The Way of the Wizard

The Ereshkigal Working Jonathan L. Howard

This was not the first time a corpse had abruptly sat up on the mortuary slab and turned to face Johannes Cabal with murder in its eyes; it was, however, the first time one had done so without waiting to be formally reanimated. They stared at one another for a moment before the corpse, apparently unaware of the faux pas, made a cry like somebody receiving terrible news, and lunged at Cabal. Cabal, whose faults were mainly moral, grabbed the dead man by the scruff and threw it face first to the floor. While keeping it prone and thrashing with a foot to the back of its neck, he pulled a nearby wheeled trolley to him and reached into the brown leather Gladstone bag that lay open upon it.

The performance was observed in a baleful silence by a dishevelled police constable who sat against the wall, gagged and bound. He watched as Cabal drew a handgun of egregious aspect from the Gladstone, placed the muzzle at the junction between the occipital lobe and the atlas vertebrae, and completed the ad-hoc de-animation procedure with the introduction of a.577 bullet. The sound of the shot was deafening against the morgue’s hard walls and floor, echoing harshly from the cold stone slabs. Cabal kept his foot in place and drew back the revolver’s hammer in anticipation of further trouble. The corpse, however, showed no signs of attempting any further movement other than slumping. Cabal waited for a long moment in case it was a cunning zombie ruse, before gently thumbing the hammer back to rest. He glanced sideways as if sensing the policeman’s accusing glare.

“I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that,” said Cabal, a faint German accent just discernible in his clipped and clearly enunciated speech. “This has nothing to do with me.”

Nor was he lying. Johannes Cabal had taken advantage of the town’s annual carnival weekend to carry out a little specialist shopping. While the crowds gathered on the streets to see the parade go by — this year with the exciting new innovation of enormous hydrogen balloons rendered in the form of newspaper cartoon characters and advertising mascots — Cabal had quietly entered the municipal mortuary through a back window and sequestered himself in the morgue, wherein he had intended to remove some footling bits of offal necessary to his researches. This simple plan had almost foundered once already; an alert police officer had seen Cabal slide down a back alley and had become suspicious. This was not a startling piece of detectively intuition; Cabal was a tall blond man of wan complexion, wearing a black suit and carrying a brown leather Gladstone bag. Though he was only in his late twenties, Cabal’s demeanour was not one of fun and frivolity, even on such an occasion. He had barely looked at the parade as it passed, beyond a glance at the great flying cartoon characters, and even these had only caused his lip to curl. Then he had looked both ways — failing to spot the policeman who had taken station in a doorway — before all but tip-toeing down the alley to the rear of the mortuary. Thus, while not quite wearing a striped shirt, mask, and carrying a bag marked “Swag,” Cabal had not been as surreptitious as he had hoped.

The officer, a Constable Copeland, had investigated the alley and, finding a window jemmied open, had crept inside. Unhappily for him, his creeping was not so very surreptitious either, and he had been laid low by a scientifically applied crowbar. When he had recovered consciousness, it was to discover himself tied and gagged and witness to Cabal’s attempted body part snatching… and the unexpected resurrection that thwarted it.

Cabal was most put out. First, the policeman turning up had put him off his stride, and now a dead man coming at him really was beyond the pale. “This is not normal,” he commented. Most people would doubtless have agreed, but most people were not necromancers for whom “normal” is a much broader category.

A whispering groan from beneath a sheet on the furthermost slab drew his attention. He watched the form beneath it stirring into a semblance of life even as the occupant of the next-closest table also begun to wheeze air into lungs unused for a day or two. Cabal considered quickly; he had five rounds remaining in his Webley, and a further six in his pocket, bundled together with an elastic band to prevent them rattling. There were four occupied slabs in the morgue, all of whose occupants were showing uncalled for signs of activity. He could probably stay and fight, but there was something untoward occurring here and he might need the ammunition later. Discretion, as was usually the way, would stand in for valour.

