The Fall of the House of Cabal (27 page)

Indeed, Princess Zarenyia was watching them go with no apparent emotion at all. That would never do. Demons are built of passion, after all. She should be showing something. Satan turned his full attention upon her, and felt for the first time a slowly wiggling qualm in his consciousness. Something was not right here.

‘Your Highness.' His voice was low with suspicion. ‘We should be going. I shall order that the tunnel be sealed permanently.'

Then Zarenyia turned to him, looked him in the eye sockets with an insouciant smile, and said, ‘You do that, poppet.'

Suspicion crystallised into certainty. He growled with sudden anger. ‘What have you done?'

Out in the lava lake, the last floating stone floe rolled and sank beneath the glowing surface.

‘Me? Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. Just done a betrayal, like you said I should.'

‘What are you saying, devil? That you have betrayed
me
?'

The lava started to glow a cherry pink, and the heat in the chamber became stifling as Hell itself responded in kind to Satan's growing fury.

‘Only sort of, darling.' The smile remained broad, but her eyes narrowed. ‘You might call it a sin of omission.'

*   *   *

Miss Smith was disgruntled by the speed with which Johannes Cabal sought annihilation. As soon as a twist in the tunnel hid them from the view of the collected demons, he had quickened his gait from a sober ‘man walking to the gallows' pace to a ‘if we don't get a move on, we shall miss our train' semi-trot.

‘I am not so very keen to see the Ivory Citadel, Cabal. If you want to rush off there, be my guest, but I plan to take my time.'

For his reply, Cabal pulled her down behind a boulder. For her reply, she belaboured him with her parasol. ‘I am very much
not
in the mood,' she said as she rained blows upon his head and shoulders. ‘You should have asked earlier. Nicely. Over dinner.'

‘Madam.' Cabal sounded pained, if not necessarily physically. ‘You may belabour me with your parasol later at your leisure. At this instant, however, I would appreciate it if you desist.'

Miss Smith desisted. ‘Then why are we hiding behind a boulder? You heard that house of cards with the skull and a hat; they're going to seal off the tunnel. There's no going back.'

Ruminating upon just how much of his life seemed to consist of explaining to women why they were hiding behind things, Cabal reached into his jacket and drew the little Senzan pistol from its holster. ‘Do you know how to use a gun?'

She accepted the weapon with distrust. ‘Of course I don't. I'm a witch these days. It's all wands and fell powers.'

‘I am not sure your “fell powers” will work in this environment, but I am confident bullets will. They are of my own design and will have some effect even upon demons. They may not kill demons, but I guarantee it will be very upsetting to them, all the same. The device is simple; release the safety catch thus, aim along the top of the weapon much like pointing, squeeze the trigger. Repeat until some sort of resolution occurs.'

Miss Smith glanced dubiously at him. ‘And while I'm irritating demons, what will you be doing?'

‘Irritating them alongside you.' He opened his Gladstone bag and withdrew from its depths the bulky form of a Webley .577 revolver.

Her dubious expression darkened. ‘Why do I get the girly little gun?'

He handed her the revolver. She weighed it against the semi-automatic for a moment and then handed the Webley back. ‘Unwieldy, isn't it? Very well, so you have your artillery piece and I have my
bijou
little demon-botherer. Is there a plan, or is this just a tantrum that involves firearms?'

‘To be candid, I do not know for a certainty. The plan, if it exists, is not mine.'

‘Then whose?' Miss Smith popped her head up to peer over the boulder and up the tunnel. ‘Zarenyia? Didn't she just betray us?'

‘I do not know that, either. It certainly looked like a betrayal. I suspect not of us, however.'

*   *   *

Satan, previously Ratuth Slabuth, née Ragtag Slyboots, was prone to a certain footling administrative wiliness that, in a poor light, might be construed for cunning. He liked to flatter himself that his coup had been a masterpiece of patient scheming and that his was the triumph of that quiet man, but the truth was he had been lucky. He lacked for the killing instinct that had promoted the previous Satan's cabinet of princes and generals to positions of power, but his own position with that group had always been that of a reliable factotum, not of a trusted confidante. When he had been given a simple task of elementary perfidiousness to perform, he had failed in it and been demoted to the non-commissioned ranks for it. He had hated Cabal for the humiliation, but then it is the habit of small men—and demons—to blame others for their failings.

