Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

“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 their care, and so eased the animal's pace. He passed a stand of birch trees, planted as an estate boundary, but all of the surrounding lands had been gobbled up by Vandaariff's agents to ensure his privacy. Beyond the birches was a proper road, and on that road an inn. Chang pulled up and walked the horse to a trough of water. He was debating whether to slide from the saddle himself when a boy ran out from the inn with a mug of beer and a wadded cloth. He handed the mug to Chang and began at once to rub the horse with the cloth. Feeling he had been given a role to play—and since it only required drinking beer—Chang drank deeply, suddenly aware of how thirsty he was. He returned the empty mug, feeling one could enjoy country life after all, and dug in his coat for a coin, asking the boy in an idle tone where the road might take him. One direction looped back toward the Orange Canal station, and the other led all the way to the lonely coastal fortifications at Maxim-Leduc. He wondered aloud that the inn must not see many travelers, and the boy shook his head, accepting the tarnished old florin—he'd seen no other rider stop all day. Chang flicked his heels and nearly lost his perch as the mare shot forward, appalled at the figure he made, but far too occupied with staying aboard the animal to care.

HE CLATTERED across a small wooden bridge, children fishing down in the reeds to either side, thinking to inquire about Xonck but not wanting to again wrestle with a horse that had no inclination to stop. The road topped a gentle hill. At its crest Chang stood in the stirrups and saw, miles ahead, what must be Parchfeldt's thick green canopy. Then the road dropped down into an even denser wood, and Chang felt the air grow colder.

With a determined tug, Chang reined the mare until she walked, slow enough to study each side of the path as they went. If Xonck knew he was being followed, this was the best location so far for an ambush. Chang tried to remember what else he knew of Parchfeldt, from the maps and the newspapers, and from whatever Elöise had told them about her uncle's cottage— Elöise …the woman had slipped from Chang's thoughts!

Where was she now? He had not, frankly, expected to see her again—any more than a hundred others who had crossed his path on one unsavory matter or another: the widow Cogsall, the old ship's clerk, the basement-dwelling apothecary, or that Russian cook… or was she Hungarian? He remained haunted by her arm—the inch-long scar, from a stove. The ragged diffusion of his memory was echoed in the colors of the forest, trees in such number and variety to make him think he had never truly seen one in life before. But the vivid density of the wood only drove Chang's thoughts deeper. He pulled his collar up against the chill. Moisture leached into the earth here, giving off a cold that touched his very bones. In nature's eyes, human desire seemed a brief-lived thing, no more notable than the blind hopes of a fox for its cubs or a lark for the contents of each fragile egg.

THE ROAD was barred by a low wrought-iron gate, beyond which lay a wooden landing and the brick-lined canal. Chang listened in vain for any voices or recognizable sounds, then gripped tight to the saddle and swung himself to the ground. He patted the mare's neck as he had seen other horsemen do, and walked her to the gate.