In three long strides he was by the policeman, pulling him to his feet and pushing him through the swinging double doors. He let the bound man sprawl to the floor, taking the moment to draw a switchblade that snapped open with a perfunctory clik. He quickly knelt by the policeman, who was regarding the sharp blade with some trepidation and, fearing the worst, began to struggle. Cabal was having none of it, and slapped Constable Copeland. “Don’t be a fool. If I wanted you dead, you would never have woken up.” The blade went in and sliced, and the policeman suddenly found his hands free. Cabal stood up, the ropes in his left hand, the blade in his right. He snapped the blade shut and dropped it back into his jacket pocket.

Shadows fell across the frosted glass in the upper halves of the morgue doors as Cabal turned back to them. He jammed his foot against the base of the doors as he fed the rope through the handles and quickly knotted them tight. He stepped away as the doors were roughly shoved from the far side. Through the glass, four outlines crowded around the door, pushing.

The policeman had drawn his own penknife and was just finishing sawing through the ropes around his ankles. His gag, his own handkerchief, hung around his neck. “What’s happening?” he demanded hoarsely. “What have you done?”

Cabal didn’t turn, but continued to watch the activity of the shadows. “To answer your second question first, beyond saving your life, I have done nothing. To answer your first, I am not yet sure.”

The shoving had quietened down, and Cabal was just wondering if they had given up when all four shapes rammed the door simultaneously. The rope grew tight under the impact, but held. The shadows became blurs, then sharpened as they rammed the door together again. The rope, tied with a knot that would distress Houdini, held firm. “Ah,” Cabal said. “Now that is interesting.”

“You,” said the policeman, searching for a rock to base his sanity upon and settling upon duty, “are under arrest.”

Cabal sighed, pulled his revolver from his bag and waggled it in a more or less threatening way. “You are being a fool again, officer. I truly am not only the least of your worries at present, but possibly your only chance for salvation. Listen… ”

They listened, and beyond the rhythmic thump of undead bouncing off morgue doors could be heard distant screams. Cabal noted the policeman’s expression of dawning realisation with a thin smile. “We are not the only ones having trouble with the walking dead.”

From the topmost storey of the mortuary, they were able to look out across the town square, and the massacre that was occurring there. The carnival crowd had only recently become aware that there was something very horrible occurring within it. It had started when first a scattering of people across the town had collapsed, including many in the crowd. A doctor had struggled through to the nearest victim and done his best, but it was too late. Too late in all manner of ways as it turned out when the dead man’s eyes had flickered open. The happy cries of his family sounded a lot less happy when he grabbed the doctor by the throat and throttled him in a few convulsive twists.

Then the doctor had gotten up too, and the bystanders decided they were not in the safest place. But, hemmed in by the surrounding crowd, there was nowhere to run.

“My God!” cried the policeman.

“Oh? Where?” replied Cabal, looking about with affected surprise.

The policeman glared at him. “I have to help!”

For his part, Cabal now leaned on the chest high windowsill with both arms flat, his chin resting on the uppermost, watching the chaos below with the detachment of an entomologist watching red ants fight black. The policeman waited a long moment for some sort of response before finally giving up and turning angrily on his heel.

“This helping,” said Cabal, just loudly enough to be heard. He did not look away from the window. “This helping to which you refer, I assume you intend to help the living?” Cabal took the pause in footsteps to mean he had the policeman’s attention. “It’s just that your current course of action can only help the walking dead I see out there, by inevitably bolstering their numbers. Come here.”

With some reluctance, the footfalls grew closer until the policeman joined him at the window.

Cabal lifted his head and made a small wave of his hand to take in the moiling mixture of violent dead and unhappy living. “Observe, constable. What do you see?”

“Carnage,” said the policeman hoarsely. His mouth was dry and when he licked his lips, it didn’t help at all. “Terror.”

“Yes, yes,” said Cabal impatiently. “Very picturesque terms but hardly scientific.”

The constable breathed in sharply. “Oh, dear God, there are children out there!”

