Chang spent the next day paralyzed with waiting, watching the landscape descend from the brown hills to cultivated fields and villages and then small towns, each indicated from afar by its brittle spire. By the time night had fallen again he sat slumped in the seat, his glasses folded in his lap and a hand pressed over his eyes, hating the confinement, hating the docile passengers around him, hating every prim little town he passed. It was ridiculous, patently ridiculous. The woman was dead. He pulled away his hand and looked up, squinting at the yellow lantern light that came from the corridor.
Then for no particular reason he thought of the Contessa on her knees at the trackside. The image was impossibly vivid—her face flushed, hair wild, the scarlet gash on her shoulder. He recalled striking her in the stable, and the exquisite movement of her body as she had stumbled back but kept her feet… the elegance of her pale hand touching her new-bruised jaw… Cardinal Chang covered his eyes with a groan. He was insane.
THE SKY was dark when the train pulled into Stropping Station. Chang dropped down on the gravel trackside a good distance from the main station floor and its crowd. He looked down the line of ore cars, knowing the Captain could be anywhere. The scattered pages of a newspaper blew toward him with a blast of steam from the engine, and Chang reached down to catch one. Although his eyesight made reading anything but the largest type difficult, he'd been gone from the city for days and knew he ought to see where things stood. It was the Courier, an inflammatory, vulgar rag, of two days previous. The headline read “Market Crisis!” Chang sneered—the markets were always in crisis—and allowed his eyes to drift down the page. The other stories seemed no less dire—“Blood-Fever Fear,” “Industry at Standstill,” “Privy Council Delay”—but that was the Courier. Chang balled up the paper and threw it aside.
A flicker of movement caught his eye. Behind the ore cars, between the wheels—for an instant only—had been a shadow. It was a crouching man, and that man was watching him. Chang broke into a jog across the tracks, ducking beneath the railcars until he reached a side exit he'd found on a Royal Engineers' architectural survey plan some years before and employed on numerous occasions since. A quick kick to the half-rusted door, up two stories of metal staircase in pitch black—just slow enough for the Captain to follow—and Chang was groping for the bolt of a small iron door. He paused… smiled at the sounds of footfalls in the darkness below… and emerged onto Helliott Street, narrow and high-walled, and dangerous at anytime to the careless or unarmed. Chang left the door ajar behind him and smiled again, pleased to be back where he knew his way.
Helliott Street fed into the Regent's Star, a square formed by the meeting of five roads and once dominated by the apartments of the old Queen's utterly unregretted father. The district was steeped in the louche sort of traffic those apartments housed—at the Prince's death the Royal apartments had been vacated, but the place only became more deeply the province of the lawless and depraved.
The hideous Stropping clock had marked the time as nine o'clock. Even without being followed, Chang could not go back to his rooms until he knew his status with the law, nor could he show his face at the Raton Marine tavern. Chang knew he must choose a path. But he waited—detecting the slightest squeak of the rusted door—then loudly cleared his throat and spat toward the gutter.
Two men, one of them abnormally large, had stepped forth from the shadows of St. Piers Lane and walked toward him… the exact last thing he needed.
THE LARGE man, whose throat bulged like a toad's above a soiled, tightly knotted cravat, wore a shapeless wool cap pulled close around his ears. Chang knew him to be bald, with a mouth full of worn-to-stump brown teeth, and that his hands, presently in the pockets of a too-small greatcoat, were caged in chain-mail gloves. The second man wore a battered top hat and a green military jacket, all of its gold braid removed. His face was thin, unshaven, and his yellow hair flattened back on his skull with grease. This man's left hand, scratching a groove along his scalp as they advanced, was empty. His right, tucked neatly behind his back, would hold a belled brass cutlass hilt set with a fat, squat double-edged blade. Chang drifted along the square so his back was no longer to Helliott Street. He did not care for the Captain to strike from behind.
“Cardinal Chang,” the big fellow called. “It was said you'd run away.”
“That you'd come to your senses.” The other man shook his head ruefully. “Yet here you are, mad as ever.”
“Horace,” Chang called to the large man, and then with a wry nod to his companion, “Lieutenant Sapp. I suppose I ought to have expected such a meeting.”
“Why is that?” asked Sapp.
“Because I am sought by parties with little knowledge of the town,” said Chang. “Being ignorant, they were certain to employ the likes of you to find me.”
Horace exhaled with a snort and took his chain-sheathed fists from his coat. Chang carefully measured the distance between them— perhaps four feet of cobbled walkway—and exhibited his own empty hands for them to see. “Unfortunately, I am quite helpless.”
Horace snorted again.
“Will you convey me to your employer?” asked Chang.
“We will convey you to the dog-heap,” Sapp told him. “A pleasure I have been anticipating these long years.”
Chang smiled back coolly. “And whose feet are you licking to night, Sapp? Do you even know? Or are you licking something other than a foot and enjoying yourselves too much to care?”
CHANG SNAPPED his head back as Sapp's arm swept forward, attempting—with some skill—to cut a small canal across the width of Chang's throat. The stroke went wide. Sapp slashed again, then feinted at Chang's stomach as Chang hopped back another step, keeping Sapp between him and Horace's meaty fists.
“Slow as ever, Sapp,” observed Chang.
“Choke on your own blood,” snarled the former officer. Sapp had been cashiered for selling his regiment's ammunition to the local population to pay his gambling debts, but persisted in wearing his rank-stripped coat in defiance of his shame.
Sapp stabbed across Chang's face—too close. This time, Chang did not give ground but shifted so the blade shot past, then he seized hold of Sapp's wrist. Sapp tried to pull away, which gave Chang room to kick him viciously in the groin. As the wheezing Sapp crumpled to the cobbles, Chang tore his blade free and called sharply to the big man, who stood murderously flexing his ring-wrapped fingers.
“Stay and think, Horace,” hissed Chang. “As you say yourself, I am mad. It also means I will have no qualms about killing you. I will kill you, Horace. I will bury this blade in your throat if you take one more step in my direction.”
Horace did not move. Sapp whimpered, his breath huffing clouds against the night-wet stone.
“No,” Horace announced. “I'm killing you.” He came at Chang like a bull.
It was all Chang could do not to laugh. For the stinging impact of one blocked fist on his forearm, Chang slashed Sapp's very sharp blade once across Horace's bulging stomach, opening a seething, surging line of red. Horace grunted and swung again. This time Chang merely stepped aside and chopped at the man's extended arm, severing the cords at his elbow. When Horace clutched at the spurting wound with his other hand—his upper body now utterly open—Chang drove the blade hilt-deep into the bulging flesh below the big man's chin. He released the weapon and Horace toppled backward to the street.