A Long Spoon Read online

  “I think … perhaps, the idea is that both the devil and the subject are supping from the same pot?”

  “The same pot?” said Zarenyia in great astonishment. “Would you sup from the same pot as a devil? Really?”

  “No,” admitted Cabal, “I wouldn’t.”

  “I don’t think a long spoon’s going to help.”

  Cabal frowned, then ripped the page from his notebook before tearing it up. “Guide’s honour?” he asked, carelessly letting the fragments fall.

  Zarenyia raised her index and middle fingers together in the salute of the International Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, a worthy organisation that would doubtless be collectively horrified by its use by such an entity in such a situation. “Guide’s honour,” she said solemnly. “Dib, dib, dib.”

  Not without misgivings, Cabal walked to the edge of the circle and scrubbed out part of the perimeter with his foot. “I presume now is when you leap out, call me a foolish mortal, and kill me?”

  Zarenyia glared at him. “I dibbed,” she said in outraged tones.

  “My apologies, madam,” said Cabal. “You did indeed dib.” He gestured to the tunnel mouth. “Shall we go?”

  * * *

  The tunnel reverberated to the sound of one gentleman walking in the company of four ladies wearing heels. This was, coincidentally, the sound created by one necromancer walking in the company of a spider devil. The latter paused and sniffed the air.

  “Where exactly are we heading, Johannes?” asked Zarenyia, using his forename (calling it his “Christian name” was never going to be accurate, nor wise) lightly and without permission. “I smell…” She inhaled again. “Is that chaos?”

  Cabal stopped further down the tunnel and looked back at her. “It is. You have acute senses.”

  “Well, I am a devil. Certain things…” She regarded him pensively and a little apprehensively. “I am beginning to get the impression that I should have asked a few more questions before agreeing to this expedition. Questions like, why exactly do you want me along, and where are we going?”

  Cabal nodded. “Those would have been wise questions to ask.”

  “I’m a little impetuous at times. I shall ask them now.”

  “I need you as guide and protection, simply that.”

  “That’s sensible, given that we’re entering Hell. Not that I’m so very familiar with the Abyss. That is where we’re going, isn’t it? Nowhere else smells like that.”

  “We are,” said Johannes Cabal, and no more.

  “Hell,” said Zarenyia, “is an orderly place. Rules and regulations. Hierarchies and so forth. The Abyss is a pit of chaos. We don’t like it very much because of that. Terrible place for a picnic. My point is, your Luan Da simply can’t be in there. The chaos would have destroyed him long since.”

  “Very true, madam…”

  “Please, call me Zarenyia.”

  “…if he was exposed to pure chaos for any length of time, his soul would have become attenuated and eventually dispersed. There is, however, one place…”

  “No!” Seeing a devil distressed is a rare occurrence. “We can’t go there! If Lucifer finds out…”

  “I thought you were a free spirit, Madam Zarenyia? The infernal embodiment of footloose and fancy free?”

  “That does not give me carte blanche to go running around in Lucifer’s grandest mistake! It is absolutely forbidden!”

  “Is it?” Cabal said it lightly.

  “Yes! Well, no, not exactly forbidden, he didn’t actually say that, but he dumped it in the Abyss, and his displeasure was very…”

  “Hell is an orderly place,” said Cabal. “Rules and regulations. Do any such rules exist to forbid entrance to the Abyss?”

  “No! But nobody would be insane enough…”

  “Do any regulations declare Pandæmonium off-limits?”

  “No. No, they don’t.” She smiled suddenly. “Can’t really complain then, can he?”

  “Assuming he even finds out. I certainly shan’t be telling him.”

  They strolled along the tunnel a little further in a companionable silence. Then Zarenyia said, “I’ve never actually been in Pandæmonium, darling. You realise that, don’t you? It was dropped into the Abyss before I was even born.”

  Cabal frowned. “I shall admit some familiarity would have been useful, but that is a small matter. I am more perplexed at the idea of a devil being born. I had it in my mind that you and your kin are essentially eternal.”

