The Dark Volume

The girl stood up but did not move to descend.

“O I cannot go!” she said.

“Of course you can.”

“But the Lady said I must stay.”

“I will take you back to your brothers.”

“The Lady doesn't want them. She wants me.”

“What about your mother?”

“But Mama said to stay too.”

“I'm sure she did not mean it. Parents often lie, you know.”

The little girl spoke in a rush, catches in her breath forced through the cracks in her failing courage. “Mama was gone for so long—everyone said we would find her—and when we did find her—we heard her—she did not say anything—anything to me—she only talked to them—and I could not talk—she would not let me—and no one will tell me of Papa—and Mama is so different! Why won't she take me home?”

Miss Temple saw the dried tears across each cheek, and smelled the indigo reek in the girl's hair. “I do not know. But that will not stop us. Come.”

Francesca pointed with the candle toward the door. “We cannot!”

“Nonsense.”

“But the Lady will know! I am only outside to keep watch.”

“Keep watch for what?” asked Miss Temple.

“For you!” said Francesca. “They are all waiting!”

MISS TEMPLE saw a flicker of terror in Francesca's eyes but then just as fast it was gone, and the girl's entire face went blank as stone. The muscles of the tiny arm went slack and the tallow light was dropped, plunging the landing into blackness. Miss Temple still held Francesca's arm, but she knew she could not carry the girl alone, not down the stairs in the dark. Such helplessness was infuriating.

The first wisp of cold flitted against her mind, like a moth past a window.

“Celeste…” the girl whispered.

Miss Temple heard it with revulsion, for in the twisted little voice lay the death of Soames, of Rawsbarthe, the decay of her own body. She squeezed the unresponsive little hand and awkwardly stumbled them both up the last steps to the door. She shifted the pistol and the leather case and found the knob with her fingertips. At its touch the girl gasped and immediately began to whimper.

“Do not be afraid.” Miss Temple's voice was unpleasantly grim. “These people are weak, and weaklings only ever want for whipping.”

She pushed on the door, and the landing was flooded with white light.

THE TABLEAU struck Miss Temple as one of those unsettling dreams, in which figures from quite separate portions of one's life are thrown together, as if cut from paper and pasted together in a frame— the schoolmaster and the housemaid and the garrison soldier and wretched Cynthia Hobart from the plantation on the opposite side of the river, all eating toads on a boat that she herself was expected to steer. In dreams, such unpleasant groupings always appeared to demonstrate some unwanted lesson—that she was too proud, or had been cruel, or covetous of something (always the case regarding Cynthia) in truth beneath her. But what met Miss Temple in the white factory was different, not only because she knew it to be real, but because Miss Temple had finally accepted, despite every determined effort, how impossible it was to avoid consequence. She stepped through the doorway, the girl's hand in hers, with the same awareness of import as when she had first boarded the ship that would take her across the sea, when each hollow knock beneath her heels had echoed the certainty that she would never return. Her entrance brought an end to the business of all these people as surely as a little flaming match sets off a siege gun.

The open room was enormous, its far end fully taken up with bright metal ducts bundled together to feed a line of silver machines. These in turn sprouted black hoses, vibrating with gases and fluid, covering the floor like creepers from an industrial jungle. The shining casings of these machines had been peeled back and white light streamed out, each cracked carapace cradling a nugget of brilliance— super-refined bolts of indigo clay, powering the machines as they had powered the airship. Behind the machines and along each side wall were lines of green- coated soldiers with carbines. The factory's defenders had been withdrawn to this center point, as if to maintain power in this room was to maintain it over all.

On a raised dais, like a carved figure above an altar, perched Robert Vandaariff. Three huge metal plates hung behind the financier from a lattice of chains, like panels in an indecipherable triptych. To each side were placed the buzzing brass box-stands, and at his feet lay long wooden boxes lined with orange felt—the whole arrangement like a bizarre icon for a religion, the deranged alchemy of the Comte d'Orkancz. The Comte's black memories surged within her like hounds against a leash. The scrawls on the metal plates jabbed at her thoughts and she gagged to recognize the ruddy purpled burn that looped around the industrialist's eyes and across his nose. The screams were now explained. Robert Vandaariff had just undergone the Process.

Next to Vandaariff, like an angel hovering near a punished soul in Purgatory, stood a slender woman with reddish hair, wearing a dark dress whose hem was crusted with dried mud. At her side lurked a man in a respectable brown topcoat, meager hair pasted optimistically upwards, whose eyes kept flicking between the soldiers along the walls and those guarding the machines directly at his back.

Forming a triangle with Vandaariff and his keepers were two other groups, divided from each other like rival suppliants before an idiot king. On the left stood Mrs. Marchmoor's party: the glass woman in her black cloak; Aspiche; and Phelps. Opposite them, in a strange little non-knot of their own—and Miss Temple did not comprehend this group at all—stood the Contessa, Francis Xonck, Cardinal Chang, and Doctor Svenson. They looked so depleted by their journey that even their hatreds had lost fire. She met their eyes—Xonck's insanely glazed, the Contessa's hard as a hunting bird's, the Doctor's pale with despair, and finally Chang's, mere smoked glass.

Had they been captured? By whom? What were they doing together?

What Miss Temple did not understand made her angry at the best of times, but now these least-expected betrayals made her furious— and this fury, so like the Comte's own bitter rage, broke her last restraint on his memories. Miss Temple choked and lost her balance. She let go of Francesca Trapping and dropped to one knee, face flaming red, trying to retain her mind against the tide of despair and spite, against the crowd of facts— sickening facts—that split her attention into slivers. All around her the insanity of the room began to make sense… she knew that the copper filaments had burned through, that the rattle of one machine that was off by a quarter-turn, that the exact temperature of the indigo clay perceived by smell was—

“Celeste! Celeste—are you all right?”

A hand had gently taken her shoulder. Miss Temple looked up with an unladylike grunt into the face of Eloise Dujong, crouching next to her. Where had she come from?

Eloise shouted to the man in the brown coat. “Mr. Leveret! Please!”

The man did not react, but then Mrs. Trapping spoke in his ear and he waved to the soldiers behind him. They pulled brass levers on each machine, and like kettles taken off their flame, their high-pitched wailing fell away. The machines far below them still rumbled, but now the upper floor stood in silence.

EVERYONE WAS staring. How long had she been on her knees? The leather case had been taken away, and was held by Mr. Phelps. The pistol was nowhere to be seen. Francesca Trapping stood with the glass woman. The child's streaked face was turned to Miss Temple without expression. Eloise spoke urgently.

“Celeste… please listen… they know everything—”

The anger caught at the back of Miss Temple's throat like a rusted spike she could not swallow.

“What have you done, Eloise? Why does everyone stand with them?”

“Celeste, it is your parcel.” Eloise pointed to Lydia's case. “You have been their pawn. She has monitored your passage all the way from Harschmort, the better to get both you and it here safely, away from the gunfire…”

Miss Temple felt ill. She was a fool, a vulgar lap-dog. She began to gag again. She swatted blindly at Eloise's hand and gasped.

“Get away from me…”

“Leave her be, Eloise,” called the red-haired woman. “It seems you've done