No doubt the barge was rife with rats. She snorted. If the rats knew what was good for them they would steer clear.
Miss Temple snorted again. For the very first time she understood the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza's slovenly room at the St. Royale. With death and desire such constant companions, what attention would a woman like that possibly waste on décor?
Or indeed, thought Miss Temple—curling onto her side to sleep, an animal in its lair—a woman like herself.
Eight. Reticence
THE SHOUTING from the open French doors must have been very loud, for it penetrated—like the first perceived drop of rain out of a thousand others—just enough to disrupt Chang's velvet enthrallment. He was on his knees in Harschmort's garden. Someone was pulling his hand. He turned—his glasses askew on his nose, half his head still surrounded by morning light and perfume, the voices of young women—as the pistol was wrenched from his fingers.
Before him lay the Duke. Francis Xonck slithered from view behind an ornamental boxed juniper. The black-coated Ministry man fired the pistol, the bullet splintering the box near Xonck's foot. Bodies rushed past Chang to cluster around the glass woman, her shattered wrist waving above their heads and steaming blue. The Ministry man's pistol clicked on an empty chamber.
“Reload, Mr. Phelps! Where can he hide?”
Too slowly Chang spun on his knees. The sharp toe of Colonel Aspiche's boot caught him square on the shoulder. The blow knocked Chang onto his back, the whole of his left arm gone numb. Aspiche swept out his saber. Chang scuttled farther away, feet hopelessly tangled, still unable to stand, raising his stick as Aspiche came on with his blade. Chang knew from experience that stabbing or slashing at a man on his back was more difficult than one might assume—cold comfort when he still felt half-asleep. Aspiche cut at Chang's left knee, to maim him. Chang deflected the blow with his stick, cracking the wood.
“Ought I to shoot him?” asked Phelps. He stood quite prudently beyond Chang's reach, the cylinder of the revolver opened out, digging in his waistcoat for brass cartridges. Both men gasped at another sharp silent spasm from Mrs. Marchmoor—some tall fellow grappled to wrap her hand. Chang rose to one knee. Again the impact of her distress had passed him by.
“Cardinal Chang is entirely my business,” barked the Colonel. “Find Mr. Xonck. Predators are most dangerous when they are hurt…”
Aspiche did not bother to feint, but hacked directly at Chang's head. Chang dodged to the side, another chip of wood flying out from his stick. Around them dashed more servants and soldiers, as if he were nothing but an animal being put down in a corner.
He called to Aspiche, “How can you kill Xonck? You underwent the Process! Where is your loyalty?”
“Ask me rather why he—like you—has lived so long!”
Aspiche's curved blade lanced viciously at Chang's stomach. Chang slashed the stick desperately across his body, splintering the tip, and the saber's deflected point disappeared into the earth. Behind them came two more pistol shots—Phelps putting Xonck from his misery—but their sudden sound launched another shattering vibration from Mrs. Marchmoor's mind, and Aspiche flinched.
The vibration did not stop Chang. He flung himself forward. The Colonel stumbled back, flailing wickedly with the blade, but Chang rolled free. Around him a nest of dragoons and servants and Ministry men all took sudden notice of his presence—blades swept from scabbards in every direction. Chang plunged after Xonck around the same boxed juniper—but in three long steps came to an abrupt halt, arms circling to keep his balance, at the sudden edge of the collapsed cathedral chamber, a dizzying slope of jagged, smoking wreckage beneath his feet, dropping at least a hundred feet. Not five yards away stood Phelps. The man raised the pistol straight at Chang's head. Without a second's thought, Cardinal Chang launched himself into the void.
HE LANDED ten feet down on a blackened iron beam and without pause sprung recklessly onto the shattered remains of a jail cell, a fall of perhaps fifteen more feet, the breath driven from his body. His stick flew from his hand, and before he could see where it landed a shot crashed out from above, the bullet pinging like a hammer near his head. Chang writhed over the twisted prison bars, hanging so the metal floor of the cell shielded him—at least until Phelps moved to a better angle. He looked past his dangling legs—a straight drop some sixty feet into a wicked pile of sharp steel that would finish him as neatly as the press of an iron maiden.
Phelps fired again—the bastard had moved around—the bullet sparking near Chang's left hand. Chang swore and began to vigorously swing his body back and forth. The earth wall had fallen in, some yards away, creating at least the pretense of a slope. If he could reach that, there was a chance. He looked up. Phelps stood directly above him, Aspiche at the Ministry man's side. Phelps extended the pistol. Chang kicked out his feet and let go.
WHEN HIS body came to rest—after perhaps as brief a time as ten seconds, but seconds as eventful and bone-shaking as any Chang had ever known—he lay on his back with his legs—fortunately unbroken—stretched out above him. His knees were bleeding and his gloves were torn, and he could feel abrasions on his face that would unpleasantly scab. His dark spectacles had remarkably remained in place (Chang had long ago learned the virtues of a well-tightened earpiece), but his stick was lost in the heights above. Roused to his danger, Chang scrambled into the cover of a buckled sheet of steel—part of the cathedral tower's skin, half-embedded in the ground like the blade of a gigantic shovel. The wreckage around him was so complete and his passage down so chaotic that he'd no idea where he was, or whether his enemies could see him. He peeked around the metal sheet. A shot rang out and he darted back, the bullet ringing harmlessly off the debris. That was one question answered.
In the silence, and quite near, Cardinal Chang heard a distinctive and odious chuckle.
The chuckle was followed by an even more disgusting gagging swallow. Francis Xonck crouched in a nook of mangled ducts and prison bars, just across the clearing from where Chang had come to rest. The wound in his chest had congealed to a sticky cobalt.
By now, Phelps might have been joined by twenty dragoons with carbines.
“I thought you'd been shot,” he called casually to Xonck, keeping his voice low.
“My apologies,” sneered Xonck. “It is a younger son's natural talent to disappoint.”
Chang studied the man, taking his time since neither of them seemed likely to go anywhere soon. Xonck's face was more altered than Chang had realized. The eyes were wild with fever, nostrils crusted, and his blue lips blistered raw. Where his skin was not discolored it was pale as chalk.
The glass woman's fingers had been inside Xonck's body… when her wrist had broken, had they come out? Or were they still inside? What delirium must be swimming through Xonck's head, bearing so much glass in direct proximity to his heart, his lungs, his rushing blood. Yet during their own recent battle in the train car, he'd shown no weakness…
“But you were shot before… I see you've dressed the wound in an extremely sensible fashion.”
Xonck spat a ribbon of clotted indigo onto the broken stones.
“I can only imagine what it's doing to your mind,” continued Chang. “One recalls those African weevils that chew from ear to ear, right through a man's brain. Their victim stays alive the entire time, losing control of his limbs, unable to speak, to reason, no longer noticing when he's fouled himself.”
Xonck laughed, eyes shut tight against his mirth, and playfully stabbed his plaster-cast arm at Chang. “The sensations are singular, Cardinal—you have no idea! The pleasure in action, the impact of feeling, even pain… like having opium smoke for blood, except there is no sleep in it. No, one is most viciously awake!”