mores, will be observed to be pure phantasms. It is a deep belief, however, and that is where our danger lies, for the ridiculously inflated beliefs of generations of delusional cat devotees – and I use the term advisedly – are made concrete in the Dreamlands. Here they truly are intelligent, cunning, sophisticated and capable of the most exquisite malevolence, just as the dreamers who unwittingly weave them would want them to be. You have killed one of their number and, among far too many people, that is a capital offence. And so it is here.’
Soon the cats did not trouble to hide themselves, but sat erect like statuettes by the way, only their eyes moving as the three men hurried past. Then they rose and trotted along in a growing pack behind them, their tails low and twitching with anger.
There was no time to catch their breath and take stock. The horde of idealised kittery in their wake grew in numbers and in threat at every moment. It had long since ceased to be just a bunch of cats – now it was a furred stream that swept after them, an avalanche of claws awaiting the signal.
It was Corde who gave it to them. His evident panic increased with every step, every new recruit to the pursuing army, and his desperation grew with it. He was offered no comfort by his companions. Cabal was silent and focused purely on reaching the desert where the cats might desist. If he knew anything, it was that he loathed the thought of his last moments consisting of being swamped by an overindulged bunch of goldfish-botherers like their persecutors. Bose said nothing, but hurried along in a state of confusion, blinking furiously.
Then panic froze into hopelessness and a desire for some sort of resolution right at that very minute, and Corde stopped, spun on his heel, drew his sword, and bellowed, ‘Come on, then, you damn’d fleabags!’
He was probably expecting a moment of indecision on the part of the cats, a beat before they were faced down, or flew at him, all claws and spitting, but they did neither. They did not stop when he turned, but continued to flow across the ground, and he had barely time to cry his challenge when they were flowing over him too. He was surprised, and did not call out or scream, as he became coated in cat. He struggled, but soon enough he could not see or hear anything. His hands flailed and his sword fell.
Bose said, ‘Oh!’ and went to help him, but Cabal caught his arm and said, ‘If you hurt even a hair on one of their smug little heads, they will kill you too.’
‘But Mr Corde isn’t dead!’ he cried. Cabal just held his arm tightly and watched as Corde fell, and the boiling, purring pool of fur where he had stood smoothed out, and became distinguishable individuals again, then poured off in all directions as if they had appointments elsewhere.
When they had gone, Cabal finally let go of Bose’s arm. ‘Now he is,’ said Cabal.
There was little left, just an abandoned sword, a few scraps of torn cuir-bouilli and some tumbled pieces of equipment. Cabal watched a kitten a few yards away dragging off a finger bone, the joint gripped fiercely in its adorable little blood-smeared mouth.
‘And then there were two, Herr Bose.’
Chapter 13
IN WHICH THE DOMESTIC WONTS OF SORCERERS ARE INVESTIGATED AND CABAL CANNOT BE CONCERNED
Much as a rubber ball deforms on impact only to spring back into its usual shape, so Bose’s crumpled spirits soon rose above such small distractions as having two friends die in relatively rapid succession and in the most horrible ways. After all, life goes on, which in the case of Gardner Bose meant strolling along, whistling a jaunty tune and generally exhibiting a guileless, indeed witless, mien. On a village street, it would be acceptable. In the dun dunes of the alkali Cuppar-Nombo Desert, it was a little wearing.
At least it was not especially hot. The lack of water in the desert was more an accident of geography than extreme temperatures and, while it was a long way from cool, it was not unbearable. Of the environmental hardships, Bose’s whistling was by far the worst. It came slightly muted – although not nearly enough – by the handkerchief he had tied over his mouth and nose in imitation of Johannes Cabal, a measure to avoid breathing in more sand than was necessary. Cabal’s second innovation of wearing his baffled blue-lensed sunglasses Bose could not emulate, so he was reduced to squinting fiercely against the fine dusty clouds that blew up into dust devils given the excuse of any faint breeze.
At least Cabal would not have to endure Bose’s whistling for long, as this leg of their journey would be a short one: according to Cabal’s maps and notes, the abandoned city lay a day’s walk into the sands and was easily visible at range, so an error in navigation was unlikely. When the distant towers of ancient Golthoth appeared, only slightly off their set course, they were only as tired as a day’s walking on sand would warrant and – since the sun didn’t seem greatly interested in the Cuppar-Nombo – barely dehydrated at all.
Golthoth was a very different city from the one they had left by the Lake of Yath. Where that had been strangely vibrant, as if all the citizenry were just hiding out of sight and waiting to leap out in an impracticably large game of peek-a-boo, Golthoth seemed to have been built as a mysterious abandoned city right from the first stroke of an architect’s stylus. As Bose commented when they first walked into its broad precincts, the place seemed very redolent of ancient Egypt, calling to mind the Memphis of the early dynastic period. Was it perhaps possible, he wondered, that the dreams of the first pharaohs had influenced this place? Cabal was quite certain it was the other way around.
The city contained a great deal of formal statuary, made from a dense stone of less scatological shades of brown than the desert. Gods and rulers they may once have been, but a thousand generations of sandstorms had eroded their faces into little more than arrays of suggestive bumps and contours that seemed to indicate that few had begun with human physiognomies. Cabal also noted that the doorways were uniformly a good twenty inches taller than normal Earthly doors, and that the more important buildings often seemed to sport additional doors of a curious squat hexagonal design, some larger examples lacking the upper edge to become pentagonal instead. Cabal kept his counsel, but suspected that these buildings had witnessed visitors for whom the strange doors were ideally suited.
The architectural style, however, was not homogenous. Here and there later additions stood awkwardly surrounded by the eldritch opulence of the original buildings. Some seemed to have been built in an attempt to claim the city for some interloping power, a strategy that had only ever been met by failure, judging from the current state of affairs. Other – rarer – forms were more enigmatic. These were uniquely towers, dotted randomly about the place as if they had been dropped from space, or had grown up through the pavements and squares. There were not many; Cabal counted five easily visible, with two or three more tumbled and broken, the brown sand grown yards deep in drifts against the shattered stone.
‘Wizards,’ he said disparagingly. ‘The pretentious bastards just have to set up shop in towers situated in awkward places. It is a fault endemic among them.’
‘And this wizard Ercusides mentioned . . .’