Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

TWO Cardinal

He was called Cardinal from his habit of wearing a red leather topcoat that he’d stolen from the costume rack of a traveling theatre. It had been winter, and he’d taken it because the ensemble included boots and gloves as well as the coat, and at the time he was lacking all three. The boots and gloves had since been replaced, but he had preserved the coat, despite wearing it through all weathers. Though few men in his line of work sought to identify themselves in any way at all, he found that, in truth, those who sought him out—for employment or punishment—would find him even if he wore the drabbest grey wool. As for the name, however ironic or mocking, it did bestow a certain veneer of mission—given his life was a persistent and persistently vicious struggle—onto his itinerant church of one, and though he knew in his heart that he (like everyone) must lose at the finish, the vain title made him feel less through the course of his days like an animal fattened in a pen.

He was called Chang for more immediate reasons, if equally ironic and mocking. As a young man he’d been deeply slashed by a riding crop over the bridge of his nose and both eyes. He’d been blinded for three weeks, and when his vision finally cleared—as much as it was ever going to clear—he was greeted with the blunt scars that crossed and then protruded out from the corners of each eyelid, as if a child’s caricature of a slant-eyed menacing Chinaman had been scrawled with a knife over his features. His eyes were thereafter sensitive to light, and tired easily—reading anything longer than a page of newspaper gave him a headache that, as he had learned many times over, only the deep sleep of opiates or, if such were unavailable, alcohol, might assuage. He wore spectacles with round lenses of dark smoked glass in all circumstances.

It was a gradual process by which he accepted these names, first from others, and then finally used them himself. The first time he replied “Chang” when asked his name, he could too easily recall the taunting comments as he waited day after day in the sickroom for his sight to return (it was a name to be always accompanied by a bitter smile), but even those associations seemed more real—more important to carry forward—than an earlier identity marked with failure and loss. More, the names were now a part of his working life—the rest were distant landmarks on a sea voyage, faded from sight and usage.

The riding crop had also damaged the inside of his nose, and he had little sense of smell. He knew abstractly that his rooming house was more objectionable than his own experience told him—he could see the nearby sewers, and knew by logic that the walls and floors had fully absorbed the fetid airs of their surroundings. But he was not uncomfortable. The garret room was cheap, isolated, with rooftop access and, most importantly, in the shadow of the great Library. For the smell of his own person, he contented himself with weekly visits to the Slavic baths near the Seventh Bridge, where the steam soothed his ever red-rimmed eyes.

At the Library, Cardinal Chang was a common sight. It was knowledge that put him ahead of his competitors, he felt—anyone could be ruthless—but his eyes prevented long hours spent in research. Instead, Chang made the acquaintance of librarians, engaging them in long interrogative conversations about their given responsibilities—specific collections, organizational theories, plans for acquisition. He pursued these topics in calm but relentless inquiry, so that eventually—through memory and rigorous mental association—it had become possible for him to isolate at least three-quarters of what he needed without actually reading a word. As a result, though he haunted its marbled halls nearly every day, Cardinal Chang was most often found pacing a Library corridor in thought, wandering through the darkened stacks by memory, or exchanging keen words with a blanching though professionally tolerant archivist as to the exact provenance of a new genealogical volume he might need to consult later in the day.

Before the incident with the riding crop and the young aristocrat who wielded it, Chang had been a long-time student—which meant that poverty did not trouble him, and that his wants, then from necessity and now by habit, were few. Though he had abandoned that life completely, its day to day patterns had marked him, and his working week was divided into a reliably Spartan routine: the Library, the coffeehouse, clients, excursions on behalf of those clients, the baths, the opium den, the brothel, and bill collecting, which often involved revisiting past clients in a different (to them) capacity. It was an existence marked by keen activity and open tracts of ostensibly lost time, occupied with wandering thought, thick sleep, narcotic dreams, with willful nothingness.

When not so pacified, however, his mind was restless. One source of regular consolation was poetry—the more modern the better, as it usually meant a thinner text. He found that by carefully rationing out how many lines he read at a time, and closing his eyes to consider them, he could maintain a delicately steady, if perhaps finally grinding, pace through the whole of a slim volume. He had been occupying himself in such a manner, with Lynch’s new translation of the Persephone fragments (found in some previously unplundered Thessalonikan ruin), when he looked up and saw the woman on the train. He smiled to think of it, as he lay just awake on his pallet, for the lines he’d been reading at the time—“battered princess / that infernal bride”—had seemed to exactly illustrate the creature before him. The filthy coat, the blood-smeared face, her curls crusted and stiff, her piercing grey eyes—a meeting of such beauty and such spoilage—he found it all perfectly impressive, even striking. He had decided at the time not to follow, to allow the incident its own distinction, but now he wondered about finding her, remembering (with a stirring of lust) the lines fallen tears had traced down her cheeks. After consideration, Chang decided he would ask at the brothel—any new whore so covered in blood would certainly have someone talking about her.

The grey light from his window told him that he had slept later than usual. He rose and washed his face in the basin. He dried himself vigorously on an old towel and decided he could go another day without shaving. After a moment of indecision, he decided to swirl a mouthful of salt water around his teeth, spat into his chamber pot, pissed in the pot, and then ran his fingers through his hair in lieu of a comb. His clothes from the previous day were still clean enough. He put them on, re-knotted a black cravat, tucked his razor into one coat pocket and the slim volume of Persephone into another. He put on his glasses, relaxed as even this day’s pallid light was dimmed, grabbed a heavy, metal-knobbed walking stick, and locked his door behind him.

It was just after noon, but the narrow streets were empty. Chang was not surprised. Years ago the neighborhood had been fashionable, rows and rows of six-story mansions crowded near the river, but the growing stench of the river itself, the fog and the crime it covered, along with the city’s expansion elsewhere into broad landscaped parks had caused the mansions to be sold, each of them cut up into a myriad of smaller rooms, rough unpainted walls thrust between the once elaborate stucco moldings, catering to a vastly different caste of occupants—disreputable occupants such as himself. Chang walked some distance out of his way, north, to find a morning newspaper, and tucked it under his arm unread as he turned back toward the river. The Raton Marine was historically a tavern—and still functioned as such—but during the daylight had taken to serving coffee, tea, and bitter chocolate. In this way it had expanded its role as a place of itinerant business, where men might linger to seek and to be found, in rooms both public and unseen.

The Cardinal took a table inside the main room, away from the glare of the open walkway, and called for a cup of the most dark and acrid South American chocolate. This morning he didn’t want to speak to anyone, or at least not yet. He wanted to read the newspaper, and that was going to take time. He spread the front page over his table and squinted so that he could really only make out the largest size of type, sparing his eyes as much unwanted text as possible. In this way he skimmed through the headlines, moving quickly past international tragedies and domestic scandals, the perfidies of weather and disease, the problems of finance. He rubbed his eyes and took a hot mouthful of chocolate. His throat clenched against the bitter taste, but he felt his senses sharpened all the same. He returned to the paper, moving into the inner pages, bracing himself for smaller type, and found what he was after. Chang took another fortifying swallow of his drink, and plunged into the dense column of text.

REGIMENTAL HERO MISSING

Col. Arthur Trapping, commander of the 4th Dragoons, decorated hero of Franck’s Redoubt and Rockraal Falls, was reported missing today from both his regimental quarters and his own dwelling on Hadrian Square. Col. Trapping’s absence was noted during the formal investiture of the 4th Dragoons as the “Prince’s Own”, with newly designated responsibilities as a Household Regiment for Palace defense, Ministry escort, and ceremonial duties. Acting for Col. Trapping in the ceremony was the regiment’s Adjutant-Colonel, Noland Aspiche, who received the formal charge of duty from the Duke of Stäelmaere, attended by Palace representatives. Despite concerns expressed from the highest levels of government, the authorities have been unable to locate the missing officer….

Chang stopped reading and rubbed his eyes. It told him all he needed to know—or all he was going to learn for the moment. Either the truth was being suppressed, or indeed the facts had somehow remained unknown. He could not believe that Trapping’s movements were so much a secret—he’d followed the man easily enough, after all—but any number of things could have happened between then and now to alter what appeared to be the facts. He sighed. Though his involvement ought to have been finished, it was more likely to be merely beginning. It would depend on the client.

He was about to turn the page when another headline caught his eye. A country aristocrat—Lord Tarr, whom he’d never heard of—had been murdered. Chang peered at the text, and learned that the ailing Tarr had been found in his garden, in his nightshirt, with his throat torn out. While there was a chance that he’d been attacked by an animal, it was now suspected that the wound had been brutally enlarged to disguise the deep cross-cut of a blade. Inquiries were pending. Inquiries were always pending, Chang thought to himself, reaching for his cup—that was why he had regular work. No one liked to wait.

As if on cue, someone near him coughed discreetly. Chang looked up to see a uniformed trooper—red coat and trousers, black boots, a brass helmet with a horse-tail crest in one hand, the other resting on the hilt of a long saber—standing at the doorway, as if actually entering the Raton Marine would foul his military crispness. Upon getting Chang’s attention, the trooper nodded and clicked his heels. “If you’ll accompany me, Sir,” he deferentially called over to Chang. None of the other customers acted as if they’d heard a word. Chang nodded to the trooper and stood. This was happening more quickly than he’d expected. He collected his walking stick and left the paper for someone else to read.

They did not speak as Chang was led to the river. The bright uniform of his guide seemed to vibrate against their monochrome surroundings of stone paving, grey mottled plasterwork, and black pools of standing fetid water. Chang knew that his own coat had a similar effect, and smiled at the thought that the two of them might be seen as a strange kind of pair—and how much the trooper would loathe such an idea. They rounded a corner and walked onto a stone balcony that overhung the river itself. The wide black water slipped past beneath them, the far bank just visible through the tracings of fog that had either not fully abated from the night or were already beginning to gather. The balcony had been a wharf for pleasure craft and boats for hire when the district was thriving. It had since been left to rot, despite being regularly used for nefarious transactions after nightfall.

As he expected, Adjutant-Colonel Noland Aspiche stood waiting for him, with an aide and three other troopers standing behind, and two more waiting in the trim launch tied up to the stairwell. Chang stopped, allowing his escort to continue on to his commander, click his heels and report, gesturing back to Chang. Aspiche nodded, and then after a moment walked over to Chang, out of earshot from the others.

“Where is he?” he snapped, speaking quietly. Aspiche was a hard, lean man, with receding hair cut close to his skull. He dug a thin black cheroot from his red jacket, bit the tip off, spat, and pulled out a small box of safety matches. He turned away from the wind and lit one, puffing until the flame took. He exhaled a blue plume of smoke and returned his sharp gaze to Chang, who had not answered. “Well? What have you got to say?”

Chang despised authority on principle, for even when veiled by the rubric of practical necessity or the weight of tradition he could not see institutional power as anything but an expression of arbitrary personal will, and it galled him profoundly. Church, military, government, nobility, business—his skin crawled at every interaction, and so though he granted Aspiche his probable competence there was an urge in Chang, rising at the very manner in which the officer bit off the tip of his cheroot and spat, to savage the man with his razor then and there, no matter the consequences. Instead he was still, and answered Adjutant-Colonel Aspiche as calmly as possible.

“He’s dead.”

“Are you sure? What did you do with the body?” Aspiche spoke moving only his mouth, keeping the rest of his body still—from the back, as his men saw him, he was merely listening to Chang.

“I didn’t do anything with the body. I didn’t kill him.”

“But—we—you were instructed—”

“He was already dead.”

Aspiche was silent.

“I followed him from Hadrian Square to the country, to the Orange Canal. He met a group of men, and together they met a small launch sailing up the canal. From the launch they unloaded a cargo onto two carts, and drove the carts to a nearby house. A great house. Do you know what house that was, near the Orange Canal?”

Aspiche spat again. “I can guess.”

“Evidently it was quite an occasion—I believe the given excuse was the engagement of the Lord’s daughter.”

Aspiche nodded. “To the German.”

“I was able to enter the house. I was able to find Colonel Trapping, and with a fair amount of difficulty, I was able to introduce a substance to his wine—”

“Wait, wait,” interrupted Aspiche, “who else was there? Who else was with him at the canal? What happened to the carts? If someone else killed him—”

“I am telling you,” hissed Chang, “what I am going to tell you. Are you going to listen?”

“I’m contemplating having you horsewhipped.”

“Are you really?”

Aspiche sighed and glanced behind him at his men. “No, of course not. This has been very difficult—and not hearing from you—”

“I was awake into the early morning. I explained that this was likely to happen. And instead of paying attention you first sent a uniformed man to collect me, and then appeared yourself in a part of the city you can have no decent social or professional business in whatsoever. You might as well have set off fireworks. If anyone has suspicions—”

“No one has suspicions.”

“That you know of. I will have to go back to the coffeehouse and give ready money to the five men who saw me so collected—to protect the both of us. Are you this careless with the lives of your men in action? Are you this careless with yourself?”

Aspiche was not accustomed to such a tone, but his silence itself was admission of his error. He turned away, gazing back into the fog. “All right. Get on with it.”

Chang narrowed his eyes. So far it had been simple enough, but here he was in the dark as much as Aspiche was at least pretending to be. “There were hundreds of people in the house. It was indeed an engagement party. Perhaps that is not all it was, but it was certainly that, which created both confusion for me to blend into, and confusion that got in my way. Before the substance could take effect, Colonel Trapping eluded me, leaving the main gathering by way of a back staircase. I was unable to follow directly, and was forced to seek him through the house. When I finally did find him, he was dead. I could not see why. The substance I gave him was not in a quantity to kill, yet he had no marks of mortal violence about his body.”

“You’re sure he was dead.”

“Of course I am.”

“You must have miscalculated your poison.”

“I did not.”

“Well, what do you think happened? And you still haven’t explained what happened to the body!”

“I suggest that you calm yourself and listen.”

“I suggest that you get damned on with your explanation.”

Chang let that pass, retaining his even tone. “There were marks on Trapping’s face, like burns, around the eyes, but of a regular, precise nature, as if from a brand—”

“A brand?”

“Indeed.”

“On his face?”

“As I said. Further, the room—there was a strange odor—”

“What was it?”

“I cannot say. I have no ability with odors.”

“A poison?”

“It is possible. I do not know.”

Aspiche frowned, thrown into thought. “All this—it makes no sense,” he snapped. “What about these burns?”

“That is my question to you.”

“What does that mean?” said Aspiche, taken aback. “I don’t have a clue.”

They stood in silence for a moment. The Adjutant-Colonel seemed genuinely perplexed.

“My examination was interrupted,” continued Chang. “I was again forced to make my way through the house, this time away from pursuit. I managed to lose my pursuers on my way back to the canal.”

“All right, all right. What was in those carts?”

