But the man was incredibly fast, and lashed out with his plaster-cast fist, catching Chang's shoulder like a hammer. Chang gasped at the impact as if he had been nailed to the wall behind him. The man dug under the black cloak and came out with another dagger-length spike of blue glass.
The man spat a rope of fluid from the side of his mouth and extended the dagger mockingly toward Cardinal Chang's right eye. Chang could not run—he'd only be gashed in the back. His mind ran through each feint and counter-feint he might attempt, and every possible attack—just as he knew his enemy was doing, the entirety of a chess match in one instant.
“She's escaped you,” Chang whispered. “Just like at the stables.”
“No matter.” The man's voice was a slithering limestone grind.
“She will survive us all.”
“You, certainly.”
“You are no portrait of good health.”
“You have no idea.”
Like a bullet from a gun, the man's stone fist swept forward, smashing into the wall as Chang dodged away and then dropped to his knees, just below the dagger hacking at his face. Chang dove forward, catching his opponent around the waist, and bull-rushed him backward into the compartment. The man roared, but in three quick steps was pinned against the shattered window frame, then toppled through with a cry. His flailing boot caught Chang across the face as he fell, knocking the Cardinal to the glass-littered floor. By the time Chang could lurch to his knees and peer out of the window, his mysterious enemy had vanished.
CHANG STOOD wincing at the pain scoring across the whole of his body, catching his rasping breath and taking in the ruined compartment—window and door destroyed, upholstery slashed, the floor scratched and pitted by the glass ground beneath their boots. He took in the fact that the Contessa had never especially feared Chang at all, that her only concern—at the stable and on the train—had been that hooded, implacable killer. The man had chased her from the front of the train toward Chang—what did that mean with regard to the Captain? Chang had assumed the disfigured man was another of the Captain's soldiers, who'd run afoul of the blue glass… but Chang realized that the man—and by extension, the Captain?—had been trying to kill the Contessa. One of the most subtle achievements of the Cabal had been their insinuation into the highest levels of government— suborning powerful figures throughout the Ministries and the Palace to the extent that state policy would be now executed to serve their particular interests. What was more, an entire regiment of dragoons had been reassigned to “unspecified duties” at the Palace, an unprecedented gesture that had allowed the key figures in the Cabal—Minister Crabbé, the Comte, Francis Xonck, the Contessa—to protect their every endeavor with seasoned troops. Chang frowned, for given all of this, what he'd seen made little sense. If the search party had been sent by the Palace, were they not the Contessa's allies?
Was the Captain in the passenger cars or had he talked his way into the engine itself? Chang wanted to leap out the window and run after the Contessa, but knew that stopping the Captain, stopping any discovery of their survival—especially if he did not truly understand who the Captain served—was more important than revenge. Yet if Chang remained on the train, he was now leaving two deadly enemies behind him, when all of his companions would be passing through Karthe village.
But who knew when Svenson and the women might arrive? It could be another week, even more. By driving the Captain and Josephs away from the fishing village, Chang had ensured his companions would be safe there. The Contessa wanted only to escape Karthe, and the disfigured man had shown he would pursue her above anything.
The Contessa was one woman. If no one stopped the Captain delivering his news, Chang and the others would be hunted everywhere, by hundreds of men… and he had left his warning note at the Flaming Star…
The splitting ache in his head prevented further thought. There was no clean choice—either way he risked damning both the others and himself. He needed to sleep, to eat—to eat opium, he thought with no small longing.
Chang staggered against the row of seats. The train was moving. He looked at the dark trackside moving past, weighing the possibility of leaping out, but did not move. The decision had been made.
IT HAD taken the whole of that night's travel to descend from the dark mountains into a land of treeless hills marked, as by the scrawls of a child's pencil, with arbitrary seams of lichen-speckled slate. He had bartered with the trainsmen for some meat and bread and tea. To his great frustration, the Captain was not in the passenger cars, nor the coal wagon, nor the engine. Nothing was said of the ruined compartment—the glass was swept up and the broken doorway stretched with canvas by the time he had finished his search in the forward cars— even if the men seated around the stove cast more than one wary glance at Chang's unsettling eyes and his battered, nonsensical garments. He paced the length of the train, fruitlessly hoping he had overlooked some nook or cupboard, but only frightened the other passengers—three men with business at the mines, an old woman, and two young laborers on their way to shackle their lives to a mill, or one of the new factories setting up outside of the city.
Given that Chang had no way to search the ore cars himself while they were in motion, and barring an open attack on his person, there was nothing he could do for the remainder of the journey.
He did not know who the disfigured man was—either one of the Captain's men…or not. Had the Contessa contaminated some woodsman? Chang shivered to recall the agony of the ground blue glass inside his own lungs. If this fellow had the same torment… was he even in his own mind? And what had been in the strange trunk? The orange felt marked it as salvage from the dirigible… if a priceless glass book had been brought to shore only to smash into weaponry, what else could be still more valuable?
The question made Chang think of the airship. Just when the members of the Cabal had stood at the very brink of success— unimaginable wealth and power all but in their grasp—the suspicions and rivalries between them had been inflamed to open, violent antagonism. Chang had seen it before, thieves turning on each other in the midst of a crime, but these were no common thieves. What they had schemed to steal was nothing less than the free thought of a nation— of many nations—to fashion an empire of oxen. That extreme ambition had fed their fears and distrust of one another, of which the violence on the dirigible was only the final, sudden flowering. Chang knew that Xonck, the Contessa, the Comte, and Crabbé had all hatched their own secret plans against the others—either for insurance or outright betrayal. As he wondered what was in the trunk, he also wondered what private schemes remained in place, like loaded weapons in an unlocked cupboard, just waiting to be found.