Johannes Cabal the Detective

CHAPTER 5 in which dinner is served and acquaintances are made

The same steward who had cleared up Cabal’s spilt drink also seated him. The dinner was being held in the dining room at the ship’s bow, the same room that Cabal had first entered when boarding. “Oh, there are so many more gentlemen than ladies on this voyage,” he confided. “I’m afraid we’re having to seat the men in twos, but at least every gentleman will have a lady to chat to.” To Cabal’s dismay, he realised that he was being placed next to Leonie Barrow. He sat down in silence and looked pointedly off into the middle distance. The steward, however, had not quite fulfilled his quota of mischief for the day. As he leaned over Cabal’s shoulder to pour the wine, he whispered, “I took the liberty of seating you with this young lady.”

Cabal looked at him. The expression “if looks could kill” does not begin to describe the pure corrosive abhorrence that he put into the glance. If, however, the steward had suddenly found himself transported far away and nailed, through his genitals, to the steeple of a church in the middle of a violent electrical storm, a more exact impression may be gained.

The steward winked conspiratorially and moved along, pleased with his work. Cabal turned reluctantly to find Miss Barrow smiling not altogether pleasantly at him.

“I think we’re the ship’s official lovebirds,” she murmured.

Cabal, stony-faced, took his napkin, flicked it out, and placed it on his lap. “Imagine my delight,” he said, apparently to his place setting. Miss Barrow tapped his elbow and indicated the rest of the diners with a surreptitious gesture. Looking around, he saw that every single man there was tucking his napkin into his collar. Moving smoothly to avoid attracting attention, he picked up his and followed suit.

“Don’t bother thanking me,” she whispered. Cabal growled slightly and ignored her. He was mentally kicking himself; he’d learned about this particular piece of etiquette during his stay in Krenz prior to the attempt at burglary that had ended in dog drool and disappointment. Now he’d allowed himself to get rattled and it had slipped his mind. Johannes Cabal hated being rattled. It was so … human.

The first course was soup. Mirkarvian tastes predictably eschewed consommé in favour of something a little more masculine. Miss Barrow filled a spoon but found that she couldn’t bring it to her mouth without the spectre of a gag reflex. “What is this stuff?” she asked Cabal. “Oxtail?”

“I’m not sure.” He sniffed cautiously. They seemed not to have stopped with the ox’s tail. “Possibly boiled bull’s blood.” He fished around in the dark depths with his spoon. “With croutons.”

The next course was more acceptable — poached fish — and Cabal took the opportunity to study some of his fellow passengers. The “captain’s table” was actually a construct of all the dining tables in the room unbolted from the deck, rearranged into a squat oval, and bolted down again. Captain Schten held court from the middle of the forward long side — and very uncomfortable he looked in the rôle, too. With Leonie Barrow to his left, Cabal was almost opposite the captain. Cabal watched without sympathy as Schten tried to look interested in what a self-made, self-satisfied, self-aggrandising businessman was telling him about pork scratchings, the Bierkeller snack of the future.

To Cabal’s right sat a man in his mid to late forties. His face seemed lived-in to the point of being secondhand, perhaps third. He was prodding his fish fitfully with the end of his knife and it was hard to tell who was unhappier with the situation. The man noticed Cabal looking at him. “Poached,” he said in a tone of defeated disgust. “Flippin’ Nora, it would be poached. I thought, Oh, your luck’s in here, Alexei m’boy. Fish.” He patted his stomach. “I’m a martyr to my guts. They ought to open an institute dedicated to the study of my guts. The Alexei Aloysius Cacon Memorial Institute.”

“It’s traditional to be dead before having a memorial institution named after you,” Cabal observed.

“And how long can it be, eh? Murdered by me own internals.” Cabal thought they would have to go to the back of a long queue. “Still, if they’re the death of me perhaps medical science can study them and find a cure for my ills, so that future generations can say, ‘His sacrifice was not in vain.’”

Cabal watched him carefully for any flicker of irony and found none. “Ills?”

