The Fear Institute

Captain Lochery himself was on deck as they approached the ship. He positively grinned with delight when he saw Shadrach and bounded down the gangplank to meet them.

‘Master Shadrach!’ he cried, grasping Shadrach’s hand in both of his and pumping it firmly. For Shadrach, who was used to handshakes with all the vigour of a cucumber sandwich left out in the rain, this was a surprise, and all he could manage were a couple of ‘Oh!’s and ‘Ah!’s in response.

Lochery, who outmatched his vaguely Scottish name with an accent that would have made Robert Burns sound English by comparison, was introduced to Shadrach’s companions and was polite and friendly with them all. When he reached Cabal, however, his mood faltered. He took in Cabal’s clothing, and said, ‘You’ll be a strong-minded one, that’s plain enough. This place will be a trial to you, no doubt.’

Cabal remembered the witch’s reference to a trial, but decided that he was not so foolish as to see meaning where there was only coincidence. ‘It has been noted before now, yes. Thank you.’

Lochery shook his head. ‘No, son, you don’t understand. The Dreamlands were built by dreamers, and dreamers are what they expect. Like a body fights an infection, this world will fight you.’

Cabal’s lips thinned. ‘Then I shall fight back.’

Lochery laughed, a fatalistic laugh of the sort reserved for gladiators, soldiers on suicide missions, and explorers leaving tents who ‘may be some time’. ‘I like your pluck, Master Cabal, but this is a world you’re talking about. You can fight it, but you will lose.’

Cabal looked around him. ‘I have no sense of the Dreamlands going to war with me, Captain. Do you? No black clouds, water spouts or monsters come to destroy me. I feel no more threatened than I might on Brighton beach.’ He spat into the water for punctuation. ‘Heaven forfend.’

‘Oh, it won’t be anything like that,’ said Lochery. ‘But I’ve seen men like yourself come here, and one of two things always happens.’ He leaned closer and spoke in a hushed tone. ‘The Dreamlands either destroy ’em, or absorb ’em. I’d buck up your ideas and try to fit in if you don’t want the ’Lands to do it for you. For an example, I went to sleep in the wrong opium den. Well, wrong in one sense. I don’t know what they’d mixed their stuff with but it brought me here. I guess it killed me too. My old body, that is. No goin’ back for old Cap’n Lochery. But, as you see, I fitted in. You should try to do the same, sir, or things won’t go so well for you.’ Seeing Cabal’s expression he raised his hands in conciliation. ‘Not a threat, son. Just a friendly warning.’

‘Do you always hand out metaphysical advice to your passengers?’ asked Cabal, growing a little heated.

‘Only those that looks as if they need it,’ said Lochery, with infuriating good humour. ‘And, for the truth, you’re not passengers yet. No negotiations have been made, no bargain has been struck.’

Shadrach held up a handful of gold from his purse and said, ‘Passage for we four to Oriab Island, Captain Lochery.’

Lochery’s grin widened. ‘And now they have, and now it has.’ He stepped to one side and bowed them to the gangplank. ‘Step lively, gentlemen. The tide turns soon, and then we’ll be away to Baharna, capital city and – ’tis no secret – the only city on Oriab Island. The only one standing, at least.’

It was their second experience of nautical travel on the expedition so far, but taking passage upon a form of ship that had been obsolete for the best part of six centuries was a very different matter from eight days aboard a modern steam liner. In the first instance, the Edge of Dusk was small, barely fifty tons, and lacked the comforts that Messrs Shadrach and Bose, in particular, had enjoyed so much while crossing the Atlantic. To be precise, the Edge of Dusk lacked any and all comforts, including privacy. The vessel’s single toilet was a cubbyhole in the rear quarterdeck with a piece of cloth held across the entrance by two nails. Inside was a bench with a hole and the ocean ten feet below. This, Captain Lochery proudly believed, was the very cutting edge of hygiene technology. Indeed, in high seas, it doubled as a bidet. This intelligence Shadrach and Bose received in a pallid silence, while Corde laughed, and Cabal looked at the horizon in the direction of Oriab Island.

They would be expected to sleep in hammocks along with the crew – as captain, Lochery had a small closet aft that he called his ‘cabin’ – and during the day were expected to stay at the rail and therefore out of the way as much as possible. Shadrach had suggested that, since they were paying passengers, seats upon the quarterdeck might not be unreasonable, but had quickly learned that, to a sailor, this was deeply unreasonable. Instead they had grudgingly been given permission to sit on barrels on the foredeck with the proviso that they get out of the way immediately if ordered by any member of the crew. Going from ordering stewards around to being ordered around by any passing sailor was a great humiliation for Shadrach in particular, and he spent much of the first two days of the trip standing by the bowsprit, stony-faced and uncommunicative, to the extent that the crew started calling him ‘the spare figurehead’ behind his back.

The time between standing at the bowsprit he passed much as the others did; swinging unhappily in a hammock, putting off visits to the frightful cubbyhole as long as possible, and being gloriously and violently sick on a regular basis. During the Atlantic passage, they had all suffered some sea-sickness for the first day or so, but had quickly overcome it and had mistakenly come to the conclusion that this was all the time necessary to find one’s sea-legs. Compared to the steam liner, however, the Edge of Dusk was like spending every hour of every day being blindfolded and lobbed at short, random intervals on to a trampoline. The horizon wantonly flung itself around at peculiar angles and the contents of their stomachs followed it faithfully, even while their inner ears told them that everything else was lying, and ‘downwards’ was actually this way. The crew found the sight of their passengers leaning over the rails hugely amusing in the absence of any other form of entertainment, although they quickly got a sense that it was unwise to laugh at Cabal. He never seemed particularly stricken, barking up his breakfast in a perfunctory way as if he had planned to do so all along, then strolling over to the water-butt and taking a mouthful from the scoop to rinse his mouth before spitting it out over the rail to follow his bacon and biscuit. None of the crew had ever seen a man vomit in a dignified manner, and it worried them in an disquietingly undefined fashion.

There was some commotion on the third day when the lookout sighted a sea serpent about a league off the port bow. Cabal barely felt it necessary to use his telescope to examine it; the creature was vast, a mile long and thicker than the Edge of Dusk was tall. They watched it swim by in a series of undulating humps that barely disturbed the waters, the sun glistening off the slick grey scales, unaware or uncaring of the tiny ship that sailed so near.

Corde noticed the captain watching it, his arms crossed and a ruminative expression on his face. His calmness did much to still Corde’s own nerves at being so close to such a giant, and he said, ‘I gather such creatures do not attack ships, Captain?’

Lochery looked sideways at Corde, and raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh, aye? And what makes you say that, Master Corde?’

Corde laughed. ‘Why, your unconcerned attitude, of course. You do not look like a man who suspects imminent death.’

‘Ah,’ said Lochery, returning his attention to the diminishing serpent, now beginning a descent back into its native depths. ‘Well, you see, if we had been in its path, it would have devoured the ship whole. They can do that, you know, and we would not have been able to do a thing to stop it.’

‘What?’ Corde’s sang-froid fractured abruptly. ‘We were in danger the whole time? How could you be so calm, man?’

‘I repeat, we would not have been able to do a thing to stop it. If we are to die, Master Corde, we can at least die well.’

Ten days, the trip took altogether, and the majority were much like one another. Once, when the ocean grew shallow over a submarine plateau, Corde excitedly pointed out that he could see a sunken city clearly beneath the waves. Lochery was unhappy to hear it and put a greater press upon the sails, the sooner to be clear. Nor was Cabal delighted by this remarkable sight, refusing even to look at it, instead pacing up and down the deck, muttering about how greatly he resented the loss of his pistol.

Everyone was relieved when, on the early evening of the tenth day, the lookout called, ‘Land, ho!’ and shortly thereafter Oriab Island crept over the easterly horizon. There was sufficient light to study the architecture as the Edge of Dusk glided between two lighthouses to rival the Pharos on either side of Baharna harbour, and approached the quayside before lowering her sails and sculling in the last few yards. Sailors leaped easily to the quay and, within a minute, were tying her off to the bollards. After such a long and occasionally harrowing journey, the sense of anticlimax was intense.

‘Well,’ said Bose, as they gathered their few items of luggage bought in Hlanith, ‘that was an adventure in itself. Sea serpents and sunken cities! Tell me, Captain, is this journey always so exciting?’

Lochery considered for a moment. ‘No pirates this time,’ he said, shrugged, and then bade his passengers a good evening before turning his attention to unloading cargo.

Baharna was a very different city from Hlanith, even larger (in their experience to date, the Dreamlands didn’t seem to do small – except for ships) and seemed to owe less to Earth in its architecture. Or at least, as Cabal commented, to any surviving architecture known on Earth. The city was terraced, but in such a way as to make the ranks of Hlanith seem very modest indeed. The streets of Baharna rose and fell steeply and, as a result, were frequently stepped. The visitors guessed that loads were carried on the sharply zigzagging roads that ran across the terraced levels, but people still managed to ride up and down the interstitial stepped highways by an unexpected method.

‘Oh, I say,’ said Bose. ‘That chap’s riding a zebra.’

It seemed that the zebras of the Dreamlands, or at least the zebras of Oriab, were far more biddable creatures than their terrestrial counterparts. A smiling trader in an orange silken robe, saluted them with something similar but not exactly a salaam gesture, and rode by on his patient and sanguine zebra, laden with panniers.

They watched him pass and then watched him ride off down the stepped road towards the quays. The observation grew to a slightly irritating length until it was halted by Cabal’s curt, ‘Oh, hallelujah. We have seen a man on a zebra and may now die content.’ He stalked off up the hill, looking for an inn the captain had told them of, and did not deign to make sure the others were keeping up.

As he walked, and they pursued him in a desultory we-were-going-this-way-in-any-event sort of way, he looked up at the huge archways that bent upon the highways of the city, archways upon which stood more buildings of the same dark purplish porphyry from which much of the city seemed to be built. It gave an impression of great solidity and great age. Cabal knew that an igneous stone like porphyry was difficult to cut; the ancient Egyptians had certainly made heavy weather of it, loathing the stuff for its hardness but loving it for its colour, finish and resistance to the elements. Or so the mummy of a master architect had once told him during a not entirely legal experiment at a respected science academy held long after normal hours. In fact, the virtues of building materials were all that ancient worthy had been prepared to talk about, probably because the rest of his brain was in a canopic jar somewhere.

The vast quantities of the stuff in evidence here, however, raised the question of just how large a quarry would have to be opened in the side of a nearby volcano to supply such gargantuan – indeed, Cyclopean – loads of the distinctive rock. Cabal considered the hypothesis that if all the porphyry were to be dumped neatly back into the quarries it would produce a good-sized hill after filling the holes. In short, that most had never been mined but dreamed into existence, long, long ago by men or things like men. The hard stone had been chosen because it reasonably matched the environment, but mainly because it emanated permanence, and permanence in the land of sleep is better than gold in the world of wakefulness. Cabal’s chosen profession meant that he must perforce dabble frequently in history and folklore and the misty hinterland between them. Over time, he had developed a sense of what was likely and what was not, which historical theories were probably true, and which were bunkum. To this sense, the Dreamlands stank of bunkum, a rank, musty smell like old sacking. Real history was unromantic, steeped in greed and blood and abject eye-rolling stupidity. An endless parade of putative Ozymandiases marching off to glory before snapping off at the ankles in the depths of the desert: that was human history. Every now and then there would be the pretence of civilisation, but soon enough the restless, hateful, atavistic hearts of humanity would tear down the towers and slide back into barbarism, squealing with glee. Decadence loves the taste of blood, even though it is poison.

The Dreamlands had none of that. The town squares had statues to poets and artists, philosophers and writers, not generals and statesmen. Cabal had heard of no wars or even border squabbles in living memory. Oh, there were tales of great wars and toppled states, but these all dwelled in the distant past. When an Ozymandian empire fell here, it was explicitly for the convenience of any passing Shelley looking for a subject for a sonnet.

Yet, Cabal concurred, the Dreamlands should have had all the necessary ingredients for conflict and anarchy. There were fat merchants with vast wealth, so money was important here, and where there was money there were jealousy and violence. There were pirates, mercenaries, marines and soldiers. There were kingdoms that chafed under ancient enmities with other races and neighbours. All the elements were here, so why did no spark start a conflagration?

Perhaps, he concluded, wars could only start here for aesthetic reasons. Tawdry little land grabs simply didn’t happen because they were revolting and wrong. Noble crusades and heroic ventures, on the other hand, were romantic and right. Perhaps, Cabal thought, when he had more leisure he might try his hand at starting a conflict here, just for purposes of scientific enquiry. The Trojan model looked simple and effective. He made a mental note to foment a war at some point, and returned his attention to finding the inn.

It took another twenty minutes to locate the place, ten of which were spent in a small square, the centre of which was a compact but beautiful garden, arranged around a statue of a middle-aged man of patrician features, dressed in a toga. The statue was of striking craftsmanship, but the reason for the pause there was because all of the party – Cabal included – were astounded to discover that they were able, at some curious subconscious level, to hear the statue think. Several people were gathered around, sitting on the pale wood benches that bordered the square, in poses of deep concentration, ‘listening’ to the thoughts and occasionally nodding in slow comprehension.

When one of them arose from his meditations to make a few notes upon a waxen tablet, Corde asked him, ‘That statue, how is it that we can hear its mind?’

The man laughed, a small polite laugh of the type reserved for ignorant foreigners, and said, ‘That is not a statue. It is the great thinker Arturax, he who has travelled so deeply into the inner realms of thought and intellect that he has been transfigured by the very nature of his ideas. He has no need of food, drink or rest because such things are animal and unsuited to a man of thought. Thus, he has dispensed with them. He is a hero to all mankind, as he addresses question after question, slaying them with his wisdom.’

‘These problems,’ asked Johannes Cabal, ‘I was wondering, do they include how to deal with urban pigeons?’ But his colleagues shushed him and took him away before the student of Arturax could hear.

The inn was called the Haven of Majestic and Bountiful Rest and, worse yet, deserved that name. Cabal rarely visited inns, except to secure the temporary services of ratlike men with names like Tibbs, Feltch and Crivven to do the basic shovel work in moonlit cemeteries when he was in too much of a hurry to do it himself. The inns such men frequented in turn had names like the Friendly Gibbet, the Sucking Wound and the Sports Bar, vile places with vile clientele. The Haven, by contrast, was a lively, bustling place full of open-faced men and more than a few women, all wearing bright silks, drinking golden mead and ice wine, singing risqué but by no means obscene songs, and never getting more than pleasantly tipsy. Even the sawdust upon the saloon-bar floor was fresher than that in a busy woodwork shop. Bose and Shadrach were delighted to see it thus, Corde seemed slightly disappointed, and Cabal simply scowled, as was his wont.

The food was good, the drink was good, and the company was bearable, so Cabal bore it where once he might have gone to bed, leaving the others with an unspoken curse to be visited upon their next of kin. Two hours later, Bose waved over Captain Lochery, fresh from completing the offloading of the Edge of Dusk’s cargo and looking for a soft berth for the evening. As they were buying, he joined them with the practised alacrity of a seaman who scents free booze and, in return for a drink and a meal, regaled them with tales of the Dreamlands’ seas. These frequently ended with the words ‘. . . and he was never seen again’ so Cabal quickly lost interest. He was on the point of going to his room when he noticed that Lochery was – while cheerfully telling nautical tales of shipwrecked desperation, ingestion by sea monsters, the sodomite proclivities of pirates, and some unexpected combinations of these elements – feeding his right leg.

‘Captain Lochery,’ said Cabal, as he watched the man offer a piece of sour bread to his calf, which gratefully devoured it, ‘I cannot help but notice that you are feeding your leg.’

‘Aye,’ said Lochery, unabashed. ‘It gets hungry.’ In explanation, he rolled up his right pantaloon leg to reveal what Cabal had assumed would be pale flesh but was actually a beautifully carved wooden prosthetic. In the outer right calf there was a small hole, and from this hole an inquisitive rodent’s face was peering out at them.

There were cries of astonishment from the others, but Cabal went down on one knee to look more carefully. ‘I don’t recognise the species. It looks a little like a guinea pig, and a little like a dwarf rabbit, but is barely bigger than a hamster. What is it, Captain?’

‘Guinea what was that? Rabby? I don’t know anything of those, Master Cabal, exotic though they sound. But this is a dreff. They’re only found on this island.’ He slapped his thigh, but gently, so as not to disturb the creature. ‘I lost this leg when I was a lad. One day out from here. The weather was strange, and the creatures of air and water were disturbed. My ship – she was the Fool’s Wager out of Ulthar, under Captain Mart, dead these twenty years – was attacked by seagaunts.’ Some interested bystanders made a sympathetic groan. ‘Twenty or thirty, driven mad by the green sun.’

‘I’ve heard of nightgaunts,’ said Cabal. ‘Slick, rubbery, faceless black creatures with horns and wings. What are these seagaunts?’

‘Much the same,’ said Lochery, ‘except at sea. They fell on us. I saw poor old Jecks Pilt borne off by them. They tried to do the same to me, filthy flapping things, but I got a deadman’s grip on the rigging of the foremast – she was lateen rigged, by the bye – and I was not going to let go, not with Jecks’s screams still echoing in my ears. But the ’gaunts, they wanted something for their trouble. So . . .’ He waved at the wooden leg.

‘Well, Captain Mart, he was a good man, he said to me, “You’re a sailor through and through and no leg-thieving seagaunts are going to take that away from you.” At least, that’s what he said later, ’cause I’d flaked out at the time from loss of blood. Anyway, he had a favour owed to him by a sorcerer in the city, and he took me to him – big tower at the northern end of the Spice Quarter, some dodgy evoker’s got it now, last I heard – and he comes up with this little beauty. See, dreff live in trees from the Sinew Wood, south-east of the Lake of Yath. The trees can move, but they got no brains. The dreff have brains – pretty good ones, considerin’ how little they are – but they can’t look after themselves. So, the dreff and the sinew trees are sort of . . .’ He looked for the word.

‘Symbiotes,’ supplied Cabal, intrigued by the insight into an alien ecology.

‘Pals,’ continued Lochery. ‘Now, this sorcerer says dreff are clever and they know a good thing when they see it, which is a roundabout way of saying that they train up easy. Keep ’em fed and happy, and they’ll be your pals for life. This little fella in here, Checky, he knows that when I throw my hip forward, it’s walking time, and he makes the leg – finest sinew wood, this is – shift at knee and ankle. Fact is, that he just seems to know now, we been together so long.’

He fed the dreff the last of the sour bread before gently nudging its head back in and bunging the whole with a stopper perforated with air holes. ‘They live about ten years. Takes about six months for you to understand each other, and they go a bit mad a few weeks before they die, sleeping a lot, making the leg bend all ways, so you know it’s time to get to the Sinew Wood with a box trap and some sour bread. They love the stuff.’

He looked off into the middle distance, lost in the past. ‘But you know the worst part of all of this? Not my leg, no, there’s people suffer worse. No, I still think of Jecks, the poor sod. You know what?’

The rhetorical question was interrupted by Cabal rising. ‘He was never seen again. Goodnight, gentlemen. An early start tomorrow.’

Chapter 7

IN WHICH THE EXPEDITION EXPLORES A NAMELESS CITY OF EVIL REPUTE

‘Wamps,’ said the sergeant, as he checked the ties on his scabbard.

‘Wamps!’ replied Bose, hand held up.

‘Wamps,’ said Cabal, ‘are a species. Not a greeting.’

‘Oh,’ said Bose, unabashed. ‘They sound rather harmless, though, don’t they?’ He tested the name several times with different intonations, each implying wamps were cuddly, warm, docile and fun to have around the house.

Sergeant Holk, a man with his experience measured in scars and a hard, weather-beaten face, looked at Bose as a father might look at a child who wants a wolverine for Christmas, ideally one with rabies. ‘They’re bigger than a man. They have nine legs and heads like great bats with no eyes at all. They’re disease-ridden killers . . . Just a scratch from one can kill you, even if it takes a year of miserable, agonising sickness to do it.’

