The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  “I should appreciate that very much.”

  She saw Soames bite back a comment as the third man marched away at once, a small satisfaction that allowed Miss Temple to enter the room with poise. To her surprise, the door was not locked behind her.

  “Go ahead and sit down.” Phelps gestured with his protruding pink fingers toward the nearest chair. Miss Temple did not move. He stepped into the room.

  “I appreciate the oddness of the occasion. You have no need to be afraid.”

  “I am not afraid,” replied Miss Temple.

  He looked as if he expected her to say more, but being rather afraid indeed, she did not. Phelps turned to Soames. “What is your name again?”

  “Soames. Joseph Soames. One of Lord Acton's special liaisons.”

  “Soames.” Phelps intoned it, committing the name to memory. “Per haps you could discover what delays this woman's tea.”

  SOAMES' FOOTSTEPS echoed down the corridor. Phelps reached into the pocket of his topcoat, pulling out one black leather glove. Still watching her expression—which remained willfully bland—he tugged the glove onto his non-plastered hand and then carefully opened the canvas sack. As if he were unpacking a cobra, Phelps removed a shining blue glass book. He set it down on the table and took two steps away, removing the glove.

  “What was your name again?” he asked, a bit too idly. “Because I feel I have seen you before.”

  “Isobel Hastings. May I ask what happened to your arm?”

  “It was broken,” said Phelps.

  “Did it hurt?”

  “It did indeed.”

  “Does it hurt still?”

  “Only when I am attempting to sleep.”

  “You know, I myself am fascinated by that exact sort of thing— how in the middle of a sleepless night a sore tooth can seem to have become the size of one's entire fist—so much room does it take up in one's thoughts, you see. What did you actually do to break it?”

  “A German doctor broke it for me—at a place called Tarr Manor. Do you know it?”

  “Do you insinuate I ought to?”

  “Heavens no, I merely pass the time.”

  Miss Temple settled herself on one of the chairs, both because she was bored by standing like a servant and to bring the knife in the boot nearer to her hand.

  “I'm sure it is a lesson to steer clear of Germans to begin with,” she observed. “Am I your prisoner?”

  “I will tell you as soon as I know myself,” said Mr. Phelps.

  Mr. Soames returned alone, holding a metal tray with a pot, a stack of cups without saucers, a small jug of milk, and, Miss Temple noted bitterly, not one biscuit on a plate. He stopped abruptly in the doorway, his eyes fixed on the book on the table, then caught himself and turned to Phelps, raising the tray as if to ask where—the table taken—he should put it. Phelps gestured with disdain to the floor. Soames set the tray on the tiles and knelt, pouring tea, looking to Miss Temple to see if she wanted milk, then pouring milk at her indication that she did. He took the cup to her, returned to the tray, and looked to Phelps, who shook his head with impatience. Soames looked down briefly at the tray, measuring whether, with Phelps' demurral, he might avail himself of a cup, but then clasped his hands behind his back, looking sharply at Miss Temple. She held the warm cup cradled on her lap and smiled back at him brightly.

  “We were just discussing the manner in which pain can preoccupy the mind—”

  Her words were cut off by the loud clatter of Mr. Soames' foot kicking the teapot, scattering the tray and its contents across the floor. He staggered where he stood, his face blank as it had been in the coach, arms dangling at his side. Miss Temple looked to Phelps, but Phelps had already crossed to the doorway. He slammed it shut and turned a metal key in its lock. Miss Temple's hand reached toward her boot. Soames blinked and cocked his head, watching her with intent, flickering eyes.

  “Celeste Temple.” His voice was an unpleasant, uninflected hiss.

  “Mr. Soames?”

  “It is not Mr. Soames,” whispered Phelps. “If you value your life, you must answer every question put to you.”

  Mr. Soames drew back his lips in the unnatural leer of an ape in a cage. “Where is she, Celeste? Where are the others?”

  It was a small number of people who might presume to call her Celeste and a smaller number still to whom she might grant the privilege—not half a dozen in life, and nowhere in this number stood Mr. Soames. The troubling, hideous spectacle was not—at least in terms of mind—Mr. Soames at all.

  Mr. Phelps cleared his throat, and Miss Temple looked to him. “You must answer.”

