The Dark Volume

Mrs. Marchmoor would find Miss Temple. For Celeste to survive, Chang needed to deliver someone of equal value. He had been released to find Charlotte Trapping. Was their understanding so naked?

As he walked Chang brought his injured palm up to his mouth and tore off the bandage with his teeth. He stepped into a small mirrored alcove and took out the razor. He opened his hand wide, stretching the skin, and dipped the square corner of the razor into wound, pressing delicately until blood was flowing over his fingers. The metal touched something hard… Chang shifted the blade and braced himself against the insistent, pulsing memory of Angelique. He gouged the last splinter of glass free, winking and wet on the flat blade… the final shred of Angelique. Chang flicked the blade at the mirror, spattering it red, the blue fragment sent who knew where. He'd have no further shackling.

He kept walking until he finally reached what seemed like an acre of black-and-white tile, the entryway to Harschmort, a crossroads usually thronged with servants and guests, now empty. He made his exit without incident, trotting down the wide stone steps, certain he was being observed. In the courtyard were at least five coaches laid in a line, but their drivers stood clustered together, watching him descend.

No one had cleared the hallways for Francis Xonck, yet Chang was sure the man had escaped. In the Library, Chang relied on the archivists to limit his own effort and spare his eyes—could he not use Xonck the same way? Xonck's first priority would be to locate his book and thus Miss Temple. This ought to have meant following her path through the garden, slavering after his prize like a pig after truffles … but Aspiche's dragoons were combing the land between the gardens and the shoreline, from the farmlands to the canal—and the Colonel, odious but not incompetent, would have sent patrols to the train stations at both Orange Canal and Orange Locks. Yet they had not found her. Nor had they found Xonck. What did he know that his pursuers did not? Chang returned the impassive gazes of the gathered coachmen, and strode toward them.

THE COACHMEN were wary of someone—by his clothes at least—so obviously of a lower rung. But once he stood with them, their caution was punctured by both discomfort at Chang's scars and a curious compulsion, for his questions were so specific and assured that only afterward did the more careful amongst them realize they had answered the strange figure as if he were a policeman. Having learned where each coach had come from, and with whom, Chang asked if any had returned to the station. He was told they had not, nor had anyone approached them to do so. The men waited for another question. Chang cleared his throat.

“It will be obvious that I am being observed from the house—do not look at the windows, you will see no one—and were any one of you to go so far as drive me to the train station, another would be immediately drafted to follow in pursuit. I thus apologize for not being able to employ you. I would be much obliged if you might point me in the direction of the canals.”

In saying this to men he knew would be interrogated, Chang was simply attempting to save time. He knew the way perfectly well—and while the canals were a reasonable, even clever destination for a man seeking escape from Harschmort, Xonck would avoid them, for the canals would be thick with dragoons. Since Xonck had also avoided the coachmen, that left Cardinal Chang with a single place to pick up his trail—the Harschmort stables.

He jogged toward the outbuildings, but then deliberately overshot them, so anyone watching would assume he had passed the stables. At the next row of sheds he darted to the right and broke into a dead run to get around the far wall, where he paused, waiting. Soon enough a rumble of bootsteps on the gravel reached his ears and then faded in the distance. Chang hurried back, slipping the razor from his coat.

He need not have bothered. The stable door swung ajar, and a black-coated groom lay facedown in a heap of straw not two yards away. Beyond the groom gaped an open stall, no horse within. The boards at Chang's feet were sticky. Chang scuffed new straw into the goo and saw its vivid blue color. He sighed. Horses were not, to Chang, any source of comfort or pleasure. A rustle caused him to turn—a second groom in the doorway, obviously on the verge of shouting for help.

“Be quiet!” Chang snarled. “Who has done this to your fellow?”

The confused groom looked at the fallen man and then back to Chang. “But—I— you—”

“If it had been me, I would not be here. There was a horse there, yes? He has taken it!”

The groom nodded dumbly.

“A saddle! Another mount! Your friend will revive,” Chang said firmly. “I must catch his assailant—it is the only hope we have! As fast as you can or we are finished!”

As the groom leapt to his task, Chang risked a glance outside. No one had come back to search. He picked up the fallen man from the straw and turned him over. White flecks from Xonck's plaster fist dotted the raw skin along the jaw. Chang slapped the young man lightly and stepped away, letting him grope to awareness on his own.

Minutes later a saddled mare was brought forward for his approval. Chang nodded gravely—what did he know of horses?—and did his best to mount the thing on the proper side on the first attempt. This done and Chang's feet having found the stirrups, the groom guided the horse through the door and pointed to the only path Xonck could have taken—then slapped the mare's flank. Fast as a rifle shot the animal leapt forward. Chang squeezed with his knees to keep his seat, expecting at every moment to break his head like a melon.

Within minutes, the cobbles of Harschmort gave way to a grassy path. At the end of the immediate estate grounds the grassy path forked, the left side clearly turning toward the rail station at Orange Canal. He pulled the horse to a halt and awkwardly—for he did not trust himself to dismount and remount with any success—paced the mare along each path of the fork. If Xonck had gone to the station, he had gone back to the city. But without the machines Xonck needed to survive, the city was just a place to die. It took Chang another three minutes, glancing over his own shoulder for pursuing dragoons, to find a smear of blue on the bright grass, like the excrement of some especially exotic African bird, on the fork going north. Chang wheeled the horse and dug in his heels.

He bounced past meadows dotted with the gnarled survivors of abandoned apple orchards, testament to the unpredictable flooding of the fenland. He thought back to the confrontation with the glass woman and her mocking description, “resourceful”… he was smart enough to realize that whatever hopes she had that he might deliver Charlotte Trapping would keep Miss Temple alive. Was it possible that Miss Temple had escaped? She had been in the garden—no doubt he'd been blinded to her presence by his fit. With the damage to Mrs. Marchmoor and the rush to shoot Xonck and himself, the search might have been delayed some five or even ten minutes. How much ground could she have made with such a start—against the determination of organized soldiers? Chang gripped the reins more tightly. She would stick out against the dunes and fen grass like a fox on a croquet lawn.

HE KEPT riding. Mrs. Marchmoor—two weeks before, a whore named Margaret Hooke—had somehow become his keenest enemy. She was vulnerable, to be sure, and hot-tempered, but she was learning. She had taken personal control of the Ministries. She had launched Tackham on his search. And she was willing to sacrifice anyone. It would be insane to underestimate her—insane to come within a hundred yards of the woman without a coatful of orange rings. Woman? Margaret Hooke had been a woman. This was a creature, the abhorrent residue of one man's diseased imagination. Who knew when she might become unstoppable altogether?

This thought pricked his memory… something else the glass woman had said, that she “needed the machines… needed the power…” He had taken it to mean power in the broadest sense— domination over an invisible octopus of minions. But what if Mrs. Marchmoor had been speaking literally? The Comte's laboratory held paintings, chemicals, papers, the man's knowledge. But the cathedral chamber had contained not only the machines, but also the power to run them, through Harschmort's fantastic network of ducts and furnaces and boilers. Whoever had taken those massive machines would find them useless without an equal source of power.

At once Cardinal Chang knew where Xonck was riding, and where he was bound to follow. The clue had been before him from the moment he'd seen the striations of shell-blast. The explosives had been courtesy of Alfred Leveret—the same man who had over-seen the refitted factory near Parchfeldt Park, a factory specifically remade to house all the Comte's machines… machines no doubt already arrived on the newly made canal and set into position.

THE MEADOWS lasted another three miles and Chang began to worry about the horse, knowing nothing of