Johannes Cabal the Detective (38 page)

“‘A curse?’

“‘No, the Ugol liked their curses to go on for several stanzas. This is a warning. They believed in reincarnation, you see.
Not only death in this life but the one that is to follow
. It’s saying that you will be killed so very thoroughly that your reincarnation will die by it, too. That’s not the kind of thing they’d say lightly.’

“It is not for me to say I am a brave man, but I believe I can at least claim not to be a coward, physically or morally. Yet, as we stood in that close passageway and read those dire words of warning, inscribed seven hundred years before and likely never read until then, I felt a sense of nervous tension that I had never experienced before. The walls, lit by the fitful dancing flame, were covered in strange shadows that seemed to crowd about us; the air was thick enough to touch. There, gentlemen, within the living stone of that hill, I think I felt the slender, strong fingers of mortal, nameless fear close around my heart.”

Enright paused in his narrative to light another cigar. We waited in utter silence for the minute that the commonplace ritual lasted. When he spoke again, it was a shock.

“Thus when the bandits returned in force, it was actually something of a relief. A relief to be confronting a foe I understood on terms I was familiar with. A relief to face a known quantity. Admittedly, they would probably murder us in cold blood, but that, at least, was something I could apprehend and fight against.

“First we heard the clatter of hooves on the stone floor of the cave entrance and the laughter of men back from a successful day’s butchery. Leaving Cabal searching for the entrance implied in the warning for a moment, I walked quickly and quietly up to the opening of the passage into the main body of the cave and looked cautiously around the corner. There were a dozen of them if there was one—dangerous men, of evil aspect. The pair they’d left behind to guard the hideout were obviously the least of them, lowered still further by their evident dereliction of duty. Their leader looked around, and his snarling countenance showed his displeasure at their absence. A moment later, they ran in. The cockier of the two affected to slow to a saunter as he came to his leader’s notice. There were some barked derogatory remarks that left the less self-assured guard cowering and begging. The rest of the surly gang gathered around as the other guard stood up to his leader and spoke dismissively. The cave was safe, he seemed to be saying, why the complaints? Who was the leader to second-guess the man on the spot? The coxcomb actually swaggered back and forth as he spoke, taking the dark smiles of the other bandits as approbation. I did not. I knew their look, had seen it on the faces of righteous executioners and priests watching the innocent burn, seen it too many times to mistake it or the horrid sense of foreboding that always came with it. It wasn’t approval I saw in their eyes. It was anticipation.

“And then the leader, an ugly bear of a man, swept a curved dagger from its sheath, held it up just long enough for the guard to see it, to understand its import, and then he smashed it down into the hapless man’s chest.

“The blow was brutal, but it was not efficient. I think it took the guard almost a minute to die, sobbing and pleading for help as his blood ran free and hot over his fingers. A minute of laughter and derision as his ‘comrades’ watched his life flow across the floor to mix with the filth. Sickened, I quietly returned to Cabal.

“I found him behaving oddly, using his fingers like a cartographer’s dividers to measure out distances on the rock face. He listened as I told him about the number of bandits and pursed his lips. The fate of the guard he greeted with a nod and, ‘Good. One less to worry about.’

“‘No man deserves to die like that,’ I said, angered by his insouciance.

“‘Or kicking on the end of a length of state-owned rope. Or blown to pieces on a battlefield. Or quietly in bed surrounded by
loved ones
.’ He spat out these last words venomously. ‘One cannot pick and choose. You shouldn’t be railing against the manner of death, Enright.’

“‘And you find nothing to fear in death, I suppose?’

“‘Only one thing.’ He drew a line with his left fingertip along a crack and then continued down to where his right waited, having finished its curious measurings. He mouthed
Perfect
and pushed hard. There was a hollow grating sound of stone on stone, and the end of the passage swung in and back. Cabal looked at me, said, ‘Its
inevitability
,’ and plunged into the darkness beyond. I admit I stood gawping at the secret entrance, so perfectly concealed, for a long moment until Cabal’s irritated voice demanding the torch broke me from my daze.