“Boxes. Of what I don’t know.”

“And his confederates?”

“No idea. It was a masked ball.”

“And this—this substance—you don’t think you killed him?”

“I know I did not.”

Aspiche nodded. “It’s good of you to say. Still, I’ll pay you as if you had. If he turns up alive—”

“He won’t.”

Aspiche smiled tightly. “Then you’ll merely owe me the job.”

He pulled a thin leather wallet from his jacket and handed it to Chang, who tucked it into his coat.

“What happens next?” asked Chang.

“Nothing. My hope is that it’s over.”

“But you know it isn’t,” Chang snarled. Aspiche did not reply. Chang pressed him. “Why has there been no further word? Who else is involved? Vandaariff? The Germans? Any one of three hundred guests? You know the answers or you don’t, Colonel. You’ll tell me what you want to. But someone’s hidden your body, and you’re going to have to know why. You’ve come this far—it’ll have to be finished.”

Aspiche did not move.

As Chang gazed at the man—stubborn and dangerously proud—one of the Persephone fragments rose to his mind:

His willful suit, imperious and cold Pay’d court perfum’d by graves and fetid mold

“You know how to find me…discreetly,” Chang muttered. He turned and stalked back to the Raton Marine.

Chang had spent the previous three days planning the murder of Arthur Trapping for a fee. It had seemed simple enough. Trapping was the ambitious brother-in-law of Henry Xonck, a wealthy arms manufacturer. To find a position fitting to his newly married status, he had with his wife’s money purchased a prestigious commission as commander of the 4th Dragoons, but he was no soldier and his decorations resulted from his mere presence at two provincial engagements. Trapping’s actual exploits were limited to consuming heroic quantities of port and a lingering patch of local dysentery. When his regiment was rewarded with a significant change of duties, Trapping’s executive officer, the long-suffering Adjutant-Colonel—a professional soldier who, if he were to be believed, didn’t desire the command so much for himself, but only to clear the place for any genuinely worthy figure—had taken the quite remarkable step of engaging Cardinal Chang.

Outright assassination was not Chang’s usual line, but he’d done murder before. More often, as he preferred to see it, he was engaged to influence behavior, through violence, or information, or both, as necessary. In recent months, however, he’d felt a growing disquiet, as if there were behind his every step the barely audible ticking of a clock, that his life wound toward some profound accounting. Perhaps it was a malady of his eyes, a general gnawing anxiety that grew from seeing as much as possible in shadow. He did not allow this lurking dread to influence his movements, but when Aspiche had offered a high fee, Chang saw it as an opportunity to withdraw from view, to travel, to disappear into the opium den—anything until the cloud of foreboding had passed by.

Not that he trusted what Aspiche had told him of the job. There was always more to it—clients always lied, withheld. Chang had spent the first day doing research, digging through social registers, old newspapers, genealogies, and as ever, the connections were there for the finding. Trapping was married to Charlotte Xonck, the middle child of three, between Henry, the oldest, and Francis, as yet unmarried and just returned from a lengthy tour abroad. Though poor Adjutant-Colonel Aspiche might assume that the regiment’s rise in stature had been earned by its colonial triumphs, Chang had found that the order to invest the 4th Dragoons as the Prince’s Own (or Drunken Wastrel Whoremongering Sodomite’s Own, as Chang preferred to think of it) was issued one day after the Xonck Armory agreed to lower terms for an exclusive contract to re-fit the cannons of the entire navy and coastal defenses. The mystery was not why the regiment had been promoted, but why Henry Xonck thought it worth such a costly bargain. Love for his only sister? Chang had sneered and sought out another archivist to badger.

The precise nature of the regiment’s new duties was not part of any official document he could find, every account merely parroting what he’d read in the newspaper—“Palace defense, Ministry escort, and ceremonial duties”—which was gallingly vague. It was only after pacing back and forth that it occurred to him to confirm where the announcement had actually been issued. He again dragged the archivist away from his other duties to retrieve the folio of collected announcements, and then saw it on the cover of the folio itself—it was from a Ministry office, but not the War Ministry. He peered at the paper, and the seal at the top. The Foreign Ministry. What business had the Foreign Ministry with announcing—and thus, by inference, arranging—the installation of a new regiment of “Palace defense, Ministry escort, and ceremonial duties”? He snapped at the archivist, who merely stammered, “Well, it does say Ministry escort—and the F-Foreign Ministry is indeed one of the, ah, M-M-Ministry offices—” Chang cut him off with a brusque request for a list of senior Foreign Ministry staff.

He’d spent a good hour wandering through the darkened stacks—the staff had conceded access to Chang, reasoning it was less bother to have him out of their sight than in their faces—pushing these rudimentary pieces around in his mind. No matter what else it did, the most important work of the regiment would be under the aegis of the Foreign Ministry. This could only refer to diplomatic intrigues of one kind or another, or internal government intrigues—that somehow in exchange for Xonck’s lowered fee, the War Ministry had agreed to put the regiment at the Foreign Ministry’s disposal. For Xonck, Trapping would obviously function as his spy, alerting him to any number of international situations that might influence his business, and the rise and fall of the business of others. Perhaps this was reward enough (Chang was unconvinced), but it did not explain why one Ministry would be doing such an outlandish service for another—or why the Foreign Ministry might require its own troops in the first place.

Nevertheless, this much information allowed Chang, after making himself familiar with Trapping’s person, the location of his house, his coach, and the regimental barracks, to position himself outside the Foreign Ministry itself, convinced that this was the crucial point of revelation. Such was Chang’s way, and while he performed such investigation to better understand what he was engaged with, it’s also true that he did it to occupy his mind. If he was but a brute murderer, he could have cut Arthur Trapping down at any number of places, simply by following him until he was isolated in the street. The fact that Chang might well end up doing that very thing in the end didn’t alter his desire to understand the reasoning behind his actions. He was not squeamish about his work, but he was well aware that the risk was his, and that a client might always wonder about furthering their own security by arranging things so that Chang too might fall victim to unpleasant circumstance. The more he knew—about the clients and their objects—the safer he was going to feel. In this case, he was keenly aware that the forces involved were far more powerful and vast than Trapping and his bitter Adjutant-Colonel, and he would need to be careful not to provoke their interest. If ’twere done, ’twere best done as invisibly as possible.

On the afternoon of that first day and again on the second, Trapping’s coach had taken him from the regimental barracks to the Foreign Ministry, where he had spent several hours. At each evening the coach had taken him to his house on Hadrian Square, where the Colonel remained at home, without any notable visitors. On the second night, as he watched Trapping’s windows from the shadow of decorative shrubbery, Chang was startled to see a coach move past, the doors painted with the Foreign Ministry crest. The coach did not stop at Trapping’s door, however, but continued on to a house on the other side of the square. Chang quickly loped after it, in time to see a trim man in a dark coat exit the coach and enter the door of number 14, weighed down with several thick satchels. The coach drove away. Chang returned to his surveillance. The next morning at the Library he again consulted the list of Foreign Ministry staff. The Deputy Minister, Harald Crabbé, made his residence at 14 Hadrian Square.

On the third day he’d once again gone to the Ministry, passing his time on the edge of St. Isobel’s Square, at a point where he could observe both the coach traffic in front of the building and the intersection where any coach by way of the rear alley would have to exit. By now he’d become familiar with at least some of the Ministry staff, and studied them as they went in and out, waiting for Trapping to arrive. Despite all the suggestions of intrigue around the Colonel, Chang judged the man himself to be a reasonably simple target. If he repeated his pattern of the previous two nights, it would be easy enough to enter through a second-story window (accessible from a drain pipe whose strength Chang had tested the night before) and creep down to Trapping’s chamber (whose location he had established from watching the appearance of light in the windows as Trapping climbed to the third floor to sleep). The precise method wasn’t settled in his mind, and would depend on the exact circumstances in the room. He would have his razor, but also come equipped with a poison that would, to a careless eye, suggest an apoplexy not unheard-of for a man of Trapping’s age. Whether anyone would consider it murder would be one more signifier of the intrigue, and the stakes of Trapping’s elevation. Chang was not overly concerned about anyone else in the house. Mrs. Trapping slept apart from her husband, and the servants, if he chose his time correctly, would be far from the room.

He crossed the square at two o’clock and bought a meat pie, breaking it into pieces and consuming them one at a time while he walked back to his position. As he passed the sculpture of St. Isobel, he smiled, his mouth full. The truly hideous nature of the composition—garish sentiment, cloying pathos—never prevented him from finding lurid satisfaction in the image of the saint herself, the coiling serpents swarming across her slippery flesh. It amazed him that such a piece had been erected at public expense in such an open space, but he found the blithe veneration of something so obviously rank to be a comfort. Somehow it restored his faith that he indeed had a place in the world. He finished the meat pie and wiped his hands on his trousers.

At three o’clock, Trapping’s regimental coach appeared, empty, at the alleyway exit, and turned left, heading back to the 4th Dragoons barracks. The Colonel was inside by way of the rear entrance, and intending to leave by other means. It was four-fifteen when Chang saw a Ministry coach at the same spot. On one side of the coach sat Harald Crabbé and in the seat opposite, a splash of red and gold through the window, sat Arthur Trapping. Chang dropped his gaze while they passed and watched them go. As soon as they rounded the corner he sprinted for a coach of his own.

As he expected, the Ministry coach was on its way to Hadrian Square, and easily followed. What he did not expect was that it would stop in front of number 14 and that both men would enter, nor that, when they reappeared some minutes later, their coach would take them on a direct path northwest of the city. The fog was growing, and he moved next to his driver to better see—though his distant vision was at its limit in the falling dusk—where his quarry took him. His driver grumbled—this was far beyond his normal reach—and Chang was forced to pay him far more than he would have liked. He thought of simply taking the coach for himself, but he trusted neither his own vision nor his driving skills, besides not wanting to spill any unnecessary blood. As it was, they were soon beyond the old city walls, and then beyond the sprawl of new building and into the country itself. They were on the road to the Orange Canal, which went as far as the ocean, and the coach ahead of them showed no sign of stopping.

They rode for nearly two hours. At first Chang had made his driver pull back, allowing the other coach to drift to the edge of sight, but as the darkness grew they were forced to close, being unable to see if the other coach should turn from the road. He had followed Trapping initially as merely a continuation of his plan, and then farther at the prospect of isolating him at some vacant place in the country where a murder might be more easily managed. But the farther he went in pursuit, the more wrong-headed it seemed. If he were merely trying to kill the man, he should turn around and try again the next night—simply repeating the plan until he was able to get Trapping alone in his room. The long coach journey with Deputy Minister Crabbé was a matter for intrigue, for Xonck and the War Ministry, and while Chang was certainly curious, he had no idea what he was riding into, and that was always foolish. Aside from these doubting thoughts, he realized he was cold—a bitter wind from the sea had chilled him utterly. He was forming the very words to tell his driver to stop when the man grabbed his shoulder and pointed ahead at a distant knot of torchlight.

Chang ordered him to stop the coach, and instructed him to wait for fifteen minutes. If he had not returned, the man was free to leave him and return to the city. The driver did not argue—he was certainly as cold as Chang, and still bitter over the unexpected length of this particular fare. Chang climbed from the coach, wondering if the man would even wait that long. He gave himself five minutes to make a decision—the last thing he wanted was to be stranded in the darkness, all but blind. As it was, he had to move extremely cautiously. He pulled off his glasses, this being a case where any light was better than none, and tucked them into the inner pocket of his coat. Ahead of him he could see the Ministry coach, waiting among several others. He moved into the grass and toward the torchlight, some thirty yards away, where two figures were walking toward a larger group. Chang crept as close as he dared on the path, and then stepped away from it and crouched, his eyes just clear of the grass to see.

There was a low brisk conversation—it was clear Trapping and Crabbé were late—and what seemed like a perfunctory shaking of hands. As his eyesight grew accustomed to the torches, Chang saw that something was reflecting them—water—and what seemed to have been an abstract mass of shadow resolved itself into an open launch, tied up at the canal. Trapping and Crabbé followed the others along the canal and to what looked like carts (Chang could just make out the wheel tops above the grass). A canvas sheet was pulled back from one cart to show the late arrivals a number of wooden boxes, obviously loaded from the launch. Chang could not make out the faces of any other men, though he counted six of them. The canvas sheet was pulled down again and tied, and the men began to climb onto the carts. At a sharp whip crack, they drove off, away from the coaches, down a road that Chang from his place could not see.

Chang moved quickly after them, pausing to glance into the launch—which told him nothing—and down the road, which was little more than a country path worn through the grass. He thought again about what he was doing. Pursuing the carts meant losing his coach. He resolved himself to being abandoned—worse things had happened to him, after all, and this still might be a perfect opportunity to execute his task. The carts moved much faster than he, however, and soon enough he was walking on his own, alone in the dark. The wind was still cold, and it was at least thirty minutes before he came upon the carts tied up at the kitchen entrance of what looked like a formidable building—though whether it was a dour mansion or a splendid fortress, he could not say. The boxes were gone, as were the men…

Still annoyed from his interview with Aspiche, Chang walked back into the Raton Marine and was relieved to see that everyone who had been present at the trooper’s arrival was still there. He stood in the doorway a moment, allowing each person to glance up at him, in order to return those glances with a meaningful nod. He then went around to each man—including Nicholas the barman—and placed a gold coin next to his glass. It was all he could do—and if one of them were to go behind his back, it would at least be seen by others as a broken agreement reflecting poorly on the Judas. He ordered another cup of bitter chocolate and drank it outside. For all practical purposes, he was waiting for Aspiche to do something, but Noland Aspiche was at best a fool who hoped to profit from someone else killing his Colonel, or at worst part of the larger intrigue, which meant he had been lying to Chang from the start. In either case, Aspiche was unlikely to act. Despite the wallet in his coat, Chang was regretting the entire affair. He took a swallow of chocolate and grimaced.

As soon as he’d seen the size of the house, he’d known where he was, for there was only one such dwelling on the coast near the Orange Canal, that of Robert Vandaariff, recently made Lord Vandaariff, the financier whose daughter was famously engaged to a German prince of some small state, Karl-Horst von Somesuch-or-other. Chang couldn’t remember—it was in any number of headlines he’d skipped past—but he was quick to realize, as he pushed his gloved hand through the pane of a delicate glass doorway, that he was trespassing into a rather large social occasion, some kind of formal masked ball. He watched from the shadows until he found a drunken guest from whom he could safely wrestle a mask, and then so covered (though again it meant taking off his glasses) moved out in direct search of Trapping. As most of the men were in formal black topcoats, the red-uniformed Colonel was relatively easy to find. Chang himself attracted attention for the same reason—the willfully brazen figure he cut in his usual environment, where intimidation balanced concealment, hardly lent itself to a fancy-dress party in a lavish mansion. But he simply carried himself with the disdainful air of a man who belonged. It amazed him how many people immediately assumed that, because of an unpleasant arrogance, he possessed more rights than they.

