A Long Spoon (3 page)

*   *   *

Presently, Cabal checked his watch to see how long they had been travelling and was bemused to find his watch told him “dolomite,” and then on subsequent rechecks “ampersand,” “elongate,” and “Presbyterian o'clock.”

“Reality is becoming obstreperous,” he said. “We grow close to the Abyss.”

They were indeed. Two and a hippodrome turns of the tunnel later, they were standing on a vertiginous outcrop the shape of the underside of Elgar's nose, the tunnel exit being the shape of Elgar's screaming mouth, and the rock formations below being Elgar's inverted features. Off and around them, the dark gulf of the Abyss boomed and echoed with inchoate, everything ricocheting from the steep walls. Into the edge of the precipice were inexpertly carved the words, “Nietzsche woz here.”

“Bracing, isn't it?” said Zarenyia, breathing in deeply as if on the seafront at Skegness. “Nice to visit, but I wouldn't like to live here.”

“…Yes…” said Cabal, rendered irrational and piscine by the environment.

Zarenyia sighed. “Mortals. You just can't take the slightest collapse in the laws of causality, can you? Come along, fish-man, let's get you somewhere more probable.”

In the looming shadows, amidst forms too chaotic to be merely random, she spied an edge, straight and true. It was impossible to gauge any scale to the thing—it could as easily have been an inch long as a league—but there was only one regular form within the Abyss. So she leapt without hesitation toward it trailing a silken thread behind her as they fell, she a model of concentration, he singing about sausages.

Through the Abyss they plummeted, or possibly rose, the spider devil and her necromancer-cum-halibut passenger. Zarenyia was, it must be admitted, enjoying herself. The very quality of obscurity that Cabal had sought in selecting her had rendered her diabolical life diabolically boring. She would not lower herself to prodding people with pitchforks while they basted in liquid brimstone, but neither was she often summoned. On the rare occasions when some magus or another called upon her, there were never repeat performances. Over the centuries she had left an intermittent trail of dead magi behind her, more as a matter of her nature rather than any animosity towards them. It was sad, but there it was. Thus, being an enforced shut-in with no hobbies (she had tried the common infernal pastimes of cribbage and macramé, but neither had engaged her enthusiasm), her own immortality was a burden rather than a boon.

Here she was, however, on some desperate mission upon whose particulars she was still a bit vague, abseiling into the Abyss in the company of somebody she gathered was on Satan's admittedly voluminous shit list. It was all tremendously exciting and the nearest thing to fun she'd experienced since the Bishop of Onslow had tried exorcising her from his cathedral in 1737. She'd had one of her little chats with him, and then secreted the remains behind the organ pipes, where they had lain undisturbed for three decades until an organ mechanic happened upon them. Good times.

She set down a leg on a parapet, and hooked the tip around the castellation she found there, drawing herself and her burbling cargo onto the tower top. As she gained a proper footing, Cabal became less fishy by degrees until he was able to say, “That was not
at all
enjoyable.”

“Piff. You were adorable,” said the devil Zarenyia.

*   *   *

Pandæmonium was surprisingly ordered. Then again, against the backdrop of the Abyss, a hundredweight of cooked spaghetti thrown on a ballroom floor would look surprisingly ordered. The point of Pandæmonium was never chaos, however, even though it had become a byword for it. Back in the days when he was full of pep and his shelf-load of management books were shiny and new, Satan had created Pandæmonium. In those days, Satan regarded himself as something of a pirate captain, which is to say that he saw himself as a nominal leader, generally respected, but only turned to for direction at times of crisis.

Towards such an egalitarian view, intended to demonstrate that God's notoriously hands-on style of obsessive micro-management was unnecessary and patronising, Satan built Pandæmonium as a parliament for his demons. Here they would gather and discuss the issues of the day, develop policies, and enact laws. It was all to be very democratic. Just because he and his fallen angels had been a little uppity in the face of God was no reason to doubt that they would not be able to govern like sensible, thoughtful creatures.

