Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

CHAPTER 1 in which a scientist visits Hell and a deal is struck

Walpurgisnacht, the Hexennacht. The last night of April. The night of witches, when evil walks abroad.

He stood at a desolate and lonely place where there would be no interruption, no prying eyes. The air smelled metallic with freshly spilt blood; the body of a decapitated virgin kid goat lay nearby. He had no alloyed metal about him but for a thin-bladed sword of fine steel he held in his right hand; that arm was naked, his shirt sleeve rolled up to the biceps. A silver coin wrapped in paper nestled in his waistcoat pocket. Before him burned a fire of white wood.

His name was Johannes Cabal, and he was summoning a demon.

“… Oarios! Almoazin! Arios! Membrot!” The chanted names faded into the unusually still night air. Only the crackling of the fire accompanied him. “Janna! Etitnamus! Zariatnatmix … and so on.” He drew a deep breath and sighed, bored with the ritual. “A. E. A. J. A. T. M. O …”

There was hidden meaning in the names he must call, the letters he must chant. That didn’t mean he had to approve or even be impressed by them. As he recited the Grand Conjuration, he thought that some magicians might have better served the world by writing crossword puzzles.

Then space distorted, and he was no longer alone.

The demon’s name was Lucifuge Rofocale. He stood a little taller than Cabal’s six feet, but the bizarre fool’s cap he wore — three flopping horns, or perhaps tentacles, ending with arrowheads — made his height vary from moment to moment. In one hand he held a bag containing, at least symbolically, the riches of the world. In the other, a golden hoop. He wore a segmented, studded leather skirt rather like a Roman soldier’s. Beneath it, fur-covered legs ended in hooves. He had a fat anteater’s tail, and a silly little Hercule Poirot moustache. As is often the case with demons, Lucifuge looked like an anatomical game of Consequences.

“Lo!” cried the demon. “I am here! What dost thou seek of me? Why dost thou disturb my repose? Smite me no more with that dread rod!” He looked at Cabal. “Where’s your dread rod?”

“I left it at home,” replied Cabal. “Didn’t think I really needed it.”

“You can’t summon me without a dread rod!” said Lucifuge, appalled.

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes, but under false pretences. You haven’t got a goatskin or two vervain crowns or two candles of virgin wax made by a virgin girl and duly blessed. Have you got the stone called Ematille?”

“I don’t even know what Ematille is.”

Neither did the demon. He dropped the subject and moved on. “Four nails from the coffin of a dead child?”

“Don’t be fatuous.”

“Half a bottle of brandy?”

“I don’t drink brandy.”

“It’s not for you.”

“I have a hip flask,” said Cabal, and threw it to him. The demon caught it and took a dram.

“Cheers,” said Lucifuge, and threw it back. They regarded each other for a long moment. “This really is a shambles,” the demon added finally. “What did you summon me for, anyway?”

he Gates of Hell are an impressive structure. A great adamantine finger of rock a mile in diameter and two miles high punches through the surface of the cracked and baking desert plain of Limbo. On one side of this impenetrable edifice are the Gates themselves: massive iron constructions hundreds of feet wide and a thousand high. Their rough, barely worked surfaces are pocked and pitted with great bolts driven through in ragged lines, huge bands of brass running across in uneven ranks. One could be forgiven for thinking Hell’s a popular place to get into.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is.

On the outside, one wonders what happens once you pass through that terrible, cruel portal. Some believe that all Hell is somehow crammed within the rock, a place where dimensions mean nothing. Others say that immediately beyond the Gates, within the hollowed rock, is a great chasm that opens into the pit of Hell, and that those stepping within must surely plunge straight to their eternal dooms. Others believe that the rock conceals the top of a very big escalator. Nobody on the outside knows for sure, but everyone wants to find out, and they want to find out because anything — anything — is better than the forms.

Lots of forms. Stacks of forms. An average of nine thousand, seven hundred, and forty-seven of them were required to gain entrance to Hell. The largest form ran to fifteen thousand, four hundred, and ninety-seven questions. The shortest to just five, but five of such subtle phraseology, labyrinthine grammar, and malicious ambiguity that, released into the mortal world, they would certainly have formed the basis of a new religion or, at the least, a management course.

