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

Four. Corruption

MISS TEMPLE did not make a sound. She could not tell if the shadow in the doorway—hissing in ragged gasps—was climbing in or not. The Contessa's hand tightened hard across her mouth.

There was a shout from outside, from the trainsmen. With the barest scrape of gravel the shadowed figure was gone. Miss Temple struggled to peek but the Contessa sharply pulled her down. A moment later came the sound of more bootsteps, jostling bodies in the doorway, mutters about the godawful smell—and then, like the sudden crash of a cannon, the door to the goods car slammed shut. Another agonizing minute, for the woman was nothing if not careful, and the Contessa at last released Miss Temple's mouth.

Miss Temple spun so her back was against the barrels and raised her knife. Her heart was pounding. The car was dark as a starless night.

“Wait now,” whispered the Contessa. “Just a few moments more…”

Then the entire train car shook, jolting Miss Temple and the barrels behind her, then settled to a regular motion as it gathered speed.

The Contessa laughed out loud. Then she sighed—a pretty, sliding sound.

“You may put away your knife, Celeste.”

“I will not,” replied Miss Temple.

“I have no immediate interest in harming you—I am not hungry, nor am I especially disposed to make a pillow of your lovely hair.”

The Contessa laughed again and Miss Temple heard her rummaging in the darkness. Then the Contessa lit a match, and set it to a white wax candle she had wedged into a knothole in the car's plank floor.

“I do not like to waste them,” the Contessa said, “but a little light will aid our… negotiation. The journey will best be served by a short-term mutually beneficial agreement.”

“What sort of agreement?” hissed Miss Temple. “I cannot imagine it.”

“Simple things. An agreement whereby, for example, we trust each other enough to sleep without fear of never waking.”

“But you are a liar,” said Miss Temple.

“Am I indeed? When have I ever lied to you?”

Miss Temple thought for a moment, and then sniffed. “You are vicious and cruel.”

“But not a liar, Celeste.”

“You lied to the others—to the Comte and Francis Xonck! You lied to Roger!”

“I did not need to lie to Roger, my dear—no one ever did. As for Francis and Oskar, I will admit it. But one always lies to friends—if you had friends you would know friendship relies on that very tradition. But lying to enemies… well, it lessens one's spark.”

“I do not believe you.”

“You would be a fool to believe me. And yet, I am offering a bargain. While we share this train car, I will not harm you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I do not need anything from you, Celeste. What I need is sleep. And sleep in a cold train car will be more restful if we are not barricaded behind barrels of fish oil ready to kill one another. Truly, it is a civilized gesture—a logic beyond morals, if that speaks to you.”

Miss Temple shifted slightly—one of her legs was getting a cramp, and the sweat on her back had cooled. She could feel the weight of her exertions waiting to fall. If she did not sleep well she would slip back into her fever.

“Do you have any food?” she asked.

“I do. Would you like some?”

“I had a perfectly fine supper,” said Miss Temple. “But I expect I will be hungry again in the morning.”

The Contessa smirked, and for the first time Miss Temple saw the woman's sharp spike had been ready if their conversation had gone another way.

THE CONTESSA removed a small cork-stoppered bottle and a handkerchief from her bag. She tugged the cork free and tamped the cloth over the bottle, tipping it once to soak a small circle. Without a glance to Miss Temple she wiped her face and neck as deliberately and thoroughly as a cat giving itself a bath. Miss Temple watched with some fascination as the woman's face slipped through so many guileless formations—shutting her eyes as the cloth dabbed around them, stretching her lips as she swabbed around her nose and mouth, lifting her jaw as she swept the cloth—resoaked—up and down her throat and under the collar of her dress.

“What is that?” Miss Temple finally asked.

“An alcoholic tincture of rosewater. The scent is horrid, of course, but the alcohol a welcome enough astringent.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Would you like to clean your face, Celeste? In truth, you do not appear at all well.”

“I have had fever,” said Miss Temple.

“Goodness, did you nearly die?”

“As I did not, it does not especially matter.”

“Come here, then.”

The Contessa soaked a new spot on the handkerchief. She held it out and, not wanting to seem either docile or ill-bred, Miss Temple scooted closer. The Contessa took gentle hold of Miss Temple's jaw and started at her forehead, working down. Miss Temple flinched as the cloth came near the bullet weal above her ear, but the woman took account of the rawness and her touch did not hurt at all.

“Did you ever think you. would die?” asked the Contessa musingly.

“When?” replied Miss Temple.

The Contessa smiled. “At any time at all.”

“I'm sure I did. Did you?”

Finished with the face, the Contessa re-drenched the cloth and swabbed brusquely at Miss Temple's neck. “Your hair.”

Miss Temple obligingly lifted both arms and held the curls to either side. A few more swipes with the cloth and the Contessa was finished, but then she blew a cool breath across the newly clean and dampened skin. Miss Temple shivered. The Contessa set down the bottle and cloth and looked up.

“Perhaps you will help me,” she said.

Miss Temple watched the Contessa's fingers undo one line of ebony buttons and then ease her right arm, pale as a swan's wing, from the dark silk dress with wincing difficulty. Miss Temple gasped at the bloody gash on the woman's shoulder blade.

“I can reach it myself,” the Contessa said, “but if you could assist me we would waste less of the tincture.”

The cut was deep but had closed with a near-black clotting seam. Miss Temple frowned, not knowing quite how to begin, a little transfixed by the sweep of the Contessa's shoulder and the smooth line of the Contessa's vertebrae—these were her bones—disappearing down her back like something whispered but not understood. She returned her gaze to the wound.

“It must be soaked,” said the Contessa. “It does not matter—this far north I cannot prevent a scar.”

Miss Temple took up the bottle and poured carefully along the wound, catching the drips with the cloth. The Contessa winced again, but said nothing. The cut seeped blood as Miss Temple pressed against it, refolding the stained cloth several times until the bleeding stopped. At last the Contessa's hand came over hers, holding the cloth in position herself.

“I am obliged to you, my dear.”

“What happened?” asked Miss Temple.

“I was forced to pass through a window.”

“By whom?”

“Cardinal Chang.”

“I see.” Miss Temple's heart leapt. Chang was alive.

“But I was not fleeing Cardinal Chang. I was fleeing Francis Xonck.”

“Francis Xonck is alive?”

“If you can call it life. You smelled him yourself, didn't you?”

“He was chasing me? Just now? The monster?”

“I say this with kindness, my dear, but you really must keep the pace.”

“But Xonck stinks of the blue glass!”

“He does.”

“But the Doctor shot him!”

“One did not think the Doctor had it in him—yet it does seem Francis has taken drastic steps to survive…”

The Contessa carefully returned her arm to her dress and did up the buttons. The close working of her fingers drew Miss Temple's eyes as if their repeated movement was a conjuring sign.

“How did you escape the airship?” Miss Temple asked.

“How do you think?”

“You must have jumped.”

The Contessa tilted her head, encouraging her to go on.

“But your dress—the Doctor said it would have soaked in the water and pulled you down.”

“The Doctor is astute.”

“You took it off!”

The Contessa tilted her head once more.

“I should never have done that,” whispered Miss Temple.

“Then you should have died,” the Contessa told her. “But I think you would have done it. And anything else you needed to. That is how we recognize one another, Celeste.”

Miss Temple's words came suddenly, hot and loud. “But you did not recognize me, madame. You consigned me to death. On more than one occasion!”

The Contessa's eyes glittered, but her voice remained even. “Why should wanting you dead change a thing?”

Miss Temple opened her mouth, then shut it with a snap.

SHE LISTENED to the rattling wheels, wondering what stops there might be between Karthe and the city, and if the contents of their car were even destined for the city. The doors might well open in an hour at another mountain town, or two hours after that in some village that stank of pigs. And would Francis Xonck be waiting for them?

“Where is Elöise Dujong?” she asked.

“I'm sure I've no idea.”

“I thought I was chasing her,” said Miss Temple. “But I was chasing you. The man on the path—Mr. Olsteen, the hunter—”

“The soldier, Celeste.”

Miss Temple ignored her. “He had her knife in his hand.”

“What a conundrum. A shame he cannot explain it.”

“You killed him.”

“Someone had to.”

“How do you know he was a soldier?”

“Because I went to great trouble to avoid him—and his fellows— for some days, while they went to not quite enough trouble to find me.”

“Did they find Chang?” Miss Temple asked, suddenly afraid. “Did they find the Doctor? Who are they?”

“I thought you wanted to know about Mrs. Dujong.”

“I want you to answer my questions.” Miss Temple fixed her gaze on the Contessa quite firmly.

The Contessa studied Miss Temple's face, then yawned, covering her mouth with her hand, and then lowered the hand to reveal another knowing smile.

“I am tired. As you look like without sleep you will die, I would suggest that you do so next to me. It is still the mountains, and we have no blankets. Think of it as a pact for warmth between animals.”

Before Miss Temple could reply the Contessa blew out the candle.

MISS TEMPLE did not move from her barrel, listening with consternation to the rustling of the Contessa's petticoats as the woman sorted herself on the floor. The Contessa was a wicked, wicked creature—it would be the act of an idiot to trust her. Miss Temple was exhausted and shivering. What had happened to Chang? He'd left his note—and then done what, simply vanished to the city, knowing the Contessa was alive and free? And was Doctor Svenson any better? Miss Temple hugged her knees to her chest. She did not wish to find either man a source of disappointment, and yet they had clearly done less than they might have in her service.

