The Dark Volume mtccads-2

by Gordon Dahlquist

  The Contessa only pushed past him into the trees.

  When they emerged on the other side, another road crossed before them, overgrown with grass and knee-high saplings. Svenson realized it must have predated the canal, for it curved away around the forest, and recalled all the ruins he had passed in the woods while walking with Elöise. Parchfeldt Park was a sort of graveyard—like any forest perhaps, where every new tree fed on the pulped-up corpses beneath it. But as graveyards always brought to the Doctor's mind his own mortality, so standing on the derelict road placed all the new life and effort he had seen—the barge, the re-fitted factory, its master's blazing ambition—within the heavy shadows of time.

  The Contessa had not spoken since they'd seen the torch-led crowds. Doctor Svenson cleared his throat and she turned to him.

  “If I had not appeared, did you intend to simply approach the front door and charm the inhabitants to your will?”

  He was aware that sharp questions and a mocking tone must be strange to her, and did not doubt he was angering the woman—and yet his questions were also plainly meant. What had she expected? What seeds of defeat or despair might find purchase in her heart?

  “You're a strange man,” she at last replied. “I remember first meeting you at the St. Royale, where it was immediately obvious you were an intelligent, dutiful, tractable fool. I do not think I was wrong—”

  “I admit Cardinal Chang cuts a more spectacular figure.”

  “Cardinal Chang is merely another stripe of heart-sop idiot—you could each learn a thing from your little provincial ice floe. Yet I am not speaking of them, Doctor, but of you.”

  “What you think cannot be my concern.”

  The Contessa gazed at him, so wan and simple it made him blanch. “I will find the proper word for you someday, Doctor. And when I do, I shall whisper that word into your ear.”

  The Contessa turned and began to walk toward the factory.

  “Where are you going?” he cried. “We do not know who is there! We do not know why—if you have not called them—these people, your minions, have assembled!”

  The Contessa looked over her shoulder—an action he was certain caused her pain.

  “Content yourself with your card,” she called back to him. “The ideals you place upon the world are broken. There is nothing necessary here at all.”

  THE SHIMMER of her silk dress caught the moon even after he could, no longer distinguish her shadow from the surrounding dark, and then she was around the curve and gone. He did not follow, wondering why, and looked back at the trees where they had come from, and then down the overgrown road as it led away from the factory… a path he might follow to another world. He reached into his pocket for his cigarette case and felt his fingertips touch the cold glass card. Was there enough moonlight to see? Was it not an intensely stupid thing to do in such open ground?

  Doctor Svenson sighed, regretting the act already (what had Elöise said, that knowing more of a thing invariably meant more pain?), and turned his gaze into the glass.

  WHEN HE finally looked up again the world around him seemed unreal, as if he had been staring into the sun. He felt the sweat on the back of his neck and a stiffness in his fingers from gripping the glass rectangle so tightly. He slipped it back into his tunic pocket and rubbed his eyes, which seemed to be moist… tears? Or merely his body's response to not blinking? He began walking toward the factory.

  The card had been infused with Trapping's memory, but that made sense, since the man would have taken part in many gatherings where the Cabal recruited its intimates, where the cards were a prominent lure. Svenson had looked into two cards before this, each different from the other in the manner of captured experience. The first contained one specific event—the Prince's intimacy with Mrs. Marchmoor, when the woman's sensations had been bled into the glass on the spot. The second card, holding the experiences of Roger Bascombe, had been an assemblage of impressions and memories, from his groping of Miss Temple on a sofa to the quarry at Tarr Manor. To fabricate it, the memories must have been distilled into the card well after the fact, from Bascombe's mind.

