The Dark Volume (60 page)

“Where is Cardinal Chang?”

It was not at all what Svenson expected her to say, and he was strangely crestfallen.

“I have no idea.”

The Contessa was silent. Svenson exhaled and tapped his ash onto the stones.

“If you hope Chang will aid you any more than I—”

“Aid?”
she snapped. “You are a presumptuous Teuton.”

Her mood had sharpened, or she had stopped bothering to hide it.

“Upon surviving the airship, madame, you must have assumed you were the only one of your Cabal—”

“Cabal?”

“What else does one call you and your… associates?”

“Anything
else. The word smacks of businessmen playing with corn harvests.”

“My
point,”
continued the Doctor, “is that your allies must have been few—thus your enlistment of the poor boy in Karthe. He was quite badly killed, you know.”

The Contessa's eyes were harder. “The subject is not diverting.”

“You ask for Chang because you are alone and seek greater numbers—and since you do ask, since you do expect my help—”

“How very
dramatic,”
she sneered.
“Ganz tragisch.”

Svenson's cigarette had burned nearly to his fingers. He took one last puff and dropped it into the fire. He looked the Contessa in the eye.

“You left the train deliberately to come here, to this spot in Parchfeldt Park. While this building is of a size to be a manor house, the construction is made for industry. The location of the canal allows the swift passage of goods—and yet the road and the canal are new-made. That you are here suggests you are one of the people who has new-made it—just as it is
you
who have made Xonck your enemy. You met him—in the village or on the way to Karthe. You most likely stole his horse, you certainly stole his book—and yet even after recovering it he was still doing his level best to find you.”

“Once wronged, Francis is most persistent in his rage. As you put a bullet in his chest, you might bear it in mind.”

The Doctor ignored her mocking smile. “He has had several opportunities to take my life, yet I am here. Which means this place too is entirely related to Xonck.”

This last did not come from any deduction about the Contessa, but from the crates of Xonck munitions on the barge with Mr. Fruitricks. Svenson was sure now that Fruitricks was an agent of Francis Xonck, who had intended all along to seize control of the Comte's machinery. And now Charlotte Trapping had the Comte's paintings along with Vandaariff Whatever she knew of the Cabal—through her brother or her husband or even, he had to admit it, Elöise—had been enough to send her on her own extreme journey. Did the woman hope to challenge Fruitricks? Or was she hoping only to survive?

Svenson swallowed. Would he see Elöise again after all?

“In any event,” he muttered, “you must expect Xonck here, if he still lives.”

“I do. And you and I have been here far too long.”

The Contessa stood, reached behind for her bag, and smiled as Svenson struggled to his feet.

“You have caused me so much trouble, Abelard Svenson, yet as you say, you
are
here.” She flicked a bit of grime from his hair. “It shows something more than your
decency
—passion, lust, despair, one scarcely cares—but something in you uncontrolled. I find it spurs my trust.”

“But I do not trust
you
at all.”

“If you did I should think you quite a worm,” she replied. “The fire will die on its own, and by now we will be unseen on the road. Come, it is time.”

THEY WALKED without speaking to the gravel road, a rough carpet threading the wood to either side. With night fallen full, the building glowed even more brightly. The Contessa reached for his arm, and then her touch became a tug on his uniform sleeve. He quickly followed her off the path, crouching low and keeping silent. A thin glimmer of yellow drifted toward them from the white building: the gleam from a mostly closed lantern. Svenson had not even glimpsed it— without the Contessa he would have blundered on and been taken. Behind the lantern came a double line of figures dragging two low, flat carts. These were the bargemen going back for the final load from the canal. Once they had passed, the Contessa's lips touched his ear.

“They will find him. We must hurry.”

In a rustle of leaves she was back on the road and walking as quickly as the dark and her injury would allow, and Svenson broke into a rapid jog to catch up.

“What is this place? I know they have brought the Comte's machines …”

She ignored him. Svenson caught the Contessa's uninjured shoulder and pulled the woman to a stop, her furious glare causing him to take back his hand at once.