The Contessa sighed, rather contentedly. Miss Temple yawned, not even bothering to cover her mouth, and blinked. She was trembling with cold, and felt utterly ridiculous. Staying awake would only waste whatever strength she still possessed—she knew this for a fact and bitterly resented that in being sensible she was doing the Contessa's bidding.

Miss Temple crawled to the Contessa's side and then, rather hesitantly, pressed her body close, curling her knees behind the other woman's and nestling her face against the nape of the Contessa's neck, which smelled of the alcohol and rosewater. At her touch the Contessa pushed her body gently back into Miss Temple's. Miss Temple held her breath at the suddenly intimate press of the woman's silk-wrapped buttocks into her own pelvis. The Contessa shifted again, nuzzling her body still closer. Miss Temple's impulse was to draw away, though already she was shivering less and it was pleasant to have something as soft as the Contessa's hair upon which to rest her head. From the smell of alcohol and roses she realized that the shoulder inches from her face bore the bloody gash. She found herself tempted to touch it, to even— her eyes were heavy and her thoughts slipping adrift—dab at it with her tongue. But before this thought could even spark her own disapproval, the Contessa reached back, groped between them, and took firm hold of Miss Temple's hand. The hand was pulled across the Contessa's body and tucked tightly between the woman's breasts. The Contessa wriggled a last time—now the hand was no longer in the way—tight against Miss Temple, and sighed deeply. Miss Temple had no idea what to do at all. She gently squeezed the Contessa's hand. The Contessa squeezed hers in return, slipping two of her fingers into Miss Temple's half-formed fist. Within worries that she very much should get back to her barrel, Miss Temple fell asleep.

SHE OPENED her eyes in a dim light that peeped cautiously through the very few gaps and knotholes in the freight car wall. The train had stopped. Outside she heard footsteps on the gravel. They passed by, followed by an exchange of shouts. Then with a slow, grinding rhythm the train pulled back into life.

Miss Temple realized with a shock that her hand was cupping the Contessa's breast, and that the woman's own hand held hers in place.

Miss Temple did not move. Had she shifted her hand to its present location or had the Contessa done it for her? Miss Temple had, with an interest at times abstract and at other times less so, of course held her own breasts, wondering at their shape and sensitivity, convinced they were both bothersome and perfectly splendid. But the Contessa's breast felt very different—being somewhat larger and connected to an altogether different body—and it was all she could do not to gently squeeze her fingers. Miss Temple bit her lip. At the margins of her mind she felt the seeping presence of the blue glass book, insistent and intoxicating, sparking an undeniable itch between her legs (… wrapped naked in furs in the back of an ice-sledge… a smearing of musk and blood across her lips… her own inner thighs stroked with a feather…) and she squeezed her hand, ever so softly, breath held tight, then squeezed again, her whole body warming with desire.

The Contessa's hips pushed luxuriously back into her own. Miss Temple yanked her arm free with a gasp, sitting up. In a moment she was across and against her barrel, knees drawn up, smoothing back her hair. When she could no longer prevent her eyes from glancing to the Contessa, she saw that the woman was leaning on her elbow, still drowsy from sleep, smiling back at her with a mild sort of hunger.

“WE STOPPED,” said Miss Temple. “I've no idea where. Did it wake you?”

“It must have,” said the Contessa, a little dreamily for Miss Temple's taste. The Contessa plucked idly at her hair. “I must look a fright.”

“You do not,” said Miss Temple, “as I am sure you know. I am the one who is frightful—my hair has not been curled, my hands are scabbed, my complexion is quite ruined with sundry disfigurements and bruising and what-have-yous—not that I care a jot for any of it.”

“Why should you?”

“Exactly,” snorted Miss Temple, not exactly sure why she was suddenly so cross.

“How did you sleep?”

“Quite poorly. It was very cold.”

The woman was smiling at her again, and Miss Temple nodded peremptorily in the direction of the Contessa's bag.

“Would you have anything to eat?”

“I might.”

“I would even more enjoy a cup of tea.”

“I cannot help you there.”

“I am aware of it,” said Miss Temple, and then observed, “Some people prefer coffee.”

“I am one of those people,” said the Contessa.

“Coffee is too bitter.”

The Contessa let this stand and opened her bag, then looked back at Miss Temple before removing any article from it. “And what do I get in return for sharing my food?”

“What would you expect?”

“Not a thing. That is, I would not rely upon it.”

“Then we understand each other quite well.”

The Contessa chuckled and produced two dried apples and a gold-crusted pie wrapped in a grease-stained cloth. She handed one of the apples to Miss Temple and took the pie between her hands. Miss Temple thought to offer her knife to cut it in two and reached down to her boot. The knife was no longer there. She looked up at the Contessa, who had broken the pie between her fingers and was handing across one half.

“It is too much to hope for anything but mutton,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

“Not at all,” replied Miss Temple, taking the pie. The crust flaked onto her wrist and she brought it to her mouth, catching the flake on her tongue like a toad. “I am much obliged to you.”

“You needn't be,” said the Contessa, chewing, and rather more frank in her manners than Miss Temple had expected. “I have no further interest in any memory of Karthe, much less its food. As I have no desire to eat more than half this pie—in fact, hardly enough to eat any at all—giving that much to you costs me nothing.”

Miss Temple had no response to this, so she simply ate. Despite everything she felt well rested, and stronger than she had the day before. She bit into the apple, found it too chewy but still tart.

“You took my knife, didn't you?”

“Do you always insist on asking questions to which you know the answer?”

“It was a way of letting you know I was aware of it.”

“Only a fool would not be, Celeste.”

“I must have slept deeply, then.”

“Like a mewling kitten.” The Contessa swallowed another bite of pie. “You mentioned our stopping. But that was the third time we had stopped—you slept through the others.”

“Will you give it back?”

“I shouldn't think so.”

The Contessa saw her cross expression and leaned forward.

“Understand, Celeste, I could have slit your throat as easy as patting your head. I did not, because we had an agreement.”

“But after the agreement, after we arrive—”

“I will not give it back then either. Who knows when you will want to slit mine?”

Miss Temple frowned. It was far too easy to imagine some future meeting—in the city, in a train car, on a marble staircase—where the Contessa would without pause slash her glittering spike at Miss Temple's unprotected face. Could she do the same, after pressing herself against the Contessa's warm and splendid body in the dark? How could mere familiarity change anything between them? But how could it not?

Miss Temple cleared her throat. “If we are so agreeable, perhaps you will now tell me of Elöise. You did promise to do so.”

“It is a very boring thing to ask.”

“Did you hurt her?”

“I did not. Mrs. Dujong and a young man entered a house in Karthe, a house I myself was observing.”

“Why?”

“Because I lost something, Celeste.”

“But the boy who lived there was murdered!”

“Yes, I know. Once they went in, I saw the soldier lurking in the street—he'd followed them. I took this as my own opportunity to slip past him to the inn, but before I was finished with the innkeeper, the soldier returned and insisted on being unpleasant to everyone.”

“And Elöise?”

“Since she did not come back to the inn with the soldier—well, either he killed her, or Francis killed her… or something else.”

“What else do you mean?”

“Once again, Celeste, if you simply made a habit of thinking before speech—”

“Xonck knows her?”

“Of course Francis knows her. She is his sister's loyal confidante.”

“She never said any such thing to me!” Miss Temple sniffed doubtfully. “Francis Xonck…”

“But that is what is so delicious!” cried the Contessa. “She does not even know herself!”

“Know what?”

“That she is already his!”

Miss Temple recalled Elöise's determination not to explain why Chang and the Doctor had vanished, indeed her determination to explain as little as possible… but Francis Xonck? Miss Temple was appalled.

“But what has happened to her?”

“I've no idea,” said the Contessa. “When I got to the train yard I did what I could to create a disturbance—to make it that much harder for Francis to move about freely—and found my place to hide. Per haps there was a scream or two outside—I was securing my place with the fish oil.”

“I should not think he would scare you,” observed Miss Temple mildly.

“Francis does not scare me,” the Contessa replied pointedly. “But he is very dangerous, and in Karthe I had no way to combat him. In the city I shall. Most definitely.”

The Contessa idly patted her bag, then realized she had done so and that Miss Temple had noticed the gesture. Miss Temple smirked with great satisfaction, and nodded to the closed car door. “If we stopped three times, do you know where we are, or what time it is?” she asked.

“I do,” replied the Contessa, “and see no profit whatsoever in telling you. But you did sleep so beautifully.”

The Contessa set the rest of her pie on the floor, pulled up her dress to wipe her hands on her petticoats, then flounced the dress back into position and crawled deliberately toward Miss Temple on her hands and knees, until their faces were very near. Miss Temple swallowed, suddenly afraid, but her fear was of a different order than the night before. The Contessa had become more known…a woman who ate and slept and yawned and flexed her hips with restless hunger… somehow it made her even more monstrous. Despite everything the Contessa had said, Miss Temple did not know why she was still alive— there must be a reason, some role the woman hoped she would perform. What other explanation was there?

“The thing is… I have slept as well. I am no longer tired, nor does my shoulder so vex my movement—I am indebted for your…ministrations.”

The Contessa's tongue caught a last crumb of pie crust from the corner of her dark mouth.

“Not to worry,” croaked Miss Temple.

“I am not in the slightest worried. Though I do wonder… I wonder what you intend.”

“Me?” whispered Miss Temple. “Nothing at all.”

