“Starck! Stop it! Stop him! Starck! ” Crabbé barked, backing up, exerting his full authority. Over his shoulder dove the other man from the tavern—Mr. Starck—reaching for Svenson with both hands. Svenson met him with his own outstretched left arm. For a moment they grappled at such arm’s length, which left Svenson’s other hand, with the candlestick, free to swing. The blow caught Starck squarely on the ear with a sickening, pumpkin-thwacking thud, dropping him like a stone. Crabbé stumbled into the Royal personage, who was finally taking note of the mayhem around him. He had released the woman’s jaw—the bubbles at her mouth a foaming mix of blue and pink. Svenson prepared to strike over the shorter diplomat’s head directly at the offending aristocrat—Prince, Duke, whoever—and realized, somewhere in the periphery of his mind, that he was acting just like Chang. He was astonished at how good it felt, and how much better it would feel as soon as he’d broken the face of this monster into pulp…but it was just then that the ceiling of the room—he did not know, as he fell, what else could have been so heavy—collapsed without warning on the back of Doctor Svenson’s head.
He opened his eyes with the distinct memory of having been in this exact lamentable situation before, only this time he was not in a moving horse-cart. The back of his head throbbed mercilessly and the muscles of his neck and right shoulder felt as if they’d been set aflame. His right arm was numb. Svenson looked over to see it shackled above his head to a wooden post. He was sitting in the dirt, leaning against the side of a wooden staircase. He squinted his eyes, trying to focus through the pain in his head. The staircase wound back and forth many times above him, climbing close to a hundred feet. Finally the truth dawned on his dimmed intelligence. He was in the quarry.
He struggled to his feet, desperately craving a cigarette despite the bitter dryness of his throat. Doctor Svenson squinted and shaded his eyes against the glaring torchlight and the quite oppressive heat. He had awoken into a very hive of activity. He fished for his monocle and attempted to take it all in.
The quarry itself was deeply excavated, its sheer orange stone walls betraying an even higher concentration of iron than he had seen from the train. The density of the reddish color made his scattered mind wonder if he had been transported in secret to the Macklenburg mountains. The floor was a flattened bed of gravel and clay, and around him he could see piles of different mineral substances—sand, bricks, rocks, slag heaps of melted dross. On the far side was a series of chutes and grates and sluices—the quarry must have some supply of water, native or pumped in—and what might have been a shaftway descending underground. Near this—far away but still close enough to bring sweat to Svenson’s collar—was a great bricked kiln with a metal hatch. At the hatch crouched Doctor Lorenz, intent as a wicked gnome, once again wearing his goggles and gauntlets, a small knot of similarly garbed assistants clustered around him. Opposite these actual mining works of the quarry, and sitting on a series of wooden benches that reminded Svenson of an open-air schoolroom, were the men and women from the train. Facing them and giving some sort of low-voiced instruction was a short, curvaceous woman in a pale dress—it could only be Miss Poole. Installed alone on the backmost bench, Svenson was startled to see the Bascombe woman, her wig restored and her face—if perhaps a little pale and drawn—almost ceramically composed.
He heard a noise and looked up. Directly above him on the wide, first landing of the staircase, which made a balcony from which to overlook the quarry, stood the party of black-coated men: the Royal personage, Crabbé, and to the side, his complexion the color of dried paste, Mr. Phelps, his arm in a sling. Behind them all, smoking a cheroot, stood a tall man with cropped hair in the red uniform of the 4th Dragoons, the rank of a colonel at his throat. It was Aspiche. Svenson had not attracted their notice. He looked elsewhere in the quarry—not daring to hope that Elöise had escaped—scanning for any sign of her capture. On the other side of the stairs was an enormous, stitched-together amalgamation of tarps, covering something twice the size of a rail car and taller, some kind of advanced digging apparatus? Could it being covered mean they were done with digging, that the seam of indigo clay was exhausted? He looked back to the kiln for a better sense of what Lorenz was actually doing, but his eyes were stopped by another single tarp, thrown over a small heap, near the large stacks of wood used to stoke the oven. Svenson swallowed uncomfortably. Sticking out from the tarp was a woman’s foot.
“Ah…he has awakened,” said a voice from above.
