Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

“Don't be a fool, woman! You cannot escape!”

The Contessa groaned with a savage, desperate effort and reached a stumbling, drunken run. Chang looked at the shattered window with distaste, and cleared as much of the remaining glass as he could with the iron pole, sweeping it along the lower frame.

He turned in time to see a dark shadow fill the entire doorway, the compartment air suddenly thick with indigo clay. He turned a thrust with the pole, raising it swiftly before him, and heard more shattering of glass. The second blow, fast upon the first, was a stone-hard fist, catching Chang square on the jaw and sprawling him onto the compartment seats. At once Chang rolled to his side, just evading a shard of glass slicing down to shred the upholstery where his head had been. Chang rolled again, whipping the iron pole at his assailant's face. The man blocked it on his forearm without the slightest cry—a blow meant to shatter bone—but as he did Chang landed a kick square in the fellow's stomach. The man grunted and staggered back. Chang scrambled to his feet, jaw numb, trying to see who—for it was not the Captain—had determined to kill him.

His attacker was tall, wrapped in a black woolen cloak, its hood pulled forward. Chang could see only his pale jaw, a mouth with broken teeth, lips nearly black, and shining with what might have been blood but for the smell. It was the same blue discharge Chang had seen on the lips of Lydia Vandaariff, after the doomed heiress' body had been corrupted by the Comte's alchemical injections. The man snarled—a mean, rasping exhalation like the grinding of flesh between two stones—and Chang's eyes darted to his hands. The left was wound thick with cloth and held a squat spear of blue glass, the shattered edge bristling like a box of needles, while the right—no wonder Chang's jaw felt as if it had been broken—was wrapped in plaster. Then the instant was over. As his attacker surged forward, Chang cracked the pole against the man's left hand, knocking the blue glass to the floor, and received another blow from the plaster-covered right, which drove the air from his lungs. He was thrown back through the open compartment door and slammed into the corridor wall. The man was right after him, groping for Chang's throat with one hand and clubbing at his head with the other. Chang dropped the pole and tore at the ice-cold squeezing grip with both hands, his boots slipping on broken glass. The man pressed close. The indigo stench was near to nauseating, pricking the back of Chang's throat—part of his mind vaguely curious as to whether it was possible to vomit while being strangled to death. Chang found his footing at last and snapped forward, sharply striking the man's face with his forehead, then driving his knee between them, sending his assailant back into the doorway.

But the man was incredibly fast, and lashed out with his plaster-cast fist, catching Chang's shoulder like a hammer. Chang gasped at the impact as if he had been nailed to the wall behind him. The man dug under the black cloak and came out with another dagger-length spike of blue glass.

The man spat a rope of fluid from the side of his mouth and extended the dagger mockingly toward Cardinal Chang's right eye. Chang could not run—he'd only be gashed in the back. His mind ran through each feint and counter-feint he might attempt, and every possible attack—just as he knew his enemy was doing, the entirety of a chess match in one instant.

“She's escaped you,” Chang whispered. “Just like at the stables.”

“No matter.” The man's voice was a slithering limestone grind.

“She will survive us all.”

“You , certainly.”

“You are no portrait of good health.”

“You have no idea.”

Like a bullet from a gun, the man's stone fist swept forward, smashing into the wall as Chang dodged away and then dropped to his knees, just below the dagger hacking at his face. Chang dove forward, catching his opponent around the waist, and bull-rushed him backward into the compartment. The man roared, but in three quick steps was pinned against the shattered window frame, then toppled through with a cry. His flailing boot caught Chang across the face as he fell, knocking the Cardinal to the glass-littered floor. By the time Chang could lurch to his knees and peer out of the window, his mysterious enemy had vanished.

CHANG STOOD wincing at the pain scoring across the whole of his body, catching his rasping breath and taking in the ruined compartment—window and door destroyed, upholstery slashed, the floor scratched and pitted by the glass ground beneath their boots. He took in the fact that the Contessa had never especially feared Chang at all, that her only concern—at the stable and on the train—had been that hooded, implacable killer. The man had chased her from the front of the train toward Chang—what did that mean with regard to the Captain? Chang had assumed the disfigured man was another of the Captain's soldiers, who'd run afoul of the blue glass… but Chang realized that the man—and by extension, the Captain?—had been trying to kill the Contessa. One of the most subtle achievements of the Cabal had been their insinuation into the highest levels of government— suborning powerful figures throughout the Ministries and the Palace to the extent that state policy would be now executed to serve their particular interests. What was more, an entire regiment of dragoons had been reassigned to “unspecified duties” at the Palace, an unprecedented gesture that had allowed the key figures in the Cabal—Minister Crabbé, the Comte, Francis Xonck, the Contessa—to protect their every endeavor with seasoned troops. Chang frowned, for given all of this, what he'd seen made little sense. If the search party had been sent by the Palace, were they not the Contessa's allies?

Was the Captain in the passenger cars or had he talked his way into the engine itself? Chang wanted to leap out the window and run after the Contessa, but knew that stopping the Captain, stopping any discovery of their survival— especially if he did not truly understand who the Captain served—was more important than revenge. Yet if Chang remained on the train, he was now leaving two deadly enemies behind him, when all of his companions would be passing through Karthe village.

But who knew when Svenson and the women might arrive? It could be another week, even more. By driving the Captain and Josephs away from the fishing village, Chang had ensured his companions would be safe there. The Contessa wanted only to escape Karthe, and the disfigured man had shown he would pursue her above anything.

The Contessa was one woman. If no one stopped the Captain delivering his news, Chang and the others would be hunted everywhere, by hundreds of men… and he had left his warning note at the Flaming Star…

The splitting ache in his head prevented further thought. There was no clean choice—either way he risked damning both the others and himself. He needed to sleep, to eat—to eat opium, he thought with no small longing.

Chang staggered against the row of seats. The train was moving. He looked at the dark trackside moving past, weighing the possibility of leaping out, but did not move. The decision had been made.

IT HAD taken the whole of that night's travel to descend from the dark mountains into a land of treeless hills marked, as by the scrawls of a child's pencil, with arbitrary seams of lichen-speckled slate. He had bartered with the trainsmen for some meat and bread and tea. To his great frustration, the Captain was not in the passenger cars, nor the coal wagon, nor the engine. Nothing was said of the ruined compartment—the glass was swept up and the broken doorway stretched with canvas by the time he had finished his search in the forward cars— even if the men seated around the stove cast more than one wary glance at Chang's unsettling eyes and his battered, nonsensical garments. He paced the length of the train, fruitlessly hoping he had overlooked some nook or cupboard, but only frightened the other passengers—three men with business at the mines, an old woman, and two young laborers on their way to shackle their lives to a mill, or one of the new factories setting up outside of the city.