“O tush. Our journey together is a parenthesis, and upon disembarkation we must once more become active enemies. In truth, you are lucky that you have been isolated with me, for alone among my companions I am… whimsical. I helped the Doctor rescue his Prince once, just to confound the Comte. I lied to Francis—O goodness how he was angry—and of course all of us betrayed Lord Vandaariff quite utterly. So it is not for squeamishness regarding a promise that I have not killed you in your sleep. But that, as I say… I am curious.”

“About what?”

“About you, of course.”

The Contessa nudged her face closer, dipping her nose toward Miss Temple's curls, and inhaled. Miss Temple could not meet the woman's eye, but found her own caught by the other's pale throat, the two jet buttons still undone at the top of her bodice. She could feel the strange memories within her mind, pushing forward, shining their insidious light through each crack in her resolve.

“You must be full of flames,” whispered the Contessa. “The book in which you nearly drowned… I know it haunts you, Celeste. It was my book—I know everything that was in it, everything that must be preying on your heart… it was my own calculated entrapment. I expect you struggle against it even now. Look at you trembling… Do you fear I will bite you?”

At this the Contessa did just that, snapping her teeth gently onto Miss Temple's cheek. Miss Temple cried out and the Contessa let go, laughing, and then swept her tongue across the blushing, bitten spot.

“All of this can be over for you, Celeste. Roger is dead—you've had your revenge. As you said yourself on the roof of the airship, my plots are finished. Macklenburg is unreachable—with the Prince and Lydia dead there is no marriage, and all the money and land remain in Lord Vandaariff's name, beyond my control… no doubt he has been placed in a madhouse…”

She nipped again at Miss Temple's face and then pushed her mouth onto Miss Temple's. The Contessa's lips were even softer than Miss Temple had feared, and the woman's tongue darted past her teeth so very deliciously Miss Temple groaned. The Contessa pulled back, breathing just a touch deeper herself, and went on as if there had been no interruption.

“You can go back to your hotel, back to your husband-hunting, back to your little island… there is no need for the two of us… to come… to blows…”

The Contessa feinted another kiss and smiled at Miss Temple's indecision, whether to turn her head or open her mouth.

“You must stop,” Miss Temple whispered.

“Stop what?” asked the Contessa, stabbing her mouth forward again. This time Miss Temple's tongue responded, pushing into the Contessa's mouth. Miss Temple's hands were balled into fists against the desire to seize the Contessa's body. Her mind was spinning, so many flickering memories leaping to feed her senses. She did not know how much of what she felt came from the book and how much from the Contessa—did it matter? Was she any less subject either way? The Contessa broke contact and kissed her a third time, pushing forward. Miss Temple's left hand groped to keep her balance, while her right shot out to push the woman away, but felt the stiff corset beneath the cheap silken dress and then slid farther along, smoothing past the corset's edge to the sweet soft rounded sweep of the Contessa's hip, where she could not help but squeeze. The Contessa broke away to bite Miss Temple's little chin.

“You must stop…”

“I do not believe you,” breathed the Contessa against Miss Temple's throat.

“Your plots,” gasped Miss Temple, turning her head away despite herself, so the Contessa's tongue might trace itself more freely. “Your intrigues—you must be content with survival…”

“What did you say?”

“You have corrupted my heart—”

“O… nothing of the kind… you were always so…”

“They will kill you if you do not disappear.”

“Who will kill me?”

“Cardinal Chang—the Doctor—”

“Those heroes… but what, Celeste, of you?”

“I would kill you myself—”

“And how very brave, and how principled.”

This did not seem like a compliment. Miss Temple's breath was still rapid—when had the Contessa's knee lodged itself between her legs?

“Such principles just show how much you understand…” The Contessa planted small speculative kisses along Miss Temple's jaw. “And how little… a gratifying thing to have displayed by an enemy.”

“I am your enemy.” Miss Temple writhed against the Contessa's grinding knee.

“You always have been, dear.”

“Then why have you kept me alive?”

“Because even I cannot be everywhere at once.”

To Miss Temple's surprise, even as once more her tongue was darting within the warm and silken confines of the Contessa's mouth, the Contessa's fingers pinched Miss Temple's nose tightly closed. Merging oddly with the tingle of her loins and the flush she was sure had spread all down her front… was the realization that she could not breathe. She tried to gently shift the Contessa's arm but found her own sharply pinned by the woman's elbow. She tried to turn away, but the Contessa did not loosen her grip. Miss Temple arched her back. She tried to bite the Contessa's tongue but the woman merely brought up her other hand to clamp shut Miss Temple's jaw. Miss Temple thrashed her legs. She slapped at the Contessa's face, groped for her hair. The Contessa did not budge, the seal of her soft lips fast as an oyster to stone. Miss Temple became dizzy and afraid. She could not think. She heaved with all her strength but could not dislodge her succubus. With a last, desperate thought that such an end was exactly what she had come to deserve, Miss Temple's mind went black.

SHE OPENED her eyes to an unmoving car and the Contessa gone. Attempting to sit up, she found herself pinned to the wooden floor, the tip of her own knife driven through her dress at the very juncture of her legs. Miss Temple wrenched it free with both hands, snorting that to the Contessa such a gesture would pass for wit, and returned the blade to her boot. She crawled to the doorway of the car and, heaving with both arms, pulled it three inches wide, enough to peer through.

The land before her was a blend of fen and forest, perfectly suited for the construction of canals. She remembered Elöise's description of her uncle's cottage, annoyed that she had listened with such disinterest, for she was certain his home lay in this very part of the country. It had been in a park of some sort—what had it been called? Parchfeldt! Yet the idea of leaping off the train in the deluded hope that anyone— if there was anyone—might direct her to Parchfeldt Park was ridiculous. Miss Temple slumped back against the wall. Her actions in the freight car—from the first decision to sleep next to the Contessa to this last humiliating struggle—flayed her conscience like a whip.

If she ever found Chang and Svenson, what would she say to them—about her own failures of character, or about her loss of Elöise? Where would she possibly find the two men? She did not know where Parchfeldt was. She did not know what Chang's message possibly meant—“the Lord's Time”—no doubt it was the secret name for some gambling club or brothel!

The Contessa's words echoed in her heart. She could choose to leave her adventure as something finished, be satisfied with her revenge and her survival. She could return to her life with lessons learned and precious few scars to prove it. But then she clenched her legs tightly together, shivering at the memory of the Contessa's touch, pulling her knees to her chest in fervid misery.

The train at last pulled forward. Miss Temple curled onto her side, though the rest she found was thin and brought no comfort.

SHE WOKE to whistles and the rushing racket of other trains passing near. Miss Temple straightened her dress and wiped her face, making sure of the knife in her boot. They had entered the tunnels surrounding Stropping Station. The train slowed and crawled agonizingly to a stop. She opened the door with a determined, prolonged shove, wriggled through, legs dangling, and pushed herself off to land with a grunt on the soot-blackened gravel. Miss Temple ducked her head down and scuttled like a crab beneath the next train over. Emerging unseen on the far side, she advanced briskly toward the main station hall.

She was still in a quandary as to her path. She was tempted by so many sensible tasks—to find a hotel, arrange a draft of money from her bank, refit herself, a new bag from Nesbit's, undergarments from Clauchon, a dress from Monsieur Massée (who would have her sizes, and could be counted on to be discreet), and before everything a hot bath with rosemary oil.

Miss Temple ducked into the space between two cars. Ahead of her a figure in a long hooded black cloak crept from under a railcar, escaping her own train just as she had done. The figure paused there, for the path to the thronging open plaza of Stropping Station had been blocked by two men in long black coats and top hats and behind them four red-coated soldiers. The men in black looked very much like Roger—like government officials—and gazed grimly down the track-side, but they saw neither the cloaked man nor Miss Temple. With a shrug of agreement they marched from view, the soldiers in stomping unison behind them. The hooded man flowed soundlessly forward like a shadow against the side of the train.

Miss Temple scampered after him. She reached the spot where he had hidden and wrinkled her nose at the reek of indigo clay. She was following Francis Xonck. But why was Xonck hiding from the government officials and soldiers who had been his allies? Her heart rose with sudden hope. Did it mean that the Cabal had been overthrown?

Then she sighed bitterly. If only she knew where to meet Chang or Svenson she could satisfy herself with having seen Xonck, and make her way directly to a hotel, perhaps the Beacon, or—her heart leapt just a little—Anburne House, which boasted an especially excellent tea. But she did not know.

Xonck rushed into the bright lights of the main station floor and disappeared. Miss Temple reached down for her knife and, holding the thing as discreetly as she could in her fist, dashed after him.

THE MASSIVE angel-flanked clock, hanging over Stropping terminal like an oppressive omen of guilt, set the time at just before noon. As she turned away from its unwelcome image, Miss Temple realized that something in the station had changed. The teeming crowds coursed between the high staircases and the ticket counters and the different platforms, with eddies and pools around the various shops and kiosks scattered across the floor… but their formerly free movement was now directed by an army of brown-coated railway con stables. What had happened? She saw travelers driven in harried groups, resentful sheep under the rule of nipping hounds. She saw uncooperative individuals pulled aside and escorted brusquely away— respectably dressed people given over to the custody of soldiers! Had there been some rail crash or catastrophe? Had there been another riot at a mill? At the kiosks and shops, each purchase was observed by constables— even small groups standing in conversation were ordered to move along. Across the station Miss Temple saw bright knots of scarlet— dragoons in uniform, each group accompanied by figures in crisp city black. They peered down the track lines as different trains pulled in and out of Stropping, obviously engaged in a massive search—and a preponderance were gathered near her own quadrant of the station's platforms, where trains arrived from the north.

