The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  SHE DID not see Mr. Phelps, Mr. Fochtmann, or Colonel Aspiche, and assumed they had advanced with Mrs. Marchmoor, despite Mrs. Trapping's order—either willingly or dragged as automaton slaves— along with Francesca Trapping. But again, why Francesca alone? Miss Temple thought of the vials stopped up and smeared with blue. Had a sliver of glass been inserted into each little dram of blood? Or had Mrs. Marchmoor transformed the vials herself with the tip of her finger, like an indigo Medusa?

  To enter the factory, Miss Temple stepped over two men in green uniforms, blood smeared from their upper lips down to their chin. Beyond these bodies, the entire ground floor of the factory was occupied by rattling, blazing machinery. Miss Temple winced. Oppressed by the din and nauseated by the reek of indigo clay, she stopped where she stood, one hand to her brow. Through the Comte's memories, every machine seemed to glow before her eyes as she sensed its purpose, its hideous capacity. Each polished carapace vibrated like an ungainly tropical beetle bellowing for its mate. Miss Temple knew there were only rods and shafts and oiled bolts beneath their metal covers— but to the man who had made them, these devices represented life, and somehow the shuddering things seemed ready to extend their awful legs and wings at any moment.

  WHERE WAS everyone? She picked her way around the machines, to a nest of little rooms, past another two crumpled men in green. Why would the defenders leave their crucial machines so unprotected—were they so desperate, or so confident? Or did they know Mrs. Marchmoor required them in full operation as much as they?

  Miss Temple was gratified to find a staircase—wider than normal, which she supposed actually was normal when one had to shift, well, who knew what exactly… material up and down to be worked or lathed or milled or baked—again, details escaped her. But the staircase was as dark as the rest of the factory was bright—lacking windows, lamps, lanterns, even a candle left on a plate. Miss Temple gazed up into the blackness with distaste, the mechanical roar chopping at her concentration and her nerves. Then she perceived something new in the rhythmic din, writhing through the air like a snake… an agonized scream.

  The first-landing door was locked tight. The next, up a double length of stairs, was locked as well. She pressed her ear against the door. If the massive beetles below created the rumbling buzz, here was the gnashing, hammering clatter, what she took to be the turbines— the works—of a proper mill. This floor must also hold the cannons— stuffed with soldiers and locked to keep their threat sure. Miss Temple did not care for cannons. It was sixteen steps to the next landing, each one carrying her closer to the keening scream.

  But this landing bore a meager light, a tiny tallow stub that allowed Miss Temple to ascend without feeling her way. She let her eyes fix first upon the little hands cupped round it, their skin glowing yellow, and then upon the ghostly small face floating above the flame. Francesca Trapping.

  The girl did not speak, and so Miss Temple climbed until their heads were at the same height and did her best to smile, as if the horrid sounds around them were not there, and the simplest thing in the world would be for Miss Temple to lead the child away to safety.

  “You are the lady from the house,” said Francesca. Her voice was very small, and her shoulders trembled.

  “I am,” Miss Temple said, “and I have come a very long way to find you.”

  “I do not like it here,” said the girl.

  “Of course not, it is entirely unwholesome. Why are you on the stairs?”

  “They have put me out.”

  “Are they not afraid you will run? I would run.”

  Miss Temple peered more closely at the girl's face, but with just the one candle it was impossible to see if she had been damaged by the glass. Francesca shook her head, her lips pressed so tight together, they nearly disappeared.

  “I have been told not to,” she said.

  “No sort of reason at all.” The wailing cry worked to undo Miss Temple's composure like a key. “Who is that?”

  “I suppose it is him.”

  “And I am certain he deserves every second of it too,” said Miss Temple. Beyond the door, the scream bubbled away… and there was nothing but the sound of machines. There was no time. She took Francesca's arm. The girl stood up but did not move to descend.

  “O I cannot go!” she said.

  “Of course you can.”

  “But the Lady said I must stay.”

  “I will take you back to your brothers.”

  “The Lady doesn't want them. She wants me.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “But Mama said to stay too.”

