The Dark Volume

She heard a noise on the opposite bank. To turn was to face whoever hunted her. Fear gripped Miss Temple as fiercely as a hand around her neck. She ran on.

THE WAY abruptly forked—to the right curving back toward the town, the left winding away through a squat tumble of boulders. She paused, chest heaving, willing herself with a brutal severity to look behind her: she saw nothing. Was she a fool—imagining ghosts? No—no, she swallowed; Mrs. Daube's horrid scream still rang in her ears. She forced her tired mind to study the two paths for the slightest sign to which way Elöise might have gone, knowing she could spare but seconds. The fork to the town led over an open, flat meadow; the one to the rocks disappeared almost at once. If Elöise was frightened, she would want to hide. Miss Temple flung herself toward the blackened stones.

Not twenty steps on, a flashing stripe across a moonlit boulder caught her eye—a smear of blood, a hand hurriedly wiped clean. She had chosen correctly. Elöise must be ru

The path dropped downhill across a moonlit meadow toward a copse of gnarled trees. Miss Temple's heart leapt at the sight of a woman ru

THE TREES were dark and dense, and she made her way quickly to the other side. Below her yawned another, deeper ravine, split not by a watercourse but by the rail tracks themselves. Miss Temple stumbled to the edge, looking down, and then saw smoke rising into the air around a turn, some hundred yards away. There would be engineers, firemen, a conductor—surely enough to forestall the actions of one woman! She craned her head down the tracks and just saw Elöise vanish around the bend, too far to hear any call. Miss Temple began a hesitant shuffle down the slope. Half-way down, she was compelled by gravity to sit, scooting the rest of the way like a crab. She swatted the dirt from her dress as she jogged alongside the tar-soaked wooden ties.

Miss Temple found herself suddenly taken with another question that had slipped her mind: the smell of the blue fluid on the window-sill. It had without doubt been infused with blood… yet that made no sense. From what she had seen in the dirigible and from what she could guess from Franck's body, the blue glass acted in an instant to solidify human blood, and thus the flesh seethed with it, into glass. So how was the blood-tinged liquid on the sill, spat from the mouth of the ghostly face, still a liquid? How could the blue fluid, which utterly, utterly stank of indigo clay, be taken inside a body without hardening whatever flesh it touched? If only the Doctor were here! Perhaps this was one more reason he'd gone ahead to warn Chang. Miss Temple fought away a tentative impulse of pity for the Contessa—for the ghastly, pale face spoke to an unthinkable price paid for survival. Yet the disfigurement of so cruel a seductress could be no cause for sorrow—such ironies of justice were more aptly met with outright glee.

MISS TEMPLE saw the train. Most of the cars were open and piled high with what must be ore to be taken south for smelting. Miss Temple needed to lie down, to sleep, to bathe, and she kicked at a nearby stone with irritation. She reached the rearmost cars, hissing aloud.

“Elöise! Elöise Dujong!”

The woman must have gone on toward the engine, where she would find more protection. Miss Temple sighed—she was not in any state to meet anyone, much less unfamiliar men smothered in coal dust—and followed on.

Near the front of the train was a squat building topped with skeletal scaffolding and a metal chute—where the ore was poured into the cars—and next to it a more modest cabin whose windows gleamed with yellow light. Miss Temple padded on, cautious at an eruption of voices, trainsmen shouting to each other with sudden urgency. A gang of nine or ten burly fellows in helmets and long coats had gathered around a figure on the ground, directly beneath the loading chute. The figure writhed and moaned as some of his fellows held him down and the others ran about for bandages or water or whisky to ease his pain. She crept forward in the shadow of the train.

“Elöise?” she whispered.

The car seemed empty and, with a sudden surge of effort, Miss Temple tossed the book and the knife in before her and jumped up, catching the car's floor just above her waist. She hung for an awkward second before heaving herself inside and crawling inelegantly from view. The trainsmen still ringed their fallen fellow—someone knelt over him, tending a wound on his face. Miss Temple ducked from sight, doing her best to still her heaving breath.

She looked down at the book in her hands and on a whim let it fall open, expecting to take comfort at its opening to the same poem. But the book did not. Instead, to Miss Temple's great dismay, it fell to the next page—the reverse side of “Pomegranate.” How had she not seen— the folded-over page was bent in the opposite direction—it was to mark not that poem, but the next! This poem, “Lord of Sighs,” was even shorter (two meager lines!), leaving more room for Cardinal Chang to write his own words in the open space:

OUR ENEMIES LIVE. LEAVE THIS INN.

TRUST NO ONE. TRAVEL BY NIGHT. STAY TOGETHER.

I WILL WAIT AT NOON THE LORD'S TIME.

Outside the car a footstep turned the gravel. Miss Temple slipped farther from the door into shadow. Was it one of the trainsmen? What if the fellow locked the door? Was she prepared to remain on the train for its journey south to the city? What had happened to Elöise? What would she say to Svenson and Chang—what feeble excuses? The steps crunched closer and, curling like an unseen cobra into the chilled air of the train car, she smelled the first creeping, reeking tendrils of scorched indigo clay.

An u

From the darkness behind her a firm hand fell hard across her mouth and soft lips pressed full against Miss Temple's ear, the words that slipped between them scarcely louder than a sigh.

“Be still, Celeste,” breathed the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza, “or it will mean the death of us both.”