“The passageway continued down perhaps only another ten feet or so before opening out abruptly. I stepped out into this new cave and held the torch high. I confess, I was harbouring some childish expectations of what the tomb of the Great Hass Majien would look like. I’d envisaged a cavern, its soaring vaulted ceiling supported by Cyclopean columns, heaped piles of treasure of unimaginable worth and, at the centre of it all, a great golden sarcophagus, perhaps standing by the famous war chariot of legend.

“Instead, I found that we were in a roughly hemispherical cave perhaps forty feet across with a pond in the middle. High on one wall, a V-shaped hole vented water that ran down the rock in a steady flow into a gutter. The gutter, in turn, fed a square pool that lay exactly in the middle of the floor, perhaps six feet along the edge the gutter ran over and ten in the other dimension. At the other end of the pool, another, deeper gutter took the overflow and ran it off into a sinkhole. Much time and effort had clearly been spent in the excavation, construction, and concealment of that place, yet its purpose was, to me at least, unfathomable.

“Cabal went to where the water flowed into the room, took some in his cupped hand, and tasted it. ‘If you still have a thirst, Enright, you can slake it here. The water’s good.’ He walked around the pool to the other gutter and, taking the tube of holy water from his pocket, allowed a drop to fall from it into the runoff. There was a brief flash of blue fire as the two liquids mingled. He nodded, clearly pleased that the experiment had performed as expected. ‘And this is the source of that remarkable stream. Now, I wonder what it is,’ he said, going to one knee by the pool, ‘that lies in here and has been supernaturally corrupting spring water by the tun for seven centuries.’ I didn’t like the calculating way he said it, and I was glad to find something to distract him.

“‘Cabal! Look!’ In the torchlight, I had made out more of the carvings, this time plainly written. He was with me in a moment.

“‘This one looks quite simple. No triple imperatives, no flowery discursions, just
Thou who hast entered here, know thy folly. For the sake of thine soul and the sanctity of life upon life, leave now. This is the tomb of
 … ’ It was hard to tell beneath the unsteady light of the torch, the unshaven, chin, the dirt of the woods, and his own sallow complexion, yet I had the distinct impression that Cabal paled. ‘
Umtak Ktharl
,’ he said finally, in a ghastly thin voice.

“‘What did you say?’ I demanded.

“My voice seemed to shake him out of the state of mental paralysis he’d retreated into and he turned to me with a new, urgent vitality. ‘I said,’ he said, snatching the torch from my hand and heading for the entrance, ‘we’re leaving.
Now!
’

“Remonstrations were pointless as he gained the exit and moved out of sight. Cursing my impetuous companion, I went after him.

“I caught up with him at the corner of the passage and the main cave, where he was glaring at the bandits from concealment, apparently trying to will them into nonexistence. ‘Who’s Umtak Ktharl?’ I whispered urgently.

“‘That doesn’t matter,’ he whispered back. ‘We should be concerning ourselves with how to escape.’

“‘No, it
does
matter. Why are you so scared?’

“He glared at me. ‘I am
not
scared,’ he barked, rather too loudly.

“The bandits all turned to look at us.

“Cabal looked at them, then looked back at me. ‘Now look what you made me do,’ he said, exasperatedly. Then he walked up to the nearest bandit as if we had every right to be there. ‘
Guten Abend
,’ he said. The bandit looked at him with sheer disbelief. ‘We’re so very sorry, but we’ve rather been forced into precipitate action. A thousand pardons.’ So saying, he pulled the bandit’s revolver from his belt and shot him through the head. He backed towards me, firing twice more, snatched up a rifle that was lying at hand, and threw it to me. ‘We’ll just be holing up down here. Feel free to try and winkle us out.’ He turned and ran back down the passage, with me close at his heels. I swear there was a count of three before the bandits fully appreciated what had happened. Our unexpected appearance and Cabal’s easy resort to great violence had quite discomforted them. Then the bullets started flying.

“‘Now what?’ I asked him as we sought cover in the tomb cave.

“‘I’m no military man, thankfully,’ replied Cabal as he laid himself flat behind a partially emergent boulder, ‘but, in their place, there are two obvious plans. The better of the two is simply to ascertain that there is no exit from here and then seal us in. In a couple of weeks, they can wander in with complete impunity.’

“‘And the second?’ Although I was sure I already knew.

“‘The second is purest folly. A frontal assault. Here they come!’

