The Chemickal Marriage

worked – something always worked – but if the choice between an infusion of mercury or silver was rendered consequential only by volatile explosives, their alchemical qualities meant nothing with regard to his reaching the door alive …

Still, he must suffer these trappings. What planet went with silver? He’d no idea. At the touch of his fingers on a tile of streaked violet his teeth ached sharply, as if his mouth had been crammed with ice. He stepped onto the tile, hacked an x in the corner, then jumped to a bilious tile in the seventh and last row that he knew he’d not yet used. No explosion.

Chang marked his x, then reached under the helmet and tugged at the seal, wincing as he pulled off the awkward thing. He shook his head, eyes bare and blinking, and faced the four soldiers. He gave them a sardonic nod, which was returned by their leader, whose eyes were ringed with scars. Chang straightened, then whipped a glass sphere straight at the man, so it burst against his chest. As all four crumpled, Chang slipped through the door. Only a fool kept an enemy at his back.

In the next room Chang found the Comte d’Orkancz – although not in body. Whereas the rest of the remade Harschmort had been expedient and raw, this was the man’s vision to the last detail: sconces shaped like open wounds, murals of elongated Byzantine bodies, blue carpets with lurid orange beasts. Every carpet made a path from a doorway – one in each wall of an octagonal room – to its centrepiece: a fountain of clear glass, whose pipes and chambers looped in two intertwined but separate routes, not unlike a human heart. The fluid gushing through one chamber was blue, and through the other orange.

The fountain’s rim was inscribed. Imbibo frater vivo.

Chang restored his spectacles. Drink, brother, and live … not damned likely.

He glanced at the other doors. Did each hide a corridor of explosives? Would others – Schoepfil, Svenson, the Contessa – be driven to their own particular trial? It seemed ridiculous. While proving oneself worthy might well be a tenet of an alchemical treatise like The Chemickal Marriage, here it could result in the deaths of those persons Vandaariff had already selected – and protected – for their participation. What if Chang had chosen wrongly, and blown off his own skull? Where would Vandaariff’s great experiment be then? Was he so confident that his most desired guests knew the answers – and so willing to eliminate anyone else?

Chang worked quickly around the room. Every way was locked save the double doors on the far side of the fountain. These revealed a dim room with a squat rostrum studded with knobs and switches. Chang took a step and knocked his chin into a wall of glass, flush with the archway – the glass appeared to be built into the frame. He tapped it with his fingers, then his fist. The barrier was too thick to shatter without a hammer or axe.

On the far side of the small room was an identical archway, presumably sealed off as well, beyond which lay another large room, with an array of Vandaariff’s machines connected to five large porcelain tubs.

Chang turned to the fountain. Did Vandaariff seriously expect him to choose between orange or blue, when the wrong choice meant death? And what in hell could the right one mean, apart from fulfilling Vandaariff’s intent? In the room at Raaxfall there had been an eighth card, of bright orange glass, the experience of which had nearly killed him. For Vandaariff the orange card had represented a kind of completion …

Give and it shall be given. Chang fished the blue glass disc from his pocket, studying the pathways inside the fountain … and saw, right where the streams curled in a helix, two narrow openings in the glass …

He inserted the disc into the orange stream, and at once the flow was blocked; pressure forced the fluid up a previously unused tube of glass and into the air. In moments it filled a trough deep enough for him to dip his hand. Chang sighed. He set down the brass helmet, scooped out a palmful of the orange liquid and raised it to his lips.

He choked audibly and stumbled back, chin dripping, waving his wet glove as if it burnt. Chang’s eyes tipped back in their sockets, showing the white. He fell, limbs extended like a fallen horse. His breath came ragged and he went still, eyes open to the ceiling.

‘As tractable as a babe with an unknit skull. An object of desire dangles before it and all else recedes …’

The diminished voice of Robert Vandaariff. Somewhere behind Chang, a door had opened. Slippered footsteps. The orange fluid trickled in its trough.

‘A common misconception … at birth the bones are soft, allowing passage of essence from one realm to another, the crucial, brutal pressure associated with emission. In time the gap closes and the seams calcify – or so fools would have you believe …’

Into Chang’s peripheral vision came several figures in white robes, faces shrouded. A figure at his feet held a tray of corked bottles …

‘But the skull of an adult bends every bit as much as the human spirit, and that same spot – the fontanel – remains in every esoteric system a fountain through which souls flow to the ether. Even as coarse a soul as this.’ Vandaariff croaked with laughter. ‘Little more than an animal in trousers! What is the time?’

The man with the tray replied, ‘Near to the dawn, my lord.’

‘And our other guests? Our royal party? Our Warden? Our Bride? The Virgo Lucifera?’

‘All … mid-passage, my lord … save the ladies.’

‘Feminine vectors. What of our Executioner?’

To this question there was no reply. The robed acolytes glanced nervously across Chang’s body. A sharp sound brought them back to attention – Vandaariff rapping his cane.

‘None of that! The contract will be signed. To the vessel – he must be readied!’

Chang waited for the hands to take his shoulders and each leg. He gripped the robes of the men at his shoulders and yanked down hard, driving their heads together with an ugly thud. Sharp kicks drove the men at his legs away and he was up. The acolyte with the tray retreated, protecting his charge. None of them appeared to be armed. Chang drew the silver knife and made for Vandaariff, ready to plant it in his chest.

‘I am here, Cardinal Chang.’

Chang first turned to the voice – a metal grille, painted like a fresco of a blue-skinned maiden – and then to the glass barrier. Beyond it, in a white robe of his own, stood Vandaariff. The knobbed hand that gripped his cane was blackened, as if with burnt cork.

‘So you did not drink the Draught of Silence after all.’ Vandaariff’s hood slipped back to show a smug rictus grin and above it a soft half-mask of pale feathers. ‘I did not think you had.’

Chang snatched up the brass helmet and extended the knife to the acolytes.

‘Show yourselves.’

Vandaariff nodded, and the five pulled back their hoods. Every face bore new scars of the Process, a raw- skinned loop around the eyes and across the nose – more souls sacrificed on the altar of ambition. He wondered what clothes they’d shed in exchange for these robes, what uniforms or vestments, fashionable stripes or silks. Chang slammed the brass helmet into the barrier with all his strength. It rebounded nearly out of his grasp, the glass barely scratched.

‘Subdue him,’ said Vandaariff.

Chang faced the acolytes. ‘Keep away.’

‘Subdue him!’ repeated Vandaariff.

‘You will die,’ warned Chang.

Vandaariff cooed to his minions, ‘You’ll be reborn.’

Chang looked into eyes bright with belief and felt his stomach turn. His fist shot out, bloodying the nose of the foremost man and knocking him aside.

‘You cannot win, Cardinal Chang. The spheres have turned!’

Chang clubbed down one man with the helmet and then another. The last of the four rushed him with both hands. Chang dodged to the side, as if he were in a corrida, and drove the acolyte face first into the wall. The fifth remained where he’d been, backed against the fountain, still holding the tray. Chang suddenly scoffed.

‘I know your face. You’re an actor. Charles Leffert!’ Here was the leading man of the stage dressed like a eunuch in a comedy harem. ‘Not enough roses after the matinee? Not enough wives to seduce in their husbands’ carriages?’

‘You must submit!’ commanded Leffert in a heroic baritone. ‘The ceremony has begun – you cannot prevent