A Long Spoon Page 3

He opened the Gladstone bag he had suspended across his back with a leather belt and looked inside. He withdrew a droopy thing, covered in breadcrumbs. “My pistol has transmuted into a fishcake, and failed to transmute back. You know, I do wonder if chaos can actually be said to be chaotic when it shows an obsession with fish like this.”

  Zarenyia did not answer. Cabal looked around to discover that, somehow, she had gone. Given her size, this was a remarkable disappearance in itself, and he wondered if the storming chaos outside had somehow affected her after all, given its piscine orientation, probably turning her to a shower of sardines or somesuch.

  This theory he discarded quickly, and then feared that perhaps she had actually gone to engage the guard instead. He braced himself for the booming of the gong the instant the thought struck him, but the alarm was not sounded. Cautiously, he looked back around the corner.

  The guard had gone. The gong hung unattended and silent.

  Baffled, Cabal cautiously poked his head out further, but there was still no sign of the guard, nor of Zarenyia. He stepped out quietly, but his soft footfall did not presage a horde of guards tumbling through the door, and so he risked another step. By a procession of such steps, he found himself by the tower door soon enough.

  “Where the blazes are you?” he hispered, which is to say, half-whispered and half-hissed.

  A sound in the shadowed rafters made him look up and there he thought he saw a glistening chitinous form moving. He squinted harder until he could discern what exactly he was looking at. It was, after all, an unusual shape, comprised as it was by two forms.

  Cabal gave a disgusted snort and turned away. “Du lieber Gott!”

  “Busy!” called Zarenyia from above. “Be with you in a tick! Read a book or something.”

  Cabal walked away a few steps, but there was no getting away from the noises from above. The guard—it could hardly be anyone else—cried out now and then, sometimes with fear, sometimes with ecstasy, sometimes both. He sounded muffled, but as he was partially cocooned in webbing, that was hardly surprising.

  “Do you think you could hurry up a bit?” asked Zarenyia of her captive. She sounded sympathetic. “Love to dawdle, but on a tight schedule. You know how it is. I’ll tell you what, how about I do … this?”

  There was a wet noise, as organic as it was salacious, and the guard cried out one last time. A long cry it was, filled with dark pleasure and diminishing life-expectancy. It lasted a full minute, far beyond the normal capacity of human lungs to maintain, Cabal thought, but the guard was in the process of discovering Zarenyia had the ability to extend some human capacities far beyond the norm, to quite fatal extremes.

  Then the cry dwindled, and stopped.

  A moment later the guard’s desiccated corpse, all swathed in web, crashed to the floor near Cabal. Its face was turned towards him, and Cabal could see it was smiling, nor yet in a post mortem rictus, either.

  Zarenyia clicked lightly down the wall and walked to Cabal. She seemed a little sheepish, an impression enforced by the covert little kick she gave the cadaver of her erstwhile beau, enough to send the dried remains skidding off into a dark corner. She smiled awkwardly at Cabal. He looked stonily back.

  “You’re being all judge-y, aren’t you? Well, look—I was peckish, and he was in the way. I mean, really … what’s a girl to do?”

  “I thought,” said Cabal with pointed emphasis, “that you said that you don’t eat people.”

  “I don’t!” she said in an outraged tone. Then she smiled a half smile. “Well, only sort of.”

  * * *

  “So,” said Cabal, “you are a succubus?”

  It was an unusual conversational gambit, but then the conversation was between a necromancer and a devil as they ascended a winding staircase leading to—in all probability—an undead Chinese sorcerer in his hiding place within the abandoned parliament of Hell, tumbling eternally through the stuff of pure elemental chaos, and unusual is a very subjective term.

  “Succubine,” Zarenyia corrected him.

  “I’m not familiar with that term.”

  “Succubine is a more general sort of category,” she explained. “A method of feeding. The succubi are the examples everyone thinks of, but they’re not the only ones, you know.”

  “I know now.”