Trapping was drinking heavily, in the midst of a rather large party, though it did not seem like he took an active part in the conversation. As he watched, he now realized that Trapping stood between two groups. One gathered around a heavy, balding man to whom all the others deferred—most prominently a young man with thick red hair and an exceedingly well-dressed woman (could this possibly be Trapping’s wife, Charlotte Xonck, and the men her brothers Henry and Francis?). Behind this woman was another, whose gown was more demure and who, much like Chang, occupied herself with subtly studying the figures around her—and in this struck him as the figure in the party to most carefully avoid. The other group was made of men, in both formal attire and military uniforms. Chang could not tell if Crabbé was present or not—the masks made it difficult to be sure. As curious as he was to watch such parties gathered around as unimpressive a figure as the Colonel—and to discover why—Chang was aware he could not linger. Bracing himself, he strode quite near to them, avoiding eye contact and addressing the servant at the nearby table, calling for a glass of wine. The conversation faded around him as he waited, feeling the impatience of both groups for him to leave. The servant handed him a full glass, and Chang took a swallow, turning to the man next to him—who was, of course, Trapping—fixing him with his gaze. Trapping nodded, then could not help but stare. Chang’s scarred eyelids, visible through the mask-holes, gave Trapping pause, for though he could not be certain what he was seeing, he knew something was not quite right. The length of the contact, though, allowed Chang to speak.

“A fine occasion.”

“Indeed,” answered Colonel Trapping. His gaze had dropped from Cardinal Chang’s eyes to his coat, and then to the rest of his garments, which though striking were hardly appropriate for the occasion, or even quite reputable. Chang looked at his own clothes, caught Trapping’s eye again and scoffed, chuckling.

“Had to come straight from the crossing. Been riding for days. Still, couldn’t miss it, eh?”

“Of course not.” Trapping nodded, vaguely mollified, but looking somewhat helplessly over Chang’s shoulder, where the rest of his group was drifting distinctly in the other direction to resume their conversation.

“What are you drinking?” demanded Chang.

“I believe it is the same as what you are drinking.”

“Is it? Do you like it?”

“It is indeed fine.”

“I suppose it is. I suppose it would be, eh? Here’s to the host.”

Chang touched his glass to Trapping’s and tossed off the contents, more or less forcing Trapping to do the same. Before he could move, Chang snatched the glass from him and held them both out toward the servant, barking for more wine. As the servant leaned forward to pour, and as Trapping groped for excuses behind him to leave, Chang deftly dusted a small amount of white powder onto his thumb, and—distracting the servant with a brusque question about a possibly spoiled cork—rubbed it along the rim of Trapping’s glass as he picked it up. He handed the glass to the Colonel, and they drank again—Trapping’s lips touching the rim of his glass where he’d placed the powder. Once this was done, just as abruptly as he’d arrived, Chang nodded to Trapping and walked out of the room. He’d watch from the margins until the drug took hold.

From there it had quickly gone wrong. The group of men—Crabbé’s faction?—finally claimed Trapping from the group Chang guessed to be the Xoncks and walked with him to a rear corner of the room and through a doorway flanked by two men who stood, casually but unmistakably, as sentries. Chang watched his quarry disappear, and looked around for another way, just for one moment catching the eye of Charlotte Xonck’s companion, who looked away—not quite quickly enough—in the same instant. He stalked from the main rooms before he attracted any more unwanted attention. It had taken him at least an hour—time spent dodging servants, guests, and what looked to be a growing number of openly suspicious faces—before he finally found himself in a long marbled corridor, lined with doors. It was an exact epitome of his ridiculous situation, and how his decision to risk first entry and then bold exposure to Trapping had utterly failed. By this time Trapping should have been dead, but instead he was most likely shaking off what he would explain to himself as a bit too much wine. Chang had given him only enough of the drug to guarantee his pliability—thinking to drag him into the garden—but now it was just another mistake. He stalked down the corridor, trying the doors as he went. Most were locked, and he was forced to move on to the next. He had perhaps reached the mid-point when he saw, ahead of him at the far end, a crowd begin to emerge from a balcony above, and make its way down a spiral staircase. He lunged for the nearest door. It was open. He dashed through and closed it behind him.

On the floor was Trapping, dead, his face branded—seared? scarred?—but with no immediately apparent cause. Chang detected no wound, nor any blood, any weapon, even another glass of wine that might have been drugged. Trapping was still warm. It couldn’t have been long—no longer than thirty minutes, at most—since he had died. Chang stood above the body and sighed. Here was the result he wanted, but in a far more disturbing and complicated manner. It was then that he’d noticed the smell, vaguely medicinal or mechanical—but thoroughly out of place in that room. He had bent down again to go through Trapping’s pockets when there was a knock at the door. At once, Chang stood and walked quietly to the next room of the suite and from there into the bath closet, looking for some place to hide. He found the servants’ door just as the hallway door was opened, and someone called to Colonel Trapping by his Christian name. Chang was carefully, silently easing the latch behind him when the voice began calling harshly for help.

It was time to get out. The narrow dark corridor led to a strange man in a room—a crabbed, officious creature—surrounded by familiar-looking boxes. The man wheeled at his entry and opened his mouth to shout. Chang crossed the distance to him in two steps and clubbed him across the face with his forearm. The man fell onto a table, scattering a pile of wooden box pieces. Before he could rise, Chang struck him again, across the back of the head. The man smashed into the table and slumped to the floor, groping, gasping damply. Chang glanced quickly at the boxes, which all seemed to be empty, but knew that he had no time. He found the next door and stepped into an even larger corridor, lined with mirrors. He looked down the length and knew that it must lead to the main entrance, which would never do. He saw a door across the hall. When he found that it was locked, he kicked it until the wood around the lock buckled in, and shouldered his way through. This room had a window. He snatched up a side chair and hurled it through the glass with a crash. Behind him there were footsteps. Chang kicked the broken shards free from the panes and leapt through the opening. He landed with a grunt on a bed of gravel and ran.

The pursuit had been half-hearted—for he was near-blind in the night and by all rights any serious attempt should have taken him. When he was sure that they had stopped following, Chang eased into a walk. He had a general notion of where he was in relation to the sea and so turned away from it and eventually struck the rail tracks, walking along them until he reached a station. This turned out to be Orange Canal, and the end of this particular line. He boarded the waiting train—pleased that there was a waiting train—and sat brooding until it finally began to move, carrying him back to the city and, in the midst of that journey, his moment with the battered Persephone.

At the Raton Marine, he finished his drink and put another coin on the table. The more he worried over the events of the previous day and night, the more he berated himself for impulsive nonsense—all the more that now there was no announcement of Trapping’s death. He felt like going back to sleep for as long as he could, perhaps for days in the opium den. What he forced himself to do instead was walk to the Library. The only new information he had was the possible association of Robert Vandaariff or his high-placed prospective son-in-law. If he could explore their connection to Xonck, or to Crabbé, or even to Trapping himself, he would then be able to obliterate his senses with a clear conscience.

He walked up the grand steps and through the vaulted lobby, nodding at the porter, and climbed to the main reading room on the second floor. As he entered, he saw the archivist he was looking for—Shearing, who kept all records relating to finance—in conversation with a woman. As he approached, the small gnarled man turned to him with a brittle smile and pointed. Chang stopped as the woman turned to face him, and dipped her knee. She was beautiful. She was walking toward him. Her hair was black, and gathered behind to hang in curls over her shoulders. She wore a tiny black wool jacket that did not reach her thin waist over a red silk dress, subtly embroidered in yellow thread with Chinese scenes. She held a small black bag in one hand, and a fan in the other. She stopped, a mere few feet away, and he forced himself to look at her eyes—past her pale throat and fiercely red lips—which were fixed upon him with a certain seriousness of manner.

“I’m told your name is Chang,” she said.

“You may call me that.” It was his customary answer.

“You may call me Rosamonde. I have been directed to you as a person who might provide me with the aid I require.”

“I see.” Chang shot a look back at Shearing, who was gawking at them like an idiot child. The man ignored the look entirely, beaming at the woman’s splendid torso. “If you’ll walk this way”—Chang smiled stiffly—“we may speak more discreetly.”

He led her up to the third floor map room, which was rarely occupied, even by its curator, who spent most of his time drinking gin in the stacks. He pulled out a chair and offered it to her, and she sat with a smile. He chose not to sit, leaning back against a table, facing her.

“Do you always wear dark glasses indoors?” she asked.

“It is a habit,” he answered.

“I confess to finding it disquieting. I hope you are not offended.”

“Of course not. But I will continue to wear them. For medical reasons.”

“Ah, I see.” She smiled. She looked around the room. Light came in from a high bank of windows that ran along the main wall. Despite the grey of the day, the room still felt airy, as if it were much higher off the ground than its three stories raised it.

“Who directed you to me?” he asked.

“Beg pardon?”

“Who directed you to me? You will understand that a man in my position must have references.”

“Of course. I wondered if you had many women for clients.” She smiled again. There was a slight accent to her speech, but he could not place it. Nor had she answered his question.

“I have many clients of all kinds. But please, who gave you my name? It is quite the final time I will ask.”

The woman positively beamed. Chang felt a small charge of warning on the nape of his neck. The situation was not what it appeared, nor was the woman. He knew this utterly, and strove to keep it in the fore of his mind, but in the same moment was transfixed by her body, and the exquisite sensations emanating from its view. Her chuckle was rich, like the flow of dark wine, and she bit her lip like a woman play-acting the schoolgirl, doing her level best to fix him with her riveting violet eyes, like an insect stuck on a pin. He was unsure she had not succeeded.

“Mr. Chang—or should I say Cardinal? Your name, it is so amusing to me, because I have known Cardinals, for I was a child in Ravenna—have you been to Ravenna?”

“No. I should of course like to. The mosaics.”

“They are beautiful. A color of purple you have never seen, and the pearls—if you know of them you must go, for not seeing them will haunt you.” She laughed again. “And once you have seen them they will haunt you all the more! But as I say, I have known Cardinals, in fact a cousin of mine—who I never liked—held such an office—and so it pleases me to see a figure such as yourself hailed with such a name. For as you know, I am suspicious of high authority.”

“I did not know.”

As the moments passed, Chang became painfully more aware of his rumpled shirt, his unpolished boots, his unshaven face, that his whole life was at odds with the splendid ease, if not outright grace, of this woman. “But you still, forgive my insistence, have not told me—”

“Of course not, no, and you are so patient. I was given your name, and a notion of where you might be found, by Mr. John Carver.”

Carver was a lawyer who, through a number of unsavory intermediaries, had engaged Chang the previous summer to locate the man who had impregnated Carver’s daughter. The daughter had survived the abortion her father—a harsh pragmatist—insisted upon, but had not been seen in society since—apparently the procedure had been difficult—and Carver was especially distraught. Chang had located the man in a seaside brothel and delivered him to Carver’s country house—not without injury, for the man had struggled hard once he realized the situation. He left Carver with the wandering lover trussed on a carpet, and did not concern himself further with the outcome.

“I see,” he said.

It was extremely unlikely that anyone would associate his name with Carver’s unless the information came from Carver himself.

“Mr. Carver has drawn up several contracts for me, and has come to share my confidence.”

“What if I were to make it quite clear to you that I have never met nor had any acquaintance with John Carver?”

She smiled. “It would be exactly as I feared, and I must turn for assistance elsewhere.”

She waited for him to speak. It was his decision, right then, to accept her as a client or not. She clearly understood the need for discretion, she was obviously rich, and he would certainly welcome a distraction from the unsettled business of Arthur Trapping. He shifted his weight and hopped onto the table top, sitting. He bent his head toward hers.

“I am sorry, but seeing as I do not know Mr. Carver, I cannot in conscience accept you as a client. However, as a man of sympathy, and since you have come all this way, perhaps I can listen to your story and in return provide you with whatever advice I am able, if you are willing.”

“I would be in your debt.”

“Not at all.” He permitted himself a small smile in return. At least this far, they understood one another.

“Before I begin,” she said, “do you need to take notes?”

“Not as a rule.”

She smiled. “It is after all a simple situation, and one that while I am unable to answer it doesn’t strike me as particularly unanswerable for the man with the proper set of skills. Please interrupt me if I go too fast, or seem to leave anything out. Are you ready?”

Chang nodded.

“Last night there was a gathering at the country home of Lord Vandaariff, celebrating the engagement of his only daughter to Prince Karl-Horst von Maasmärck—you surely have heard of these people, and appreciate the degree of the occasion. I was in attendance, as a school friend—acquaintance, really—of the daughter, Lydia. It was a masked ball. This is important, as you will see later. Have you ever been to a masked ball?”

Chang shook his head. The warning tingle on his neck had by now traveled the whole length of his spine.

“I enjoy them, but they are disquieting, for the masks provide license for behavior beyond the social norm, especially at a gathering this large, at a house this expansive. The anonymity can feel profound, and quite frankly anything can happen. I’m sure I do not need to explain further.”

Chang shook his head again.

“My escort for the evening was, well, I suppose you would describe him as a family friend—somewhat older than I, an essentially good fellow whose weak resolve had led him to repeated degradations, through drink, gambling, and foolish, even unnatural, indulgence—and yet through all of this, for our family connection and his, I do believe, essential inner kindness, I was resolved to try and do my part to return him to the better graces of society. Well, there is no way of putting it cleanly. The house is large and there were many people—and in such a place, even in such a place, people enter who should not, without invitation, without regard, without any intention beyond, if I may say so, profit.”

Chang nodded in agreement, wondering exactly when he ought to run from the room, and how many confederates she might have on the staircase below.

“Because—” her voice broke. Tears formed at the corners of each eye. She dug for a handkerchief in her bag. Chang knew he ought to offer her one, but he also knew what his own handkerchief looked like. She found her own and dabbed at her eyes and nose. “I am sorry. It has all been so sudden. You must see people in distress quite often.”

He nodded. Distress that he himself caused, but he needn’t point that out.

“That must be terrible,” she whispered.

“One becomes used to anything.”

“Perhaps that is the worst thing of all.” She folded the handkerchief back into her bag. “I am sorry, let me continue. As I say, it was a large affair, and one was required to speak to many people, aside from Lydia and Prince Karl-Horst, and so I was quite busy. As the evening went on, I realized that I had not seen my escort for some time. As I looked for him, he seemed to be nowhere. I was able to engage the assistance of mutual friends and, as discreetly as possible, we searched the adjoining rooms of the house, hoping that he had merely overindulged in drink and fallen asleep. What we found, Mr. Chang—Cardinal—was that he had been murdered. After conversation with other guests I am convinced that I know the identity of his killer. What I should like—what I should have liked, were you able to accept this task—is for this person to be found.”

