Johannes Cabal the Detective (14 page)

He disliked extemporised activities, not least because going without preparation usually meant being unprepared. As he lowered himself into the darkness of the ducting that lay beneath the open hatch, he reflected that there were better ways to explore a mysterious dark place than without a torch and naked but for a Chinese dressing gown and a pair of slippers. Giving himself the assurance that he would not go far, he shuffled along on all fours.

The duct almost immediately reached a T-junction. He gauged that turning left would take him beneath the corridor on which DeGarre’s cabin lay, so that was the way he went. The light filtering down through the open hatch behind him dimmed sharply as he took the corner, and for the next two or three metres he crawled forwards in deep gloom. Thus, he felt, rather than saw, something unusual in the duct. The slightly flexible sheet metal became suddenly rigid and, feeling around, he realised that he had discovered yet another hatch, locked shut at its four corners by rotating catches connected to small handles. He gripped one of the handles, gave it an experimental turn, and felt a catch disengage. He did the same to one of its neighbours, and felt that side of the hatch drop slightly until it came to rest on something. He guessed that the hatch would have a lip running around its edge to prevent it simply falling through once all four catches were opened, because—unless he was very much mistaken—he had a very good idea what was on the other side of it, and dropping the hatch would be inconvenient at the very least.

He released the last catch, lifted the far edge of the hatch, and pushed it away from him so that it lay on the duct floor on the far side of the opening. Then he crawled back a little and gingerly pushed the near edge of the hatch away from him to reveal what lay beneath.

It was Mirkarvia, some four thousand feet below him, and barely visible in the early-morning darkness. A cold wind blew up through the hatch and made him shiver, suddenly very aware of how ridiculously unprepared he was. Extemporisation! Pah! He spat, mentally, on the concept. Here he was, woefully underequipped to carry out any sort of detailed investigation, without light or notebook. And cold. Very, very cold. Still, he was here now, so he should make the most of it, although he had little idea what he hoped to find. The duct didn’t run beneath DeGarre’s cabin, with a convenient hatch to give the hypothetical assassin an escape route. He felt around for anything suspicious, but there was nothing; the duct’s main function seemed to be to carry assorted cables and pipes around the ship, with ventilation possibly a secondary task. There were a couple of sturdy metal handles mounted on either side of the opening, although they struck him as more likely to be used as mounting for ladders during maintenance than as rungs to hold when engineers climbed through here.

He reached down and felt around on the outer skin of the
Princess Hortense
but found very little to excite his attention. Well, it had seemed an interesting avenue of enquiry when it was all dreamscapes and hypercubes, but now that it had been reduced to freezing in a tin tunnel Cabal felt it had lost some of its allure. He pulled his arm back inside and backed up a little to allow himself room to pull the hatch into position. Except that he couldn’t back up a little; something was in the way, and by the time he realised that “something” was actually “somebody” it was much too late.

His knees squealing against the steel floor of the duct, he was bodily shoved forward. He tried to scramble across to the other side of the open hatchway, but a hand came down in the small of his back and pushed him forcefully down. As he fumbled, looking for some way to pull himself clear, one knee dropped over the edge of the gap, and Johannes Cabal fell out of the hatch.

Chapter
7

IN WHICH CABAL IS IN TERRIBLE DANGER AND THEN HAS BREAKFAST

Johannes Cabal disliked many things, despised fewer, loathed fewer still, and reserved true hatred for only a handful. Understanding how intense his personal definition of “dislike” was, however, gives some impression of how hot his hatreds ran. This is a man who had, after all, shot men dead for making him faintly peeved.

Johannes Cabal hated people trying to kill him. He hated it, and he hated them. Certainly, most people aren’t keen on it, but few have actually experienced it, and fewer still on the regular basis with which Cabal was familiar. Already, within this single narrative, we have seen how the Mirkarvian judicial system had salted him away for execution and then, more personally, how the Count Marechal had intended to skewer him upon a cavalry sabre. Cabal by degrees had grown more inured to the actual event of an attempt upon his life, but he never could gird himself effectively against the intent. He didn’t so much find it hurtful as ignorant. To kill him would either be the work of a Luddite, fearful of his necromantic studies, or a vandal who tried to destroy him simply because that’s what vandals do. Thus, for Johannes Cabal, was the world arranged: Luddites, vandals, and a vast chorus of the undecided.