  “There’s a whole—I don’t know what you’d call it … a phylum?—of spider-ish demons and devils, but many of them just have venom and enzymes and suck out liquidised innards.” She grimaced. “Bit uncouth if you ask me. Lacks the personal touch.”

  “Your finer feelings are an ornament that suits you well, madam.”

  “You think so? You’re such a sweet boy, Johannes. I’m glad I dibbed. We’re having fun together, and I haven’t killed you. It’s nice.”

  Cabal paused on a step and looked back at her. “Against all common sense, I’m beginning to like you,” he said.

  “Even though I’m a devil and I have a lot of legs and I devour the souls of my prey through the expedient of lethal orgasms?”

  “I’m still waiting for you to raise a bad point.”

  She slapped him lightly on the back. “You charmer!”

  They continued up the stairs, both doing poor jobs of concealing their smiles.

  “I’ve met a few demons in my time,” said Cabal. “You’re not at all like them. I didn’t realise that the difference between a demon and a devil would be so distinct.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t take me as a case study,” said Zarenyia. “I’m my own creature, really.”

  “But still evil?”

  “Oh, yes,” she replied absently.

  They climbed in silence a little further.

  Then she said, “Well, I suppose I’m evil, at any rate. I’m a devil, when all is said and done, so I just assumed that I’d be evil. I kill people, after all.”

  “For sustenance.”

  “Yes, but I don’t have to eat them at all if I don’t want to. I’m immortal, after all. But I become a poor enfeebled thing if I don’t snack on an obliging chap now and again.”

  “Obliging?”

  “Unsuspecting, which ends up being much the same thing.”

  “And men only? That seems somewhat unfair.”

  “Oh, I can prey on women. In theory.”

  “In theory? How does the practise vary?”

  “We end up chatting and after a while it seems impolite to kill them.”

  They walked in silence a little further. Then Zarenyia said, “You’re wondering how it works, aren’t you?”

  “How a demi-spider can even mate with a human, or how you absorb their soul?”

  “Both, an inquisitive boy like you.”

  “Yes. Both mechanisms intrigue and perturb me in equal measure.”

  “Mechanisms he says. Such a romantic. Well, what say I let you watch the next time I do it?”

  “Madam, I am no voyeur.”

  “It’s not voyeurism,” she chided him, “it’s science!”

  * * *

  As they climbed, Cabal mentally shrugged off the bantering pleasantries—diverting though they were—and concentrated on the trials to come. The soul of Luan Da had gone to considerable trouble to hide in Pandæmonium. Why? It seemed unlikely that he had gone to such trouble to avoid the attentions of Satan, not least because he would probably have found himself well regarded and given a position in middle management. Satan was very happy to delegate matters wherever possible. Even if that didn’t happen, restructurings in the processes of Hell meant that it simply wasn’t the pit of eternal punishment that it once was. Unless Luan Da had a pathological fear of amateur dramatics groups, card schools, and balloon debates (admittedly with real balloons), it seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, especially since using Pandæmonium as a bolt hole would surely earn the wrath of Satan, should he ever find out.

  Yet here they were, aboard (Cabal had found himself thinking of the edifice as a vessel atop a permanently storming sea rather than as a building) Pandæ
monium, and it was most definitely inhabited, almost certainly by somebody of oriental origin, given the armour of the guard they had encountered. Speaking of whom …

  “Madam, enlighten me. When you have captured your prey and have, how may I put this delicately..?”

  “Shagged them to death?”

  “Quite. You feed upon the soul, yes?”

  “Yes. And a few bodily fluids, but that’s more a matter of personal preference than necessity.”

  “Lovely,” he said, but seemed distracted.

  “You seem distracted, sweety,” said Zarenyia after some minutes’ silence.

  “When you killed the guard—”

  “Killed makes it all sound so sordid…”

  “—you left a body.”

  “Yes. Didn’t I just explain all that? Is my memory going? So sad, and so young, too. And pretty.”

  “Madam, please leave your vanity unattended for a moment and consider the facts. You devoured the guard’s soul.”

  Zarenyia sighed. “Yes.”

  “Leaving his corpse.”