He looked up to see Harald Crabbé leaning over the rail with a cold, vengeful gaze. A moment later he was joined by the Royal, whose expression was that of a man examining livestock he had no intention to buy. “Excuse me for a moment, Highness—I suggest you keep your attention on Doctor Lorenz, who will no doubt have something of great interest to demonstrate momentarily.” He bowed and then snapped his fingers to Phelps, who slunk after his master down the stairs. After another taste of his cheroot, Aspiche ambled after them, allowing his saber to bang on each step as he went. Svenson wiped his mouth with his free left hand, did his best to hawk the phlegm from his throat and spat. He turned to face them as Crabbé stepped from the stairs.
“We did not know if you would revive, Doctor,” he called. “Not that we cared overmuch, you understand, but if you did it seemed advantageous to try and speak with you about your actions and your confederates. Where are the others—Chang and the girl? Who do you all serve in this persistently foolish attempt to spoil things you don’t comprehend?”
“Our conscience, Minister,” answered Svenson, his voice thicker than he’d expected. He wanted very much to sleep. Blood was creeping into his arm, and he knew abstractly that he was going to be in agony very soon as the nerves flooded back to life. “I cannot be plainer than that.”
Crabbé studied him as if Svenson could not possibly have meant what he said, and therefore must be speaking in some kind of code.
“Where are Chang and the girl?” he repeated.
“I do not know where they are. I don’t know if they’re alive.”
“Why are you here?”
“And how’s the back of your head?” chortled Aspiche.
Svenson ignored him, answering the Minister. “Why do you think? Looking for Bascombe. Looking for you. Looking for my Prince so I can shoot him in the head and save my country the shame of his ascending its throne.”
Crabbé twitched the corners of his mouth in a sketch of a smile.
“You seem to have broken this man’s arm. Can you set the bones? You are a doctor, yes?”
Svenson looked at Phelps and met his pleading eyes. How long had it been? Hours at least, with the raw fractures cruelly jarred with each step the poor fellow took. Svenson raised his shackled wrist. “I will need out of this, but yes, certainly I can do something. Do you have wood for a splint?”
“We have plaster, actually—or something like it, Lorenz tells me—they use it for mining, or for shoring up crumbling walls. Colonel, will you escort the Doctor and Phelps? If Doctor Svenson diverges from his task in the slightest, I’ll be obliged if you would hack off his head directly.”
They walked across the quarry, past the impromptu schoolroom, toward Lorenz. As they passed, Svenson could not help but glance at Miss Poole, who met his eyes with a dazzling smile. She said something to her listeners to excuse herself and a moment later was walking quickly to catch him.
“Doctor!” she called. “I did not think to meet you again, or not so soon—and certainly not here. I am told ”—she glanced wickedly at Aspiche—“that you have made yourself a most deadly nuisance, and have nearly slain our guest of honor!” She shook her head as if he were a charmingly disobedient boy. “They say that enemies are often closest in character—what separates them is but an attitude of mind, and as I think we all must see, those are eminently flexible. Why not join us, Doctor Svenson? Forgive me for being blunt, but when I first saw you in the St. Royale, I had no idea of your status as an adventurer—your legend grows by the day,
even to the heights of your unfortunate friend Cardinal Chang, who I am led to understand is, well, no longer your competition in heroic endeavors.”
Svenson could not help it, but at her words he flinched. To the obvious anger of Colonel Aspiche, Miss Poole draped her arm in Svenson’s and clucked her tongue, leaning in to his face. Her perfume was sandalwood, like Mrs. Marchmoor’s. Her soft hands, the overwhelmingly delicate scent, the sweat around his neck, the hammering in his skull, the woman’s galling blitheness: Doctor Svenson felt as if his brain would boil. She chuckled at his discomfort.
“Next of course you will tell me you are a rescuer and defender of women—I have heard as much this very evening. But look”—she turned and waved to the Bascombe woman, sitting on the bench, who immediately waved back with the hopeful vigor of a whipped dog’s wagging tail—“there is Pamela Hawsthorne, the present Lady of Tarr Manor, and happy as can be, despite the unpleasant misunderstanding.”
“She has undergone your Process?”
“Not yet, but I’m sure she will. No, she has merely been exposed to our powerful science. Because it is science, Doctor, which I hope as a scientific man you will credit. Science advances, you know, just as must the moral fiber of our society. Sometimes it is dragged forward by the actions of those more knowledgeable, like a recalcitrant child. You do understand.”
He wanted to offend her, call her a whore, to crassly violate this pretense of companionable flirtation, but he lacked the presence of mind to form the appropriate insult. Perhaps he could vomit from dizziness. Instead, he tried to smile.
