"The Dark Volume" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dahlquist Gordon)

Five. Carapace

AS IT WAS the nearest place certain to be void of any occupant, L Chang had dragged the insensible man into the closet and through the connecting door into Colonel Trapping's private rooms, locking the door and lighting a single candle after making sure every window shade had been tightly drawn. His captive's topcoat, black suit, and shoes were well made and crisp—Chang was reminded of the odious Roger Bascombe. He held the candle close to the man's face, pulling back the lid of each eye. The whites were bloodshot and yellowed, but the pupils reacted to the candlelight. Chang turned the man's jaw—already a bruise was darkening where his blow had landed—and frowned to see his lips were also bleeding. Had he broken a tooth? With some distaste he peeled back the lower lip, surprised by the raw color of the gums and a newly missing canine. The gap was on the opposite side of the mouth from where Chang had struck him.

Chang rolled back on his heels and slapped his captive on the face. The man coughed and Chang slapped him again, noticing a patch of scalp above his left ear, pink and raw, like the mistake of a razor or— he was not sure why the thought came to mind—as if his prisoner had sacrificed a lock of hair to some witch's ceremony. Chang glanced at the room, well kept and undisturbed. Any secrets it held would require a thorough search, and yet—the Ministry man was now blinking and wheezing—Chang felt there was more to it, that the room was not well kept so much as embalmed. The Colonel's desk was completely clean—not a blotter, not pens or an ink-pot, even the square sorting compartments empty of envelopes, as if the desk was new. Every trace of Arthur Trapping had been discreetly removed.

The man coughed again and tried to sit. Chang's free hand easily gathered up the lapels of the fellow's coat, and twisted the fistful of fabric into a knot beneath his jaw.

“You will answer my questions,” he whispered, “quietly and with speed. Or I will cut your throat. Do you understand?”

The man looked into Chang's covered eyes with dismay. Chang was aware—what with the candlelight—that his appearance must be even more mysterious than normal, and he permitted himself a satisfied smile.

“Who do you serve? What Ministry?”

“Privy Council,” the man whispered.

“The Duke is alive?”

The man nodded.

“Then what about the woman?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Margaret Hooke. Mrs. Marchmoor. The glass woman.”

The man swallowed. “I'm afraid I am not acquainted—”

Chang casually tipped the candle and dropped a spatter of wax onto the functionary's forehead. The man hissed with pain and clenched shut his eyes.

“She would be with the Duke,” Chang explained patiently. “If you have seen the Duke, you must have seen her.”

“No one has seen the Duke!” the man protested. “Everyone is waiting—all the Ministers, the Generals and Admirals, the Men of Business. There are rumors—blood fever at Harschmort House, quarantine …”

“Where is he now?”

“In his rooms! The Duke does not appear—merely sends his servants on—on—on—errands—as he requires information—”

“What information?”

“Whatever we can find—”

Chang dripped another stream of wax and used the man's subsequent writhing as a pause, allowing a shift in his questions.

“What is your name?”

“Rawsbarthe!” the man whined. “Andrew Rawsbarthe—assistant to the Deputy Under-Secretary of the Foreign Ministry.”

“Who is the Deputy Under-Secretary?”

“Roger Bascombe.”

Chang laughed out loud. “You are Bascombe's assistant? You are older than he by five years!”

Rawsbarthe sputtered, “Mr. Bascombe's ascent at the Foreign Ministry is due to his great talents—and once Mr. Bascombe discovers how I have been so roundly mistreated—”

“Roger Bascombe is dead.”

“What?” Rawsbarthe licked his swollen lips. “May I ask how you know this?”

“My name is Chang.”

FOR A moment Rawsbarthe looked up without understanding, and then suddenly his entire body burst into a thrashing attempt to get away. As the fellow was on his back and in no way strong, it was simple for Chang to pin him with one knee and shift his grip to the fellow's throat, squeezing tight.

“You are a criminal!” Rawsbarthe gasped.

“And you were searching Mrs. Trapping's private room. I do not believe a woman's bedchamber is the lawful province of any Ministry.”

“Mrs. Trapping has been summoned to the Duke's presence! She has not complied. My investigation is fully within the scope of the Privy Council's powers—”

“Then why are you alone in the dead of night? Where are your soldiers? Where is your writ?”

“I…” Rawsbarthe gulped and twitched his cheek where a fleck of wax had hardened, a milky teardrop. “I… I do not answer to the likes of… ah…”

“Why does the Duke want to see Mrs. Trapping?”

“Her brother—”

“Which brother?”

Rawsbarthe frowned as if this were the question of an idiot. “Henry Xonck has withdrawn to his home in the country—an attack of fever. With his munitions works, such incapacity becomes a matter of national interest—”

Before the man could finish, Chang hauled Rawsbarthe to a sitting position against the side of a bedpost. Chang stood, ready to send a kick wherever it might prove necessary.

“So what did you find here? In the national interest?”

“Well, firstly—goodness, it seems the room is not Mrs. Trapping's room at all.”

“Goodness indeed,” sneered Chang. “Empty your pockets.”

Rawsbarthe shrugged his coat back into place and patted it vaguely, as if trying to remember where the pockets actually were. He plucked out an envelope and peered at the writing.

“Yes… here… and the woman whose belongings do in fact fill it—one—ah—one—Elöise Dujong—”

“Tutor to the Trapping children.”

Rawsbarthe's eyes went wide. “You know her?”

Chang snatched the envelope from Rawsbarthe's grasp. “Keep talking.”

“The room is hers! Her clothes fill the closet connecting to the Colonel's chamber! Yet the children have no rooms on this floor of the house! It may well be that Elöise Dujong is the Colonel's mistress! Yet with such a settled inhabitation of the nearby room, Mrs. Trapping must herself be fully aware of the arrangement!”

Chang dealt enough with the back staircases and alleyways of so ciety to know this sort of arrangement was far more common than was believed. What he did not know—and must discern, for his own safety—was where Elöise's involvement stopped. Was she merely Trapping's mistress… or more? Trapping had been on the periphery of the Cabal, a go-between serving the Xoncks and Vandaariff… but Elöise was hardly unobservant… or a fool…

Chang looked down at the envelope, sorting his earliest memories of Elöise at Harschmort—she had been whispering advice into Charlotte Trapping's ear. But on their last night—when she had been captured in the Comte's laboratory—it had been Francis Xonck who had taken personal charge of her. Could it be that Elöise was dear to Xonck—that he had manipulated events to spare her?

“Why take this?” Chang asked Rawsbarthe. “There were many others.”

“N-no reason at all, merely to satisfy my superiors that I had successfully entered—”

Chang sent the toe of his boot sharply into Rawsbarthe's ribs, turning the man's words into a wheeze. The letter was a single page, folded over, covered in script, addressed to Mrs. Elöise Dujong, 7 Hadrian Square… the postal marks were smudged, with no clear date, nor was there any other writing to indicate who the envelope was from. He glanced to Rawsbarthe, who was looking up at him with some trepidation.

Mrs. Dujong,

I trust you will forgive my presumption, yet the matters at hand are too vital for etiquette to prevent sharing what I have learned. Your loyal attachment to Colonel and Mrs. Trapping is well known and so I fear you may be the only person in a position to give warning about the imminent danger that now threatens them both. I say both, yet it is for the Lady I am most urgently concerned. You must perceive the depth of interests arrayed against Mrs. Trapping's recent and misguided efforts of enquiry. I have included such tokens that may convince you of my good intention, and implore you to reveal this letter to no one, most particularly the Lady herself.

Word may be left in my name at the St. Royale Hotel and I shall respond directly. In this I am your humble and obedient servant,

Caroline Stearne

There was nothing else in the envelope. Chang crouched down, leaning his face closer to Rawsbarthe.

“Where is the rest of it?” he asked.

“I've no idea!” the man squeaked.

“Who is your immediate superior after Bascombe?”

“M-Mr. Phelps!”

This was going nowhere.

“Why give him this? Of all her things? The truth—or I shall cut off your nose.”

“Because it mentions Mrs. Trapping! And she has vanished!”

“Vanished as of when?”

“Three days ago.”

“Then who is in charge of the Xonck family interests?”

Rawsbarthe shook his head. “Stewards, directors, factory managers—but no one can step forward. They all wait for Henry Xonck to recover, though the Doctors give no hope—but the nation's defense, our capacity for military action—”

“I am not aware of any need for war.”

Rawsbarthe sputtered. “Simply because you are not aware does not mean that genuine threats—”

Chang snapped the envelope at Rawsbarthe's nose.

“What ‘misguided efforts’ was Charlotte Trapping engaged in? Is she being blackmailed? By someone who wants her newly expanded share of the Xonck empire?”

“I've n-no idea!”

“Do you know this Caroline Stearne?”

“Unfortunately not—however, as soon as you allow me to leave I assure you that one of my very first points of business will be to inquire for her at that very hotel.”

“Do not bother. The woman's throat has been cut ear to ear this last week.”

Chang stood. If only the letter had a date! How had Caroline Stearne known to write Elöise? When had she known? Such a warning may have steered Charlotte Trapping away from discovering the Cabal's plot, but might it not also have protected the woman when her husband and older brother were both marked for ruin? Serious and stable like Bascombe, Caroline Stearne had been in the first rank of the Cabal's minions, but Chang had no illusion that she would do such a thing on her own impulse… so who amongst the Cabal had directed her?

Chang turned to Rawsbarthe, who had grown rather accustomed to looking up at the ceiling.

“Where is Colonel Aspiche?” asked Chang.

“Who?”

“Colonel of Dragoons—the 4th Dragoons.”

“How on earth should I know?”

“Is he alive?”

“Is there a reason he wouldn't be?”

Chang dropped to his knees and drove his fist hard across Rawsbarthe's jaw, knocking the man senseless once more. He stood, flexed the fingers in his glove, and tucked the envelope into the inner pocket of his coat. He'd been in the Trapping house far too long.

FIVE MINUTES later Chang was on the street, unseen and unremarked, threading his way toward the White Cathedral, itself no particular destination but on the way to others he had not yet chosen between. One possibility would be the Palace—Stäelmaere House itself—to find firsthand about the Duke and the glass woman. Charlotte Trapping had been missing for three days… yet for the Captain and his soldiers to reach Karthe, they must have been sent well before that, soon after the airship had set forth. He was sure the true sequence of events would tell him who lay behind it, and their real intentions… but it was very late and the pleasure Chang had felt from his encounter with Sapp and Horace had faded before the unremarkable complexity of what he had learned of Elöise. She was an intelligent woman, but the idea that an intelligent woman would make the choices her room had spelled out, as he knew perfectly intelligent people did every day of the week, was nevertheless dismaying.

He reached the Cathedral and kept on, up St. Margaret's to the Circus Garden, but turned well before he reached its lights—even at this hour burning bright—wending by habit back toward the Library. In another five minutes he reached the squat hut housing the sewer entrance, and ten minutes after that heaved open the hatch in the Library basement. He climbed the inner staircases in silence, located the pallet in the dark—quietly displacing the bottles around it (the spot was used in the afternoons by an especially gin-steeped catalog clerk)—and gratefully stretched the whole of his frame onto its welcome softness. He laid his coat over his body like a stiffened blanket and folded his glasses into the outside pocket. He exhaled in the dark, feeling the bones in his shoulders settle into the pallet, the edges of his mind already beginning to fray into dream… he recalled a stanza from the Coeurome retelling of Don Juan, extending the story into the new world—“that eternal optimism of desire/persistent as plague”—but then the words blurred, flowing from line to line like a bubbling stream of broken ink… then the lines became smoke against a white sky, Doctor Svenson's cigarettes, curling up… smoke rising from Angelique's shattered torso… from the Contessa's lacquered cigarette holder. Chang's last thought was of that same smoke, exhaled from the Contessa's mouth into the ear of Celeste Temple, still feverish on her bed. Then Celeste opened her eyes, the whites swirling with the filth that had been blown into each blinking globe.

CHANG WOKE to shafts of dimmest morning falling five floors through a lattice of metal catwalks and staircases, all the way from skylights of thick streaked glass on the roof. The effect was very much like a prison—or how Chang imagined a prison to be—but he enjoyed it nevertheless, taking pleasure in willful limitation. He padded his way to the archivist's closet, where he found water, a mirror, and a chamber pot. The water was not hot, so he did not shave, but rinsed his neck cloth, wrung it out, and then draped it across his shoulders to dry. He grimaced at the state of his once-fine leather coat, ruined first by passage through the furnace pipes of Harschmort and second by immersion in the sea. But Chang had no money to replace it. As the lining was whole and the coat still kept him warm, he resigned himself to being mistaken, with his glasses, for a blind beggar.

Morning ablutions as complete as they were ever going to be, Chang climbed to the ninth floor of stacks, emerging on the third floor of high vaulted public rooms. He crossed to the Document Annex, where the government publications were housed. Like every public room in the Library, the Annex was graced with a pink-streaked marble floor and a large cartouche above the door bearing the arms of the aristocratic family funding that particular room's construction (in this case the extinct and unregretted Grimps). In direct opposition to its opulent trappings, the Annex, owing to its ever-expanding contents, had been crammed with shelving, covering the walls and in free-standing rows, some fifteen feet tall, requiring ladders and the help of Library staff to find anything whatsoever.

For Chang, the collection was a ready source of information about land holdings, changes in law, marriages, estates, legacies, census surveys—anything (which meant everything) the dogged grind of the government decided ought to be set down for posterity. He started at the beginning. The Duke was alive, which meant his puppet mistress, Mrs. Marchmoor, must be as well. Charlotte Trapping was not in her house, and the Palace bureaucracy sought her. By all accounts she was no idiot (unless one took into account her marriage), only a woman who had been routinely shunted aside from her family's power…

Chang rolled a wooden ladder into position and climbed to its highest rung. On the top shelf was a wooden tray holding the newest reports not yet of a quantity to be bound. Chang scooped up the contents and stepped easily down the ladder with his arms full, sure as a cat, crossing to a wide table. He dropped the pile onto it without ceremony.

When the 4th Dragoons had been re-posted to serve at the Palace, Chang had used Ministry announcements to trace where the order had come from. Thus he had uncovered a bargain made between Henry Xonck and Deputy Minister Crabbé. While Chang was not a man to imagine purity in the intentions of others, even he had been surprised by the nakedness with which a man of business like Xonck had insinuated his agenda into that of the government. By placing Colonel Trapping—his own brother-in-law—at the center of the Palace, Xonck ensured that he would receive advance notice of all military actions, diplomatic agreements, tariff decisions—an almost infinite number of events that he could then skillfully exploit to his financial advantage. In turn, Crabbé had been given—quite without lawful precedent—the equivalent of a private army at his own command, which also—being now executed by the Queen's soldiers—put an official government stamp on all of the Cabal's actions. The arrangement had been audacious and arrogant. But now Chang was curious about the finer details that—due to the grind of bureaucracy— might not have been published initially. What had Henry Xonck been promised for his part in the bargain? And by extension what might Charlotte Trapping have discovered since that final night at Harschmort House?

The reports were an uncollected jumble, from every Ministry and each department, but Chang sorted rapidly, discarding documents on agriculture, legal reform, medical patents, cheese, livestock, and stamps. He paused at a mention of royal game preserves, his squinting eyes caught by a reference to Parchfeldt Park. Chang held the paper up to his face and read more closely: a portion of land running directly through the park's southern quarter had been given over to the public interest to allow an arm of the Orange Canal to be extended across the width of the preserve. Chang frowned. What was on the far side of Parchfeldt Park that required access to the canals, and through them the sea? He set this aside and sorted through the rest of the unbound papers, but nothing else caught his interest. He shrugged. That a Parchfeldt canal had anything to do with the Xoncks was mere speculation. On a whim he crossed to the Interior Ministry documents, looking for any previous attempts to open this portion of Parchfeldt to private usage. With some satisfaction he found a cluster of petitions brought forward by a certain Mr. De Groot, the apparently ill-favored owner of a local mill. All had been denied. The requests had persisted for ten years and then abruptly ceased, leaving a gap of some three years with no requests whatsoever… until this last winter, when one was put forward by a Mr. Alfred Leveret.

This request had been granted.

HE LEFT the Annex and crossed the marble landing to the reference room, vaulting behind the archivist's counter without a qualm. Moving like a deliberate half-blind bee amongst dusty blossoms, Chang dipped in and out of heavy, flaking volumes—registries of business, of death, catalogs of land transfer. Thirty minutes later he slipped off his glasses and spat into his handkerchief, rubbing the moistened cloth over each tender eye. He had learned what he needed to know: August De Groot had died bankrupt in a debtor's cell. After three years unclaimed and empty, his mill works had been purchased— just this last October—by Alfred Leveret, a senior employee of Xonck Armaments. And now, in the wake of all the recent transactions between Henry Xonck and the Privy Council, the precious canal access had been granted.

He snorted at the way wealth so effortlessly got its own, De Groot's misery bringing to mind the story of Margaret Hooke, the daughter of a northern mill owner gone bankrupt, no doubt hounded to ruin just as De Groot had been, by others waiting to snap up the leavings for cheap. And what had happened to De Groot's children, or his displaced workers—were any of them driven to a life in the brothels? Were such costs ever considered in the transactions of high finance? Certainly they lay outside the care of any official counting, and thus beyond what the nation could ever admit had occurred. Chang swatted the book dust from his hands.

IT WAS near eight o'clock. The staff would be arriving. De Groot's factory and its proximity to Parchfeldt struck Chang as the exact sort of circumstance he had been looking for, though his rational mind told him it was far more likely that the widowed Charlotte Trapping had decamped to the cottage of some cousin by the sea, or even to a welcoming foreign capital. But was Charlotte Trapping really the person he wanted to follow? He'd gone into her home only to have his search dislocated by the mysteries of Elöise Dujong… ought he to be investigating her? He climbed quietly up to the map room, hoping to investigate all three quarries at the same stroke.

Perhaps his distrust finally had the better of him—perhaps he over-estimated the reach of his enemies, and their capacity… or perhaps he was finally learning that their plans for profit and control spread beyond any boundary he had formerly understood. Chang opened the surveyor's codex and found the map number for Parchfeldt Park, then turned to the large cases of the maps themselves, located the proper drawer, and finally hauled the item in question onto the table.

Like many royal preserves, Parchfeldt was enormous. The park was shaped like a tall Norman shield, and with the Ministry report in mind Chang turned his attention to the southernmost spike, now crossed by the band of a newly laid canal. The park was nearer to the sea than Chang had realized, close to the northern spur of the Orange Canal. Just to the edge of his map he picked out the abandoned—or soon to be so, depending on when the map had actually been made— mill works of the late Mr. De Groot. Chang shook his head. From the mill to the nearest canal had been an awkward circular path, adding days to any delivery, not withstanding the tolls and duties levied along the way—a minor concern to someone like Henry Xonck, but the exact margin of cost to drive a man like De Groot into collapse. With the canal extended, the factory would be but a day from the open sea itself—a shocking advantage, with few or no duties at all. It would be a perfect manufacturing point for goods going abroad… to such a place as Macklenburg.

He dug Caroline Stearne's letter from his pocket. Two things struck him, the first of which was that Elöise had been contacted at all. Xonck had persuaded Elöise to visit Tarr Manor to find Colonel Trapping only after Trapping had been killed. But this letter meant some other member of the Cabal had targeted Elöise and Mrs. Trapping well before… which was also to say that they had their eyes on outflanking Xonck with regard to his family's fortune. Chang snorted at the brazen strategy… and the letter did mention the St. Royale Hotel. It had to have come from the Contessa.

Chang turned his attention to the second point—the “efforts” of Charlotte Trapping. The very fact that she was a woman meant that his usual tactic—sorting through the footpaths of paper that nearly every respectable man left in his wake—was useless. It would be nearly impossible for Charlotte Trapping to exercise her desires apart from the consent of her husband or brothers in any way that would be so recorded. That she possessed all manner of personal resources he did not doubt, but discovering their workings would be very difficult.

Yet if he could not guess what she had done, perhaps he could deduce what might have provoked the Contessa.

