Johannes Cabal the Detective

“She’s ENGLISH!” the tiny Miss Ambersleigh screamed in the lieutenant’s face. “How dare you suggest such a foul calumny upon an English lady, you … you … foreigner!”

The lieutenant looked down at the incandescent woman and raised an unbearably superior eyebrow. “Ah, signora. Here, you are the foreigner.”

There is possibly no insult so calculated to sting the English as the suggestion that they may at any time be considered foreign, as this flies in the face of the obvious truth that the whole of Creation actually belongs to the English, and they are just allowing everybody else to camp on bits of it from a national sense of noblesse oblige.

If looks could kill, the lieutenant would surely have been turned to gritty dust in an instant, and his entire family tree, dating back seven generations, retrospectively stricken from history. Looks, however, do not kill. He remained alive and smug, despite Miss Ambersleigh’s very best efforts.

“You vile man,” she said slowly, managing to make even “You” sound like a dreadful slur. She pointedly turned her back to him and spoke urgently to Miss Barrow. “You mustn’t worry about a thing, my dear,” she said, taking Miss Barrow’s hands in hers. “This ridiculous toy soldier has obviously made a stupid mistake. I shall go straight to the British Consulate and inform them of what has happened. You mustn’t worry, please. Help is on its way. Chin up, Miss Barrow. You show ’em, eh?”

Leonie Barrow had not had much time for the twittering antics of Miss Ambersleigh on the journey, but there was something very affecting about the little woman’s faith in her innocence, and her confidence that the truth would out, that made a lump grow in Miss Barrow’s throat. No matter what, she could be sure of one ally in this ordeal.

“Thank you,” she managed to say. “Thank you, Miss Ambersleigh. I shall.”

“Tchah,” muttered the lieutenant dismissively. The thrill of doing something out of the ordinary was wearing off. He’d been hoping for a gunfight, or a pitched battle against zombies. Two Englishwomen being unutterably English with each other was just boring. He gave an order to the sergeant, and Signorina Johanna Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy apparently, was escorted off the aeroship and into custody.

* * *

Herr Johannes Cabal, meanwhile, an actual necromancer of some little infamy (and even smaller scruples), was wandering the streets of Parila and considering his next move. His original plan had been to get out of the town with as much alacrity as he could muster. The reason for such haste was based on the least helpful chain of events that he could hypothesise; to wit, that Miss Barrow proclaimed, “I am innocent! That document is a forgery! You are actually looking for Johannes Cabal, who has been masquerading as Gerhard Meissner, a Mirkarvian civil servant!” and the Senzans replied, “So you are! So it is! After him!” In this dire scenario, the whole town would raise a hue and cry within minutes, and he would be arrested very shortly thereafter. This was an unpleasant hypothesis, and he didn’t care to think about it for too long, not least because it was not very likely. The document was not a bad forgery, and would maintain a thread of doubt in the mind of the authorities no matter how convincingly Miss Barrow proclaimed her innocence. They might believe her, but it would be gross incompetence to release her without definite proof of her bona fides. It was, after all, far better to detain an innocent person for a day or so, and then apologise, than to let a necromancer go free. A day or so, then. That was all the leeway he had. Trying to leave town with undue haste would draw attention, so he would spend a little time making life difficult for the pursuers who would inevitably try to pick up his trail when the authorities wearied of the little joke he had played on them. Miss Barrow also.

He had an uncomfortable feeling in his chest that he believed was probably the prickling of a guilty conscience. He was glad to have his soul back, but the whole “conscience” business that had come with it was very wearying. How dare this irksome inner voice torment him for doing what was necessary? Furthermore, it kept dredging up another unfamiliar sentiment — that he hoped she was all right. He couldn’t begin to imagine why he should care. She had been mildly discommoded, that was all. Good grief, he had shot people for being less of a nuisance than she. She should be grateful. He felt the faint flickering of a resentful anger at her, and this alarmed him, too, with its base irrationality. Finally, he drove all such thoughts from his mind by forcefully reminding himself that he was on borrowed time, and that she would soon be free — if rather cross with him — and the hounds would be on his trail.