“You are very persuasive, Miss Poole. May I ask you a question—as I am a foreigner?”
“Of course.”
“Who is that man?”
Svenson turned and nodded to the tall figure next to Crabbé on the stair landing, looking over the quarry as if he were a Borgia Pope sneering down from a Vatican balcony. Miss Poole chuckled again and patted his arm indulgently. It occurred to him that she had not possessed this sort of power before the Process, and still searched for its proper expression—was he a child to her, a pupil, an ignorant tool, or a trainable dog?
“Why, that is the Duke of Stäelmaere. He is the old Queen’s natural brother, you know.”
“I did not know.”
“Oh yes. If the Queen and her children were to perish—heaven forbid—the Duke would inherit the throne.”
“That’s a lot of perishing.”
“Please don’t misunderstand me. The Duke is Her Majesty’s most trusted sibling. As such he works most intimately with the present government.”
“He seems intimate with Mr. Crabbé.”
She laughed and was about to make a witticism when she was brusquely interrupted by Aspiche.
“That’s enough. He’s here to fix this man’s arm. And then he’s going to die.”
She bore the intrusion gracefully and turned to Svenson.
“Not much of a prospect, Doctor. I would consider a switch in alliances, if I were you. You truly do not know what you are missing. And if you never do, well…won’t that be too sad?”
Miss Poole gave him a smiling, teasing nod of her head and returned to her benches. Svenson glanced at Aspiche, who watched her with evident relish. Had she been groping Aspiche or Lorenz in the private dining room at the St. Royale? Lorenz, he was fairly sure—though it looked as if Lorenz was quite occupied with his smelting and could not be bothered. Svenson saw the man empty one of the bandolier flasks into a metal cup that his assistants were preparing to stuff into the raging kiln. He wondered what the chemical process really was—there seemed to be several distinct steps of refinement…were these for different purposes, to convert the indigo clay to distinct uses? He looked back at Miss Poole, and wondered where her glass book was now. If he could manage to capture that…
He was interrupted again by Aspiche, tugging his tingling arm toward Mr. Phelps, who was painfully attempting to take off his black coat. Svenson looked up at Aspiche, to ask for splints and for some brandy at least for the man’s pain, when he saw, looming in the orange kiln-light like the tattoos of an island savage, the looping scars of the Process scored across his face. How had he not noticed them before? Svenson could not help it. He laughed aloud.
“What?” snarled the Colonel.
“You,” answered Svenson boldly. “Your face looks like a clown’s. Do you know that last time I saw Arthur Trapping—which was in his coffin, mind you—his face was the same? Do you think, just because they have expanded your mind, that you are any less their contingent tool?”
“Be quiet before I kill you!” Aspiche shoved him toward Phelps, who began to move out of the way and then flinched with pain.
“You’ll kill me anyway. Listen—Trapping was a man with powerful friends, he was someone they needed. You can’t pretend to that—you’re just the man with the soldiers, and your own elevation should demonstrate how easily you too could be replaced. You mind the hounds when they need to hunt—it’s servitude, Colonel, and your expanded mind ought to be broad enough to see it.”
Aspiche backhanded Doctor Svenson viciously across the jaw. Svenson sprawled in a heap, his face stinging. He blinked and shook his head. He saw that Lorenz had heard the sound and turned to them, his expression hidden behind the black goggles.
“Fix his arm,” said Aspiche.
In fact the “plaster” was some kind of seal for the kiln, but Svenson thought it would work well enough. The breaks were clean, and to his credit Phelps did not pass out—though to Svenson this always seemed a dubious credit indeed. For, if he had passed out it certainly would have gone easier for them all. As it was, the man was left trembling and spent, sitting on the ground with his arm swathed in his cast. Svenson had curtly apologized for the inconvenience of breaking his arm—assuring him that it was the Duke he had wanted to strike—and Phelps had answered that, of course, given the circumstances, it was entirely understandable.
“Your companion…,” Svenson began, wiping his hands on a rag.
“I’m afraid you have done for him,” replied Phelps, his voice somehow distant for all the pain, with the delicate, whispered quality of dried rice paper. He nodded to the tarp. Now that they were closer, Svenson saw that in addition to the woman’s foot, there was also a man’s black shoe. What had been his name—Starck? The weight of the killing settled heavily on the Doctor’s shoulders. He looked to Phelps, as if he should say something, and saw the man’s eyes had already drifted elsewhere, biting his lip against the grinding of his broken bones.
