They were not half-way down the mirrored corridor when behind them erupted a clatter of bootsteps. Miss Temple saw the whiskered man, Blenheim, whom she took to be Lord Vandaariff’s chamberlain, racing toward them with a group of red-coated Dragoons in his wake. He carried a carbine, and all of the Dragoons held their saber- sheaths so they would not bounce as they ran.
In a moment his group had passed them by, running ahead to one of the doors on the far right side…a room—she had tried to maintain Harschmort’s geography in her head as they walked—that bordered the exterior of the house. Caroline pulled on her hand, walking more quickly. Miss Temple could see that they were nearing the very door she had gone through with the Contessa, where she had previously found her robes, the room that led to the medical theatre…it seemed a memory from another lifetime. They kept walking. They had reached it—should she try to run?—Caroline did not release her hand but nodded to one of the soldiers to get the door. Just then the door ahead of them—where Blenheim’s party had gone—burst open, spewing a cloud of black smoke.
A Dragoon with a soot-smeared face shouted to them, “Water! Water!”
One of the Macklenburg men turned at once and ran back down the hall. The Dragoon disappeared back through the open door, and Miss Temple wondered if she dared dash toward it, but again before she could move, her hand was squeezed by Caroline and she was pulled along. One of the remaining Macklenburg troopers opened the door to the inner room and the other anxiously shepherded them inside away from the smoke. As the door shut behind them Miss Temple was sure she heard an escalation of shouts and the echoing clamor of more bootsteps in the marble hall.
It was once more silent. Caroline nodded to the first soldier and he crossed to the far door, the one cunningly set into the wall, and vanished through it. The remaining man installed himself at the hallway entrance, hands behind his back, and his back square against the door. Caroline looked around, to make certain all was well, and released her grip on their hands.
“There is no need to worry,” she said. “We will merely wait until the disturbance is settled.”
But Miss Temple could see that Caroline
“What do you think has happened?” she asked.
“Nothing that Mr. Blenheim has not dealt with a thousand times before,” Caroline replied.
“Is there really a
“Blenheim is horrid,” said Lydia Vandaariff, to no one in particular. “When I have my way he will be
Miss Temple’s thoughts began to race. On the far side of the theatre was another waiting room—perhaps that was where the soldier had been forced to go…she remembered that her own first visit had revealed the theatre to be empty. What if she were to run to the theatre now? If it was empty again might not she climb into the gallery and then to the spiral staircase, and from there—she knew!—she could retrace the path of Spragg and Farquhar across the grounds and through the servants’ passage back to the coaches. And it was only running on floors and carpets and the grassy garden—she could do it with bare feet! All she needed was a momentary distraction….
Miss Temple manufactured a gasp of shock and whispered urgently to Miss Vandaariff. “Lydia! Goodness—do you not see you are most lewdly exposed!”
Immediately Lydia looked down at her robes and plucked at them without finding any flaw, her voice rising in a disquieting whimper. Caroline’s attention of course went the same way, as did the Macklenburg trooper’s.
Miss Temple darted for the inner door, reaching it and turning the handle before anyone even noticed what she was doing. She had the door open and was already charging through before Caroline called out in surprise…and then Miss Temple cried out herself, for she ran headlong into the Comte d’Orkancz. He stood in heavy shadow, fully blocking the doorway with his massive frame, somehow even larger for the thick leather apron over his white shirt, the enormous leather gauntlets sheathing his arms up to each elbow, and the fearsome brass-bound helmet cradled under one arm, crossed with leather straps, great glass lenses like an insect’s eyes and strange metal boxes welded over the mouth and ears. She flung herself away from him and back into the room.
The Comte glanced once, disapprovingly, at Caroline, and then down to Miss Temple.
“I have come myself to collect you,” he said. “It is long past time you are redeemed.”