Any objective look at the Xonck family would have found Henry by far the most important, with Charlotte and her socially promoted husband a distant second, and Francis—the rakish dilettante—an ill-considered third. To all appearances, the Cabal was dominated by Robert Vandaariff and Henry Xonck—its true architects posing as mere hangers-on to these great men. If Mrs. Trapping had been curious about her husband's activities, her inquiries would have naturally centered on his relations with those two most powerful men… Chang began to pace between the tables, hands clasped behind his back. He was near to something, he knew. Through Caroline Stearne and Elöise Dujong, the Contessa had warned Charlotte Trapping— the distance kept between herself and her object making clear the need for subterfuge and care. Chang strode back to the Annex. On the stairs he saw one of the catalogers from the second floor climbing slowly ahead of him, holding a bulging satchel. Chang ignored the fellow's nod, stalking back to the report about canal-building, flipping the pages… and found an address cited for Mr. Alfred Leveret. This done, he crossed to the volumes of property holdings. Another two minutes told him that Alfred Leveret had recently become the owner of a Houlton Square townhouse. In no way fashionable, Houlton Square offered its residents an unquestionable, drab respectability— the perfect address for an ambitious underling of industry.

The property record cited another entry, in an appendix… which in turn documented bank drafts … which in turn… Chang flipped page after page, tracking a deliberate trail of obfuscation that spawned a litter of paper across the Annex. But then he slipped his fingers beneath his glasses, rubbing his tender eyes with a smile. He had found it after all. The Contessa had frightened Charlotte Trapping away from prying into Henry Xonck's affairs—like the purchase of De Groot's mill—precisely because they were not Henry Xonck's affairs at all. The money for Leveret's house had come from a bank in Vienna representing Francis Xonck. The factory was his, and the Contessa knew it—which meant she was determined no one else, much less a disenfranchised prying sister, ought to.

BY THE time Chang slipped from the rear entrance, it was almost ten o'clock. He'd spent far longer than he'd intended in the Library. Through a roundabout route, winding as far north as Worthing Circle—stopping there for a pie and a hot mug of tea from a stall— Chang returned to the shuttered building at the next corner from his own rooming house and forced the door. No one followed. He climbed rapidly to the empty attic and located the floorboard under which he'd stashed the saber of the Macklenburg Lieutenant, killed in his own rooms so long ago. He stuffed the weapon under his coat and returned to the street, ready to draw it in defense if need be, but there was no one.

Another brisk walk took him to Fabrizi's, to exchange the saber for his repaired stick, apologizing for the loss of his loan. The old man eyed the saber with professional detachment and accepted it—with a clicking sound—as adequate payment. The gold on the hilt and scabbard alone would have bought the stick twice over, but Chang never knew when he would need to presume on Fabrizi for special treatment, and this was a simple enough way to build up a balance. It was nearly eleven. There was just time for a visit to Houlton Square.

THE SERVANT answering the door was stout and white-whiskered, a man who some years ago might have been of a height with Chang but had since lost an inch to age. His expression upon seeing Chang was admirably impassive—for it was broad daylight, with any number of people in the road to notice an unsavory character calling on so respectable a man as Alfred Leveret.

“Mr. Leveret,” he said. “My name is Chang.”

“Mr. Leveret is not at home.”

“Might one enquire when he will return?”

“I am unable to say.”

Chang curled his lip in a very mild sneer. “Perhaps because you do not know yourself?”

The servant ought to have slammed the door—and Chang was poised to interpose a boot and then drive his shoulder forward to force himself through—but the man did not. Instead, he merely sketched a careful peek at whoever might be watching from the street or nearby windows.

“Are you acquainted with Mr. Leveret?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Chang answered. “Yet it appears we have interests in common.”

The servant did not reply.

“Charlotte Trapping, for example. And Mr. Francis Xonck.”

The man's crisp professional veneer—the collar, the coat, the clean-scrubbed nails, the impeccable polish of his shoes—was suddenly belied by his eyes, twitching with the encapsulated worry of two nervous mice.

“May I ask you a question, Mr….?”

“Mr. Happerty.”

“Mr. Happerty. That you entertain a character like myself in the middle of the morning on your own doorstep tells me you have certain … cares about your master. That I am here, never having met the man, is signal enough of his grave situation. I would suggest we speak more frankly—for speak we must, Mr. Happerty—indoors.”

Happerty sucked on his teeth, but then stepped aside.

“I am obliged,” whispered Cardinal Chang. Things were far worse than he had assumed.

THE FOYER of Leveret's townhouse was all one would have imagined, which was to say it expressed an imagination utterly contained: a black-and-white-checkered marble floor, a high-domed ceiling with an ugly chandelier dangling from a chain like a crystallized sea urchin, a staircase marked at regular intervals with paintings nakedly selected to match the upholstery of the reception chairs— optimistic river scenes showing the city's waters in a hue Chang doubted they would possess if Christ Himself walked across them on the brightest day in June.

Mr. Happerty shut the door, but did not invite Chang farther into the house, so Chang took it upon himself to stalk a few steps toward the open archway.

“The house is new to Mr. Leveret,” Chang stated. “Were you in his service at his previous residence?”

“I have allowed your entry only so as to not be further seen from the street,” said Happerty firmly. “You must tell me what you know.”

“Tell me how long your master has been missing.”

It was a guess, but a reasonable one. The real question was whether Leveret had fallen victim to the Cabal, or whether something else had occurred in the confusion of the past week—that is, whether the man was simply in hiding, or whether he was dead.

“I have let you in this house,” said Happerty again. “But I must know more who you are.”

“I am exactly what I seem,” Chang replied. “I do not care two pins for your master—I am not interested in harming him, if that is what you ask. Or harming you—or I would already have done so.”

There were no other servants—no crowd of footmen at call to throw him out of doors. Had they all gone? Or been sent away?

“It has been four days,” said Happerty at last, with a sigh.

“And to your mind, when you last saw him, did he expect to be gone?”

“I do not believe so.”

“No valise? No pocket of ready cash? No changes to his social calendar?”

“None of those things.”

“And where is his place of business?”

“Mr. Leveret travels to the different gun-works throughout the week. But that day…” Happerty hesitated.

“Can he defend himself?” asked Chang.

Happerty said nothing.

“Your employer is in danger,” said Chang. “Henry Xonck is an imbecile and Francis Xonck is dead. Forces more powerful than they, thus very powerful indeed, have made your master their target.”

Chang found his eye caught by the grain of the close-shaven skin on the underside of Happerty's jaw, reminding him unpleasantly of sliced salmon. The way it rubbed against the white starched collar, Chang expected to see a greasy pink stain. Then the old servant cleared his throat, as if he had made a decision.

“Mr. Leveret had an appointment at the Palace.”

“Is that normal?”

“Such appointments are a regular consequence of government contracts, though Mr. Leveret never appeared himself—they were the province of Mr. Xonck.”

“Henry Xonck?”

Happerty frowned. “Of course Henry Xonck. Yet in Mr. Xonck's absence—the quarantine—Mr. Leveret was summoned, to present delivery time-tables related to shore defenses.”

“Deliveries by way of the western canals?”

“I only keep Mr. Leveret's house.”

“Do you know who he met at the Palace?”

“Apparently he never arrived. They were most insistent he appear. An officer came. Quite beyond all decorum and without any further explanation, his men searched the premises for Mr. Leveret, despite everything I might do to persuade them otherwise!”

Happerty had become more animated, describing the disruption of his own domain. Chang nodded in sympathy. “But who was he meeting? At the Palace?”

“Mr. Leveret's calendar names a ‘Mr. Phelps,’ of the Foreign Ministry—itself a thing that makes no sense for coastal defenses. I do not believe Mr. Leveret had ever met with him before.”

Happerty gestured, affronted, beyond the archway. In the far room a window had been cracked, the fine lace curtains lay on the floor in a heap, the expensive Italian floor tiles had been scratched…

“Do you recall the officer in command?” Chang asked.

“It is my duty to recall everyone. Colonel Noland Aspiche, 4th Dragoons.”

Chang recalled the looping scars from the Process around Aspiche's eyes, the temporary disfigurement an apt sign of the man's internal distemper. Though he had hated Trapping's corruption, Colonel Aspiche had been seduced by the Cabal with ease. Chang was sure any remorse lay curled like a worm within the Colonel's conscience, making him that much more severe in executing his new masters' agenda.

“Two more questions, and I must go,” he said, “though I am in your debt, and will do my best to find Mr. Leveret. First, did your master ever visit Harschmort House?”

Mr. Happerty shook his head no.

“Second—in the last fortnight, did you ever see his face discolored, a scarring around the eyes? Or was he ever absent for some days at a time when such a condition might have healed without your knowing it?”

Happerty shook his head again. “Mr. Leveret is a prompt man with regular habits, dining at home each night at half-past six.”

“In that case, I will ask a third question,” said Chang, his hand on the crystal knob of the door. “You are a man who pays attention. Are you acquainted with Mrs. Elöise Dujong?”

“She is the widow,” said Happerty. “Mrs. Trapping's woman.”

“Would Mr. Leveret know her?”

“Mr. Leveret is most attentive to social nuance.”

HE WAS forced to cut through the Circus Garden, a district he preferred at all times to avoid and found especially onerous in his presently battered appearance. His path was momentarily blocked by a coach of young ladies, and Chang was stung by the trust cocooning them, even to the color of their merry hats, the blitheness—in a city of filth and smoke and blood and tobacco juice and layered grease—that allowed anyone to wear anything the color of a lemon meringue.

In his hurry, he'd not gone the extra streets to enter hidden through Helliott Street, and he was jostled down Stropping's main staircase into what appeared to be an especially restive and hostile crowd of travelers… but then he saw a line of constables at the foot of the wide stone steps, barking at people to form lines and group themselves by destination. What in the world was this? Chang paused, as angry bodies pushed past him—people muttering at the constables, constables answering the travelers with sharp shoves. What was more, beyond the constables he picked out pockets of red—dragoons scattered across the whole of the terminal, with each little crimson band led by men in Ministry topcoats—in the midst of a search the scale of which Chang had never seen in a lifetime of crime and its consequence. He was shoved forward, swept down by the crowd's momentum, waiting with rising dread for a constable to pick him out. Just before the foot of the stairs Chang muttered a sudden apology, as if he had dropped his stick, and crouched below the shoulders of the travelers around him, scuttling quickly ahead and past the harassed constables. He kept low until he reached the cover of an advertising kiosk, and then carefully took stock of his predicament.

Rawsbarthe, while knowing clearly who Chang was, had not been searching for him—perhaps it was the same with the men here. Even if the constables knew Chang from the Captain's description, he could not merit this. Could things actually be so desperate that the Palace would so openly search for Charlotte Trapping or even Leveret—as if they were criminals? But the constables did not even seem to be searching. Rather, they were positioned to quell unrest amongst the people themselves. What else had happened in the city? He remembered the newspapers—but one always ignored the newspapers, they were written for fools. Was it possible their shrill warnings had been real?

He looked up at the clock—it was just before noon—and then beneath it. There was no sign of the Doctor or Miss Temple—nor, for that matter, Elöise Dujong.

THE MEETING place was extremely exposed, and he had no desire to linger. He inched up on his toes, trying to determine if the search was directed at trains coming or going from a particular place. Along the southern platforms, to Cap Rouge and other coastal resorts he had never seen (Chang took some satisfaction at how freezing the wind would be at this time of year), roamed a pair of dragoons, with one portly man in black standing in place while the soldiers marched back and forth. For the entire bank of western platforms, which would have included Tarr Manor, the detachment of dragoons had been expanded to six.

It was noon. Since his allies would arrive from the north, he made his way to the clock by a looping path that brought him close enough to the northern platforms to see that each of these trains had its own black-clad functionary, with at least an entire squadron of dragoons arranged between them. Neither the Doctor nor Miss Temple would have the knowledge—or the sense, honestly—to slip out the side door to Helliott Street. They would be taken. And yet… a train from the north had apparently arrived—he could see a small line of disembarked passengers under scrutiny, but he did not see Svenson or Miss Temple, nor did he see anyone being dragged away. Chang took up his position at the clock, wondering how long he could realistically expect to stand unnoticed, and in which direction, when he was noticed, he would flee.

He gave them three minutes—any more would be idiotic—and berated himself for setting up a rendezvous that had become a trap for anyone credible enough to trust him. The seconds ticked by. The constables came near with their charges. He could hear soldiers calling above the train whistles. Enough. Chang stalked abruptly into the thickest part of the crowd. As long as he was there, his time could be far better spent with the last quadrant of trains, those going back and forth from the east—toward the coastal canals, and Harschmort. He rose to his full height. The red and black coats of his enemies were laced through the swirling crowd as sure and as hard as whalebone in a woman's corset.

A heavy hand gripped his right shoulder. Chang spun and raised his stick. Before him stood Colonel Aspiche, bawling out to the red-coated troopers behind him.

“Dragoons! Arrest this man!”

Chang knocked away the Colonel's arm, but the moment when Chang might have landed a kick or chopped the handle of his stick into Aspiche's throat was lost in his shock at the man's appearance. Where before the Colonel had been hale and fierce, now his eyes were shot through with blood, his skin was lividly blistered around both nostrils, and his close-cropped grey hair had gone entirely white.

The dragoons surged forward and Chang dove away into the crowd. But the simmering anger he had witnessed on the staircase had been inflamed, as if the Colonel's cry had tarred Chang as a scapegoat for every humiliation and inconvenience that had been inflicted on them. He heard shouts and insults and knew—he had his own experience of hostile mobs—that any moment some angry idiot would try to bring him down, and then a dozen others would follow suit. He seized an elderly man by the arm and yanked him squawking into the path of whoever might be behind. He heard the ring of sabers being drawn, Aspiche shouting at the crowd to make way, the screams of women—he had no idea where to go, he could not see—another scream, but then he bulled through to an open area of the terminal floor, the people shrinking away and pointing. To hesitate was death— Chang flung himself forward in a dead run toward a gap between two waiting east-bound trains.

Blocking the way stood a man in black and another four dragoons, their backs to the commotion, intent on something down the track. Aspiche roared out for Chang to stop. The Ministry man turned, paled, and flapped his arms at his men—but Chang measured the distance in an instant, they were too far away, he was moving too fast. He slammed into the Ministry man, screaming upon impact to further terrify his quarry, seized his black lapels and spun him, limbs flailing, into the dragoons at his heels. Chang sprinted for the nearest train car, diving beneath and crawling furiously out the far side, tearing his trousers on the gravel, up on his feet as the soldiers fell to their knees in pursuit, emerging in another corridor between two trains. He had gained perhaps five seconds of distance. More soldiers appeared at the head of this corridor's platform, shouting, pointing—Chang broke into a run away from them all.

The train he'd crawled beneath had just arrived—that is, its engine faced the platform—but the other train, on his right, was preparing to leave Stropping, and Chang dashed alongside, toward its steaming engine. Without looking back he dove beneath it, scrambling out the other side.

The row of track before him was empty. Chang ran at an angle toward the next train over, painted yellow. He considered doubling around—back to the terminal—or climbing into the train through a window, just to get out of view. But what he needed more was distance. Another twenty yards and he dove under again. On the other side of the yellow train, Chang began to sprint: the train beyond it was in motion, leaving Stropping, its distant front end disappearing into the black tunnels at the station's edge. He glanced over his shoulder— no dragoons.

He reached the train just as its final car swept by. He leapt between the tracks proper, running hard to catch up. The train was gaining speed but so was Chang. His gloved fingers just brushed the rear rail. He looked up to see a figure in the caboose's doorway, wrapped in a hooded black cloak. It was his assailant from the train compartment in Karthe. The man's arm lashed down, a blue spike in his hand. Chang let go before the blow could land and nearly stumbled onto his face. The man stared malevolently at Chang as the train disappeared into the tunnel, his hood opened by the wind. Or maybe that was wrong—maybe he had wanted Cardinal Chang to see his face. Chang bent over, gasping for breath, hands on his knees, as any number of nagging questions began to fall into place.

Francis Xonck was still alive.

SOME DISTANCE behind him, but still closer than he would have liked, a determined pair of dragoons emerged from under the yellow train. Chang broke into a ragged run, following Xonck's train into the dark tunnel. At the very least it would serve as a place to turn and set his own ambush. With any luck, the dragoons would simply give up once they saw him go in—as well they ought to, for the tunnels were insanely dangerous, with tracks crossing each other without any warning and trains screaming out of nowhere from every direction. He'd no desire to enter it himself, and only hoped the passage of Xonck's train would keep these particular tracks clear for at least the time it took to lose the dragoons.

But the tunnel was farther away than it seemed. By the time he reached it, Chang was winded and the darkness echoed with the sounds of other trains. What was worse, the dragoons had not stopped. Instead, the ones in front had paused, allowing the rest to catch up— some ten men in all, sabers out, forming a line between the tracks. Chang spat out another curse and pulled off his glasses, stuffing them into the inner pocket of his coat. He could barely see a thing. He held his stick out before him to find the tunnel's wall, hoping for an alcove to hide in. Instead, he tripped over a half-buried stretch of unused track and fell to his knees. He groped for his stick and looked back, blinking. The line of dragoons raced directly toward him, moving faster than Chang had anticipated. He found the stick and plunged into the darkness, landing hard on the tar-soaked stones. A train roared past—inches away, it seemed, though he knew this was but the speed and violence of its passage. In the doorway of its final car stood a conductor with a lantern, illuminating for a teasingly brief instant the vaulted tunnel where Chang crouched.

One line of tracks veered into a deeper side tunnel. It was the sort of place that might be a trap—even the best ambush would not catch Aspiche and all of his men—but Chang was drawn to it anyway on the chance of another side exit, and an easy escape. Once he'd stumbled in, however, the side tunnel's isolation became its own difficulty, for the blackness was total. Chang felt his way, knocking with his stick, wasting time. He could hear the dragoons calling to one another and then, shadows playing about the cavern, saw with a sick realization that they had fetched lanterns. They would pick him out like a rat cornered in the pantry.

But the flickers of light at least showed him where to go. He broke into a reckless run as the neglected side cavern echoed with the approach of another train. Yet instead of roaring past, this train broke speed to actually enter the cavern. Knowing there were only seconds before he must be found, Chang sprinted toward the curving cavern wall, the bricks black with soot. The wall was a series of arches, each one penetrated by a set of rail tracks, all fanning out from a central spur. Chang ducked inside the nearest arch and flattened himself against the wall. The cavern had become much brighter, both from the train—now easing its way slowly and backwards into the vast hall—and the dragoons waving their lanterns. Chang retreated farther, and was suddenly surprised to see the lantern light reflecting back. His alcove archway was not empty, but exactly designed to house—as it did now—a detached train car.

He edged between the train car and the filthy wall. The dragoons came nearer. Chang flung himself down and rolled beneath the car. He felt for the cross-braces above and hauled himself up off the ties, wedging his boots to each side and wrapping his arms around the cables. In a matter of seconds his tunnel was bright with lantern light. Chang held his breath. The gravel crunched as two soldiers marched the length of each side of the car. Their light passed by and left him in a momentary shadow. He released the air in his lungs and carefully inhaled. The men came back. They thrust their lanterns beneath the car, but Chang remained suspended just out of view. The light was withdrawn. He heard the soldiers walk on to the next tunnel.

Chang slowly lowered himself onto the bed of rail ties, listening to the sounds in the cavern, feeling the pressure of the wood and gravel against his back, and the cool, foul air of the cavern on his face. What if he merely died where he was? How long until his bones would be discovered? Or would they be taken apart by rats and scattered across the whole of the tunnel?

He peered past his boots. The light in the cavern was moving again. Divested of its cars, the engine had reversed direction back toward the station proper. In its wake came the smaller bobbing glows of the individual dragoons. Chang relaxed on the wooden ties—he would wait another few minutes before moving—and turned his mind to more useful matters. Francis Xonck was alive. Colonel Aspiche was diseased. There was growing unrest in the city.

In hindsight, it seemed stupid not to have recognized Xonck during their struggle in the train compartment at Karthe, and his reappearance was a reminder that Chang could take nothing for granted when dealing with the Cabal. For all he knew, not a single person had perished aboard the dirigible. But then Chang recalled the severing of Lydia Vandaariff's head and the Prince of Macklenburg's legs, and then Caroline Stearne floating facedown in the rising flood. The servantry always died.

Chang rolled out from under the rail car, brushing at his coat from habit. Barely able to see a thing—but suddenly curious—he walked, one hand against the wall, to the car's far end. Chang patted his hands across the platform, and found a metal ladder welded to its side. He climbed up and felt for a waist-high railing of chain around the platform's edge. He threw a leg over it and ran his hands across the door. It was metal, cold, and lacking any handle.