“It’s what happens in war,” Aspiche sneered with contempt. “When you made the choice to fight, you made the choice to die.”
Svenson’s gaze returned to the hidden stack of bodies, trying desperately to recall Elöise’s shoes. Could that be her foot? How many people—dear God—were under the tarp? It had to be at least four, judging by the height, perhaps more. He hoped that, with him captured, they would not bother to search the inn or the train platform in the morning, that she might somehow get away.
“Is he going to live?” This was the arch, mocking call of Doctor Lorenz, walking over from the kiln, the goggles pulled down around his neck. He was looking at Phelps, but did not even wait for an answer. His eyes roamed over Svenson once, a professional estimation that revealed nothing save an equally professional depth of suspicion, and then moved on to Aspiche. Lorenz gestured to his assistants, who had followed him over from the kiln.
“If we’re to dispose of this evidence, then now is the time. The kiln is at its hottest, and will only burn lower from this point on—for all that we wait, the remains shall be more legible.”
Aspiche looked across the quarry and raised his arm, getting the attention of Crabbé. Svenson saw the Minister peer, then realize what the Colonel was pointing to and give him an answering wave of approval. Aspiche called to Lorenz’s men.
“Go ahead.”
The tarp was whipped away and the men stepped to either side, each pair picking up a b
ody between them. Svenson staggered back. On top of the pile were the two women from the attic room, their flesh still glowing blue. Beneath them were Coates and Starck and another man who he recalled but vaguely from the train, his skin also aglow (apparently the men had been shown the book as well). He watched in horror as the first two bodies were taken to the kiln and the wider stoking panel kicked open, revealing a white-hot blaze within. Svenson turned away. At the smell of burning hair his stomach heaved. Aspiche grabbed his shoulder and shoved him back across the quarry to Crabbé. He was dimly aware of Phelps stumbling along behind. At least Elöise had not been there…at least she’d been spared that…
As they again passed Miss Poole and her charges, he saw her amongst the benches, handing out books—these with a red leather cover instead of black, whispering something to each person. He assumed it was a new code, and the key for new messages. She saw him looking and smiled. To either side of Miss Poole were the man and woman he’d first sat with on the train. He barely recognized them. Though their garments had changed—his were smeared with grease and soot, and hers were noticeably loosened—it was more for the transformation of their faces. Where before had been tension and suspicion, now Svenson saw ease and confidence—it truly was as if they were different people entirely. They nodded to him as well, smiling brightly. He wondered who they were in the world, who in their lives they had just betrayed, and what they had found in the glass book to be so altered.
Svenson tried to make sense of it all, to force his tired brain to think. He ought to be drawing one conclusion after another, but nothing followed in his dulled condition. What was the difference between the glass book and the Process? The book could obviously kill—though this seemed almost cruelly arbitrary, like a toxic reaction to shellfish, as he doubted the deaths were intentional or planned. But what did the book do? Elöise spoke of falling into it, of visions. He thought of the compelling nature of the blue glass card, and then extrapolated that to the experience of a book…but what else…he felt near to something…writing…a book must be written in, the thoughts must be recorded…was that what they were doing? He recalled Chang’s description of the Institute, the man dropping the book as it was being made—made somehow from Angelique—the same man from Crabbé’s kitchen. What was the difference between using a person to make the book, and then using these people here to write in it…or be drawn into its clutches like a spider’s web? And what of the Process? That was simple conversion, he felt—a chemical-electric process using the properties of the refined indigo clay—indigo clay melted somehow into glass—to affect the character: to lower inhibitions and shift loyalties. Did it merely erase moral objections? Or did it re-write them? He thought how much a person could accomplish in life without scruples, or one hundred such people working together, their numbers growing by the day. Svenson rubbed his eyes as he walked—he was getting confused again, which merely returned him to the first question: what was the difference between the Process and the book? He looked back at Miss Poole and her little schoolroom in the slag heaps. It was a question of direction, he realized. In the Process, the energy went into the subject, erasing inhibitions and converting them to the cause. With the glass book, the energy was sucked out of the subject—along with (or in the form of—was memory energy?) specific experiences in their lives. Undoubtedly this was the blackmail: the secrets these bitter underlings had to tell were now secreted within Miss Poole’s book, and that book—like the cards—would allow anyone else to experience those shameful episodes. There would be no denial, and no end to the Cabal’s power over those so implicated.