The Dark Volume

around them Miss Temple could see the flotsam left from the flooding rain and its recession. The air was tinged with a certain whiff of corruption, of river mud churned and spread like a stinking condiment amidst the grasses and the trees.

“I'm sure I don't know what you hope to find,” said Eloise.

“I do not either,” replied Miss Temple, “but I do know I have never seen a wolf in a boat. And now we can speak freely—I mean, honestly, wolves!”

“I do not know what you would like me to say.”

Miss Temple snorted. “Eloise, are our enemies dead or not?”

“I have told you. I believe they are dead.”

“Then who has done this killing?”

“I do not know. The Doctor and Chang—”

“Where are they? Truthfully now, why did they leave?”

“I have been truthful, Celeste.”

Miss Temple stared at her. Eloise said nothing. Miss Temple wavered between dismay, mistrust, and condescension. As this last came most easily to her nature, she allowed herself an inner sneer.

“Still, as we are here, it seems perfectly irresponsible not to investigate.”

Eloise pursed her lips together, and then gestured about them at the ground.

“You see the many bootprints—the village people collecting the bodies. There is no hope of finding the sign of an animal's paw, nor of disproving any such signs were here.”

“I agree completely,” said Miss Temple, but then she stopped, cocking her head. To the side of the cabin steps, pressed into the soft earth was the print of a horse's shoe—as if the horse had been tethered near the door. Miss Temple leaned closer, but found no more. What she did find, on the steps themselves, was one muddy bootprint followed by a thin trailing line.

“What is that?” she asked Eloise.

Eloise frowned. “It is a horseman's spur.”

FOR ALL her bravado, Miss Temple found herself taking a deep breath when she opened the cabin door— slowly and with as little sound as possible, and wishing she'd some kind of weapon. The interior was as simple as the outside promised—one room with a cold stove, a table and workbench, and a bed—plain and small, yet large enough to hold a marriage. Beyond the bed was an achingly little cot, and beyond this Miss Temple saw the trunk where her dress had undoubtedly been kept. She felt Eloise behind her, and the two stepped fully into the room, amidst the trappings of dead lives.

“I'm sure the others have… have cleaned,” said Eloise, her voice dropping to a whisper.

Miss Temple turned back to the door, to the hinges and the handle.

“Do you see scratch marks? Or anything that would suggest a forceful entry?”

Eloise shook her head. “Perhaps Mr. Jorgens opened the door himself upon hearing a noise—they apparently had dogs, if there was barking—”

“They were killed in bed—I saw the bedding, quite covered in blood.”

“But that could be only one of them—when the other had opened the door, allowing the animal inside.”

Miss Temple nodded. “Then perhaps there are signs of violence in the door's vicinity…”

“Celeste,” began Eloise, but then stopped, sighed, and started to look as well.

But there was nothing—no scratches, no blood, no sign at all. Miss Temple crossed to the bed—at least someone had been killed there.

“Can you search the stove, in case anything untoward has been burned?”

“Such as what?”

“I'm sure I do not know, Eloise, but I speak from experience. When the Doctor, Cardinal Chang, and I searched the workroom of the Comte d'Orkancz—we knew the Comte had been keeping a woman there who had been injured by contact with the blue glass—I located a remnant of the woman's dress, which proved a helpful clue.”

Eloise took all this in with a tolerant sigh and set to clanging about with a poker. Miss Temple pulled back the bed's patchwork quilt. The mattress below was marked with rust-brown stains, soaked through the absent sheets. The marks were heaviest near one end of the bed— the head, she assumed—but spread across its width in a series of lines and whorls.

“There is nothing here but ash,” muttered Eloise, setting down the poker and wiping her hands with a grimace.

“I believe both husband and wife were in the bed,” said Miss Temple. “If the Doctor were here he might confirm it—but the stains suggest two occupants. Of course, we have no idea where the bodies were found.”

“With their throats torn out,” said Eloise, “the blood would be prodigious.”

“Where was the child?”

“What child?”

“There is her cot,” said Miss Temple. “Surely you would have been told…”

Eloise sighed. “After a certain point it was simpler not to mix with the villagers at all. Perhaps there is an orphan. Lina never said.”

“But was she here?” asked Miss Temple. “Did she see it?”

“Of course she wasn't,” said Eloise. “Any wolf would have killed a child as well.”

Miss Temple did not reply. She stepped past the bed to the small cabin's only window. It was latched, but she could see, fine as the tip of a needle drawn across the worn wood, a tiny scratch. Something sharp had been driven between the frame and the pane. Miss Temple slipped the latch and pulled the window open, only to have it stick half-way.

“The wood has warped,” said Eloise, pointing to an imperfection in the upper frame.

Miss Temple leaned forward and looked out the window to the ground, some five feet below. Who could say what climbing or jumping might be possible? She was about to shove it closed when her eye caught something flicked by the wind. At first it seemed a shred of cobweb, but when she reached out to take it she saw it was a hair. She plucked it from the splinter where it had snagged. A very black hair, and some two feet long.

IF THERE was anything else to find in the cabin, it escaped them. Retracing their steps across the moist forest floor, Miss Temple glanced at Eloise, who walked ahead. The one black hair was wound in a loop and stuffed into the pocket of her dress—Miss Temple's dress had no pockets (not that she normally sought pockets, it was why one carried a bag, or walked with servants). Eloise's hand persisted in absently plucking at it as they went, as if her mind wrestled with the truth behind their discovery.

Miss Temple took the moment to study Eloise—for she had not before in all their time together taken any particular time to examine the woman, involved as they had been with fires and killings and airships. The tutor's brown hair was piled sensibly behind her head and held in place with small black pins. To her sudden surprise Miss Temple noticed within Eloise's hair one thin strand of grey—and then upon searching, two or three more. Exactly how old was she? To Miss Temple the very idea of a grey hair was outlandish, but she accepted that time did grind all before it (if not in equal measure) and became curious about how such a thing felt. Such projection of interest, if not sympathy, drew Miss Temple's eyes down Eloise's body, where she found herself satisfied by the woman's practical carriage, her slim but sturdy shoulders, and her ability to walk without whinging over muddy and rough terrain. Of course, she knew Eloise had been married, and that married life expanded a woman's experience in a way that left Miss Temple morally ambivalent. On the one hand, experience tended to improve a person by removing illusions—and at the least giving them more to speak of at the table—but on the other, there was so often in married women a certain vein of mitigation, of knowledge that served to reduce rather than expand their thoughts. She suddenly wondered if Eloise had children. Had she ever had children? Had they possibly died?

With a sudden urge, for she had no vocabulary to express the deep unsettled thoughts behind such questions, Miss Temple stepped up her pace and took Eloise's restless hand in hers.

“We must be careful,” she said, looking down at her boots and away from the surprise on her companion's face. “Never having been acquainted with the late Mrs. Jorgens, it is strictly possible the hair is hers…”

Eloise nodded. Miss Temple took a breath and went on. “But I have a memory, upon the airship, that the Contessa carried… well, a vicious sort of spike upon one hand—and you see, it is how they have described the