Johannes Cabal the Detective

path to Parila, but nobody needed to. The guns and rockets the entomopters carried were not there simply for show. Perhaps, oddly, it was the fact that the pilots did not return the waves of the passengers, but remained grim and cold, that caused a greater sense of foreboding than all the weaponry.

“Bloody Senzans,” sniffed Cacon, making one of his occasional but always unpopular appearances. “Wouldn’t kill them to crack a smile now and then.” That this was the most rank hypocrisy, coming from a man for whom cracking a smile himself would probably prove fatal, was silently noted by his listeners. None, however, commented on it; that would have meant possibly provoking a conversation with him, and this was too great a price to pay.

The captain’s description of the fighter aircraft as an “honour guard” was therefore believed by no one, nor was his additional announcement that there would be a stopover of a full day at Parila to allow the passengers to stretch their legs a little and take in the sights. In reality, all knew that Senzan officials would be going through the ship’s every nook and cranny in search of possible military supplies intended for Katamenia. On this particular occasion, it would mean searching the tons of food supplies intended for disaster relief, which could only prolong the search process. There are only so many bags of potatoes that can be bayoneted in a working day.

The final approach to the mooring cradle was slow but sure, the tone of the manoeuvre being “no sudden moves” writ large. The fighter aircraft had stacked into a formation high and astern of the Hortense, all the better to stoop down and strafe her into wreckage if she did anything the squadron leader considered suspicious or threatening. Captain Schten intended to provide no such excuse, and was clearly signalling every turn and alteration in speed, right down into the cradle itself. It was not just the relief of completing the difficult landing that caused the passengers and, it was reasonable to assume, the crew to sigh but also the lifting of the threat of machine-gun bullets and rocket explosions.

Cabal stood at one of the long salon windows. He had watched the approach with a lively interest, specifically the arrangement of the aeroport itself. Around the field stood a high-wire fence, and without that a ditch or possibly an overgrown ha-ha. Alongside the wire ran a long strip of carefully maintained tarmacadam, near the end of which were two hangars. One seemed to be for civilian aircraft, but the other was partitioned off by another fence and gates, and was presumably the hangar from which the military ran its aerial patrols. Between the runway and the two aeroship cradles (the other standing empty) was a clear green swathe of short cut grass perhaps three hundred metres wide. The cradles stood much closer to the aeroport buildings than the hangars, and it was clear that entomopters were the lesser part of the facility’s traffic, in status if not quantity. It all seemed very efficient. Rather too efficient for Cabal’s liking. To be sure, he had a Plan A to get him out of the aeroport, away and clear before anybody was any the wiser about the truth of “Herr Meissner.” He didn’t like the plan much, though. It involved close dealings with the Senzan authorities, and if they failed to react the way that he’d predicted they need only reach out to arrest him. He had hoped for a less complex Plan B to present itself — something along the lines of sneaking through the aeroport’s perimeter under cover of darkness — but the high fences and the military presence had snuffed out that hope. There was no choice, then; Plan A, with all its attendant opportunities for unwanted complication, was his only option. Filled with conflicting emotions, none of them pleasant, he retired to his cabin to prepare.

Even after the ship had settled onto the cradle, the etheric line guides had disengaged, the gyroscopic levitators had been allowed to wind down to a halt, and the passenger ramp had been lowered, nobody was allowed to disembark. Instead, there was a long and humiliating wait while Senzan customs made ready. The passengers hung around in the salon, impatient but speaking little. Only Leonie Barrow was actually scheduled to leave the journey here, but everybody wanted to stretch their legs and see a little of Parila, a city noted for its history, art, and architecture throughout the civilised world. Even the most fervent Mirkarvian patriot would not like to be regarded as a barbarian — though most were — and so they were prepared to wander the streets, guidebook in hand, and pretend that they appreciated what they saw.