‘Do be quiet,’ said Corde. The sergeant’s predilection for gruesome hyperbole was proving counterproductive. It was Corde who had found him at one of the ill-regarded dives he was becoming quite adept at locating. The sergeant had agreed to tell them what was known of the empty and partially ruined city to the east in exact, non-folklorish terms for he had been there.

So far his advice had been very much of the ‘Don’t go there’ variety, of which the presence of wamps was the newest variant. Warming to his theme, the sergeant said, ‘Six years ago, I went in there with a platoon to raid the old library. Special commission, you see. We got the scrolls we went in for, but it was dusk by the time we were ready to move out. The wamps ambushed us. They’ve got a few brains, and they don’t fight like animals. They’re cunning, see? They can creep up walls and drop on you from above. That’s what happened to us. Thirty of us went in, only four of us got out.’

‘Without a scratch, I presume?’ said Cabal, drily.

The sergeant just laughed and pulled up the left side of his jerkin. Beneath, the flesh was not simply scarred but missing down to the ribs, which showed as slats beneath a thin covering of skin. His audience watched, fascinated, as the slats rose and fell with his breathing. ‘No, sir. Not without a scratch. Within half a day, that scratch was a mass of worms. The chirurgeon had no choice but to cut out all the tainted flesh before it spread. I cursed him. Gods, in my delirium, I cursed the eyeballs from his head. But he saved my life.’

Shadrach was caught in the flux between repulsion and fascination. ‘Worms? You mean maggots, surely?’

‘I mean worms. Filthy, fat things that swallowed strings of my flesh at one end and shat out pus at the other.’

‘But where did they come from?’

‘From the same place a worm that causes a toothache comes, Shadrach,’ said Cabal.

Shadrach looked sourly at Cabal. ‘Don’t talk nonsense, man. Worms don’t cause toothache. That’s an old wives’ tale.’

Cabal made a noise often heard from the parents of ungifted children just before explaining for the tenth time why it’s bad for Timmy to put Timmy’s arm in the big fire. ‘Herr Shadrach . . . this is a world in which old wives are authorities. How many times must I reiterate this, gentlemen? This is the Dreamlands, where theories of micro-organic infection carry far less weight than the realities of myth. In the waking world, one may profitably avoid plaque and gingivitis. Here, dental hygiene consists of avoiding the attention of tooth worms.’

The sergeant listened to this, nodding with approval. ‘Flossing helps,’ he added. ‘They hate that.’

‘It all sounds a bit dangerous,’ said Bose, quietly.

‘It all sounds remarkably dangerous,’ corrected Cabal. ‘We don’t even know if this marvellous hermit is still alive, or can help us if he is. Perhaps we should look elsewhere for data.’

Shadrach took a firm grip on the edges of his simarre and jutted out his jaw. ‘Mr Cabal. We have crossed a sea to find this man. If you had any caveats with this plan, the time to say so has long since passed. We are committed, sir! We are committed!’

‘Are we? Are we indeed?’ Cabal could feel an old and pleasant feeling stirring in his breast. He had shown great patience with these fools to date. He had not failed them or abandoned them. Neither had he murdered even a single one of them. Yet for all these kindnesses he had received no thanks, only whining and, now, undiluted stupidity. The delightful sensation he could feel was his temper slipping the leash.

‘Your argument is as specious as it is fallacious. I do not give a damn that we have crossed a sea to be here. By your logic, if one was to circumnavigate the globe before being given the option of jumping off a cliff or not jumping off a cliff, you would fling yourself off immediately because – oh, my goodness – you’ve gone all that way and it would be a shame not to do something memorably stupid at the end. Not memorable to you, of course: you’d be dead. But everyone for miles around will always remember the day the idiot from afar threw himself to his death because, well, it would have been a shame not to.’

‘Mr Cabal!’ Shadrach was scandalised.

Bose, meanwhile, had become very wide-eyed and was muttering, ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ under his breath, while Corde and the sergeant were smiling.

Shadrach was appalled that Cabal – a hireling, for heaven’s sake – should be so . . . ‘The impertinence, sir!’

‘Are you going to challenge me to a duel, Shadrach?’ Cabal drew back the edge of his jacket to show the hilt of his rapier. ‘I very much hope you are.’

Corde stirred himself enough to step between them. ‘That’s enough, gentlemen. I think Mr Cabal is simply giving vent to some inner issues.’

Cabal’s face tightened. ‘I am angry, Herr Corde,’ he said, in a severely calm tone. ‘Not flatulent.’

Corde ignored him. ‘But he makes a valid point. Rational caution, eh? Remember that? These ruins out by the lake are not safe, not even close to safe. I think we must still go there – pace, Herr Cabal – but we must take every precaution and learn all that we may. For example, Sergeant, you said the wamps only attacked you on the way out. Was that because darkness had fallen?’

The sergeant nodded. ‘Like I said, they don’t have eyes. They don’t see like we do. They can see in the dark, and they know we can’t. I can’t say if they hate the light, but I’m sure they love the dark.’

‘There, then.’ Corde held his hands wide in a supplicatory gesture. ‘We have the beginnings of a plan. Nobody has to go jumping off any cliffs.’ He considered momentarily asking Shadrach and Cabal to shake hands and make nice, but one look at their faces, Cabal’s particularly, dissuaded him immediately.

Cabal released the edge of his jacket to cover his sword’s hilt once more, and as it was apparent that this – a tacit agreement not to run Shadrach through right this minute – was the closest he would be offering in the way of an olive branch, it was duly accepted by all present, again tacitly.

‘So,’ he said, his narrowed eyes never leaving Shadrach, ‘of what does the rest of this plan consist?’

As it transpired, it was not nearly so much a plan as a list of things to be careful about. They would be careful about the wamps. They would be careful to get in and out during daylight. They would be careful never to split the party. They would be careful not to tickle any dragons, antagonise any ogres, irritate any trolls. They would also – and this was Cabal’s contribution to the plan – be careful to let somebody else go first.

Sergeant Holk was apparently used to the role of professional Judas goat and was easily able to lay hands upon a likely trio of bullyboys to traipse into danger in return for a decent reward. Shadrach was irked that he had to use more of his gold than he felt comfortable about to change what had first been envisaged as a relaxing stroll into a scenic set of ivyentwined ruins to seek the counsel of a wise old man, and had now taken the character of an armed assault upon a Hellmouth.

Certainly the logistics of the matter had stretched out over three interminable days while equipment and mounts were secured. That the mounts were zebras did nobody’s humour much good.

‘They look ridiculous,’ said Cabal, on the morning the expedition left Baharna from the Lava Gate in the eastern wall. He was standing by his zebra looking at it at least as caustically as it was looking at him. The irony that he himself was dressed entirely in black and white passed him by, his self-awareness not being of a high enough pitch to detect this resonance. The zebra, on the other hand, felt a nebulous sense of indignation that it would be ridden by another zebra, albeit an odd bipedal one with not much of a mane. This indignation would have manifested as kicking and biting among the zebra’s Earthly brethren, but the zebras of the Dreamlands are a breed apart, intellectual and dignified by their own lights, so it communicated its disdain with a basilisk stare accompanied by a monstrous and lengthy micturition, during which it did not even blink.

Holk’s three handpicked men – Cabal had watched him pick them out of the gutter outside an alehouse, and Holk had definitely used his hand to do it – were looking more presentable now that they’d had a chance to sober up and were wearing a uniform of sorts. Holk had found a reliable manufacturer of good cuir-bouilli armour and bought four suits in a striking shade of crimson. Corde, who had gone along on the shopping expedition, had bought himself one in grim sable, set with acid-blacked studs. He developed an inordinate attachment to it, and wore it with great frequency even while they were within the safety of the city. ‘I’m just wearing it in,’ he would say, but no one believed him. For his part, Cabal purchased a leather strap that he used to make a baldric for his Gladstone, allowing him to carry it slung across his body, and so leaving his hands free.

And so, on the morning of the fourth day, the expedition embarked upon its journey to the ruins by the Lake of Yath, with Holk and one of the mercenaries riding in the vanguard, the other two in the rearguard, and the four explorers in file in the middle, Corde to the front. Oriab Island was no small rock in the sea, and they knew it would take four or five days to reach the lake, even assuming easy going and no unwelcome adventures en route.

For his part Cabal bore it all with the same grim detachment that he had brought to the ocean journey. He was intrigued by so much in this world that he had little time for the small-talk of the others. He was interested in the way that distant places were not merely distorted by the haze of the air but – to his eye – seemed actually unfinished. There was nothing he could definitely give a name to, but there was a distinct sense that details clustered on these far vistas as they were approached, like coral accruing around a simple rock. He was surprised to find Bose, of all people, thinking along the same lines.

‘Well, they are the Dreamlands, I suppose,’ said Bose, swaying gently from side to side in time with his zebra’s gait. ‘And what we can’t see close to has no need of . . . I have no idea what to call it . . . this stuff of dreams, until it’s right there in front of you.’

‘I’m not sure that is how it works,’ said Cabal. He did not need to refer to his notes: he had reread them so many times by now that they were thoroughly ingrained in his always rapacious memory. ‘We are not dreaming the Dreamlands. Others dreamed them before us, and the superimposition of their dreams has given it permanency. One may dream of the Dreamlands, but the Dreamlands are not a dream.’

‘Yes,’ Bose conceded, ‘yes, that is very true. We, for example, are awake.’

We hope, thought Cabal, giving inner voice to the most recurrent of his concerns.

‘Well, whatever the metaphysics of it,’ said Bose, rising in his stirrups to look ahead, ‘it is beautiful here. Great men must have dreamed some very wonderful dreams to have wrought such a world.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Cabal, for this had raised another concern: a suspicion verging on a certainty that the majority of the creation here was not of human origin. He had not spoken again of what had happened in the Dark Wood, but it rarely left him. Nothing else of the same sort had happened since the dislocation in time and space, and the destruction of the spider-ant-baby things, and the others seemed to have forgotten about it. Cabal had not, any more than a man kneeling in prayer would forget if the clouds parted, God Almighty poked his head out, and demanded, ‘Yes? What is it?’

He had gained the attention of a god, and could not be sure that he had lost it, or would ever lose it. On a purely pragmatic level, if he had not called for the intervention of Nyarlothotep, they would doubtless all have died in the wood. He still wondered, however, if being prey to a spider-ant-baby thing was potentially preferable to whatever the infamously capricious god might visit upon him in return for the favour.

The small column rode on, and on, and on.

One of Holk’s men turned out once to have been a restaurateur who – while under the influence of an experimental mixture of spices – had been murdered by a jealous sous-chef. The spices had included some unusual powders from the Orient, and as a result the restaurateur was sitting up blinking in the Enchanted Wood while, back in the waking world, the dirty deed was done. Divorced from his body and therefore a now permanent immigrant to the Dreamlands, he had briefly considered setting up a restaurant in Hlanith before realising that all he had ever really wanted to do in life was strap on a sword and do some serious swashbuckling. The swashbuckling had quickly deteriorated into roister-doistering, and thence to lying in gutters outside alehouses. Cirrhosis of the liver being unknown in the Dreamlands, this was a career path he had heartily enjoyed, right up to the moment when he had run out of money and had had to go back to full-time swashbuckling until he had made enough to be a drunk again.

This was all of very little interest to those around him, except for the detail about restaurants because he was a very decent chef. As a result, the evening meals were of surprising complexity, sensually challenging, and the uncontested highlight of every day. His pièce de résistance was the-thing-I-shot-with-my-crossbow-au-vin, which was universally praised on the second evening.

On the third evening, just as it was growing too dark to travel further, they crested a hill and saw, glittering beneath the light of the Dreamlands’ large and disquieting moon, the Lake of Yath stretching out before them. Perhaps four miles away, visible as a hulking mass of shattered rooftops and fallen columns showing pale, like bones in a giants’ graveyard, stood the unnamed city of legend and dread. Certainly Sergeant Holk regarded it with stony-faced stoicism, but his gaze moved constantly, looking for the shadows of nine-legged things scuttling around the archways and byways.

‘We should go back half a league,’ he said finally. ‘We don’t want them knowing we’re here. Getting most of this hill between us and them should hide us from them until dawn.’

Nobody argued. Even Cabal forwent the opportunity to make a snide comment about Holk’s bravery because, having seen what the slightest wound from a wamp could do, he knew that almost any precaution could be regarded as reasonable. So they turned their zebras and cantered back down the hillside to make camp near a stream, their fire masked from the hilltop by a copse of trees. They ate quietly that night, and the guard rota was arranged more carefully than previously.

When morning came, none were dead, or alive and mortally diseased, or alive and rotting, so they regarded their precautions as effective. They rose, performed their morning rituals, ate, organised their equipment with great thoroughness, and then struck camp. Foreboding hung upon them like a cloud as they rode back up the hill and down the far side.

Cabal had gone to great pains to discover everything that could be discovered about the mysterious nameless ruined city while the expedition was being prepared in Baharna, and had raided every library and archive he could find, including several that were not open to the public. The collected intelligence thus uncovered agreed on three main points:

The city was in ruins.

The city’s name was unknown.

The city was a tad mysterious.

As far as could be ascertained, the city had once been a great conurbation, renowned far and wide for the strength of its commerce, the creativity of its artists, the skill of its artisans and the depths of its depravities. In its hubris, however, its collective wisdom had been insufficient to stop it angering something or somebody.

Probably a god.

Probably Nyarlothotep.

Cabal had paused when he saw this, closed his eyes for a long moment, breathed heavily, then returned to his reading.

The somebody or something had sent a monster or, if it really had been Nyarlothotep, assumed the form of one of his larger and more antagonistic avatars. Beneath a red and gibbous moon, doom had crawled from the lake and crept through the city, entering every home and every hostel, every bed and every cradle. By dawn, the city was dead and empty, with not a person or animal left in the place. A merchant caravan that had left the day before and had returned after a night of vile portents was the first to discover the horror.

It was not the first time such a fate had befallen a city in the Dreamlands – Cabal noted that the tale was very similar to the infamous fate of Sarnath – but this event seemed to predate even that. The lesson seemed to be twofold: do not anger the gods, but if you must, at least make sure your city isn’t next to a lake, as that’s just asking for trouble.

The lake looked, if anything, more forbidding than it had the previous evening. The sun was barely above the horizon, so was too low to cast its light directly upon the waves that jagged across the surface to lap at the banks. It left the waters themselves dark and unknowable, doing little for the approaching men’s mood. The Lake of Yath was huge, only the distant hills and mountains giving any indication that it was not a sea, and its depths could only be guessed at.

‘The hermit moved here only about three years ago,’ said Corde, repeating a briefing he had already given before they had left Baharna and again the previous night as they ate. ‘He is believed to reside in a temple on a hilltop in the most regal canton. Presumably some aspect of the temple, its construction or perhaps its significance, keeps creatures like the wamps at bay. That would be useful to discover straight away, as it would give us a secure camp overnight. Failing that, we must be out and clear of the city by dusk.’ He looked at Holk, the image of exposed ribs covered only with scarred pink skin evidently large in his mind. ‘That is imperative, for all our sakes.’

The city walls were still standing in long stretches, but breaches were common and large. They found a tumbled gatehouse with the remains of a tariff-taker’s house outside and hitched their zebras’ reins to a dead tamarind tree that grew by the ruin. Then, heavy with misgivings, they picked their way over the rubble and entered the nameless city.

Cabal had wandered around a few ruined villages and towns in his time, but this was the first city he had entered that still looked anything like a city. Nature reclaims quickly, especially when there is sufficient water to support significant plant growth. Oriab was a temperate island, with no shortage of fresh water, yet the city seemed in remarkably good condition. Scrubby grass grew in patches by the roadsides, ivy tangled the statues, bushes grew at cornices, and some buildings even had trees thrusting up through shattered walls, but it all seemed very mannered and controlled to Cabal’s eye, as if it were the work of an artist portraying an abandoned city rather than the natural actions of time.

‘Sergeant,’ Cabal addressed Holk. He spoke quietly: the city pressed tightly upon the nerves and there was a sense that speaking loudly or even normally might somehow awaken the place. ‘How long ago was this city abandoned?’

Holk did not answer for a moment as he adjusted the buckler strapped to his left forearm. ‘Centuries ago, Master Cabal. Perhaps millennia.’ He drew his sword – his men already had theirs in hand – and scanned the rooftops for movement.

‘Impossible,’ Cabal said. He turned to Shadrach, Bose and Corde. ‘This place would be a forest in less than two hundred years.’

‘On Earth, Cabal,’ said Corde.

‘Yes,’ admitted Cabal. The way this place failed to behave scientifically never ceased to irritate him. ‘On Earth.’

The city clustered up the hillside above the lake. On their approach, they had seen the remains of the docks and the simple housing that huddled near them. It seemed likely that the ‘most regal canton’, in Shadrach’s phrase, would be at the top of the hill, and this area they therefore headed towards as quickly as they dared. They discovered a great city square and followed a broad road that led straight up the hill from there. Holk made a point of keeping the party in the middle of the road: if there had been any risk of coming under arrow or quarrel fire, he would have used cover, but as the primary concern was wamps, some dead ground between them and any potential ambush places could give them vital seconds. At least they had light: there was barely a cloud in the sky, and the sun made the pale volcanic stone of the buildings gleam.

They had been on the road for only a minute or two when Cabal saw the skull. He signalled the sergeant to form a perimeter while he examined it.

‘It’s a city of the dead,’ muttered Corde. ‘A skull is hardly a surprise.’

‘You forget the story, Herr Corde,’ said Cabal, not paying him much attention as he crouched by the skull and examined it cautiously. ‘Whatever happened to the citizens of this place ultimately, the point is that they all vanished from the city beforehand. Besides, this skull is evidently not human.’ He pushed it over with the tip of a stick and examined the jaw. ‘It is similar to a bat skull, but obviously much larger. The orbits are atrophied. This creature had no eyes.’

‘A wamp!’ gasped Bose.

‘Well, of course it’s a wamp. Why do you think I’m not touching it directly? What intrigues me is how it died. The skull is broken.’

‘It’s how they breed,’ said Holk. ‘They can burst out of the skull of anything that’s dead in an abandoned place like this. If the skull’s big enough to house a new wamp – and a human skull works fine – they just grow in there and smash their way out when they’re ripe. They can grow in adult wamp skulls, too. They’re not fussy.’

‘They lay eggs in skulls? I’m confused,’ said Shadrach. ‘How exactly do they reproduce?’

‘They don’t,’ said Cabal. ‘Spontaneous generation. It doesn’t happen on Earth but, as has been made apparent to me on many occasions so far, this is not Earth. An abandoned place of foul repute and a large corpse. That’s all you need for a wamp infestation. However,’ he tapped the broken side of the skull with the stick, ‘this skull has not been burst from the inside. It has been smashed from the outside. Nor is the damage directly over the brainpan. The fact that there is no skeleton or bones around is also significant. This wamp was killed with great violence, and the skull damaged in such a way as to prevent a new wamp forming in it.’ He straightened up and looked around, throwing the potentially contaminated stick into an overgrown garden as he did so. ‘We must consider the possibility that wamps are not the main threat here. There may be something or things here that efficiently hunt wamps and that are, in all likelihood, not going to want to be our friends.’

Three hundred yards further up the hill they found a more complete skeleton, albeit one that somebody had played ‘She loves me, she loves me not’ with. Cabal stood by one of the skeletonised legs while the others located others, around the roadsides. None was closer than three yards to its nearest neighbour. ‘These limbs were torn off and thrown away when they still had flesh upon them,’ said Cabal. ‘See? The bones lie close to one another as they did in life.’ He walked over to the torso and skull in the middle of the avenue. The skull had been crushed in the same way as the previous example. ‘This creature was torn limb from limb while it was alive. So, we can conclude that whatever killed it was very powerful physically, and entirely undaunted by the diseases wamps carry.’

He looked up the hill and then back in the direction they had come. ‘Interesting.’