  “His mortal coil, all shook off, yes. I have done this before, you know.” She stopped on the stairs. “Oh, I am a silly. Yes, darling, I take your point, now.”

  “How, if he were a true inmate of Hell, would he have a coil to shake off? Exactly my concern.”

  “He was alive. Actually alive. Not now, obviously. He’s nothing at all now, apart from the fond memory of a pleasant repast. But he was alive.” She looked inquiringly at Cabal, as if this were some clever party trick of his. “So how is it a living man was in Hell?”

  “It is not,” said Johannes Cabal significantly, “without precedent.”

  “I can’t see the Old Man being very happy about it.”

  “He wasn’t, nor would he be if he knew I was here again. Still less so if he knew where we were, and least of all were he to discover that Pandæmonium contains more living mortals than just myself.”

  “That guard wouldn’t be the only mortal here, then? Of course he wouldn’t. No. It looks like your sorcerer has brought a retinue with him.”

  “It also presents the question, why would a dead man need living men as that retinue?”

  “Well, Luan Da’s clearly not dead. That’s obvious. Have you really not worked that out, Johannes?”

  “I was working up to it,” said Cabal. “It was to be a rhetorical flourish.”

  “Ah,” said Zarenyia. “Oops. Bad of me. But hold on, what about his … oh, what do you call them? Those things humans have?” She fussed as she scoured her memory, then clicked her fingers triumphantly. “I remembered! Life span!” She grew serious in the way a five year old grows serious when reprimanding a doll. “Wouldn’t he be frightfully old?”

  “He would, yes. We shall have to find him to ascertain whether, in the first instance, he is a living man or merely a spirit, and in the second, assuming he is alive, how old he appears. In any case, he will have demonstrably discovered the secret—or more exactly a secret of immortality. It will be interesting to see how much vivacity that secret lends him.”

  “Yes. He could just be a hairy little wrinkly thing. Oh! Deja vu!” She slapped him on the back, but was only rewarded with a hard look. “Little bit of succubine humour, there,” she said, abashed. “Doesn’t always travel.”

  * * *

  They passed many doors en route to the tower top, and dutifully checked each and every one of them. All were unlocked, and all were empty, of guards and sorcerer at least. Many showed recent signs of habitation, however, and Cabal calculated that Luan Da must have at least twenty unaccounted for guards or other servants lurking around the apparently abandoned structure.

  “And you know what that suggests to me?” he said, risking another rhetorical device upon his companion.

  “Lunch?” said his companion.

  “An ambush.”

  “The two things aren’t necessarily exclusive of one another, you know.”

  As they closed on the topmost floor of the tower, Cabal grew more cautious while Zarenyia became more enthusiastic. She had been impressed upon not to kill Luan Da until Cabal said she might, but that the rest of his staff were fair game.

  “Just try to be, you know…” She evidently did not. “Discreet,” said Cabal, unsure what that meant in this context.

  “I shall, darling, you know I shall. I shall very discreetly shag them to death.”

  “Do you have to use that term?”

  “I have many others,” she said, and smiled. Then more soberly, she added, “Terminology aside, and as much as I enjoy the occasional orgy—or feast, again depending on terminology—I am concerned by numbers. If you’re right, and the Chinese chappy has twenty little friends with him, I can hardly ask them to take a number and read a magazine until I can get to them, can I? And there’s you with a fishcake. We may have a few problems.”

  Cabal had been thinking along the same lines. “I know a few cantrips,” he unwillingly admitted. “I don’t usually have much time or talent for such fripperies, but I thought the proximity of the chaos stream would magnify whatever abilities I have in that direction.” He reached into his trouser pocket and reluctantly slid out a few inches of ebony wood, thin and gleaming, before letting it slide back into concealment.

  Zarenyia was agog. “Is that a wand in your pocket?” she said, “or are you just glad to see me?”

  Cabal seemed pained. “I do not easily use such accoutrements. There is something very unscientific about them.”

  “Seemed very scientific to me. Is it telescopic?”

