The Dark Volume (29 page)

“Lord Acton.”

Lord Acton ignored Phelps, barking impatiently at the secretary on his knees. “Pick it up, man!”

With a protesting whine the secretary raised a hand to his mouth, caught the tip of one gloved finger in his teeth—his gums unpleasantly vivid—and pulled it off, leaving the glove to dangle as his bare hand scrabbled to gather the parchment. Miss Temple winced to see the fellow's nails were ragged, split, and yellow as a crumbling honeycomb.

Phelps made to edge past, when Lord Acton turned and, as if echoing his servant, called to Phelps in a bleating complaint.

“If we are to do the Council's business we must see him, sir! His Grace cannot take hold of the Council if he will not lead!”

“Of course, my Lord.”

“We cannot even gather enough of our number for the simplest work—Lord Axewith, Henry Xonck, Lord Vandaariff—none will answer my entreaties! Nor have we any news from Macklenburg, none at all! We are prepared—all the instructions have been observed—the regiments, the banks, the canals, the sea ports—but they must hear from the Duke!”

“I will inform his Grace at once,” said Phelps, nodding.

“I have no desire to
trouble
him—”

“Of course, my Lord.”

“It is simply—he now
rules
, yet remains absent—and I have been waiting outside his door for so very long…”

“Of course, my Lord.”

Lord Acton said nothing, out of breath, waiting for Phelps to respond more fully. When Phelps did not, he then abruptly nudged a foot at the man on the floor, still collecting pages.

“At this rate we will be here all
day,”
he complained to no one in particular. “While my head, you know… it aches most cruelly—”

While Phelps muttered his condolences for Lord Acton's head, and the Lord's aide continued to grapple with his armload of papers, Miss Temple's attention turned to the far end of the corridor, where a man in a red dragoons' uniform had just stumbled into view. The man was tall and slim, with fair hair and side whiskers, and held his brass helmet under one arm. With his other arm against the far wall he bent over, as if gasping for breath or vomiting. Without looking in her direction, the officer recovered himself, squared his shoulders, and strode out, disappearing down a much smaller staircase. She looked back to Phelps.

“You will
tell
him, won't you?” whined Lord Acton. “I am not without enthusiasm!”

“Of course, my Lord—if you will excuse me…”

Lord Acton sneezed, which gave Phelps exactly enough time to reclaim Miss Temple's arm and sweep her directly toward the set of high, carved doors from which the dizzied officer had emerged.

“The Duke's chambers. You will be presented by his manservant.” Phelps passed a hand over his brow, and sighed. “In your interview… downstairs… you mentioned Deputy Minister Crabbé. That he is dead. We… we at the Ministry did not know.”

Miss Temple indicated Mr. Phelps' broken arm. “I think you knew enough, sir.”

Phelps looked back down the corridor, his expression once more pained, and absently scratched at his shirt-front. Miss Temple's eyes widened as she noticed a tiny bead of red soaking up into the fabric from where Phelps' nail had touched.

“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps we are beyond them all…”

He rapped the iron door knocker, cast in the shape of a snarling hound's head.

The door opened and Miss Temple suppressed a gasp. If the other occupants of Stäelmaere House had seemed unwell, the man before her looked as if he'd spent a fortnight in the grave. While his body may have once stood tall and thin, now it was skeletal. His stiff topcoat tented like a bedsheet hanging from a tree. His pale hair hung lank and unkempt, and there were clumps of it on his lapel. Miss Temple flinched against the foulness of his breath.

“Mr. Fordyce,” said Phelps, his gaze turned to the wall.

“Mr. Phelps.” The voice was moist and indistinct—Miss Temple heard it as
“Fauwlpth”
—as if the man's tongue had lost the ability to shift within his mouth. “The Lady will follow me…”

Fordyce stepped aside and extended a brittle arm, his gloved hand and white cuff divided by a wrist wrapped with a rust-soaked twist of cloth. Miss Temple entered a dimly lit ante-room. A single silver candelabrum flickered on a small writing desk. The room's massive windows were curtained tightly, and when the door was closed behind her the darkness deepened that much more.

“Etiquette,” slurred Mr. Fordyce, “demands you not speak… unless the Duke requests that you do so.”

He crossed to the candelabrum and raised it to the level of his face, the orange glow dancing unpleasantly across the man's mere scattering of teeth. In his other hand he held the canvas sack.

