The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  MISS TEMPLE slipped from her shadow to a hatchway at the rear of the barge. She stuffed the knife into her boot, and pushed the hatchway wide, wrinkling her nose at the stink of bilge water below her in the dark. She slid the hatchway closed above her, perched in pitch black, listening. Footsteps thumped above… but no cries of alarm, nor was the hatch flung wide. She groped around her—boxes, bales of moist cloth, coiled rope—and then wormed her way behind the ladder so that anyone looking down would not see her, no matter that they had a light. Shifting her buttocks and shoulders made room between the bales where she could sit and Miss Temple did so, leaning back, Lydia's case on her lap.

  No doubt the barge was rife with rats. She snorted. If the rats knew what was good for them they would steer clear.

  Miss Temple snorted again. For the very first time she understood the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza's slovenly room at the St. Royale. With death and desire such constant companions, what attention would a woman like that possibly waste on décor?

  Or indeed, thought Miss Temple—curling onto her side to sleep, an animal in its lair—a woman like herself.

  Eight

  Reticence

  THE SHOUTING from the open French doors must have been very loud, for it penetrated—like the first perceived drop of rain out of a thousand others—just enough to disrupt Chang's velvet enthrallment. He was on his knees in Harschmort's garden. Someone was pulling his hand. He turned—his glasses askew on his nose, half his head still surrounded by morning light and perfume, the voices of young women—as the pistol was wrenched from his fingers.

  Before him lay the Duke. Francis Xonck slithered from view behind an ornamental boxed juniper. The black-coated Ministry man fired the pistol, the bullet splintering the box near Xonck's foot. Bodies rushed past Chang to cluster around the glass woman, her shattered wrist waving above their heads and steaming blue. The Ministry man's pistol clicked on an empty chamber.

  “Reload, Mr. Phelps! Where can he hide?”

  Too slowly Chang spun on his knees. The sharp toe of Colonel Aspiche's boot caught him square on the shoulder. The blow knocked Chang onto his back, the whole of his left arm gone numb. Aspiche swept out his saber. Chang scuttled farther away, feet hopelessly tangled, still unable to stand, raising his stick as Aspiche came on with his blade. Chang knew from experience that stabbing or slashing at a man on his back was more difficult than one might assume—cold comfort when he still felt half-asleep. Aspiche cut at Chang's left knee, to maim him. Chang deflected the blow with his stick, cracking the wood.

  “Ought I to shoot him?” asked Phelps. He stood quite prudently beyond Chang's reach, the cylinder of the revolver opened out, digging in his waistcoat for brass cartridges. Both men gasped at another sharp silent spasm from Mrs. Marchmoor—some tall fellow grappled to wrap her hand. Chang rose to one knee. Again the impact of her distress had passed him by.

  “Cardinal Chang is entirely my business,” barked the Colonel. “Find Mr. Xonck. Predators are most dangerous when they are hurt…”

  Aspiche did not bother to feint, but hacked directly at Chang's head. Chang dodged to the side, another chip of wood flying out from his stick. Around them dashed more servants and soldiers, as if he were nothing but an animal being put down in a corner.

  He called to Aspiche, “How can you kill Xonck? You underwent the Process! Where is your loyalty?”

  “Ask me rather why he—like you—has lived so long!”

  Aspiche's curved blade lanced viciously at Chang's stomach. Chang slashed the stick desperately across his body, splintering the tip, and the saber's deflected point disappeared into the earth. Behind them came two more pistol shots—Phelps putting Xonck from his misery—but their sudden sound launched another shattering vibration from Mrs. Marchmoor's mind, and Aspiche flinched.

  The vibration did not stop Chang. He flung himself forward. The Colonel stumbled back, flailing wickedly with the blade, but Chang rolled free. Around him a nest of dragoons and servants and Ministry men all took sudden notice of his presence—blades swept from scabbards in every direction. Chang plunged after Xonck around the same boxed juniper—but in three long steps came to an abrupt halt, arms circling to keep his balance, at the sudden edge of the collapsed cathedral chamber, a dizzying slope of jagged, smoking wreckage beneath his feet, dropping at least a hundred feet. Not five yards away stood Phelps. The man raised the pistol straight at Chang's head. Without a second's thought, Cardinal Chang launched himself into the void.

  HE LANDED ten feet down on a blackened iron beam and without pause sprung recklessly onto the shattered remains of a jail cell, a fall of perhaps fifteen more feet, the breath driven from his body. His stick flew from his hand, and before he could see where it landed a shot crashed out from above, the bullet pinging like a hammer near his head. Chang writhed over the twisted prison bars, hanging so the metal floor of the cell shielded him—at least until Phelps moved to a better angle. He looked past his dangling legs—a straight drop some sixty feet into a wicked pile of sharp steel that would finish him as neatly as the press of an iron maiden.

