Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute (24 page)

Irritatingly, it also gave the giant a full 360 degrees of vision, and when Cabal saw a beady-eyed little face peering down at him from the aft hole, he knew he could expect trouble in the immediate future. He still had a few seconds’ grace, however. The giant was just tearing loose Gesso’s remaining leg, the right, and seemed a slave to procedure. It would finish removing the leg, toss it away, deliver the
coup de
grâce
to Gesso’s head, drop him and then, finally, it would apply itself to providing the same service to Cabal.

He was just formulating a response to this state of affairs when Holk and his two remaining men burst out of the temple, swords drawn, and immediately split up, running for the edges of the square and shouting like maniacs. Cabal was impressed by their professionalism; they had been hired as, essentially, bodyguards and here they were, doing their best to distract the giant from their clients even though it would probably result in their deaths.

Tellingly, they were visible to two of the three head holes, and therefore two thirds of the fuzzy little committee that directed the giant. The other was the only one that had seen Cabal, but it was promptly outvoted in the ‘Who shall we kill next?’ stakes. Gesso was reduced to a torso and his skull punctured with a sharp jab of a great wooden index finger, whittled to a stake at its tip, in a hurried perfunctory way, and tossed aside, a broken toy.

The giant seemed to consider Holk and Thirsh as equally likely or, at least, one third of its mind wanted to go after Holk and another wanted to go after Thirsh. Since both options were known directly to those thirds, these were the only options they would willingly consider, and the remaining third was left lamenting a lost opportunity to kill the four-legged wamp that lurked just behind it. The outvoted dreff withdrew its head and disappeared back into its snug little chamber, presumably to play music loudly and write bad poetry about how nobody appreciated it.

Cabal saw the situation changing and immediately rubbed the current list of plans off his mental blackboard in preparation for some revisions. As he did so, he slipped the
baldric over his head and left his bag at the base of the wall, his jacket joining it a second later. The best defence was looking to be an offence, and he did not wish to be encumbered when the moment came. That moment was delayed for a few more seconds as the two thirds of the giant’s brain psychically bickered, the shoulders of the great homunculus shuddering from facing Holk, then Thirsh and back again, as the dreff repeatedly failed to arrive at a consensus. Cabal had already arrived at his own decision, proving that two heads are not always better than one. With no apparent trepidation, he stepped on to the heel of the giant’s flat right foot, wrapped his arms around the shin, and waited for the inevitable. At last, one of the command dreff capitulated, and the foot lifted, swung forward in a great arc at unexpected speed, and slammed down again, several yards closer to the fleeing figure of Sergeant Holk than it had been a few seconds before.

Cabal saw the giant’s intent and committed himself to preventing it if at all possible. A year or two before, he would not have cared, but then he had been a soulless creature. Now he found himself very occasionally making decisions that were not entirely logical. It was easy enough to rationalise attempting to save Holk: he was a useful soldier who might prove useful again subsequently. Beneath that, however, there was the hint of a shadow of a faint possibility that Holk had impressed him with his professionalism and competence, and that Cabal did not care to see such a man die while there was any chance of saving him.

Then the leg was rising again, and all of Cabal’s concentration was required just to hang on to the dizzying rise, swing and fall. He had the presence of mind to use the fall as an opportunity to shin his way a little further up the leg as
it descended faster than he would drop. In that moment of freefall, he was able to shift himself almost a yard up the shin. Then the foot slammed down and, once again, he had to hang on hard to avoid losing this gain. He looked back, and saw Shadrach, Bose and – with a notable lack of swashbuckling bravado – Corde sneaking out of the temple and quickly around its edge while the giant was fully engaged in heading away from them. Cabal permitted himself a curled lip before looking up. He was glad he was climbing up a giant and not a colossus. Better yet, a giant with insensate legs, or he would have been scraped off by now and would probably be adjusting to life as a sticky patch under one of the giant’s feet. The knee was a tad over four yards from the base of the foot, by his reckoning; easily attainable in most situations, but not when he was swinging up and down as if he were on a demented carnival ride. Cabal, who had briefly run a demented carnival, knew this to be a reasonable simile. By his reckoning, he could reach the knee in two more strides providing he exerted himself and did not fall off. Unhappily, Holk was no more than two strides away.