“Plural.” Cacon prodded his fish again. “That would have gone nice with a bit of batter. Oh, yes. I’ve got a regular compendium of complaints, I have. Me doctor’s baffled, baffled. Well, I say ‘doctor.’ I go to him and he just sends me home with the milk of magnesia and tells me not to worry about it.” His lip curled and he sighed deeply, disgusted at the way of the world. “The quack.”

Despite himself, Cabal was fascinated. He’d never met anybody so profoundly … wrong before. “I was under the impression that poached fish was supposed to be good for the digestion.”

“Oh, well,” said Cacon with the wearied yet supercilious air of somebody who’s put down that specious argument before. “They’d like you to think that, wouldn’t they?” No further indication of who the mysterious conspiracy of “they” might be was forthcoming.

The woman at Cacon’s other side started talking about how lovely it was to be away from that tiresome trouble back home, and Cacon had opinions on that, too. Cabal was unsurprised to discover that Cacon had been a tiger in his youth, a sergeant with the grenadiers. “Clickety-snitch,” he kept saying, to represent the pin being pulled and the spoon springing clear of an armed grenade. Cabal found something almost touching in the man’s self-belief, a faint tremor of empathy. Cacon seemed to live in his own little world, and where the real one impinged upon his it was always … disappointing.

Cabal looked around for other distractions. As the steward had intimated, the men outnumbered the women by a ratio of more than two to one. From his own place and running clockwise, he let his gaze slide from diner to diner, as a second hand sweeps a path around a watch.

To his immediate left was Miss Leonie Barrow, and he regarded her with an outer dispassion and an inner sourness for a few seconds before moving on.

On Miss Barrow’s left was an old soldier, a brilliant deduction that Cabal based upon the man’s no longer being young, and his wearing an impressive collection of medal ribbons on the breast pocket of his dinner jacket. The fact that the captain had called him “Colonel Konstantin” also helped. The dinner jacket in question was rather old-fashioned in style, featuring the sort of high collar normally seen only in regimental histories in these days of loud ties and ill-considered cuff links. The colonel was also old-fashioned in his manners: attentive to the ladies and sober to the gentlemen. He nursed his wine slowly, waving away an increasingly distressed steward, who seemed to regard topping up glasses as a religious duty. Cabal was pleased that Konstantin avoided war stories, and intrigued that he also avoided current affairs.

“Is this your first flight, Colonel?” Captain Schten asked.

“In an aeroship, yes. I’ve been up in the observer’s seat of a few entomopters, though.” He gestured vaguely with his fork. “This is a great deal more comfortable, Captain. She’s a fine vessel.”

“You’ve flown in an entomopter?” said Miss Barrow. Konstantin turned to her and, as he did so, his demeanour shifted slightly from that of a professional speaking to a professional to the pleasantly avuncular.

“Indeed I have, Fräulein, and trust me when I say that this is a far more pleasant way to fly. I have had need to see the land from above on some occasions, and an entomopter reconnaissance was the best way of doing it. I am an infantryman through and through, though — I cannot tell you what a relief it was to set foot on terra firma once more.”

“Herr Meissner here used to be a cavalryman,” said Miss Barrow. Cabal’s fork stopped en route to his mouth.

“Really?” Konstantin regarded Cabal with a neutral stare. Then he smiled. “You would have broken your lances on one of my squares, sir, let me assure you.”

Cabal smiled, too, a purely technical exercise. “I do not doubt it, Colonel,” he replied without the faintest idea what Konstantin was talking about.

Next to the colonel was a floppy-haired youth, which is to say, he was perhaps five or so years younger than Cabal. Cabal had, however, worked hard to cram such grotesque quantities of responsibility, activity, and learning, both theoretical and practical, into every one of his days, that his years became akin to dog years. This youth, whom — after muttering into his chest when questioned by the colonel — Cabal had finally been able to name as one Gabriel Zoruk, swung from moodiness to airs of unwarranted moral superiority, depending upon how out of his conversational depth he found himself. Cabal disliked him instinctively, having identified him as a man still prey to his hormones while his intellect puttered around in the background like an embarrassed parent. He was dressed simply, but not cheaply, judging by the tailoring, and it seemed safe to assume that somewhere along the line he had decided to be a political activist without regard for his painfully apparent lack of competence, knowledge, or acuity. It seemed that nice hair and the eyes of a cherub had gained him attentions that he had construed as somehow inspired by his political thoughts. In this he was mistaken, an error of the sort commonly found among millionaires who believe that they are charismatic.