Chang retraced his way to the car's other end, finding an identical platform, ladder, and flat metal door. He pulled the glove from his right hand and ran it over the cold surface. His fingers found the depression of a key hole.

He fished out a ring of skeleton keys, sifting through them by feel for three particularly heavy and squat specimens he had acquired in trade from a Dutch thief named Rüud, after Chang had secured him a hiding space on a smuggler's ship to Rotterdam. Chang had more than once contemplated discarding them, annoyed by the weight they added to the ring and having only a thief's word as to their value. He brought the first key to bear with the keyhole, but it would not go in. The second key slipped inside, but did not turn. He jiggled it free with some effort and no little irritation. The third key went in—again the fit was tight—and turned to the right. It did not move. With another burst of impatience, Chang turned the key sharply to the left. The lock caught and the key spun a complete circle, rolling the bar free with a muffled clank.

THE INTERIOR of the car glowed blue from a hundred bright points, as if he had wandered into a grotto of fairies. He stood inside the Comte's specially fabricated car. Chang leaned to the closest glowing array—bulbs of blue glass set into a hanging rack, drilled with holes the size of the Doctor's monocle. Similar racks were hung along each wall of the open room. Chang wondered why, with such a supply of glass, the car had been sent to storage, and in such a relatively public space. Perhaps because the order had come from the Comte, and no one yet dared to countermand him? Were the tunnels under Stropping parceled out to the wealthy to store their private cars? Was the old Queen's own silver anniversary coach, made at such public expense (for a figure so dyspeptically viewed) gathering soot but another stone arch away?

Chang left the door ajar—the last thing he wanted was to be locked in by yet another mechanism he didn't understand—and stepped to a glowing rack of glass. It held perhaps thirty bright bulbs and reminded Chang of an array of ammunition for an imaginary weapon. If this was just-refined blue glass, there would be no memory imprinted on it, merely the substance's own raw, untreated properties … of which Chang had no real idea. Each hole was covered by a disk of clear glass, held in place by a thin metal ring. Chang frowned. Was the metal copper… or brighter than that, more distinctively… orange? Chang dug a fingernail under the metal ring—the instant of pressure conjuring the image of his entire nail peeling hideously back—and popped both the metal ring and the clear disk out of place. With his gloved hand, he extracted the bolt of blue glass, the size of a very large bullet—for elephants perhaps—and completely smooth and symmetrical.

Against his better judgment, Cardinal Chang slipped it into the pocket of his coat. In an afterthought he put the orange metal ring in with it. The clear glass cover he fit back over the empty hole.

The car's interior had been designed to resemble an elegant parlor: windows with tasteful sashes and drapery, carpets and stucco moldings, with the appropriate furnishings—all nailed down—an assortment of fauteuils and chaises and spindle-legged sideboards. Chang sneered at the desire to at all times be accompanied by the familiar. Did not the pleasure of having one's own railcar lay in its being exclusive and unique? The décor ought to be proudly unsuited to anyplace else, expressing the soul of this new environment of privilege. Instead, he saw the trappings of staid comfort, a train car styled on the anteroom of a gentleman's club—or, he sneered, a dirigible fitted with sofas. New places ought to be platforms of discovery, not merely venues for drinking port in a chair.

Not that Cardinal Chang drank port, but poverty of means did not contradict his conviction regarding his enemies' poverty of mind. And yet… the railcar was the work of the Comte d'Orkancz, hardly a slave to conventional taste. He looked around him more closely, and the interior began to take on a certain irony, precisely because of its banality. Now he saw the staid interior fittings were all an arrogant black—the carpet, the walls, the loops of stucco, even the upholstery— as if the comfort and security they projected was itself a source of wicked, contemptuous pleasure. The Comte was an artist, and he saw the world in terms of metaphor—however dark his sensibilities, the worlds he created remained expressions of beauty and wit. The elegant chaise was fitted with leather restraints. The wide, soft fauteuils bore lacquered trays that folded out like square wasp wings, where one might lay out food, drink… or medical implements.

Chang's amusement stuck in his throat. A ventilation grille had been set into the ceiling, and at his feet, in a pristine square of slate, lay a metal drain. The square of slate was edged with a thin band of orange metal, the same orange metal that ringed every bulb of glass. He looked up. The ventilation grille as well. And the stucco molding, running the entire circuit of the car, bore a line of orange the width of an infant's finger along its upper edge.

He took a breath and then sharply exhaled. The air in the railcar nearly vibrated with dread. On the far end of the room was a low wooden cabinet, its top wide enough to serve as a desk for examining the documents sequestered within its many thin drawers. To his right stood a more unusual fixture, braced at either end by mechanical standing cabinets—the same species, but not full-grown, as the brass-bound kiosks the Comte had used in the cathedral tower to transform his three women to glass. These versions bore fewer black hoses and brass switches, but the sight of them made Cardinal Chang's throat go dry. The black hoses ran into the side of the large object that lay between them, a high metal box the shape of a large coffin, with a curved lid of thick glass. This was where they had kept Angelique.

The glass cover was smoked and he could not see in. With a grimace Chang set his stick against the box, replaced his glove, and lifted the cover carefully with both hands, looking down with revulsion. The interior of the coffin, for he could call it no other thing, was lined with black rubber. Its center depression was dusted with a small ring of sediment, like the sigil of a parched, departed sea, the salts of her body—of whatever had been done to her—the waters all having dried away. His eyes flicked quickly about the box's interior—more tubes, and holes where liquid or gas had been pumped inside. Chang dropped the cover loudly back into place, his own breath coming raw with anger. He stalked to the cabinet, pulling open the drawers one after another, pawing the papers inside, until he realized he was not seeing them at all. He ought to feel none of this—it was nothing he had not seen before, nothing he had not resigned himself to bear. Chang pulled out his glasses. The blue glow made him squint.

He sorted the cabinet's contents with a grim concentration. One drawer was given over to the plans for the railcar itself, others held purely alchemical formulae—all of it in the same hand, assumedly the Comte's. Next came designs for various small machines. Here the Comte's notations were augmented by another hand, some pages attached with pins to others that were more technically detailed. These bore a different notation in the corner. Chang held it up to his eyes: a stamp of several horizontal lines, each of which was initialed. It was a way to track production, Chang realized—these were all designs for machines that had been made. The top lines were all initialed “Cd'O”… the second line—perhaps referring to the mechanical details, was initialed “GL” or “JC”—Lorenz or Crooner, engineers from the Royal Institute, recruited by the Comte to construct his fever dreams in iron and brass. A fourth line bore simply a stylized mark, identifying the Xonck Armament Works—indicating where the fabrication had been done—but the third line, in every instance, was initialed “AL” …

Every machine had been made for the Comte d'Orkancz by the Xoncks. The construction itself had been completely overseen by Alfred Leveret.

Chang went back to the case. Three drawers had been emptied. He assumed he would find specifications for the great cathedral tower, and for the creation of the glass books, but they did not appear. The rest held more alchemical scribbling, half-legible and meaningless to anyone save d'Orkancz. He shoved the last drawer home, and heard the rustle of something caught in it. Curious, Chang reached to the back of the drawer and found a balled-up piece of vellum, as if it had slipped out of the drawer above… one of the drawers that had been emptied. Chang carefully smoothed it out on the cabinet top.

It was smaller than the rest, and depicted a device the size of a black-powder pistol. The design was executed entirely in the hand of the Comte d'Orkancz, and labeled “marrow sparge”—an insidious term that meant nothing to Chang. There was no Xonck stamp in the corner. Had this implement been fabricated? Or did it exist solely in the Comte's ecstatic brain?

With a sudden curiosity Chang studied the tool's dimensions, and wondered—trying to recall the impression set into the velvet—if this, or something very like it, might have fit in the Contessa's mysterious trunk. He could not say. He stuffed it into the inner pocket of his coat.

NO DOUBT there remained more crucial information about the workings of the glass, but Chang knew it was beyond his own understanding. He wished Svenson were there—at least he understood the medical issues. It seemed inarguable that in the Comte's absence whoever did best understand the glass must destroy their rivals. Chang strode to the door, but then paused at a sudden impulse of responsibility. Working deliberately he began to dig the orange metal rings from one rack of glass, stuffing one after another into his pockets. He'd no idea of their value, but Svenson might, and if they gave any protection whatsoever, it was worth his hauling them around.

He abruptly looked up. A noise outside the car. Chang stepped to the door, listening carefully. There were voices, bootsteps. Without hesitation he eased the door closed, sealing himself in, and looked around the room, hating every inch of it, hating the fools outside who had trapped him.

The entire car lurched and Chang was nearly thrown to his knees, grabbing a rack of glass to stay upright. He cursed the black-painted windows and the thick steel doors. He could not hear a thing. The car shook again, and then settled into a regular rhythm. Chang wanted to spit with frustration. The black car was being collected. He was a prisoner.

HE COULD drag the chaise in front of one door and use the squat cabinet to block the other, but this would turn the situation into a siege, which must end in his death. He wondered where the car was being taken, and by whom. Could it be merely trainsmen executing an order in which they had no personal interest? Such men would hardly care if Chang were to slip out and vanish into the shadows of Stropping… but if there were dragoons, if the car was being added onto a train chartered and occupied by his enemies, any appearance would be the end of him. There was simply no way to know.

The movement stopped. Then the black car shook at an impact from the other side. It was now bracketed between cars. The car resumed its movement, rising to a regular jogging motion as the train took up speed. Was it possible that the front of the car was attached to the coal wagon? Could he slip out that way and hide, while they were still in the tunnels? Before he could sort his thoughts further he heard a key being thrust into the lock. Thanking fate for the difficulty of the lock itself Chang strode to the coffin and flipped up the lid. Bile rose in his throat. The lock was turning. If he fought them he would probably die. Did it matter? Chang tossed his stick into the box. He swung himself in flat on his back, shuddering at the vile feel of the soiled black rubber, and pulled the smoked glass cover into place. He could see nothing through it. Then the door to the black car opened and Chang poured all his will into silence.

THE FIRST thing he heard was a whistle, low and under someone's breath.

“Indeed,” observed a hard voice somewhat thickened with phlegm. “The construction is… unique.”

“We are to retrieve what we came for and that is all.” This was a thinner voice, also male.

“Don't be such a woman,” the hard-voiced man snarled. “Mr. Fochtmann must make an estimation—it is the entire purpose of our errand.”

“It is not our entire purpose,” replied the man by the door. “There are materials to gather, documents to find—”

“Don't be a fool,” growled the hard voice, “and step inside.”

Chang could hear footsteps as someone came farther into the car, and then knuckles rapping against the glass lid of the coffin. He gripped his stick, ready to draw the dagger and slash upwards. With a good first cut he could scramble out before these two were on him—

At once Chang started—the thin voice—it was Rawsbarthe, the Ministry man he'd found at the Trappings' house, he was sure of it! And the hard voice… could that be Aspiche? The tone was clotted, and Colonel Aspiche had looked very ill…

“I have no wish to come between you gentlemen,” said a third voice, smooth and diplomatic. This was the third man, the one who had whistled—Aspiche had said his name: Fochtmann. “Indeed, though I have been summoned by the Privy Council—”

“By the Duke of Stäelmaere,” corrected Rawsbarthe.

“Of course—by his Grace himself. Yet whether I may be of service to the Duke remains to be seen. Though I know of him, I am unfamiliar with the precise, ah, practical… achievements of the Comte d'Orkancz, though their scope is evident just from where we stand.”

“You are a colleague of Doctor Lorenz,” observed Aspiche, as if this were evidence enough.

“Certainly,” replied Fochtmann. He rapped again on the curved glass, directly above Chang's face, as if gauging the thickness. “Though in truth more his rival. I am curious… is Doctor Lorenz aware you have contacted me?”

Neither of the other two men answered until, the moment having become awkward, Rawsbarthe muttered, “It is, ah, possible that Doctor Lorenz is dead.”

“Indeed?”

“It is, more precisely… probable.”

“Does that change anything?” Aspiche's hard tone was obliquely threatening.

“No change at all,” replied Fochtmann smoothly, adding with a smile Chang could not see but knew was there, “save perhaps the size of my fee.”

At this Fochtmann stepped away from the coffin-chest and began taking formal stock of the room, calling notes or instructions to Rawsbarthe, who seemed to be writing them down. Between these calls and the sound of Fochtmann's rummaging, Chang was unable to make out the private conversation between Aspiche and Rawsbarthe, low and under their breaths…“Bascombe assured me”…“depletion of the quarry”…“dispatched vessels”…“no word from Macklenburg” …

Fochtmann fell silent, a slick clicking indicating that he was occupied with a rack of the glass bullets. Chang heard Aspiche remark quietly, “You say he asked about me? About my health?”

“He did, Colonel,” replied Rawsbarthe, “and rather implied that your being alive was a surprise.”

“What the devil does he know?” snarled Aspiche, and then sneezed loudly and moistly, twice. “My apologies—this damned… condition—”

“It is seasonal, I think,” sniffed Rawsbarthe. “The shifting weather— as the days become warmer, one's body is never prepared.”

“I am sure you are right. And these wretched chills…”

Fochtmann resumed calling out figures—perhaps the number of glass bullets, or their estimated weight, or—who knew?—the purity of refinement. The man's tone remained cheerful with each detail: Chang became certain that Fochtmann and Lorenz were the bitterest of enemies, and that Fochtmann's presence signified a desperation to understand the science of the slain Comte. Chang smiled at being that odious man's executioner, and causing so much trouble for so many who deserved it.

Fochtmann's investigations moved to the large cabinet, sorting through the same papers Chang had so recently ransacked.

“And all this time I thought Lorenz was a fool,” Fochtmann whispered. “Even if the ideas belonged to d'Orkancz, the construction is magnificent, delightful!”

“Delightful?” asked Colonel Aspiche.

“What other word for such cleanly made machines?” cried Fochtmann. “They can be improved—my own revisions already suggest themselves—but the flow, the clarity of…” The man chuckled merrily. “Of power! And you are certain Lorenz is dead?”

“It is likely,” said Rawsbarthe. Fochtmann cackled.

“And you promise me, it is only Lorenz—of men at the Institute, in industry—who knows of this, this vein of… of…”

“Alchemy,” said Aspiche.

Fochtmann snorted.

“According to the Comte,” continued Aspiche.

Fochtmann exhaled in pointed exasperation. “While the basic properties of the glass alone are beyond question—”

“They are a matter of fact,” Aspiche snapped.

“The Comte's writings are the ravings of a madman,” replied Fochtmann. “A madman with some small sense of insight. One sees the approving notations of others—engineers, architects of science— and so one studies that insight more scrupulously than the mania would suggest. These machines, this very railcar—one cannot gainsay concrete results…”

Fochtmann paused.

“Or… for another example… these books…”

“Books?” asked Rawsbarthe innocently.

“Prominently described in the notes. Apparently a most singular exploitation of the… acquisitive… properties of indigo glass.”

“I would not know,” said Rawsbarthe. Aspiche remained silent.

“Not that I have seen such a thing,” Fochtmann went on easily. “Indeed, ‘book’ may merely be a term for compiling knowledge. Every visionary has his own vocabulary, and such terms are always strange to those outside its understanding. What is significant about the mention of book, of course, is how as a device it embodies the capacity of indigo clay—in an explicit indication of function. Indeed, many of the major machines seem to employ these ‘glass books’ in their actual workings. But then again, as a man of science, one looks for clues! You gentlemen will see yourselves, in this very car, the prevalent inlay of orange metals—an alloy made to very exact specifications—around the ceiling, between the floor tiles, around each piece of glass…”

“What is it?” asked Rawsbarthe, with concern.

“Rather, why is it?” chuckled Fochtmann. “The effect is deliberate—could it be solely in the service of beauty? Where is the serious intent? I cannot say—you must give me time to read before we arrive—I will take these papers to a compartment where I may commune with my own thoughts.”

“Does this mean you have accepted the Duke's commission?” asked Rawsbarthe.

“It does indeed, sir. How could I refuse his Grace's personal invitation?”

“Excellent,” said Rawsbarthe. “Welcome news. Our situation—”

Aspiche cleared his throat.

“Colonel?” asked Fochtmann.

“I am sure his Grace will cherish your dedication,” said Aspiche. “But I wonder if… for the time being… the three of us might keep word of your… discoveries between ourselves.”

No one spoke.

Rawsbarthe sniffed. “Ah, well… yes, that seems to me a rather… interesting… and prudent suggestion. Especially as Mr. Fochtmann has made clear the value of this—what is the word?—lode of unknown science.”

“Unknown and provocative,” said Aspiche.

“Provocative and powerful,” said Rawsbarthe.

“Mr. Fochtmann?” asked Aspiche.

“Why should I object to that?” replied Fochtmann. “I should hardly expect the Queen's own brother to attend to every small detail.”

“Then we have an understanding?”

“I believe we do. I will share my immediate findings only with you two gentlemen, and the three of us together will determine… further steps.”

“It is sensible,” said Rawsbarthe.

“It is.” Chang could imagine the greedy smile on Fochtmann's lips. “Yet this material is copious, and we have very little time. If you gentlemen would excuse me…”

A hand rapped sharply on the glass cover above Chang's face.

“And what is this large thing?” asked Rawsbarthe, his voice only inches away.

Chang looked up to see the hand now rubbing on the glass, as if to clear away the darkness and peer more clearly inside.

“Do you know its purpose?”

“Not until I've done more study,” answered Fochtmann.

“Should we not open it and look?”

“If you are keen to do so,” replied Fochtmann, “by all means.”

Rawsbarthe's hand moved to the edge of the glass and gave it an exploratory nudge, realized how heavy it was, and then put both hands upon it, ready to push harder.

“It was where the Comte had the woman,” said Aspiche.

“What woman?” asked Fochtmann.

“His Oriental harlot. Angelique. Something had been done to her, she became ill. He kept her alive there, to reach Harschmort—you see the brass boxes, and the tubes that feed inside. Blue water was pumped through them, thick as glue.”

“She was ill?” asked Rawsbarthe.

“The Comte called it an ‘imbalance of heat’ or some such.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died.”

No one spoke. Fochtmann cleared his throat. “On the chance— seeing there is much we do not yet understand—that her illness might be… catchable…”

Rawsbarthe plucked his hands away as if the coffin had become a hot stove.

“Indeed, yes. Besides, we have more than enough to occupy our time.”

CHANG WAITED to make sure that they'd closed the steel door behind them before he raised the glass top with both hands. He knew by the car's rocking gait that they had left the tunnels under Stropping and were crossing open country. He extricated himself, one long leg at a time, from Angelique's coffin, replaced the lid, and crossed to each window in turn, all equally shuttered in black-painted steel. Not that he needed to see a thing—Chang knew he was being taken back to Harschmort.

There were immediate questions he needed to answer—where the black car had been placed in the whole of the train, how many dragoons were aboard and where—and there were decisions to make, most importantly whether he ought to accept his fate and take his inquiries to Harschmort directly or do his best to escape the train while it was still close to the city. Chang stretched his shoulders—tight after his time in the coffin—and turned his neck, the bones answering with an audible click. Fochtmann might not have wanted to deal with the coffin when his arms were full of papers that piqued his curiosity, but he would certainly do so upon arrival. The black car would be studied, perhaps even dismantled, as a means of explaining the Comte's science. This might begin even sooner—it was at least another hour to Harschmort. He needed to leave immediately.

The door the three men had used to enter and exit led to a railcar of passenger compartments—Fochtmann had said as much—so Chang crossed to the opposite door and took out his keys. Unless a dragoon had been posted on the outer platform, it was highly unlikely—with the noise of train—anyone would hear the turning of his key. Still, it was with a deliberate slowness that Chang twisted his hand until the inner lockings caught. He snatched up his stick before opening the door, ready to strike at anyone there. No one. Chang stepped into the roar of the train track, the wind flapping his coat around him.

Ahead was another passenger car, the flaring sunlight preventing him from seeing anything inside. Chang crossed the jouncing platform and pressed his face against the window. Coming straight toward him was a red-coated dragoon, wearing his brass helmet, in that very instant glancing down to take something from an inside pocket. He would look up and see Chang. Chang spun and launched himself onto the narrow metal ladder bolted to the passenger car. As the door opened he flattened himself against the vibrating ladder, the tracks racing past below his feet.

