‘You couldn’t if you wanted to. Takes years of practice and three guild examinations to get to this standard. No, just look as if you gave a bugger about the departed and follow along.’
Cabal doubted he was a good enough actor to manage that, but he had spent his whole life polishing sombreness to a dignified mahogany glow that looked much the same to the unpractised eye. Thus, he followed at a steady funereal pace, and that did very nicely.
‘So, what did you want to know, mate?’ said the mourner, when he was satisfied that Cabal’s presence was an asset to the procession.
‘I was wondering if you could direct me to the oldest part of the necropolis.’
The mourner almost stumbled in mid-mimed declamation. ‘You want to go where? What for?’ he said, in open astonishment. ‘That’s the bad place.’
‘It is also the interesting place and, for me, the necessary place.’
‘No, seriously, chum, you don’t want to go there. There’s ghouls up there. The gardeners only go once a month and even then under armed guard. You’re looking to get chewed if you go up there.’
‘I’m not afraid of ghouls,’ said Cabal. ‘In fact, I might even learn something of interest from them. They are not my current concern, however. Does anyone live there? Any soothsayers? Oracles? Anybody like that?’ He had the impression that the mourner was looking oddly at him.
‘How’d you know?’
‘It is a principle of the Dreamlands that themes of folklore are followed, even if they are altered or corrupted. Oracles and soothsayers are associated with shunned places. Therefore it seemed rational to seek out such a place. Given the predilection of ghouls to populate old graveyards and cemeteries in both worlds, I guessed their quarter would represent such a shunned place.’ The impression of being oddly looked at had not diminished, although its timbre had changed. ‘Well, you did ask,’ said Cabal, perhaps a little tetchily.
The mourner looked at him a moment longer, then started striking attitudes once more, albeit at an accelerated pace to catch up with the procession. When they were back in place, he said, ‘There’s supposed to be a witch.’
‘A witch,’ Cabal repeated. He shrugged. ‘Good enough. When you say witch, do you mean the sort with a cauldron and potions, or just a mad old lady who feeds stray cats?’
‘How should I know? Never been up there. But there is supposed to be a witch.’
A witch, then, would have to do. Cabal took leave of his short career as an amateur mourner with directions to the purportedly doom-haunted old cemetery in the north-eastern quadrant of the necropolis, and set off at a swift stride. Finding the right place had taken longer than he had anticipated and the sun was already low in the sky. While he truly did not fear the ghouls, he equally truly had a rational concern about being near one of their warrens after sunset. Between threats and a large Webley, he could keep a horde of them back for hours, but threats and a less immediate engine of extermination such as his sword offered no such certainty.
A decision to forgo the directions in an attempt to cut corners turned out to be unwise, and he wasted still more time while he backtracked first to where he had made the rash decision, and then to the circus. The shadows were long indeed by the time Cabal finally arrived at the old cemetery, where ghouls reputedly cavorted and a witch made her home.
The city of Hlanith had stood in the Dreamlands for as long as men have dreamed, and they have been dreaming for a very, very long time. It was a different place then, of course; crude and barbaric as those who dreamed it were crude and barbaric, but even from the first, it had known death. The necropolis was just a plot of land, then, in which the dead were interred with a few grave goods, their resting places marked with sticks and rocks and bones. Over time, the sticks and bones were discarded as too ephemeral in the former case, and too attractive to the local scavenging dogs in the latter. This left the stones, which grew larger, eventually sporting inscriptions of differing measures of accuracy, sincerity and spelling. These levels of increasing sophistication had travelled out, like ripples, from this original site until the differences became aesthetic and modish rather than fundamental. Seen from on high, however, the original burial ground still stood out like a black wart on a grey face. It had been shunned when it was first marked out, and it was shunned ground now, ancient, primal, dangerous.
There had been sundry ill-omened attempts to rehabilitate the area down the centuries. Every few generations, somebody would take it into their head that the ideal place for their inhumation or that of a respected family member, friend or client would be the oldest part of the necropolis. The builders would enter cautiously at dawn, and stampede out at dusk, spending the meantime erecting whatever tomb or crypt or mausoleum had seemed like such a good idea in the architect’s office. After the things were built, and occupied, they were rarely visited again when it had become plain that, rather than civilising the atavistic nature of the place, the new structures might as well have been built in a war zone. So, abandoned if still remembered, these tombs, crypts and mausolea stood around like gentry who had inadvertently wandered into a rough pub, and there they grew grubbier as the years passed.
Johannes Cabal stood at the edge of the old cemetery and paused to take in the ambience of the place. The last shunned burial ground he had been in had been more than two years before, an unusually long period between shunned burial grounds in his working life. That one had been beautiful in its way, misty and artful in its slow, entropic descent into ruin. It had also borne an air of waiting for death, of hungering for new inmates, of taking the role of a great pointing skeletal hand in a misty, artful memento mori. It had not been a pleasant place to dawdle for reasons beyond its aesthetics, but it had never felt especially malign.
This old cemetery, on the other hand, reeked of malevolence. There were no true paths through it; nor had there ever been. Just jumble and tumble, weeds and briars, markers and ancient bones, some belonging to local scavenger dogs who had allowed their hunger to override their sense that the nature of this land was changing. The newer structures stood sloped and grimy, overwhelmed and embarrassed by their incongruity in this place of primordial death. Some had already collapsed, and from where he stood Cabal could see a smashed marble sarcophagus on its side amid the ruin of the tomb once built to hold it. The sarcophagus was empty, which did not surprise him. In this place, it had probably been emptied within a day of the funeral ceremony. To the ghouls, these structures were not hallowed resting places: they were larders.
Cabal loosened his sword in its scabbard and walked slowly forward. He wished he had a canteen of water with him: he was probably going to be speaking ghoulish soon and it always played havoc with his larynx. Some water to moisten his vocal cords would have been very helpful. He took up station upon a mound, under which lay the mouldering bones of a tribal shaman, and waited as the shadows flowed like ghost blood and the darkness grew deep.
He was not sure when he first became aware of the eyes that watched him. They did not blink, nor did they move, but they watched him with unwavering intent as their faint phosphorescent glow, an unhealthy greenish yellow, slowly made them stand out from the growing gloom. While there was still light in the sky, he knew they would be too cautious to attack, so he decided that now would be a good time to start his entreaty to them.
He cleared his throat, and began with a creditable attempt at meeping: ‘I bear you no ill-will. I only seek counsel with one who lives in this place. My name is—’
‘I have told you once before,’ said a ghoulish voice from the shadows, and it spoke in English. ‘I know who you are, Johannes Cabal.’