‘Interesting?’ said Bose. ‘Mr Cabal, I must admit that I have been in a state of trepidation verging on fear ever since the matter of these wamp creatures was first raised. Now you tell us that this city contains something that preys upon them – that preys on monsters – and you characterise it as “interesting”?’

‘You seem pale, Herr Bose. Something you ate, perhaps?’

‘There was nothing wrong with that Hasenpfeffer,’ said their resident cook, from his position on the perimeter.

‘Hasenpfeffer?’ said Cabal. ‘I’m very familiar with that dish, but it’s a rabbit stew. I haven’t seen any rabbits, just those furred creatures like wingless turkeys . . . Oh.’ He considered for a moment. ‘They were delicious.’ He turned his attention back to Bose. ‘My apologies, I interrupted your panicking.’

‘I am not panicking!’ shouted Bose.

Somewhere off to the east, there was the sound of collapsing masonry.

‘No rubble’s fallen since we arrived,’ said Holk, tersely.

‘The stuff must fall over occasionally,’ said Shadrach, the paragon of reason. ‘It is a ruined city, after all.’

‘It may be a coincidence that it happened at the same moment Herr Bose gave away our position,’ said Cabal, picking up his bag and starting to walk up the hill at a quick pace, ‘but it may not be. It would be nothing more than a practical application of the rational caution that you are so quick to espouse if we were to start running. Now.’ He did so, the mercenaries – professionally attuned to danger as they were – joining him in a dogtrot.

Messrs Shadrach and Bose looked at one another in astonishment before looking to Corde, only to find him already well up the road, running also.

Then more rubble fell, to the east, but now it was closer. Shadrach and Bose decided that keeping their dignity came a poor second to keeping their limbs attached to their torsos, and set off after the others as quickly as their robes would allow.

The change from a stealthy progress through the totterdown city into a headlong charge did not reduce the tension that ran through them in the slightest. Headlong charges do not offer many opportunities to look back and, on the snatched glances they did take, they saw nothing but the empty houses and tenements, eyeless yet noble in their slow death. Of the wamps, they saw no living examples, but every alleyway and courtyard seemed to contain their skeletons, all torn, all smashed. The expedition saw them and their sense of growing threat intensified with every snapped bone. There were no longer any unexplained sounds to haunt them – or, at least, none that could be heard over the sound of eight men running – but this did not settle their nerves: if there is one thing more disquieting than an unexplained sound, it is a silence after an unexplained sound.

Around them, the city became steadily grander and more impressive as they passed fallen gateways that marked off the different areas. Each gate had been more massively built and heavily ornamented than the one before as they progressed from being simply markers to show where the scum lived, to actually restricting access to keep the scum out. Cabal ran by a basalt basilisk lying on its side at the end of a line of rubble where a gatepost had fallen, the basilisk’s beak open in challenge, but gagged with a growth of dandelions. On its head was a diadem of gold; one of the mercenaries paused by it, and made to lever it off with the tip of his sword, but Holk swore sharply at him, and the man ran onwards with only one regretful backward glance.

They arrived at the corner of a plaza close to the top of the hill, and as they turned it, the ones at the front came to an abrupt halt, the others piling into them with cries of mixed anger and dismay.

‘The greatest temple of the most regal canton, wasn’t it, Shadrach?’ said Cabal. ‘Does this qualify?’

The great cathedrals of Europe are massive affairs, and would frequently have been larger yet, but for the soil beneath their foundations being unable to bear their prodigious weight. Aachen, Paris, York, all have mighty houses of worship that are known throughout the world. Yet if the Kaiserdom of Aachen, the Cathedral of St Peter in York, and Notre Dame in Paris were placed side by side, there would still have been room for a horse track and a shopping precinct within the temple to an unknown god before them.

‘That’s . . .’ started Corde, but words failed him.

‘Cyclopean?’ suggested Shadrach, who read a lot.

The temple was a vast circular building, as far as could be made out, with a large flight of steps, as wide as a football field is long, leading up to a colonnaded terrace upon whose rear wall was the temple’s main entrance: massive twin doors of wood and brass. The colossal edifice was topped with a shallow dome that glowed with the reflected light of the Dreamlands’ sun upon copper that had never and would never suffer the touch of verdigris.

Behind them, some five or six hundred yards away, and perhaps a hundred yards from the road, whose head they had reached, stood a thin, delicate tower that must once have been the domain of an ancient sorcerer or mystic. It rose above its neighbours unbowed and unmarked by the passage of the ages, a fine stalk broadening to a complex series of petal-like walls in different stones, a great stone flower topped by a peacock palace. Sergeant Holk was covering their backs, so he was the only one facing in the right direction to see it when the tower abruptly lurched bodily to one side, stood as if in injured dignity for a long second, then fell headlong and out of sight behind the closer buildings. A second later, a muffled whump reached them.

‘What was that?’ squeaked Bose.

Cabal watched a plume of brick dust blossom out into the wide avenue behind them. ‘Good news, Herr Bose. It definitely wasn’t wamps.’

Without another word, they ran across the plaza for the temple, passing wamp bones all around.

Chapter 8

IN WHICH CABAL HAS A SURPRISINGLY CIVILISED CHAT WITH A MONSTER

The great size of the temple on the hill confused the eye as they closed on it; they had preconceptions as to the limits of heavy stone construction and therefore the greatest size the temple could realistically be. The Dreamlands, however, was always pleased to squash the preconceptions of the waking world, blithely ignoring building restrictions, health and safety considerations, and – most rudely – physics. The overall effect was to reproduce one of the most common and least enjoyable of dream experiences: running very hard yet barely seeming to get anywhere. The square before the temple simply could not have been that huge, the temple could not have been so vast, yet the square was, and the temple was, and the flagstones beneath their feet seemed never to end as they ran and they ran and they ran.

And then, as is also the way of dreams, they were suddenly there, so abruptly that there was not even the sense of having covered the last hundred yards. They ran up the steps, all ninety-nine – Cabal counted – and arrived in front of the great entrance into the building.

‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ gasped Corde, as he tried to recover his breath. ‘Have you ever seen such enormous doors?’ Behind him, Shadrach and then Bose staggeringly reached the top of the steps and promptly fell down, wheezing pathetically.

‘Yes,’ said Cabal, as indeed he had. ‘But they had the decency to have a porter’s door set into them. How is anyone supposed to open these things for worship? Did they have mammoths for ushers?’ He turned and looked out across the square, which, typically, now didn’t seem anywhere near as enormous. The glare from the morning sun on the pale stone made his eyes water, and he instinctively felt for his glasses in his jacket pocket.

As he did so, something twisted uncomfortably in his mind. Something like déjà vu, except instead of having the sense that he had done all this before, he had an unaccountable sense that he had never, not even once, in all the time that they had been in the Dreamlands, checked his pockets for their contents. It didn’t make sense, and almost immediately small fragments of memory, like ants, clustered around and he thought, perhaps, that he had after all. Yet the scent of an unreliable recollection, a false memory hung around it, and it was with considerable effort that he pulled himself back to the present. He found he had his blue-glass spectacles out, and was staring at them as if he had just noticed that he had eight fingers on that hand. How many fingers did that hand have? Eight. No, five. That was right. Five. Five phalanges; four fingers and an opposable thumb. That was what he had. He counted twice to be sure.

Shadrach had managed to regain his feet by leaning on one of the massive columns that supported the portico over the temple gates. He was looking at Cabal oddly. ‘Mr Cabal? Mr Cabal, are you well, sir?’

Cabal put on the glasses quickly, but his hand shook as he did so. ‘I am perfectly well, Mr Shadrach,’ he said, taking care that there was no tremor in his voice. ‘Simply exhausted after the run. I’m sure you can sympathise with that.’ Without waiting for a reply, he turned his attention to the square. It was empty of all but wamp bones and scrub grass forcing its way between the slabs. Of their pursuer, if there was a pursuer, there was no sign. ‘It isn’t showing its face – assuming it has a face – yet,’ he said to Corde. Corde ignored him: he and the mercenaries were at the crack between the great wooden doors, trying to get enough purchase to open them. Normally Cabal would have been happy to watch them scrabble away for a good long while, but as his own survival was also at stake, he decided he should make a few constructive comments.

‘Don’t be such verdammt fools,’ he snapped. They turned to him with differing degrees of curiosity and resentment. ‘If this is the correct temple, and I hope for all our sakes that it is, then a lone hermit lives here. I hardly think he manhandles those doors open and shut every time he wishes to dash out for some milk. There must be some other way in. I had hoped it would be at the top of the stairs by the main gates and that we could not see it as we approached because of the curvature of the frontage or the occlusion of the colonnades. A forlorn hope, it appears. The fact remains that a frontal assault on these doors is doomed to failure, and that time may be limited before whatever destroyed the wamps locates and does the same to us.’

‘The man’s right,’ said Holk, brushing grime off his hands. ‘We would need a platoon and ropes stapled to the door edge to stand any chance of getting this thing open. If there’s another way in, we have to find it, and soon.’ Without waiting for orders from either moneyman Shadrach or ‘Captain’ Corde, he turned to his men. ‘Right, you two go around widdershins and take Masters Bose and Shadrach with you. The rest of us will go the other way. If anybody finds a door, send a runner immediately to tell the other party. Understood? Then jump to it!’

Going down ninety-nine steep stone steps in a hurry was less tiring than going up ninety-nine steep stone steps in a hurry, but comfortably made up for it in terms of perceived danger. Hand rails and other such nods to safety had apparently been regarded as somehow heretical, and it was better that some of the faithful should finish as broken lumps of flesh at the bottom with bones sticking out at odd angles than there be any backsliding into being blasphemously careful. After the first few steps taken at a rapid pace, it became obvious that stopping was no longer an option so all eight men found themselves having to apply their full concentration to a descent that was quickly developing an aspect of ‘headlong’. All it took was for one little mincing step inadvertently to be a long, manly one, and the owner of the recalcitrant leg would shortly find himself at sixes and sevens, and possibly eights and nines, depending on how many sharp-edged corners he encountered on the way down.

They reached the square at a gallop, the more adventurous jumping the last few steps, the less adventurous losing any remaining dignity as they had to keep running while bending their legs to absorb the downward momentum, overall giving the effect of a drunken uncle at a party doing the hilarious going-down-to-the-cellar visual gag, and doing it badly.

They split off into the teams Holk had suggested and began their circumnavigations of the great round bulk of the temple. ‘You realise that we shall be travelling far faster than the other party, Sergeant?’ said Corde. ‘Shadrach and Bose are exhausted. They’ll have to keep stopping.’

‘He knows,’ interrupted Cabal. ‘That’s exactly why he did it. If he’d split Shadrach and Bose between parties, both would be impeded. This way at least one is making decent time.’

They were indeed making decent time. Cabal had realised some time ago that much in the Dreamlands depended on one’s state of mind. If one expected to be exhausted, one would likely be so that much sooner than somebody with more faith in their own endurance. Similar aspects were equally affected by expectation and, it seemed, aesthetics. Cabal and the Fear Institute expedition had been in the Dreamlands weeks already, yet none of them had had any need to change their clothes. Well, there was Corde and his studded black leather, but that had been by choice, not necessity. If their situation changed to one in which the popular imagination decreed bad smells – if they were taken as galley slaves, for example – then bad smells there would be. But for doughty adventurers, there would be nothing more than the smell of fresh sweat and, when the need arose, blood. Such was Cabal’s observation, his conviction and his expectation.

All of them now and then looked back at the top of the avenue by which they had reached the square. Cabal found himself half expecting the appearance of some monster rendered in painted latex upon a wire armature, lent life by stop-frame animation and scale by back projection, like a film he had seen when he was young and had time for such nonsense. The harsh light and hard shadows gave the whole vista an artificial air that chimed with the thought, and Cabal made a conscious effort to suppress it: this world seemed to take far too much notice of one’s inner musings. Or day-dreaming, he reminded himself, which seemed to explain a great deal. As they continued to dogtrot clockwise, the top of the avenue slowly became hidden from view, and not one of them was sure that they preferred it that way.

When they finally found an entrance, it was not quite of the nature they had been expecting. Something discreet and bijou like a castle’s postern gate, perhaps, or a theatre’s stage door, by which, in days of yore, theological groupies might have clustered in the hope of a glimpse of some superstar preacher. Instead they discovered a great yawning cavern of destruction, a ragged hole in the temple’s rear wall sufficient to provide disabled access for a wheelchair-bound diplodocus. Blocks of stone, Brobdingnagian in scale, lay tumbled about like a child’s toys amid drifts of rubble. The four men had slowed to walking pace when the first pieces of debris had become visible, and now were all but walking on tiptoe. There was no chance that this was a natural collapse: the top of the hole remained firm and the blocks had not simply fallen but had been thrown some distance.

Cabal moved up first, to peer cautiously around the edge of the breach. Beyond, he could see a trail of demolished internal walls going deep into the building, until all was lost in gloom.

‘It got in,’ said Corde, defeat heavy in his voice. ‘It got in and killed him. The whole journey out here has been pointless.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Cabal admonished him. ‘Observe – the rubble from the walls, right from the inside to out. This damage was not caused by something monstrous going in: it was caused by something monstrous coming out.’

‘Well . . .’ Corde thought for a moment. ‘Mightn’t whatever did this have gained entrance elsewhere and just created destruction on the way out? For all we know, Shadrach’s party are standing by an equally massive hole, but one in which much of the debris lies inside the line of the wall.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Cabal, impatiently. ‘Look, man! If there is another breach, would we not be able to see light somewhere within?’

Corde opened his mouth, failed to think of anything more intelligent to refute this argument than an arch, but in this case unsupported, ‘Not necessarily,’ and therefore shut his mouth without saying anything at all.

‘There is, of course, a chance that this mysterious colossus has returned here and is lurking deep inside, presumably with one hand over its mouth to stifle its giggles, as it waits for us to stroll in and consequently suffer blunt trauma and detached limbs.’ The others looked at him uncertainly. Cabal shrugged. ‘But it’s unlikely. Well, this represents an entrance, I suppose. Sergeant Holk, we should alert the other group to our discovery.’

Apparently Holk was still having trouble getting past the image of a snickering colossus waiting to do him harm. ‘Eh? Oh, yes. At once, Master Cabal.’ He turned to the other mercenary and sent him off to continue clockwise around the building at a run until he met the rest coming the other way. He was to make a mental note of any other entrances he passed en route, but the important thing was to reunite everyone as quickly as possible. With a hasty salute, the soldier ran off, his hand on his sword hilt to keep his sword angled up and away from his heels as he went.

‘Right,’ said Corde. ‘Very well. Good plan, Sergeant.’ He plainly felt keenly the way he was not being consulted, but was endeavouring not to show it. ‘When the others get here, we shall decide how to proceed.’

‘Yes, you do that.’ There was a faint hollow quality to Cabal’s voice that made Corde turn, and then gasp audibly, for Cabal had already climbed over the sill formed by the shattered stone and was advancing into the temple. ‘I shall just have a little wander around while you wait.’

‘But!’ Corde realised he’d shouted, and lowered his tone to sotto voce. ‘But, Cabal! What if the – the thing really is still in there?’

Cabal had just vanished behind the first broken internal wall but he leaned out and put his finger to his lips. ‘Hush, Herr Corde,’ he said. ‘I need to be able to hear a snickering giant if I am to survive this.’ With which he vanished into the shadowed interior, leaving only a faint tang of sarcasm upon the air.

Once he was out of sight and – longed-for and glorious – by himself, Cabal’s artfully angled flippancy fell away to be replaced by a cool wariness, honed by a hundred unauthorised sorties into other people’s laboratories, other people’s libraries and other people’s graves. He could see that the damage caused by the mysterious Goliath was in no way wanton: it had simply decided that it wished to leave, had had its own reasons for not going by the main door – it was very hard to believe that a creature capable of such destruction would have had any problems with the great gates – and had made a dash for the outside, swatting away several hundred tons’ worth of pesky intervening walls in the process. Cabal could not know why the gates hadn’t appealed to it, but he was inclined to think that it was simply because it had not understood the concept of doors. He was also inclined to think, and here he was very sorry that he did not know, that since it had been so very keen to leave the confines of the great temple, then it would not be in any great hurry to return. This was supposition, however, and supposition could often cause one to die at an inconvenient time and with one’s work left unfinished. Therefore, he backed it with a generous portion of caution.

He paid little attention to the chambers he climbed through, beyond checking for possible threats: he found none. The light was becoming dim as he clambered through ruined offices, storerooms, subsidiary chapels and libraries, all raised in the honour of a god who seemed to care little enough now, perhaps even the god who had visited the city’s doom upon it. Gods had so much power here, and so little wisdom: like a child with a howitzer, they rained death on those who displeased them, and as for those who did please them, the gods did nothing. It was a poor sort of deal, to be left alone in return for tribute, a bullying sort of worship, but one common in the Dreamlands, and implied often enough on Earth.

He was just negotiating a route through some sort of chapel of rest, which must have been used on an industrial scale in its heyday, judging by the number of empty funereal biers, when he met with mishap. He stood upon a tumbled pew, and its end seesawed down alarmingly. Too far down: the floor was broken deeply through not just the sombre black tiling but into the very fabric of the Romanesque cement that lay beneath. The floor beneath the pew tipped steeply, pivoted on a structural beam beneath, and Cabal – unable to keep his feet – fell heavily and slid into the dark depths. Without his weight upon it, the floor swung back to equilibrium. Of the gap in the floor where Cabal had vanished, there was no sign but a crack.

It was not the first time Johannes Cabal had been dumped into darkness, and the experience had lost its dubious allure on his very first outing. He was thus already in a vile mood as he crumpled on to an unseen floor, his right knee driving up hard enough on impact to strike him in the face and to draw blood from where his canine ripped the inner lip. He spat out blood, saliva and invective as he sought to reorientate himself in this new and troublesome environment.

First, he took in what he could through his available senses. Wherever he was, the floor was even and worked so at least he hadn’t fallen into a cave system or a cavity formed by natural subsidence. This was good: there must therefore be a way out. He could taste dust that had been thrown up by his undignified entrance and, from his extensive experience of long-abandoned places, could tell that it was largely inorganic in nature, indicating that at least he was unlikely to be sharing the space with anything else at that exact moment, a small comfort. The air was cool and musty and, even after standing, he could wave his hand over his head without touching the ceiling, which accorded with the second and a half it had taken him to reach the floor. The light in the room from which he had fallen had been attenuated at best and none of it could make it past the obliquely spalled crack. He listened for a full two minutes before sharply stamping, and listening for the echoes. They confirmed what he had gathered in the moment of poor light as he fell, that he was in a room with hard walls, more likely stone than brick, and that it was no more than forty feet across in any dimension.

Now it was time to cast a little light on his situation. He had two option: to use a match from the silver matchbox in his pocket – a technological innovation that the Dreamlands were apparently prepared to countenance – or to try out a device he had spotted in an artificer’s shop in Baharna while trying to explain the concepts of percussion caps, powder corning and the special joy of putting a lead ball into any person who presents a nuisance.

The device consisted of a beautifully filigreed brass cylinder topped with a sphere of solid glass. Into the space beneath the sphere one placed a small capsule in which there was a beetle of a particular species, kept alive but sluggish through the agency of a small quantity of drugged food. The beetles were the Dreamlands’ equivalent of glow-worms or fireflies but, unlike their mundane cousins, they did not generate their light as it was required through a chemical reaction but, rather, stored sunlight during their pupal stage and released it at will through adulthood. Cabal had, at this stage of the artificer’s explanation, pointed out several scientific implausibilities in this explanation, stated a distinct lack of faith in the artificer’s truthfulness, and offered to nail the artificer’s fingers to the counter in full knowledge of the detrimental effect this would have on the artificer’s subsequent livelihood. At this point, the artificer decided that this would be an ideal point to offer a small lagniappe of sorts, in return for good will, future business and not having his fingers nailed to the counter.

Cabal had studied the device only briefly at the time, and had not loaded one of the capsules into the cylinder beforehand. Now he sat cross-legged and, in total darkness, carefully unscrewing the glass from the end of the cylinder. Once it was off, he dropped it into his right pocket for easy recovery later, and opened the parchment tube containing four capsules of fine wound wire. The parchment bent in his hand, and he was rewarded with the sound of the four capsules falling to the floor and rolling off in all directions. He bit back another testy comment, and started patting the floor around him carefully, with his open palm, in an attempt to find one.