These failings were multitudinous, and it truly was only a matter of time (and little time at that) before some imp or minor devilkin with an ounce of nous overturned the order once more. One such failing was a general heedlessness, an incipient lack of sagacity that coloured, or rather failed to colour, his every action. If there was a princedom available for complacency, Ratuth Slabuth would surely have risen to it long ago.

In this particular case he had failed to do what Zarenyia had been doing whenever she had a moment since learning that this Hell was indeed
the
Hell; she had been testing the bounds of its reality. It struck her as reasonable that, since the Five Ways had brought them there via an entrance woven at the continuum of its reality and what we may laughingly call our own reality, that it would also provide an exit when necessary. She had not been able to detect it, only tasting the decaying weft that briefly connected Hell to the endless cemetery and was now too fragile to return across.

Then, as this penny-ante Satan she so roundly loathed had smugly laid out his silly master plan to destroy Cabal utterly, she had felt the glimmering formation of the hoped-for exit. It had come from Satan's mouth, born on glowing threads of eventuality and recourse; it had risen from the plan of Lucifer's tower that he showed her; it had grown in the air like the scent of nearby water. The Ivory Citadel. Perhaps most of the time it was indeed the home to the final death, but—for a short engagement only—its place would be taken by the path through the Five Ways.

So she had played along, she had fooled Satan, and the most depressing part of it all was that it had been so easy. He really wasn't up to the job.

‘You're really not up to this job, are you?' Zarenyia laughed. She would be destroyed soon, she knew, but better this than rotting of boredom in a palace, burdened by a meaningless title bestowed by a fool. She nodded at the encroaching crescent of demons. ‘You can do much better than this idiot, you know. I am only amazed that he's lasted this long. Any of you could do a better job. Well, not
you
exactly, darling—sorry to raise your hopes.' A demon with the face of a rhinoceros, the intellect of a rhinoceros, and the ego of a shy virgin, stood crushed. ‘But the rest of you with a few wits about you. You would make a far better Satan.' She nodded directly at one of them illustratively as she spoke, a thing like a wilful rag doll made from spite and gingham that, incidentally, smelled of aniseed. Zarenyia's attention moved on, so she did not see the diminutive demon nod slowly. Mimble Scummyskirts liked the sound of that.

Ratuth Slabuth—he truly did not deserve the title of Satan—withdrew his own senses. He had felt the edge of his domain where it tended into the dreadful negative of the Ivory Citadel fade into something else. The Five Ways. It could only be the Five Ways.

‘Why?' he roared, his anger raising the inferno about them. The lava bubbled. ‘I offered you everything! Why would you throw everything away for that … that
shit,
Cabal?'

‘Language, sweetheart. And, here's a pointer for the future, should you have one. Tempting people involves offering them something that they actually want. I never really knew what I wanted, you see. I thought I would be happy with adventures and murder, and in no way am I deprecating them—adventures and murder are super fun. But I found something else. My funny little friend. I know humans live so briefly, and it should not concern me when that span is shortened further still. But you, Ragtag Slyboots … I was not about to betray my friend, my only friend, for the likes of you. So.' She smiled brightly, but her eyes were sad, her remaining time brief. ‘Why don't you take your palace and your pretty pink princess tiara, and stick them up your non-Euclidean arse?'

She turned and fled.

*   *   *

Zarenyia had little enough of a plan, and what she had consisted of ‘Fight until they kill me; give Johannes and the chippy little thing with the parasol time to escape.' It was elegant in its simplicity, and modest in its aims, unburdened as it was with anything approaching an exit strategy. She would fight in the tunnel to limit the number of challengers who might engage her at once, and she was fairly confident that she would last a few minutes at least. She would also have the tactical advantage of experience; she did a lot of hunting in the tunnels of the outer darkness—mainly of demons who had become lost at the furthest marches of Hell—and had a few tricks up her angora sleeves.

