Infernal Hordes, did he intend to do anything about it? Flying devils were sent to reconnoitre the enemy force, but these quickly returned and — somewhat crestfallen — reported that the invaders consisted of one man with a short temper and sunglasses. Intrigued, the general had decided to take the situation into his own hands, claws, and writhing thorned tentacles.
Ratuth Slabuth, a stack of shifting non-Euclidean angles topped by a horse’s skull in a stylised, ancient- Grecian helmet, looked down from a great height upon the insolent human.
“This is Hell,” he tried to explain for the third time. “Not a drop-in centre. You can’t just turn up and say, ‘Oh, I was just in the neighbourhood and thought I’d call by and have a bit of a chinwag with Lord Satan.’ It simply isn’t done.”
“No,” said the infuriating mortal. “It hasn’t
“No, you may not. Satan’s a very busy … um,
“Really?” said Cabal. “I had no idea. I thought this would be an uncommon occurrence, unique even, but you seem to imply that it happens all the time. Fair enough.”
Ratuth was just thinking how well he’d handled things when, suddenly, Cabal pointed directly at him. “I call you liar!” he spat. “I call you duplicitous, mendacious, and thoroughly amateur at both enterprises.”
“What?” shrieked the demon general. “WHAT? You, a mere mortal, dare to call me thus?” The eldritch angles unfolded, the darkness about him deepened as he rose like some dreadful bird of prey. “I shall destroy you! I shall rend the very flesh from your skeleton, hollow your long bones, and play your funeral lament upon them! For I am Ratuth Slabuth! Dark General of the Infernal Hordes! Father of Desolation! Despoiler of Innocence! Look upon me, mortal, and know thy doom!”
Cabal, he noticed through his rage, looked calm. Worryingly so.
“ ‘Ratuth Slabuth,’ eh?” said Cabal. “You wouldn’t happen to have started your career as Ragtag Slyboots, Despoiler of Milk and Entangler of Shoelaces, would you?”
The effect was electric. Ratuth Slabuth folded up like an especially large deck of cards in the blink of an eye until he was the same height as Cabal.
“How did you know that?” he asked quickly.
“I’m a necromancer. You’d be surprised at the sources we dig up. Now, then, do I get my audience with Satan or do I spread rumours about a certain diabolic general’s personal history? Which is it to be?”
Johannes Cabal. Johannes Cabal. I’m sure I know that name.”
Lord Satan was actually pleased to have something to distract him from the dull day-to-day administration of the Eternally Damned in all their massed homogeneity. He’d simply waved an embarrassed and apologetic Ratuth Slabuth behind his throne and settled down to be amused.
The throne was only a throne by dint of its vast scale; otherwise, it was simply a big stone chair on the end of a rocky peninsula that extended into the centre of a lake of boiling lava. All in all, it was less of an audience and more of a fireside chat.
Satan sat comfortably on the unyielding basalt throne, massive and urbane. All things to all people, he looked exactly as you’d imagine.
“Oh, of course. The necromancer. Now I recall. You have a contract with me, I think. Yes?” He gestured, and a demonic secretary appeared in his colossal hand. “Nip over to Contracts and pull whatever we’ve got on Johannes Cabal, please.” The demon made a note on a yellow pad before soaring into the sulphurous air and out of sight.
“Yes,” replied Cabal. “You have my soul. I’d like it back.”
Ratuth Slabuth choked down a laugh. Cabal gave him a milk-curdling look and continued.
“I traded my soul over to you some years ago. That was a mistake — its absence is proving an intolerable burden. Therefore, I should like it back.”
Ratuth Slabuth was making idiotic muffled guffawing noises. Satan quelled him with a glance before addressing Cabal.
“Now, you see, Johannes, we have a little bit of a problem there.” The secretary landed on Satan’s casually opened hand and passed him a roll of parchment before ceasing to exist. Satan unrolled it between his fingers and read it as he spoke. “You see, as a rule of thumb, I don’t give souls back. It might set a precedent. These things do. This” — he indicated the parchment with the wave of a finger tipped with a nail the size of a very well-manicured tombstone — “is a perfectly standard contract with the exception of a proviso about you giving up your soul immediately rather than my having to wait until you’re dead or after a set period, the Faust clause, that sort of thing. My notes indicate that was your idea.”
“I believed my soul was irrelevant to my researches, so I determined to see what empirical differences there were between the soulful and the soulless, which is to say, me. I was wrong to believe in its irrelevancy. The interference caused by its absence, I can no longer countenance.”
Ratuth Slabuth leaned forward, interested. “Interference?” he asked. “What sort of interference?”
“Not to be obtuse, your interference,” replied Cabal, pointing at Satan.
Satan tapped his chest in surprise. “My interference?”
“Constant interruptions. Stupid games. Interference. You know perfectly well what I mean.”
For a moment Satan didn’t seem to. Then the great brow cleared and he nodded. “Your soullessness must be attracting avatars of mine. Fancy that.”
Cabal, apparently, did not fancy that at all. “Especially an irritating little man with a big beard. But it goes further than that. The spiritual vacuum within me is actually causing freak results in my experiments. I cannot perform the same procedure twice in full confidence that I will see the same results. I’ve wasted years trying to locate the problem. Now that I have, I’m here to rectify things.”
It was the truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth.
As a scientist, Cabal preferred to work in scientific absolutes wherever possible. The lack of a soul, however, was a quantifiable hindrance in as much as it lent his researches a variable percentile of veracity and therefore rendered them 100 per cent useless. This was a scientist’s cavil, a good rational reason. Johannes Cabal had no trouble accepting it and expressing it.
But there was something else. Something deeper and very, very well hidden. Given Satan’s legendary ability to worm out secrets, Cabal could not afford to give him the faintest whiff of this other truth, for he knew Satan would worry at it like a dog with a rag. Cabal didn’t intend to let that happen; it was his business, and his alone. So he focussed on the scientific and the quantifiable and did not allow even a tremor of this other, this greater truth into his voice.
Satan was studying the contract. “You sold your soul to gain an insight into necromancy in the first place. If I were to give you your soul back, I would want that in return. That would invalidate the whole scheme, perhaps?”
“I need that knowledge,” said Cabal. “That is non-negotiable.”
Satan smiled. “That’s that, then. You can’t eat your cake and have it, too, Johannes. Sorry and all that.”
For a long minute Cabal glared at Satan. Satan continued to smile, twiddled his thumbs, and awaited developments. He wasn’t disappointed.
“I’ll … ” Cabal paused. It was as if he were dealing with an alien concept. “I’ll…” He coughed. “I’ll make you … a … wager.” He stopped, uncertain if he’d used the right term. “I believe that you have a reputation for accepting … wagers. I should like to make one.”
Satan waited, but there was no further clarification. Finally, he leaned forward and said, “Fine. Wagers, yes, that’s good. I like them. What’s your wager?” Cabal was clearly stumped. “Not something you’ve ever done before, hmm? Never mind, shall I suggest one?”
He allowed Cabal’s continued silence to become slightly embarrassing before taking it for assent. “Now, as I’ve already said, I can’t start giving souls back willy-nilly or else I’ll never hear the end of it. There’d be a queue from here to Tartarus of ne’er-do-wells whinging and whining and wringing their hands, and I get enough of that at the best of times. So you must appreciate that it can’t be anything easy.
