Johannes Cabal the Detective

CHAPTER 17 in which there is danger, disaster, and death

The detonation was that much closer and that much more violent, throwing Cabal and Marechal off their feet. The large windows on the starboard side of the salon exploded inwards, and suddenly the room was home to a howling gale and tumbling fragments of glass. The clouds outside seemed to buck backwards and forwards as the Princess Hortense yawed wildly. Miss Barrow and the other passengers were hurled from their seats, Lady Ninuka sent sprawling over Colonel Konstantin’s body. Her screams mingled with the other cries of surprise and terror.

“Cabal!” bellowed Marechal, climbing to his feet and standing with his legs well apart, braced against the rolling deck. “You’re insane! You’ll kill us all!” He looked around, and caught sight of Cabal taking refuge behind a sofa. It was no sort of cover; Marechal aimed and fired, the heavy slug tearing clean through it. The lurching deck had spoilt his aim, however, and the bullet hole went through the MirkAir antimacassar on the sofa top.

“Two bullets left,” called Cabal. “This is one of the many reasons you would make a bad ruler, Marechal — poor resource management. Also, you show appallingly weak anticipatory skills.”

“Oh? And how would anybody guess that you would be mad enough to do this?”

“Not this,” said Cabal, his tone dismissive. “This.” He leaned out suddenly. Marechal barely had time to register that Cabal had a gun in his hand before it fired. The swaying of the deck saved him, too, the round going high and punching a hole in an aft window, and he ducked low and scuttled away. “You think a city as close to a bunch of rabid dogs as Parila is to Mirkarvia wouldn’t have a good supply of gunsmiths?” Cabal called after the scampering noble.

He weighed the gun in his hand; the man behind the counter had looked at him quizzically when he’d enquired whether they stocked the Webley.577 revolver. Thwarted, Cabal had settled on a Senzan revolver, but at least had the mild pleasure of finding one in an equally untidy calibre — 10.35 mm. His mind was usually quite pristine, but — O secret sin! — he had always taken a perverse joy in dangling decimals.

“The ship’s going down and you two are having a gunfight?” shouted Herr Roborovski. “You’re both mad!”

“Sir, this may not be the best time for this,” agreed Fraulein Satunin, grimly holding on to the carpet. Behind her, the ground was briefly glimpsed through the aft windows as the ship’s tail dipped and swung.

“Shut up!” spat Marechal, his black hair askew and his composure shattered, from the end of the bar furthest from Cabal. “You, Satunin! You’re supposed to be a trained killer! Get him!”

“Sir,” she replied forcefully, “he has a gun. I have a knife. He has cover. I have open ground. Worst of all, you’ve told me in his hearing what you want me to do. Tactically, this is a very unsound proposition, sir!”

“I don’t give a flying pfennig for your damned tactical propositions, you stupid bitch! Just kill him!”

“No! You’re not listening to me!” interrupted Roborovski with urgent passion. “We’re all in dreadful danger!”

“Nice attempt, sir,” called Cabal from where he lay in moderate comfort behind the sofa. He was glad all the furniture was bolted down. With the Princess Hortense’s current perturbations, he would otherwise have been forced to chase his place of concealment around the salon. “But the line guides provide only forward motion, not lift. As long as the gyroscopic levitators continue to spin, we will not crash. We will just drift. Shortly, the Senzan airforce will come in pursuit of my stolen entomopter, and they will find us.”

“Oh, God,” said Miss Barrow, and Cabal had a sudden intimation that he may have made a miscalculation. “Cabal, the line guides are the ship’s main source of power! Didn’t you know that? It’s in the pamphlet!”

Cabal twitched. “Pamphlet?”

“The one about the ship! The one you got with your travel documents and itinerary!”

Cabal thought of an origami swan and swallowed.

“Not so mythical now, eh, Cabal!” Marechal started laughing — a coughing, barking laugh that contained little humour.

