The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  “Like any of us, indeed. But you saw those wounds. The grooms were not killed by any blade I know—not unless it was a cutlass, or a boarding axe. Think, all of you! If the grooms were murdered not by a wolf, they were murdered for horses, which means whoever killed them then left ! On a horse! Chang did not so leave—nor, as he was here in your sight that entire day, did he have any horse tucked under his coat! I do not excuse Chang, but my reasoning tells me that someone else has done this killing. Perhaps they have now killed Chang. Perhaps there is something else we do not know…”

  He looked out hopefully, but no one replied. Svenson turned to Sorge. “Is there paper, something to write on?”

  There was no paper, but Sorge passed him a mostly white patch of sailcloth, which Svenson spread on the table, plucking a stub of charcoal from near the stove. With quick strokes he drew out the coastline as he knew it, the pathways of the village, the line of the river, and the expanded width—as he guessed—of its storm-fueled flood. Then, explaining as he went, he drew an X to mark the stables, another to mark the fishing boat.

  “I am trying to reason why these people have been killed. Killing the grooms would have given their killer a mount—also blankets, food, clothing. If you look, you will see from the map that, having killed them, the killer's path south would have been unimpeded by the flood.”

  “What if he did not want to go south?” asked an older man. Svenson had tended his pigs.

  “Where else would he go?” the Doctor replied. “He could not have gone north, since he could not have passed the flood. We would have heard the horses in the village.”

  Svenson lit another cigarette, snapping it out from his silver case. “My point is that the grooms' killer is gone. As for Sarn—well, first, there would have been no horse, little food, no clothing—why was he killed at all? Secondly, because of the flooded river, there would have been no path south until last night at the earliest. His killer was marooned.”

  Even the booted man nodded. Svenson began drawing small x's.

  “Those are houses,” said Sorge, unnecessarily narrating for the others. Svenson was touched by this spot of loyalty and nodded.

  “They are. Anyone coming from the fishing boat must have passed by someone's house. I suggest that men go to each one, asking questions about what was heard, what was seen…”

  Svenson looked up and saw the booted man studying the crude map. He reached across the table, took the charcoal from Svenson, and marked an area to the west, in the thick of the woods. This house lay on the exact route, from the vantage of the wreck, of a person attempting to skirt the village entirely.

  “Whose home is that?” Svenson asked.

  “Jorgens'”, Sorge answered. “More a hunter than a fisherman. He prefers the woods.”

  “Has anyone seen Mr. Jorgens since the storm?”

  Sorge looked up at Svenson with a blank expression.

  At once the men were shouting to each other—calling for lights, for weapons—but the man with the riding boots hissed sharply and brought them all to silence.

  “What if your man Chang is at Jorgens'? What if that's where he's been hid?”

  “Then you must seize him,” said Svenson.

  “And what if he's already gone?” The man stabbed his finger back onto the map, tracing a line south. “We need to search both ways— some to Jorgens', and some by sea, around the forest.”

  “But that's full of wolves,” hissed Sorge, and other men muttered in agreement. “No matter what else is true, that way is asking for death.”

  The Doctor felt a sudden peaceful symmetry.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I'll go. It is the simplest way to prove myself and guarantee the safety of Mrs. Dujong and Miss Temple. If I do find Chang, I can get closer to him than any of you—and if I find wolves, well, I shall do my best to make a wolf-skin hat.”

  “That is madness,” whispered Sorge.

  “Do I have a choice?” asked Svenson. “If I am to convince you of my intentions?”

  No one answered. The man with the boots nodded sharply, signaling the end of discussion.

  “We will go to Jorgens' and walk south—you, Doctor, will skirt around the forest and come back north to the village.”

  “Excellent,” said Svenson.

  It was decided.

