The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  “Not at all.”

  “One must assume their silence comes for a reason. They might have been held at pistol-point. Or saw no reason to be afraid.”

  “But they were murdered.”

  “Obviously such reasoning was wrong. Was this man found inside the factory?”

  “Can you say who has murdered them or not?”

  Svenson imagined the ease with which the Contessa had approached each dead man, stilling their suspicions with a smile. He recalled the speed and violence—and the glee—with which she had murdered Harald Crabbé. Did his own reticence to name her prove she had charmed him as well?

  A green-coated officer burst into the room.

  “Mr. Leveret! Another man! You must come directly!”

  HE LED them all, the Doctor following “Leveret” (since neither name meant anything to Svenson, it was as easy to call him this instead of the frankly ridiculous “Fruitricks”) out the opposite side of the building, another squad at loopholes guarding this door. On this side of the factory there was no wooden wall, but the still-standing stone border of a much older structure whose crumbled outline lay strewn beyond it, just visible through the trees, like a faded inscription on a moss-covered grave. At the base of the wall several soldiers clustered around a figure on the ground.

  Leveret was already snapping for an explanation. The officer pointed to a wooden ladder fixed to the wall. Had the man simply lost his balance? Leveret wheeled on the Doctor, his mouth a tight line.

  “This is monstrous!”

  The Doctor glanced once at the corpse. He drew a last, long puff from the diminished stub of his cigarette before grinding it out against the stone wall. “You must send your men away.”

  “I will not!” insisted Leveret. “You will take no more advantage of my tolerant manner!”

  “As you insist… then they will hear the truth.”

  Svenson had seen this countless times in the navy: over-promoted fools whose prideful insistence on “having their way” resulted in a ship needlessly lost in a storm, or drifting within range of enemy batteries. Svenson glared at him, flatly contemptuous. Mr. Leveret swallowed. With an impatient flipping of both hands he waved the soldiers back to their posts.

  The dead soldier's eyes were open in uncomprehending terror, the corners of his mouth crusted with a blue-tinted saliva. The Doctor recalled Karthe, the blood on the rock where the boy had been mauled, the cold stench of death in the mining camp. With effort—and then with Leveret's help—he tipped the man on one side to expose his back: a shining lattice of spattered slashes and stabs, the blood hardened to gleaming blue, suffusing the green wool coat. Svenson counted at least seven deep punctures, all made with a savage rapidity. He nodded to Leveret and they gently set the body down. Doctor Svenson stood and dug in his pocket for his silver case.

  “If you hoped for time to secure your rebellion, you will not get it. I have seen this before. In Karthe.”

  “Karthe is in the mountains!” Leveret's face went even whiter with rage. “You will tell me what you know, sir, and straightaway! Rebellion indeed! You are my prisoner! I insist you tell me what has killed this man!”

  “I should think it obvious.”

  Leveret glanced again at the soldiers, all watching closely. Their master licked his lips.

  “But—but it makes no sense… the others were killed by someone they trusted—or who did not scare them. However, this man…”

  “Yes?” snapped the Doctor.

  “Is it not the same killer?” Leveret asked hopelessly.

  “Does it look like it?”

  Leveret swallowed and crossed his arms.

  “I suppose you doubt a man who kills like that would meet Mr. Brandt face-to-face without alarming him.”

  “I also doubt a man who kills like that is necessarily sane.”

  “You said you saw this before—in the north.”

  “So I did.”

  “Then what must we do? How was this person stopped?”

  “He wasn't stopped at all, obviously. He's come to your door.”

  Leveret studied the body, flinching with distaste at the shining wounds. “It is not possible…”

  “What else did you expect?” Svenson asked. “Who else did you think you served? When you next see Francis Xonck, will he reward you? I should think a man who makes munitions would understand how care must be taken when one's work becomes deadly. But you will learn it soon enough—since this man was killed inside the wall, your defenses must be considered breached.” Svenson called to the soldiers directly and pointed to the ladder. “Look where this man was posted! Whoever killed him is inside! You must search in force!”