‘Try by the tip of your left shoe,’ said a voice in the dark. It said it in Ghoulish.

Cabal started, his head held up, his ears keening. ‘Who are you?’ he meeped slowly.

‘Oh, do not attempt my language,’ said the voice. ‘Your accent is terrible. Speak in German, or English, or Latin, or whatever tongue you prefer, without that awful parody of a pharyngeal stop. I will understand you perfectly, and not be offended by your butchery of my elegant and poetic tongue.’

‘Ghoul speech sounds like somebody vomiting up halibut heads in syrup,’ said Cabal, stung by the attack on his pronunciation. He had worked hard on that pharyngeal stop. As he spoke, he reached out cautiously with his hand and discovered that, indeed, there was one of the lost capsules by the tip of his left shoe.

‘For somebody whose native language is German, you should be very careful about casting aspersions on the artistry of any other tongue.’

‘It is the language of Goethe,’ said Cabal, dropping the capsule into the open end of the cylinder. He recovered the glass sphere from his pocket and began screwing it home.

‘An accident of birth, not an informed choice. Forgive me if I am underwhelmed.’ There was a pause, then the voice said, ‘You are forgetting that it’s a left-hand thread. You will never put the thing together like that.’

Cabal had indeed forgotten that it was a left-hand thread, such had been his concentration on the voice and wherever it was coming from. ‘You don’t mind me using this, then?’ he said, as he finally finished screwing the sphere back into place.

‘Not at all. I know you cannot enjoy being in the dark, unable to see me, when my eyes can see you so very easily. Go ahead, Johannes. Cast a little light on proceedings.’

‘As you wish,’ said Cabal, and gave the lower end of the cylinder a vicious twist. Inside, a piston drove upwards, crushing the tiny cage and its soporific occupant. As the beetle was smashed flat and partially sieved through the mesh of the capsule, captured sunlight was released, refracted through the glass ball, and emitted all around in a yellow glow with an unhealthy green tinge. Cabal held the cold torch aloft and took stock of his surroundings.

The room was perhaps forty feet along its long axis, and thirty feet broad, built from rough brick. Around the walls were marble slabs, and Cabal realised that the room had once served as a mortuary for those of insufficient standing to take a place in the chapels above. At one end of the room there was a ramp broad enough for a coffin to be borne along, upon the shoulders of bearers. By the ramp on either side were deep alcoves at waist height, and in one of these sat a ghoul. Cabal risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that the brickwork had been broken through in the far corner. Beyond it doubtless lay a ghoul warren. Something caught his eye, and he walked over slowly to the pile of bricks as the ghoul watched him with mild interest.

Unlike house bricks in the waking world, they were square prisms so had no specific upper or lower sides. ‘Some of these bricks have mortar on four sides,’ said Cabal. ‘They’ve been reused. Why is that? Why has this wall been broken down once, rebuilt – less expertly by the look of the mortar – and then been broken down again? By you, I would guess.’

‘Well, let’s see,’ said the ghoul. It unwound its long betaloned fingers and began counting off points as if it were a professor in a lecture theatre. ‘First, this room used to have food in it.’

‘You mean corpses.’

‘Of course I mean corpses. I’m a ghoul. What did you think I meant? Sausage rolls and fairy cakes? Yes, human corpses. Not only delicious, but good for you too. You should try one some time.’

Cabal watched the ghoul with carefully concealed worry. Ghouls were not necessarily ruthless killers all the time, just most of it. They were strong, resilient and unpleasantly flexible, armed with vicious teeth in their canine jaws and sharp claws upon their powerful fingers. Once they had been human, though, and vestiges of that humanity still showed in many of them. Most had been nothing more than vile cannibals in life, and joined the tomb legions of the ghouls as their appetites overwhelmed their physiologies, altering them in these loathsome ways. They were beasts long before they ever became ghouls, and their chaotic, insane minds had long since fragmented completely. Others, however, had come to this transfiguration voluntarily via decadence and intellectual preference, and held on to much more of their previous life. He had never heard of a ghoul being quite so jocular before, though.

‘They don’t taste like chicken,’ mused the ghoul. ‘I don’t know why people think that. They should try some before spouting such rubbish. Much more like pork.’ The ghoul sighed. ‘But I digress. I was explaining the state of that wall. First, this room had food, corpses if you prefer, in it. So we broke open the wall, took a few bodies and replaced the bricks after we went.’

‘And nobody noticed?’

‘Administration is poor in the Dreamlands,’ said the ghoul. ‘They come down here, think, Wasn’t there a body on that slab? then think perhaps they imagined it, and wander off to write a haiku. We got away with it for years, sneaking in and out as necessary.’

‘Hold hard,’ said Cabal. ‘This city has not been populated in millennia. How could you have been here when it was occupied?’

‘That? Two reasons. Ghouls are effectively immortal, barring accidents and foul play. Thing is, being a ghoul invites accidents and foul play. It all evens out. Second, the ghoul warrens, the great underworld beyond that wall, obey the confines neither of time nor space. I can enter here, and exit in Massachusetts sixty years ago, or on the Moon sixty years hence. Time and place mean a lot less to me than they do to you.’

Cabal was silent for a long moment. ‘You can travel through time.’ His tone was distracted, thoughtful.

The ghoul chuckled, an unpleasant sound. ‘Then one day all the bodies went – living ones up above, and dead ones down here. All gone. The city was abandoned. No, that’s not a good word. Abandoned makes it sound like they had a choice. Depopulated. That’s better. Like deforested. Chopped down where they stood and taken away. Much better. That has a sense of it. Then we knew they would come. The many-legged ones, with the bat faces and no eyes, full of fever and corruption. And people think we’re disgusting.’ The ghoul laughed once, a bark. ‘Then the big thing came and killed the many-legs. Crack! Crack! Crack! Off come their legs! Then, crunch! Crush the skulls so no new little baby many-legs pop out of the dead brains. Have to admire the big thing. Thorough. Methodical. Never stopped until the many legs of the many-legs were dangling from gutters and thrown over rooftops and anywhere at all except on the bodies of the many-legs. Every skull . . . crunch! Good job, big thing! Of course,’ it added, rubbing its chin in a very human gesture, ‘if we go up top it will pull off our legs and crunch our skulls too. So we don’t go up there. That hole was blocked when the many-legs came, unblocked when the many-legs died. Now we peek out – careful and crafty – but the big thing is never about. Haven’t seen it,’ it giggled, as if at a private joke, ‘only hearsay.’

‘What is this “big thing” of yours?’ asked Cabal. He had never had such a lengthy conversation with a ghoul before. Normally they consisted of little more than ‘Get back into your holes, you damned cannibals, before I shoot you,’ and rarely developed into a discourse.

‘Not of mine,’ said the ghoul. ‘Not of mine, oh, no. Of somebody’s, but not mine. They’ve gone away now, but the big thing will be here for ever. Oh,’ it added conversationally, ‘it will kill all of you. Pull off your legs and break your skulls. Will probably pull off your arms, too. A limb’s a limb to the big thing.’

‘We got in easily enough,’ said Cabal, not sounding quite as confident as he would have preferred.

‘It didn’t know you were there. It was bored, lying down in Artisans’ Square, eating weeds. Very bored. Then you made lots of noise and it came looking for you.’

‘We did not make lots of noise,’ snapped Cabal. Then he thought of Bose’s indignant squeal. ‘Well, not very much.’

‘Made enough. The big thing has little ears, but they are very keen.’

Cabal frowned suspiciously. ‘I thought you said you’d never seen it?’

‘Oh, I haven’t.’ The ghoul smiled innocently, which went about as well as could be expected. ‘Not in person.’

‘Why are telling me all this? Why are you talking to me at all? You could have killed me in the dark. What do you want?’

The ghoul’s smile vanished in unexpected ways, as if its face was made of melting wax. When it spoke, the light, bantering tone was gone. ‘I want you to succeed, Johannes Cabal. It is your destiny. If you fail, more than your puerile Fear Institute will be disappointed.’

‘I don’t believe in destiny,’ said Cabal. ‘We make our own futures.’

‘So we do. But I have seen your future, Johannes Cabal, and if you do not find the Phobic Animus, you will lose more than your life or your soul.’

Cabal’s eyebrows raised. ‘I’m not sure I have anything more than those to lose.’

‘Oh, yes, you do. Believe me, necromancer. You do.’ The ghoul paused and looked up at the ceiling, as if listening. When it looked back at Cabal, it said, ‘Your colleagues – I am sure you don’t think of them as friends – are above us now. The two parties are together and they have entered the temple. They are following your tracks through the dust. Soon they will find the disturbance at the place where you fell through into this room and they will attempt to rescue you.’

‘Attempt?’ said Cabal, slowly.

‘Attempt,’ confirmed the ghoul, ‘because you will already have freed yourself.’ It nodded up the short ramp that ran beside it. ‘The door is not locked. I know you would not wish to be indebted to them for rescuing you.’

‘I’m their guide,’ said Cabal. ‘They would be lost without me. Don’t delude yourself into thinking they would rescue me out of any finer feelings.’

‘Guide?’ The ghoul laughed again, a sound like a choking dog. ‘You think they could not hire a hundred reliable men who know these lands better than you, Johannes Cabal? Your usefulness ran out the day you got them to Hlanith.’

‘That is not so,’ said Cabal, although he was racking his brains for a good reason why it was not so, and having little luck in the process.

The ghoul leaped from its resting-place and bounded past him on all fours in a long, fluid lope, like a great whippet with rubber bones. It reached the hole in the brickwork and vanished through it in a blink. A moment later, it leaned its head and shoulders back out and leered at Cabal.

‘Johannes Cabal. Just remember him in your greatest extreme in the next few hours. Remember him.’

‘Remember who?’ said Cabal, raising the light sphere high.

‘Remember Captain Lochery,’ said the ghoul, and vanished back into the shadowed breach.

Chapter 9

IN WHICH A HERMITAGE IS DISCOVERED AND A GREAT TERROR REVEALED

The others were on the point of standing in the wrong place and falling through into the underground chamber, when Johannes Cabal said, ‘Step back from that pew, please. It is the beginning of a short if entertaining ride into the mysteries of the temple’s cellars.’

They turned to see him, standing in a doorway behind them, beating dust from his clothes. ‘We thought—’ Corde stopped himself.

Bose, however, had no such form of manly internal censor. ‘We thought you’d been got! By it! Or something! Oh, Mr Cabal, we were so worried, I can’t tell you!’

‘I think you just did,’ said Cabal, unsure whether to be amused at their childishness or offended that they thought he couldn’t look after himself. Later, he would realise that he had actually been neither of these things but, instead, pleased. ‘Did you see anything else outside?’

‘No,’ said Holk, straight to the point as always. ‘No wamps, and no sight or sound of whatever killed them. Maybe it lost interest.’

Cabal shook his head. ‘No. Whatever else it is, it is very single-minded. It knows we’re here now,’ he looked pointedly at Bose, who blushed, ‘and it won’t stop looking until it finds us and kills us.’

‘It is curious that it is so precise in the way it kills,’ said Shadrach. ‘Not only dismembering its victims, but always making a point of crushing or piercing the skull to prevent a new wamp infestation occurring. For something possessed of such Herculean power,’ and here he gestured at the pathway of shattered walls through the temple, ‘it shows remarkable precision in some of its acts.’

‘It does,’ agreed Cabal. Seen in that light, however, the dismemberment was a strange embellishment. It seemed vengeful and petty, where the skull-breaking was pragmatic and sensible. Still, conjecture was of little use when based upon such a paucity of data. ‘We should move on. The sooner we can find this mysterious hermit and get clear of the city, the happier I think we shall all be.’ There were a few nods to his words, largely from the mercenaries. Cabal picked up his bag from where it lay beside the treacherous pew, and led the way.

They continued further into the interior. Four more smashed walls later, they found themselves in a great open space. The light from Cabal’s dead-beetle-powered device did not penetrate nearly far enough for them to see the whole place, but the mercenaries lit torches and spread out until the limits of the room, at least, were discovered, although the upper reaches of the vast dome within which they found themselves were lost in gloom. Ranked around were scores, hundreds of pews facing a great lectern that rose from the base of one wall, like the prow of a rakish ship, to stop some fifty feet above the ground.

Cabal considered it for a moment. ‘Either this place has excellent acoustics,’ he said, ‘or the priests of old were very loud.’

‘What?’ called one of the mercenaries from a far wall.

‘Well, that answers that question, anyway,’ said Cabal to Corde. ‘Practical archaeology.’

Elsewhere, there were signs that the dome had been undergoing renovations when the city had been attacked. Great wooden beams and scaffolding lay among heaps of wood chips and shavings. Shadrach was wandering among them, illuminated by a beetle light of his own that he must have bought independently of Cabal, to Cabal’s petty and irrational irritation. Suddenly he paused, and looked around the floor by him, patently confused. ‘Over here!’

They hurried to him rather than ran; he was plainly in no danger. When they reached him, it quickly became apparent what had bemused him so. Scattered among the wooden wreckage were several man-sized wooden dummies, like great marionettes. They were crude and bore no features but for a single eye drilled through the forehead, opening into a brainsized cavity. Cabal peered inside, and then, using a foot long splinter that lay by his feet, probed inside the cavity. It came out with more wood shavings on it. Cabal sniffed them before letting them fall to the floor. ‘Ammonia,’ was all he would say. His brow furrowed, and he shushed Shadrach in an offhand fashion when he tried to speak. Finally, Cabal nodded, and muttered to himself, ‘So that is what it meant.’

‘What was that?’ demanded Shadrach. ‘What do you mean, sir?’

‘I mean nothing just yet, mein Herr,’ said Cabal. ‘But I have suspicions. Here, see.’ By the wood debris there were several clay pots, thick hairy string handles tied at their necks. Cabal took one up and held it out to Shadrach.

Shadrach shied back a little, uncertainly. ‘And what, sir, is that?’

‘It does exactly what it says on the label.’

Shadrach peered at it. Indeed, under the dark patches that ran down from the stoppered neck he could make out a label. He squinted closely. ‘“Wood preservative”,’ he read slowly. He straightened up and looked at Cabal with undiluted bafflement. ‘Is that important?’

‘Important? To somebody, yes. To us, it is suggestive. Look how many pots there are. There must have been gallons, but now it’s all gone.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t follow you,’ said Shadrach, slowly.

‘I’d recommend that you do. There is little time to waste.’ He put the pot back on the marble floor with a hollow klop, and walked to the temple’s main door. ‘Barred from the inside. Of course it is.’ He shook his head and came back, a rare smile on his face. For all that, it was a predatory sort of expression. ‘There’s ingenuity here. Also a terrible oversight on his part, but an understandable one. Regrettable, but understandable.’

‘Cabal,’ said Corde, ‘none of us know what you’re talking about. Speak sense, man.’

‘Speak sense? I always speak sense. Apart from that time with the mild concussion, yes, but apart from that, I always speak sense. Don’t you see it? You’ve seen everything I have. Don’t you know what that monster out there is? There’s just one missing factor.’ As he spoke, he was walking quickly down the aisle between two columns of pews, his light held high, looking this way and that. Suddenly he halted and bent down. When he stood up it was with a skeletal limb in his hand.

‘Right arm. Belonged to a Caucasian male in his fifties.’

‘How can you possibly . . .’ Corde paused. ‘Oh, my God.’

‘Gentlemen,’ said Cabal, holding the arm aloft. ‘Allow me to introduce you to the object of our expedition to this place. I give you, the Hermit of the Nameless City.’ He dropped the arm, the bones rattling on the marble floor in an awful silence. And then a terrible thing happened.

Johannes Cabal giggled.

He felt giddy, ebullient, strange. Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong at the edge of his understanding, and he feared it. It waited for him, and he knew he could not avoid it. Soon, he thought, I shall be dead.

His sojourn in this strange fugue was short, but even so, he was treated to the sight of his seven comrades in adversity all wearing similar expressions of horrified bafflement, the sort of expressions they might have worn if he had vomited millipedes while toy trains shot out of either ear. ‘Look at you all,’ he said, scorn in every syllable. ‘Gawping like simpletons.’

‘You . . .’ Shadrach was momentarily unable to communicate the full enormity of what they had just witnessed. ‘Cabal . . . you . . . giggled.’

‘Which is cause for standing around like moonstruck zebras?’ They had all commented upon the zebras’ vacuous expressions on seeing a full moon during the journey. Cabal permitted himself the indulgence of a luxuriant sneer. ‘You do not know me. Do not presume to imagine that you do.’

It was a magnificent act, for behind the façade he was as astonished as any of them and, more, he was unnerved. He doubted he had giggled since his teenage years; its sudden reappearance, and at such a fraught time, smacked of hysteria. He had never been hysterical – angry, yes, incandescently so, on several occasions – but he had never so utterly lost control as to make that horrible tittering sound.

He faced them down until they looked away rather than meet his eye, his stoic aspect dispelling any fears as to his state of mind. He was very clearly a man in control of himself, and therefore they might permit him control of their destinies, at least in the short term.

Now all business, Cabal looked around, sidling up and down the aisle and occasionally pausing to look under pews.

‘Mr Cabal?’ said Bose hesitantly. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘His skull,’ replied Cabal, without pausing. ‘It may prove useful.’

‘For what?’ asked Corde, but Cabal was not in the mood to enlighten him, and from the looks the others were giving him, Corde decided that it was not the time to press the matter. They scattered and started searching in the same slightly mannered way that one might adopt while helping a stranger hunt for lost keys. After five minutes of quiet diligence, Thirsh – one of the mercenaries – held up his hand and called, ‘Here, Master Cabal!’

Cabal was with him in a few moments, and between them they dragged out the semi-mummified torso and head of a long-dead man. ‘Over here,’ Cabal ordered Thirsh, ‘in the open area.’ They pulled the partial cadaver up the aisle to the clearing beneath the lectern, Cabal by putting his hand inside the empty right arm socket, Thirsh rather more fastidiously by gripping the left clavicle. Still, he was glad to let go when Cabal told him to, and stood off to one side, dusting off his hand on the side of his Romanesque centurion’s skirt for quite a long time afterwards.

Cabal, meanwhile, was studying the body. ‘Evidently he died in the same way as the wamps,’ he said, carelessly gesturing at the empty places where most people liked there to be limbs. ‘The skull is partially crushed, too. Enough to prevent a new wamp spontaneously generating within, but not quite as violently as we’ve seen previously. Sloppy. Very sloppy.’

‘Does it matter, Mr Cabal?’ said Shadrach, snippy with disappointment and frustration. ‘We should be getting out of here with all possible dispatch! Come along! If we are quick, we can gain the outskirts by nightfall.’

‘Yes, we can do that,’ admitted Cabal, as he opened his bag and looked through the contents, ‘but wouldn’t you rather learn the whereabouts of the Phobic Animus?’

Shadrach gave a short, unamused laugh. ‘From whom, Mr Cabal? From whom? From the dreadful monster that apparently seeks to kill everything in this city? Shall we ask it, hmm? Clarify the etiquette in that conversation for me, Mr Cabal. Do we ask it before, after, or while it is tearing our arms and legs from us?’

Cabal sighed. ‘Everybody is such a critic. No, I do not suggest that we interrogate the monster, not least because it is not a monster in the sense that you imagine, nor because it will have little of import to tell us even if we found a way of communicating, and finally – most tellingly – because we have a far more immediate and useful source right before us.’ And here he made a distracted gesture at the corpse while he continued to search through his bag.

There was a silence, during which the mercenaries frowned even as the penny dropped for the Fear Institute members. ‘Ooooh,’ said Bose, the slowest to cotton on. ‘Of course. I keep forgetting. You’re a necromancer.’

This was news to the mercenaries, who all took cautious steps back from Cabal.