The dragoon stepped out onto the platform, a half-smoked cheroot in his mouth, saber knocking against the door, the horsehair crest of his helmet whipping wildly in the wind. In his gloved hand was a pewter flask. The marks on his collar and epaulettes showed a Captain's rank… then Chang saw the fair whiskers slipping out from beneath the brass helmet, pale as corn silk—it had to be his adversary from the north, the very Captain who had evaded him in the forest and in Karthe and in the darkness of Helliott Street. What was he doing with the black car—alone, and apart from his commanding officer? Or was he just nipping whisky?

It was not the whisky. The officer peered back where he'd come— pressing his face to the glass (helmet clicking at impact), just as Chang had done against the glare—before crossing to the metal door. Chang wondered he had not been seen, but knew that where one did not expect something one often neglected to look. The dragoon stuffed the flask back in his tunic, and came out with something else… a large metal key. He inserted it quickly into the black car's lock, standing casually so anyone who happened to see him might think he was merely smoking. Chang heard the snap of the bolts in the door… but instead of pushing it open, the officer merely sealed it shut again and then tucked the key back in his tunic.

The dragoon turned and saw him.

The soldier's hand shot to his saber hilt. Holding tightly to the ladder Chang kicked both legs at the Captain, one sharply to his chest and the other across his jaw, knocking him back into the metal door and then, with a dangerous stumble, into the rail of chain. Abandoning his attempt to draw his weapon, the man desperately caught hold with both hands to prevent toppling over. The kick left Chang hanging for a sickening moment by his hands, boots just above the implacably deadly wheels. He caught a leg on the lowest rung and tried another kick—but the Captain, his face red where Chang's boot had landed, snatched hold of Chang's ankle and yanked hard to pull him from the ladder to his death.

Chang held fast. The Captain pulled again, grunting aloud, boots slipping on the metal platform. Chang held, less certainly, and then, because he could not withstand a third pull, let go with one hand and stabbed his stick like a blunt court sword into the Captain's face. The officer flinched and swore aloud—blood welling under his eye. Dangling by one hand, Chang swung his other boot in a sweeping kick that caught the officer square on the ear, bouncing his brass helmet onto the trackside and the man again into the rail of loose chain, where he over-balanced and began to jackknife off the platform.

Before he could fall, Chang shot both legs forward and wrapped them tightly around the fellow's neck. The Captain leaned perilously forward, suspended over an abyss of rushing rail track, the chain caught uselessly below his waist, his open hands pawing the air. It seemed as if he must fall, but Chang held strong, looping both arms tight around the iron rungs, grimacing with the effort. Neither man moved, the train roaring around them. Then the officer carefully twisted his head to meet Chang's gaze. He said nothing, but his eyes burned with hatred and with fear.

“Whose key?” called Chang, loud enough for the man to hear above the wheels.

“Yours, if you want it,” sneered the Captain. “Of course, if you drop me—”

“I have one.” Chang dug his heel hard into the man's jugular. “Where did you get yours? Aspiche?”

“Leveret.”

“You searched Leveret's home. Does Aspiche know you have that key?”

The man spat. “If he knew, why would I be out here on my own?”

“What about the woman?”

“What about her? No one knows where she went!”

Chang's question had been about Mrs. Marchmoor, not Charlotte Trapping. But he nodded, playing along.

“Where do you think she went?”

“We can have this chat perfectly well on the damned platform,” the officer grunted. “I can feel your bloody legs slipping. We may well be of use to one another.”

“You're a liar.”

“My point exactly,” the Captain wheezed. “You have caught me out on forbidden business… the advantage is all yours…”

The man's point was echoed by a growing ache in Cardinal Chang's arms. With a grunt he heaved the Captain back toward the platform.

The man wavered, his fair hair blowing around his face, then caught the chain and dropped safely to his knees. By the time he looked up Chang had vaulted onto the shaking platform and pulled apart his stick, the dagger held ready at the level of the Captain's eyes. The officer looked past Chang at the compartment door.

“Not the best place for a private conversation,” he called.

Chang ignored this. “Why were you in that car at all? Why not in the back, with your betters?”

“Would you trust them—my betters?”

“If I were you—or your betters' master?”

The man shrugged, as if the question answered itself.

“What is your duty here?” asked Chang, impatiently.

“What was my duty in the north?” the Captain replied. “As one says in the Latin, ad hoc.”

The man's features were boyish, but his eyes were hard, as if too early disillusioned by the temptations available to his station.

“A great deal has changed in the city since we both left it,” said Chang.

The man shrugged again. Chang nodded at the key in the man's tunic.

“But I suppose change begets opportunity.”

“Have you seen their faces?” replied the Captain, with a wicked smile. “My God, by the smell alone—very soon there will be gaps in the upper echelons. And every gap needs filling.”

“You were telling me about the woman.”

The officer smiled, rubbing his throat. As he did, Chang noticed the man's face seemed more pale than it had in the woods, only days earlier. Fatigue? Or was he sick too, without knowing it?

“Mrs. Trapping has disappeared.”

“So has Leveret.”

“Leveret's a dull clot. He will be as obvious in his hiding place as a schoolboy crouching under a table.”

“Is Charlotte Trapping a clot?”

“Even more than Leveret! She is a society widow. She is marooned—she has no skills. The powerful brother has lost his mind, and the other brother… has vanished.”

“Along with the Contessa, and everyone else on the airship.”

“Quite a tragic journey, that,” said the Captain. “A comprehensive loss for the nation.”

Chang studied the man's face, as he knew the man studied his. The Captain had been in the train yard along with Chang—it was entirely possible he too had seen the Contessa and Xonck. In fact, he must have seen them—why else would the Ministries be searching Stropping with such vigor?

“As you say… there may be opportunities… Mrs. Trapping—” The Captain spoke carefully.

“What can a woman matter?” Chang interrupted. “Especially her?”

“The Privy Council believes Mrs. Trapping matters a great deal. Makes a fellow think…”

“Think what?” asked Chang, stepping closer.

The dragoon glanced at the knife blade and then up to Chang, girlish curls framing a mirthless smile. “That the Privy Council has lost its head.”

“Get out your key.”

CHANG TOSSED the dragoon's saber behind him on the chaise. He looked into the open coffin where the Captain lay, arms tucked tightly to his sides, face set with displeasure.

“What is your name?” asked Chang.

“Tackham. David Tackham.”

“They will find you when we arrive, if not before.”

“I assure you, it is not necessary—”

“It is this or cutting your throat,” said Chang.

“My point being, such a choice does not have to be—”

“What do you know of this Fochtmann?”

Tackham sighed. “Nothing at all. Engineer—invented some useful… thingummy.”

“And Rawsbarthe?”

“Another Foreign Ministry stick insect. Why the Duke entrusts such weak tea to do his bidding—”

“Where is Margaret Hooke?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Marchmoor.”

“Who?”

“Where is Charlotte Trapping?”

“As I have told you—”

“Who is Elöise Dujong?”

“I've not the slightest idea—”

“Then where is Captain Smythe?”

Tackham was taken aback and smiled, unsure of the question's intent.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Captain Smythe,” snarled Chang. “Your brother officer.”

“Yes, of course—I just don't know why you would be asking, of all people!”

“Answer me.”

“Captain Smythe is dead. Shot in the back and strangled where he lay—on the roof of Harschmort House, before the airship went aloft. Shot and strangled by you, according to every account I have heard. Assuming you are the infamous Cardinal Chang…”

Chang was no longer listening. He dropped the glass lid into place and shot the bolts, trapping Tackham inside. Perhaps the man would be able to kick his way free. Chang did not especially care.

THE LIGHT in the next car was all wrong—brighter than it should have been. Chang craned his head around the wall of what he assumed was the first compartment, only to see that the compartment was not only empty of people, but of seats and luggage racks as well. Moreover, the walls between this compartment and the next two had been knocked down. Chang silently crossed this opened space, and craned round again to find another three compartments enlarged into one. This new room was cluttered with boxes and occupied by a man in a black coat, sitting with his back to Chang at a table of stacked crates piled high with notebooks. Chang did not move… and neither did the man. Chang stalked closer, slipping the dagger from his stick. The man's face was pale, red around the nose and eyes. A crust of blood lined his nearer ear. He rocked gently with the motion of the train, upright but quite asleep.

If the train was going to Harschmort with so much empty space, its aim must be to collect whatever of the Comte's scientific paraphernalia still remained. What would prompt such an expedition, and on such a scale? It could not have been the return of Francis Xonck— Aspiche and his men had orders to collect the black car before Xonck arrived at Stropping, probably even before Tackham could have confirmed Xonck was alive. Chang imagined all the titled and moneyed adherents the Cabal had suborned for various schemes, all waiting greedily, desperate for the orders that would make them exceedingly rich and powerful… and yet it was clear, from the soldiers controlling Stropping Station and the reclamation of the black car, that something was happening. Was the plotting of Aspiche and Rawsbarthe part of it? Or were they already the first sign of rebellion?

There was one more compartment. Going to it would put Chang in the line of sight of the sleeping man, but even if the fellow woke, who could he call for help?

Chang peered around the wall. Curled on the far seat lay a girl in a lilac dress, perhaps eight years old, and next to her, his head having sagged into the girl's lap, a boy of five in a black velvet suit. The near row of seats held a still-younger boy, in a matching suit, save he had kicked off his shoes. He sat next to another sleeping man in a black coat with a sheaf of papers on his lap. Chang tilted his head to see the man's face: fair, with a pale waxed moustache, just enough like the dip lomat Bascombe to spark contempt. The face bore no signs of the degenerative pallor. The man's fingernails, however, were splitting and red. Another look at the man's face—the eyelids were noticeably gummed—and Chang stepped back from view.

These were Charlotte Trapping's three children.

He looked again, only to find the girl, eyes now open, staring directly back at him. Chang froze. The girl did not make a sound. She glanced quickly to her sleeping Ministry guardian, then to Chang's black lenses. Her face betrayed no fear—though he knew her world had been uprooted like a tree, both parents gone, in the custody of men she did not know. His own appearance must seem to her like something from a carnival. Yet the girl merely watched him.

The chilling air above a winter stream

A stab of doubt enrobing every day

Why did this come into his head now? More of DuVine's “Christina,” a poem Chang did not so much enjoy as feel subject to. With his painstaking reading habits he had lived in the work's incandescent world for days—an archaic story of a woman bewitched by a wizard who had died, taking to his grave the secret of her enchantment, and of her doomed lover, unable to penetrate the magic—“a sheet of lead enwrapping a corse”—yet unwilling to abandon his love… or was it merely impossible to remember a life before his efforts?

None of this was helping.

He could do nothing for the Trapping girl. In two steps Chang was through the far door, hoping the sudden rush of noise from the platform did not wake the other children or the man. Before him was the coal wagon. As he climbed to it, the train rattled past Raaxfall Station without slowing. At this pace they would reach the Orange Locks in under an hour.

CHANG LEAPT off the train—hanging from the coal wagon ladder— half-way between St. Porte and Orange Locks. He landed without breaking his ankle and rolled into the cover of a copse of low trees. He stayed down until the train was well past, collected his stick from where he had thrown it before jumping, and began his hike to Robert Vandaariff's mansion.

Why had he not cut Tackham's throat? Was it because the man had revealed himself as the greedy minion of fools? Or was Chang still hesitant to spill the blood of any 4th Dragoon? Captain Smythe had saved his life more than once, and the lives of Miss Temple and Svenson. Chang felt his jaw tighten at the utter waste of the man's death—shot from behind, on the roof of Harschmort, and no doubt finished off by Francis Xonck. Was that a surprise? What other reward did decency receive in this world? Chang shook his head. Tackham must be newly promoted in Smythe's stead—Aspiche's handpicked favorite. And yet, for all that he despised Aspiche as a hypocritical ass, Chang had to allow that the man knew his soldiering—and knew his men. Tackham's character was no mystery to Aspiche—and the choice simply confirmed where Aspiche's intentions truly lay, as fully evidenced by the conversation he'd just overheard in the black railcar. It was the ambition of such trusted underlings as Roger Bascombe and Caroline Stearne that had brought the Cabal to ruin in the airship. Why should Colonel Aspiche be any more loyal?

Chang's mind went back to Tackham. That he had been an instant away from killing him in the woods meant nothing—such careening circumstances could happen to anyone. The man was unquestionably dangerous. Chang spat into a ditch as he jumped across, his heels sinking into the muddy earth. No, it did mean one thing: Tackham would be particularly keen to cut him down.

The idea was a whetstone for Chang's bitterness. He vaulted another ditch, wider than the last, the water's surface swirling with what looked like ash. Harschmort was visible now, like the ridged scar of a bullet in an expanse of unblemished skin. He wondered about its master, shut indoors under false quarantine. Was there anything remaining of the man who had once bent a continent to his will?

BEARING IN mind that the party from the train might arrive before him in their coaches, Chang angled his approach well to the far side of the gardens, between the estate and the sea. Several hollows within the dunes had been flecked with ash, probably just the normal burning of leaves or scrub that came with any garden the ridiculous size of Harschmort's. By the time he approached a scatter of outlying sheds his attention was focused on anyone watching from the French doors or an upstairs window. Chang waited, saw no one, and dashed across to the nearest fragile glass door. A quick jab of his dagger into the lock, and one sharp turn to pop the bolt. He was in.

Robert Vandaariff's office and private apartments lay on the opposite side of the massive house, but Chang was near to at least one of his targets. He poked his head into a white-tiled corridor that ran the length of the entire wing, off of which lay the stairway to the lower levels. He readied his stick, for the corridor was not empty.

An elderly man in black livery lay on his back, his face dark and wet. Chang advanced quietly, close to the wall. The servant's eyelids fluttered. Blood had poured from his nose and smeared itself over the near half of his face, but the nose itself was not bruised or red—it did not seem he had been struck. Chang looked up. Farther down the hallway, toward the center of the house…a strangled cry…a man's voice? He waited. Silence, but in it as he listened, even to his limited senses, penetrated the odor of smoke. Could the garden fires have drifted indoors? Chang abruptly stepped to the staircase door, and hurried down.

THE COMTE'S laboratory was a blackened shambles. Chang stood in the doorway, attempting to remember the room as it had been, the better to discern the intentions of whoever had set the fire. That it was deliberate he had no question, and from the density of the reek he knew it had occurred within the last few days. He stepped over a fallen beam and the half-charred remnants of a wooden chair. To the left had been the Comte's laboratory proper. This had been the center of the fire (not surprising, given the density of volatile chemicals), and the balcony above it was completely consumed, the stone walls behind scorched to the cracked and blackened ceiling. Books had been pulled from the walls and hurled into the flames, along with the Comte's implements, now reduced to twisted lumps of metal sticking up from the ashes. Indeed, it seemed like every sign of the Comte d'Orkancz's work had been purposefully destroyed—except…

Chang's eyes went to the walls, where the Annunciation had been hung. This was an enormous canvas cut into thirteen parts, portraying the Comte's blasphemous interpretation of Mary's visitation from the angel (whose skin was a tell-tale blue). Seen in isolated fragments, the painting's lurid sexual intent might not have been immediately apparent, but with the slightest study the nasty amusement infusing the artist's composition was both obvious and appalling. But most importantly, the rear of each canvas had been covered with alchemical formulae—explaining, if one knew how to read the Comte's symbolic codes, vital secrets about the properties of indigo clay. That these too had been destroyed…

Chang frowned, comparing the scorch marks on that part of the wall with the rest of the room—there was no difference at all. If the thirteen paintings had burned, the chemicals embedded in the paint should have marked the walls with the same livid whorls of burnt color scored across the marble worktop. He took another few steps, wondering if the paintings had simply been taken from the walls and thrown into the fire directly—it was possible, to be sure… but was it also possible they had been saved? It all depended on who had set the blaze and why. Chang took another step, and a curl of glass popped to pieces beneath his boot.

The skin at the back of his neck suddenly went cold. The floor was littered with glass—broken, blackened, but still glinting blue… Angelique.

Chang knelt despite himself, setting his stick on the floor, and reached out a gloved hand, touching the pieces—faceted pebbles, with one or two long, curving fragments—with just the tips of his fingers, gently, as if he were tracing them across her skin.

In the corridor were footsteps and he spun on his heels, one hand snapping up the stick and the other—the most natural and yet the stupidest impulse in the world—stabbing down at the floor to maintain his balance. Chang felt the sharp pain in his palm, just as the black cloak of Francis Xonck flitted past the doorway. But then Xonck was forgotten, for when the blue glass shard penetrated his flesh, Chang's mind was suddenly swallowed up… with hers.

ANGELIQUE STOOD in her small room at the Old Palace brothel, wearing a pale silk robe, her hair hanging wet and fragrant with sandal-wood—Chang knew the smell only because she herself had taken such pleasure in it, but he experienced it now, the sensation of scent, in his mind, with a deranging vividness well beyond him in life—facing an open cabinet set with five empty shelves. On a chair next to her and on the small pallet bed were piles of clothing, dresses and robes and underthings and shoes, and then a small carved wooden box, cheaply bought from the markets near St. Isobel's. From her memory he knew the box contained every bit of meager jewelry that she owned. As she looked at the empty shelves, Chang felt from Angelique such a surge of pleasure—of arrival, of security, of an answer so gratefully received to a question Chang himself had never wanted to ask—and he realized that this was her first-ever room of her own, where her things would not be stolen, where she might put a printed postcard or a picture cut from a colored newspaper on the wall without it disappearing the next day—and her happiness, to begin to place her clothing in the cabinet, rejoicing in the extent of her possessions, shifting each piece with delight from shelf to shelf just to stretch out the task, beaming with pleasure at her escape from the degradations of the brothels that had so far been her life, chuckling with anticipation at the advantages she was sure to find, at the mere prospect of—

CHANG WRENCHED the shard from his palm and threw it into the wreckage, tearing the glove from his stricken hand, his concentration desperately held in the face of the continuing—a pulsing echo even after the glass was gone—repetition of Angelique's captured happiness pressing inescapably at his brain. The glove came off at last and he saw his palm starred with blue glass—newly made from contact with his own blood, a fat, flattened, still-biting spider—his fingers clutching at its impossibly cold burn. Thankful it had gone into his left hand, Chang pulled the razor from his pocket and flicked it open. With an excruciating burst of pain he sliced under the glass and then, blood pooling brightly beneath the blade, did his best to pry it up. For a moment it would not come, pulling cruelly. Chang bit his lip, digging deeper with the razor. The spiked lozenge of glass flipped free, leaving his palm a raw, seething mess. Chang swore aloud. He wrapped a handkerchief tight around the wound, pulling the knot with his teeth. He snatched up his stick and stumbled after Xonck—how much time had he lost? Chang reeled like a drunkard but kept going, the smell of her hair in his mind like a poison.

He burst back onto the main floor, past the unmoving elderly servant, striding too recklessly toward the center of the house. Ahead of him were jostling footsteps, voices, a crowd of people—Aspiche and his Dragoons? No, it was a gang of servants from Harschmort, all in Vandaariff's black livery, rushing ahead of him into the ballroom. Chang felt a spur of curiosity—it was easier than thinking—and followed. Someone shouted over the tumble of voices—a man just come in from the French doors. Chang could not see him, but his voice was loud and very angry.

“Let me have it!” the man cried. “There is no time!”

“But it is mine!” protested the servant.

“There is no time!” the man cried again, and lunged—Chang could tell from the sudden swirl of bodies—wrestling desperately for whatever it was he sought.

Without warning, the memory of Angelique in her room rose to swallow him once more. Again he was in her body, but this time more deeply, feeling so intimately the strength of her limbs, the weight of them, the particular distribution of female flesh, the pins in her hair, and all of it infused with her happiness.

He shook his head like a dog, keeping his glasses in place with his bandaged hand, wondering what had set off the spell—a perfume, the sight of an open cabinet? He had pried the glass out of his hand—the memory ought to be gone! And yet he could sense it still, gliding beneath the surface of his thoughts like a pike-fish in a pond, waiting to sink its sweet teeth into his scarcely coherent will. He snapped his eyes to the open French door and the suddenly motionless crowd of servants.

From the garden came a pistol shot, and then a hideous scream.