  “Do not instruct us,” shouted Leveret. The soldiers had Svenson's arms and were hauling him away. “You are just like the rest of them— these social-climbing, whore-aping adherents—so confident, so ambitious, hoping to achieve by playing leapfrog, by climbing on the backs of others until they are lifted to the very top of their childish dreams. And lifted by whom? Where are these masters? I am master here!”

  “I thought you served Francis Xonck!” Svenson called. He hoped for a reaction from the green-coated soldiers, but their faces did not shift.

  “What you think means nothing!” cried Leveret. “Take him!”

  THE DOCTOR gazed hopelessly at the silver walls of the tempering room, and at the round refining chamber hanging in its harness. He wanted to kick it. A moment after he had been escorted in, the same two soldiers resuming their stance by the door, another pair had dropped the third glass-stabbed body at his feet, as if the murder was his doing. Perhaps these new weapons were protection enough—perhaps Francis Xonck's own soldiers would shoot him like a rabid dog. Perhaps… but he could still remember the earnest faces of the slaughtered townsmen of Karthe. Svenson stared at the dead man's blue-crusted lips, then turned to the men at the door, just as doomed. This little room of corpses would not do.

  He dropped to one knee, gasped, then leapt up and shouted urgently to the door. “You there—at once, run for Mr. Leveret! I have discovered something on the body. He must be warned!”

  The men looked at each other.

  “There is no time!” Svenson cried. “He may be making a terrible mistake!”

  One man ran off, toward the front of the factory. The other stepped into the room, his carbine held ready.

  “What mistake?” the soldier asked warily.

  “Look for yourself,” said Svenson, and he knelt next to the third corpse, indicating a spot just to the back of the dead man's neck. “The brighter light in this room that allowed me to see—”

  “I do not see anything,” said the soldier, leaning.

  “I'm a blind fool! There! Under the collar—the first point of impact—the wound!”

  The soldier knelt. Tentatively, he extended one hand toward the body, his other resting the carbine on the floor for balance. “What is it?”

  Svenson stepped on the hand holding the carbine—pinning the fingers between his boot and the weapon—and brought his other knee up into the man's jaw. The sickening clop toppled the soldier over the bodies. Svenson dashed from the room.

  HE COULD not hope to best the soldiers around either doorway, so he dove instead toward the main chamber, straight amongst the machines. He pressed himself between bright pipes and sweating hoses, stumbling on, but once inside he was near-blinded by the bright light and distracted by a very loud hissing and clanking from every direction. He would not hear the soldiers—with this light he could not even see them, while they could pot him as easily as boys shooting squirrels in a tree. A tall shadow crossed his path—one of the high metal plates. The inner face had been scored with the same dense scribbled nonsense he had seen on the paintings of Oskar Veilandt: equations, different languages, even scrawled figures like a Polynesian pictogram. The plate's reflected light fell in a pattern onto the floor. Svenson cursed his own slowness of mind—the content of the writing meant nothing at all! It could have been sm
eared with house paint— the only requirement was for the metal to reflect the glare to a specific degree. But to what purpose? The tall plates had been hung in a rough circle, but the center of the circle… was only empty space, tangled with hose. He stepped inside the circle and could suddenly see. At the far edge of the room, staring directly at him, stood Leveret with at least four soldiers.

  Svenson fell to his knees and cast his gaze wildly around for some way out. To his great surprise the ceiling directly above him was open, a wide round hole dangling hoses and chain. Stifling all fear and decent feeling he leapt on top of the nearest machine, whose thrumming vibrated through his boots, and jumped at a hanging metal sheet, his heart in his mouth, catching the chains above it. His knees whacked the metal, and the weight of his body caused it to swing, his feet kicking to either side. He heard a cracking sound. The metal plate rang with the impact of a carbine bullet. Svenson stabbed out a hand for a higher chain, from the hole in the ceiling, caught it, and with a rush of vertigo let go of the sheet altogether. Another crack from the carbine, the bullet whipping who knew where, and Svenson seized the edge of the hole. He threw up an elbow with a gasp, then another, and then with a terrible heave rolled his body over the lip and lay sprawled, breathing hard. Leveret had four men with him with rapid-fire carbines, yet he'd only fired at Svenson twice and missed both times. They had held back to preserve the machines.

