The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  CHANG STOOD wincing at the pain scoring across the whole of his body, catching his rasping breath and taking in the ruined compartment—window and door destroyed, upholstery slashed, the floor scratched and pitted by the glass ground beneath their boots. He took in the fact that the Contessa had never especially feared Chang at all, that her only concern—at the stable and on the train—had been that hooded, implacable killer. The man had chased her from the front of the train toward Chang—what did that mean with regard to the Captain? Chang had assumed the disfigured man was another of the Captain's soldiers, who'd run afoul of the blue glass… but Chang realized that the man—and by extension, the Captain?—had been trying to kill the Contessa. One of the most subtle achievements of the Cabal had been their insinuation into the highest levels of government— suborning powerful figures throughout the Ministries and the Palace to the extent that state policy would be now executed to serve their particular interests. What was more, an entire regiment of dragoons had been reassigned to “unspecified duties” at the Palace, an unprecedented gesture that had allowed the key figures in the Cabal—Minister Crabbé, the Comte, Francis Xonck, the Contessa—to protect their every endeavor with seasoned troops. Chang frowned, for given all of this, what he'd seen made little sense. If the search party had been sent by the Palace, were they not the Contessa's allies?

  Was the Captain in the passenger cars or had he talked his way into the engine itself? Chang wanted to leap out the window and run after the Contessa, but knew that stopping the Captain, stopping any discovery of their survival—especially if he did not truly understand who the Captain served—was more important than revenge. Yet if Chang remained on the train, he was now leaving two deadly enemies behind him, when all of his companions would be passing through Karthe village.

  But who knew when Svenson and the women might arrive? It could be another week, even more. By driving the Captain and Josephs away from the fishing village, Chang had ensured his companions would be safe there. The Contessa wanted only to escape Karthe, and the disfigured man had shown he would pursue her above anything.

  The Contessa was one woman. If no one stopped the Captain delivering his news, Chang and the others would be hunted everywhere, by hundreds of men… and he had left his warning note at the Flaming Star…

  The splitting ache in his head prevented further thought. There was no clean choice—either way he risked damning both the others and himself. He needed to sleep, to eat—to eat opium, he thought with no small longing.

  Chang staggered against the row of seats. The train was moving. He looked at the dark trackside moving past, weighing the possibility of leaping out, but did not move. The decision had been made.

  IT HAD taken the whole of that night's travel to descend from the dark mountains into a land of treeless hills marked, as by the scrawls of a child's pencil, with arbitrary seams of lichen-speckled slate. He had bartered with the trainsmen for some meat and bread and tea. To his great frustration, the Captain was not in the passenger cars, nor the coal wagon, nor the engine. Nothing was said of the ruined compartment—the glass was swept up and the broken doorway stretched with canvas by the time he had finished his search in the forward cars— even if the men seated around the stove cast more than one wary glance at Chang's unsettling eyes and his battered, nonsensical garments. He paced the length of the train, fruitlessly hoping he had overlooked some nook or cupboard, but only frightened the other passengers—three men with business at the mines, an old woman, and two young laborers on their way to shackle their lives to a mill, or one of the new factories setting up outside of the city.

  Given that Chang had no way to search the ore cars himself while they were in motion, and barring an open attack on his person, there was nothing he could do for the remainder of the journey.

  He did not know who the disfigured man was—either one of the Captain's men…or not. Had the Contessa contaminated some woodsman? Chang shivered to recall the agony of the ground blue glass inside his own lungs. If this fellow had the same torment… was he even in his own mind? And what had been in the strange trunk? The orange felt marked it as salvage from the dirigible… if a priceless glass book had been brought to shore only to smash into weaponry, what else could be still more valuable?

