"The Dark Volume" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dahlquist Gordon)

Ten. Factory

WHEN MISS TEMPLE opened her eyes the tiny hold was still dark. She lifted her head from a burlap sack of beans she had pulled onto the bale of wool (the moist wool being raw and still smelling of sheep) and rubbed absently at the imprint its rough surface had pressed into her cheek. The barge was not moving. They had arrived. She sat up fully and restored Lydia's case to her lap from the crevice it had found between the bales. She bundled up her dress and wiped her face with her petticoat, then smoothed it down again. A very small amount of light crept in through an imperfection in the hatch cover, but it did not tell her whether it was safe to emerge.

Miss Temple felt better for sleep, though her dreams had been unpleasant. She had been once more on the roof of the sinking airship, but the sea was made of shifting plates of blue glass, and as it licked her feet she had felt them freeze and stiffen. Elöise had been there, but then Elöise had become Caroline Stearne, her neck still cruelly gashed, the ruby wound and her black hair making her skin appear achingly pale. As if to amplify this impression, Caroline had reached behind her bloody shoulders and undone the buttons on her black dress. Miss Temple had squirmed at this impropriety, but then Caroline's torso was bare, the dress draped around her hips like a funereal willow. Miss Temple swallowed, rooted by Caroline's sorrowful beauty, the gentle curve of her belly, soft, hanging breasts, nipples the color of raw meat, and the white flesh above them flecked with dried blood. Miss Temple felt her frozen toes beginning to snap. She tottered, knowing that to fall would mean death. Caroline had changed back to Elöise, but with the same body and the identical wound. It was suddenly vital that Elöise reveal some secret, but her ruined throat would hold no air. Each attempt to open her mouth was mocked by the puppetlike gape of the open gash below it. In a sudden spasm of dread Miss Temple reached up for her own throat and felt the tips of her fingers enter the cold incision carved across it…

She frowned, plucking at her hair with both hands, remembering rather more of the dream than she cared to. While she did feel restored—more physically capable, at least—this improvement was accompanied by a palpable increase in her own hunger. Not any hunger for food—though it had been some time since she had eaten, and Miss Temple would not have refused anything wholesome (save mutton)— but an erotic hunger calibrated precisely to the urges of her blue glass memories. At the same time, her sleep had placed some small distance between her and the black influence of the Comte d'Orkancz's book of death. She could taste ash in the back of her throat when she swallowed, but the impulse to despoil things lay not so heavy on her will.

Miss Temple swallowed again (having done so once to gauge the acrid taste, she could not prevent herself from repeating the gesture) and quietly shuffled off of the bales to the ladder, climbing until she touched the hatch cover. She heard nothing, and so pushed gently with the top of her head. The cover was quite heavy and did not budge until she pushed with her hand as well, when it lurched a sharp half-inch, the sudden scrape horridly loud. She peeked through the tiny crack, but could see nothing. Miss Temple raised the hatchway another two inches, waited, then raised it more, waited again, then finally raised it enough to make any further pretense of secrecy absurd. The deck was empty. She shifted the hatch cover to the side and carefully clambered through, keeping her dress and petticoats free of her feet in case she needed to run.

The lantern whose dim light had penetrated the hold hung some yards away, and in its glow she saw they were docked at the edge of the canal. Beyond the canal's bricked border lay a cleared grassy sward and a thick, dark wall of trees whose high branches stretched over the barge, the moon and stars only visible through their whispering canopy.

Miss Temple crept to a short mast half-way up the deck, the furled sailcloth at its side making a thick column to hide behind. She heard the clomp of a heavy bundle dropped onto a wooden surface, and then laughter. In the glow of another lantern loomed a knot of men hauling boxes from another hatch. But they were too far away—and then Miss Temple realized her own barge had been tied directly behind another of identical width, and that it was her very good luck to have emerged just when the crew of her own vessel had chosen to plunder their unguarded neighbor. Miss Temple seized the opportunity and scuttled to her barge's gangway. She looked once more at the men, heard the thud of another box dropped on the far deck, and picked her way down the planking, each footfall silent as a fox. She padded across the grass to a gravel road, crouching low until she reached a turn that hid her from the bargemen. Miss Temple stood straight and exhaled. The dark color of her dress and hair would hide her in the night.

The gravel road terminated at a high square building. The tall windows blazed in the darkness like a star come down to earth.

The closer she came to the bright building, the more she heard what sounded like the low roar of a fire, and the metallic clatter of pots and pans. The sky above the building was covered with cloud, yet it took Miss Temple some minutes to realize that the cloud came from the building, for it rose not from a single chimney stack, but in a long curtain the width of the entire structure. Once the massive scale of the industry at work became plain to her, the low roar became legible as the hum of turbines and engines, and the kitchen racket as the remorseless clanking of mill machines.

It was no great leap for Miss Temple to connect the destruction of the Comte's laboratory at Harschmort with another factory so vividly alive. Yet when she shut her eyes and opened her mind to the sickly pool of his book—which she did there on the road, despite her abhorrence, for she knew the knowledge might save her life—she detected no inkling of such a place whatsoever. But how could these works exist without the Comte's knowledge? Miss Temple walked on, dizzied again. She had seen her father's sugar works and the great coppers cooking rum—the stink of burning cane stayed with her to that day—but this would be her first modern mill. She did not expect to enjoy it in the least.

DID SHE expect to enjoy anything anymore? It was a puling thought, more suited to a helpless lady in a play than Miss Temple's sturdy character, and yet at the core of the complaint lay something very real. She might appreciate incidental niceties—scones, for example—but these seemed merely appetite, an animal's need. Did not pleasure depend on an architecture of perspective—on contrast and delay, withholding and loss? Did not true enjoyment rely on facing the future? Did a cat possess such understanding? Did Miss Temple—in truth, in her soul?

It was a difficult prospect to swallow, walking alone in the dark. What of substance had she ever wanted—genuinely, not taken by rote from the expectations of others? A husband? Roger was gone, and even if there had been someone to replace Roger (not that she was any sort to stick her affections so quickly from one place to another), what then? What sort of lover—the very word was an unchewed bite she could not swallow—could she possibly be when at the first intimation of desire she vanished beneath a sea of depravity? What man would possibly have her once they glimpsed the dark lusts staining every cranny of her mind? She saw herself lying exposed on what ought to have been her marriage bed, eyes nakedly aflame with knowing desire— he would cast her away in disgust! How could she convince anyone else of her innocence when she could not convince herself?

Instead, as if in wicked confirmation of her failure, Miss Temple's brooding opened her senses to the very lurid memories that she feared—the knotted collisions of a wedding night refracting into a score of disturbingly remade memories, rooms she had been in throughout her life now repurposed to lust, every bed, every sofa, carpets, tables, her father's own garden. She staggered from the road and sank to her knees, the glow of need spreading from her hips through what felt like every stinging nerve. The sweet quickening swept on, deliciously re-coloring her past—Doctor Svenson's elegant, gentle fingers and the muscles in his neck like a gazelle's… Chang's curling lips and unshaven face… Francis Xonck groping her body in the crowded corridor of Harschmort House… Captain Tackham's long legs and broad shoulders… the Comte d'Orkancz reaching underneath her dress—

She shuddered, exquisitely suspended, then exhaled with a gasp. She opened her eyes deliberately wide, forcing her mind to think, to remember where she was… and where she had been. This last memory had come from her coach ride with the Comte and the Contessa, from the St. Royale. But it was wrong—the Comte's hand had been around her throat. The groping fingers had been the Contessa's, seeking in Miss Temple's arousal nothing more than the young woman's debasement and shame. Miss Temple had refused to be ashamed then, and with a snort she refused again now—refused the bond any of these magnetic bodies might place upon her mind or heart.

She wiped her eyes and wondered sadly at how she had placed Svenson and Chang so easily with so many obvious villains—but what did that signify after all? Miss Temple was very sure about the hearts of men. Her blue glass memories were full of them.

A SHARPER NOISE caused her to turn toward the bright building, and then instantly throw herself down flat. A knot of jostling shadows … Dragoons marching to the canal, at least forty soldiers in all. Before they reached her, at a crisp word from their officer the soldiers stamped to a halt, close enough for Miss Temple to place the easy— even soft—voice giving out their instructions.

“A score to each side,” began Captain Tackham. “I will command the eastern squadron; Sergeant Bell, the west. Each will advance through the wood—quietly—until to the west you meet the crowd at the gate, and to the east we reach the first ruined wall. These are hold points. At the signal you will then move forward in force, firing as necessary. In the west your objective is to open the gate so the men gathered there may enter. In the east, it is merely to clear the yard and prevent any retreat. Are there any questions?”

“These men at the gate, sir,” whispered the Sergeant. “They will expect us?”

Tackham paused, and a slight weaving of his posture filled Miss Temple with dread, as if his mind had been occupied.

“Sir?” asked Sergeant Bell.

“They will,” said Tackham, clearing his throat. “But if any man gives you trouble, do not hesitate to club him down. It is time. Good luck to you all.”

The soldiers poured into the woods. Miss Temple remained still. She knew that dragoons could both ride and shoot, trusted men for reconnaissance and courier missions, and yet as they vanished with the skill of practiced woodsmen she was newly aware of how serious— how real—her enemies were. These men—hundreds of them, hidden all around her—were trained killers. And their officers, men like Tackham and Aspiche, were cold-eyed experts who long ago made their accommodation with dealing out death.

Miss Temple stood, brushing at her damp-stained knees. The land surrounding the factory had been infiltrated by the glass woman's forces… but when a single bullet from a window—or for that matter, one flung brick—could end her life, Mrs. Marchmoor would be in the rear, Miss Temple was sure, with her closest minions arrayed before her like a shield. Yet their attention would be directed ahead of them, to the factory.

Miss Temple took the knife from her boot with a grim determination. She had followed them across miles and through the dark, just like a wolf. They did not know she was there.

SHE HAD been walking on for two careful minutes, when suddenly new figures appeared, silhouetted against the white building's glare. It was not the dangerous mass she had expected, nor even the glass woman herself. Instead, a single man guarded what appeared to be a collection of baggage. Miss Temple crept closer… and then one of the bags yawned. She looked around to confirm there was truly only the one soldier and then strode forth, the knife held tight behind her back.

“There you are,” she called, causing the soldier to swivel abruptly, a carbine in his hands. Miss Temple ignored the weapon and approached the drowsy Trapping children, who struggled to stand. With a pang she saw it was only the two boys, Charles and Ronald, the latter especially cold and sniveling. Their sister was not with them.

“Who is there?” cried the guard. “Halt!”

“O I will not,” replied Miss Temple. “I have been following Mrs. Marchmoor these hours—hours, I tell you—and must know where she is. I am Miss Stearne. I have something she needs.”

She raised the leather case for the soldier to see, and shifted her grip on the knife. Was she near enough to strike him? Did she want to strike him? In front of the children? She bent forward to the boys.

“We met at Harschmort. You were with Captain Tackham.”

“You had someone's hairbrush,” replied Charles.

“My own hairbrush,” said Miss Temple. “It had been borrowed. Who is your soldier?”

“Corporal Dunn,” said Charles.

“Excellent.” Miss Temple turned to the Corporal. “I assume you are charged with the safety of these two young men. I met your Captain coming the other way—he directed me to you. If you might in turn direct me…”

“To the Colonel?”

“The Colonel will do perfectly well.”

“How did you follow?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Is there another barge?”

“Do I have wings? Of course there is.”

