The others gathered around, crowding into Cabal’s personal space and galling him immeasurably. ‘Whereabouts are we in the woods?’ asked Bose.
‘Somewhere.’
‘How far away is Hlanith?’ asked Corde.
Cabal measured out the distance from roughly the middle of the long length of riverbank where the Dark Wood met the Oukranos to the dot labelled ‘Hlanith’ between finger and thumb, then held up his hand. ‘About three and a half centimetres, I’d say.’ He rolled up the map, put it back in its tube and restored it to his bag. ‘You really must grasp the overriding principles at work in this place. Distances are measured in the difficulty of travel, time is measured by a sense of being either quick or slow. This is a world of subjectivism, loathsome though that may be.’
‘So the journey to Hlanith is what? Quick or slow?’
Cabal gestured carelessly at the trees standing densely behind them. ‘Is that not already painfully apparent?’
They tried to stay on the riverbank as they headed eastward, but quickly ran into an inlet that forced them inland. It was little more than a stream, but the cut it had created was steep and sharp and looked to be a great deal more trouble to climb out of than fall into, so nobody argued with taking the diversion. Soon, however, the wisdom of not risking the inlet became questionable.
The trees grew closer, the areas between them populated with bushes and tangles of high weed and briars. There seemed to be few paths, whether made by animals or people, and the ones they did find wound randomly about until they petered out into undergrowth and shadows. Cabal had anticipated the journey to Hlanith taking some time, but in the face of the extraordinarily hard going, he was forced to re-evaluate his estimate from ‘some time’ to ‘some considerable time’.
It was dark in the Dark Wood, indicating that in the Dreamlands, at least, things functioned as advertised. It was not simply the dappled verdant darkness of a normal wood, however, but a heavy, hungry darkness that seemed to sap the brilliance of every ray of sunlight that somehow penetrated the canopy of leaves until the light fell upon the ground attenuated and ghostly. No insects buzzed, no animals cried.
‘Anybody frightened yet?’ asked Cabal, suddenly, from a position of scientific curiosity.
‘We do not succumb to fright, Mr Cabal,’ said Shadrach, not at all convincingly. ‘Only rational concern.’ The grunts of agreement from his fellows lacked conviction also. These grunts are worth mentioning if only because, if there had been a little less disconsolate grunting, they might have heard the crying a moment earlier, and subsequent events might have gone a little better for them.
It was Bose who heard it first, pausing and looking off to one side, while waving a hand for silence. ‘Can you hear that?’ he asked.
The others listened intently. The woods were unnaturally quiet, but even so the sound was distant. ‘Good heavens!’ said Shadrach, finally. ‘It’s a baby! Do you hear it?’
‘I hear it,’ said Cabal. ‘And it causes me rational concern. We should be going.’ He took a moment to gauge the direction the crying was coming from, then pointed diametrically opposite. ‘That way. With speed.’
‘It could be a child, lost and frightened,’ said Corde, unwilling to take any advice from Cabal. ‘We should investigate.’
‘Excellent idea,’ agreed Cabal. ‘You investigate just what sort of child can move through this difficult terrain with such remarkable rapidity while the rest of us run away.’
It was true: where a moment before it had been necessary to demand silence and yet still barely hear the crying, now it was easily audible and becoming louder by the second. There was also the unpleasant realisation that more than one voice was crying.
Corde blanched and made to run, but paused as the sound spread around them as quickly as a forest fire. They were being flanked. ‘Oh, my God.’
Cabal, too, had given up hope of escaping on foot. His sword was already in his hand as he scanned the trees. ‘You know,’ he said, with a tone of mild distraction, ‘people keep saying that, but he never turns up.’
Corde did not reply, but his sword was drawn in a moment, and he fell into a fighting stance that, to Cabal’s mixed surprise and relief, looked competent. Bose and Shadrach inspired less confidence, having drawn the curved daggers that had come with their costumes (Cabal could not bring himself to think of their clothing as anything other than fancy dress). They stood there, eyes wide, the largely ornamental daggers held as awkwardly as if they had just been drafted in from the street to murder the Duke of Clarence. Cabal expected little of them apart from acting as distractions to whatever was coming. With luck, they would be identified as the easiest targets and attacked first, giving Corde and himself a moment’s advantage.
But the attack didn’t come immediately. ‘Back to back, gentlemen,’ said Cabal, tersely. ‘Cover all approaches. No, Shadrach on my left, Bose the right.’ This left Corde directly behind Cabal; it seemed better to have two weak 90-degree arcs in their defence than the uninterrupted 180-degree arc that would result from Shadrach and Bose standing together.