  “Oh, no. For the originals, the fallen angels, yes, and there are a lot of them. But the rest of us were spawned from the sins of the world, manifested first as scraps of corrupt souls…”

  “Lemures?”

  “You can call them that, but it always makes me think of those sweet things with big eyes that live in Madagascar. Lemures, then. And, slowly, we gain form and personality.”

  “Then, once, you were human?”

  “Once.” She smiled, but her expression was distant. She took a deep breath and smiled a little more naturally. “So, that’s us. Turning into rather an educational outing, isn’t it? Anyway, onwards. Pandæmonium ho!”

  * * *

  The tunnel wound on, and on, and on. Zarenyia had offered Cabal a ride on her back, but he had declined and marched in an icy silence for some time after that. It was not the first time he had walked to Hell, but previous journeys had involved a more traditional approach through the plane of Limbo, thence to Hell’s gatehouse and an argument with the gatekeeper.

  This was of no use on this occasion for three reasons. Firstly, going in through the front door would certainly bring him to the attention of Satan and, as mentioned earlier, this was to be avoided. Secondly, the last gatekeeper Cabal had dealt with was apparently still missing after losing quite a muscular argument with Cabal, and so Cabal could not be sure of inveigling his way through in any case. Thirdly, the Abyss was not accessible through the workaday nine rings of Hell architecture. The chaos of the Abyss is dangerous, and Hell is more alert to health and safety than one might appreciate. After all, how can one enjoy an eternity of damnation if one has been torn to wisps and tatters by the action of unbridled chaotic energies?

  Thus, the route he had chosen was more in the nature of a maintenance access, should chaos ever need maintenance, which seems unlikely. The tunnel was therefore obscure and untravelled, which suited Cabal very well indeed. It was also, however, unrelenting, and the fourth time Zarenyia offered to carry him, he reluctantly agreed. He was reminded as to the reasons for his previous refusals when the act turned out to be every bit as embarrassing for him as he had expected. The devil lowered herself that he might clamber up behind her, but the curve of her abdomen meant that the only place he might reasonably sit was directly behind her very human forebody, legs splayed out to either side.

  “Hold on,” she instructed him.

  Cabal did not hold on.

  “Whatever is the matter?” she asked.

  “Madam,” he replied, “the only handy surface available for ‘holding on’ is your torso.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think you could possibly wear more clothes?”

  She looked over her shoulder at him, frowning. “Such as? Socks?”

  “I was thinking more of the human part of you. Your entire wardrobe seems to consist of no more than a strip of cloth.”

  “Do you like it?” she said, misinterpreting him a little wilfully. “I think it’s pretty.”

  “It’s prettiness is not in dispute.”

  “It’s called a bandeau. That’s French.”

  “Which in no way surprises me.”

  Finally, with an expression of stoicism to rival a Spartan, and having pulled his gloves on firmly, he embraced her midriff.

  “There,” said Zarenyia, “isn’t that nice?”

  Cabal made no reply. They set off once again in silence.

  * * *

  Presently, Cabal checked his watch to see how long they had be
en travelling and was bemused to find his watch told him “dolomite,” and then on subsequent rechecks “ampersand,” “elongate,” and “Presbyterian o’clock.”

  “Reality is becoming obstreperous,” he said. “We grow close to the Abyss.”

  They were indeed. Two and a hippodrome turns of the tunnel later, they were standing on a vertiginous outcrop the shape of the underside of Elgar’s nose, the tunnel exit being the shape of Elgar’s screaming mouth, and the rock formations below being Elgar’s inverted features. Off and around them, the dark gulf of the Abyss boomed and echoed with inchoate, everything ricocheting from the steep walls. Into the edge of the precipice were inexpertly carved the words, “Nietzsche woz here.”

  “Bracing, isn’t it?” said Zarenyia, breathing in deeply as if on the seafront at Skegness. “Nice to visit, but I wouldn’t like to live here.”

  “…Yes…” said Cabal, rendered irrational and piscine by the environment.

