The Dark Volume (21 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Someone should find his father,” said Svenson.

“The father has been killed this night.”

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

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

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

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

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

The man nodded.

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

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

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

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

“You should come with us,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But why kill his son?” asked Bolte.

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

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

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

“It is that villain,” she announced.

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

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

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

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

“What man, Franck?”

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

“He
is
a devil!” growled Mrs. Daube.

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

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

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

“Abelard Svenson. I am a Doctor.”

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

“Macklenburg.”

“Long way from Macklenburg.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was there trouble?” asked Mr. Carper.

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

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

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

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

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

“Murdered this night!” whispered Franck.

“Just like that devil promised!” cried Mrs. Daube. “He told me plain as day that any person crossing him would die. No doubt he went from here to the stables! Now that I remember, I am
sure
he said it quite clear: ‘If that boy crosses me—”

The two townsmen erupted in astonished and outraged shouts, demanding that Mrs. Daube explain more, demanding of Svenson where his
friend
was hiding, insisting (this was Mr. Carper) that the fellow be hanged. Svenson put up his hands and called out, his eyes darting between the strangely satisfied innkeeper and her watchful guest.

“Gentlemen—please! I am sure this woman is wrong!”

“How am I wrong?” she sneered. “I know what I saw—and what he said! And now you say the boy's been slaughtered!”

“The many cuts—” began Mr. Bolte.

“The knife!” cried Mr. Carper.

“I understand!” shouted Svenson, raising his hands again to quiet them.

“Who are you anyway?” muttered Mrs. Daube.

“I am a surgeon,” said Svenson. “I have spent the last hour attempting to save that poor boy's life—I am not
unmindful
of the savage way in which he was killed. Mrs. Daube, you have told us what Chang—”

“He is a Chinaman?” asked Mr. Bolte, with open distaste.

“No. It—it does not
matter.
Mrs. Daube claims that Chang told her—”

“He
did
tell me!”

“I do not doubt you, madame.” Indeed, Svenson was surprised not to find the imprint of Chang's hand still raw on the woman's face. “But
when
… when did this conversation occur?”

Mrs. Daube licked her lips, as if she did not trust this line of questioning at all.

“Yesterday evening,” she replied.

“Are you
sure
?” asked Svenson.

“I am.”

“And after this conversation Cardinal Chang departed—”

“He is a
churchman?”
asked Mr. Bolte.

“He is a
demon,”
muttered Mrs. Daube.

“A demon you last saw yesterday evening?” asked the Doctor.

Mrs. Daube nodded with a sniff.

“Why are you
defending
his man?” Mr. Potts asked Svenson.

“I am trying to learn the
truth.
The boy was attacked only some hours ago, and by his wounds, the father at most only hours before that.”

“That proves nothing,” offered Mr. Potts. “This fellow might have spent the whole next day tracking them, only to make his attack to night.”

“Certainly true,” nodded Svenson. “The question is whether Chang left town in the intervening hours or not. You did not see him yourself, Mr. Potts?”

“Regrettably, no.”

“Mr. Potts and his fellows have each traveled different directions from Karthe,” explained Mrs. Daube, “the better to find the best hunting.”

“And none of your fellows were back either?” asked Svenson.

“I fear I am the first to return, being less of an outdoorsman—”

“Not like the Captain,” said Mrs. Daube with a smile, “who has come and gone again. As handsome a man as this Chang is a terror—”

“No one was here,” Potts insisted, over her words. “Suspicion naturally falls on this man Chang.”

“Who
else
could have done these things?” asked Mr. Bolte.

“Why else would anyone do them?” asked Mr. Carper.

“Why would Chang?” countered Svenson. “He is a stranger here— like myself and Mr. Potts—and come to Karthe only in order to leave it, and leave
before
these killings occurred.”

“And yet,” began Carper, “if he
is
a natural villain—”

“How would we learn whether he had gone?” asked Mr. Bolte.

“Quite simply,” said Svenson. “Did a train depart last night or this morning?”