The Brothers Cabal (17 page)

As for Horst, he was reliving yet again how it feels to be hit in the head by an irate badgerman. This time at least, no bones were broken, but he was terribly disorientated, and could only think of bonfires and toffee and clung to the belief that there had been an accident with a Roman candle. A face appeared over him and he said,
‘Vati?'
even though part of him was saying that this was a question that would never receive the answer
‘Ja'
ever again.

‘Afraid not, son,' said the major. He looked away, towards the bridge. ‘How is she?'

‘She's—' began the young man's voice, but was interrupted by an impatient ‘Get
off
me! I'm fine!' Alisha appeared in Horst's eyeline a moment later, beating out areas of her jacket that were smoking.

‘Smoking jacket,' said Horst, and laughed weakly.

Alisha looked down at him, and wiped away blood trailing from her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Thank you,' she said. ‘Again. You were right; that was a
very
short fuse.'

Horst struggled upright. His head spun, and his back felt as if he'd been given a playful whack with an oak tree. He flexed his shoulders and there was a visceral
crack
that sounded serious. He could sense warmth there as his injuries rapidly healed in the offhand way they did these days. He had a feeling that if he wasn't undead, he'd be very thoroughly dead by now. For lack of any other conversational gambits, he said, ‘Did you blow up the other bridge, too?'

Alisha frowned. ‘What other bridge?'

Somewhere nearby, Horst heard an engine turn over. He clambered to his feet with the catlike grace of a drunken orang-utan to witness an ageing open-bed lorry drive out from the farm buildings and wait, engine idling. The older man of academic mien threw open the door and called at them, ‘Could we get a move on, please? They're coming across!'

A quick glance showed the truth of it; while the bridge was destroyed across two of its three pilings, the lycanthropes were massing to make their way along the surviving lengths of shattered wood to jump the gaps, while the zombies—with a forgivable air of long-suffering—were attempting to cross the river in the manner of army ants. By sheer numbers and the bloody-mindedness of those who are past the point of having anything to live for by dint of being dead, they were walking into the river and clinging to one another in an effort to form a bridge that, if not living, was at least animate. There were those that were carried away by the flow, and did so slowly thrashing the water and pedalling their legs as if demonstrating how to drown. Some, semi-skeletal and holed below any waterline one cared to draw, sank from sight to walk the riverbed as if it were the surface of the moon. Unhappily, having poor navigational skills, this availed them little and they were as likely to walk to the sea as anything else. Others at least slightly bloated with the gases of putrescence bobbed on the surface like inflatable beach toys intended for children whom one wishes to traumatise. Examples of these who failed to join the bridge were to be seen floating off with expressions of dull-witted embarrassment, while those who
had
been incorporated into the bridge found themselves used as pontoons, which was scarcely better. However inefficient their efforts, it was clear that the barrier offered by the river would be breached in a matter of minutes.

Quickly, therefore, Horst and the Dee Society members gained the lorry and departed that hellish scene in a dense cloud of exhaust fumes that coincidentally made them all think ‘carburettor' without actually saying it.

Horst rode in the back with the young man, whose name turned out to be Richard. ‘Well,' said Horst as they bounced around in the flatbed, ricocheting from the metal sides, ‘this is travelling in style.' Indeed, the lorry was making along with a vigorous enthusiasm to be away from the environs of the castle, and the ridged farm track did much to amplify this vigour into vertical motion as they bumped their way towards putative safety.

‘Do you think we'll be all right now?' said Richard, apparently already blasé to the joint threat of being in a badly driven vehicle with a vampire.

‘Frankly?' said Horst. ‘I have no idea. I wouldn't put anything past the
Ministerium
.' He glanced back at the castle and what he saw did little to undermine his misgivings. ‘
Mein Gott!
What are they doing?'

The castle was aglow. Not simply the windows, but the walls around the upper reaches of the structure, the towers and battlements, and even some way into the night sky throbbed with a violet glow that was just short of invisible, flickering at the edges of perception. It was a strangely vivacious effect, as if the light was in some sense alive and aware, and the suspicion grew in the mind of the observer that the glow was not so much emanating from the castle as squatting upon it like a ghastly, ghostly toad.

