Johannes Cabal the Detective

their kindred. It was an impossible situation and should never have been given to an aeroship flotilla to resolve. A case for the infantry. Von Falks should have deployed his marines to prove as much and then reported it to his superiors. As we all know, he did not. It was regrettable.”

“Regrettable?” spat Zoruk, but DeGarre hadn’t finished.

“The Destrier and her sisters were built to fight a good war, by the rules of war, to the honour of war. Commodore Von Falks sullied those rules, his family, and, to my chagrin, the reputation of my ships. Direct your ire elsewhere, monsieur. It is wasted here.” He reached for his wineglass and took a calm sip amidst a light patter of applause from other passengers who preferred that war crimes not be discussed at dinner. Zoruk glared at him, picked up his cutlery, and made as if to start eating again but, after a moment’s wavering, slammed them onto his plate, stood up, and walked out with less dignity than he supposed. Cabal watched him go with approval: anything that distracted attention away from, say, a fugitive necromancer travelling abroad under the alias of a comatose civil servant, was to be encouraged.

“Stone the crows, what a berk,” observed Cacon. “Things were different when I was a boy. Respect for your elders, oh yes. Always the same, though, isn’t it? When you’re young, you had to show respect for your elders or you’d get a right lathering. Now I am an elder, you have to treat the youth of today with kid gloves or they’ll give you a right lathering. Doesn’t matter which side of the generation gap I’m on, it’s the wrong side.” He breathed a deep breath so that he could sigh a deep sigh. “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?”

* * *

Pudding, however, still lay a little way off into the future. The main course came next, steak cooked in the Mirkarvian fashion — so rare as to be just this side of stationary. Miss Barrow looked at her plate as red juices oozed from the flesh. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked Cabal in an aside. “Eat it or resuscitate it?”

“Thank your stars that you asked for it well done,” he replied. He’d asked for his to be cooked medium rare, which in Mirkarvian cuisine meant it had been shown a picture of an oven for a moment and then served. A very brief moment, mind.

As his fellow diners had their full attention on their plates as they laboriously sawed away at their meals — less fine dining, more like a bayonet charge — Cabal took the opportunity to study them in greater detail. Sitting on the captain’s left was a young woman, expensively yet, unusually for the Mirkarvian aesthetic, tastefully dressed in burgundy silks and velvet. This, it transpired, was the Lady Ninuka, yet another of Mirkarvia’s serried ranks of nobles. Apparently she was quite senior, however, based on her place at table and Schten’s great and careful civility towards her. For her part, she was polite but disengaged. The businessman with the major breakthrough in bar snacks, a Herr Harlmann, was on her left, and had talked through her to Schten. She had disregarded him as easily as she might a small fly — a notable feat, in particular when Harlmann had gone on to the intricacies of manufacture.

In her early twenties, and beautiful in an obvious “flawless complexion, perfect bone structure, glistering eyes of russet brown, wine-dark hair” sort of way, there was a slight downturn at the edges of her mouth that implied a dissatisfaction with life. It left her with a mild pout, but Cabal doubted there was much of the child left in her. Her gaze ranged around the table, and he found himself the subject of it more than once, her eyes switching between him and Miss Barrow, as if gauging the nature of their relationship, before moving on. When her eyes met his, there was no sudden looking away, or even glances laden with meaning. She looked dispassionately into his eyes, as she might those of a statue or an animal at the zoo. He noticed that she also looked occasionally at the door through which Gabriel Zoruk — that singularly ineffectual rabble-rouser — had left earlier, as if expecting him to return. That he didn’t seemed not to concern her greatly.

To Cabal’s side, Miss Barrow took a rest from her knife work. “This isn’t a meal,” she muttered to him, “it’s a cow’s postmortem. I think I’ll stick with the potatoes and carrots.” She waved a steward over and asked for some more vegetables.

The woman on the far side of Cacon overheard her, and said, “Ah, well, that’s one thing we won’t be short of on this voyage, my dear,” and gave a curious laugh: Muh’heh! The muh was low and slightly distressed, as if she were expressing illness, but the ’heh! was higher and girlish. The overall effect was thus: “Muh, I don’t feel well … Heh! Fooled you!”

Cabal turned to look at the woman, if only from curiosity at what sort of creature would produce such a sound. She was approximately forty, he gauged, and exhibited that interesting combination of dour propriety overlaying a coltishness inappropriate, for a lady of her age, that was a peculiarity distinctive to women who have been to an English public school. Such schools begin the process of inculcating eccentricity right from the moment it is understood that English public schools are not meant for the public; the name is not merely inaccurate, it is actively misleading. Any other country would call these schools “private,” but where’s the fun in that? She wore a dress that would be considered frumpy by most grandparents, a brown affair that carried a palpable air of spinsterhood. Her hair was very nearly the same shade, arranged in harsh shingles about a sharp pale face. She had made an attempt at makeup, but the rouge sat on her cheeks like red paint on a white-wall.

“Why so?” he asked.

“You don’t know?” butted in Cacon, whose tales of military ferocity had gained some veracity in light of the horrible wounds he was inflicting on his food. “Blimey, mate, ’ave you been living under a rock? This is a mission of mercy we’re on ’ere.”

Cabal said nothing, but his expression indicated that he had seen more likely angels than Cacon.

“The Katamenian famine, Herr Meissner,” supplied Miss Barrow. “The crop failure?”

Cabal may have had many faults, but difficulty in rapidly absorbing, reviewing, and extrapolating from new data was not among them. “Of course,” he said nonchalantly. “My ministry has been working towards logistical relief programmes, but I was not aware this ship was involved.”

“It’s why there are so few passengers aboard this vessel, sir,” added the woman with the aggravating laugh. “Herr … Meissner, was it?”

Cacon paused, with a chunk of meat speared alongside a fragment of boiled new potato on his fork hovering before his open mouth. It was not a pleasing tableau vivant. “Miss Ambersleigh, this is Herr Meissner of the Mirkarvian civil service. Herr Meissner, Miss Ambersleigh, ’er ladyship’s companion.” It looked as though he were introducing the meat and potato to each other. As an afterthought, he leaned slightly towards Cabal, and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “She’s English.” This bombshell delivered, and etiquette satisfied, he dumped the food into his mouth with all the delicacy of a steam engine’s fireman shovelling coal into the firebox. Cabal turned his attention towards Miss Ambersleigh quickly, that he might spare himself the sight of Cacon chewing.

“I’m sorry — you were saying, Miss Ambersleigh?” he prompted her.

“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. At least, it explained Frau Roborovski’s obscure reference to exploding potatoes.

“So, only the first-class deck is occupied? And the crew deck, of course.”

Harlmann raised an interrogative hand. “I say, the crew deck’s at the top, isn’t it? Along with engineering and suchlike? Doesn’t that make the old bird a bit … top-heavy?”

Schten had obviously fielded questions like this before. He had his glass to his lips, however, and by the time he could lower it DeGarre had leapt into the breach.

“Yes, monsieur, it does make the vessel top-heavy, but you see, that is the intention. It is an easy error to fall into — that an aeroship is much like a nautical ship, and in many respects, especially in how they are run, that is true.” He cupped his hand. “An aeroship does not float in a sea of air, however.” He twisted his wrist so that his fingers dangled downwards. “It hangs, like a chandelier in the heavens. Thus, may the Good Lord forfend, should any of the levitators fail, then it may lean over a little. If they were at the bottom and the same thing happened …” He shrugged. “It would fall over. Pouf!”

Cabal did not recall ever having heard an apocalyptic disaster resulting in death and horror characterised as