Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

HE HAD in his life seen waterfalls where one might climb between the falling water and the cliff face, and gaze out through a shimmering curtain. It seemed he had entered a similar, though utterly unearthly, cavern. Surrounding the Doctor were dangling sheets of cable, ducts, hose, and chain—arrayed without any order he could see. The hanging mass of tubes and chain rose twenty feet—the next floor of the factory had been taken out to make room—before finally being gathered together and forced into larger metal ducts. The ceiling above held a matching circular hole, far too high for Svenson to reach by climbing.

He shoved his way through them on his hands and knees. There must be a staircase. The calling voice of Mr. Leveret rose up through the open hole in the floor.

“Do not be an ass, Doctor! You cannot survive! You have no idea of your danger!”

Svenson snorted—he had every idea—feeling his way through a curtain of silver ducts and hoses. What was the point of so many pipes and tubes, filling the floor? It must be the height of the building! He remembered the high walls of the chamber at the Royal Institute, covered with pipes and ducts—with so much less space, Leveret had run the pipes up and down, stuffing the two stories tight to gain the same required length. Svenson stopped. He heard footsteps on the wooden planks. He unfolded the clasp knife.

A shuffling, closer than before. Svenson squeezed through a thicket of black hoses, their condensation moist on his face. All of this to recreate the Comte's Harschmort “factory,” yet to what end—or, more precisely, for what product? What business—the steps came nearer and he slithered around a bundle of silver tubes—did Leveret have stealing the machines from Harschmort and setting up a factory of his own? He recalled Leveret's querulous reaction to the glass-slain soldier. What could a man like Leveret perceive of the workings—the import —of a glass book?

Svenson could hear his pursuer shoving closer and dove blindly away, disquieted by the sudden image of a steaming cavity during surgery—the cords of muscle fiber, the globular strands of lung tissue, the tender tubing of vessels and veins—shuddering at the notion of his entire body somehow swimming through that . Doctor Svenson spun desperately at a second set of steps—another soldier! Without thinking he thrust himself in a third direction, the clasp knife in his hand, ready to defend himself.

The hanging curtain gave way and Doctor Svenson stepped out into thin air. He dropped the knife with a cry, boot heels balanced on the edge of a precipice, and snatched at a canvas hose. He tottered in one of the tall windows he had seen from the road—windows no longer glazed, wide open to the elements. What sort of insane idea was that? He looked down, swallowing nervously. It was not so very high and the fall onto grass—but for Svenson, whose outright loathing of heights had been only amplified by the airship, it was enough to fix him stiff.

The rustling sounds were directly in front of him. He had dropped the knife. An iron ladder had been bolted to the building's outer wall, running from the roof to the ground, a mere three feet away. The tubes shifted in front of him and one green arm pushed through, waving a long double-edged bayonet.

Svenson jumped, catching the cold rungs with both hands, and clambered like an untrained ape, waiting for the blade in his back.

It did not come. The hand with the bayonet slashed wildly at the air where Svenson had just been standing, but the soldier did not appear. The tubes and hoses rippled… the man was struggling with someone the Doctor could not see. The curtain parted and the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza shot out, surprised by the drop just as Svenson had been. She adroitly caught hold of a dangling chain and swung to the side like a circus gypsy as the soldier finally emerged. But then the man saw her—saw he was fighting not the foreign prisoner, but a breathless, beautiful woman—and hesitated. The Contessa slashed her brilliant spike into the hoses near the soldier's face and sent a spray of burning steam into his eyes. He reeled back into the shifting curtain. The Contessa dove after him and was gone.

The encounter had been totally silent, and it was strange when Mr. Leveret's voice, dimmer now, called again for the Doctor's surrender. Svenson ignored it, climbing, terrified and horribly exposed, like a centipede stranded on a whitewashed tropical wall. Where had the Contessa come from? He must have inadvertently drawn the soldier to her own hiding place. Svenson's head spun and he squeezed shut his eyes, then opened them again, staring into the white bricks only inches from his face.

He clung to the rear wall, on the opposite side from the canal: to his right was the crowd of adherents, to his left the yard where they had found the soldier riddled with glass. From this higher vantage he could now see over the stone wall and into the woods. Suddenly their depths were pierced by a brace of torches… a snaking line with green-coated soldiers marching at either end… but in between— he squinted at the flickering torchlight—a gang of… prisoners . Two soldiers—in red, dragoons!—with their hands bound, and then another man, hatless, in a black topcoat, and behind the man… two women. Doctor Svenson's breath stopped in his throat. The second woman was Elöise Dujong.

Doctor Svenson's heart leapt in his chest, but he forced himself upwards, eyes resolutely fixed to the brick. To attempt a rescue, unarmed and alone, would merely deliver himself to Leveret's rage. Judging by the soldiers, Elöise's party—the other woman must be Charlotte Trapping, the man Robert Vandaariff—had been first captured by Mrs. Marchmoor's dragoons, and then taken again by Mr. Leveret's private army. As curious as Svenson was to see Leveret's reunion with the Xonck sister—she must be his keenest rival—it was the two dragoons that confirmed the mobilization of the Ministries, that, as he had speculated to Leveret, the whole of the military lay at their call.

The next floor was different in that the nearest windows, also unglazed, were blocked by iron bars. He peered closely at the bolts and saw no fresh scrapes on the bricks—the bars had been set in place for some time, even years. The machines here were larger, dark and oiled with heavy usage. The Doctor had no experience with industry but had been escorted by many a ship's engineer past turbines and boilers, enough to recognize that here were the guts of the factory proper, the powerhouse heart to pump life through the rest. Leveret had adapted these mill-works to animate the Comte's metallic fantasia. If one sought to bring the whole place to a halt, this was the spot to start swinging the pickaxe. Not that Svenson had a pickaxe, or could penetrate iron bars. He resumed his climb.

WITH A shock that nearly caused him to fall, he felt the ladder shudder with the weight of a new occupant. Svenson looked down, to see the shimmering black top of the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza's head, and the purple silk of her climbing arms. Svenson hurried upwards, aware that in haste his grip was not as sure and his boot heels more likely to slide off the iron. He reached the highest line of tall windows, also barred. Each opening had been stretched with sailcloth. He could smell the reek of indigo clay, as strong as it had been amongst the forest of ducts and hoses—and detected a new sound, high-pitched and sustained, like the buzzing of porcelain wasps. He glanced down. His lead of two stories had been cut in half. The woman looked up, black hair in her eyes, and as she stabbed for the next rung she bared her teeth. The back of her dress shone with blood. She caught his eye and did not smile, the iron frame of the ladder throbbing with each determined step. Svenson groped blindly for the next rung, hauling himself recklessly toward the roof.