The City of Taxon

Horst hasn't been to Metody Green's new house much. He's walked past it a few times, smiling at the cheery, bright pink-ness of it, but that's often been in the middle of the night, when he expects people like Metody to be fast asleep, and his own house has one too many Johanneses in it for Horst's liking. It's amazing the gift solitary people have for driving other people away in droves.

Even so, he notices a new addition that draws him up short, etched into the fabric of the ground: this house has been warded.

Horst knows the ward, too; it's one of the same ones that's on his house, laid there by his intrepid and infinitely paranoid brother. This one is a blood ward against the unholy. Horst is still slightly bitter about it, in fact.

Unfortunately, Horst is also considerably hampered in his plan to knock on Metody's door because of this ward. Instead, and feeling his dignity abandon him by the second, he settles for standing on her sidewalk after dark, hands cupped around his mouth, and shouting at the front of her house.

"Miss Green! Miss Green!"

Of all the hours in the day, the ones Horst misses the most are in the early afternoon. Ever a social creature, in his youth, he'd usually bypassed most of the unpleasantly early morning hours by sleeping through them, unless he happened to be working a day job at the time and had to show up at an unfashionable seven or eight or nine o'clock to earn his daily bread. He'd liked to sleep in until lunchtime, given his druthers -- and once that was done, there was no better time than the sunny midafternoon to make social calls and go on all manner of adventures with one's friends.

Now, robbed of the better part of his social calendar, particularly on a long summer day like this, it's difficult for Horst to arrange to run into anyone without seeming overly inappropriate. The beginning of his day is rarely much earlier than 10:30, and that assumes he bestirs himself to shower and dress as soon as the sun's finished its nightly set. When it's important, though, you make concessions to inappropriateness in order to see someone, and you make sure you get up early. So tonight, Horst is up by nine-thirty and dressed by ten, wearing his sharpest clothes, looking healthy and smelling faintly of something like apricot or plum.

He slips out of the house while Johannes is busy with the dishes and won't notice, disabling his location on the Taxon map once he's out the door. Johannes is a magician of no small ability, and could certainly scry Horst's location if he wanted to, but Horst doubts he'll bother. He doesn't have enough blood to go scrying for things willy-nilly, does he? Besides, if he magically spied on Horst every time Horst went off to do something Johannes wasn't interested in, his brother would have no time left in the day to do anything he was interested in. It's fair to say they both enjoy a good amount of time apart.

Horst makes his way uptown at good speed, watching the other names on Taxon's map on his tablet, looking to see that one name in particular is still where it was when he left the house. It roughly is.

This part of town isn't one Horst has frequented much yet. He doesn't think any of Taxon's captives live on this street, though it's a nice enough area. Ivy grows up and down a few brick-lined causeways, and there's an open plaza just down the way where several late summer flowers all seem to be coming into bloom. That's where Horst heads, because he can hear the soft chiming of bells and see the silvery shimmer of jewelry-adorned movement, and that means he's come to the right place.

Mr Cabal: Check the map. -SH

Sherlock Holmes, damn him, has always been too clever for anyone else's good.

Panic rises immediately in Horst's throat, all his fears and theories momentarily confirmed: someone knows the Cabal name, and they know that Horst bears it. He stares at the words Mr. Cabal for several seconds longer. This is awful.

It's a while before he settles himself again and goes through the arduous process of remembering how Sherlock told him to use the tablet, the right voice commands to open the map. It's another few seconds of looking at it before something jumps out at him that he realizes Sherlock meant him to find. A name floating around a city block in the middle of the Central district:

Johannes Cabal.

He stares at the name for a full minute longer. By this time, it's lucky that Herr Holmes didn't deliver his message in person: he'd have no doubt complained about the exceptional slowness with which Horst executed every piece of this process, the long stretches of time spent staring dumbly at things.

Or then again, if he knows Johannes Cabal, maybe he'd understand perfectly. Sometimes Horst's little brother really does invite various forms of dumbfoundedness.

He looks at the map once more, at the name, that damned name.

But a tiny voice in his head says, He came for you. This time, he came. And Horst knows he has to see for himself.

After that, he moves quickly enough that even Sherlock Holmes would call it satisfactory, gone in a soft blur.

* * * *

Horst finds his brother on the map in a little pub, the kind that sells food he'd recognize by name. He melts away into thin air and slinks through the door when someone else is exiting, and scouts the room till he finds what he's looking for: blond hair, black suit, miserably unfriendly facial expression. Well, it certainly looks like Johannes.