“And delivered to the authorities?”

“Delivered to me.” She met his gaze quite evenly.

“I see. And this person?” He shifted in his seat, ready to leap at her. With the razor at her throat he could force his way past any phalanx of waiting men.

“A young woman. An inch or two above five feet but no more, chestnut hair in sausage curls, a fair complexion, pretty enough in a common style. She wore green boots and a black traveling cloak. Due to the manner in which my friend was killed, it is safe to say that she bore significant traces of blood. She gave her name as Isobel Hastings, but that is undoubtedly a lie.”

He had asked other questions after this, but a part of his mind was elsewhere, attempting to make sense of the coincidence. Rosamonde could not say anything else about the woman—she was assumed to be a prostitute of some high stature, otherwise it was not known how she could have entered the house so easily, but Rosamonde had no idea how she had arrived nor how she had escaped. She asked him, as a point of reference, about his usual fee. He told her, and suggested that, again, if he had been able to accept her as a client, they would choose a place to meet or leave word. She looked around her and declared that the Library suited her fine for such a meeting, and that word could be left for her at the St. Royale Hotel. With that she rose and offered him her hand. He felt like a fool but found himself bending over to kiss it. He remained where he was, watching her leave, the stirring vision of her walking away quite matched by the seething disquiet in his mind.

Before anything else, he sent a message to John Carver, asking for confirmation, via the Raton Marine, that his name had been given to a young woman in need. Next, he required something to eat. It had been since the meat pie in St. Isobel’s Square the day before, and Chang was famished. At the same time, as he walked down the marble steps outside the Library and into the open air, he was keenly suspicious of having been exposed. He made his way west, toward the Circus Garden and its shops, then stopped at a news kiosk, pretending to look at a racing pamphlet. No one seemed to have followed him from the Library, but this meant nothing—if they were skilled he might have men waiting for him at any particular haunt, as well as his rooming house. He put down the pamphlet and rubbed his eyes.

The food stalls gave him another meat pie—the Cardinal was not expansive in his diet—and a small pot of beer. He finished them quickly and continued to walk. It was nearing four o’clock, and already he could feel the day turning toward darkness, the wind acquiring its evening bite. As Chang saw it, he had three immediate choices: first, back to the Raton Marine to await contact from either Carver or Aspiche; second, stand watch at the St. Royale and find out everything he could about his new client, beginning with her true name; or third, start visiting brothels. He smiled—a rather simple choice, after all.

In truth, it made sense to see the brothels now, for there the business day would have just begun, and his chances were better to get information. The name Isobel Hastings was a place to start, for even if it was false, Chang knew that people grew attached to their disguises, and that a false name used once would most likely be used again—and if it were her true name, then all the easier. He walked back toward the river, farther along the strand, into the decayed heart of the old city. He wanted to visit the lowest of the houses first, before it became too thick with clientele. The house was known as the South Quays because it fronted the river, but also as a joke (for there were no south quays in the city) on the various points of moorage one might consider on the body of a whore. It catered to men of the sea and had a pitiless changeover among its available women, yet it was the best place to look for someone new. The South Quays was a drain that drew down into it all the loose and soiled flotsam of the city.

As he walked, he also regretted giving up the newspaper—he’d have to find another—now wanting to search for this new killing; even another vague reference to Rosamonde’s companion as “missing” would at least provide him with a name. A second death on Robert Vandaariff’s premises, on such an occasion, certainly added to the financier’s reasons for keeping things quiet, though Chang wondered how long Trapping’s death could remain so. Chang knew that even if Rosamonde had not actually lied to him, there was more to the story. His own memory of Persephone (which he preferred to Isobel) in the train told him that much. But pursuing Rosamonde’s (whoever she actually was) investigation was a way to also pursue the intrigue around Trapping, and keep abreast of his own vulnerability in that regard—for it must mean learning more about the house, the guests, the party, the circumstances. But she had told him nothing about any of that, merely about the woman she wanted found. He clucked his tongue with annoyance as he walked, knowing that his best path to protect himself was also the path most likely to expose his involvement.

When he reached it, Dagging Lane was still empty. This was the rear of the house, whose front overhung the river itself and allowed for easy disposal of those contentious or unable to pay. A large man lounged outside a small wooden door, whose bright yellow paint stood out in a street of dirty brick and weather-stained wood. Chang walked up to him and nodded. The man recognized him and nodded in return. He knocked three times on the door with his meaty fist. The door opened and Chang stepped into a small entryway, cheaply carpeted, and lit with yellow lantern light instead of gas. Another large man demanded his walking stick, which Chang gave over, and then indicated with a practiced leer that he should proceed past a beaded curtain into a side parlor. Chang shook his head.

“I am here to speak to Mrs. Wells,” he said. “I will pay for the time.”

The man considered this, then walked through the curtain. After a brief interval, which Chang passed by looking at a cheap print framed on the wall (illustrating the intimate life of a Chinese contortionist), the man returned and ushered him through the parlor—past three sofas full of half-dressed, over-painted women, all appearing equally young and equally ravaged in the dim sickly light and who seemed to be generally yawning, scratching themselves, or in several cases, coughing thickly into napkins—and then to Mrs. Wells’s own inner room, where the woman herself sat next to a crackling fire with an account book on her knees. She was grey, small, and thin, and in her work as routinely nurturing and dispassionately brutal as a farmer. She looked up at him.

“How long will this take?”

“Not long, I am sure.”

“How much were you expecting to pay?”

“I was expecting this.”

He reached into his pocket and removed a crumpled note. It was more than he ought to have offered, but the risk in this matter was closer to his person, so he didn’t begrudge it. He dropped the banknote onto her ledger book and sat in the chair across from her. Mrs. Wells took the note and nodded at the large man, still standing in the doorway. Chang heard the man leave and close the door, but kept his gaze on the woman.

“I am not in the custom of providing information about my customers—” she began. Her teeth clicked when she spoke—some large percentage were made of white porcelain, which rather hideously showed the true color of those real teeth that remained. Chang had forgotten how much this annoyed him. He raised his hand to cut her off.

“I am not interested in your customers. I am looking for a woman, almost assuredly a whore, whom you may know of, even if you do not employ her directly.”

Mrs. Wells nodded slowly. Chang didn’t quite know what that meant, but as she did not then speak, he went on.

“Her name may be, or she may call herself, Isobel Hastings. Out of her shoes she is most likely five feet in height, with chestnut hair, in curls. The most salient fact is that she would have been seen early this morning wearing a black cloak and quite liberally—her face, her hair, her person—covered in dried blood. I expect that such a girl returning to your house, or any house, in such a manner—though it is not unheard-of—would have caused remark.”

Mrs. Wells did not answer.

“Mrs. Wells?”

Still Mrs. Wells did not answer. Very quickly, and before she could slam the book, Chang darted forward and snatched the banknote away from her. She looked up at him in surprise.

“I am happy to pay for whatever you know, but not for abject silence.”

She smiled as slowly and deliberately as a blade being unsheathed. “I am sorry, Cardinal, I was merely thinking. I do not know the girl you speak of. I do not know the name, and none of mine came home so bloodied. I would certainly have heard, and as certainly demanded reparations.”

She stopped, smiling. There was more, he saw it in her eyes. He returned the banknote. She took it, placed it in the heavy ledger as a bookmark, and closed the book. Chang waited. Mrs. Wells chuckled, a particularly unpleasant noise.

“Mrs. Wells?”

“It is nothing,” she replied. “Merely that you are the third to come asking for this same creature.”

“Ah.”

“Indeed.”

“Might I ask who those others were?”

“You might.” She smiled, but did not move, a silent request for more money. Chang was torn. On one hand, he had already paid her far more than he should. On the other, if he attacked her with his razor, he’d have to deal with the two men at the door.

“I believe I have been fair with you, Mrs. Wells…have I not?”

She chuckled again, setting his teeth on edge. “You have, Cardinal, and will be so in the future, I trust. These others were less…respectful. So I will tell you that the first was this morning, a young lady claiming to be this person’s sister, and the second, just an hour ago, a man in uniform, a soldier.”

“A red uniform?”

“No no, it was black. All black.”

“And the woman”—he tried to think of Rosamonde—“she was tall? Black hair? Violet eyes? Beautiful?” Mrs. Wells shook her head.

“Not black hair. Light brown. And she was pretty enough—or would have been without the burns on her face.” Mrs. Wells smiled. “Around the eyes, you know. Such a dreadful thing to have happen. Windows to the soul, don’t you know.”

Chang stalked back to the Raton Marine in a fury. It would have been one thing to learn that he was but one of several out to find this woman, but when he himself was so close to dire exposure in the same affair—whether he’d actually killed Trapping or not, he could just as easily hang for it—it was doubly maddening. His mind was spinning with suspicion. When he reached the Raton Marine it was nearly dark. No word had come from John Carver. Not quite ready to question his client directly, he began walking to the next likely house, near the law courts. This was known as the Second Bench, and was not too far and in a marginally safer location. He could thrash through his thoughts on the way.

As he forced himself to break the parts into discrete elements, he admitted that it was not strange that Mrs. Wells did not know his Persephone. When he had seen her on the train, there was the distinct sense that the image she then made was spectacular—that it was unusual to her, however telling or revelatory, or however large a story lay behind it. Her curls, though bloody and ruined, bespoke a certain care—perhaps the assistance of a servant. This would mean the Second Bench, or even the third house he had in mind, the Old Palace. These respectively offered an escalating class of whore, and served an escalating class of clientele. Each house was a window into a particular stratum of the city’s traffic in flesh. Chang himself could patronize the Palace only when he possessed significant cash, and even then solely because of services rendered its manager. The unsavory nature of the South Quays only raised the question of how the other two searchers had found it, or thought to go there. The soldier he could understand, but the woman—her sister? There were, frankly, only so many ways a woman would know of such a place’s existence, for the South Quays was nearly invisible to the greater population. That Rosamonde would know of it, for example, he would find more surprising than a personal letter from the Pope. But the others searching did know. Who were they, and whom did they serve? And who was this woman they all sought?

This did nothing to support his client’s story of her poor murdered friend, who could be no disconnected innocent, but someone about whom other issues—inheritance? title? incrimination?—must be spinning, all of which she had withheld in their interview. Chang cast his mind back to the train, looking into those unreadable grey eyes. Was he looking at a killer, or a witness? And if she had killed…as an assassin, or in defense? Each possibility altered the motives of those searching for her. That none of them had gone to the police—even if it was at the specific, powerful request of Robert Vandaariff—did not reflect well on anyone’s good intentions.

Not that good intentions were any normal part of Chang’s life. The Second Bench was his usual choice in brothels, though this had more to do with a desire to balance his financial resources against the likelihood of disease than with any particular merits of the house. Still, he was acquainted with the staff and with the current manager, a fat greasy fellow with a shaved head named Jurgins who wore a number of large rings on his fingers—the very image of a modern court eunuch, it always seemed to Chang. Jurgins affected a jolly manner, though this was pushed aside like a curtain every time money came into the conversation, to be shot back into place once his insistent greed was no longer at the fore. As so many of the place’s customers were drawn from business and the law, this mercenary manner was barely noticed, and certainly no cause for offense.

After a few quiet words with the men at the door, Chang was guided into Jurgins’s private room, hung with tapestries and lit with crystal lamps whose shades dangled all kinds of delicate fringe, the air so thick with incense that even Chang found it oppressive. Jurgins sat at his desk, knowing Chang well enough to both see him alone and to also keep the door open with a bodyguard at close call. Chang sat in the chair opposite, and removed a banknote from his coat. He held it up for Jurgins to see. Jurgins could not help but tap his fingertips on the desk with anticipation.

“What may we do for you today, Cardinal?” He nodded at the banknote. “A formal request for something elaborate? Something…exotical?”

Chang forced a neutral smile. “My business is simple. I am looking for a young woman whose name may be Isobel Hastings, who would have arrived back here—or at another such establishment—early this morning, in a black cloak, and quite covered in blood.”

Jurgins frowned thoughtfully, nodding.

“So, I am looking for her.”

Jurgins nodded again. Chang met his gaze, and deliberately smiled. Out of a natural sycophantic impulse, Jurgins smiled as well.

“I am also”—Chang paused for companionable emphasis—“interested in the two people who have already wasted your time asking for her.”

Jurgins smiled broadly. “I see. I see indeed. You’re a clever man—I have always said it.”

Chang smiled thinly at the compliment. “I would expect them to be a man in a black uniform and a woman, brown hair, well-dressed, with a…burn of strange design around her eyes. Would that be accurate?”

“It would!” Jurgins grinned. “He came first thing this morning—he woke me up—and she some time after luncheon.”

“And what did you tell them?”

“What I will be forced to tell you, I’m afraid. The name means nothing. And I have heard no news about such a bloody girl, neither from here or any other house. I am sorry.”

Chang leaned forward and dropped the banknote onto the desk. “No matter. I did not expect that you had. Tell me about the other two.”

“It was just as you said. The man was an officer of some kind—I do not follow the military, you know—and perhaps your own age, quite the insistent brute, not understanding that I was not of his command, if you get me. The woman said the girl was her sister, quite lovely—as you say, except for the burn. Even then, we get people who fancy that kind of thing directly.”

“And what were their names—or the names they gave you?”

“The officer called himself Major Black.” Jurgins smirked at its obvious falseness. “The woman gave herself as a Mrs. Marchmoor.” He chuckled with a lurid relish. “As I say, I would have been happy to offer her employment, if not for the delicacy of the occasion, her missing a relative and all.”

The Second Bench and the Old Palace were on opposite sides of the north bank, and his path to the Palace took him close enough to the Raton Marine that he decided to stop by to see if Carver had left word. He had not. It was unlike Carver, who fancied himself so important that he kept messengers and runners on hand at all hours—and certainly well into the evening. Perhaps Carver was in the country, which made it less likely that between last night and today Rosamonde could have received his recommendation. It was still possible, however, and he pushed the matter aside until he heard either way. He’d pressed Jurgins for more detail about the officer’s uniform—silver facings and a strange regimental badge of a wolf swallowing the sun—and could just return to the Library before its doors shut for the day. Instead, he decided it was important to reach the Palace. In the unlikely case that he did find direct information, he wanted to get it as soon as possible—certainly the major and the sister were there now or had been already. He could easily find the regiment and identify the officer in the morning, if it was still of importance.