“If you expect my help, you must say.” He gestured at the bright building. “You and Xonck were
both
to have been cavorting in Macklenburg for how long? Another month? Two? All
this
was set in motion without regard to your present state
or
his. It is either Xonck's secret plan against you all, or it is mutiny in his absence.”

“Francis
is
coming—that is all that matters.”

“Whatever of his you have—whatever his book contains—can you really want it for yourself?”

“Really, Doctor, I want him not to
kill
me—whether Francis dies or we make peace, I care little. But at this moment I care least of all to be
caught on the road!”

Behind them Svenson heard a cry—distant, but telling. The barge-master had been found. The Contessa picked up her dress and quickened her pace to a run. Svenson dashed after her.

“We must hide!” he hissed.

“Not yet!”

“They will see us!”

She did not reply, bearing straight toward the house. Over his shoulder Svenson saw a lantern wink on and off in sequence. Figures silhouetted in an upper window of the white building replied with their own signal. With a sinking realization he knew the bargemen would assume
him
to be the murderer.

Abruptly the Contessa dodged from the road. The Doctor followed, the undergrowth whipping around his knees. The Contessa vanished into the trees. An instant afterward the branches were slapping Svenson's face in the dark. The double doors of the building had opened wide—pools of light bobbed forward and over the trees. Then the Contessa stopped and he was right upon her, nearly knocking her down.

“There is a party, coming down the road,” he whispered, “from the—the—”

“Factory,” she finished his sentence. “Follow me. Walk on the leaves!”

She darted ahead again, not quite so fast, moving with hushed footfalls under a line of high, old elms. He followed, making up the ground with his longer strides, and saw she held her dress with only one hand, to favor her injury. The minutes passed in silence, the moonlight flickering through the treetops onto her shoulders. With a puncturing loneliness, Svenson marveled at how delicate a woman the Contessa truly was, in contrast to the enormity of her character. He tried to imagine possessing the same determination, for he too had driven himself to extremes, but it had always been in the service of someone else.

The Contessa reached with her good left arm and took hold of Svenson's tunic, slowing them both to a stop. Through the trees before them he could see torchlight. He reached carefully into his pocket for his monocle and fit it over his eye. The torches were moving—figures on the march down a different forest road… but marching
toward
the factory. Was this a second search party? Had they been cut off? He looked behind him, but saw no one following under the trees.

He turned back to the roadway, screwed in his monocle more tightly, and frowned. The party walked with the serious intent of soldiers on a forced march—except, by their dress, these were evidently figures of
quality
. At least thirty people had passed… and the stream showed no sign of ending.

“This is no search,” he breathed into the Contessa's ear, his concentration even then pricked by the smell of her hair. She nodded, but did not shift her gaze.

The line of figures finally came to an end. As if the decision had been made together, both the Doctor and the Contessa inched forward. The road indeed led straight to the large brick building—fronted here by a high wooden wall and an iron-bound gate. They turned to look in the other direction, to where the strange crowd had appeared. Perhaps fifty yards away
another
set of torches was bobbing toward them.

“Now!” the Contessa whispered. “Keep low!”

They broke from their shelter and dashed across the road—horribly exposed for an instant—and stumbled into another grove of trees, this one more tangled with broken limbs. They threw themselves down in the shadows.

“You know those people,” whispered Svenson.

The Contessa did not answer.

“I believe the preferred term is ‘adherents,’” he hissed, “those fools who have pledged their loyalty to you and your associates—and had it seared into their souls by the Process. One wonders what in the world such a collection of people is doing so far out in the countryside—almost as much as one wonders why you did not reveal yourself to them. It would seem the answer to all your present difficulties. That you did not tells me their presence here is a mystery—and that you fear they retain no loyalty to
you
at all.”

The Contessa only pushed past him into the trees.