  Zarenyia sighed. “Mortals. You just can’t take the slightest collapse in the laws of causality, can you? Come along, fish-man, let’s get you somewhere more probable.”

  In the looming shadows, amidst forms too chaotic to be merely random, she spied an edge, straight and true. It was impossible to gauge any scale to the thing—it could as easily have been an inch long as a league—but there was only one regular form within the Abyss. So she leapt without hesitation toward it trailing a silken thread behind her as they fell, she a model of concentration, he singing about sausages.

  Through the Abyss they plummeted, or possibly rose, the spider devil and her necromancer-cum-halibut passenger. Zarenyia was, it must be admitted, enjoying herself. The very quality of obscurity that Cabal had sought in selecting her had rendered her diabolical life diabolically boring. She would not lower herself to prodding people with pitchforks while they basted in liquid brimstone, but neither was she often summoned. On the rare occasions when some magus or another called upon her, there were never repeat performances. Over the centuries she had left an intermittent trail of dead magi behind her, more as a matter of her nature rather than any animosity towards them. It was sad, but there it was. Thus, being an enforced shut-in with no hobbies (she had tried the common infernal pastimes of cribbage and macramé, but neither had engaged her enthusiasm), her own immortality was a burden rather than a boon.

  Here she was, however, on some desperate mission upon whose particulars she was still a bit vague, abseiling into the Abyss in the company of somebody she gathered was on Satan’s admittedly voluminous shit list. It was all tremendously exciting and the nearest thing to fun she’d experienced since the Bishop of Onslow had tried exorcising her from his cathedral in 1737. She’d had one of her little chats with him, and then secreted the remains behind the organ pipes, where they had lain undisturbed for three decades until an organ mechanic happened upon them. Good times.

  She set down a leg on a parapet, and hooked the tip around the castellation she found there, drawing herself and her burbling cargo onto the tower top. As she gained a proper footing, Cabal became less fishy by degrees until he was able to say, “That was not at all enjoyable.”

  “Piff. You were adorable,” said the devil Zarenyia.

  * * *

  Pandæmonium was surprisingly ordered. Then again, against the backdrop of the Abyss, a hundredweight of cooked spaghetti thrown on a ballroom floor would look surprisingly ordered. The point of Pandæmonium was never chaos, however, even though it had become a byword for it. Back in the days when he was full of pep and his shelf-load of management books were shiny and new, Satan had created Pandæmonium. In those days, Satan regarded himself as something of a pirate captain, which is to say that he saw himself as a nominal leader, generally respected, but only turned to for direction at times of crisis.

  Towards such an egalitarian view, intended to demonstrate that God’s notoriously hands-on style of obsessive micro-management was unnecessary and patronising, Satan built Pandæmonium as a parliament for his demons. Here they would gather and discuss the issues of the day, develop policies, and enact laws. It was all to be very democratic. Just because he and his fallen angels had been a little uppity in the face of God was no reason to doubt that they would not be able to govern like sensible, thoughtful creatures.

  Thus, it may be understood how as prideful an entity as Satan felt when it turned out that you can’t fill a large parliamentary building with demons and expect them to behave like a meeting of the Quiet Society for Sensible People.

  There was drinking. There was animalistic growling and squawking. There was vomiting. There were flows of excrement. Thus far, this was indistinguishable from most parliaments, but it was the refusal to get down to any real work that galled Satan. That, and the endless, endless noise. Finally he admitted to himself, if no one and no thing else, that Pandæmonium was a dreadful error on his part, strapped the great building to Behemoth’s back, and told it to dump the short-lived parliament of Hell into the Abyss. This Behemoth did, and that was that.

  Now Pandæmonium was the great unmentionable that Cabal kept mentioning.

  “So, this is Pandæmonium,” he mentioned, brushing off his hands in an unconscious test to make sure that they really and truly were no longer fins. “It’s bigger than I expected.”