Outside the Raton Marine, he paused, and looked at his garments as objectively as possible. They wouldn’t do, and he’d have to quickly visit his rooms to change. The Palace was particular about who it allowed in, and if he were to expect further to interrogate its manager then he would have to look close to his best. He cursed the delay and strode quickly along the darkened street—more peopled than before, some nodding to him as he passed, others simply pretending he didn’t exist, which was the normal way of the district. Chang reached his door, fishing a key from his pocket, but found when he tried to insert it into the lock that the lock had been dislodged in its frame. He knelt and studied it. A sharp kick had snapped the wood around the bolt. He pushed the door with a gentle touch and it swung open with its habitual creak.

Chang looked up the empty, dimly lit staircase. The building was silent. He rapped on his landlady’s door with his stick. Mrs. Schneider was a gin drinker, though this was a bit early for her to be insensible. He tried the knob, which was locked. He knocked again. He cursed the woman, not for the first time, and turned back to the stairs. He advanced quickly and quietly, holding his stick before him in readiness. His room was at the top, and he was used to the climb, striding across each landing with a glance to the doorways, all of which seemed to be closed, the occupants silent. Perhaps the lock had merely been kicked in by a tenant who’d misplaced his own key. It was possible, but Chang’s natural suspicion would not rest until he reached the sixth-floor landing…where his own doorway gaped wide open.

With a swift tug Chang pulled the handle out of his stick, revealing a long, double-edged knife, and reversed his grip on the remaining portion in his other hand, allowing him to use the polished oak as a club or to parry. With both hands so armed, he crouched in the shadow and listened. What he heard were the sounds of the city, faint but clear. His windows were open, which meant that someone had gone onto the roof—perhaps to escape, perhaps to explore. He kept waiting, his eyes fixed on the door. Anyone inside would have heard him come up the stairs, and must be waiting for him to enter…and they must be getting as impatient as he. His knees were stiffening. He took in a breath and quietly sighed, willing them to relax, and then heard a distinct rustle from the darkened room. Then another. Then a fluttering of wings. It was a pigeon, undoubtedly entering by way of the open window. He stood with disgust and walked to the door.

As he entered, the combination of the darkened room and his glasses left Chang not altogether blind, but certainly in the realm of deep nightfall, and perhaps this deprivation had sharpened his other senses, for as his foot crossed the open doorway he sensed movement from his left side and by instinct—and by his embedded knowledge of the room—threw himself to the right, into a nook between a tall dressing cabinet and the wall, raising the length of his stick before him as he did. The bit of moonlight from the window caught the flashing scythe of a saber sweeping down at him from behind the door. He’d stepped clear of the main blow and stopped the rest of it on his stick. In the same instant Chang drove himself directly back into his assailant. As he did, he thrust the stick across the man’s blade—which, in the close quarters, the man was awkwardly pulling back—and so prevented a second blow. Chang’s right hand, holding the dagger, shot forward like a spike.

The man grunted with pain and Chang felt the thick, meaty impact—though in the darkness he could not tell where the blow had landed. The man struggled with his long blade, to get the edge or the point toward Chang’s body, and Chang dropped his stick to grab the man’s sword arm, grappling to keep it clear. With his right hand he pulled the dagger back and rapidly stabbed forward three times more, like a plunging needle, twisting it as he yanked it clear. By the final thrust he felt the strength ebbing from the man’s wrist, and he released his grip, stepping away. The man collapsed to the floor with a sigh, and then a choking rattle. It would have been better to question him, but there was nothing for it.

When it came to violence, Chang was realistic. While experience and skill would increase his chances of survival, he knew that the margins for error were tiny and often subject not so much to luck as to a certain authority of intention, or will. In those minute spaces of variability a firm, even grim, determination was crucial, and hesitation of any kind a mortal flaw. Any man could be killed by any other, no matter what the circumstances, and there was always the blue moon chance that a fellow who has never carried a sword will do a thing with it no sane duelist would expect. Chang had in his life dealt out and received all sorts of punishment, and was under no illusion that his skills would protect him forever, or from everyone. In this particular instance, he was lucky that a desire for silence had led his opponent to choose—instead of a revolver—a weapon ridiculously unsuited for assassination in such close quarters. Once he’d missed with his first blow, Chang had stepped within his guard and stabbed home—but the window for action was very narrow. Had Chang paused, dodged farther into the room, or tried to dash back to the landing a second blow from the saber would have mown him down like fresh wheat.

Chang lit the lamp, located the pigeon and—feeling especially ridiculous stepping around the dead body—drove it out of the open window onto the rooftop. The room was not too much of a mess. It had been thoroughly searched, but without the intent to destroy anything and as his possessions were few it would be a brief matter to set things back to rights. He stepped to the still-open door and listened. There was no sound from the stairway, which meant either no one had heard, or that he was indeed alone in the building. He closed the door—the lock had been forced just like the front entrance—and braced the back of it with a chair. Only then did he kneel, wipe the dagger on the man’s uniform, and slide it back into the body of his stick. He cast an eye along the length—he’d been fortunate enough to parry the saber on the flat of the blade, and hadn’t cracked the wood. He set it against the wall, and looked down at his assailant.

He was a young man, blond hair cropped short, in a black uniform with silver facing, black boots, and a silver badge of a wolf devouring the sun. His right shoulder sported one silver epaulette—a lieutenant. Chang quickly went through the man’s pockets, which aside from some small amount of money (which he took) and a handkerchief, were empty. He looked more closely at the body. The first dagger blow had landed just below the ribs from the side. The next three had driven up under the ribcage and into the lungs, judging by the bloody froth at the fellow’s mouth.

Chang sighed and sat back on his heels. He didn’t recognize the uniform at all. The boots suggested a horseman, but an officer might wear anything, and what young man foolish enough to be a military officer wasn’t also going to want high black boots? He picked up the saber, feeling the balance of the weapon. It was an expensive piece, exquisitely weighted, and wickedly sharp. The length, the broad curve and flat width of the blade made it a weapon for horseback, for slashing. He’d be light cavalry—not a Hussar by his uniform, but perhaps a Dragoon or a Lancer. Troops for quick movement, reconnaissance, intelligence. Chang leaned over the body and unfastened the scabbard. He sheathed the blade and tossed it onto the pallet. The body he would get rid of, but the sword would certainly be worth something if he needed ready cash.

He stood up and exhaled, his nerves finally easing back to a more normal state of wariness. At the moment a corpse was the last thing he wanted to waste time with settling. He had no clear idea of the hour, and knew that the later he arrived at the Palace the harder it would be to speak to the manager, and the more of a lead his rivals would have upon him. He permitted himself a smile to think that at least one of these rivals would be thinking him dead, but then knew that this also meant that the Major would be expecting word—and undoubtedly soon—from this young agent. Chang could certainly expect another visit, this time in force, in the near future. His room was unsafe until the business was settled—which meant that he’d have to deal with the body now, for he really did not want to leave it unattended—possibly for days. His sense of smell was not that bad.

Quickly then, he made himself presentable for the Old Palace: a shave, a wash from his basin, and then a new change of clothes—a clean white shirt, black trousers, cravat and waistcoat—and a quick scrub and polish for his boots. He pocketed what money he had stashed about the room and three books of poetry (including the Persephone), and then combed his still-wet hair in the mirror. He balled up his old handkerchief and tossed it aside, then tucked a fresh one and his razor into the pocket of his coat. He opened the window to the roof, stepped out to see if any nearby windows were lighted or occupied. They were not. He returned to the room and took hold of the body under each arm, dragging it onto the rooftop, out to the far edge. He looked over, down at the alleyway behind the building, locating the trash heap piled around the habitually clogged sewer. He glanced around him once more, then hefted the body onto the edge and, checking his aim, pushed it over. The dead soldier landed on the soft pile. If Chang was lucky, it would not be immediately clear whether he had fallen or been murdered in the street.

He returned to his room, collected his stick and the saber, blew out the lamp, and crept back out the window, closing it behind him. It wouldn’t lock, but given that the location was known to his enemies, it hardly mattered. He set off across the rooftops. The buildings of this block were directly connected, and his path was simple enough, with only a few slippery stretches of ornamental molding requiring caution. At the fifth building, which was abandoned, he pried open an attic hatchway and dropped down into darkness. He landed easily on the wooden floor, felt for a moment, and located a spot of loose planking. He pulled it back and shoved the saber inside, replacing the plank over it. He might never come back for it, but he had to assume his own room would be searched by more soldiers, and the less they found of their fallen comrade the better. He groped again and found the ladder to the landing below. In a matter of moments, Chang was on the street, still presentable and bound for the Palace, with yet another soul weighing upon his exiled conscience.

The house was named for its proximity to an actual royal residence given over—its fortified walls too out of fashion—some two hundred years ago, which had first been used as a home for various minor Royals, then as the War Ministry, then an armory, a military academy, to finally—and presently—as the home of the Royal Institute of Science and Exploration. While it would seem that such an organization would hardly encourage the nearby thriving of such an exclusive brothel, in fact the various endeavors of the Institute were almost all supported, in competitive fashion, by the wealthiest figures in the city, each striving against the others to finance an invention, a discovery, a new continent, or a newly located star to result in the immemorial attachment of their name to something permanent and useful. In turn, the Institute members strove against each other to attract patrons—the two communities of the privileged and the learned spawning between them an entire district whose economy derived from flattery, favoritism, and the excessive consumption that followed each. Thus, the Old Palace brothel—named, in another anatomical witticism, for perhaps the oldest palace of all.

The entry to the house was respectable and austere, the building itself crammed into a block-long row of identical stiff stackings of grey stone with domed rooftops, the doorway green and brightly lit, the walk from the street leading through an iron gate and past a well-occupied guard’s hut. Chang stood so he was clearly seen, waited while the gate was unlocked, and made his way up to the door itself, where another guard allowed him into the house proper. Inside was warm and bright, with music and distant decorous laughter. A fetching young woman appeared for his coat. He declined, but gave her his stick and a coin for her trouble. He walked to the end of the foyer where a thin man in a white jacket hovered at a high rostrum, fitfully scribbling in a notebook. He looked at Chang with an expression that kept just barely to the prudent side of amusement.

“Ah,” he said, as if to convey the multitude of comments regarding Chang’s person he was, through compassion and kindness, withholding.

“Madame Kraft.”

“I am not sure she is available—in fact, I am certain—”

“It is quite important,” Chang said, meeting the man’s eyes levelly. “I will pay for the lady’s time—whatever fee she sees fit. The name is Chang.”

The man narrowed his eyes, ran his gaze once more over Chang, and then nodded with a doubtful sniff. He scrawled a few lines on a small piece of green paper, stuffed the paper into a leather tube, and inserted the tube into a brass pipe fixed to the wall. With a gulping hiss, the tube was abruptly sucked from sight. The man turned back to his rostrum, making notes. Minutes passed. The man ignored him absolutely. With a sudden chonk the leather tube reappeared from another pipe, shooting into a brass pocket beneath. The man extracted the tube and dug a scrap of blue paper from it. He looked up with a blank expression that nevertheless exuded contempt.

“This way.”

Chang was led through an elegant parlor and down a long hallway where the light was dim and the closely patterned wallpaper made the space seem narrower than it actually was. At its end was a metal-sheathed door where the man in white knocked, four times, deliberately. In answer, a narrow viewing slot slid back and then, the visitors having been seen, shot closed. They waited. The door opened. His guide gestured for Chang to enter a darkly paneled room with desks and blotters and ledgers and a large abacus screwed into prominent position on a side table. The door had been opened by a tall man in his shirtsleeves, a heavy revolver holstered under one arm, with black hair and skin the color of polished cherry wood, who nodded him toward another door on the far side of the office. Chang crossed to it, thought it would be polite to knock, and did so. After a moment, he heard a muted request to enter.

The room was another office, but with a single wide desk, across which was spread a large blackboard that had been painted with various columns and inset with strips of wood with holes bored into them, so that colored pegs could be inserted along the columns, cutting each into rows, the whole forming an enormous grid. The blackboard was already scrawled with names and with numbers and dotted with pegs. Chang had seen it before and knew it corresponded to the rooms in the house, the ladies (or boys) at work, and the segments of time in the evening, and that it was wiped and re-written fresh every night of the week. Behind the desk, a piece of chalk in one hand and a moist sponge in the other, stood Madelaine Kraft, the manager—and some said actual owner—of the Old Palace. A well-shaped woman of uncertain age, she wore a simple dress of blue Chinese silk, which set off her golden skin in a pleasant way. She was not beautiful so much as compelling. Chang had heard she was from Egypt, or perhaps India, and had worked her way from the front of the house to her present position through discretion, intelligence, and unscrupulous scheming. She was without a doubt a far more powerful person than he, with high-placed men from all over the land profoundly obligated to her silence and favor, and thus at her call. She looked up from her work and nodded to a chair. He sat. She dropped the chalk and sponge, wiped her fingers on her dress and took a drink of tea from a white china cup to the side of the board. She remained standing.

“You’re here about Isobel Hastings.”

“I am.”

Madelaine Kraft did not reply, which he took as an invitation to continue.

“I was asked to find her—a…lady returning from an evening’s work covered in blood.”

“Returning from where?”

“I was not told—the understanding was that the quantity of blood was singular enough for her to be remembered.”

“Returning from whom?”

“I was not told—the assumption being the blood was his.”

She was silent for a moment, in thought. Chang realized that she was not thinking of what to say, but weighing instead whether or not to say what she was thinking.

“There is the missing man in the newspaper,” she said, musing.

Chang nodded absently. “The Colonel of Dragoons.”

“Could it be him?”

He answered as casually as he could, “It’s entirely possible.”

She took another sip of tea.

“You will understand,” Chang went on, “that I am being honest.”

This made her smile. “Why would I understand that?”

“Because I am paying you, and your bargains are fair.”

Chang reached into his coat for the wallet and extracted three crisp banknotes. He leaned forward and set them down on the blackboard. Madelaine Kraft picked up the notes, glanced at the amount, and dropped them into an open wooden box next to her tea cup. She glanced at the clock.

“I’m afraid there is no great deal of time.”

He nodded. “My understanding is that my client desires revenge.”

“And you?” she asked.

“First, to know who else is searching for her. I know the agents—the officer, the ‘sister’—but not who they represent.”

“And after that?”

“That will depend. Obviously they have already been here asking questions—unless you are involved in this business yourself.”

She cocked her head slightly and, after a moment of thought, sat down behind the desk. She reached over for another sip of tea, took it, and kept the cup, holding it between her breasts with both hands, watching him evenly across the desk top.

“Very well,” she began. “To begin with, I do not know the name, and I do not know the woman. No person of my household—or of my household’s acquaintance—appeared in the early hours of this morning displaying any quantity of blood. I have made it a point to ask, and I have received no such answer. Next, Major Blach was here this afternoon. I told him what I have just told you.”

She pronounced the name unlike Jurgins or Wells, as if it was foreign…had he spoken with an accent? The others had not mentioned it.

