The Dark Volume

“Where is Mrs. Marchmoor?”

“Where did he take all the machinery?”

“Where is Mrs. Marchmoor?”

“No, you must answer me! Where is Robert Vandaariff? Why does he want this particular tool? Why did he send you?” He slammed both fists onto the table, his long arms like the forelegs of a powerful horse. “You cannot brave me unless you are prepared to brave Mrs. Marchmoor! However… if you cooperate with me now…”

Miss Temple shivered to recall the glass woman hammering her mind.

“You have no choice,” he said, gently as a farmer easing a lamb onto the block.

“It's because you can see, isn't it?” she said. “You understand what this glass can do, perhaps now more than any man alive… they have employed you like a coachman, but they do not comprehend that you will gain an advantage over them all… over her, over the world.”

Fochtmann smiled tightly, immensely pleased with her description.

“What will you do with me?” Miss Temple asked.

“That depends. You must do what I say.”

“Must I?”

He chuckled. Miss Temple leaned across the table, as if to share a final secret, daring him to hear it. Despite himself, Fochtmann leaned down to meet her. Her voice was a whisper.

“You were given a chance.”

She swung the case with all her strength, for it was well made, with sharp metal corners—one of which caught Mr. Fochtmann's shining forehead like the spike of a chisel. He reeled with a cry, one hand to the wound, blood already pouring through his fingers and across the Comte's papers.

“O! O damn you to hell! Help! Help me—help!”

Instead of running to the door, which had been her first impulse, Miss Temple instead went directly at the weaving, keening man. He saw her coming and croaked his defiance, waving a spattered palm to ward her off, but she swung the case again, with both hands, hard, cracking it straight into his right kneecap. Fochtmann toppled with a squawk at her feet. Miss Temple felt the sickening black presence in the back of her throat. She brought the case down once more on Mr. Fochtmann's head and stopped his movements altogether.

HE WAS still alive, for the bellows of his chest beat like the wet wings of a newborn insect. Miss Temple seriously considered cutting his throat with the knife in her boot—inflamed without even noticing by seven different memories of that very action, nose thick with the remembered smell, hands twitching at how hot the spray—but instead she sensibly crossed to the door and locked it. She returned to the prone man—curious at how out of their element a tall person seems when on the ground, like fish on a tar- baked dock. Ignoring the dark coagulated smears above his face, she stepped to his topcoat, hung on a chair: cigars, matches, a scented handkerchief, a brass case of visiting cards printed with swirling script on a pale green bond paper (Marcus Fochtmann, Theoretical Engineer, 19 Swedter Street).

The outer pocket contained something heavy and clinking, and Miss Temple extracted a canvas pouch, sewn shut, like a bag of grape-shot for a tiny cannon. She sensed a glimmer of nauseating memory and forced it away— any more and she would vomit. What did every detail matter—no doubt the bag held machine parts—and she shoved it angrily back into his coat.

The final pocket was custom-made, for it was long and perfectly suited for what it in fact held, a rolled piece of stiff vellum. Miss Temple hesitated, but could not prevent herself from unrolling the paper. The sheet held an elegant sketch by the Comte d'Orkancz of a slotted brass pedestal, trailing thick metal tubes and black hoses. At the sight of the sketch a black acrid surge brought Miss Temple to her knees, gagging, but the harsh strain on her throat was subsumed by a wave of perception as to the pedestal's function. The slot held a glass book. The tubes and hoses were attached to a person, laid out upon a table—the machine serving to connect the glass book to that person's mind. Depending on how one set the seven brass knobs, alchemic energy could flow in either direction. If the energy was directed toward the book, the person's mind was drained and the book inscribed with their memories. If the energy was directed toward the person, the book's contents were imprinted on the person's mind, obliterating their own memory—and possibly, if one chose to use the word, their soul.

Miss Temple gasped as if she had been submerged in water and with desperate fury ripped the vellum drawing in half and then half again, pulling the pieces to ragged bits. Her mind swam with black loathing, and when her eyes found Fochtmann laid out next to her, his eyelids fluttering, she was at once caught between the futility of any action and the sharp urge to end his life. The knife lay in her boot. Fochtmann's right hand feebly groped the carpet. He was an enemy. If one saw the world with open eyes, was it anything but cowardice to halt half-way? Chang would not have scrupled to kill him. The Contessa would have slain the man without a qualm. Miss Temple wanted to believe her rage was her own, but as she swayed on her feet she knew it had been contaminated every bit as much as her desire.

With a tremor of fear she tried to remember some moment of her own—some instant she could claim—but found only a new swirl of visions, like the flutters of a dovecote, set loose inside her head. She squeezed her thighs together and sucked hard on her lower lip, appalled at the sudden rush of sweetness in her loins, and groaned (… smooth cool marble against her bare buttocks, her fingers, heavy with ecclesiastical signets, forced into a grunting man's mouth…), willing her thoughts to something else—to someone else—but it seemed as if every bit of care and affection in her heart had been translated to mere hunger, the impulse of animals, a callous cycle of need and dissipation, of emptiness and death at the end of everything, woven into each moment, inevitable and cruel. She remembered Chang's hand on her body and gagged, steeped in the horrid futility of each morsel of longing.

MISS TEMPLE wiped her eyes on a sleeve, wishing herself back to a time when everything had always seemed so clear. But how long ago was that? Before leaving her island? Before Roger's letter ended their engagement? Before the glass book? Miss Temple was not one to care about causes, or about cares in the first place—it was a simpler life without them—but she could not bear being so subject to forces she insisted on seeing as external, as unthinkable plagues. A larger thought hung within her reach—the differences between one death and another, or between her killing of Roger and the hanging of a renegade by her father's overseer… her benefit from each, her participation in each. More examples flared from the Contessa's book, murders and executions and desperate struggle, those collected lives rising to mirror a secret history she could not deny—how violence, rather than gold, was the true currency of her world, and how in such a world, to her sharp shame, she remained a very wealthy girl indeed.

But Miss Temple appreciated shame no more than criticism, and shoved this unwelcome conclusion away as if it were a malingering servant in her path. On her way to the door she paused to wipe the edges of Lydia's case on the carpet. The last thing she needed was to stain her dress.

MISS TEMPLE realized she had not properly understood the glass woman. Fochtmann must have been sought out some time ago, perhaps as soon as the airship had been aloft. Even if only in the interest of survival, Mrs. Marchmoor was casting a wider net—hiring her own expert on the glass, hunting down Charlotte Trapping, ransacking the minds around her for diplomatic advantages. But the Duke's usefulness was only a matter of time, and the glass woman would need another mouthpiece.

At once Miss Temple saw the glass woman's plan, and the reason she had come to Harschmort: to implant the contents of the book— the Comte's memories and sensibility—into the vacant mind of Robert Vandaariff. With both the Comte's knowledge and Vandaariff's vast fortune at her call, what need she fear from any survivor of the Cabal— what from any quarter anywhere?

Yet this book was now Miss Temple's. And the Comte's machinery— whose now was that? And where was Robert Vandaariff? Every element of the glass woman's plan had gone wrong. Miss Temple's torment of minutes before was shoved aside by her own ably working mind—these plagues would prove as tractable as any other apparently devastating tragedy. Did the loss of a mother or a father's violence dog her every step as a woman? Of course not—she scarcely recalled either to mind at all.

Her intention had been to climb through a window and hike across the fens to the train. Yet as she sought the proper ground-floor room, Miss Temple was aware of another possibility, like the echo of her boots against the