  Mr. Soames watched her closely, a bit of foam having appeared at each corner of his mouth.

  “What others do you mean precisely?” she said to him.

  “You know what I want,” hissed Mr. Soames.

  She glanced fearfully at Mr. Phelps, but the man's attention seemed split between discomfort and curiosity. Miss Temple forced herself to shrug and began to rattle away in as blithe a tone as possible.

  “Well, it all depends on where one starts—I don't know if the events at Harschmort House are known to you, but on the airship nearly everyone was killed, and the airship itself—with all the books and machinery and most of the bodies—has been sunk beneath the sea. The Prince, Mrs. Stearne, Doctor Lorenz, Miss Vandaariff, Roger Bascombe, Harald Crabbé, the Comte d'Orkancz I saw dead with my own eyes—”

  “Francis Xonck is still alive,” spat Mr. Soames. “You were with him. You were seen.”

  Miss Temple felt an icy blue pressure against her skull, the pressure escalating to pain.

  “He was in Karthe,” squeaked Miss Temple. “I saw him get off the train and followed him.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I don't know—he disappeared! I took his book and ran!”

  “Where is the Contessa?” asked Soames. “What will she do?”

  “I cannot say—her body was not found—”

  “Do not lie. I can feel her.”

  “Well, you know more than I do.”

  Mr. Soames twitched his fingers. “I can see her near you,” he whispered. “I can sense her… on your mouth.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Miss Temple.

  “Tell me I am wrong,” rasped Mr. Soames.

  Mr. Phelps crossed to Soames. He placed a hand on Soames' forehead, and then—with some distaste—peeled back the lid from the man's left eye. Its white had acquired a milky blue cast that, as Miss Temple watched, crossed into the brown iris.

  “There is not much time,” whispered Mr. Phelps.

  “Where is the Contessa?” cried Soames.

  “I do not know!” insisted Miss Temple. “She was on the train. She left in the night.”

  “Where?”

  “I do not know!”

  “Scour the length of the train tracks!” Soames barked to Phelps. “Every man you have—near the canals! She must be near the canals!”

  “But,” began Phelps, “if it was Francis Xonck—”

  “Of course it was Xonck!” screeched Soames.

  “Then surely we must keep searching—”

  “Of course!” Soames coughed thickly, spattering saliva on his moustache and chin. He turned his attention back to Miss Temple. “Xonck's book!” he cried hoarsely. “Why did you take it?”

  “Why would I not take it?” replied Miss Temple.

  Soames coughed again. His eyes were almost entirely blue.

  “Bring her upstairs,” he croaked. “This one is spent.”

  In an instant, like the snuffing of a candle, the presence that had inhabited Mr. Soames was gone. He toppled to the floor and lay still, gasping like a fish in the bottom of a boat, a ghastly rasp that filled the room. She looked up to Phelps.

  “I will escort you to his Grace's chambers,” he said.

  WAITING OUTSIDE the door were two servants with an assortment of mops and bottles.

  “You will manage the gentleman,” Phelps
said to them. “Be sure to scrub well with vinegar.”

  He took Miss Temple's arm and guided her down to the corridor. Her eyes darted to each new door and alcove they passed. Phelps cleared his throat discreetly.

  “Any attempt to flee is useless. As is any hope to employ that weapon in your boot. At the slightest provocation—and I do mean slightest—you will be occupied. You have seen the consequences.”

  His tone was stern, but Miss Temple had the distinct feeling that Mr. Phelps also found himself a prisoner, forever wondering when he in his turn would become as expendable as a nonentity like Soames.

  “Will you tell me where we are?” she asked.

  “Stäelmaere House, of course.”

  Miss Temple saw no “of course” about it. Stäelmaere House was an older mansion that lay between the Ministries and the Palace, connecting each to each through its ancient drawing rooms—a stucco-encrusted architectural pipe-joint. It was also home, she assumed, to the very horrid Duke.

  In the ballroom of Harschmort House, Miss Temple had seen the Duke of Stäelmaere addressing the whole of the Cabal's gathered minions—making clear, for he was the new head of the Privy Council, how powerful the Cabal had finally become. But Miss Temple knew that the Duke had been shot through the heart not two hours before that speech. Using the blue glass and the mental powers of the glass women, the Comte d'Orkancz had extended the Duke's existence by transmuting him into a marionette, without anyone seeing through the trick. This fact had left Miss Temple, Svenson, and Chang with a dilemma—whether to prevent the Duke from seizing power or stop the airship sailing to Macklenburg.