Another sweep of the leg, and Cabal was so close to the knee that he bared his teeth with frustration. There was his goal. Bored into the leading face of the laboriously smoothed barrel hinge there was another dreff hutch hole. He could almost reach it. Just one more . . .

The leg lifted again, but instead of performing a full walk swing, only came as far as its neighbour. The giant was going into a stand, and even as it did so, the torso was rotating on the hips, the right arm was swinging out, and Cabal realised he was too late. ‘Holk!’ he shouted. ‘Dodge, man! Dodge it!’

Holk was a calm, focused, exemplary warrior right to the
end. Of their charges, he had long since identified Cabal as the only one to trust in crisis, and on hearing Cabal’s cry he did not look back or falter, but immediately dodged. If he had dived to the left, he might have got away with it, but he dived to the right and straight into the palm of the wooden hand that was swooping down to capture him. He realised his mistake at once, and tried to roll out again, but the fingers curled quickly and he was held firmly.

The giant took no pause for gloating, for what it did it did through training, not inclination. It derived no pleasure, except that of fulfilling a function, as the left hand swung up in a practised arc and grasped the first limb it reached, Holk’s right leg. With a sharp tug, like a farmer’s wife plucking a dead chicken, it tore the leg off, and threw it sharply over its shoulder to whirl away into the darkening sky. Holk screamed, a hoarse roar that faded into sobs when he wanted to scream more but could not draw breath. The great left hand, dripping with his blood and Gesso’s before his, swept forward again.

For all their practice at hunting and killing, the dreff were still essentially shy woodland creatures, albeit of an unusual wood in a strange land. Thirsh’s furious battle cry startled the whole ambulatory warren – nothing they had yet encountered had prepared them for such a thing – and the giant jumped as if another giant had stealthily approached before exploding a paper bag the size of a pup-tent behind it. Cabal hung on for life itself as the giant leaped some ten feet into the air, but loosened his grip as it fell, sliding up its shin and grabbing the splayed upper front of the lower leg attached to the barrel hinge. The impact slapped his face and body hard against the wood, and he felt something give in his shoulder that ideally should not, but he was alive, and he was in position. He
snorted blood out of his nose, and felt hatred blossom deliciously in his heart for small furry woodland creatures. Retribution was at hand.

Thirsh rushed at the giant, his sword held high. Cabal could see that he must have almost reached safety when the sound of Holk’s agony had reached him. He had exchanged survival for peril purely out of loyalty, and in doing so had bought Cabal an extra few seconds. Thirsh would probably be dead at the end of those seconds, but that – Cabal concluded – was none of his concern.

Thirsh made the most of those seconds. He arrived at the giant to find it still in a state of nervous paralysis analogous to a skittish terrier being rushed by an unexpectedly aggressive rat, and capitalised on this by hacking fiercely at the giant’s left leg while swearing furiously, like a lumberjack with coprolalia. A real giant of flesh and blood would have been mightily discomforted by such attentions, but this giant, being more like a collection of diligently murderous telegraph poles than anything else, only regarded them with mute incomprehension until the initial surprise dissipated and it noticed that Thirsh had more limbs than was permitted locally. Ercusides had considered the possibility of too many targets to deal with concurrently, and had provided the dreffs with a simple but useful tactic to give themselves a little leg-plucking time when challenged. With a fast sideswipe, the giant’s left arm swept down out of a darkening sky and Thirsh was suddenly travelling backwards much faster than he had charged, and doing it a yard off the ground to boot. Its immediate situation thus simplified, the giant was returning its attention to the fitfully struggling Holk when part of its group consciousness reported that something was peering into its chamber and
asked what the standard operating procedure was for such an occurrence. The three head dreffs were considering how to respond to this, when the reporting dreff added a slightly panicky addendum to the effect that the face had gone and now a snake or possibly a limb, yes, definitely a limb, one of the ones without the foot on the end, was in through the entrance hole and was tipped by something shiny and
PAIN! PAIN! PAIN!
At which point the report stopped, and the dreff Brains Trust was left fairly sure that this was a good thing as obviously the problem had gone away, until they noticed that the group consciousness was definitely a member short – and why were they tilting dramatically to one side?

