The Fall of the House of Cabal (38 page)

Cabal stepped away from Horst and addressed the chamber. ‘Varney is dead. Destroyed, and good riddance. You have a simple choice: either accept our leadership and stand once more for your country and principles, or regretfully we shall have to destroy you all. I believe there are rules of fealty that run through your … subspecies. Do you pledge loyalty to us, or will there have to be more violence here?'

The City gent rose to his feet. He seemed calmer and more reassured now that the surprise of the battle was over. ‘We are patriots here, I think, and yes, we are compelled by laws of fealty that draws us by the sinew, even against the will. I believe I speak for us all, then, when I say, we shall
not
follow you, sir.'

Cabal's shoulders drooped. ‘After all this and we have to have another fight? This is very inconvenient.'

‘You will permit me to finish, sir. We shall not follow you, but
you
'—and here he pointed at Horst—‘we shall follow to the ends of this miserable, blighted earth. We are at your disposal, my Lord Horst, I think you said your name is?'

‘Lord?' Horst put up his hands and shook his head with evident dismay. ‘No, no, no. I am no lord.'

‘You are, sir. You are Lord of the Dead, and your word is our law.'

Horst looked around as the vampires rose to pay obeisance to him. He looked aghast. ‘The Lord of the Dead?' He looked at Cabal. ‘That was what Ninuka wanted me to be. Her general of the undead. I can't, Johannes. I cannot.'

‘You must. This is a game, and those are the rules. We have each been tested and awarded laurels that we have or have not enjoyed. Now it is your turn.'

‘
Great Detective,
' said Leonie Barrow. It sounded like a moan. ‘Oh, I've been an idiot. Of course. Now it makes sense. I thought they were very swift to hand out the superlatives.'

‘My own future is misted, and I do not think I exactly fitted the bill in the great necropolis.' Cabal took his brother by the arm and led him back to the group. ‘I may not have triumphed precisely, but I finished far from being a failure, and that apparently sufficed. Besides, I think that experience was telling me something else.'

‘But, Johannes, sweetness,' Zarenyia was considering his words, ‘I was offered a principality of Hell as my very own, and I turned it down.'

‘Surely you see that this was the test? Giving in to temptation is easy. Resisting it for the sake of others, there lies the triumph.'

‘And I became the Witch Queen,' said Miss Smith. She shook her head. ‘But that was almost by accident. How is that a trial?'

Cabal lowered his head and was silent for a long moment. When presently he raised it again, his expression was somber and perhaps even sad. ‘Miss Smith. You are not part of this undertaking. I am sorry, but the trials were never meant for you.'

She flinched as if he had spat in her face. ‘What? But this Five Ways thing … there are five of us. What are you talking about? Of course I'm part of it.'

‘You were drawn into it by forces of association, specifically your association with me. Your necropolis in the Dreamlands is part of my life and experiences now, but—unusually—one that comes with an occupant. Your presence in the unfolding events is the merest accident.'

‘But there are
five
of us.'

‘There are, but you are not the fifth point of the pentagram of forces that circle around the prize. She lies less than a mile away, over the ruin of Buckingham Palace.'

Cabal looked at his comrades. ‘We find ourselves drawn into a trap. Ninuka meant for me to find
The One True Account of Presbyter Johannes by His Own Hand
. Ever was she the student of human nature. Even mine; a thought that distresses me in a variety of ways.'

‘She read you like a book, Cabal.'

‘I believe I intimated as much just this moment, Miss Barrow.'

‘Played you for a fool.'

Cabal's face darkened, but it was no more than the truth. ‘We have unwittingly performed a great and dangerous ritual for her, and now she enters it at the end with overwhelming forces at her command with the intention of claiming the prize for herself.'

‘Overwhelming, you say?' Zarenyia gave an insouciant toss of her hair.

‘Superior, then—at least numerically. Now, however, we have shocking troops.' He gestured at the vampires. ‘My mistake.
Shock
troops.' He studied Horst's stolen uniform, now sadly the worse for wear thanks to repeated journeys through furniture. ‘We shall have to find you something more fitting for the coming battle. A general's uniform, perhaps. Or perhaps there's still something ermine-trimmed in the cloakroom here suitable for a lord.'

‘Do shut up, Johannes.'

‘To think that we would one day have a peer in the family. I am quite filled with emotion.'

And so, bickering, they settled down to plan the assault on the floating palace of the Red Queen, Orfilia Ninuka.

 

The Fifth Way:
RUBRUM IMPERATRIX

General Klaus Fischer did not enjoy the daily briefings he was obliged to supply Her Majesty. She rarely gave the slightest impression that she was listening; more than once she had been reading while he supplied the gloss overviews of the vast number of reports that were submitted, analysed, and rendered from mere information into valuable intelligence. He would say that he was wasting his time for the vanity of a woman who liked to pretend that she maintained a finger upon the pulse of the incorporation of the British Isles. (It was always an ‘incorporation', according to all documentation and newspapers, never something as crude and uncalled for as an ‘invasion'. After all, Britain no longer had a functional government, or anything approaching one. It was now green and pleasant real estate, available for whosoever had the means to take it.) He would say that, but for her unnerving ability to look up from her book and ask a deep question based on the meanings between the lines, or to demand that new data be ascertained and brought to her as soon as was humanly possible.

