“Not frightened, Fraulein. More … discomforted.” He took a moment to compose himself. “Now, are you really all that blase about somebody trying to kill me?”
She looked at him seriously. “Of course not. Tell me what happened.” She ate her breakfast as Cabal concisely related the events of the previous night. When he had finished, and was taking the opportunity to dispatch the remainder of his steak, Leonie drank her tea and considered. “There are two possibilities, I suppose. The misarranged carpet really does have something to do with DeGarre’s death. Or — ” She studied him carefully before proceeding. “Or an enemy of yours has followed you onto the ship or has recognised you.”
Cabal stopped sawing up his last bit of meat. “You’re not serious?”
“You must have dozens of enemies — ” She almost said his name, but restrained herself in time. “Herr Meissner. Importantly, you probably don’t even know a few of them on sight.”
“Explain.”
“You leave a trail of destruction through people’s lives.” Cabal started to argue, but she talked through him. “Even if the ones you affect directly either will not or cannot come after you, that still leaves family and friends. You provoke hatred and revenge. You know it.”
Cabal hadn’t really thought about it in those terms, but he could see the truth in her words. He never went out of his way to damage people’s lives — not except in some very deliberate cases, anyway — but people would insist on getting in the way. Now he considered it more carefully, he began to appreciate just why quite so many bullets, knives, and the occasional crossbow quarrel had whistled past his frantically dodging head down the years.
“Rufus Maleficarus,” he said in quiet contemplation.
“What about him?” Leonie had heard the name before: a notorious warlock who had crossed swords with Cabal on at least one occasion to her knowledge. “I thought he was dead?”
“He is. I killed him thoroughly. That was the second time I met him, though. The first time, it wasn’t just happenstance. He blamed me for what happened to his father.”
“Was he justified in that?”
“Yes. Yes, he was. But, really, his father was a monster. I had no choice.”
“With your history, I really don’t think you’re in any position to call anybody else a monster,” she said sharply.
Cabal’s expression was unreadable. “No, I am being entirely literal, in the non-metaphorical, purest dictionary sense of the word. His father was a
The brief spark of warmth they had struck in the earlier part of their conversation was entirely dead now. The air between them was cold enough to condense dew.
“No,” he said finally. “It has to be something to do with DeGarre’s death.” Leonie noticed that he’d dropped the “disappearance and probable-death formula.” “If it was somebody I had … upset in the past for whatever reason, why would they go to all the trouble of sneaking after me, gloves at the ready, on the small chance that I would find a hatch in the ship’s underside, open it, and then obligingly hang halfway out of it?”
“Why weren’t they armed, you mean?”
“Not even that. You yourself, Miss Barrow, have already threatened me with exactly the same weapon that anybody with the slightest whiff of intelligence would use.” He looked around to confirm that there were no prying eyes or ears before leaning forward and whispering, “You know who I am.”
Leonie Barrow hated to admit it, but Cabal’s point was solid. Unless he was being stalked by somebody who was absolutely determined to kill him with his or her own hands, the safest and surest way of seeing him die was simply to use the Mirkarvian state as the instrument of death. They would simply denounce Cabal to the captain, and that would be that. The alternative — that this putative revenger wanted to kill Cabal him-or herself — presupposed that somebody who was organised enough to locate and then shadow Cabal onto the
The form “him or her” made her think of Cabal’s story of his narrow escape. “In the conduit, this person who tried to kill you, was it definitely a man?”
Cabal waited a moment while a steward came over and cleared away their plates. He poured himself another coffee. “I’ve wondered about that myself. I couldn’t see, and the thick leather gloves meant I don’t even know what kind of fingers my attacker had. When they cried out, it was high, but I’ve heard men in great pain sound quite literally like a child, so that proves little.”
“I’m not even going to ask how you have heard such sounds, Herr Meissner.”
“No? You know so little of the world. You should get out more, Miss Barrow.”
Leonie made an offhand gesture that took in the aeroship. “I would say this is fairly ‘out.’ Your definition probably involves more time spent in graveyards.”
Cabal reined in his habitual desire to argue. He had an unpleasant mental image of things getting so heated that Miss Barrow would end up standing on the table, pointing at him, and screaming “Necromancer!” repeatedly. Instead, he raised his hand slightly in a conciliatory gesture. “
The change of tack caught Leonie by surprise. “A lamp? I thought you’d sat here to avoid having to look at one of the horrible things. It’s the only table without one.”
“No. There’s one over there without one as well.” He gestured carelessly over his shoulder without looking, and she saw that he was indeed right; another table on the far side of the room was also lampless. “I sat here because it was less cluttered. I wonder — ” He lifted the plate in the middle of the table on which lay the butter dish and some small pots of preserve. Beneath it was a small neat hole in the tablecloth, its edge hemmed to avoid fraying. “It’s meant to have a lamp. That’s where it would be screwed into place and the electrical cable connected.”
Leonie watched his investigation with an impatient frown. “So? What do the table lamps have to do with anything?”
“Not the table lamps themselves. It’s the absence of two table lamps. Probably not relevant.” He said this with an air of deep distraction.
Leonie Barrow knew enough about real criminal investigations to know full well that cases rarely if ever hinged on an encyclopedic knowledge of tobacco ash or the curious incident of the butler’s allergy to spinach. Cabal’s musings seemed self-indulgent and immaterial, and she belatedly realised that he wasn’t truly talking to her at all. She was merely a sounding board for him to reflect his own ideas back to himself in a slightly different light. Her irritation showed in her voice. “To bring your attention back to the matter at hand, are you going to report the attack on you last night?”
Cabal blinked slightly, startled out of his reverie. “I haven’t made up my mind about that yet. I shouldn’t draw attention to myself.”
“I think the time for that is passed. Let’s just say that the captain’s own enquiries turn up whoever attacked you and, under interrogation, they mention they’d try to throw you out of the ship in your dressing gown and slippers? The captain comes to you and asks the obvious question: ‘Why didn’t you tell me that somebody tried to kill you, Herr Meissner?’ What would you say? You didn’t want any fuss?”
Cabal looked sourly at her, but he couldn’t refute her argument. His first instinct was always to keep his business to himself, not least because his business frequently carried a death sentence. “That
“What will you tell him?”
“The truth. Mostly.”
Captain Schten listened with the expression of a man who goes into a striptease parlour and finds himself attending a lecture on quantum mechanics, expectation giving way to bafflement. He had particular problems with Herr Meissner’s motives for wishing to take up a section of the corridor’s carpeting.
“You excavated beneath the carpet because you had a dream that told you to?”
“No. The dream was just my subconscious mind’s way of drawing attention to something I’d seen without
