Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

He raised an eyebrow at Mrs. Marchmoor, who had not moved, and then addressed the Contessa. “You seem reticent, Rosamonde. Did you not want to renew our compact? Or has your recent ill fortune rendered you as tremulous as these men?”

The Contessa held Phelps' revolver—it was within her power to shoot Vandaariff down.

“Why do you hesitate?” hissed Miss Temple. “After what he was saying, what he would do to you—”

“Be quiet, Celeste!” The Contessa licked her lips, weighing greed and arrogance and hope against the man's outright insanity. For a creature as once splendid as the Contessa to even hesitate, Miss Temple was appalled. The Contessa cleared her throat and spoke in a cool, careful tone.

“I am sure the Comte was merely… exorcising his old rage.”

“I was exactly,” said Vandaariff, smiling.

“Telling stories.”

“I was indeed.”

Vandaariff turned to Miss Temple and smirked at her distressed expression. “The Contessa is my good friend, how could we not go on together? Of course, Margaret is a different story. She is imperfect, created from flawed premises, and so we see the result—beautiful enough, yet rebellious, acquisitive… stupid.” He called to Chang. “Take her head, I beseech you.”

“Enough,” the glass woman whispered.

The chuckle stopped in Vandaariff's throat, and his body stiffened. But despite the redness of his face and the bulging veins in his neck… he continued to smile.

“I may be yours, Margaret,” Vandaariff gasped, his face streaming with sweat. “But Francis… is mine .”

At once Mrs. Marchmoor rocked on her feet. She released Vandaariff, visibly shaking where she stood, and pivoted her attention solely to Francis Xonck. Still bound to the chair, Xonck had lifted his head to face her, his depthless eyes dark and bright. Miss Temple watched transfixed as each glass creature strained against the other— unnatural, hypnotic, battling statues—until it seemed that both must shatter. Xonck's mouth hung open, his broken teeth bared. Blue steam rose from Mrs. Marchmoor's damaged arm.

“I cannot! I cannot!” wailed Mrs. Marchmoor, and at once the tension snapped away, the air in the room as crisp as if it had been split by lightning. Miss Temple's eyes burned and she covered her mouth and nose. Mrs. Marchmoor retreated to the canvas-covered window. Vandaariff barked with hoarse laughter.

“Well done, Francis—though rather tardy . If you delay like that again… suffice to say that I do not tolerate independence.”

He took hold of Francis Xonck's right ear and with a sudden turn of his wrist snapped the upper half clean off, tossing it away to shatter behind the machines. Xonck grunted and an invisible ripple of pain shot through each unprotected mind in the room. Vandaariff mockingly addressed the steaming stub.

“Am I understood?”

The Contessa stepped forward, one hand to her forehead. “Oskar…”

Vandaariff ignored her, calling gaily across the room, “It is no use, Margaret, you will not fit through the bars! You've been damaged— and Francis is your match!”

“What do you want?” the glass woman whispered.

“Everything,” Vandaariff replied. “It would be more efficient to break you apart and pound the pieces into sand… but perhaps that arm can be mended after all. I can mend all manner of broken souls, can't I?”

He looked into Xonck's swirling depths of color with a sour mix of delight and disdain. Miss Temple winced as Xonck's new voice entered her mind, a groping, graveled scrape, deeper than Mrs. Marchmoor's and more sad.

“Oskar… I… I… never—”

“Who asks for destiny?” replied Vandaariff with a strange light in his eyes. “You have been tempered to a harder steel. And perhaps there is justice in it—we have each preserved the other by way of torment.

You are quite new! The corruption is gone, the weakness burned away—your body has undergone the true chemical marriage!”

“You have no idea,” whispered Xonck.

“You think not?” Vandaariff laughed coldly. “The arrogance of this world! Your puling grief, Margaret's grasping fear, this beastly hope —”

Mrs. Marchmoor interrupted him. “What do you want?”

He did not reply. Instead, he turned at last to the Contessa, smirking at the pistol in her hand.

“What would you say, Rosamonde? What price to keep Margaret among us?”

The Contessa looked carefully at Mrs. Marchmoor—her ally of just moments before—and shrugged, flinching against the pull of her shoulder.

“Her continued service,” she said. “Even if she is no match for Francis, she remains inordinately powerful. And in our absence, she has no doubt discovered any number of useful secrets within the Ministries.”

“Excellent practical reasoning, madame. I too am practical, and I think it is extremely important to retain control of this excellent facility—which means, of all things, Xonck.”

“That is nothing to do with Margaret—”

Again, Vandaariff did not seem to answer her words, but spoke from his own urges, the same poisonous resentment. “These machines are our future, but my vision. You deprived me of Lydia, Rosamonde. Her flesh had become my canvas.” Vandaariff's eyes sharpened. “Now my dreams have changed—they have deepened in astonishing ways… I see how I can go so much further…”

His eyes settled on his target with a hungry gleam and Miss Temple felt her gorge rise.

“My price… is the child.”

“The child?” The Contessa shook her head. “But she is not Lydia—She cannot—What will you do with her?”

“Absolutely anything”

Vandaariff looked to the glass woman, who met his gaze and sucked her lower lip, measuring the foulness she had tasted against survival and a return to servitude. She nodded, the barest dip of her chin. Vandaariff turned to the Contessa. Her face was drawn and her mouth grimly set. “Done.”

FRANCESCA TRAPPING screamed. Elöise had plucked up the girl—startling her—and run for the open door. Mrs. Trapping, shocked to life as well, shrieked after them.

“Elöise! You cannot take my daughter from me! Elöise!”

But Mrs. Trapping did not stir from where she stood—wringing her hands, tears on her cheeks—between the corpse of Mr. Leveret and the scarcely recognizable figure of her brother.

Nor was Elöise able to escape. Just at the door she stumbled—her body stopped from afar—and toppled to the floor, face blank, pulling Francesca down with her. The girl had not been occupied. Now she struggled against the unmoving arms of her tutor. Her panicked eyes met those of Francis Xonck, and she screamed even louder.

Miss Temple wheeled to the dais. It was Francis Xonck who had prevented Elöise from taking the girl.

IT WAS not often in Miss Temple's life that she received credit for being intelligent. She had never cared for her studies. She had participated rarely in discussions of substance —business or finance or politics or religion, which was to say the discussions of men—the only sphere where intelligence might be seen as a factor. Instead, it was her lot to be found (and even this less often than she liked) cunning or clever, animal associations—as if one were to admire a badger for digging—less a compliment than a condescending description. Yet in that instant, Miss Temple's mind made a small leap, one that she herself found startling.

It was also at that moment that she noticed a fallen soldier near Elöise move his arm.

Miss Temple took hold of the Doctor's uniform tunic with both hands and shoved him as hard as she could toward the doorway.