The Dark Volume

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What… what is he doing?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What I represent?” hissed Mrs. Marchmoor.

“O for God's sake!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He must be killed…”

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

THE PITCH-BLACK stairwell echoed with shouts and gunshots. Chang tightened his grip around her and forced a path down. The doorway to the cannons had been split open—there were still screams and fighting inside—but they did not pause until the ground, the steps hellishly strewn with bodies. Many machines had been