Cabal hid his exasperation that, even here in this land of wonders, his profession was held in much the same opprobrium as it was in the waking world. He did not hide it well, however. ‘Yes,’ he said, allowing the s to draw out into a sibilant expression of dangerous resentment. ‘A necromancer. Shaking facts out of dead heads is more traditionalist than most of my experiences, but it’s always nice to do something that harks back to the old school.’ He removed a small padded case from his Gladstone bag and opened it to reveal several small test-tubes, each stoppered with wax. ‘One of these might do the trick,’ he said conversationally, laying the case to one side. Then he took the head of the hermit firmly between his hands and, with a sharp twist and the sound of tearing dry skin, muscles and tendons, and the clacking of vertebrae scraping over one another, wrenched it off. He turned away from the hapless torso, placing the head on its stump to glare eyelessly at him. ‘There,’ he said, pleased. ‘Much more convenient.’

‘How much . . . Cabal, how much will this . . . thing be able to tell us?’ Shadrach was as fascinated as he was appalled. That Cabal was a necromancer they had known all along, of course, but they had not been anticipating him actually having a need or an opportunity to practise his skills while in their company. One may travel with a slaughterman from a knacker’s yard for the knowledge he has on a related subject, but one does not necessarily expect him to fish a poleaxe out of his jacket and use it on a passing horse. This was the scale of the dismay Cabal’s companions felt as he sorted through test-tubes, and prodded the dead man’s head as if it were a potted plant.

‘Back in the real world, next to nothing. I would expect the procedure to fail. If, against all expectation, I actually got a reaction, he would probably just discuss his last breakfast, or his favourite colour, or what a splitting headache he had. Here, however, things are generally more puissant on the thaumaturgical side. I have hopes, but we shall see. We shall see.’ And, so saying, he flipped the wax seal off one of the test-tubes, using his thumbnail, and scattered the contents over the head. The fine powder, blue-grey with tiny flickers of reflected light from the minute crystals within the mixture, fell upon the desiccated scalp with all the magical effect one might ascribe to a test-tube full of powder paint, and it sat there, besmirching the dead man’s brow, to no obvious purpose.

Cabal rocked back on to his haunches and regarded the head with evident disappointment. ‘Oh. Perhaps I overstated my case.’ He frowned, and then said, ‘Ashmarakaseer,’ in a spirit of experimental optimism. It was, in vulgar parlance, a ‘magic word’, and had its uses in a few of the less impressive feats of necromancy. It was, however, of roughly the efficacy of ‘abracadabra’ when applied to anything greater, such as the matter currently at hand.

The powder burst abruptly into a brilliant shuddering blue-green light amid a thick cloud of rising fumes within which shapes writhed and contorted. Everybody else was so busy jumping backwards and swearing volubly in surprise that nobody noticed Cabal fall from his hunched crouch on to his arse and swear too, albeit in a much pithier fashion. Things had gone from very disappointing to almost unbelievably successful in the time it takes eight men to be violently surprised, and Cabal did not know whether to be delighted or horrified. Cautious exploitation fell somewhere between these extremes and he settled upon it quickly, gathering himself into a crouch over the head once more, and saying in the nononsense tones of one who has dealt with the dead before and isn’t about to take any backchat, ‘Speak to me! You, who once knew this face and this skull, as his own, you will speak to me! I command you! I draw you back from the shadows into the sight of men once more, and compel you to speak!’

‘All right,’ said the head.

There was more swearing and jumping back from the spectators. Cabal ignored them and demanded, ‘What is your name?’

‘My name . . .’ The head did not move its jaw. It did not move at all, but they all heard the voice as clearly as if a living man stood before them rather than a decapitated head, the scalp aflame with an unnatural eldritch fire. ‘I am Ercusides. Who are you people?’ The voice altered in tone and volume slightly, as if an invisible speaker was looking around as he spoke. ‘I came out here for a bit of peace and quiet! Why cannot you all just leave me be?’

‘I assume you used to live in Hlanith,’ said Cabal.

‘And what if I did?’

‘In a tower, in the north of the city? I believe you sold it to an evoker of dubious reliability.’

‘A bloody fraud, you mean. Still, his money was good.’ The head faltered, and when it spoke again, its tone was suspicious. ‘Who are you? You know too much of my business!’

Bose said, in a quiet and somewhat tremulous voice, ‘Aren’t you going to tell him he’s dead?’ Shadrach and Corde shushed him immediately.

‘I have a question or two that only a man of your great wisdom and knowledge can help me with. Then, sir, I shall be delighted to leave you to enjoy your hermitage.’

The head of Ercusides was not about to be distracted so lightly. ‘How did you get past the wamps, eh?’

‘We travelled into this city by day. We are aware of the risk.’

‘Risk? Heh! Not for much longer. I’ve had enough of those nine-legged bastards, a-creeping and a-crawling around the place. You can hear them at night, you know, trying to get in. Lucky they’re as thick as they’re filthy. Still, when I’m done with them, they’ll be sorry they ever bothered me. Do you want to know what I’m going to do, eh?’

‘At a guess,’ said Cabal, growing bored with the dead man’s egotism, ‘you have parlayed your knowledge of the curious foibles of sinew wood, the same knowledge you used to make that remarkable prosthetic leg for Captain Lochery, to create homunculi as your helpers. These were then used to bring substantially larger quantities of material in from the nearby Sinew Wood,’ he turned to the others and added, in an undertone, ‘which you recall grows “by the Lake of Yath”, according to the redoubtable Lochery. Then,’ he returned his attention to Ercusides, such as he was, ‘from these long beams you created a weapon to prosecute a war of extermination against the wamps. You trained the dreff rodents to hunt and kill, to tear away the limbs of their targets – which may have started as a necessary way of immobilising the creatures but was allowed to descend into petty sadism – and then to damage the skull to prevent any more wamps coming into being.’ He sniffed, drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and blew his nose. ‘That’s just a guess, of course,’ he concluded, as he put the handkerchief away.

The head was silent for a long moment, the only sound being the gentle growl of the supernatural flame. ‘Bit of a smartarse, aren’t you?’ it said.

‘You have no idea,’ said Shadrach.

‘Yes, I’ve done all that, I’ve got the dreff trained, and tonight they’re going wamp hunting. I can hardly wait. By tomorrow morning the streets will be full of wamp legs, all over the place. That’ll teach them, the ugly bastards.’

Bose went to say something, but Cabal quelled him with a hard stare and a raised index finger. ‘All very ingenious,’ said Cabal to Ercusides. ‘I am sure it will go swimmingly. In the meantime, however, perhaps you could assist me with my little problem. I promise you, we have no desire to linger here, disturbing your peace.’

The head sighed heavily. ‘Oh, if you must. Go on, then. What is it?’

‘We seek something that goes formally by the name of the “Phobic Animus”, but you may know of it by some other name. It is the spirit of fear, the epitome of terrors. It dwells somewhere in the Dreamlands. Do you know where we might find it?’

‘You seek the spirit of fear?’ The voice Ercusides spoke slowly, disbelief evident in its tone. ‘Phobic Animus: that is a good name.’

‘Thank you,’ said Bose, before being punched in the arm by Corde.

‘You are fools to seek it. You will all surely die.’

‘Yes, well, be that as it may,’ said Cabal, trying hard not to retaliate with a comment upon Ercusides’ own current state. ‘The fact is that we still need to know where it is. Can you help us?’ He paused, but the head said nothing. ‘O great and wise philosopher,’ he added flatly, an unconvincing attempt at flattery and shameless buttering-up.

Being dead, fortunately, had done nothing for Ercusides’ perceptiveness, and when he spoke next, it was with unwarranted smugness. ‘Oh, I can tell you where to seek it, all right. But whether you will want to, now that is another matter.’

Cabal bit his tongue, and consoled himself with a mental image of punting the recalcitrant head clean across the temple with a well-placed kick. ‘Quite so, O celestial sage, but let’s assume that we’re going to ignore all warnings and go anyway. Where might we find it?’

‘The Frozen Heart you seek,’ continued Ercusides, plainly enjoying saying sooths so much that it was affecting his sentence constructions. ‘Look you to the distant Island of Mormo, deep in the Cerenarian Sea. Far it is from the sail-roads of mortal men. Unseen it is by living eye. Unmarked it is in book or chart.’

‘Hold on,’ interrupted Cabal. ‘Do you mean to say that nobody knows where it is?’

The head paused, a trifle testily. ‘Far it is,’ it repeated, ‘from the sail-roads of mortal man. Unseen it is—’

‘Annoying it is to hear you talking in such a ridiculous fashion,’ retorted Cabal. ‘To get straight to the point, you don’t know where it is? Nobody knows where it is?’

‘The Frozen Heart you seek,’ Ercusides said, starting from the top. ‘Look you to the—’

‘Distant Island of Mormo. Yes, yes, I got that gem of information. But knowing the name of the place is not of much help if I cannot then look it up in an almanac. Where is the verdammt Island of Mormo? And if you say it’s deep in the Cerenarian Sea, I shall not be responsible for my actions.’

‘The location of the Island of Mormo is unknown and unknowable, a secret of the gods themselves, and one that they guard jealously, for how much of the adoration of their worshippers comes from fear? But . . .’ Ercusides added quickly, for he had heard Cabal’s grunt of hot exasperation and had suddenly experienced a psychic glimpse of a possible future that involved travelling at great speed and height across the temple to smash into the wall ‘. . . But . . . that does not mean the island is unachievable. Once, the great sorcerer Hep-Seth of Golthoth was minded to seek the island. Not for the Frozen Heart, but for the great weapons that were said to be stored there by the gods against a future in which even gods may war. With even a single such treasure, none would stand against him, and even the gods would fear him, for he could strike them down with their own weapon. It was a fine plan, but a vain one, for he did not consider everything that might befall him before he gained such a weapon.

‘He bragged that he knew how to reach Mormo and spoke of a seven-sided gate that would guide the way.’

‘And then?’

‘And then . . . nothing more is known.’ Ercusides managed to give the impression that he was shaking his head without moving an iota. ‘That is all that is known.’

‘Golthoth.’ Cabal drew his notes from his bag and flicked through them. ‘Oh, by all that is holy and many things that aren’t . . . I feared as much. We must go back the way we came and . . .’ He was silent for a few moments while he read some more, and then he shoved them back into his bag with an expression of violent exasperation. ‘The Brothers Grimm can have this abominable place,’ he said finally, when his temper was under some tenuous form of control, ‘and I hope it chokes them.’

He replaced the test-tubes in their case, and then in the Gladstone. ‘We should make our plans to escape this place,’ he said quietly. ‘Something colossal, wooden and remarkably dangerous this way comes.’

‘My colossus?’ said Ercusides. ‘You are mistaken. It has not yet been animated, and even when it is, it will obviously not attack men. That would be ridiculous. I have trained the dreffs to attack only wamps.’

Cabal picked up the head and looked into the gaping eye sockets. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘your training techniques leave something to be desired.’

‘I . . .’ Ercusides faltered. ‘What happened just then? The floor . . . Where is the floor? Why can I not move?’ He sounded curious and inconvenienced rather than scared, as if a rather outré practical joke had been played upon him. ‘Why can I not see?’

‘Ah,’ said Shadrach, entering his professional mode in which he was adept at dealing with the recently bereaved, and those deep in denial.

‘You’re dead,’ said Cabal, whose professional mode employed a very different set of skills, even if they also applied to the dead. ‘Your creation pulled off your arms and legs, threw them around the place willy-nilly, then cracked your skull. Look on the bright side: it didn’t damage your head anywhere near as badly as it has those of the wamps we’ve seen around the city. I think the dreffs may have been gentler with you because you had looked after them and trained them.’

‘You speak nonsense, man!’ cried the head. ‘I taught them carefully! I even wore a wamp costume I’d made so . . . Oh. Ooooh . . .’ Ercusides thought about it for a moment, during which the others looked looked uncomfortable and somewhat embarrassed. Finding out that one is a decapitated head is a private sort of experience. ‘No. No! They wouldn’t misunderstand what I meant. They couldn’t . . .’

‘They would, they could and they did. They were probably a little bemused that you wanted them to kill you – if they even understood that that was what they were doing – but training is training. They saw a wamp, but they also saw a man, and gained the impression that you wanted both species dismantled on sight. You’re talking to me at the moment only because I am a necromancer. You can work out the ramifications of that for yourself.’

‘Oh, well, this is just wonderful.’ Ercusides’ tone indicated that, no, it wasn’t. ‘I left Baharna in the first place to get some peace and quiet. Sold my tower, and came here. I knew there would be wamps, but I thought, The place was stripped of its population. Without bodies to spawn from, just how many wamps can there be, anyway? Hundreds! That’s how many! Hundreds! All that fiddling about with dreffs and sinew wood and creosote and for what? So the little bastards could pop my limbs off and cave in my skull!’

Cabal had had enough. ‘You want peace and quiet?’ he asked, then opened his bag, dropped the head inside, and closed it again. Ercusides’ complaining stopped. Cabal stood, hefting the bag to analyse its new weight, and found it acceptable. He turned to find the others looking at him with a variety of expressions, none of them admiring. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘You’ve . . . put his head in your bag,’ offered Shadrach, after some hesitation.

‘So I have,’ agreed Cabal. ‘How astute of you. Now,’ he turned his attention to Holk, ‘Sergeant, we really should be getting away from this temple now that our business here is concluded. This idiot’s wamp-killing machine . . .’ here he illustrated who ‘this idiot’ was by holding up his bag ‘. . . will certainly return. Even if it doesn’t know we’re here yet, this is familiar ground to it. We must leave before it gets bored tearing up the city looking for us and comes home.’

Given the likelihood of Cabal’s hypothesis, and the generous amounts of evidence for what they could expect if they were discovered, the general consensus was to stop being appalled at what Cabal had in his Gladstone, and to get out of the city as quickly as was safely possible.

‘Gesso,’ Holk called to one of his men, ‘you’re the quietest. Go out and scout the area around the breached wall. If it’s clear, we’ll head for the buildings over yonder. They’re close together and should give us enough cover to hide from it as we move.’

Gesso did not seem pleased to be delegated to the rank of forward guard, but he was a disciplined soldier and, besides, Holk was right: he was light on his feet and could move like a cat when necessary. They moved as a group through the fallen internal walls until they were close by the outer breach. It was indeed getting dark out there; all the stumbling around inside the temple had eaten away at the time more quickly than anyone had realised. They hid in the deepening shadows around the hole in the wall, and Holk gestured to Gesso to scout the area outside.

Gesso made to draw his sword, hesitated, as if realising how useless it would be against the man-made monster they knew was out there, then drew it anyway. If he was going to die, he could at least die with a sword in his hand. He crept close to the lintel formed by the shattered blocks and paused there, looking left and right. He scanned the visible part of the square and the buildings at its edge – the painfully distant buildings that might be their only refuge – and then moved forward, silent and graceful. He slid across the broad stone surface of the broken block like a shadow, and all those observing were in the process of being impressed when a great claw came down from above and snatched him out of sight.

‘Oh, dear God!’ cried Shadrach. Outside they heard Gesso shout in surprise, then roar with rage, and then he screamed, a high-pitched cry of mortal terror and disbelieving horror. A moment later, his arm fell on to the stone. The hand still held the sword.

‘Oh, dear God!’ cried Shadrach again, but this time it was more like a sob. ‘What shall we do? Whatever shall we do?’

Cabal slapped him hard. Perhaps harder than necessary, but he felt he deserved a little recreation. ‘You can stop blubbering like a child for a beginning, Shadrach,’ he snapped. ‘Sergeant, my analysis is that if we stay here, we shall all suffer the same fate . . .’ a leg fell wetly on to the square a hundred metres away, a long trail of blood splashing down after it ‘. . . as Gesso. Agreed?’

‘Aye, Master Cabal,’ said Holk. ‘It’s a desperate business, and we won’t all make it.’

‘What?’ said Bose. ‘What? What is he talking about? What are you talking about, Sergeant?’

‘He means,’ said Cabal, slinging his bag on to his back with the aid of a black sash he had bought in Baharna for exactly this purpose, ‘that some of us are going to die when we run for it. We must move now, while that thing is absorbed in dismembering Gesso. Get out there and scatter. Head for the buildings as quickly as you can. Well? Come on!’

He drew his sword, and rushed at the breach.

Chapter 10

IN WHICH THERE IS A BATTLE AND CABAL MAKES IT QUICK

As with many aspects of Cabal’s life, charging at a great monster that has been specifically designed to kill other monsters looked, to the untrained eye, like arrant suicide. Johannes Cabal, though, was a man who lived a life of calculated risk. He knew, more or less, what he was up against, and he appreciated that, while the wamps were dangerous foes, they were not great tactical thinkers. Holk had been impressed by their ability to organise an ambush, but ambush predators are hardly unknown even in the waking world.

Ercusides, for all his many and varied failings, had created a device for efficiently wiping out the city’s wamp infestation, and he had based his plan on the wamps’ observed behaviours. They were cunning, but no more cunning than a fox, and foxes were regularly exterminated by fleets of horse and hound marshalled by folk with the collective wit of an umbrella stand. Wamps had three modes: hide; attack; flee. They only used the first as part of an ambush since, being towards the top of the food chain, they had no natural predators; its use as a defensive tactic escaped them. The second was the default, but so simple had they previously found killing that it lacked flexibility. Cabal had no doubt that the wamps’ nemesis carried scratches and bites about its feet, shins and claws, but this was the equivalent of trying to defeat a sequoia with one’s teeth, when one is not a beaver and when the sequoia is intent on tearing your legs off. Orphaned limbs scattered about the dead city gave mute witness to the futility of that. Finally, there was fleeing, but the nine legs of a wamp were there to allow easy climbing and not sustained running beyond that required to bring down escaping prey. Soon those nine legs would grow tired, unlike the long-striding doom bearing down upon them.

Therefore, Cabal had decided that fleeing was pointless, and hiding would only delay the inevitable. Instead he would apply himself to the attack, the exact nature of which he would evolve on sighting the colossus.

His forward foot coming to rest on the leading edge of the broken wall, he jumped down, landed on the ground running and jinked left, the direction he guessed the colossus to be standing, based on the angle of the claw’s descent when it had taken Gesso, and the subsequent observed trajectories of his limbs. In this he was proved correct, almost running into a leg the thickness of a tree trunk, largely because it was a tree trunk. He ducked and dodged, whirled and looked, even as he backed away in an undignified reverse skip.

Colossus, he admitted to himself, was probably something of an overstatement. To his mind, something would have to stand at least a hundred feet tall before it could really be termed ‘colossal’. He recalled that the Colossus of Rhodes was reputed to stand somewhere around the 110-feet-tall mark, commensurate with the Statue of Liberty, which their ship had sailed past in what already felt like a lifetime ago. Ercusides’ effort lacked that scale, measuring certainly no more than perhaps sixty feet from the base of its great flat pallet-like feet to the top of its conical watchtower head. The design was innovative, perhaps, but inelegant in the extreme. So, no, colossus was not an ideal description. Giant, though, was certainly acceptable.

It was structured identically to a great wooden mannequin, a larger cousin of the homunculi they had discovered within the temple. The finish was crude: the bark had been sheared from the logs and treated with whatever variant of creosote Ercusides had bubbled up in his pots and cauldrons. Here and there, holes were cut into the wood, and Cabal was confident that each was the entrance to a snug little chamber containing bedding of wood shavings and a trained dreff. The head had three such holes equally spaced around its sloping sides, which must contain the cleverest specimens, for they commanded the whole by some strange binding of intellects into a single intent and impetus: a hive-mind of hamsters; a Gestalt of guinea pigs.

Irritatingly, it also gave the giant a full 360 degrees of vision, and when Cabal saw a beady-eyed little face peering down at him from the aft hole, he knew he could expect trouble in the immediate future. He still had a few seconds’ grace, however. The giant was just tearing loose Gesso’s remaining leg, the right, and seemed a slave to procedure. It would finish removing the leg, toss it away, deliver the coup de grâce to Gesso’s head, drop him and then, finally, it would apply itself to providing the same service to Cabal.