‘Come on,’ he heard Corde growl. ‘Show yourselves.’
Cabal didn’t bother commenting upon how one should be careful what one wishes for, partly because it was rather trite, but mainly because they had come on and shown themselves.
He heard Shadrach gasp, and Bose sob with rational concern.
The things were not children – or, at least, not human children. They had cherubic faces and golden curls upon their alabaster pale brows, and lips as red as rose petals. Their compound eyes, however, went a lot of the way towards ruining the effect, as did the large chitinous bodies split into two tagmata in the same way as a spider, but with only six legs, much like an insect. The angelic little faces were mounted at the front of the cephalothorax, just as a true spider carries its seeing and biting apparatus. Unlike a true spider, however, the creatures made as ungodly a din as a kindergarten at feeding time. An unhappy simile, Cabal inwardly admitted.
They crept out from between the trunks of the trees, and peered down from the boughs, each at least a yard long. A swift count gave Cabal a result of eleven, approximately ten more than he felt they could comfortably deal with. Perhaps, he thought, they would be lucky and the creatures would not be as formidable as they looked. Perhaps, and there was a degree of irrational optimism here, they would not even attack, but were just gathered around out of natural curiosity. Then one of the creatures let out a scream like burning cat, and leaped in a single effortless strike at Bose.
Bose, to his credit, saw it coming. Bose, to his debit, reacted by moaning and fainting. The creature sailed through the space where he had been a moment before and crashed into Shadrach’s back, sending him sprawling with a shout. Two more darted out from the trees at the defenceless undertaker, but were met by Corde’s steel. He roared and whirled, hitting the first hard across the side closest to him, severing two legs in a spray of brown ichor and sending it rolling and shrieking miserably into its partner. This one scuttled quickly over the wounded monster only to be met by Corde’s second blow, delivered down and across. The creature slumped, its legs spasming madly as its baby head sailed across the clearing to strike a tree trunk with a wet thud.
The creature on Shadrach’s back was far too excited by having a helpless victim to hand to pay any attention to the fates of its siblings. It gripped him fiercely by the shoulders, the barbed claws along the inner edges of its forelegs stabbing him painfully through his layers of clothing and making him cry out. Its mouth opened wide and a wet proboscis, tipped with a flexing rasp, slid smoothly out and towards the base of Shadrach’s skull. In a small part of a moment, the proboscis was joined by a second, but whereas the first was tubular and pulsingly organic, the second was flat, and steel. The creature was clearly baffled to find the tip of Cabal’s rapier driving out from between its eyes, but after a moment it seemed to conclude that it had been stabbed through the top of its skull where the face joined the carapace and the sword tip was merely exiting. In this, it was correct and died in a state of intellectual satisfaction, a nice enough way to go.
Corde stamped down on the intersection between the body segments of the creature whose legs he had cut off and was rewarded with a satisfying squeal of pain that ended abruptly with a crunch of splintering chitin. He stepped back to his mark and fell once more into a ready position. ‘Eight to go,’ he called to Cabal.
Cabal grunted in reply, secretly quite relieved that he had not got as far as fighting Corde earlier; it might not have gone as well as anticipated. Not that he felt that it had extended his life by very much; Bose and Shadrach’s limited usefulness in the fight had already been expended, which left Corde and himself to deal with the remaining spider-ant-baby things. The creatures seemed surprised with the speed by which three of their number had been dispatched and the remainder hung back, communicating with one another in a high cacophony of whines, screams, sobs and howls in a language that was both complex and uniquely irritating. The next attack, Cabal had no doubt, would be well co-ordinated and tactically sophisticated. He hefted his sword and wished once again that it was still a pistol.
The assault would certainly come in the next few seconds, and when it did, Cabal and the others would die. Therefore, waiting was a poor decision. Any chance of survival depended on taking the initiative. It fell into two categories: attacking first, or escaping. Escape was clearly hopeless: even if they were somehow to break the cordon around them, they would still be stumbling around in this warren of a forest, an environment that the creatures knew well and were admirably adapted to. Therefore, the best chance was to combat them somehow. Sheer force of arms would probably fail, but perhaps a bluff might work. The creatures had a level of intelligence, it seemed and a language. If a species has speech, it can be lied to.
