The Chemickal Marriage

Two Lazarus

When he woke everything had changed. One moment Chang had been face down in the forest, his life bleeding away … and the next – a next he frankly did not expect to occur – he was chained to a table, or so he guessed from the iron bite across his chest and waist and around each limb. The coarse planks scratched his back and buttocks. He was naked and quite blind.

A rasping attempt to speak echoed strangely, and he realized his head was encased in metal. He extended his tongue to sketch a rectangular opening, sealed tight. The inner edge was crusted … was it porridge? It seemed someone was keeping him alive.

He arched his back, bracing himself for agony. The chains held tight … but where was the pain? The wound in his back ought to have killed him – how could it be so neatly healed?

How much time had passed? How had he survived?

He shifted his body against the wood. He retained his limbs, his extremities, but the area where the wound ought to have been was numb. He turned his head and the helmet bit around his neck.

Chang started at a hand on his bare abdomen, a friendly pat. He pulled at the chains and demanded to be freed. The words crashed around his ears, but then the metal plate over his mouth slid open. A wet cloth was shoved inside and his nostrils flooded with the reek of ether.

When he woke again he was lying on his face, neck awkwardly bent by the helmet, something sharp probing his back. He lay still, concealing his wakefulness, until a spike of pain shot the length of his spine, and he gasped aloud. The mouth box was opened, and again came the ether.

He woke and slept in an incessant, arbitrary cycle, always aware of someone around him, intrusive hands, constant observation. How long had he been here? His existence made no sense. Had he not fouled himself? He could not remember. Or had he died after all – was he in hell?

He blamed such thoughts on the chemical nightmares and strove to concentrate during each lucid period, to recall the world he’d lost … his rooms, the Slavic Baths, the Library and the opium den. The irony did not escape him. Had he finally found the oblivion he had courted for years?

And Celeste? Chang reflected with chagrin on their last minutes in the wood. Like a fool she had kissed him, and like a greater fool he had responded. What had he been thinking – to take her there in the bracken? And then what? He could just imagine the awkward – no, that word was far too weak – the unconscionable afterwards: mortification, guilt, stupidity. He’d enough on his conscience. He hoped she had outrun the Contessa, found Svenson, made her escape. He ran his tongue across his lips, remembering the sudden softness of her mouth. And her hunger. As a man whose most common intimacies arose from negotiations in a brothel, Chang knew it was Celeste’s expression of need that had pierced his reason like a nail. But sense had returned. He tried to imagine the two of them strolling together in a street. Even had he desired it – and he was quite sure he did not, for the girl, however beddable, was also wholly absurd – to entertain the idea, in this world, was like planting corn in the snow.

He woke, eyes screwed shut against a painful glare. The helmet had been removed. Chang squinted and saw it on the wall: hammered brass, with two glass eye plates – round, like the eyes of an insect, now painted black. The earpieces and mouth box had likewise been bolted tight. It was a helmet designed to protect the wearer during the smelting of indigo clay.

He was a prisoner of the Comte d’Orkancz, whose rotted mind now lived in the body of Robert Vandaariff. Who else? The others were all dead. Chang had done his best to kill the Comte and failed. His skin went cold. Had he been kept alive only for revenge?

A voice reached him from beyond the glare, soft, chuckling.

‘You have been so long away from any light as to be a mole.’

Chang blinked and made out a padded chair. In it, business attire shielded by an oilcloth apron, sat Robert Vandaariff.

‘You are under my protection.’

Vandaariff used a thin black cane to rise and advanced to the table. His steps were brittle and, as he entered the light, his face revealed new lines of age.

‘Reincarnation disagrees with you.’ Chang’s voice was raw. ‘You look like a fishwife’s dinner.’

‘And you have not seen a mirror.’

‘Now that I’m awake, might I have my clothes?’

‘Are you cold?’

‘I am naked.’

‘Are you ashamed?’ Vandaariff’s eyes drifted across Chang’s body. ‘A handsome man – barring the scars, of course. So many scars … knives mostly, by the stitching. But your face … the damage there is singular – and to most tastes horrifying, I’m sure. The eyes are abnormally sensitive – even when asleep you flinch from a lantern. Do you mind my asking the cause?’

‘A riding crop.’

‘Viciously applied. How long ago?’

‘Where are my clothes?’

‘I’ve no idea. Burnt? No, Cardinal Chang, you remain almost as you were born. For one, to increase the difficulty of slipping away, were you – ever resourceful – to manage it. But, in the main, it makes you easier to study.’

‘Study how?’

‘Such a hopeful question. I will ask one in return, now we are speaking. What do you remember?’

The words hung between them, and Chang knew his inability to recall a thing since the forest was a direct result of something Vandaariff had done. With nothing else to say he could only hope to provoke the man.

‘I remember putting a sabre through your guts on the airship.’

‘But that was not me at all,’ Vandaariff replied mildly. ‘That was the poor Comte d’Orkancz. I was at Harschmort House, left behind by all my former friends.’

‘Left an idiot, you mean. I saw you – him – and I saw everything at Parchfeldt! How in hell did you survive? That mob was set to tear you to pieces.’

‘Very good. The airship and the factory. And after that? What, Cardinal Chang, do you remember next?’

Chang pulled against the chains and exhaled through his nose.

‘If you have done anything to me – I promise you –’

‘Done? I have saved your life.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Another excellent question. You are abrim.’

Chang turned at a sound to his left – a panel flush with the wall, swinging clear. A tall man in a shining black coat stepped through, silk rustling against the doorframe. Though he was not old, white hair hung to the man’s collar, and his skin was as brown as a Malay sailor’s. He sank into a silent bow and then spoke gently, tamed.

‘My apologies, my lord …’

‘Yes?’

‘Another incident at the gate. A single man. Not from the town.’

‘Not from the town? Gracious, is he alive?’

‘He is.’ The white-haired man met Chang’s gaze without expression.

‘Bring him, Mr Foison,’ said Vandaariff heartily. ‘We will seize the opportunity to learn.’

Foison bowed and left the room. What town? Chang could see nothing to place where he was. If only he were not so weak. Through the door came the sounds of men lugging a burden. Vandaariff rubbed his hands as if this bespoke an awaited meal.

‘What of the others?’ Chang could not help himself. ‘Celeste Temple, Svenson, the Contessa?’

‘Do you not know?’

‘I’ve asked, haven’t I? Tell me, damn you!’

‘Why, they are all dead,’ answered Vandaariff. Then he smiled. ‘That is, dead or entirely mine.’

Chuckling, he limped through the door and pulled it tight. The walls were not so dense as to stop the screams. It was a relief when Foison finally re-entered with the ether and sent Chang to darkness.

He was shocked to wakefulness, face down again, by a sudden freeze across his lower back, sharp as an animal’s bite.

‘Do not move,’ Vandaariff intoned. ‘It will only prolong the struggle.’

‘What … struggle is that?’ gasped Chang, his chin grinding into the planking.

‘A struggle of metals.’ The chill curled to the base of Chang’s spine. ‘Alchemy tells us of different metals linked in a lattice of power. The natural blood of your body, Cardinal Chang, is suffused with iron – thus we have begun with a vector of quite traditional magnetism.’

‘You’re insane, mad as a foaming dog.’

‘Your body was depleted of course – vital salts, ethereal compounds. After this restoration, the true work may begin …’

Just beyond the light stood Foison, silent, white hair glowing in the shadow. The cold seeped past Chang’s pelvis to his legs. His teeth were chattering.

‘I killed you once. I’ll do it again.’ Chang could scarcely speak. ‘What true work?’

‘A cloth in his mouth, Mr Foison. It would be a shame if his shivering broke a tooth.’ Vandaariff leant to Chang’s ear. ‘The true work of heaven, Cardinal.’

Their final conversation had been prefaced by the entrance of Foison. In the man’s hand was a ceramic bowl with a wooden spoon sticking out. He saw Chang was awake and set the bowl aside. Inside lay a sickly dollop of grey paste.

‘Is that what I’ve been eating? If you free my hand I could feed myself.’

Foison ignored him, glancing instead to Chang’s groin.

‘Do you need the bucket?’

‘And you’re cleaning me as well? I trust the privy-work hasn’t spoilt your lovely sleeves.’

Foison only pulled at the chains and, satisfied with their sureness, left the room.

‘What about the true work of my supper?’ Chang called mockingly.

The cold had left his body eventually, the gradual warming keeping pace until he burnt with fever. This too had passed. His back remained numb around the wound, but Chang no longer felt an invalid’s weakness.

Vandaariff hobbled in with the cane, a leather satchel tucked beneath his arm. He set the satchel down and dug a gloved hand inside. Chang heard clicking, like the beads of an abacus, and Vandaariff emerged with a fistful of blue glass cards. He laid them on the table as if he were playing Patience, eyes unpleasantly bright.

‘No apron?’ Chang asked.

‘Not today.’

‘Are those for me?’

‘You will look into them. I prefer not to prise back your lids, but Foison is within call.’

‘What events do they hold? What do you want me to see?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Vandaariff. ‘I want your body to feel.’

The first card plunged Chang into the midst of a rousing country dance, a farm girl to either side. Fiddle music sang in his ears. Vandaariff pulled the card away and he was back in the nasty room, panting, sweat on his limbs.

Vandaariff raised the second card. Chang balanced on the edge of an icy rooftop. Three yards away, across an abyss of five flights, stood the next building. Men ran towards him, shouting, waving clubs. He steeled himself and leapt – and once more Vandaariff pulled the card away. Chang’s breath heaved. His body pressed against the chains.

‘Who are these people? Whose memories –’

The third card was a banquet. The fourth card a horserace. The fifth a game of whist. In the sixth he strangled a man with a silken rope. In the seventh he lay on a brothel sofa with a thin-limbed whore bouncing energetically above him. Vandaariff pulled the glass away and Chang looked down at his arousal, mortified and angry.

‘Enough,’ said Vandaariff, smiling. ‘Unless you would prefer that last again?’

‘Choke on your own blood.’

‘An admirable performance. A foundation upon which to build.’

Vandaariff returned the cards to the satchel. He removed a second batch. These cards were like nothing Chang had ever seen, for they were not blue … instead, each glinted with different colours. The first was mottled with streaks of red.

‘We start with iron.’

The card contained no experience, no memory, no human life. Chang’s senses fogged and he gagged at the taste of blood filling his throat. Vandaariff pulled the card away and selected another, greenish and flecked with copper …

One after another Chang absorbed their depths. Where before the glass had implanted memories, here the transaction lay beyond his mind, as essential forces passed from the glass to his body. Each time he felt both sickened and more strong, Vandaariff tempering Chang’s body like a blacksmith working steel. When the cards were back in the satchel, pain echoed in his bones and knotted his organs. His teeth burnt like coals in a fire. Vandaariff reached into his coat and came out with an eighth card, bright orange. He gripped the back of Chang’s head and thrust it before his eyes. Chang arched against an explosion of agony near his spine.

When it was finally taken away, Chang could barely breathe.

‘I’m going to cut your throat,’ he gasped.

Vandaariff took off his gloves and snapped the satchel closed.