Thus, it may be understood how as prideful an entity as Satan felt when it turned out that you can't fill a large parliamentary building with demons and expect them to behave like a meeting of the Quiet Society for Sensible People.

There was drinking. There was animalistic growling and squawking. There was vomiting. There were flows of excrement. Thus far, this was indistinguishable from most parliaments, but it was the refusal to get down to any real work that galled Satan. That, and the endless, endless noise. Finally he admitted to himself, if no one and no thing else, that Pandæmonium was a dreadful error on his part, strapped the great building to Behemoth's back, and told it to dump the short-lived parliament of Hell into the Abyss. This Behemoth did, and that was that.

Now Pandæmonium was the great unmentionable that Cabal kept mentioning.

“So, this is Pandæmonium,” he mentioned, brushing off his hands in an unconscious test to make sure that they really and truly were no longer fins. “It's bigger than I expected.”

It was approximately twice the size of the British Palace of Westminster, Cabal's only useful guide to roughly how big a parliament should be. Twice as large in all dimensions, including a great spiked tower on one corner. Unlike the St Stephen's Tower of its earthly equivalent, Pandæmonium's great tower was not faced with clock dials, but only with empty gibbets flailing in the chaos storm of the Abyss from the ends of long, iron poles. Cabal watched the cages thrash for some moments, then said, “If I know anything about sorcerers—and I do—Luan Da will have made himself comfortable up in there.”

Zarenyia followed his gaze with an expression of mild misgiving. “However can you be sure?”

“Sure, I am not. But sorcerers are creatures of habit. Give them a tower to hide in and they're up the stairs like a ferret up a drain, to borrow a phrase. Towers exert a strange glamour upon sorcerers. Caves, too, but only if a tower isn't handy.”

“Even on you?”

Cabal glanced at her, scowling. “Madam, I have never expressed any desire to take up residence in a tower.”

“Bet you would if you could, though.”

Cabal suddenly realised that his laboratory was in the topmost storey of a tall house. Not
exactly
a tower, but still …

He coughed. “There's no access directly to the tower from this rooftop. I think if we descend these stairs, we can search forward from there.”

*   *   *

Presently Cabal and Zarenyia found themselves in a broad corridor overlooking on one side the parliament building's large courtyard, certainly sufficient to place a full-sized football field in the centre, with a horse racing course around it, and enough space left over for three or four Olympic standard swimming pools. As it was, however, such facilities would have offered a poor afternoon's sport, as there was no ground to speak of. From the great glazed windows, they could see the Abyss below, and the Abyss above. As Nietzsche warned, it was not wise to look into the Abyss for too long, although this was largely because it gave one a screaming headache after a few minutes.

Cabal had better things to do than sightsee in any case, and they progressed at a meaningful pace in the direction of the tower. Cabal was walking on his own feet now, and Zarenyia politely crept along behind him, although Cabal knew full well she could gallop along gamely on her many legs far faster than any running human could possibly match.

There was little to say of the corridor, not least because much of the high-vaulted passage was in a flickering darkness cast partially by the embers of uncertain existence without and partially by flambeaux mounted in shoulder-high sconces along the way. Above them loomed a deep darkness, its monstrous architecture occasionally illuminated during lightning flashes outside. The architecture really
was
monstrous, too; Satan should definitely have hired in a decent consultancy.

After perhaps half an hour of walking, they reached a corner that surely led to the entrance of the tower. Cabal signalled to Zarenyia to wait while he advanced on tiptoes to peek around the corner and gather the lay of the land.

To his vast disappointment and irritation, the door to the tower was guarded. Slightly to his consternation, the guard was human. Or, he granted,
apparently
human. Either way, the man was heavily built, wore a suit of
liang-tang
armour of the sort used during the Han period, and stood cradling a huge temple sword in his arms. To be able to do such a thing for long periods was in itself a great feat, and Cabal found the man's likely strength to be a likely stumbling block in the ongoing mission to locate Luan Da, find out if he knew anything of import, and then chastise him for his little pranks involving murderous crows and hot nitric acid. Cabal's spectrum of chastisement began with “killing” and finished shortly afterwards with “killing.” It wasn't much of a spectrum, when all was said and done.

