A hundred yards later he caught up with Corde and Bose, who were having a heated discussion. Bose was saying, ‘Shadrach died for this. I cannot just give up immediately afterwards, as if that counts for nothing. I do not weigh my life as worth more than his. I must go on, don’t you see?’
‘Damn you, Bose!’ It was hard to be sure if Corde was angrier with Bose or himself. ‘Damn you! We’ll all die in this misbegotten world if we don’t leave, can’t you see that?’
‘No. No, I don’t. Although I would be happier if Mr Cabal were to stay with us, or me, if you insist on returning.’
‘Me?’ said Cabal, intrigued. ‘Why me?’
‘You saved us all against the spider-ant-baby things, and against the black galleys. And without you we would never have known that our goal lies on Mormo.’
‘Hold hard,’ said Cabal, raising an admonishing finger. ‘I had nothing to do with what happened back there.’
‘Didn’t you? I’m not so sure, Mr Cabal. I saw the hand of Divine Providence in what happened. Perhaps not the divinity that we usually look to, but any port in a storm, eh?’
Cabal’s face hardened; he had been trying hard to forget about his inadvertent calling down of Nyarlothotep in the Dark Wood in the irrational but fervent hope that if he forgot about it so would the god. Unfortunately, it seemed likely that Bose was correct. It was stretching coincidence a little far to believe that the sky had just decided to split open and the Moon to explode at that exact moment on a whim. It seemed that Cabal was still being monitored by a supernatural force that, for reasons that remained alien and indistinct, had taken an apparently benevolent interest in his activities. There seemed to be no reason for it – Nyarlothotep was a deity more than usually well disposed to incandescent levels of mindless terror. Why it would see fit to aid an expedition to destroy the well of all irrational fear was a mystery, and perhaps one that transcended the human mind’s ability to comprehend, even if it was explained very, very slowly with diagrams, models and glove puppets. Probably quite frightening glove puppets.
‘The . . . entity to which you are referring, Herr Bose, is notoriously fickle. It did not intervene in the nameless city.’
‘But that wooden monstrosity just fell over, didn’t it? What caused that?’ said Corde.
Cabal looked at him in offended consternation. They had not spoken of that night again, except in the broadest terms, Holk’s death still throwing a pall upon events, but he had not realised that they thought the sinew-wood giant’s fall was due to natural, supernatural or otherwise non-Cabalian causes. ‘It just fell over,’ he said icily, ‘because I was on its shin, waggling a knife around inside its knee joint. I don’t suppose either of you noticed that, due to all the intense skulking you were doing at the time.’ This was slightly hypocritical of Cabal, who had done a great deal of skulking in his life, and was probably regarded as something of a master of the form among the skulking fraternity.
Bose nodded thoughtfully, but Corde was stung. ‘Are you suggesting that we are cowards, Cabal?’
‘Not at all,’ said Cabal. ‘I am stating it. Bose at least has the grace to admit it, by act if not by word. He has never pretended to be anything he is not. Apart from a magistrate,’ he conceded, gesturing at Bose’s judicial robes, ‘but that was rather thrust upon him by the Dreamlands. Reach for that sword, and I shall kill you where you stand.’
For Corde’s hand had strayed to the hilt. It wavered there for a moment, then fell by his side.
Once he was satisfied that Corde would not sully his discourse with any further murderous intentions, Cabal continued, ‘That, Herr Corde, was reasonable caution. Your behaviour in the presence of Ercusides’ great scarecrow was not. Any lucid, rational eye would quickly have discerned the thing’s nature and evolved a strategy for dealing with it, as I did. I required no external agencies to do so.’
Yet as soon as he had said it he doubted it. He had not thought through every detail of that night, but now it occurred to him that there was a speck around which his deductions had been built, a few words of forewarning that had given him a head start on the truth. He thought of a whispering inhuman voice beneath a temple to a forgotten god in a city with no name: ‘Remember Captain Lochery.’
He had focused purely on wondering how the ghoul had even known of the captain and that Cabal was acquainted with him. He had concluded that the ghouls’ unnerving ability to go almost anywhere and anywhen that amused them had been the cause of it, and that the ghoul was merely using the captain as an example of their wide-spanning intelligence, and as a warning to be careful. Now that he paused to consider his memories of the ensuing ratiocinations, however, he realised that the unusual nature of the captain’s leg had flickered through his mind. This, truly, had been the seed from which his deductions pertaining to the true nature of the mysterious wamp-killer had sprung, the moment he had clapped eyes upon the evidence of Ercusides’ exercises in arcane woodwork.
This was a disturbing revelation in itself, and Cabal hushed Corde’s simmering outrage with an impatient flutter of his fingers and a pneumatic pffft of the type used for shooing off cats. Cabal needed to think, and he didn’t need a histrionic solicitor distracting him while he did it.
The truly disturbing element, however, was the nature of the hint. It had been cryptic to the point of abstruseness, and not a reasonable bet for a hint to most people. For Cabal, and Cabal’s thought processes, however, it had been precise and exact. How could some cadaver-chewer have known that? Unless, and he did not enjoy the thought, the ghoul had not been a ghoul at all. Nyarlothotep famously had a thousand avatars, a thousand faces to present, a thousand masks to wear. This was only a figurative figure, however: Nyarlothotep in reality had far, far more. It did not stretch credibility in the slightest to suggest that the ghoul was one of them. If anyone could gauge a clue with such terrifying meticulousness, surely it had to be a god.
Once one accepted in principle that their expedition was being protected by the Crawling Chaos (one of Nyarlothotep’s many names, along with others such as the Black Pharaoh, Ahtu, the Grey Man, Loki, the Child of Eyes, the Bloated Woman, Anansi, the Dweller in Darkness, the Smiling Killer, Tezcatlipoca, and Dave in Accounts), abandoning it became problematical. Nyarlothotep might just shrug and leave them to it, or he might take offence and then revenge. Given that Nyarlothotep’s revenge would likely be biblical in scale, Dadaist in commission, and cruel enough to make de Sade wince, not offending the god seemed very sensible.
Cabal had many faults, several of which were also capital crimes, but he was in no wise indecisive. He shouldered the baldrick to which his Gladstone was attached, and started walking again. ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘I am not abandoning our quest, and therefore will not be finding a reciprocal gateway for the Silver Key. Without it, you are trapped here, Herr Corde, so I suggest you have little option but to accompany us.’
Corde was furious, but still he did not reach for his sword. ‘Don’t I have any say in the matter?’
Cabal stopped to look at him. ‘You have no say, but perhaps you do have a choice. Come or stay.’ He considered. ‘Yes, that covers all the possibilities.’ Cabal made to start walking again.
‘One day, Cabal, you will have your comeuppance.’
‘Is comeuppance some mealy-mouthed way of saying die? One day I shall die, yes, and given my profession, it will likely be sooner than later. But it will also likely be random and stupid and pointless. It is to war against the very irreversibility of such deaths that I do what I do. In all your days as a solicitor, Herr Corde, I doubt you even once pressed the war against death with a minute of your time or an iota of your energy. In real humanitarian terms, your campaign against the Phobic Animus is the most selfless and noble thing you have ever done or will ever do. Do not miss your chance to be useful.’