Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal - The Fear Institute

They tracked cautiously through the entry hall, but if it had ever contained any defences, magical or mechanical, they had long since manifested or sprung. Round the curved wall stood a solid staircase of the same black stone that rose in a clockwise spiral, much like that of a lighthouse. Up this stair Johannes Cabal slowly climbed, followed at a judicious distance by the pallid Bose. The first floor consisted of an antechamber of sorts, the stair to the next floor being behind an elegant but sturdy door of suggestively molten forms, all rendered once more in the smooth glossy black stone. Fortunately it was not locked, and they were able to climb further upwards to what seemed to be an audience chamber or even a throne room. ‘They never lack for egos, do they?’ said Cabal, as they moved up to the third floor. This was the living quarters, informed with the decadent luxuriance so common among top-end wizards. There was a bathing chamber beside the bedroom that contained a great sunken bath, and beyond that a discreet privy, whose drainage plumbing appeared to be a transdimensional interface of some sort. ‘Presumably waste is thereby conducted to some distant place where raining excrement is not regarded as unusual, like Tartarus,’ he guessed. ‘Or Ipswich.’

Cabal had already made some rough guesses as to the dimensions of the rooms, and he could not help but notice that they were growing steadily larger, unlike the external dimensions, which apparently tapered to a small lookout on the highest floor. Apparently, playing merry-hob with dimensions had been Hep-Seth’s major stock-in-trade, and based on this conjecture he had already made a guess as to what the next floor would reveal.

Neither was he incorrect, as they climbed up into Hep-Seth’s laboratory. It was a large room, some hundred feet in diameter, windowless yet illuminated by good, unwavering lights that seemed simply to emanate from the air close to the ceiling. In the centre of the chamber was an iron spiral staircase that seemed likely to re-enter the normal dimensions of the exterior at its peak and open into the small lookout deck. Cabal walked a few yards into the laboratory and looked around, uncertain what he should be searching for. Looking back, however, he spotted Bose’s head from the nose up just peeping out of the stairwell.

‘Is it safe?’ asked Bose, a waver in his voice.

‘That I cannot say. If you specifically mean, Is there an ancient sorcerer up here who is outraged by our intrusion and means us harm? the answer is no. Neither is there a body. The signs are that the tower is abandoned, just like the rest of the city. Hep-Seth either didn’t need this place any more, or died elsewhere and never returned. I cannot say which.’ He grunted irritably. ‘Do come out from there, Bose. I feel like I’m talking to a mole.’

As Bose crept up the remaining steps, like a man entering a maiden aunt’s sick room, Cabal turned his professional eye upon Hep-Seth’s arcane paraphernalia. He was inwardly disturbed by how little of it he could recognise. There were several things whose function he couldn’t even guess at, and his ignorance chafed at him. Nor were they even comfortable to examine visually, their edges, angles and vertices behaving in ways so strange and ill-mannered that Euclid would have been brought to tears.

‘This is the work of a man who was obsessed with reaching the Island of Mormo,’ he said, half to himself, this being the half from which he expected a sensible conversation.

‘Eh?’ said Bose, the half from which Cabal expected nothing, so he ignored him.

‘A genius, judging by his work here. A genius of dimensional engineering. If he wants to go somewhere, he doesn’t call a taxi. He wants to go somewhere none can go, because nobody knows where it is. And he speaks of a . . .’ He had been turning, slowly, as he talked, his eye sweeping around the room, and now he stopped and stared. ‘A seven-sided gate.’

‘Yes, he did,’ agreed Bose, standing by a structure that, to the unjaundiced eye, looked a great deal like an asymmetric seven-sided gateway standing by itself some twenty feet from the nearest wall. It was made from thin, lath-like girders of a brass-like metal that was not brass but a strange alloy that Cabal had encountered once before in unenjoyable circumstances. ‘That’s what your head in the bag said, anyway. But what does it mean?’

Cabal walked over to him, grasped him firmly by the back of his collar, and twisted him to look at the structure. ‘Count,’ he commanded.

‘One!’ squeaked Bose. ‘What’s got into you, Mr Cabal? There’s one frame sort of thing! Should there be more?’

Cabal gave up and let him go while he himself stepped away to weigh up the next move. The gateway was as ambivalent to reality as anything else in the room, seeming to change form within flashes of perception, as if unable to decide whether to be two faces talking or a vase. In this case, however, the choice was between being one asymmetric seven-sided gateway and being any of a vast number of similar but different seven-sided gateways. Looking upon it for even a minute was very uncomfortable, as if the intellect was firmly and methodically unplugging and replugging the cables on the switchboard of the mind into new and ontologically challenging configurations. With difficulty Cabal managed to look away from it, and instead found himself gazing at the cheerfully gormless face of Bose, thereby going from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The work of creating the necessary gate of dubious physicality within the gateway built for it was not going to be a sudden great revelation any time in the next few minutes, so Bose repaired to the sorcerer’s bedchamber to snore gently upon grey-silver samite sheets miraculously untouched by the passage of time, another boon of the tower’s curious reality. Cabal, meanwhile, settled down in the laboratory with what writings of the great man he could find, and started sorting them into piles of graduated usefulness. Even for a man of Cabal’s voracious intellect, this proved difficult. He was a long way from his specialities, and his problems were compounded by the growing realisation that Hep-Seth was not only a leading light in his field but that he was the only light. His notes used forms and nomenclature that were unique to him because he had originated this whole thaumaturgical subset of theory. So, Cabal not only had to evaluate the notes, but he also had to learn a new and novel lexicon in which to do it. Muttering sourly to himself, he began to pore over the papers in the full knowledge that he might be days or weeks about it. Happily, they had discovered a large store of fresh food that was as fresh as the day the fruit had been plucked or the animal slaughtered. It was another of Hep-Seth’s innovations, like the privy, applying the extraordinary to the mundane; neither had he overlooked a seemingly boundless supply of fresh, cool water. They would not starve here, at least.

The next morning – the rooms’ mysterious lighting helpfully waxed and waned to give a sense of the time of day outside – found Cabal surrounded by notes in his own writing and possessed of a grudging admiration for Hep-Seth, albeit one overmatched by a solid dislike for the man based on his inability to write a glossary of terminology and leave it out where some passing necromancer might find it. That he himself wrote notes in a dead language and then enciphered them did not strike him as blinding hypocrisy: he could be executed for necromancy, whereas somebody who could create such magical conveniences as instantaneous travel, perfect food preservation and unblockable toilets had very little to fear, except being mobbed by a loving population.

Bose came in, the very epitome of ebullience and – in rapid succession – wished Cabal a good morning, asked him if he’d cracked the secret of turning the gateway on yet and, even as Cabal was looking for something heavy and spiky to throw at his head, patted it for purposes of illustration, thereby activating it.