HE SHOULDERED his way into the garden. A second, more terrible fire had caused the ornamental garden to collapse in on the cathedral chamber below, leaving a massive ruined pit from which fumes and foul vapors continued to rise. Near to the edge, grappling like unnatural statues amidst the scorched greenery, were Francis Xonck and Mrs. Marchmoor. Xonck writhed against the glass woman's hand, two fingers of which were buried in his chest like a dagger. On the grass lay two men: one by his iron-grey hair and blue sash Chang knew as the Duke of Stäelmaere; the other, his head bloodied, looked like a Ministry peon. Directly in front of Chang but facing the garden stood a second Ministry official, a smoking pistol extended in his hand. But the man hesitated to shoot again, for Mrs. Marchmoor and Francis Xonck were still entwined.

Chang had no such scruples. He stabbed the tip of his stick hard into the Ministry man's right kidney, deftly snatched the pistol as the man arched his back in pain, and then kicked the back of the fellow's knee, dropping him to the grass. Chang strode toward the conjoined pair of his enemies and fired, the pistol kicking at his grip. The bullet flew between them—it was not his weapon, or perhaps he could not choose which of the two he more wanted to kill—and cut across Margaret Hooke's wrist, chipping the glass and sending a single pale fissure forward into her hand. Xonck grunted with pain and twisted, exerting pressure on the damaged hand. As Chang aimed again, her wrist began to give, puffs of blue smoke rising out from the cracks. Xonck hurled himself away, screaming with agony, and the hand sheared off, its jagged stump sparking glass chips like the spout of a spitting kettle.

Chang staggered, as if he had borne the great blast of a silent explosion. He looked behind him. The servants of Harschmort had as one collapsed to their hands and knees, holding their heads in pain. He could not hear. He looked back to Mrs. Marchmoor, waving her broken limb like a smoking branch, staggering. Xonck was on his back, pulling at the shattered fingers still penetrating his chest. How had the silent explosion of Margaret Hooke's anguish left him standing while flattening everyone else?

Chang raised the pistol for another shot. Angelique… He felt the rising sensation of her flesh once more, in every limb—he shook his head, it was no time—it was never time, was not right, could not be borne, how could she be in him when he knew she had not cared? He blinked his eyes—he could not free his mind—he could not see—he fired blindly at the woman, then just as recklessly at Xonck. Angelique would not leave him. Chang thrashed like a bull beset with stinging bees, except the bees were all beneath his skin. He moaned at the complete idiocy of his predicament, even as he sank helpless to his knees, and his mind surrendered to the feel of silk pyjamas.

Six. Canal

DOCTOR SVENSON stared at the purple stone in the trainsman's open palm for three seconds, just long enough for the men encircling him to take in his silence and the stricken pallor of his face, before reaching to take it with his left hand, his right occupied with Mr. Potts' revolver. The man who had spoken still indicated with an extended arm the first compartment car of the train. Without a word Svenson walked toward it, his pace quickening. He was up the five iron stairs in two steps, and then, far too soon it seemed, standing at the compartment's open door.

Elöise lay in her black dress, with one arm pinned beneath her and the other awkwardly splayed above her head. Svenson set the revolver on the nearest seat and sank to his knees, whispering her name. Be hind in the corridor came shuffling bootsteps. Svenson turned, aware that his face was flushed and that his voice held firm by the scarcest margin.

“Send men to search! The killers! They could still be anywhere!” Svenson shifted forward, stuffing the purple stone into the pocket of his trousers, again whispering her name as if it were a spell. He placed two fingers against the pulse in her throat. Her flesh was still warm… but cooling… he felt nothing… but then—some birdlike tremor, was it possible? No, his own hands were shaking—he was unable to perform a simple examination, nerves of an untempered student. If he had only been here sooner, even a few minutes! His boots ground unpleasantly against the floor. He looked down and saw glittering dust—a scattering of shattered blue glass across the polished wood.

Francis Xonck. If Svenson had not been such a helpless wretch at the mining camp—if it had been Chang instead of him—Elöise might still be living.

He delicately rolled her onto her back, wincing at the lifeless loll of her head—at the base of her sternum, a dark circle, smaller than his monocle, soaking the black fabric and catching the lantern light… blood. The relatively small amount spoke to a deep, suddenly mortal wound. He touched the stain with a finger to judge how long ago it had occurred.

The stain was solid and clicked against his nail, like a shining black coin set into the cloth. It was glass.

“A knife—sharp as you have—at once!”

He snapped his fingers as the men hurriedly patted their pockets, aware he was again burying heartbreak under a shovelful of useless effort. He looked down at Elöise's impossibly pale face…

Doctor Svenson's breath stopped. Was it only the light? At once he feverishly dug into his coat. A man stepped forward with a knife.

“Not now—not now!” he cried, and pulled free his silver cigarette case.

He rubbed the shining surface violently across his trouser-leg and leaned forward, cradling her head and holding the polished metal directly before her parted lips. He waited… waited… bit his lip hard enough to draw blood… and then felt a surge of desperate joy as the surface fogged ever so delicately, an infinitesimal pearling.

“This woman is alive!” he cried. “Hot water! Clean linen—whatever you have! At once!”

Svenson thrashed out of the horrible stiff coat. He snapped his fingers again at the man with the knife, and snatched it away—an old penknife, its thin blade nothing near sharp enough. He put a hand again to Elöise's throat and then her forehead, which was cold and moist, and unbuttoned the black dress to either side of the tight glass disk, which seemed fixed through to her skin. Svenson carefully plucked up the dress and sawed a quick circle around the glass. The wound was just at the lowest joint of her rib cage. Had the cartilage shattered Xonck's glass stiletto, or had the blade thrust past, penetrating her vital organs? That would be an injury he could scarcely address with a fully equipped surgical theatre.

He gently palpated the paper-white skin around the dark lozenge, seeking the submerged hardness of a deeper plume of glass. The skin was colder around the wound. Her lips had darkened in the seconds she'd been on her back. Svenson turned savagely to the men clustered at the door.

“Where is the water? She will die without it!”

A man in a blue uniform edged toward Svenson and cleared his throat. “The train, sir… the schedule—”

“I do not give a damn for your schedule!” cried Svenson.

A ring of blued flesh was spreading before his eyes across Elöise's abdomen. He could not wait for the water. He pulled the skin taut with the fingers of his left hand and edged the knife beneath the disk of glass. A sharp chop and the glass came free, leaving only a few splintered chips. Elöise gasped, but when he glanced to her face she was no closer to her senses. What was more, part of the wound had coagulated at once back into glass. The remaining hole was small, perhaps a half inch wide—but how deep did it go? How could he dig without any way to control the bleeding? Would more bleeding simply transform into more blue glass and make things worse? Svenson was sure it was the toxic quality of the glass itself, more than the puncture, that was killing her. He thought back to Chang's damaged lungs. The orange liquid—if only he had some now!—had dissolved the glass Chang had inhaled, allowing him to spit it up like the gelatinous detritus of any chest cold, removing it in a way surgery never could have. And once it was done the man had regained his strength with striking rapidity.

But Svenson had no orange liquid. There was nothing else for it. He inserted the knife blade into the wound—and then cursed out loud in German as the entire compartment lurched around him. The train was moving.

“God damn!” he cried to the men in the doorway. “What is this idiocy?”

“It is the schedule,” protested the uniformed conductor. “I have tried to explain—”

“She will die!” barked Svenson.

None of the clustered men spoke, stepping away as the conductor appeared in the doorway.

“I hope the lady will not. And I am happy to postpone any questions of payment… of your fares … until… ah… we know if there will be—that is—one or two of you.”

Svenson glared at the man, thought better of anything he could possibly say, and spun back to Elöise, painfully aware of the tiny shakes now wracking her body. He parted the wound again, his own fingers unsteady, the edge of the glass flecking new chips into the shimmering tight cavity, as it nicked her flesh. The knife would not work. He set it down and dug in his pocket for a handkerchief, and then wrapped it around his fingers. With a sharp push that sparked another gasp from Elöise, Svenson took hold of the spike and wrenched it out. He folded the handkerchief and held it over the wound—clean flowing blood staining the cloth—and eased it away. The wound was not deep. The glass was gone.

WHEN THE hot water and linen finally arrived, Svenson cleaned and dressed the wound and settled Elöise onto a row of seats. He brooded with a cigarette, watching her face for some sign he could not quite name. Perhaps he simply wanted to know she would survive, so he could leave with a clear conscience, as he had left Miss Temple…

Svenson sat bolt-upright in his seat. What had he been thinking? He was an idiot, a negligent fool—they were miles beyond Karthe with no way to return. Miss Temple must have traveled to Karthe with Elöise… was she marooned at the inn awaiting Elöise's return? Was she dead in the shadows of the train yard, another glass spike in her heart? Was Xonck even then stalking her through the streets, as he had hunted the men of the village?

Svenson stuffed the pistol into his belt, pulling his uniform tunic down to cover the butt. He strode to the front of the train and found the conductor chatting with two men of business, perhaps from the mines. Svenson cleared his throat. The conductor did not respond, but when Svenson cleared his throat more pointedly, the man looked up, wary at what the troubling foreigner might want now, as if delay, disruption, and women mysteriously reclaimed from death were not enough for an evening. With a nod to the two businessmen, he joined Svenson in the corridor.

“Something else?” he asked crisply.

“Is there is another woman on the train?”

“Who requires a rescue?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“No other women at all that I am aware of.” The conductor smiled at him. “And I am quite correct in my counting.”

“I'm sure you are,” said Svenson. “Yet this woman is very small, and may be hidden.”

“To avoid paying her fare?”

Svenson shook his head. “She may have been subject to the same assailant—”

“Assailant?”

“The woman who was attacked—Mrs. Dujong—by the same man who attacked the fellow in the train yard!”

“Impossible. He was attacked by a woman.”

“What?” said Svenson. “Who says so?”

“Everyone, of course. The man himself!” The conductor glanced to the businessmen, raising his eyebrows.

“Why did no one tell me?”

“You were tending to the lady.”

Had the Contessa truly been at the train yards? Could Xonck have mistaken Elöise for her?

“There are no other female passengers?” Svenson asked. “You are certain?”

“There are not,” replied the conductor.

“But the cars for freight, from the mines…” Svenson pointed to the rear of the train.

“These hold no passengers.”

“Not normally…”

“They are full of freight.”

“Have you inspected them?” pressed Svenson. “Some must be empty, to pick up goods farther down your line.”

“Empty cars would be locked.”

“But locks can be picked. Is there no way one might examine—”

“There are no connecting doors, you see.” The two businessmen were now openly eavesdropping, and the conductor appealed to them for the obviousness of his logic.

“But it might be possible when we stop?” Svenson asked.

“We are not stopping for some time.”

“Yes, of course, but when we do…”

“I will be sure to advise you of that fact,” said the conductor. “You will excuse me…”

THE DOCTOR stalked the length of the train's two passenger cars. The conductor had told the truth. Besides the two mining men, only one other compartment in the first car was occupied—a quartet of laborers heading south to work in the mills. Might Miss Temple have found refuge in the caboose? He would have to wait until the train stopped to reach the caboose too.

Elöise's forehead was warmer to the touch. Svenson lit another cigarette. He pulled the pistol from his waistband, dropped it on the coat, and stretched his legs out on the seats. After another minute of restless thought he fished out the purple stone. Elöise had been clutching it in her hand—he could not allow the fact any significance… yet it was with a disgusting ease that his mind slipped to the two of them standing on the sand, the sound of the sea, and the wind against her glowing face…

He put the stone away. He had abandoned the woman without fully apprising her of the dangers he knew to exist. If he was now in a position to help, it was a matter of expiating guilt, not of reclaiming affection. Svenson forced his mind to the facts at hand—it was the only way he was going to help anyone.

What had Elöise been doing in Karthe so soon? Obviously Miss Temple had recovered—or, he realized helplessly, had died… but no, if that had been the case, Elöise would have been occupied for at least an additional day with a burial. Yet if Miss Temple had simply come to her senses, fever passed, the Doctor would have expected the women to delay another day to build up her strength. What could have driven them from the fishing village with such precipitous haste? Clearly the villagers had not loved their presence… could there have been more murders? What had they found at the Jorgens cabin?

It seemed obvious that Xonck had killed the grooms in the fishing village. If the Contessa truly lived, then she must be responsible for the fisherman—and the man in the train yard, whose face had been slashed. This placed the Contessa in the train yard at the same time as Elöise—so perhaps Xonck had mistaken her identity.

Svenson shut his eyes. What was the connection between Francis Xonck and Elöise?

He wondered again what he might say to her. Once in the city they would pursue their separate paths, and forever. But before that, he would search the train when it stopped. If he found no sign of Miss Temple, he would return to Karthe, to track the poor girl down… but perhaps once Elöise was able to speak, she might know perfectly well where Miss Temple was…perhaps the women had hatched some plan together… perhaps—the Doctor's eyes closed… perhaps he would never wake at all…

IT TOOK him a moment to remember where he was, but the instant he did the Doctor sat up straight. The train was stopped. He looked to Elöise, still asleep—and groped for the pistol, couldn't find it, then stood and snatched up the coat he had sometime in the night bundled up for a pillow. The weapon had maliciously worked its way beneath. He seized it with one hand and smeared his hair back with the other. He rushed into the corridor, only to be thrown into the far wall as the train pulled forward.

“God damn!” Doctor Svenson cried aloud, and he stumbled down the corridor in search of the hateful conductor. He'd no sense of the time—the sky remained dark and he had no watch. He had completely missed a stop! How long had he slept? The four laborers sat slumped against once another, and each of the two businessmen was stretched across three seats in their compartment. A third compartment had been occupied by an elderly woman and two heavy-lidded children. The woman looked up at Svenson as he paused by her open door.

“Have you seen the conductor?” he asked.

She nodded toward the front of the train. Taking this for an answer, Svenson continued forward, but when he reached the head of the car the conductor was not there. Svenson slid open the door and stood in the cold, rushing air. Before him lay a narrow railed platform, the greasy coupling, beyond it the blank wall of the coal wagon, and beyond that the engine. The plume from the smokestack blew over him, suffusing the air with an acrid, moist, and smoky odor. Could the conductor have been behind him, in the second car? He made his way to the rear door and wrenched it open. Barring a leap from the railed platform to the ladder on the freight car, there was no exit here.

If the train had stopped… the conductor might have walked back to the caboose, or forward to the engine. But why, especially when new passengers had been taken on? Svenson re-entered their compartment and set the pistol (had he been waving it at the old woman?) onto a seat cushion. Where was the man?

ELÖISE ABRUPTLY gasped, as if waking from an especially fearful dream, her eyes snapping open.

“Francis?”

The name was a spike of ice in Svenson's heart.

“No, my dear,” he said. “It is Doctor Svenson.”

She did not hear him, her eyes still wide. She attempted to sit up and cried out. Svenson darted across to her, sank to his knees and eased one hand behind her head, and with the other caught the hand that sought to explore her bandages.

“You must not move,” he whispered to her. “Elöise—”

“Francis—”

“You have been stabbed. You very nearly died.”

He eased her back until her head lay fully on the seat once more, and squeezed her hand.

“You were very brave, and very fortunate the blade of glass penetrated only as far as it did. The blow was meant to kill.”

For the first time her eyes found his with recognition—his face, his hands, their physical proximity. Svenson stepped away at once. He waited for her to speak.

“We are on a train?”

“We are, from Karthe to the city.”

“You were in Karthe?”

“I was—quite luckily. My own story is too long to tell, and yet…” He took a breath. “Elöise, I must apologize. The peremptory—indeed, even cowardly—manner—”

“Where is Celeste?” asked Elöise, interrupting him.

“I have been waiting for you to tell me.”

“But she will be killed!”

“How? By whom?”

In answer, Elöise only groaned, for she had tried again to rise. Svenson caught her with both hands and eased her down.

“You have been stabbed. I have done what I can and the wound has closed, but it will tear if you—”

“She was in town—with them.” Elöise stifled a bitter cry. “It was my own fault—again—I went to a house… he was killed—”

“I know, my dear,” whispered Svenson, going so far as to brush the sweat-curled hair from her brow. “The poor boy had not even ten years—”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “Franck was dead. But we smelled him—and I thought I could lead him away from Celeste, that he might follow… I went to the train, to find help. But he did not follow. I was alone. I knew I should go back, to help her, to face him—”

Svenson nodded, finally catching up to her pronouns. “Francis Xonck.”

“But instead… instead… I hid under the train. I was afraid. And then I saw her, running past, and then men were shouting, and I stepped out—right into him. He chased me—” The words choked in her throat.

“There is no shame. Francis Xonck has this last day killed far too many to add you to that number—he near as did for me as well.”

“But…but—”

“You have survived. The wound is minor, but the properties of the glass are especially disagreeable to you. The men on the train thought you were dead.” On a sudden whim he opened his palm. “They gave me this.”

Elöise was silent. Doctor Svenson pressed the purple stone back into her hand, and once more stepped away.

“But Celeste had recovered?” he asked. “She came with you to the town, but then you separated?”

Elöise nodded. Despite his own guilt, Svenson could scarcely credit the decision to leave someone so recently ill alone. Yet he also knew Miss Temple enough to wonder if it had not been entirely Elöise's doing.

“She is… at times… willful.”

“She is a girl. It was entirely my fault. I was upset, about everything. You speak of cowardice—I could no more say the truth to Celeste than you could say it to me. And now—”

“If Miss Temple is left behind in Karthe, the best we can do for her is find our enemies. Both the Contessa and Francis Xonck were at the train. In his attack he may have mistaken you for her.”

Svenson paused and met her eyes, discomfort hardening his voice. “Did he speak to you?”

“No—it was too sudden—he caught me from behind—”

“But did he see you? What I mean—of course he saw you—but did he know you?”

“Why does that matter?”

“You are acquainted with the man—from before all of this, in the Trapping household.” The name stuck in Svenson's mouth like a too-large bite of unboned fish. “I promise you I do not care—it is no matter of feeling. The matter is Miss Temple's life… and ours.”

“I do not remember,” whispered Elöise.

“You do. You remember enough.”

“I cannot—”

“No, Elöise. You must.” His tone had grown sharp. “You took a lover—very well, we are adults, it is the world. But that man was Arthur Trapping. Or—yes, I am not a fool—that man was Francis Xonck. It is all done. What matters is your loyalty now, what we know now!”

“Loyalty? But—but they have tried to kill me—”

Svenson waved his hand angrily. “Who have they not tried to kill? How many of their own have they not sacrificed pell-mell, as if they were laying tricks at whist!”

“Abelard—”

Doctor Svenson stood. “You must hear me. I do not care for your past, save how it can help us now. As for the hole in your mind—to my mind it gives you a choice. If you were with them before—”

“I—I was not—I cannot have been—”

He overrode her words. “You have the opportunity for a clean slate. I will do all I can to help and protect you. If you will excuse me, I must locate our conductor.”

HE WHEELED from the compartment, blindly snatching up the pistol, his own idiotic words echoing in his head. He had only exposed himself as a jealous, bitter fool—and how many hours would they be on this godforsaken train together? Nor, with her injury, was there any credible way for him to once more, like a coward, leave her behind. He stepped into the next car, acutely aware of the eyes of each passenger—all seemed to have woken—sliding suspiciously over him as he passed. Still no sign of the conductor. Svenson stepped through the far door onto the platform.

The wind was freezing, and as he stood with his hands on the rail Svenson felt every bit as helpless as he was certain he appeared. He stared down at the black ties, flashing past so fast, and exhaled deeply, doing his level best to empty his heart along with his lungs. He breathed in the unmistakable odor of indigo clay.

He yanked the pistol from his belt, but all he could see was the night sky and the coal wagon. He crouched below the rail, sniffing again—faint, but any whiff of indigo clay was enough to prickle a man's throat… yet where was the source? He lifted his boots—something spilled onto the platform? No… it was from below. There were cross-braces under each car, and indigent fellows bold—or desperate— enough to travel that way… but how could he be smelling something under his own car with this wind, which ought to whisk any smell immediately behind them? Svenson screwed in his monocle, peering ahead, beneath the coal wagon. He could not see a damned thing.

Svenson returned to the car for a lantern, but the hook was empty. One of the businessmen looked out of his compartment, blanching to see Svenson advancing at such speed.