His first thought, as his legs preceded him towards a likely doom, was that at least this settled the question of DeGarre’s death. Unless there was some sort of recluse who lived in the ducting and took very unkindly to strangers, the person who had just thrown him out was DeGarre’s killer. Not suicide, then. Good. The numerous anomalies would have bothered him forever if it had been suicide. “Forever,” however, currently seemed to equate to the time it would take him to hit the ground.

Fortunately for him, the animal part of his brain that so irritated him with such base desires as eating and sleeping had different priorities. To expedite these, the uppermost of which was “Don’t die,” it had dumped a large quantity of adrenaline into Cabal’s bloodstream, and had—after locating one of the rungs by the hatch edge during a panicked fumble—affixed his right hand to it with a grip of stone. Thus, Cabal did not tumble to a lonely death on an unseen mountainside. At least, not immediately.

Instead, he hung by one hand like an apple from the bough, and wondered, with a degree of objectivity that surprised him even at the time, whether panicking might help. Despite the received wisdom in such events being “Don’t look down,” he looked down, and regretted it terribly. Not because of the great height—he could barely see anything in the darkness; he might have been a few metres above a mound of mattresses for all he knew—but because his dressing gown had come undone and he had neglected to put on anything beneath it, such had been the alacrity with which he left his cabin. No, this view was not especially what he wanted for his last memory.

The slipper fell from one foot and whirled into the void and out of sight. That settled it. The thought of his corpse being found largely naked but for one slipper (should it stay on during the fall) and a dressing gown that was a definite crime against aesthetics spurred him into action. He looked up and started to swing his free hand to grab on to the handle. As the edge of the hatch was almost within range, a gloved hand reached down and slapped his away. Oh yes, thought Cabal. Somebody’s trying to kill me. I’d almost forgotten. His assailant, hidden in the shadows of the conduit, gripped the little finger of Cabal’s right hand and very deliberately started to bend it back.

This was really too much. There was nothing for it—his attacker had to die.

Currently, however, Cabal was at a great disadvantage: several, in fact. Yet, even as his shadowy attacker worked on loosening Cabal’s grip, on the rung in particular and on life in general, Cabal was quickly cataloguing his situation and his assets. He had one hand free, he had one slipper, he had one dressing gown, and—he remembered with a pleasurable frisson—he had a switchblade knife in one of the pockets of that dressing gown. Yes, between the free hand and the switchblade he felt sure he would be able to formulate a robust response.

Preparation is everything. Cabal was very much aware that to lose the knife was to lose his life, so he was careful to grip the knife firmly when he finally got his left hand into his right-hand pocket, the dressing gown having grown frolicsome in the aeroship’s slipstream. He found the release, and the blade snicked out between the gap he had left between his fingertips and his thumb. Closing his fingers and thumb to reestablish a good grip, he concluded the preparatory step of his plan. It had taken perhaps three seconds.

What the plan itself lacked in subtlety, it more than made up for in brutality. As his attacker, who seemed to be wearing coarse leather gloves, finally got a good grip on Cabal’s little finger, Cabal reached up and stabbed, aiming at the attacker’s wrist. Anatomically, you can really spoil somebody’s day with even a shallow cut there, and Cabal was very much in the mood to cause as much misery as possible. There was a cry, and Cabal’s finger was released.

He knew he had a moment’s grace. If the attacker was only scratched, he would resume with a great deal more violence in a moment. Looking to his reserves, Cabal put the knife in his mouth and grabbed the other side of the hatch with his free hand. In his teens, he would have been able to pull himself up with little difficulty, but he was now in his late twenties and exercised but little. He steeled himself and pulled. He didn’t care how many muscles he tore or how much agony he put himself through. Falling was not an option. Dying was not an option. There was too much to be done.