This, then, was the first torment of Hell, as engineered by the soul of a bank clerk.

Nobody had to fill in the forms, of course. But, given that the alternative was eternity spent naked in an endless desert that has never known night, most people found themselves sooner or later queuing up at the small porter’s door set into one of Hell’s Gates. There they would receive a form entitled “Infernal Regions (Local Authority) Hades Admission Application — Provisional (AAAA/342)” and a soft pencil.

Congas of hopeful applicants wound around the gatehouse like a line drawn by somebody wanting to find out how much writing you could get out of a box of ballpoints. The formerly quiet desert hummed to a steady drone of sub-vocalised reading and flipped pages. New arrivals and old hands queued patiently at the porter’s door to hand in and receive forms. The quickest route through the paper trail necessitated the completion of two thousand, seven hundred, and eighty-five, but nobody had yet fulfilled the extremely narrow conditions that would permit such a speedy passage. Most could anticipate three or four times as many, not counting forms rejected for mistakes; the hand-picked team of administrative imps that dealt with admissions didn’t like errors at all, nor did they issue erasers.

Through the muttering crowds, stepping over form-fillers and never pausing to apologise, came a pale man. Johannes Cabal was walking to Hell.

Tow-headed, lean, in his late twenties, but with any spirit of that youth long since evaporated, Cabal seemed otherwise unremarkable except for his air of intent, his unwavering advance on the gatehouse, and his clothes.

“Hey, watch it!” barked Al Capone, wrestling with the spelling of “venereal,” as Cabal stepped over him. “Why don’t you just…” The protest died on his lips. “Hey … Hey! That guy’s dressed! He’s got clothes!”

That guy did, indeed, have clothes. A short black frock coat, slouch-brimmed black hat, black trousers, black shoes, a white shirt, and a tidy black cravat. He wore dark-blue tinted glasses with side-baffles, and he carried a black gladstone bag. Unexciting clothes, but clothes nonetheless.

It was the first sensation that the desert had ever experienced. The damned parted before Cabal, who, in his turn, seemed to accept this as his due. Some excitedly speculated that he must be a messenger from the Other Place, that the end times had finally arrived. Others pointed out that nothing in Revelation referred to a man in a black hat and sensible shoes.

Cabal walked directly to the porter’s door and slammed his hand on the closed window. While he waited for a reply, he looked about him, and the damned withered beneath his soulless and impassive gaze.

The window snapped open.

“What do ye want?” demanded a weasely man wearing a teller’s shade from the other side, a man named Arthur Trubshaw.

Sartre said that Hell was other people. It transpires that one of the other people was Trubshaw. He had lived a life of bureaucratic exactitude as a clerk out in a dusty bank in a dusty town in the dusty Old West. He crossed all the “t”s and dotted all the “i”s. Then he made double entries of his double entries, filed the crossed “t”s, cross-referenced the dotted “i”s in tabulated form against the dotted “j”s, barred any zeroes for reasons of disambiguation, and shaded in the relative frequencies on a pie chart he was maintaining.

Arthur Trubshaw’s life of licentious proceduralism was brought to an abrupt end when he was shot to death during a robbery at the bank. He did not die heroically: not unless one considers demanding a receipt from bandits as being in some sense praiseworthy.

Even in Hell, Trubshaw had continued to demonstrate an unswerving devotion to the penny ante, the nit-picking, the terribly trivial, the very things that had poisoned his soul and condemned him in the first place. Given such a mania for order, a den of chaos like Hell should have been an ideal punishment. Trubshaw, however, just regarded it as a challenge.

At first the demons assigned to torment him laughed diabolically at his aspirations and looked forward greedily to the sweet juices that drip from crushed hopes. Then they discovered that, while they had been laughing, Trubshaw had rationalised their tormenting schedules for maximum tormenting efficiency, organised a time-and-motion study for the imps, and, in passing, tidied the underwear drawers of the demon princes and princesses. Lilith, in particular, was mortified.

Never one to squander such a remarkably irritating talent, Satan put Trubshaw in charge of admissions. Hell had grown a new, unofficial ring.

“I want to see Satan. Now.” Cabal’s accent was clipped and faintly Teutonic. “I don’t have an appointment.”