He was just formulating a response to this state of affairs when Holk and his two remaining men burst out of the temple, swords drawn, and immediately split up, running for the edges of the square and shouting like maniacs. Cabal was impressed by their professionalism; they had been hired as, essentially, bodyguards and here they were, doing their best to distract the giant from their clients even though it would probably result in their deaths.

Tellingly, they were visible to two of the three head holes, and therefore two thirds of the fuzzy little committee that directed the giant. The other was the only one that had seen Cabal, but it was promptly outvoted in the ‘Who shall we kill next?’ stakes. Gesso was reduced to a torso and his skull punctured with a sharp jab of a great wooden index finger, whittled to a stake at its tip, in a hurried perfunctory way, and tossed aside, a broken toy.

The giant seemed to consider Holk and Thirsh as equally likely or, at least, one third of its mind wanted to go after Holk and another wanted to go after Thirsh. Since both options were known directly to those thirds, these were the only options they would willingly consider, and the remaining third was left lamenting a lost opportunity to kill the four-legged wamp that lurked just behind it. The outvoted dreff withdrew its head and disappeared back into its snug little chamber, presumably to play music loudly and write bad poetry about how nobody appreciated it.

Cabal saw the situation changing and immediately rubbed the current list of plans off his mental blackboard in preparation for some revisions. As he did so, he slipped the baldric over his head and left his bag at the base of the wall, his jacket joining it a second later. The best defence was looking to be an offence, and he did not wish to be encumbered when the moment came. That moment was delayed for a few more seconds as the two thirds of the giant’s brain psychically bickered, the shoulders of the great homunculus shuddering from facing Holk, then Thirsh and back again, as the dreff repeatedly failed to arrive at a consensus. Cabal had already arrived at his own decision, proving that two heads are not always better than one. With no apparent trepidation, he stepped on to the heel of the giant’s flat right foot, wrapped his arms around the shin, and waited for the inevitable. At last, one of the command dreff capitulated, and the foot lifted, swung forward in a great arc at unexpected speed, and slammed down again, several yards closer to the fleeing figure of Sergeant Holk than it had been a few seconds before.

Cabal saw the giant’s intent and committed himself to preventing it if at all possible. A year or two before, he would not have cared, but then he had been a soulless creature. Now he found himself very occasionally making decisions that were not entirely logical. It was easy enough to rationalise attempting to save Holk: he was a useful soldier who might prove useful again subsequently. Beneath that, however, there was the hint of a shadow of a faint possibility that Holk had impressed him with his professionalism and competence, and that Cabal did not care to see such a man die while there was any chance of saving him.

Then the leg was rising again, and all of Cabal’s concentration was required just to hang on to the dizzying rise, swing and fall. He had the presence of mind to use the fall as an opportunity to shin his way a little further up the leg as it descended faster than he would drop. In that moment of freefall, he was able to shift himself almost a yard up the shin. Then the foot slammed down and, once again, he had to hang on hard to avoid losing this gain. He looked back, and saw Shadrach, Bose and – with a notable lack of swashbuckling bravado – Corde sneaking out of the temple and quickly around its edge while the giant was fully engaged in heading away from them. Cabal permitted himself a curled lip before looking up. He was glad he was climbing up a giant and not a colossus. Better yet, a giant with insensate legs, or he would have been scraped off by now and would probably be adjusting to life as a sticky patch under one of the giant’s feet. The knee was a tad over four yards from the base of the foot, by his reckoning; easily attainable in most situations, but not when he was swinging up and down as if he were on a demented carnival ride. Cabal, who had briefly run a demented carnival, knew this to be a reasonable simile. By his reckoning, he could reach the knee in two more strides providing he exerted himself and did not fall off. Unhappily, Holk was no more than two strides away.

Another sweep of the leg, and Cabal was so close to the knee that he bared his teeth with frustration. There was his goal. Bored into the leading face of the laboriously smoothed barrel hinge there was another dreff hutch hole. He could almost reach it. Just one more . . .

The leg lifted again, but instead of performing a full walk swing, only came as far as its neighbour. The giant was going into a stand, and even as it did so, the torso was rotating on the hips, the right arm was swinging out, and Cabal realised he was too late. ‘Holk!’ he shouted. ‘Dodge, man! Dodge it!’

Holk was a calm, focused, exemplary warrior right to the end. Of their charges, he had long since identified Cabal as the only one to trust in crisis, and on hearing Cabal’s cry he did not look back or falter, but immediately dodged. If he had dived to the left, he might have got away with it, but he dived to the right and straight into the palm of the wooden hand that was swooping down to capture him. He realised his mistake at once, and tried to roll out again, but the fingers curled quickly and he was held firmly.

The giant took no pause for gloating, for what it did it did through training, not inclination. It derived no pleasure, except that of fulfilling a function, as the left hand swung up in a practised arc and grasped the first limb it reached, Holk’s right leg. With a sharp tug, like a farmer’s wife plucking a dead chicken, it tore the leg off, and threw it sharply over its shoulder to whirl away into the darkening sky. Holk screamed, a hoarse roar that faded into sobs when he wanted to scream more but could not draw breath. The great left hand, dripping with his blood and Gesso’s before his, swept forward again.

For all their practice at hunting and killing, the dreff were still essentially shy woodland creatures, albeit of an unusual wood in a strange land. Thirsh’s furious battle cry startled the whole ambulatory warren – nothing they had yet encountered had prepared them for such a thing – and the giant jumped as if another giant had stealthily approached before exploding a paper bag the size of a pup-tent behind it. Cabal hung on for life itself as the giant leaped some ten feet into the air, but loosened his grip as it fell, sliding up its shin and grabbing the splayed upper front of the lower leg attached to the barrel hinge. The impact slapped his face and body hard against the wood, and he felt something give in his shoulder that ideally should not, but he was alive, and he was in position. He snorted blood out of his nose, and felt hatred blossom deliciously in his heart for small furry woodland creatures. Retribution was at hand.

Thirsh rushed at the giant, his sword held high. Cabal could see that he must have almost reached safety when the sound of Holk’s agony had reached him. He had exchanged survival for peril purely out of loyalty, and in doing so had bought Cabal an extra few seconds. Thirsh would probably be dead at the end of those seconds, but that – Cabal concluded – was none of his concern.

Thirsh made the most of those seconds. He arrived at the giant to find it still in a state of nervous paralysis analogous to a skittish terrier being rushed by an unexpectedly aggressive rat, and capitalised on this by hacking fiercely at the giant’s left leg while swearing furiously, like a lumberjack with coprolalia. A real giant of flesh and blood would have been mightily discomforted by such attentions, but this giant, being more like a collection of diligently murderous telegraph poles than anything else, only regarded them with mute incomprehension until the initial surprise dissipated and it noticed that Thirsh had more limbs than was permitted locally. Ercusides had considered the possibility of too many targets to deal with concurrently, and had provided the dreffs with a simple but useful tactic to give themselves a little leg-plucking time when challenged. With a fast sideswipe, the giant’s left arm swept down out of a darkening sky and Thirsh was suddenly travelling backwards much faster than he had charged, and doing it a yard off the ground to boot. Its immediate situation thus simplified, the giant was returning its attention to the fitfully struggling Holk when part of its group consciousness reported that something was peering into its chamber and asked what the standard operating procedure was for such an occurrence. The three head dreffs were considering how to respond to this, when the reporting dreff added a slightly panicky addendum to the effect that the face had gone and now a snake or possibly a limb, yes, definitely a limb, one of the ones without the foot on the end, was in through the entrance hole and was tipped by something shiny and PAIN! PAIN! PAIN! At which point the report stopped, and the dreff Brains Trust was left fairly sure that this was a good thing as obviously the problem had gone away, until they noticed that the group consciousness was definitely a member short – and why were they tilting dramatically to one side?

Cabal withdrew his hand from the dreff hole on the front of the right knee and examined the dead animal impaled on his switchblade. Not a zoologist by training or disposition, his examination was perfunctory and finished with him tossing the corpse away with the same dismissive flick that the giant had so often used to dispose of wamp legs and man limbs. He snapped the blade back into the knife’s handle and dropped it into his trouser pocket, before hastily shinning down the leg, dropping the last metre and running clear, keeping an eye on the giant as he waited for the inevitable. Nor did he have to wait long: there are only so many contingencies rodents can be trained for, and the loss of control over one leg was not on that short list. The sinew wood hung as a dead weight, stylishly carved with three points of articulation, from the giant’s right hip, and all the dreff panic in the Dreamlands would not keep the construct upright any longer. With some unhelpful waving of arms, the giant fell sideways very heavily, the right side smashing to splinters on impact, the head falling off and bouncing across the square to a muffled cacophony of dismayed squeaking.

Cabal had intended to make a circuit of every dreff hole in the fallen giant to introduce them all to his switchblade, but the destruction had been greater than anticipated and, apart from some spastic flexing in the wrecked timbers, it seemed unlikely that it would ever again represent a threat. Thus, when one of the surviving dreff emerged stunned and disorientated from the head, he made no move towards it, but simply watched it wander in a circle, sniffing the air and trying to understand what had just happened to it.

Shadrach’s foot stamping down hard probably came as something of a surprise to it. Cabal watched, unconcerned at the animal’s death, but unimpressed with the motivation for it. Shadrach stamped on the animal again, his expression one of pure petulance. ‘Horrible creatures!’ he spat. ‘Disgusting little rats!’

‘They bear no resemblance to rats whatsoever,’ said Cabal, tetchy rather than angry. Shadrach’s pomposity and pettiness seemed to define him as a person, and neither endeared him to Cabal. If he had hidden qualities, they had been very well hidden indeed. Cabal turned his back on him, and went to Holk.

He reached the still clenched hand around the sergeant just as Osic, the mercenary with culinary leanings, reached them at a run. ‘I thought the others would find cover before me,’ he panted. ‘What happened?’ He saw Holk’s terrible injury and his shoulders sagged with dismay. ‘Oh . . . Oh, by Nodens – not the sergeant.’

‘Thirsh is over there somewhere,’ Cabal gestured off into the darkness. ‘He may still be alive.’ Osic nodded, and ran to investigate.

Cabal knelt by Holk. The sergeant was terribly pale and deeply unconscious. Cabal opened the giant’s hand with little difficulty: robbed of its motivating force the sinew wood was just wood, and the fingers swung back easily on their knuckles and joints. He took a deep breath, and weighed up the options. Movement made him look sharply to his side. Shadrach, Bose and Corde were hesitantly shuffling forward, none of them offering any help, appearing to Cabal’s eye to be little more than the oafish onlookers drawn to any disaster. Cabal suddenly realised how much he hated this ‘Fear Institute’ and its selfless members. ‘You,’ he snapped, pointing at Shadrach. ‘Get my bag. It’s by the wall.’ Shadrach hesitated, unused to being spoken to in such a way, but Bose made a move to comply. ‘Not you!’ Cabal barked. Bose stopped, looking quite similar to another stunned dreff that limped by at that moment. Cabal pointed very deliberately at Shadrach. ‘You. Get me my bag.’

As he waited, he checked Holk’s pulse. It was weak and thready, and Cabal expected the worst. The blood loss was heavy, and although he made impromptu knots in the severed major blood vessels, the segeant’s chance of surviving the shock seemed infinitesimal. Shadrach arrived with the Gladstone bag and dropped it by Cabal with ill grace. Cabal ignored him, taking out his surgical instruments and the very few chemicals he carried that might conceivably be of use. It was a loathsome thought, and he banished it as soon as it started to coalesce, but just this once, he wished he were a doctor. That he was not could not be helped: he could only try to apply his skills in raising the dead to preserving the living. He had no great expectations. ‘I will do what I can,’ he said, in an undertone to Holk, and began.

Holk did not die that night, much to Cabal’s apparent satisfaction and inner consternation. Thirsh, too, was alive, although he had to discard his cuir-bouilli breastplate, which had crumpled under the fierce impact of the gigantic backhanded blow. Better that than his chest, which, while bruised and painful, was at least still where it was supposed to be, as distinct from snugly fitting against his spine, his lungs crushed and heart burst by the new arrangement.

Even though the city was now safe, at least until some new horror moved in, the zebras refused to pass through the line of the outer walls. Osic and Thirsh constructed a litter from bedrolls and lengths of wood culled from the fallen giant, a curiously pathetic object in the clear light of day, and placed Holk upon it to drag him from the city to where the zebras waited. What was left of Gesso that they could find, they gathered up and hauled out of the city, too, to be buried in the gently rolling hills below the sinew trees. Thirsh had at first suggested burying him in a small overgrown garden he had noticed on their approach, where beautiful flowers grew, but Cabal had remembered the ghoul in the temple cellar and intimated to the others that anyone who was buried within the city would not rest there long.

He also took with him a block of sinew wood and a captured dreff, but would not explain why. He strapped the block to his saddle, and kept the dreff in an extemporised cage fashioned from Gesso’s helmet and a length of quarter-inch chain that had once formed part of the dead man’s sword belt, criss-crossed across the helmet through holes he had punctured for the purpose. The dreff sat behind the chain bars and regarded Cabal with curiosity, as did the others, but still he would not discuss his intent.

The journey to the city had not been especially rambunctious or as thigh-slapping as an adventure of a different hue might have been – the city’s reputation had done a lot to undermine that sort of ebullience. The journey back, however, had been envisaged as a far more joyful event; they would not, after all, be dead, and that’s always nice. So pre-eminent had the possibility of a total massacre with no survivors been in their minds, however, that none had ever considered a result midway between annihilation and complete success. One man dead and another dying had never been seen as possibilities.

On the first evening of the return trek, it became apparent that the hand that had torn Holk’s leg away had carried some contamination from the blood of the wamps it had slaughtered previously. Holk’s skin became drawn and wrinkled like wet paper, and beneath the yellowing surface, small bumps moved freely like protozoa upon a microscope’s slide. It seemed that Holk had survived one wamp-induced parasitic infestation in his life only to succumb to another. Thirsh and Osic spoke together in hushed tones, then came to Cabal as he watched Holk’s symptoms progress. ‘Is there anything you can do for the sergeant?’ asked Thirsh.

‘No,’ said Cabal.

Thirsh and Osic exchanged glances, and Thirsh said, ‘No, Master Cabal. We know he cannot be saved. We mean to ask, is there anything you can do . . .’

‘His suffering,’ said Osic. ‘The sergeant does not deserve to suffer.’

‘What we mean to say is, is there anything you can do?’

For a moment Cabal thought they were asking him to resurrect Holk after his inevitable death, and his raised eyebrow communicated this.

‘No!’ said Thirsh. ‘No, that would be wrong. Please, Master, that is not what we are trying to say.’

But Cabal had already moved past that misapprehension, and now understood their intent. ‘You don’t want him to suffer. Yes, I understand.’ He knew they were soldiers, and had likely killed in cold blood as well as in battle before. This, however, was different. ‘Start gathering wood. We shall have to cremate him immediately afterwards to prevent the contamination spreading or a new wamp forming.’

They left quickly, taking the members of the Fear Institute with them, the latter’s confused objections being quickly silenced with barely cloaked threats. Cabal watched them go, then went to sit by Holk. He was deteriorating rapidly, his skin starting to become baggy and threatening to slough in places, his breathing thick and ragged as his lungs slowly flooded. The worst of it was that he could not slip into sleep, but remained conscious and lucid as his body turned into a swamp around him. His eyes, filmed and yellowish, looked up at Cabal as he sat and took in the extent and variety of symptoms. With difficulty, Holk gathered enough breath to speak.

‘I did not want to die this way,’ he said, in a hoarse whisper that bubbled up from his chest.

Cabal shook his head. ‘No.’

There was silence for some minutes but for the crackling of the campfire. Then Holk said, ‘Make it quick, Master Cabal.’

When the others arrived back, carrying wood, Cabal was already sewing Holk into his bedroll. ‘Better it were done quickly,’ he said, as they stood over him. His eyes were not cold, but they were empty, and when he looked up, at least one of them wondered if they had left all the monsters behind them.

‘But,’ said Thirsh, both horrified and relieved, ‘you said . . . a wamp . . . you said . . .’

‘I took a leaf from Ercusides’ book,’ said Cabal, calmly. Covered by the sheet, none could see the thin stake Cabal had fashioned from a fallen branch, then driven through Holk’s eye and into his brain once he had breathed his last breath. There would be no wamp cracking its way out of Holk’s skull.

They made a pyre and placed Holk upon it. As he burned and the wamp filth in his veins boiled and died, Cabal threw the block of sinew wood he had been carrying on his saddle pack into the flames, and they watched it twist and flex as the fire took it too. It would have been about large enough to carve a wooden leg from, but that happenstance was now gone for ever. When the fire finally burned low, Cabal gathered up Gesso’s helmet, unfastened the chain lattice running across its mouth, and let the dreff free. They watched it run up the hillside towards the treeline. Two thirds of the way there, a white eagle with lines of black and gold upon its wings stooped down from the cloudy sky and took the dreff cleanly, flying away with the unmoving animal in its claws. If it was an omen, it was an uncertain one.

Their arrival in Baharna was unheralded. They rode in during the morning of a market day, overtaken by farmers, traders and lava gatherers, and the little troupe of dusty travellers sitting silently on their zebra mounts drew little attention, or even that two unridden zebras followed the column, led by their tied-off reins.

Their passage through the eastern gate was untroubled: the guard who dealt with them had been on duty the day they left and already knew where they had been. He eyed the trailing zebras, but said nothing.

Once within the city, Shadrach concluded their dealings with Osic and Thirsh. Holk had no family, but Gesso had a wife and a young daughter. Shadrach refused to be taken to see them, but gave the zebras to Thirsh, with a fistful of gold, and told him to see Gesso’s family all right. As the mercenaries walked away, Corde moved alongside Shadrach and said, ‘How do we know they were telling the truth? Gesso never spoke of a family – we only heard of them after he was dead. How do we know they haven’t just taken you for a fool?’

Shadrach just looked at Corde with something like loathing in his face. ‘We don’t know,’ he said in disgust, and turned away, abandoning a dialogue before it had even started.

Cabal had noticed that Shadrach had seemed to be ageing rapidly ever since the battle in the nameless city on the banks of the Lake of Yath. His hair was greying at the temples, the lines of his face deepening, and now he walked with a stoop. It seemed that the Dreamlands were not the only thing that could be physically influenced by the psyches of dreamers.

In contrast, Corde was developing a distinctly lean and hungry look. Whereas earlier he had only been play-acting the role of a latter-day Caesar, now his profile was becoming more patrician, his eyes hooded and predatory, and his armour seemed far less of an affectation than it once had. There was something thoroughly rapacious about the way he watched Osic and Thirsh carry on down the Great Market thoroughfare, the string of zebras behind them. It was the expression of a man denied his spoils and already scheming to regain them. Cabal did not care for it at all, and put part of his intellect to the task of devising ways to dispose elegantly of Corde should he prove troublesome.

Having placed an abeyant death sentence on Corde’s head, he turned his attention to Bose, who, for his part, looked vapid and without a shred of malice or machinatory instinct about him, a soft toy in the great department store of life. In short, just the same as he always did. He seemed to bimble around the Dreamlands like somebody at a museum exhibit of how frightful foreigners are. He would look, and gasp, and be appalled, then go home, have a boiled egg for tea and be utterly untouched by what he had seen in any lasting sense.

Inevitably, Cabal wondered if he, too, was changing in appearance. If the mechanism was one of altered perceptions, then it was unlikely; he was as sure as he could reasonably be that he was of the same mind and worldview as he had been the day that the Fear Institute had first come to call. It’s difficult to be objective about the subjective, but Cabal maintained assorted mental checks and balances to confirm that he was reasonably sure his mentality remained recognisable, and that he had not gone inconveniently mad. As Descartes would have been quick to tell him, his perceptions could not necessarily be trusted, but – then again – if he was so mad that he didn’t realise he was utterly mad, it was academic anyway. He would have failed in his life, and that was that. He could just get on with learning to enjoy institutional food and the sure knowledge that electricity makes your eyes go black.