It was necessary for Herr Meissner to lead the crowd, however, and he couldn’t do that via the salon. Instead, he took advantage of the crew hatch down through the dining room and found himself on the top of a steel spiral staircase leading down one of the support stanchions, the very cousin of the one by which he had first boarded the Princess Hortense at Emperor Boniface VIII Aeroport in Krenz. He was thankful that they all seemed to be built to a standard pattern; the alternative might have involved him dangling from the aeroship’s underside by his fingertips, and he’d done quite enough of that for one voyage.

He descended quickly, carrying no luggage but for his case and his cane. Meissner’s could stay aboard the Hortense and be divided amongst the crew by lots as far as he was concerned. He was almost done with the petty civil servant whose persona he had been forced to estimate and assume. He had met the real Meissner only briefly and had not had sufficient time on that occasion to properly foment a real dislike for the man. He had, however, by a combination of going through Meissner’s luggage, personal effects, and work papers, got his measure and could not wait to shrug the lowly and loathly civil servant from him as a serpent might slough off a particularly irritating skin.

His progress was noted and acted upon by the Senzans, which was fine and predicted, and so he was unsurprised to be met, a few metres from the base of the steps, by a small cortege of serious and concerned customs officers. Their leader made as if to say something officious and obvious, but Cabal preempted him with an impatient wag of his finger. “Not here!” he snapped at the surprised officer. “Not now!” He moved through them with such a sense of purposeful intent that the customs men found themselves falling into twin columns as he headed for the main aeroport buildings, the cortege becoming an entourage.

Upon arrival at the customs shed, he glared significantly at the junior officers until they wilted. Taking the hint, their senior dismissed them with a wave, as if shooing off flies. Once again, the officer drew breath to demand of Cabal an explanation and, once again, Cabal preempted him. He drew a long white envelope from an inner pocket quickly enough to make a small krak, like a tiny whip. The customs man looked at it curiously, and raised his eyebrows when he saw the Mirkarvian state seal in red wax on the flap. Cabal ran his thumb under it and broke the wax before the officer had a chance to see that it was a low-priority variant of the seal, such as a docket clerk (first class) might carry with him.

“I was given this when I embarked upon the Princess Hortense,” Cabal told the officer in a conspiratorial tone. “You will understand that there are … politics at play, even within my government? Factions and suchlike. One of these has taken to dabbling with certain … procedures that are not acceptable to civilised persons, no matter what their nationality.” He took the two folded sheets of paper from the envelope that he had placed there less than an hour before and passed them over. If the customs officer had been startled by events so far, that was as nothing to his expression when he read the first paragraph of the letter.

He looked up from the letter and stared at Cabal with wide eyes. “A necromancer?” he said, nearly in a whisper.

“Indeed so,” confirmed Cabal. “Read on, read on.”

The officer did so, and his discomfort increased with every line. “This is dreadful,” he said when he had finished, this time in a definite whisper.

Cabal hoped and trusted that he was referring to the document’s content and not to the fact that it was a forgery. “Yes, it is. I am ashamed that I have to turn to you for help, instead of concluding this affair in Mirkarvia. The people who first employed this … monster made that impossible. This is my last chance to prevent their plan reaching fruition.”

The customs officer was out of his depth. He kept rereading the document, or, at least, one part of it. Cabal suspected it was the phrases “mass resurrection” and “army of the dead” that had fixed his attention so admirably, which was gratifying, as that was exactly the reason he had included them. The vision they provoked was of the victims of the Katamenian famine being so ill-bred as not only to be Katamenian and dead but brain-eating Katamenian zombies stumbling over the border into Senza to suck the cerebellums of the Senzan citizenry, all under the domination of a mercenary necromancer backed by Mirkarvian money. To an officer whose usual workaday routine consisted of saying “Anything to declare?” repeatedly, it was all a bit much to grasp.

Cabal allowed him another few seconds of grasping time, then said, “You have to inform your superiors immediately! This plot has to be exposed and stopped, for the sake of your people and for the very soul of mine! Do you understand how important this is?”

“But who?” asked the customs officer, almost pleading. “Who should I go to?”

This foxed Cabal for a second. He’d expected the Senzan customs to be rather more thorough in its preparedness for the ghastly plots of its neighbours. “You’re going to be overseeing the search of the