“Where is the conductor?” the Doctor called, his voice low but sharply urgent.

“I—I have not seen him this hour,” stammered the man.

But Svenson was already past, convinced the conductor had been thrown off the train or beneath its wheels after inadvertently discovering Xonck's hiding place. And if Xonck was hiding under the coal wagon, what did that mean as far as the Contessa's fate—or Miss Temple's? Had they been dispatched like so many others? Or could they be on the train? That would put Xonck in the same situation as Svenson with regard to the freight cars and the caboose… unless— and Svenson cursed himself once more—Xonck had not been asleep when they'd stopped. Of course not—Xonck would have been waiting, leaping at once from hiding and loping like a wolf down the length of the train. Perhaps even now he was warming himself at the stove in the caboose, having slaughtered every other occupant! And if Miss Temple or the Contessa had sought refuge there—was there a thing they could have done to stop him?

Svenson stalked through to the second car without finding a lantern. Upon reaching Elöise's compartment he found its door open and one of the young men traveling to the southern mills standing inside. Beyond the man, Svenson saw Elöise, the bandage in place, her hands held tightly together. The young man spun to Svenson, eyes caught by the pistol in his hand.

“I—we heard the lady cry out,” he managed. “For help.”

“Elöise?” Svenson called past the man to her, fixing the interfering fool with an openly vicious gaze.

“I was asleep… I do not know… dreaming—perhaps I did.”

“Excellent. Most kind of you to help.” Svenson stepped aside with all the crispness of a Macklenburg soldier on parade to allow the man to exit. “If you will excuse us.”

The young man did not move, his gaze still fixed on the weapon.

“Is there something wrong on the train?” he asked.

“I cannot locate the conductor,” replied Svenson, in as mild a voice as he could manage. “Perhaps he walked up to the engine when last we stopped.”

The young man nodded, waiting for Svenson to say more, and then nodded again when it became clear that Svenson had no plans to do so. He edged into the corridor and walked quickly away, looking back once, to find Doctor Svenson glaring. The man bobbed his head a third time as he left the car.

“I am sure he was only trying to help,” whispered Elöise.

“A man of his age alone with an injured woman,” observed Svenson, “is no more worthy of trust than an asp let into a child's nursery.”

She did not reply, giving him the clear impression that his entire manner only made things worse.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I have been thinking,” she replied, not to his question at all. “You asked me of Francis Xonck. Whatever glass he used to stab me, I know it was from a book that had been imprinted. Because I felt myself— my flesh, but also my mind—being penetrated, not by a blade, but by… experiences.”

“Do you recall them?”

Elöise sighed. “Will you not put that thing away?”

Svenson looked down at the pistol. “You do not understand. The conductor is missing.”

“Yet if he has only gone to the engine—”

“Xonck is on the train—somehow—I am not certain where. The conductor may have discovered him and paid the price.”

“You should not have lied to that boy—you ought to have enlisted his help!”

“There is no time, Elöise, and too much to explain. He and everyone else on this train would think me mad—”

“It would be mad to face Francis Xonck alone when there is no need! Or are you set on some ridiculous notion of revenge?”

Svenson swallowed an angry reply. That she could so easily mock the very notion of revenge, that he might be owed anything, or that he was incapable of taking it… or even that despite everything she might be correct—he slapped the metal door frame with an open palm. The anger was pointless, and he let it go, his emotion stalling like a Sisyphean stone at the crest. She was waiting for an answer. Svenson seized on the first unkempt thought that came to mind.

“You… Yes, before—you mentioned the glass, dreaming—the fragment. Do you recall what you saw?”

“I do,” she sniffed, shuffling to a sitting position. “Though I cannot see it helps us.”

“Why?”

“Because it was broken. The thoughts inside, the sense of the memory… the content of the glass had been deranged. Like the ink running on a waterlogged page, but in one's mind… I cannot describe it.”

“It was a very small piece—”

Elöise shook her head. “The matter is not size. There was no logic—as if five memories, or five minds, were overlaid one on top of another, like patterns of paper held to a window.”

“Was there any detail to suggest who might have been the source?”

She shook her head again. “It was too full of contradiction—all tumbled into one place, which was not one place… and all the time… I had forgotten, music…” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “It means nothing—though I'm certain the memories themselves are true. Each portion flickered… overlapping the seams between them.”

“And none of these… elements seemed… significant?”

“I do not believe so,” she said. “Indeed, now that I try, I can scarcely recall a thing.”

“No no, this is useful.” Svenson nodded without conviction. “A wound with the blue glass—as contact with blood creates more glass— necessitates some exclusive contact between the glass and the victim, do you see? Blood congeals against the original glass and is itself crystallized—the flesh becomes solid. But what is the nature of this newly made glass? Since it is in—is of—your body, does it contain some memory from you? How is this raw glass different from that smelted by the Comte?”

Svenson's mind genuinely raced with the consequences of Elöise's broken shard, and what this implied about the structure and workings of the glass books. A torn piece of paper would show only the fragment of type printed upon it, but a similarly sized spear from a blue glass page apparently contained an overlay of multiple memories. It meant that the books were not read (or “written”) in any linear way, but that the memories were shot through the glass like color in paint, or seasoning in soup, or even tiny capillaries in flesh. Whatever aspect of the glass normally allowed a person to experience the memories in sequence had been dislodged on the broken fragment, and the different memories it contained had been jammed into one jagged, unnatural whole.

He looked over at Elöise. “On the airship, the mere touch of a glass book on her bare skin drove the Contessa to distraction.”

“She killed the Prince and Lydia for no reason but pique—”

“Francis Xonck has used broken glass to cauterize a bullet wound, and now carries that glass within his body. He may well be insane.” Svenson winced to think of it. Given the wound, the lump of glass would be the size of a child's fist; what visions gnawed—no, tore—at Francis Xonck's mind? “He also possesses a glass book, saved in particular from the wreckage. I do not know what that book holds, I can only say that a perfectly sound man who did look into it was turned to a gibbering wreck. That Xonck has selected this of all books must mean something.”

He knelt near her. “Elöise, you may be closer to his thoughts than any other soul alive.”

“And I have told you—”

“He knows the glass will kill him,” said Svenson sharply. “In the Comte's absence, he will attempt to find the man's notes, his tools— anything to reverse what has been done. I must find him.”

“Abelard, he will kill you.”

“If you know anything more, Elöise. Anything at all, his aims— his cares…”

But she shook her head.

AT THE far door he finally found a lantern on a hook. Svenson struck a match, tamped the wick to a steady glow, and stepped out to face the blank wooden wall of the freight car. He sniffed the air to no avail, then leaned cautiously over the rail with the lantern. An iron ladder was bolted to the freight car, but he saw no sign of blood or indigo discharge. He returned to the corridor, striding willfully past Elöise and the other occupants, back to the front of the train. He drew out the revolver, took a breath, and then—acutely aware of being watched by the businessmen—realized he could not open the door with both hands occupied. He fumbled the lantern handle into his gun hand and groped for the knob.

The ceiling above him thumped with an impact. Someone had leapt onto the passenger car from the coal wagon—in itself a prodigious feat—and was racing toward the freight cars. Svenson broke into a run. He clawed open the connecting door, just as a second thudding impact echoed Xonck's leap from the first passenger car to the second.

Svenson sped down the corridor, just a few steps behind the man on the roof, and shouted for Elöise to stay where she was. He reached the rear door and yanked it wide. The footsteps were gone. Xonck must have leapt ahead onto the freight car, but Svenson could not see him, nor—above the clattering wheels—hear a thing. He spun round to find that all four of the young laborers had followed.

“Mrs. Dujong!” he called to them. “She is in danger! There is a man aboard the train—the roof—a murderer!”

Before they could reply, he stepped fully onto the platform. With the lantern at arm's length, he judged the distance between the platform and the ladder, swallowing with fear. Svenson stuffed the pistol into his belt and, gripping tightly to the rail, swung one leg over it. He shifted his grip, too aware of the vibrating rail, how the fluttering stripe of train ties whipped past beneath him, the slippery soles of his boots. He jammed his toes between the bars of the railing—and swung his other leg over. The ladder was still too far away. He would have to jump.

A lurch of the train caused Svenson to lose his balance completely and he flew into space between the cars. His body cannoned into the iron rungs and slid toward the flashing wheels. The lantern burst onto the rocky trackside, a bloom of flame gone instantly from view. He cried out like a child as his right boot heel was kicked by a tie. His hands finally seized hold, tight as a rigorous corpse, on a cold, rust-chipped bar.

The sound of the train had changed… it was slowing down.

THE TRAIN came to a halt with a final great wheeze of steam. Svenson dropped trembling to the track and looked to the engine—a small station platform, men with lanterns, perhaps other passengers. He turned the other way, pulled the revolver from his belt, and ran for the caboose. There were at least fifteen closed freight cars, each with a wide door shut with a heavy metal hasp. He raced past, sparing only such attention to see whether they might have been pried open, but saw nothing untoward. Svenson looked back to the engine, wondering how long they would be stopped. If he did not return, Elöise would be at Xonck's mercy.

The Doctor's breath heaved as he hauled himself onto the caboose's platform and rapped on the door with the pistol butt. Without waiting for an answer the Doctor pushed the door open, the revolver before him. A small man in a blue coat, his pink face scumbled with an uneven swath of bristle, looked up with alarm, a metal mug in one hand and a blackened teapot in the other.

“Good evening,” said Doctor Svenson. “I am so sorry to intrude.”

The porter's arms rose higher, still holding the mug and teapot.

“There is no m-money,” he stammered. “The ore is still raw— p-please—”

“It could not be further from my mind,” said Svenson, peering in each corner: a table, a stove, chairs, maps, a rack of shelves stuffed with tools, but no place another person might hide. “Where is the conductor?”

“Who?” replied the trainsman.

“I am looking for a man.”

“The conductor would be up front.”

“Yes, another man, dangerous, even mad, and perhaps a lady, or two ladies, one younger, small, and the other taller, black hair, possibly injured—even, ah, killed.”

The porter did not answer. Svenson smiled brightly.

“And where are we—this station?”

“Sterridge.”

“And what is Sterridge?”

“Sheep country.”

“How far to the city?”

“Three hours?”

“And what other stops before we reach it?”

“Only one, at the canals.”

“What canals?”

“Parchfeldt Junction, of course.”

“Of course,” echoed Svenson, with the annoyance of every traveler confronted with benign native idiocy. “How long until the train moves on?”

“Any minute.” The man poked the teapot at the revolver. “You're a foreign soldier.”

“Not at all,” answered Svenson. “Still, I should advise you to lock the door and let no one inside. I apologize again for the disruption.”

The Doctor leapt off the caboose's platform, gazing to its rooftop, the revolver raised. He saw nothing. Svenson wheeled for the front of the train. Far in front of him—and by its posture sniffing—a sinuous figure in a black cloak stood pressed at the door of a freight car like a fox against a hen coop. Svenson broke into a run.

XONCK LOOKED up, alerted by the nearing bootsteps, the lower half of his face just visible beneath the hood of his cloak, both hands wrestling with the rusted iron clasp that held the freight-car door fast. Svenson raised the pistol but stumbled badly on the rocks, just barely keeping his feet. He looked up and Xonck was gone. Had the man darted beneath the cars—or between them to lay in wait as he passed? Or was he already scrambling to the roof? If Xonck was on the roof, he might well reach the passenger cars, and Eloise, before Svenson could cut him off. The Doctor ran past the freight car, sparing one brief glance beneath it, wondering what Xonck had smelt inside.

Xonck was not in wait—Xonck was nowhere at all. Svenson reached the landing, out of breath, just as the men at the front of the train blew their whistles. He slithered his legs over the railing with a groan. The train pulled forward and Doctor Svenson fell into the corridor, the revolver still in his hand. Staggering toward Elöise's compartment, he felt the dread lancing his spine—he was too late, she was dead, Xonck crouched at her open throat like a ghoul. But then he was at the door. Elöise lay where she had, asleep. Across from her, looking up with defiant expressions, were two of the four young men.

Svenson rolled away from the doorway to lean his back against the wall with a sigh, eyes closed. His every effort was a mindless grope in the dark.

THEY WOULD reach the Parchfeldt canals in the next two hours. Elöise would know how far from the city they were, for this would be near her uncle's cottage, but Svenson did not want to wake her, nor yet confront the young men of such galling good intent. The Doctor allowed himself another cigarette. He shook out the match and stared out the windows, at the carpet of fog that clung to the dark grassland. He blew smoke at the glass, as if to add it to the fog, and wondered what had happened to Cardinal Chang. Was he in the city? Was he alive? Svenson inhaled again and shook his head. He knew this feeling from his naval service, where men who had bonded as shipmates would, upon shifting to another vessel, leave every friendship or pledge of trust behind like the crusts and bones at the end of a meal. Svenson tapped his ash to the floor. How long had he known Chang or Miss Temple compared to the crew of the Hannaniah, men who never crossed his mind, though he'd sailed with them for three years?

He remembered his own advice to Miss Temple in the silence of the spiraling airship, that she ought to face Roger Bascombe while she could, or she might forever regret it… and the girl had killed the man. Had he known that would happen—had he spurred her on to murder? Bascombe was nothing. What pricked his conscience was the burden the death had set on Miss Temple's soul. Doctor Svenson recalled every death—far too many—he himself had managed, with a mortified regret. Yet he knew his advice had been correct. If Miss Temple had simply let the man drown, some vital question for her character—one that their entire adventure had, like some enormous alchemical equation, served to compound and lay before her—might not have had its answer. Did his own journey demand a similar accounting with Elöise Dujong?

HE GROUND the butt out with the toe of his left boot and returned to the doorway of the compartment, signaling with a jerk of his chin for the two young men to return to their compartment. Svenson smiled bitterly that his adoption of the behavior of braver, harder men—like Chang or Major Blach—was so successful, for the pair did exactly as he demanded, sullen but fully deferent. He stood in the corridor until the far door had closed, listening to the muffled racket of the train and fighting the urge for yet another smoke.

Slumping onto a seat opposite the sleeping woman, Doctor Svenson reached into his tunic and pulled out his crumpled and bloodstained handkerchief, unfolding it carefully on his palm to reveal the broken sliver of blue glass he had removed from Elöise's flesh. The sliver had been altered—no longer merely a smooth shard snapped from the rendered page of a glass book. One side now bore a whorled ridging grown from contact with Elöise's body, her blood congealing like stiff beads of sap on a newly sliced wedge of oak. He picked up the sliver between his forefinger and thumb and held it up to the dim light. Svenson felt a pressing behind his eyes and the urge to swallow, as if his throat was suddenly dry—but the glass did not absorb him. It could have been the size of the fragment, but he sensed at least some of what Elöise had said, that its contents were not whole, and as such perhaps offered no real point of entry. Svenson sighed. He pulled up the sleeve of his tunic and then the shirt beneath it, exposing his left arm—above the wrist, well clear of the artery. He took the glass piece delicately in his right hand and, with a quick glance to make sure Elöise still slept, stabbed the sliver's tip firmly into the meat.

THE PRICK of pain was immediately swallowed by a freezing sensation that spread with astonishing speed, and with such chilling force that Doctor Svenson very nearly lost his ability to think. He fought the sudden certainty that he had done something incalculably stupid and forced his eyes to focus on the wound: the gripping cold, though he felt it extending along his veins, did not mean the flesh of his entire arm was being turned to glass. On the contrary, the altered area was actually quite small, perhaps the size of a child's fingernail. Svenson's relief came with a growing dizziness. He blinked, aware that time had become unnaturally expanded with sensation, that each breath felt trackless, and fought down another rush of panic. There… at the edge of his attention, roiling like rats in the hold of a ship, lurked the visions he had sought—but the worlds they contained were utterly unlike the seductive realms he had found in the blue glass before. These were sharp, even painful, unhinged, without coherence. Again Doctor Svenson was sure he had made a grave mistake. Then the visions were upon him.

The first was a thick black slab of stone, carved with characters Svenson did not know (and the person whose memory this was did not know either), at once overlaid, from another mind, with a harsher carving on paler, softer stone, a creature from some primitive time, with a bulbous head and too many arms—and then overlaid again with a fossilized stretch of an enormously large cephalopod, with suction cups wide as a grown man's eye… and then strangest of all came a sound, a chanting he understood was a wicked, wicked prayer. Each element bled sharply into the next, colliding in nauseous diagonals, as if the scattered bits of memory had been sliced with a scissors and reshuffled at random, or hammered together like a ball of wire and nails. Even as he winced, Svenson knew the strange carved language was located on a different stone altogether, that the music had not been heard on a deserted rocky shore at all, but in the close confines of a thickly carpeted drawing room, that—

Just as the entire head-splitting and meaningless sequence was about to be repeated in his mind, Svenson sensed another strain in the mixture—a different, palpable quality altogether… female… though the woman's presence was the merest impression, a whisper in his ear, his senses cleaved to those of her body—her own inhabitation. And finally, like ghosts taking shape from the fog on a fearful heath, Doctor Svenson isolated three successive instants, clear as whip cracks, three tableaux so sharp in a maelstrom of lesser visions they might have been etched by lightning…

A uniformed man in a side chair waiting, head in hands, as a woman's voice rose in anger on the opposite side of a door—the man looked up, his eyes red—Arthur Trapping…

Francis Xonck within a grove of trees, kneeling to whisper to three children gathered around him…

Holding the hand of a nervous, determined Charlotte Trapping, a servant opening a door to reveal another woman waiting at the far end of a table, her dark hair tied simply with a black ribbon—Caroline Stearne, and in her hand—

DOCTOR SVENSON opened his eyes. The frost in his arm had reached his shoulder, the arm gone numb. He flung the sliver of glass away and with a grimace worked the thumb of his right hand beneath the button of congealed flesh that surrounded the puncture. With a wrench that hurt far more than he was prepared to withstand, the lump of crystallized flesh came free. The Doctor stabbed his handkerchief into the wound and then tightly held it there, biting the inside of his cheek at the pain. He shut his eyes and rocked back and forth in his seat. Already the cold was ebbing away in his arm, and he could flex his fingers. He let out a long and rueful sigh. He had taken a terrible risk.

He looked up and found Elöise staring at him.

“What have you done?” she whispered.

“I had a small idea,” Svenson replied with a tight smile. “It has come to nothing.”

“Abelard—”

“Hush, now. I promise you, there is no harm.”

She watched him closely, hesitating on the edge of difficult questions. It was evident to them both he had not told the truth.

Yet as he watched Elöise settle back to sleep, Doctor Svenson knew he should have confronted her. The final three tableaux were memories from Elöise herself, transmitted through the congealed residue of her own blood. Were these memories she herself recalled, and had hidden from him—or had they been hidden from her as well, buried like a hidden seam of silver in the fibers of her body? It was another fundamental question about how the blue glass worked. Elöise was missing pieces of her mind, given over to a glass book…but what if memories taken into a book disappeared only from the forebrain, from a person's ready memory, but not necessarily altogether? Did that mean the minds of men like Robert Vandaariff or Henry Xonck might be reclaimed?

And if those experiences could be restored… what sort of person would Elöise be? Did she even know herself?

THE DOCTOR woke to brighter light and a canal streaming past the window, a shining ribbon between the rail tracks and a dense green forest beyond. Elöise still slept, rolling partially onto her side to face him, which—as he could see no bleeding on her bandage—spoke to a lack of discomfort with her incision. He sat up, the pistol still in his hand but the hand itself half-asleep, tucked into an awkward position between his torso and the seat. How long had he slept? It could not have been more than a doze, and yet, he ruefully realized, however short or long, such laxity would have given Xonck ample time to eliminate them both. But they both lived. Even if Xonck was kindly disposed toward Elöise, did it follow he would scruple to kill Svenson? It did not.

Svenson leaned forward and cracked the knuckles of each hand as he thought. The freight car where Xonck had been interrupted, sniffing and pawing to get inside… such a man would have no interest in any set of goods from these northern towns—in ore or dried fish, in oil or furs. If he traced Francis Xonck from murder to murder, each act had been in the express interest of returning to the city, or in recovering the glass book. Could it really be as simple as that?

The Doctor knelt next to Elöise and gently shook her arm. She opened her eyes, saw him, and then—with a speed that pierced his heart—composed her features into a cautious mask.

“I need to know how you feel,” he said. “If you can stand, or travel.”