  THE TIDE had changed and Svenson clambered aboard the fishing boat, directed to a seat in the bow. He had not said good-bye to Elöise. He was leaving Miss Temple, but Miss Temple had passed the crisis— it was merely a question of when she might regain her strength. Elöise would be safer without him, safer with the village mollified. The craft's sail filled easily and they pulled away, bobbing over small breaking waves. The water darkened beneath the bow, and he looked back to find the land had curved—so quickly—and the village was already out of sight. Doctor Svenson held a hand over his eyes, for they were tearing in the bitter wind.

  THE SKY was black by the time the boat reached the swollen estuary lined with reeds. Svenson thanked the fishermen, and followed their directions up the bank, and through the trees. But instead of following the path deeper into the forest, the Doctor cut across a wide, wet meadow to a line of hills he could sense only as shadows. He dismissed the idea of wolves—there was no danger at all—as he now dismissed the notion of following the forest road back to the fishing village. Their enemies had already fled—the danger would be in returning to the city. He would go on to this mining town and seek Chang, not that he expected to find Chang either. He would continue to travel ahead of the women, clearing the way of danger without the painful necessity of actual contact. The villagers might assume his death—but he could leave word in the town, and any sorrow on his behalf would be brief, if it existed at all. The more he thought of it, the less he believed Elöise would want to see him anyway—would this not be the cleanest break?

  Once he reached drier ground he made camp, not wanting to blunder about in the dark. He built a small fire, ate his meager supper, and spread his coat over his body. He woke with the sun and walked steadily past noon, winding to the dark hills, grateful for the physical effort to distract his mind and wear his limbs. He knew next to nothing about Karthe, and was mildly worried about his arrival—a foreigner in a military uniform in a town that saw few travelers at any time and scarcely one in half a century from abroad. So much would depend on who else had reached the town before him, and what story they had told. Yet there must be an inn, and he had money. Once the place was sure, he would take the train back to the city. He wondered which of his countrymen might be left at the mission compound, and what word had been sent to Macklenburg. Could it possibly be safe for him to appear there? Perhaps he ought to go straight on to Cap Rouge… on to the sea, and some other ship.

  If she loved another man—Trapping or Xonck—what did it change? And why was it so surprising, such terrible men? When did love ever care for facts? Did Corinna moldering in a grave shift Svenson's feeling for her?

  THE TWILIGHT was just creeping from the hills when he came to a wider road, rutted by the passage of mining carts. He hoped with the appearance of the road that the town was near, but after another half an hour the Doctor stopped for a drink from his water bottle, sweat under his collar. He looked around him. His gaze was taken by a stand of high black stones, each the size of a house but sharply upthrust through the earth, one on top of the other, like a spectacularly unfortunate tangle of teeth. If he did not think the town so close, he would have investigated it at once for a campsite. He corked the bottle and returned it to the rucksack.

  He heard a noise—perhaps a bird, perhaps an animal, but not the wind—faint, but coming clearly from the stones. The Doctor stepped off the road, his pace quickening to a run, boots clumping over the knotted grass.

  “Is someone here?” he called aloud, his own voice sounding foolish after so long in silence. The clearing was abandoned, but there was a ring of blackened rocks for a fire, flat slabs to sit or sleep upon, and even a collection of coal
, most likely stolen from the mines, or from an unguarded scuttle in the town.

  In answer came the same huffling wail that had reached him on the road. It was above him. He dug a candle from his coat and dragged a match on the rock to light it. Some ten feet above he saw a cracked seam between two larger stones, not a cave as such, but large enough to shelter something small. The smooth surface of the rock face below it gleamed wet. He knew it at once for blood, and called to whoever had crammed themselves into the tiny crease.

  “What has hurt you? Is it an animal? Can you come down? I am a doctor—if you are injured, I can help.”

  He received no reply. The rivulets of blood were smeared and spattered and dragged. The injured person had done his best to climb away, even as his attacker had persisted in trying to reach him.

  “I am here to help you,” called Svenson. “I cannot get up—you must come down! Who are you? What is your name?”

  In an abrupt answer the figure toppled off the rock, nearly knocking Svenson flat. He raised his arms without thinking and managed to half catch the bloody, windmilling tangle of limbs… but as he held the weight he saw it was only a boy. Svenson eased him to the ground, recovered the candle, and lit another match, moving the light to identify what wounds he could.

