The Chemickal Marriage

Bronque signalled for a soldier to bring down the coachman … yet the coach rocked ever so gently an instant before the first grenadier started his climb to the driving box. Before Chang could make sense of what he’d seen, the driver whipped out a pistol and put two shots into the grenadier. He furiously slashed the reins. The horses leapt to motion, kicking past their minders. Bronque began to shout, echoed by every officer and sergeant. The entire front rank of grenadiers shouldered their weapons and aimed for the departing coach –

The simplicity of the plan took Chang aback. In the split second before he’d flung himself face down he saw through the misdirection, how every eye’s placement on the coach meant no one noticed the man behind it – the passenger whose exit from the coach’s far side had caused the rocking Chang had seen: a man – no doubt the last of Miss Temple’s missing hirelings – whose torso bulged with another explosive harness.

The passenger, suddenly revealed as the coach surged away, stood not ten yards from the heart of the massed grenadiers. He reached into his coat with both hands. Only then did Colonel Bronque see, far too late, and his scream of warning vanished in an unearthly roar.

Chang stumbled to the thicket of scrub. The entire night sky seemed to echo with shrieks and moans. He met the astonished faces of the others but angrily drove them on. ‘Go! Go!’

‘But what happened?’ asked Gorine.

Chang caught Gorine’s arm. ‘They are alive. The wagon was too far away. Run.’

Only after fifty yards did Chang allow a look back. The Orange Canal Station was dotted with flame, even its shingled roof set alight.

Chang had glimpsed only a flattened mass, and enough bodies to turn a slaughterman’s stomach. How many had been left standing – even as Vandaariff’s damned coach rattled into the distance – perhaps three men in ten? But Chang had not lied to Gorine. The wagon, well off to one side, was intact, and its occupants apparently unhurt. As for Bronque … where the Colonel had stood was a seething heap.

In a stroke every contingency had changed. Chang had counted on Bronque’s men forcing an entrance to Harschmort. He considered doubling back to join forces – and felt Gorine’s pressing gaze silently urging that very path – but rejected the idea. The soldiers still standing would be only too delighted to find new targets on whom to vent their wrath. And Chang had already given Mrs Kraft her chance. He was damned if he would save her now.

They walked without the benefit of stars or moon. The chaos of the station gave way to rustling grass and the squelch of muddy fields. Trooste kept up a low litany of dismay, blundering into the muck and standing water the others always managed to avoid.

‘Lost your papers, I see,’ observed Chang.

Trooste looked up with a sour expression, balanced on one foot as he shook its dripping mate. ‘Not lost at all! Taken!’

Chang looked at Cunsher, who scratched an ear by way of apology. ‘The Professor’s attempt to protect his possessions may have encouraged their confiscation.’

‘And where are they now?’ Trooste asked the meadow at large. ‘Those papers were our only safeguard –’

‘Stop,’ said Chang. ‘Listen.’

Trooste paused, then turned to the sound. ‘Is it music?’

The low grass would not hide them. Chang broke into a run. Twenty sodden yards brought an unpaved road. He vaulted the ditch at its edge and waved the others across, risking a look in the direction of the station. Led by a line of torches, a body of grenadiers gave full-throated voice to a regimental song of blood:

Grind each foe beneath our heel

Whenever duty calls

Blood and iron, shot and steel

Until the last man falls

Beyond the road the land grew sandy, rising to dunes. The grenadiers marched nearer, the crash of their boots like a bass drum to their song. The brazen advance – announcing their presence without care – spoke to a dark resolve. Once more Chang had no desire to be its object. The grass fell away, a slight depression but enough. He dropped flat and the others followed. Chang slid off his spectacles – the lenses would reflect the torchlight – and raised his head.

The Queen’s elite regiment had been transformed to a medieval danse macabre, with every man – most showing visible wounds – bearing the weight of his own doom. Chang had not considered the screams and shouting that had followed the blast – he had been too busy gathering the others – but now he shuddered. These survivors had not been touched by the explosion. Their injuries were more cruel: suffered at the hands of comrades deranged by glass spurs. How many of their own had they been forced to put down like rabid dogs? A deadly bitterness constricted every face.

In front of the ragged column – Chang counted thirty men – marched Colonel Bronque, bareheaded, gold brucade in tatters, left arm in a sling, singing louder than anyone. Bringing up the rear came the wagon, with Mrs Kraft, Mahmoud and Kelling. Chang ducked away from Mahmoud’s higher vantage, and waited a full minute before risking another look. The column had passed like a funeral cortege into the darkness, the death song’s echo like a trail of black crepe.

Chang restored his glasses. ‘We can follow at a distance on the road, but risk being caught up in their collision with Vandaariff.’

‘Likely another blast,’ said Cunsher.

‘They’re going to die,’ said Gorine miserably. ‘Every one of them.’

‘Or we continue over open ground,’ Chang continued. ‘Easy enough to walk, but the closer we come to Harschmort the more dangerous it will be. In the past, the grounds were salted with steel traps.’

‘Traps?’ Trooste looked at the grass around him with an appalled suspicion.

Chang patted the Professor’s knee. ‘That would snap the leg off a bear.’

‘We are caught between,’ said Cunsher, ‘while Vandaariff waits, a worm in its cave. The key element is time. He cannot wait for long. He needs you, Miss Temple, perhaps others.’

‘Worm?’ protested Gorine. ‘He is rather more than that!’

‘My apologies,’ said Cunsher. ‘I select the wrong word. Not worm, but dragon.’

‘I see, yes, lovely.’ Gorine frowned. ‘But what does he intend?’

Chang tapped Trooste with the toe of his boot. ‘Professor?’

Trooste sighed. ‘He is dying. And believes he does not have to.’ He gestured to Cardinal Chang, but thought better of saying more. ‘In any event – he has made plans.’

‘Like the Comte with Angelique,’ said Gorine bitterly.

‘And what do you know about that?’ asked Chang, deadly cold.

Gorine shook his head. ‘I don’t. I swear to you. Mrs Kraft drove us from the room. But she and the Comte bargained for an hour, and then she gave him the Oyster.’ Gorine saw their looks of incomprehension. ‘The Oyster Room. Reserved for the highest quality – everything laid on, the most luxurious single chamber for a hundred miles.’

‘But she didn’t trust the Comte,’ said Chang. ‘Why show him that kind of favour?’

‘He has already said,’ said Cunsher. ‘A room for the highest quality – kings, ministers, generals. It thus follows that clients were given this Oyster Room only to be observed by Mrs Kraft herself. And there her secret lies.’

The Comte d’Orkancz had been unable to avoid a simple sabre blade, and Robert Vandaariff would fall the same way if Chang could get near enough to land the blow. The larger task was not so clear. While the Comte had been the only soul in the airship with any understanding of indigo clay, now there were too many others – Trooste, Schoepfil, Kraft, even Svenson and, with her corrupted mind, Miss Temple. Must they all perish too?

Chang paused at the crest of a dune, saying nothing until Trooste, lagging and out of breath, reached the top. Chang extended an arm to the low line of lights. Originally constructed as the Queen’s prison, Harschmort House was a large horseshoe-shaped structure, only three storeys tall but stretching from end to end as far as a parade ground. The flagged courtyard and forbidding gates looked north. The rear of the house, a hollow around which both