  But Miss Temple had discovered that every “adherent” undergoing the alchemical Process (a fearsome alchemical procedure that instilled loyalty to the Cabal) had their minds inscribed with a specific control phrase. This was a sort of verbal cipher that, when invoked, allowed the speaker to command the adherent at will. Miss Temple had learned the control phrase of Colonel Aspiche, and when the Duke of Stäelmaere returned to the city with Mrs. Marchmoor, the sole surviving glass woman, Miss Temple had sent Aspiche in pursuit, with orders to assassinate the Duke at all costs.

  She had hoped that the unrest at Stropping and in the streets might be due to the Duke's assassination by the Colonel. But Mr. Soames had insisted it was not the case. Her cunning plan had failed.

  THEY REACHED a wooden door. Phelps rapped the wrought-iron knocker and the door was opened by a crisply dressed servant. Miss Temple noticed with some alarm—did the fellow have mange?—that a patch of hair was missing from behind the man's ear. His complexion was even paler than Mr. Phelps' and his lips unpleasantly chapped. As the servant closed the door behind them she saw a smudge of bloody grime beneath his stiff white shirt cuff, as if the fellow's wrist had been cut and poorly bandaged.

  Phelps led her past high, dark paintings and massive ebony glass-front cabinets stuffed with every conceivable dining article one might fashion out of silver. Apparently ancient servants darted silently around them, but then Miss Temple saw with some alarm that they were not old at all, merely exhausted—faces horribly drawn, eyes red, and their swan-white collars and cuffs chafed with rust-colored smears. She looked fearfully to Phelps, wondering if he had delivered her to some hideous epidemic. What she had first taken to be a well-kept corridor was in fact littered with smatterings of—she could find no other words—interior decay: dust thick on the paintings, a tangle of cleaning rags pushed into a shadowy corner, candle wax pooled onto a Turkish carpet, another carpet blackened by coal dust. And yet there were servants everywhere. She stepped around a man crouched with a dustpan and a broom, and looked back to see him sag against the wall, eyes shut, succumbing to thin, sickly sleep.

  “This way,” muttered Phelps. They climbed to another high-ceilinged hallway, the landing littered with loose pages of parchment. Three men in black coats stood with their arms full of similar documents, while a fourth crouched on his hands and knees, attempting to peel a sheet of paper from the floor without removing his white gloves. Near them sat an elderly man with a close-trimmed beard and a steel-rimmed monocle. Phelps bowed and addressed him with grave respect.

  “Lord Acton.”

  Lord Acton ignored Phelps, barking impatiently at the secretary on his knees. “Pick it up, man!”

  With a protesting whine the secretary raised a hand to his mouth, caught the tip of one gloved finger in his teeth—his gums unpleasantly vivid—and pulled it off, leaving the glove to dangle as his bare hand scrabbled to gather the parchment. Miss Temple winced to see the fellow's nails were ragged, split, and yellow as a crumbling honeycomb.

  Phelps made to edge past, when Lord Acton turned and, as if echoing his servant, called to Phelps in a bleating complaint.

  “If we are to do the Council's business we must see him, sir! His Grace cannot take hold of the Council if he will not lead!”

  “Of course, my Lord.”

  “We cannot even gather enough of our number for the simplest work—Lord Axewith, Henry Xonck, Lord Vandaariff—none will answer my entreaties! Nor have we any news from Macklenburg, none at all! We are prepared—all the instructions have been observed—the regiments, the banks, the canals, the sea ports—but they must hear from the Duke!”

  “I will inform his Grace at once,” said Phelps, nodding.

  “I have no desire to trouble him—”

  “Of course, my Lord.”

  “It is simply—he now rules, yet remains absent—and I have been waiting outside his door for so very long…”

  “Of course, my Lord.”

  Lord Acton said nothing, out of breath, waiting for Phelps to respond more fully. When Phelps did not, he then abruptly nudged a foot at the man on the floor, still collecting pages.