Cabal favoured him with a disapproving glance. “Of course there were children out there. There was a parade. Why wouldn’t there… Oh.” He nodded with realisation. “You mean there are children being murdered. Yes, there are, but that isn’t the interesting thing.”

“What kind of a man are you?”

“The kind who sneaks into mortuaries with the intention of stealing parts of human brains, and isn’t especially put out by the appearance of the unquiet dead — beyond a sort of ‘Oh, what a nuisance’ sort of reaction, anyway.” The two men glared at one another. “Those are all the hints you’re getting,” said Cabal. “I really can’t see you making CID if you can’t reach a conclusion based on them.”

The constable had, in fairness, already reached a conclusion, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. “You’re a necromancer,” he said, quietly repulsed.

“Yes, I am.” Cabal was splendidly unconcerned with the constable’s opinion one way or the other. “And we are a rare breed, which makes all this,” he looked out the window again, “all the more interesting. I come here and the dead spontaneously rise. This really is not normal.”

“Isn’t it?” There was a distinct sneer in the words, and an irony that tottered into sarcasm. It could not have been calculated to irritate Cabal — a man notoriously prone to irritation — with more effectiveness.

“No,” he snapped, rounding on the constable. “No, it isn’t, and I have some actual experience in these areas, rather than that righteous unctuousness in your tone that you fondly believe substitutes for knowledge. Look!” And so saying he took hold of the constable’s collar and pushed him to the window. “There!” Cabal pointed at one group of undead shambling across the road. “There!” He pointed out another group standing aimlessly in the churchyard on the southern side of the town square. “And there!” The mortuary was just off the square, but the town hall was still visible some two hundred yards away. “Do you see?”

The constable angrily shook Cabal’s hand from his collar and glared out of the window. “Monsters,” he said, finally. “Your monsters are everywhere, they… ” He paused.

“You see?” asked Cabal, deciding to ignore the “your monsters” calumny.

“They’re behaving differently,” said the constable slowly, his eyes flickering from one group to the next. “Some are working together, others just stand there.” There was a scream outside. The constable blanched. “Unless somebody gets too close. Why aren’t they all doing the same things?”

Cabal didn’t answer. Instead he had opened his Gladstone and was sorting through its contents. A moment later, he straightened up, snapped a small telescope out to length, and peered out across the town square.

The constable saw he wasn’t going to be getting any immediate answers and ventured upon conjecture. “Are they… like bees? Workers and… drones and… ”

“A gestalt hive mind,” offered Cabal, not lowering his telescope.

“Yes!”

“No. Not least because drones sexually serve the queen, and the idea of those roles having analogies in a horde of walking dead is simply too distasteful to contemplate. More pertinently, however, they are not exhibiting different behaviour; only one area of the growing horde is, and that area is not fixed. These are not human bees; these are puppets of flesh. Observe, and you will note that the walkers become more active, more directed, in an area some thirty feet across. This signifies the area of the puppet master’s attention.”

“The puppet master? Somebody’s controlling them? Who?”

“Yes, there is a puppet master. Yes, he is controlling them and… ” he handed the constable the telescope and pointed across the square, “… he’s the fat bastard on the roof of the town hall.”

“Fat” was an overstatement, but the man visible on the town hall roof was certainly well-built. The constable could see an ursine form capering back and forth along the parapet edge of the flat-roofed building, gazing out across the chaos he had created now and then with what appeared to be a pair of army surplus field glasses.

“Why has he done this? All this death? All these innocent people? Why?”

Cabal took the telescope back, closed it up with a smart snap, and put it back into his bag. “At the risk of sounding conceited, I believe it’s all about me. It really is too great a coincidence that this fellow decides to embark on such a clottish piece of amateur necromancy at the very same time that I just happen to be skull delving in the local mortuary.”

“He’s trying to impress you?” The idea horrified the constable. “What sort of… ”

“No, no, no,” said Cabal, and made a haha sort of noise that may have been a laugh, or it may have been a nervous tic. “He’s trying to kill me. Not the most efficient way of setting about it, but I can imagine how all this might appeal to a certain type of personality. Not a very clever one, though.”