By now Trubshaw had noticed the clothes and was considering possible explanations. “And who might ye be? The Archangel Gabriel?” He started the sentence as a joke but modified his tone halfway through. After all, perhaps it was.

“My name is Johannes Cabal. Satan will see me.”

“So ye’re nobody special, then?”

Cabal gave him a hard look. “It is hardly my place to say. Now, open this door.”

Clothes or no clothes, Trubshaw decided he was on pretty familiar ground after all. He produced a copy of AAAA/342 and pushed it towards Cabal.

“Ye’ll need to fill this in, mister!” he said, and indulged himself in a chuckle, a horrible noise, like a clockwork crow running down. Cabal gave the form a cursory glance and handed it back.

“You misunderstand. I’m not staying. I have business to discuss. Then I’m leaving.” There was a muted gasp from the interested onlookers.

Trubshaw narrowed his eyes. “Leaving, ye reckon? Well, I reckon ye’re wrong. This is Hell, sonny. Ye just can’t come gallivanting in and out like a lady’s excuse-me. Ye’re dead and ye’re staying. That’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it is now, y’hear?”

Cabal looked at him for a long, long moment. Then he smiled, a cold, horrid rictus that travelled up his face like rising damp. The crowd went very quiet. Cabal leaned close to Trubshaw.

“Listen, you pathetic little man … you pathetic little dead man. You’re making a fundamental error. I’m not dead. Tried it once, didn’t like it. Right now — right this instant, as I look into your rheumy little gimlet corpse eyes — I am alive. I have come here at great inconvenience, causing considerable disruption in my work, to talk to your seedy fallen angel of a boss. Now, open the door before you regret it.”

Everybody shifted their attention to Trubshaw This was going to be good.

“No, Mr. Fancy-Pants-Living-Fella, I ain’t gonna open the door, and I ain’t gonna regret it, neither. Know why? Because, as ye spotted so neatly despite them damn foolish spectacles, I’m dead, and, better yet, I’m on the payroll in these parts. My job’s to make sure people fill in the paperwork. All the paperwork. Elseways, they don’t get in, and right now, right this instant, I’m guessing that means you, too, ye lanky son of a bitch. So — what’re ye going to do about that? Eh?”

For his answer, Cabal raised his bag until it was level with the window. Then he carefully opened it and, with a flourish like a stage magician, produced a skull.

Trubshaw shied away momentarily, but curiosity overcame him. “What ye got there, ye freak?”

Cabal’s horrible smile deepened.

“It’s your skull, Trubshaw.” Trubshaw blanched and his eyes widened as he gazed at it. “I … ‘liberated’ it from your old town’s cemetery. They still talk about your death there, you know. You’ve quite passed into local folklore.”

“I always did my duty,” said Trubshaw, unable to tear his eyes away from the skull.

“Oh, yes. Your name lives on to this day.”

“Yeah?”

“Indeed.” Cabal waited exactly long enough for pride to start swelling agreeably in Trubshaw’s withered excuse for a heart before adding, “It has become a byword for stupidity.”

Trubshaw blinked, the spell broken.

“Oh, yes. Well, what do you expect if you get yourself murdered for the sake of a receipt? Children say, ‘You’re as dumb as Trubshaw,’ to their little playmates. When their parents refer to somebody remarkably stupid, they’ll say, ‘Well, there goes a proper Trubshaw and no mistake.’ You can get souvenirs and everything. It’s quite the cottage industry.”

He smiled, and something like benevolence slipped into his expression for the first time. It was almost certainly a trick of the light.

Trubshaw incandesced with fury.

“How the heck do you reckon you’re gonna get by me now, you goddamned Kraut? You really got my goat now, y’know. By jiminy, it’ll be a cold day around here afore I let ye through!”

Cabal affected a yawn. “Your reputation is well deserved, Arthur Trubshaw. You think I stole this skull as a keepsake? Do you know who I am?”

“I don’t care who ye are, mister! You can take yer bag a’ bones and shove it right up ye — ”

“I am Johannes Cabal. Necromancer.”

It went very quiet indeed on both sides of the door. Word gets about in the shadowed places. Corpses exchange scuttlebutt and gossip, and they know all about the necromancers, the sorcerers who use the dead. They are the Bogeyman’s Bogeymen.