“What's going on?” whispered Zarenyia, unable to hide her glee at being out and about.

“This is an infiltration, followed by interrogation and then, in all likelihood, an execution,” said Cabal, also in a whisper. “If you could manage to avoid giving the impression that we're just sneaking off to the pantry to indulge in a midnight feast, this would all feel a little more professional.”

Zarenyia put on the most serious expression she could manage. “What's going on?” she asked, this time half an octave lower.

“I can see why you're not a demon,” said Cabal. “Discipline doesn't come naturally to you, does it?”

She slowly lowered herself until she was more or less at eye level with Cabal. “You must tell me
all
about discipline, the very first chance you get.” She was smiling disconcertingly as she said it.

Cabal was disconcerted. “Briefly,” he said, “there is a guard perhaps a hundred yards away. By him is a warning gong. On no account do we want him to strike it. I wonder if shooting him would do the trick?”

He opened the Gladstone bag he had suspended across his back with a leather belt and looked inside. He withdrew a droopy thing, covered in breadcrumbs. “My pistol has transmuted into a fishcake, and failed to transmute back. You know, I do wonder if chaos can actually be said to be chaotic when it shows an obsession with fish like this.”

Zarenyia did not answer. Cabal looked around to discover that, somehow, she had gone. Given her size, this was a remarkable disappearance in itself, and he wondered if the storming chaos outside had somehow affected her after all, given its piscine orientation, probably turning her to a shower of sardines or somesuch.

This theory he discarded quickly, and then feared that perhaps she had actually gone to engage the guard instead. He braced himself for the booming of the gong the instant the thought struck him, but the alarm was not sounded. Cautiously, he looked back around the corner.

The guard had gone. The gong hung unattended and silent.

Baffled, Cabal cautiously poked his head out further, but there was still no sign of the guard, nor of Zarenyia. He stepped out quietly, but his soft footfall did not presage a horde of guards tumbling through the door, and so he risked another step. By a procession of such steps, he found himself by the tower door soon enough.

“Where the blazes are you?” he hispered, which is to say, half-whispered and half-hissed.

A sound in the shadowed rafters made him look up and there he thought he saw a glistening chitinous form moving. He squinted harder until he could discern what exactly he was looking at. It was, after all, an unusual shape, comprised as it was by two forms.

Cabal gave a disgusted snort and turned away. “
Du lieber Gott!
”

“Busy!” called Zarenyia from above. “Be with you in a tick! Read a book or something.”

Cabal walked away a few steps, but there was no getting away from the noises from above. The guard—it could hardly be anyone else—cried out now and then, sometimes with fear, sometimes with ecstasy, sometimes both. He sounded muffled, but as he was partially cocooned in webbing, that was hardly surprising.

“Do you think you could hurry up a bit?” asked Zarenyia of her captive. She sounded sympathetic. “Love to dawdle, but on a tight schedule. You know how it is. I'll tell you what, how about I do …
this
?”

There was a wet noise, as organic as it was salacious, and the guard cried out one last time. A long cry it was, filled with dark pleasure and diminishing life-expectancy. It lasted a full minute, far beyond the normal capacity of human lungs to maintain, Cabal thought, but the guard was in the process of discovering Zarenyia had the ability to extend some human capacities far beyond the norm, to quite fatal extremes.

Then the cry dwindled, and stopped.

A moment later the guard's desiccated corpse, all swathed in web, crashed to the floor near Cabal. Its face was turned towards him, and Cabal could see it was smiling, nor yet in a post mortem rictus, either.

Zarenyia clicked lightly down the wall and walked to Cabal. She seemed a little sheepish, an impression enforced by the covert little kick she gave the cadaver of her erstwhile beau, enough to send the dried remains skidding off into a dark corner. She smiled awkwardly at Cabal. He looked stonily back.

“You're being all judge-y, aren't you? Well, look—I was peckish, and he was in the way. I mean, really … what's a girl to do?”