that level.
“Good. Splendid.” Satan tossed the large file at Cabal, who avoided it concussing him only with difficulty. “There’s your carnival, there’s your budget.” He squeezed his hand shut until his nails drove into the flesh. A single drop of black blood fell to the floor and formed into a glistening, gelid sphere about the size of a medicine ball. “And there’s your year.” He snapped the fingers of his other hand and an hourglass appeared. He turned it and placed it in front of Cabal. “Enjoy it in good health. Now shoo. You bore me.”
“Hold on,” said Cabal, uncertainty turning to suspicion. He pointed at the sphere. “What do you mean, ‘budget’?”
“The Carnival of Discord never became operational. All the materials were allocated, but it was never manned. It’s all in the file. That ball of blood is my diabolical influence and power. Every time you call upon it, the ball will diminish. Use it wisely, Johannes Cabal. Now” — he spoke with finality — “this audience is at an end.”
He snapped his fingers again and, abruptly, Cabal was elsewhere.
CHAPTER 2
in which Cabal practices his map-reading and meets an old acquaintance
The Flatlands rolled as far as the eye could see in any direction — remarkably flat, remarkably boring, and not nearly high enough above sea level for comfort. The fields all looked like marshes waiting to happen; in some cases, the wait was over. Dilapidated wooden fences made a poor job of delineating one unhealthy-looking patch of land from the next. Stone walls didn’t last here; they sank. In three directions it was hard to see where the grey land merged into the grey sky. In the fourth, a long earthwork ran until it faded into the distance.
A dreary, depressing place, and Cabal was very surprised suddenly to be in the middle of it. He spent an undignified few moments trying to get over the fact that he was no longer in Hell, wheeling on the spot like somebody who has walked into the wrong toilets. When he finally deduced that he had been unceremoniously translocated, he marked the revelation with a filthy curse in a language that had been dead eight thousand years, so managing to be amazingly erudite and amazingly uncouth in the selfsame instant.
Cabal put down his gladstone bag, beat the last few whiffs of sulphurous smoke out of his clothes with his hat, and opened the file. Several sheets down, he found a map of the area that he withdrew before reclosing the file. He took a moment to orientate himself. Without a compass or a visible sun to work with, a map of the Flatlands tended to be like one of those pictures which look like something completely different when you turn them upside down. In this case, it looked really rather similar no matter which way you turned it.
He found a few lanes that ran straight until it seemed that whoever built them had realised there was no point in pretending that anyone was ever going to travel them. These lanes had been hastily finished with odd little curlicues, as if that had been the intention all along. Only the earthwork stood out in that tedious landscape, but, unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be on the map. Finally, after some exasperated and faintly histrionic sighing, Cabal noticed a faint dotted line on the map labelled “Route of proposed spur line.” The red cross that he assumed was his destination lay on the line, but the line had been so slight, he simply hadn’t seen it.
That must be it, he concluded. It was an old map, and the spur line had been built. The earthwork was a raised railway bed. Simple. Pleased with his deduction, he turned to pick up his bag and found that he was no longer alone.
The two men whom he’d caught in a pantomime of stealth were of a disreputable appearance. There was a sense that if you opened an illustrated dictionary and looked up “disreputable” there would be a picture of one or the other of them. Possibly both. After all, if there was some minor detail of reprehensible untrustworthiness that couldn’t be found in one of them, it was certain to be present in his partner. One was short and greasy. The other was taller, and looked like his mother had been scared — scared quite badly — by a scabby vulture. They grinned, and Cabal almost sighed with the pathetic predictability of it all. Oh well. Best to get it over with.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” he said with no hint of irony.
“Oh, he called us ‘gennlemen,’ Dennis, didja ’ear ’im?” said the short one.
“Hur-hur. ‘Gennlemen.’ Hur,” answered the tall one, Dennis, who seemed to be the straight man.
“Tha’s very perlite, innit? Very perlite indeed. Ho, yus. Spoke jus’ like a gennleman.”
“‘Gennleman,’ hur-hur. Yus, Denzil. Verr perlite.” Dennis nodded and showed the poor state of his dentition.
Cabal was getting irritated. He was on a tight schedule and just wished they’d hurry up and mug him.
“Werl,” said Denzil, the brains of the operation, “we wus wondering if you’d paid the toll, see?”
“Of course,” said Cabal, who spoke Bare-Faced Liar like a native when the situation called for it. “I paid at the toll gate.”
Dennis and Denzil looked nonplussed. They’d spent weeks practising this criminal act; diagrams on blackboards, little dioramas with figures representing them and their potential victim — a tin Sioux Indian, a small bear with a pair of cymbals, and a llama respectively. Somehow this particular eventuality had never been covered.
“There b’aint be no toll gate,” muttered Denzil.
“No? Then there can’t be any toll,” said Cabal with an easy irrationality that ran against the grain of his brutally rational mind. He knew he’d regret it in the morning, but he just wanted to get this whole situation over and done with as quickly as possible.
Dennis was shaking his head slowly as he ran through the contingency plans. They’d never made any, so it didn’t take very long. They had considered making some, but, then, they’d also considered getting drunk at the same time. If they had ever actually come up with a contingency plan — and there is no evidence that they did — they had forgotten it again somewhere around the tenth pint. It had been no great loss: they had never needed a Plan B before. Indeed, they had never needed a Plan A before, dependent as it was upon actually finding somebody to rob amongst the dreary and seldom-travelled lanes of the Flatlands. With the unexpected discovery of an actual viable victim, the gaping holes in the scheme were quickly becoming apparent.
Dennis shook his head again, but when his cognitive process halfheartedly kicked in, the sensation of thinking was like worms in a jam jar, and he wished it would stop. Meanwhile, the incisive wit of Denzil had come to the rescue.
“I don’t care if there b’aint be no toll. We’re robbin’ you anyway.” He drew a short, rusty blade and elbowed Dennis until he drew his. Now they were on solid ground. They’d killed before and, by some miracle, had got away with it. If this thin streak of piss didn’t stump up the cash right this minute, they’d be taking their chances with the gallows again, and the devil could take the consequences. Cabal shrugged.
“I don’t have any money,” he said truthfully.
Denzil pointed at the bag. “What’s in there, then?”
There comes a time when the thin skein of possibilities that suspends us above the unknown stretches and tears in places. For Dennis and Denzil, that moment was now. The skein grew thinner and more transparent as Cabal reached down and picked up his bag.
“Nothing that you could want. I’m a scientist. This contains my equipment.”
“A scientiss?” moaned Dennis. He put his hand on Denzil’s shoulder. “He woan have no money. C’mon, Denzil. Less go.”
The skein thickened and started to knit itself back. Denzil, however, had decided that he really didn’t like Cabal. Even if Cabal had nothing that they wanted, Denzil was damn sure that he was going to take it anyway. He angrily shook Dennis’s hand from his shoulder.
“No, I want whatever you’ve got, you milk-faced bugger. Open the bloody bag before I cut ya.” The skein grew thin as a bubble, tight as a drumskin. Cabal pursed his lips and opened the bag. The skein tore from side to side. Although Dennis and Denzil hadn’t been fully acquainted with the facts yet, they were doomed men.
Cabal reached in and drew out a human skull. Denzil and Dennis took a step back. Cabal wondered for a moment how he was going to explain concisely why he was carrying a bank clerk’s skull and decided not to.
“This is a