  Trapping's card—as the Doctor now thought of it—was different from each of these. Its experience was not rooted in images, or even in tactile sensations. Instead, it conveyed—and to a hideous degree—an emotional state alone. There was context—and here the card was similar to Bascombe's card, with an apparently random flow of trivial incidents: the foyer table of the Trappings' house at Hadrian Square… the Colonel's red uniform reflected in polished silver as he ate a solitary breakfast… the house's rear garden, where he watched his children from a cushioned chair. Yet suffusing each of these moments was a feeling of bitterness, of selfish need and brutish reaction, of exile and isolation, of a man whose bluff, unthinking complacency had been punctured by sorrow sharp as an iron nail.

  Mrs. Trapping appeared nowhere, yet her absence was not its source. What reason did Arthur Trapping have to be so bitter? His ambition had been handsomely rewarded… and suddenly Svenson placed Colonel Trapping's bottomless resentment: he owed the Xonck brothers for everything he had achieved. Each gleaming point of disgust spelled it out: a calling card in the foyer from Francis, Trapping's red uniform a disgraceful sign of Henry's patronage, the very house itself a wedding present, the children—even these, Svenson thought, shuddering, came under Trapping's eyes with guilty sparks of hatred, before the lightness of their voices spun the anger into a binding net of grief. And this struck Svenson most of all—that the lasting impression from Colonel Trapping was not rage, but unanswerable sadness.

  If Mrs. Trapping was absent from the card, Elöise Dujong was even more so—was she not the man's mistress? This was convenient if Elöise hoped to assuage Svenson's anger, but Doctor Svenson was not truly angry—perhaps, he thought dryly, it was a lifelong failing. The choices Elöise had made, however much apart from his own desires, were too easily seen to be contingent and human. She had done what she had done—though he did not especially want to think about it— just as he had buried his own grief for Corinna in useless service. And yet, to present him with the experience of this man—was that not simply cruel? Being the object of such cruelty deadened his heart. What else would she expect? What could trump the visceral distaste of being placed within his rival's body? That Trapping was sad? That Trapping loathed his in-laws? What did either of these matter when Svenson would have happily seen Trapping horsewhipped by both brothers and thrown into a salt-bath?

  THE LIGHT still blazed through the factory's windows, and Svenson could see the shadows of a gathered crowd against the wooden wall. As he came nearer he heard a buzz of discontentment, affronted mutters, and calls of disbelief. The gate had not opened, a turn of events the crowd found altogether unexplainable. The men with torches held them high, the better to shout to the unanswering windows. Their dress was not as formal as when he'd seen these same people at the final Harschmort gala, but there was no question they represented the highest levels of profession, the military. There was also a rank of younger faces within the whole—those for whom profession was but a path to pass the time, high-born siblings or cousins living near enough to taste the titles they would never hold, forever nursing jealousies and resentments. Svenson compared this gathering with the servants and clerks he'd met on the train to Tarr Manor, seduced into selling the dark secrets of their masters in exchange for what to the Cabal must have seemed like red feathers given to South Sea islanders for land—a decent place to live and enough money for a new coat in winter. What could any of the well-placed people before him lack, by what lures had they been led along? The Doctor shook his head—the terms did not matter at all. The Cabal had suborned each group by dangling before their eyes a credible prospect of hope.

  HE DROPPED onto his knees in the grass. The way into the factory was twice blocked—by the spreading crowd and by the wall. The crowd bunched in front of the gate, but their numbers were such that the mass had spread along the wall—perhaps as many
as two hundred people altogether. Svenson could hear people knocking on the gate and calling for entrance, but their calls were so arrogantly presumptuous in their tone that the Doctor began to doubt that any of the crowd really knew where they were… or what might be inside. Did they not even register the contrast between the isolation of the factory and its fantastic new blazing inhabitation, between the derelict road and the recently raised outer wall?

  Svenson did not see the Contessa.