‘Three days, Cardinal. In three days you may well do just that thing.’

But the next day he heard voices in the other room. Then the door was flung open by Doctor Svenson, with Celeste Temple screaming like a fool. Svenson leapt to the chains but Chang stopped him with an urgent whisper. ‘Where are we? Where is he? Where is his man?’

‘The Xonck works at Raaxfall – there are soldiers just outside –’

Another figure in the doorway – was it Phelps? ‘They have heard – they are coming!’

‘Leave the chains!’ Chang hissed. ‘Against the wall – hide!’

Svenson had already shut the door. The Ministry man pressed himself into the corner. Celeste Temple stood like a stone, staring at Chang’s body. Finally she noticed Svenson waving vigorously and dropped under the table. The girl would kill them all.

For a moment he heard nothing … then the hidden door swung open, shielding Svenson behind it. No one stepped through. Chang jerked his head as if woken and blinked at the light. He could see Foison’s shadow, and a gleam of metal in his hand.

‘What now?’ Chang called hoarsely. ‘Where is your master?’

Foison took a single step into the doorway, offering no clear shot to Svenson or Phelps.

‘Where are they?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Chang cocked his head. ‘Has the cat misplaced its mice?’

Chang looked past Foison, hearing more footsteps.

‘Benton’s dead, sir!’ The man was out of breath. ‘Everyone but Hennig – two men, he says, with guns – left with the girl!’

‘Left where?’

‘He didn’t see, sir. We’re looking everywhere –’

‘Bring Hennig. Send word to Lord Vandaariff.’

‘But, sir – if we find them – no one need know –’

‘If we find them, we will then send word of that. Do it now.’ The man ran off. Throughout their conversation Foison had kept his eyes on Chang, who could not decide whether his captor was Asiatic or, instead, some Lapp or northern Finn.

‘There are footprints outside. I came to ask. You might have heard.’

‘Not a thing,’ said Chang.

‘You are fortunate they did not find you.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because you … are the property of a jealous, jealous man.’

Foison drove his body hard against the door, slamming it into Svenson, then he spun, whipping the knife in his right hand towards Phelps, who cried out, the bright blade sticking out of his topcoat. Foison slammed the door again, still harder – Chang could see Svenson’s legs buckle – and then opened it wide, another knife in his hand, and kicked the still-struggling Doctor in the ribs.

The chain across Chang’s chest and arms went slack. Foison turned at the sound, but Chang took hold of the chain and cracked it at Foison like a whip, the last hard link snapping at the man’s forehead. Foison sprawled into the wall.

Miss Temple stood, her fingers rapidly working free the other chains, eyes blessedly averted from Chang’s body. Svenson was on his knees, an unwieldy Naval revolver jammed into Foison’s belly. The white-haired man lay on his back, blood on his face, his teeth bared in pain.

‘He has pinned me to the wall,’ hissed Phelps, pulling at the knife that held him.

Miss Temple hurried to assist Phelps, who did not seem to be injured. Chang gratefully slipped off the table to crouch near the Doctor.

‘We did not expect you,’ said Svenson. ‘We thought you dead.’

‘As I you,’ replied Chang.

‘These fellows will kill us.’

‘They will try.’

Chang slapped Foison across the face, and then wrenched him up by the collar.

‘I require your clothes.’

He left the white-haired man his undergarments and boots, for Foison’s feet were small. He turned his back on the others to dress. Foison’s trousers were black leather, but the white shirt was silk and draped Chang’s skin like cool water. Decent once more, he reached for the jacket, but paused at the expression on Svenson’s face.

‘Dear Lord … Cardinal …’

‘I beg your pardon,’ Chang snarled, turning his head. ‘I have lost my glasses, I cannot help it if my eyes offend your delicacy –’

‘No, no – good heavens, no – your spine –’

Both Miss Temple and Phelps stood in shocked silence. It was the last thing Chang wanted to think about. He could move without pain – that was what mattered. He slipped into the coat, a surprisingly good fit, given the discrepancy of shoe size, and jerked his chin at their prisoner.

‘Get him on his feet.’

Foison’s hands had been tied behind his back. Chang picked up the second knife – Foison’s coat still held another pair sheathed within it – and held it flat against the man’s throat.

‘Must we take him with us?’ asked Phelps.

Chang raised a hand for silence, then pointed to the door. At his nod the Doctor pulled it wide, revealing Chang alone in the doorway, Foison before him like a shield.

The clicking of pistol hammers came like a chorus of crickets – at least ten men, standing in the cover of more tables and the colourless corpses they bore.

‘If you interfere, he will die.’

‘If you touch him, we’ll shoot you to pieces,’ replied the man to his right, in a green Xonck tunic, three stripes on his sleeve. His revolver pointed straight into Chang’s ear.

‘Then we understand one another,’ said Chang. ‘As much as I would enjoy killing this man, in exchange for safe passage, I will not.’

This was the moment. If they had orders to prevent an escape at all costs, the bullets must fly. But Chang did not believe these men possessed such autonomy. Foison ruled them with as tight a hand as Vandaariff ruled him. Chang pressed the blade into his captive’s brown throat, against the vein. The Sergeant lowered his pistol and barked at the others. They fell back.

Chang looked at Svenson. He had no idea where they ought to go, yet it was crucial this ignorance not be conveyed to their enemies. But the Doctor turned to Miss Temple. She swallowed with a grimace, and her words came out a croak. ‘Follow me. The tunnels.’

Chang kept his face a mask, but marvelled at the size of the factory – furnaces, silos, catwalks, assembly tables, projectile moulds, cooling pools. He walked backwards, holding Foison between them and the gang of soldiers, whose guns still tracked their every move.

Foison did not speak, though his eyes remained fixed on those of his sergeant.

‘This coat of yours cannot have come cheap,’ Chang whispered. ‘I did not think silk wore well enough for the expense.’

‘Silk is surprisingly warm,’ observed Doctor Svenson. ‘The north of China is very frigid.’

Chang ignored the interruption, watching the Sergeant, not ten steps away, and hissed into Foison’s ear, ‘What will your master say, I wonder?’

‘This changes nothing,’ replied Foison. ‘Three days. You are his branded stock.’

Miss Temple’s sharp call stopped Chang’s reply. ‘We require a key.’

A gate of iron bars blocked the tunnel. At Foison’s nod, the Sergeant came forward and unlocked the gate. Doctor Svenson held out his hand.

‘You shall not follow.’

Again Foison nodded and the Sergeant gave over the keys. They slipped past the bars, and Chang called to the soldiers as Phelps relocked the gate.

‘We will leave him further on, unharmed.’

The Sergeant opened his mouth to protest, but Foison shook his head.

Chang continued to walk backwards until the light had gone and their view of the soldiers with it. Then Chang drove a punch into Foison’s kidney and forced him to kneel.

‘What are you doing?’ Svenson whispered.

Chang had the knife at Foison’s throat. ‘What do you think?’

‘You gave your word …’

‘This man will kill us all. Don’t be a fool.’

‘If his men find him dead,’ hissed Svenson, ‘they will hunt us all the more!’

‘They are already hunting us. Without their leader, they will hunt us poorly –’

‘But you have given your word!’ whispered Phelps, aghast.

Chang wedged a knee into Foison’s back and pushed him face down in the dirt. ‘You do not know how he has wronged me.’

‘We do not,’ said Phelps, ‘but you cannot execute a helpless man –’

‘He is helpless because we have bested him. Are you an idiot?’

‘We have all given our word with yours,’ said Svenson. ‘I understand your impulse –’

‘Sanity is not an impulse!’

‘What on earth is happening?’ asked Miss Temple. She stood beyond the others, sagging against the wall.

‘This man must die,’ said Chang.

‘He cannot,’ said Phelps.

Svenson reached over to her. ‘Celeste, are you well?’

‘Of course I am. Have we not promised to let him live?’

Chang growled with frustration, then impatiently extended his hand to Phelps. ‘Give me your damned handkerchief.’

Having stuffed the cloth into Foison’s mouth, Chang bound Foison’s legs, pulling the knot as tightly as he could.

‘This kindness means nothing,’ he whispered. ‘If I see you again I will kill you.’

Foison remained silent, and Chang resisted a final urge to kill him anyway. He padded on to where he heard the others breathing.

‘I cannot see,’ he whispered. ‘Celeste, do you know where you’ve led us?’

‘Of course.’

‘Those men will pursue, and quickly –’

‘Yes, but do we seek the canal, or the front gate?’

‘Where are we now?’

‘The blasting tunnels. They run in all directions.’

The girl’s assurance frayed Chang’s patience. ‘How do you know this?’

Phelps cleared his throat. ‘There was a map of glass, sent by the Contessa –’

‘That is not it at all,’ croaked Miss Temple.

‘Perhaps we should press on,’ suggested the Doctor.

‘If we talk while we are walking, I will lose my way.’

‘And our pursuers will hear the echo,’ added Phelps.

‘Go how you please,’ Chang snarled. ‘We will follow like blind lambs.’

Chang’s poor eyes could discern but shadows in the chiselled ceiling, and he was forced to keep a hand on Mr Phelps’s coat-tails, last in line, wincing when his bare feet caught the edges of broken stones.

It was not the reunion he had expected, with Celeste Temple in particular. What in the world was Phelps doing here? And why had they stared so at his wound? Svenson was not one to talk – unshaven and more gaunt than ever, the man looked like he’d crawled from a crypt.

Where was Elöise Dujong? Probably somewhere minding the Trapping child …

Knowing the others could not see, Chang reached beneath the jacket and under the silk shirt … his finger ran across the ridges of a new scar, but from the scar itself he felt no contact. He gently probed … below a thin layer of flesh lay something hard.

At the tunnels’ end the ground was damp, the gravel sunk with river mud.

‘These tunnels would have been used to transport the Comte’s machines,’ explained Miss Temple. She coughed and then, to Chang’s surprise, she actually spat. ‘Do excuse me – beyond is the canal, and beyond that our boat, unless someone has sunk it. We can return to the city, or press on to Harschmort.’

‘Are we prepared for Harschmort?’ asked Svenson. ‘Two of your men have disappeared there – Cunsher himself would not risk it.’ He turned to Chang. ‘And you, Cardinal … in all gravity, had I the space and the light to examine –’

‘Who is Cunsher?’ Chang broke in curtly. ‘And what men?’

Svenson fell behind and whispered a brief and thoroughly frustrating account of their doings since they had seen him last. However gratifying it was to hear of Tackham’s death (and Chang could not help but be impressed by the Doctor’s courage), the rest of Svenson’s narrative strained any impression of sense – an alliance with Phelps, dependence on this Cunsher, and then acceptance of Miss Temple’s own ridiculous scheming. Jack Pfaff? And how many others – apparently dead? Arrant foolishness aimed at taking her money and abandoning her to peril when that was gone.

‘You had no idea she was pursuing such nonsense?’ he asked the Doctor.

‘She found me. Once I realized – well, the girl is determined.’

‘Damned little terrier.’

Svenson smiled. ‘A terrier with her teeth around a wolf’s leg, I agree. Nevertheless –’

‘We’re here again.’