He stays out of sight and out of mind for the time being, watching, not sure yet of what he'll say. He'll make himself known when he chooses to.

Horst Cabal has never actually been to Hell before, but he can say with confidence that he knows someone who has, and this is distinctly not how it’s been represented to him in that person’s descriptions. There’s no desert here with an endlessly beating sun, no hopelessly complex admissions paperwork to be filled out, no crotchety desk clerk. He’s not even naked.

Under normal circumstances, on all counts, Horst would be pleased for his expectations to have been proven wrong. In this case, however, he has cause to be suspicious.

“Johannes!” he yells, uncertain if the party in question can even hear him. The room he’s contained in is circular, and silvery from floor to ceiling, the view broken up only by a single pedestal and an open door. His own voice has an uncomfortably metallic echo. Horst cups his hands around his mouth and shouts up at the ceiling in his native German, ignoring for the moment the rather obvious suggestion of the open door. “Johannes, you little shit! This is brassy, even for you.”

Horst blames himself. He probably should’ve just gone off without saying anything, walked into the sunlight without saying goodbye. Maybe he should’ve known. He guesses, in the end, he had expected that even Johannes would have the decency to let Horst die on his own terms. So really, Horst should’ve known better. Whatever pocket dimension this is that he’s been unceremoniously dumped into, he can only imagine one possible cause. One very possible, very infuriating cause.

“Come now. Be reasonable,” he tries again, outwardly cooling his temper. “This is silly, Johannes. Wherever you've dropped me for safekeeping, you can’t keep me here forever. I can still find a way to kill myself, you know.”

Perhaps he can’t fault Johannes too badly for this, though. Alongside his long-laid plans and his calculated risks, Johannes’s rare impulse decisions are usually some of his worst ideas. His brother panicked, that’s all. Maybe he'll reconsider whatever it is he's done.

Then again, it did take Johannes eight years to come down from his last panic.

Still no response. On to a second plan, then.

Horst takes a second survey of his surroundings. There little raised stand nearby with something suspiciously purple set out atop it, which seems to be the only particularly interesting thing in the room. More worryingly, however — and Horst can’t say why this bothers him so excessively — there’s a silver bracelet of some sort wrapped just a bit too snugly around one of his wrists, set with some sort of -- glassy screen. Horst likes a bit of sparkle now and then as much as the next person, mind, but he didn’t exactly pick this particular accessory out himself. He digs at it experimentally with a fingernail, but can only catch onto his own skin. He knows enough to recognize that this is probably not a good sign.

Endeavoring to remain as calm as possible, since getting too worked up might be unproductive, Horst walks over to the wall by the door, raises his arm, and pounds his braceleted wrist against the wall as hard as he can for about thirty seconds straight. At the end of the experiment, much to his chagrin, the bracelet and the wall are both still entirely undamaged. So much for Horst’s grand foray into the scientific method, then. Whatever it is, it's staying put.

The purple objects sitting on the nearby pedestal turn out to be a familiar — very familiar — frock coat, walking stick, and hat. They match the rest of his clothes, and he's fairly certain that he'd taken them off not moments ago for his little dawn appointment and left them folded neatly in the grass. (Just because one's attempting suicide is no excuse to get ash all over a perfectly good coat, after all.)

Horst approaches them cautiously, wary of unexpected gifts from unknown sources, but a bit of careful poking and prodding seems to confirm that they are, to all visible intents and purposes, simply his coat, his hat, and his cane. He can’t really make sense of why they’re there, but they’re there all the same. It seems a relatively minor risk to take them.

He puts the hat on his head and looks upward, though nothing in the metallic device on the ceiling sheds any more light on the situation. “Well, at least that’s something,” he says of his clothes, still talking to the empty room in German in hopes there’s someone there. “I suppose it makes an immediate improvement on my last stint of captivity.”

Tipping his hat to the empty room, possessions either in hand or tucked under one arm, Horst decides to try his luck with the hallway. He'll play his brother's game for now. Wherever Johannes has dropped him, it's clear this room doesn't have much more to offer him.

He hesitates momentarily, instinctively wondering if he’s about to step out into sunny midday by accident and bring on his own accidental demise — but then remembers that that was his exact intention only a few minutes ago. Putting off death just to give Johannes a stern talking-to is probably not that crucial, all in all. What does it matter?

Horst takes a last look at the room, then ducks out into the hall.