The Dark Volume mtccads-2

by Gordon Dahlquist

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

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

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

  “It will not work!” she croaked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “She does not have it,” said Chang.

  “And you do?”

  “No…”

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

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

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

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

  “The marrow sparge,” said Chang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You cannot think he will be your ally?”

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

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

  “Inconsequential,” rasped Xonck.

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

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

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

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

  “Exactly so. Proceed.”

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

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

  Vandaariff sagged against the restraints. No one else moved.

  “Did it work?” whispered Charlotte Trapping.

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

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

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

  “Do not approach him,” Fochtmann warned.

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

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

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

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

  The Contessa took one hesitant step. “Oskar?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Mr. Fochtmann insinuated himself between Leveret and Vandaariff.

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

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

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

  The Contessa sighed with irritation and shifted closer.

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

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

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

  Once more Leveret thrust his face forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Nonsense. Alfred?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What do you see?” whispered Fochtmann.

  “Tell us!” hissed Mrs. Trapping.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Francesca!” shrieked Mrs. Trapping.

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

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

  “Charlotte—no, wait—”

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

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

  “He… he is… unclean…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What is from his body?” demanded Aspiche.

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

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