No muscles tore, but he knew they would be complaining bitterly in a few hours, as he clambered gracelessly into the secure darkness of the conduit. His attacker was nowhere to be seen. He waited in silence for almost three minutes before he was convinced that he was alone. Then he allowed himself the luxury of flopping forward, exhausted and half frozen, to lie on his front. Under his breath he mumbled, “Too much to be done. Too much to be done. Too much to be done …”

L
eonie Barrow found Cabal at breakfast. The long dining table of the evening before had been separated into individual tables and bolted down in their customary positions. Each also had the addition of a four-headed lamp: four iron swans’ necks that rose from a central mounting curved down and then up to conclude with the swans’ heads, beaks agape, with lightbulbs stuck in their gullets. It was a typical Mirkarvian conceit: exquisite engineering merged with a barbaric aesthetic. She noticed that Cabal was sitting, probably deliberately, at one of the few tables that had no lamp. The rest of the room was almost empty, but for Herr Harlmann, who, it seemed, had struck up a relationship with Lady Ninuka’s companion, Miss Ambersleigh. He was presumably boring her with business anecdotes, though she was maintaining an air of interest that might even have been real. Whatever they were talking about, it was in low tones that would have seemed conspiratorial but for the change in atmosphere brought on by the events of the previous night. The disappearance and presumed suicide of M. DeGarre had cast a pall over the ship, and the jollity of the previous evening had entirely evaporated. Even the crew seemed subdued beyond professional impassiveness.

Leonie ordered poached eggs and toast from a steward, who seemed perplexed that anybody would want such a combination for a meal when she wasn’t ill, and sat uninvited at Cabal’s table. He paused for a moment while cutting his steak—a far more Mirkarvian choice for breakfast—to eye her suspiciously. “Good morning, Miss Barrow,” he said in a perfunctory tone, immediately forking a neat square of meat into his mouth to forestall any more speech.

“Good morning, Herr Meissner,” she replied. She had momentarily considered teasing him by almost using his real name, but she was not in the mood and she was positive that he wasn’t, either. He looked tired and somewhat distracted. “Any further thoughts about last night?” she asked when there was nobody near.

Cabal slowed his chewing for a moment. Then he took a sip of black coffee, swallowed, and said, as if it were a common subject for conversation, “Last night, somebody tried to kill me.”

The steward’s arrival with her food and a pot of tea covered her surprise. When they could speak again, she whispered, “Tried to kill you? Who did?”

Cabal regarded her with mild amusement. “Smile when you whisper,” he advised her. “You’re supposed to be flirting with me, if you recall?”

She stared at him icily. Then suddenly her expression thawed and she smiled winsomely, her eyes dewy with romantic love. “Oh, sweetheart … somebody tried to kill you? Whosoever would do such a thing to my nimpty-bimpty snookums?”

Cabal could not have been more horrified if she’d pulled off her face to reveal a gaping chasm of eternal night from which glistening tentacles coiled and groped. That had already happened to him once in his life, and he wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.

“What?” he managed in a dry whisper.

“Smile when you whisper,” she said, her expression fixed and bloodcurdlingly coquettish. “You’re supposed to be flirting with me, remember?”

“Please don’t do that.” He wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t prefer to be dangling from the underside of the
Princess Hortense
again rather than endure another second of Miss Barrow’s unnerving countenance. He certainly found it a great relief when she allowed the expression to slip and be replaced by one of wry amusement.

“So, I’ve discovered what it takes to frighten a man who deals with devils.”

“Not frightened, Fräulein. More … discomforted.” He took a moment to compose himself. “Now, are you really all that blasé about somebody trying to kill me?”

She looked at him seriously. “Of course not. Tell me what happened.” She ate her breakfast as Cabal concisely related the events of the previous night. When he had finished, and was taking the opportunity to dispatch the remainder of his steak, Leonie drank her tea and considered. “There are two possibilities, I suppose. The misarranged carpet really does have something to do with DeGarre’s death. Or—” She studied him carefully before proceeding. “Or an enemy of yours has followed you onto the ship or has recognised you.”

Cabal stopped sawing up his last bit of meat. “You’re not serious?”

“You must have dozens of enemies—” She almost said his name, but restrained herself in time. “Herr Meissner. Importantly, you probably don’t even know a few of them on sight.”

“Explain.”

“You leave a trail of destruction through people’s lives.” Cabal started to argue, but she talked through him. “Even if the ones you affect directly either will not or cannot come after you, that still leaves family and friends. You provoke hatred and revenge. You know it.”

Cabal hadn’t really thought about it in those terms, but he could see the truth in her words. He never went out of his way to damage people’s lives—not except in some very deliberate cases, anyway—but people would insist on getting in the way. Now he considered it more carefully, he began to appreciate just why quite so many bullets, knives, and the occasional crossbow quarrel had whistled past his frantically dodging head down the years.