‘We are. It is a comfort to have you.’

Chang shrugged, knowing he ought to return the sentiment – that it was good to have Svenson by his side – but the moment passed. He had scarcely spoken to the Doctor since their sojourn in the fishing village on the Iron Coast and almost laughed to remember how Svenson had been expected to tend any and all ailing goats and pigs.

‘And the Contessa?’

For a moment Svenson said nothing. ‘Only the two red envelopes. The woman has otherwise vanished, with the book and the child.’

‘Rosamonde is the most dangerous of all.’

‘So experience would indicate.’

Abruptly Chang realized that the Doctor had said nothing of the person he ought to have mentioned most of all. ‘Where is Elöise?’

The question had come without consideration of her absence, and an instant later Chang regretted it.

‘Your Rosamonde cut her throat.’ Svenson’s voice betrayed no emotion. ‘Phelps and I went back and made her grave.’

Chang shut his eyes. No words came. ‘That was good of you.’

‘We looked for you as well.’

He turned to the Doctor, but could not read his expression at all. ‘I am happy not to have obliged.’

The Doctor nodded with a wan smile, but took the moment to turn his attention to whatever Phelps was asking Miss Temple. Chang fell back a step and let the conversation end.

They crouched in the shadow of an empty barge. Ahead was the sunken gate to the river. Chang scanned the catwalks and iron towers for any watchman with a carbine.

Miss Temple pointed to a platform just visible beyond the docks. ‘That was where we entered,’ she said. It was the first time she had addressed him since the tunnels. ‘Set with a snare of glass bullets.’

‘No guards in sight,’ said Phelps. ‘Perhaps they have placed their trust in another trap.’

‘Or do they wait for another reason?’ asked Svenson. ‘The Comte’s arrival?’

‘The Comte is dead,’ replied Chang drily. ‘He told me so himself.’

Mr Phelps sneezed.

‘Are you wet?’ asked Chang.

Phelps nodded and then shook his head, as if an explanation was beyond him.

‘O this waiting is absurd,’ snapped Miss Temple, and she marched from cover towards the gate. Chang sprang after, hauling her back. She sputtered with indignation.

‘Do not,’ he hissed. ‘You have no idea –’

‘I have no idea?’

‘Stay here.’

Before she could vent another angry syllable he loped down the pier, bare feet slapping the planks. If he could but satisfy himself that the gate was locked …

It was nothing but luck that the first shot came an instant before the others could move, and that it missed. At the flat crack of the carbine Chang hurled himself to the side and rolled. A swarm of bullets followed – the new rapid-firing Xonck weapons he’d seen at Parchfeldt. Tar-soaked splinters flew at his eyes. He scrambled behind a windlass wrapped with heavy rope. The slugs tore into the hemp but until the snipers moved he was safe. At the barge, Miss Temple knelt with a hand over her mouth. Svenson and Phelps lay flat, none of them thinking to look where the shots had come from, much less of returning fire.

Not that they would hit a thing – their pistols would be inaccurate at this distance, and the sharpshooters too well placed. Chang looked behind him: a wall he could not climb, a locked gate he could not reach. Now that they had been seen, it was a matter of minutes before a party arrived on foot.

Above, a hemp cable rose from the windlass to a pulley, from which hung a pallet of bound barrels. A chock held the windlass in position. Chang grimaced in advance and bruised his bare foot kicking it free.

The gears flew as the rope whipped upwards, and the pallet of barrels dropped like a thunderbolt. Assuming this would draw all eyes, Chang burst forth, racing for the barge, waving for the others to run. The barrels crashed onto the wharf behind him, and quite suddenly he was lifted off his feet, the entire dockfront shaking. He landed hard, ears ringing, smoking wood all around him, and began to crawl. Svenson pulled him up and they ran. Chang looked back to see a massive column of smoke obscuring the gate and the canal, lit from within by bolts of light, an angry stormcloud brought to ground.

‘What on earth?’ managed Mr Phelps, but no one had the breath to reply. They were running blindly, simply racing down any clear avenue that appeared. Then, looking left, Chang saw a flash of black.

‘A tunnel!’ he cried, and veered towards it, the others raggedly at his heels. But the tunnel was blocked by an iron grille.

‘Shoot the lock!’ cried Phelps.

‘There is no lock,’ snarled Chang, who nevertheless dug his fingers into the grille-work and pulled. ‘The bars are set into the cement.’

‘It is a blast tunnel,’ said Svenson, ‘for testing explosives. Pull in the centre – better yet, step away.’

Chang realized he had been pulling at the edge of the grille, trying to wrest it from the stone. But the centre of the iron mesh was blackened from who knew how many exhalations of scalding gas. Svenson raised one heavy boot and stamped hard. The bars shook and bent inward. Phelps added his foot to the Doctor’s and one corroded joint snapped clean. They kicked again and two more gave way. The Doctor fell to his knees and strained with both hands, bending the damaged metal enough to clear a hole.

‘Hurry. Celeste, you are smallest – see if you can fit!’

Miss Temple carefully inserted her head and writhed forward. The cage caught her dress but Svenson disengaged it and she was through.

‘It smells dreadful!’ she called. Chang crawled in. He knelt alongside Miss Temple, the two of them together for a moment while Svenson and Phelps each insisted the other enter first.

‘I was foolish,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’

Chang did not know if she meant having darted forward to the gate on the dock, or their kiss in the Parchfeldt woods. He had never heard Miss Temple apologize for anything.

‘What’s done is done.’ He reached for Svenson’s flailing hand.

Where Miss Temple passed with a stoop, the men were forced to bend low. Chang called forward irritably, ‘Do you know where this takes us?’

‘No. Would you prefer we turn back?’

Mr Phelps sneezed. Svenson rummaged in his pockets, and then a wooden match flared. The tunnel, walls blackened and stubbled with chemical residue, receded far beyond the match light’s reach. Svenson took the opportunity to light a cigarette, speaking as he puffed the tip to red life.

‘The main gates will be guarded, and we are no party to force them.’ The match went to his fingertips and Svenson dropped it, the flame winking out mid-fall.

‘I should like a pair of shoes,’ said Chang.

‘And I should like to examine your spine,’ replied the Doctor.

‘Whilst we are being hunted in the dark, I suggest it be postponed.’

‘Perhaps we could find that man again,’ said Phelps, ‘with the white hair –’

‘His name is Foison.’

‘The thing is, I believe I have seen him before.’

‘Why didn’t you say so?’ snapped Chang.

‘I was not sure – and we have been running!’

‘Where did you see him?’ asked Svenson.

‘At Harschmort, it must have been – ages ago. Not that he spoke, but when one serves a man of power, as I did the Duke of Staëlmaere, one observes the minions of others.’

‘So he was Robert Vandaariff’s man?’ asked Svenson.

‘But Vandaariff’s body holds another,’ said Miss Temple. ‘Robert Vandaariff is gone.’

‘Does Mr Foison know that?’

‘Why should he care?’ asked Miss Temple, crawling on. ‘The man is a villain. I think you should have killed him. O there now – do you mark it – the air is warmer … is there a join with another passage?’

The Doctor lit a second match. Chang turned his eyes from the flare and noticed, above them in the cement, a perforated hatchway.

‘Here it is …’

He slipped his fingers through the mesh and lifted the hatch from its place, then hauled himself up into darkness, where his bare feet touched cold stone. The Doctor’s match died and he lit another. Chang reached to Miss Temple.

‘And so Persephone escaped from the underworld …’

At this she pursed her lips, but took his hand with both of hers. He lifted her out, then helped Phelps. The Doctor stood in the hatchway, head and shoulders in the room, holding the match aloft. Miss Temple laughed aloud.

‘I am a goose! See here!’ From her bag she pulled a beeswax stub and gave it to Svenson to light. ‘I had forgotten!’

‘O for all love,’ muttered Phelps sullenly.

Chang shared the sentiment, but was happy enough to see where they were: a square chamber with a stone-flagged floor. At the base of each wall lay a scattering of straw, and bolted into the cement at regular intervals – almost to resemble an art salon – were long rectangles.

Doctor Svenson sniffed the air. ‘Vinegar. As if the chamber had been scoured.’

Miss Temple took the candle from him, walking closer to a wall. ‘Look at the straw,’ she said. ‘It has all come out of this burlap sacking …’

The scraps of sacking had been painted with crude faces, and within the straw lurked tattered strips of clothing.

‘Straw mannequins,’ Chang said. ‘Test targets …’ Crossing nearer, he could see the rectangles were of different materials: hammered steel, smelted iron, brass, oak, teak, maple studded with iron nails, each to test an explosive’s power. The power of a prototype explosive set off within the chamber – its gasses venting to the tunnel – could be measured against all kinds of surfaces: wood, armour, fabric, even (he imagined a row of hams hanging from hooks) flesh, all from a single blast.

‘Take care for your feet,’ said Doctor Svenson, joining them. ‘Celeste, hold your light closer to the straw.’

She knelt and Chang saw a glimmer near her boot. She gingerly pulled the straw away to reveal a gleaming chip of blue glass. Miss Temple lifted the light to the rectangle above. Its oaken planks bristled with tiny glass splinters, like a cork board stuck with pins. Higher up, still whole, perched a small, spiked blue disc, perhaps the size of a Venetian florin. Chang bunched the silken sleeve over his fingers and tugged the disc free. The edge was sharp and the spikes as regular as a wicked, wheeled spur.

‘A projectile?’ asked Svenson. ‘Grapeshot?’

‘But why blue glass?’ countered Chang. ‘A broken gin bottle will cut just as well.’

‘What have you found?’ called Mr Phelps from across the room, sniffling.

‘The poor man needs a fire,’ Svenson muttered, before calling back. ‘It is blue glass, perhaps part of a weapon.’

‘Will they not be searching for us?’ Phelps replied. ‘Should we not flee?’

Miss Temple plucked the disc from Chang’s palm. Before he could protest she raised it up to her eye.

‘Celeste!’ gasped Svenson. ‘Don’t be a fool!’

Chang forcibly pulled her arm down, breaking the connection.

Her eyes were wide and her face had flushed – but with anger, he realized. Miss Temple thrust the glass back into Chang’s hand.

‘I saw nothing,’ she growled. ‘It is not a memory but a feeling. Deeply felt, obliterating wrath.’

Chang looked to the shredded straw. ‘What does rage matter when the target’s cut to ribbons?’

‘There is a door,’ called Mr Phelps thickly. ‘I am going through it.’

Svenson hurried after Phelps. Chang caught Miss Temple’s arm and turned her to him. ‘You insist on risking yourself –’

‘That is my own business.’

Her cheeks were still red from the glass, and Chang recalled the forest at Parchfeldt. She had been striking his chest in fury before lunging up to kiss him. He imagined slipping a hand through her curls right then and pulling her face to his.

‘Impatience gets a person killed,’ he said instead. ‘And trying to make up for past mistakes only muddles your thinking.’

‘Mistakes?’

‘What of these men you hired, or Jack Pfaff – what of Elöise – what of shooting Roger Bascombe –’

‘I should have spared him, then? And the Contessa – shall we spare her as well?’