Her rapid retreat had caught Ratuth Slabuth—she really couldn't think of that nincompoop as Satan a second longer—on the hop, but now she heard him roaring orders that substituted bluster for authority. If nothing else, she thought she might have fatally undermined His Satanship. It would have happened sooner or later in any case, but now she felt sure it would happen a great deal sooner. If Satan couldn't be relied upon to successfully deal with a couple of mortals, really, what was he good for?

Fifty yards into the tunnel, she found a useful narrowing and skittered to a halt, performing a full turn as she did so. The pack leaders of the pursuing party were not far behind, but they were small and fleet rather than large and dangerous. She speared the first on a foreleg, tossed its convulsing body into the air with a careless flick, and batted it down the tunnel at its fellows with her other foreleg, forcing them to scatter or be knocked over.

In the breath the attack allowed her, she ran up the wall, trailing silk, and then allowed herself to fall from the ceiling. It was an ugly way to build a web, but she doubted they would afford her the time to do a proper job. She was fighting under disadvantages greater than merely numbers. She was a weaver of traps of assorted forms, and the close press of the enemy prevented her from doing so. Further, her succubine abilities were of little use when confronted by so many. Ideally, she'd ask them to queue up and take a ticket while she dealt with them one by one—male, female, indeterminate, or anywhere else on the spectrum, she was confident of popping just about anyone and anything's cork in the most terminal of ways. Demons, however, were appallingly uncouth, and this Satan was no gentleman.

A scurvy of imps ran at her with spears, trying to overwhelm her with numbers, but she raised the bladed barbs along the ridges of her legs and scythed them down as easily as wheat in a field, the kind of bad-smelling wheat that bleeds all over the place and complains bitterly about being harvested.

The entrée completed, the main course arrived. Zarenyia faced them with more evident confidence than she felt. She was beginning to think that lasting even a few minutes might turn out to be optimistic, for here came Grith demons, hollow-eyed spectres of misery, bearing broadswords. These were not cannon fodder by any means; Ratuth Slabuth did not care to wear her down first. Fine, she decided. If he didn't mind losing a few elite troops simply because he was in a foul dudgeon, that would count against him, too, when the butcher's bill was reckoned up. She would be very dead by then, but you can't have everything.

The first ran at her, sword trailing in both hands, ready to swing. She saw another start its run almost immediately and saw their reputation was deserved. This was no hasty attack, but rather a practised team manoeuvre. While she was dealing with the first, the second or third would already be killing her. Very well, she would just have to spoil their party piece.

She moved to engage the first of the Grith, but instead of fighting it, she suddenly changed course and ran up the wall past it. It swung to follow her, and so didn't realise the attack was coming from the side. Zarenyia was still trailing silk. It caught the Grith under the armpit, and it barely had time to realise the sticky cable had snagged it when Zarenyia released her end and the Grith was yanked off its feet and off towards where she had begun the frame of her apparently unsuccessful web.

Its fellows did not hesitate at all as their comrade vanished off into the gloom with a despairing cry, but Zarenyia had not expected them to. They would already be moving to a secondary plan, and this, too, she would have to outwit. She flipped forwards and landed behind the two remaining Grith, ready to fight. One she smashed aside with a hard flick of her No. 3 Port leg. The other came at her, sword back to swing. Zarenyia feinted right, then swung back and left, the tip of the demon blade only just missing the threads of her angora sweater. She moved forwards hard, grabbing the Grith's sword hand with her own and swinging it in a half circle so they were facing the same direction. It struggled to no avail; the demon was strong, but the devil was stronger. It was held helplessly, its sword pointing uselessly down the tunnel.

‘Now, now, poppet,' she whispered in its pointy ear, ‘I like my boys to lead with their weapons. Now, show me how you use it.'

Out of the gloom swung a frantic shape, the first of the Grith to attack and still fixed firmly to the end of the silk line. Neither it nor the one Zarenyia held had even half a moment to react before the first swung directly onto the second's sword, the night-black blade easily piercing it to emerge in a welter of innards from its back. The sword's tines caught on its victim's ribs. Zarenyia released the Grith and let it swing away clinging to the corpse of its comrade. Now its rhythm was broken, it would be easy meat in a moment. In the meantime, however, she had the third to …