  HE HAD in his life seen waterfalls where one might climb between the falling water and the cliff face, and gaze out through a shimmering curtain. It seemed he had entered a similar, though utterly unearthly, cavern. Surrounding the Doctor were dangling sheets of cable, ducts, hose, and chain—arrayed without any order he could see. The hanging mass of tubes and chain rose twenty feet—the next floor of the factory had been taken out to make room—before finally being gathered together and forced into larger metal ducts. The ceiling above held a matching circular hole, far too high for Svenson to reach by climbing.

  He shoved his way through them on his hands and knees. There must be a staircase. The calling voice of Mr. Leveret rose up through the open hole in the floor.

  “Do not be an ass, Doctor! You cannot survive! You have no idea of your danger!”

  Svenson snorted—he had every idea—feeling his way through a curtain of silver ducts and hoses. What was the point of so many pipes and tubes, filling the floor? It must be the height of the building! He remembered the high walls of the chamber at the Royal Institute, covered with pipes and ducts—with so much less space, Leveret had run the pipes up and down, stuffing the two stories tight to gain the same required length. Svenson stopped. He heard footsteps on the wooden planks. He unfolded the clasp knife.

  A shuffling, closer than before. Svenson squeezed through a thicket of black hoses, their condensation moist on his face. All of this to recreate the Comte's Harschmort “factory,” yet to what end—or, more precisely, for what product? What business—the steps came nearer and he slithered around a bundle of silver tubes—did Leveret have stealing the machines from Harschmort and setting up a factory of his own? He recalled Leveret's querulous reaction to the glass-slain soldier. What could a man like Leveret perceive of the workings—the import—of a glass book?

  Svenson could hear his pursuer shoving closer and dove blindly away, disquieted by the sudden image of a steaming cavity during surgery—the cords of muscle fiber, the globular strands of lung tissue, the tender tubing of vessels and veins—shuddering at the notion of his entire body somehow swimming through that. Doctor Svenson spun desperately at a second set of steps—another soldier! Without thinking he thrust himself in a third direction, the clasp knife in his hand, ready to defend himself.

  The hanging curtain gave way and Doctor Svenson stepped out into thin air. He dropped the knife with a cry, boot heels balanced on the edge of a precipice, and snatched at a canvas hose. He tottered in one of the tall windows he had seen from the road—windows no longer glazed, wide open to the elements. What sort of insane idea was that? He looked down, swallowing nervously. It was not so very high and the fall onto grass—but for Svenson, whose outright loathing of heights had been only amplified by the airship, it was enough to fix him stiff.

  The rustling sounds were directly in front of him. He had dropped the knife. An iron ladder had been bolted to the building's outer wall, running from the roof to the ground, a mere three feet away. The tubes shifted in front of him and one green arm pushed through, waving a long double-edged bayonet.

  Svenson jumped, catching the cold rungs with both hands, and clambered like an untrained ape, waiting for the blade in his back.

  It did not come. The hand with the bayonet slashed wildly at the air where Svenson had just been standing, but the soldier did not appear. The tubes and hoses rippled… the man was struggling with someone the Doctor could not see. The curtain parted and the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza shot out, surprised by the drop just as Svenson had been. She adroitly caught hold of a dangling chain and swung to the side like a circus gypsy as the soldier finally emerged. But then the man saw her—saw he was fighting not the foreign prisoner, but a breathless, beautiful woman—and hesitated. The Contessa slashed her brilliant spike into the hoses near the soldier's face and sent a spray of burning steam into his eyes. He reeled back into the shifting curtain. The Contessa dove after him and was gone.

  The encounter had been totally silent, and it was strange when Mr. Leveret's voice, dimmer now, called again for the Doctor's surrender. Svenson ignored it, climbing, terrified and horribly exposed, like a centipede stranded on a whitewashed tropical wall. Where had the Contessa come from? He must have inadvertently drawn the soldier to her own hiding place. Svenson's head spun and he squeezed shut his eyes, then opened them again, staring into the white bricks only inches from his face.