“Amateur? He managed to raise an army of the dead!”

“Oh, that?” Cabal sniffed dismissively, as if this unknown enemy had raised an army of chinchillas. “Any fool can do that. In fact, only a fool would do that. That is a ritual known as the Ereshkigal Working, and no necromancer with an ounce of wit who isn’t an avowed nihilist would want anything to do with it.”

Constable Copeland was not overly interested in what was à la mode this year in necromancy. He was watching the quick legging it from the dead. “That's the last of the survivors out of the square. If they have any sense, they’ll barricade themselves in their homes until the army gets here. Those things won’t stand a chance then.” He nodded with desperate assuredness at Cabal. “We can just sit this out, can’t we?”

Cabal shook his head, and left the window to perch on the edge of a desk. He gestured for Copeland to sit by him, and this he did with a sense that Cabal had approximately a bathful of ice-cold water to throw on those hopes. As, indeed, he did.

“Constable,” Cabal began, “this is a reasonably-sized town, yes? About two hundred thousand people?” Copeland nodded, and Cabal continued, “In a conurbation of this size, about twelve people die every day. Their bodies remain viable for Ereshkigalian resurrection for about a month. Assume that half are cremated within the first week after death, and that half of the remainder can’t get out of their graves. That’s optimistic, by the way. The dead are very good at exhuming themselves.”

Copeland opened his mouth to ask how Cabal could know such a thing, before realising how foolish that would sound, so he closed it again.

“Therefore,” continued Cabal, “in addition to the scattering of deaths that the Working caused, there are approximately another hundred and fifty five corpses around the place that will also be up and about by now. Each will attempt to kill the living. Every time that they succeed, the fresh corpse will be added to the sum of their army. If you have ever wondered what a geometrical progression looks like, you need only look out of that window. So, to answer your question, no, we cannot just ‘sit this out.’ ”

There was a crash from downstairs that startled Copeland to his feet. “They’re out of the morgue!”

“Right,” said Cabal with an air of getting down to work. “First things first. Avoid being killed by undead. That’s very important. Then, deal with that idiot before he inadvertently wipes out the human race. Also quite important.”

“Wait.” The constable took Cabal by the arm. “I can’t take this in. You really mean this is… this could be Doomsday?”

Cabal looked pointedly at the constable’s hand until he removed it from Cabal’s bicep. “I mean what I say, Constable. What the hoi polloi sensationally and inaccurately call the Zombie Apocalypse, professionals such as myself refer to more soberly as the Ereshkigal Working. Nomenclature aside, the results are much the same. Humanity goes down beneath a tide of its own angry carcasses.”

Below them they could hear the sound of the building being thoroughly if violently searched by the mortuary corpses. Cabal said that these were the ones most concentrated upon by their resurrector, and that he would certainly be watching through their eyes in the periods when he wasn’t using his own through the field glasses. If they should see Cabal, the main force would be directed toward him instead of milling around the streets. Things would likely go badly for Cabal and the constable in such a case.

Thus, instead of descending to street level just yet, they climbed to the roof. “This is the plan, constable. We shall travel along this rooftop, drop to the next, go to the alleyway on its far side, descend via the fire escape… ”

“How do you know it’s got a fire escape?” interrupted the constable.

“Because I made it my business to know. It usually pays to have at least two escape routes planned; a fast one and an evasive one. This is the evasive. Now, once we reach street level, we cut across the road behind that overturned wagon. The dead are staying this side of it so far, so we had better use it before they spread out.”

“That’s insane. Why break cover that long? If we go in the other direction, we only have to cross two small alleyways.”

Cabal drew a pair of dark glasses from his breast pocket, and made a small show of polishing the blue lenses. “That route has been considered and rejected.” He put on the glasses with an air of finality.

“Rejected? But, why?” The constable scoffed incredulously. “Your route is madness. Mine is much safer, a couple of alleyways, and cut through the churchyard and… ” He paused, a thought occurring. “Do you have a problem with churches?”

