Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal the Detective

Cabal frowned. “So this isn’t a Mirkarvian affair at all?”

Zoruk shook his head. “Politically, no. But we are all brothers against injustice, Herr Meissner, are we not?” Herr Meissner declined to comment, so Zoruk continued. “Civil disobedience escalated to attacks on property, and finally to the derailing of a Priskian troop train. There were a handful of injuries, and one death. The Priskians responded by sending in Commodore Von Falks’s aerosquadron. He was supposed to monitor activity in the valley only, and lend support to ground troops should they request it.” He looked in the direction of the dining room and his humiliation. “DeGarre was wrong about one thing. I should have pointed it out, small victory that it was. He said the locals slaughtered patrols. That’s not true; they attacked one patrol when the Priskians started enforcing a curfew, and killed two men, at the cost of four of their own. Farmers against soldiers — hardly a fair fight. But one of the dead Priskians was an officer of Von Falks’s squadron who had been liaising with the ground troops.

“The commodore was furious. Insane with anger. Quite literally, insane. He located the three villages that were most likely the source of the ‘terrorists’ who had killed his officer, and then — ” He closed his eyes, and did not speak for several seconds. When he opened them again, he said. “They eradicated all three villages. Bombed and bombarded them. Strafed the streets with Gatling guns. Dropped liquid fire on the homes and the farms and the churches. They burnt the houses, and shot the people when they ran from the flames. By the time he received orders to cease immediately and withdraw, it was too late. Twenty-four hundred people were dead or dying.”

There was silence for a dozen heartbeats. “Twenty-four hundred?” Cabal’s voice was hollow.

Zoruk nodded. “It was a disaster in many ways. Priskia had little choice but to cede the Guasoir back to Dulkis under international pressure. Von Falks was given a revolver with one bullet and a quiet room for ten minutes to give him the opportunity to do the decent thing, which he did. And when the world saw what DeGarre’s machines had done to those poor people” — he looked Cabal in the eye — “orders went up by eight hundred per cent. I accept his argument that he didn’t design his ships to kill civilians, but that doesn’t excuse him getting rich from it.” He shrugged. “Or am I still being a damned fool?”

“Yes,” said Cabal. “I’m expected in the salon, Herr Zoruk. Good evening.” He made to leave, but at the corner he paused and looked back. “Humanity is a despicable mass, Herr Zoruk, and ill-suited to the compassion of romantics. Sometimes it requires culling.”

“Oh?” said Zoruk. He sounded worn out and depressed. “And who would choose who lives and who dies?”

I would, ideally, thought Cabal. I’d make a more informed job of it than most. But instead he said, “Who, indeed, Herr Zoruk?” and took his leave.

Walking into the salon was like entering a fog bank, albeit a very Cuban one. Every man present had a cigar in his mouth and a snifter in his hand containing enough brandy to preserve a mouse. The coffee pots sat by, unloved and unused, as the men stood around in that peculiar chest-out-and-stomach-sucked-in pose that men in dinner jackets feel obliged to strike after dinner. Cabal had suffered the misfortune of attending several such gatherings before and was quite aware that they laboured under a sense of ritual that eroded a great deal of any potential enjoyment to be had. The Mirkarvian variety, however, was almost a full-blown dominance display of the sort that gets anthropologists excited. A certain pecking order was already apparent: Captain Schten stood unassailable because he was, after all, the captain, and they were all on his territory; DeGarre had age, experience, fame, and a certain cachet of notoriety about him, and so stood at an only slightly less certain second place. After that, however, it was every man for himself, with the sole exception of Herr Roborovski, who refused to play and stood off to one side, gazing mournfully into his brandy as if he really did expect a pickled mouse to surface.

Currently holding the floor was Bertram Harlmann, king of the bar snacks. He had moved on from exhaustive details of the all-conquering pork scratching, and was offering to let the gentlemen present in on the ground floor of the next breathtaking breakthrough in overpriced tidbits for the Bierkeller market. This white-hot cutting edge was called “mixed nuts,” and apparently contained the secret weapon of dried fruit. “Almonds,” he said in a significant tone to one half of the gathering. “Raisins,” he said to the other. Cabal managed to reduce a full roll of the eyes to a momentary interest in the carpet’s pattern, and entered the fray.

Cabal slept lightly. This was as much a learned behaviour as a natural aspect; far too many people and other entities had trod lightly towards him as he slept with less kindly intentions than tucking him in and kissing his brow. He skimmed through the dreaming edges of deep sleep like a man on ice skates, standing rigid, arms crossed, and wearing a disapproving expression, as his subconscious mind threw phantasms, childhood memories, and random elements of his recent past in his path with more optimism than expectation. He slid through them all with the humourless gravitas of an Old Testament prophet challenged to a magical duel by Uncle Mungo the children’s conjuror. When he did finally reach the places of the mind too dark and motionless for dreams, he paused, barely over the tree line, and waited for his body and his mind to recuperate, all the time listening to the distant call of his senses, singing like the wind over telegraph wires. If they suddenly cried with pattern and purpose, he could be up and out of the well of sleep faster than a rabbit from a trebuchet.

Tonight, he had taken almost an hour to drift into even a light slumber, and was just in the act of strapping on his figurative skates when something roused him back to full wakefulness. He did not sit bolt upright — there’s nothing like visibly declaring oneself awake to precipitate an attack. Instead, he lay, his eyes opening only slightly as he took in his surroundings, and listened carefully. The steady thrum of the levitators he had grown accustomed to, and this he ignored. There was something else, however. A dull battering sound running through the outer hull, as if somebody was kicking the wall. After a moment more it ended, and there were only the sounds of the ship’s running.

Cabal rolled onto his back and gazed at the ceiling as he wondered what had made the noises. It was, he knew, largely an exercise to bore himself back to sleep; he had no inkling of the workings of a vessel like the Hortense . For all he knew, the sound might be a common occurrence, made by some necessary component doing its job. There had been something about it, though, something organic rather than mechanical. He had heard dying men drum a similar tattoo on the floorboards with their heels, and this thought shooed sleep away.

Five minutes later there was a new sound, and at this Cabal did sit bolt upright. It was a dull roar that grew, in a rapid crescendo, to a climax that coincided with a sharp metallic thud. Cabal had heard a sound very similar to it earlier in the evening when the sliding windows in the salon were drawn back. But then they had been flying lower and slower. The window in one of the nearby cabins had been drawn back, he was sure of it, and this raised two objections in his mind. First, that the cabin would now be bitterly cold as the wind blew harshly around it. Second, that when he had been looking from his own window earlier in the evening, he noted in passing that the sliding frame was locked shut by a bolt that would require a specialist tool to release. These two factors seemed to indicate that whoever had opened the window had not done so purely for a breath of fresh air.