So, Cabal made his plans. The first thing to do was draw a line between himself and the discarded Meissner persona. The first part of that was to lose the Mirkarvian accent he had adopted — very successfully, it seemed, judging by the fact that not a single native Mirkarvian had commented on it. Instead, he would exaggerate what was left of his own Hessen pronunciation and claim to be a tourist from the Germanies. A casual stroll into a bookshop and a perusal of its geography section gave him the details he needed to flesh out his story. He was staying at an inn in Escalti, a small town some fifteen kilometres away. He had found the place a little dull (a point intended to play to the locals, who maintained a friendly rivalry with Escalti), and cadged a lift to Parila, with the understanding that he make his own way back. Thus, could you direct me to the stazione ferroviaria Parila, bitte?

Of course, he had no intention of going to a provincial little dump like Escalti. Instead, he would lose himself in a city like Genin until he could find a way to get across the border. That shouldn’t be too difficult, he thought; it was its eastern borders, with untrustworthy neighbours like Mirkarvia and Katamenia, that Senza guarded closely. The west was a different thing altogether.

He would also have to undergo a physical transformation, and this he was not looking forward to in the slightest. He would change clothes when he reached the city, but in the meantime he would locate the necessary chemicals to make himself a quantity of impromptu hair dye. He certainly didn’t want to just buy the stuff ready- made; a single police enquiry in the right place and the fact that he was disguising his hair colour and the shade used would be known. Far better to make his own. The necessary knowledge to synthesise hair dye from common chemicals was something he had developed some years earlier when it became apparent that it might very well come in handy. To Cabal’s mind, it had been worth a few days then, and a few hours a year subsequently, to brush up on his notes and avoid the possibility of ending up on a gallows simply because he looked so very much like himself. His most obvious physical feature, after all, was that he was very blond indeed. Once he changed that, descriptions would lose a lot of their usefulness. He had thus developed a simple dye, synthesised from common chemicals, that rendered his hair a convincing brown. Furthermore, the stuff came out again after four or five washings, using warm water, a strong shampoo, and a lot of white pickling vinegar. It left him smelling like a gherkin, with hair the consistency of straw, but that passed quickly after a further wash in more sympathetic substances. Beer and raw egg worked well.

After a visit to the bank to change some of the British notes he had concealed in the lining of his case for Senzan liras (“I’m touring,” he told the cashier, almost truthfully), he found a dispensing chemist’s and a very well- stocked hardware shop that between them provided everything he needed for his hair dye. He had no intention of actually making it while in Parila; the plan was to mix it in the train’s lavatory en route to Genin, so that he would step down to the platform a different man. For the moment, he stored his purchases away in his bag and wondered if it would be advisable to buy a change of clothes, too, before travelling. No, the chance of police enquiries revealing the purchases, and so updating his description, was too great. On the other hand, he could always buy something gaudy and memorable and then dump it at the first opportunity. Should the police discover the purchase, they would certainly regard it as an attempt to radically alter his appearance and therefore report it in their police bulletins, rendering them even more inaccurate. This seemed to Cabal a desirable state of affairs. He was just wandering the streets, looking for somewhere that might sell orange ruffled shirts, when he paused to look in a shop window. In the reflection, he saw a familiar figure across the avenue behind him, but only a flash and then it disappeared up an alleyway. Cabal’s heart sank.

All that paranoia aboard ship had just been mellowing into an acceptance that there weren’t armies of agents and masses of interlocking conspiracies at all, and he had been enjoying being able to forget all that in order to concentrate on simply avoiding the police. As a necromancer, this was very much part of the job requirements, and he flattered himself that he was quite practised and professional at it. Now, however, all those fears that something terribly complex that killed people in passing was going on, and he had no idea what it was, came back to him with sobering intensity. The man he had seen reflected in the glass was Alexei Aloysius Cacon, and he was positive that Cacon had been watching him.

Cabal turned, but caught just a glimpse of Cacon’s coat as he scurried up the alley and out of sight. This complicated things; Cabal needed at least another half hour to complete his arrangements before catching the train.