“She’s right!” Herr Roborovski was hanging on to a table support for dear life as the deck pitched violently beneath him. “With two of them destroyed, there’s barely enough to keep the levitators running! We need to land! We need to land immediately before the reserves are depleted!” He was interrupted by a shuddering groan that juddered through the entire fabric of the vessel. It ran through their bodies and shook their hearts in their chests. Roborovski swore something in a Mirkarvian dialect, a desperate and pleading jumble of words. “It’s the ship’s spine! She’s not designed to be thrown around like this! If we don’t set down soon, she’ll break her back!”

But beneath them was nothing but forest and steep hillsides.

* * *

Johannes Cabal was, though it pained him sorely to admit it, only human, and it is human to err. In his chosen profession, however, to err was to risk lynching, immolation, or ingestion. Cabal had so far kept his errors mainly on the small side — a singed eyebrow here, a deranged imp with a meat cleaver there — but overlooking the intimate connection between the etheric line guides and the gyroscopic levitators was beginning to look like one of the more final variety.

Furthermore, there was naught he could do about it while pinned down in the salon. While he and Marechal maintained their standoff, there was little chance of anybody getting out of there alive. He could bet that the crew members were too busy trying to restore trim to the ship to bother him for the moment, but this was an imperfect state of affairs. They would either succeed, and then he would have a lot of angry Mirkarvians after him, or they would fail, and Cabal would finish his life and career cremated on some anonymous Senzan hillside.

He considered his options. How much of a threat was Marechal? Assuming he had the same sort of revolver that Cabal had stolen from him back in Harslaus, it was a six-chamber design. Assuming, further, that he wasn’t the cautious type and therefore carried a round under the hammer, that left him with two rounds. Might he have reloaded? Possible, but unlikely; given the softness of Cabal’s cover, it would have been an obvious tactic to place three or four rounds in judiciously chosen points through the sofa with a guarantee of at least one hit. Even if not fatal or debilitating, it would give him an advantage. That Marechal had not done so suggested that he had come out unprepared to shoot more than six peasants. Cabal had five rounds remaining, and was bitterly regretting not having brought some more with him. Like Marechal, however, he had not been anticipating a gunfight. So, he had a small advantage, but time was wasting. He risked a peep along the side of the sofa away from the bar and saw Miss Barrow and the others clinging to the furniture.

Not so long ago, he thought, I would have been safe on a train at this point. Harlmann could have said what he liked, and I wouldn’t have cared a fig.

The ship pitched upwards amidst shouts and screams. Everybody who could, clung on for their lives. Unattended, Konstantin rolled heavily back and up against the base of the bullet-damaged window in a half-sitting position. With a hollow musical tone, a long crack formed between the hole and the base of the window. It held for a second longer, then shattered, great shards of glass falling down to the treetops. Konstantin lolled like a rag doll with nothing to support him, and slipped backwards out of the window. Cabal watched the old soldier vanish, and ground his teeth together. So, this is what a conscience does for one, is it?

He’d had enough. Precipitate action would kill him just as surely as indecision, but at least he would be doing something. He quickly analysed his situation, recalled that almost everything aboard an aeroship is built to save weight, and decided that the wood panels of the bar could not be as substantial as they appeared to be. In the moment between the Princess Hortense swaying this way and that, he stood up and put three judiciously aimed bullets through the side of the bar. The scream of rage from behind it told him his gamble had paid off, thus far at least.

Moving quickly towards the huddled group of passengers, he tried to get an angle on Count Marechal — a clear shot that would finish all this now. The wind roaring through the two broken windows whipped through his clothes and made his tie flutter like a black pennant as he strode forwards, gun aimed at the bar edge, waiting to see his target.

He never heard the metallic hiss of the blade being drawn; there wasn’t the faintest possibility that he ever could, in that maelstrom of sound and whirling newspaper sheets and napkins. He would have died there and then but for Miss Barrow calling, “Cabal! Behind you!” He didn’t look at her first, which also saved his life. He simply