Beyond Zoruk was Frau Roborovski, sitting apart from her husband presumably as part of the etiquette of “mixing.” He was to Cabal’s right, two places beyond Cacon, and apparently not enjoying his liberty to chat with strangers. This may well have been because of the proprietary glances she would occasionally shoot him if he showed any sign of coming out of his shell. Marriage, it seemed, was truly an institution; in this case, something along the lines of a prison or an asylum. Cabal avoided any eye contact with Frau Roborovski that might result in conversation and moved on.

Captain Schten had managed to settle into a far more interesting conversation with the next man along — a gentleman in his sixties, whose taste in clothing was a trifle fusty but whose eyes and manner were bright. “It’s a fascinating vessel, Captain,” he said, a piece of fish falling unnoticed from his fork back to the plate. “A fascinating vessel. I’ve been out of the job for a while, but you always keep your interest.”

“This isn’t your first trip aboard an aeroship, then?” said Schten, helping himself to more potatoes.

“Oh, good heavens, no.” The man laughed in the indulgent manner of one about to make a revelation. “I used to design the things.”

“Really? You astonish me, Herr DeGarre.”

“Ah, please, Monsieur DeGarre, if you would. ‘Herr DeGarre’ sounds a little too much like ‘hurdy-gurdy.’”

“Hurdy —?”

“One of those ghastly boxes that the English imagine is a musical instrument. Yes, I retired from aeronaval architecture, cah, it must be seven years ago. You’ve heard of the Destrier class? That was one of mine.”

“Destrier?” Schten looked uncertain. “But that was a warship, was it not, m’sieur?”

“It was.” DeGarre took a sip of wine. “Three were built. The Bucephalus was sold off for scrap about five years ago, the Marengo is now the entire aerial navy for some little republic in the tropics, and the Destrier herself ploughed into a mountainside in bad weather.” A few people listening in on the conversation showed mild signs of discomfort; nobody likes to hear tales of aeroship disaster while travelling in one. “I told them not to use that type of altimeter, but you know military contractors — anything to save a few francs.” He shook his head and picked up the piece of fish again. This time there was no escape for it.

“And all three were used in the Desolée Suppression, were they not, m’sieur?” said a clear voice, cutting across all other conversations. Heads turned to look at the interjector. It was Gabriel Zoruk, all dark-haired, clean-jawed, handsome, and probably riding for a fall. He looked, Cabal thought on further consideration, like the sort of man who does all the wrong things for all the right reasons.

Cabal leaned back in his seat and, inclining his head towards her, asked Miss Barrow quietly, “What is the ‘Desolée Suppression’?”

She looked at him, suspicious with disbelief. “You’re joking?”

“Not at this exact moment, no.”

“You’ve never heard of the Desolée Suppression?”

Cabal bit his lip and sought patience. “If I knew, I’d hardly be asking, would I?”

He received no useful reply. She was no longer listening to him but to the exchange between DeGarre and Zoruk. “I’ll tell you later,” she said offhandedly to Cabal, leaving him to stew.

“Yes,” said DeGarre, evenly and without rancour. “They were used in the Suppression.”

“Your gleaming death machines,” said the young man, showing an entirely unconscious attachment to the melodramatic turn of phrase. Another mark of his breed, Cabal observed. “Against women and children. Does that make you proud?”

“Mein herr,” began the captain, beginning to heat at this discourtesy. DeGarre interrupted him.

“Monsieur, you are a romantic, non?”

Zoruk frowned, uncertain.

“I was young once, too,” continued DeGarre. “Things are pleasantly blanc et noir, are they not? All morality is a matter of certainty.”

