The Brothers Cabal (8 page)

Or maybe it was mutual, he mused. Perhaps right that moment Johannes was in a tavern somewhere, employing a warm eye, an easy smile, and an insouciant line in chat to add new recruits to his coterie of adoring women. Horst smiled at the image, until it faltered at the memory of why Johannes would never do such a thing, would never betray the one woman he'd sacrificed so much for. Then the smile vanished altogether. Of course. Silly of him. His brother was dead and in Hell. How had he forgotten that, he wondered. After all, Horst had put Johannes there himself.

He looked at the clock, suddenly eager to be back in his coffin and insensible. Things usually seemed better when he was incapable of thought. The hour was late, but only to the diurnal. He realised he wasn't even sure of the time of year. There was a nip in the air and he had a feeling it was early autumn even if the leaves hadn't started falling yet. Still, it could be early spring. Nobody had even told him what year it was. Perhaps that was because he hadn't asked anyone. It had all seemed so stupendously irrelevant in the days immediately after his re-rebirth when it had all seemed a little dreamlike. But now he was up to his knees in rich men not explaining things to him, and lady necromancers, and men whom he disliked for reasons that he appreciated weren't just to do with how they wore their cravat. Now he realised he would have to start being more methodical, not really for reasons of self-preservation nearly so much as curiosity. He'd been dead twice now, and was beginning to understand why it had concerned Johannes so little.

There had been nothingness.

Horst frowned. Why hadn't he gone to Heaven or Hell? Johannes had been very vocal about his scorn for the former and personal animosity for the latter. Shouldn't Horst have found himself in one place or the other? It was a peculiar sort of theological question and not the sort that was best suited for answering by a priest, should one be handy within the castle, and that seemed remarkably unlikely. Again, Horst found himself wishing Johannes was about. It was a shame about the whole sending-his-brother-to-Hell thing. It had seemed like a good and moral thing to do, but now it was turning out to be a bloody nuisance. Where was he supposed to find a necromancer at that time of night?

There was a gentle, perhaps nervous tap at his door. Before he could say anything, the door opened and Lady Misericorde leaned around the edge. ‘I hope I'm not intruding, my lord,' she said, despite the very obvious fact that she was. ‘There was nobody around so I just…' She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

‘Ah,' said Horst regretfully. ‘I appear to have frightened away my maid. I hope she comes back.'

‘I doubt she has any choice,' said Misericorde, smiling a little wanly. ‘The castle is very secure. She can't just walk out.'

‘That sounds like the voice of experience.' He waved vaguely at one of the ludicrously over-appointed ottoman sofas, dripping with cushions and decadence. ‘I'm forgetting my manners. Please, sit.'

She looked at the sofa and shook her head. ‘I dislike seats without backs. I'll forget myself, lean back, and fall over, and where shall my dignity be then? I shall stand.'

Horst half smiled. He regarded her shrewdly. ‘That accent of yours. Not quite German and not quite French. Are you from the Alsace?'

‘Very good.' She favoured him with her own half a smile. ‘And you were brought up in Hesse, although there's provincial English in your vowels.'

Horst's eyebrows rose. Although technically true, nobody enjoys the slight pejorative taint inherent in
provincial
. ‘Yes,' he said a little sharply to cover his discomfort. ‘I have had a chequered sort of life so far.'

‘Life. Perhaps not the perfect technical term for it,' she said. ‘But it will have to do.'

Horst gave her a hard look. According to his upbringing, there were certain subjects that it was ill-mannered to raise in conversation with a new acquaintance. With the likes of politics, religion, fatness, and house prices, it seemed reasonable to assume that ‘being dead' was likely to be somewhere on the list.

‘So,' he said when it became apparent that his hard look was not doing all it might in humbling her, ‘you're a necromancer.'

‘So,' she replied, ‘you're a vampire.'

An awkward silence followed, as if they had just met through the offices of a cryptic dating agency.