The general was a lifelong warrior and had been the right hand of Count Marechal, the Queen's late and—by her at any rate—lamented father. Marechal had been an ambitious man, and his plans to pincer Senza, the hated northern neighbour of Mirkarvia, with an unexpected airborne assault from the loathsome but useful allied state of Katamenia might well have worked. Fischer had been left to damp down the remains of one of Mirkarvia's occasional little outbreaks of civil disobedience while Marechal travelled to Katamenia to make sure the assault was properly prepared.

The plan never reached fruition, and Marechal returned as an urn full of ashes in the arms of what had turned out to be the count's greatest creation—his daughter. General Fischer did not enjoy the briefings because he, a broad-shouldered man standing six feet and two inches in his stockinged feet, was afraid of Orfilia Ninuka.

She had once merely been wilful, but now she was a monster. Nobody called her mad, for she was possessed of vanity and vengefulness. Nobody called her mad, for she maintained a diffuse and effective secret police that, with the abetment of eavesdroppers, informants, and even the occasional loyal citizen, seemed to know every unguarded word. Nobody called her mad but for she herself, and surely a touchstone for true insanity was that the lunatic does not realise his or her state?

Nobody called her mad, for was she not the Red Queen who dealt in blood and abomination? Did she not hold a small army of Katamenian cut-throats in her thrall, who would die for her as eagerly as they would kill? Was she not a necromantrix, so that even death was no release for those who died in her prisons and interrogation cells and the awful glass oubliettes in which humans were observed in their faltering mortalities even as an insect may be left to die in a test tube?

With the fall of Senza, the Mirkarvian military gained easy access to Western Europe in general and the Mediterranean in particular. The fleet of warships and troopships culled from the vanquished surface navies of Senza and Poloruss sailed out towards the Atlantic. Commentators and terribly clever civil servants concluded that this was merely the new regime showing off. After all, with no clear lines of logistics it seemed incredible that there might be a brutally military point to all this. As is so often the case with commentators and terribly clever civil servants, they had failed to understand with exactly whom they were dealing.

The surface ships, after all, were not the only examples of useful materiel that had fallen into Mirkarvian hands. Poloruss's aerofleet was justly famous. Indeed, a new flagship was midway through being fitted out prior to its commissioning voyage, when disaster struck the country. Whatever it was going to be called hardly mattered to anyone except military historians; what it was called now and its new function were far more important: the
Rubrum Imperatrix,
personal ship and mobile palace for the Red Queen herself.

From this flying aerie, Queen Orfilia had headed a shadowy fleet over misty northern climes and through clouded skies, unseen and unsuspected. No storms or bad weather troubled the fleet, nor did the cloud ever break to betray it to ground-based observers. Meteorologists would regard this as an unusual combination, but perhaps Her Majesty simply had the luck of the Devil on her side.

In any case, she and her ships arrived over the grey skies of Britain just as the surface fleet passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and, under the curious eyes of the Spanish and then the Portuguese, turned to the north.

By the time the invasion fleet arrived at the English south coast, the war—an inaccurate term, but ‘slaughter' seems overly emotive—was already over. Ninuka had rained hell and damnation down upon London, cursing the metropolis using magics only whispered of since the days of the Assyrians, who had wisely never used them.

The
Rubrum Imperatrix
remained in London while the rest of the fleet dispersed to bring havoc down upon a country abruptly decapitated. Scattered battles and last-ditch defensive engagements still raged, but it was only a matter of time. Orfilia Ninuka sat in her study and gave orders as easily as she might once have offered chitchat at a
soirée
. She didn't seem very much like the sort of person who might have
soireés
any more.

Fischer watched in silence as Ninuka now took up the gloss of incoming reports and read down the list, wafting herself slowly with a Chinese fan in her off hand. She paced languidly about her study-cum–throne room, once the intended day office of a flag admiral. She walked by the two great panes of thick glass joined at the prow line by a supporting girder. She would insist on doing this, parading around where anyone might see her. The glass would stop anything short of a close range shot from an elephant rifle, but such weapons and those with the skill and will to use them might very well be out there in this wounded city caught in a never-ending cycle of dusk, night, dawn, and then dusk again.

‘I see nothing of London itself here, General.' Ninuka spoke suddenly, breaking him from his reverie. ‘Is there no new intelligence? No news?'

The general thought for a moment before speaking. ‘Your Majesty, may I be so impertinent as to ask why you remain so interested in this place? It may have been interesting enough before our arrival, but now it feels like taking residence in the rotting skull of a dead empire. The rest of the country is not yet pacified, whereas London is, if anything, overly so.' He saw the tightening of her jaw that had led directly to the deaths of good men before his very eyes and hastened to explain himself. ‘I do not criticise, ma'am. I only seek to clarify my understanding of your strategy.'

‘My strategy.' The idea seemed to amuse her. ‘Ah, General, if I told you exactly the point of all this you would not give it a moment's credence. Worse, you would think me mad even if you were sensible enough to keep that thought to yourself. I will tell you this much; the pivotal act that this entire invasion was predicated upon shall occur in this city, and it will happen soon. You are a career soldier, Klaus. I know you have been wondering what possible goal can there be in bringing down an imperial power that has never shown our country anything but polite disinterest, a country that is so far from the fatherland that holding the territory would be next to impossible, especially with the army already stretched in our new Senzan and Polorussian conquests. Well, it was never about gaining territory. The Irish and French can fight over it when we leave. Oh, yes.' She smiled at the general's inability to hide his surprise. ‘We are not staying longer than necessary. If you must have political reasons for us being here, perhaps it was to create instability in the perceived world order from which we may profit, or perhaps it was simply to demonstrate the invincibility of our forces and our fearlessness to engage. Perhaps it is all about fear.'