The Dark Volume

wait, shouted for the glass woman to stop him. But Robert Vandaariff seized the handle on the brass box and pulled it down.

MISS TEMPLE had stolen one glimpse of the Comte's cathedral chamber at Harschmort, with all its machines at full roar and Mrs. Marchmoor, Angelique, and Elspeth Poole laid out on tables awaiting transformation—and she had seen the sickening glamour of their grand unveiling in the Vandaariffs' ballroom later that night. But she had not witnessed the alchemical transformation itself, human flesh remade to blue glass. And so the spectacle of Francis Xonck writhing in unspeakable agony—madly shrieking as his body boiled away before them all—filled her with unprecedented horror.

The change began at the gleaming lump near his heart and then spread out in twisting ropes, wriggling fingers surging up each side of his throat, fast-growing tropical vines rippling across his sweat-slicked chest. She heard muffled cracks, like splitting ice, as his bones were over-borne, and then came the bubbling away of muscle and sinew. The hissing glass erupted upwards to pepper the skin in raw blue patches, a horrid dense scatter of virulent blistering. Then these blisters fattened, pooling, colliding into one another until the whole of Xonck's exposed flesh congealed into one gelid gleaming sheet.

At the first jolt of current, the man screamed and thrashed his arms—and it seemed he might tear free, so prodigious was his terror. But as his body incrementally stiffened, his ability to struggle was curtailed. His protests dropped at the last to a lost, vacant moan behind the rubber mask, the sound of wind against the lip of an empty bottle, and then he was silent altogether.

Fochtmann switched off the power.

No one spoke, and not one person moved, save for Robert Vandaariff, who delicately leaned to his new- made creature and whispered in its ear.

“WHAT HAVE you done?” rasped Colonel Aspiche, lifting his head from the floor. “What madness?”

Vandaariff did not answer. Gently peeling free the mask, he exposed Francis Xonck's face—an inhuman swirling blue, copper hair hanging in oily locks against his bare neck. Xonck's moustache and side whiskers were gone. He seemed so much younger—and his corruption more stinging. Vandaariff bared his teeth in a mirthless leer of satisfaction.

“Were you saying something, Rosamonde? I could not hear.”

“Oskar…” The Contessa groped for words, unable to turn from the spectacle of Xonck's body. “O Oskar…”

“Oskar indeed—I trust any questions of identity can be laid to rest. As requested, I have ended Francis' struggle with the blue glass—to everyone's profit… or at least my own.”

“Jesus…” Mr. Phelps seemed near tears. “Jesus God…”

Vandaariff smiled. He scratched his earlobe with the nail of his right thumb. Miss Temple saw with a shudder how the sensibility that had been placed into Robert Vandaariff's body was not truly that of the Comte d'Orkancz. The Comte was an esthete, a sensualist who rated the entire world only by its beauty. Yet in his despairing grapple with death, that sensuality had been spoiled—like a freshly opened egg mixed with tar, like sugar frosting spun with putrid meat, like sliced fruit writhing with maggots—leaving his mind riddled with loathing and spite for everything that remained alive. Whatever ruin he could replicate in the world would merely echo the despoilment of his once-splendid dreams.

He raised an eyebrow at Mrs. Marchmoor, who had not moved, and then addressed the Contessa. “You seem reticent, Rosamonde. Did you not want to renew our compact? Or has your recent ill fortune rendered you as tremulous as these men?”

The Contessa held Phelps' revolver—it was within her power to shoot Vandaariff down.

“Why do you hesitate?” hissed Miss Temple. “After what he was saying, what he would do to you—”

“Be quiet, Celeste!” The Contessa licked her lips, weighing greed and arrogance and hope against the man's outright insanity. For a creature as once splendid as the Contessa to even hesitate, Miss Temple was appalled. The Contessa cleared her throat and spoke in a cool, careful tone.

“I am sure the Comte was merely… exorcising his old rage.”

“I was exactly,” said Vandaariff, smiling.

“Telling stories.”

“I was indeed.”

Vandaariff turned to Miss Temple and smirked at her distressed expression. “The Contessa is my good friend, how could we not go on together? Of course, Margaret is a different story. She is imperfect, created from flawed premises, and so we see the result—beautiful enough, yet rebellious, acquisitive… stupid.” He called to Chang. “Take her head, I beseech you.”

“Enough,” the glass woman whispered.

The chuckle stopped in Vandaariff's throat, and his body stiffened. But despite the redness of his face and the bulging veins in his neck… he continued to smile.

“I may be yours, Margaret,” Vandaariff gasped, his face streaming with sweat. “But Francis… is mine.”

At once Mrs. Marchmoor rocked on her feet. She released Vandaariff, visibly shaking where she stood, and pivoted her attention solely to Francis Xonck. Still bound to the chair, Xonck had lifted his head to face her, his depthless eyes dark and bright. Miss Temple watched transfixed as each glass creature strained against the other— unnatural, hypnotic, battling statues—until it seemed that both must shatter. Xonck's mouth hung open, his broken teeth bared. Blue steam rose from Mrs. Marchmoor's damaged arm.

“I cannot! I cannot!” wailed Mrs. Marchmoor, and at once the tension snapped away, the air in the room as crisp as if it had been split by lightning. Miss Temple's eyes burned and she covered her mouth and nose. Mrs. Marchmoor retreated to the canvas-covered window. Vandaariff barked with hoarse laughter.

“Well done, Francis—though rather tardy. If you delay like that again… suffice to say that I do not tolerate independence.”

He took hold of Francis Xonck's right ear and with a sudden turn of his wrist snapped the upper half clean off, tossing it away to shatter behind the machines. Xonck grunted and an invisible ripple of pain shot through each unprotected mind in the room. Vandaariff mockingly addressed the steaming stub.

“Am I understood?”

The Contessa stepped forward, one hand to her forehead. “Oskar…”

Vandaariff ignored her, calling gaily across the room, “It is no use, Margaret, you will not fit through the bars! You've been damaged— and Francis is your match!”

“What do you want?” the glass woman whispered.

“Everything,” Vandaariff replied. “It would be more efficient to break you apart and pound the pieces into sand… but perhaps that arm can be mended after all. I can mend all manner of broken souls, can't I?”

He looked into Xonck's swirling depths of color with a sour mix of delight and disdain. Miss Temple winced as Xonck's new voice entered her mind, a groping, graveled scrape, deeper than Mrs. Marchmoor's and more sad.

“Oskar… I… I… never—”

“Who asks for destiny?” replied Vandaariff with a strange light in his eyes. “You have been tempered to a harder steel. And perhaps there is justice in it—we have each preserved the other by way of torment.

You are quite new! The corruption is gone, the weakness burned away—your body has undergone the true chemical marriage!”

“You have no idea,” whispered Xonck.

“You think not?” Vandaariff laughed coldly. “The arrogance of this world! Your puling grief, Margaret's grasping fear, this beastly hope—”

Mrs. Marchmoor interrupted him. “What do you want?”

He did not reply. Instead, he turned at last to the Contessa, smirking at the pistol in her hand.

“What would you say, Rosamonde? What price to keep Margaret among us?”

The Contessa looked carefully at Mrs. Marchmoor—her ally of just moments before—and shrugged, flinching