Cabal’s expression was unreadable behind the glasses. Without a word, he turned and trotted off in a crouch to avoid being seen from the town hall. On reaching the end of the roof, he unhesitatingly stepped off into space. A moment later, the constable heard the crunch of sensible shoes on gravel and bitumen, and knew Cabal was safely on the next rooftop. Cursing under his breath, Constable Copeland followed.

With galling inevitability, Cabal turned out to be right about the fire escape, and the two men descended unseen to a narrow lane that opened out onto the main road. Cabal wasn’t quite so accurate on the state of the road itself, however. A lone corpse had wandered past the overturned wagon and was standing aimlessly in the middle of the way, its back to them. Once upon a time, it had been a tobacconist, but now it was just a nuisance.

“What do we do? Can you shoot it?” The constable was trying hard to think of the figure as an object, and not Mr. Billings from whom he had bought a packet of Senior Service that very morning before going on duty. He thought of the cigarettes sitting in his locker at the police station; they seemed like an artefact of a bygone civilisation now. The Apocalypse had come, and here he was, PC Copeland, a parochial plod of the local constabulary, lurking down an alley in the company of a necromancer while avoiding the attentions of an undead tobacconist.

“They’re dead, not deaf.” Cabal took the switchblade from his pocket, and snapped out the blade. He searched around in an eddy pool of litter by the base of the wall and found a bottle top. “No, this calls for subtlety.” Holding the knife so the blade was angled down, much like one might hold an ice pick, Cabal set off to demonstrate his personal definition of subtlety. Walking quietly but upright, trusting to the wagon to hide him from the main mass of walking dead, he approached the former Mr. Billings from the rear. On reaching him, Cabal paused and flipped the bottle top so it landed in front of Billings with a distinct musical ting, all glittery and eye-catching in the midday sunshine. Mr. Billings, who found the smallest things of infinite wonder ever since Mrs. Billings, about fifteen minutes earlier, had torn out his throat with her teeth, looked down at it and in so doing obligingly exposed the nape of his neck. Without the slightest hesitation, Cabal drove the knife in with an expertise that should worry any casual observer. Just as in the morgue, the spinal cord was transected between the occipital and the atlas — the strings were cut — and Mr. Billings’ body fell forward heavily to lie in the middle of the High Street on carnival day.

Cabal leaned down, and Copeland momentarily thought he was going to check that the job had been done properly, but Cabal only wiped the blade on the back of Mr. Billings’ coat before snapping it shut and dropping it back into his pocket. “Come on,” said Cabal. “And bring my bag.”

They made their way down the alleyway, across the High Street, and continued some little way down there until Cabal paused at the back door of a shop and forced his way in. It was a hardware store, which he seemed to expect, making Constable Copeland realise just how meticulous his unusual companion’s reconnaissance had been. Cabal paused to steal a coil of half-inch rope, and Copeland didn’t even bother to tut disapprovingly; things had moved beyond worrying about petty larceny. They reached the top floor where Cabal opened a locked skylight with the crowbar from his bag, and then they were on the rooftops again. They moved along a little way and then, from the shadow of a chimneystack, they observed the man on the town hall roof once again. He was still about a hundred feet away, but they could see him far more clearly now. This was not necessarily a bonus. The man wore a suit cut from the sort of tweed that weavers devise for a bet; brown lines against a yellow field, making the wearer look like an Ordnance Survey map of custard. He was a big bear of a man with a fine, Jovian beard and a collar-length mane of thick red hair of a shade too ruddy for any to call “ginger” and live.

“Are you that good a shot?” whispered Copeland.

