“I don’t want you to make any frivolous comments. You obviously enjoy calling me a monster, and I’m not inclined to give you any more ammunition. However — ” He flared his nostrils again and inhaled. “However … I can smell blood.”
She looked at him in astonishment for a moment, and then sniffed experimentally. Perhaps it was just his words playing on her imagination, but she thought she could scent something warm and metallic on the warm evening air. “Oh, God. I think you’re right. Where’s it coming from?”
Cabal looked around, questing. “I think it’s coming from — Ah. Actually, you’re standing in it.”
To her credit, Miss Barrow reacted in no more melodramatic a fashion than stepping back to study the dark wet patch that had formed between the cobbles at the end of a small shadowed pathway that led down beside the church before joining the road. It looked black and oily under the yellow glow of the warming gaslight mantles, high atop their lampposts.
“That’s a lot of blood,” she said with more detachment than Cabal would have expected.
“Not necessarily. A little blood goes a long way,” he replied a bit ruefully, the voice of experience.
For her answer, she daintily dipped the toe of her shoe into the patch. It went in quite a way. It seemed that the patch was just the surface of a deep pool that had formed where a cobble was missing. “That’s a lot of blood,” she repeated, and Cabal couldn’t argue with that. It had to be the best part of a litre, and people tend to get very distressed when they find themselves missing such a large portion of their vital bodily fluids. That, or dead.
“There’s a trail,” he said. There was indeed a trail, but not one made up of drops. The pool had formed by blood running down the pathway for a metre or so, but shortly beyond that there was a broad, smeared trail of the stuff. It didn’t take a great forensic talent to realise that whoever was bleeding had collapsed, and dragged himself away further up the path. “Odd. If I were badly wounded right next to a thoroughfare, I would head towards it, try to get help. Admittedly, it’s quiet at the moment, but it’s still the best choice.”
“Would you be thinking that straight if you were so hurt?” Miss Barrow was walking slowly up the path, following the trail.
Cabal didn’t know. He also didn’t know if they should be getting involved. “This has nothing to do with us. We should go.”
“No. There’s somebody terribly injured. They need help.”
“Help? Look how much blood there is, woman. They’re dead. So, I repeat: we should go.”
She stopped and turned to look at him. In the darkness, he couldn’t make out her expression, but her stillness unnerved him strangely. When she spoke, the tone was tired and dismissive, but he thought he heard something else there that he couldn’t quite identify. Perhaps it was disgust. Or disappointment. “Go then, Cabal. Just shoo. I’m done with you.” She turned her back on him and continued to follow the trail of blood.
He watched her, while he failed to do anything: he failed to come up with a witty retort; he failed to say anything very profound regarding their unusual relationship; he failed to walk away with dignity. He succeeded only in opening his mouth and closing it again, undecided, and — as her back was to him — she didn’t even see that. He was still standing there impassively, thirty seconds later, when she became tired at being stared at. In that time she hadn’t progressed very far, the blood becoming increasingly difficult to see in the shadows.
“Just bugger off, will you, Cabal? You’re in my light. If you aren’t going to — ”
The groan that shuddered out of the darkness made her spin around with a small yelp of surprise. It was a barely human sound, deep and miserable, but Cabal — who had far too much experience in such things — realised that it definitely was human. It seemed that he had been wrong to believe that the donor of the blood on the cobblestones was dead, although by the sound of it that error would be moot in a few minutes. Checking that his knife was easily accessible in his jacket pocket, he followed Miss Barrow as she walked as quickly as she dared into the shadows.
A few paces on, she paused. “It wasn’t far away,” she whispered, ready to be quiet immediately she heard anything else. “There’s a side door here.” Cabal heard a handle being tried. “It’s locked.”
He stood beside her. The shape of the doorframe was just visible in the shadows. Further along the wall beside it was a narrow locked and shuttered window. “Are you sure this is where that groan came from,” he asked, whispering, too.
“Must be.” She squinted into the darkness beyond them. “I don’t think there’s anywhere else it could have come from. It just looks like blank walls after this house.” She tapped experimentally at the ground past the door, and then turned back to him all business. “The cobbles don’t seem tacky past the door. I think the trail stops here. We need to get in somehow. Can you pick locks?”
“No,” said Cabal shortly, and kicked the door open. He stepped through and stood in the dark while checking his pockets. Miss Barrow heard a rattle, and suddenly a match flared in Cabal’s hand. He quickly held the match away from himself to save his eyes from the sudden light, and shielded it further with his free hand. In the reflected glow from the walls, they saw that the door opened into a narrow hallway. At the end, a staircase ascended a few steps onto a landing before turning to the left. In the unsteady light, there seemed to be a widening in the hallway just before the stairs and the hint of another door leading further back into the house. To the right was a small dresser with a tray on which sat a candle in a holder. Finally, a door stood half open in the wall to their left. Cabal glanced down. The blood trail angled beneath his feet and through the door. A single smeared bloody handprint showed on the whitewashed plaster by the base of the frame.
He took a moment to light the candle, and lifted it. He stood before the half-open door and favoured Miss Barrow with a sideways glance in which only a grim necessity was decipherable. Then he turned his attention back to the door. With the fingertips of his gloved left hand, he gently pushed it open.
* He kept a collection, his favourite being the one with the decent woodcut, the correct punctuation, and — a tiny bit of egotism here — the eye-wateringly large bounty on his head.
CHAPTER 13
in which Cabal practises necromancy and ways are parted
Cacon had seen better days. To be precise, every day up to this one had been better, for today was the day that some unkind soul had stuck a long, thin-bladed knife into him and twisted it, and so murdered him.
He lay in a dark pool of his own blood in the middle of the barely furnished room. Cabal stood over him and noted the pallor, the slow drip of blood between the floorboards, and the slight quiver of Cacon’s eyelids as he prepared to breathe his last.
“Dear God, Cabal!” Miss Barrow was past him and kneeling by Cacon’s supine body. “Don’t just stand there! He’s still alive!”
Cabal was going to say, “But not for long,” when he thought ahead and just knew that this would result in Miss Barrow’s doing a lot of shouting in his face that he could well do without. So instead, noting that the windows were already closed and shuttered, he set the gas going in the two mantles in the room and lit them cautiously with his candle. Now, at least, Cacon could die in decent visibility.
Miss Barrow had meanwhile, with an admirable disdain for ladylike decorum, undone Cacon’s jacket and torn open his shirt. The knife wound was instantly apparent despite the mass of venous blood around it. A narrow slit forced open by the twist of the blade, it lay in his skin like a single gill cover of a pale cave fish, his life pulsing weakly from it in time to his slowing heart. She tore a strip from his shirt, folded it into a thick wad, and held it over the wound, pressing down hard, trying to hold his soul to his body by the strength of her arms.
“Do something, Cabal! Do something! Get help!” She looked up at him and, suddenly, Cabal understood that she had never seen death at first hand. The realisation sent a cool shiver of remembrance through him, back to when this had been him, kneeling over somebody and willing them back to life. And failing. Now he could only stand, and watch, and see the signs of imminent, inevitable death, and he felt nothing. Miss Barrow looked up at him, and she didn’t even like Cacon, but there were tears in her eyes. “Do something, Cabal.
He knelt on the other side of Cacon, unconsciously avoiding the blood, and leaned in close. “Alexei. Alexei! Can you hear me?”
Cacon’s eyelids flickered, but beneath them his eyes rolled drunkenly in their sockets. Cabal gripped the side