Still, things were progressing, at least. They had a faint idea where to go next, to speak with someone else who was probably dead, who might not be able to help them whether he breathed or not, and who might be able to direct them to somewhere that might or might not hold the Phobic Animus, but which was ludicrously dangerous in either case. Cabal had a sense that the whole expedition had long since taken on the character of certain doom, but was dooming them all so very, very slowly that it was difficult to get upset about it. It was like travelling by glacier to be hanged.

True, they had also lost two men, but neither had been him, so that was of limited concern.

Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 3 Azathoth, the Demon Sultan

Azathoth is as huge as anything (except Yog-Sothoth, who is as huge as everything), but do you know, O best beloved, he’s as mindless as . . . Well, there’s the thing. Nothing is as mindless as Azathoth (who is sometimes called the ‘Demon Sultan’, although never to his face, but then he doesn’t have a face). Think of the most stupid thing you can. A flatworm? No, that’s cleverer than Azathoth. A rock? No, that’s still brighter than he. A Member of Parliament? Shocking as it may seem, O best beloved, far more obtuse even than that. Azathoth is so cosmically stupid that he saps the intelligence from those who see him, big old chaos beyond angled space that he is. Why, if you were to take the biggest fool in the world to see him, the fool’s wits would still steam out of his ears. And if you took the thousand cleverest people in the world, their minds would spill into the void, like water from overturned goblets, but all their cleverness would not even dampen the burning void of Azathoth’s mindlessness. Still, it’s fun to try.

Chapter 11

IN WHICH IT TRANSPIRES THAT DYLATH-LEEN IS NOT VERY NICE

Captain Lochery was at sea, it transpired, and they therefore had to make alternative arrangements to go westwards from Baharna. This was how they came to be sharing a table with two merchants swathed in heavy black robes that left only their faces exposed, an unfortunate oversight in Cabal’s opinion. The merchants smiled and chuckled and smirked and giggled and rubbed their heavily bejewelled gloved hands and tittered and were so transparently evil that he spent much of the time watching his colleagues for the moment when the penny must surely drop. After almost an hour of oleaginous dickering, Shadrach and the others were all set to buy passage aboard the merchants’ black galley. Wearily Cabal realised that he would have to save the day again. Luckily, he could do it by being monumentally rude.

‘So, gentlemen,’ he said to the merchants, ‘you undertake to transport we four to Dylath-Leen in safety and comfort. That is the deal, yes?’

‘Yes, O most perspicacious one,’ said one of the merchants – it barely mattered which – smiling and nodding and smiling some more.

‘Really, Mr Cabal,’ said Shadrach sharply, ‘you haven’t said a word in an age, and now you wish to be involved in the negotiation. I have the matter well in hand, I assure you.’

‘Oh,’ said Cabal, chastened. ‘My apologies, Herr Shadrach. Forgive my interruption. Please, carry on . . .’ he leaned back in his chair and then added, quietly but clearly ‘. . . selling us into slavery.’

‘What?’ said Corde. He looked at Cabal in surprise, then swung his gaze to the merchants, his expression hardening. He did not much care for Cabal’s company, but he knew his instincts to be good.

‘These creatures before you, and I say “creatures” advisedly, mean to capture us all and use us as slaves. At the conclusion of your discussion they will call for wine to celebrate the agreement. The wine will, of course, contain enough soporifics to stun a shoggoth. The intention is that, when we wake, we shall find ourselves aboard the fetid black galley, which – incidentally – is safe and comfortable only for these . . . people. Finally, we shall be dumped upon the Moon. Yes!’ (He said it quickly to overrule Shadrach’s dismissive ‘Oh!’) ‘The Moon is a viable environment in the Dreamlands, and it is inhabited by these . . . people’s employers, who are white and toad-like and hideous. They get through slaves quite rapidly, by a dual process of attrition and peckishness, hence a steady demand for replacements. It says little for the acuity of the Dreamlands’ citizens that the merchants of the black galleys have been plying this trade for millennia, using precisely the feeble technique we see this evening, and people still fall for it.’

‘Is all lies,’ said one merchant, cheerfully.

‘We has deck quoits,’ said the other, happily.

‘No doubt you do,’ said Cabal, climbing to his feet, ‘and that is another excellent reason not to travel with you. Good night, gentlemen,’ he said to Shadrach, Bose and Corde. ‘I shall see you in the morning, when we shall look for a real captain who has a real chance of getting us to Dylath-Leen. If I do not see you, I shall assume you have decided to ignore my advice, have accepted the offer of these . . .’ he couldn’t bring himself to flatter them with people, given he knew full well that, beneath their robes, they were not even faintly human ‘. . . these things, and that you are bound for an interesting, if short and miserable, lunar experience.’ With that, he left.

On one side of the table Shadrach, Bose and Corde turned to regard the two merchants with manifest suspicion.

‘We has deck quoits,’ repeated the second merchant, blissfully, a sweetener that had always sealed the deal in the past.

‘We’ll try the docks tomorrow,’ said Corde to Shadrach, and left the table. Bose followed quickly, and a moment later, with some reluctance, Shadrach.

The two merchants sat smiling but nonplussed, looking around the room as if for an explanation as to why their infallible ruse had failed. After a few moments, two adventurers walked up to them, fine, swashbuckling types with chiselled jaws and declamatory voices.

‘Ho there, sirrah!’ cried one, putting a knee-booted foot upon one of the recently vacated stools and resting his forearm on the raised knee. ‘Rumour has it that if a couple of bullyboys like meself and me companion here –’

‘Ho-ho!’ boomed his barrel-chested companion, fists on hips.

‘– should seek passage to Dylath-Leen at the turn of the next tide, then you’re the swarthy coves we should be talking to!’ He grinned, and his teeth gleamed as brightly as the golden ring in his ear.

The merchants were only swarthy by dint of a layer of preservative upon the stolen faces they wore, faces that had once graced the skulls of two previous passengers. The chemical layer contracted over time, giving the faces a manic rictus that people simply interpreted as the open smile of an honest visage.

‘We has deck quoits,’ said the second merchant, gleefully, the only phrase in human speech it knew.

‘Done then!’ roared the first adventurer, confident that good voice projection and a waxed chest would see him through every predicament. He shook the hand of each merchant in turn, failing to notice that their arms each had two elbow joints. ‘Done, and double done! We sail with the morrow’s tide!’

‘Ho-ho!’ boomed his barrel-chested companion, all unaware that in a week he would be giant Moon toad food.

Next morning discovered Cabal and the others – they in a variety of moods from indifferent to disgruntled, he supremely unconcerned – negotiating passage aboard a weathered but serviceable caravel to Dylath-Leen. There was a clear advantage in travelling aboard the lean and rakish ship in that she would make significantly better time than a fat cog hybrid like Lochery’s Edge of Dusk, a coastal vessel pressed into sea-crossing journeys with a few alterations to hull and sheets that ranged from canny to optimistic. The captain of the Audaine, Wush Oleander, was short and fiery, and came with an unusual prosthetic, apparently an entry requirement for the job. In his case, it was a scrimshaw left hand, beautifully carved to show a tiny vignette of a screaming Captain Oleander dangling by the stump of his wrist from the jaws of a great sea serpent. Bose was particularly taken with it, and plied him with questions about the event, and whether Oleander was filled with an obsessive desire to pursue the sea serpent to the four corners of the Dreamlands, seeking vengeance, but Oleander just looked at him askance, and said, no, these things happened and you just had to accept them. Bose nodded sagely, digesting this shimmering truth, then asked about meals.

After passage to Dylath-Leen had been agreed, and their few belongings secured, Cabal and Corde stood by the rail as the ship made ready to depart on the running tide. They had little to say to one another, and instead watched the docks and the other ships departing the Oriab Island. One was a large black galley that slid by, its ranks of oars working strongly, silently, and with inhuman synchronisation. On deck, two merchants, swathed in black, played quoits. As a breeze blew toward the Audaine, it seemed to carry a scrap of sound with it, a voice raised in righteous indignation, apparently somewhere below.

Corde frowned as he listened intently, then said to Cabal, ‘Did somebody just shout, “Release us at once, you varlets!”?’

Cabal watched the black galley glide by and out past the harbour mole, a great breakwater of natural and worked stone. ‘No,’ he said, and went below.

The journey back across the sea was largely uneventful. They happened upon the sunken city again and, as before, the crew became anxious and hastened to clear it as quickly as they could. This time, however, they crossed it at dusk, and during the night the ship was paced by something that never came closer than a hundred yards off the starboard beam, churning the sea into a phosphorescent glow as it went. Captain Oleander stood by the wheelsman for five long hours, quietly warning him to hold his heading and to change course neither closer nor further away from their submarine shadow. Eventually, whatever it was dived deep, leaving the surface to the waves and the white horses, and the Audaine as she sped away from those unhallowed waters. Oleander stayed watching until the sky started to lighten in the east, and only then did he go to his bunk.

Cabal had little interest in such things: he was entirely of Captain Lochery’s liver here. If a sea monster attacked the ship, there would be some screaming, men falling off rigging and the other usual accoutrements of such an attack, and then they would all die and that would be that. As he would have no say in the outcome, he failed to see any reason why he should spend time fussing about it. Besides, he had a much more immediate and more intriguing happenstance upon which to apply his intellect.

He had been waiting for Ercusides to die again, but Ercusides hadn’t, and Cabal found this perplexing in the extreme. The agent he had used to bring some sort of life back to the slightly crumpled skull had been a long shot, and he had been pleasantly surprised when it had not only worked but worked magnificently. From past experience, the best he had been hoping for was a few sepulchral sentences from Beyond the Veil, yet instead Ercusides had been loquacious to the point of actually being rather exasperating. His personality seemed to be much as it had been in life, which was unfortunate but there it was. Cabal had not even had to mutter the mandatory incantation to complete the ritual, indicating that perhaps in the Dreamlands ‘mandatory’ was not so terrifically mandatory.

Every day or so, he would open his Gladstone bag and be unsurprised, if increasingly perturbed, that cold ghost fire was still rolling off the skull and that the spirit of Ercusides was still there, still aggravatingly chatty.

‘Is that you, Cabal?’ the skull demanded, as Cabal took it out of his bag and placed it on the small table in the cramped cabin the four men shared. The others were up on deck at the moment, taking the air, and – by the bye – watching out for more sea monsters, although they would never admit that.

‘How did you know I had opened the bag?’ asked Cabal. ‘I was very quiet.’

‘I could feel the light on me,’ said Ercusides. ‘Do you think I might be getting my sight back?’

Cabal looked at the mummified eyelids over the empty sockets. ‘No,’ he said. He leaned back in his chair and regarded the flaming skull thoughtfully. ‘Whatever shall I do with you, Ercusides? Once upon a time I would have dropped you over the side and been done with you. That would have been the convenient thing to do, for me at least. These days I am minded that you are only talking now because of me, and that I am, in some tiresomely moral way, responsible for you. So,’ he leaned forward and rested his chin on his hands on the tabletop, regarding the skull, nose to gap-where-the-nose-used-to-be, ‘what am I to do with you?’

Ercusides was silent for a time, and then said, soberly and without resentment, as one learned man speaking to another, ‘Shall I ever know rest again?’

‘I do not know. You should have returned already, but the Dreamlands seemingly amplify my powers, and do so unsystematically. I could destroy your skull, but I strongly doubt it would do any good. The bone is only an anchor for the fire, and the fire is you. You would still be here, but in nowhere near as convenient a form. But tell me, you were an aesthete and a hermit in life. Is this new existence really so execrable to you?’

‘No, and that I find execrable. But . . . I have time to think now. Nor am I totally isolated while I still have one sense left to me.’ A pause, and then, ‘Ask me in a year, Cabal. Do that for me.’

‘If I am still alive myself in a year,’ said Cabal, ‘you have my word.’

Where Hlanith was virile and lively, and Baharna was exotic and vivacious, Dylath-Leen was built from basalt and made no further claims. The Audaine glided slowly into port soon after dawn, having sighted land too far to the south and hugged the coast back to the north until it found the city. Captain Oleander made no apologies for the navigational misstep, pointing out that changing course at the correct time would have made them cross paths with the thing in the sea, in which case they would probably all be dead by now. Given that as an alternative, a few extra hours afloat seemed far preferable.

Even having arrived at the city, the event was not one of great joy for crew or passengers. Their first sight of the docks lined with black galleys drew a pall over any such positive feelings. Oleander cut a wad of Ogrothi baccy and chewed it slowly as he eyed the ships with undisguised jaundice. ‘Never seen so many,’ he muttered. under his breath. ‘I’m guessin’ we won’t be callin’ at Dylath-Leen agin fore too long.’ On the decks, they could see figures swathed in black robes, their gloved hands glinting with rare yet vulgar gems, strolling around, or conversing with one another in little gaggles, or playing deck quoits with an obvious ignorance of the rules, such was the depth of their depravity.

He found his dock at the far end of the wharf, as far away from the ominous vessels as he could. Even as they were tying up to the broad bollards along the dockside, Oleander was already engaged in conversations with other captains who had congregated nearby. Cabal, who was leaning on the rail, was able to make out the gist of the news, and it did not make comforting hearing. The scuttlebutt – a marine term for ‘gossip’ that might amuse or bemuse the casual listener depending on personal interpretation – was that Dylath-Leen was in serious trouble. The council, which had always maintained at least a cosmetic distrust of the black galleys, had suffered a reversal when all its leading members disappeared in a single night. The lesser members, all men of luxuriant tastes and representative of the city’s trading guilds, had slid into the senior executive roles aboard a carpet of greased palms and their first act had been to revoke the limitations upon the black galleys, imposed some years earlier after a previous slavery scandal. There had been little surprise among the citizenry that the councillors’ luxurious tastes had subsequently been gratified to a disgusting level by nameless benefactors. Many people were finding excuses to leave the city, but since the captains of the guard had all been replaced with foreign mercenaries, it was becoming more and more difficult to get through the gates.

Oleander walked back up the gangplank, scowling. He saw Cabal and said, ‘You mayn’t want to be leaving the ship at this place after all, Master Cabal.’

‘It doesn’t seem very friendly here, Captain,’ agreed Cabal. He was thinking of what inevitably lay ahead: there would be a slow erosion of liberties within Dylath-Leen, and then, when the inhabitants were prepared to accept anything because they were permitted to do nothing, the patrons of the black galleys would regard this little patch of ground as safe enough for them to visit from their lunar cities. They would bring with them their unholy appetites and exercise them upon an unwilling populace. After that, it could only be a matter of months at most before Dylath-Leen joined the Dreamlands’ slowly growing list of abandoned and shunned places.

By this point, the Fear Institute contingent had appeared on deck, carrying their small bags of belongings and eager to disembark. The captain and Cabal’s sour expressions gave them some small inkling that they were going to be missing out on hugs and lei. ‘Is there something awry, Cabal?’ asked Corde.

‘Oh, I say! Look at all those black boats!’ cried Bose, inadvertently answering the question. ‘And look! There are more coming!’

Swearing an oath salty enough to make Dagon purse his lips, Oleander ran aft and looked to the harbour mouth. Bose had spoken nothing more than the truth. Perhaps two miles off, three black galleys in line astern were heading implacably towards Dylath-Leen. ‘What are they doing?’ he demanded of nobody in particular. ‘That’s madness! They’ll never get by the gates beam to beam like that.’ Then he understood, and his face grew pale beneath the tan. He ran to the rail and shouted down to the gossiping captains there gathered, ‘To your ships! To your ships! The devils mean to blockade the harbour!’

Abruptly all the serious standing around and muttering ominously at one another turned into a mad and undignified dash back to their vessels. Even as they did so, Cabal saw that the city guard, in full mail and faceless behind their helmets, was approaching the docks at a lumbering charge. They ran oddly, as if their knees weren’t in quite the right places for their greaves. Not for the first time, he wished he had access to something with rather more range than a rapier. ‘Captain—’ he began.

‘I see ’em, Master Cabal,’ snapped Oleander. ‘Cast off, fore and aft! Cut the lines, damn you!’

Axes thudded and the mooring ropes parted. The gangplank, forgotten in the frenzy of intent, fell into the water between the ship’s side and the dock as she started to move away, pushed back fiercely by crewmen wielding poles.

‘Herr Corde,’ said Cabal. He was watching several of the guards still heading straight for them, despite the widening gap between the ship and the quay. ‘Draw your sword.’ He drew his own, his eyes never leaving the charging guards.

Corde frowned at him, followed his gaze and scoffed. ‘You’re joking, Cabal. The gap’s twenty feet if it’s an inch. They couldn’t make it even if they weren’t weighed down in armour. Relax. They’ll end up drowning themselves.’

‘If they were men, I would agree,’ said Cabal, as the first guard reached the quayside and, without hesitation, threw himself towards the Audaine.

In a cool, rational world, the guardsman would have described a graceless parabola into the harbour waters and – wrapped in steel knitting as he was – made swift progress to the sea bed. The Dreamlands, however, do not present a cool, rational world, instead favouring a sequence of events such as the guard leaping the gap as if catapulted, crashing heavily into the rail without even a grunt, and then hurdling it easily, drawing its – we can no longer dignify such a creature with his – longsword, and looking for somebody to carve up with it.

Cabal backed away as the guard swung its helmeted head this way and that. ‘Herr Corde? How much provocation do you need?’ Corde said nothing, but let his cloak fall from his shoulders to reveal the leather armour beneath. The sound of his sword sliding from its scabbard was enough to engage the guard’s attention.

There was another dull, gruntless thump against the rail, and then another, but this one was followed by a splash: the Audaine was finally out of jumping distance for even these inhuman creatures.

The first guard spoke, but it was an unconvincing attempt, full of gurglings and basso profundo boomings from deep within. It tried again, and this time managed to produce something like human speech, although it was as convincing a rendition as a dog saying, ‘Sausages.’

‘Ship . . . impounded . . . by authority of . . . impounded . . .’ It swung its head from side to side, a poor impersonation of a man looking around. Cabal’s misgivings deepened: however the guard was sensing them, it was not through eyes.

‘Ye’ll step off my ship, sir!’ demanded Oleander. He carried a polished falchion that Cabal had assumed uncharitably was for show. Now drawn and glinting in the weak sunlight, it looked far more like a device for creative hacking.

‘Ship impounded . . . order of . . . council . . . Dylath-Leen . . .’ Without allowing even the shortest moment for a reply, it launched into the attack.

Oleander met the slashing blow with a fast parry of his falchion that struck sparks. He thrust the guard’s sword arm to one side and shoved it back with his free hand to gain a little space. Cabal, meanwhile, was weighing up the wider situation. All along the dock, the other manned ships were trying to cut loose while their crews engaged the wave of bestial guards. A swift glance over his shoulder showed that the three galleys were close by the mole and all had their tillers hard over, swinging across to block the harbour mouth. Then, to add to his rapidly populating list of concerns, he saw that some of the black galleys already in dock were moving out to engage the ships that had managed to cast off. They were in a rat trap and, his mind whirling through alternative plans, Cabal could see no way out of it. Then he noticed the second guard who had jumped, painfully hauling itself on to the rail, and noted with satisfaction that there was at least one small victory he could achieve.

‘Corde! Help the captain, you idiot!’ he shouted, as he ran for the second guard. ‘You don’t need to be invited!’

Corde, who at some deep and very English level was indeed waiting for an invitation to fight – a slap with a gauntlet or a strongly worded note, perhaps – shuddered into action. He ran forward and stood shoulder to shoulder with Oleander, jumping around a bit as if preparing to receive a serve in a friendly game of tennis. ‘Get behind it!’ said Oleander, angrily, as Corde ate into his room for manoeuvre. ‘Stab it in the back!’

While Corde wrestled with his sense of fair play, Cabal had reached the rail at a charge. The second guard had just got its head above it when it found a rapier waiting for it. Cabal struck hard and precisely, the tip of the blade going neatly through the left eye of the guard’s helmet. Cabal doubted he could blind it, but hoped it had something precious to it stored inside its head; a brain would be lovely, but an important nerve ganglion would suffice.

