Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

‘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.’