  “What? Oh. No, these trousers contain a truncheon pocket.”

  “My,” she said. “You have a high opinion of yourself. Oh … pocket. My mistake.”

  “You are smirking, madam.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  * * *

  The attack came as they reached the top the stairs, and as an antechamber before what seemed likely to be Luan Da’s sanctum sanctorum came into view. The guards—fourteen, Cabal quickly noted—came charging down the stairs as the necromancer and the devil were still some ten yards from the top, and therefore at a disadvantage.

  Years of reflexive conditioning caused Cabal to first try to threaten the enemy with a wilting fish cake before he realised his mistake.

  Zarenyia, meanwhile, said, “Hello, boys!” in tones of undisguised delight, before wading in. It turned out that her earlier concerns about being outnumbered had been a little ingenuous, as she was most definitely a fighter as well as a lover of the more terminal sort. Powerful arachnid limbs shot out, and caught guards hard enough in the midriff to knock them from their feet. While Cabal was still wrestling with his “truncheon pocket,” Zarenyia was scuttling up a wall, a guard dangling by the scruff of his neck from a hind leg.

  “This is not the time for that!” shouted Cabal, finally clearing the wand from the cloth.

  “Oh, hush,” came the reply. “I know what I’m doing. Buy us time, Johannes. Wave your little stick at them.”

  Cabal truly hated wands. Now the wretched thing was in his hand, he felt as he had always done in the very few instances when he had used one before—foolish. It was a pleasure to clear his mind before using it, as it allowed him to forget what an utter idiot he must look.

  The chaos without the walls provided a constant background hum of magical energies, the least ability of which was to cause blinding headaches. The trick was to let the rolling static of creation flow through his consciousness without catching on any thoughts along the way. Chaos was as impressionable as a young child and, like a young child, tended to misinterpret things. It really didn’t take too much of a desire to see one’s enemies on fire, for example, for chaos to express that as one’s medulla going off with the force of a hand grenade. The best plan was just to direct the stuff in a direction where it might cause trouble and then leave it to its own devices.

  Chaos erupted from the tip of his wand like a lazily drawn line, curving gently in long sinuous w
aves as it snaked up the stairs and struck a guard squarely in the chest. He must have been entertaining a notion that he didn’t want to trip on the stairs as he would bounce down a good few steps of the steep rake. This was duly illustrated by the guard turning momentarily into a guard-shaped figure constructed from toy balls of all sizes and colours before they lost their cohesion and bounced down the steps in a bright avalanche.

  This would have been a tactical coup twice over if the guard had been to the rear of the attackers, in which case the cascade would have caused them a hazardous descent. As it was, however, the guard had been in the lead and so only Cabal was troubled by balls bouncing off him and being forced to hold his position until they had passed for fear of taking a tumble.

  The guards, all identically dressed and equipped although noticeably of varied ethnicities, came on, swords slashing at him, and he retaliated by slashing the air with the wand, all the time keeping his mind clear of any violent thoughts.

  A hundred black darts spat from the wand, to ricochet harmlessly off the guards’ armour, although at least it brought the charge to a premature halt. Several of the darts rolled past Cabal, and he saw that they were fountain pens. On this one occasion, he wished they had been swords.

  A guard stepped on a pen, and immediately a longsword sprang up through his sandalled foot. His cry was cut short as he tripped forwards and the tip of the blade caught in the flesh of his throat and then drove through with the force of his tumble. The body clattered towards Cabal, who reflexively stepped back, stood on a ball decorated with stars in concentric circles that had moments before been a spleen, and himself fell.

  As he turned his attention from the possibility of being killed by a bunch of men with swords to being killed by bouncing down several hundred stone steps and revised his defensive options accordingly, Cabal caught a glimpse of something multi-limbed and almost egregiously jolly descending from the upper reaches of the high ceiling on a silken cable.

  Zarenyia plucked one of the soldiers from his feet with her forelegs and threw him offhandedly up into the shadows from whence she had come. He didn’t come down again. Her further actions were lost as Cabal continued his fall.