EIGHT
Cathedral
Chang made a conscious effort to bend his knees—knowing that a rigid leg could easily mean a shattered joint—and did so just as he collided hard with a curving, hot wall of filthy, slippery metal. The actual time in the air, undoubtedly brief, was enough to allow a momentary awareness of suspension, a rising in his stomach which, due to the total darkness in the shaft, was exceptionally disorienting. His mind made sense of the fall—he’d struck a curve in the pipe, after a drop of perhaps ten or fifteen feet—as his body crumpled and rolled, losing all pretense of balance or control, and then dropped again as the pipe straightened into vertical once more. This time he slammed down even harder, knocking the breath from his lungs on a welded corner—he’d struck a gap where his pipe was joined by another, his upper body striking the seam and his legs continuing past, dragging him downwards. He scrabbled for a grip, couldn’t get one on the slick metal—covered with the same slimy deposit caked onto the lattice in the urn—and slid down into the darkness, just keeping hold of his stick as it clattered from under his coat. But the impact had slowed his descent, and he was no longer falling but sliding—this pipe was set at an angle. The air rising up to Chang was more noxious and becoming hotter—it seemed grimly probable that this path would feed him into their furnace. He pressed his legs and his arms to the side of the pipe, grudgingly but surely slowing his descent. By the time he slammed into the next junction he was able to catch hold of the lip and stop himself completely, legs swinging below him in the dark. He pulled himself up with an effort and wedged his torso into the opening, so he was nearly balanced and could relax his arms. Chang caught his breath, wondering how far down he had come, and what in the utter world he had been thinking.
He shut his eyes—he couldn’t see anything anyway—and forced himself to focus on what he could hear. From the pipe below came a steady, metallic rattle, in time with regularly spaced gusts of steaming, chemically fouled air. He leaned into the second, joining pipe, which was not as large—large enough to hold him?—and cooler to the touch. He waited, allowing time for a longer cycle, but heard no such rattle from its depths nor felt any such toxic exhalations. He realized absently that his head hurt. The first tendrils of bilious nausea were rising in his stomach. He had to get out. He wrenched himself around in the narrow space and slipped his feet into the narrower pipe. There was just room to fit, and Chang pushed from his mind the prospect of the pipe getting thinner mid-way down—he did not want to think about trying to claw his way back against the slippery interior. He tucked his stick under his coat and pinned it with his left arm, and eased himself down as slowly as he could, pressing his legs against the side of the shaft. There was less of the greasy accretion and Chang found that he could more or less manage his descent, for the pipe went down at a milder angle. The farther he sank from the main shaft, the clearer became the air, and the less he worried about being dropped into a cauldron of molten glass. The pipe continued for some distance—he stopped even trying to guess—and then flattened out, blessedly without narrowing, so that he was on his back (and doing his best to keep his mind from tales of coffins and live burial). The pipe still curved, but now horizontally…as if, he thought with a smile, it traveled around the floor of a circular room. He inched along feet first—unable to turn—trying to make as little noise as he could, though he was forced to stop once, preventing by sheer force of will the voiding of his stomach—jaw clenched against the rising bile, huffing like a wounded horse through his scarred nasal passages. He pushed himself on until, so suddenly it took his fogged mind a moment to make sense of what he was seeing—that he was seeing anything at all—the blackness above him was punctuated by a chink of light. He reached up to it carefully and felt the underside of a metal clasp, and then by delicately searching around it sketched out the borders and sweetly welcome hinges of some sort of panel.
Chang turned the clasp to the side, slipping the bolt clear, and then brought both hands beneath the panel and slowly pushed. The hinges gave way with a rusted groan. He stopped, listened, and forced himself to listen more, another whole agonizing minute. A dim light poured into the shaft and he could see with disgust how rusted and filthy it was. He pushed again, and with a longer squeal of protest the panel swung clear. Chang gasped at the cleaner air and sat up. Only his head and the tip of one shoulder fit with ease through the gap. He was in some sort of brick-walled machine room—a secondary one, perhaps, thankfully not in use—with several similarly sized pipes coming through the walls from different directions, all converging at an enormous riveted metal boiler, clotted with