‘Are you coming?’ called Doctor Svenson, his words edged with a finite patience.

‘You know full well what I refer to,’ muttered Chang, wishing he had not said a word.

‘An ordnance room,’ explained Svenson, indicating the high scaffolds holding kegs of powder. ‘The racks allow ventilation – and do you mark the slippers?’ A pile of grey felt slippers lay heaped just inside the doorway. ‘To cover one’s shoes, so there is no chance of a spark from a hobnail – an old habit from ships. And there, do you see?’ Svenson pointed to a portion of empty scaffolding against the wall. ‘View-holes into the blast chamber, bent like the mirrored periscopes one uses in trench-works, so no random shot can plunge through, yet still allowing the engineers to view the explosion.’

Mr Phelps had rallied, or perhaps was abashed at his show of peevishness. ‘These barrels are not yet stored away – if they are newer, might they not hold the explosive we saw at the canal?’

Chang took one of Foison’s knives and set to prising the lid from the nearest barrel, grateful for an excuse not to talk. He did not relish companionship for its own sake and often felt, perhaps perversely, that the people one knew best were the most difficult to bear. Over-familiarity with their habits made even the smallest interaction grate, while the obverse notion – of being that much more on view himself – was even worse.

He wedged the knife under the lid and saw Phelps had joined him.

‘If it is the same explosive, might the jostling of your knife set it off? It did strike me as especially volatile.’

Chang applied a slow, strong pressure. The edge grudgingly rose until he could fit his fingers beneath and wrench it clear.

‘Merciful hell,’ muttered Mr Phelps.

Instead of any kind of powder, the barrel was filled with blue glass discs, sharp-spurred, coin-sized … thousands and thousands of them. Chang scooped up a handful and threw it against the wall, but the discs only shattered. Clearly these new glass weapons were not the source of the explosion on the wharf.

Outside the ordnance chamber was another tunnel laid with rail. Miss Temple screwed up her mouth, as if she’d taken a ladle of fish oil.

Svenson reached out with concern. ‘Celeste –’

‘Left at the crossroads takes us back to where we found Chang. Right and straight ahead lead to other blasting chambers … but I believe I know our exit.’

She glanced at Chang, as if daring him to disagree. When he said nothing, she wheeled away. What had happened to her? Chang could feel Svenson watching him, but he had no desire to speak of what he did not understand.

At the crossroads they entered another blast tunnel proper, the men again reduced to ungainly scuttling. Chang managed to slip ahead of Phelps, but he reduced his pace so the Doctor and Miss Temple were soon some yards ahead. Then Chang stopped altogether.

‘Have you hurt your foot?’ asked Phelps.

‘No. It seemed prudent for us to talk. If you are playing Svenson false I’ll cut your throat.’

‘I beg your pardon –’

‘If you cause harm to Miss Temple I’ll hack off your hands.’

‘Harm? Have I not shared their peril? Why would I have saved Svenson’s life –’

‘I have no idea. Didn’t he break your arm at the quarry?’ Chang clamped a hand around Phelps’s wrist. ‘You’ve taken off the plaster, but no doubt the bones remain fragile …’

Was it the insistence on sparing Foison that had fired Chang’s suspicion? Foison’s knife had only pinned Phelps to the wall – on purpose? Had Phelps not delayed them with his snivels and sneezes, perhaps enough to allow recapture? He squeezed. Phelps gasped and tried to pull his arm away.

‘Doctor Svenson is a man of principle! In killing Tackham he saved my life as well!’

‘Where is the Contessa?’

‘If I knew that, I would not be in a stinking tunnel with a madman! I have thrown over my entire life –’

‘Why should I trust a man who’s done his best to kill me?’

‘Because everything has changed!’ Phelps hissed. ‘The city is in chaos!’

Chang seized the man’s damp cravat and twisted the knot against his throat. ‘All part of your mistress’s plan, I think.’

‘Listen to me,’ Phelps wheezed, ‘I think you are a criminal – and that your kind deserves death – but you hardly threaten the state. We need you now – as you need me!’ Phelps jerked his chin towards Svenson and Miss Temple. ‘Do you think they know the codes to summon the militia, or can counterfeit diplomatic ciphers? When it comes to the final battle –’

‘I will be watching your every move.’ Chang released his grip and turned after the others … half expecting a bullet in his back.

If Chang’s bluntness accomplished nothing else, it would make Mr Phelps keen to prove his value, if he was honest – and, if dishonest, that much more likely to misstep, from fear. That he would also hate Chang with a burning fire was neither here nor there.

Miss Temple crouched with Svenson beneath another metal hatchway, waiting for Chang and Phelps to catch up. The Doctor studied Chang’s blank expression but said nothing. Phelps only cleared his throat and apologized for keeping them.

‘But you’ve found another room, it seems,’ he said. ‘How cunning.’

‘It is not a room,’ whispered Miss Temple, ‘but our exit.’

Chang lifted one foot, for the ground was damp. ‘You’ve brought us to a sewer.’

‘Try your luck with Mr Foison,’ she replied. ‘I’m sure he’s forgiven everything.’

This time Svenson shifted the metal hatch cover, then pulled himself from sight. A hand came down and Miss Temple went next, then Chang. He emerged into another cement chamber, but one lined with massive cisterns, each with a spigot the width of a 12-pound cannon at its base. He did not bother to assist Phelps.

‘They contain different solutions,’ Miss Temple explained, her voice thick, ‘released into the tunnels to stifle various kinds of explosive residue. The Comte was taken with the … engineering.’

‘How will that get us out?’ asked Phelps, rising stiffly. Miss Temple pointed to the largest cistern of all, filling one corner of the room and reaching near the roof beams.

‘Because that is full of water – to flush away the other chemicals – and the pipes that feed it run to the canal.’

‘I am just beginning to dry!’ moaned Phelps.

‘But Celeste,’ said Svenson, ‘we have tried the canal – the defences are too strong.’

Miss Temple shook her head impatiently. ‘Not the canal gate at the river. We have walked entirely beneath the works, away from the river and near a spur of the Orange Canal itself, used to ferry goods in the opposite direction, to the Raaxfall railway head. These pipes pass under the border fences to reach the water.’

‘You want us to swim through the pipes?’ squawked Phelps. ‘The plan is blind idiocy!’

Miss Temple was stricken by another fit of choking. It did not stop, and she bent over as if she might be sick. Svenson glared at Phelps, who shrugged and fished out a damp handkerchief to blow his nose. Miss Temple straightened. Her eyes were red and moist.

‘There are valves,’ she rasped. ‘The water can be turned off or reversed – they also use the pipes for drainage. It will be noissome, but the distance is not far, and we may pass through.’

‘How do we enter?’ asked Svenson.

Miss Temple looked to the top of the cistern, high above. ‘There is a ladder – it may require a bit of a jump.’

‘Ah. Perhaps –’

Chang slashed his hand through the air to indicate silence. They followed his gaze to the hatch, which Phelps had not replaced, and the flickers of light that danced in the tunnel beneath.

Chang waved them brusquely to the cistern of water, where Miss Temple told the other two men which valves to close. The squeaking valves were heard in the tunnel: lantern beams stabbed into the chamber. Chang crossed to a smaller cistern, wrenched at the spigot head and leapt clear of a spew of green liquid. The chamber floor was angled exactly for this purpose, and the steaming chemicals gushed straight at the hatch. Chang ran for the ladder. Phelps was in the lead, then Miss Temple, and finally Svenson, climbing with the speed of a tortoise.

Shouts of outrage echoed from the tunnel, then the crack of lantern glass bursting from contact with the liquid. Chang shoved the Doctor’s rump without ceremony. A hand rose through the sick green flow and then a gasping, shaking head – one of the Xonck soldiers, more intrepid than the rest. Chang looked up to see Phelps’s feet disappearing into a pipe above the cistern pit, Miss Temple right behind, balanced on the slippery rim. Svenson reached the top of the ladder but quailed at the four-foot gap to the pipe.

The soldier hauled himself clear and saw them, his shaven head gleaming green. He aimed a pistol at Chang’s back, but the hammer clicked impotently – the chemical wash had done something to the charge. He tried again – more heads rising to the hatch rim – then threw the gun aside and drew a wicked knife. Miss Temple had entered the pipe, but Svenson stood fixed.

‘It is just like the gangplank of a ship!’ cried Chang.

‘I despise gangplanks!’ But the Doctor lunged forward. Three reckless storklike steps and he was there, Miss Temple catching his arm.

Chang readied one of Foison’s knives. The bald soldier had reached the ladder. Chang considered throwing the knife, but he’d not Foison’s skill. Another two men stood at the hatch, pistols snapping without effect. Chang ignored them, waiting for the bald soldier – climbing with one arm, the long knife held upwards. The green liquid had bleached his uniform yellow, and his coat seams split at the effort of his arms. Chang feinted a cut at the climbing man’s face, which was aggressively parried – but all Chang sought was blade contact. He deftly turned his wrist so the silver tip of Foison’s knife drew a sharp line along the soldier’s hand, cutting deep. The long knife leapt from the man’s grip. Chang snapped a fist into the soldier’s nose, the man’s feet went out from under him, and he slid down the rungs. Chang crossed the cistern rim as quick as a cat and was gone.

Like fools, the others were waiting in the pipe. He shouted them on, but then caught Svenson’s foot and called for a pistol. He could not count on all their pursuers’ firearms being disabled. Svenson passed back his revolver. Chang crawled furiously, then turned and aimed for the diminishing circle of light at his heels. He squeezed off four roaring shots and slithered on – the pipe was coated with slime – then turned and fired two more.

The pipe angled abruptly down and Chang slid out of direct range with relief, and just in time, for the metal behind him echoed with gunfire. He pressed himself flat, but the ringing ricochets spent themselves at the turn. He kept crawling. The pipe changed its construction – intrusive ridges where each individual piece had been riveted together. Chang clipped his knees and elbows groping forward.

More shots came from the cistern, but nothing found its mark. Chang feared the other end of their journey. Surely Foison’s men knew where the pipes led, and might run over land more quickly than they could crawl like worms. Abruptly Chang’s face met the grimy sole of Doctor Svenson’s boot. He swore aloud, spitting, and the Doctor’s whisper reached him. ‘Do you hear it?’

‘Hear what?’

‘The water.’

Chang listened. Of course … far more effective than any scramble of men, Foison would simply reverse the valves. He wondered how it had taken them this long to think of it. Chang slapped Svenson’s foot.

‘Go on, as quickly as you can – we cannot go back!’

‘We will drown!’

‘And if we go back they will shoot us! For all we know we are near the finish!’

They scuttled like crabs before a looming wave. Chang heard Phelps’s cry, though by then the water’s rush echoed all around them.

‘I am to it! O – the cold – O damnation!’

The icy black water swallowed them all. Chang used the riveted ridges as ladder rungs, hauling himself forward against the current. Again he struck Svenson’s boots, and shoved the Doctor to go faster. The pressure in Chang’s lungs flowered into pain. He felt a tightness in his ears but pressed on, the idea of drowning like a rat in a drainpipe still worse to bear.

