The Dark Volume (16 page)

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

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

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

“Why is that?” asked Sapp.

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

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

Horace snorted again.

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

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

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

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

“Slow as ever, Sapp,” observed Chang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I would kill you in any case—”

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

“You killed Horace—”

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

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

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

Chang waited, not easing his grip. Sapp swallowed.

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

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

“Word from where?”

“Nicholas…”

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

“What
about
Nicholas?”

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

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

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

“And he told you to watch the trains?”

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

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

“Because of the
crisis.”

“What crisis?”

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

“I've seen the
Courier.
Nothing new.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AFTER SO long in the train, Chang was happy enough to walk, and made for the empty lanes behind the White Cathedral. Named for the pale stone used to rebuild it after a fire, the Cathedral had remained unfinished for years, its broken-toothed dome, crusted with scaffolding, a mighty testament to corruption. The streets were narrow and had been meticulously lined with a spiked iron fence, but for Chang they made a convenient path between the evening crowds at the Circus Garden and the less-savory gatherings closer to the river. He swung his arms with satisfaction, passing through the motions of parry and attack and slash. It had pleased him immensely to dispatch Horace and Sapp. He had despised them for years, of course, but, after so much that had been inconclusive, simply
doing
something was a profound relief. And he had even
warned
them!

In another thirty minutes he had entered a world of well-kept street lamps and shade trees, of courtyards and small private parks. Chang made a slow ambling circuit of an especially neat and proud little square, first along the main walk and then, with the silent hop of a locked gate, through the servants' alley behind, to crouch in the shadows of an impressive townhouse. It was well after ten o'clock. The rooms on the ground floor were still lit, as were the gabled attic rooms that housed the servants. Executing a plan whose origin seemed to lie in another lifetime, Cardinal Chang followed a line of sculpted juniper bushes to a drain pipe bolted to the wall. He took hold with both gloved hands and pulled himself rapidly to a narrow eave, his legs hanging free, and then swept first one and then the other over the ledge, until he knelt outside a dark second-story window. The window had not been locked during his previous reconnoiter. It was not locked now. Chang silently slid up the sash and stepped through, starting with one long leg—his boot soft against a runner of rose-colored carpet—then his torso and finally the remaining leg, carefully folded through like an insect tucking in its wing. Chang eased Sapp's razor from his pocket, orienting himself from his research as to the exact location of Mrs. Trapping's bedroom.

HOW LONG ago had Chang been hired by Adjutant-Colonel Noland Aspiche—the very beginning of his involvement in this wretched affair—to murder his commanding officer, Arthur Trapping, Colonel of the Prince's Own 4th Dragoons? Trapping was an ambitious rake, rising by virtue of his wife's powerful brother, the arms magnate Henry Xonck. It was Xonck who had purchased Trapping's commission and then maneuvered the 4th Dragoons' assignment to Ministry service, thus inserting his brother-in-law at the center of the Cabal's activity. For Trapping, it was a chance to climb to the Cabal's upper ranks, playing them off against one another—his intentions unfortunately far outstripping his ability. Both Trapping and Henry Xonck had all been outmaneuvered by the youngest of the three Xonck siblings— Francis, as capable an adversary as Chang had ever seen. Decadent and disregarded, Francis Xonck had manipulated his brother's use of Trapping, Trapping himself, and his sister's hope that her worthless husband's rise might provide the social status her dour eldest brother denied her. Francis Xonck's plans to usurp the family empire even went so far as to involve the Trapping children's tutor—Elöise Dujong. Only a bullet from the Doctor on the sinking dirigible had finally forestalled the man's ambition.

But before any of this, hired by Aspiche, Chang had crafted a detailed plan to penetrate the Trapping home in secret, to eliminate Colonel Trapping in his bed, if necessary. He had never employed it— Chang had instead followed the Colonel to Harschmort, the mansion of Robert Vandaariff, where his quarry had been murdered by someone else before he could act. But now… now, even though she was a marginal figure in the whole intrigue, Chang was certain Trapping's widow might possess
some
insight on what had transpired during the week he had been marooned in the north. With any luck a few good words about her children's missing tutor would gain him a clean bed and breakfast… once the woman got over the shock of his arrival, of course.

His study of Arthur and Charlotte Trapping had not shown either to be an especially doting parent: at this time of night the children should be asleep in their rooms—directly behind him—and their mother in her own chamber on the third floor. The lights down below would be servants, some cleaning up that night's dinner and others preparing the meals and linens for tomorrow. Chang strode quietly to the staircase. Keeping close to the wall, he climbed three steps at a time to the next landing, pausing to crane his head around the corner. He heard nothing. To the right lay Colonel Trapping's bedchamber. To the left was that of the Colonel's new widow. A bar of yellow gaslight peeked out beneath the door. Chang took gentle hold of its ivory knob. From within he heard a muffled squeak… the opening of a drawer. Was Mrs. Trapping awake? Would her back be to the door? If he could just enter without her screaming…

Chang turned the knob with the deliberate patience of a man stroking a woman's leg during church service, but then the bolt released with a
snap
that echoed down the hall. He thrust the door wide. A trim man in a long black coat wheeled in alarm from a writing table strewn with papers, his mouth open and his eyes wide—a man perhaps of Chang's age, hair combed flat, each cheek bristling with side whiskers. Chang backhanded the man savagely across the face, knocking him past the table and onto a tasseled square of Turkish carpet, where he lay still. Chang returned to the open door, listening for any alarm, heard nothing, and eased it closed.