  “What is your name?” he repeated, dropping his voice to a soothing whisper. The boy did not reply. He had been gashed at the throat and chest, and then repeatedly along his legs. Svenson could only too vividly imagine how these last had been received—the boy's assailant relentlessly scrabbling up the rock, slashing again and again at whatever could be reached, the cave so shallow that the child had not room enough to pull his legs clear. Svenson winced at a brutal gash below the child's knee, a shining, near-black drag of blood… then reached out to touch it. The dark shining line was not blood at all. He held the candle close. The line was blue… a shooting vine of glass beneath the boy's opened flesh. The Doctor hoisted the child in his arms and stumbled back to the road.

  HIS SHOUTING brought a rush of people from the doorways of Karthe. Svenson handed the boy into the arms of others and gasped out that he was a doctor and required a table and some light. The townsmen did not question him—neither his words nor his appearance—as he removed his bloody coat and rolled up his sleeves, stepping into someone's kitchen, vaguely aware of the pale faces of a woman and her children as they cleared the table and attempted to lay down a sheet. Svenson waved it away.

  “It will merely be ruined,” he said, and then turned to the nearest man—older than he and with luck someone in authority. “I found him in a stand of black rocks outside the town. He has been attacked— perhaps by an animal. Do you know him? Do you know his name?”

  “It is Willem,” the man replied, unable to shift his gaze from the blood crusting the boy's mouth and nose. “A groom at the stable. His father—”

  “Someone should find his father,” said Svenson.

  “The father has been killed this night.”

  THE BOY did not regain his senses before death. Given the absence of opiates or ether, Svenson counted it a blessing. The Doctor had stanched the deeper cuts at the throat and across the ribs, but neither of these had been mortal. Instead, he blamed the many gashes across each leg, all with some trace of blue glass in the wound. He recalled the freezing, snapping deaths of Lydia Vandaariff and Karl-Horst von Maasmärck on the airship, the chemical reaction of indigo blue glass and human blood, and was astonished the boy had remained alive as long as he had. He took the once-proffered sheet and pulled it over the body, shutting the child's eyes with a sad sweep of his hand.

  Svenson looked up and saw the ring of faces. How long had he worked to save the boy? Thirty minutes? He hoped the effort had at least gone some way toward establishing his own good intentions. He nodded to the woman, her wide-eyed children around her (had no one thought to shoo them from the room?), and indicated the peacoat bundled over a chair. She handed it to him and the Doctor dug out his case, selected a cigarette, and leaned toward a tallow light in a wooden dish next to the dead boy's arm. Svenson straightened, exhaled, and cleared his throat.

  “My name is Svenson, Captain-Surgeon Abelard Svenson from the Macklenburg Navy. Macklenburg is a German Duchy—perhaps you do not know it. Through a complicated set of events I have found myself ashore in your country, some days' travel north, in the company of several companions. Upon nearing Karthe I heard this boy cry out. He had climbed into a nook in the rocks, where something or someone attempted to drag him down with a savage determination. I find it hard to conceive of a reason any sane person should so fiercely desire the death of a child. Is that stand of rocks someone's property? Was the boy trespassing?”

  He had no interest in the answer to either question, but as long as he diverted conversation from the blue glass he would have that much more time to make sense of the situation himself. One of the men was answering him—the rocks were common land, no one would have harmed the boy for his presence there. Svenson nodded, reminding himself to search the boy's pockets as soon as he had a private moment.

  “But you say his father is newly dead as well?”

  The man nodded.

  “Where? How?” He paused at the silence in the room. “Murdered?”

  The man nodded again. Svenson waited for him to speak. The man hesitated.

  “Could it have been the same killer?” the Doctor asked. “Perhaps the boy ran to a hiding place he thought would be safe.”

  The man looked at the other faces around him, as if asking each a question he did not care to voice. Then he turned back to Svenson.

