The Chemickal Marriage

Her throat seized at a rancid nugget of insight from the Comte’s memories. She spat onto the ground and shut her eyes, finally managing to swallow.

‘The map!’ whispered Phelps.

The square of glass lay shattered. Miss Temple wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

‘We do not need it. There is a room, fitted for the Comte’s research, from when they built his machines. We would have walked right past …’

They crouched behind crates stencilled with the Xonck crest. Twice they had heard steps nearby – more fellows in unkempt green – but avoided discovery. Ahead lay a well-lit door that echoed with activity, a guardhouse. Miss Temple pointed to a smaller door half the distance on.

‘But it has no guard,’ whispered Phelps. ‘It seems a disused storeroom.’

She darted out, forcing them to follow. The final yards had her heart in her throat, waiting for the thin-voiced man to appear … but then her hand was on the cool brass handle. They slipped inside.

Phelps carefully shut the door and turned the lock, one hand tight across his mouth and nose. Miss Temple crept forward, face pinched against the pungent reek of indigo clay.

Mr Ramper lay on a table, naked and white as chalk. Across his body were craters – each as large and deep as an apple – where both flesh and bone had been scooped away: abdomen, right thigh, left wrist (the hand severed), near the heart, left shoulder, right ear – each cavity offering its own appalling anatomical cross- section.

‘The glass bullets,’ whispered Svenson. ‘All transformed flesh has been removed … and, good heavens, preserved.’

She followed his gaze to a row of meticulously labelled jars, each dark with thick liquid in which floated a fist-sized, jagged blue mass. Svenson delicately peeled back one of Ramper’s eyelids. The pupil had rolled into his skull, leaving a dead white egg whose veins were shot with blue. Svenson put two fingers to the carotid and stepped away.

‘I do not think he died at once.’

‘Interrogated?’ asked Phelps.

Svenson indicated two of Ramper’s open wounds and against her wishes Miss Temple leant forward to look. ‘The variance in the clotted blood – the colour. I would hazard that during some of these excavations the poor man still lived.’

‘And there are more,’ said Phelps. ‘My God … they must be from the town … no wonder their rage …’

Beyond Ramper lay five men and one woman, naked and despoiled, their discoloured flesh indicating a longer tenure in the room. Miss Temple’s eyes drifted to their hands – callused, with broken, dirty nails – and then, despite herself, to their genitals, exposed and mournful. The lone woman’s breasts hung flat to either side of her ribs, framing a bloody cave at the base of her sternum.

A rustle of papers startled her. The Doctor stood at a long table piled with bound journals and surgical tools, his face an impassive mask.

‘He has documented every step,’ said Svenson quietly. ‘For weeks. Keeping records … every one of these people – each step scrupulously observed.’

Phelps nodded towards Ramper’s corpse. ‘God forgive me – but does he note anything the poor man might have revealed?’

The Doctor thumbed the notebooks quickly. Phelps glanced to the door. Miss Temple stared at a body whose eye socket was a coagulated well.

‘Whatever the Comte’s insanity,’ muttered Phelps, ‘this room cannot explain Vandaariff’s occupation of the entire works.’

Svenson turned to Miss Temple, his eyes wide. An open journal lay in his hands.

‘What is it? What have you found?’

Instead of answering he marched past her, past the tables, to the cluttered shelves, the journal dropped, both hands pawing the wall.

‘Doctor Svenson?’ she asked, suddenly afraid.

‘What has happened?’ hissed Phelps.

The Doctor found the hidden door and pulled it wide. On another table lay a man secured with chains, naked, pale and still. Miss Temple screamed. Cardinal Chang’s eyes snapped open.

Two Lazarus

When he woke everything had changed. One moment Chang had been face down in the forest, his life bleeding away … and the next – a next he frankly did not expect to occur – he was chained to a table, or so he guessed from the iron bite across his chest and waist and around each limb. The coarse planks scratched his back and buttocks. He was naked and quite blind.

A rasping attempt to speak echoed strangely, and he realized his head was encased in metal. He extended his tongue to sketch a rectangular opening, sealed tight. The inner edge was crusted … was it porridge? It seemed someone was keeping him alive.

He arched his back, bracing himself for agony. The chains held tight … but where was the pain? The wound in his back ought to have killed him – how could it be so neatly healed?

How much time had passed? How had he survived?

He shifted his body against the wood. He retained his limbs, his extremities, but the area where the wound ought to have been was numb. He turned his head and the helmet bit around his neck.

Chang started at a hand on his bare abdomen, a friendly pat. He pulled at the chains and demanded to be freed. The words crashed around his ears, but then the metal plate over his mouth slid open. A wet cloth was shoved inside and his nostrils flooded with the reek of ether.

When he woke again he was lying on his face, neck awkwardly bent by the helmet, something sharp probing his back. He lay still, concealing his wakefulness, until a spike of pain shot the length of his spine, and he gasped aloud. The mouth box was opened, and again came the ether.

He woke and slept in an incessant, arbitrary cycle, always aware of someone around him, intrusive hands, constant observation. How long had he been here? His existence made no sense. Had he not fouled himself? He could not remember. Or had he died after all – was he in hell?

He blamed such thoughts on the chemical nightmares and strove to concentrate during each lucid period, to recall the world he’d lost … his rooms, the Slavic Baths, the Library and the opium den. The irony did not escape him. Had he finally found the oblivion he had courted for years?

And Celeste? Chang reflected with chagrin on their last minutes in the wood. Like a fool she had kissed him, and like a greater fool he had responded. What had he been thinking – to take her there in the bracken? And then what? He could just imagine the awkward – no, that word was far too weak – the unconscionable afterwards: mortification, guilt, stupidity. He’d enough on his conscience. He hoped she had outrun the Contessa, found Svenson, made her escape. He ran his tongue across his lips, remembering the sudden softness of her mouth. And her hunger. As a man whose most common intimacies arose from negotiations in a brothel, Chang knew it was Celeste’s expression of need that had pierced his reason like a nail. But sense had returned. He tried to imagine the two of them strolling together in a street. Even had he desired it – and he was quite sure he did not, for the girl, however beddable, was also wholly absurd – to entertain the idea, in this world, was like planting corn in the snow.

He woke, eyes screwed shut against a painful glare. The helmet had been removed. Chang squinted and saw it on the wall: hammered brass, with two glass eye plates – round, like the eyes of an insect, now painted black. The earpieces and mouth box had likewise been bolted tight. It was a helmet designed to protect the wearer during the smelting of indigo clay.

He was a prisoner of the Comte d’Orkancz, whose rotted mind now lived in the body of Robert Vandaariff. Who else? The others were all dead. Chang had done his best to kill the Comte and failed. His skin went cold. Had