and trays and brass boxes of machinery. The tables each bore a woman, held with leather straps just as Angelique had been at the Institute, naked, bodies obscured by a sickening nest of slick black hoses. Each woman’s face was completely covered by a black mask fitted with smaller hoses—for each ear, each eye, the nose and mouth—and their hair completely wrapped in a dark cloth, so that despite their nudity Chang could not begin to guess who might be on which table. Only the woman nearest to the turret, who he could barely glimpse from his angle of sight, was distinguished from the others, for the soles of her feet were discolored blue in an identical manner to Robert Vandaariff’s hands.
Next to her stood d’Orkancz, with the same leather apron and gauntlets he’d worn at the Institute and the same brass-bound helmet, to which he’d attached another hose, hooking it into the metal box that made the mask’s mouth. Into this hose the Comte was speaking, and somehow through its engine his voice was magnified, like a very god’s, to crash against every distant corner of the vast chamber. Behind d’Orkancz stood at least four more men, identically dressed, their faces hidden. Men from the Institute, like Gray and Lorenz? Or could one of these be Oskar Veilandt—present either as prisoner or slave? Chang could not see the very base of the tower. Where were the guards? Where was Svenson? Which table held Celeste? None of the women seemed awake—how could he carry her away?
Chang spun at a sound behind him—a clanking from the staircase itself. The stairs wound around an iron pillar—the noise came from within it. He reached across and felt a vibration. The clanking made him think at once of a hotel’s dumbwaiter…could the pillar be hollow? How else to get things quickly from the top to the bottom? But what was being delivered? This was his chance. When whatever was being sent reached the bottom, someone was going to have to open the tower door to get it—and that would be his moment to break through. He shoved his glasses back into place, set the pillowcase down against the wall and threw himself forward.
The Comte was still speaking. Chang didn’t care—it was all the same nonsense—another stage of the circus act to dazzle the customers. Whatever the real effects of this “transformation”, he didn’t doubt it was but a veil for another unseen web of exploitation and greed. The clanking stopped. As Chang swept around the final curve he saw two men wearing the aprons and gauntlets and helmets bending over the open dumbwaiter, just sliding an iron- bound crate from it and into a wheeled cart. Behind them was the open door to the chamber platform, to either side of it a Macklenburg trooper. Chang ignored the men and the cart and vaulted from the steps at the nearest Macklenburger with a cry, slamming the man across the jaw with his forearm and driving a knee into his ribs, knocking him sprawling. Before the second man could draw his weapon Chang stabbed the stick into his stomach, doubling him over (the man’s face falling near enough to Chang that he heard the brusque click of the fellow’s teeth). He drove the dagger up under the man’s open jaw and just as quickly wrenched it free. He stood—the dead trooper sinking like a timed counterweight—and wheeled back to the first man, planting a deliberate kick to the side of his head. Both troopers were still. The two men in the masks stared at him with the dumb incomprehension of inhabitants from the moon first witnessing the savagery of mankind.
Chang spun to the open door. The Comte had stopped speaking. He was staring at Chang. Before Chang could react he heard a noise behind and without looking threw his body forward out the door—just as the two men in helmets shoved the trolley at his back. The corner clipped him sharply across his right thigh—drawing blood, but not enough to run him down. Chang stumbled onto the platform, the sudden enormity of the cathedral-like void above staggering him with a spasm of vertigo. He groped for his bearings. The platform held four more Macklenburgers—three troopers, who as he watched swept out their sabers in one glittering movement, and Major Blach, calmly drawing his black pistol. Chang glanced wildly around him—absolutely no sign of Svenson or which, if any, of the brass-masked men might be Veilandt—and then up to the dizzying heights and the clustered ring of masked faces peering down in rapt attention. There was no time. Chang’s only path away from the soldiers led to the tables and—striding quite directly to cut him off from the women—d’Orkancz.
The troopers rushed forward. Chang in turn charged directly at the Comte before dodging to the left and ducking beneath the first table, swatting through the dangling hoses to reach the other side. The soldiers careened to either side of d’Orkancz. Chang kept going, crouched low, until he was under and past the second table. He emerged on the other side as the Comte shouted to the soldiers not to move.
