The Cabal?
There is no Cabal.
Subutai Corporation, the brainchild of Neal Stephenson, has sold its Personal Ubiquitous Literature Platform (PULP) to a company called Brainstem Media. Brainstem is founded and run by the PULP’s developers. PULP was developed to deliver chapters of a serialised novel to an iOS and Android app. The novel in question, The …
Surely the point of the swordfights in the Baroque Cycle is that mostly they wouldn't have been highly-skilled fencing matches. As one character says (paraphrasing), if you're up against a really good swordsman, you don't fight him with a sword, you beat him to death with a treetrunk.