Francis Xonck thrust himself past two quarreling constables into the crush of waiting travelers, crouching low. Miss Temple threw herself into his wake, into the bags and elbows, the jabbing umbrellas and ankle-catching canes, finally stumbling to a halt against an elderly gentleman's back. She looked up to apologize and saw his face was wrinkled with nausea. With a hop she glimpsed Xoncks black hood. He had changed direction.

Thinking quickly, Miss Temple joined a group of schoolchildren led by hectoring tutors, for whom the constables made way—and when one of the children turned curiously back to her she hissed, “Face front!” with such authority that the young thing instantly complied. Suddenly Xonck was almost directly before her… waiting for an opening between the patrols of soldiers. From behind she could see how tall Xonck truly was, as she could too easily recall his deadly movements…the man was actually quite a bit like Chang. Of course, Xonck was a preening dandy, a wicked vampire of a man, while Chang… well, one had to admit the red coat was ostentatious, and Chang's character was wicked. He had abandoned them all, hadn't he?

Xonck dashed forward. At either side of the platform's edge stood black-coated men and dragoons, but Xonck slipped skillfully past them all, down a graveled alleyway beside a waiting, steaming train. She leapt after him—Xonck did not look back, racing straight to the farthest car. He craned his head ahead to the coal wagon, first looking for any trainsmen—warning Miss Temple, who threw herself down— then glancing behind him. When she peeked again he had climbed to an odd-shaped window at the car's front, perhaps to a lavatory. Miss Temple crept closer. The window would not open, and Xonck shoved again, striking the sash with the heel of his fist. He shifted his grip to push with both hands, but lost his balance and dropped to the ground with a snort of disgust. Xonck flipped his cloak over his shoulder to reveal a heavy canvas bag looped around his right hand—which Miss Temple now saw was wrapped with plaster. Setting the sack on the rocks, he rescaled the car, now clubbing at the window latch with the cast and pushing at the sash with his more nimble left hand.

Miss Temple advanced across the rocks, quiet as a trotting cat. Xonck did not see her. Without hesitation she snatched up the sack and ran.

THE SACK was heavy and bounced against her thigh. She'd not gone five yards before she heard Xonck roar. A rush of delirious fear rose to the very roots of her hair. Xonck's bootsteps pounded behind her. At the platform stood a man in a black coat, with three soldiers at his side, not a single one of them looking her way. Miss Temple screamed, high-pitched and helpless. She darted to the side and heard Xonck— so very close behind her—stumble to change direction. She screamed again and the idiots on the platform at last turned their faces. The man gaped at her, then finally called to his men. The dragoons drew their sabers and followed. Miss Temple screamed a third time and cannoned into the official's arms, knocking him back a full two steps as the soldiers charged by. She turned, chest heaving, to see the path behind her utterly empty. Francis Xonck was gone.

A SOLDIER STALKED along each flanking train, peering beneath every car. The third remained on guard, his saber drawn. The man in the black coat studied her with concern, a thin-faced fellow with a waxed black moustache and side whiskers a touch more full than his jaw could attractively bear.

“He was chasing me,” she gasped.

“Who was chasing you, child? Who was it?”

“I do not know!” cried Miss Temple. “He was quite wicked-looking and smelled foul!”

“She says there's a smell!” he called out to the dragoons. As if this was not at all strange, both searching soldiers bent forward to sniff.

“Yes, sir!” one called back. “Cordite and corruption—just like we were told!”

The man in the black coat raised Miss Temple's chin in a way she did not appreciate. “What is your name?”

“I am Miss Isobel Hastings.”

“And what are you doing running about between trains at Stropping Station, Miss Hastings?”

“I did not intend to be between trains at all, I promise you. I was chased. Of course, I am so grateful for my rescue.”

“What is in your parcel?”

“Only my supper. I was to travel on to Cap Rouge, you see, to meet my aunt.”

“All the way to Cap Rouge?”

“Indeed,” she said, hefting the sack, “and so I have packed enough for two meals. A pork pie and a wedge of yellow cheese and a jar of pickled beetroot—”

“Cap Rouge is to the south,” said the man, condescendingly. “These trains ride to the east.”

“Do they?” asked Miss Temple, curious why Francis Xonck had not simply fled into the city.

The man spoke to the soldier near him.

“Call them back. I must make my report.” He took hold of Miss Temple's shoulder. “Miss Hastings, I shall require a bit more of your time.”

SHE WAS escorted to a larger group of soldiers, with two Ministry officials instead of her one, who she overheard addressed as Mr. Soames. When Soames returned, his face was grave and he again took firm hold of her arm, pulling her toward the large staircase. Miss Temple was about to inform Mr. Soames that she was perfectly able to accompany him without physical contact—in fact, to wrench her arm away—but in that moment they passed a shop stall selling hats and scarves to forgetful travelers, which was to say she passed a stall that housed a mirror. With a shock, she first realized the standing rectangle was a mirror, and to her full mortification Miss Temple realized that she had seen herself without any recognition whatsoever. Every part of her body belonged to a different person: her splendid hair was tangled and lank; her dress was out-of-date, dirty, and plain; her boots, cracked and scuffed, her skin, streaked with grime where it was not marked with a cut or bruise—even the sack in her hand spoke to poverty and weakness. For the first time in her life Miss Temple was without control of her own character. In the eyes of the world she had been transformed to a completely and commonly known type of woman—unvalued, poor, untrustworthy—which left her at the unquestioned mercy of a man like Mr. Soames.

They reached the stairway, the soldiers falling in line behind, and began to climb. Had she eluded her enemies only to face the disinterested cruelty of the law? In vain she looked below her, the milling snakes of the ticket lines, the crowds at each platform, the tangle of bodies below the clock… the clock… Miss Temple's heart fell in an instant to her feet. The Lord's Time! Below the angel-flanked clock stood a tall, lean figure in red, motionless amidst the swirling crowd. It was Cardinal Chang. She had missed him completely. Soames pulled her arm and she stumbled. They had reached the top of the stairway. She looked back again but the soldiers blocked any sight of the terminal floor. Chang was gone.

ONLY SOAMES joined her in the coach, rapping his knuckle imperiously on the roof to start it forward.

“Where are we going?” asked Miss Temple, the canvas sack held tightly on her lap. At least Mr. Soames was crisp in his appearance, his hat set on the seat beside him, his dark hair parted in the middle, not over-oiled, and his coat well cut and clean.

“Do you know the man who chased you?”

“Not at all—he quite surprised me, and as I told you, smelled terrible—”

“Between the tracks.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Between the tracks,” repeated Soames. “It is not an especially safe place, nor where one might expect to find a lady.”

“I have told you. He chased me there.”

Soames raised one warning eyebrow at her tone.

“The man in question is sought by the highest levels of government,” he announced. “He is a dangerous traitor.”

“What Ministry do you work for?”

“Excuse me?”

“I am acquainted with many men at the Foreign Ministry—”

“A word of advice, Miss Hastings. It is the wise trollop who holds her tongue and survives.”

Miss Temple was stunned. Soames studied her closely, as if weighing a decision, and then leaned back and glanced too casually at the window, as if none of what he had said was of the slightest importance.

“I have been recently promoted,” sniffed Soames. “I have been seconded to the Privy Council.”

Would he proposition her then and there in the coach? Soames took off his gloves one finger at a time, as if the task was serious business, and then slapped them together on his knee.

“It is a very different matter than what you are used to.” He smiled tolerantly. “Very easy for a girl to get in over her head—to quite lose herself, without an ally—”

He was interrupted by a cry from outside. The coach lurched and came to a sudden stop. Before Soames could call to the driver they heard the driver calling himself, a torrent of abuse immediately echoed by a swell of shouting from the street.

“What is going on?” asked Miss Temple.

“It is nothing—agitators, malcontents—”

“Where are we?”

Soames did not answer, for the harsh voice of the dragoon sitting next to the driver now threatened whoever blocked the coach. Soames waited—the voices in the street remained defiant—but then the coach moved again. Soames sank back in his seat with a frustrated sigh, snapping closed the curtain on the small window as they passed the still-shouting crowd apparently lining both sides of the street.

“Do not be concerned,” he muttered. “All this rabble will soon be settled.”

“As all rabble ought to be,” said Miss Temple, and then she smiled. “Privy Council! My goodness—then perhaps you can tell me if the Duke of Stäelmaere is still alive?”

Soames sputtered, then shot an arm out to the door to steady himself as the coach went round a turn too fast. “Of course he is alive!”

“Are you sure?”

“He rules the Privy Council!”

“And Colonel Aspiche?” asked Miss Temple.

“Colonel Aspiche?” cried Soames. “By God, someone has schooled you in any number of topics you have no business knowing!”

He leaned forward and Miss Temple feared he might strike her, or worse. She looked up at Mr. Soames and batted her eyes hopefully.

“I should be more than happy to answer your questions, Mr. Soames, but you can see for yourself that I am tired and—well, indeed—disheveled. I have an excellent proposal that will help us both. If you would let me off near the Circus Garden I should be most grateful, and we can speak tomorrow when I will be rested and not so unpleasantly insolent. The fright of my escape, you understand, has rattled my nerves—”

“I cannot oblige you.” There was a distinct note of pleasure in his voice. “Any person having contact with traitors must be transported directly for questioning.”

“Traitors?” asked Miss Temple. “You only mentioned the one.”

“It is hardly your concern.”

“It becomes mine when you detain me.”

“What do you expect?” replied Soames. “You obviously know more than you will say!”

“Say? You have barely asked a thing!”

“I will ask however it pleases me!”