When they emerged on the other side, another road crossed before them, overgrown with grass and knee-high saplings. Svenson realized it must have predated the canal, for it curved away around the forest, and recalled all the ruins he had passed in the woods while walking with Elöise. Parchfeldt Park was a sort of graveyard—like any forest perhaps, where every new tree fed on the pulped-up corpses beneath it. But as graveyards always brought to the Doctor's mind his own mortality, so standing on the derelict road placed all the new life and effort he had seen—the barge, the re-fitted factory, its master's blazing ambition—within the heavy shadows of time.

The Contessa had not spoken since they'd seen the torch-led crowds. Doctor Svenson cleared his throat and she turned to him.

“If I had not appeared, did you intend to simply approach the front door and charm the inhabitants to your will?”

He was aware that sharp questions and a mocking tone must be strange to her, and did not doubt he was angering the woman—and yet his questions were also plainly meant. What
had
she expected? What seeds of defeat or despair might find purchase in her heart?

“You're a strange man,” she at last replied. “I remember first meeting you at the St. Royale, where it was immediately obvious you were an intelligent, dutiful, tractable fool. I do not think I was wrong—”

“I admit Cardinal Chang cuts a more
spectacular
figure.”

“Cardinal Chang is merely another stripe of heart-sop idiot—you could each learn a thing from your little provincial ice floe. Yet I am not speaking of
them
, Doctor, but of
you.”

“What you think cannot be my concern.”

The Contessa gazed at him, so wan and simple it made him blanch. “I will find the proper word for you someday, Doctor. And when I do, I shall whisper that word into your ear.”

The Contessa turned and began to walk toward the factory.

“Where are you going?” he cried. “We do not know who is there! We do not know why—if you have not called them—these people, your
minions
, have assembled!”

The Contessa looked over her shoulder—an action he was certain caused her pain.

“Content yourself with your card,” she called back to him. “The ideals you place upon the world are broken. There is nothing
necessary
here at all.”

THE SHIMMER of her silk dress caught the moon even after he could, no longer distinguish her shadow from the surrounding dark, and then she was around the curve and gone. He did not follow, wondering why, and looked back at the trees where they had come from, and then down the overgrown road as it led away from the factory… a path he might follow to another world. He reached into his pocket for his cigarette case and felt his fingertips touch the cold glass card. Was there enough moonlight to see? Was it not an intensely stupid thing to do in such open ground?

Doctor Svenson sighed, regretting the act already (what had Elöise said, that knowing more of a thing invariably meant more pain?), and turned his gaze into the glass.

WHEN HE finally looked up again the world around him seemed unreal, as if he had been staring into the sun. He felt the sweat on the back of his neck and a stiffness in his fingers from gripping the glass rectangle so tightly. He slipped it back into his tunic pocket and rubbed his eyes, which seemed to be moist… tears? Or merely his body's response to not blinking? He began walking toward the factory.

The card had been infused with Trapping's memory, but that made sense, since the man would have taken part in many gatherings where the Cabal recruited its intimates, where the cards were a prominent lure. Svenson had looked into two cards before this, each different from the other in the manner of captured experience. The first contained one specific event—the Prince's intimacy with Mrs. Marchmoor, when the woman's sensations had been bled into the glass on the spot. The second card, holding the experiences of Roger Bascombe, had been an assemblage of impressions and memories, from his groping of Miss Temple on a sofa to the quarry at Tarr Manor. To fabricate it, the memories must have been distilled into the card well after the fact, from Bascombe's mind.

Trapping's card—as the Doctor now thought of it—was different from each of these. Its experience was not rooted in images, or even in tactile sensations. Instead, it conveyed—and to a hideous degree—an emotional state alone. There
was
context—and here the card was similar to Bascombe's card, with an apparently random flow of trivial incidents: the foyer table of the Trappings' house at Hadrian Square… the Colonel's red uniform reflected in polished silver as he ate a solitary breakfast… the house's rear garden, where he watched his children from a cushioned chair. Yet suffusing each of these moments was a feeling of bitterness, of selfish need and brutish reaction, of exile and isolation, of a man whose bluff, unthinking complacency had been punctured by sorrow sharp as an iron nail.