Then Svenson’s feet were no longer there, and Chang’s fingers found the pipe rim itself. He wriggled his way through and shot for the surface of the canal, breaking into the air with a gasp. The others were bobbing near him, pale and heaving, hair plastered to their heads. Chang spun round, searching the banks for men with carbines.

‘We have to go on,’ he gasped. ‘They will be here.’

‘Go where?’ called Phelps, teeth chattering. ‘Where are we? We shall catch our deaths!’

‘This way, sir! There is a rope!’

A crouching man in a long brown coat had appeared on the canal bank, a hat pulled low over his eyes.

‘O Mr Cunsher!’ exclaimed Phelps. ‘Thank God you have found us!’

The small hut felt like a room at the Slavic baths. Their clothing hung on lines and steamed in the heat of a squat metal stove so stuffed with coal that one could not approach within a yard. A separate line had been draped with a sheet from the cabin’s cot, and behind lurked Miss Temple, unseen.

Chang wrapped a blanket around himself and cleared his throat, as if the sound might clear his mind. Svenson sat with a mouldy blanket of his own. Phelps had taken the other bedsheet and now stood like a dismal Roman, his bare feet in a pan of hot water.

The strange foreigner had pulled them from the canal and led them pitilessly through brown scrub woodland to a scattering of squat shacks – stonecutters he said – one of which he unlocked with a hook-ended metal pin. Cunsher spoke only to Phelps, gave an occasional respectful nod to Svenson, and ignored Chang and Miss Temple altogether. He had found their carriage in Raaxfall, heard the explosion and observed the movements of guards at the gate, finally deducing that the canal was the only possible exit within his reach. Cunsher then left them, muttering something to his master that Chang had not heard. To Chang, the drainpipe was no sensible option to occur to anyone. He was glad for this second rescue, but trusted the fellow no more than he trusted Phelps.

It was not suspicion that now gnawed his peace of mind. Whatever their danger, Chang found his thoughts quite irresistibly settled on the proximate nudity of the young woman, not ten feet away behind a single pane of threadbare cloth. He could hear her bare feet on the floorboards, the creak of her body on the wooden stool. Were her arms huddled for warmth or modesty – or were they raised to recurl her hair, breasts exposed and high on her slim ribcage? Chang shifted on his own seat, willing his thoughts elsewhere against tumescence. How long had it been since he’d had a woman?

‘Are you warm enough, Celeste?’ Doctor Svenson called.

‘Yes, thank you,’ she replied from behind her curtain. ‘I trust you will recover?’

‘Indeed.’ Svenson selected a cigarette from his silver case, a civilized veneer already returned to his voice. ‘Though I must admit – when the water rose, my heart was in my throat. You did very well to drive on,’ he said to Phelps. ‘The slightest hesitation would have done for us all.’

Phelps shuddered. ‘It does not bear thinking. Though one begins to understand why men of adventure are so grim.’ He made a point of looking at Chang. Chang said nothing, his own gaze taken by the long, livid scar across the Doctor’s chest. Svenson inhaled deeply, then thought to offer his silver case to the others.

‘Were they not drenched?’ asked Chang.

‘Ah – it is the case, you see.’ Svenson snapped the silver case closed so they all might hear the catch of its clasp, then popped it open again. ‘Tight as a clam. Will you partake? Tobacco is highly restorative.’

‘It hurts my eyes,’ said Chang.

‘Truly? How strange.’

Chang turned the subject before Svenson recalled his earlier keenness to examine him. ‘As soon as our clothes are dry, we must move on.’

‘We need food,’ croaked Phelps, who had accepted Svenson’s offer. His words were broken by coughing. ‘And rest. And information.’

‘But we have learnt much,’ said Svenson. ‘The new explosive, the glass spurs – that they are inscribed with an emotion instead of a memory.’

‘We’ve no idea what that means.’

‘Not yet, but have you ever eaten hashish?’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Phelps.

‘I am thinking of the glass – the anger, a state of pure emotion –’

‘You think the glass contains hashish?’

‘Not at all. Consider Hassan i-Sabbah and his guild of assassins, who entered a state of deadly single-mindedness under the combined influences of religion and narcotics. Think of the Thuggee cult of India – incense, incantations, soma – the principle is the same.’

‘Not unlike the Process,’ observed Chang.

Phelps managed to exhale without coughing. ‘The glass may answer for the narcotic, yet if the spurs hold no memory, where is the instruction? Without thought, how can Vandaariff direct those stricken?’

‘Perhaps he cannot.’ Svenson sighed ruefully. ‘Do not forget, the man believes his alchemical religion. We mistake him if we seek only reason.’

Chang knew Svenson was right – he had seen the unsettling glow behind Vandaariff’s eyes – yet he said nothing about the ‘elemental’ glass cards, or the too-rapid restoration of his own strength. He ought to have described the whole thing then and there – if there was any man to make sense of things, it was the Doctor – but such disclosure would have led to a public scrutiny of his wound. Chang waited until Svenson put more coal in the stove before carefully stretching the muscles of his lower back. He felt no pain or inhibition of movement. Was it possible that Vandaariff had merely healed him, and that the others had stared only at the vicious nature of the scar?

A faint but high-pitched gasp came from behind Miss Temple’s curtain. The three men looked at each other.

‘Celeste?’ asked Svenson.

‘Do go on,’ she replied quickly. ‘It was but a splinter on my chair.’

Svenson waited, but she said nothing more. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Goodness, yes. Do not mind me in the least.’

The trousers were not completely dry, but Chang reasoned that wearing them slightly damp would settle the leather more comfortably around his body. To hide his wound from Svenson he made a point of shucking off his blanket with his back to the wall. Tucking in the silk shirt, stained by its time in the canal, he caught a flicker of movement at the edge of the curtain. Had she been peeking? Disliking the entire drift of his thoughts, Chang strode past the others and slipped into the cold afternoon sun.

The hut was surrounded by squat pine trees. Chang did not relish another bare-footed tramp through twigs and stones, but saw no alternative, and so set off, keeping to the mud and dry leaves. As he reached the other huts, he saw one whose door hung open several inches. Smoke rose from the chimney – indeed it now came from several huts, none of which had seemed occupied before – and from inside he could hear footsteps.

Chang snapped his head back from the door at the wheeling movement of a pistol being drawn and the click of its hammer.

‘Do not shoot me, Mr Cunsher.’

If Cunsher was in the service of their enemies, this was the perfect opportunity to blow Chang’s head off and explain it away as an accident. But the man had already lowered the gun. Chang stepped inside and nodded to the stove.

‘Our company does not suit you?’

Cunsher shrugged. His accented speech slipped from his mouth as if each ill-fitting word had been oiled. ‘One smoking stove reveals our refuge. Four stoves make a party of stonecutters. Here – for you.’

Cunsher tossed a pair of worn black boots in Chang’s direction. Chang saw the leather was still good and the soles were sound. He wormed his foot inside one, stepped down on the heel, and then rolled his ankle in a circle.

‘It’s a damned miracle. Where did you find them? How did you know the size?’

‘Your feet of course – and then I have looked. Here.’ Cunsher took a pair of thin black goggles from a wooden crate. ‘Used for blasting. The Doctor related your requirements.’

Chang slipped the goggles on. The lenses were every bit as dark as his habitual glasses, but came edged with leather to block peripheral glare. Already he felt his muscles relaxing.

‘Thank you again. I had despaired.’

Cunsher tipped his head. ‘And you are dry. The others? We should not wait.’

But Chang subtly shifted his weight so he stood between Cunsher and the door. The man nodded, as if this too was expected, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat.

‘You do not know me. These enemies are strong – of course.’

‘You’re Phelps’s man.’

Between the thick brim of his hat and the even thicker band of hair below his nose, Cunsher’s face was lined and his eyes were as brown and sad as a deer’s. ‘You are like me, I wonder. We have stories – stories we cannot tell. Your Ministry had business where I lived, a business that in time allowed me to … execute a relocation.’

‘And you have served Phelps since? Served the Ministry?’

‘Not in its most recent campaign – which has assailed you, and whose part in it my employer most earnestly repents. But otherwise. I was abroad.’

‘Macklenburg?’

‘Vienna. When in time I came back –’

‘Phelps was gone.’

‘What is not gone? All your nation. One has seen such change elsewhere.’

‘Because a crust of parasites is getting scraped off the loaf? Worse could happen.’

Cunsher caught a tuft of moustache in his teeth and chewed. ‘Parasites, yes. Hate the oppressors, Cardinal Chang – there I am with you. But fear the oppressed, especially if they receive a glimpse of freedom. Their strength is, how to say, untrained.’

Cunsher reached into the wooden crate and came up with a small cracked teapot in the shape of an apple.

‘I had thought to make tea for the young lady,’ he said glumly. ‘There does not seem now the time.’

His body low, as if he were discerning the way by smell, Cunsher led them to a rutted cart road, and along it to the railway station at Du Conque.

As they waited for the train, Miss Temple stood apart under the station eaves, frowning at a faded schedule posting, for all the world the same insufferable girl who had made Chang and Svenson swear an oath on the roof of the Boniface. Chang found himself annoyed by her standing apart. Did she expect him to make a point of walking over to inquire after her health?

Svenson spoke of the need to search the train for any agents from Raaxfall and Chang grunted his agreement. In the presence of Phelps he could hardly speak freely, though the change in Svenson was clear. The Doctor’s starched manner had been leeched by loss to the brittleness of an old man’s bones. Quite casually, for he was abashed to realize he had not yet done so, Chang asked the date. Phelps informed him it was the 28th.

Two months since Angelique had died. Chang wondered what would have become of Angelique had she possessed Miss Temple’s privilege – then scoffed at his own sense of injustice. Angelique well born would have tolerated his presence even less.

The train came at last. When the conductor arrived, Miss Temple opened her clutch bag, speaking tartly to Phelps. ‘I assume you have money for yourself and your man. I will pay for the Doctor and Chang.’

Phelps sputtered and felt in his coat pocket for a wallet of wet bills. Miss Temple took her tickets and stuffed them into the clutch bag with her change.

‘I am obliged, my dear –’ began Svenson, but Chang hooked the Doctor’s arm and pulled him out of the compartment.

‘Your idea to search.’

They need not have bothered. Five carriages found no one from the Xonck Armaments works. At the far end, Svenson stopped for a cigarette.

‘As to our return. You have not been in the city. We would do well to avoid the crowds at Stropping.’

‘It can be done.’

Svenson nodded, inhaling sharply enough for Chang to hear the burning paper. Chang sighed, feeling obliged and resenting it.

‘I did not know about Elöise. I am heartily sorry.’

‘We failed her.’

Chang spoke gently. ‘She failed herself as well.’

‘Is that not exactly when we depend upon our friends?’

The silence hung between them, marked by the rhythm of the train.

‘I do not have friends, as a rule.’

Svenson shrugged. ‘Nor I. Perhaps in that way we fail ourselves.’

‘Doctor, that woman –’

‘Rosamonde?’

‘The Contessa. I promise you. She will pay.’

