The Dark Volume

dropping at least a hundred feet. Not five yards away stood Phelps. The man raised the pistol straight at Chang's head. Without a second's thought, Cardinal Chang launched himself into the void.

HE LANDED ten feet down on a blackened iron beam and without pause sprung recklessly onto the shattered remains of a jail cell, a fall of perhaps fifteen more feet, the breath driven from his body. His stick flew from his hand, and before he could see where it landed a shot crashed out from above, the bullet pinging like a hammer near his head. Chang writhed over the twisted prison bars, hanging so the metal floor of the cell shielded him—at least until Phelps moved to a better angle. He looked past his dangling legs—a straight drop some sixty feet into a wicked pile of sharp steel that would finish him as neatly as the press of an iron maiden.

Phelps fired again—the bastard had moved around—the bullet sparking near Chang's left hand. Chang swore and began to vigorously swing his body back and forth. The earth wall had fallen in, some yards away, creating at least the pretense of a slope. If he could reach that, there was a chance. He looked up. Phelps stood directly above him, Aspiche at the Ministry man's side. Phelps extended the pistol. Chang kicked out his feet and let go.

WHEN HIS body came to rest—after perhaps as brief a time as ten seconds, but seconds as eventful and bone-shaking as any Chang had ever known—he lay on his back with his legs—fortunately unbroken—stretched out above him. His knees were bleeding and his gloves were torn, and he could feel abrasions on his face that would unpleasantly scab. His dark spectacles had remarkably remained in place (Chang had long ago learned the virtues of a well-tightened earpiece), but his stick was lost in the heights above. Roused to his danger, Chang scrambled into the cover of a buckled sheet of steel—part of the cathedral tower's skin, half-embedded in the ground like the blade of a gigantic shovel. The wreckage around him was so complete and his passage down so chaotic that he'd no idea where he was, or whether his enemies could see him. He peeked around the metal sheet. A shot rang out and he darted back, the bullet ringing harmlessly off the debris. That was one question answered.

In the silence, and quite near, Cardinal Chang heard a distinctive and odious chuckle.

The chuckle was followed by an even more disgusting gagging swallow. Francis Xonck crouched in a nook of mangled ducts and prison bars, just across the clearing from where Chang had come to rest. The wound in his chest had congealed to a sticky cobalt.

By now, Phelps might have been joined by twenty dragoons with carbines.

“I thought you'd been shot,” he called casually to Xonck, keeping his voice low.

“My apologies,” sneered Xonck. “It is a younger son's natural talent to disappoint.”

Chang studied the man, taking his time since neither of them seemed likely to go anywhere soon. Xonck's face was more altered than Chang had realized. The eyes were wild with fever, nostrils crusted, and his blue lips blistered raw. Where his skin was not discolored it was pale as chalk.

The glass woman's fingers had been inside Xonck's body… when her wrist had broken, had they come out? Or were they still inside? What delirium must be swimming through Xonck's head, bearing so much glass in direct proximity to his heart, his lungs, his rushing blood. Yet during their own recent battle in the train car, he'd shown no weakness…

“But you were shot before… I see you've dressed the wound in an extremely sensible fashion.”

Xonck spat a ribbon of clotted indigo onto the broken stones.

“I can only imagine what it's doing to your mind,” continued Chang. “One recalls those African weevils that chew from ear to ear, right through a man's brain. Their victim stays alive the entire time, losing control of his limbs, unable to speak, to reason, no longer noticing when he's fouled himself.”

Xonck laughed, eyes shut tight against his mirth, and playfully stabbed his plaster-cast arm at Chang. “The sensations are singular, Cardinal—you have no idea! The pleasure in action, the impact of feeling, even pain… like having opium smoke for blood, except there is no sleep in it. No, one is most viciously awake!”

His laughter stopped short in a cough and he spat again.

“Your mood seems strangely merry,” said Chang.

“Why shouldn't it be? Because I am dying? It was always possible. Because I'm a stinking leper? Was that not always possible too? Look at yourself, Cardinal. Did your mother breed you for such work? Would her eyes shine with pride at your fine habit? Your high-placed companions? Your virtue?”

“It does not seem you are anyone to speak of family. What are you but an inheritance, and the debauchery that came with it?”

“I could not agree more,” growled Xonck, with all the spite of a viper that has bitten itself in its rage.

CHANG RISKED another glance at the high crater's edge. No bullet followed, but he tucked his head back into cover. Xonck's eyes were closed but twitched like a dreaming dog's. Chang called to him.

“Your former associates have not welcomed you with affection.”

“Why should they?” Xonck muttered hoarsely.

“Does not your Process ensure loyalty? Slavish devotion?”

“Don't be a fool, the Process harnesses ambition. That is the risk of ruling by fear. As long as they know disobedience will be crushed, our adherents remain fiercely loyal. If, however—” and here Xonck chuckled too giddily “—the masters lose their hold, or become so ill-mannered as to die, these restraints vanish. We are sunk to their level— or they raised to ours—all the more, since knowledge itself is the most leveled field of all.”

“Because the Comte is dead?”

“Very bad form, in my own opinion.” Xonck thrashed his head— as if struggling with an unseen hand around his neck—and then gasped aloud.

“But Cardinal, you forget my family business—I am not such a dilettante as I may appear. Perhaps for all your reputation for learning, you are…”

Xonck nudged his plastered arm at the destruction around them. To his chagrin, Chang registered for the first time the striations of force amidst the fire… clear signs of an initial and massive point of ignition.

“An explosive shell.”

“Perhaps even two,” replied Xonck. “Detonated after the Comte's machinery had been removed. Not one of his infernal machines is here. Just as in his laboratory—”

“You're wrong.”

“I am not! Smell the cordite within the ash!”

“I do not mean here.” Chang could not smell anything and was annoyed to have missed so obvious a clue. “In the laboratory there was no detonation. That was a fire, started with the Comte's chemicals. Though again his things—or at least the paintings—had been removed.”

“Perhaps they did not care to set off ordnance indoors.”

“This destruction is not the act of someone who cares.”

Xonck smiled. “So… we have two sources of fire. Then there must also be two perpetrators, for anyone with access to our munitions has access to quantities. Neither deed can be laid to our surviving glass creature, for she quite convincingly asked me these very same questions in the garden.”

“Then who has done it?”

“Lord knows. Where are your own earnest compatriots?”

“I have no idea. Dead?”

“How cold you are, Cardinal.”

“I thought you were an ardent admirer of the Contessa.”

“Well, you know, who isn't?”

“You tried to kill her before my eyes.”

“Again, who doesn't—eventually? Did you not yourself, on several occasions?”

“Actually, I never did,” replied Chang, surprised that this was actually true. “I should be happy to do so now.”

“How lovely to have things in common.”

Xonck looked up at the lip of the crater. There were no gunshots.

“The Contessa took your little trunk, didn't she?” Chang called.

Xonck winced at some internal pain—the blue glass ripping at the flesh it was frozen against—and merely