Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

recalled that the Colossus of Rhodes was reputed to stand somewhere around the 110-feet-tall mark, commensurate with the Statue of Liberty, which their ship had sailed past in what already felt like a lifetime ago. Ercusides’ effort lacked that scale, measuring certainly no more than perhaps sixty feet from the base of its great flat pallet-like feet to the top of its conical watchtower head. The design was innovative, perhaps, but inelegant in the extreme. So, no, colossus was not an ideal description. Giant, though, was certainly acceptable.

It was structured identically to a great wooden mannequin, a larger cousin of the homunculi they had discovered within the temple. The finish was crude: the bark had been sheared from the logs and treated with whatever variant of creosote Ercusides had bubbled up in his pots and cauldrons. Here and there, holes were cut into the wood, and Cabal was confident that each was the entrance to a snug little chamber containing bedding of wood shavings and a trained dreff. The head had three such holes equally spaced around its sloping sides, which must contain the cleverest specimens, for they commanded the whole by some strange binding of intellects into a single intent and impetus: a hive-mind of hamsters; a Gestalt of guinea pigs.

Irritatingly, it also gave the giant a full 360 degrees of vision, and when Cabal saw a beady-eyed little face peering down at him from the aft hole, he knew he could expect trouble in the immediate future. He still had a few seconds’ grace, however. The giant was just tearing loose Gesso’s remaining leg, the right, and seemed a slave to procedure. It would finish removing the leg, toss it away, deliver the coup de grace to Gesso’s head, drop him and then, finally, it would apply itself to providing the same service to Cabal.

He was just formulating a response to this state of affairs when Holk and his two remaining men burst out of the temple, swords drawn, and immediately split up, running for the edges of the square and shouting like maniacs. Cabal was impressed by their professionalism; they had been hired as, essentially, bodyguards and here they were, doing their best to distract the giant from their clients even though it would probably result in their deaths.

Tellingly, they were visible to two of the three head holes, and therefore two thirds of the fuzzy little committee that directed the giant. The other was the only one that had seen Cabal, but it was promptly outvoted in the ‘Who shall we kill next?’ stakes. Gesso was reduced to a torso and his skull punctured with a sharp jab of a great wooden index finger, whittled to a stake at its tip, in a hurried perfunctory way, and tossed aside, a broken toy.

The giant seemed to consider Holk and Thirsh as equally likely or, at least, one third of its mind wanted to go after Holk and another wanted to go after Thirsh. Since both options were known directly to those thirds, these were the only options they would willingly consider, and the remaining third was left lamenting a lost opportunity to kill the four-legged wamp that lurked just behind it. The outvoted dreff withdrew its head and disappeared back into its snug little chamber, presumably to play music loudly and write bad poetry about how nobody appreciated it.

Cabal saw the situation changing and immediately rubbed the current list of plans off his mental blackboard in preparation for some revisions. As he did so, he slipped the baldric over his head and left his bag at the base of the wall, his jacket joining it a second later. The best defence was looking to be an offence, and he did not wish to be encumbered when the moment came. That moment was delayed for a few more seconds as the two thirds of the giant’s brain psychically bickered, the shoulders of the great homunculus shuddering from facing Holk, then Thirsh and back again, as the dreff repeatedly failed to arrive at a consensus. Cabal had already arrived at his own decision, proving that two heads are not always better than one. With no apparent trepidation, he stepped on to the heel of the giant’s flat right foot, wrapped his arms around the shin, and waited for the inevitable. At last, one of the command dreff capitulated, and the foot lifted, swung forward in a great arc at unexpected speed, and slammed down again, several yards closer to the fleeing figure of Sergeant Holk than it had been a few seconds before.

Cabal saw the giant’s intent and committed himself to preventing it if at all possible. A year or two before, he would not have cared, but then he had been a soulless creature. Now he found himself very occasionally making decisions that were not entirely logical. It was easy enough to rationalise attempting to save Holk: he was a useful soldier who might prove useful again subsequently. Beneath that, however, there was the hint of a shadow of a faint possibility that Holk had impressed him with his professionalism and competence, and that Cabal did not care to see such a man die while there was any chance of saving him.

Then the leg was rising again, and all of Cabal’s concentration was required just to hang on to the dizzying rise, swing and fall. He had the presence of mind to use the fall as an opportunity to shin his way a little further up the leg as it descended faster than he would drop. In that moment of freefall, he was able to shift himself almost a yard up the shin. Then the foot slammed down and, once again, he had to hang on hard to avoid losing this gain. He looked back, and saw Shadrach, Bose and – with a notable lack of swashbuckling bravado – Corde sneaking out of the temple and quickly around its edge while the giant was fully engaged in heading away from them. Cabal permitted himself a curled lip before looking up. He was glad he was climbing up a giant and not a colossus. Better yet, a giant with insensate legs, or he would have been scraped off by now and would probably be adjusting to life as a sticky patch under one of the giant’s feet. The knee was a tad over four yards from the base of the foot, by his reckoning; easily attainable in most situations, but not when he was swinging up and down as if he were on a demented carnival ride. Cabal, who had briefly run a demented carnival, knew this to be a reasonable simile. By his reckoning, he could reach the knee in two more strides providing he exerted himself and did not fall off. Unhappily, Holk was no more than two strides away.

Another sweep of the leg, and Cabal was so close to the knee that he bared his teeth with frustration. There was his goal. Bored into the leading face of the laboriously smoothed barrel hinge there was another dreff hutch hole. He could almost reach it. Just one more . . .

The leg lifted again, but instead of performing a full walk swing, only came as far as its neighbour. The giant was going into a stand, and even as it did so, the torso was rotating on the hips, the right arm was swinging out, and Cabal realised he was too late. ‘Holk!’ he shouted. ‘Dodge, man! Dodge it!’

Holk was a calm, focused, exemplary warrior right to the end. Of their charges, he had long since identified Cabal as the only one to trust in crisis, and on hearing Cabal’s cry he did not look back or falter, but immediately dodged. If he had dived to the left, he might have got away with it, but he dived to the right and straight into the palm of the wooden hand that was swooping down to capture him. He realised his mistake at once, and tried to roll out again, but the fingers curled quickly and he was held firmly.

The giant took no pause for gloating, for what it did it did through training, not inclination. It derived no pleasure, except that of fulfilling a function, as the left hand swung up in a practised arc and grasped the first limb it reached, Holk’s right leg. With a sharp tug, like a farmer’s wife plucking a dead chicken, it tore the leg off, and threw it sharply over its shoulder to whirl away into the darkening sky. Holk screamed, a hoarse roar that faded into sobs when he wanted to scream more but could not draw breath. The great left hand, dripping with his blood and Gesso’s before his, swept forward again.

For all their practice at hunting and killing, the dreff were still essentially shy woodland creatures, albeit of an unusual wood in a strange land. Thirsh’s furious battle cry startled the whole ambulatory warren – nothing they had yet encountered had prepared them for such a thing – and the giant jumped as if another giant had stealthily approached before exploding a paper bag the size of a pup-tent behind it. Cabal hung on for life itself as the giant leaped some ten feet into the air, but loosened his grip as it fell, sliding up its shin and grabbing the splayed upper front of the lower leg attached to the barrel hinge. The impact slapped his face and body hard against the wood, and he felt something give in his shoulder that ideally should not, but he was alive, and he was in position. He