Johannes Cabal the Detective

feeling a little gyromantic in itself — refocussed on the reflections in the glass, and, just for a moment, saw a face he knew to be dead. His heart jolted. He took a sharp breath, looked again, and saw he was mistaken, but that the truth was just as shocking. Cabal was not a man given to gasping, usually, and he did not do so again. Standing at his right shoulder, her gaze balefully meeting his, was Leonie Barrow.

It can be said of a necromancer that, given his profession, there are few people he can ever truly be sure of never seeing again, even the ones he buries in shallow graves in the woods. Johannes Cabal, however, could have said in any second up to this that the last person he expected to see aboard the Princess Hortense was Leonie Barrow, a woman he’d last seen many months ago, and a considerable number of international borders away.

Cabal had on that occasion held stewardship of a diabolical carnival, committed to wandering the railway network for a year, scooping up the souls of the disaffected along the way. It was all done at the whim of a bored and capricious Satan, who had made a wager with Cabal: Cabal’s own soul would be returned to him on receipt of a hundred others, with one year in which to do so and the carnival to help him bring in the harvest.

He had loathed that year, even though he really had only himself to blame. It had been a ramshackle period of travel, perfunctory damnations, and tawdry knickknacks during which he had experienced much and enjoyed little. At the time, he thought the end had justified the means, but — a final, bitter irony on top of a year full of them — the end had made him question those means, making his small victory seem petty and ignoble.

He had met Miss Barrow and her father towards the end of the year, when things had become unexpectedly desperate. Mr. Frank Barrow, a retired policeman and redoubtable nuisance, had descended upon Cabal like Nemesis, but in the end it was Leonie Barrow who had proved the cleverer foe. Considered as a whole, it had not been a happy meeting, and they had not parted on the best of terms. In fact, if Miss Barrow had murdered him on that occasion, the prosecution would have had a hard time finding a jury to hang her.

Cabal turned to face her, needing the proof of direct sight. She was still tall, still crowned with the tawny blond hair that matched her name so well, still very striking in a pre-Raphaelite sort of way, and, judging by her expression, still deeply pissed off with him. He tried to speak, but his vocabulary had studied the situation and taken the evening off. “Accch,” he grated slowly, for once speechless. His thumb twitched involuntarily and the cup of his glass snapped off, dumping the remains of the champagne at their feet.

A steward was at his side in an instant, mopping up and apologising for the inferior quality of the glasses; the company would certainly complain to the manufacturers for their shoddiness. “Can I get you another drink, Herr Meissner?” he asked as he gathered up the remains of the glass.

Meissner? mouthed Miss Barrow at Cabal. He barely responded, his mind finally getting up to whirring pace as the frost of surprise thawed. If she denounced him, the ship would turn right around and take him back to the waiting arms of the Count Marechal. He couldn’t let that happen. But he couldn’t see a way around it, either. He calculated possible schemes. Plan A consisted of punching her in the stomach and heaving her through the window. It was direct and effective, but there were certain practical drawbacks that mitigated against its use. He didn’t have a Plan B.

“Fraulein Barrow, perhaps you would like a freshener?” said the steward, indicating her glass.

“No, thank you,” she replied, smiling for his benefit. “I’m replete for the moment. I’m sure if I need any more Herr Meissner will be kind enough …?” This last directed at Cabal, who almost missed it.

“Of course, Fraulein, it would be my privilege,” he replied, nodding and clicking his heels, as appeared to be de rigueur.

“A military man, sir?” said the steward, impressed.

Cabal blinked. He couldn’t wipe his nose around here without committing some sort of social gaff or telegraphing the wrong thing. “Not really,” he prevaricated. “I was at the academy in my youth, but my horse — ” What do horses do that is bad for their riders? he wondered. “Fell on me.” That sounded more than a good enough reason for a medical discharge. He touched the imaginary shoulder wound the horse had caused and accidentally prodded the sabre cut that Marechal had left in him. His unfeigned grimace of pain seemed to do the trick. The steward nodded sympathetically and moved on.

Leonie Barrow watched Cabal as he watched the steward go. He was leaning back with studied nonchalance as he let his gaze wander around the room, but she knew that he simply didn’t want anybody else walking up behind him unexpectedly, especially when they started talking about what she knew they had to talk about. She waited. Finally, Cabal found words.

“Why didn’t you denounce me?” he asked, not looking at her.

She smiled, as if making small talk, but her voice was cold. “Because they’d have taken you back to Krenz and strung you up. That’s if they didn’t throw you overboard here and now. Your breed isn’t popular among the Mirkarvians.” His gaze slid to look at her. “Or anywhere,” she added with a certain emphasis.

Cabal narrowed his eyes, nettled. “So you’re preserving my life for humanitarian reasons. How very kind of you. I feel redeemed already.” She still had the power to send him to his death but, somehow, that was preferable to being patronised.

“Save your sarcasm, Cabal. When we reach Senza, I’ll see you put under arrest. They don’t have capital punishment for the likes of you. It will be life imprisonment, but that’s no more than you deserve.” She spoke with a cold certainty.

Cabal wished he had a drink, just to give his hands something to do. Currently, they were keen on carrying out Plan A, and damn the consequences. “You’re your father’s daughter,” Cabal said finally. “Speaking of whom, how is he?”

“As well as can be expected after what you put us through.”

“I don’t suppose your opinion of me would be moderated at all if — ”

“No.”

“If I told you I was hardly a free agent.” He looked at her. “No, I don’t suppose it would. Not in your little world of moral certainties.”

“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.

They stood in awkward silence for a few moments. “So,” said Cabal, fractionally less irritated by the presence of words than by their absence. “What brought you to a pit like Mirkarvia?”

“My degree,” replied Miss Barrow, grudgingly. She volunteered no more.

“Your degree? What sort of degree, precisely?”

“Criminal psychology,” she replied, and looked squarely at him.

Cabal sighed. “You really are your father’s daughter. What is your intended career? A plodding police officer, or the proprietor of an asylum for the criminally insane? I’d suggest you plump for the latter; the hours are better.”

In reply, she simply tilted her head and looked more keenly at him. It was a look that, he realised, closely mirrored his own when a likely corpse happened his way. Usually under a tarpaulin on the back of a cart at three in the morning.

“Tchah,” he tutted. “You think I’m a criminal, don’t you? One of your grubby little perpetrators from a troubled family background who commits outrages because a cousin told him horses have five legs when he was an infant and it scarred him for life. Is that it?”

“You are a criminal, Cabal. But there’s nothing common or garden about you. Do you know I decided on taking this degree in the first place after meeting you?”

Cabal frowned. “If you’re trying to endear yourself to me, you’ve chosen an odd way of setting about it.”

“Your behaviour was criminal, but your motivation … I didn’t understand your motivation at all. Most of your colleagues — ”

“I don’t have colleagues. It is not a profession that encourages union activity or glee clubs.”

“ — are a bunch of shallow megalomaniacs. They’re easy — I can spot a power-crazy, corpse-raising nutcase — ”

“Ah, now you’re trying to lose me with jargon.”

“Stop interrupting me. I can spot one of those pathetic creatures at ten paces.”

“You must have met dozens,” muttered Cabal.

“I’ve met a couple,” she said. Cabal looked at her with surprise. Having secured his attention for the moment,