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Nearing Parchfeldt Park,” answered Svenson. “I have reason to believe it may be in our interest to leave the train when we stop there.”

“To reach my uncle's cottage?”

“In time perhaps,” said the Doctor. “But I must open one of the freight cars, and I would not leave you alone, in case the train continues on before I am finished. If all goes well and quickly, we may re-board. But it may be that the hidden shelter of your cottage is exactly what you need. Certainly it will aid your recovery.” He looked down at her, his eyes touching on the bandage. “And yet, if you cannot stand, all is moot—”

“What is in this car?” asked Elöise.

Svenson met her eyes and replied as casually as he was able. “Ah, well, it may be the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza.”

“I see.”

“My thought is to reach her before Francis Xonck.”

“Then I had best be getting ready,” said Elöise.

HER INCISION had closed cleanly and well before Svenson would have expected, given how close she had been to death. The lasting trouble was the dizzying effect of the glass, and Doctor Svenson was dismayed to find his own head swimming as he helped her walk—just a trace, almost as if he had consumed too many cigarettes at a sitting, yet he knew that he hadn't, just as he knew the sharp taste in his throat was not tobacco, but the acrid tang of indigo clay. It moved him to still more patience and more care. When he took a moment to tighten the handkerchief he'd tied across his wrist, Elöise noticed the gesture but did not comment. He caught her glance, but as if they both knew it would be a complicated conversation—for she did not know why he had done such a thing, or having done it, what he had discovered— neither pressed the matter. Instead they found themselves at the rear platform. His hands were on the rail, his eyes focused on the passing track below. He sensed Elöise turning toward him, but did not look up.

“It is beautiful here,” she said, just loud enough to be heard above the wheels. “I knew the park as a girl. The entire place felt like it was mine, of course, the way the whole of anything feels like yours as a child, simply because you desire it so fully. I am sure I intended to desire my husband quite as much, and for a time perhaps I did. I did love him, but then he died, and so far away, and so uselessly.”

She laughed ruefully and plucked at the epaulette of Svenson's uniform. “And here I am standing with another soldier.”

Svenson turned to her. “I am not—”

“Of course not, no.” She smiled. “A Doctor is very different, and a Captain-Surgeon even more. But that is not what I meant to say. And now I no longer know what it was… I have misplaced the thread.” She sighed. “Something profound, no doubt, about how dreams retreat, about how knowing more of a thing—about oneself—invariably means more pain. And the pain of smaller dreams is, I find, especially acute.”

Doctor Svenson knew that he ought to reply—that his reply was the exact opportunity to bare, without rancor and for the first time in his life, the merest glimpse of his own struggles—about Corinna and his squandered years, about Elöise herself, but his thoughts were swimming. What was the whole of a life anyway? What was the measure of his own against a life like Elöise's? What, after everything, through everything—what seemed like years of bitter remembrance— did one look back on, apart from love? He was taking too long, the silence stretching out between them, and he felt a new urgency to speak, to let her know that he had been happy for her words.

But he could not find the way to begin, and then the train began to slow.

“It seems we are stopping,” he said, and reached for the ladder.

THE MOMENT of conversation was gone. Elöise smiled somewhat, sadly, nodding to let him know she was ready. Svenson swung a leg over the rail, waiting. The train came to a halt and he heard the relieved exhale of steam from the engine.

Svenson dropped to the train track and stumbled onto the sloped gravel track bed, looking down to the freight car. Toward the engine a cluster of people waited to board—there would be some time at least to search. He returned to Elöise. Above them a dark figure sailed over the gap between their car and the next, landing with a heavy thud. Svenson spun, knowing he was too late even as he did so, and snapped off a shot that flew harmlessly behind Xonck's disappearing figure, the flat crack echoing loudly down the tracks. Elöise cried out in surprise and fell into the ladder, grunting with pain. Svenson caught her waist and eased her down.

“This way,” he said, and pulled her as gently as he could, wanting to run full-out but knowing Elöise could not. At the far end of the train the porter from the caboose appeared, staring at them—had he heard the shot?

“Where are we going?” called Elöise, as Svenson crouched down, peering past the wheels to the far side of the train.

“She is in a freight car,” he said, “directly in the middle of the line—”

“The Contessa?” asked Elöise.

“Yes.”

“That one?”

Doctor Svenson looked to where she pointed. The door of the car had been pushed open wide enough for the woman to exit—or for Xonck to enter. Svenson swore in German beneath his breath, still pulling Elöise along. The rushes between the canal and the sloping gravel of the track were high enough to hide the water. He swept his gaze beyond the canal to the trees—though how the Contessa might have crossed the water he did not know—but saw nothing. What he could see of the car's interior lay dark and empty. The porter came toward him, waving. Back near the engine, the various figures seemed stopped. Had they heard the pistol too?

He turned at an audible plunk of canal water. The Contessa.

Elöise gasped aloud and pulled at his hand, and Svenson spun back to see Francis Xonck—through the underside of the carriage— on the far side of the train, having just dropped from some hidden perch. He was on hands and knees. With a rasping, hacking rale Xonck vomited a bilious stream of dark liquid onto the stones. Svenson extended the pistol, unsure of his aim through the intervening cables and wheels, and Xonck reeled to his knees, the hood falling back onto his shoulders. Elöise gasped again and her fingers dug into Svenson's hand. Xonck's face had been savaged by his ordeal—eyes rimmed red as two open wounds, lips blue, face streaked like a sweat-smeared actor's greasepaint. Doctor Svenson hesitated, and then Xonck's torso convulsed and he fell forward again, spewing another vile splashing bolt. The Doctor looked away with a wince—it was almost as if the sight conjured the smell—then saw the flash of a woman—black hair, dark dress, white hand—vanish into the trees on the canal's opposite side.

He pulled Elöise's hand and leapt into the rushes, the high green stalks slapping against them.

“But—Francis—the freight car—” cried Elöise.

“It is empty!” shouted Svenson. “Xonck is dying—the Contessa is more important!”

Her reply was curtailed by a grunt of pain as they stumbled abruptly into the low brick barrier that lined the canal. The bricked border of the canal was slick with dead reeds, flattened and brown, dangling into the dark green water.

“How did she cross?” asked Elöise.

“Perhaps she swam.”

“Never so quickly,” replied Elöise. “And not in any dress.”

The canal was not excessively wide, perhaps ten yards, but far enough for a woman's swimming to have made some noise—simply her climbing out would have dripped and splashed enough to draw their attention, and yet they had not heard a thing. He scanned both banks in either direction, looking for any rope or ferry box that might be hauled across. Once more Elöise pulled at his arm. She pointed farther down the canal, where the current flowed. Svenson screwed in his monocle and saw it for himself—a small flat-bottomed launch. The Contessa had taken it across and then pushed it away downstream.

“Can we catch it?” asked Elöise.

“We have little choice, save swimming,” replied Svenson.

Behind them the train whistle sounded its shrill and forlorn cry. They both looked back, hesitating, but reaching the train before it pulled forward, even if they had wanted to, was impossible. The iron wheels ground into motion with a shriek.

“Let us find our way across,” Elöise said.

AS IT happened, they did not need the little boat. Thirty yards away they found a narrow bridge of ingenious construction: it could be folded—allowing the water traffic to pass—and then laid out again as necessary to reach the other side. As the Contessa's boat drifted farther from their view, Doctor Svenson wrestled with the knots securing the planking. Once loosed, the network of pulleys and weights and cords stretched itself like some sort of wood-and-hemp mantis across the green canal, falling on the far bank with a slap.

He took Elöise's hand, helping her climb the short rise through the rushes. They had entered the vast and isolated woods of Parchfeldt Park.

“Do you know where we are?” he asked.

She squeezed his hand and pulled hers free. Doctor Svenson fussed in his pocket for a handkerchief to wipe his monocle.

“I am not sure,” said Elöise, taking a deep breath of the country air and exhaling with a smile, as if to displace the tension between them. “You see how dense the forest is. The canals are to the south—as is my uncle's cottage, but I have always come by the road. We could be within two hundred yards of the place or twenty miles… I've truly no idea.”

“The Contessa has not run so far only to escape Xonck. If she was intent on reaching the city, that woman would have clawed his eyes out rather than leave the train. She has entered the park for a reason. Can you think what it might be?”

“I cannot.”

“But did she ever, when speaking to you—”

“She never spoke to me.”

“But did she see you… did she know you were on the train?”

“I'm sure I've no idea!”

Doctor Svenson was torn between shaking her hard by the shoulders and caressing her face with sympathy. He diverted both urges by re-wiping his monocle.

“I'm afraid that will not do, my dear. Though I am an ignorant foreigner, I can at least make speculations. If it is a royal preserve, is there some royal presence—the hunting lodge of the Duke of Stäelmaere, for example? Some other estate where the Contessa might hope to find rescue?”

“I do not know the whole park, only one small portion.”

“But if we are near that portion—”

“I do not know—”

“But if we are, what other tenants, what other possibilities?”

“There are none. The Rookery is all that remains of an estate house that burned some years ago. There are villages and wardens, but wholly unremarkable. Certainly a woman such as the Contessa might convince them to give her food—”

“She did not leave the train to find food in a village,” said Svenson.

“If you say so,” snapped Elöise.

“It will not help to get angry.”

“If I am angry it is because—because all of this—my mind and my body—”

She was breathing quickly, her face flushed, one hand in the air and the other protectively touching the bandage below her breasts.

“Listen to me.” The Doctor's sharp tone brought her eyes to his. “I am here—in this wood—because I am trying to recover my sense of duty. This woman we chase—the man in the train—the dead Ministry man at Karthe—”

“Who?”

He waved her question away. “If the Contessa escapes, other people will die—we will die. I am not thinking of myself, or of us, it is the last of my concerns—whatever I once thought, or hoped, I have put it away.”

“Abelard—”

“There is a hole in your mind you cannot help. That is a fact. And yet there are other facts you have not shared. Perhaps you have your reasons—but thus, you must see, comes my own dilemma. With some distress I must admit that we do not truly know each other at all. For example, I know that you met Caroline Stearne in a private room of the St. Royale Hotel, in the company of Charlotte Trapping.”

He waited for her to respond. She did not.

“You did not mention it,” he said.

Elöise looked away to the trees. After another hopeless silence Svenson indicated the way before them.

IT TOOK ten minutes of thrashing through a dew-soaked thicket of young beech trees before their way broke into a band of taller oaks, beneath whose broad canopies the ground was more bare and easy to cross. More than once Svenson caught Elöise's arm as she stumbled. After each stumble she thanked him quietly and he released her, stepping ahead and doing his best to clear the branches from her path. Aside from this they did not speak, though once the Doctor risked an observation on the majesty of the mighty oak in general and, with a nod to a darting red squirrel, how each tree functioned within the forest as a sort of miniature city, supporting inhabitants of all stations, from grubs to squirrels, from songbirds to even hawks in its heights. It would have been possible for him to continue—the relation of oak to oak being certainly comparable to the various tiny duchies that together formed a sort of German nation—yet at her silence he did not, allowing the last sentence to dissipate flatly in the empty woods.

Beyond the oaks they met a path, wide enough for a horse and wagon, but so covered with leaves that it was clear traffic was rare.

“You recognize nothing?” he asked.

She shook her head, and then gestured to their left. “There is perhaps a better chance if we continue west.”

“As you wish,” said Svenson, and they began to walk.

They walked in an unbearable silence. Doctor Svenson tried to distract himself with the birdsong and the rustles of invisible wind. When he could stand it no more, yet upon opening his mouth found nothing to say, he indicated their leaf-strewn path.

“Our way is as thickly padded as a Turkish carpet—I find it impossible to tell if the Contessa has preceded us.”

Elöise turned to face him quickly. “Do you think she has?”

“She has gone someplace.”

“But why here?”

“We are walking west. Is not west more toward the city?”

“If she sought the city, she would have remained on the train— you said so yourself.”

“I did.” Such stupidity was exactly what came of making conversation to no purpose. “Still, the park is large. We can only hope.”

“Hope?”

“To catch her, of course. To stop her.”

“Of course,” nodded Elöise, with a sigh.

“You would prefer her free?” asked Svenson, somewhat tartly.

“I would prefer her vanished from my life.”

Doctor Svenson could not stop himself. “And what life is that? Your master is dead, your mistress in turmoil, your enemies everywhere. And yet what life was it before, Elöise? Can you even remember what you embrace with such determination—or why?”

“One might say the same,” she answered, her voice swift and low, “to a man whose Prince is dead, whose Prince was a fool, whose wasted efforts on an idiot's behalf have left only bitterness and shame.”

Svenson barked with disgust, looking to the trees for any retort, but nothing came. Her words were exact as a scalpel.

“You are of course correct—” he began, but stopped at her exasperated sigh.

“I am an idiot whose life has been saved countless times by your precise foolishness. I have no right to say one word.”

Before he could disagree, Elöise stopped walking. He stopped with her. She turned to look behind them.

“What is it?” he asked.

Elöise pointed off the path. Through the new green trees Svenson saw a grey stone wall, perhaps the height of his shoulder.

“We have passed something,” said Elöise. “Perhaps it is a house.”

ON THE far side of the wall they found the ruins of what might have been an abbey, the stones draped with vines, the windows empty holes through which he could see trees that had grown up inside, nurtured on the decayed beams of the ceiling. Svenson recognized several fruit trees, gnarled and unkempt, the remnants of some abbot's orchard or lady's garden, and then as they neared pointed out an even thinner line of wide step-stones that led beyond the ruin.

“Do you know what this place is?” Svenson asked.

Elöise shook her head. She had stopped, staring ahead into the trees. Svenson nodded to the new flagstone path.

“Shall we not see where it goes?”

“It is a ruin,” she said.

“I find ruins stirring,” he replied. “Each holds its own secret tale. And besides, these stones seem quite well kept.”

He stepped forward and she followed without answer. Ruins of any kind, but most particularly those overcome by nature, spoke to Svenson's heart deeply—and he glanced at Elöise with an encouraging smile. She did her best to smile in return, and he reached to take her hand, which she allowed with a defeated look that left him wishing he could, without even sharper embarrassment, let it go again.

The path of stones wound to a wooden gate, set with an iron latch.

The square flagstone below the gate showed a fading wet mark… a small footprint… a woman's boot… or a man's that had evaporated to a smaller size. Svenson slipped the pistol into his hand. He motioned that Elöise should keep behind him and reached for the iron latch.

BEYOND THE gate, the flagstone walk threaded a pair of well-tended flower beds (pruned rosebushes to the left and new budding tulips— red and yellow—to the right) and ended at a low stone house with a thatched roof whose edges hung far enough to cast the walls of the house, its two rounded windows, and its wooden door into shadow. The green turf that lined the walkway was wet with dew, the stones ahead marked with more footprints. The air was silent save for the birds.

“Do you know this place?” he whispered.

Again Elöise shook her head. Svenson crept to the nearest print, crouching down to study it. This was unquestionably left by a woman's boot, for even a young man's would not show such a pointed toe. He pointed toward the rosebushes, where a small spade had been set against a stake. Elöise pulled it from the ground and somewhat uncertainly shifted it in her hands to find the proper grip for swinging.

They had been standing in the garden too long, and with a nod to Elöise the Doctor advanced quickly to the doorway, darting to one side and indicating that she should stand opposite—which at least hid them from the windows. She hefted the shovel gamely, but he saw she was entirely without confidence. For all he knew, her wound had reopened and was bleeding. He must capture the Contessa by himself. The less any situation asked of Elöise, the better.

He reached for the iron latch. The door swung wide without a squeak onto a room exuding both intimate care (the hearth dotted with porcelain keepsakes, the furniture waxed and gleaming, and the plaster walls covered with framed engravings) and abandonment, for the flowers on the table had died and the flagstones beneath Svenson's feet showed streaks of dust the wind had blown beneath the door. The Doctor entered carefully and crossed to the hearth. The grate was empty and cold.

He turned to Elöise, standing stiffly in the door with her shovel, and motioned her inside. The Doctor led the way into a humble kitchen. No one was there, nor were there signs of recent occupation, but his eye caught a shapeless pile covered with cloth, stuffed behind the butcher's block. He pulled back the cloth. Heaped beneath, without the sensitive regard their maker might have demanded, lay the Annunciation canvases of Oskar Veilandt, Comte d'Orkancz, last seen, face to the wall, in the laboratory at Harschmort House.

He looked up to see Elöise's gaze fixed on the topmost painting— one Svenson had not seen before, showing the haloed face of the angel. The awful man's brushwork really was exquisite—the flesh of the ecstatic woman seemed as real as that of Elöise across the room, and the blue surface of the menacing angel shone like glass itself. The angel's mouth was open, almost in mid-bite, or perhaps this was only the hissing exhortation of its message. The teeth were sharp and—to the Doctor's dismay—bright orange. Like a Roman statue, the eyes bore no iris or pupil, and were as entirely blue as the skin around them, only more liquid, giving the unpleasant impression that were he to touch a finger to its surface, it might penetrate full length into the eye. He lifted the painting, flipping it over to study the bright inscriptions on the back. Despite there being the odd legible word—“incept” … “marrowes” … “contigular” —Svenson could perceive no larger meaning, bristling as it was with symbols, some no doubt unique to the Comte alone. The Doctor shivered to recall the slick blue discharge as it coated Lydia Vandaariff's quivering chin, and set the painting back onto the pile.

Elöise was no longer there.

SVENSON WAS through the doorway in two strides. She stood across the main room, having clearly just taken a peek through its far curtained door. He spoke in the barest whisper.

“I did not see you leave.” He nodded to the curtain. “Did you see anything?”

“Perhaps we should go,” Elöise whispered back.

She was trembling. Had she seen something? Or had he lost track of her frailty in his pursuit of the Contessa?

“We cannot. She must have come here. The footprint.”

He pushed aside the curtain for himself, revealing a dark unlit corridor lined with high, ebony cupboards. At the far end was a second curtain, sketched out by the light beneath. He crept down the passage, resisting the urge to open the cupboards—there was plenty of time for that later—and a creak from the floorboards told him Elöise had followed. He held up his pistol hand for silence as his other reached for the curtain and twitched it aside: iron-frame bed, seaman's trunk at its foot, another tall cupboard, writing desk with a bevel-edged mirror above.

Svenson crossed to a small door, left open to a rear garden. Beyond its threshold lay another smeared footprint, and another trail of step-stones leading deeper into the woods.

“She has escaped,” he called to Elöise. “She cannot have stayed long. Why did she not simply go around?”

“Perhaps she wanted food,” said Elöise, still in a whisper.

“More likely a weapon.” The Doctor stepped back into the bedroom. “If only the occupants might provide some sense of where we are, and where she might be going—hopefully they have not come to harm—”

He paused at a muted scuffle from within the bedroom's tall wardrobe. Svenson yanked it open and shoved the pistol into the face of the man who crouched there, gazing up without concern—indeed without any expression whatsoever. His clothes gave off the distinct reek of a fire. It was Robert Vandaariff.

The blow caught Doctor Svenson square across the side of his head and sent him straight into the wardrobe, where, aside from a mixture of camphor and smoke, his last sensation was of a doubled shadow in the room behind him…a second woman standing next to Elöise.

WHATEVER CAMPHOR had been laid in the wardrobe only evidenced a struggle lost, for as the Doctor woke, stifling the simultaneous urges to groan aloud and to be sick, he looked down to see his tunic covered with the detritus of moths—spent cocoons, corpses, dusty webbing. He batted at it, realizing as he did so that his arms were free, and that he was no longer in the wardrobe. He had been laid on the bed, a thick towel set beneath his bleeding head. He explored the wound with his fingers—a mild enough cut, though extremely sensitive—and discerned that no bones had been staved in, though he was certainly suffering some degree of concussion. Vandaariff was no longer in the wardrobe. The revolver was nowhere in sight. Nor was Elöise.

He sat up and felt a dizzying rush. He patiently allowed the rush to subside, then swung his legs over the bed. On the desk lay a piece of paper. It had not been there before. He picked it up, squinted, and took a moment to insert his monocle. A woman's writing… “Forgive me.” He folded the paper absently into quarters and then folded it again, smoothing each edge as his mind sought some sensible purchase on his emotions. He stuffed the folded bolt of paper into his pocket and took out his silver case. The Doctor lit a cigarette and smoked it through, leaning so his thighs were braced against the desk, tapping the ash into a dish half full of pins, and gazing into the beveled glass. His face, as leeched of pride as a thrice-whipped dog, did nothing to jog his heart into some response—anger, scorn, even despair.