She glanced at the boys and saw that Ronald held the small leather case she had last seen in the hands of Andrew Rawsbarthe, lined with orange felt and holding vials of what she assumed to be the children's blood.

“Ronald,” she snapped. “What do you have?”

“They left it behind,” the little boy sniffed, gripping the case tightly.

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

“I will return the thing, Ronald, but you must let me look at it.”

“No.”

“You must give it to me or the Corporal here will force you.”

She gave the soldier a narrow glance that warned him to cooperate. He obligingly cleared his throat.

“Come now, Master… the lady says she'll give it back…”

Ronald wavered, looking at his older brother, and Miss Temple took the instant of distraction to snatch the case away. Ronald's mouth opened wide in shock. Miss Temple leaned forward with a hiss. “If you cry out, Ronald, I will throw this into the trees—and then where will you be? You will go looking for it and be eaten!”

The boy's lower lip quivered. She nodded sharply—aware that the soldier too was curious to see inside—and snapped it open.

The three vials were exactly where they had been, but the orange felt around them was smeared and stained, the fabric stiffened… and blue. The vials had all been opened and replaced uncorked, but the contents had not spilled, for the blood within had been solidified into glass. Miss Temple closed the case and returned it to Ronald, who took it in sullen silence.

“What do you say to the lady?” prompted Corporal Dunn.

“Nothing,” sniffed Ronald.

“It is perfectly well,” said Miss Temple. She turned to the older boy. “Put an arm around your brother, Charles—he is cold. Corporal Dunn, you have been entirely helpful. Your Colonel would be where?”

MISS TEMPLE strode confidently toward the house, measuring how far she needed to walk until the Corporal could no longer see her, fearful that by then she would have already reached Aspiche. She went as far as she could bear with her spine straight, the factory and its racket looming nearer, then looked back and saw with relief the soldier and the boys sunk in the darkness. Miss Temple dropped to a crouch and squinted toward the factory. Where was the main force of Dragoons? Had they all advanced when Tackham and his men had gone into the trees? If all the glass woman's soldiers became involved in the attack, perhaps she could ambush her enemy directly.

A loud shouting erupted to the west side of the factory, like the noise of a mob in a city square—Sergeant Bell and his dragoons. Miss Temple was suddenly afraid she had dawdled and missed her time. She broke into a hurried trot, the curls to either side of her head bobbing against her shoulders.

The shouts at the gate were answered by a crashing volley of gunshots. The shouting did not flag, not even after another volley. In stead, the cries soared into a triumphant spike—had the mob forced the gate? A third volley was answered by screams, cutting through the shouts like a scythe. The Dragoons began returning fire and the volleys from the factory grew ragged, though most of the screaming still came from the attackers.

But then Tackham's men in the ruins opened fire in the east. The bullets spattered at the factory's defenders like hot rain on a metal roof. Yet it was as if the men in the white building had an entirely different sort of weapon, firing faster and to terrible effect, even though they were clearly outnumbered. Miss Temple could not see anything of either combat, but she noticed when the defenders' gunfire came from within the building, as if they had fallen back. Would the dragoons storm the factory so soon—would it be that simple? From the gate came a rising cry, as the crowd charged forward.

A window above the crowd spat out a tongue of flame, and directly before it—from the thick of where she imagined the crowd of men to be—a column of black smoke bloomed up like a wicked night-flower. The screams were horrific, and the charging cry faltered at once. An identical blast crashed into the ruins, with its own echoing curtain of screams and the cracking of toppled trees. With an instant of forethought Miss Temple looked up at the windows facing the gravel road—facing her—and flung herself down. Another crash, and the earth around her kicked like a horse. She cried out but could not hear her own voice. Her body was spattered with pebbles and earth. The ground shook again and again. She could not move. The defenders had cannons facing every direction.

SMOKE DRIFTED up from the battered landscape, a scatter of riven pits. From beyond the trees rose moans and screams. The firing had ceased. Miss Temple shook the loose earth from her hair. A raw hole lay steaming in the center of the road, not ten yards away.

A sound cut through the ringing in her skull. Someone was speaking.

The voice was amplified as the Comte's had been inside the cathedral tower at Harschmort. With a slicking of bile in her throat, Miss Temple recalled the black speaking tube connected to the Comte's wicked-looking brass helmet, and how the great man's voice had then filled the massive chamber like a god's. But this voice was different— thin, and brittle, even cruel. It was a woman.

“As you have seen and felt,” cried the voice, “our artillery can be directed anywhere we choose, from our doorstep to the canal. You cannot hide, and you cannot advance. Your men will be slaughtered. Your business here has failed. Your soldiers and your rabble will withdraw. You yourself will come forward from your shadows, madame, alone. You have five minutes, or we will begin shelling the ground in every direction. Make no mistake. If you do not come forward, you will all be destroyed.”

These words were followed by a rasping pop, which told Miss Temple the speaking tube had been detached and the woman's fearful pronouncement was done. Miss Temple waited for any response— orders bawled out to the dragoons, cries of retreat from the crowd around the gate—but heard nothing. Miss Temple crept forward through a line of shell-holes and their rising smoke. Still she heard no response, neither to attack nor to flee. Surely staying where they were, vulnerable and in the open, was the poorest strategy of all—it could only provoke another barrage.

The smoke cleared enough for her to see that the gravel road ended at a low wooden wall, beyond which rose the factory. Its white surface seemed all windows and light, and the bricks the merest framework, like a flaming cage made from innumerable small bones. Shadows darted across its openings and along the edge of the rooftop, and above it the black smoke still rose in a billowing curtain.

The smoke cleared and Miss Temple finally saw the glass woman's army, for the low wooden wall was lined with crouching figures… more than a hundred Dragoons, with here and there an awkward fellow in Ministry black. Not one of them moved. Miss Temple went near—as if she were dreaming, for not a man acknowledged her approach—finally close enough to touch the soldiers on the face. Had Mrs. Marchmoor immobilized her own minions, as she had stilled Miss Temple in the coach? Had she grown so powerful—to touch so many minds in a stroke, and with such force? But why were the men not sent away? Did this not leave them even more vulnerable to cannon fire? Not to retreat was direct defiance of the amplified voice's demands, and when the minutes ticked away these men must die.

She had very little time herself. Miss Temple looked up to the windows, aware there must be all sorts of eyes upon her. But no one shouted, no one shot her down. She returned the knife to her boot and stepped to the nearest of the black-coated men. It was the odious drone from Harschmort, Mr. Harcourt, his blue eyes staring blankly like a fish looking up from the poaching pan. Cradled in his hand was a small six-shot revolver. She tugged it from his grip and measured the cold iron's weight in her little palm. It would absolutely do.

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 seriously 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.

“Are you back with us, Celeste?”

“She is not well,” announced Svenson. “It is the glass.”

The Doctor's gaze flicked again to Elöise, near Francesca Trapping. The little girl did not respond to her tutor in any way. Her vacant eyes stared ahead. But Miss Temple could detect a thin halo of blue around each eye. The girl's thin lips had darkened to the color of bruised plum-skin. At once Elöise raised one hand to her head and, stumbling backwards, extended the other toward Mrs. Marchmoor, as if warding off a blow.

“I'm sorry,” she cried. “I'm sorry—”

“Get away from her, Elöise!” called Mrs. Trapping. “You must stop interfering! Francesca will be perfectly safe. Come stand by me.”

“She is not safe, Charlotte—look at her!”

With a reflexive defensiveness, Mrs. Marchmoor's remaining hand slipped from her cloak and took tight hold of the girl's shoulder. Francesca did not react, her face slack and dull, but Mrs. Trapping's face went as suddenly sharp as an unsheathed blade.

“Alfred!”

“Company!” Mr. Leveret shouted. “Arms!”

The soldiers shifted their carbines with a uniform precision, their aim fixed on the glass woman and her party.

Mr. Phelps stumbled forward as if he had been pushed very hard.

“Ladies, Mr. Leveret—please! There is no call for histrionics—we are nearly to the finish, I beg you—one more moment of patience! Look around you!”

Phelps sniffed loudly and dabbed at his nose with a handkerchief, careful to fold it over before anyone could detect any trace of blood, and then, back to business, gestured to Lord Vandaariff, whose scarred, livid face was wet with tears.

“In administering the Process, we have made proof of both Mr. Fochtmann's learning and Mr. Leveret's machines. What is more, this proof has rendered our subject's empty mind utterly compliant!”

Miss Temple remembered Roger Bascombe rhapsodizing about the Process—its gift of clarity, passage to essential truths—claptrap— but what essence did a man like Vandaariff still possess? Even without the Comte's book, she knew the main advantage of the Process for the Cabal was the insertion of a control phrase, allowing them to issue commands the subject would be forced to obey. At once she understood—a control phrase had just been implanted in Vandaariff and given to both parties.

“Charlotte, your daughter is at stake.” Elöise pointed toward Mr. Leveret. “And that man will not tell you what you need to hear.”

“And who are you?” Leveret snorted. “That child's tutor!”

“Mrs. Trapping knows very well what I am,” answered Elöise. “And she ought to know what it has cost me. Charlotte, think! Once they get what they want, you will not matter!”

“But they have not got anything, Mrs. Dujong,” cried Leveret hotly, “nor will they!” He smugly snapped his fingers at a pair of crouching soldiers. “We stand quite completely protected—by a Xonck Armory 296 explosive shell!”

Leveret surveyed the silent room with satisfaction. “A 296 explosive shell, Mrs. Dujong, will shatter every piece of glass in this building. As our windows lack glazing, the glass I refer to stands there.” He stabbed a long, thick-knuckled finger at Mrs. Marchmoor. “And at the first sign of—of—alchemical, mind-bludgeoning, dream-sniffing, thought-eating nonsense, those men will push their plunger and that creature's newest allies shall be a broom and dustpan!”

“What side are you on, Elöise?” called Mrs. Trapping. The woman was smiling. Leveret broke into a confident grin, looking back at her.

“Charlotte,” Elöise pleaded, gesturing to Francesca, “it is not about mere sides.”

“But it is, Mrs. Dujong,” called another voice. “And you must get out of the center… before you are killed there.”

Doctor Svenson stepped toward Elöise, his arm outstretched. His uniform was shabby and his face smeared with soot, but his blue eyes were clear. Stranded in the center of the room, Elöise looked down at his extended hand. As if his gesture was especially unbearable, she veered away with a cry, standing alone with her arms crossed and one hand covering her mouth.

“WE'LL NOT waste more time,” announced Mrs. Trapping. She turned to Fochtmann and clapped her hands together, as if she were calling a dog. “I trust you are finished?”

The tall man bowed gravely and motioned Mrs. Trapping and Mr. Leveret farther away. He had secured black hoses across Vandaariff's body, strapped the black rubber mask across his face, and swaddled the black webbed gloves around his hands and bare feet. Lord Vandaariff sat wrapped like a stuporous insect, stuffed away for future consumption in some spider's larder. Miss Temple wondered at how easily people who two weeks before would have licked this man's boot heel for the merest scrap of attention now treated him like a slave. Vandaariff's fate—pathetic, degraded—seemed only what any of them would receive, or even merit.

Fochtmann turned dramatically to face them all, pulling the brass helmet onto his head. At the wash of ash in her mouth, Miss Temple gagged.

“It will not work!” she croaked.

“Of course not!” Fochtmann barked through the helmet's voice box. “We have not restored the power.”

Fochtmann signaled the men and the line of silver machines roared back to deafening life. Then he pulled down the brass handle with the flourish of a circus showman.

