Иоганн Кабал, ученый, скептик и некромант, снова в бегах, правда на этот раз его преследуют правительственные агенты. Под чужим именем он проникает на борт «Принцессы Гортензии», пассажирского дирижабля, направляющегося в другую страну. Кабал мечтает о спокойном путешествии без всяких происшествий, но вынужденная праздность и рутина дурно сказываются на его планах. Когда на борту погибает один из пассажиров и обстоятельства его смерти наводят на мысли об убийстве, Кабал решает заняться...
Ну а если им это придется не по вкусу, пообещайте, что тогда их навестит тайная полиция и во всех подробностях расскажет, что значит быть патриотом.
Человек познается по поступкам.
– Вы не можете просто убивать людей, чтобы скрыть свои ошибки. Такими темпами вам придется вырезать половину страны.
Сидел и ждал, когда у властей найдется минутка, чтобы его казнить.
Будущее остается скрытым от нас, как бы мы ни старались его прочесть.
Люди были кошмарными созданиями, на них не стоило тратить силы.
– По традиции сперва требуется умереть, и только потом институт могут назвать в вашу честь, – заметил Кабал.
Нельзя винить человека в том, что он изготовил пулю, которой потом убили святого.
Уродливость – это дело вкуса.
– Вы всегда столь откровенны? – Экономит время.
I come before you today to share a vision I have of the future. Not just the future of our own great and noble country but also that of our neighbours...
"This is a fine country you`ve got here," he said to Antrobus II. "Such a fine place. A nominal leader who should have been in a sepulchre a week ago and a military full of inbred psychopaths." They walked a little further. "A little bit like Imperial Rome, really."
What`s this? Psychoanalysis by coercion? "Tell me about your childhood, or else?" I didn`t realise psychiatry had become so two-fisted.
Пистолеты не убивают людей. Люди убивают людей.
"Do you smoke, Herr Cabal?" "Only to be antisocial," replied Cabal, making no move.
I work alone. If you insist on having a spy present to report on my actions, he can sit quietly in the corner and stay out of my way.
He also realised that the Mirkarvians set a great deal of store by what a man put into his glass. Asking for the wrong thing might well plant suspicions in people’s head. Sparkling water with a slice of lime, for example, would probably see him thrown overboard for crimes against masculinity.
They served to remind Cabal - should a reminder ever be necessary - why his social skills were so poor; people were loathsome and not worth the practise.
In all fairness, Cabal’s vengefulness was as much a product of his lifestyle as his humours; in his career to date, he had long since discovered that rivals and enemies rarely simply shook their heads and wandered out of his life, older and wiser. Instead, they were inclined to go off to a dark corner and fester away on new plots and schemes that would explode all over his life like acidic pus. Johannes Cabal had far better things to do with his time than spend it dodging acidic pus, so he had realised early on that the best way to avoid assorted blowhards and rapscallions bursting through the door declaiming ‘We meet again, Mister Cabal!,’ or some such nonsense, was simply to kill them the first time around while they were handy and vulnerable. It wasn’t a perfect solution, he had to admit; his rivals and enemies tended to have access to the same sorts of forbidden arcane arts and unwholesome sciences that he did, and so having them sometimes come crawling out of their graves, intent on inflicting a messy postmortem revenge, was not unknown.
There is possibly no insult so calculated to sting the English as the suggestion that they may at any time be considered foreign, as this flies in the face of the obvious truth that the whole of Creation actually belongs to the English, and that they are just allowing everybody else to camp out on bits of it from a national sense of noblesse oblige.