The Dark Volume Part 22

"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 gla.s.s 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 airs.h.i.+p?"

"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 gla.s.s 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 p.r.i.c.kling against her cheek. She was lying flat, unable to think. How much time had pa.s.sed? Had the gla.s.s woman already ransacked her memories? Her eyes stung and her teeth ached. The unnatural face loomed above her, its eyes s.h.i.+ning as if they'd been slickened with oil. The fingers of Mrs. Marchmoor's hands moved slowly as her mind worked, like sea gra.s.ses in a gentle current.

"In the airs.h.i.+p," 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.

The door opened for Fordyce, shuffling his feet and breathing wetly. He tottered directly to the seated Duke and executed as deferential a bow as his precarious balance might allow. From the Duke's decay-riddled chest came a rotting meat wheeze that drove Miss Temple to put a hand across her mouth.

"Fordyce... the large brougham... private steps... at once."

"At once, your Grace."

"And those fellows..."

"Fellows, your Grace?" Fordyce tipped toward the desk and reached out a subtle hand to steady himself.

"Phelps..." rasped the Duke, stretching the name on the rack of his breath to three ugly syllables. "Crabbe's man... and the other... newly posted... Soames... I require them."

"Excellent, your Grace."

"And the corridors... as always... cleared."

"As always, your Grace. At once."

Fordyce tottered from the room without the slightest glance in their direction. Miss Temple flinched as the abrasive hiss filled her mind.

"You will take the Duke's arm."

THE CORRIDORS were indeed empty of all human traffic. With everyone in Staelmaere House waiting anxiously for the Duke's appearance, the decaying chamberlain's announcement of his departure must have been a blow. Were there topcoated diplomats and Ministers kneeling behind every keyhole as they walked? The Duke's steps were deliberate and slow, but he was stable enough-or Mrs. Marchmoor's control so powerful-that she could brace him with one hand and keep the other over her mouth, for the Duke's perfumed stench was extremely disagreeable. The gla.s.s woman herself followed behind, swathed in her thick dark cloak, its hood pulled forward. Only the m.u.f.fled click of her footfalls betrayed her to Miss Temple's ears, though to anyone else the sound would have merely suggested fas.h.i.+onably Spanish, metal-capped boots.

Fordyce led the way, his left leg dragging more than before, to a portrait of the young Duke dressed in a das.h.i.+ng hussar uniform, his vicious face and long black hair at odds with the merry profusion of ta.s.sels and plumes. To the side of the portrait-the background of which, Miss Temple noticed with a shock, showed a line of severed brown heads on fence-spikes-was another over-carved wooden door. Fordyce clawed it open with shaking hands and stepped aside for them to enter a narrow vestibule, waiting for Mrs. Marchmoor without ever seeming to acknowledge her presence. He nodded gravely and shut them in. Miss Temple grimaced-the air was impossibly close. Were they hiding here while the rest of the Privy Council crept past? She gagged into her hand. Suddenly the entire chamber shuddered. Miss Temple looked over at the gla.s.s woman, whose lip curled with a stiff amus.e.m.e.nt. The entire vestibule was a dumbwaiter-and they were descending.

The vestibule came to a stop. The door was unlocked from the outside by Mr. Phelps. Behind him waited Mr. Soames-face drawn, eyes ringed with red-earnestly staring down at the floor. Neither man acknowledged Mrs. Marchmoor as she glided past them into a corridor flagged with slate tiling. The air was cooler, as if they had descended far beneath the house.

"The large brougham..." rasped the Duke. "It is prepared?"

"It is, your Grace," answered Phelps. "May I ask our destination?"

The Duke's voice was a baleful sc.r.a.pe. "The driver knows."

BEFORE THEM waited a large black coach, strangely constructed with two distinct compartments, the whole pulled by six enormous black horses. The rear compartment was windowless-almost as if it were part of a hea.r.s.e-while the forward was every bit a normal sort of carriage. Liveried footmen stood waiting, utterly attentive though avoiding any eye contact, as Mrs. Marchmoor very slowly scaled the small steps into the rear compartment, whose interior was as lushly upholstered as a Turkish sofa. The footmen relieved Miss Temple of the Duke's arm and eased their master up. Once he was settled, they shut the door and opened the front compartment. Miss Temple raced to the far corner without anyone's help. Phelps sat across from her. Soames perched nervously next to Phelps, plucking at the frayed skin of his lower lip with his teeth. The footmen shut the door, called out to the driver, and the coach eased forward so gently it might have carried a cargo of eggs.

At first the way around them was dark, but then they safely emerged into a cobbled avenue dotted with well-dressed scowling men striding about importantly.

"The rear of the Kingsway," observed Phelps, and then, as Miss Temple had no comment, "We are behind the Ministries."

