man’s shoes, but he drew the line at dead man’s knickers.
He’d allowed his concentration to slip and, in those few moments when he wasn’t being aloof and unapproachable, he’d been approached.
He considered quickly. He’d heard about this sort of thing. If his understanding was correct, he could well be in the process of being “picked up,” currently at the “small talk” stage.
He tried to speak, but his vocabulary had studied the situation and taken the evening off.
“You really do think that you’re superior to everybody else, don’t you?” “Don’t be absurd,” he answered, while trying hard to think of somebody he looked up to. There didn’t seem to be anybody.
Cabal looked at him. The expression “if looks could kill” does not begin to describe the pure corrosive abhorrence that he put into the glance. If, however, the steward had suddenly found himself transported far away and nailed, through his genitals, to the steeple of a church in the middle of a violent electrical storm, a more exact impression may be gained.
“Typical. Abso-lutely flipping typical.” He shoved his plate of disrupted fish away from him. “Oi, garkon! Give this to the cat. What’s for pudding?”
This is funny for highly specific personal reasons.
“I said it’s the reason there are so few passengers aboard. This is the only occupied passenger deck. I’m told that above us is storage, and above that is the second-class deck, but that it is entirely unoccupied. All the staterooms, you see, are full of food. Vegetables, mainly. Imagine! Tons and tons of potatoes and carrots and turnips, just above our heads!” Her eyes glittered at the prospect of so many root vegetables. Cabal sensed there was not going to be a meeting of the minds here.
Pure brute logic overruled any silly murder shenanigans by pointing out the suicide note and the locked room, and then proceeded to wave Ockham’s razor around in a threatening manner.
Cabal could not have been more horrified if she’d pulled off her face to reveal a gaping chasm of eternal night from which glistening tentacles coiled and groped. That had already happened to him once in his life, and he wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.
He almost said he could tell of times when such submerged ideations had saved his life while dealing with supernatural entities that had come from whichever blighted netherworld they called home with the express intention of swallowing his soul, eating his brains, and using his giblets for gravy. Then he decided not to, in much the same way he might decide not to say, “Incidentally, Captain, I’m a necromancer. It would be best to shoot me now.”
He wouldn’t have minded so much if he just had the faintest idea what was going on. No, that was untrue. He would have minded just as much even if he were in possession of a concise document entitled “What Is Going On.” He would probably have minded it even more, because then the motives for what was going on would have been clearly listed as bullet points, and their weak, pettifogging, infantile nature would be revealed.
He is taken into custody, put on trial, and sent to prison for a period of, allowing for good behaviour, forever. This was a poor prospect.
As the barman’s hand rose from beneath the bar, Cabal was filled with a presentiment and a strange foreboding that he hadn’t felt since the last time he’d watched the nightmare corpse city of R’lyeh rise, effulgent with the ineffable and fetid with fish, from the depths of the Pacific.
Quite apart from the necromancy, the assumed identity, the mysterious disappearance, the attempted murder, and the Mirkarvian noble after his neck, he now had another Mirkarvian noble after one or more other parts of his anatomy.
Yet he had defied expectations by going around exploring in the middle of the night and, when attacked, had defended himself successfully. There was more to Herr Meissner than met the eye, and Lady Orfilia Ninuka intended to split him open like an oyster and so discover what lay within.
He had no idea where he stood with her; their relative positions were entirely at her whim. It was all very confusing for a man who was much happier at a dissection slab than at a soirée.
Our Lady Ninuka has a hobby. Whenever she sees a man who interests her in a certain way, she isn’t happy until that man has joined her for an evening of sport.” It was obvious from Cabal’s face that he was working down a list of possible sports. The slight expression of consternation indicated that he had arrived at cricket. Leonie decided to put him out of his misery. “She’s a bike. A tart. A slut. She’ll be buried in a Y-shaped coffin. A baggage. A hussy. She’s the good time that was had by all. A wanton floozy.” She looked closely at him, but he still seemed to be stuck on cricket. “A
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There is possibly no insult so calculated to sting the English as the suggestion that they may at any time be considered foreign, as this flies in the face of the obvious truth that the whole of Creation actually belongs to the English, and they are just allowing everybody else to camp on bits of it from a national sense of noblesse oblige.
He was glad to have his soul back, but the whole “conscience” business that had come with it was very wearying. How dare this irksome inner voice torment him for doing what was necessary?
Sighing heavily, for he disliked violence generally and murder in particular, Cabal set off to commit violent murder.
Leonie Barrow looked at him with a strange expression, her pale skin blue and shadowed by the failing light, her eyes dark and bottomless. “Cabal …” she whispered. “Yes?” he replied. “How—” She paused, searching for the words. Her gaze fell, and then rose again, and she looked deep into his eyes. “How did you ever become so very fucked up?”
“There’s a café up there, where there is a police officer busily derelicting his duty—” “Hold on. There’s no such verb as to derelict.” “There is now. Would you kindly stop interrupting?
Unperturbed, he murmured to Miss Barrow, “And perhaps that’s why there’s so much wrong in the world. Calcium’s quite my favourite alkaline earth metal. It should be more highly regarded.”
Thwarted, Cabal had settled on a Senzan revolver, but at least had the mild pleasure of finding one in an equally untidy calibre—10.35 mm. His mind was usually quite pristine, but—O secret sin!—he had always taken a perverse joy in dangling decimals.
The journey was uneventful in all respects, unless one counts the business with the spy and the bandits and the Elemental Evil and the end of the world as we know it. So, no. Nothing one might call noteworthy.
Enright, by comparison, was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a very tasteful Holland & Sherry suit.