‘I believe I shall sit, after all,' said Misericorde. There followed a few moments of silent reorganisation. A good number of cushions ended on the floor, from where she did not trouble to recover them. Finally, she arranged herself with a little difficulty but with decorum intact. Half reclining, she looked up at where he stood across the room from her. ‘I can hardly believe that you've come along with this so far and have no idea what it's all about, my lord.'

He considered asking her to call him by his name rather than the very new and, to his ear, very false title, just as he had done with Alisha. But, he considered, he liked Alisha, so he would let Misericorde continue to wrestle with the title for a while. ‘It was hardly my choice. I was just lying around, minding my own business, when some of
their
'—here, he gestured sideways with a jerk of his thumb in the general direction of the dining room—‘hirelings turned up.'

‘You didn't have to come.'

‘It seemed rude not to. So … what
is
it all about?'

She smiled, or—as her very next action was to avoid answering the question—possibly smirked. ‘I don't have much experience of vampires,' she confided. ‘There aren't that many of them around these days.'

‘You probably know more about that than I do. Now, this little group we find…'

‘No, there aren't. People keep hunting and killing them. Which is to say, hunting and killing you. Still, that's what you get for trying to predate upon humanity. We don't take it very well.'

‘This little group into which we find ourselves recruited … this conspiracy, it seems…'

‘Our little cabal. Yes?'

The woman really was infuriating, Horst was finding. Now that she was ready to talk about the subject, she threw that needless little roadblock in the way. ‘Not the term I'd use, for obvious reasons.' She looked off to one side, digesting his words, and Horst saw that she was honestly confused. ‘My name,' he explained. She held out her hands and shrugged, still unilluminated. He sighed. ‘It's nothing important, just that you said “our little cabal”, and that's my name. “Cabal”, that is. Not the whole thing. I'm not called “Horst Our Little Cabal”.' He grunted, exasperated at himself. ‘I'm rambling.'

It hardly mattered. Misericorde had sat up at the revelation, eyes wide. ‘You're a Cabal?' she said in astonishment. ‘Does the name “Johannes Cabal” mean—'

‘My brother,' Horst interrupted. ‘Yes, the name definitely means something to me. He was my brother.'

A modicum of a new expression was colouring her surprise and Horst, who was bracing himself for the usual hatred and name-calling, had to remind himself that he was not in normal company when he saw that the expression was pleasure. ‘This is such a surprise,' she said. ‘I had no idea. Cabal … your brother, that is, he has a remarkable reputation.'

‘Infamy,' he corrected her. ‘Not especially widespread, but…'

Misericorde waved the comment aside. ‘Most people can't even explain electricity. Their opinion is worthless.'

Horst laughed, though slightly troubled. ‘You sound just like him.'

‘That,' she said with emphasis, ‘is a compliment.'

‘It is?' It all seemed a long way from the usual reaction his brother's name provoked. Then again, this was a very different parish. ‘I didn't realise he was so well regarded in your community.'

‘My community?' Again that frown of real incomprehension. Her expression cleared. ‘Oh, of course. You wouldn't know. You've been … incommunicado for a while, haven't you?'

‘I don't know,' he admitted. ‘That clock over there tells me the time, but that's all I've been furnished with. I don't know the day, or the month, or the year. I'm beginning to think that might be useful data to know. A desk calendar would have been nice.' He looked around the otherwise exhaustively furnished room. ‘A desk would have been nice.'

Lady Misericorde was pleased to bring light to his temporal darkness, although if she had been expecting an Olympian detachment to the flight of time, she was to be disappointed.

‘Dear God,' he said, and perched on the end of her ottoman sofa. He put both hands over his mouth and gazed fixedly off, reconciling what he knew to the current date. After almost a minute, he lowered his hands and looked at her with disbelief. ‘That's over two years. Over two years. It hurt, but not for long. When the end came, what I
thought
was the end came, the world just turned off. Over two years. Oh, my God.' He looked away, still battling to take it in, relieving her of the stress of his regard. But it was only for a moment before he turned back and demanded, ‘I wouldn't know what? Surely Johannes is dead?' He licked his lips and anguish flickered across his face for a moment. ‘Dead and damned.'