“Now, Arthur, your choice is clear. You can open the door and let me in. Or I can go back to the land of the living in a truly abominable mood, raise you up from this place, put your cankerous soul into something that will do as a body, and then make you wish you were dead all over again. Repeatedly.”

Cabal pulled down his smoked-glass spectacles far enough to show his hard, humourless eyes — grey flecked with blue that suggested tempered steel and difficult times ahead for any foe — and Trubshaw knew he meant every word. “Which is it to be?”

The Arch Demon Ratuth Slabuth had been informed that Hell had been invaded and, being a general of the Infernal Hordes, did he intend to do anything about it? Flying devils were sent to reconnoitre the enemy force, but these quickly returned and — somewhat crestfallen — reported that the invaders consisted of one man with a short temper and sunglasses. Intrigued, the general had decided to take the situation into his own hands, claws, and writhing thorned tentacles.

Ratuth Slabuth, a stack of shifting non-Euclidean angles topped by a horse’s skull in a stylised, ancient-Grecian helmet, looked down from a great height upon the insolent human.

“This is Hell,” he tried to explain for the third time. “Not a drop-in centre. You can’t just turn up and say, ‘Oh, I was just in the neighbourhood and thought I’d call by and have a bit of a chinwag with Lord Satan.’ It simply isn’t done.”

“No,” said the infuriating mortal. “It hasn’t been done. There is a difference. May I pass now?”

“No, you may not. Satan’s a very busy … um, is very busy right now. He can’t go interrupting his work for every Tom, Dick, and Johannes” — he paused for effect, but the human just looked at him with a faint air of what seemed to be pity — “Harry, that is, who turns up demanding audience.”

“Really?” said Cabal. “I had no idea. I thought this would be an uncommon occurrence, unique even, but you seem to imply that it happens all the time. Fair enough.”

Ratuth was just thinking how well he’d handled things when, suddenly, Cabal pointed directly at him. “I call you liar!” he spat. “I call you duplicitous, mendacious, and thoroughly amateur at both enterprises.”

“What?” shrieked the demon general. “WHAT? You, a mere mortal, dare to call me thus?” The eldritch angles unfolded, the darkness about him deepened as he rose like some dreadful bird of prey. “I shall destroy you! I shall rend the very flesh from your skeleton, hollow your long bones, and play your funeral lament upon them! For I am Ratuth Slabuth! Dark General of the Infernal Hordes! Father of Desolation! Despoiler of Innocence! Look upon me, mortal, and know thy doom!”

Cabal, he noticed through his rage, looked calm. Worryingly so.

“ ‘Ratuth Slabuth,’ eh?” said Cabal. “You wouldn’t happen to have started your career as Ragtag Slyboots, Despoiler of Milk and Entangler of Shoelaces, would you?”

The effect was electric. Ratuth Slabuth folded up like an especially large deck of cards in the blink of an eye until he was the same height as Cabal.

“How did you know that?” he asked quickly.

“I’m a necromancer. You’d be surprised at the sources we dig up. Now, then, do I get my audience with Satan or do I spread rumours about a certain diabolic general’s personal history? Which is it to be?”

Johannes Cabal. Johannes Cabal. I’m sure I know that name.”

Lord Satan was actually pleased to have something to distract him from the dull day-to-day administration of the Eternally Damned in all their massed homogeneity. He’d simply waved an embarrassed and apologetic Ratuth Slabuth behind his throne and settled down to be amused.

The throne was only a throne by dint of its vast scale; otherwise, it was simply a big stone chair on the end of a rocky peninsula that extended into the centre of a lake of boiling lava. All in all, it was less of an audience and more of a fireside chat.

Satan sat comfortably on the unyielding basalt throne, massive and urbane. All things to all people, he looked exactly as you’d imagine. Exactly. He snapped his fingers.

“Oh, of course. The necromancer. Now I recall. You have a contract with me, I think. Yes?” He gestured, and a demonic secretary appeared in his colossal hand. “Nip over to Contracts and pull whatever we’ve got on Johannes Cabal, please.” The demon made a note on a yellow pad before soaring into the sulphurous air and out of sight.