“And the sister?”

She smiled conspiratorially. “I have seen no sister.”

“A woman, scars on her face, a burn, claiming to be Isobel Hastings’s sister, a ‘Mrs. Marchmoor’—”

“I have not seen her. Perhaps she’s still to come. Perhaps she does not know this house.”

“That’s impossible. She has been to two other houses before me, and she would know this one before all the rest of them.”

“I am sure that’s true.”

Chang’s mind raced, sorting quickly—Mrs. Marchmoor had known the other houses, she had bypassed this one—to a swift conclusion: she did not come because she would be known.

“May I ask if any women of your household have recently…graduated to other situations, perhaps without your consent? With light brown hair?”

“It is indeed the case.”

“The type to be searching for a blood-soaked relative?”

“Hardly,” she scoffed. “But you said burns across the face?”

“They could be recent.”

“They would need to be. Margaret Hooke has been gone four days. The daughter of a ruined mill owner. She would not be known at any lower house.”

“Does she have a sister?”

“She doesn’t have a soul. Though it appears she’s found something. If you can tell me what that is—or who—I’ll be kindly disposed.”

“You have a suspicion. That’s why we’re talking.”

“We’re talking because one of several regular customers of Margaret Hooke is presently in my house.”

“I see.”

“She saw many people. But anyone wanting to learn what might be learned…as I said, there’s little time to talk.”

Chang nodded and stood. As he turned to the door she called to him, her voice both quiet and more urgent at the same time. “Cardinal?” He looked back. “Your own part in this?”

“Madam, I am merely the agent of others.”

She studied him. “Major Blach did ask for Miss Hastings. But he also sought any information about a man in red, a mercenary for hire, perhaps even this bloody girl’s accomplice.”

He felt a chill of warning. The man had obviously asked Mrs. Wells and Jurgins too, and they had said nothing, laughing at Chang’s back. “How strange. Of course, I cannot explain his interest, unless he had been following my client, and perhaps observed us speaking.”

“Ah.”

He nodded to her. “I will let you know what I find.” He stepped to the door, opened it, and then turned back. “Which lady of your house is entertaining Margaret Hooke’s customer?”

Madelaine Kraft smiled, her thin amusement tinged with pity.

“Angelique.”

He returned to the front of the house and collected his stick, then so armed—and untroubled by the staff who seemed to understand that it had been arranged—approached the man in white. Chang saw that he held another small piece of blue paper, and before he could speak the man leaned forward with a whisper. “Down the rear staircase. Wait under the stairs, and then you may follow.” He smiled—Kraft’s acceptance smoothing the way for his own. “It will provide the additional benefit of allowing you to leave unseen.”

The man went back to his notebook. Chang walked quickly past him into the main part of the house, along wide welcoming archways that opened onto variously entrancing vistas of comfort and luxury, food and flesh, laughter and music—to a rear door, watched by another burly man. Chang looked up at him—he was tall himself and found the immediate density of so many taller, broader figures a little tiresome—waited for the man to open the door, and then stepped onto the landing of a slender wooden staircase leading down to a narrow, high passageway of some twenty yards. This basement passage was significantly cooler, moist-aired, and lined with brick. Directly beneath the staircase was a hutch with a door. Chang pulled it open and climbed inside, bending nearly double to fit, and sat on a round milking stool. He pulled the door closed and waited in the dark, feeling foolish.

The interview had raised more questions than it had answered. He knew his conversation with Rosamonde in the map room had been unobserved, so Black must know of him independently—either from some other informant, from seeing him at the Vandaariff mansion, or, he had to admit, from Rosamonde herself. If Mrs. Marchmoor was also Margaret Hooke, then Angelique was in danger of disappearing as well—though Madelaine Kraft’s suspicion had not stopped her from accepting the regular client who might have been the cause. Perhaps this meant that the client was not as important as some other party, or some other power, yet hidden in the shadow—information she hoped Chang could provide. Chang rubbed his eyes. In the course of a day he had placed himself in the shadow of one murder, performed another, and set himself against at least three different mysterious parties—four if he counted Rosamonde—without any real knowledge of the larger stakes at hand. Further, none of this had brought him a step closer to finding Isobel Hastings, who grew more mysterious by the hour.

Despite his racing mind, it was only a minute before he heard the door open and the descending weight of footsteps on the stairs above his head. A man was speaking, but Chang couldn’t make out the words over the noise—to his best guess there were at least three people in the party, perhaps more. Finally they were off the stairs and walking away from him down the passage. He cautiously opened the hutch door, and peeked out: the party could only walk single file in the narrow space, and all he could see was the back of the rear figure, an unremarkable-looking man in a formal black topcoat. He waited until they reached the far end of the passage before slowly pushing the door open and extricating himself. By the time he was once more standing at his full height, they had rounded a corner and disappeared. Walking as much as possible on his toes to reduce the sound of his footsteps, he followed at a trot to make up the distance.

At the corner he stopped, listening, and again heard the voice—low and strangely muttering—but not the words themselves, obscured by jingling keys and their fumbling at a lock. He silently dropped to a crouch and then risked edging one eye around the corner—knowing that anyone looking would be less likely to notice an eye at a less-than-normal eye height. The party was some ten yards away, standing in front of a locked, metal-bound door. The man in the rear still stood with his back to Chang, the closer view revealing him to be younger with thin, oak-colored hair plastered flat to his skull. Beyond him Chang could see parts of three other people: a small man in an ash-grey coat bent over the door, attempting to find the right key, a tall, broad-shouldered man in a thick fur, impatiently tapping a walking stick on the floor and leaning down—he was the one muttering—to the fourth person, tucked under his arm like a flower in a grenadier’s bearskin: Angelique. Her dress was deep blue, and she did not react to whatever the man was saying, gazing without expression at the elegant grey man’s hands as he sorted through keys. The lock turned—he’d found the right one at last—and he opened the door, looking back at the others with a trim twitch of a smile. It was Harald Crabbé.

At this the man in the fur snapped open a pocket watch and frowned. “Where in hell is he?” he said, his voice an iron rasp. He turned to the third man and hissed balefully, “Collect him.”

Chang darted back around the corner, desperately looking around him for a place to hide. He was fortunate in that, being in a crouch, his eyes naturally looked upwards, and saw a pair of iron pipes, as wide as his arm, running the length of the passage just below the high ceiling. Behind him he heard another voice—Crabbé—interrupt the nearing footsteps of the third man, just at the corner, a step away from discovering Chang.

“Bascombe.”

“Sir?”

“Wait a moment.” Crabbé’s tone changed—clearly now he was addressing the man in the fur. “Another minute. I should rather not give him any insight into our growing displeasure, nor the satisfaction such knowledge would undoubtedly bring. Besides”—and here his voice changed again, to an awkward sugarish tone—“his prize is with us.”

“I am no one’s prize,” replied Angelique, her voice quiet but firm.

“Of course you aren’t,” assured Crabbé, “but he needn’t know that until we’re ready.”

Chang looked up in horror. At the far end of the passage, above the staircase, the door was opened. Someone was coming. He was caught between them. In a surge of strength he took three steps and jumped, bracing one foot against the wall and thrusting off, catching the other foot on the opposite side and thrusting again, higher, so that his outstretched arms could reach the pipes. A pair of legs were visible descending the stairs. The group around the corner would hear any second. He pulled himself up, wrapping his legs around the pipes, and then through sheer force rolled over above them, so he faced the floor, quickly tucking the ends of his coat so they didn’t hang. He looked down with despair. His stick was still on the floor, close to the wall, where he’d set it when he’d peeked around the corner. There was nothing he could do. They were coming. How long had he taken? Had he been seen? Heard? A moment later—holding his breath despite his heaving chest—Chang saw the third man, Bascombe, step around the corner—standing bare inches from his stick. The footsteps neared from the other end—louder than he’d thought. It was more than one person.

“Mr. Bascombe!” one of them shouted, a kind of exuberant greeting made all the more hearty (or fatuous) by the fact that the men had most likely been apart for all of five minutes. But the tone served to announce that they were on an adventure together, an evening—and declare as well who was that evening’s guide. Chang’s skin prickled with loathing. He exhaled silently through his nose. He could not believe they had not seen him—and prepared to drop onto Bascombe, attack the newcomers, then run for the steps. The pair passed directly beneath. He froze, again holding his breath. One man, a sharp fellow in a crisp black tailcoat, bristling red side whiskers, and long, thick, curled red hair (obviously the man who had called out), supported the shambling steps of another taller, thinner man in a steel blue uniform, capped with a squat, blue-plumed shako, with medals across his chest and tall boots that unmercifully hampered his alcoholic gait. Once they were close enough, Bascombe stepped forward and took the uniformed man’s other side, and the three of them vanished around the corner.

Chang stayed above the pipes until he heard the iron door close behind them, then swung himself down to hang by his arms and drop to the floor. He brushed himself off—the pipes were filthy—and picked up his stick. He exhaled, berating himself for being trapped so foolishly. He had only been saved by the uniformed man, he knew, whose stumbling drunken state had diverted attention away from anything else. He thought back to the conversation between the man in fur and Crabbé: which of the two men had they been waiting for—the drunken officer or the hearty fop? And though he resisted the thought—for it led to naught but slow disintegration of his peace—as he walked around the corner and stared at the iron door they’d closed behind them…which among them all had laid claim to Angelique?

She’d come from Macao as a child, orphaned when her father, a Portuguese sailor, had died in a knife fight his second day off the ship. Her mother had been Chinese, and her appearance had transfixed Chang from the moment he’d seen her in the main room of the South Quays—where she had found a kind of home after the cruelty of the public orphanage. Exotic beauty and a strangely compelling reserve had elevated her first from that squalid lair to the Second Bench and finally this last year, at the ripe age of seventeen, to the perfumed heights of the Old Palace, Madame Kraft having purchased her contract for an undisclosed amount. This had effectively placed her beyond Chang’s reach. He had not spoken to her in five months. Of course he had barely spoken to her before that—he was not one for speaking in general, and still less to anyone for whom he might possess actual feelings. Though he told himself she was well aware of the special place she held within his—he could not say “heart”, for what was that in a life like his (perhaps “panoramic painting” was a more accurate description of the rootless pageant of Chang’s existence)—this had prompted no significant words on her part, for no matter her own feelings, she preferred silence as much as he. At first this might have been a question of language, but by now it had become an expression of professional manner, one with a bright smile, pliant body, and impossibly distant eyes. In the devastating moments they’d spent in what passed for intimacy, Angelique was never other than polite and practiced, but always allowed just a glimpse of a boundless inner landscape held firmly in reserve…a glimpse that went through Chang’s very soul like a fishhook.

He tried the metal door, to no avail, and sighed with impatience. It was an old lock, intended more to delay determined pursuit than prevent it utterly. He groped in his coat for a ring of iron skeleton keys and flipped through them. The second key worked, and he swung the door open slowly—it was well-greased and did not creak—and stepped through into darkness. He pulled the door behind him, leaving it unlocked, and listened. His quarry’s pace was slow, not surprising due to the combination of the drunken man and Angelique—her shoes and dress would not be suited to a darkened cobblestone tunnel. Chang followed quietly, stick before him, left hand feeling the wall. The tunnel was not long—judging by the distance just far enough to clear the alley and next block of houses. Quickly Chang tried to place the exact direction—the stairway down, then the passage, the corner, then the dark tunnel, which seemed to have a very gentle curve to the left…the block behind the brothel was the outlying wall of the Palace itself—additional buildings for the Institute. Undoubtedly the tunnel had been originally built as a secret bolt-hole from the Palace, perhaps to what was then the house of a mistress, perhaps as a way to escape a mob. Chang smiled to see the usage reversed, but retained his air of caution. He had never been within the walls of the Institute, and had no clear idea what he was going to find.

Ahead, they had stopped. Someone pounded on another iron door, a metallic rapping (the large man’s stick?) that echoed sharply through the tunnel. In answer, Chang heard the working of a lock, the shrill ripple of chain pulled through an iron ring, and then the creak of heavy hinges. Orange light bled into the darkness. The party stood at the base of a short stone staircase, and above them an open hatch nearly flush with the ground, as to a cellar. Several men stood with lanterns, offering their hands one at a time as the party members climbed out. They did not close the door—perhaps because they would be bringing Angelique back?—so Chang took the opportunity to slip to the stone steps and crouch low, looking up. Above him, quite ghostly in the moonlight, were the leafless limbs of a tree.

He peeked over the edge and saw that it opened onto a large grassy courtyard between buildings of the Palace. The pool of lantern light moved farther away as the group was guided across the lawn, leaving him very much in shadow. Keeping low, Chang stole from the tunnel—it felt like leaving a crypt—and after them, drifting as he went toward the nearest tree, which gave a more substantial cover. The windows in the buildings around him were dark—he had no idea how much of the Palace the fellows of the Institute actually occupied, or in what manner, so could only hope to remain unobserved. He jogged along to another tree, now even closer to the walls, the thick turf swallowing the sound of his boots. It was easy to see where the party was headed—toward another man with a lantern, who stood marking the entrance to a strange structure at the courtyard’s center, apart from and unconnected to any other building.

It was one low story, made of brick, without windows and, as near as Chang could tell, circular. As he watched, the group of six and their guides reached the doorway and entered. The man who had been at the door remained. Chang advanced to another tree, taking more care with any noise. He was perhaps twenty yards away. He waited, still, for several minutes. The guard did not move from the door. Chang studied the courtyard, wondering if he could creep around to the far side of the circular building, in case there might be another door, or a window, or access through the roof. Instead, he eased into a crouch and decided to wait, hoping that the guard would enter or some of the party would come out. The party itself he was still pondering. He did not recognize any of them save Crabbé and Angelique. The man Bascombe was a lackey for either the Deputy Minister or the man in the fur, it was unclear who—just as it was unclear who between those men was the superior power. The final two were a mystery—from his vantage point on the ceiling he could hardly see the face of either man, nor the details of the drunken officer’s uniform. Obviously there was some relation to the gathering at Robert Vandaariff’s house—Crabbé had been in both places. Had one of them courted Margaret Hooke in the same way as they were courting Angelique—Margaret Hooke who was looking for Isobel Hastings (who had also been at Vandaariff’s) and who had the same scarring as the late Arthur Trapping? Her scarring had been recent, just as Trapping’s had occurred in the few minutes between his leaving the main reception and Chang finding him on the floor—which at least told Chang that the scarring itself hadn’t caused Trapping’s death, as the woman had obviously survived. Most important was the disparate nature of the group, gathering for some shared purpose—a purpose that, perhaps only as a tangent, had killed Arthur Trapping and prompted a search for Isobel Hastings. Chang doubted this search was about revenge. His Persephone may indeed have killed Rosamonde’s friend—the blood had come from somewhere—but she was being hunted for what she had seen.

