perceiving its significance.”
“A square of carpet?”
“A misaligned square of carpet. Yes. Which had not been so misaligned earlier in the evening when I walked by.”
The captain pursued his point with the determination of a man after the last pea on his plate. “So you
“Yes, but not consciously. Captain, I have a problematical relationship with the inner workings of my mind. Why, I could tell you — ” He almost said he could tell of times when such submerged ideations had saved his life while dealing with supernatural entities that had come from whichever blighted netherworld they called home with the express intention of swallowing his soul, eating his brains, and using his giblets for gravy. Then he decided not to, in much the same way he might decide not to say, “Incidentally, Captain, I’m a necromancer. It would be best to shoot me now.”
Instead, he said, “I could tell you of the silliest things that lead to useful concepts, like displacement … vulcanization …” He tried to think of a third thing, and failed. “Jam. But this is all digression. The important point is that I knew the carpet had been interfered with, and I investigated.”
“And somebody tried to throw you out. Yes, I understood that part. You took a terrible risk, Herr Meissner.”
“How was I to know somebody was going to kill me?” protested Cabal. “It was hardly the most obvious course of events.”
“I’m not talking about some phantom assailant, sir. I am talking about how ill-advised it is to go wandering around the bowels of a great machine of which you know nothing. You could have been incinerated, or electrocuted, or crushed. Worse yet, you might have interfered with the operation of this vessel and brought it crashing down! Did you ever pause to consider that?”
Cabal had not, and inwardly rebuked himself. He wasn’t about to let the reference to a “phantom assailant” go unchallenged, though.
“Such catastrophic scenarios aside, Captain, I repeat: somebody tried to kill me. I did not imagine that.”
“So you said, and they just vanished. Hardly the actions of a determined attacker.”
“Only after I stabbed them!” There was sudden silence. Cabal searched the captain’s face. “I
“You did not.” The captain looked suspiciously at Cabal. “How came you to be wandering the corridors in the early hours in your nightwear and carrying a knife, sir?”
“I needed something to lift the corner of the carpet square. I had a pocketknife in my luggage, and went back for it. I do not habitually go to bed armed, if that is what you are implying.”
The captain didn’t seem mollified by this explanation, but he let it pass. “So this individual is injured, yes?”
“In the wrist. It was all I could reach.”
The captain seemed satisfied for the first time. He was a practical man and — while talk of hallucinatory tesseracts and shadowy assassins might irk him — a wound was altogether more concrete an entity. “Finally! Some real evidence. Very well, Herr Meissner. I shall start questioning every single person aboard ship, both passengers and crew, with the specific aim of finding a wounded wrist. Then we shall see.”
Cabal was caught between conflicting emotions. On the one hand, he was pleased that his attacker would soon be identified. On the other, he was being drawn into official scrutiny too close for comfort. He would have to arrange jumping ship in Senza to a nicety when the time came. Previously, he had only had to worry about the tenacious Miss Barrow handing him over to the Senzan authorities. An awkward bit of evasion would have been necessary, but nothing that he felt he couldn’t handle. Now he had Schten to worry about, too. This was getting complicated, and complications could get him killed.
In a curious way, it was perhaps fortunate that there had been a probable murder and an attempted murder aboard (Cabal’s nocturnal adventure soon became common currency), or the trip would have been stunningly dull. Low cloud choked the valleys below, and the
Well, not quite anybody. Cabal himself was a topic of conversation already, based on what little was known about the previous night, so when he came in he was fastened upon to add meat to the thin stew of rumour. The Roborovskis were first out of the slips; specifically Frau Roborovski, her reluctant husband pulled along in her wake.
“Herr Meissner! You must tell us everything!” she demanded as soon as they’d finished the dance of courteous rising to one’s feet and offering a seat. She then sat in silence, gazing owlishly at him with an air of attentive anticipation, like somebody who once came across the word
Cabal wasn’t inclined to for a variety of reasons, the least of which was that he felt sure Captain Schten would not appreciate the detail of his attacker’s incriminating wound becoming public knowledge. Instead, he limited himself to saying that he had noticed something amiss with the carpet and, investigating, had discovered the conduit, opened the ventral hatch, and then been thrown out by somebody. It bored him to have to retell it, but it was almost worth the effort simply for the way Frau Roborovski went pale and seemed likely to faint when he got to the murder attempt itself.
“Dangling by one hand!” she managed when her attack of the vapours had attenuated slightly.
“Yes,” replied Cabal. And then, for sheer devilment, added, “Largely naked.”
He had been expecting her to faint outright, or rush off in horror, or do almost anything except what she did do, which was to widen her eyes a little further still and look at him in such a way that he suddenly realised she was imagining it in far too much detail to be seemly.
“Fortunately,” he said quickly and a little too loudly, “I was able to climb back aboard.”
“If you were just hanging there — ” began Herr Roborovski, but the thought mired him down and he said nothing more.
“Yes?” asked Cabal.
“If you were just hanging there,” continued Herr Roborovski with renewed inertia, “why didn’t this blackguard who attacked you finish the job? You couldn’t really defend yourself, could you?”
“He must have thought I had fallen immediately, and was already scurrying away like a rat,” said Cabal, steering around the fact that he had, indeed, defended himself.
Herr Roborovski considered this for a moment. “That was lucky,” he said finally, but Cabal thought he detected a note of suspicion in his voice.
Cabal inwardly admitted that it certainly sounded that way. Some economy in veracity seemed called for. “Not lucky at all. Only a coward would have attacked me like that in the first place. It seems hardly surprising that he would want to be away from the scene of the crime as quickly as possible.”
“Herr Meissner has a point.” It was Colonel Konstantin, who had been listening from the next table. “It was a craven assault. Any man worthy of the name would have struck from the front. Pushing people out of hatches … It’s un-Mirkarvian.”
From Cabal’s admittedly limited contact with the modern face of Mirkarvia, a sneak attack seemed entirely in character. Then again, he had been dealing only with the ophidian Count Marechal, a bargain-basement Machiavelli if ever there was one. Konstantin, in contrast, struck him as an officer and a gentleman of the old school. He wondered how a man like that would fit into Marechal’s vision of a new, resurgent Mirkarvia that embraced deceit and devious doings to achieve its ends.
“You have high standards, Colonel,” said Frau Roborovski. “Not everybody else has them. No. Some of the things I read of in the newspaper … Shocking! Shocking!”
“A criminal is a criminal,” agreed her husband with a very Gallic shrug. “If they had any honour they wouldn’t be criminals, after all.”