  “You should come with us,” he said.

  IT WAS exactly like the murdered grooms—the gaping throat that on first glance seemed simply an especially vicious laceration but that upon further inspection betrayed a substantial removal of flesh. Svenson held a candle close to the wound, aware that his examination caused the townsfolk around him to blanch and turn away. He was certain, especially after seeing the murdered boy's legs, that the father had been killed by a weapon of blue glass.

  He tilted the man's head, frowning at the discolored band of skin that stretched on either side of the wound. He looked up, and saw the head townsman—who had on their walk to this house introduced himself as Mr. Bolte—notice his discovery.

  “He was hanged once,” said Mr. Bolte. “Neck didn't break and he was cut down—proven innocent, he said.”

  “Or freed by his friends,” muttered one of the women.

  “What did he do?” asked Svenson. “What work in the town?”

  “In the mines,” said Bolte. “But he'd been ill. The boy supported them both.”

  “How could his wages be enough?” asked Svenson. “Was the man also perhaps… a thief?”

  He received no reply—but no denial. Svenson spoke carefully. “I am wondering if any person might have reason to kill him.”

  “But why kill his son?” asked Bolte.

  “What if the boy saw the murder?” said Svenson.

  Bolte looked to the faces around him and then back to Svenson. “We will take you to Mrs. Daube.”

  MR. BOLTE and one of his fellows—Mr. Carper, a very short man whose torso was the exact size of a barrel—accompanied Svenson to the inn. The Flaming Star's landlady met them in the perfectly hospitable common room. The Doctor smelled food from the kitchen and gazed jealously past her shoulder to the crackling fire. He nodded kindly at Mrs. Daube as she was named to him, but her eyes darkened as Bolte narrated the circumstances of the Doctor's arrival in Karthe.

  “It is that villain,” she announced.

  Mr. Bolte paused at the vicious look on the woman's face. “What villain, Mrs. Daube?”

  “He threatened me. He threatened Franck. He had a knife—waved it right in my face—in this very room!”

  “A knife!” Mr. Carper spoke across Svenson to Bolte. “You saw how the boy was cut!”

  Mr. Bolte cleared his throat and called gravely to the young man now visible near th
e kitchen door.

  “What man, Franck?”

  “In red, with his eyes cut up, dark glasses. Like a devil.”

  “He is a devil!” growled Mrs. Daube.

  Svenson's heart sank. Who knew what Chang might have done?

  Another voice broke into his thoughts, from the foot of the stairs. “Who are you exactly, sir? I confess I did not hear your introduction.”

  The speaker was younger than Svenson—perhaps an age with Chang—with combed, well-oiled black hair and wearing, of all things, black business attire for the city.

  “Abelard Svenson. I am a Doctor.”

  “From Germany?” The man's smile floated just short of a sneer.

  “Macklenburg.”

  “Long way from Macklenburg.”

  “And yet not so far away to introduce oneself politely,” observed Svenson.

  “Mr. Potts is a guest of the Flaming Star,” said Mrs. Daube importantly. “One of a hunting party—”

  Svenson looked at the man's pale hands and walking shoes, his well-pressed trouser crease.

  Mr. Potts caught Svenson's gaze and cut the woman off with a crisp smile.

  “So sorry, to be sure. Potts. Martin Potts. But do you know this— this devil?”

  “I know of him. We had been to the same village, up north.”

  “Was there trouble?” asked Mr. Carper.

  “Of course there was trouble,” hissed Mrs. Daube.

  “But who is he?” demanded Mr. Bolte. “Where is he now?”

  “I do not know,” said Svenson, looking straight at Potts. “He is called Chang. My understanding is that he was returning to the city.”

  “And yet now there has been murder,” observed Mr. Potts mildly, and cocked his head to Bolte. “I heard you mention a boy?”

  “Young Willem,” explained Bolte. “A stable groom. This gentleman found him at the black rocks, savagely attacked—we were unable to save him. You know his father—”

  “Murdered this night!” whispered Franck.