His laughter stopped short in a cough and he spat again.

“Your mood seems strangely merry,” said Chang.

“Why shouldn't it be? Because I am dying? It was always possible. Because I'm a stinking leper? Was that not always possible too? Look at yourself, Cardinal. Did your mother breed you for such work? Would her eyes shine with pride at your fine habit? Your high-placed companions? Your virtue?”

“It does not seem you are anyone to speak of family. What are you but an inheritance, and the debauchery that came with it?”

“I could not agree more,” growled Xonck, with all the spite of a viper that has bitten itself in its rage.

CHANG RISKED another glance at the high crater's edge. No bullet followed, but he tucked his head back into cover. Xonck's eyes were closed but twitched like a dreaming dog's. Chang called to him.

“Your former associates have not welcomed you with affection.”

“Why should they?” Xonck muttered hoarsely.

“Does not your Process ensure loyalty? Slavish devotion?”

“Don't be a fool, the Process harnesses ambition. That is the risk of ruling by fear. As long as they know disobedience will be crushed, our adherents remain fiercely loyal. If, however—” and here Xonck chuckled too giddily “—the masters lose their hold, or become so ill-mannered as to die, these restraints vanish. We are sunk to their level— or they raised to ours—all the more, since knowledge itself is the most leveled field of all.”

“Because the Comte is dead?”

“Very bad form, in my own opinion.” Xonck thrashed his head— as if struggling with an unseen hand around his neck—and then gasped aloud.

“But Cardinal, you forget my family business—I am not such a dilettante as I may appear. Perhaps for all your reputation for learning, you are…”

Xonck nudged his plastered arm at the destruction around them. To his chagrin, Chang registered for the first time the striations of force amidst the fire… clear signs of an initial and massive point of ignition.

“An explosive shell.”

“Perhaps even two,” replied Xonck. “Detonated after the Comte's machinery had been removed. Not one of his infernal machines is here. Just as in his laboratory—”

“You're wrong.”

“I am not! Smell the cordite within the ash!”

“I do not mean here.” Chang could not smell anything and was annoyed to have missed so obvious a clue. “In the laboratory there was no detonation. That was a fire, started with the Comte's chemicals. Though again his things—or at least the paintings—had been removed.”

“Perhaps they did not care to set off ordnance indoors.”

“This destruction is not the act of someone who cares.”

Xonck smiled. “So… we have two sources of fire. Then there must also be two perpetrators, for anyone with access to our munitions has access to quantities. Neither deed can be laid to our surviving glass creature, for she quite convincingly asked me these very same questions in the garden.”

“Then who has done it?”

“Lord knows. Where are your own earnest compatriots?”

“I have no idea. Dead?”

“How cold you are, Cardinal.”

“I thought you were an ardent admirer of the Contessa.”

“Well, you know, who isn't?”

“You tried to kill her before my eyes.”

“Again, who doesn't—eventually? Did you not yourself, on several occasions?”

“Actually, I never did,” replied Chang, surprised that this was actually true. “I should be happy to do so now.”

“How lovely to have things in common.”

Xonck looked up at the lip of the crater. There were no gunshots.

“The Contessa took your little trunk, didn't she?” Chang called.

Xonck winced at some internal pain—the blue glass ripping at the flesh it was frozen against—and merely grunted his assent.

“What was inside it?” asked Chang. “The Comte's device?”

Xonck grunted again at a still sharper pain and then, when the pain did not give way, kicked his boot at the ground, muffling a louder cry through force of will, breathing through his nose like a bull. When the attack at last subsided, the man's face was even more spent, the red around his eyes deepened to scarlet and his teeth the color—whether this was the enamel itself or the slick discharge, Chang could not tell—of lapis lazuli stones. Strands of blue stretched between his lips with each huffing breath.

“It is true,” Xonck whispered at last. “I must recover it… as I must recover my book… as I must locate the requisite power… and the requisite vessel… all true… and all unlikely. I am not a fool, Chang. If I hate the proud virtue of a real fool, like—I lose the name—your Captain of Dragoons, men the likes of whom I would happily shoot every day before breakfast… if I hate such virtue it is because… for all my rank and privilege, I have been defined by exclusion. I have studied the limits of what human beings can endure—a study undertaken without scruple, indeed, well aware that such pursuits might consume my own soul away… like Brasilan fish strip the carcass of a bull—have you been to Brasil?”

Chang snorted.

“A pity,” sniffed Xonck. “It is a crucible—destruction of men, of men's souls, on such a scale… an idiot can see what drives his enemies, only a rare man perceives what drives himself. But when men and women are bought and sold so openly… one is oneself devalued… yet made wise. In our civilized society we actually compete for the privilege of being owned by the very foulest of masters. As I am from a family of the foul, I know this to be true.”

“I thought you were describing how you were doomed,” observed Chang dryly.

“Of course.” Xonck laughed. “If only one could put such a thing in a play, its audience must be huge! ‘Francis Xonck to Perish: Extra Performances Added!’”

He shook his head and coughed, but almost immediately Chang could see the man had become rueful again, resistance to self-pity never being—in Chang's observation—a priority of the rich.

“But perhaps I should have died with the rest and been swept beneath the sea. I could have lain still and allowed the water to rise over my face with a hideous serenity. But I do not possess that sort of mind… and so, before you and I make our compact of survival, Cardinal—as it seems we must—I will tell you… a little story.”

Xonck wiped his face. When he spoke again his voice was calm.

THREE CHILDREN, the oldest by enough years to seem more an uncle, never one with whom the younger two shared interests or exchanged secrets—a figure who from his own youth had been occupied with making business out of air—that is, quite literally, from conversation, from cunning speeches both made and overheard… for the father of all three—a sort of king, or more exactly a sort of magician—had left behind a secret, a treasure horde. It was the oldest child's skill to inflame this treasure into an empire, where the secret was sold and resold and refined and resold again, innumerable times, until he became more like a king than their father ever could have hoped, and all around him kings in truth were made to kneel.

“The second and third children were nearly twins, growing up in the shadow not of their father but of their fearsome elder sibling. They had their own portion of inheritance, but not—for he would not allow it—any role in the kingdom. Their lives became nothing but appetite and ease, and no one paid either any mind, save to condemn their sloth, or blanch with disapproval at what new tastes they found. But each possessed an innate inheritance from their father, like the oldest's skill with commerce. The middle child glimpsed the father's secret itself, though she was not schooled, because she was a girl. The youngest saw only the father's lack of fear…”

Xonck paused. “Or perhaps it was not from the father at all, but the mother… she who had been slain by his birth, giving him life no matter that she would die.”