  “I'm sure she did not mean it. Parents often lie, you know.”

  The little girl spoke in a rush, catches in her breath forced through the cracks in her failing courage. “Mama was gone for so long—everyone said we would find her—and when we did find her—we heard her—she did not say anything—anything to me—she only talked to them—and I could not talk—she would not let me—and no one will tell me of Papa—and Mama is so different! Why won't she take me home?”

  Miss Temple saw the dried tears across each cheek, and smelled the indigo reek in the girl's hair. “I do not know. But that will not stop us. Come.”

  Francesca pointed with the candle toward the door. “We cannot!”

  “Nonsense.”

  “But the Lady will know! I am only outside to keep watch.”

  “Keep watch for what?” asked Miss Temple.

  “For you!” said Francesca. “They are all waiting!”

  MISS TEMPLE saw a flicker of terror in Francesca's eyes but then just as fast it was gone, and the girl's entire face went blank as stone. The muscles of the tiny arm went slack and the tallow light was dropped, plunging the landing into blackness. Miss Temple still held Francesca's arm, but she knew she could not carry the girl alone, not down the stairs in the dark. Such helplessness was infuriating.

  The first wisp of cold flitted against her mind, like a moth past a window.

  “Celeste…” the girl whispered.

  Miss Temple heard it with revulsion, for in the twisted little voice lay the death of Soames, of Rawsbarthe, the decay of her own body. She squeezed the unresponsive little hand and awkwardly stumbled them both up the last steps to the door. She shifted the pistol and the leather case and found the knob with her fingertips. At its touch the girl gasped and immediately began to whimper.

  “Do not be afraid.” Miss Temple's voice was unpleasantly grim. “These people are weak, and weaklings only ever want for whipping.”

  She pushed on the door, and the landing was flooded with white light.

  THE TABLEAU struck Miss Temple as one of those unsettling dreams, in which figures from quite separate portions of one's life are thrown together, as if cut from paper and pasted together in a frame— the schoolmaster and the housemaid and the garrison soldier and wretched Cynthia Hobart from the plantation on the opposite side of the river, all eating toads on a boat that she herself was expected to steer. In dreams, such unpleasant groupings always appeared to demonstrate some unwanted lesson—that she was too proud, or had been cruel, or covetous of something (always the case regarding Cynthia) in truth beneath her. But what met Miss Temple in the white factory was different, not only because she knew it to be real, but because Miss Temple had finally accepted, despite every determined effort, how impossible it was to avoid consequence. She stepped through the doorway, the girl's hand in hers, with the same awareness of import as when she had first boarded the ship that would take her across the sea, when each hollow knock beneath her heels had echoed the certainty that she would never return. Her entrance brought an end to the business of all these people as surely as a little flaming match sets off a siege gun.

  The open room was enormous, its far end fully taken up with bright metal ducts bundled together to feed a line of silver machines. These in turn sprouted black hoses, vibrating with gases and fluid, covering the floor like creepers from an industrial jungle. The shining casings
of these machines had been peeled back and white light streamed out, each cracked carapace cradling a nugget of brilliance— super-refined bolts of indigo clay, powering the machines as they had powered the airship. Behind the machines and along each side wall were lines of green-coated soldiers with carbines. The factory's defenders had been withdrawn to this center point, as if to maintain power in this room was to maintain it over all.

  On a raised dais, like a carved figure above an altar, perched Robert Vandaariff. Three huge metal plates hung behind the financier from a lattice of chains, like panels in an indecipherable triptych. To each side were placed the buzzing brass box-stands, and at his feet lay long wooden boxes lined with orange felt—the whole arrangement like a bizarre icon for a religion, the deranged alchemy of the Comte d'Orkancz. The Comte's black memories surged within her like hounds against a leash. The scrawls on the metal plates jabbed at her thoughts and she gagged to recognize the ruddy purpled burn that looped around the industrialist's eyes and across his nose. The screams were now explained. Robert Vandaariff had just undergone the Process.

