Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute (23 page)

‘The Frozen Heart you seek,’ Ercusides said, starting from the top. ‘Look you to the—’

‘Distant Island of Mormo. Yes, yes, I got that gem of information. But knowing the name of the place is not of much help if I cannot then look it up in an almanac. Where
is
the
verdammt
Island of Mormo? And if you say it’s deep in the Cerenarian Sea, I shall not be responsible for my actions.’

‘The location of the Island of Mormo is unknown and unknowable, a secret of the gods themselves, and one that they guard jealously, for how much of the adoration of their worshippers comes from fear? But . . .’ Ercusides added quickly, for he had heard Cabal’s grunt of hot exasperation and had suddenly experienced a psychic glimpse of a possible future that involved travelling at great speed and height across the temple to smash into the wall ‘. . .
But
. . . that does not mean the island is unachievable. Once, the great sorcerer Hep-Seth of Golthoth was minded to seek the island. Not for the Frozen Heart, but for the great weapons that were said to be stored there by the gods against a future in which even gods may war. With even a single such treasure, none would stand against him, and even the gods would fear him, for he could strike them down with their own weapon. It was a fine plan, but a vain one, for he did not consider everything that might befall him before he gained such a weapon.

‘He bragged that he knew how to reach Mormo and spoke of a seven-sided gate that would guide the way.’

‘And then?’

‘And then . . . nothing more is known.’ Ercusides managed
to give the impression that he was shaking his head without moving an iota. ‘That is
all
that is known.’

‘Golthoth.’ Cabal drew his notes from his bag and flicked through them. ‘Oh, by all that is holy and many things that aren’t . . . I feared as much. We must go back the way we came and . . .’ He was silent for a few moments while he read some more, and then he shoved them back into his bag with an expression of violent exasperation. ‘The Brothers Grimm can have this abominable place,’ he said finally, when his temper was under some tenuous form of control, ‘and I hope it chokes them.’

He replaced the test-tubes in their case, and then in the Gladstone. ‘We should make our plans to escape this place,’ he said quietly. ‘Something colossal, wooden and remarkably dangerous this way comes.’

‘My colossus?’ said Ercusides. ‘You are mistaken. It has not yet been animated, and even when it is, it will obviously not attack men. That would be ridiculous. I have trained the dreffs to attack only wamps.’

Cabal picked up the head and looked into the gaping eye sockets. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘your training techniques leave something to be desired.’

‘I . . .’ Ercusides faltered. ‘What happened just then? The floor . . . Where
is
the floor? Why can I not move?’ He sounded curious and inconvenienced rather than scared, as if a rather
outré
practical joke had been played upon him. ‘Why can I not see?’

‘Ah,’ said Shadrach, entering his professional mode in which he was adept at dealing with the recently bereaved, and those deep in denial.

‘You’re dead,’ said Cabal, whose professional mode
employed a very different set of skills, even if they also applied to the dead. ‘Your creation pulled off your arms and legs, threw them around the place willy-nilly, then cracked your skull. Look on the bright side: it didn’t damage your head anywhere near as badly as it has those of the wamps we’ve seen around the city. I think the dreffs may have been gentler with you because you had looked after them and trained them.’

‘You speak nonsense, man!’ cried the head. ‘I taught them carefully! I even wore a wamp costume I’d made so . . . Oh. Ooooh . . .’ Ercusides thought about it for a moment, during which the others looked looked uncomfortable and somewhat embarrassed. Finding out that one is a decapitated head is a private sort of experience. ‘No. No! They wouldn’t misunderstand what I meant. They couldn’t . . .’

‘They would, they could and they did. They were probably a little bemused that you wanted them to kill you – if they even understood that that was what they were doing – but training is training. They saw a wamp, but they also saw a man, and gained the impression that you wanted both species dismantled on sight. You’re talking to me at the moment only because I am a necromancer. You can work out the ramifications of that for yourself.’

‘Oh, well, this is just wonderful.’ Ercusides’ tone indicated that, no, it wasn’t. ‘I left Baharna in the first place to get some peace and quiet. Sold my tower, and came here. I knew there would be wamps, but I thought, The place was stripped of its population. Without bodies to spawn from, just how many wamps can there be, anyway? Hundreds! That’s how many! Hundreds! All that fiddling about with dreffs and sinew wood and creosote and for what? So the little bastards
could pop my limbs off and cave in my skull!’

Cabal had had enough. ‘You want peace and quiet?’ he asked, then opened his bag, dropped the head inside, and closed it again. Ercusides’ complaining stopped. Cabal stood, hefting the bag to analyse its new weight, and found it acceptable. He turned to find the others looking at him with a variety of expressions, none of them admiring. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘You’ve . . . put his head in your bag,’ offered Shadrach, after some hesitation.

‘So I have,’ agreed Cabal. ‘How astute of you. Now,’ he turned his attention to Holk, ‘Sergeant, we really should be getting away from this temple now that our business here is concluded. This idiot’s wamp-killing machine . . .’ here he illustrated who ‘this idiot’ was by holding up his bag ‘. . . will certainly return. Even if it doesn’t know we’re here yet, this is familiar ground to it. We must leave before it gets bored tearing up the city looking for us and comes home.’

Given the likelihood of Cabal’s hypothesis, and the generous amounts of evidence for what they could expect if they were discovered, the general consensus was to stop being appalled at what Cabal had in his Gladstone, and to get out of the city as quickly as was safely possible.

‘Gesso,’ Holk called to one of his men, ‘you’re the quietest. Go out and scout the area around the breached wall. If it’s clear, we’ll head for the buildings over yonder. They’re close together and should give us enough cover to hide from it as we move.’