  He clung to the rear wall, on the opposite side from the canal: to his right was the crowd of adherents, to his left the yard where they had found the soldier riddled with glass. From this higher vantage he could now see over the stone wall and into the woods. Suddenly their depths were pierced by a brace of torches… a snaking line with green-coated soldiers marching at either end… but in between— he squinted at the flickering torchlight—a gang of… prisoners. Two soldiers—in red, dragoons!—with their hands bound, and then another man, hatless, in a black topcoat, and behind the man… two women. Doctor Svenson's breath stopped in his throat. The second woman was Elöise Dujong.

  Doctor Svenson's heart leapt in his chest, but he forced himself upwards, eyes resolutely fixed to the brick. To attempt a rescue, unarmed and alone, would merely deliver himself to Leveret's rage. Judging by the soldiers, Elöise's party—the other woman must be Charlotte Trapping, the man Robert Vandaariff—had been first captured by Mrs. Marchmoor's dragoons, and then taken again by Mr. Leveret's private army. As curious as Svenson was to see Leveret's reunion with the Xonck sister—she must be his keenest rival—it was the two dragoons that confirmed the mobilization of the Ministries, that, as he had speculated to Leveret, the whole of the military lay at their call.

  The next floor was different in that the nearest windows, also unglazed, were blocked by iron bars. He peered closely at the bolts and saw no fresh scrapes on the bricks—the bars had been set in place for some time, even years. The machines here were larger, dark and oiled with heavy usage. The Doctor had no experience with industry but had been escorted by many a ship's engineer past turbines and boilers, enough to recognize that here were the guts of the factory proper, the powerhouse heart to pump life through the rest. Leveret had adapted these mill-works to animate the Comte's metallic fantasia. If one sought to bring the whole place to a halt, this was the spot to start swinging the pickaxe. Not that Svenson had a pickaxe, or could penetrate iron bars. He resumed his climb.

  WITH A shock that nearly caused him to fall, he felt the ladder shudder with the weight of a new occupant. Svenson looked down, to see the shimmering black top of the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza's head, and the purple si
lk of her climbing arms. Svenson hurried upwards, aware that in haste his grip was not as sure and his boot heels more likely to slide off the iron. He reached the highest line of tall windows, also barred. Each opening had been stretched with sailcloth. He could smell the reek of indigo clay, as strong as it had been amongst the forest of ducts and hoses—and detected a new sound, high-pitched and sustained, like the buzzing of porcelain wasps. He glanced down. His lead of two stories had been cut in half. The woman looked up, black hair in her eyes, and as she stabbed for the next rung she bared her teeth. The back of her dress shone with blood. She caught his eye and did not smile, the iron frame of the ladder throbbing with each determined step. Svenson groped blindly for the next rung, hauling himself recklessly toward the roof.

  The irony of finding a haven on a rooftop—a place where at the best of times his vertigo would drop him to his hands and knees—was not lost on him. He would have to pull himself over the lip, an awful moment of releasing the ladder entirely and taking hold of a bare— and dusty, slippery, even crumbling—crenellation of brick with his hands. What if he mistimed his reach? What if his boots slipped? And if he took too long, would the Contessa slash the back of his knee? Useless anxiety hammered his nerves. He was at the top of the ladder. He could not see beyond the lip of brick some two feet above him. With a feral snarl he thrust his arms up and took scrabbling hold, the edge of the brickwork digging awkwardly into his bicep, flailing with his legs, scuffing his knees. The Doctor clawed his way onto a gritty, soot-smeared expanse of planking slathered with old tar.

  The rooftop, an open rectangle some thirty yards across and sixty yards long, was divided lengthwise by a double line of squat brick chimneys, each perhaps the width of a barrel and twice the height of a tall man. But near to where he had emerged, on his side of the line of smokestacks, rose a squat brick hutch, with a door to the factory below. Svenson gave one quick glance to where the Contessa would momentarily emerge, and dashed to the door—reasoning one fearsome women to be less dangerous than an army of soldiers. He snatched up a length of broken wood—at one point it had been the leg of a chair (who knew how it had migrated to the rooftop, like a sheep's bone in an aerie)—and wedged it fast between the door and the frame. He heard no steps at the door, and peering through the line of chimneys he saw no guards ascending from the other side of the rooftop. How could that be?