These were the Dreamlands, after all. The place was littered with ancient sorceries and all that airy-fairy nonsense, Cabal reasoned. He was a magician of sorts, and even if his magic depended more on extensive laboratory time and a lot of glasswork than on waving staffs around and calling down damnation upon his enemies, the creatures were not to know that. He racked his mind for a suitable abjuration, quickly reaching down to pull his cane from the straps on his Gladstone. He levelled it at the nearest creature.
‘Aie! Fhtagn!’ he began, Aie! Fhtagn! generally being a good place to start when dealing with abominations such as these. It even impresses shoggoths – and it takes a lot to impress a shoggoth. He spoke the words again in the most impressive tone he could manage. Encouragingly, the creatures stopped their infernal noise and gawped at him, their cherubic faces agog, like a bunch of choirboys discovered raiding the sherry in the vicarage. Choirboys with compound eyes, shiny black carapaces and far too many legs for polite society, it was true, but otherwise the expression fitted.
He glared steely-eyed at them, while internally his mental cogs whizzed fast enough to burn oil. ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,’ he tried next. It wasn’t much – everybody in the Dreamlands surely knew that dead Cthulhu was happily dreaming in his house in R’lyeh: it was probably sewn into innumerable samplers on innumerable parlour walls – but at least it demonstrated that Cabal was willing to call on some big names. ‘Aie! Nyarlothotep! Chaos that crawls . . . messenger, mind and will of the gods . . . the haunted dark . . . devourer of grey lilies . . .’ The creatures twitched in a way that seemed to Cabal to indicate growing unease. They shied back a little. This was going well, he realised. Cthulhu was all very well, but Nyarlothotep was known and active. A few more threatening phrases and their morale might break altogether. ‘Aie! Nyarlothotep! See and smite my enemies! Crumble them to dust, and their kin, and their homes, and their . . .’ He dried for a moment, fumbled for a continuation, and made do with ‘. . . and their pets. Strike them down, your humble servant implores thee! I . . .’ And that was all he had to say.
It would be pleasant to report that Cabal’s ruse worked exactly as he had intended, that the creatures would decide that even if he wasn’t a great sorcerer, he was convincing enough not to trifle with, and scamper off into the woods, never to threaten Cabal and his party ever again. Unhappily, only the very last part of this came true.
The creature that Cabal had levelled his cane at was the first to die. It looked startled, then truly afraid. Its lips drew back in an expression of terror, the eyes grew wide, exposing even more of the vile tiny lenses of which its eyes were made, the skin grew ashen and then the whole beast became ashes – thin grey ashes, as if sieved from an intense fire. A rapidly advancing tide of colourless death swept from its head to the tip of its legs and abdomen, and where it passed, the creature just fell away in silent drifts and plumes.
Corde and Shadrach cried out in wonder and horrified joy – and Bose snored in innocent deep sleep – as the grey death came to every one of the creatures, striking them down where they stood or as they tried to run from that circle of destruction. After no more than a minute, the men stood alone, and they were triumphant.
‘By all that’s wonderful, Cabal!’ said Shadrach, his thin, joyless face temporarily invaded by a smile. ‘I thought the jig was up then but, by heavens, you showed them what for, eh? I knew he was the man for this job! Didn’t I say so, Mr Corde? Did I not say so?’
Corde regarded Cabal with new respect. ‘That was a nice piece of work, Mr Cabal,’ he said, wiping his sword clean on the swathe of dust-covered grass at his feet.
Cabal, however, was not exhibiting any signs of exuberant happiness. To the contrary, he was pale, and beneath his dark glasses, his eyes were as wide as the creatures’ at the moment they had met their doom. ‘Ach, Gott,’ he said, in a hoarse whisper. ‘What have I done?’
‘Done, old man?’ said Corde. ‘You’ve saved our bacon, that’s what you’ve done, and we’re all very grateful, believe me.’ He went to rouse Bose.
‘No. No, you don’t understand,’ said Cabal. He was breathing heavily.
Shadrach was appalled to recognise the symptoms of fear. ‘What is it, Cabal? Did something happen to you when you performed that magic?’
‘Magic?’ Cabal looked at him as if just realising that Shadrach was speaking to him. ‘Magic? I performed no act of magic. It was a ruse . . . a ploy. I intended only to fool those creatures, to scare them into thinking I am the sort of magician who goes around casting spells.’
Shadrach frowned, perturbed and surprised. ‘But they . . . You destroyed them.’
‘No, I did not.’ Cabal was recovering control of himself, but he was only hiding his fear, not dispelling it. ‘I called on other powers. I have done so before in similar circumstances on the basis that at least it buys me some time. The calls are hopeless, you see. They have no effect.’