  Next to Vandaariff, like an angel hovering near a punished soul in Purgatory, stood a slender woman with reddish hair, wearing a dark dress whose hem was crusted with dried mud. At her side lurked a man in a respectable brown topcoat, meager hair pasted optimistically upwards, whose eyes kept flicking between the soldiers along the walls and those guarding the machines directly at his back.

  Forming a triangle with Vandaariff and his keepers were two other groups, divided from each other like rival suppliants before an idiot king. On the left stood Mrs. Marchmoor's party: the glass woman in her black cloak; Aspiche; and Phelps. Opposite them, in a strange little non-knot of their own—and Miss Temple did not comprehend this group at all—stood the Contessa, Francis Xonck, Cardinal Chang, and Doctor Svenson. They looked so depleted by their journey that even their hatreds had lost fire. She met their eyes—Xonck's insanely glazed, the Contessa's hard as a hunting bird's, the Doctor's pale with despair, and finally Chang's, mere smoked glass.

  Had they been captured? By whom? What were they doing together?

  What Miss Temple did not understand made her angry at the best of times, but now these least-expected betrayals made her furious— and this fury, so like the Comte's own bitter rage, broke her last restraint on his memories. Miss Temple choked and lost her balance. She let go of Francesca Trapping and dropped to one knee, face flaming red, trying to retain her mind against the tide of despair and spite, against the crowd of facts—sickening facts—that split her attention into slivers. All around her the insanity of the room began to make sense… she knew that the copper filaments had burned through, that the rattle of one machine that was off by a quarter-turn, that the exact temperature of the indigo clay perceived by smell was—

  “Celeste! Celeste—are you all right?”

  A hand had gently taken her shoulder. Miss Temple looked up with an unladylike grunt into the face of Elöise Dujong, crouching next to her. Where had she come from?

  Elöise shouted to the man in the brown coat. “Mr. Leveret! Please!”

  The man did not react, but then Mrs. Trapping spoke in his ear and he waved to the soldiers behind him. They pulled brass levers on each machine, and like kettles taken off their flame, their high-pitched wailing fell away. The machines far below them still rumbled, but now the upper floor stood in silence.

  EVERYONE WAS staring. How long had she been on her knees? The leather case had been taken away, and was held by Mr. Phelps. The pistol was nowhere to be seen. Francesca Trapping stood with the glass woman. The child's streaked face was turned to Miss Temple without expression. Elöise spoke urgently.

  “Celeste… please listen… they know everything—”

  The anger caught at the back of Miss Temple's throat like a rusted spike she could not swallow.

  “What have you done, Elöise? Why does everyone stand with them?”

  “Celeste, it is your parcel.” Elöise pointed to Lydia's case. “You have been their pawn. She has monitored your passage all the way from Harschmort, the better to get both you and it here safely, away from the gunfire…”

  Miss Temple felt ill. She was a fool, a vulgar lap-dog. She began to gag again. She swatted blindly at Elöise's hand and gasped.

  “Get away from me…”

  “Leave her be, Elöise,” called the red-haired woman. “It seems you've done something to offend her.”

  “Charlotte—”

  Mrs. Trapping dismissed Miss Temple with a toss of her head. “We do not care about her. We care that she hasn't done anything to harm that book.”

  “Allow me to make sure of it.”

  Mr. Fochtmann appeared from behind Vandaariff, white shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows and his forehead bound with a plaster. The engineer strode self-importantly across to Phelps, taking the case from him. He set it on the floor. His long fingers unsnapped the clasps and opened the lid, then Fochtmann carefully plucked at the pillowcases, one after the other, until the gleaming blue book was revealed to them all.

  “You will notice I do not touch the glass,” Fochtmann announced. “We do not know what consequences might have arisen from the circumstance of its … harvest, or from the circumstances of its … conveyance.”

  Fochtmann studied the book carefully through slitted eyes, then picked it up—using the silk as a barrier to his skin—tipping it this way and that, as if he might penetrate its contents without risk.

  Mrs. Trapping's shrill voice rang out again. “Is it what we have waited for or not? For all the time she's cost me, I should just as soon have this young lady flung headfirst out the nearest window.”