Nothing happened. Fochtmann raised it up, prodded a bit of wiring, and pulled it down even harder. Nothing happened. Fochtmann waved angrily at the men, and the machines powered down. Fochtmann pulled off the helmet, his face hot and the bandage on his brow flapping loose. He strode toward Miss Temple.

“Why did you say it would fail? What do you know?”

“You lack a device… to manage the flow.” Miss Temple's words slurred.

“What device?” demanded Fochtmann, taking hold of her jaw.

“She does not have it,” said Chang.

“And you do?”

“No…”

Chang turned, and every eye in the room shifted with him, toward the Contessa.

“Once again you block our way, madame!” cried Mrs. Trapping. She snapped her fingers, but before the soldiers reached the Contessa, the woman raised her hand and delved into her clutch bag.

“My goodness, Charlotte,” the Contessa replied with an icy brightness. “Allow me to help you all.”

She extracted a shining metal implement from the bag. With two tugs she doubled its size, stretching the device like a telescope until it took the shape of an old-fashioned pistol, with a ball-shaped handle on one end and a barreled tube on the other.

“The marrow sparge,” said Chang.

The Contessa spared him one glacial smile and then tossed the thing in a lazy arc to Fochtmann, who caught it with both hands.

“Now, in exchange…” the Contessa began calmly, as if her words were not an explicit plea for her life.

“O do not!” sneered Mrs. Trapping. “Because I have been powerless you think I have seen nothing! I see you now—in tatters, like a gypsy! This business no longer requires you, madame—nor my brother, who has been a ghost these many years. You have lost your wager!”

Mrs. Trapping's face was red and her hands were clutching her side. Mr. Leveret reached for her arm but she shook him away. The Contessa had not moved.

“As you desire, Charlotte,” she said. “Of course, there remains much that none of you know, despite your presumption—all of Macklenburg, for example, as ripe for plunder as Peru, and richer to our interests than a continent full of silver. And even more beyond Macklenburg— initiatives have begun in Vienna and Cadiz, in Venice—”

“What initiatives in Venice?” asked Mr. Phelps, rather quickly.

“Precisamente,” laughed the Contessa. Then the laughter caught in her throat and the light stalled in her eyes. She clawed at the air, and gasped through her open mouth, an animal panting. The glass woman withdrew. The Contessa met their gazes, eyes fierce, her voice raw as she called to the glass woman.

“You may harvest facts from my brain, Margaret. But beyond fact lies an understanding you cannot capture—and that is my instinct. I outwitted Robert Vandaariff and Henry Xonck—and it ought to be clear to a hare-lipped infant that if you proceed without me now, it is at your peril.” She turned to Fochtmann, snorting at the metal device he held. “I watched Oskar create the marrow sparge himself. Do you even know what it is?”

“It connects below the skull,” hissed Mrs. Marchmoor. “There are hidden needles.”

Fochtmann snorted upon finding the needles—as, now he had the tool, how obvious was its purpose—and set at once to its installation. Mrs. Trapping watched him for a moment but then looked away, impatient and cross.

“What is a ‘sparge’?” she asked, generally.

“A medieval term,” said Doctor Svenson, after no one else replied. “For the Comte, the meaning would be alchemical—to aerate, to infuse—”

“That tells me nothing,” Mrs. Trapping muttered.

“Why ask a German?” Leveret replied with a sneer.

The Doctor cleared his throat. “With this device in place, the energy from the book will be sent directly along Lord Vandaariff's spine, infusing the natural fluid there. This same fluid bathes the primary mass of nerves—the spinal column as well as the brain. It is the alchemical marrow.”

“Will that work?” Mrs. Trapping asked doubtfully.

“If it does not also boil his brain like a trout.”

“We have seen it,” grunted Xonck from the depths of his distress. “At the Institute—the Comte wiped the mind of a caretaker, then infused it with the memories of an African adventurer he had harvested that week at the brothel. The old man's mind became nothing but slaughtered dervishes and impregnated tribeswomen.”

“How interesting it will be to speak to Oskar once again,” said the Contessa.

“If I remember correctly,” observed Doctor Svenson, “at the moment of his own death the Comte—beg pardon, Oskar—was intending to kill you.”

“O tush,” said the Contessa. “The Comte d'Orkancz is, if nothing else, sophisticated.”

“You cannot think he will be your ally?”

“Doctor, I will be over-joyed to see my old friend.”

“But will it be the Comte?” asked Chang. “That adventurer was harvested under the Comte's own care. This book was inscribed at the very worst of times—”

“Inconsequential,” rasped Xonck.

“And what of Robert Vandaariff?” asked Svenson. “Is he truly expunged? Or will a lingering remnant dangerously shatter the Comte's essence?”

“And will either of these proud men submit willingly to all of you?” asked Chang.

“Be quiet!” cried Mrs. Trapping. “They do not have to submit willingly! The Comte must do our bidding—is that not why he underwent that horrible Process—so we may manage him and Vandaariff's money? We have acquired this power, and now we will employ it! Everyone has agreed—it is very, very simple—and I insist that we be finally ready. You, there—tall fellow…”

“I am Mr. Fochtmann,” he said, aghast.

“Exactly so. Proceed.”

THE HANDLE was pulled and the crackle of current spat across the copper wires like fat on a red-hot stove. Miss Temple clenched her fists and squinted, half turning her face away. Robert Vandaariff's voice echoed from under the black rubber mask, in unearthly yelps of terror, high-pitched and plaintive as an uncomprehending dog whose leg had been crushed by a cart. His tightly bound limbs thrashed and his spine arched until it seemed it must break from straining. At the first touch of current, blue light glowed from the brass device that held the book, intensifying to a bright white flame—the scorching reek of indigo clay came off in clouds. Within the glare, Miss Temple saw flickers of shadow, ghost fragments, dreams flaming to life.

Then it was done. At Fochtmann's wave the machines went silent.

Vandaariff sagged against the restraints. No one else moved.

“Did it work?” whispered Charlotte Trapping.

Vandaariff lurched forward, choking. Miss Temple felt a mirroring, sympathetic spasm of nausea. Leveret cried aloud as he pulled the mask away—Vandaariff had filled it with black bile, and now vomited another ink-colored gout across the man's trousers.

GRIM AND determined, Fochtmann loosened the restraints, easing Vandaariff to his knees and watching carefully as the man emptied the fouled contents of his stomach onto the planking. Leveret opened his mouth to complain, but the engineer impatiently motioned him to silence.

Vandaariff tipped his head from side to side, slowly, like a stunned bull, and flexed his fingers as if he were testing a pair of new leather gloves.

“Do not approach him,” Fochtmann warned.

Vandaariff strove to rise, grunting with effort, the livid scars accentuating the whiteness of his eyes. Fochtmann took the rag and wiped Vandaariff's face.

“Look at him!” whispered Mrs. Trapping. “What is wrong?”

“These are temporary effects,” said Fochtmann. “Be patient…”

“Monsieur le Comte?” asked Leveret. “Is it you?”

The Contessa took one hesitant step. “Oskar?”

Vandaariff tried to stand but could not, slipping to his knees and elbows like a tottering colt. He looked into the faces around him, and his eyes—the whites tinged with a blue film his blinking pushed into beads that broke down his cheeks—began to clear… and upon seeing the Contessa, a rattle of recognition rolled from his throat.

“Oskar?” Her voice was gentle. He swallowed, his face suddenly clouded by fear. The Contessa sank so her face was at his level.

“You are alive again, Oskar… it is not the airship. On the airship you were killed… but you have been restored. You have been restored by one of your own marvelous books, Oskar. Do not be afraid. You have come back to us… back from where no man has ever returned.”

Vandaariff swung his head awkwardly, straining to make sense of her words, of the different room and so many people—so different from the ones he had last seen. He lurched forward. Fochtmann patiently raised him when the spasms had stopped, once more wiping Vandaariff's chin.

“Is it truly him?” whispered Mrs. Trapping.

“Of course it is,” said the Contessa easily. “He knows me.”

“Did not Robert Vandaariff know you too?” asked Leveret. He peered suspiciously into Vandaariff's face, like a farmer inspecting a pig at auction.

“Monsieur le Compte—if you are the Compte—my name is Leveret—”

“Tell him we need proof,” Mrs. Trapping called over Leveret's shoulder. “Something only he could know—some snip of alchemical whatsit.”

Mr. Fochtmann insinuated himself between Leveret and Vandaariff.

“Give him room, sir—the physical costs of the infusion are prodigious. Robert Vandaariff has undergone this after the Process, nor had he a young man's vitality to begin with.”

“The problem is not his body,” said Doctor Svenson, studying Vandaariff with pained disapproval, “but his mind. The Comte was snatched from the arms of death.”

“I'd expect him to be grateful,” muttered Mrs. Trapping.

The Contessa sighed with irritation and shifted closer.

“Oskar… try to remember… on the airship. The last minutes. You were very angry—angry at me. I had behaved very badly. I had killed Lydia—”

Vandaariff's eyes flared at her words. The Contessa nodded as if to encourage his memory, as if his rage were entirely natural. “I had ruined all of your great plans. You came at me… you thought to kill me… but then you were stabbed. Do you remember? Everything had gone wrong. We were betrayed. The airship was sinking. You were dying. Francis came to you with a book… an empty book, Oskar. Francis captured your soul.”

Robert Vandaariff swallowed, listening intently, watching her mouth. His lips trembled.

Once more Leveret thrust his face forward.

“This is the Xonck Armament Works in Parchfeldt Park, monsieur. I am Mr. Leveret. You are—” He grimaced with distaste and then muttered to the room at large, “I feel a fool saying this at all—we have no certainty that anything of the sort has occurred…”

“Go on, Alfred,” said Mrs. Trapping. Leveret sighed, then snapped his fingers in front of Vandaariff, whose gaze had gone back to the Contessa.

“The contents of that book have been infused into the body of Robert Vandaariff. If you are indeed the Comte d'Orkancz, we require you to give out some sign—some assurance—that this is true. We require it now.”

Vandaariff blinked, returning Leveret's stare. Miss Temple could see the man's expression had sharpened, enough for his true thoughts to be veiled behind it—though this might bespeak no more intelligence than a cat's wary reaction to a curious child. She swallowed with a wince, like the others unable to look away from his scarred face, but unlike them, dreading an echo of the corruption she had already allowed to stain too much of her own mind. But Robert Vandaariff remained mute.

“Why don't we simply make him answer?” Charlotte Trapping addressed Mr. Fochtmann. “What did you call it—the control phrase? Why doesn't Alfred simply speak the phrase aloud and order him to tell us?”

“He may not be unwilling,” began Fochtmann, “but unable. If we try to imagine what this man may have seen—”

“Nonsense. Alfred?”

Leveret stood tall and cleared his throat. “Indigo Pilate iris sunset Parchfeldt! Are you the Comte d'Orkancz?”

No one spoke. Instead of answering, Vandaariff attempted to stand. Fochtmann caught his arm, and so steadied, Vandaariff kept his feet.

“He will not answer,” hissed Leveret. “Look at him! He does not even acknowledge the phrase!”

“That is impossible,” said Mrs. Trapping. “At least… it ought to be…”

Leveret's face darkened with rage. “Is this trickery? Does he presume to trifle?”

“For God's sake!” cried Fochtmann. “Give him another moment! He has only come back from the dead!”

Miss Temple was startled by the halting clicking steps—the glass woman was advancing with great care, the little girl in tow. Vandaariff thrust Fochtmann away from him, gripping one of the brass boxes in an effort to remain upright. A line of saliva hung from his lips. He met Mrs. Marchmoor's swirling blue eyes.

