The Chemickal Marriage

At a touch the key emerged from the book and Vandaariff tucked it away. The acolyte reverently restored the book to a case holding a score of others – most only partially extant, their bindings cracked.

Vandaariff sighed. ‘It was a second Library of Alexandria. Now so much is lost, and so thoughtlessly.’

‘These are not the tragedies of Agathon. Chang deserves to live, in his own skin.’

‘Chang is forfeit.’

‘As are you. The rot in your body proclaims it –’

‘Please, we have been down this road. You are not here to lecture.’

‘Then why? To witness my friend’s place in your collection?’ Svenson glared angrily at the books. Both acolytes moved to block his way.

‘Doctor Svenson, you cannot hold a single thought much less two or three. I have brought you to my person through deliberate steps, knowing your preference for my death. Why? Because, plain enough for a cat to perceive, in exchange for your aid I offer you something you desire, available nowhere else on earth.’

‘That Chang will survive, of course, and Miss Temple –’

Vandaariff shook his head. ‘No. No, they are gone. Their consumption is required.’

‘I will not be party. I will do anything in my power –’

Vandaariff rubbed the skin beneath his feathered mask and groaned with impatience. ‘Doctor, I beg you, think. What have you done today? Beyond all sane probability?’

‘Madelaine Kraft was healed. As Chang might now be –’

‘Not Chang! Never Chang! Chang has become raw goods. No, Doctor Svenson, who else? What else in the world would prick your virtue like the balloon I know all virtue to be?’

Another glass book was set on the table. Vandaariff inserted the key and, resting a fingertip lightly on the glass, turned the pages to the clouded leaf he sought. He rotated the book so that it faced the Doctor.

‘Taste.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You will not regret it.’

‘Damn you.’ Svenson stabbed his forefinger onto the glass.

The first impression was too sharp, like whisky on his tongue, a pungent whirl of hair and scent, of softness and weight, tenderness, doubt, carnality –

He yanked up his hand. Vandaariff fed on his reaction with an ugly leer.

‘O … do take a little more.’

Svenson swallowed. ‘How … how in all hell –’

‘You know yourself! You were there!’

‘Tarr Manor,’ Svenson whispered. ‘Her memories were taken. Only a few, still, she almost died –’

‘A singularly aggressive reaction – and the only reason these memories survived! Set aside for study – the actual information, once Arthur Trapping was dead, bore no interest. But now it bears all manner of interest – for you! And, through your inevitable compliance, for me!’

Svenson shook his head. ‘I won’t. I won’t. She is dead –’

An acolyte hooked an arm around the Doctor’s neck, while the other caught his hand and pressed it, palm down, upon the glass. Svenson bucked against the contact. Yet, at its bite, he could not but drop his gaze …

… and enter the memories of Eloise Dujong, the whole of her relations with Arthur Trapping from innocent affection to shame-filled lust. The Doctor gasped at intimacies he himself had never shared, her body in gross and sweet detail – assignations, fervent, guilty, compulsive. He swam in her tears, sank in her self-recriminations, thrilled to the touch of kisses down her neck, Trapping’s fingers tracing the inner sweep of her white thigh –

Svenson blinked, in tears, the confinement of the helmet unfamiliar and strange. The acolytes had pulled him free. Vandaariff stood at the glass wall, shouting.

‘No! This must not occur! Stop him! Mr Foison! Mr Foison! ’

Mahmoud held a length of copper wire and swung it like a whip at an acolyte foolish enough to have gone near. The wire slashed through the white robe and the acolyte dropped screaming. The big man took the acolyte by the scruff of the neck and hurled him down the trapdoor stairs, a sheer drop of at least thirty feet. Several acolytes lay on the floor, and who knew how many more had taken that plunge. Foison, armed with only a silver knife, had retreated behind Chang’s table with Professor Trooste.

Mahmoud reached into the sticky red fluid to raise up his mother.

‘Do not!’ cried Trooste. ‘You will kill her! The essential liquor is all that keeps them alive!’

Mahmoud hesitated, not trusting Trooste, yet not daring to risk her life. Vandaariff rapped his cane against the glass.

‘Enough! If you care for that woman, you will listen to me!’ He gave Svenson a haughty snort and when he spoke it was as much for the Doctor as for Mahmoud. ‘Six chambers, for the first six compounds, each reduced in turn. The seventh will infuse the final coupling. The vessel itself constitutes the eighth – tempered metal, the rebirth. The ordure of death will be shed like a serpent’s skin, peeled like a malignant husk, passed on.’

‘What in the name of all hell –’ began Mahmoud. Vandaariff rapped on the glass.

‘I hold that woman’s life in my grasp. The dawn has come!’

Vandaariff waved like a tragedian at the honeycombed ceiling. Each round tube glowed brightly, the shafts of light landing, Svenson saw, directly on the rostrum. Vandaariff ran dark fingers along six identical brass knobs. ‘What do you say, Professor Trooste? Iron, to start?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Matthew Harcourt,’ Vandaariff intoned, ‘I initiate your sacred journey … now.’

‘No!’ shouted Doctor Svenson, but the acolytes held him back. Vandaariff slipped the brass cap off one knob to expose a lozenge of blue glass. The light from the ceiling fell upon it and the glass began to glow. A moment later, the wires leading to Harcourt’s tub coughed sparks into the air. Mahmoud raised a hand to shield his eyes …

Nothing else happened. No surge of energy came through the machines. Vandaariff was speechless. He slipped the brass cover on and off. More sparks, then nothing. Mahmoud roared and went for Trooste with both hands.

‘Stop.’

Foison knelt over Gorine’s tub, the silver knife at the floating man’s neck.

‘Down on your knees or he’s dead.’

Slowly, Mahmoud did just that. Svenson saw the heaviness in the large man’s limbs, that his body still fought the effects of the blue smoke.

‘What in heaven, Professor Trooste!’ shouted Vandaariff. ‘What has gone wrong? Examine every coupling, every cable! This cannot be allowed! Send men below! The time, sir, the time!’ Vandaariff turned from the window, mopping his mouth with a sleeve.

‘Already your plan fails,’ said Svenson.

‘Momentary malfunction is not failure,’ barked Vandaariff. ‘Why was that black fellow not redeemed?’

‘Because I saved him,’ said Svenson.

‘Saved? You have doomed him altogether.’

Mahmoud looked at the glass wall with a baleful hatred. Svenson spread his fingers on the glass, anything to urge patience.

‘Why preserve me?’ Svenson asked. ‘Why any warden at all? You offer me Eloise – but merely her shadow, a sliver of her mind –’

‘A taste of heaven is still heaven, Doctor.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I will be forced to trust you.’

‘And if I refuse?’

‘Then everything dies. And every person with it. The chaos in the city goes unchecked and my work will be