Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

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.