Cabal glanced significantly at Miss Barrow, but she was listening attentively to the exchange.

“The ships I built were intended for aerial warfare. Their every line proclaims it. Warship against warship. That was my brief and that was my design. The Suppression, as has been repeatedly shown and famously proclaimed, was the decision of an aeroflotilla commodore straying far, far beyond his orders. When he took those ships into a low-level attack against the villages of the Guasoir Valley, he did so out of a rage of frustration. He had been sent to fight the partisans. They, awkwardly, did not wear uniforms. They did not simply vanish among the villagers. They were the villagers. They slaughtered patrols and then vanished amongst their kindred. It was an impossible situation and should never have been given to an aeroship flotilla to resolve. A case for the infantry. Von Falks should have deployed his marines to prove as much and then reported it to his superiors. As we all know, he did not. It was regrettable.”

“Regrettable?” spat Zoruk, but DeGarre hadn’t finished.

“The Destrier and her sisters were built to fight a good war, by the rules of war, to the honour of war. Commodore Von Falks sullied those rules, his family, and, to my chagrin, the reputation of my ships. Direct your ire elsewhere, monsieur. It is wasted here.” He reached for his wineglass and took a calm sip amidst a light patter of applause from other passengers who preferred that war crimes not be discussed at dinner. Zoruk glared at him, picked up his cutlery, and made as if to start eating again but, after a moment’s wavering, slammed them onto his plate, stood up, and walked out with less dignity than he supposed. Cabal watched him go with approval: anything that distracted attention away from, say, a fugitive necromancer travelling abroad under the alias of a comatose civil servant, was to be encouraged.

“Stone the crows, what a berk,” observed Cacon. “Things were different when I was a boy. Respect for your elders, oh yes. Always the same, though, isn’t it? When you’re young, you had to show respect for your elders or you’d get a right lathering. Now I am an elder, you have to treat the youth of today with kid gloves or they’ll give you a right lathering. Doesn’t matter which side of the generation gap I’m on, it’s the wrong side.” He breathed a deep breath so that he could sigh a deep sigh. “Typical. Abso-lutely flipping typical.” He shoved his plate of disrupted fish away from him. “Oi, garkon! Give this to the cat. What’s for pudding?”

Pudding, however, still lay a little way off into the future. The main course came next, steak cooked in the Mirkarvian fashion — so rare as to be just this side of stationary. Miss Barrow looked at her plate as red juices oozed from the flesh. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked Cabal in an aside. “Eat it or resuscitate it?”

“Thank your stars that you asked for it well done,” he replied. He’d asked for his to be cooked medium rare, which in Mirkarvian cuisine meant it had been shown a picture of an oven for a moment and then served. A very brief moment, mind.

As his fellow diners had their full attention on their plates as they laboriously sawed away at their meals — less fine dining, more like a bayonet charge — Cabal took the opportunity to study them in greater detail. Sitting on the captain’s left was a young woman, expensively yet, unusually for the Mirkarvian aesthetic, tastefully dressed in burgundy silks and velvet. This, it transpired, was the Lady Ninuka, yet another of Mirkarvia’s serried ranks of nobles. Apparently she was quite senior, however, based on her place at table and Schten’s great and careful civility towards her. For her part, she was polite but disengaged. The businessman with the major breakthrough in bar snacks, a Herr Harlmann, was on her left, and had talked through her to Schten. She had disregarded him as easily as she might a small fly — a notable feat, in particular when Harlmann had gone on to the intricacies of manufacture.

In her early twenties, and beautiful in an obvious “flawless complexion, perfect bone structure, glistering eyes of russet brown, wine-dark hair” sort of way, there was a slight downturn at the edges of her mouth that implied a dissatisfaction with life. It left her with a mild pout, but Cabal doubted there was much of the child left in her. Her gaze ranged around the table, and he found himself the subject of it more than once, her eyes switching between him and Miss Barrow, as if gauging the nature of their relationship, before moving on. When her eyes met his, there was no sudden looking away, or even glances laden with meaning. She looked dispassionately into his eyes, as she might those of a statue or an animal at the zoo. He noticed that she also looked occasionally at the door through which Gabriel Zoruk — that singularly ineffectual rabble-rouser — had left earlier, as if expecting him to return. That he didn’t seemed not to concern her greatly.