Then his mouth slackened and his eyes went under a cloud. The glass woman was quite obviously probing Robert Vandaariff's new-fashioned soul.

“What do you see?” whispered Fochtmann.

“Tell us!” hissed Mrs. Trapping.

The glass woman began to glow with the same cerulean sparks Miss Temple had seen that morning in the Duke of Stäelmaere's study, and her gleaming fingers tightened around the vacant girl's arm.

“Look at this marvel!” Fochtmann whispered, eagerly staring at the glass woman. “She senses him… she sees what has been done—an accomplishment beyond anything I might have dreamed…”

Francesca's eyelids flickered like a dreaming animal's. Miss Temple looked back to Vandaariff… with alarm she realized that Francesca's face was now flinching and twitching exactly in time with his. Through the conduit of the glass woman's hand, the child was being completely exposed to Vandaariff's mind. Did no one else see?

Mrs. Marchmoor's words curled into Miss Temple's mind like a serpent encircling a sleeping bird.

“It is done. The Comte d'Orkancz has been saved.”

FRANCESCA TRAPPING suddenly coughed, choked, and then sprayed out a mouthful of blackened spit. Her mother screamed. As if realizing too late what had happened, Mrs. Marchmoor thrust the child toward Colonel Aspiche, breaking the connection. Francesca retched again, bent over double.

“Francesca!” shrieked Mrs. Trapping.

The girl looked up, eyes wide, as if she were seeing the room for the very first time. Mrs. Trapping rushed toward her, but was caught about the waist by Leveret.

“What has happened?” shrieked Charlotte Trapping. “What has she done to my child?”

“Charlotte—no, wait—”

“Do not!” cried the Colonel. He held tight to Francesca's shoulder and pointed to Mrs. Marchmoor. “Margaret—Margaret, what in heaven…”

Her remaining glass hand had been sprayed with black bile. Mrs. Marchmoor convulsively licked her lower lip as she stared down at the stain, as if she could taste the nauseating substance through her surface. The surprise in the glass woman's voice pierced Miss Temple's mind like a pin.

“He… he is… unclean…”

The bright slug of her blue tongue spurred another spasm in Miss Temple's stomach. The glass woman had never found the corruption, even when probing Vandaariff's mind outright, having wrongly assumed that with the change in bodies the Comte's prohibition no longer held force. Only when the taint had passed to the child could the glass woman sense it. Mrs. Marchmoor retreated from Vandaariff, her blue lips drawn back.

“Unclean?” Leveret shook his head angrily, still holding Mrs. Trapping. “What does that mean?”

“It means nothing!” shouted Fochtmann. “We all saw the sickness from the procedure—this is more of the same—it is natural—”

“It is not,” Aspiche shouted. “Look at the child!”

Francesca trembled, held at arm's length by the Colonel. Her lips and chin were black, and her small mouth dark as a wound.

“The child is ill,” snapped Fochtmann. “It has no bearing on our work.”

Phelps nervously addressed the glass woman. “You must explain, madame. You looked into his mind—you told us the infusion worked, that this was the Comte—”

“It is the Comte!” insisted Fochtmann, but the glass woman's continuing distress stopped his speech.

“I could not see it in him,” Mrs. Marchmoor hissed. “Only in the girl… but it is from his body…”

“What is from his body?” demanded Aspiche.

“Nothing!” Fochtmann waved his arms. “The girl must be diseased—”

“I was forbidden by him,” said Mrs. Marchmoor. “None of the Comte's servants could enter his mind—”

“We don't understand you, Margaret,” said the Contessa.

The glass woman rolled her head as if to clear it, yet her words remained too dense, as if she could not find the way to translate her present senses into language.

“I could taste that the book held him, that he had been infused with Lord Robert—but not the character of his mind… I was forbidden, and so the corruption… eluded me…” Mrs. Marchmoor thrust her bandaged stump at Miss Temple. “She knew! She knew all along!” Her dismay rose to a keening shriek.

Fochtmann wheeled toward Miss Temple, his own frustration finally finding its object.

“Did she? It seems she has known all sorts of things! She was alone with the book—and alone with the girl! I suggest she tell us all exactly what she has done to them both!”

Miss Temple took a careful step backwards.

“The truth is before you all—the decay. You have not given a man new life… you have retrieved a corpse.”

“TRUTH BE damned!” roared Xonck, and he careened toward Vandaariff, scattering everyone. Fochtmann turned in protest, but Xonck drove his plaster fist into the man's stomach, then took Vandaariff by the collar with his other hand.

“Francis!” screamed Mrs. Trapping. “Francis, we need him—step away at once! At once or you will die!”

“Company!” cried Leveret. “Arms!”

The soldiers raised their carbines. Xonck spun Vandaariff's body before him as a shield, his foul lips pressed dripping against the man's right ear. Aspiche thrust Francesca Trapping to Phelps, sweeping out his saber as Phelps caught the girl in the crook of his cast and groped in his coat for a pistol. Leveret waved to stop the soldiers from firing, visibly furious at events being so suddenly beyond his control.

But then Xonck's whispering was answered.

From inside his raw throat came a chuckle, and the man's features settled into a heavier, petulant expression Robert Vandaariff had never worn.

“Why, Francis…” he rasped. “You seem to be in… a very bad way…”

“Oskar?” whispered Xonck with fervent relief. “Is it you?”

“You hold me rather tightly,” answered Vandaariff. “I do not like it.”

“If I release you, I will be shot.”

“Why is that possibly my concern?”

“Let me enlighten you, Oskar,” Xonck snarled. “My body is poisoned by your glass. I require you to save my life—after which I am again your willing friend. I cannot speak for Rosamonde—she too is not her best—but I can say that others, who hold the power to end both your life and mine and whose place this is, have agreed to your restoration only so you can be their slave.”

“That is only to be expected.” Vandaariff shrugged, surveying the room as if his gaze were a gun site, nodding with contempt as he recognized the faces around him. He reached up to wipe his face, the surprisingly delicate movements of his large hand entirely of a piece with the Comte d'Orkancz. He frowned at the black fluid wetting his fingertips. “What is this?”

“Margaret says you're unclean.”

Vandaariff studied the glass woman, cocking his head at her bandaged arm. “Does she? Well… poor Margaret… always so emotional.”

“They have administered the Process,” hissed Xonck impatiently.

Vandaariff reached up to the scars, his touch smearing the black fluid across the raised welts. “A perfectly good idea, I'm sure. At any rate, worth the attempt…”

Mr. Leveret stepped forward and shouted directly into Vandaariff's face. “Indigo Pilate iris sunset Parchfeldt!”

Vandaariff chuckled. “The Process is powerful,” he said with a wan shrug. “But infusion from a book is even more so. One is new-laying the essence.”

“But—but we have remade you out of nothing!” Mrs. Trapping's arrogance had taken on a plaintive whine. “We must control you!”

“Must?” Vandaariff faced her with a sudden, low intensity. “Control the worms in your own stomach, madame. Command the innocence of your daughter to return. Order your bankrupt heart to pump clean—”

Mr. Fochtmann brought down an iron wrench on the back of Francis Xonck's head, with a sickening, crushed-pumpkin thwock. Xonck collapsed on the dais, utterly still.

Vandaariff looked down, abstractly curious. “My goodness.”

Mrs. Trapping's hand was over her mouth. “Francis! Francis!” She strode toward Fochtmann. “What have you done to my brother?”

Mr. Fochtmann struck her cleanly on the jaw with his fist, knocking her into a sprawl of kicking legs.

“My God, sir!” cried Leveret, leaping to her. “You will not hit a woman!”

“I am surely finished with them hitting me,” growled Fochtmann, and he called to Mrs. Marchmoor. “Enough of this nonsense.”

Colonel Aspiche extended his saber toward Vandaariff.

“It does not sound like nonsense to me! If he can defy us—if he does not possess the knowledge to repair this sickness—I am finished with the pack of you!”

Phelps cradled the pistol in one hand and pulled the girl tighter to him with the other, addressing Mrs. Marchmoor. “Please, madame— the sickness! You call him ‘unclean’—does that mean we are doomed?”

“Don't be idiots,” began Fochtmann, “there is no need for rebellion—we are all allies!”

Aspiche spun to Mrs. Marchmoor, the naked saber daringly near her body, his voice tight and his arm shaking.

“For pity's sake, Margaret—tell us!”

But Mrs. Marchmoor said nothing. Her gaze remained locked on Robert Vandaariff. Miss Temple knew the glass woman had no answer, that she could not tell who—or what—this new person before her truly was. Vandaariff cocked his head again and licked his lips, deliberately tasting them. He abruptly began to retch but then swallowed it down with difficulty, a display that to Miss Temple was every bit as revolting as if he had vomited outright.

Still Mrs. Marchmoor said nothing, Aspiche's saber-tip dancing before her.

Charlotte Trapping cried out plaintively, “Alfred! They have Francesca—please!”

Mr. Leveret was startled to action. He swept his arm dramatically toward the soldiers with the concussive shell. “No one will do anything—unless everyone here wishes to die!”

But Leveret's next shout failed on his lips. Blood burst out from the faces of the two soldiers. They dropped their wires and fuses as cleanly as if their arms had been lopped off with a scythe. Leveret stammered, and then yelled desperately for his army. He was already far too late.

MISS TEMPLE was staggered, as if she'd been cuffed hard across the ear, while all around her carbines clattered to the floor. The soldiers toppled heedless to their faces, eyes open wide, bodies entirely still. Across the entire room it was the same. Every person was incapacitated in an instant's sudden violent pulse from the glass woman's mind. Leveret and Mrs. Trapping lay flattened. Phelps and Aspiche sprawled on their backs, pulling Francesca Trapping with them. Elöise groped on the floor, hair fallen about her face. Vandaariff slumped into the brass boxes. The Contessa was on all fours. Only Fochtmann had kept his feet and his senses… along with herself, Chang, and Svenson.

Miss Temple shook her head—her ears were ringing—taking in the swathe of destruction. A moment before it seemed as if the glass woman's impossible powers had finally reached their limit, but she had smothered the rebellion in one mighty, silent stroke. Yet whatever she had intended—to escape? to eradicate her enemies?—was forever stalled when she saw they still stood to defy her. With a plangent whine Mrs. Marchmoor retreated several rapid clicking steps. If they could withstand her mental powers, Miss Temple realized, the creature was utterly defenseless. They might be children with stones intent on crushing a tortoise. Miss Temple met the glass woman's gaze and saw in her swirling eyes incomprehension and terror.

Chang lurched toward Colonel Aspiche, groping for the insensible man's fallen saber.

“Sir! I beg of you!”

Margaret Hooke cried out to Fochtmann, stirring him from his daze. As Chang took hold of the Colonel's weapon, Fochtmann took two strides and snatched up Mr. Phelps' pistol. Doctor Svenson tackled Fochtmann, and the tall man fell, crashing to the floor in a heavy tangle. Fochtmann fought against Svenson's arms to aim the gun at Chang, who was stranded between the struggling men and Mrs. Marchmoor, neither target within reach of his saber. Miss Temple darted forward and kicked Fochtmann's hand quite cleanly. The pistol flew away from them all, skittering unimpeded across the floor… until it was stopped by the Contessa's foot.

THE CONTESSA bent down unsteadily to retrieve the gun.

“Are we finished with the circus?” she asked. “I do hope so. I am tired.”

She cocked the gun and held it generally, so she might as easily fire at Miss Temple or Chang as at Mrs. Marchmoor.

