'They will,' said Sparks quietly. 'Not tonight, or the night after. But they will.'
A long silence followed.
'How do we get out of here?' asked Doyle.
'Through that gate,' said Sparks, pointing at an exit leading toward the factory.
'How do we manage it?'
'Simple, my dear Doyle. We'll walk.'
Sparks stood and headed out from behind the barrels. Doyle and Eileen followed, heads down, blending into the milling mix of the courtyard. No one stopped or questioned them. It wasn't long before they cleared the open gates and left the walls of Ravenscar behind.
The path led directly to the biscuit factory. Jaundiced electric lights lit up entrances as figures scurried in and out its open doors. To the west behind the hulking structure lay the moors, what remained of the snowfall glowing faintly in the moonlight. Sparks stopped where the railroad tracks branched toward the factory loading dock.
'Let's have a look,' he said.
They followed the tracks to a pair of huge double-hung doors through which the train line ran into the building. Closed boxcars crowded the sidings that flanked the main spur.
Inside the doors was no approximation of a biscuit factory. The air was sulfurous, choked with smoke, coal dust, floating
cinders. Conveyors carried rough ore to crucibles suspended over howling, incendiary blast furnaces. Massive, lipped cauldrons poised over iron molds the size of houses. A concatenation of cables, belts, hooks, flywheels, pistons, linked in a dance of churning, perpetual motion, climbed impossibly high into the air under the sloping roof, an industrial Tower of Babel. Blossoms of flame spurted rhythmically out of twisted valves and malformed appurtenances. Smoke of various contaminated colors belched out of oscillating cavities and tubes. The army of shirtless workers moving about, blackened by the foul atmosphere, dwarfed by the monolithic machineries, seemed entirely superfluous; if they abandoned their stations, it seemed the host apparatus, with a frighteningly singular unity of purpose, would continue to grind on eternally.
What end product resulted from this manufacturing hell was far from certain. Hulking shapes on trolleys leading to the tracks outside suggested the silhouette of cannon, but of a size far greater than any they had ever seen. Engines of war of some kind, of a war not yet glimpsed or even guessed at. As they watched, a strenuous final effort was apparently under way in the despotic factory, hot steel flowing, boxcars frantically loaded by workers driven on by armed overseers.
No one spoke; they wouldn't have been heard over the tumult of the infernal works if they had. Sparks gestured. They stepped away from the doors, back to the relative quiet of the boxcars.
'What is it? What is it for?' Doyle asked, almost to himself.
'The future,' said Sparks.
'Look there,' said Eileen.
She pointed to a path tramped out of the snow, paralleling the tracks as they ran away from Ravenscar, where two armed figures bearing lanterns escorted a column of men. They were headed onto the moors. The wrists of the men being led were bound in irons connected by a long, unifying chain. Judging by the ungainliness of their shuffling gait, their ankles were similarly encumbered. Some wore the dirty gray suits of the convicts, others the familiar servants' garb.
Was there something even more familiar about one of those hobbled figures? thought Doyle.
'Where are they going?' he asked.
'We'll follow and see,' said Sparks.
They set out along the spur. The track bed was elevated above the boggy ground on a levee of earth and cinder. Staying to the shelter of the opposite slope, they kept the light of the lanterns in sight maintaining pace with the column. Before long they saw a bright glow issuing from a shadowy structure set on a narrow rise a half-mile south of the tracks. Doyle identified it as one of the low buildings spotted from the window at Ravenscar. They heard what sounded like gunfire inside: single shots and occasional volleys. As the tracks drew even with it, the guards herded the column away from the rail line up a slight hill toward that dark building.
'What's in there?' said Doyle.
Jack peered down the tracks to the west. Looking for something.
'Let's find out,' said Sparks.
Moon shadows led them down from the rails to the path below. The ground felt soft underfoot, covered with lichen and low shrubs, slick with melting snow. A hundred yards ahead, the column of men had just reached the building.
Keeping as low as the limited cover of the ground would allow, they crept up the hill and skirted the edge of the compound; two structures set on a level patch of land, roughly constructed of clay brick, adjoined by a narrow walled passage. Six stunted chimneys rose from the second building: Smoke and red heat chugged steadily from them, the origin of the glow they had seen in the distance.
A shifting wind sent the smoke in their direction; a fetid, malodorous stench swept over them, the overwhelming force of it driving them to their knees. Doyle fought off nausea. Sparks gave Eileen a handkerchief, and she gratefully covered her mouth and nose. Doyle and Jack exchanged a grim look, Sparks gestured to Eileen to hold her position, and the two men inched up the hillock to within twenty yards of the compound.
The row of men they had tracked stood idly outside the first building, behind a second shackled group herded around a single door. The armed guards who had guided the column stood off to one side. Two others flanked the doorway.
Doyle pointed to the figure he'd recognized in the middle of the group to the rear. Sparks nodded.
Rifle fire rang out from inside. Muffled echoes cracked sharply over the moors. The two guards at the door took the shots as a cue; one trained his rifle on the men nearest the door, the second took a key from his belt and unlocked their chains. Shackles removed, none of the men reacted to their freedom; they stood lifelessly, as before, eyes obediently downcast.
The steel door to the building opened from inside, and the first group of men were prodded inside. A row of riflemen lined an interior wall, reloading their weapons. Beyond them, carts laden with sprawling corpses were wheeled by men in gray down the passage to the second building.
To the ovens.
The door slammed shut. The second set of guards exchanged words with the two at the door—a transference of responsibility. The guards with the lanterns turned and headed down the path toward the tracks.
Sparks waited until the guards cleared sight of the building. The trailing man's neck was broken before he could make a sound. As the first guard turned, the butt of the second's rifle silenced him for good. Sparks and Doyle moved up the hill to the crematorium.
There was no stealth, no subterfuge. Sparks strode up to the guards at the door and cut them down before either man could lift his rifle.
Doyle retrieved the keys and removed the irons from the hands and feet of the second column of men. None moved. All bore the traumatic stamp of Vamberg's vile alteration. These were his failures. This was where they disposed of their waste.
Shots from inside. Doyle moved to the man they'd come for, took Barry by the hand, and led him away. He offered no resistance or recognition, following as docilely as a child. Sparks gestured Doyle to take him quickly down the path. He remained behind, near the door to the abattoir.
Doyle and Barry were out of sight of the door when he heard its hinges crack open, followed by a volley of shots and screams from within. Doyle stopped. Barry stared vacantly at the ground. Eileen moved up the path to join them; they turned toward the building and waited.
The shots ceased. Nothing moved. The sudden silence of the moors seemed as vast as the span of stars above.
Sparks appeared over the rise. He discarded the rifle as he drew near. His face and clothes were awash with blood, which looked black in the moonlight. Doyle had never seen such an expression on a human face: pity, horror, rage, like nothing so much as a god who had just destroyed a world of his own creation that had spun insanely out of control. Behind him, a column of flame shot up into the sky; Sparks had set fire to the buildings.
Sparks walked right by them, gathered Barry tenderly up in his arms, and carried him toward the railroad tracks. Eileen sobbed once, involuntarily. Doyle put an arm around her, and they followed.