‘That is very much my intention.’ Svenson dropped the butt and ground it with his boot.

Returning, they met Miss Temple in the corridor, clearly on her way to find them.

‘Is anything wrong?’ asked Svenson.

‘Nothing at all,’ she said. ‘I mean no disrespect to Mr Phelps and his foreign agent – but – both of you – I thought the three of us might be together. If there are things we ought to say. Aren’t there?’

Chang saw Cunsher watching from the far end of the carriage. On being seen, the man retreated.

‘What things?’ asked Svenson.

‘I do not know,’ she replied. ‘But so much has happened and we have not talked.’

‘We have never talked,’ said Chang.

‘Of course we have! At the Boniface, and at Harschmort, and on the airship – and then at Parchfeldt –’ Her eyes met his and she swallowed, unable to go on. Svenson took Miss Temple’s arm and indicated the nearest compartment, which was empty.

She sat in the middle of one side, leaving Chang the choice to sit next to her, which seemed too forward, or opposite – where he installed himself against the window. The choice passed to Svenson, who settled on Chang’s side, leaving a seat between them. Miss Temple looked at each man in turn, her face reddening.

She took a deep breath, as if to start again, but only let it out with a slump of her shoulders. Svenson slipped out his silver case.

‘Did you not just have one?’ asked Chang waspishly.

‘They do sharpen the mind.’ Svenson clicked the case shut and tapped the cigarette three times upon it, but did not light it. He cleared his throat and addressed Miss Temple, far too stiffly. ‘Indeed, it has been some time since we three were together. All the days with Sorge and Lina – but you were not strictly with us then, were you Celeste?’

‘You both left me!’

Chang rolled his eyes.

‘O I know you had reasons,’ she added, with an impatience that made Chang smile. She saw the smile and went on with a venom normally reserved for disobedient maids. ‘I have said this to the Doctor, but perhaps you will appreciate that I have passed the last five weeks believing you had both been killed through my own foolishness. It was a terrible burden.’

‘Now we are alive you may unburden yourself, I am sure. Do you wish to dissolve our little covenant and go our separate ways, is that it?’

‘Go?’ She glared at him. ‘How? Where? We all heard that white-haired serpent – that you were the property of a jealous man. Can you walk away? Can the Doctor, after Elöise? Can I? Is that all you think of me?’

Svenson cleared his throat. ‘Celeste –’

‘Our agreement holds. To the death of the Contessa. To the death of the Comte – whatever body holds him. After these things, I do not care.’

Her last words carried an air of drama, and the men exchanged a tactful glance. Again, Miss Temple reacted with fury.

‘Elöise is a corpse because we were not stronger, and both of you – and I – would be rotting too but for blind chance – how many times? I will not have it. Who else will do our work? Who else will stop them?’ She flung herself back and appealed to the ceiling. ‘O this is not what I wanted to say.’

Chang did not require Svenson’s look to know he must say nothing. The Doctor’s voice was gentle. ‘We have all been frightened –’

‘Being frightened is appalling,’ Miss Temple whispered. ‘There is nothing for it but rage, and I am so tired of being angry.’ She looked down at her hands, flushing red, though her eyes remained fierce. ‘I’m sure it is easy for you to laugh.’

‘No, Celeste.’

‘I do not believe you. I do not believe either of you.’

Chang jerked his head to Svenson. ‘What has he done?’

‘He is unpleasantly kind. As if I could forget how I have failed – as if I ought to. You have no idea.’

‘Idea of what?’ asked Svenson.

‘How late. How late it already is.’ Miss Temple abruptly stood, and reached the door before the Doctor had gained his feet.

‘Celeste, wait –’

‘She has Francesca and the book. He has the money to make his madness real.’

But Svenson held out an open hand. ‘All that is true. But please … what else did you want to say? The three of us. When you say it is “late” –’

‘I’m sorry. I would not want to further bruise Mr Phelps’s feelings,’ said Miss Temple. The door slid shut behind her.

Svenson struck a match and puffed his smoke to life. ‘She is agitated.’

This did not strike Chang as worth reply. He recalled the sabre scar across the Doctor’s chest and wondered, not for the first time, what truly drove the man.

‘Celeste has changed. Her sense – her moral sense.’

‘Did she tell you this?’

‘Of course not. I cannot explain it otherwise. She has ever been collected –’

‘Unless she is bursting into tears or a rage, certainly.’

Svenson’s tone grew sharp. ‘Perhaps you have your own answer.’

‘What does that mean – why should I?’

‘You question my observation – I ask for yours.’

‘I’ve no idea in the slightest!’

Svenson passed the hand with the cigarette over his brow, wreathing his head with smoke.

‘We are men. We meet our fate as a duty – as our lot. But her fate surpasses expectation. The book that held the Comte’s corrupted mind – it was in Celeste’s possession. Did you not wonder how she could guide us through the munitions works?’

‘Of course I wondered.’

‘You did not ask.’

‘When should I have done so? When the dock was exploding? In the damned pipe?’

‘Well, that is why, I think. She has touched that book, gazed inside.’

‘Why did you even go to Raaxfall?’

‘I told you, Celeste received a map of the works, in glass, from the Contessa.’

‘And you went! Of all the idiocies –’

‘Our journey saved your life.’

‘Do you think that is the end of it? What else did you accomplish without understanding? What task did you perform for her?’

Svenson rose and stalked from the compartment. Chang suppressed the urge to call the man back. He shut his eyes behind the stonecutter’s goggles and settled deeper in his seat.

His thoughts rushed elsewhere, worrying a phrase of Miss Temple’s like a sore tooth: ‘Whatever body holds him.’ She had referred to the Comte, his essence scattered to Vandaariff, a glass book, even part of Miss Temple herself – and as long as that book existed, what prevented his incorporation into one new victim after another? Chang was not concerned with imaginary incarnations. He could think only about himself, chained to the table, suffering the procession of elemental glass cards. No sleep came.

When the train met the tunnels outside Stropping Station, Chang rejoined the others. He was surprised no one had come to fetch him – taking it either as a measure of respect for his ordeal or disapproval of his temper – and so simply stood and faced them, cracking the knuckles of both hands.

‘The conductor is gone to the front,’ said Phelps.

‘Good. As soon as the train stops we will exit through the rear. Follow me. We will cross the tracks and leave the station in secret.’

They waited at the rear of the train. Miss Temple’s eyes were red. Chang looked to her right hand and saw the fingertips smeared, as if she had been reading newsprint. A bead of black stained her collar.

The train’s brakes seized with a screech and Miss Temple staggered, steadied by Doctor Svenson. Chang peered out of a compartment window. Setting off from the platform at a trot was a squad of brown-coated, truncheon-wielding constables. Across Stropping, similar knots of lawmen prodded passengers into groups, escorting them through the station like criminals.

‘Open the door! We will be stopped any second.’

Cunsher, in the lead, called back, ‘It is locked!’

Chang rushed into the corridor. ‘Kick it open! The place is thick with policemen!’

‘Policemen?’ cried Phelps. ‘But why?’

Chang shouldered through to Cunsher, whose kicks had done nothing. The train gave out the massive hiss of an exhausted dragon. The air was split with police whistles. Svenson pulled them aside and extended the long Navy revolver, firing three rounds point-blank into the lock plate. Chang kicked and the door flew wide. He leapt to the gravel and turned for Miss Temple. A constable shouted to stop. Letting the others come after, Chang raced away, Miss Temple’s hand tight in his, headlong for the nearest train.

‘Under! Under!’ he cried, and dived first. The stones stung his knees and elbows, but Chang rolled out the other side. He caught Miss Temple’s shoulders as her head appeared and they were up and scrambling towards another train. Miss Temple held up her dress (the clutch bag leaping about on its strap), all attention focused on keeping her feet.

Out from under the next train, Chang finally looked back: no police in sight. He sighed with relief. If the search had been particular to them, the constables would not have given up so easily. From the number of officers spread across the station floor, he guessed their orders had been limited to managing passengers in general – and to give chase would have meant leaving other travellers with little or no escort. Besides, lacking Chang’s knowledge of the remote corners of Stropping, the harried lawmen would assume that any fugitives must return to their cordon sooner or later, when their capture would be far less strenuous.

Svenson slithered from under the last train, smeared with soot.

‘You spoke the truth about unrest,’ Chang called.

‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ huffed Phelps, just behind the Doctor.

‘Who could order such measures?’

‘Any number of utter fools,’ Phelps replied grimly. ‘But it means the Privy Council.’

Cunsher emerged after Phelps, holding his soft hat in place as he crawled. Chang took Miss Temple’s hand, proud of how well she had managed. Despite her outburst on the train, this was the same Celeste Temple who’d kept her wits on the airship.

‘This way. There is a climb.’

The side exit to Helliott Street from the railway tracks had always felt like Chang’s private possession, discovered on a pillaged Royal Engineering survey years before and employed sparingly. But now, mounting the metal staircase, his boots scuffed into newspapers, wadded fabric and even empty bottles. Miss Temple pulled her hand free to cover her nose and mouth.

‘Are you not choked? The stench is horrid!’

Chang’s own sense of smell scarcely existed, but as he squinted above them he perceived a huddled shape blocking the way. He climbed and gingerly extended a toe to the pile of rags. It was a man: small, old, and dead for at least a week.

‘Step carefully,’ he called behind, and then to Miss Temple, ‘I should not let your dress drag.’

Two more corpses cluttered the top of the stairs, propped against the iron door like sacks of grain – women, one gashed across her forehead. The wound had suppurated, and bloomed in death like slashed upholstery. The second woman’s face was wrapped in a shawl save for the hanging mouth, showing a line of stumped brown teeth. Chang heaved at the bolt, then kicked the door open. The two bodies toppled into the cold light of Helliott Street. Chang stepped over them onto the cobbles, but as always Helliott Street was abandoned. Cunsher helped him shove the door closed again, sealing the corpses back into their tomb. Chang wiped his hands on Foison’s coat and wondered what had happened to his city in so short a time.

‘At the end of this street is the Regent’s Star,’ he explained, ‘as nasty a crossroads as this city holds. Any of its foul lanes will offer rooms to hide …’ Miss Temple had been scraping something from her boot, but now looked up to meet his gaze. ‘Unless anyone has another suggestion.’

‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ she replied. ‘I did not think – or rather thought I could find our enemies only by their own clues – in any event, I am a goose for not perceiving the significance of my dressmaker, Monsieur Masseé. As you may imagine, a woman known to have money is besieged like Constantinople: she must submit to this fashion, that fabric, this fringe, or, if you please, a perfectly unnecessary toque. And so used am I to this beseechment, even from dear Monsieur Masseé, that I did not mark a suggestion some days ago to avail myself of an elegant bolt of fabric sworn to have arrived straight from Milan. Indeed, I rejected the offer out of hand – crimson silk is not only beastly expensive, but also unseemly for anyone not in an Italian opera. And yet I thought only of myself, not of who would buy that rarest, exquisite silk, in that colour, demanding a specific complexion and temperament.’

She raised her eyebrows expectantly, waiting.

‘You think the Contessa desires new dresses?’ asked Phelps. ‘Now?’