“An interesting circumstance,” the Contessa observed. “Like some interlocking Chinese box. Margaret can overpower me, but not Chang. I can shoot Chang, but then Margaret is free to overwhelm my mind. And no doubt each of us would be more than happy for the others to die.”

Before anyone could respond, another stirring on the floor caught Miss Temple's eye. Mr. Leveret sputtered and struggled to rise. He looked about him, taking in the crushing vision of his soldiers all dropped to the floor, saw the glass woman and Chang, and then lastly the Contessa. He rose to his knees, his voice pinched with disapproval.

“I must protest, madame, and demand that in all decency—”

The Contessa's bullet caught Leveret square between the eyes, a spout of dark red blood flipping in the air as he went down. Charlotte Trapping screamed aloud, and screamed again, drawing her shaking hands up to her face. Mr. Leveret did not move.

“Be quiet, Charlotte,” warned the Contessa coldly. “Or I will kill your child.”

She extended the pistol to where Francesca lay curled, looking altogether too small. Her mother's next cry stopped in her throat with a moan. Miss Temple turned with helpless anger to Chang. “Will you not do something?”

“She is right,” he said quietly. “If I take Margaret's head, nothing stops the Contessa from killing as many of us as she has bullets.”

The hard truth of his words fell flat upon the room, and no one spoke. Then Robert Vandaariff coughed wetly He watched them with one open eye from where he lay slumped, the corners of his mouth touched with a distant bemusement. The Contessa called sharply to the glass woman.

“Margaret, I would put it to you that nothing between us need prevent an understanding now. We have an unparalleled opportunity, you and I—to create in a stroke a new future. My former agreement lay with Harald Crabbé, Francis Xonck, and the Comte d'Orkancz. Crabbé is dead. Francis is ill. The Comte has been reborn. You and I stand opposed. You already rule the Ministries—take Crabbé's place. With the Comte reborn and Francis restored, we can begin again as equal partners.”

The depths of Mrs. Marchmoor's blue eyes flickered, but she did not respond.

“Your only alternative fate is Cardinal Chang's blade. Come—together, Margaret, we will be truly unstoppable.”

“Francis Xonck tried to kill you,” said Chang.

“And I to kill him,” the Contessa replied. “What of it? This factory is reason enough to retain Xonck Armaments within the portfolio— do you think I can trust Charlotte? Besides, there is also that claim of Margaret's to settle… that Oskar is unclean. In my opinion, restoring Francis to good health is a perfectly reasonable test, demonstrating Oskar's sound mind and intact knowledge. It is entirely sensible.”

Miss Temple felt the bile at the edge of her mind, curdling her concentration like tart lemon dripped in milky tea.

“But this man is not the Comte—not the Comte you knew!”

“Be quiet, Celeste. Come, Margaret… do we have an agreement?”

“If he can restore Francis…” The glass woman's words hung hesitant and thin, broken ice stretched across the skin of a dark pool. “Perhaps the corruption… is not important…”

The Contessa turned toward Robert Vandaariff. “What do you say to that, Oskar?”

“What can I say, Rosamonde?”

“You can agree.”

“And what of this… supposed ‘taint’?”

“Do you feel unclean?”

“I feel clean as Arctic ice.”

“He is lying!” cried Miss Temple. “For pity's sake, I touched the book—I know!”

“If that is so,” the Contessa rejoined, “then we simply administer the Process once again, or find an empty book to re-vacate his mind, or wrap him in chains until the body of Robert Vandaariff is tractable once more.”

“Your sentiment is touching.” Vandaariff straightened his filthy coat with meticulous small tugs.

“Come now, Oskar, I am overjoyed at your return. Will you join us? Surely you would prefer not to be forced?”

“My goodness. How would you do that?”

The Contessa laughed. “How to decide? There is no time for seduction, and no one you care for to threaten. I could put this gun against your knee—one shot and the Doctor would no doubt be forced to amputate with a penknife!” She laughed again. “And think of all the money you would save, buying but one shoe!”

Vandaariff laughed with her. “It is a very good thing we are such friends. Of course I will join you, and join Margaret. I suppose I am even in Cardinal Chang's debt for stabbing me when he did—otherwise I should surely have twisted your lovely neck clean through.”

“Is… is Francis alive?” It was the tearful voice of Charlotte Trapping.

“O certainly,” replied Robert Vandaariff mildly. “One can see him breathe.”

He snapped his fingers at Fochtmann, who—after a wary glance back to Mrs. Marchmoor—lifted Xonck into the chair that had held Vandaariff. Under Vandaariff's instruction he reattached the nest of stinking tubes and hoses and masks to Xonck's body. As he worked, Fochtmann cut away Xonck's clothing and exposed the gleaming dark wound in his chest. It throbbed with each heavy breath, like a parasite with intentions of its own.

“What will you do?” asked Doctor Svenson. “The glass has fused to his heart and lungs. How can you hope to extract it?”

“The dilemma is indeed perplexing,” agreed Vandaariff, tapping the pulsing wound with his fingernail.

“If you cannot do it, let him die.” This was Cardinal Chang.

“O I can do it,” replied Vandaariff. Behind him Francis Xonck opened his eyes and groggily shook his head, pushing without comprehension against his bonds. Vandaariff tightened the mask with a tug. He turned and met Miss Temple's gaze. Her throat clenched hard, the arrangement of copper wires and hose around Xonck seeming to twist before her eyes into letters, nearly forming words. She was suddenly terribly afraid, but she could not quite pierce his intention… and then she burst out coughing, unable to speak. Doctor Svenson stepped to her but Miss Temple pushed him away, waving her hand at Vandaariff.

“What is wrong with her?” demanded the Contessa.

“She is ill,” replied Vandaariff. “An effect of the glass. Just like poor Francis. Can you hear me, Francis? Are you alive?”

“Can you truly heal him?” asked Mrs. Trapping.

Vandaariff tied off the end of a black hose. “Do you want me to?”

“I… I do,” she whispered.

An excitement leapt to Vandaariff's eyes.

“But your brother is a wicked thing. If anyone deserves an agonizing death it is certainly Francis. No, Mrs. Trapping, I'm sure I don't believe you.”

“I want him as he was,” she insisted.

“You must convince me…”

“I want him back,” she whimpered.

“Back?” asked Vandaariff. “I see—so you can kill him yourself?”

“No,” sniffed Mrs. Trapping, but then was overtaken by sobs. “I do not know what I want at all!”

Robert Vandaariff sniggered, arch and vile. The Contessa spoke angrily. “When you open your mouth, Charlotte, it helps you not at all!”

“As if I had a choice! In anything!”

The Contessa snorted and pointed to the deathly pale little girl, huddled in an insensible ball at the feet of Mr. Phelps. “You might have remembered your daughter.”

“I might have—I might have?”

Mrs. Trapping took three quick steps toward the Contessa, like a high-strung dog, her hands raised, then staggered from an unseen blow. She wheeled to the glass woman in a tearful fury.

“Do not touch me!” she shrieked. “I will not have your filthy mind in mine! I will break you to a thousand pieces! I do not care if my daughter dies! I do not care if I die! If you touch me again, this whole building can go to the devil's hottest furnace!” Mrs. Trapping swayed with the same crazed ferocity her brother had shown on the roof of Harschmort. “This is my factory,” she gasped, “my brother, you cannot—”

“Be quiet, Charlotte!” snapped the Contessa. “Oskar, what pleasure is there in tormenting an idiotic…”

Her words fell silent. Vandaariff's smiling lips were slick with black fluid.

“Oskar?”

“You never did credit my alchemy, Rosamonde.”

“I beg your pardon? Who was it who took your learning to Vandaariff, to Henry Xonck—men of immense power of whom you had never heard.”

Vandaariff nodded dismissively, stroking his chin as if it held the Comte's beard. “Yes, for you it was ever a means to power.”

“For all of us.”

“You lack higher goals, Rosamonde. At heart you are a dog. A pretty dog, but now look at you! You dismissed the glory of my plans for Lydia… for Margaret… even—” he giggled wickedly “—my plans for you. My goodness, yes—if you'd only dreamt what truly awaited you in Macklenburg… one limb at a time, my sweet… and your womb—O that more than anything, Rosamonde, your own sweet legacy… all given over to me.”

The Contessa stared at him.

“Oskar…you—even you—would not have dared—”

Vandaariff barked with contempt. “Would not dare? Would not dare?”

He raised his arm and Fochtmann, back at the line of machines, restored them to roaring life. The Contessa's eyes went wide. She looked with alarm at Miss Temple, still unable to speak, and shouted for him to wait, shouted for the glass woman to stop him. But Robert Vandaariff seized the handle on the brass box and pulled it down.

MISS TEMPLE had stolen one glimpse of the Comte's cathedral chamber at Harschmort, with all its machines at full roar and Mrs. Marchmoor, Angelique, and Elspeth Poole laid out on tables awaiting transformation—and she had seen the sickening glamour of their grand unveiling in the Vandaariffs' ballroom later that night. But she had not witnessed the alchemical transformation itself, human flesh remade to blue glass. And so the spectacle of Francis Xonck writhing in unspeakable agony—madly shrieking as his body boiled away before them all—filled her with unprecedented horror.

The change began at the gleaming lump near his heart and then spread out in twisting ropes, wriggling fingers surging up each side of his throat, fast-growing tropical vines rippling across his sweat-slicked chest. She heard muffled cracks, like splitting ice, as his bones were over-borne, and then came the bubbling away of muscle and sinew. The hissing glass erupted upwards to pepper the skin in raw blue patches, a horrid dense scatter of virulent blistering. Then these blisters fattened, pooling, colliding into one another until the whole of Xonck's exposed flesh congealed into one gelid gleaming sheet.

At the first jolt of current, the man screamed and thrashed his arms—and it seemed he might tear free, so prodigious was his terror. But as his body incrementally stiffened, his ability to struggle was curtailed. His protests dropped at the last to a lost, vacant moan behind the rubber mask, the sound of wind against the lip of an empty bottle, and then he was silent altogether.

Fochtmann switched off the power.

No one spoke, and not one person moved, save for Robert Vandaariff, who delicately leaned to his new-made creature and whispered in its ear.

“WHAT HAVE you done?” rasped Colonel Aspiche, lifting his head from the floor. “What madness?”

Vandaariff did not answer. Gently peeling free the mask, he exposed Francis Xonck's face—an inhuman swirling blue, copper hair hanging in oily locks against his bare neck. Xonck's moustache and side whiskers were gone. He seemed so much younger—and his corruption more stinging. Vandaariff bared his teeth in a mirthless leer of satisfaction.

“Were you saying something, Rosamonde? I could not hear.”

“Oskar…” The Contessa groped for words, unable to turn from the spectacle of Xonck's body. “O Oskar…”

“Oskar indeed—I trust any questions of identity can be laid to rest. As requested, I have ended Francis' struggle with the blue glass—to everyone's profit… or at least my own.”

“Jesus…” Mr. Phelps seemed near tears. “Jesus God…”

Vandaariff smiled. He scratched his earlobe with the nail of his right thumb. Miss Temple saw with a shudder how the sensibility that had been placed into Robert Vandaariff's body was not truly that of the Comte d'Orkancz. The Comte was an esthete, a sensualist who rated the entire world only by its beauty. Yet in his despairing grapple with death, that sensuality had been spoiled—like a freshly opened egg mixed with tar, like sugar frosting spun with putrid meat, like sliced fruit writhing with maggots—leaving his mind riddled with loathing and spite for everything that remained alive. Whatever ruin he could replicate in the world would merely echo the despoilment of his once-splendid dreams.