Richard pounded on the glass in the back of the lorry's cab. ‘Professor! Professor! Oh, stop! Look!'

The professor obligingly stopped by stamping on the brake and clutch pedals simultaneously, sending Horst and Richard up against the back of the cab with uncomfortable momentum. While they were untangling themselves, he flung open the driver's-side door and leaned out to look back at the castle.

‘Madness!' he said. ‘They've rushed into some work of great power, and trebled the danger in so doing!'

‘What sort of thing?' asked the major as he leaned out of his side. Alisha, in the middle of the bench seat, looked back through the glass.

The professor shook his head as much in disbelief as in answer. ‘Truly, I cannot say. They are dabbling in rituals that have not been practised in centuries or even millennia. No living eye has seen them, and no reliable accounts of them survive. But all I can say is, just
look
at that bugger. It bodes ill, can't you feel it in the very marrow of your bones?'

‘You know,' said Horst in a conversational tone, ‘they might not have done it if you hadn't provoked them.'

‘Oh, good point,' conceded the professor. ‘You're right, of course. We should have just left them to conquer the region and cast its mortal inhabitants into slavery and worse. Why didn't we think of that? So much easier. Thank you for pointing that out, my lord.'

‘Sarcasm,' said Horst.

‘Yes,' said the professor.

‘Thought so,' said Horst. ‘My brother employs it often. I've grown rather good at spotting it.'

The unearthly glow was shuddering in waves across the parapets, and even the most insensitive of them could feel some terrible inchoate energy upon the air, and somewhere within it, a definable emotion.

‘It feels … joy,' said Richard. ‘Some sort of horrible joy.'

‘Exultation, I was about to say,' said the major. ‘I think we've lost this round.' He climbed out and walked around to the driver's side. ‘Shove over, Professor. I'll drive.'

Grumbling a little, the professor complied. As the major climbed in behind the wheel, Horst felt sharp pains in the pads of his thumbs that made him gasp where, for example, being pasted across the face by a werebadger had not. On each thumb, drops of blood stood out in sharp contrast to his pale skin. The pain faded quickly to be replaced by a deadening numbness and the left thumb started twitching spastically. He regarded them with disbelief, then heard an oath muttered with feeling behind him. He looked over his shoulder to find the professor looking at the drops of blood on Horst's thumbs, too, but where Horst was bemused, the professor was horrified.

‘Drive, man! Drive!' he snapped at the major. ‘Something wicked this way comes!' He looked at Horst. ‘You didn't think Shakespeare was being anything less than literal, did you, my lad?'

The major slammed the lorry into gear and pulled away almost as violently as the professor had braked. Over the sound of the engine, Richard shouted to Horst, ‘Do you know what they're doing?' and jerked his head at the castle. Horst shook his head, but he had suspicions. Perhaps the Lord of Powers had been closer at hand than even the
Ministerium
had guessed. Certainly from his knowledge of necromancy gleaned from Johannes, this seemed too gross a manifestation of arcane energies by several magnitudes for a necromancer's liking. Lady Misericorde's little army of the unwilling dead was impressive enough, but there was a personal touch to it; every one of them had been raised with personal attention from the necromantrix herself. The great lowering cloud of malevolent violet light, however, was the very embodiment of impersonal potency, as unconcerned of the individual as a naval bombardment. Horst knew the professor had been right to say it boded ill, as had the major when he said they'd lost this round. Whatever the
Ministerium
had conjured, it moved on their agenda in no uncertain fashion.

As the major drove them away, Horst and Richard had little else to do but hold on tight and watch the castle diminish into the distance, a black excrescence upon a midnight-blue field, detailed with flickering yellow from the burning drawbridge. As they watched, however, an uncomfortable realisation slowly dawned upon them. ‘I say,' said Richard. ‘Is it my eyes, or is that glow staying the same size?'