“I’m not going to shoot him,” replied Cabal. “Worst thing I could possibly do. Despite the brutal, painful, and lingering death that this idiot so richly deserves, I have to keep him alive for the moment.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Since they don’t teach necromantic theory at the police college, I’m hardly surprised. Very well — a crash course. You will notice that the undeads’ behaviour falls into three categories. There are the very focussed examples in the morgue; these are the only ones that saw me, and so their master is keeping much of his attention on them, for the moment at least. Then there are the ones who are moving around as a flock; these are his secondaries and his attention upon them is vague. He has moved them up towards the mortuary in reserve should he still find me there. Finally, we have the vast majority, who stand around like that example in the road. They are at the edge of his awareness. He is overwhelmed by complexity here — he has far, far more subjects than he can effectively control. So, most are forgotten and are being fed no commands by the psychic links he has with the whole ugly crowd of them.”

“How are they dangerous, then?”

“Because the force that animates them is atavistic and feral. Whenever an opportunity to kill is presented to them, they slip the vague control of this nominal puppet master until the killing has been done. The force is greedy — it craves more bodies to occupy.” Cabal turned his telescope upon the man on the roof once more. “He is the means by which this animating force came into our world, and he holds its leash. That leash can never be more than a range of twenty-three tirum, an obsolete unit of measurement once used by the culture that created the Ereshkigal Working. Twenty-three equates to just under three miles. Twelve yards, seven point one six inches under, to be exact.

“But, what he is doing is mentally exhausting. Sooner or later, he will have to sleep. That is when they will kill him. The leash will evaporate, and the animating force will have free rein to extend its activities as far as it likes. Did I mention how greedy it is for more bodies? I believe I did.”

All the talk of an apocalypse had seemed like so much hyperbole up to now, but now Constable Copeland could see the awful mechanism at play. “Won’t… won’t he stop if he gets you? Won’t he send this force back where it came from?”

Cabal had been wondering how long it would be before a cloaked version of What happens if I throw you to the zombies? was aired, and he was ready for it. “The ritual is irreversible. He either doesn’t realise that yet, or he just assumed he’d have a use for an army of the dead afterwards. As I said, the man’s an idiot.”

Copeland considered Cabal’s words. “So you’re saying, we only have a few hours before this all becomes unstoppable?”

“Exactly so.” Cabal was looking around the square through his telescope. He considered the remains of the parade in front of the town hall; he considered the hydrogen-filled cartoon characters looking cheerfully down upon the scene of carnage; he considered the undead turning away from the mortuary as presumably the search there was abandoned; he considered the church across the way. “That church has a weathervane, so at least the wretched building is good for something.”

“It has a clock, too," Copeland retorted without thinking, a feeling of guilty apostasy immediately settling upon him.

Cabal did not reply, but was looking at the bridge over the local river, just visible where the road in front of the town hall curved. “This town has a small harbour, does it not?”

“We’re at the neck of the estuary here. The sea’s less than a mile away. Why?” he said, then added a little bitterly: “Are you going to steal a boat?”

Cabal lowered the telescope and looked at him. It was an unreadable look, and Copeland had a strange sense that behind the blue-glass spectacles and behind the eyes themselves, there was something disarranged, something missing. “Perhaps I have not made my intentions clear, Constable. There is a brief period before this plague will spread, and the world as we know it is lost forever. I need that world, and I will not stand idly by or run while there is the slightest chance of preserving it.”

Copeland grimaced. “How do you make something heroic sound so selfish?”

“You cut me to the quick,” Cabal replied evenly. Then he said, “You’re a policeman. I assume that means you carry useful pieces of equipment as well as that comedic helmet we left in the morgue? A truncheon? Handcuffs? A notebook? That sort of thing?”

Copeland narrowed his eyes — he liked his helmet — but nodded.

“Excellent. Well, if it is so necessary for heroism to save the day, and given that I am such a selfish person, then by a process of deduction… ”

And Johannes Cabal smiled.

Being a mighty sorcerer was turning out to be a great deal easier than he had imagined. The hardest part of the whole plan had been tracking Cabal to this town, but after that it had been plain sailing. Admittedly, he had only intended the dead in the morgue to rise, and the resurrections in the carnival crowd had been a surprise — it seemed that the Ereshkigal Working was a more of a blunderbuss than he’d anticipated — but he had shrugged, taken it in his stride, and it all seemed to be going very well now. By allowing his consciousness to blur, he had put out a ring of drones to keep the area contained, and he was positive that it had not been breached. Now he just had to search every building within the cordon, and soon he would have his revenge. He hoped it was soon; all the extra work involved in controlling so many carcasses was astonishingly tiring.

