The Chemickal Marriage (9 page)

The Contessa had sent it to
her
. Just as Miss Temple had deciphered the clipping, so she ought to decipher this. The message had been sent some days ago – before Ramper had been taken – it was nothing to do with
now
. The key lay in the past. In the Comte’s past …

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.

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 he been kept alive only for revenge?

A voice reached him from beyond the glare, soft, chuckling.

‘You have been so long away from any light as to be a
mole
.’

Chang blinked and made out a padded chair. In it, business attire shielded by an oilcloth apron, sat Robert Vandaariff.

‘You are under my protection.’

Vandaariff used a thin black cane to rise and advanced to the table. His steps were brittle and, as he entered the light, his face revealed new lines of age.

‘Reincarnation disagrees with you.’ Chang’s voice was raw. ‘You look like a fishwife’s dinner.’

‘And
you
have not seen a mirror.’

‘Now that I’m awake, might I have my clothes?’

‘Are you cold?’

‘I am naked.’

‘Are you ashamed?’ Vandaariff’s eyes drifted across Chang’s body. ‘A handsome man – barring the scars, of course. So
many
scars … knives mostly, by the stitching. But your face … the damage there is singular – and to most tastes horrifying, I’m sure. The eyes are abnormally sensitive – even when asleep you flinch from a lantern. Do you mind my asking the cause?’

‘A riding crop.’

‘Viciously applied. How long ago?’

‘Where are my clothes?’

‘I’ve no idea. Burnt? No, Cardinal Chang, you remain almost as you were born. For one, to increase the difficulty of slipping away, were you – ever resourceful – to manage it. But, in the main, it makes you easier to
study
.’

‘Study how?’

‘Such a hopeful question. I will ask one in return, now we are speaking. What do you remember?’

The words hung between them, and Chang knew his inability to recall a thing since the forest was a direct result of something Vandaariff had done. With nothing else to say he could only hope to provoke the man.

‘I remember putting a sabre through your guts on the airship.’

‘But that was not me at all,’ Vandaariff replied mildly. ‘That was the poor Comte d’Orkancz.
I
was at Harschmort House, left behind by all my former friends.’

‘Left an idiot, you mean. I
saw
you –
him
– and I saw everything at Parchfeldt! How in hell did you survive? That mob was set to tear you to pieces.’

‘Very good. The airship
and
the factory. And after that? What, Cardinal Chang, do you remember
next
?’

Chang pulled against the chains and exhaled through his nose.

‘If you have done anything to me – I promise you –’

‘Done? I have saved your life.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Another excellent question. You are abrim.’

Chang turned at a sound to his left – a panel flush with the wall, swinging clear. A tall man in a shining black coat stepped through, silk rustling against the doorframe. Though he was not old, white hair hung to the man’s collar, and his skin was as brown as a Malay sailor’s. He sank into a silent bow and then spoke gently, tamed.

‘My apologies, my lord …’

‘Yes?’

‘Another incident at the gate. A single man. Not from the town.’

‘Not from the town? Gracious, is he alive?’

‘He is.’ The white-haired man met Chang’s gaze without expression.

‘Bring him, Mr Foison,’ said Vandaariff heartily. ‘We will seize the opportunity to learn.’

Foison bowed and left the room. What town? Chang could see nothing to place where he was. If only he were not so
weak
. Through the door came the sounds of men lugging a burden. Vandaariff rubbed his hands as if this bespoke an awaited meal.

‘What of the others?’ Chang could not help himself. ‘Celeste Temple, Svenson, the Contessa?’

‘Do you not know?’

‘I’ve asked, haven’t I? Tell me, damn you!’

‘Why, they are all dead,’ answered Vandaariff. Then he smiled. ‘That is, dead or entirely mine.’

Chuckling, he limped through the door and pulled it tight. The walls were not so dense as to stop the screams. It was a relief when Foison finally re-entered with the ether and sent Chang to darkness.

He was shocked to wakefulness, face down again, by a sudden freeze across his lower back, sharp as an animal’s bite.

‘Do not
move
,’ Vandaariff intoned. ‘It will only prolong the struggle.’

‘What … struggle is that?’ gasped Chang, his chin grinding into the planking.

‘A struggle of metals.’ The chill curled to the base of Chang’s spine. ‘Alchemy tells us of different metals linked in a lattice of power. The natural blood of your body, Cardinal Chang, is suffused with iron – thus we have begun with a vector of quite traditional
magnetism
.’

‘You’re insane, mad as a foaming dog.’

‘Your body was depleted of course – vital salts, ethereal compounds. After this restoration, the true work may begin …’

Just beyond the light stood Foison, silent, white hair glowing in the shadow. The cold seeped past Chang’s pelvis to his legs. His teeth were chattering.

‘I killed you once. I’ll do it again.’ Chang could scarcely speak. ‘What true work?’

‘A cloth in his mouth, Mr Foison. It would be a shame if his shivering broke a tooth.’ Vandaariff leant to Chang’s ear. ‘The true work of heaven, Cardinal.’

Their final conversation had been prefaced by the entrance of Foison. In the man’s hand was a ceramic bowl with a wooden spoon sticking out. He saw Chang was awake and set the bowl aside. Inside lay a sickly dollop of grey paste.

‘Is that what I’ve been eating? If you free my hand I could feed myself.’

Foison ignored him, glancing instead to Chang’s groin.

‘Do you need the bucket?’

‘And you’re cleaning me as well? I trust the privy-work hasn’t spoilt your lovely sleeves.’

Foison only pulled at the chains and, satisfied with their sureness, left the room.

‘What about the true work of my supper?’ Chang called mockingly.

The cold had left his body eventually, the gradual warming keeping pace until he burnt with fever. This too had passed. His back remained numb around the wound, but Chang no longer felt an invalid’s weakness.

Vandaariff hobbled in with the cane, a leather satchel tucked beneath his arm. He set the satchel down and dug a gloved hand inside. Chang heard clicking, like the beads of an abacus, and Vandaariff emerged with a fistful of blue glass cards. He laid them on the table as if he were playing Patience, eyes unpleasantly bright.