They spent some moments gawping at themselves and one another before turning their attention to Cabal who, they were confounded to discover, was still dressed much as he had been back in Arkham, although a scuff on his right shoe’s toecap that he had suffered on the street was now gone and a button on his left jacket cuff, formerly depending upon a loosening thread where it had caught in a doorway, was now perfectly secure.
Bose spoke for them all when he said, ‘I don’t understand, Mr Cabal.’
For his part, Cabal seemed to find something secretly amusing about the whole scene, although the smirk was in a sense psychic, for his expression did not change at all. ‘Herr Shadrach, you remind me of a portrait by Holbein the Younger. A successful merchant. Tell me, did you ever harbour ambitions towards a mercantile life?’
‘No,’ said Shadrach, immediately. Then he frowned. ‘Well, briefly . . . once, long ago. When I was a boy, I visited my uncle’s warehouse. He was a trader in teas and bric-à-brac from the Orient. He travelled a lot. I wanted . . . My father told me not to be foolish. There was a family business to inherit, his business.’ Shadrach paused, looking at his hands. ‘Shadrach and Son, undertakers.’ He looked up at Cabal, frowning. ‘Is this . . . this what I could have been?’
‘You could have been anything, but you wanted to be a merchant, evidently. Herr Corde, I surmise, read far too many twopenny papers when he was young.’ Mr Corde was not listening. He had freed the sword from its scabbard and, while not fully drawing it, was admiring the blade. It shone white and blue as it caught the light, steel of such beautifully patterned perfection that the swordsmiths of Damascus would have torn their beards in frustration at the very sight of it.
‘You, however,’ said Cabal, turning to Bose, ‘you, sir, intrigue me. What is your heartfelt boon? Your great sublimated desire?’
‘Well,’ said Bose, before becoming distracted by the gold chain. He lifted the medal and tried to read it, without success. ‘Well, I was thinking that, perhaps, one day, I might like to be a magistrate.’ Everybody looked at him. He blushed and smiled awkwardly. ‘It’s good to have an ambition.’
Cabal nodded. ‘A chain of office, of course. Another historical trapping. The Dreamlands seem incapable of letting any lily go ungilded.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Shadrach, profoundly uninterested in Bose’s long-term ambitions to hand out small fines and morally improving lectures in court. ‘But what about you, Mr Cabal? Why haven’t your clothes changed?’
Corde slammed his sword back into its scabbard with jaunty gusto. ‘Because you’re already what you want to be, eh, Cabal?’
‘Just so,’ said Cabal, and this time the spectre of a smirk flittered around his mouth. He turned to look down the slope of the valley, and the smirk diminished to nothing. ‘Now, to business.’
He reached down for his bag, and paused. It seemed that he had not managed the transition into the Dreamlands quite as unaltered as he had thought. The bag was open, as it should have been. He had left it open on the floor of the garret, the Silver Key lying within. When he had abandoned his post at the top of the stairs, he had dropped his pistol in before snatching up the bag and throwing himself into the vortex. The Key, he was relieved to see, was still where he had left it. His cane still remained secured to the bag by the leather straps that ran up the sides. Of his gun, however, there was no sign. Instead, lying along the open maw of the bag, like a stick in a toothless dog’s mouth, there was a sword, scabbarded and attached to a belt.
Cabal bit back a snarl. Of course the Dreamlands would not tolerate something so prosaically mechanical as his Webley. Here, progress was held back by a vast romantic inertia as great as that of the mountain on which they stood. One day, it might finally allow flintlocks, perhaps at some future date when the waking world was using death rays and germ bombs.
Cabal took up the sword by the belt and strapped it on. It hung neatly at his left hip, and added a pleasing weight to his stride that he knew a real sword would never match. Demonstrating none of Corde’s bashfulness, he drew the blade in a swift motion and tested its balance. Predictably, it was perfect, although it was no sort of weapon that he had ever held or even seen before. It was a rapier of sorts, but of a combative nature rather than for fencing: flat-bladed with a shallow curve that swept up to a right angle a finger’s length from the sharp tip. Cabal slashed and thrust at the air for a few seconds. An interesting weapon, he concluded. At heart a rapier, but with just enough sabre in its family tree to allow the easy hacking of unfortunates when the mood took one.
He returned it to its scabbard with precision, and looked up to see Corde watching him with interest. ‘You’ve fenced before, Cabal?’
Cabal noticed that familiarity was breeding sufficient contempt for them no longer to address him as ‘Mr Cabal’. ‘I have. Have you?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Corde drew his sword, and it was as different from Cabal’s as a Viking one-and-a-half-hander bastard sword is, unsurprisingly, from a rapier with a bit of sabre on the side. ‘Nothing like this, I grant you.’ He whirled the sword in the air and it seemed for a moment that its path was made of a gleaming arc of solid steel. He swept it back again and then around his head, his eyes filling with undisguised joy. ‘It’s wonderful . . . wonderful!’
Suddenly his sword stopped in mid-air with a sharp cry of steel on steel. Cabal stood with his own once again drawn, halting Corde’s in an exact parry. ‘It is a dream, Corde.’ He lowered and scabbarded it. ‘Time is pressing, and we shall have plenty of time for you to demonstrate your dazzling swordsmanship. I would remind you that we have an entire world to search and we are by no means immortal.’ He took up his bag while Corde reluctantly slid his blade into its scabbard.
Cabal took out his folder of notes on the Dreamlands and found a flattish section of ground on which to unroll a map.
‘You have a map, Cabal?’ said Shadrach. ‘By all that’s wonderful . . . !’
‘Please do not become overly excited by it, gentlemen,’ Cabal warned. ‘It was drawn from the fancies of poets and the ravings of maniacs – which is to say much the same thing – and is therefore only slightly more useful than a blank sheet of paper. Why it is always poets, who are at the laudanum trough or gulping down absinthe, instead of somebody useful like cartographers, I have no idea. In any event, we have an unreliable map. And upon it, we are . . .’ Cabal stabbed his finger down ‘. . . here.’
The others crowded around and looked at the map. After a few moments of angling his head this way and that, Shadrach asked, ‘How can you be so sure?’
Cabal took up the map, rolled it and put it into his bag. ‘In all the Dreamlands, there is one particularly famous mountain, Mount Hatheg-Kla. We are about one mile up it.’ He turned and pointed towards the cloud-wreathed summit. There was something unpleasant about the mountain’s perspective, as if there were simply too much of it and it had somehow furled itself just enough for it to be acceptable to the human psyche. Once inside the mind, however, it popped open like an umbrella with an unreliable catch, jabbing the sensitive fleshy parts with the spiky tips of its ribs and poking about with its contradimensional ferrule. Cabal, from long mental exercise, firmly closed the umbrella again and dropped it into the elephant’s foot of his super-ego. The others, less prepared, were struck dumb by the immensity of the prospect.