Chang stood and looked back. The Comte faced him from the far side of the first table, still wearing the mechanical mask, the first woman swathed in hoses before him. At the Comte’s side stood Blach, his pistol ready. The troopers waited. Svenson was not here. Nor, as best as he could tell, was Veilandt—or not with his own mind, for the two masked men behind the Comte had not stopped in their working of the brass machinery, looking for all the world like a pair of insect drones. Chang looked at the platform’s edge. Below it, on every side, was a steaming sea of metal pipes, hissing with heat and reeking sulphurous fumes. There was no escape.
“Cardinal Chang!”
The Comte d’Orkancz spoke in the same projected, amplified tones that Chang had heard in the tower. Heard this close the words were impossibly harsh, and he winced despite himself.
“You will not move! You have trespassed a place you do not comprehend! I promise you do not
Without a thought for the Comte, Chang reached out to the woman on the second table and ripped the dark cloth free that held her hair.
The hair was too dark. It was not Celeste. He scuttled at once to the far side of the third table. The troopers advanced with him, up to the second table. The Comte and Blach remained on the far side of the first, the Major’s pistol quite clearly aimed at Chang’s head. Chang ducked behind the third woman and pulled the cloth from her hair. Too light and less curled…Celeste must be on the first table. He’d charged past her like a fool and left her in the direct control of d’Orkancz.
He stood. Upon seeing him the troopers stepped forward and Chang detected the briefest flicker of movement from Blach. He dropped again as the shot crashed out. The bullet spat past his head and punched into one of the great pipes, spitting out a jet of gas that hung flickering in the air like a blue-white flame. The Comte screamed again.
The soldiers—nearly at the third table—froze. Chang risked a slow peek over the raft of black hoses— glimpsing between them pale damp flesh—and met the Major’s baleful gaze.
The chamber was silent, save for the dull roar of the furnace and the high note of hissing gas behind him. He needed to overcome nine men—counting the two with the cart—and get Celeste from the table. Could he do that without harming her? Was that harm possibly worse than what would happen to her if he didn’t? He knew what she would want him to do—as he knew how meaningless any notion of preserving his own life had become. He felt the seething lattice of cuts inside his chest. This exact moment was why he had come so far, this very effort the last defiant, defacing mark he could inflict upon this privileged world. Chang looked up again to the mass of masked faces staring down in suspenseful silence. He felt like a beast in the arena.
The Comte detached the black speaking hose from the mask and draped it carefully over a nearby pedestal box bristling with levers and stops. He faced Chang and nodded—with the mask on it was the gesture of an inarticulate brute, of a storybook ogre—to the woman nearest Chang, whose hair he had exposed.
“Looking for someone, Cardinal?” he called. His voice was less loud, but issuing from the strange mouth box set into the mask, it still struck Chang as inhuman. “Perhaps I can assist you…”
The Comte d’Orkancz reached out and pulled away the cloth that wrapped the final woman’s hair. It cascaded out in curls, dark, shining, black. The Comte reached out with his other hand and swept away the hoses hanging across her feet. The flesh was discolored, sickly lustrous, even more so than Vandaariff’s hand or John Carver’s face when it had lain against the book—pale as polar ice, slick with perspiration, and beneath it, where he had before known a color of golden warmth, was now the cool indifference of white ash. On the third toe of her left foot was a silver ring, but Chang had known from the first glimpse of her hair…it was Angelique.
“I believe you are…acquainted with the lady,” continued d’Orkancz. “Of course you may be acquainted with the others as well—Miss Poole”—he nodded at the woman in the middle—“and Mrs. Marchmoor.” The Comte gestured to the woman directly in front of Chang. He looked down, trying to locate Margaret Hooke (last seen on a bed in the St. Royale) in what he saw—the hair, her size, the color of what flesh he could see beneath the black rubber. He felt the urge to be sick.
Chang spat a lozenge of blood onto the platform and called to the Comte, his hoarse voice betraying his fatigue.