‘All her things are lost at the St Royale. It was an entire bolt of cloth. A woman of fashion wanting any of it would buy all of it, to prevent anyone else from duplicating her prize. We need only find who did buy the fabric, and where it was delivered.’

‘So you do not literally know where she is?’ ventured Svenson.

Miss Temple rolled her eyes. ‘Monsieur Masseé’s salon is directly down the Grossmaere. Shall we?’

‘Of course not,’ broke in Mr Phelps. ‘Look at us! We cannot dream to enter such an emporium – and you yourself could only do so by presuming upon a very established familiarity. Miss Temple, you have been immersed in a canal. You offer to expose yourself gravely for our benefit, but whatever information you hope to acquire will be more dearly bought, if not rendered beyond price, if such bedraggled men as we come with you –’

‘Do you think I care for such exposure? I am more than willing to pay for what I ask.’

‘Society is not only a matter of money,’ said Phelps.

‘Of course it is!’

‘For all your pride,’ Phelps answered harshly, ‘Roger Bascombe was not a titled prince. Despite the advantages some wealth may have afforded you, Miss Temple, real status is something you have not glimpsed.’

Miss Temple scowled. ‘I have never found disdain for money to be a compelling force.’

‘Who stands with you now, Celeste?’ asked Svenson quietly. ‘Are we swayed by your banknotes?’

Miss Temple threw up her hands. ‘That is not the same at all!’

‘You will be seen,’ insisted Phelps. ‘When all of this is over, if you do expect to retain any place in society –’

‘I have no place!’ Miss Temple shouted. ‘I am a New World savage! And I expect this present business to end my life!’

She turned on her heel down the narrow canyon of Helliott Street. The four men avoided each other’s gaze, watching her small form diminish.

‘Deftly managed all round,’ muttered Svenson.

‘But the idea,’ protested Phelps, ‘that a ridiculous bolt of fabric –’

‘Hiding is not about concealment,’ said Chang, ‘but revelation. A fugitive is given away just like an animal – by instincts that aren’t, or can’t be, denied. A badger spreads its scent. The Contessa has her finery.’

‘I should look in the home of some sympathetic great lady,’ agreed Cunsher, ‘where the signs you mention may be laid to another’s appetite.’

‘But she has the child,’ said Svenson. ‘Francesca Trapping would be a burden.’

Chang shook his head. ‘For all we know, the girl is chained in a wardrobe, licking glue from hatboxes to stay alive.’

Phelps wrinkled his nose. ‘Cardinal Chang –’

‘Licking hatboxes if she’s lucky.’ Chang stepped to Svenson and slapped the dust from his coat. ‘Doctor, since your uniform suggests some respectability, will you run after Miss Temple so she does not launch on any additional journeys alone? Phelps, I would suggest you visit the offices of the Herald and locate the full text of this clipping about the Comte’s salon. Mr Cunsher, perhaps you might discover whether any further red envelopes have arrived at the Hotel Boniface. As we near the end of business hours, I recommend speed. Let us meet in two hours at some public place. St Isobel’s statue?’

He turned sharply to leave, but Svenson called behind him, ‘What of you? What will you do?’

‘Find a fresh pair of stockings!’ Chang shouted back. Under his breath, he muttered, ‘And wrap them tight around Jack Pfaff’s neck.’

Ten minutes took Chang to the river. The streets were filled with huddled figures – men passing bottles, children watching his passage with large eyes, women with hopes as cold and distant as a star. He assumed these were foreign dregs, washed into the city without language or a trade, but from snatches of conversation – and cries for money he ignored – he realized they were displaced citizens, refugees in their own city. Chang increased his pace. He had no wish for any entanglement, nor for the constables these unfortunates would inevitably attract.

To his right lay a fat Dutch sloop, painted the warm yellow of a ripened pear. The craft was anchored well out in the river, and on its deck stood armed men. He had seen such caution before, with especially valuable cargo, but the sloop was not alone. In fear of pillage, the entire river was choked with vessels keeping a night-time distance from the bank.

The building on the corner of his own street remained derelict and Chang entered through an empty window. He drew one of Foison’s knives, but advanced without incident to the roof. He picked his way across four buildings, and dropped in silence to a fifth, landing in a crouch. The windows around him glowed with candles and lamps, but no sign of habitation came from his own open casement. Chang gave the window a shove, waited, then eased himself in. No one. The floor by the window was caked with feathers and white-streaked filth.

Few objects caught Cardinal Chang’s sentiment, and most of those – his red leather coat, his stick, his books – he had already sacrificed. Within his genuine regret for their loss, he nevertheless detected a vein of relief … the more of his past that disappeared, the less he felt its cold constraint.

He lit a candle and, scraping the crust from the sill, pushed the window shut. He quickly stripped off Foison’s clothing and laid out his own – red trousers with a fine black stripe, a black shirt, a fresh black neckcloth and clean stockings. He stood for a moment, exposed to the waist, shaving mirror within reach, but then pulled the fresh shirt on, telling himself he’d neither the light nor time to examine the wound. Cunsher’s boots he kept, but availed himself of stockings, a handkerchief, gloves and a spare set of smoked dark glasses. The goggles had been a godsend, but he could not wear them and fight – too much of his vision was blocked off.

He knelt at his battered bureau, pulled the bottom drawer from its slot – a clatter of pocket watches, knives, foreign coins and tattered notebooks – and set it aside, pausing to pluck up an ebony-handled straight razor and drop it into his shirt pocket. He groped into the open hole, face and shoulder pressed to the chest-of-drawers. His fingers found a catch and an inset wooden box popped free: inside were three banknotes, rolled tight as cigarettes. He tucked them next to the razor, one at a time, as if he were loading a carbine, and turned his attention back to the box. Underneath the bank-notes was an iron key. Chang pocketed the key, dropped the empty box into its space and shoved the drawer back into the bureau.

He shrugged his way back into Foison’s black coat. It was warmer than it looked, and remained a trophy after all.

The Babylon lay on the edge of the theatre district proper, convenient to several notorious hotels – no surprise, given that its stock in trade lay less in strictly recognizable plays than in ‘historical’ pageantry, with the degree of accuracy proportionate to the lewdness of the costumes. The only offering he’d seen – whilst stalking a young viscount whose new title had prompted a naive rejection of past debts – Shipwreck’d in the Bermudas, featured sprites of wind and water, strapping seamen, and shapely natives clad in leaves that tended to scatter before the mischief of said sprites. Befitting an institution so shrewdly dedicated to fantasy, the Babylon permitted no crowd of admirers at its stage door – an alley where no money could be made. Instead, its performers escaped the theatre through a passage to the St Eustace Hotel next door, with both champagne and easy rooms in staggering distance, from all of which the owners of the Babylon exacted a share.

The rear door had attracted the attention of at least one man of secrecy and cunning. Cardinal Chang strode to it unobserved and opened the lock with his recovered skeleton key, determined to cut Pfaff’s throat at the slightest provocation.

It was too early for even the curtain-raising circus acts, but backstage would soon fill with stagehands (often sailors with their knowledge of ropes and comfort with heights) and performers, getting ready for their work. Chang found such entertainments dire. Was there not ample pretence in the world, enough mannered screeching – why should anyone crave more? No one in Chang’s acquaintance shared his disgust. He knew without discussing the matter that Doctor Svenson admired the theatre greatly – perhaps even the opera, not that the distinction mattered to Chang: the more seriously a thing was taken by its admirers, the more fatuous it undoubtedly was.

The man he pursued loved the theatre above all things. Chang found a wooden ladder, bolted to the wall, climbing in silence above painted flats and hanging velvet to a narrow catwalk. Jack Pfaff adored beauty but lacked the money to join the ogling fools in the St Eustace, settling to be a hungry ghost in the shadows. Past the catwalk was another lock, the opening of which must ruin any hope of surprise. Chang did not need surprise. He turned his key and entered Jack Pfaff’s garret.

Mr Pfaff was not home. Chang lit a candle by the sagging bed: peeling walls, empty brown bottles, a rotten, rat-chewn loaf, jars of potted meat and stewed fruits, once sealed with wax, knocked on their sides and gobbled clean, a pewter jug near the bed with an inch of cloudy water. Chang opened Pfaff’s wardrobe, an altar of devotion filled with bright trousers, ruffled cuffs, cross-stitched waistcoats and at least eight pairs of shoes, all cracked and worn, yet polished to a shine.

Pushed against the far wall, angled with the slant of the rooftop, was a desk fashioned of wood planks laid across two barrels. A square of newsprint had been spread, and atop it lay an assortment of glass.

Most might have come from a scientist’s laboratory – fragile coils to aid condensation, slim spoons and rods – but two pieces caught Chang’s eye. The first was broken, but Chang recognized it all the same – a thin bar ending in a curled circle: half of a glass key. The Contessa had described keys that allowed a person safely to examine the contents of a glass book – and then asserted that all such keys had been destroyed. Chang turned the fragment in his hand. The original keys had been made by the Comte from indigo clay. The broken one in his hand was as clear as spring water.

The second piece was more confounding still: a thin rectangle, the twin of the Comte’s glass cards, yet so transparent that it might have been cut from a window. Chang held the card to his eye without any effect whatsoever … yet its size, like the construction of the key, could be no accident. Someone without a supply of indigo clay was nevertheless learning to make the necessary objects.

The city was full of glassworks large and small – no doubt Pfaff had isolated the proper one after a great deal of legwork. Chang searched the desk, under the newspaper, even lifting the planking to examine the barrels, but found no papers, no list, no helpful notes. Not that note-taking was Pfaff’s style. The information would be in his head and nowhere else.

Apart from the wardrobe, Pfaff’s possessions were few and without character. Crammed in a box and set on the street, they would denote no particular man. Chang thought of his own rooms, so recently rummaged. His books of poetry might offer a measure of identity – but was a taste for words so different from that for gaudy clothing? Would Pfaff ever come back to his rat’s nest above the theatre? Would Chang ever return to his own den? He had longed for his rooms – but the place answered his deeper need no more than a dream. Like a wolf whose forest has been cut down, Chang knew his life had irrevocably changed, that in some profound way it was over. The crime, the corruption, the violence, everything that fed him had only become more virulent. He ought to feel alive, surrounded by dark opportunity. But change was not a force Cardinal Chang enjoyed. He blew out the candle and descended quickly.

As he stepped off the ladder a giggling woman dressed as a shepherdess burst in from the corridor beyond, no doubt accustomed to the always-closed rear door providing a private alcove. She stopped dead – Chang’s glasses had slid down his nose – and screamed. Behind her stood a shirtless man in trousers of white fleece – a costumed sheep. The woman screamed again, and Chang’s left hand shot out, taking hold of her jaw. He shoved her into the man, throwing them off balance, and swept out the razor. The pair gaped up at him. Chang wheeled away. He strode down the alley, angry at how close he had come to carving them both, his jaw still tight with the desire to have done it.