Cabal withdrew his hand from the dreff hole on the front of the right knee and examined the dead animal impaled on his switchblade. Not a zoologist by training or disposition, his examination was perfunctory and finished with him tossing the corpse away with the same dismissive flick that the giant had so often used to dispose of wamp legs and man limbs. He snapped the blade back into the knife’s handle and dropped it into his trouser pocket, before hastily shinning down the leg, dropping the last metre and running clear, keeping an eye on the giant as he waited for the inevitable. Nor did he have to wait long: there are only so many contingencies rodents can be trained for, and the loss of control over one leg was not on that short list. The sinew wood hung as a dead weight, stylishly carved with three points of articulation, from the giant’s right hip, and all the dreff panic in the Dreamlands would not keep the construct upright any longer. With some unhelpful waving of arms, the giant fell sideways very heavily, the right side smashing to splinters on impact, the head falling
off and bouncing across the square to a muffled cacophony of dismayed squeaking.

Cabal had intended to make a circuit of every dreff hole in the fallen giant to introduce them all to his switchblade, but the destruction had been greater than anticipated and, apart from some spastic flexing in the wrecked timbers, it seemed unlikely that it would ever again represent a threat. Thus, when one of the surviving dreff emerged stunned and disorientated from the head, he made no move towards it, but simply watched it wander in a circle, sniffing the air and trying to understand what had just happened to it.

Shadrach’s foot stamping down hard probably came as something of a surprise to it. Cabal watched, unconcerned at the animal’s death, but unimpressed with the motivation for it. Shadrach stamped on the animal again, his expression one of pure petulance. ‘Horrible creatures!’ he spat. ‘Disgusting little rats!’

‘They bear no resemblance to rats whatsoever,’ said Cabal, tetchy rather than angry. Shadrach’s pomposity and pettiness seemed to define him as a person, and neither endeared him to Cabal. If he had hidden qualities, they had been very well hidden indeed. Cabal turned his back on him, and went to Holk.

He reached the still clenched hand around the sergeant just as Osic, the mercenary with culinary leanings, reached them at a run. ‘I thought the others would find cover before me,’ he panted. ‘What happened?’ He saw Holk’s terrible injury and his shoulders sagged with dismay. ‘Oh . . . Oh, by Nodens – not the sergeant.’

‘Thirsh is over there somewhere,’ Cabal gestured off into the darkness. ‘He may still be alive.’ Osic nodded, and ran to investigate.

Cabal knelt by Holk. The sergeant was terribly pale and deeply unconscious. Cabal opened the giant’s hand with little difficulty: robbed of its motivating force the sinew wood was just wood, and the fingers swung back easily on their knuckles and joints. He took a deep breath, and weighed up the options. Movement made him look sharply to his side. Shadrach, Bose and Corde were hesitantly shuffling forward, none of them offering any help, appearing to Cabal’s eye to be little more than the oafish onlookers drawn to any disaster. Cabal suddenly realised how much he hated this ‘Fear Institute’ and its selfless members. ‘You,’ he snapped, pointing at Shadrach. ‘Get my bag. It’s by the wall.’ Shadrach hesitated, unused to being spoken to in such a way, but Bose made a move to comply. ‘Not you!’ Cabal barked. Bose stopped, looking quite similar to another stunned dreff that limped by at that moment. Cabal pointed very deliberately at Shadrach. ‘
You
. Get me my bag.’

As he waited, he checked Holk’s pulse. It was weak and thready, and Cabal expected the worst. The blood loss was heavy, and although he made impromptu knots in the severed major blood vessels, the segeant’s chance of surviving the shock seemed infinitesimal. Shadrach arrived with the Gladstone bag and dropped it by Cabal with ill grace. Cabal ignored him, taking out his surgical instruments and the very few chemicals he carried that might conceivably be of use. It was a loathsome thought, and he banished it as soon as it started to coalesce, but just this once, he wished he were a doctor. That he was not could not be helped: he could only try to apply his skills in raising the dead to preserving the living. He had no great expectations. ‘I will do what I can,’ he said, in an undertone to Holk, and began.