  The question made Chang think of the airship. Just when the members of the Cabal had stood at the very brink of success— unimaginable wealth and power all but in their grasp—the suspicions and rivalries between them had been inflamed to open, violent antagonism. Chang had seen it before, thieves turning on each other in the midst of a crime, but these were no common thieves. What they had schemed to steal was nothing less than the free thought of a nation— of many nations—to fashion an empire of oxen. That extreme ambition had fed their fears and distrust of one another, of which the violence on the dirigible was only the final, sudden flowering. Chang knew that Xonck, the Contessa, the Comte, and Crabbé had all hatched their own secret plans against the others—either for insurance or outright betrayal. As he wondered what was in the trunk, he also wondered what private schemes remained in place, like loaded weapons in an unlocked cupboard, just waiting to be found.

  Chang spent the next day paralyzed with waiting, watching the landscape descend from the brown hills to cultivated fields and villages and then small towns, each indicated from afar by its brittle spire. By the time night had fallen again he sat slumped in the seat, his glasses folded in his lap and a hand pressed over his eyes, hating the confinement, hating the docile passengers around him, hating every prim little town he passed. It was ridiculous, patently ridiculous. The woman was dead. He pulled away his hand and looked up, squinting at the yellow lantern light that came from the corridor.

  Then for no particular reason he thought of the Contessa on her knees at the trackside. The image was impossibly vivid—her face flushed, hair wild, the scarlet gash on her shoulder. He recalled striking her in the stable, and the exquisite movement of her body as she had stumbled back but kept her feet… the elegance of her pale hand touching her new-bruised jaw… Cardinal Chang covered his eyes with a groan. He was insane.

  THE SKY was dark when the train pulled into Stropping Station. Chang dropped down on the gravel trackside a good distance from the main station floor and its crowd. He looked down the line of ore cars, knowing the Captain could be anywhere. The scattered pages of a newspaper blew toward him with a blast of steam from the engine, and Chang reached down to catch one. Although his eyesight made reading anything but the largest type difficult, he'd been gone from the city for days and knew he ought to see where things stood. It was the Courier, an inflammatory, vulgar rag, of two days previous. The headline read “Market Crisis!” Chang sneered—the markets were always in crisis—and allowed his eyes to drift down the page. The other stories seemed no less dire—“Blood-Fever Fear,” “Industry at Standstill,” “Privy Council Delay”—but that was the Courier. Chang balled up the paper and threw it aside.

  A flicker of movement caught his eye. Behind the ore cars, between the wheels—for an instant only—had been a shadow. It was a crouching man, and that man was watching him. Chang broke into a jog across the tracks, ducking beneath the railcars until he reached a side exit he'd found on a Royal Engineers' architectural survey plan some years before and employed on numerous occasions since. A quick kick to the half-rusted door, up two stories of metal staircase in pitch black—just slow enough for the Captain to follow—and Chang was groping for the bolt of a small iron door. He paused… smiled at the sounds of footfalls in the darkness below… and emerged onto Helliott Street, narrow and high-walled, and dangerous at anytime to the careless or unarmed. Chang left the door ajar behind him and smiled again, pleased to be back where he knew his way.

  Helliott Street fed into the Regent's Star, a square formed by the meeting of five roads and once dominated by the apartments of the old Queen's utterly unregretted father. The district was steeped in the louche sort of traffic those apartments housed—at the Princ
e's death the Royal apartments had been vacated, but the place only became more deeply the province of the lawless and depraved.

  The hideous Stropping clock had marked the time as nine o'clock. Even without being followed, Chang could not go back to his rooms until he knew his status with the law, nor could he show his face at the Raton Marine tavern. Chang knew he must choose a path. But he waited—detecting the slightest squeak of the rusted door—then loudly cleared his throat and spat toward the gutter.

  Two men, one of them abnormally large, had stepped forth from the shadows of St. Piers Lane and walked toward him… the exact last thing he needed.

  THE LARGE man, whose throat bulged like a toad's above a soiled, tightly knotted cravat, wore a shapeless wool cap pulled close around his ears. Chang knew him to be bald, with a mouth full of worn-to-stump brown teeth, and that his hands, presently in the pockets of a too-small greatcoat, were caged in chain-mail gloves. The second man wore a battered top hat and a green military jacket, all of its gold braid removed. His face was thin, unshaven, and his yellow hair flattened back on his skull with grease. This man's left hand, scratching a groove along his scalp as they advanced, was empty. His right, tucked neatly behind his back, would hold a belled brass cutlass hilt set with a fat, squat double-edged blade. Chang drifted along the square so his back was no longer to Helliott Street. He did not care for the Captain to strike from behind.