It turned out to be even sooner than he’d expected. As he leaned on the town hall parapet and marshalled his forces to tear through shop after office, a voice spoke behind him, quiet and with a faint Teutonic accent.

“So,” it said. “You are the one behind this ham-fisted attempt on my life, are you?”

He turned to see Cabal himself, the loathed object of his every waking thought for years past, standing before him, arrogant and unconcerned. “Johannes Cabal. You should be dead by now, and one of my meat puppets.” He laughed, a very declamatory laugh of the kind normally associated with cloaks, thin moustaches, and a battered top hat. “Well, I’m glad that you have survived this long. I wouldn’t want to miss the pleasure of your final destruction!”

“I haven’t come to confront you, whoever you are. I’ve come to parlay. See?” Cabal took his switchblade from his pocket, showed it, and dropped it to the gravelled surface of the roof.

“You… don’t know who I am?” The man’s face twisted in an ugly admixture of fury and sneer. “I have hunted you for years, Cabal, and you didn’t even know it. You fool!” Ideally there would have been a crack of thunder at this point.

“Fool is a strong term to be used by somebody who does such a thing to kill one man,” said Cabal, nodding at the crowded corpses below them.

“You don’t deserve a clean, quick death, Cabal. Not after what you have done.” The man threw out his chest and drew himself up to his admittedly impressive full height. “You murdered my father!”

“Did I?” Cabal was glad that they had arrived at some sort of conclusion, although it didn’t actually help him that much. “Oh.”

Despite his profession and his laissez-faire attitude to the mortality of others, Cabal had not actually had cause to kill very many people who hadn’t previously been dead anyway, and he doubted whether putting down an uppity revenant such as the very, very deceased Mr. Billings, to take a recent example, was technically murder at all. Then again, people often developed emotional attachments to sides of meat that had once been relatives, so who was to say that some experimental subject or another had not once been this buffoon’s father?

“Well,” Cabal continued, “obviously I’m very sorry about killing your father, whoever he was, but don’t you, whoever you are, think causing the destruction of the human race for purposes of personal revenge is at least mildly disproportionate?”

“Whoever I am?” roared the man, the perceived insult rating far more highly in his world than accidental genocide. “I am your nemesis, Johannes Cabal! I am the architect of your destruction! I am… Rufus Maleficarus!”

“Who?”

“You dare? You killed my father!”

Cabal rolled his eyes. “So you keep saying, Mr… ” And then the penny dropped. “Maleficarus… As in Maleficarus the Magnificent? The conjuror?” He laughed. This was simply too ludicrous. “You have the wrong man, sir. I didn’t kill your father. He killed himself. Twice in fact, which shows a certain stoicism.”

Maximilian Maleficarus “the Magnificent” had been a stage illusionist with delusions of magical competence beyond the vanishing of rabbits and the sawing in half of obliging young ladies. After an encounter in his early career with the lively, if technically dead, Maleficarus senior, Cabal had walked away with a broken scapula, and Maleficarus had not walked away at all. Given that the elder Maleficarus spent a considerable time dead before resurrecting himself, it seemed unlikely that his son could have known him as more than a blurry figure from childhood.

But, in much the same way that feuds and vendettas can run for generations without troubling themselves to find a decent cassus belli, it seemed to the outraged family pride of Maleficarus junior, a planet full of undead was a small price to pay for hurt feelings.

Or was it? Maleficarus’ heavy brow folded with suspicion. “What did you mean just then, the destruction of the human race?”

“The Ereshkigal Working. You must remember it? That thing you did with the chalk circle and the incense? Well, all these dead people walking around, the two things are actually related. Did you know that?”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot, Cabal!”

“You are an idiot, Maleficarus! Have you the vaguest idea why the Working has not been used in over four millennia? See! Over there on the far side of the square! See what you stupidity has created!”

