The Dark Volume

“That is no answer! If you think I will scruple to get the information I require…”

The man was near to screaming and Svenson's head throbbed with each shrill, miserable word. He inhaled deeply and replied as calmly as he could. “I am no sort of interested party—while you are. You really do need to think while you can. This mob at your door, sir—it means that you are finished.”

“We are nothing of the kind! Our store of munitions alone—”

“Cannot hold off the Queen's entire army!” cried Svenson. “This mob is but a vanguard—a simple delaying tactic until the greater force can arrive.”

“What greater force?”

“Whatever the Duke of Staelmaere can command. Whole regiments. Do you think they will scruple to get their answers?”

Fruitricks returned to his seat, tapping his fingers on the desk top.

“But who is killing my men?”

“How should I know?” asked Svenson, fatigued by the man's inability to keep to the obvious point. “Someone else.”

“But who is left? They are all dead. Or in Macklenburg.”

Svenson rubbed his eyes and sighed. “No one ever reached Macklenburg. My Prince is dead. Lydia Vandaariff's head was cut from her body. The airship sank into the sea.”

Fruitricks' face went pale. He shrieked to the door, “Take him to the tempering room—at once!”

SVENSON WAS taken through a narrow corridor into an enormous chamber so crammed with machinery that he could not see the far side. He held a hand before his eyes—gas lamps had been placed along the walls, but the truly blazing light shone from the machinery itself, piercing as winter sunshine slicing off the Baltic ice. He looked back to see if Fruitricks had followed—he had not—and noticed fresh saw-cuts and nails. The warren of little rooms had been recently made.

The green-coated soldier behind him touched his arm—a decent enough gesture when the man perfectly well might have given him a shove—and Svenson moved on. The bulky machines he had seen on the barge, all now roaring with life, had been arranged in a jagged, radiating spiral around a hidden center, shielded by tall rectangles of beaten steel that hung in frames. The metal sheets reflected the light off one another, and he could see that each was somehow scored with writing. At once he thought of the Comte's alchemical formulae, scrawled on the Annunciation paintings… perhaps Fruitricks had taken the plates as well from Harschmort. But the barge had only just arrived. All of this had to have been in preparation for some time, the large machines themselves dropped into place as the final pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

On the far side of the industrial floor another hasty wall had been flung up, and Svenson was shown into a room whose every surface had been sheathed with bright metal sheets. In the center of the room, suspended in a complicated harness strung between iron poles was the same—or if not the same, its double—round, helmetlike contraption the Cabal had used in Tarr Village to refine raw lumps of indigo clay into pliable bolts of glass. The burning, acrid smell told Svenson it had been successfully used. The room would forever stink of it.

Yet the smell and the machine were nothing, the Doctor's attention captured instead by the corpse on the floor. The kerchief around the barge-master's neck had been removed, and Svenson saw the wound clearly for the first time—a deep slash across the jugular and into his larynx. Svenson turned to the soldiers posted to either side of the open door. Each resolutely ignored his gaze. He fished out a cigarette and sensed by a tightening in each man's posture that they disapproved of his access—as a prisoner—to any such luxury.

“Any physician can judge from skin pallor and stiffening of the limbs how much time has passed since this man's murder,” he observed aloud. “Enough that the event must have taken place while I was still under confinement at the canal. Your master knows this. It proves I am no killer.”

The soldiers said nothing, not that he expected they would. He lit his cigarette, wondering how long he would be confined in this especially unnatural cell. He shook out the match and tossed it to the floor. In the brilliant light he could see the yellow stains on his fingers.

HE LOOKED up at a commotion in the corridor. Two more soldiers bustled in with a second body on a stretcher. Fruitricks stood to the side, hands balled into bony fists, waiting for the soldiers to leave. As soon as the stretcher-bearers had gone, he darted at Svenson with a nervous, sour expression.

“You must tell me who has done this!”

Doctor Svenson knelt by the body—another body—and inhaled, feeling the copper filigrees of nicotine score into his blood. It was one of the green-coated soldiers, sporting an almost identical incision— but not yet congealed to such purples and blacks.

“This has been done while you were out there!” Fruitricks waved impatiently toward the front of the building. “With them!”

“The wounds look… similar.”

“Of course they are similar! They are one and the same! Who is the killer?”

“You must study the clues.”

“I do not care to—I am no butcher or surgeon! It is horrid!” Fruitricks stabbed a finger at the barge-master. “That is Mr. Brandt! He is dead!”

“If you do not look, you will not learn. This is the world you have entered. Here.”

Svenson indicated with his right hand—the cigarette between his fingers, a translucent ribbon of smoke fluttering above it—Mr. Brandt's opened throat. Fruitricks winced in protest, but knelt beside him.

“From the angle of the cut, it is clear that his assailant stood before him—from where the blade enters to where the cut leaves off… it is unlikely for anyone to have done it from behind.”

“He saw his killer? But there was no cry, no signal!”

“Look closer, at the actual angle of the blade—excuse me, I mean no disrespect… but to illustrate my point…”

Svenson took out the dead man's own clasp knife and snapped it open. If Fruitricks recognized the weapon he kept silent. Svenson delicately pressed the flat blade into the sticky wound.

“To make this incision the blade must be pointing up.”

“What does that signify? If I were to attack you with a knife, my hands would be below your throat—my hands hang below my waist—they would rise in the same way!”

“No,” said Svenson. “Stand.”

They rose. Svenson put the blade into the other man's hand and then took hold of that hand's wrist, moving the blade slowly toward his own throat to sketch an attack.

“In making your stroke, your arm is actually much more likely to swing the blade from your shoulder, like a fist, and so the angle of entry is more a flat gash than what we see.”

Fruitricks looked down at the knife in his hand with distaste. “What does that mean?”

“Only that whoever killed the man was a good deal shorter.”

Svenson took back the clasp knife and knelt by the newly dead soldier, pressing aside the wound in much the same way—the fresher gash seeping unpleasantly over the blade.

“It is the same—from the front, and from below. I assume there was no cry or signal from this man either?”

“Not at all.”

“One must assume their silence comes for a reason. They might have been held at pistol-point. Or saw no reason to be afraid.”

“But they were murdered.”

“Obviously such reasoning was wrong. Was this man found inside the factory?”

“Can you say who has murdered them or not?”

Svenson imagined the ease with which the Contessa had approached each dead man, stilling their suspicions with a smile. He recalled the speed and violence—and the glee—with which she had murdered Harald Crabbe. Did his own reticence to name her prove she had charmed him as well?

A green-coated officer burst into the room.

“Mr. Leveret! Another man! You must come directly!”