He raised an eyebrow at Mrs. Marchmoor, who had not moved, and then addressed the Contessa. “You seem reticent, Rosamonde. Did you not want to renew our compact? Or has your recent ill fortune rendered you as tremulous as these men?”

The Contessa held Phelps' revolver—it was within her power to shoot Vandaariff down.

“Why do you hesitate?” hissed Miss Temple. “After what he was saying, what he would do to you—”

“Be quiet, Celeste!” The Contessa licked her lips, weighing greed and arrogance and hope against the man's outright insanity. For a creature as once splendid as the Contessa to even hesitate, Miss Temple was appalled. The Contessa cleared her throat and spoke in a cool, careful tone.

“I am sure the Comte was merely… exorcising his old rage.”

“I was exactly,” said Vandaariff, smiling.

“Telling stories.”

“I was indeed.”

Vandaariff turned to Miss Temple and smirked at her distressed expression. “The Contessa is my good friend, how could we not go on together? Of course, Margaret is a different story. She is imperfect, created from flawed premises, and so we see the result—beautiful enough, yet rebellious, acquisitive… stupid.” He called to Chang. “Take her head, I beseech you.”

“Enough,” the glass woman whispered.

The chuckle stopped in Vandaariff's throat, and his body stiffened. But despite the redness of his face and the bulging veins in his neck… he continued to smile.

“I may be yours, Margaret,” Vandaariff gasped, his face streaming with sweat. “But Francis… is mine.”

At once Mrs. Marchmoor rocked on her feet. She released Vandaariff, visibly shaking where she stood, and pivoted her attention solely to Francis Xonck. Still bound to the chair, Xonck had lifted his head to face her, his depthless eyes dark and bright. Miss Temple watched transfixed as each glass creature strained against the other— unnatural, hypnotic, battling statues—until it seemed that both must shatter. Xonck's mouth hung open, his broken teeth bared. Blue steam rose from Mrs. Marchmoor's damaged arm.

“I cannot! I cannot!” wailed Mrs. Marchmoor, and at once the tension snapped away, the air in the room as crisp as if it had been split by lightning. Miss Temple's eyes burned and she covered her mouth and nose. Mrs. Marchmoor retreated to the canvas-covered window. Vandaariff barked with hoarse laughter.

“Well done, Francis—though rather tardy. If you delay like that again… suffice to say that I do not tolerate independence.”

He took hold of Francis Xonck's right ear and with a sudden turn of his wrist snapped the upper half clean off, tossing it away to shatter behind the machines. Xonck grunted and an invisible ripple of pain shot through each unprotected mind in the room. Vandaariff mockingly addressed the steaming stub.

“Am I understood?”

The Contessa stepped forward, one hand to her forehead. “Oskar…”

Vandaariff ignored her, calling gaily across the room, “It is no use, Margaret, you will not fit through the bars! You've been damaged— and Francis is your match!”

“What do you want?” the glass woman whispered.

“Everything,” Vandaariff replied. “It would be more efficient to break you apart and pound the pieces into sand… but perhaps that arm can be mended after all. I can mend all manner of broken souls, can't I?”

He looked into Xonck's swirling depths of color with a sour mix of delight and disdain. Miss Temple winced as Xonck's new voice entered her mind, a groping, graveled scrape, deeper than Mrs. Marchmoor's and more sad.

“Oskar… I… I… never—”

“Who asks for destiny?” replied Vandaariff with a strange light in his eyes. “You have been tempered to a harder steel. And perhaps there is justice in it—we have each preserved the other by way of torment.

You are quite new! The corruption is gone, the weakness burned away—your body has undergone the true chemical marriage!”

“You have no idea,” whispered Xonck.

“You think not?” Vandaariff laughed coldly. “The arrogance of this world! Your puling grief, Margaret's grasping fear, this beastly hope—”

Mrs. Marchmoor interrupted him. “What do you want?”

He did not reply. Instead, he turned at last to the Contessa, smirking at the pistol in her hand.

“What would you say, Rosamonde? What price to keep Margaret among us?”

The Contessa looked carefully at Mrs. Marchmoor—her ally of just moments before—and shrugged, flinching against the pull of her shoulder.

“Her continued service,” she said. “Even if she is no match for Francis, she remains inordinately powerful. And in our absence, she has no doubt discovered any number of useful secrets within the Ministries.”

“Excellent practical reasoning, madame. I too am practical, and I think it is extremely important to retain control of this excellent facility—which means, of all things, Xonck.”

“That is nothing to do with Margaret—”

Again, Vandaariff did not seem to answer her words, but spoke from his own urges, the same poisonous resentment. “These machines are our future, but my vision. You deprived me of Lydia, Rosamonde. Her flesh had become my canvas.” Vandaariff's eyes sharpened. “Now my dreams have changed—they have deepened in astonishing ways… I see how I can go so much further…”

His eyes settled on his target with a hungry gleam and Miss Temple felt her gorge rise.

“My price… is the child.”

“The child?” The Contessa shook her head. “But she is not Lydia—She cannot—What will you do with her?”

“Absolutely anything”

Vandaariff looked to the glass woman, who met his gaze and sucked her lower lip, measuring the foulness she had tasted against survival and a return to servitude. She nodded, the barest dip of her chin. Vandaariff turned to the Contessa. Her face was drawn and her mouth grimly set. “Done.”

FRANCESCA TRAPPING screamed. Elöise had plucked up the girl—startling her—and run for the open door. Mrs. Trapping, shocked to life as well, shrieked after them.

“Elöise! You cannot take my daughter from me! Elöise!”

But Mrs. Trapping did not stir from where she stood—wringing her hands, tears on her cheeks—between the corpse of Mr. Leveret and the scarcely recognizable figure of her brother.

Nor was Elöise able to escape. Just at the door she stumbled—her body stopped from afar—and toppled to the floor, face blank, pulling Francesca down with her. The girl had not been occupied. Now she struggled against the unmoving arms of her tutor. Her panicked eyes met those of Francis Xonck, and she screamed even louder.

Miss Temple wheeled to the dais. It was Francis Xonck who had prevented Elöise from taking the girl.

IT WAS not often in Miss Temple's life that she received credit for being intelligent. She had never cared for her studies. She had participated rarely in discussions of substance—business or finance or politics or religion, which was to say the discussions of men—the only sphere where intelligence might be seen as a factor. Instead, it was her lot to be found (and even this less often than she liked) cunning or clever, animal associations—as if one were to admire a badger for digging—less a compliment than a condescending description. Yet in that instant, Miss Temple's mind made a small leap, one that she herself found startling.

It was also at that moment that she noticed a fallen soldier near Elöise move his arm.

Miss Temple took hold of the Doctor's uniform tunic with both hands and shoved him as hard as she could toward the doorway.

“The child is Xoncks!” Miss Temple hissed. “Get her away!”

AS A person who naturally thought the worst of everyone, Miss Temple never doubted the revelations about Elöise and Colonel Trapping (or Elöise and Francis Xonck), though she had not understood why Mrs. Trapping still suffered Elöise's presence. She remembered the Contessa's letter to Caroline Stearne—that she possessed some secret to control Mrs. Trapping. Had Mrs. Marchmoor known it too? Perhaps it had been her taste of Xonck's blood in the garden. Only after that had Andrew Rawsbarthe been ordered to collect vials of blood from each child… and Mrs. Marchmoor had sampled all three vials in the same fashion, turning them to glass. Yet only Francesca had been taken inside the factory—for only her vial had matched the glass woman's earlier taste of her hidden parent—brought to provide leverage against both mother and father. Miss Temple was dismayed by the revelation itself, but the West Indies offered innumerable examples of distressing patrimony—one was always seeing features one shouldn't on the most inconvenient faces, and she herself had studiously ignored what might be familiar noses or chins amongst her own plantation's offspring. The thought opened her heart the slightest crack to how troubled and painful the Trapping household must have been—the devastating tangle of loyalties and humiliations and betrayals, the impossibility of anything but the bitterest compromise …

“FRANCIS!” CRIED Vandaariff. “Francis—stop him!”

“Go to the devil!” barked Svenson. The Doctor stumbled as the force of Xonck's mind struck him, but then he lurched free—free of the same power that had toppled Elöise and overcome Mrs. Marchmoor. Svenson leapt forward to catch the sobbing girl's hands.

“I cannot reach him!” whispered Xonck.

“Reach her!” commanded Vandaariff.

The girl slumped into dead weight. With an exasperated cry in German, Svenson pulled with all his strength, wrenching the slender child away from Elöise, and sprawling onto his seat.

“Stop him!” Vandaariff's voice rose to a shriek. “She is my price! She is my price to spare the lot of you! If she escapes—”

The crack of the Contessa's pistol rang in Miss Temple's ear and a white seam of new wood was ripped from the planks near Svenson's head.

Miss Temple wheeled toward the Contessa and shrieked, desperately waving her arms.

“The soldiers are waking up!”

The Contessa could not help but look—and indeed the green-coated bodies were slowly writhing to life, their limbs like a welter of interlocked snakes—as did everyone else in the room.

Everyone but Chang. At Miss Temple's cry he launched himself straight for Vandaariff. Fochtmann hurled himself in front of his new master, arms outstretched. Chang struck him on the jaw with the saber hilt, and the tall man flew back like a parasol taken apart by the wind. Vandaariff stumbled into the brass machinery, and hissed with pain as his bare hand touched the hot metal. Chang raised the blade. Fochtmann, bleeding from his mouth, dove at Chang's legs, knocking him off balance and sending the stroke wide, striking sparks from a snarl of copper wire. Chang kicked Fochtmann viciously below the ribs.

Fochtmann moaned. “You cannot! You cannot!”

Chang kicked him again, then took hold of Vandaariff's coat and threw the old man brutally to the floor. Chang raised the saber. With horror Miss Temple saw the Contessa aiming her pistol at Chang's chest.

Too late, Miss Temple groped for the knife in her boot—but the Contessa's shot also went wide, as Chang stumbled, nearly falling… kicked by Francis Xonck's glass foot. Chang wheeled as Xonck rose from the nest of machinery. Without the least hesitation he hacked the fat-bladed saber at Xonck's head, but the edge was turned by the plaster cast still sheathing Xonck's right arm, chopping out a hunk of plaster and skidding past the clear blue shoulder. Before Chang could pull the saber back for a second blow, Xonck's plastered arm shot forward like a hammer, striking Chang's head with enough force to sever the glass arm at the elbow in a shower of sparking shards.

The mental explosion at Xonck's willful amputation staggered Miss Temple, but she kept her senses while across the room others toppled or stood stunned. With an anguished cry she threw herself at the Contessa. Too dazed to shoot at so fast a target, the Contessa clubbed the gun wildly, clipping Miss Temple's head with the butt. Miss Temple went to her knees, but slashed out with the knife as she fell, drawing blood on the Contessa's outer thigh. The Contessa screamed and hopped away, the distance allowing her to bring the pistol to bear and fire. The bullet plucked at Miss Temple's curls and tore a jagged gash in the planking. Miss Temple launched herself at the Contessa's bleeding leg and brought the woman down in a heap, the gun bouncing across the floor. The Contessa kicked and clawed for the knife. Miss Temple stabbed her fingers blindly at the woman's eyes. The Contessa twisted her face and very nearly caught Miss Temple's thumb between her snapping teeth. With her free hand Miss Temple slammed the Contessa's bad shoulder. The Contessa screamed—as much with rage as pain—and Miss Temple rolled away toward Robert Vandaariff, who recoiled as if she were an advancing animal, an ugly resolve coloring his eyes like a greasy black film.