  Fochtmann frowned at the book, and then stood. “I am sorry, ma'am. I have managed the convection chambers, the aerating pathways, the distillation pipes, yet here I am blocked out. Only one of our company can divine if the book is what we hope, and whether it may be used.” He turned haughtily to Mrs. Marchmoor. “Enter her mind, madame! Enter the book! Is there any impediment to our going forward? Has she harmed it? Is there any damage?”

  “Did the harvesting work at all?” added the Contessa. “Given that Oskar was dying at the time—”

  “Of course it worked!” Xonck's voice was thick and labored.

  “Be quiet, Francis!” shouted Mrs. Trapping. She called to the glass woman, imperious and resentful, “Tell us!”

  Against her will, Miss Temple looked at Mrs. Marchmoor, flinching with dread at the invasion to come. An icy prickling resonated inside her skull… but then retreated at once, leaving only the chilly echo of a distant winter chime. Miss Temple braced herself for another, more savage penetration… but then the pressure receded altogether, and along with everyone else in the room she felt only the cold slither of the glass woman's voice.

  “The book… contains… the Comte d'Orkancz.”

  The room was completely still, the air abruptly pregnant with discomfort. The glass woman had spoken. Miss Temple saw the reactive loathing on the faces of Leveret and Mrs. Trapping, and on every soldier ringing the room. She waited for Mrs. Marchmoor to say more, but she did not. Had she not sensed the corruption? Or was she laying yet another trap?

  “Excellent.” Charlotte Trapping smiled icily. “Let us move on.”

  MISS TEMPLE was forgotten. Every eye in the room was fixed on Fochtmann's meticulous efforts. Lifting the book carefully from the case, the silk pillowcases between his fingers and the glass, he eased it into the slotted brass box and then screwed a metal plate tight over the slot to seal it in. The glass began to glow. Miss Temple shut her eyes and swallowed against the rising burn in her throat, against the knowledge that the different plates of memory were being activated one after another, the electrical current weaving a lattice of force through a precise fusion of tempered metal and alchemical salts—

  Hands slipped under her arms and heaved Miss Temple to her feet. She turned, to see Chang behind her, and then Svenson took gentle hold of her jaw, gazing se
riously into her eyes.

  “Do nothing rash,” whispered Chang. “Let them have at one another. Just stay alive.”

  “Why should I care about that?” she replied.

  “You are not well,” muttered the Doctor under his breath. “That book is deadly. You must prevent any further contact with it, or her.”

  “How did you simply leave?”

  The question had flown from Miss Temple's lips before she knew it. Svenson's gaze darted up to Chang's, then back to her grey eyes. “Ah—O—no, no—it was not—truly—”

  Chang tightened his grip on her arms. His whisper was curt and condescending. “They will hear you—”

  She turned to him. “How did you leave? Are you such a coward?”

  “Celeste,” the Doctor said, “I am most sorry—so many things happened…”

  This annoyed Miss Temple even more. She saw Elöise Dujong over the Doctor's shoulder, watching them, and spoke bitterly. “Trust makes everyone its fool.”

  Svenson followed her gaze, only to see Elöise turn away. He turned back to Miss Temple, his voice even and hard. “What they intend to do is abominable—”

  “I know it very well!”

  “And I know you have been most brave—”

  “You are both insane,” hissed Chang, and he pushed his knee into the back of Miss Temple's, causing her to sag suddenly into Svenson, who raised both arms to catch her. Miss Temple just saw Chang's hand slip out of the Doctor's pocket, then Chang pulled her backwards, spinning her so she lurched face-first into his chest. She gasped as the Cardinal's fingers plunged directly into the bosom of her dress and felt, as his fingers just as quickly pulled away, an unfamiliar weight where they had been. Chang had deftly tucked something beneath her corset, in front of everyone.

  He stepped back, straightening Miss Temple on her feet. Miss Temple looked guiltily at Mrs. Marchmoor, but the glass woman was blocked by Elöise. Miss Temple looked the other way. Xonck had his head down and was rocking back and forth on his heels, his breath whistling thickly. But the Contessa's violet eyes met Miss Temple's coldly.