“What apparently pleases you most is to waste my time,” muttered Miss Temple.

THE COACH pulled up, forestalling Soames' defiant reply. Miss Temple pulled aside the curtain, but saw nothing through the little window save a waist-high wall of white brick. Beyond it rose a very musty old hedge, blocking the sky. Soames reached for the door handle.

“You had your chance. Now we shall see how you answer your betters.”

But instead of opening the door, Soames exhaled with a strange rattle. Both eyelids fluttered, the eyes themselves rolled back in his head. Then the fluttering stopped and he very slowly turned toward her, his jaw slack. Miss Temple retreated to the far corner of her seat.

“Mr. Soames?” she whispered.

He did not seem to hear. The coach rocked as the soldier climbed down. Miss Temple heard bootsteps on the cobbles. Then, like the prick of a needle puncturing her skin, Soames' eyes snapped into focus— he saw her…

Then Soames was shaking his head and swallowing awkwardly, smacking his lips like a dog that has snapped at a bee. He pulled open the door and stepped through, turning behind to take her hand.

“This way, Miss Hastings.” He cleared his throat and then smiled heartily. “It will be for the best. Better manners always are…”

HE DID not release her hand as they made their way to a small open gate in the wall. Before they reached it, two more men emerged. They wore coats identical to Soames'.

“Mr. Phelps,” called Soames in greeting.

Phelps, whose coat hung slack over his right shoulder, ignored Soames. Instead he met Miss Temple's gaze with an expression of dismay, as if her existence was simply more evidence of a disappointing world. His hair was brushed forward in an old-fashioned manner, and strangely his right arm, like Francis Xonck's, was wrapped in plaster, from the hand up to the elbow.

“What is in that bag?” His voice was crisp and high-pitched, as if belonging to a smaller animal.

“Her supper,” answered Soames.

“Give it to me.”

Soames reached for the canvas sack. Miss Temple knew she could not maintain her grip in the face of so many, and let it go. Phelps did not look into the bag—nor did he even seem tempted, merely looped it over his plaster-wrapped hand. Without another word he led them through an ill-trimmed archway in the hedge to a little courtyard with a weed-choked pool, from which rose a nonworking fountain, a stone statue of a naked youth with broken arms, a corroded metal spout protruding from his mouth.

Across the plaza was another archway in another hedge, this time leading to a heavy wooden door set with an iron-barred window. The third man fished out an iron key and unlocked it. Miss Temple followed them into a dark, dank, stone corridor with a low ceiling. The door was locked, the dragoons remaining on the other side.

They passed through narrow pools of light let in by a series of oval barred windows, footsteps echoing off the stone. Another wooden door was opened with another key. Mr. Phelps indicated that Miss Temple should enter—a room of pale plaster walls, the floor bare, two simple wooden chairs, and a battered table of planking.

“Would you care for anything while you wait?” he asked. “Tea?”

“I should appreciate that very much.”

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

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

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

“I am not afraid,” replied Miss Temple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was broken,” said Phelps.

“Did it hurt?”

“It did indeed.”

“Does it hurt still?”

“Only when I am attempting to sleep.”

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

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

“Do you insinuate I ought to?”

“Heavens no, I merely pass the time.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Soames?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where did he go?”

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

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

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

“Do not lie. I can feel her.”

“Well, you know more than I do.”

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

“I beg your pardon?” said Miss Temple.

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

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

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

“Where is the Contessa?” cried Soames.

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

“Where?”

“I do not know!”

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

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

“Of course it was Xonck!” screeched Soames.

“Then surely we must keep searching—”

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

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

Soames coughed again. His eyes were almost entirely blue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stäelmaere House, of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lord Acton.”

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

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

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

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

“Of course, my Lord.”

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

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

“I have no desire to trouble him—”

“Of course, my Lord.”

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

“Of course, my Lord.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your Grace… the young woman…”

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

“Your Grace?” Miss Temple ventured.

The Duke did not stir. Miss Temple crept carefully closer. The smell here was different, the noisome, waxy reek smothered in jasmine perfume. Still he did not move, not even to blink his glassy eyes. She took another hesitant step, slowly extending one arm, and at the tip of that arm a finger toward his nearest hand, large-knuckled and knotted with rings. When her finger touched the clammy skin, the Duke's face snapped toward her, a movement as sharp as a cleaver cutting meat. Miss Temple yelped in surprise and leapt back.

Before she could gather words to speak, her ears—though not her ears at all, for she felt the noise erupt within her head—rebounded with brittle, sliding laughter. The glass woman emerged through a gap in the tapestries, wrapped in a heavy cloak, her hands and face reflecting the gaslight's glow.

“You are alive!” whispered Miss Temple.

In answer, the unpleasant laughter came again—like a needle dragged across her teeth—and with a sudden flick of intention Mrs. Marchmoor—the glass woman—caused the Duke to turn his head just as sharply away.

Miss Temple ran for the door. It had been locked. She turned to face the woman—the glass creature—the slick blue surface of her flesh, the impassive fixity of her expression belied by the wicked amusement in her laugh, and the subtle curl of her full, gleaming lips.

She had seen three glass women paraded by the Comte before the gathered crowds at Harschmort, each naked but for a collar and leash— like strange beasts from deepest Africa captured and sent to Rome to astonish a dissolute Emperor. The last of the three, Mrs. Marchmoor—a courtesan, born Margaret Hooke, the daughter of a bankrupt mill owner—was quite obviously no longer human. But was she sane?

“At your feet,” hissed the voice inside Miss Temple's skull. “Bring it to me.”

The canvas sack lay on the carpet, where Fordyce must have set it.

“Do it. No one will come. No one will hear you.”

Miss Temple walked forward with the sack and set it onto the desk with care. Then, glancing once into Mrs. Marchmoor's unsettling and predatory blue pearl eyes, she shucked the canvas away without touching the surface of the blue glass, exposing it to the air.

“Explain.”

“I took it from Francis Xonck,” said Miss Temple, with a sort of shrug that she hoped conveyed that this had been no particular challenge for her. “I can only assume he took it from the trunk of books on the airship.”

Mrs. Marchmoor floated closer to the book, gazing intently into its depths.

“It is not from the trunk…”

“But it must be,” said Miss Temple. “Where else?”

“The book itself perhaps, but not what lies within—the mind… is new…”

Mrs. Marchmoor extended one slender arm toward the book, the cloak falling away to either side, the fingers of her hand uncurling like the stalks of some unclassified tropical plant. Miss Temple gasped. At the point where the woman's fingertip ought to have clicked against the cover like a tumbler striking a table top, it instead passed directly through, as if into water.

“Glass… is a liquid…” whispered Mrs. Marchmoor.

At the first intrusion of her finger the book began to glow. She slowly inserted the whole of her hand, and then, like the curling smoke from a cigarette, twisting, glowing azure lines began to swirl inside the book. Mrs. Marchmoor cocked her head and extended her fingers, as if she were tightening the fit of a leather glove. The lines wrapped more tightly around her and glowed more brightly—yet Miss Temple was sure that something was wrong. Then the gleam went out, and Mrs. Marchmoor retracted her hand, the surface of the book top never once betraying a single ripple at her passage.

“Can you… can you read it?” asked Miss Temple.

Mrs. Marchmoor did not respond. Miss Temple felt a harsh pressing at her mind, cold and uncaring, and stumbled backward in fear.

“Simply ask me!” she squealed.

“You will lie.”

“Not when I know you can enter my mind as easily as one sticks a spoon in a bowl!” Miss Temple held out her hand. “Please—I have seen what you have done to the people in this place—I have no desire to lose my hair or see my skin split by sores!”

“Is that what I have done?” asked Mrs. Marchmoor.

“Of course it is—you must know very well!”

The glass woman did not respond. Miss Temple heard her own quick breath and was ashamed. She forced herself to swallow her fear, to pay attention, to think. Why was her enemy silent?

“I do not see anyone, Celeste,” whispered Mrs. Marchmoor, carefully. “I remain in this room and only rummage what minds are near. I cannot go out. I am not unaware of your reaction to my … form— yours and everyone else's. I am alone. I am alone in the world. I have been waiting for word, but no word has come.”

“You sent soldiers, didn't you?” asked Miss Temple. “Did they tell you nothing?”

“What happened on the airship?”

“Quite a lot happened,” replied Miss Temple nervously. She pointed to the Duke. “What happened to Colonel Aspiche?”

A trilling series of clicks in Miss Temple's head told her Mrs. Marchmoor was chuckling.

“That was very clever of you. But I stopped the Colonel in time. I cleansed his mind. I can do that. I have discovered that I can do all kinds of things.”

“But you can't do anything with him.” Miss Temple gestured again toward the sepulchral Duke. “If anyone but Fordyce gets a glimpse— or a whiff—of him, they'll know something's wrong. Everyone outside is most agitated, you know.”

Mrs. Marchmoor's rage struck Miss Temple's mind like a hammer.

“I could kill you,” the glass woman snarled. “I could skin your mind like a cat and keep it dancing in an agony you cannot conceive.”

“The city is in turmoil,” spat Miss Temple, on her hands and knees, a strand of saliva hanging from her lip. “Someone will force their way in, or the Duke will decay beyond what perfume can hide. His palace will be burned to the ground like a plague house—”

Another hammer blow and Miss Temple felt the carpet fibers prickling against her cheek. She was lying flat, unable to think. How much time had passed? Had the glass woman already ransacked her memories? Her eyes stung and her teeth ached. The unnatural face loomed above her, its eyes shining as if they'd been slickened with oil. The fingers of Mrs. Marchmoor's hands moved slowly as her mind worked, like sea grasses in a gentle current.