Miss Temple slashed at his legs and missed, falling forward. She lunged with a grunt, and missed again, her blow stopped short. The Contessa had taken hold of her foot. Miss Temple kicked fiercely and broke free, but then powerful hands caught her wrist—Fochtmann, risen again—and pried her fingers apart one at a time until her weapon fell to the floor.

“YOU REALLY should have killed her, Rosamonde,” rasped Robert Vandaariff. “She is a very vexing creature.”

Chang lay near her, glasses askew, blinking at the blood dripping into his dark eyes. He was alive and awake. The Doctor was gone, along with the girl. Francesca had been saved—she had done that much. Elöise propped herself up on her arms, oblivious to the soldiers around her, all shaking their heads in the same way, all struggling to rise.

Vandaariff's forehead was bloody. He clucked his tongue absently at the blue glass scattered around him.

“Such recklessness, Francis… I do not like your being so free with my property—”

“What is that?” interrupted Mr. Fochtmann, cocking his head toward the windows where Mrs. Marchmoor had retreated.

Below, through the open windows, came a chorus of shouts…then a loud rhythmic smashing. The mob below had recovered their nerve and were battering the factory doors.

“The soldiers!” snapped Fochtmann. “You must rouse them—while there's still time!” He turned to Xonck, whose impassive expression was fixed on the empty doorway. “Order them to fire the cannons!”

“Yes, yes,” muttered Vandaariff. “That does seem sensible… Francis?”

“They will not obey Francis,” groaned the Contessa, clutching her leg. “They will not know him.”

The mob burst into another roar. The doors were down. Their cries echoed higher as the throng flooded into the factory itself.

“I suppose you are right at that,” said Vandaariff, struggling to concentrate. “It is very vexing in general…”

“He must stop them!” cried Fochtmann. Vandaariff shut his eyes. The Contessa attempted to shift her body, and grimaced. Xonck ignored them all, occupied as he was with the delicate task of stepping free of the brass boxes. Fochtmann pointed with dismay.

“What… what is he doing?”

Miss Temple swallowed, quite unable to avert her eyes, not only because of the man's nudity (she had not quite apprehended it, because of the bindings and hoses, yet was now provoked to inevitable and insistent questions about how the glass flesh actually worked and, as she stared, its elasticity), but also because she was fascinated to see another glass body move—for Xonck, lean and strong like Chang, was of an entirely different weight and figure to the three glass ladies. Miss Temple swallowed again, her mouth terribly dry. Watching Xonck was like watching a tiger on a chain; she marveled at the unfamiliar muscles shifting powerfully with each step. But her gaze was drawn again to Xonck's groin as he turned, lurid memories bubbling in her mind, though this was like nothing anyone had ever seen… the dark whorls of color, so shining and so soft, disgusting and ripe, arrogant and tender, lewd and alluring… she wondered if his body would be cold to the touch… she wondered at its taste. Xonck flexed the fingers of his one hand, grimacing at the steaming, shattered stump, and picked away stray flecks of glass where they clung.

The mob burst into another roar, which was followed by the high-pitched screeching of disabled machinery and a spattering of gunfire.

“If they come up here,” called Aspiche hoarsely, “it will be finished.”

Phelps turned to Mrs. Marchmoor. “Madame—what instructions have you given them, what summons?”

“Those men will destroy you too,” Fochtmann yelled to the glass woman. “As soon as they see you—like any monster! You can stop them! All you represent will be needlessly lost!”

“What I represent?” hissed Mrs. Marchmoor.

“O for God's sake!”

Fochtmann snatched up Miss Temple's knife and hurled it with all his strength across the room. The blade struck Mrs. Marchmoor's cheek, snicking off a sliver of glass in a puff of blue smoke.

“She does not matter!” Aspiche shouted at Fochtmann. “They are still coming for you !”

Fochtmann snorted and looked down for the Contessa's pistol, only to find Charlotte Trapping standing with the pistol in her hand. He reached out with one brusque, impatient arm.

“Mrs. Trapping, I will have that weapon. If you cooperate, as a gentleman I can promise you—”

Mrs. Trapping fired the pistol into Fochtmann's body, spinning the tall man headlong onto the floor. He raised his head once and she fired a second time, the bullet spattering the top of his bald head as if it had been swatted by a shovel.

CHARLOTTE TRAPPING pointed the pistol at Vandaariff's chest… but then her aim wavered to the Contessa, still on the ground, and finally to the glass monstrosity of her brother.

From the floor below came the crash of cannons and the rattle of gunfire. Around them all the soldiers awkwardly regained their senses, collecting their carbines, trying to make sense of the carnage before them.

Tears streamed down the face of Mrs. Trapping. She opened her mouth but then flinched as her brother's power touched her mind.

She gasped as he withdrew, and her eyes cleared with a terrible understanding of how he could—and would, and how fully—now possess her. With an anguished cry she pressed the pistol to her own head, but before her finger could tighten on the trigger, her features went blank and the pistol clattered to the floor.

Mrs. Marchmoor had finally turned her attention to the soldiers moving stiffly toward her. Smoke seeped from the crack on her face, and the white bandage at her broken wrist dripped blue.

Phelps ran for the door, followed a moment later by Aspiche. Elöise was already gone. Robert Vandaariff stared at Xonck, dumbly enthralled by the rebellion of his creature.

Xonck's hand slipped behind his sister's head to gather her red curls, angling her passive face up to his. With a whimper of dread, Miss Temple watched Xonck's blue tongue dip between Charlotte Trapping's coral lips, just an instant of tease before the full of his ravaged mouth fell upon her.

Chang lurched up and thrust his arm across Miss Temple's chest. Before she realized what was about to happen he threw his body over hers, turning his battered leather coat to where Francis Xonck, staring into the terrified eyes of his sister, raised one bare foot and brought it down on the 296 shell's plunger.

CHANG LIFTED Miss Temple to her feet, even as another volley of cannon from the floor below—felt but barely heard, her ears still ringing from the blast—made him stumble. The window bars where Mrs. Marchmoor had stood were coated in fine blue dust, and the unlucky soldiers who had been nearest lay horrid and unrecognizable, blasted through and apart by innumerable razor-sharp glass grains. Charlotte Trapping's body was nothing more than red tattered shreds.

Vandaariff lay on his side in a black pool on the planking. Chang glared darkly at the man, and glanced around him for a weapon.

“He must be killed…”

But then Chang spun and abruptly seized Miss Temple, bundling her desperately away just as the surging mob burst—red-faced and roaring—onto the factory's top floor. Mrs. Marchmoor's minions swept into the crawling soldiers that remained and into the bloody spectacle of her destruction. Even as they struggled, the men, confused by the sudden loss of the glass woman's summons, shouted to one another in terror and surprise, their collection of topcoats and silk cravats utterly out of place in the slaughterhouse the Parchfeldt factory had become. Chang dove with Miss Temple for the doorway. She looked back over her shoulder. Through the churning crowd she saw the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza groping like a blind beggar, feeling for the pockets of Fochtmann's topcoat.

THE PITCH-BLACK stairwell echoed with shouts and gunshots. Chang tightened his grip around her and forced a path down. The doorway to the cannons had been split open—there were still screams and fighting inside—but they did not pause until the ground, the steps hellishly strewn with bodies. Many machines had been disabled— the light of the factory had dimmed, and its harsh song reduced to the hacking clatter of a carriage with one broken wheel. Their way to the front was barred by smoking wreckage and struggling men. Chang pulled her the other way, to the ruins, and they burst into the darkness, gasping in the cold night air, soldiers in green and red sprawled in death across the grass.

“Where are the others?” she whispered, looking around them at the empty yard.

“They have run on,” replied Chang, releasing her to pick up a fallen dragoon's bloodied saber. He pointed with the blade to a ladder set against the rough stone wall. “We must follow.”

“But where?” asked Miss Temple, running ahead of him, one hand on the ladder and the other gathering her dress so her feet might find the rungs. She gasped again as Chang's hands found her waist, lifting her up—which was not strictly necessary, her legs simply kicked in the air—and setting her down at a higher rung. As long as he did not meet her gaze the man seemed perfectly able to touch her body in the most presumptuous of ways.

“What will happen to the Comte?” she cried. “Or the Contessa?”

“They will be destroyed.” She felt Chang's weight behind her on the ladder.

“But if this mob knows them—if this factory becomes theirs—”

“Without their mistress these minions will not stand up to the soldiers, if enough soldiers survive to face them down.”

“Is that why you would not kill her yourself?” snapped Miss Temple, angrily. She reached the top of the wall and looked back over her shoulder. “You will not be encumbered with me, but are perfectly happy to protect a pestilent monstrosity!”

Chang looked up as if she had spoken French and, for the first time in her memory, stammered. “If—if I had taken her head—her power balanced the others'—without her to stop the soldiers—or the Contessa—we all would have—”

Miss Temple snorted, this being no response at all, and threw a leg over the wall, clambering down an unstable slope of tumbled stone into the darkening shadows of the wood. She reached the bottom in a rush, staggering into the undergrowth. Chang descended more carefully behind her.

“Celeste—” he began, but she did not bother to listen.

“Doctor Svenson!” she shouted into the woods. “Doctor Svenson! Where are you?”

Chang seized her shoulder and hissed, “Do not call out! We do not know who is here!”

“Do not be ridiculous,” she cried, “and let me go!”

She pulled her arm free and stalked away, stumbling on a thicket of vines before locating a path.

“Celeste,” Chang whispered, following. “There is still Aspiche— and Phelps—who knows who else—”

“Then I suppose you will have to kill them. Unless you prefer I do that as well. I'm sure I have no idea of your preferences in anything.”

“Celeste—”

Miss Temple wheeled where she was and struck out with her right hand, slapping Cardinal Chang's chest. Chang caught her hand, and so she struck him with the other, this time a fist across his jaw, dislodging his glasses. Chang stabbed the cavalry saber into the ground and caught that hand as well. Miss Temple kicked his leg. He shook her.

“Celeste!”

Miss Temple looked at him, her hands held tight, and saw with a piercing despair the beauty of his jaw, the broad grace of his shoulders, and his especially elegant throat, bound as it was by a filthy neck cloth. Then with a swallow she looked into Chang's eyes, visible past the skewed black lenses… squinting and damaged… confused and hideous… and she realized that this man was the exact image of everything that had gone so horribly wrong, of so much she had lost and could never recover.

Like a striking snake Miss Temple stabbed her face up to his, her lips finding the rough stubble of his cheek and then his mouth, which was so much softer than she ever expected.

CHANG ARCHED his back with a cry and then, his eyes finding hers once more, shoved Miss Temple away from him with all his strength. She caught her foot on another vine and tumbled to her back, watching helplessly as Chang tried to turn, groping for the saber, only to collapse facedown on the forest floor. Behind him stood the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza. In one hand she held her recovered spike, and in the other Lydia Vandaariff's leather case… but had not the book been destroyed by the shell? Could it have been protected inside its brass casing? Without pausing to cut Chang's throat—a sure sign of haste and anger—the Contessa lurched straight for Miss Temple, her face grim and cold. Miss Temple screamed aloud and kicked herself backwards through the leaves, finally rolling to her feet just as the Contessa was snatching at her dress.

Miss Temple tore away and broke into a run, careening blindly through the darkness, heart thudding in her chest, eyes streaming with tears.