The guard turned suddenly, away from Chang, and a moment later Chang himself heard footsteps from across the courtyard. Walking forward into the lantern’s glow was a spare man in a long, dark, double-breasted greatcoat with silver buttons and bare epaulettes, his pale head bare, his hands joined behind his back. At the guard’s request he stopped several yards away, nodding sharply and clicking his heels in salute. The man was clean-shaven and wore a monocle that reflected the light as he nodded his head, clearly requesting entry and then taking in the guard’s refusal. The man exhaled with resignation. He looked behind him and gestured vaguely with his left hand—perhaps at a place where he might be allowed to wait. The guard turned his head to follow the hand. In one swift movement the man whipped his right arm forward, his thumb drawing the hammer of a gleaming black pistol, and aimed the barrel square at the guard’s face. The guard did not move, but then very quickly, at the man’s brisk, whispered instruction, dropped his weapon to the grass, put down the lantern, and then turned his face to the door. The man snatched up the lantern and placed the pistol against the guard’s spine. The guard opened the door with a key and the two men disappeared inside.

They did not close the door either. Chang quickly loped across the lawn toward it and carefully craned his head so he could see in. The entrance led directly to a low staircase that descended several stories on a direct and very steep incline. The building was sunk deeply into the ground and Chang could just see the two figures leaving the stairwell, with only a flickering orange glow bleeding back from the disappearing lantern. Chang glanced around the courtyard, readied his stick, and crept down the stairs, moving slowly, silently, and keeping himself at all times ready to bolt back to the top. Once again he’d placed himself in a narrow corridor at the mercy of anyone appearing above or below him—but if he wanted information, he saw no other way. Just above the lower landing he stopped, listening. He could hear distant conversation, but the words were muddled by the strange acoustics. Chang looked above him. No one was there. He continued his descent.

The stairs opened onto a circular hallway curving away to either side, as if it formed a ring around a great central chamber. The voices were to Chang’s left, so he went that way, pressing close against the inner wall to remain unseen. After some twenty yards, moving into a steadily brighter light, he stopped again, for suddenly—as if he had walked through a door—he could hear the voices perfectly.

“I do not care for the inconvenience.” The voice was angry but controlled. “He is insensible.”

The accent sounded German, but perhaps something else—Danish? Norse? The words were met first with silence, and then the delicate speech of a practiced diplomat, Harald Crabbé.

“Doctor…of course…you must see to your duties—quite understandable, in fact, admirable. You will see, however…the delicacy, the time element—that there are requirements—duties—in competition. I believe we are all friends here—”

“Excellent. Then I will bid you a friendly good evening,” replied the Doctor. In immediate answer came the ringing of steel—a sword being drawn—and the clicks of several guns being cocked. Chang could imagine the standoff. What he could not imagine were the stakes.

“Doctor…,” Crabbé continued, with a rising strain of urgency in his voice. “Such a confrontation suits no one—and your young master’s wishes, if he were able to make them known—”

“Not my master, but my charge,” cut in the Doctor. “His wishes in the matter count for very little. As I said, we will be leaving, unless you choose to kill me. If you do so choose, I promise that I will first blow out the brains of this idiot Prince—which I believe will quite spoil your plans, as well as leaving a powerful father…angry. Good evening.”

Chang heard shuffling steps, and a moment later saw the Doctor, one hand holding up the tottering, insensible man in uniform, and the other occupied with the pistol. Chang retreated with him step for step, keeping out of view of the larger group which he had just glimpsed—Crabbé, Bascombe, the foppish red-haired man (who held the sword), and three guards (who held the pistols). There was no sign of the man in fur, nor of Angelique. As they retreated, no one spoke—as if the situation had progressed beyond words—and soon Chang found himself retreating past the staircase. He considered dashing up, but it would only expose him—they would have to hear his steps and he could not reach the top unseen. It might also be the exact distraction to get the Doctor killed, and right now Chang didn’t know if that would be a good thing or not. He still hoped to learn more. The drunken, uniformed man, unless he was very wrong, must be Karl-Horst von Maasmärck. Once more, mysterious connections between Robert Vandaariff, Henry Xonck, and the Foreign Ministry seemed to be dancing just out of reach in his brain. Momentarily distracted with thought, Chang looked up. The Doctor had seen him.

He stood with the slumped von Maasmärck at the base of the stairwell, and had merely glanced down the other end of the corridor as a reflex and been shocked to see anyone, much less a strange figure in red. Chang knew he was beyond the curve of the wall and out of sight to the others, and slowly brought a finger to his lips, indicating silence. The Doctor stared. His skin was pale and the impression he gave nearly skeletal. His hair was ice-blond and shaved on the back and sides of his head in a nearly medieval fashion, long and plastered back in a part on top—though his struggles had broken it forward in lank, white clumps that hung over his eyes. It did not seem, for all his apparent confidence, that the Doctor was a man of action, or necessarily used to waving a pistol. Chang deliberately backed away from him, keeping eye contact, and made a gesture to indicate that the Doctor should exit—now. The Doctor darted his gaze back to the others and began to awkwardly mount the stairs, pulling up the near deadweight of the Prince along with him. Chang retreated farther from view, his thoughts once more askew upon seeing von Maasmärck’s face: quite clearly livid with red circular burns around both of his eyes.

The group clustered around the lower door. “Doctor, I am sure we shall see you again,” called Crabbé amiably, “and good night to your sweet prince.” The Deputy Minister then muttered to the guards near him, “If he falls, take him. If he doesn’t, one of you secure the door, and the other follow him. You”—he singled out the guard the Doctor had brought down at pistol point—“stay here.” Two of the guards climbed rapidly from sight and one remained, his pistol in hand. Crabbé turned and, with Bascombe and the red-haired fop, disappeared down the hallway whence they’d come.

“It doesn’t signify,” he said to them cheerfully. “We shall find the Prince tomorrow—in some fashion—and the Doctor may be dealt with at leisure. There is no hurry. Besides”—and here he chuckled, speaking more intimately—“we have another engagement with nobility—yes, Roger?”

They passed out of hearing. Chang slowly retreated another ten yards, boxed in again. He would have to attack the guard to get out, or outlast them—assuming that when the party left they would take the guards along. He turned and continued down this half of the corridor, hoping the circle might join on the other side.

Chang advanced with his stick before him in both hands—one on the handle and one on the body—ready to pull it apart at a moment’s notice. He had no real idea if he was the hunter or the hunted, but knew that if things went bad he could be fighting several men at once, which was almost always fatal. If the group of men kept their heads, one of them was always presented with an opening, and their lone opponent, no matter how vigorous or skilled, would fall. That man’s only option was to attack at as many points as possible and through pure aggression separate the group into fragile individuals—who might then be prone to hesitation. Hesitation created tiny moments of single combat, winnowing the group, which in turn created more hesitation—ferocity pitted against presence of mind, fear trumping logic. In short, it meant attacking like a madman. But such a wanton strategy opened his defense with more holes than Mrs. Wells’s natural smile—and any remaining presence of mind in his opponents—which was to say, if they were not inexperienced, stupid, easily rattled farmers—would leave him stuck like a pig. The better aim was to avoid it entirely. He took care to make no noise.

As the corridor curved, he detected a low humming from beyond the inner wall—from the central chamber, whatever that actually was. On the floor in front of him lay a profusion of long boxes, opened and emptied in a great tumbled pile, the same boxes he’d seen on the cart at the canal and in the house of Robert Vandaariff—though these were lined with blue felt rather than orange. The humming grew louder, then steadily louder still, until the very air seemed to vibrate. Chang put his hands over his ears. The discomfort bled horribly into pain. He stumbled forward. The corridor ended at a door, sheathed in metal. He picked his way across the boxes—the great throbbing noise covering the sound of his awkward steps—but he could not concentrate, tripping, knocking boxes aside. He tottered and shut his eyes. He sank to his knees.

It took Cardinal Chang several seconds of brutally reverberating echo in his ears to perceive that the sound had stopped. He sniffed, and felt his face. It was wet. He dug for his handkerchief—his nose was bleeding. He struggled to his feet amidst the littered boxes, shaking away a fog of dizziness, staring at the bright stains on the cloth as he doubled it over and dabbed again at his face. He collected himself, sniffed, stuffed the handkerchief into a side pocket, and stepped carefully to the door. He pressed his ear against it, listening, but it was too thick—which only made him wonder all the more at the true extremity of the throbbing hum, to have so touched him through the massive walls and this heavy door. What had happened to the people within the chamber? What was the cause of the noise? He stood for a moment, assessing just where he was in relation to his ostensible aims—to find the true killer of Arthur Trapping and the elusive Isobel Hastings. Chang knew he had pursued a dangerous tangent—perhaps trapped himself there. Then he thought of Angelique, perhaps on the other side of this door, involved he knew not how—but certainly without any protection he could trust. He turned the handle.

The heavy door swung open on silent well-oiled hinges, and Chang entered with all the noise of a ghost—and indeed, as he took in the spectacle before his eyes, the color drained from his face. He had entered a kind of ante-room, divided from a larger, vaulted chamber—whose high walls were lined with gleaming pipes, like a great organ, like a cathedral—which he saw through a large window of thick glass. The pipes ran together down to the floor and gathered under a stage-like platform upon which was a large table. On the table lay Angelique, quite naked, her head covered with an elaborate mask of metal and black rubber, her body a-swarm with black hoses and cables, an infernal, passive vision of St. Isobel’s martyrdom. Standing on the platform next to her were several men, their heads covered with great helmets of brass and leather, with thick lenses for their eyes and odd inset boxes over the mouth and ears, all identifiable to Chang from their garments: a small man in grey, a crisp man in elegant black, a slender man who must be Bascombe, and a large man no longer in his fur, shirtsleeves rolled up, arms covered to his elbows by heavy leather gauntlets. They were all looking in his direction—not at him, but through the window at the delicate procedure taking place before Chang’s eyes.

The ante-room was dominated by a wide stone trough of bubbling, steaming liquid, into which fed at least fifty of the slick black hoses, which were draped across nearly every inch of floor space. Suspended by chains above this hissing pool hung a dripping metal slab, obviously just retracted out of the trough. On the opposite side of the trough from Chang was a man in leather gloves, a heavy leather apron, and one of the strange helmets. He was awkwardly leaning forward and in his arms cradled a pulsing rectangular object, brilliantly opaque, the exact shape of a large book, only fabricated from dripping, steaming, gleaming, piercingly indigo blue glass. The glass book was perilously balanced on his open hands and forearms, as if it were too fragile or too dangerous to actually grip. With extreme concentration he had clearly just raised it from the roiling liquid and then taken it off the metal slab. Then the man looked up and saw Chang.

His concentration snapped. His balance shifted, and for an endless sickening moment Chang watched the glass book slide off the slick leather gauntlets. The man lurched, trying to correct the balance, but only sent it skidding uncontrolled in the other direction. He lurched again but it bobbled away from his grasp and dropped onto the edge of the stone trough, where it shattered in a cloud of sharp fragments. Chang saw the figures in the great chamber running toward the window. He saw the man reeling back, his clutching hands bristling with thin daggers of glowing glass. But mainly Chang was overwhelmed by the smell, the same smell he had known near the body of Arthur Trapping, now impossibly more intense. His eyes stung, his throat clenched, his knees sagged. Before him the man was screaming—the muffled shrieks echoed through the helmet. The others were quickly approaching the room. Chang could barely stand. He looked through the window at Angelique on the table, writhing as if the hoses were sucking out her life blood, and stumbled back, his hand over his mouth, his head swimming from the fumes, black spots floating up in front of his eyes. He ran for his life.

He clattered unheedingly through the litter of boxes, sucking in the cleaner air, shouts behind him, and tore his stick apart, readying each piece. He raced around the corridor, his legs pounding, his heart reeling from what he’d just seen, from abandoning Angelique—could he have freed her? Was she there willingly? What had he just done?—and charged straight at the guard, who had heard him coming and frantically dug for his pistol. The guard pulled the weapon free just as Chang reached him, swinging his stick at the barrel. The shot was knocked wide and then Chang’s right hand was lancing forward. The man twisted desperately away and the blade caught on his right shoulder instead of his throat. The guard bellowed. Chang ripped the blade free and struck him across the face with the stick, knocking the man to his knees. He glanced behind—he could hear people charging through the boxes, and ran up the stairs. He was half-way up when a shot went off below—the guard trying with his left hand. The shot missed but would surely alert the man at the top, who would only have to slam the upper door to trap Chang completely. He pushed forward, his legs protesting—his head still dizzied from the fumes, his thoughts still on the table in the vaulted room, Angelique’s thrashing masked face—gasping with effort. Another shot from below, another miss, and Chang had reached the top, charging into the courtyard, already swinging his arms in defense—but seeing no one. He stopped, stumbling, breathing hard, his eyes blind in the darkness. He looked back to the door and located the guard…on the ground, facedown and still.

Before he could think—the Doctor?—two black shapes stepped from shadow, one of them slamming the door closed. Chang backed away onto the grass, and then wheeled at the sound of steps behind him. Two more shapes. He adjusted his angle of retreat away from both pairs, and then heard more steps—he was cut off again. He was surrounded in the dark by six men…all of whom seemed to be wearing black uniforms with silver facings. With a metallic ringing they each drew a saber. There was nothing he could do. Was Angelique dead? He didn’t know—he didn’t know anything. Chang abruptly sheathed his dagger into the body of his stick, and looked at the soldiers.

“Either you are going to kill me here or escort me to your Major.” He pointed at the door. “But they will interrupt us any moment.”

One of the soldiers stepped aside, making a gap in the circle, and gestured for him to walk that way—toward a large arch, the actual entrance to the courtyard. As Chang stepped forward the soldiers as a group extended their sabers toward him, and the one who had moved demanded, “Your weapon.” Chang tossed his stick to him and walked on, half-expecting a blade in his back. Instead, they quickly marched him into the shadow of the archway and toward a black coach. The soldier with his stick sheathed his saber and drew a small pistol, which he held against Chang’s neck. Once this was done, the others sheathed their blades as well, and set about their tasks—two climbed up to drive the coach, one opened the coach door and climbed in, turning to help Chang enter, two more ran to open the courtyard gates. The trooper with the pistol followed him in and closed the door behind. The three sat on the same side, Chang in the middle, the pistol tight against his ribs. Across and alone on the other side of the coach sat a hard man of middle age, his grey hair cropped short, his face without expression. He rapped his knuckled fist on the roof of the coach and they pulled forward.