  He had seen a bust of Cleopatra once, in Berlin—his thoughts were wandering, it was getting cold—life-sized, but he had been struck by how small it seemed, that she was only one woman, who no matter how much of the world she had set aflame remained only so many pounds of flesh and bone, so much breath, so much warmth within one bed. He thought of the Contessa's lacerated shoulder, her quiver of pain beneath his touch, and laid against it like a wager her determined and rapacious—and cruel, he could not forget that— hunger. What life could have constructed such a creature? What events had shaped a man like Chang? Svenson had seen the scars of course, but those were only outward signs, the oil-slicked surface of a pool. He could not be less like them, despite his own bursts of invention or courage. Those moments were not who he was. And what of Miss Temple? He compared her with the men of privilege milling about before his eyes, discontented and hungry… was she not as restless and peremptory? The Doctor's mind went to Elöise, but he rubbed his eyes and shook the entire train of thought away.

  He stood and straightened his tunic. Some of these people had no doubt witnessed him being knocked on the head at Harschmort and dragged away to die—but that only meant they assumed he was dead. If the Contessa had avoided the restive mob, as he was quite sure she had, then there seemed all the more reason for him to do the exact opposite.

  Svenson reached the crowd and shouldered his way past the rearmost ranks before speaking aloud, in a disdainful voice borrowed from the late Crown Prince. “Why do they not open the gate? Do they intend we should wait like tradesmen in the lane? Have we not traveled all these miles?”

  A man next to him, in a crisp wool overcoat, snorted in commiseration. “No one answers at all! As if we were not even expected!”

  “There can be no mistake,” whispered a thin, older fellow with gold spectacles. “When so many of us have received the message.”

  This was met with a general murmur of agreement, but still the gate did not open. Farther down the wall—Svenson was some distance from the gate itself—he could hear the rapping of steel-toed boots kicking hard against the wood.

  “Have you seen no one?” Svenson asked.

  “When we first approached, the gate was open. They barred it shut at the sight of us!”

  “They must know we are summoned!”

  “They do not act as if they do!” complained the older man. “And now it has grown cold… and the country is so damp.”

  “Gentlemen,” offered the Doctor, hesitating enough to make sure of their attention. “Is it possible… there is trouble?”

  The man in the overcoat nodded vigorously. “I have the exact notion!”

  “What if it is all a… a… test?” whispered the older man.

  Svenson was aware that their small conversation had attracted many listeners.

  “Then we were best not to fail,” he replied, pitching his voice more loudly. “Would you not agree?”

  He was answered by nods and mutters by others around them.

  “I beg your pardon,” one said, “but your voice…your accent—”

  “We are not to know one another any more than necessary!” the older man broke in.

  “Our league is intended to be invisible in the world,” the Doctor agreed, “like a fishing net in the ocean, yes? Yet I will say, since you hear it clear enough, that I am from the Duchy of Macklenburg, serving my Prince, who serves the same… principles… as you yourselves.”

  “You are a soldier.” The older man indicated the Doctor's uniform.

  “Perhaps we are all soldiers now,” replied Svenson gravely, feeling an absolute ass. The men around him nodded with a cloying self-satisfaction.

  “Something has gone wrong,” announced the man in the overcoat. “I am sure of it.”

  “You were not told why you were summoned?” asked Svenson.

  “Were you?”

  Svenson felt the entire gang of men around him waiting for his answer.

  “Not told…” he began carefully. “Perhaps I over-reach myself…”

  “Tell us what you know!” urged the older man, and he was echoed by many others. Svenson surveyed their faces and then shook his head seriously, as if he too had come to a decision—to trust them all.

  He lowered his voice. “On the other side of this wall is a factory… the property of Xonck Armaments.” At this revelation came a gasp from the older man. “Exactly who controls the factory at this moment is a mystery. Francis Xonck has journeyed to Macklenburg. Henry Xonck has been taken with an attack of blood fever… and yet there has been a summoning.” Svenson swatted at his less-than-scrupulous uniform. “I say ‘summoned,’ but you will notice I am here later than you all, and after traveling for a longer time. I have come from Harschmort House, where the miraculous machinery of the Comte d'Orkancz has all been removed… removed and relocated into this very factory, behind this very wall.”