To Cabal’s side, Miss Barrow took a rest from her knife work. “This isn’t a meal,” she muttered to him, “it’s a cow’s postmortem. I think I’ll stick with the potatoes and carrots.” She waved a steward over and asked for some more vegetables.

The woman on the far side of Cacon overheard her, and said, “Ah, well, that’s one thing we won’t be short of on this voyage, my dear,” and gave a curious laugh: Muh’heh! The muh was low and slightly distressed, as if she were expressing illness, but the ’heh! was higher and girlish. The overall effect was thus: “Muh, I don’t feel well … Heh! Fooled you!”

Cabal turned to look at the woman, if only from curiosity at what sort of creature would produce such a sound. She was approximately forty, he gauged, and exhibited that interesting combination of dour propriety overlaying a coltishness inappropriate, for a lady of her age, that was a peculiarity distinctive to women who have been to an English public school. Such schools begin the process of inculcating eccentricity right from the moment it is understood that English public schools are not meant for the public; the name is not merely inaccurate, it is actively misleading. Any other country would call these schools “private,” but where’s the fun in that? She wore a dress that would be considered frumpy by most grandparents, a brown affair that carried a palpable air of spinsterhood. Her hair was very nearly the same shade, arranged in harsh shingles about a sharp pale face. She had made an attempt at makeup, but the rouge sat on her cheeks like red paint on a white-wall.

“Why so?” he asked.

“You don’t know?” butted in Cacon, whose tales of military ferocity had gained some veracity in light of the horrible wounds he was inflicting on his food. “Blimey, mate, ’ave you been living under a rock? This is a mission of mercy we’re on ’ere.”

Cabal said nothing, but his expression indicated that he had seen more likely angels than Cacon.

“The Katamenian famine, Herr Meissner,” supplied Miss Barrow. “The crop failure?”

Cabal may have had many faults, but difficulty in rapidly absorbing, reviewing, and extrapolating from new data was not among them. “Of course,” he said nonchalantly. “My ministry has been working towards logistical relief programmes, but I was not aware this ship was involved.”

“It’s why there are so few passengers aboard this vessel, sir,” added the woman with the aggravating laugh. “Herr … Meissner, was it?”

Cacon paused, with a chunk of meat speared alongside a fragment of boiled new potato on his fork hovering before his open mouth. It was not a pleasing tableau vivant. “Miss Ambersleigh, this is Herr Meissner of the Mirkarvian civil service. Herr Meissner, Miss Ambersleigh, ’er ladyship’s companion.” It looked as though he were introducing the meat and potato to each other. As an afterthought, he leaned slightly towards Cabal, and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “She’s English.” This bombshell delivered, and etiquette satisfied, he dumped the food into his mouth with all the delicacy of a steam engine’s fireman shovelling coal into the firebox. Cabal turned his attention towards Miss Ambersleigh quickly, that he might spare himself the sight of Cacon chewing.

“I’m sorry — you were saying, Miss Ambersleigh?” he prompted her.

“I said it’s the reason there are so few passengers aboard. This is the only occupied passenger deck. I’m told that above us is storage, and above that is the second-class deck, but that it is entirely unoccupied. All the staterooms, you see, are full of food. Vegetables, mainly. Imagine! Tons and tons of potatoes and carrots and turnips, just above our heads!” Her eyes glittered at the prospect of so many root vegetables. Cabal sensed there was not going to be a meeting of the minds here. At least, it explained Frau Roborovski’s obscure reference to exploding potatoes.

“So, only the first-class deck is occupied? And the crew deck, of course.”

Harlmann raised an interrogative hand. “I say, the crew deck’s at the top, isn’t it? Along with engineering and suchlike? Doesn’t that make the old bird a bit … top-heavy?”