“In the airship,” Miss Temple gasped, “every one of your masters plotted against the others. You say you have discovered new talents, yet I am certain the Comte set controls on your independence. Why else would you hide in this tomb?”

“I am not hiding. I am waiting.”

Despite her aching mind, Miss Temple smiled.

“I wonder… are you more frightened that none of the others possesses his knowledge… or that one of them does?”

“I have nothing to fear from the Contessa or from Francis Xonck.”

“Is that why you sent men to kill them?”

“I sent men to find them, Celeste. And to find you. I can take whatever I need from your mind. I can leave you dead.”

“Of course you can,” admitted Miss Temple, with a nervous breath. “You kept me alive to talk to me—but if I live still, it has to do with that book… and everything you fear.”

Mrs. Marchmoor was silent, but Miss Temple could see flecks of brightness flitting inside her like sparks from an open fire at night. There was no telling what secrets the woman had plucked from the minds of those around her. Like a hidden spider at the heart of the Palace, with every day Mrs. Marchmoor extended her knowledge beyond the Cabal.

The door opened for Fordyce, shuffling his feet and breathing wetly. He tottered directly to the seated Duke and executed as deferential a bow as his precarious balance might allow. From the Duke's decay-riddled chest came a rotting meat wheeze that drove Miss Temple to put a hand across her mouth.

“Fordyce… the large brougham… private steps… at once.”

“At once, your Grace.”

“And those fellows…”

“Fellows, your Grace?” Fordyce tipped toward the desk and reached out a subtle hand to steady himself.

“Phelps…” rasped the Duke, stretching the name on the rack of his breath to three ugly syllables. “Crabbé's man… and the other… newly posted… Soames… I require them.”

“Excellent, your Grace.”

“And the corridors… as always… cleared.”

“As always, your Grace. At once.”

Fordyce tottered from the room without the slightest glance in their direction. Miss Temple flinched as the abrasive hiss filled her mind.

“You will take the Duke's arm.”

THE CORRIDORS were indeed empty of all human traffic. With everyone in Stäelmaere House waiting anxiously for the Duke's appearance, the decaying chamberlain's announcement of his departure must have been a blow. Were there topcoated diplomats and Ministers kneeling behind every keyhole as they walked? The Duke's steps were deliberate and slow, but he was stable enough—or Mrs. Marchmoor's control so powerful—that she could brace him with one hand and keep the other over her mouth, for the Duke's perfumed stench was extremely disagreeable. The glass woman herself followed behind, swathed in her thick dark cloak, its hood pulled forward. Only the muffled click of her footfalls betrayed her to Miss Temple's ears, though to anyone else the sound would have merely suggested fashionably Spanish, metal-capped boots.

Fordyce led the way, his left leg dragging more than before, to a portrait of the young Duke dressed in a dashing hussar uniform, his vicious face and long black hair at odds with the merry profusion of tassels and plumes. To the side of the portrait—the background of which, Miss Temple noticed with a shock, showed a line of severed brown heads on fence-spikes—was another over-carved wooden door. Fordyce clawed it open with shaking hands and stepped aside for them to enter a narrow vestibule, waiting for Mrs. Marchmoor without ever seeming to acknowledge her presence. He nodded gravely and shut them in. Miss Temple grimaced—the air was impossibly close. Were they hiding here while the rest of the Privy Council crept past? She gagged into her hand. Suddenly the entire chamber shuddered. Miss Temple looked over at the glass woman, whose lip curled with a stiff amusement. The entire vestibule was a dumbwaiter—and they were descending.

The vestibule came to a stop. The door was unlocked from the outside by Mr. Phelps. Behind him waited Mr. Soames—face drawn, eyes ringed with red—earnestly staring down at the floor. Neither man acknowledged Mrs. Marchmoor as she glided past them into a corridor flagged with slate tiling. The air was cooler, as if they had descended far beneath the house.

“The large brougham…” rasped the Duke. “It is prepared?”

“It is, your Grace,” answered Phelps. “May I ask our destination?”

The Duke's voice was a baleful scrape. “The driver knows.”

BEFORE THEM waited a large black coach, strangely constructed with two distinct compartments, the whole pulled by six enormous black horses. The rear compartment was windowless—almost as if it were part of a hearse—while the forward was every bit a normal sort of carriage. Liveried footmen stood waiting, utterly attentive though avoiding any eye contact, as Mrs. Marchmoor very slowly scaled the small steps into the rear compartment, whose interior was as lushly upholstered as a Turkish sofa. The footmen relieved Miss Temple of the Duke's arm and eased their master up. Once he was settled, they shut the door and opened the front compartment. Miss Temple raced to the far corner without anyone's help. Phelps sat across from her. Soames perched nervously next to Phelps, plucking at the frayed skin of his lower lip with his teeth. The footmen shut the door, called out to the driver, and the coach eased forward so gently it might have carried a cargo of eggs.

At first the way around them was dark, but then they safely emerged into a cobbled avenue dotted with well-dressed scowling men striding about importantly.

“The rear of the Kingsway,” observed Phelps, and then, as Miss Temple had no comment, “We are behind the Ministries.”

“A shame you've no more idea than I where we are off to,” replied Miss Temple.

Phelps said nothing.

“What of you, Mr. Soames?” she called, doing her best to smile brightly.

“I'm sure I couldn't say!” he managed, in an earnest sort of yelp.

The coach left the white stone warren of the Ministries and flanked the river itself, for she recognized its stone walls and iron railings and saw beyond them open sky.

For a moment it seemed as if Soames might speak, but he glanced first to his superior and thought better of it. Miss Temple exhaled with a sharp little huff. That she found herself—so quickly upon her return—in the exact sort of situation she had been determined to avoid galled her extremely. So much was happening—the glass woman had forsaken her lair!—and yet here she was cocooned with two utterly bloodless drones. She thought again of Chang standing by the clock, and her anger rose, as if her predicament was entirely his doing.

“If you think I care that she hears us you are mistaken,” Miss Temple said. “And if you think fawning will save your disease-ridden skins, then you are outright fools.”

“She?” asked Mr. Soames.

Miss Temple ignored Soames altogether and leaned to Phelps.

“Deputy Minister Crabbé is dead,” she hissed. “Roger Bascombe is dead. That part of your plot died with them. She is looking for something in that book! Once she finds it, she will rule every soul in Stäelmaere House as easily as you can butter hot toast.”

Phelps looked to Soames, but Soames bore the troubled expression of an ailing man whose physicians have begun to speak across his head in Latin.

“The deprivations of poverty and despair,” Soames offered to Phelps. “Once a girl sheds her virtue, her thoughts become every bit as corrupted as her body—”

“Be quiet!” spat Phelps to his shocked colleague. Phelps turned back to Miss Temple. “It is pointless to speculate, pointless to discuss. I am bound by an oath to my Queen.”

“Your Queen?” Miss Temple sneered. “And who do you think that will be in a fortnight? A blue glass monstrosity who but one week ago was an upper echelon whore!”

The pain took hold of her mind like an iron hand, its fingers bunching tight into a fist through the very fabric of her thoughts, an excruciating crush that shot a thread of blood from each nostril. The two men before her faded to the palest glimmers, as if the coach had been flooded with the brightest summer sun, as if each of her eyes had been somehow smeared with fire. She squeezed shut her eyes, but the brightness blazed through her lids. Into her very soul she felt the malevolent burn of Mrs. Marchmoor's violent disapproval. Miss Temple arched her back, gagging against what felt like an impossibly sustained whip crack along her spine.

She sat up on one elbow and dabbed at her nose with one hand, pulling it away and looking at her red-tipped fingers. Phelps passed her a folded handkerchief, and she struggled to a sitting position, wiping her face and where the blood had dripped onto her dress. In the center of her thoughts was a buzzing, as if she had not slept for three days.

Was this how it had begun, for Soames and Fordyce and the other servants of Stäelmaere House? Would she have sores and splitting nails and her hair dropping out in clumps? Did she already? Miss Temple sniffed deeply, refolded the handkerchief, and pressed it quickly to each corner of her eyes. She looked out the window. They had left the city altogether and rode along a country road bordered to either side by wide, flat brown fields of marsh grass. Fen country—and as she formed that thought she smelled a tang of salt in the cooler air. She looked up to meet the gaze of Mr. Phelps.

“We are going to Harschmort House,” she said.

THE JOURNEY lasted another hour, during which there was little talk. Phelps had shut his eyes, with only his left hand's restless plucking at a spot of loose plaster on his cast to betray his wakefulness. Soames slept without any disguise, his mouth open and his posture slack, like a switched-off machine. Despite her own weariness, Miss Temple did not follow their example. There was no reason not to, she knew— even if she were to open the coach door and fling herself to freedom, Mrs. Marchmoor could still reach out and stop her. Miss Temple examined the front of her dress with annoyance, and lifted the stained portions to her mouth and sucked on them one after another, tasting the blood and working the fabric back and forth between her tongue and teeth. Her thoughts sank into a brood.

If she had followed Francis Xonck and stolen his book out of a determined antagonism to evil, she would have happily curled herself up for a proper nap. But Miss Temple knew, for hers was a habitually lacerating scrutiny, that the daring theft had been spurred by the confusion she felt in the wake of the Contessa's seduction and rebuff—that her stabbing action was in fact a running away. With a growing conviction she began to wonder if the entirety of her adventures, from first following Roger's coach to ending his life inside the airship, had not been a flight from a deeper and unflattering truth about her character and its essential paucity.