“Yes,” replied Cabal. “You have my soul. I’d like it back.”

Ratuth Slabuth choked down a laugh. Cabal gave him a milk-curdling look and continued.

“I traded my soul over to you some years ago. That was a mistake — its absence is proving an intolerable burden. Therefore, I should like it back.”

Ratuth Slabuth was making idiotic muffled guffawing noises. Satan quelled him with a glance before addressing Cabal.

“Now, you see, Johannes, we have a little bit of a problem there.” The secretary landed on Satan’s casually opened hand and passed him a roll of parchment before ceasing to exist. Satan unrolled it between his fingers and read it as he spoke. “You see, as a rule of thumb, I don’t give souls back. It might set a precedent. These things do. This” — he indicated the parchment with the wave of a finger tipped with a nail the size of a very well-manicured tombstone — “is a perfectly standard contract with the exception of a proviso about you giving up your soul immediately rather than my having to wait until you’re dead or after a set period, the Faust clause, that sort of thing. My notes indicate that was your idea.”

“I believed my soul was irrelevant to my researches, so I determined to see what empirical differences there were between the soulful and the soulless, which is to say, me. I was wrong to believe in its irrelevancy. The interference caused by its absence, I can no longer countenance.”

Ratuth Slabuth leaned forward, interested. “Interference?” he asked. “What sort of interference?”

“Not to be obtuse, your interference,” replied Cabal, pointing at Satan.

Satan tapped his chest in surprise. “My interference?”

“Constant interruptions. Stupid games. Interference. You know perfectly well what I mean.”

For a moment Satan didn’t seem to. Then the great brow cleared and he nodded. “Your soullessness must be attracting avatars of mine. Fancy that.”

Cabal, apparently, did not fancy that at all. “Especially an irritating little man with a big beard. But it goes further than that. The spiritual vacuum within me is actually causing freak results in my experiments. I cannot perform the same procedure twice in full confidence that I will see the same results. I’ve wasted years trying to locate the problem. Now that I have, I’m here to rectify things.”

It was the truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth.

As a scientist, Cabal preferred to work in scientific absolutes wherever possible. The lack of a soul, however, was a quantifiable hindrance in as much as it lent his researches a variable percentile of veracity and therefore rendered them 100 per cent useless. This was a scientist’s cavil, a good rational reason. Johannes Cabal had no trouble accepting it and expressing it.

But there was something else. Something deeper and very, very well hidden. Given Satan’s legendary ability to worm out secrets, Cabal could not afford to give him the faintest whiff of this other truth, for he knew Satan would worry at it like a dog with a rag. Cabal didn’t intend to let that happen; it was his business, and his alone. So he focussed on the scientific and the quantifiable and did not allow even a tremor of this other, this greater truth into his voice.

Satan was studying the contract. “You sold your soul to gain an insight into necromancy in the first place. If I were to give you your soul back, I would want that in return. That would invalidate the whole scheme, perhaps?”

“I need that knowledge,” said Cabal. “That is non-negotiable.”

Satan smiled. “That’s that, then. You can’t eat your cake and have it, too, Johannes. Sorry and all that.”

For a long minute Cabal glared at Satan. Satan continued to smile, twiddled his thumbs, and awaited developments. He wasn’t disappointed.

“I’ll … ” Cabal paused. It was as if he were dealing with an alien concept. “I’ll…” He coughed. “I’ll make you … a … wager.” He stopped, uncertain if he’d used the right term. “I believe that you have a reputation for accepting … wagers. I should like to make one.”

Satan waited, but there was no further clarification. Finally, he leaned forward and said, “Fine. Wagers, yes, that’s good. I like them. What’s your wager?” Cabal was clearly stumped. “Not something you’ve ever done before, hmm? Never mind, shall I suggest one?”

He allowed Cabal’s continued silence to become slightly embarrassing before taking it for assent. “Now, as I’ve already said, I can’t start giving souls back willy-nilly or else I’ll never hear the end of it. There’d be a queue from here to Tartarus of ne’er-do-wells whinging and whining and wringing their hands, and I get enough of that at the best of times. So you must appreciate that it can’t be anything easy. Pour décourager les autres. You follow me so far?”

“I understand.”

