If she loved another man—Trapping or Xonck—what did it change? And why was it so surprising, such terrible men? When did love ever care for facts? Did Corinna moldering in a grave shift Svenson's feeling for her?
THE TWILIGHT was just creeping from the hills when he came to a wider road, rutted by the passage of mining carts. He hoped with the appearance of the road that the town was near, but after another half an hour the Doctor stopped for a drink from his water bottle, sweat under his collar. He looked around him. His gaze was taken by a stand of high black stones, each the size of a house but sharply upthrust through the earth, one on top of the other, like a spectacularly unfortunate tangle of teeth. If he did not think the town so close, he would have investigated it at once for a campsite. He corked the bottle and returned it to the rucksack.
He heard a noise—perhaps a bird, perhaps an animal, but not the wind—faint, but coming clearly from the stones. The Doctor stepped off the road, his pace quickening to a run, boots clumping over the knotted grass.
“Is someone here?” he called aloud, his own voice sounding foolish after so long in silence. The clearing was abandoned, but there was a ring of blackened rocks for a fire, flat slabs to sit or sleep upon, and even a collection of coal, most likely stolen from the mines, or from an unguarded scuttle in the town.
In answer came the same huffling wail that had reached him on the road. It was above him. He dug a candle from his coat and dragged a match on the rock to light it. Some ten feet above he saw a cracked seam between two larger stones, not a cave as such, but large enough to shelter something small. The smooth surface of the rock face below it gleamed wet. He knew it at once for blood, and called to whoever had crammed themselves into the tiny crease.
“What has hurt you? Is it an animal? Can you come down? I am a doctor—if you are injured, I can help.”
He received no reply. The rivulets of blood were smeared and spattered and dragged. The injured person had done his best to climb away, even as his attacker had persisted in trying to reach him.
“I am here to help you,” called Svenson. “I cannot get up—you must come down! Who are you? What is your name?”
In an abrupt answer the figure toppled off the rock, nearly knocking Svenson flat. He raised his arms without thinking and managed to half catch the bloody, windmilling tangle of limbs… but as he held the weight he saw it was only a boy. Svenson eased him to the ground, recovered the candle, and lit another match, moving the light to identify what wounds he could.
“What is your name?” he repeated, dropping his voice to a soothing whisper. The boy did not reply. He had been gashed at the throat and chest, and then repeatedly along his legs. Svenson could only too vividly imagine how these last had been received—the boy's assailant relentlessly scrabbling up the rock, slashing again and again at whatever could be reached, the cave so shallow that the child had not room enough to pull his legs clear. Svenson winced at a brutal gash below the child's knee, a shining, near-black drag of blood… then reached out to touch it. The dark shining line was not blood at all. He held the candle close. The line was blue… a shooting vine of glass beneath the boy's opened flesh. The Doctor hoisted the child in his arms and stumbled back to the road.
HIS SHOUTING brought a rush of people from the doorways of Karthe. Svenson handed the boy into the arms of others and gasped out that he was a doctor and required a table and some light. The townsmen did not question him—neither his words nor his appearance—as he removed his bloody coat and rolled up his sleeves, stepping into someone's kitchen, vaguely aware of the pale faces of a woman and her children as they cleared the table and attempted to lay down a sheet. Svenson waved it away.
“It will merely be ruined,” he said, and then turned to the nearest man—older than he and with luck someone in authority. “I found him in a stand of black rocks outside the town. He has been attacked— perhaps by an animal. Do you know him? Do you know his name?”
“It is Willem,” the man replied, unable to shift his gaze from the blood crusting the boy's mouth and nose. “A groom at the stable. His father—”
“Someone should find his father,” said Svenson.
“The father has been killed this night.”
THE BOY did not regain his senses before death. Given the absence of opiates or ether, Svenson counted it a blessing. The Doctor had stanched the deeper cuts at the throat and across the ribs, but neither of these had been mortal. Instead, he blamed the many gashes across each leg, all with some trace of blue glass in the wound. He recalled the freezing, snapping deaths of Lydia Vandaariff and Karl-Horst von Maasmärck on the airship, the chemical reaction of indigo blue glass and human blood, and was astonished the boy had remained alive as long as he had. He took the once-proffered sheet and pulled it over the body, shutting the child's eyes with a sad sweep of his hand.
Svenson looked up and saw the ring of faces. How long had he worked to save the boy? Thirty minutes? He hoped the effort had at least gone some way toward establishing his own good intentions. He nodded to the woman, her wide-eyed children around her (had no one thought to shoo them from the room?), and indicated the peacoat bundled over a chair. She handed it to him and the Doctor dug out his case, selected a cigarette, and leaned toward a tallow light in a wooden dish next to the dead boy's arm. Svenson straightened, exhaled, and cleared his throat.
“My name is Svenson, Captain-Surgeon Abelard Svenson from the Macklenburg Navy. Macklenburg is a German Duchy—perhaps you do not know it. Through a complicated set of events I have found myself ashore in your country, some days' travel north, in the company of several companions. Upon nearing Karthe I heard this boy cry out. He had climbed into a nook in the rocks, where something or someone attempted to drag him down with a savage determination. I find it hard to conceive of a reason any sane person should so fiercely desire the death of a child. Is that stand of rocks someone's property? Was the boy trespassing?”
He had no interest in the answer to either question, but as long as he diverted conversation from the blue glass he would have that much more time to make sense of the situation himself. One of the men was answering him—the rocks were common land, no one would have harmed the boy for his presence there. Svenson nodded, reminding himself to search the boy's pockets as soon as he had a private moment.
“But you say his father is newly dead as well?”
The man nodded.
“Where? How?” He paused at the silence in the room. “Murdered?”
The man nodded again. Svenson waited for him to speak. The man hesitated.
“Could it have been the same killer?” the Doctor asked. “Perhaps the boy ran to a hiding place he thought would be safe.”
The man looked at the other faces around him, as if asking each a question he did not care to voice. Then he turned back to Svenson.
“You should come with us,” he said.
IT WAS exactly like the murdered grooms—the gaping throat that on first glance seemed simply an especially vicious laceration but that upon further inspection betrayed a substantial removal of flesh. Svenson held a candle close to the wound, aware that his examination caused the townsfolk around him to blanch and turn away. He was certain, especially after seeing the murdered boy's legs, that the father had been killed by a weapon of blue glass.
He tilted the man's head, frowning at the discolored band of skin that stretched on either side of the wound. He looked up, and saw the head townsman—who had on their walk to this house introduced himself as Mr. Bolte—notice his discovery.