Schten had obviously fielded questions like this before. He had his glass to his lips, however, and by the time he could lower it DeGarre had leapt into the breach.

“Yes, monsieur, it does make the vessel top-heavy, but you see, that is the intention. It is an easy error to fall into — that an aeroship is much like a nautical ship, and in many respects, especially in how they are run, that is true.” He cupped his hand. “An aeroship does not float in a sea of air, however.” He twisted his wrist so that his fingers dangled downwards. “It hangs, like a chandelier in the heavens. Thus, may the Good Lord forfend, should any of the levitators fail, then it may lean over a little. If they were at the bottom and the same thing happened …” He shrugged. “It would fall over. Pouf!”

Cabal did not recall ever having heard an apocalyptic disaster resulting in death and horror characterised as Pouf! A disciple of understatement himself, he warmed slightly to DeGarre.

Captain Schten nodded benevolently. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.” Which was probably true.

“How many levitators does a vessel like this carry, Captain?” DeGarre asked.

“Or, strictly speaking, how many levitators carry a ship like this?” replied Schten. Delighted with his wit, he reached once again for his glass.

“As you say,” said DeGarre, with the sort of smile normally employed in the patronisation of idiot children. “How many?”

Schten paused, glass halfway to his lips. “Eh?” His eyes wandered in their orbits as he reengaged his attention. “The levitators? Oh, there’re two batteries of eight.”

“Parallel or cross-linked?”

“Ah … cross-linked. Much safer.”

“Much more expensive, too.”

Schten opened his arms in about as expansive a gesture as he dared without knocking DeGarre and Lady Ninuka off their chairs. “She’s not exactly a scow, mein Herr.”

DeGarre nodded. “She is impressive. I wonder, may I see more of her, please?”

“I’m sorry?”

“May I see a little of her beyond the doors marked ‘Crew Only’?”

Schten paused, uncertain. “Well, it’s not company policy to give guided tours. The bridge is not spacious — ”

“Please, Captain. I would be deeply obliged. As for the bridge, you need not concern yourself on that. One bridge is much like another. No, I’d much rather take a look at your engineering section, if I may. Just to see how the art has moved on since I retired.”

Schten wavered. Company rules and reasonable behaviour were doing battle within him. The impetus to make his decision one way or another was provided, unexpectedly, by Alexei Cacon. “Oh, you might as well, Captain,” he said as he chased the last of his peas around the plate. “The whole boat’s going to be full of greasy Senzans getting their mucky fingerprints over everything, and they won’t be saying ‘please.’ Herr DeGarre’s a gentleman at least. Why should they do anything they like, and he can’t even have five minutes looking at your spinny things upstairs?”

Schten ignored the reference to his ship as a “boat” and said, “It’s not that easy, I’m afraid, Herr Cacon. I don’t want to set a precedent.”

“Give him his guided tour, Captain,” said Lady Ninuka, in a voice that might have been gifted to her by the Lorelei and a very good elocution teacher. “I, for one, promise not to ask for a similar privilege.”

“Nor I,” added Miss Ambersleigh, which earned a disdainful glance from Lady Ninuka that seemed to say, “As if that were likely.”

“Nor me neither,” said Cacon, finally cornering the errant peas and spearing them on his fork amidst a pizzicato of dinner silver on china.

There was a general round of muttered agreements. Captain Schten gave in with good grace, and arrangements were made for the following afternoon. For his part, Cabal slightly regretted that he wouldn’t get a chance to see the engineering deck for himself. He had an interest in machinery of the metallic as well as the fleshly form.