“Excellent. So what I propose is that you must replace your soul in my little collection … ”

“You just want another soul?”

“… a hundred times over.”

“A hundred?” The number staggered Cabal. “A hundred? What do you take me for, a mass murderer?”

“You’re not listening, Johannes. I want souls, not carcasses. Not dead. Damned. Signed, sealed, and delivered. I’ll provide the forms, and the signatures don’t even have to be in blood. Although it would be nice if somebody made the effort now and then.”

Cabal looked at the floor, thinking deeply. After a minute’s consideration, he grudgingly said, “I suppose it may be possible …”

“And you’ve got a year to do it in.”

Behind his glasses, Cabal’s eyes narrowed. “Are you insane? A year? It can’t be done.”

“Oh, come, now, Johannes. A bit of that silver tongue of yours and people won’t be able to sign up for damnation fast enough. Those flashing social skills that you’ve spent so long honing to a fine edge — ”

“Sarcasm ill becomes you,” said Cabal. “I came here in expectation of dealing with a mature individual. Instead, all I get is petty slights and pointless whimsy. Good day.”

“I suppose I am rather whimsical these days. I’m sorry, Johannes, I didn’t mean to bruise your pride. Really I didn’t,” said Satan with an expression that indicated that he didn’t give a toss for Cabal’s pride one way or the other. “I like you. It takes a lot of courage to come down here when you really don’t need to. Yet. I don’t want you to go away in a huff and think that I didn’t give you a fair hearing. In fact, I will even help you get your hundred souls.”

It’s difficult for a horse’s skull to raise an eyebrow, but one of Ratuth Slabuth’s gaping eye-sockets may have widened slightly.

“Slabuth,” said Satan, “do you still have that jumble box handy?” As the general quickly searched through his intra-dimensional pockets, Satan leaned down and said confidentially, “The general and I were just having a bit of a spring clean. You’d be surprised how much rubbish builds up, and then, before you know it, it has to be sorted out again. No rest for the wicked.”

Ratuth Slabuth produced a battered tea chest from somewhere and passed it to his master. Satan went through it, sighing.

“No. No. No. Why did we ever give half of this nonsense room? No.” Then he pulled a bundle of files from the box and studied the label on the first. “Dear me, I’d forgotten all about these. One of these would be ideal.”

“What are they?” asked Cabal, interested despite himself.

“Do you enjoy going to fairs, Johannes?”

“No.”

“Then these will be ideal. They’re fairs, carnivals, amusement parks, and the like. I’ve had a hand in quite a few over the years. Absolutely splendid, they are. People looking for a good time drop their guard, you see. Then in you dart and you’ve got ’em. Splendid. Not so popular these days, unfortunately, but you can’t beat them for style.” He had opened the first file and was reading the notes inside. “Cougar and Dark’s Carnival. Regrettably, no. That one’s been wound up.” He dropped it back into the box and studied the next. “Brown’s Carnival, ‘Doctor Brown of World Renown.’ Whatever happened to that? Whatever happened to him?” He read a little further. “Oh dear. How unpleasant.”

“You’re doing a very poor job of engaging my enthusiasm,” said Cabal.

Satan wasn’t listening; he was already on to the next file. “Dr. Diabolo’s Torture Garden.” He smiled, evidently proud. “Terrific success. We’re franchising that.”

This seemed like a positive development to Cabal. “So — will I …?”

“No,” said Satan, “you will not. That would be far too easy. This is meant to represent a challenge, Johannes, not a cakewalk.” He dropped the file back into the box. This left him with one last set of papers. He took the top sheet and read out loud.

“ Pre-production schedule. ‘Carnival of Discord’ Project.” He flicked through some other sheets. “Proposed by Leviathan, seconded by Balberith. That’s a novelty, eh, Slabuth? First time he’s ever agreed with anything. Oh, here’s why. Function: to tempt to contentiousness, to blasphemy, argumentation, and murder. Typical, only Balberith would think that people want to go to the carnival to have a good bicker, spit on a Bible, and then kill each other. No wonder it got shelved. Still, the rest of the proposal has Leviathan’s paw prints all over it. Very professional indeed. With the right man at the helm, this could be a regular little soul-stealer.” He looked down at Cabal. “What do you think, Johannes? Do you think you could be the right man?”

