Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal the Detective

“‘I’m saying the history books have rationalised how a bunch of foul-smelling thugs managed to defeat every force thrown against them. The truth is too ugly for the historians in their ivory towers, so they’ve come up with the myth of an unbeatable army. The Ugol were unbeatable, but that’s the only true part of it.’

“‘They had a secret weapon?’ I ventured.

“‘No. Yes, actually. Yes, in a sense, they did. A secret weapon. Umtak Ktharl. He was the Great Hass’s vizier, adviser, majordomo. Actually, I think he ran everything and the Hass was just there as a more acceptable figurehead. The Hass could roister and doister and do all that nonsense. Umtak Ktharl, on the other hand, was evil incarnate.’ I looked questioningly at him, but he was disassembling the revolver for his amusement and wasn’t aware of me. ‘I first became aware of him when I read of something called the Red Snow,’ Cabal continued. ‘Red snow that fell from a clear sky, and where it touched human flesh it dissolved it. And every flake sighed as it ate away the meat from a man’s bones, the sigh of a tiny ribbon of vital essence leaking away into thin air. Entire armies were reduced by it, kings lived in fear of it, and it was only one of the novelties in Umtak Ktharl’s bag of tricks. Some were much, much worse. Who would stand against an army backed by a warlock like that?’

“‘A necromancer,’ I corrected.

“He seemed to be about to lose his temper, and took a moment to swallow his irritation. I affected not to notice.

“‘No,’ he said finally, and his voice betrayed no emotion. ‘Not a necromancer. They are men of a very different stripe. This warlock was the reason for the horde’s success. The only reason. Kingdoms would be abandoned at the very whisper that the Great Hass and his éminence grise were coming. If Umtak Ktharl was entombed here, it explains why the horde withdrew soon after they passed through this land. They very wisely appreciated that the jig was up and it was time to cut and run.’

“‘Not a pretty story.’

“‘No.’

“‘There’s still something about this place that I don’t understand. Why the pool, the spring?’

“Cabal looked at me again and smiled that ugly, cold smile of his once more. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ He looked over at the pool and made as if to speak. Then his expression suddenly became horrified. ‘Enright! What’s that by the gutter? Over there, man!’

“I followed his glance. Near the gutter that fed spring water into the pool, there was something dark and ophidian. As I watched, it moved slowly and cautiously towards the running water. I blinked and then appreciated the illusion. The tail of the black snake ran back towards the body of the bandit I had shot — the flattened perspective, of course, it was obvious. ‘It’s blood, Cabal. Only blood.’

“The effect on Cabal was astounding. He sat up, presenting himself as a beautiful target, and started yabbering at the bandits in furious German, pointing frantically at the dead man. Fortunately for him, my reactions were better than those of our persecutors. I dived across between cover and tackled Cabal, flattening him behind his boulder even as a shot whizzed through the space he’d occupied a moment before. I hadn’t been expecting gratitude, but I was unprepared for the vitriol Cabal blazed at me. Not much of it was in English, or even German, but what little I could make out doesn’t bear repeating.

“‘I just saved your life, Cabal!’ I bellowed in his face. ‘They would have had you otherwise!’

“‘Them?’ he barked back. ‘I’m not afraid of them . The worst they can do is kill us!’

“Suddenly, I became aware of a bubbling sound, like a great cauldron coming to the boil. Risking a peek by the boulder, I was astounded to see that the water in the pool was boiling. Beside me, Cabal said with sharp anger and desperation, ‘Blood! It’s too late, there’s blood in the water!’ And so there was; the slow trickle of blood from the bandit’s body had finally reached the gutter and thence the pool.

“I was never very bright at school in my divinity classes. Our teacher, Doctor Chatt, was a patient man, but even he must have been sorely tried by my complete inability to absorb anything at all. Or at least I’d always believed none of it had stuck until, looking at that extraordinary pool, its surface boiling fiercely and seeming to glow with subdued red, like the sea over a submarine volcano, I heard dear old Chatt’s voice speak to me over the distance of years. It was a lesson about John the Baptist, and somebody had asked what baptism meant. ‘It is the washing away of our sins,’ Chatt had replied in that dark, wooden voice of his. The washing away of our sins. And then I understood.

“Umtak Ktharl had been having his sins washed away for seven centuries. Seven hundred years of pure water driving over him as he lay at the bottom of that strange pool, seven hundred years of corruption being sapped from him. And he, a seemingly bottomless well of sin, hadn’t been purified one wit. In an instant, I saw it all. The Great Hass finally realising that his vizier’s goals surpassed those of any mortal man; the secret construction of this place; the luring of Umtak Ktharl here under some pretext and then plunging him into the pool before he recognised the trap. As generations had been born, flourished, and died away, Umtak Ktharl had lain here, rendered powerless by the never-ending purity of a mountain stream, powerless but still rotten to the core of his foul soul.

“At least, the purification had been never-ending. Until the blood of a wicked man had spilt into it and it had been polluted.

“As I watched the boiling increase in intensity, Cabal slumped down behind the boulder and commented, rather flippantly, I thought, ‘Oh, well. There’s the end of the world as we know it.’

“‘Is there nothing we can do?’ I started to ask him, but he hushed me with a raised finger.

“‘I’m thinking,’ he said. And, as he thought, Umtak Ktharl rose from the waters.

“He seemed to half climb, half float from the pool, an Oriental who should — judging merely by the elements of his face — have been in his forties. But there was something wrong in the way they worked together, perhaps caused by the uncertain light or my own state of mind, something that made him seem ancient beyond belief. The water streamed from his high brow as mercury across glass, and fell hissing like drops of lava to the rocky floor. He was dressed in a long heavy robe of the type favoured by the Ugol in centuries past, but it was dark and featureless, hanging about him like a bed of weed, dank and horrid. It had no right to have survived its long immersion, of course, but mere physics were of little consequence in that cave at that moment.

“All of which were mere details beside those eyes. I cannot even begin to describe them, for as soon as I saw him I looked away. But I know one thing of a certainty, and that is that they were not human. I knew nothing of this … man’s history and have never gone to pains to find out since, for I have no desire to learn what precisely takes a man’s eyes and replaces them with the voids that I glimpsed. Perhaps his eyes were black orbs in his skull. I hope so, for the alternative was that he had no eyes at all but saw through sockets filled by something so wrong for this world that they were not simply beyond description but beyond apprehension.

“My sanity was saved by the bandits, who, seeing only the warlock’s back, opened fire. Umtak Ktharl staggered very slightly under the rain of bullets, like a man snagging his toe in a loose carpet but catching himself in plenty of time. He seemed, if anything, faintly exasperated. Then he turned and set foot on dry ground for the first time in thirty-five generations. The instant they saw his face, the firing stopped. There was a moment of utter astonishment, and then one man made a horrible high, whining scream of terror and bolted.