Cacon’s long-awaited pudding — dessert seemed an altogether too feminine term — turned up as the next course. There was a limited choice between the famous Mirkarvian dish, tschun — which not only sounds like a sneeze but looks like it — and cheese and biscuits. Almost everybody, even the Mirkarvians, opted for cheese and biscuits. The cheese was fierce enough to strip a layer of tissue from the palate, but it was still preferable to the alternative. Cabal, however, had an unlooked-for opportunity to see tschun at close quarters, as Cacon was the only one to order it. Served in a long shallow dish, it looked and smelled like partially fermented milk, with an island of something slightly too large-grained to be sago sitting in the middle of it. Scattered across this island was a red stain of blended cinnamon and pepper. Cacon tucked into it with noisy enthusiasm. “Put hairs on your chest this will, old son,” he commented to Cabal. Cabal failed to see how this could be regarded as an advertisement, particularly with respect to female diners.

Finally, they reached the time for coffee, Cognac, and cigars. The ladies retired, Miss Barrow giving him a meaningful look as she did so, and the gentlemen wandered down toward the salon. Cabal felt constrained to attend the ritual, but first made his apologies that he would be a few minutes. The same interfering steward who had placed him beside Miss Barrow now directed him to the nearest “head,” which Cabal understood to be a slang or technical term for the toilet. He thanked the steward, though he had no intention of using it; he just wanted a little time to himself to gather his wits. He made his way instead to the starboard promenade, the better to find some fresh air filtering through the external vents there.

The promenades ran down either side of the ship on Deck B, the storage and supply deck. No passengers bunked on this level, so the rooms had no portholes, only thin windows set high in their walls to let in light from the promenades. These were accessible only via stairs from Deck A — first class — at both their fore and aft ends, and ran most of the length of the vessel. Wide glazed windows angled out in a shallow horizontal arc running almost the length of the ship to allow walkers to lean over the rail and gaze down at the hoi polloi without having their hair unduly disturbed. It was a far more scenic route from the dining room to the salon than going via the internal corridor on Deck A, but not nearly as expeditious, and Cabal was unsurprised that none of the other men climbed the stair with him, such was the lure of coffee, brandy, and tobacco.

He was hoping for a few minutes of solitude, but here he was to be disappointed. The petulant Herr Zoruk was there, hands on the rail by the windows, deep in thought, though more probably self-pity. He looked up when he heard Cabal turn the corner, denying Cabal the chance to withdraw unseen. It was an awkward situation where neither man wanted to be in the presence of the other, but manners prevailed. Cabal found a place perhaps a metre away from Zoruk at the rail, and looked out into the night.

There was silence for some moments, then Zoruk said, “I suppose I made rather a damn fool of myself tonight.”

“Yes,” said Cabal.

Zoruk shot him a slightly startled look. “You call a spade a spade, don’t you?”

“It saves time. I am not noted for my diplomatic skills.”

“But you’re a civil servant?”

“But not one in the diplomatic service. I deal in facts, Herr Zoruk, and the fact is, yes, you made a fool of yourself tonight.”

Zoruk started to say something, but the will to do so left him in a defeated sigh. He turned back to the window. “I know he’s right, that’s the worst of it. You can’t blame a man for making a bullet if that bullet is later used to kill a saint. I knew that, or I would have if I’d taken a minute to think. I was just so angry. The Desolée Suppression … words cannot …” He shook his head. “I’m being a fool again.”

“I … am not very politically aware,” said Cabal, choosing his words carefully. “In my post, I deal with figures, disbursements, quotas, and reports. Sometimes things happen in the broader world” — he gestured at the dark earth beneath them — “and I remain ignorant of them, often to my shame. Herr Zoruk, what exactly is the Desolée Suppression? What did this Von Falks do?”

Zoruk looked at him, an odd look of mild suspicion and surprise, and Cabal wondered if his curiosity was going to cost him dearly. “You live in a sterile, isolated little world, Herr Meissner,” said Zoruk. “I almost envy you. Very well … the Desolée Suppression; history lesson. You probably picked up most of the story from the dinner table. The Guasoir Valley was Priskian by right of the Treaty of Hollsberg, but the locals have always regarded themselves as culturally Dulkine. They complained about it, and especially the Priskian policy of forcible relocation and the shipping in of Priskian settlers, but nobody was listening. So they started with civil disobedience, but all that got them was a few broken heads and some unjustifiably heavy prison sentences.”

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.