  “Cardinal Chang,” the big fellow called. “It was said you'd run away.”

  “That you'd come to your senses.” The other man shook his head ruefully. “Yet here you are, mad as ever.”

  “Horace,” Chang called to the large man, and then with a wry nod to his companion, “Lieutenant Sapp. I suppose I ought to have expected such a meeting.”

  “Why is that?” asked Sapp.

  “Because I am sought by parties with little knowledge of the town,” said Chang. “Being ignorant, they were certain to employ the likes of you to find me.”

  Horace exhaled with a snort and took his chain-sheathed fists from his coat. Chang carefully measured the distance between them— perhaps four feet of cobbled walkway—and exhibited his own empty hands for them to see. “Unfortunately, I am quite helpless.”

  Horace snorted again.

  “Will you convey me to your employer?” asked Chang.

  “We will convey you to the dog-heap,” Sapp told him. “A pleasure I have been anticipating these long years.”

  Chang smiled back coolly. “And whose feet are you licking to night, Sapp? Do you even know? Or are you licking something other than a foot and enjoying yourselves too much to care?”

  CHANG SNAPPED his head back as Sapp's arm swept forward, attempting—with some skill—to cut a small canal across the width of Chang's throat. The stroke went wide. Sapp slashed again, then feinted at Chang's stomach as Chang hopped back another step, keeping Sapp between him and Horace's meaty fists.

  “Slow as ever, Sapp,” observed Chang.

  “Choke on your own blood,” snarled the former officer. Sapp had been cashiered for selling his regiment's ammunition to the local population to pay his gambling debts, but persisted in wearing his rank-stripped coat in defiance of his shame.

  Sapp stabbed across Chang's face—too close. This time, Chang did not give ground but shifted so the blade shot past, then he seized hold of Sapp's wrist. Sapp tried to pull away, which gave Chang room to kick him viciously in the groin. As the wheezing Sapp crumpled to the cobbles, Chang tore his blade free and called sharply to the big man, who stood murderously flexing his ring-wrapped fingers.

  “Stay and think, Horace,” hissed Chang. “As you say yourself, I am mad. It also means I will have no qualms about killing you. I will kill you, Horace. I will bury this blade in your throat if you take one more step in my direction.”

  Horace did not move. Sapp whimpered, his breath huffing clouds against the night-wet stone.

  “No,” Horace announced. “I'm killing you.” He came at Chang like a bull.

  It was all Chang could do not to laugh. For the stinging impact of one blocked fist on his forearm, Chang slashed Sapp's very sharp blade once across Horace's bulging stomach, opening a seething, surging line of red. Horace grunted and swung again. This time Chang merely stepped aside and chopped at the man's extended arm, severing the cords at his elbow. When Horace clutched at the spurting wound with his other hand—his upper body now utterly open—Chang drove the blade hilt-deep into the bulging flesh below the big man's chin. He released the weapon and Horace toppled backward to the street.

  The Captain was nowhere to be seen. With the commotion, Chang's pursuer had gone on his way. Chang swore aloud, the words echoing across the filthy bricks of the Regent's Star. Everything was ruined—his entire purpose in taking the train, the risk in leaving the Contessa and the disfigured man behind…

  He spun to Sapp—gaping at his companion's demise—and sent a swinging kick across the man's jaw, dropping him flat. Still snarling with anger, Chang took firm hold of Sapp's uniform collar and dragged the moaning man away from his comrade's corpse, back into the shadows.

  A quick search of Sapp's pockets produced a razor, and Chang held the open edge before the former Lieutenant's blinking right eye. Chang's other hand grasped Sapp's neck, pressing the man against a brick wall. “Who has asked you to kill me?”

  “I would kill you in any case—”

  Chang squeezed Sapp's throat until the words rattled to a stop. “Who has asked you to kill me?”