He weaved through the dark passageway of cupboards into the main room and from there to the kitchen. The paintings had been taken as well. Svenson found an earthen crock of cool water, bathed his head, mopped it with another towel—the spotting of blood gave way soon enough—and then took a long drink. His thoughts were chessmen made of lead, impossible to push into motion. He had saved her life on the train—for what? So she could refrain from taking his, an even trade.

He lit another cigarette, knowing it might cause him to vomit, and dropped the match on the table, hoping vaguely it would leave a mark. There was a clock on the mantel, but it had not been wound. The cigarette burned to ash in his fingers.

He was not dead, though he was not sure his mortification—how many times must he fail at the same hurdle?—was preferable to oblivion. Dull-minded but grimly determined, he returned to the bedroom and sorted through the papers in the writing desk, finding a ribbon-wrapped bundle in a wooden slot. Svenson recognized the same hand that had written “Forgive me,” and opened the letter, dated two years previously and addressed to Augustus Sparck… “Dear Uncle…” Svenson dropped the letter back onto the desk, feeling stupid. Her uncle's cottage after all. Of course it was—and she had allowed him to play-act each step of protecting her, pistol in hand, knowing at every instant what the end must be.

The room was too close. He walked out the still-open door into the garden, blinking, the sounds of birds in the tree branches above him.

DOCTOR SVENSON patted his pockets for a handkerchief and winced at the pain in his left arm. He had forgotten stabbing himself with the glass, and now felt a flicker of sensation throughout his body, a twitching ribbon infused with the revolting amalgamation of visions—the cenotaph, the glade, the fossilized creature… but there was something else, something apart from these, like the strain of a sweet violin within a chorus of martial brass. He had not fully appreciated it in the train car… an exquisite sensuous redolence of Elöise's own body, momentary memories of being her. This was from the new glass, created from her own blood. The memories were almost too much to bear, but he could not resist them. He sat down on a wooden stool, his head in his hands, eyes shut.

The first tableau had been a parlor: Colonel Arthur Trapping, miserable, powerless—and Elöise—overhearing a bitter disagreement in another room… a man and a woman. Svenson recognized neither voice—which meant, he realized, that the man in the quarrel was not Francis Xonck. Could it be his brother, Henry? And could the woman be Charlotte Trapping? Trapping wore his uniform… could it be about the transfer of the Dragoons to the Palace? Or was it something simpler—the payment of his debts? But then why was Elöise present?

The second was a grove of trees. Francis Xonck knelt with the three Trapping children, Elöise's charges. He chatted with them, the wry playful uncle, but then looked up at Elöise… and his expression changed. At first Svenson assumed it to be conspiratorial, but by concentrating, steeping himself in Elöise's memory, he felt something else… a lick of fear, as if Elöise had been caught out. But what could Xonck have known? Or was it the other way around? Had she learned one of his secrets—and now he knew it?

The third image was the most disturbing: Elöise and Charlotte Trapping with Caroline Stearne, the Contessa's particular minion, in a private room at the St. Royale. Svenson knew no more than that: the two women holding hands, Charlotte Trapping's obvious fear… but he'd no idea if the two women knew Mrs. Stearne—knew her connection to the Cabal—or were meeting her for the first time, or what the interview was about, or… Svenson frowned. Just as the image faded from his mind, Mrs. Stearne had been turning toward them… something, yes… in her hand, just catching the lamplight… a blue glass card.

SVENSON SAT back on the stool, blinking up at the sky, these three glimpses rendering palpable how little he knew of Elöise's life. He felt intolerably alone. He lurched to his feet. How had the Contessa known of this cottage? When had Elöise told her—in Karthe? Or before? With a chill in his heart he realized Miss Temple was even more likely to be dead. Yet… he thought back to the cottage of Sorge and Lina and he was sure—he was sure—that Elöise's affection, her devotion to tending Miss Temple had been real. But he had been sure of so many things.

The wardrobe! He had forgotten all about Robert Vandaariff. What was he doing here, of all people? How had he traveled from Harschmort to Parchfeldt? It could not have been on his own power, but who else could have managed it—and then what had happened to them? And how could the Contessa have sent word so far in advance to arrange this as a destination?

He retreated into the cottage and, paying closer attention, searched fruitlessly for any clue as to where the women had gone. Did he even want to follow them? Did he want to risk a night freezing to death in a strange forest? With a bitter determination he rummaged through the drawers of the writing desk until he found one fitted with a secret inner niche, which was locked. The Doctor popped the lock with a penknife and collected the small amount of money, mainly gold coins, that had been hidden away. From there he stalked to the kitchen and pulled open the various drawers and cupboards in search of some useful weapon. At last he found a heavy hammer—tenderizing meat? killing fowl?—he could swing with one hand. He stuck the handle through his belt, took another drink of water, and went out the front door, following the flagstone path back to the leaf-covered track he had walked with Elöise.

Once there, it was with a sudden urgency that the Doctor began to retrace his steps to the canal. He assumed the women had taken the opposite direction. Perhaps succumbing to cowardice, perhaps to common sense, Svenson fixed his thoughts on Chang waiting at Stropping. He would return to the city.

AS ALWAYS, it seemed to take less time to return than to arrive, and soon, despite the Doctor's still-thrashing thoughts, he found himself at the dark canal's edge. It was not quite the same spot where he had crossed—he could not find the little bridge—but as he looked in its direction he saw this might not matter. Sailing toward him was a low barge, wide enough that even he could hop easily aboard, cross its deck, and just as simply step off onto the far bank. The man waved in a cautious manner—perhaps taken aback by the Doctor's sudden emergence from the wood—and glanced over his shoulder. He whistled, sharp and shrill like an angry jay, and then returned his gaze to Svenson, who was doing his best to smile pleasantly.

“May I use your craft to cross?” he called, pointing to the far bank.

Three other men emerged around a line of large awkward shapes stretched with canvas and lashed to the deck, like a battery of field cannon—and as the bow swept past, the Doctor saw the long deck was covered with this strange, shrouded cargo. One of the three men, more burly and immediately daunting, stretched a hand to Svenson, who caught the man's forearm and leapt aboard. The man clapped Svenson soundly on the back, and with a general conspiratorial grinning all three walked him to the other side and hovered, waiting for a clear spot where the Doctor could easily leap away.

“Belay that, there!”

An older bargeman in a black peaked cap had shouted from the stern. But instead of saying anything further he lowered his head, deferring to a slim, tall man wrapped in a brown topcoat, face pensive, holding a thin cigar some inches from his mouth.

“What is that uniform?” this second man called out.

Svenson paused, then brushed his tunic before the men around him noticed his hesitation.

“The Duchy of Macklenburg!” he shouted back, thickening his accent deliberately. “I would not expect you to know it.”

“On the contrary,” announced the man in a flat voice, the cigar still hovering. “Perhaps you will do me the service of conversation.”

Svenson looked longingly at the far bank, but the muscular bargeman had gracefully interposed his body between the Doctor and the shore.

THE BARGE had nothing so formal as a cabin, but there was a wheel and beyond it a depression in the deck where more canvas had been stretched to shield a small stove. Svenson was directed not unkindly to a wooden crate where he might sit. The man in the black cap, the barge-master, placed a clay mug of tea in the Doctor's hands and then left the two gentlemen alone. The man in the coat sat on a crate of his own and deliberately smoothed his side whiskers with both hands.

Svenson gestured vaguely toward the train tracks, by now invisible beyond the trees.

“You may wonder, if you know Macklenburg, at how far you find me from it. The fact is, this morning I was on a train, but it stopped— some difficulty with valves—and I took it upon myself to explore these lovely woods.” Svenson waved his hand vaguely. “North country— mining has always been an interest, as I hail from our own hills, where there are many minerals. And of course the lives of fishermen. You will see from my buttons that I am of the Macklenburg Navy. One cannot keep a sailor too long from the sea! But I really ought to return, as the train must continue soon—I have no timepiece, you see, and would very much hate to miss it.”

“You are Karl-Horst von Maasmärck's Doctor,” said the man.

“Goodness,” Svenson laughed, “you speak as if you had studied the roster of the Prince's whole party!”

“And where is your Prince now?”

“In Macklenburg, of course,” said Svenson. “Where else could he be? Unless you know more than I do.”

The man narrowed his eyes. The Doctor allowed himself to become visibly exasperated.

“If there has been other news, I beg you do not trifle with me—”

He made to rise, hoping more than anything to get a current sense of where the other bargemen stood, but the man in the topcoat pulled him back onto the crate.

“Do not distress yourself,” the man hissed.

“If you will excuse me! My train—”

“Forget your damnable train!” barked the man, but the force of his words was mixed with peevish displeasure, as if he resented the necessity of their entire conversation, and even his own presence on this barge to begin with.

“Will you constrain me?”

“What happened to your head?” the man demanded. “There is blood!”

“There were difficulties with the train, as I told you—a sudden stop, falling luggage—”

“Then perhaps you can tell me instead who made up the traveling party for the Prince's return.”

The man had spoken too easily, as if the question meant nothing. Svenson shrugged, again exaggerating his accent.

“Is that any secret? I am sure your own newspapers—”

“Newspapers are trash.”

“And yet for these simple facts—”

“I insist that you tell me!”

The man balled both hands together in his lap and squeezed his fists. Svenson looked away to give himself time—was the situation so unpleasant already?

“Well… since you make such a demand… let me see… the Prince's intended bride, of course. Who else? Diplomats—your own Deputy Minister Crabbé; his assistant, Mr. Bascombe; dignitaries—the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza, the Comte d'Orkancz, both new friends of the Prince, Mr. Francis Xonck—”

He stopped at the subtle catch of his captor's breath. The man leaned closer, speaking low. “And, if you will indulge me…just exactly how did they travel?”

“You will understand,” replied the Doctor, “that however strange it may seem to find a Macklenburg Naval Surgeon in this forest, it is just as odd for me to find not only a man who knows me, but one engaged on an equally mysterious journey of… commerce.”

“Nothing mysterious at all!” snapped the man. “It is a commercial canal!”

The man took his own moment to peer over the canvas barrier. The canal had twisted more deeply into the forest and the overhanging branches blotted out so much of the pallid light that it seemed near dusk. With the thickening trees came less wind, and Svenson saw the entirety of the crew, save the master, had taken up poles. The man sat back down on his own crate, frowning that his captive had seen fit to rise along with him.

Svenson studied his adversary. The brown topcoat was of an excellent cloth, but cautious in its cut, just like the cravat—silk, but the inoffensive color of orange pith. The man's thinning hair had been pasted to his scalp that morning with pomade, but with the breeze now sported an insolent fringe.

“What a strange cargo you seem to be carrying.” The Doctor waved a hand toward the front of the barge. “All wrapped up and odd-shaped, rather like different cuts of meat from a butcher's—”

The man seized Svenson's knee. Svenson glared at the point of contact. His host removed his hand, then cleared his throat and stuck out his chin.

“You will tell me what you know of Robert Vandaariff.”

“I do not know anything.”

“Did he travel with your Prince?”

“Was there not some story of fever—that Harschmort was under quarantine?”

The man thrust his face close to Svenson's, his lips pursed and white. “I will ask you again: if he did not travel with the Prince in secret, where is Robert Vandaariff?”

“Could he not be in the city? Or elsewhere in the country—surely he owns many—”

“He is nowhere!”

“Perhaps if I knew why you need him—”

“No, you will answer me!”

“O come,” sighed Svenson. “You are no policeman—and nor am I. We are not fitted for interrogation. I am a foreigner in an unfamiliar country—an unfamiliar language—”

“You speak it perfectly well,” muttered the man.

“But I possess no subtlety. I can only be plain, Mr…. come now, your name can not be so precious…” Svenson raised his eyebrows hopefully.

“Mr.—ah—Mr…. Fruitricks.”

Svenson nodded, as if this were not an especially obvious fabrication.

“Well, Mr. Fruitricks… it would seem, and I offer this out of pure scientific deductive reasoning, that you are in—as it is said amongst your people—a spot.”

“I'm sure I am in no such thing.”

“As you insist. And yet, even the crates we are sitting on—”

“Crates are common on a barge.”

“Come, sir. I am also a soldier, though I should hardly need to be to recognize so famous a seal as the one upon your seat.”

The man looked awkwardly between his legs. The crate was stamped with a simple coat of arms in black—three running hounds, with crossed cannon barrels below.

“Are you insolent?” the man bleated.

“The only question that matters,” continued Svenson mildly, “is which member of the Xonck family you serve.”

“YOU DID not say what happened to your head,” said Mr. Fruitricks sullenly.

“I am sure I mentioned luggage.”

“You wander in a forest without any possessions? Without hat or coat—”

“Again, sir, all of this was left on the train.”

“I do not believe you!”

“What else would I be doing here?”

Svenson gestured at the trees with exasperation. The canal had curved more deeply into the park, and when Svenson looked through a small break in the trees, there was no longer any sign of the track bed. The pain in his arm was pulsing again, the disturbing overlay of images seeping up through his thoughts like bubbles of corruption in swamp water—the cenotaph, the fossil, Elöise… Svenson felt dizzy. He nodded to the stove.

“Would there be any more tea?”

“There would not,” replied Mr. Fruitricks, whose mood had soured even more. He sniffed at Svenson like a thin, suspicious dog. “You seem unwell.”

“The… ah…” The Doctor motioned vaguely toward the back of his head. “Blow… bag… hitting me—”

“You will not vomit on my barge. It has new brass fittings.”

“Wouldn't dream of it,” rasped Svenson, his throat tightening. He stood. The barge-master, who had approached without any warning at all, caught his shoulder and steadied him from pitching over the side. Svenson looked down at Fruitricks' crate.

“That has been opened,” he said.

“The Prince would not travel without you,” snarled Fruitricks, petulantly throwing his cigar into the water. “You know where he is, where they all are, what has happened! Who has attacked them? Why have I heard nothing? Why have they said nothing to the Palace?”

The questions flew at Svenson with such speed and invective that each one caused him to blink. His tongue was thick, but he knew that the situation ought not to be beyond him. Fruitricks was exactly the sort of desperate man—officious courtiers, ambitious minions—he had spent years doggedly manipulating in the service of the Macklenburg court.

The sky spun, as if a very large bird had silently swept past. Doctor Svenson lay on his back. He squeezed his eyes tightly, embracing the dark.

SVENSON WOKE slowly, his entire body stiff and chilled, and attempted to lift his arm. He could not. He craned his aching head—which felt the size of a moderate sweet melon—and saw the arm had been bound to a bolt on the deck with hemp rope. His other arm was tied as well, and both legs lashed together at the ankle and the knee: he lay cruciform between two of the canvas-wrapped objects. The sky was empty and white. He closed his eyes again and did his best to concentrate. The barge was no longer moving. He heard no footstep, call, or conversation. He opened his eyes and turned to the nearest piece of cargo. From within the canvas Svenson smelled indigo clay.

The hammer was gone from his belt. He brought his legs up and bent forward. The knot binding his knees came well within the reach of his teeth. The Doctor's naval service did not call for any particular knowledge of sailing, yet he had often found his interest piqued by older members of the crews he tended, and the earlier, vanished world those men had known. His awkward but honest attempts at friendship were often met with some practical demonstration—easier than conversation for all concerned—and in more than one instance this had involved knots and ropework. With some satisfaction, biting at the fraying hemp like a crow at a sinewy carcass, Svenson realized he knew both the knot in question—what Seaman Unger called a “Norwegian horse”—and the simplest way to pluck it apart.

With his knees free and his legs beneath him, he could bend to reach his right hand. The knot was the same—he had no high opinion of his captors' creativity—and, a few moments aside for spitting out hemp fiber, his hand was quickly free, then the second hand, and at last his ankles. Doctor Svenson crouched at a gap between the swathed pieces of cargo, working the stiffness from his wrists.

The barge was tied at a dockside of freshly cut timber, and the road that led from the water was recently enough laid to show an even depth of gravel across its width. He saw no one on the landing. He quickly untied one of the canvas flaps, uncovering a gleaming steel foot pierced with empty bolt holes. Svenson reached into his pocket for a match, then stopped as his fingers found an empty pocket. His cigarette case, his filthy handkerchief, the matches… all missing. With a surge of rage at being plundered, the Doctor caught the canvas with both hands and pulled it away from the machinery. A brass-bound column of steel, studded like jewels in a monarch's scepter with dials and gauges, liquid-filled chambers and copper coil. Svenson attacked the tall bundle to his other side: an examination table dangling black hose, like the legs of five wasps all over-laid onto a single sickening thorax, each hose end tipped with a ring of blue glass. He recalled the strange imprints on Angelique's body. This cargo had been removed from the great cathedral chamber at Harschmort.

THE ROAD narrowed between natural hedgerows of thick underbrush, and so the Doctor nearly missed it, rising above the trees: a dark curling plume against the white sky. Only then did he notice the rough path, simply made by a large man pushing his way through the foliage. He looked back toward the barge. Could it perhaps be a watch fire? But why would a watchman have set himself so far from the cargo? He took the time to dig out his monocle and screw it into place, and looked down the road.

The road curved, he realized. From the barge one could not see to its farthest end. But from the curve Svenson could see both behind to the barge and ahead to a distant white-brick building. Feeling suddenly exposed—was someone watching with a telescope?—he darted off the road. At the trees he sank to a crouch, peering through the leaves of a weeping beech at a ring of stones and a smoking knot of blackened wood. The fire had been allowed to gutter out. On a blanket next to the fire pit lay a bottle, a checked handkerchief containing what looked like bread and meat, and a flat silver square… his cigarette case.

Next to it lay the purple stone, a pencil stub, coins, his handkerchief… and something he did not recognize, reflecting light in a different way than the case. Where was the man who had taken them?

Svenson crept carefully forward, toward the fire, and snatched up his things, hesitating at the new object, which took him utterly aback. It was a blue glass card, exactly like the one he had found in the Prince's flower vase—the first glimpse of his charge's entanglement with the Cabal. The Doctor had later found another, on the body of Arthur Trapping, but both those other cards were long lost. What was another card now doing amongst his things?

Someone had slipped a blue glass card into his pocket without his knowing—but when? And who… for who could have such a thing? The cards were created by the Comte—enticing tokens to seduce potential adherents, each inscribed with the events of a few lurid moments … each as much a trap as a first exquisite taste of opium.

Svenson frowned. He had not had the purple stone in his pocket either. He had given it back to Elöise on the train…

He was an idiot—it was a message! She had tried to communicate with him! If only he had examined his pockets at the cottage! What if the blue card explained exactly what he ought to have done? What if the Contessa had forced Elöise— What if he had doubted her wrongly? What if it was not too late?

He grazed the cool surface of the glass with one fingertip, and at once felt an icy pressure at his mind. He licked his lips—

THE DOCTOR spun at a noise on the other side of the fire. He stuffed the card into his tunic and snatched up a piece of unburnt wood. The sound came from behind an alder tree. He advanced cautiously. A pair of legs, half-visible in the underbrush… the black-capped barge-master, the kerchief round his neck soaked with blood and already a dark locus for flies. Svenson took a clasp knife from the man's belt, snapping it open. He shifted the piece of wood into his other hand, feeling a little foolish, as if he were aping a true, battling man of action.

Another noise, now near the fire. While Svenson had been examining the body, the killer had quite silently circled around.

Svenson forced himself to walk—no longer caring for silence— directly toward the fire. A twig tugged insolently across his ear. Some one was there.

On the blanket, one hand picking at the food in the checkered handkerchief, the other tucked out of sight to her side, knelt the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza. She met his arrival with a mocking smirk.

“Doctor Svenson. I confess, you are no one I expected in this particular wood—apart, one supposes, from symmetry—and yet having seen you approach so earnestly…”

Her dress was of poor-quality silk, dyed deep maroon. Her black boots were smeared with mud, and above the left one he could see her white calf. She swept her hand across the blanket, as if to welcome him, indicating the exact spot where the blue card had been set, and spoke again, careful as any cobra.

“Will you not sit? Such old acquaintances like ourselves must have so very much to talk about—we should scarcely notice if it were the end of the world.”