  “But is not the Comte gone to Macklenburg as well? Upon whose orders has this been done?”

  “Is that our business?” asked the older man. “Have we not sworn to serve?”

  “Serve who?” called out a voice from the knot of men around them.

  “If we were summoned, why are we shut outside?” called another.

  “Clearly we were not summoned by whoever is master in this place,” said the man in the overcoat.

  “So we must ask ourselves,” said Svenson, “just who can issue such a summons …and who cannot.”

  The men around him erupted into mutterings that spread along the wall like a wildfire leaping from treetop to treetop in the wind. The man in the overcoat bent closer, but his words were lost in the growing noise—outright shouts that the gates must be opened at once, and an explosion of kicks and fists upon the wooden wall. He caught Svenson's arm in a powerful grip. The Doctor stood ready to rip it free, but the man only squeezed harder, hissing into Svenson's ear, “What exact message did you receive?”

  In his other hand the man held a small volume bound in red leather—the book given to every loyal servant of the Cabal for deciphering coded messages. The crowd surged closer to the wall, jostling them both. Svenson pointed to the book.

  “I am afraid I have lost mine.”

  “And yet you are here.”

  Svenson groped for an explanation that would not expose him further. Before he could speak the man tugged him away from the wall, where they might hear one another clearly. If he struck the man hard enough, might he reach the woods before the others brought him down?

  “You were at Harschmort,” the man said. “As was I. But these others… I do not know them, or where they have been enlisted.”

  “Or by whom,” Svenson added.

  “As I say, Harschmort. You were there…”

  “That night?” said Svenson. “The Duke sent off in his carriage— the Comte's ladies—”

  “You remember them, their sifting your thoughts.”

  “Not, I confess, with any pleasure,” said Svenson.

  “Nor I, and yet…” The man looked down at the red leather book. The others were now shouting quite loudly to be let in. “I felt it again not six hours ago.”

  “I had not wanted to say. It is she who summoned me also.”

  “She? You know which of the three has done it?”

  “Only one survived the night,” said the Doctor. “There was chaos and violence—I know this from the Prince.”

  “But…but…that just makes it worse!” the man cried, now barely audible against the escalating roar. “Who has given her the order to summo
n us? And who else, though you say this is a Xonck factory, bars our way?”

  “What did she tell you, in your summons?”

  “Nothing—it was not even words! Just the certain impression that I must travel at once to this place.”

  “Your dedication distinguishes you,” said Svenson.

  “My dedication leaves me flat,” the man replied. “We do not know our situation—how can we serve in ignorance?”

  Before Svenson could answer, the man pulled him back into the agitated crowd, raising his voice above their shouting.

  “Listen! Listen all of you! Here is one who has been this day to Harschmort House. More is afoot than we know! We have been called here for a rescue!”

  Any answer Svenson might have made stopped in his throat when he saw that the crowd of angry men had all turned to him, waiting for his words.

  “Ah… well… the trick of it is—”

  “He is a soldier serving the Prince of Macklenburg!”

  They gazed at Svenson with a new veneer of respect. Once more, he was appalled.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen, while that is true—”

  “Send him over the wall!” It was the old man with gold spectacles, his mouth a rictus of spite. “These blackguards won't let us in? Let's give them one who can sort them out!”

  Before Svenson could dispute this especially stupid idea he felt something cold and heavy pressed into his hand, and looked down to see he was now holding a silver-plated revolver.

  “Wait a moment, all of you! We do not know—”

  “You will shoot them!” cried the old man. “You will open the gate!”

  “That is unlikely,” snapped Doctor Svenson, but no one heard. They had already taken hold of his arms and legs, lifting him abruptly to the level of their shoulders and marching straight to the wall—indeed, slamming him into the planks. The men holding his legs hefted him higher with exuberant force. The Doctor clutched the wall convulsively with both hands, ignoring the drop to either side, and threw a leg over the top to grip tightly with all four of his limbs.