"A shame you've no more idea than I where we are off to," replied Miss Temple.

Phelps said nothing.

"What of you, Mr. Soames?" she called, doing her best to smile brightly.

"I'm sure I couldn't say!" he managed, in an earnest sort of yelp.

The coach left the white stone warren of the Ministries and flanked the river itself, for she recognized its stone walls and iron railings and saw beyond them open sky.

For a moment it seemed as if Soames might speak, but he glanced first to his superior and thought better of it. Miss Temple exhaled with a sharp little huff. That she found herself-so quickly upon her return-in the exact sort of situation she had been determined to avoid galled her extremely. So much was happening-the gla.s.s woman had forsaken her lair!-and yet here she was coc.o.o.ned with two utterly bloodless drones. She thought again of Chang standing by the clock, and her anger rose, as if her predicament was entirely his doing.

"If you think I care that she hears us you are mistaken," Miss Temple said. "And if you think fawning will save your disease-ridden skins, then you are outright fools."

"She?" asked Mr. Soames.

Miss Temple ignored Soames altogether and leaned to Phelps.

"Deputy Minister Crabbe is dead," she hissed. "Roger Bas...o...b.. is dead. That part of your plot died with them. She is looking for something in that book! Once she finds it, she will rule every soul in Staelmaere House as easily as you can b.u.t.ter hot toast."

Phelps looked to Soames, but Soames bore the troubled expression of an ailing man whose physicians have begun to speak across his head in Latin.

"The deprivations of poverty and despair," Soames offered to Phelps. "Once a girl sheds her virtue, her thoughts become every bit as corrupted as her body-"

"Be quiet!" spat Phelps to his shocked colleague. Phelps turned back to Miss Temple. "It is pointless to speculate, pointless to discuss. I am bound by an oath to my Queen."

"Your Queen?" Miss Temple sneered. "And who do you think that will be in a fortnight? A blue gla.s.s monstrosity who but one week ago was an upper echelon wh.o.r.e!"

The pain took hold of her mind like an iron hand, its fingers bunching tight into a fist through the very fabric of her thoughts, an excruciating crush that shot a thread of blood from each nostril. The two men before her faded to the palest glimmers, as if the coach had been flooded with the brightest summer sun, as if each of her eyes had been somehow smeared with fire. She squeezed shut her eyes, but the brightness blazed through her lids. Into her very soul she felt the malevolent burn of Mrs. Marchmoor's violent disapproval. Miss Temple arched her back, gagging against what felt like an impossibly sustained whip crack along her spine.

She sat up on one elbow and dabbed at her nose with one hand, pulling it away and looking at her red-tipped fingers. Phelps pa.s.sed her a folded handkerchief, and she struggled to a sitting position, wiping her face and where the blood had dripped onto her dress. In the center of her thoughts was a buzzing, as if she had not slept for three days.

Was this how it had begun, for Soames and Fordyce and the other servants of Staelmaere House? Would she have sores and splitting nails and her hair dropping out in clumps? Did she already? Miss Temple sniffed deeply, refolded the handkerchief, and pressed it quickly to each corner of her eyes. She looked out the window. They had left the city altogether and rode along a country road bordered to either side by wide, flat brown fields of marsh gra.s.s. Fen country-and as she formed that thought she smelled a tang of salt in the cooler air. She looked up to meet the gaze of Mr. Phelps.

"We are going to Harschmort House," she said.

THE JOURNEY lasted another hour, during which there was little talk. Phelps had shut his eyes, with only his left hand's restless plucking at a spot of loose plaster on his cast to betray his wakefulness. Soames slept without any disguise, his mouth open and his posture slack, like a switched-off machine. Despite her own weariness, Miss Temple did not follow their example. There was no reason not to, she knew- even if she were to open the coach door and fling herself to freedom, Mrs. Marchmoor could still reach out and stop her. Miss Temple examined the front of her dress with annoyance, and lifted the stained portions to her mouth and sucked on them one after another, tasting the blood and working the fabric back and forth between her tongue and teeth. Her thoughts sank into a brood.

If she had followed Francis Xonck and stolen his book out of a determined antagonism to evil, she would have happily curled herself up for a proper nap. But Miss Temple knew, for hers was a habitually lacerating scrutiny, that the daring theft had been spurred by the confusion she felt in the wake of the Contessa's seduction and rebuff-that her stabbing action was in fact a running away. With a growing conviction she began to wonder if the entirety of her adventures, from first following Roger's coach to ending his life inside the airs.h.i.+p, had not been a flight from a deeper and unflattering truth about her character and its essential paucity.