She could not think at all but sobbed aloud each time she gasped for breath. Patches of moonlight pierced the treetops, but the heart of the forest remained dark. Miss Temple dodged unthinkingly between ruins and thin saplings, the branches whipping her face and limbs. She glanced behind, but saw no one—with the gash on her leg the Contessa must not be able to run.

Miss Temple knew she should go back, go die next to him—even as she kept running. What had she done? What had she lost? She sobbed again and then stumbled suddenly to a stop, blinking without comprehension.

The forest around her was flooded with light.

“LOOK WHO it is,” sneered an easy, careless voice from beyond the boxed lantern, whose gate had been flung open in a stroke to blind her. “Little Miss Stearne. Or should I say Temple?”

Miss Temple looked over her shoulder, terrified that the Contessa would appear, and wheeled back to the clearing, crying aloud at what she had not seen. On the ground lay Colonel Aspiche, curled around a pooling wound in his chest, matched by a smaller stain on his back where a blade had run him full through.

“Didn't see him in the dark,” explained Captain Tackham. “Terrible thing, he being my commanding officer. Still, mistakes happen in wartime—awful, awful mistakes.”

The men to either side of him, two dragoons, chuckled at his words.

“Are you alone?” asked Tackham, lifting his bloody saber blade toward her with a frank brutality. “We heard you call for that doctor … then you screamed.”

“One… one of the factory soldiers,” she said breathlessly. “I killed him… with a rock.”

“A rock?”

Miss Temple nodded and swallowed.

“Poor fellow. Was he alone?”

“I don't know. I didn't see.”

“It seems you are pursued.”

“I don't know—I—I am afraid—”

Tackham snorted, and nodded to his soldiers. “Make sure, be careful, then come back.”

The troopers pushed past Miss Temple and vanished into the darkness. Tackham pointed with his blade just past the circle of lantern light, to where Mr. Phelps huddled on his knees, utterly cowed.

“I have been told what happened inside,” explained Tackham.

“My considered strategy is to safely wait, and then partake of what spoils remain.”

“There are no spoils!” cried Miss Temple.

Tackham laughed in her face.

“Darling, I am looking at one top-shelf spoil this very instant.”

TACKHAM SPUN at a rustle in the leaves behind him, sweeping his saber to the figure who emerged… but when he saw who it was, the Captain laughed. Doctor Svenson advanced warily with a scavenged saber of his own, looking extremely tattered and worn. He met Tackham's gaze with contempt and then called to Miss Temple.

“Celeste… you've not been harmed?”

She shook her head, unable to say a thing about Chang, her throat closed tight against the words.

“Where…?” Mr. Phelps' voice was a croak. He gestured behind Svenson. “Where is…?”

“Mrs. Dujong?” Doctor Svenson gestured vaguely behind him. “I do not know. At the canal.”

“And the child?” asked Phelps.

“No longer your concern,” said Svenson.

“Put down your blade or die,” Tackham said coldly.

“Well, one of us will die,” said the Doctor. “I heard your comment about spoils, you see—and if other men lack the courage to stop you, I do not.”

“How excellent!” Tackham hefted his blade with a wolfish smile. “You know how to use a cavalry saber, then?”

“As much as any surgeon of the Macklenburg Navy,” answered Svenson.

Tackham laughed aloud.

“Doctor—no, no—you must not—”

“Tush, my dear. What the Captain does not understand is that, like any German university man, I have done my share of dueling…”

The Doctor snapped, to Miss Temple's eyes, into an extremely dubious en garde stance, at his full height with his legs together like a dancer, and his sword arm straight out above him, the blade upside down with its tip floating directly at the level of Captain Tackham's eyes. Tackham snorted and settled into a low crouch, his left hand tucked behind his back and his right hand bouncing with anticipation, as if debating just where to land his blow.

“Not the most flexible of stances,” Tackham observed.

“It does not need to be. The mistake you have made, young man, is in thinking that I give one brass farthing for my life.” Svenson's voice was both icy and forlorn. “It is all well to fight a man whose intention is not to be killed. Fear makes defense his priority—it is the bedrock of every sane strategy. But since I do not care for my life at all, I tell you quite clearly that you are doomed. Strike me anywhere you can. My counter-stroke will land. From this inflexible stance it takes but one turn of my wrist to open your skull like a melon.”

“You're a liar,” sneered Tackham.

“You will find out, won't you?” said the Doctor. “Attack me anywhere … and die.”

“Doctor—”

“Hush now. I must concentrate.”

THE TWO men edged slowly into the center of the clearing, eyes locked on each other. Miss Temple trembled to see, up close, how vicious the saber blades truly were—the wide bright steel, the indented curve of the blood gutter, the hatchetlike chop at the tip, wide and sharp as a cleaver. It seemed the Doctor had no chance at all, yet Tackham moved with extreme care, as if the Doctor's words were at least possibly serious.

“Advancement by assassination?”

The Doctor nodded at the Colonel's corpse, childlike and bereft, on the ground. From the factory behind them came a spattering of gunshots. Tackham frowned and glanced over his shoulder.

“It barely matters,” said Svenson. “You will not live to see your new rank. They will arrive in minutes to kill us all.”

“I beg to differ,” said Tackham.

“Celeste,” said Svenson carefully, “please be ready to flee.”

At this Tackham feinted a cut at Svenson's head, but the Doctor either saw through the move or was simply too slow to respond and did not counterattack as he'd promised. Tackham chuckled. Was the Doctor's threat just bluster after all? Tackham feinted again. Svenson slipped in the dirt and Tackham swept a vicious cut at the Doctor's side that Svenson stopped—quite barely—with a parry that rang through the trees like a ship's bell.

“Counter-stroke indeed,” sneered Tackham. “You're a lying coward.”

Behind came more gunshots, closer, within the woods.

“Your men have been killed,” gasped Svenson, the tip of his blade once more floating in front of Tackham's eyes. “You are next. Throw down your sword.”

“To hell with you,” snarled Tackham, and he lunged.

His saber slapped Svenson's blade to the side and shot forward unopposed, slicing a bloody dark trough across the Doctor's chest. The Doctor reeled back. Tackham snapped upright, all his training at the fore, ready to launch a second blow.

But then Tackham wavered. A jet of blood spat from the side of his throat, and then, the gash primed, sprayed out like a fountain, for the Doctor had indeed taken his own desperate cut while opening himself to death.

Tackham toppled into the dirt. Svenson dropped the saber and slipped to his knees. Miss Temple screamed and ran to him, easing his body to the ground. The Doctor's voice was already a shuddering whisper.

“No, no! Run! Escape!”

Miss Temple was shoved aside by Mr. Phelps, who had taken off his coat and balled it up to staunch Svenson's seething wound. More gunfire rang through the trees.

“Go! He has given his life for yours! Don't be a fool!”

Doctor Svenson arched in agony as Phelps tried to peel free his tunic. Miss Temple held her hand to her mouth, sobbing, and wheeled away half-blind with tears.

SHE KNEW she was a coward, but she could not stop. She tripped headlong more than once, scuffing her hands, scratching her face and her arms, each time hauling herself up and running on. She cried for Chang, for the Doctor, and for herself—for every instant when she had failed—so very many of them—for how she had misplaced every part of her life that mattered.

When she fell the last time she lay in the dirt, overtaken with sobs. She did not know how far she had run—a hundred yards or a mile— nor did she care. The sky blazed with stars. She lay in an open space ringed with ivy-covered stones… more ruins.

Miss Temple pushed herself to her knees, brushing the hair from her face and the tears from her eyes. Something lay on the ground, catching the light… a ring of orange metal. She felt the weight in her bodice and knew Chang had placed the rings there to protect her.

“Celeste,” came a hesitant whisper. “What has happened?”

In the shadows crouched Elöise Dujong and, clasping her hand tightly, Francesca Trapping. Miss Temple spat in the dirt, weeping again, all of her bitterness and regret suddenly finding their vent.

“They are dead, Elöise! They are both dead!”

Elöise gasped, her hand over her mouth, and began to sob as well. Miss Temple rose to her feet and staggered toward the woman. As soon as she was in reach she struck her across the face with all her waning strength, knocking Elöise to the ground. Francesca leapt away with a whimper of fear.

“Get up!” Miss Temple snarled at Elöise. “They are both dead, and you killed them as much as anyone—your foolish, prideful, reckless, selfish—”

Elöise lay on her side sobbing. Miss Temple kicked her as hard as she could and nearly fell over. She kicked Elöise again and dropped awkwardly to her knees.

“He would not come with us!” Elöise whimpered. “He would not come!”

Tears streamed down Miss Temple's face.

“I have tried to protect him, Celeste,” Elöise cried to her, “to protect everyone—and not one thing has been saved! I am a fool—not one thing!”

Elöise's words stopped in her throat, her shoulders rocking.

MISS TEMPLE slumped onto her back, her ragged breath fogging in the midnight chill. Chang shoving her to safety with his last strength. The Doctor exposing his heart to a sword. Of course he had returned at her cry. Of course Chang had protected her to the end. Despair swallowed up her rage and she felt unbearably alone.

Miss Temple heard Elöise move and knew the woman was watching her, miserable, desperate for any crumb of forgiveness or care.

“It is not your fault,” Miss Temple said finally, her voice a stricken whisper. “It is only mine, and always has been. I am extremely sorry. I am… I am… nothing at all.”

Elöise shook her head. “We could go back.”

“If we go back we will die as well, and their sacrifice is made meaningless.” The words were hollow and false in Miss Temple's mouth. She felt the black coating of the Comte's book in her throat—felt the truth of it—and could find no other answer.

“I do not care,” shuddered Elöise.

Miss Temple turned her head and found herself staring into the face of the silent girl. Francesca Trapping's lower lip was trembling, her blue eyes frightened and remote. What nightmare had the poor girl lived? Miss Temple struggled to sit.

“You must take her,” she said, swallowing, kicking at Elöise's nearest leg. “She has to be saved, Elöise. You must take her away from this.”

“I cannot,” said Elöise, shaking her head at her own helplessness. “I cannot go. I have been waiting—”

“You cannot wait—the Doctor is gone!”

“But—I tried to say, so many times—”

“It has to have stood for something!” Miss Temple cried. She surged unsteadily to her feet, shouting at the other woman. “Get up, Elöise! Save this much! Save her!”

THE WHISTLE of Lydia's case as it swung in the air caused Miss Temple to turn just enough that the sharp metal corner did not punch through her skull, but the impact jarred her teeth and dropped her to the earth like a hammer. She lay without understanding, as if her head had been severed. There was blood in her mouth. She could not move.

A hissing whisper penetrated her ear like a poisonous smoke. She felt the soft lips pressed against her skin, and the warmth of each vicious word as it came.

“This is not the way, Celeste Temple—you're half dead and cannot feel a thing, cannot think a thing. For all your presumptions, I require that you taste your despair completely—that you choke on it. I want you to know to your bones when I have killed you.”

The mouth went away and Miss Temple lay for the longest time in the cold air, stunned and drifting, though she remembered somewhere that to truly sleep was to die. She lifted an impossibly heavy head and blinked gummed and crusted eyes.

Francesca Trapping was gone. Elöise was a shapeless huddle in the dirt, the dark wet stripe across her lolling throat reflecting the star light.

MISS TEMPLE retched, but nothing came. She finally stood, eyes tight against what she could not bear, and stumbled away. The gunshots had ceased—she must have outrun the search; it did not matter—she barely noticed. She was impossibly alone, and even the swirling visions that had for so long battered her mind could find no entrance to her shattered heart.

SHE WOULD reach the canal. Beyond the canal was the train. She had money in her boot. Beyond the train was the city, her certain death… and her revenge.