“I am not notably light-hearted …” Cabal started.

“Gosh, really?” said Satan with total innocence.

“… I have no grasp of what is involved in this ‘carnival’ business, and I am hardly gregarious. Frankly, I don’t think your challenge is entirely fair.”

There was silence for a long moment.

Satan’s periods of good nature — in common with many managerial types — lasted precisely up until the moment he was challenged. He scowled monstrously, the smile falling from his face like a greased pig off a church roof. Quickly, over a period of seconds, the lava lake cooled. The glowing red rock turned dirty grey and then black. It was getting distinctly colder. Frost started to appear on the stone walls.

“ ‘Not entirely fair,’ ” repeated Satan, all trace of jovial hail-fellow-well-met gone. “ ‘Not entirely fair’?” His voice became that of the inferno: a rushing, booming howl of icy evil that flew around the great cavern, as swift and cold as the Wendigo on skates. “I am Satan, also called Lucifer the Light Bearer…”

Cabal winced. What was it about devils that they always had to give you their whole family history?

“I was cast down from the presence of God himself into this dark, sulphurous pit and condemned to spend eternity here — ”

“Have you tried saying sorry?” interrupted Cabal.

“No, I haven’t! I was sent down for a sin of pride. It rather undermines my position if I say ‘sorry’!”

“I have my pride, too. Yet you insist on sending me off on a ridiculous errand posing as some sort of showman. Where’s the justice in that?”

Satan leaned back in his throne, and his voice dropped to the low tone of somebody who is about to abort an interview. “Look up ‘Satan’ in a thesaurus at some point, mortal. You’ll find terms like ‘elemental evil,’ ‘wickedness incarnate,’ and ‘the begetter of sins.’ If you find ‘nice chap,’ ‘good bloke,’ and ‘the embodiment of fairness,’ then I would suggest you buy a new one. Do you accept the deal?”

Cabal considered. “One hundred souls?”

“Yes.”

“One year? Until the midnight of the next Walpurgisnacht?”

Satan groaned. “Oh, it’s not Walpurgisnacht, is it? I knew I’d forgotten something. I’m supposed to be abroad, cavorting with witches.” He curled his lip truculently. “I really can’t be bothered this year; I’ll let the avatars deal with it. So — you were saying? Oh, yes. Next Walpurgisnacht midnight, yes.”

“I get the carnival to help me?”

“Just so.”

“What if I fail?”

“I don’t care very much. I suppose I could” — he looked about for inspiration — “take your life. That seems fair enough. By my standards.” Cabal looked dubious. “It’s the only deal you’re going to get, Johannes Cabal. Take it or leave it.”

The frost was gently melting from the frozen lake as it started to warm up again.

Cabal looked around, questing for his decision. If he didn’t take the wager, his researches were useless. Worse yet, if by some fluke he did succeed in them despite the lack of a soul, they would be pointless. If he took the wager and failed, then he would end up in this fatuous medieval monk’s idea of eternal torment.

He clicked his tongue. No choice at all, then.

He nodded. “I accept your offer.”

He had no concept of why people might want to waste their time and money at a carnival when they could be doing something important, but he was sure that as soon as he applied himself he might be able to think down to that level.

“Good. Splendid.” Satan tossed the large file at Cabal, who avoided it concussing him only with difficulty. “There’s your carnival, there’s your budget.” He squeezed his hand shut until his nails drove into the flesh. A single drop of black blood fell to the floor and formed into a glistening, gelid sphere about the size of a medicine ball. “And there’s your year.” He snapped the fingers of his other hand and an hourglass appeared. He turned it and placed it in front of Cabal. “Enjoy it in good health. Now shoo. You bore me.”

“Hold on,” said Cabal, uncertainty turning to suspicion. He pointed at the sphere. “What do you mean, ‘budget’?”

“The Carnival of Discord never became operational. All the materials were allocated, but it was never manned. It’s all in the file. That ball of blood is my diabolical influence and power. Every time you call upon it, the ball will diminish. Use it wisely, Johannes Cabal. Now” — he spoke with finality — “this audience is at an end.”

He snapped his fingers again and, abruptly, Cabal was elsewhere.