Johannes Cabal the Detective

you?”

And, indeed, they were.

* * *

How Cabal came to change his mind

* * *

It meant Leonie Barrow was in terrible danger. No phantasm of peril but true, real, and immediate danger. It also meant that it was none of his concern. He could just walk away.

So he did.

He made his way into the railway station, enjoying the day, the blue skies — although clouds were beginning to drift in from the southeast — and the delicious sense of liberty born of shedding a heavy responsibility. Soon he would be free and clear of the whole mess, and he could get back to work.

The station was a neat, unfussy building clad in sandstone slabs, the mica, quartz, and feldspar it contained lightening its colour and creating the occasional spark of reflected light from the beaming sun. In the ticket hall, Cabal found time to admire its simple but elegant architecture as he surreptitiously glanced around the space for any signs of surveillance on departing passengers, suspicious figures, or a dangerous level of police presence. To his immense satisfaction, he saw nothing of the sort, but for a single bored policeman looking at a poster for weekend breaks.

Cabal’s inner contentment deepened. He was still a long way from home, but he saw grounds for quiet optimism that he would actually reach there. He was looking at the large mosaic rail map picked out on the wall for a likely station in Senza’s western marches to head for when, most unwelcome of things, a voice sounded over his shoulder. “Ah ha, ha, ha!” said a man’s voice in a tone usually reserved for the detection of unauthorised hands in biscuit barrels. “I knew it! I just knew it! ‘Civil servant,’ my maiden aunt’s arse!”

Cabal turned to discover a man with large red sideburns, a rubicund complexion, and a strange little hat with a feather sticking out of it, regarding him as if they were long-lost cousins. But the eyes … Cabal knew those eyes, though it took him a stunned moment to remember where, exactly. “Ach mein Gott!” he said finally. “Herr Harlmann?”

Harlmann shushed him melodramatically with a lot of finger-waving, and steered him by the elbow to a cafe that occupied a corner of the ticket hall by a newsvendor’s stall. He found a table, attracted the attention of the waiter with a few imperious snaps of his fingers, and ordered two coffees, in — Cabal was astonished and perturbed to hear — a perfect Senzan accent.

Wonderful, he concluded. Now I’m in the hands of Senzan Intelligence. So much for quiet optimism. His hopes of showing a clean pair of heels vaporised like a martyr’s spit upon a bonfire, and he gloomily reconciled himself to spending the foreseeable future in a cell somewhere. At least, he consoled himself, the food would be better this time.

“Well, Herr Harlmann,” said Cabal, as he fitfully considered escape plans without any great enthusiasm. The whole concourse was surely dense with assorted secret policemen just itching for an excuse to kick his spleen into sausage meat. The fact that he was being treated to coffee rather than being bundled into the back of an unmarked van by several burly servants of the state armed with overactive thyroids and lengths of rubber hose implied that the covert machinations of Senza were handled with rather more civility than those of its neighbours, as well as subtlety. He could barely believe that he had so utterly failed to spot the trap. Therefore, he decided, he would wait for the scale of the operation he had wandered into to become apparent before giving any bright ideas for escape serious consideration. “What happens now?”

Harlmann shushed him with the same unnecessary finger-wigglage as the waiter returned with their order. He waited until the waiter had gone again before whispering to Cabal, “I’d appreciate it if you would call me Signor Moretti, old man.”

Cabal looked at him curiously, and took a sip of his coffee to hide his surprise. “Moretti?”

“Guido Moretti. Guido means ‘wide one.’” He smirked at some private joke and started on his own drink.

When dealing with devils, demons, and the ungrateful undead, hiding one’s emotions is a survival skill. Cabal — being a well-practised necromancer of several years’ experience and still alive to boot — had long since nailed that particular talent down, and so gave no hint of his inner bewilderment. He had been expecting Harlmann, or Moretti, or whatever his name was, to be in control of their little tete-a-tete, secure in the knowledge that he had any number of goons within easy call to jump on Cabal should he prove intransigent. Instead, he was behaving as if he were on equally thin ice. Guido means “wide one,” he thought. What’s that supposed to mean? Wide one. Wide. A morsel of slang occurred to Cabal, and then he understood. Wide boy.

With calculated nonchalance, he tested the water. “Profitable trip?”

Moretti (as Cabal decided to consider him, given that Harlmann was no truer a name) grimaced over his cup, and shook his head slightly as answer until he had swallowed his coffee. “No. Utter disaster. I was getting somewhere with Miss Ambersleigh on the first evening out, so the old girl could give me an in with her ladyship. Rolling in it, she is, the stuck-up little baggage. I had such plans.” He sighed regretfully. “But then that Digger fella throws himself out of the window, and then somebody has a go at you, and suddenly everybody suspects everybody. Utter, utter disaster. Just getting aboard that flying hotel cost me a fair wad of seed money, I don’t mind telling you. Well,” he added with a conspiratorial wink, “I don’t have to tell you, do I? Setting up as a civil servant, though. I have to hand it to you, that takes some neck. The Mirkies treat the civil service like the state religion. Is it true you can get executed for impersonating a pen pusher?”

It sounded like the kind of thing the Mirkarvians would do, so Cabal affected additional sangfroid on top of his nonchalance, and nodded. To think, he had been an ice-cold master criminal all along and hadn’t noticed. “I believe so.”

“You’re a cool one, Meissner,” said Moretti, chuckling. “So, what’s your real name?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” replied Cabal. His instinct was towards evasiveness, but when he realised that this had furnished him with the sort of bon mot that real master criminals sit up all night devising, he was not displeased.

It certainly had the desired effect on Moretti. He grinned appreciatively and tapped the side of his nose. “I hear what you’re saying, mio amico. I don’t know what game you were playing, but I’m sure it was something big. Hey,” he leaned forward, “so did you have that English girl?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Cabal, honestly perplexed.

“That sweet blonde,” Moretti insisted. “C’mon, you must have, the amount of time you two spent together. What was she like?”

Something slipped inside Cabal’s mind, like a gear slipping in a transmission, or a plate slipping from a shelf. It felt intrinsically wrong, and profoundly unpleasant. Here he was, pretending to be a criminal, which was all very well and good, but he was pretending to be a criminal to a criminal, and he was being all too convincing. Cabal knew that, technically, it was no more than the truth; he broke laws with such monotonous regularity that he no longer even noticed himself doing it. He stole books, he disinterred fresh corpses, and, when necessary, he killed people. He committed misdemeanours with the ease of breathing, and felonies were barely more challenging. In the strict legal sense — i.e., that committing crimes is the act of a criminal — yes, he was a criminal. He was good at it, too. He was very rarely caught, and never successfully punished, which was just as well, since most of the punishments for his acts involved nooses, axes, or immolation. All this, it was reasonable to suppose, made him a master criminal.

Yet here he was with a real criminal, a career confidence trickster, and the man made him sick. Every law Cabal broke, every crime he committed was dedicated to one, single, shining, glorious goal: to defeat death. That was all he desired. Money didn’t matter to him. Power didn’t matter to him. All he wanted was to be humanity’s champion against its first, its last, and its greatest foe.

Money mattered to Moretti. Power mattered to Moretti. He would gorge and bloat himself as a parasite on humanity’s flank, one of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of similar parasites in the world. Cabal saw a sea of filthy sucking things like Moretti, the unconscionable tide, and he saw himself there, too, drowning and indistinguishable.

Moretti was waiting for him to speak through the long silence. “That good, eh?” he said cheerfully.