  “At this rate we will be here all day,” he complained to no one in particular. “While my head, you know… it aches most cruelly—”

  While Phelps muttered his condolences for Lord Acton's head, and the Lord's aide continued to grapple with his armload of papers, Miss Temple's attention turned to the far end of the corridor, where a man in a red dragoons' uniform had just stumbled into view. The man was tall and slim, with fair hair and side whiskers, and held his brass helmet under one arm. With his other arm against the far wall he bent over, as if gasping for breath or vomiting. Without looking in her direction, the officer recovered himself, squared his shoulders, and strode out, disappearing down a much smaller staircase. She looked back to Phelps.

  “You will tell him, won't you?” whined Lord Acton. “I am not without enthusiasm!”

  “Of course, my Lord—if you will excuse me…”

  Lord Acton sneezed, which gave Phelps exactly enough time to reclaim Miss Temple's arm and sweep her directly toward the set of high, carved doors from which the dizzied officer had emerged.

  “The Duke's chambers. You will be presented by his manservant.” Phelps passed a hand over his brow, and sighed. “In your interview… downstairs… you mentioned Deputy Minister Crabbé. That he is dead. We… we at the Ministry did not know.”

  Miss Temple indicated Mr. Phelps' broken arm. “I think you knew enough, sir.”

  Phelps looked back down the corridor, his expression once more pained, and absently scratched at his shirt-front. Miss Temple's eyes widened as she noticed a tiny bead of red soaking up into the fabric from where Phelps' nail had touched.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps we are beyond them all…”

  He rapped the iron door knocker, cast in the shape of a snarling hound's head.

  The door opened and Miss Temple suppressed a gasp. If the other occupants of Stäelmaere House had seemed unwell, the man before her looked as if he'd spent a fortnight in the grave. While his body may have once stood tall and thin, now it was skeletal. His stiff topcoat tented like a bedsheet hanging from a tree. His pale hair hung lank and unkempt, and there were clumps of it on his lapel. Miss Temple flinched against the foulness of his breath.

  “Mr. Fordyce,”
said Phelps, his gaze turned to the wall.

  “Mr. Phelps.” The voice was moist and indistinct—Miss Temple heard it as “Fauwlpth”—as if the man's tongue had lost the ability to shift within his mouth. “The Lady will follow me…”

  Fordyce stepped aside and extended a brittle arm, his gloved hand and white cuff divided by a wrist wrapped with a rust-soaked twist of cloth. Miss Temple entered a dimly lit ante-room. A single silver candelabrum flickered on a small writing desk. The room's massive windows were curtained tightly, and when the door was closed behind her the darkness deepened that much more.

  “Etiquette,” slurred Mr. Fordyce, “demands you not speak… unless the Duke requests that you do so.”

  He crossed to the candelabrum and raised it to the level of his face, the orange glow dancing unpleasantly across the man's mere scattering of teeth. In his other hand he held the canvas sack.

  “In the Duke's presence, you are no longer required to keep to your knees. You are free to do so, but such deference is no longer enforced.”

  He led her across a carpet littered with tumbled books and cups and plates that clinked or snapped beneath Fordyce's feet, never once looking down, nor minding the wax that dripped freely from the candelabrum. She walked with a hand over both her mouth and nose. The reek of the man extended to every corner of the apartments. What had happened? What sort of disease might be so eroding everyone within the confines of Stäelmaere House? Would she too succumb to its effects?

  Fordyce knocked discreetly at a heavy door, meticulously carved from ebony wood. She was just realizing that the carving was actually a picture—an enormous man, flames coming off his body like the sun, in the act of swallowing a writhing child whole—when Fordyce opened the door and coughed hideously, as if gargling a piece of his own disintegrating throat.

  “Your Grace… the young woman…”

  There was no reply. Miss Temple darted forward, before the rancid man could take hold of her arm, into an even dimmer chamber, hung with high tapestries and even larger paintings—dark oil portraits whose faces loomed like drowning souls staring up through the sea. The door closed behind her and the room was silent, save for her own breath and the thudding of her heart. A faintly glowing gas-lit sconce, shaped like a tulip, floated in the gloom near a large straight-backed chair. In it sat a very tall man, staring into the darkness, his spine as rigid as the wood he leaned against. She recognized the collar-length iron-grey hair and sharply forbidding features that would not have seemed amiss on an especially intolerant falcon.