She had no answer for such thoughts save a.s.sertion, and her powers of insistence were low. The Contessa had advised her to abandon her adventure utterly. Even Eloise had attempted to dissuade her from any further investigation-was she so certain these warnings were wrong? Her adventures had altered her character-into a woman who had done murder, a woman whose body inflamed to depravity at the merest spark. It was a feral life like Chang's, and rootless like the Doctor's-marked by isolation and anonymity, by danger and, without any question, eventual doom. It was also, Miss Temple bit her lip to admit it, a life like the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza's.

Her thoughts were jarred by a sudden s.h.i.+ft in the surface of the road. They had reached the cobbled drive leading to the Vandaariff estate. She cleared her throat rather deliberately and was gratified to see Mr. Phelps open one eye in response.

"Have you ever been to Harschmort House?" she asked.

He exhaled wearily and shrugged himself to a more respectable posture.

"I have."

"With Deputy Minister Crabbe?"

"Indeed."

"And Roger Bas...o...b..?"

Phelps glanced at the still-sleeping Soames, and then out the window at the dispiriting landscape.

"Before the disappearance of the Deputy Minister, there were regular communications between his office, Lord Vandaariff's people, and officials of the Privy Council. It was in no small part owing to Lord Vandaariff that the Duke was able to achieve the control over the Privy Council that he presently enjoys."

"I would say the Duke enjoys very little," said Miss Temple, "these days."

"My point," continued Phelps, "is that since the disappearance of the Deputy Minister, no word has arrived from Lord Vandaariff whatsoever."

"Of course there hasn't," said Miss Temple.

"It is easily explained by the epidemic at Harschmort House of blood fever-"

"Blood fever!" She tossed her head at the compartment behind them. "Have you asked her?"

Phelps licked his lips. "Who?"

"Who?" She mocked him openly. "Her! Mrs. Marchmoor! Margaret Hooke! Not saying her name will not change the fact of her existence, nor lessen her power."

"I cannot say I am... personally... acquainted with the lady."

Miss Temple delicately blew her nose into the wadded handkerchief.

"A pity, for she is perfectly acquainted with you."

THE COACH crossed the flagstone plaza to the wide steps. Mr. Phelps jogged Soames awake, and the man was still blinking and unpleasantly smacking his lips as he stepped from the coach. Miss Temple realized she had never seen Robert Vandaariff's mansion during the day. With out the enfolding night, the structure's harsh simplicity was even more oppressive. The building had first been constructed as a coastal fortress, then turned into a prison. Lord Vandaariff had refitted the interiors to his own lavish specifications, but to Miss Temple, isolated between a featureless landscape and the vast-and therefore somehow inherently disapproving-sky, Harschmort seemed a prison once again.

Phelps followed her from the coach and shut the door. The Duke's footmen carefully extricated the Duke-Soames taking his Grace's elbow-and then, with all the relish they might have shown toward a similarly sized spider, Mrs. Marchmoor. The footmen remained with the coach, heads lowered, as the party made its deliberate way to the stairs: Phelps in the lead, then Soames and the Duke, and last Miss Temple next to the gla.s.s woman. Miss Temple sniffed sharply and wiped her nose.

"You hurt me very much," she said.

"You insulted me," echoed the voice of Mrs. Marchmoor in her head.

"Resenting a fact does not make it untrue," replied Miss Temple. "Besides, I thought the Process made that sort of shyness unimportant."

"It is not too late for you to discover firsthand," answered the gla.s.s woman. "All the necessary machinery is here. How very smart of you to suggest it."

Miss Temple swallowed, her fears augmented by the ruthless grip of the gla.s.s woman's hand on her arm. They had reached the stairs, and she was compelled to a.s.sist her captor's awkward climb.

"There are no servants to meet us, your Grace," Phelps called.

"Of course there are servants," croaked the Duke in reply.

As if he had been pushed, Phelps stumbled to the still-shut double doors. He lifted the enormous metal knocker and brought it down with a crash, the sound echoing across the empty plaza like the bark of an enormous lonely dog. The echoes faded to silence, and Phelps rapped the knocker twice more. He was rewarded by a metal snapping from inside as the lock was turned. One door swung open enough to reveal a man in Harschmort's black livery.

"The Duke of Staelmaere," announced Mr. Phelps. "To see Lord Robert Vandaariff."

The man looked up at Phelps, hesitating. "I am sorry to inform you that Lord Vandaariff-"

He got no further. The servant staggered backwards and Miss Temple heard the awkward clatter of his fall. Phelps pushed the door wide and motioned them in.

Vandaariff's footman lay inert on the tile, breathing in shallow puffs like an agitated spaniel, but his eyes were vacant and dull. The main foyer of the mansion was empty of any other person. Miss Temple wrinkled her nose, and saw Phelps and Soames doing the same.