“In the Duke's presence, you are no longer required to keep to your knees. You are
free
to do so, but such deference is no longer
enforced.”

He led her across a carpet littered with tumbled books and cups and plates that clinked or snapped beneath Fordyce's feet, never once looking down, nor minding the wax that dripped freely from the candelabrum. She walked with a hand over both her mouth and nose. The reek of the man extended to every corner of the apartments. What had happened? What sort of disease might be so
eroding everyone
within the confines of Stäelmaere House? Would she too succumb to its effects?

Fordyce knocked discreetly at a heavy door, meticulously carved from ebony wood. She was just realizing that the carving was actually a picture—an enormous man, flames coming off his body like the sun, in the act of swallowing a writhing child whole—when Fordyce opened the door and coughed hideously, as if gargling a piece of his own disintegrating throat.

“Your Grace… the young woman…”

There was no reply. Miss Temple darted forward, before the rancid man could take hold of her arm, into an even dimmer chamber, hung with high tapestries and even larger paintings—dark oil portraits whose faces loomed like drowning souls staring up through the sea. The door closed behind her and the room was silent, save for her own breath and the thudding of her heart. A faintly glowing gas-lit sconce, shaped like a tulip, floated in the gloom near a large straight-backed chair. In it sat a very tall man, staring into the darkness, his spine as rigid as the wood he leaned against. She recognized the collar-length iron-grey hair and sharply forbidding features that would not have seemed amiss on an especially intolerant falcon.

“Your Grace?” Miss Temple ventured.

The Duke did not stir. Miss Temple crept carefully closer. The smell here was different, the noisome, waxy reek smothered in jasmine perfume. Still he did not move, not even to blink his glassy eyes. She took another hesitant step, slowly extending one arm, and at the tip of that arm a finger toward his nearest hand, large-knuckled and knotted with rings. When her finger touched the clammy skin, the Duke's face snapped toward her, a movement as sharp as a cleaver cutting meat. Miss Temple yelped in surprise and leapt back.

Before she could gather words to speak, her ears—though not her ears at all, for she felt the noise erupt within her head—rebounded with brittle, sliding laughter. The glass woman emerged through a gap in the tapestries, wrapped in a heavy cloak, her hands and face reflecting the gaslight's glow.

“You are alive!” whispered Miss Temple.

In answer, the unpleasant laughter came again—like a needle dragged across her teeth—and with a sudden flick of intention Mrs. Marchmoor—the glass woman—caused the Duke to turn his head just as sharply away.

Miss Temple ran for the door. It had been locked. She turned to face the woman—the glass
creature
—the slick blue surface of her flesh, the impassive fixity of her expression belied by the wicked amusement in her laugh, and the subtle curl of her full, gleaming lips.

She had seen three glass women paraded by the Comte before the gathered crowds at Harschmort, each naked but for a collar and leash— like strange beasts from deepest Africa captured and sent to Rome to astonish a dissolute Emperor. The last of the three, Mrs. Marchmoor—a courtesan, born Margaret Hooke, the daughter of a bankrupt mill owner—was quite obviously no longer
human
. But was she
sane?

“At your feet,” hissed the voice inside Miss Temple's skull. “Bring it to me.”

The canvas sack lay on the carpet, where Fordyce must have set it.

“Do it. No one will come. No one will hear you.”

Miss Temple walked forward with the sack and set it onto the desk with care. Then, glancing once into Mrs. Marchmoor's unsettling and predatory blue pearl eyes, she shucked the canvas away without touching the surface of the blue glass, exposing it to the air.

“Explain.”

“I took it from Francis Xonck,” said Miss Temple, with a sort of shrug that she hoped conveyed that this had been no particular challenge for her. “I can only assume he took it from the trunk of books on the airship.”

Mrs. Marchmoor floated closer to the book, gazing intently into its depths.

“It is not from the trunk…”

“But it must be,” said Miss Temple. “Where else?”

“The book itself perhaps, but not what lies within—the
mind
… is
new
…”

Mrs. Marchmoor extended one slender arm toward the book, the cloak falling away to either side, the fingers of her hand uncurling like the stalks of some unclassified tropical plant. Miss Temple gasped. At the point where the woman's fingertip ought to have clicked against the cover like a tumbler striking a table top, it instead passed directly through, as if into water.