The guard made a sloppy wet noise as the blade went in, but Cabal could not tell if it was the sound of important flesh being parted or a vocalisation in whatever slithy collection of dripping, slobbering and burbling sounds it pleased the guard to regard as its native language. Then the guard shook its head angrily, as if getting a length of steel through the eye was a mild irritation on par with a snapped shoelace. Cabal realised that more robust measures than merely stabbing it through the head would be necessary.

The guard managed to get both hands on the rail and said something that sounded like a blocked sink clearing, yet still maintained the tonal je ne sais quoi that allows one with decent linguistic skills – and Cabal’s were more than decent – to know that a frightful insult has just been uttered. Cabal did not tolerate insult, especially from burbling things that refused to die easily. Lying near at hand was a discarded axe that had been used mere minutes ago to part the hawsers. Cabal left his rapier in the guard’s eye, took up the axe and severed the guard’s wrists with two well-placed blows ’twixt gauntlet and bracer. The guard made a new bubbling sound, this time denoting surprise, and fell backwards. Cabal snatched his rapier from where he’d left it parked in the guard’s head, and favoured the falling creature with a humourless smile as it vanished from sight, hitting the water a moment later.

On the deck, the two orphaned hands started to crawl away, presumably looking for a hiding place where they could plot their revenge. Cabal picked them up by the lames across the gauntlet backs as if handling particularly feisty crabs, and tossed them into the harbour. They could do their plotting in the mud, as far as he was concerned.

‘It won’t die!’ Corde’s shout, generously scented with more panic than rational concern, drew Cabal’s attention. Oleander was barely holding his own in a vicious exchange of blows with the first guard, while Corde stabbed it repeatedly in the back with the enthusiasm of a masochist poking a wasps’ nest. Cabal returned his rapier to its scabbard, recovered the axe from where he had left it embedded in the rail with a pool of whey-like blood around it, and went to assist.

‘You fail to employ the scientific method, Herr Corde,’ he said, as he approached. ‘After sufficient experiments to confirm your initial observation – in this case, that stabbing is an ineffective strategy – one should move on to new hypotheses. This creature is concentrating entirely upon the captain, perhaps because his falchion is a slashing weapon. Does the creature regard being slashed as more deleterious to its general operation than being stabbed? Let us experiment.’ So saying, he used the end of the axe to tip the guard’s helmet forward a little, exposing flesh with the colour, consistency and wet texture of fresh blancmange. Then he drew back the axe and decapitated the guard.

The guard was definitely surprised. Not killed, or apparently wounded to any significant degree, but certainly surprised. It turned to Cabal, the space over its neck giving every intimation of being very surprised.

‘There,’ said Cabal, pleased. It was always gratifying to see a hypothesis verified. It was less gratifying to have a headless and angry monstrosity bear down on one when its sword has twice the reach of one’s axe. ‘Some assistance here?’ asked Cabal, as he backed quickly away.

Oleander needed no second prompting. Aiming at the top of the shoulder as the guard turned away from him, he swung the falchion with great force. The links in the mail separated easily – apparently such work went to the lowest bidders even in the Dreamlands – and the blade almost reached the armpit before running out of energy. The guard’s right arm flopped down, boneless and skinless, less grown than extruded. Oleander pursed his lips, like an artist considering where to make the next brush stroke, and hacked at the thin sliver holding the arm on. It fell, the sword clattering free. After a moment, the hand started to drag the arm off behind it as it sought shelter.

Oleander and Cabal laid into the defenceless hulk of the guard, smashing it down with heavy blows until it toppled, then pounding its form until pale liquescent filth flowed from the ragged sleeve and the neck of the mail bernie, and the armour sank until it was empty.

‘What . . . what was that?’ said Corde, his eyes wide and wild. ‘What sort of creature?’

‘Something cheap and expendable,’ said Cabal, but his attention was elsewhere. The trap was still closing. The fight on the Audaine’s deck had taken only seconds, and the crew who had moved to help were already back at their stations, trying to escape the wave of galleys that was nearing them. It was plainly a hopeless endeavour, however: the oars of the galleys swept mechanically and relentlessly, while the Audaine could make little steerage with her sails furled, despite the crew’s hard sculling.

It was for the captain to call, and he stood watching the oncoming galleys as he considered the options. ‘Captain,’ said Cabal, quietly, at his side, ‘if you give up the ship, you and your men will be slaves within the hour, and dead within a month. I intend to fight.’ He drew his rapier, and awaited Oleander’s decision.

Oleander took a moment to reach it, not least because every reasonable outcome ended in death. All that mattered now was choosing which particular path was most acceptable. ‘Men!’ he shouted. ‘Stand by to repel boarders!’

It is a strange moment when one realises that one’s life is now measured in minutes, and that whatever great plans might have been laid are now all moot and pointless and – in the great burning clarity of the instant – trivial. Cabal did not know what the others were thinking of, neither did he care. All he knew was that the course of his life had long been nothing more than a list of calculated risks, and that, finally, his luck had run out. All the work, all the hardships, all the sacrifices – both personal and of livestock – had been for naught; his work would never see fruition. He would never see her again. But that was not his fault, and he regretted nothing.

He gave the situation one last appraisal before committing to what would likely be the last decision of his life. Behind him, Shadrach tried to look dignified, but was leaning on the mainmast to support him as his knees turned to water. Bose had given up any pretence of bravery and was huddled in the angle between the quarterdeck steps and the rail, trying to will himself into invisibility. Corde held his sword in his hand, and was looking at it with new eyes, as if realising that the skill with which he might wield it would mark the difference between a fast and dishonourable death, or one drawn out a few seconds longer. It would mean at least that he hadn’t died meekly and mildly, a sacrifice to alien gods.

Oleander and his men were armed and ready, facing the enemy with determination on their faces and not a whit of hope in their hearts.

Cabal felt something fluttering in his chest, and applied himself to crushing down the rising panic. Panic would only result in a confused, meaningless death. He would remain calm and rational to the end. The Phobic Animus would not have him for its prey in his last moments. He would continue being his own man to the final second. He could expect nothing less of himself. And so he stood, resolute and perhaps even a little heroic, as one of the approaching black galleys suddenly threw its tiller hard over, turned to port, and smashed into the forward side of the next galley.

Cabal blinked in astonishment, and as he blinked, so did the Dreamlands. There was a sense of waking from a nightmare, only to find oneself still in it. The harbour, the ships, Dylath-Leen, even the sky and the sea, seemed to flutter indecisively between possible meanings and the collateral paradigms. Cabal’s sword became a pistol, then a sword, then some sort of extraordinary long gun, and then it was a sword again. The Dreamlands were changing, but in awkward, inelegant, stuttering steps. He suddenly realised that they weren’t changing nearly so much as being changed. Somewhere, a great consciousness had placed them under the lens of its awareness, and the very act of being observed was making their reality waver, like a thumb flicking through a mail-order catalogue. He looked up, as if expecting an eye of cosmic proportion to be staring at him through the blueness and the high clouds.

Then he heard the screams, and around him the world gelled back into something similar to what it had been. Now, however, one of the attacking galleys was up to the bowsprit in the hull of its neighbour, and the wounded ship was screaming.

But, then, the whole world was screaming. Everyone, even the galley slavers in their shapeless black robes were looking to the sky and screaming, or howling, or sobbing. For the blue morning sky had burned back in a ragged hole, through which could be seen the Dreamlands’ Moon, and the Moon, too, was burning.

Chapter 12

IN WHICH THERE ARE MONSTERS AND CATS, WHICH IS TO SAY, VERY MUCH THE SAME THING

‘What is happening?’ bellowed Oleander, over the fearful cries and the rising note of a strengthening wind. ‘What have those devils done?’

By devils, he meant the masters of the black galleys, but even a glance was sufficient to assure anyone that not only were they not responsible for these new phenomena, but they were even more horrified by them than the humans of Dylath-Leen. The slavers tore away their stolen faces and threw them aside, pulling back their tagelmusts, thin white tendrils, the colour of cave fish, unfurling to undulate at the Moon like weed on the seabed. Then they screamed at the sight of the burning Moon, ‘Ph’nglui k’ytholo mfagnul oseer’akff!’ – a phrase that translates to something far shorter in English.

The men who looked upon these horrors felt their sanity shift, and minds broke in that moment. Corde gave a shriek like a terrified child, and backed away, shaking his head to deny the existence from which his eyes could not be drawn, Bose still lay bundled up in the corner of the deck, his shoulders heaving with his sobs, and Shadrach made no noise at all. Cabal looked around to find the cadaverous Shadrach, and found him clutching futilely at his throat. There, the first guard’s severed arm had him, the great gauntleted hand almost encircling his neck. Shadrach made no sound, but his face was dark and his eyes were starting from his head. Cabal started to run towards the stricken man, but he knew that it was already too late. The hand was not merely strangling Shadrach: it was crushing his neck. Cabal was only a matter of two yards from Shadrach when there was a percussive sound of collapsing cartilage, and the crunch of failing bone. Shadrach’s face became slack, and he fell back against the rail, then over it. Cabal reached it just in time to see the splash and Shadrach’s discreetly expensive shoes with the curled toes disappear beneath the water.

Cursing at an avoidable loss – he should have dealt with the arm after those limbs’ tendency for awkward autonomy had already been demonstrated – he turned back, but the tableau had barely changed, beyond becoming fractionally worse. The fires on the Moon had changed from wide clouds into distinct red points of light, indicating a series of simultaneous explosions across the surface. They showed against the pale lunar rock like buboes on a dead man’s face, and Cabal guessed that these were the cities of the Moon things, the creatures whose agents were even now standing awestruck, venting glutinous polysyllables of arcane vulgarity.

He went to Oleander and shook him roughly by the arm until he gained his attention. ‘The sky,’ said Oleander, a vacant look of shock in his eyes. ‘The sky is broken.’

‘So it is,’ said Cabal, pointedly ignoring it, for the wise man avoids falling through the ice by never setting foot upon it. ‘Oleander, you have to pull yourself together. The slavers are directionless at present, but we don’t know how long that will last. We must press the advantage while they are disrupted.’

But Oleander would only murmur, ‘The sky . . . the sky . . .’ with a terrible expression of haunted loss upon his face, so Cabal hit him, which worked very well. He suddenly focused on Cabal like a startled drunk, and was drawing back his blade when Cabal grabbed his sword hand in one of his own, Oleander’s jaw in the other, and shouted in his face, ‘Time, Captain! We are running out of time. Burning skies and exploding moons are all very well, but aliens with a mass of bavette for faces are our more immediate concern.’

Oleander shook himself free of Cabal’s grip and tried to rally the forces of his routed sanity, searching for a standard by which to gather them. He settled on pasta. ‘What is this “bavette“ of which you speak?’

‘It’s a form of spaghetti.’ Cabal could see the answers to Oleander’s next questions were in all likelihood going to be ‘Pasta’, ‘Italy’, and ‘A country’, so he cut sharply past such quizzical distractions with, ‘Of no importance at the moment. Action, however, is. The creatures are defenceless and vulnerable – you will never get such a good chance to kill the slavers again.’

Finally, the captain’s wits had their standard by which to regroup. The black galleys had long been distrusted among many of the races of men in the Dreamlands, but never before had their true nature been so publicly exposed, and never before had the opportunity for vengeance upon them been so advantageous. This would be a time of righteous glory, with a decent prospect of looting thrown in. It was too magnificent for any man with blood in his veins to resist. Oleander’s blood was red and hot, and he had a strong, no, irresistible urge to see what ran in the slavers’ veins. With a shout that overrode his crews’ terrors, he rushed forward at their head, throwing grappling lines to draw in the nearest galley, a vessel that so recently they would have done anything to avoid.

Cabal didn’t know what their chances were. If they died, at least they would be distracting the slavers as they did so, allowing him and his two remaining charges some precious time to make good their escape. The few inhuman guards scattered about the wharf were as fascinated and discommoded by the destruction of their home cities as the slavers, but how long that would last, he could not say. Neither did he care to bet his future safety against it being more than a few minutes. An alternative presented itself; if they got on to the northern harbour wall, they could follow it around until they were on the mole, then cut across and circumnavigate the edge of the city wall. Yes, there was a tower to protect the city against invaders performing exactly the reciprocal manoeuvre, but with luck they would be staring skywards with gormless expressions upon their pasta-like faces long enough. It was a gamble, but a lesser one than hoping to make it all the way through the city unchallenged.

Corde was staring fixedly at the hull of the black galley that had been torn open by its neighbour. Exposed within lay folds of brain-like tissue into which the shafts of the oars sank, secured with collar plates riveted directly into the living mass. It was screaming, a thin, ululating whine like an unappreciated shaman, but in such volume that it set the teeth on edge. Between the flesh and the shattered wood of the hull flapped thin leaves of a metal that seemed like lead one moment yet glistened with a rainbow of colours the next, colours not to be found anywhere upon the electromagnetic spectrum. The thin layer of metal had been placed there to keep the galley thing’s compartment hermetically sealed; now that it was exposed to the air, its flesh boiled and melted, and the creature screamed endlessly without pause or attenuation.

Cabal quickly surmised that shaking Corde to gain his attention was too time-consuming, too likely to fail, and would involve spending far too much time within his personal space, so he just went directly to his tried and tested supplemental plan. It was more of a punch than a slap, but it proved as efficacious as it had with Oleander, dragging Corde back from the slippery slope of cosmic horror while simultaneously allowing Cabal to alleviate some of his growing frustration with the situation.

‘Come along!’ Cabal barked at Corde, as if he were a recalcitrant schoolboy on a day trip. ‘No time for dawdling.’ Without waiting for a response beyond an expression of outraged astonishment, he ran to Bose’s side and pulled the sobbing man to his feet.

‘Where’s Shadrach?’ demanded Corde, as he followed.

‘Mr Shadrach’s dead,’ said Bose, in a pitiful, small voice. ‘It got him. It killed him. He fell into the water.’

Corde tried to say something, but it failed in his throat.

‘It was an arm,’ added Bose, pathetically and parenthetically.

Cabal looked at Bose, his expression entirely neutral. Then he said, ‘Herr Bose is correct. Shadrach is dead. The loss of the money he carried may present a problem later. Currently, however, we do not have time to discuss that, or what a splendid chap he was, or whatever other reason is making you stand there impersonating a guppy, Herr Corde. We must be gone immediately.’

The wind was rising, and both the Audaine and the galley to which she was grappled were being driven to the lee shore, close by the end of the wharf and the start of the sea wall. All they had to do was wait a couple of minutes, and they would be in position to jump ashore and make off. Corde started for the quarterdeck, but Cabal stopped him, and instead they went into Oleander’s cabin, a much shorter jump from its bow windows down to the shallows. It also meant they didn’t have to watch Oleander and his men engaged in a loathsome, nightmarish fight with the inhuman slavers, a fight rich with blood and ichors, desperation and despair. Finally, Cabal’s plan furnished him with an opportunity to repair their financial misfortunes by breaking into the captain’s strongbox and stealing a quantity of gold coin.

Corde watched him with evident disapproval, but did not stop him. He only said, ‘The captain’s been good to us. He’s out there right now, fighting for his life.’

Cabal finished stowing a heavy purse in his Gladstone, and said, ‘He will shortly be dead, and won’t care. Or he will have defeated the slavers and will be in a position to loot their ship, in which case the loss of this footling quantity of gold will be galling but hardly devastating. In either event, our need is greater than his.’ He paused as the ship shuddered, and grated against the pebbles of the harbour beach. ‘Ah-ha. Our cue to run away like cowards and thieves.’

The great escape was miserable, wet and tiring. They trudged to freedom. Bose and Corde walked with their heads bowed, the better to ignore the torn sky and the wounded Moon. It seemed that lunar cities had decent fire-fighting arrangements, as the red dots grew fewer by the minute. Presumably even as the three men waded through the shallows by the sea wall, and marched with squelching steps up the mole, bloated white Moon toads in brass helmets were hosing down their predictably Cyclopean buildings. They would have to do it themselves, as it was hard to believe their slaves would be in any hurry to help. They would be standing by with space marshmallows on sticks, having the one and only good time they could expect as thralls of the toad things.

Cabal kept his head up and disregarded the heavenly apocalypse as easily as more mundane folk might disregard an unremarkable cloud. He had seen inferno and tempest, and had not only looked into the abyss but the abyss had looked into him, and then made disparaging comments. Some charred troposphere and a smoke-damaged Moon were hardly worth a footnote.

The guards in the watchtower were not of the same liver – should they have livers at all, which seemed unlikely – and were howling skywards with their facial tentacles in sinusoidal agitation. As a race, it seemed they were not used to suffering reverses, and would probably be sobbing into their beer analogue for many months to come.

Cabal’s party followed the path around the outside of the wall, then stayed close to it until they came to a tumble of rocks that gave them cover to break away and head into the countryside. Even when they got a safe distance from the wall, however, they did not speak, Bose and Corde because they were subdued by what they had so recently experienced, and Cabal because he was Cabal and felt little need to jabber incontinently for the sake of conversation.

It was only when they had walked for some hours that Corde broke the silence. ‘The expedition is a disaster,’ he said. ‘We have lost one of our number, and who knows what else we may have lost?’ He looked to the sky, but the rent in the atmosphere had healed with only a dispersed, jagged pink line to show it had ever been there, and even this was slowly dissipating.

Cabal stopped walking and leaned against a dry-stone wall bordering a farmer’s field. ‘You mean Shadrach’s money?’

‘No! No, I do not!’ Corde was speechless with rage for a moment, then blurted, ‘I mean our minds, our very souls. Why did we ever come here?’

‘The Phobic Animus,’ said Bose, quietly, settling himself on a boulder by the road.

‘Yes, I . . . I know that, Bose. I don’t mean . . .’ Corde shook his head, tired and defeated. ‘We must go back.’

‘I agree,’ said Cabal.

‘You would,’ said Bose. Both Cabal and Corde looked at him with some surprise. Finding himself suddenly under observation, Bose couldn’t meet their eyes, so he addressed the turf at his feet instead. ‘You have made it very plain from the earliest stages of this venture that you thought us foolish and our quest pointless. I have no doubt that you’ve only stuck with us so far because of your own curiosity about the Dreamlands. We were foolish to leave the Silver Key in your hands, but I think . . . we all thought . . . that by your own lights you were honourable. Well, I release you from any remaining responsibilities. Take Mr Corde, and get back to the waking world. There is no use you both dying for a cause you do not believe in.’ He straightened his legs and slid off the boulder to land on his feet. He took a deep breath, and started walking again.

‘Wait, Bose. Wait!’ called Corde, to the little man’s back. ‘Where are you going?’

Bose did not turn, but kept walking. ‘To the Island of Mormo, in the Cerenarian Sea. I shall find it, and the Phobic Animus, and then I shall try . . .’ He stopped walking. ‘I shall try very, very hard . . . to destroy it.’ He began walking again.

They watched Bose walk on without them in silence for a long minute. ‘Hmm,’ said Cabal.

‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake,’ said Corde. Then he started running after Bose. ‘Bose! Mr Bose! Gardner! Wait!’

‘Hmm,’ said Cabal again, and walked after the pair of them.

A hundred yards later he caught up with Corde and Bose, who were having a heated discussion. Bose was saying, ‘Shadrach died for this. I cannot just give up immediately afterwards, as if that counts for nothing. I do not weigh my life as worth more than his. I must go on, don’t you see?’

‘Damn you, Bose!’ It was hard to be sure if Corde was angrier with Bose or himself. ‘Damn you! We’ll all die in this misbegotten world if we don’t leave, can’t you see that?’

‘No. No, I don’t. Although I would be happier if Mr Cabal were to stay with us, or me, if you insist on returning.’

‘Me?’ said Cabal, intrigued. ‘Why me?’

‘You saved us all against the spider-ant-baby things, and against the black galleys. And without you we would never have known that our goal lies on Mormo.’

‘Hold hard,’ said Cabal, raising an admonishing finger. ‘I had nothing to do with what happened back there.’

‘Didn’t you? I’m not so sure, Mr Cabal. I saw the hand of Divine Providence in what happened. Perhaps not the divinity that we usually look to, but any port in a storm, eh?’