Maleficarus looked, and saw nothing. Cabal was furious. “It is right there! Use your binoculars if you have to, but look!”

Maleficarus raised the binoculars to his eyes, and so he did not see Cabal’s high passion fade instantly away, to be put into his inner jumble room of false emotions until it was next needed.

“I don’t see anything unusual,” muttered Maleficarus, already grown blasé to zombies. “What am I looking at?” For a reply, something narrow and metallic suddenly encircled his wrist. He tried to jerk his arm away, but not nearly quickly enough to stop Cabal from closing the ratchet on the handcuff. “What? What is this? What are you doing?”

“Saving the world. I can’t take all the credit, mind you. Just most. Of course, a lot still depends on how capable the local police are.” As he spoke, Cabal was backing away to the parapet over the town hall’s rear courtyard. As he reached the edge, Cabal turned and looked down. “I hope you’re ready, Constable,” he shouted, “or we are all going to die.”

Maleficarus looked at Cabal in bewilderment, and then looked at his handcuffed wrist. The other cuff was already locked shut and, unexpectedly, there was the end of a piece of rope tied tightly to it. He followed the rope with his gaze, across the rooftop and over the parapet by where Cabal was standing. He looked up and saw one of the great hydrogen-filled carnival balloons floating there, apparently anchored to its wagon in the courtyard. Then Maleficarus understood, and the colour drained from his face. “Oh, no. No, Cabal!”

Cabal looked back at him with an expression of rapacious anticipation. He did not have to wait long. Down in the courtyard, Constable Copeland took a moment away from kicking zombies off the wagon, said a silent prayer to the effect that his knots were at least as good as Cabal’s, and severed the balloon’s tether with a pair of bolt-cutters. Then, hefting the cutters, he turned back to the encroaching horde and smashed the undead husk of his chief inspector over the head with them. Even if he were to die now, he thought, at least he’d got one last life’s ambition out of the way.

The balloon rose quickly, far too quickly to give Maleficarus any time to do more than ineffectually scrabble at the knotted end of the rope before the slack went and he was jerked off his feet and into the air. He swivelled and gibbered and screamed for help as he rose higher — the captive of a gigantic cartoon cat — begged Cabal to save him even as the prevailing wind caught the balloon and sent it in the direction of the sea.

But Cabal just stood with his hands in his pockets, and watched him go, muttering under his breath, “Goodbye, Rufus. I would be obliged if you could avoid dying until you are at least three miles away from land.” When the sight of an idiot flying into the distance ceased to amuse him, he turned to the crowd of walking dead, and waited. Presently, they started to drop to the ground at the far end of the square, and smoothly collapsed in a wave that swept towards him, past him and behind him, as their creator moved out of range and off towards a clear horizon. It no longer mattered what happened to Maleficarus; as the final zombie toppled, the Ereshkigal Working lost its last subject, and quietly came to an end.

It seemed very quiet all of a sudden. Cabal looked down upon the hundreds of corpses that lay scattered across the town square, and he shook his head sadly. It was such an awful waste. All that fresh material just lying there, and he didn’t have time to take advantage of any of it. It was heartbreaking. He walked across the flat roof to look down at PC Copeland, standing exhausted within a ring of bludgeoned bodies. Sensing himself watched, he raised his head to look at Cabal, shading his eyes against the sun.

“Still in the land of the living, eh, Constable?” called Cabal.

Copeland raised his bloody bolt cutters and pointed them at Cabal. “You,” he managed to gasp out from between ragged breaths, “are bleeding nicked.”

“Alas,” said Cabal, “there are the practicalities to observe. Not only are your handcuffs currently floating away from here with a comical character attached to either end, but you are down there, and I am up here. By the time you get up here, I guarantee I shall have found an alternative route to down there, and will be fleeing the scene with practised rapidity. Feel free to attempt an arrest by all means, but please, don’t be disappointed when you fail.”

But, despite the warning, Copeland still was disappointed.