She had no answer for such thoughts save assertion, and her powers of insistence were low. The Contessa had advised her to abandon her adventure utterly. Even Elöise had attempted to dissuade her from any further investigation—was she so certain these warnings were wrong? Her adventures had altered her character—into a woman who had done murder, a woman whose body inflamed to depravity at the merest spark. It was a feral life like Chang's, and rootless like the Doctor's—marked by isolation and anonymity, by danger and, without any question, eventual doom. It was also, Miss Temple bit her lip to admit it, a life like the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza's.

Her thoughts were jarred by a sudden shift in the surface of the road. They had reached the cobbled drive leading to the Vandaariff estate. She cleared her throat rather deliberately and was gratified to see Mr. Phelps open one eye in response.

“Have you ever been to Harschmort House?” she asked.

He exhaled wearily and shrugged himself to a more respectable posture.

“I have.”

“With Deputy Minister Crabbé?”

“Indeed.”

“And Roger Bascombe?”

Phelps glanced at the still-sleeping Soames, and then out the window at the dispiriting landscape.

“Before the disappearance of the Deputy Minister, there were regular communications between his office, Lord Vandaariff's people, and officials of the Privy Council. It was in no small part owing to Lord Vandaariff that the Duke was able to achieve the control over the Privy Council that he presently enjoys.”

“I would say the Duke enjoys very little,” said Miss Temple, “these days.”

“My point,” continued Phelps, “is that since the disappearance of the Deputy Minister, no word has arrived from Lord Vandaariff whatsoever.”

“Of course there hasn't,” said Miss Temple.

“It is easily explained by the epidemic at Harschmort House of blood fever—”

“Blood fever!” She tossed her head at the compartment behind them. “Have you asked her?”

Phelps licked his lips. “Who?”

“Who?” She mocked him openly. “Her! Mrs. Marchmoor! Margaret Hooke! Not saying her name will not change the fact of her existence, nor lessen her power.”

“I cannot say I am… personally… acquainted with the lady.”

Miss Temple delicately blew her nose into the wadded handkerchief.

“A pity, for she is perfectly acquainted with you.”

THE COACH crossed the flagstone plaza to the wide steps. Mr. Phelps jogged Soames awake, and the man was still blinking and unpleasantly smacking his lips as he stepped from the coach. Miss Temple realized she had never seen Robert Vandaariff's mansion during the day. With out the enfolding night, the structure's harsh simplicity was even more oppressive. The building had first been constructed as a coastal fortress, then turned into a prison. Lord Vandaariff had refitted the interiors to his own lavish specifications, but to Miss Temple, isolated between a featureless landscape and the vast—and therefore somehow inherently disapproving—sky, Harschmort seemed a prison once again.

Phelps followed her from the coach and shut the door. The Duke's footmen carefully extricated the Duke—Soames taking his Grace's elbow—and then, with all the relish they might have shown toward a similarly sized spider, Mrs. Marchmoor. The footmen remained with the coach, heads lowered, as the party made its deliberate way to the stairs: Phelps in the lead, then Soames and the Duke, and last Miss Temple next to the glass woman. Miss Temple sniffed sharply and wiped her nose.

“You hurt me very much,” she said.

“You insulted me,” echoed the voice of Mrs. Marchmoor in her head.

“Resenting a fact does not make it untrue,” replied Miss Temple. “Besides, I thought the Process made that sort of shyness unimportant.”

“It is not too late for you to discover firsthand,” answered the glass woman. “All the necessary machinery is here. How very smart of you to suggest it.”

Miss Temple swallowed, her fears augmented by the ruthless grip of the glass woman's hand on her arm. They had reached the stairs, and she was compelled to assist her captor's awkward climb.

“There are no servants to meet us, your Grace,” Phelps called.

“Of course there are servants,” croaked the Duke in reply.

As if he had been pushed, Phelps stumbled to the still-shut double doors. He lifted the enormous metal knocker and brought it down with a crash, the sound echoing across the empty plaza like the bark of an enormous lonely dog. The echoes faded to silence, and Phelps rapped the knocker twice more. He was rewarded by a metal snapping from inside as the lock was turned. One door swung open enough to reveal a man in Harschmort's black livery.

“The Duke of Stäelmaere,” announced Mr. Phelps. “To see Lord Robert Vandaariff.”

The man looked up at Phelps, hesitating. “I am sorry to inform you that Lord Vandaariff—”

He got no further. The servant staggered backwards and Miss Temple heard the awkward clatter of his fall. Phelps pushed the door wide and motioned them in.

Vandaariff's footman lay inert on the tile, breathing in shallow puffs like an agitated spaniel, but his eyes were vacant and dull. The main foyer of the mansion was empty of any other person. Miss Temple wrinkled her nose, and saw Phelps and Soames doing the same.

“There has been a fire,” Phelps said.

Miss Temple turned to Mrs. Marchmoor, but the glass woman was already moving. Miss Temple followed with the others, hoping Mrs. Marchmoor's probing mind might become distracted such that a resourceful person might avail themselves of something like a heavy brass candlestick or a flingable Chinese urn. A sudden snap of pain between Miss Temple's eyes made her stumble. Phelps glanced back at her, his mouth a clenched, disapproving line.

The stench of smoke was most intolerable at the center of the house, though any actual sign of what had been burned remained hidden. An elderly man in black livery toppled onto the marble floor as his mind fell subject to Mrs. Marchmoor's need. He lay on his back, blood flowing from his ears, and they swept to a winding staircase Miss Temple had taken before—down to an old library where the Comte d'Orkancz had set up a smaller experimental laboratory. The smell of smoke worsened as they traversed the curving corridor to the blackened door. The Comte's laboratory was littered with the charred wreckage of fallen balconies and the bookcases that had propped them up, the walls peeled and streaked with soot, the domed ceiling pitted by flame. The stone worktops were cracked, and seared with brilliant colors where his stores of chemical compounds succumbed to the blaze. Miss Temple stepped gingerly into the room, her feet crunching on cinders, gazing with a grim fascination at the charred feather bed where Lydia Vandaariff had undergone the loathsome ministrations of the Comte d'Orkancz.

Miss Temple turned to Mrs. Marchmoor. Clearly she had hoped to find the Comte's tools and his supply of refined blue glass, his copious notes and specially designed machines. Had Mrs. Marchmoor left the protection of Stäelmaere House, risked exposure, risked everything, only to find herself outwitted by an adversary she did not know existed?

But Mrs. Marchmoor was not looking at the wall, or the ruined chemical machinery, or even the bed. As Miss Temple watched, the glass woman carefully advanced into the ruined chamber, stopping only when she stood within a wide circle of smoke-blackened blue glass fragments. Miss Temple covered her mouth with one hand, recalling the first glass woman she had encountered—the Comte's prize… Cardinal Chang's love… the glass woman she had herself destroyed in this very room with Doctor Svenson's pistol. Mrs. Marchmoor turned to Miss Temple, impassive, her unseen feet grinding against the broken remains of Angelique.

No one spoke as they retraced their steps to the main floor. Directed by two more unfortunate servants, the glass woman stalked slowly across the empty ballroom. The smell of fire grew strong again, and then openly oppressive as they stepped through the French doors into the ornamental garden. As if a massive explosion had taken place (a level of destruction one associated only with newspaper accounts of full-scale battle), the center of the garden had fallen in on itself, collapsing utterly into the massive cathedral chamber beneath it, which now lay open to the air, and in ruins. Here the fire had been far more massive and savage, melting the bright pipes that lined the walls, consuming the roof timbers, toppling the tiers of prison cells into a mangle of misshapen steel. In the center of it all still rose the iron staircase tower, broken and jagged as a black rotting tooth. The platform at its base, where all the Comte's machinery had been installed, where Mrs. Marchmoor had been strapped to a table—for the last time flesh and blood—lay smothered in debris.

Mrs. Marchmoor's head whipped to the right, toward the interior of the house, the action so sharp as to dislodge her hood and reveal her shining face. In the doorway to the ballroom stood another figure in a cloak, as dark but much more ragged, tall but bent with fatigue. His red hair was shocked with lifeless white, as if it had been wiped with paste. His skin, deathly pale, was at every margin—the rims of each eye, the discolored flare within each nostril, both livid dripping lips— cast in varying shades of blue, as if he were a monochrome portrait of a frozen corpse. In Francis Xonck's left hand glittered a narrow lancet of blue glass.

“YOU'VE TRAVELED quite a way, Margaret. How very brave of you.”

“So you are alive, Francis.”

The woman's response insinuated itself into Miss Temple's mind, like the sound of a knife being sharpened in another room. Xonck snorted and spat a knot of blue matter on the grass.

“When did it become Francis? Whatever happened to ‘Mr. Xonck’? Even when I was rogering you sideways at the Old Palace you still kept your sense of respect. I suppose that also explains the pack of spaniels out searching for me.”

He nodded contemptuously at Phelps and Soames, then passed his gaze more deliberately over the Duke, stiff as statuary, and then Miss Temple. Xonck's voice dropped into a low snarl.

“If you have her, then you have my book. Will you give it back, Margaret?”

“I cannot, Francis. I know what it holds.”

“If I understand things correctly, the contents would be useless to you.”

“Useless in that I cannot penetrate them directly. But I am determined to influence whoever does.”

“Influence? I think you mean control.”

“A great deal has changed.”

“You are no longer bound by the Process?”

“The Process opens one's eyes to the truth—you've only yourself to blame.”