Horst himself had been watching how the glow had failed to grow distant along with the castle and had been looking for reference points in the landscape to mark scale. What they showed him was not comforting. ‘It's getting bigger.' He turned and found Alisha and the professor looking through the cab's rear window at the glow, too. ‘It's following us!' Horst shouted through the glass.

The lorry was off the farm track and onto a narrow country road, lined with tall, dense
bocage
on either side blocking the view. Richard unslung the Winchester action carbine he was carrying and checked the load. ‘If you've got any hoodoo to throw around in times of trouble, this would be one of those times,' he said to Horst.

‘Hoodoo? To be quite honest I might well have, but I've no idea what it is or how to use it. I only found out how good I am at climbing and going without breath tonight. I'm not actually very practised at the whole “Woo, I'm a vampire” job. Sorry.'

Richard looked at him curiously. ‘You're actually rather underwhelming for a Lord of the Dead, y'know.'

Horst shrugged. ‘What can you expect from a conscript? My heart was never in it. Oh, here we go.' For the glow had appeared over the top of the hedgerows in their wake. Horst frowned. ‘There's something up there. In the glow…' The view was momentarily cut off by an area of woodland, but the glow filtered through it like a mist, implacably closing the distance upon them.

Richard brought the carbine to his shoulder and worked the action, loading the chamber. He squinted at the strange glow, which illuminated the branches and trunks yet seemed to have no central source of light within itself. ‘It's in the trees!' he warned.

Through the glass, Horst saw the professor's lips move soundlessly.

It's coming.

The aberrant light closed steadily on them despite the major's repeated protestations to the professor that the old lorry was already in its highest gear and his foot had the accelerator clamped down to the floor. It was perhaps just as well that they could go no faster in that narrow, twisting lane, the hedgerows and embankments looming at them in the headlights at every turn. ‘God help us if we meet anyone coming the other way,' said the major.

Horst thought this was all rather unfair of Fate. He had quite liked the idea of becoming an architect perhaps, or an engineer. At no point had his career plans involved becoming a vampire and ending up pursued by something horrible while in the company of very strange strangers. This was a Johannes sort of job, he felt, and sorely wished his brother were there with him or, better yet, instead of him. Johannes would have identified the glow by now, said something pithily dismissive about it, pulled some useful sort of powder out of his Gladstone bag, and dealt with it, probably while saying something else pithy. All Horst could do was sit there and await a thus far undefined sort of awfulness while underwhelming his companions with his poor monster skills.

But it wasn't an entirely undefined awfulness, he realised. The others couldn't seem to see it, but the glow had a sense of being the surface of something that broke the usual laws of physics, perception, and even perspective. He had a real sense that there was something—some
things
—just beyond that surface that wanted to break through. He could see the light bulge in a manner that he could never have described to his satisfaction even given a mountain of dictionaries and thesauruses. It wasn't that his vocabulary lacked the words; it was that the words didn't exist.

‘They're coming through,' he said out loud. The glow was changing shade in places, extra-dimensional stresses pushing the violet through black and into colours that one would hunt for in vain upon the electromagnetic spectrum.

‘What?' said Richard, squinting at the glow. ‘Who's coming through? What d'you mean?'

He plainly couldn't see the stresses in the colours, Horst realised. The others couldn't see how the colours, glimmering darker than dark, were so close to bursting, like the meniscus of a soap bubble.

And then they did. The glow vanished abruptly, paradoxically making the night lighter, but this only served to allow them to see what had burst through in greater, horrifying detail.

The creatures had no right to … no right to anything at all. They had no right to fly, lacking wings. They had no right to breathe, lacking mouths or nostrils or even spiracles. They had no right to see, lacking eyes. They had no right to exist, yet they did, and they came on rapidly towards the fleeing lorry, flying without wings, screaming without mouths, seeing their prey without eyes. Offcuts from failed species, cancers given autonomous life, wriggling, writhing entanglements of animate offal, they descended towards the lorry, dripping acid and hunger as they came.