Gesso did not seem pleased to be delegated to the rank of forward guard, but he was a disciplined soldier and, besides, Holk was right: he was light on his feet and could move like a
cat when necessary. They moved as a group through the fallen internal walls until they were close by the outer breach. It was indeed getting dark out there; all the stumbling around inside the temple had eaten away at the time more quickly than anyone had realised. They hid in the deepening shadows around the hole in the wall, and Holk gestured to Gesso to scout the area outside.

Gesso made to draw his sword, hesitated, as if realising how useless it would be against the man-made monster they knew was out there, then drew it anyway. If he was going to die, he could at least die with a sword in his hand. He crept close to the lintel formed by the shattered blocks and paused there, looking left and right. He scanned the visible part of the square and the buildings at its edge – the painfully distant buildings that might be their only refuge – and then moved forward, silent and graceful. He slid across the broad stone surface of the broken block like a shadow, and all those observing were in the process of being impressed when a great claw came down from above and snatched him out of sight.

‘Oh, dear God!’ cried Shadrach. Outside they heard Gesso shout in surprise, then roar with rage, and then he screamed, a high-pitched cry of mortal terror and disbelieving horror. A moment later, his arm fell on to the stone. The hand still held the sword.

‘Oh, dear God!’ cried Shadrach again, but this time it was more like a sob. ‘What shall we do? Whatever shall we do?’

Cabal slapped him hard. Perhaps harder than necessary, but he felt he deserved a little recreation. ‘You can stop blubbering like a child for a beginning, Shadrach,’ he snapped. ‘Sergeant, my analysis is that if we stay here, we shall all suffer the same fate . . .’ a leg fell wetly on to the square a hundred
metres away, a long trail of blood splashing down after it ‘. . . as Gesso. Agreed?’

‘Aye, Master Cabal,’ said Holk. ‘It’s a desperate business, and we won’t all make it.’

‘What?’ said Bose. ‘What? What is he talking about? What are you talking about, Sergeant?’

‘He means,’ said Cabal, slinging his bag on to his back with the aid of a black sash he had bought in Baharna for exactly this purpose, ‘that some of us are going to die when we run for it. We must move now, while that thing is absorbed in dismembering Gesso. Get out there and scatter. Head for the buildings as quickly as you can. Well? Come on!’

He drew his sword, and rushed at the breach.

IN WHICH THERE IS A BATTLE AND CABAL MAKES IT QUICK

As with many aspects of Cabal’s life, charging at a great monster that has been specifically designed to kill other monsters looked, to the untrained eye, like arrant suicide. Johannes Cabal, though, was a man who lived a life of calculated risk. He knew, more or less, what he was up against, and he appreciated that, while the wamps were dangerous foes, they were not great tactical thinkers. Holk had been impressed by their ability to organise an ambush, but ambush predators are hardly unknown even in the waking world.

Ercusides, for all his many and varied failings, had created a device for efficiently wiping out the city’s wamp infestation, and he had based his plan on the wamps’ observed behaviours. They were cunning, but no more cunning than a fox, and foxes were regularly exterminated by fleets of horse and hound marshalled by folk with the collective wit of an umbrella
stand. Wamps had three modes: hide; attack; flee. They only used the first as part of an ambush since, being towards the top of the food chain, they had no natural predators; its use as a defensive tactic escaped them. The second was the default, but so simple had they previously found killing that it lacked flexibility. Cabal had no doubt that the wamps’ nemesis carried scratches and bites about its feet, shins and claws, but this was the equivalent of trying to defeat a sequoia with one’s teeth, when one is not a beaver and when the sequoia is intent on tearing your legs off. Orphaned limbs scattered about the dead city gave mute witness to the futility of that. Finally, there was fleeing, but the nine legs of a wamp were there to allow easy climbing and not sustained running beyond that required to bring down escaping prey. Soon those nine legs would grow tired, unlike the long-striding doom bearing down upon them.

Therefore, Cabal had decided that fleeing was pointless, and hiding would only delay the inevitable. Instead he would apply himself to the attack, the exact nature of which he would evolve on sighting the colossus.

His forward foot coming to rest on the leading edge of the broken wall, he jumped down, landed on the ground running and jinked left, the direction he guessed the colossus to be standing, based on the angle of the claw’s descent when it had taken Gesso, and the subsequent observed trajectories of his limbs. In this he was proved correct, almost running into a leg the thickness of a tree trunk, largely because it
was
a tree trunk. He ducked and dodged, whirled and looked, even as he backed away in an undignified reverse skip.

Colossus
, he admitted to himself, was probably something of an overstatement. To his mind, something would have to
stand at least a hundred feet tall before it could really be termed ‘colossal’. He recalled that the Colossus of Rhodes was reputed to stand somewhere around the 110-feet-tall mark, commensurate with the Statue of Liberty, which their ship had sailed past in what already felt like a lifetime ago. Ercusides’ effort lacked that scale, measuring certainly no more than perhaps sixty feet from the base of its great flat pallet-like feet to the top of its conical watchtower head. The design was innovative, perhaps, but inelegant in the extreme. So, no,
colossus
was not an ideal description.
Giant
, though, was certainly acceptable.

It was structured identically to a great wooden mannequin, a larger cousin of the homunculi they had discovered within the temple. The finish was crude: the bark had been sheared from the logs and treated with whatever variant of creosote Ercusides had bubbled up in his pots and cauldrons. Here and there, holes were cut into the wood, and Cabal was confident that each was the entrance to a snug little chamber containing bedding of wood shavings and a trained dreff. The head had three such holes equally spaced around its sloping sides, which must contain the cleverest specimens, for they commanded the whole by some strange binding of intellects into a single intent and impetus: a hive-mind of hamsters; a
Gestalt
of guinea pigs.