“Glass… is a liquid…” whispered Mrs. Marchmoor.

At the first intrusion of her finger the book began to glow. She slowly inserted the whole of her hand, and then, like the curling smoke from a cigarette, twisting, glowing azure lines began to swirl inside the book. Mrs. Marchmoor cocked her head and extended her fingers, as if she were tightening the fit of a leather glove. The lines wrapped more tightly around her and glowed more brightly—yet Miss Temple was sure that something was wrong. Then the gleam went out, and Mrs. Marchmoor retracted her hand, the surface of the book top never once betraying a single ripple at her passage.

“Can you… can you
read
it?” asked Miss Temple.

Mrs. Marchmoor did not respond. Miss Temple felt a harsh pressing at her mind, cold and uncaring, and stumbled backward in fear.

“Simply ask me!” she squealed.

“You will
lie.”

“Not when I know you can enter my mind as easily as one sticks a spoon in a bowl!” Miss Temple held out her hand. “Please—I have seen what you have done to the people in this place—I have no desire to lose my hair or see my skin split by sores!”

“Is that what I have done?” asked Mrs. Marchmoor.

“Of course it is—you must know very well!”

The glass woman did not respond. Miss Temple heard her own quick breath and was ashamed. She forced herself to swallow her fear, to pay attention, to
think
. Why was her enemy silent?

“I do not
see
anyone, Celeste,” whispered Mrs. Marchmoor, carefully. “I remain in this room and only rummage what minds are near. I
cannot
go out. I am not unaware of your reaction to my …
form
— yours and everyone else's. I am alone. I am alone in the
world
. I have been waiting for word, but no word has come.”

“You sent soldiers, didn't you?” asked Miss Temple. “Did they tell you nothing?”

“What happened on the airship?”

“Quite a lot happened,” replied Miss Temple nervously. She pointed to the Duke. “What happened to Colonel Aspiche?”

A trilling series of clicks in Miss Temple's head told her Mrs. Marchmoor was chuckling.

“That was very clever of you. But I stopped the Colonel in time. I cleansed his mind. I can do that. I have discovered that I can do all kinds of things.”

“But you can't do anything with
him.”
Miss Temple gestured again toward the sepulchral Duke. “If anyone but Fordyce gets a glimpse— or a
whiff
—of him, they'll know something's wrong. Everyone outside is most agitated, you know.”

Mrs. Marchmoor's rage struck Miss Temple's mind like a hammer.

“I could kill you,” the glass woman snarled. “I could skin your mind like a cat and keep it dancing in an agony you cannot conceive.”

“The city is in turmoil,” spat Miss Temple, on her hands and knees, a strand of saliva hanging from her lip. “Someone will force their way in, or the Duke will decay beyond what perfume can hide. His palace will be burned to the ground like a plague house—”

Another hammer blow and Miss Temple felt the carpet fibers prickling against her cheek. She was lying flat, unable to think. How much time had passed? Had the glass woman already ransacked her memories? Her eyes stung and her teeth ached. The unnatural face loomed above her, its eyes shining as if they'd been slickened with oil. The fingers of Mrs. Marchmoor's hands moved slowly as her mind worked, like sea grasses in a gentle current.

“In the airship,” Miss Temple gasped, “every one of your masters plotted against the others. You say you have discovered new talents, yet I am certain the Comte set controls on your independence. Why else would you hide in this tomb?”

“I am not hiding. I am
waiting.”

Despite her aching mind, Miss Temple smiled.

“I wonder… are you more frightened that none of the others possesses his knowledge… or that one of them
does?”

“I have nothing to fear from the Contessa or from Francis Xonck.”

“Is that why you sent men to kill them?”

“I sent men to
find
them, Celeste. And to find you. I can take whatever I need from your mind. I can leave you dead.”

“Of course you can,” admitted Miss Temple, with a nervous breath. “You kept me alive to talk to me—but if I live still, it has to do with that book… and everything you fear.”

Mrs. Marchmoor was silent, but Miss Temple could see flecks of brightness flitting inside her like sparks from an open fire at night. There was no telling what secrets the woman had plucked from the minds of those around her. Like a hidden spider at the heart of the Palace, with every day Mrs. Marchmoor extended her knowledge beyond the Cabal.