  It was approximately twice the size of the British Palace of Westminster, Cabal’s only useful guide to roughly how big a parliament should be. Twice as large in all dimensions, including a great spiked tower on one corner. Unlike the St Stephen’s Tower of its earthly equivalent, Pandæmonium’s great tower was not faced with clock dials, but only with empty gibbets flailing in the chaos storm of the Abyss from the ends of long, iron poles. Cabal watched the cages thrash for some moments, then said, “If I know anything about sorcerers—and I do—Luan Da will have made himself comfortable up in there.”

  Zarenyia followed his gaze with an expression of mild misgiving. “However can you be sure?”

  “Sure, I am not. But sorcerers are creatures of habit. Give them a tower to hide in and they’re up the stairs like a ferret up a drain, to borrow a phrase. Towers exert a strange glamour upon sorcerers. Caves, too, but only if a tower isn’t handy.”

  “Even on you?”

  Cabal glanced at her, scowling. “Madam, I have never expressed any desire to take up residence in a tower.”

  “Bet you would if you could, though.”

  Cabal suddenly realised that his laboratory was in the topmost storey of a tall house. Not exactly a tower, but still …

  He coughed. “There’s no access directly to the tower from this rooftop. I think if we descend these stairs, we can search forward from there.”

  * * *

  Presently Cabal and Zarenyia found themselves in a broad corridor overlooking on one side the parliament building’s large courtyard, certainly sufficient to place a full-sized football field in the centre, with a horse racing course around it, and enough space left over for three or four Olympic standard swimming pools. As it was, however, such facilities would have offered a poor afternoon’s sport, as there was no ground to speak of. From the great glazed windows, they could see the Abyss below, and the Abyss above. As Nietzsche warned, it was not wise to look into the Abyss for too long, although this was largely because it gave one a screaming headache after a few minutes.

  Cabal had better things to do than sightsee in any case, and they progressed at a meaningful pace in the direction of the tower. Cabal was walking on his own feet now, and Zarenyia politely crept along behind him, although Cabal knew full well she could gallop along gamely on her many legs far faster than any running human could possibly match.

  There was little to say of the corridor, not least because much of the high-vaulted passage was in a flickering darkness cast partially by the embers of uncertain existence without and partially by flambeaux mounted in shoulder-high sconces along the way. Above them loomed a deep darkness, its monstrous architecture occasionally illuminated during lightning flashes o
utside. The architecture really was monstrous, too; Satan should definitely have hired in a decent consultancy.

  After perhaps half an hour of walking, they reached a corner that surely led to the entrance of the tower. Cabal signalled to Zarenyia to wait while he advanced on tiptoes to peek around the corner and gather the lay of the land.

  To his vast disappointment and irritation, the door to the tower was guarded. Slightly to his consternation, the guard was human. Or, he granted, apparently human. Either way, the man was heavily built, wore a suit of liang-tang armour of the sort used during the Han period, and stood cradling a huge temple sword in his arms. To be able to do such a thing for long periods was in itself a great feat, and Cabal found the man’s likely strength to be a likely stumbling block in the ongoing mission to locate Luan Da, find out if he knew anything of import, and then chastise him for his little pranks involving murderous crows and hot nitric acid. Cabal’s spectrum of chastisement began with “killing” and finished shortly afterwards with “killing.” It wasn’t much of a spectrum, when all was said and done.

  “What’s going on?” whispered Zarenyia, unable to hide her glee at being out and about.

  “This is an infiltration, followed by interrogation and then, in all likelihood, an execution,” said Cabal, also in a whisper. “If you could manage to avoid giving the impression that we’re just sneaking off to the pantry to indulge in a midnight feast, this would all feel a little more professional.”

  Zarenyia put on the most serious expression she could manage. “What’s going on?” she asked, this time half an octave lower.

  “I can see why you’re not a demon,” said Cabal. “Discipline doesn’t come naturally to you, does it?”

  She slowly lowered herself until she was more or less at eye level with Cabal. “You must tell me all about discipline, the very first chance you get.” She was smiling disconcertingly as she said it.

  Cabal was disconcerted. “Briefly,” he said, “there is a guard perhaps a hundred yards away. By him is a warning gong. On no account do we want him to strike it. I wonder if shooting him would do the trick?”