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 r
eplied 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 th
em. 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.’
The Chemickal Marriage Page 10