Miss Temple remembered Xonck as a dandy—a rake, a wit—but within that pose he'd been as vicious and deadly as any viper. If Mrs. Marchmoor were not there, the whole of their party would have without question been at his mercy. Xonck took another step and his cloak gaped open to reveal a white shirt horribly stained with dried brown blood… and a spot within that stain boasting a bright blue crust.

Xonck cocked his head and studied the Duke. “Is he beginning to rot yet? I'm sure the Comte concocted all sorts of preparations to sustain longevity… such a shame he is not here to apply them.”

“You are as bereft without the Comte as I am,” hissed Mrs. Marchmoor. “Why else are you at Harschmort, if not to find his secrets?”

“I admit it freely,” replied Xonck, stepping just a bit closer. “A shame what's happened to the place, isn't it?”

“You claim not to have caused this destruction?”

“Don't be a fool,” laughed Xonck. “Look into the mind of any servant here and you will see the fire predates my return. What they will not tell you—for none of them know what to look for—is that the Comte's machinery had all been removed beforehand.”

“Who would have known to do that? Rosamonde—”

“She could not have returned any earlier than I. Truly, Margaret, who else could it be but you? Everyone else the Comte enlisted to help him is dead.”

“Where is Robert Vandaariff?” Miss Temple called out. “We did not see him anywhere.”

Xonck turned to her with a nasty look and in the same moment she felt a prick inside her skull from Mrs. Marchmoor's irritation. She winced but spoke again.

“I am well aware Lord Vandaariff's mind was emptied, but are the effects of an emptied mind permanent? Could some portion of the man remain? Before you betrayed him, Robert Vandaariff knew as much about your plots as anyone—indeed, he thought he was in command. One is curious, in these intervening days, who was given the task of minding him?”

Mr. Phelps stepped forward, sparking an immediate response from Xonck, the glass stiletto poised. Phelps raised his own empty hands before him and spoke clearly, despite his obvious fear.

“It is a simple enough matter for the servants to tell us where their master is, or at least when he left them. If his departure is coincidental with these fires, then the situation is all the clearer. Yes?”

Xonck nodded and stepped aside. Phelps walked quickly past him and into the house. Miss Temple wondered if he might not take the opportunity to run for his life.

“Elspeth Poole was to have tended Vandaariff,” said Xonck. “In her absence…”

He paused, his concentration broken by a spasm of discomfort. Miss Temple clucked her tongue. Xonck met her eyes with an intense distaste.

“May I ask why this woman is alive?” he snarled.

“Because I can force her to action, where the two of you cannot. And I don't care if she dies.”

“Do you care if anyone dies, Margaret?”

“Do you?”

“Do not be frightful,” said Xonck with a smile, his broken teeth dark and slick. “My own life I hold extremely dear.” He gestured with the dagger toward the massive reeking pit. “And I think there has been enough wanton destruction for the time being. Who has done this, if not you and if not me? Has your fellow found someone to talk to, Margaret? Eavesdrop in his brain—save us the misery of waiting!”

Mrs. Marchmoor did not reply, but Miss Temple could see the twitch in her posture. Xonck took another step. Miss Temple glanced over at Mr. Soames, but he remained holding the Duke's arm, as if that simple duty might protect him.

“He has,” replied Mrs. Marchmoor, and Miss Temple winced to imagine Phelps tottering on his feet as she possessed him, foam on his lips, eyelids batting like the wings of a moth in the dark. Mrs. Marchmoor held up one hand, sorting through the conversation they could not hear.

“The fires occurred in the night… two days ago. Lord Vandaariff was discovered missing the next morning. At first it was thought he might have set the blazes himself and perished in them—”

Xonck interrupted her. “Ask about the machinery—there must have been carts to haul it, or a freight launch on the canal.”

“Yes… the previous day, there were men—”

“Mrs. Marchmoor!” Miss Temple cried. Francis Xonck had advanced within range of a sudden lunge. The glass woman cocked her head and took a careful step back.

“What do you play at, Francis? Do you think I won't scruple to seize your mind? Do you think I would not enjoy it all the more? You rogering me? What of me rogering the stuffing from your very soul?”

“By all means, Margaret—your cause is perfectly just.” Francis Xonck leered at her, his mouth wide and hideous, and opened his arms in invitation. “But I do not think you can. I too have been touched by the glass—and my alchemy has changed…”

He took another deliberate, challenging step forward. Mrs. Marchmoor raised her arm. Xonck staggered, as if he had been struck by a hammer, and wavered on his feet. But then he rolled his head to the side, easily, as if he were resisting an unwelcome caress, and came on.

With a flick of the glass woman's arm, Mr. Soames flew forward at Xonck, grappling for the dagger. Mrs. Marchmoor retreated as fast as possible with her slow, careful pace. Miss Temple hesitated—should she fight or run? The unattended Duke sank to the grass like a balloon losing its air. Soames had Xonck's forearm with both hands, but Xonck shifted his weight and slammed the plaster-wrapped fist into Soames' head, knocking him to his knees. Still—perhaps this was the force of Mrs. Marchmoor's control—Soames did not let go. Xonck hammered him again, the impact spattering the cast with blood. Xonck shoved Soames clear.

“Give me the book, Margaret! Set it down this instant!”

Mrs. Marchmoor retreated two more steps and the edge of her cloak rippled to reveal the canvas sack she had set down on the grass. She continued backwards and Xonck followed, pausing to snatch up his prize, until they stood face-to-face.

“Very wise, Margaret. Stay where you are. You will be mine. You know it—there is no other way. I will keep you here in this garden— what can the rain or fog matter to you?—and if you set foot in the house or attempt to leave, I will smash you piece by piece and keep you alive through all of it!” He waved the book. “Because I will know how, Margaret, and I will know how to remake you, just to destroy you all over again.”

The pistol shot caught him above the right knee, the spray of blood blowing out onto the grass. Xonck crumpled with a cry of pain, but with a heave of effort he surged up and turned to face Mr. Phelps, who stood with a smoking pistol, a handful of black-coated Harschmort servants behind him.

“You fool!” cried Xonck. “Any shot that misses me shatters her!”

With an ungainly leap he took hold of Mrs. Marchmoor and pulled her roughly to him, with a force that Miss Temple was sure must crack the glass woman's arm. But it did not crack, and she stumbled, an unnatural embrace—Xonck's free hand swiftly circling her waist and his heavy cast braced against her neck, as if prepared to snap it clean.

It seemed as if Mr. Phelps would not stop—that he did not care— and his gaze passed over both the Duke, facedown on the lawn, and the unmoving Mr. Soames. But then Phelps' eyes went dull and he paused. The pistol-point drifted to the side. A stream of blood opened from Phelps' nose and dripped down to stain his starched collar. Mrs. Marchmoor had taken his decision into her own hands.

Xonck laughed again, harsh as a crow, and then swore as he shifted his weight from his bleeding leg. This caused Mrs. Marchmoor to turn, and their faces came as close as two lovers'.

Suddenly Xonck's spine stiffened. The canvas sack slipped from his hand.

In the open space between them Miss Temple saw that Mrs. Marchmoor had plunged her finger into the blue-crusted wound in Xonck's chest, well up to the third knuckle, just as she had inserted it into the book. Xonck arched his back and roared, a bull beneath the axe, but could not tear free.

Miss Temple dashed forward and snatched up the canvas sack, running away into the ruins of the Harschmort gardens, dodging behind hedges and between lines of gnarled rosebushes, her boots stumbling over sudden bands of cobblestone or crunching gravel. Xonck was screaming behind her… a pistol shot crashed into the air.

Miss Temple cried out at a sudden burst of pain. Something had happened to Mrs. Marchmoor. The glass woman's distress chopped viciously into the minds of everyone around her. Miss Temple shook her head. She lay on the grass—unaware of having fallen—and awkwardly crawled forward, heedless of the distant cries and shouting. Before her was a low stone wall—the edge of the garden?—and she scrambled over the thing with a desperate grunt of fear. The fear told her to keep running, but Miss Temple crouched low against the cover of the wall, breathing hard, listening for pursuit.

She did not feel the glass woman in her mind. Could Francis Xonck and Mrs. Marchmoor both have been destroyed?

Miss Temple looked down at the canvas sack in her hand and, just to make sure nothing had been damaged in the fracas, peeked inside. The book lay whole and gleaming. She knew how dangerous it must be. The first book she had looked into had changed her so profoundly, it was already impossible to recall what she had been like before. That this book too contained something powerful was obvious—Mrs. Marchmoor had been determined it should not fall into the hands of an enemy. Miss Temple bit her lip. Was she not an enemy? What if the book contained the knowledge that would allow her to smash the remaining members of the Cabal once and for all? What if it taught her the one true way to crush the Contessa forever?

Miss Temple looked over her shoulder… the garden was silent. If she merely touched the outside cover with one extended finger, she might but glimpse its contents… the merest graze and she would pull away…

Miss Temple looked behind her once more. Then, taking a breath, she touched her finger to the cover of the book. Nothing happened, though her fingertip began to feel cold. She pulled it away, took another breath, and then put forward two fingers. Still nothing. Then she took a deep breath and laid the entirety of her open palm upon the book.

A blast of sensation, like the sharp choking rush of black smoke from a stovepipe, shot through the flesh of her arm and without warning enveloped her mind before she could even blink. Miss Temple flew back with a strangled cry, struck the wall, and rolled into the grass, her eyes blind, vomiting without heed, moaning through each spasm like a terrified animal. For she knew now that what Xonck's book contained was death, and its obliterating taste had taken root inside her soul.