  “You killed Horace—”

  “He had his chance, Sapp. This—right now—is yours.”

  Chang squeezed again. Sapp gasped, and whined with discomfort— had the kick broken a tooth?—but then nodded vigorously.

  “I'll tell you. Don't kill me. I'll tell you.”

  Chang waited, not easing his grip. Sapp swallowed.

  “Word came down to the Raton Marine—money to be made. Everyone had seen the soldiers, outside your room—and the dead German in the alley behind—more Germans watching the Library…”

  Soldiers of the Prince of Macklenburg. With his disappearance and the death of their commander, Major Blach—at Chang's hand in the depths of Harschmort—Chang assumed they had been recalled to the Macklenburg diplomatic compound.

  “Word from where?”

  “Nicholas…”

  Nicholas was the barman at the Raton Marine. Chang's dealings with him had always been respectful, but he knew—for this was the heart of the tavern's unique marketplace—that the barman held himself scrupulously neutral with regard to fugitives, feuds, even outright assassinations.

  “What about Nicholas?”

  “Said a man had come. In a black coat—from the Palace— official.”

  “No one in the Palace knows the Raton Marine exists!”

  “Then someone told them, didn't they?” spat Sapp.

  “And he told you to watch the trains?”

  “Of course he didn't! I know you, Chang! I know how you think!”

  Chang lowered the blade from Sapp's eyes and released his throat, taking a moment to pat the street grime from each ragged epaulette. “Now why should the Palace care about the likes of me?”

  “Because of the crisis.”

  “What crisis?”

  “The Ministry men. I'm not so stupid I can't follow them just as well—and I heard them whispering—”

  “I've seen the Courier. Nothing new.”

  “Men of power, Chang. Men used to half a dozen fools leaping around at a flick of their little finger. I heard them myself. And they were terrified.”

  “I'm supposed to believe I'm wanted by the Palace—because they're frightened of me?”

  “Believe what you want.” Sapp's contempt returned with his confidence. “Or maybe you don't want to admit that you don't know already—from your Library—”

  Chang dipped the razor beneath Sapp's jaw, slicing just deep enough toward the man's gnarled right ear, and with his other hand spun Sapp's shoulder
so the spray shot onto the wall behind them. He folded the razor into his coat and returned to the light of Regent's Star. His footfalls scattered two curious dogs already sniffing at Horace. The sputtering gasps of Lieutenant Sapp were inaudible beneath the clipped echo of Chang's boots against the city stone.

  HE HAD no money for a proper hotel, and the sorts of rooms he could afford would put him in view of a bothersome host of fools, less clever than Sapp if just as bloody, all chasing the same reward. Chang shrugged his coat closer around his shoulders. Of course, he could find someplace… yet if he had no safe haven of his own, did it make sense to bring the battle to his enemies?

  The Contessa surely retained her rooms at the St. Royale—but there would be no information there, and secret entry would be difficult. There was Harschmort House, the home of Lord Robert Vandaariff… with the mighty financier reduced to the status of a mindless slave and his daughter Lydia brutally murdered on the airship, might not their sprawling mansion be the perfect place to do mischief? Chang shook his head—mischief was not the point. He was being hunted by men from the Palace, but the Palace—the many, many Ministry buildings, the Queen's residence, the Assembly chambers, Stäelmaere House—was a labyrinth. It made even Harschmort look like a country garden maze. Each option brought danger without any clear sense of advantage—he did not know enough, nor who to truly fear.

  In the morning he would buy every newspaper and confirm Sapp's information, just as he would find out the fates of those Cabal underlings left behind—whether the Duke of Stäelmaere and Colonel Aspiche were still alive… and perhaps most important of all, what had befallen Mrs. Marchmoor, the last of the Comte's most powerful creations, three women he had transfigured into living glass. Was she still alive—if her present state of existence could be termed life at all? Or had she too been destroyed? They were all questions for tomorrow. Tonight Chang needed another refuge, unexpected, yet not without some purpose.