“The villains, unappreciative that everything comes to him who waits, had massed on the other side of the entrance and were running in, zigzagging across the floor in an attempt to reach cover. Cabal fired and missed the first through. I took a little more time, in the poor light of a few torches that had been thrown in, and put a bullet in the wretch’s chest. Cabal fired once more at the entrance, and then I heard his revolver clack uselessly. He snapped the cylinder out and studied the chambers. ‘A cautious man. He didn’t carry a live round under the hammer. Five shots. I’m out.’ He closed up the pistol resignedly and dropped it to the floor. ‘Make your shots count better than I did mine, Enright.’

“A couple of the bandits had reached cover and were firing over our heads, probably trying for a lucky ricochet. They stood an excellent chance of getting one, too, given the confines we found ourselves in. Happily, ammunition became a concern and they slowed to some desultory sniping. I lay there behind that boulder knowing what it was to really be between a rock and a hard place. My rifle’s magazine held only another four rounds and there had to be at least eight bandits left. Our death was a certainty, and the only choice left to us was how easy we made it for them. I’d made up my mind to make it as difficult as possible, and I suspected that Cabal was of the same liver. After a few minutes, the ringing in my ears from the close gunfire had subsided to the point that I could hear the surviving bandits arguing amongst themselves. ‘What now?’ I asked Cabal again, with less urgency this time. There hardly seemed much point.

“He sighed, picked up the useless revolver, and fidgeted with it as he replied. ‘We wait while the better option occurs to them and they wall us in, I suppose.’

“‘That’s not very optimistic.’

“He laughed humourlessly. ‘I don’t see many grounds for optimism.’ He looked past the edge of his boulder at the pool. ‘You wanted to know who Umtak Ktharl was.’

“‘If we’re to die in his tomb, I might as well know who I’m going to be sharing eternity with.’

“Cabal nodded. ‘That’s fair. Very well. Every schoolboy knows of the Great Hass Majien and his Ugol hordes. The stories talk of vast hordes of horsemen sweeping down from the Irthat Steppes with Majien at their head in his ubiquitous war chariot. Nothing could stand before their unparalleled ferocity, expert horsemanship, uncanny archery, little ponies, comedic moustaches, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam. Utter rot. I researched this period in some detail and I’m confident that the horde barely exceeded a thousand undisciplined men. Any defending army worth the name would have wiped the floor with them.’

“‘You’re saying the history books are wrong?’

“‘I’m saying the history books have rationalised how a bunch of foul-smelling thugs managed to defeat every force thrown against them. The truth is too ugly for the historians in their ivory towers, so they’ve come up with the myth of an unbeatable army. The Ugol
were
unbeatable, but that’s the only true part of it.’

“‘They had a secret weapon?’ I ventured.

“‘No. Yes, actually. Yes, in a sense, they did. A secret weapon. Umtak Ktharl. He was the Great Hass’s vizier, adviser, majordomo. Actually, I think he ran everything and the Hass was just there as a more acceptable figurehead. The Hass could roister and doister and do all that nonsense. Umtak Ktharl, on the other hand, was evil incarnate.’ I looked questioningly at him, but he was disassembling the revolver for his amusement and wasn’t aware of me. ‘I first became aware of him when I read of something called the Red Snow,’ Cabal continued. ‘Red snow that fell from a clear sky, and where it touched human flesh it dissolved it. And every flake sighed as it ate away the meat from a man’s bones, the sigh of a tiny ribbon of vital essence leaking away into thin air. Entire armies were reduced by it, kings lived in fear of it, and it was only one of the novelties in Umtak Ktharl’s bag of tricks. Some were much, much worse. Who would stand against an army backed by a warlock like that?’

“‘A necromancer,’ I corrected.

“He seemed to be about to lose his temper, and took a moment to swallow his irritation. I affected not to notice.

“‘No,’ he said finally, and his voice betrayed no emotion. ‘Not a necromancer. They are men of a very different stripe. This
warlock
was the reason for the horde’s success. The only reason. Kingdoms would be abandoned at the very whisper that the Great Hass and his éminence grise were coming. If Umtak Ktharl was entombed here, it explains why the horde withdrew soon after they passed through this land. They very wisely appreciated that the jig was up and it was time to cut and run.’