“Major Black, how fortunate,” said Chang. The Major ignored him, nodding to the man with the pistol, who handed across Chang’s stick. The Major studied it, pulled it apart a few inches, sniffed disapprovingly and shot the pieces back together. He measured Chang with evident disdain, but did not speak. They rode in silence for several minutes, the hard muzzle of the pistol pressed unwaveringly against his side. Chang wondered what time it was—eight o’clock? Nine? Later? Usually he told time by his stomach, but his meals had lately been so arbitrary and sparse as to disrupt that normal sense. He had to assume that they were taking him to an isolated death. He made a point of yawning.

“That’s an interesting badge,” he said, nodding to the Major. “The wolf Skoll swallowing the sun—not exactly an uplifting image, a portent of Ragnarok—the final battle where the forces of order are doomed to fail, even the gods themselves. Unless you see yourself allied with chaos and evil, of course. Still, curious for a regiment. Almost whimsical—”

At a nod from the Major, the trooper on Chang’s left drove his elbow deeply into Chang’s kidney. Chang’s breath caught in his throat, his entire body tensing with pain. He forced himself to smile, his voice choking with effort.

“And Miss Hastings—did you find her? Went to a shocking amount of trouble, didn’t you—only to find out that all of your information about her was wrong. You don’t have to tell me, I know just how you feel—like a fool.”

Another savage elbow. Chang could taste the bile in his throat. He’d have to be a little more direct if he wanted to avoid vomiting into his own lap. He forced another smile.

“Aren’t you even the slightest bit curious about what I saw just now? Your men heard the shots—don’t you want to know who was killed? I would expect it to change all sorts of things—balance of power, all that. Excuse me, may I? Handkerchief?”

The Major nodded, and Chang very slowly reached into his outside pocket. His hand was only just there when the man to his left slapped it away and reached into the pocket himself, pulled out the bloody handkerchief and passed it to Chang. Chang smiled his thanks and dabbed at his mouth. They had been traveling for some minutes. He had no idea in what direction. It was most probable that they would take him out to the country or down to the river, but that only meant they could be anywhere in between. He looked up. The Major was watching him closely.

“So,” continued Chang. “Indeed. A struggle—shots—but the main point of interest being an odor—perhaps you have known it—strange, overpowering—and a noise, an excruciating buzzing noise, like a great mechanical hive, with the force of a steam engine. I’m sure you know all this. But what they were doing—what they had done, to that woman…” Chang’s voice faltered for a moment, his momentum broken by the image of Angelique writhing beneath the mass of black hose, the men around her in leather masks—

“I do not care about the whore,” said Major Black in a thick Prussian accent, his voice as cold and hard as an iron spike. Chang looked up at him—already things had become easier—and coughed thickly into the handkerchief, wiping his mouth, muttering apologies, and as he spoke he casually stuffed the handkerchief into the inside pocket of his coat.

“So sorry—no, of course not, Major—you are concerned with the Prince, and with the Minister, the figures of industry and finance—all pieces in the great puzzle, yes? While, I beg your pardon, I—”

“You are no piece at all,” the Major sneered.

“How kind of you to say,” answered Chang, as he swept his hand from his pocket, flicking open the razor and laying it against the throat of the man with the pistol. In the moment of disorientation caused by the touch of cold steel, Chang closed the fingers of his other hand around the pistol and wrenched the aim away from him and toward the Major. The men in the coach froze. “If you move,” Chang hissed, “this man dies, and the two of you must kill an angry man who holds a weapon that is very, very useful in tight spaces. Let go of the pistol.”

The man desperately looked to Major Black, who nodded, his face furrowed by rage. Chang took the pistol, aimed it carefully at the Major’s face, and pushed himself across the coach. He sat next to Black, placed the razor against his neck and then turned the pistol on the two troopers. No one moved. Chang nodded to the trooper nearest the door. “Open it.” The trooper leaned forward and did so, the noise of the coach was abruptly louder, menacing, the dark street whipping past them. It was a paved road. They were still in the city—they must have been aiming for the river. Chang threw the pistol out of the coach and reached over for his stick. He knocked on the roof with the stick, and the coach began to slow. He glared at the two troopers and then turned to the Major. “I will tell you this. I have killed one of you already. I will kill all of you if I must. I do not appreciate your ways. Avoid me.”

He launched himself through the door and tumbled into an awkward roll on the hard cobblestones. He pulled himself to his feet, stumbling ahead, and stuffed the razor into his coat. As he feared, the two troopers had leapt from the coach after him, along with one from the driver’s seat. They had all drawn their sabers. He turned and ran, the bravado of a moment before vanished like any other hopeful bit of theatre.

Somehow, when he had fallen and rolled, his glasses had stayed on. The side pieces wrapped closely around his ears for that very reason, but he was still amazed that they were there. He was running on a block with gas lamps, so he could see something, but he had no idea where in the city he was, and so in that sense was running blind—and at top speed. He did not doubt that if they caught him they would cut him down—both that they would be able to do it, and that whatever plan they’d entertained of taking him away in the coach was quite fully abandoned. He rounded a corner and tripped on a broken stone, just managing to avoid sprawling on his face. Instead he careened full into a metal rail fence, grunted with the impact and drove himself forward, along the block. This was a residential street of row houses without coach traffic. He looked behind and saw the troopers gaining ground. He looked ahead and swore. The coach with Major Black had doubled back and was coming toward him on the street. He searched wildly about him and saw an alley looming to his left. He drove his legs to reach it before the coach, which was heading straight for him, the driver lashing his team for speed. Chang was close enough to see the horses rolling their white eyes when he darted into the dark passage, his foot slipping on the filthy brick, grateful that it was too narrow for the coach, which thundered past. For a moment he wondered about stopping, facing the troopers—perhaps one at a time. It was not narrow—or he yet stupidly desperate—enough for that. He ran on.

The alley separated two large houses, without any doors that he could see, or windows lower than the second story. With a sinking feeling he realized that if he were cut off at the other end, it would turn into another trap. His only immediate consolation came from knowing that the soldiers’ boots were even less suited to this than his own, and even more prone to slipping on the slimy broken surface. He cleared the alley at a full run, saw no coach, and paused—his momentum carrying him well out into the street, lungs heaving—to grope for his bearings, for any sign or landmark he knew. He was in a part of the city where decent people lived—the last place he would know. Then, ahead of him, as sweetly welcome as a child’s answered prayer, he saw that the next road began to slope down. The only downward slope in the city went toward the river, which at least told him where he was on the compass. He pushed himself after it—looking back to see the first trooper clearing the alley—for that almost certainly meant pushing himself into fog.

He raced down the street, careening a bit as the slope began to alter his balance. He could hear the troopers clattering after him, their determination positively Germanic. He wondered if Black and the Doctor were in league and if the soldiers were part of Karl-Horst von Maasmärck’s retinue. Ragnarok was a Norse legend of destruction—it would have been adopted as a badge by only the harshest of regiments—and he could not immediately associate that with the intemperate insensible Prince. The Doctor he could understand—someone having personal charge of a Royal made a certain sense—but the Major? What interest of the Prince (or the Prince’s father?) was served by killing Chang, or by hunting Isobel Hastings? Yet who else could he serve? How else could he be in a foreign country in such force? The first wisps of fog drifted over his feet as he ran. He inhaled the moist air in gulping lungfuls.

The road turned and Chang followed it. Ahead of him he saw a small plaza with a fountain and like a key turning open a lock he knew where he was—Worthing Circle. To the right was the river itself, to the left the Circus Garden, and straight ahead the merchants’ district and beyond it the Ministries. There were people here—Worthing Circle was a place of some nefarious business after nightfall—and he veered to the right, for the river and the thicker fog. It was nearly his death. The coach was there in wait. With a whip crack the horses leapt forth, charging directly at him. Chang threw himself to the side, clawing his way clear. He was cut off from the river, and from the merchants—he scrambled to his knees as the coachman wrestled with the horses, trying to make them turn. Chang reached his feet and heard a shot whistle past his head. Black leaned out of the coach window with a smoking pistol. Chang cut across the plaza just ahead of the three troopers, once more right on his heels, and toward the Circus Garden into the heart of the city.

His legs were on fire—he had no idea how far he’d run, but he had to do something or he was going to die. He saw another alley and barreled into it. Once in he stopped and threw himself against the wall, pulling apart his stick. If he could take the first of them by surprise—but before he’d even finished the thought the first trooper charged around the corner, saw Chang, and raised his saber in defense. Chang slashed at his head with the stick, which the man parried, and then lunged with the dagger—but he was too slow and off target. The blade ripped along the man’s front, cutting his uniform, but missing its mark. The trooper seized Chang’s dagger arm around the wrist. The other troopers were right behind—a matter of seconds before someone ran him through. With a desperate snarl, Chang kicked at the man’s knee and felt a horrible snap as it gave. The man shrieked and fell into the legs of the trooper behind. Chang wrenched his arm clear and stumbled back, his heart sinking as the third man hurtled past his struggling comrades, saber extended. Chang continued to retreat. The trooper lunged at him—Chang beat the weapon aside with the stick and stabbed with the dagger, his reach nowhere near the trooper. The trooper lunged again—again Chang beat it aside—and then followed with a sweeping cut at Chang’s head. Chang raised the stick—it was all he could do—and saw it splintered to pieces. He dropped the broken fragment and ran.

As Chang careened away through the alley he told himself that in the loss of his stick he had divested himself of one trooper, but a dagger against a saber was no fight at all. Ahead of him he saw the alley’s ending, and a knot of people in silhouette. He screamed at them, an inarticulate howl of menace, which had the desirable effect of making them turn and then scatter—but not quickly enough. Chang cannoned into the rearmost figure—a man who, as Chang actually took in the group of people, must have been in negotiation with one of the fleeing women—and seized the back of his collar. He twisted the man behind him and with a brutal thrust sent him directly into the nearest pursuing trooper. The soldier instinctively did his best not to run the fellow through, raising the saber out of the way and clubbing at him with his other arm, but Chang had turned as well, advancing behind his impromptu shield. The moment the bystander was knocked aside Chang’s way was clear and he drove his dagger into the trooper’s chest. Without looking back he pulled it free and wheeled, running again. He heard the women’s screams behind him. Was the third trooper still coming? Chang glanced over his shoulder. He was. Cursing all military discipline, Chang dodged across the road into another narrow alley—the last thing he wanted to see again was the coach.

He’d lost track of his exact location—nearer to the Circus, at least. This alley was cluttered with boxes and barrels, and as he ran he passed more than one doorway. The third trooper was lagging behind, if still determined. Momentarily out of his sight, Chang dashed up the next block in a low crouch until he found what he wanted, a sunken shop front whose entrance was below the street. Chang vaulted the handrail and went to his knees as he landed at the foot of a small set of stairs, dropping his head and doing his best to stifle his heaving breath. He waited. The street was dark and drifting with fog and generally empty—if he had been seen, it was still possible no one would point him out to the soldier. He was sheathed in sweat—he couldn’t remember when he’d run as far, or last been in such an idiotic fix. Why had he thrown away the pistol? If it was going to come to murder, why hadn’t he shot them all in the coach? He waited. Unable to bear it further, he inched up the steps and peeked into the road. The trooper stood in the street, his saber out, looking up and down the road. He too was unsteady on his feet—Chang could hear the man’s ragged breathing and see it clouding in the cool night air—and clearly unaware which direction Chang had fled, taking a few steps one way, craning his head, and then walking back the other. Chang narrowed his eyes, his desperation simmering down closer to cold fury. He quietly transferred the dagger to his left hand, and fished out the razor with his right, flicking it open. The trooper still had his back to him, and stood perhaps fifteen yards away. If he could get up to the street in silence, he was sure that, at a dead run, he would cover half the distance before the man heard…another few yards while he turned…the final gap as the man raised his blade. The trooper would have one blow, and if Chang could avoid it, it would be over.

And if he didn’t avoid it…well, it would be over either way—“in each instant tenderness, and ash”, to quote Blaine’s Jocasta. He paused, balancing the outrage of being hunted like an animal through his own streets by a gang of foreign louts against patience and sanity…and then shifted his feet on the stairs, preparing to charge (he had promised to kill them). Suddenly he threw himself down into cover. A coach clattered near…and then stopped next to the trooper. Chang waited, listening. He heard the harsh interrogation from the Major, in German, then silence, and then a moment later the sweet metallic rush of the trooper sheathing his blade. Chang looked up in time to see the trooper hoisting himself onto the driver’s bench, and the coach pulling away into the fog. He looked down at his hands and relaxed his grip on his weapons. His fingers ached. His legs ached, and his head was throbbing behind his eyes. He folded the razor into his pocket and tucked the dagger into his belt. He mopped his face with his bloody handkerchief—already the sweat on his neck and back was turning cold. He remembered dully that he had no place to sleep.

Chang crossed the road and entered the next alley, looking purposefully for the proper point of entry. He was between a pair of large buildings he didn’t recognize in the dark, but knew this was a district of hotels and offices and shops. He located a first-story window near enough to a stack of barrels and climbed on top of them. The window was in reach. He wedged the dagger under the sill and twisted it, popping the window up, and then opened it the rest of the way with his hands. He stuck the dagger back into his belt and with an embarrassing amount of effort—his entire body wavering in the air as his arms nearly failed him—pulled himself through. He crawled gracelessly onto the floor of a dark room, and pulled the window closed. He groped around him. It was a supply room—shelves stacked with candles, towels, soaps, linen. He managed to find the door and open it.

As Chang walked down the carpeted hallway, paneled with polished wood and aglow with welcoming, warm gaslight, he found his mind chopping the figures of his day into factions. On one side there was Crabbé and the man in fur, who were responsible for the strange burns, so with them he placed Trapping, Mrs. Marchmoor, and Prince Karl-Horst. On the other was Major Black…perhaps with Karl-Horst’s Doctor. Scattered between them were far too many others—Vandaariff, Xonck, Aspiche, Rosamonde…and of course, Isobel Hastings. The list always ended with her, the one person about whom he’d never seemed to learn a thing.

The hallway led him into the hushed silence of a lovely vaulted room, decorated with potted palms and walls of plate mirror, with a wide wooden reception desk and a man in a frogged coat behind it. He had broken into a hotel. Chang nodded briskly at the man and reached into his coat for the wallet. Over the day he’d managed to spend nearly everything Aspiche had given him, and this would take the rest of it. He didn’t care. He could sleep, have a bath, a proper shave, a meal, and be fresh for the day to come. Tomorrow he could always fetch the saber in the attic and sell it for cash. This made him smile as he reached the desk, dropping the wallet onto the inlaid marble surface.

The desk clerk smiled. “Good evening, Sir.”

“I hope it’s not too late.”

The clerk’s eyes flicked to the wallet. “Of course not, Sir. Welcome to the Hotel Boniface.”

“Thank you,” answered Chang. “I should like a room.”