The Dark Volume

crisply dressed servant. Miss Temple noticed with some alarm—did the fellow have mange?—that a patch of hair was missing from behind the man's ear. His complexion was even paler than Mr. Phelps' and his lips unpleasantly chapped. As the servant closed the door behind them she saw a smudge of bloody grime beneath his stiff white shirt cuff, as if the fellow's wrist had been cut and poorly bandaged.

Phelps led her past high, dark paintings and massive ebony glass-front cabinets stuffed with every conceivable dining article one might fashion out of silver. Apparently ancient servants darted silently around them, but then Miss Temple saw with some alarm that they were not old at all, merely exhausted—faces horribly drawn, eyes red, and their swan-white collars and cuffs chafed with rust-colored smears. She looked fearfully to Phelps, wondering if he had delivered her to some hideous epidemic. What she had first taken to be a well-kept corridor was in fact littered with smatterings of—she could find no other words—interior decay: dust thick on the paintings, a tangle of cleaning rags pushed into a shadowy corner, candle wax pooled onto a Turkish carpet, another carpet blackened by coal dust. And yet there were servants everywhere. She stepped around a man crouched with a dustpan and a broom, and looked back to see him sag against the wall, eyes shut, succumbing to thin, sickly sleep.

“This way,” muttered Phelps. They climbed to another high-ceilinged hallway, the landing littered with loose pages of parchment. Three men in black coats stood with their arms full of similar documents, while a fourth crouched on his hands and knees, attempting to peel a sheet of paper from the floor without removing his white gloves. Near them sat an elderly man with a close-trimmed beard and a steel-rimmed monocle. Phelps bowed and addressed him with grave respect.

“Lord Acton.”

Lord Acton ignored Phelps, barking impatiently at the secretary on his knees. “Pick it up, man!”

With a protesting whine the secretary raised a hand to his mouth, caught the tip of one gloved finger in his teeth—his gums unpleasantly vivid—and pulled it off, leaving the glove to dangle as his bare hand scrabbled to gather the parchment. Miss Temple winced to see the fellow's nails were ragged, split, and yellow as a crumbling honeycomb.

Phelps made to edge past, when Lord Acton turned and, as if echoing his servant, called to Phelps in a bleating complaint.

“If we are to do the Council's business we must see him, sir! His Grace cannot take hold of the Council if he will not lead!”

“Of course, my Lord.”

“We cannot even gather enough of our number for the simplest work—Lord Axewith, Henry Xonck, Lord Vandaariff—none will answer my entreaties! Nor have we any news from Macklenburg, none at all! We are prepared—all the instructions have been observed—the regiments, the banks, the canals, the sea ports—but they must hear from the Duke!”

“I will inform his Grace at once,” said Phelps, nodding.

“I have no desire to trouble him—”

“Of course, my Lord.”

“It is simply—he now rules, yet remains absent—and I have been waiting outside his door for so very long…”

“Of course, my Lord.”

Lord Acton said nothing, out of breath, waiting for Phelps to respond more fully. When Phelps did not, he then abruptly nudged a foot at the man on the floor, still collecting pages.

“At this rate we will be here all day,” he complained to no one in particular. “While my head, you know… it aches most cruelly—”

While Phelps muttered his condolences for Lord Acton's head, and the Lord's aide continued to grapple with his armload of papers, Miss Temple's attention turned to the far end of the corridor, where a man in a red dragoons' uniform had just stumbled into view. The man was tall and slim, with fair hair and side whiskers, and held his brass helmet under one arm. With his other arm against the far wall he bent over, as if gasping for breath or vomiting. Without looking in her direction, the officer recovered himself, squared his shoulders, and strode out, disappearing down a much smaller staircase. She looked back to Phelps.

“You will tell him, won't you?” whined Lord Acton. “I am not without enthusiasm!”

“Of course, my Lord—if you will excuse me…”

Lord Acton sneezed, which gave Phelps exactly enough time to reclaim Miss Temple's arm and sweep her directly toward the set of high, carved doors from which the dizzied officer had emerged.

“The Duke's chambers. You will be presented by his manservant.” Phelps passed a hand over his brow, and sighed. “In your interview… downstairs… you mentioned Deputy Minister Crabbe. That he is dead. We… we at the Ministry did not know.”

Miss Temple indicated Mr. Phelps' broken arm. “I think you knew enough, sir.”

Phelps looked back down the corridor, his expression once more pained, and absently scratched at his shirt- front. Miss Temple's eyes widened as she noticed a tiny bead of red soaking up into the fabric from where Phelps' nail had touched.

“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps we are beyond them all…”

He rapped the iron door knocker, cast in the shape of a snarling hound's head.

The door opened and Miss Temple suppressed a gasp. If the other occupants of Staelmaere House had seemed unwell, the man before her looked as if he'd spent a fortnight in the grave. While his body may have once stood tall and thin, now it was skeletal. His stiff topcoat tented like a bedsheet hanging from a tree. His pale hair hung lank and unkempt, and there were clumps of it on his lapel. Miss Temple flinched against the foulness of his breath.

“Mr. Fordyce,” said Phelps, his gaze turned to the wall.

“Mr. Phelps.” The voice was moist and indistinct—Miss Temple heard it as “Fauwlpth”—as if the man's tongue had lost the ability to shift within his mouth. “The Lady will follow me…”

Fordyce stepped aside and extended a brittle arm, his gloved hand and white cuff divided by a wrist wrapped with a rust-soaked twist of cloth. Miss Temple entered a dimly lit ante-room. A single silver candelabrum flickered on a small writing desk. The room's massive windows were curtained tightly, and when the door was closed behind her the darkness deepened that much more.

“Etiquette,” slurred Mr. Fordyce, “demands you not speak… unless the Duke requests that you do so.”

He crossed to the candelabrum and raised it to the level of his face, the orange glow dancing unpleasantly across the man's mere scattering of teeth. In his other hand he held the canvas sack.

“In the Duke's presence, you are no longer required to keep to your knees. You are free to do so, but such deference is no longer enforced.”

He led her across a carpet littered with tumbled books and cups and plates that clinked or snapped beneath Fordyce's feet, never once looking down, nor minding the wax that dripped freely from the candelabrum. She walked with a hand over both her mouth and nose. The reek of the man extended to every corner of the apartments. What had happened? What sort of disease might be so eroding everyone within the confines of Staelmaere House? Would she too succumb to its effects?

Fordyce knocked discreetly at a heavy door, meticulously carved from ebony wood. She was just realizing that the carving was actually a picture—an enormous man, flames coming off his body like the sun, in the act of swallowing a writhing child whole—when Fordyce opened the door and coughed hideously, as if gargling a piece of his own disintegrating throat.

“Your Grace… the young woman…”

There was no reply. Miss Temple darted forward, before the rancid man could take hold of her arm, into an even dimmer chamber, hung with high tapestries and even larger paintings—dark oil portraits whose faces loomed like drowning souls staring up through the sea. The door closed behind her and the room was silent, save for her own breath and the thudding of her heart. A faintly glowing gas-lit sconce, shaped like a tulip, floated in the gloom near a large straight-backed chair. In it sat a very tall man, staring into the darkness, his spine as rigid as the wood he leaned against. She recognized the collar-length iron-grey hair and sharply forbidding features that would not have seemed amiss on an especially intolerant falcon.