He had an hour before meeting the others, not that he cared to keep them waiting – but how could he replicate Pfaff’s labour in an hour? And where was Pfaff now? Had his investigation taken him too near the Contessa? Did he still trail her or had he been killed? If he had fled, it had not been to his garret. Was there any way to guess where the man had gone to ground? One possibility was a brothel. Miss Temple would have advanced him money …

He tried the South Quays. Pfaff was not there. Chang spoke to the strong men minding the door and then to the skeletal Mrs Wells, whose surprise at finding Cardinal Chang alive actually distracted her from demanding a fee for their conversation. Back on the foul cobbles of Dagging Lane, Chang frowned. However early the hour, he had never seen the South Quays so quiet – he could not ever remember actually being able to hear the fiddle players scraping away in the main parlour. Was Mrs Wells so worried as to seek goodwill from a villain like Chang? As he could imagine no person of less sentiment than the beak-nosed brothel-mistress, he had to admit the disturbing possibility.

Pfaff could have found a room at any of twenty waterfront inns, but Chang had no more time to search. He made his way from the river, keeping to the wider streets. The narrow alleys remained thick with the disaffected poor, and he’d no care to arouse either their resentment or his own sympathies. Chang stopped abruptly – sympathy and resentment, that was it exactly. Pfaff’s pride: he would seek a refuge where he felt protected, not anonymous. Chang had not wanted to show his face so soon, but there was one obvious place he could not avoid.

By the time he reached the Raton Marine, mist had risen and the tables outside had been abandoned. Chang pushed his way in and crossed to Nicholas, behind the bar. Both men ignored the sudden rustle of whispers.

‘I was told you were dead.’

‘An honest mistake.’ Chang nodded to the balcony and its rooms for hire. ‘Jack Pfaff.’

‘Is he not doing your business?’

‘The men he hired have been killed. Pfaff has probably joined them.’

‘The young woman –’

‘Misplaced her trust. She came here for help and found incompetence.’

Nicholas did not reply. Chang knew as well as anyone the degree to which the barman’s position rested on his ability to keep secrets, to take no favourites – that the existence of the Raton Marine depended on its being neutral ground.

Chang leant closer and spoke low. ‘If Jack Pfaff is dead, his secrets do not matter, but if he is alive, keeping his secrets will quite certainly kill him. He told you – I know he told you, Nicholas – not because he asked you to keep his trust, but because he wanted to brag, like an arrogant whelp.’

‘You underrate him.’

‘He can correct me any time he likes.’

Nicholas met Chang’s hard gaze, then reached under the bar and came up with a clear, shining disc the size of a gold piece. The glass had been stamped like a coin with an improbably young portrait of the Queen. On its other side was an elegant scrolling script: ‘Sullivar Glassworks, 87 Bankside’. Chang slid it back to the barman.

‘How many lives is that, Cardinal?’ drawled a voice from the balcony above him. ‘Or are you a corpse already?’

Chang ignored the spreading laughter and stepped into the street.

He broke into a jog, hurrying past the ships and the milling dockmen to a wide wooden rampway lined with artisans’ stalls. It sloped to the shingle and continued for a quarter of a mile before rising again. Once or twice a year the Bankside would be flooded by tides, but so precious was the land – able to deal directly with the water traffic (and without, it was understood, strict attention to such notions as tariffs) – that no one ever thought to relocate. Remade again and again, Bankside establishments were a weave of wooden shacks, as closely packed as swinging hammocks on the gun deck of a frigate.

The high gate – as a body Bankside merchants secured their borders against thievery – was not yet closed for the night. Chang nodded to the gatekeepers and strolled past. Number 87 was locked. Chang pressed his face to a gap near the gatepost – inside lay an open sandy yard, piled with barrels and bricks and sand. The windows of the shack beyond were dark.

His appearance alone would have caught the attention of the men at the gate, and Chang expected that they were watching him closely. He knew his key would not fit the lock. In a sudden movement Chang braced one foot on the lock and vaulted his body to the top of the fence and then over it. He landed in a crouch and bolted for the door – the guards at the gate would already be running.

The door was locked, but two kicks sheared it wide. Chang swore at the darkness and pulled off his glasses: a smithy – anvils and hammers, a trough and iron tongs – but no occupant. The next room had been fitted with a skylight to ventilate the heat and stink of molten glass. Long bars of hard, raw glass had been piled across a workbench, ready to be moulded into shape. The furnace bricks were cold.

No sign yet of the guards. Past the furnace was another open yard, chairs and a table cluttered with bottles and cups. In the mud beneath lay a scattering of half-smoked cigarettes, like the shell casings knocked from a revolver. The cigarette butts had been crimped by a holder. Behind another chair lay a ball of waxed paper. Chang pulled it apart to reveal a greasy stain in the centre. He put it to his nose and touched the paper with his tongue. Marzipan.

Across the yard lurked a larger kiln. Inside lay a cracked clay tablet: a mould, the indented shapes now empty, used with extreme heat to temper glass or metal. Each indentation had been for a different-shaped key.

From the front came voices and the rattling of the gate. To either side of the kiln stood a fence separating the glassworks from its neighbours. From the right came the scuttle of poultry. Chang picked up a brick and heaved it over. The crash sparked an cacophony of squawking. He then vaulted the opposite fence, away from his diversion, landing on a pile of grain sacks. At once he continued to the next fence, vaulting it and then three more in turn, meeting only one dog – a speckled hound as surprised by Chang’s arrival as he by it – and no human bold enough to interfere. The final leap set him on a stack of wooden crates stuffed with straw. Whether they held exotic fruit, blocks of ice or Dresden figurines, he never knew. He straightened his spectacles and walked without hurry past a family sitting to supper, out the front, and away from the curious crowd converging on the disturbance four doors down.

He did not doubt Pfaff had been there. Was that why it had been abandoned? The crimped cigarettes conjured up the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza. Was the marzipan a treat to buy Francesca Trapping’s good behaviour? Chang was late to meet the others, but even if he’d two more hours to search it hardly mattered – the trail was dead.

He hurried north, slowed by streets crowded not only with the disaffected but also with all sorts of respectable men and women, wreathed in the grim determination of travellers at a railway station. Chang pushed on with an unpleasant foreboding. The crowd’s destination was his own.

When he finally reached St Isobel’s, Chang had to crane his head to see the saint’s statue. Screeching street children dashed across his path, as high-spirited as feral dogs. The crowd around him recoiled – first from the children and then more earnestly from the black coach cracking forward in their wake. The driver lashed his team, threatening the whip to anyone in his way. The coach windows were drawn, but, as it swept by, a curtain’s twitch gave a glimpse of the white-powdered wig of a servant. Once the coach was past and the whip out of range, resentment swelled into curses hurled at the driver’s receding head. Chang wormed towards the statue, his patience frayed by the press of bodies.

He realized that he was squinting, despite the hour, and looked up. The sky was aglow with torchlight from the rooftops of the Ministries lining the far side of the square. Was there an occasion he had forgotten? A gala for the Queen? The birthday of some inbred relation – perhaps the exact idiot inside the black coach?

‘Cardinal Chang!’

Phelps waved his arms above the crush. Cunsher and Svenson stood near with Miss Temple dwarfed between them.

‘At last!’ called Phelps. ‘We had despaired of finding you!’

Chang pushed himself through to meet them. ‘What in hell is happening?’

‘An announcement from the Palace,’ Svenson replied. ‘Did you not hear?’

Before Chang could reply that if he had heard he would not have asked, Miss Temple touched Chang’s arm.

‘It is Robert Vandaariff!’ she said excitedly. ‘He has emerged, and will call on the Queen and Privy Council! Everyone looks to him for rescue! Have you ever seen such a gathering?’

‘We have waitied for you,’ Phelps yelled above the noise, ‘ but our thought is to move closer and observe.’

‘Perhaps even brave a rear entrance to the Ministries,’ added Svenson.

Chang nodded. ‘If he meets the Queen, there will be a regiment around them – but, yes, let us try.’

They edged around the great statue, the martyr scoldingly content in her sacrifice. Chang tugged Svenson’s sleeve and gestured to Miss Temple, who had taken the Doctor’s other hand. Svenson nodded. ‘The fabric was gone, and all purchased by a single customer.’

‘Who?’

‘Not who so much as where.’ Svenson pointed to the row of tall white buildings. ‘Sent to the Palace.’

‘The Queen?’

‘Or someone well placed at court.’

‘That could be one of five hundred souls.’

‘Still, it fits with where we thought the Contessa might be hiding.’

Chang glanced at Miss Temple. ‘You were right after all, Celeste.’

‘I was indeed.’

It was not a remark Chang had any desire to answer, so he called to Cunsher. ‘Did Pfaff leave word at the Boniface?’

Cunsher shook his head.

‘The Contessa?’

Cunsher shook his head again.

‘Anything?’

‘The maid is frightened.’

Before Chang could ask Phelps about the Herald clipping, the air was split by the bray of trumpets. Horsemen in bright cuirasses had formed a line between the crowd and the Ministries and pushed forward to clear a lane. Every third horseman had a brass trumpet to his lips, while the men in between rested drawn sabres against one shoulder. The crowd gave way.

Chang searched for some other avenue. He saw the black coach again, in the thick of the crowd, and a figure – only half seen – slipping from it. At once the driver whipped his team into motion. But who had been left behind?

‘What is it?’ Phelps went to his toes, following Chang’s gaze. ‘Do you see Vandaariff?’

The trumpets came again and Svenson touched Chang’s shoulder. Behind the horsemen came a train of coaches, skirting the square. In an open brougham sat Robert Vandaariff, hatless, waving to the sea of staring faces. Lord Axewith of the Privy Council sat opposite. They swept through the ceremonial iron gate that marked the Palace proper.

‘Mr Ropp!’

Miss Temple pointed across the crowd. It took a moment for Chang to place the man she meant – barrel-chested in a black greatcoat. She shouted again, her words lost in the trumpets and the noise. Ropp was Pfaff’s man, a former soldier. Had he escaped from Harschmort? Miss Temple pushed towards him. The Doctor tried to catch her hand. Ropp vanished in the shifting crowd, then reappeared. Something was wrong. Ropp walked stiffly, as if his torso were made of steel. Had he been stabbed? Miss Temple hopped up and down, waving. Ropp finally turned to her squeaks. Even at thirty yards Chang was shocked by the man’s dull eyes. Ropp tottered and thrust a hand into his topcoat, as if he were clutching a wound.

Chang’s mind cleared. The white-wigged figure in the coach had been Foison. The barrels at the Raaxfall dock. The boxed carapace of Ropp’s body.

‘For God’s sake – get down!’

Chang tackled Miss Temple, doing his best to cover her body. His ears were split by a deafening roar as a blast of smoke and fire consumed the air. An inhuman high-pitched shrieking, dense as a cloud of arrows, whipped at the crowd, which answered with a chorus of blood-curdling screams. Chang raised his head, glasses askew, ears throbbing. All around them bodies were flattened, pulped, writhing – a perfectly scythed circle of destruction. Where Ropp had stood was a scorched and smoking hole. A grey-haired woman thrashed beside Chang, mouth flecked with foam, a blue glass spur embedded in her eye. As he stared, the white orb filled with indigo and the woman’s screams turned from shrill agony to blind wrath.