  Phelps fired again—the bastard had moved around—the bullet sparking near Chang's left hand. Chang swore and began to vigorously swing his body back and forth. The earth wall had fallen in, some yards away, creating at least the pretense of a slope. If he could reach that, there was a chance. He looked up. Phelps stood directly above him, Aspiche at the Ministry man's side. Phelps extended the pistol. Chang kicked out his feet and let go.

  WHEN HIS body came to rest—after perhaps as brief a time as ten seconds, but seconds as eventful and bone-shaking as any Chang had ever known—he lay on his back with his legs—fortunately unbroken—stretched out above him. His knees were bleeding and his gloves were torn, and he could feel abrasions on his face that would unpleasantly scab. His dark spectacles had remarkably remained in place (Chang had long ago learned the virtues of a well-tightened earpiece), but his stick was lost in the heights above. Roused to his danger, Chang scrambled into the cover of a buckled sheet of steel—part of the cathedral tower's skin, half-embedded in the ground like the blade of a gigantic shovel. The wreckage around him was so complete and his passage down so chaotic that he'd no idea where he was, or whether his enemies could see him. He peeked around the metal sheet. A shot rang out and he darted back, the bullet ringing harmlessly off the debris. That was one question answered.

  In the silence, and quite near, Cardinal Chang heard a distinctive and odious chuckle.

  The chuckle was followed by an even more disgusting gagging swallow. Francis Xonck crouched in a nook of mangled ducts and prison bars, just across the clearing from where Chang had come to rest. The wound in his chest had congealed to a sticky cobalt.

  By now, Phelps might have been joined by twenty dragoons with carbines.

  “I thought you'd been shot,” he called casually to Xonck, keeping his voice low.

  “My apologies,” sneered Xonck. “It is a younger son's natural talent to disappoint.”

  Chang studied the man, taking his time since neither of them seemed likely to go anywhere soon. Xonck's face was more altered than Chang had realized. The eyes were wild with fever, nostrils crusted, and his blue lips blistered raw. Where his skin was not discolored it was pale as chalk.

  The glass woman's fingers had been inside Xonck's body… when her wrist had broken, had they come out? Or were they still inside? What delirium must be swimming through Xonck's head, bearing so much glass in direct proximity to his heart, his lungs, his rushing blood. Yet during their own recent battle in the train car, he'd shown no weakness…

  “But you were shot before… I see you've dressed the wound in an extremely sensible fashion.”

  Xonck spat a ribbon of clotted indigo onto the broken stones.

  “I can only imagine what it's doing to your mind,” continued Chang. “One recalls those African weevils that chew from ear to ear, right through a man's brain. Their victim stays alive the entire time, losing co
ntrol of his limbs, unable to speak, to reason, no longer noticing when he's fouled himself.”

  Xonck laughed, eyes shut tight against his mirth, and playfully stabbed his plaster-cast arm at Chang. “The sensations are singular, Cardinal—you have no idea! The pleasure in action, the impact of feeling, even pain… like having opium smoke for blood, except there is no sleep in it. No, one is most viciously awake!”

  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. T
he 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.”

  Xonck spat and went on more heartily. “And for his empire the oldest son received an idiot wife, compliant whores, and children he could barely name. For her seclusion, the second child received a husband she despised, a life of craven envy, and children she could barely see without tears. For his ferocity, the third received no wife at all, unceasing hunger, and no child to ever call his own…

  “Not much of a story at all, of course,” added Xonck, after a moment of silence, “but it is a degraded plane, and one grows attached to one's fancies.”

  He spun his face from Chang, cocked his head, and sniffed several times like an animal.

  “It is a draft of air,” Xonck whispered, already pawing at the wreckage. “A tunnel blocked with debris. The stones are too large—I cannot shift them alone!”

  Against all his best instincts, Chang scrambled across the open blast space into Xonck's shelter. Working together they cleared the aperture: one of the large metal ducts, the sort through which Chang had descended from the garden urn into the boiler room.

  “That there is air shows the way is still open,” said Xonck.

  “It can only lead to the lower levels of the house. All those going up have been destroyed.”

  Xonck smiled. “Which means it may be crawled. If I go first, I am of course vulnerable to a knife from behind. If I go second, I may as easily be ambushed at the end.”

  “As may I.”

  “Indeed. I offer you the choice.”

  “What if I let you depart on your own and attempt to make my own way up the walls?”

  “You cannot. There is no other way.”