‘I don't know if he's dead,' Lady Misericorde replied in slow, careful tones. Sharing an ottoman with a distracted and upset vampire seemed to be a new experience to her, but—interesting as it was—she probably had no desire that it should be her last. ‘I only know he wasn't a year or so ago.' Horst did not respond, still caught in a web of memory and regret. ‘He saved us all.'

That got Horst's attention.

His head snapped around to bear on her as if she had just shot a spitball in his ear. ‘He saved who?' he demanded. ‘All the necromancers?'

‘No.' She smiled as she shook her head. She had read animosity in his reactions to mentions of brother Johannes earlier, but she saw a very human concern beneath that now. ‘No. He saved
everyone
.'

And then, to Horst's increasing astonishment, she told him a tale learned at second, third, and fourth hands, from a lover's indiscretion in speaking of the goings-on in a London gentlemen's club, to the researches of an occult investigator seeking the truth behind an historical mystery of the Ugol hordes and of fatal red snow that fell from a cloudless sky, to an outraged exchange of letters between an archbishop and the chief of police for some little border town somewhere.

‘That's an exaggeration, isn't it?' he asked finally. ‘That's not doomsday?'

Misericorde shrugged. ‘Perhaps not. But if even half of what I have learned is true, then your brother saved the world from a horror that would have left nations in chains, and a hundred battlefields piled with the corpses of those who tried to resist.'

Horst's mouth opened and closed several times in the manner popularised by goldfish as he tried to absorb this difficult intelligence. It was not the scale of the averted disaster that troubled him, but that his brother had been the one to deal with it. This was, for him, far more difficult to comprehend than any number of eldritch horrors from ancient centuries or inconvenienced archbishops.

‘Wow,' he said eventually.

‘Has your little brother made you proud?' she said, sowing mischief.

But to her apparent mild yet pleasant surprise, the mischief failed to take root. Instead, the Lord of the Dead, bane of humanity and master of evil eternal, smiled a huge beaming smile. ‘Proud? Yes. Yes! You have no idea how happy this makes me!' Then, with sudden emphasis, he added, ‘You are
sure
he isn't dead?'

‘I have no idea if he's alive or not at the moment, but he was alive a year ago.'

‘Then he wormed his way out of trouble somehow,' Horst said quietly to himself. He brightened up again. ‘He'd got into a situation, you see. He was going to die. No possible way out of it, one would have thought. Still, if anyone could do it, he could, slippery swine that he is!' He rose to his feet and started pacing. ‘Just as well. There to save … or probably save … or at least save quite a bit of the world. There when it mattered. My brother.'

He halted and looked down at her. ‘Oh, yes. I'm proud of him.' He was smiling and, Misericorde saw, there was a little extra glimmer of light in his eyes. Horst blinked fiercely, distractedly, and the glimmer vanished.

‘So…' He looked seriously at her, the joy of a moment before evaporating as he re-ordered priorities and re-sorted the factors that made up his current circumstances. One large factor was still notably absent, and priorities could not be arranged without it. ‘Why are we here?' He held up his hands, fingers spread, a gesture that—combined with a suspicious twitch of his eyes to take in the left-hand wall, ceiling, right-hand wall—indicated that he was talking about the castle rather than in any larger philosophical sense. ‘What is the business of those men?'

‘They call themselves,' said Misericorde, leaning back into her nest of cushions to regard him, ‘the
Ministerium Tenebrae
.'

‘Do they? Do they indeed?' He thought for a moment. ‘That's not very good Latin, is it? Is it?'

‘It's fine.'

Horst considered further. ‘Something to do with shadows, isn't it?'

‘That would be
umbras
, I think.'

‘Oh, of course.' He scratched his head and laughed self-consciously. ‘Johannes was always the one for languages. And sciences. And most things like that.'

‘The Ministry of Darkness,' she supplied. ‘Although
Tenebrarum
might have been better.'

‘Yes, it might have,' said Horst, nodding for no good reason. Certainly not from an informed opinion. ‘So … they sound … a bit…' He seesawed his head as he thought, trying to find the
bon mot
. ‘Evil.'