Cabal sighed. ‘Everybody is such a critic. No, I do not suggest that we interrogate the monster, not least because it is not a monster in the sense that you imagine, nor because it will have little of import to tell us even if we found a way of communicating, and finally – most tellingly – because we have a far more immediate and useful source right before us.’ And here he made a distracted gesture at the corpse while he continued to search through his bag.
There was a silence, during which the mercenaries frowned even as the penny dropped for the Fear Institute members. ‘Ooooh,’ said Bose, the slowest to cotton on. ‘Of course. I keep forgetting. You’re a necromancer.’
This was news to the mercenaries, who all took cautious steps back from Cabal.
Cabal hid his exasperation that, even here in this land of wonders, his profession was held in much the same opprobrium as it was in the waking world. He did not hide it well, however. ‘Yes,’ he said, allowing the s to draw out into a sibilant expression of dangerous resentment. ‘A necromancer. Shaking facts out of dead heads is more traditionalist than most of my experiences, but it’s always nice to do something that harks back to the old school.’ He removed a small padded case from his Gladstone bag and opened it to reveal several small test-tubes, each stoppered with wax. ‘One of these might do the trick,’ he said conversationally, laying the case to one side. Then he took the head of the hermit firmly between his hands and, with a sharp twist and the sound of tearing dry skin, muscles and tendons, and the clacking of vertebrae scraping over one another, wrenched it off. He turned away from the hapless torso, placing the head on its stump to glare eyelessly at him. ‘There,’ he said, pleased. ‘Much more convenient.’
‘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.