The Dark Volume

“There is no street! In a town like this, one is known by all or is a stranger.” He stepped closer to her. “Like the Captain.”

“Captain?”

Instead of answering, Chang advanced past her to the front door and quietly closed it. The innkeeper pursed her lips.

“I do not think there will be room at table—”

A movement in the kitchen caused Chang to turn. A burly young man with his sleeves rolled up and his hands black with coal dust stood in the doorway.

He stared darkly at Chang. “Mrs. Daube?”

Chang held out an open palm, his words deliberate and simple. “I require this Captain. Is he alone?”

“What Captain?” called the one with dirty hands.

“We do get so few travelers in Karthe,” began the woman.

Chang ignored her. He stepped to the staircase, drawing the hunting knife and reaching the first landing in two long strides. The rooms above him were dark and silent. Normally he would not trust his sense of smell, but even he could detect the reek of indigo clay… yet there was no trace. Chang darted up to the upper landing, bracing for an attack. When none came he stepped quickly into each room, looking behind the doors and under the beds. When he reappeared from the third, he found Mrs. Daube on the lower landing, holding a lantern, her eyes fixed on the wide-bladed weapon in his hand.

“When did he go?” Chang asked.

“I'm sure I haven't—”

“There has been murder, madame—more than one innocent life taken—in the north.” He returned the knife to his belt. “This Captain came to Karthe and then rode north, did he not?”

Mrs. Daube frowned, but did not deny it. Chang gently took the lantern from her hand.

UNDER LANTERN light, the three rooms revealed nothing. With a sudden thought, Chang sat on the bed of the center room and pulled the book of poetry from his coat. He folded the spine back and scrawled a terse warning on the open page to whoever followed. He bent the corner of the page and stuffed the book beneath the pillow. A futile gesture, but what wasn't?

When he reached the kitchen, the young man had installed himself behind the table, gripping a mug of beer, his blackened hands reminding Chang of an animal's paws. Mrs. Daube muttered bitterly, moving efficiently between her stove and table, tending a large number of steaming and bubbling pots while slicing a loaf of bread, pouring a mug of beer, and placing salt and butter in front of an empty chair. She looked up and saw Chang at the door.

“It will be two silver pennies,” she announced.

“I thought there was no room.”

“Two pennies,” she replied, “or you are welcome to go elsewhere.”

“I would not dream of it.” Chang reached into his pocket and came out with two bright coins. “What an excellent-seeming meal. You must be the finest cook in Karthe village.”

Mrs. Daube said nothing, looking at his hand.

“We have not understood each other,” continued Chang. “I am strange to you—it is only natural for a woman to have suspicions. Will you sit with me, that I may explain, as I ought to have done when first I reached your door?”

He smiled, impatient, tired, and wanting nothing more than to shove the woman into a seat so hard as to make her squawk. She sniffed girlishly. “As long as Franck is here, I am sure you will be civil.”

She sat at the table, helping herself to a slice of thick black bread. She chewed it closely, like a rabbit, peering over the slice at her guest. Franck eyed the knife in Chang's belt and took another pull of beer. Chang remained standing, the various mashed piles suddenly nauseating.

“My name is Chang.” He sighed heavily for their benefit, as if deciding against his better instincts to trust them. “As you have guessed, I too am from the city, to which I must return as soon as possible, by train. I am in Karthe to find this Captain and his men.”

“Why?” asked Mrs. Daube. “The Captain was a proper gentleman, you are a—a—just look at—at—at…”

Her twitching fingers stabbed at his ruined leather coat, his unshaven face, and then up at his shuttered eyes.

“I am indeed,” Chang agreed gravely.

“And admitting it!” sneered the woman. “Proud as a peacock!”

Chang shook his head. “And I'm sure neither the Captain nor the men with him could hide what they are any better—soldiers for the Queen, on a secret errand. At times such work requires the efforts of men like myself, who ply the darker ways of life, if you will understand me.”

“What secret errand?” whispered the young man, his upper lip wet with beer froth.

“And why were you waving that wicked knife about?” asked the innkeeper, still suspicious.

“Because terrible things have happened up north,” said Chang. “You will remember Mr. Josephs.”

“Mr. Josephs and the Captain rode together,” said Franck.

“Then the Captain will know what attacked his fellow. I myself was to meet them by way of a fishing vessel—you will see I have no horse—but Mr. Josephs was killed.”

“Killed!” gasped Mrs. Daube.

“Dead as a stone. And the Captain driven away… by something” He paused, giving them both significant looks.

“What is the secret errand?” the young man whispered.

Chang sighed and glanced quickly back into the common room, then leaned forward, speaking low, wondering how much time he still had to reach the train. “There is a sunken craft, of an enemy nation, driven to the rocks, a craft containing certain stolen documents… detailing hidden ways where an unprincipled foreigner might enter the Queen's unguarded treasury.”

Mrs. Daube and her man were silent, and Chang could sense the breathless reverberations of his last word within their minds.

“You still have not said why the likes of you would be part of it,” she said.

Chang smiled, the better to resist his natural impulses in the face of such disdain. “Because the documents are in code, a complicated cipher that only a man like myself—or a certain elderly savant of the Royal Institute—is able to make clear. With the old gentleman too feeble to make the trip, only I can tell the Captain if the documents are genuine. If I do not, my own debts to the Crown—for you are right, I have been a criminal—will not be paid. Thus, I must ask you again, for your own souls, if you know where I may find the Captain.”

“What will you do with those, then?” Mrs. Daube nodded at the hand that held the silver pennies.

Had she listened to a single word? He slapped the coins onto the table top. “There is no time—”

“I have not seen him,” said Mrs. Daube with a smirk. “And as you have seen, neither he nor his fellows are in Karthe.”

The innkeeper's hands darted out to collect the coins. Chang caught her wrist. Her expression hovered between fear and greed.

“What I've said is true, Mrs. Daube,” he whispered. “Pitiless murder. If I find you have lied to me, you are doomed.”

CHANG SWEPT back to the street and had not walked five steps before the sudden sound of a galloping horse rose out of the darkness behind him, from the north. He had just time to see the looming shape of the animal before flinging himself clear of its hoofs. He winced—one knee had landed on a stone—and looked up, but the rider was already beyond sight, tearing through the whole of Karthe in a matter of seconds. Could this have been another one of the Captain's men, racing to meet him at the train? But how would they have coordinated their rendezvous? Chang was sure that without his own intervention, the Captain and Josephs would still be doing their vicious work in the fishing village.

And what was that work? They'd known of him—“the criminal”— which meant they must have known of Svenson and Miss Temple as well. But the soldiers’ primary errand must have been to recover the airship and any survivors. Perhaps they'd seen enough of the Iron Coast to assure themselves there were none, and that the craft lay stricken beyond salvage. But none of that explained the origin of this new rider, nor the terrified white horse that