“Looking for someone, Cardinal?” he called. His voice was less loud, but issuing from the strange mouth box set into the mask, it still struck Chang as inhuman. “Perhaps I can assist you …”
The Comte d’Orkancz reached out and pulled away the cloth that wrapped the final woman’s hair. It cascaded out in curls, dark, shining, black. The Comte reached out with his other hand and swept away the hoses hanging across her feet. The flesh was discolored, sickly lustrous, even more so than Vandaariff’s hand or John Carver’s face when it had lain against the book—pale as polar ice, slick with perspiration, and beneath it, where he had before known a color of golden warmth, was now the cool indifference of white ash. On the third toe of her left foot was a silver ring, but Chang had known from the first glimpse of her hair … it was Angelique.
“I believe you are … acquainted with the lady,” continued d’Orkancz. “Of course you may be acquainted with the others as well—Miss Poole”—he nodded at the woman in the middle—“and Mrs. Marchmoor.” The Comte gestured to the woman directly in front of Chang. He looked down, trying to locate Margaret Hooke (last seen on a bed in the St. Royale) in what he saw—the hair, her size, the color of what flesh he could see beneath the black rubber. He felt the urge to be sick.
Chang spat a lozenge of blood onto the platform and called to the Comte, his hoarse voice betraying his fatigue.
“What will you do to them?”
“What I have planned to do. Do you search for Angelique, or for Miss Temple? As you see she is not here.”
“Where is she?” cried Chang hoarsely.
“I believe you have a choice,” said the Comte in reply. “If you seek to rescue Angelique, there is no human way—for I read the effects of the glass in your face, Cardinal—for you to bear her from this place and then do the same for Miss Temple.”
Chang said nothing.
“It is, of course, academic. You ought to have died ten times over—is that not correct, Major Blach? You will do so now. But it is perhaps fitting that it take place at the feet—if I am correctly informed—of your own hopeless love.”
Staring directly at the Comte, Chang gathered hold of as many of the hoses rising from Mrs. Marchmoor’s body as he could and prepared to rip them free.
“If you do that, you kill her, Cardinal! Is that what you desire—to destroy a helpless woman? At this distance I cannot stop you. The forces at work have been committed! None of these may retreat from their destiny—truly their lot is transformation or death!”
“What transformation?” shouted Chang above the rising roar of the pipes, and the hissing gas behind him.
In answer d’Orkancz reached for the speaking hose and jammed it sharply back into the mask. His words echoed through the vaulted heights like thunder.
“The transformation of angels! The powers of heaven made flesh!”
The Comte d’Orkancz yanked hard on one of the pedestal’s brass levers, and brought his other hand down like a hammer on a metal stop. At once the hoses around Angelique, which had been hanging and lank, stiffened with life as they were flooded with gas and boiling fluid. Her body arched on the table, and the air was filled with a hideous rising whine. Chang could not look away. The Comte pulled a second lever and her fingers and toes began to twitch … a third, and to Chang’s growing terror their color began to change even more, a deadening, freezing blue. D’Orkancz pushed in two stops at once, and shifted the first lever back. The whine redoubled its intensity, ringing within every pipe and echoing throughout the vaulted cathedral. The crowd above them gasped and Chang heard voices shouting from the cells—cries of excitement and delight, hoots of encouragement—that grew into a second buzzing chorus. Her body arched again and again, rippling the hoses like a dog shaking off the rain, and then within the screams and roars Chang heard another tone that pierced his heart like a spike: the rattle of Angelique’s own voice, an insensate moan from the very depths of her lungs, as if the final defenses of her body were expending themselves against the vast mechanical assault. Tears flowed unheeded down the Cardinal’s face. Anything he did would kill her—but was she not being destroyed before his eyes? He could not move.
The whining roar snapped at once to nothing, silencing the entire chamber like a gunshot. With a sudden rippling shimmer that Chang could scarce credit he was seeing, a wave of fluid rushed beneath her skin along each limb from her feet and hands, flooding up to her hips and torso and finally enveloping her head.
Angelique’s flesh was transformed to a brilliant, shining translucent blue, as if she herself … her very body … had been before them all transmuted into glass.
The Comte pulled up his stops and pushed in his final lever. He turned up to the throng of spectators and raised his hand in triumph.
“It has been done!”
The crowd erupted into ecstatic cheering and applause. D’Orkancz nodded to them, raised his other hand, and then turned to Blach, for a moment pulling the speaking hose from its place.
“Kill him.”
The obscenity of what d’Orkancz had perpetrated on Angelique—was it not a rape of her essence?—at once spurred Chang into action and turned his heart to ice. He launched himself around the third table at the two Macklenburg guards at Miss Poole’s head, the lessons of a thousand battles pouring into each relentless, bitter blow. Without the slightest pause he swung at them, a feint—their sabers rising to his chest with the unison of German training—and then swept both blades aside with his stick. He slashed his dagger at the nearest man’s face, laying it open from the tip of the jaw to the nose—a spray of blood against the silver pipes—the trooper wheeled away. The other riposted, stabbing hard at Chang’s body. Chang broke his stick deflecting the thrust past his shoulder, and knew the lunge had brought the trooper too close. He jabbed the dagger beneath the young man’s ribs and ripped it free, already—for each second seemed to arrive from a great distance as he watched—dropping to his knees. Above his head, another bullet from Blach flew into the wall of pipes. The third trooper came around from Miss Poole’s feet, stepping over his fallen companions. Chang turned and dove forward to Angelique. Blach stepped near Angelique’s head to give himself room to shoot. The Comte d’Orkancz stood at Angelique’s feet. Chang was boxed in—the trooper was right behind him. Chang wheeled and cut through a handful of hoses. The hideous, reeking gas, spitting out like a polar flame, flew into the trooper’s face. Chang wheeled, knocked the saber aside, and drove a fist into the fellow’s throat, stunning him where he stood. Before Blach could shoot, he bull-rushed the trooper around the head of the table directly at the Major. A shot crashed out and Chang felt the trooper lurch. Another shot and he felt a burn—the bullet (or was it bone?) blowing through the soldier to graze his shoulder. He shoved the dying man at Blach and immediately dove for the door.
But Blach had done the same thing and they faced each other directly, perhaps two feet apart. Blach swept the gun to bear, firing as Chang slashed at the Major’s hand. The shot went wide as the dagger bit into Blach’s fingers and the pistol fell to the floor. Blach cried out in a rage and leapt after it. The door was still blocked by the metal cart and the two helmeted men behind. Chang shoved with all his strength, driving them several steps—but they caught themselves and pushed back, stranding him within the chamber. Blach scooped up the pistol with his left hand. The Comte was urgently tying off the steaming hoses with rope. Blach raised the pistol. With a sudden shock Chang saw what the cart held, for the top of the metal casket had become dislodged in the commotion. Without a thought he dropped his dagger, seized the nearest object, and whipped it behind him at the Major, flinging himself into the cart as soon as the thing left his hand.
The glass book lanced toward Blach at the same time he pulled the trigger, shattering it in flight. Half of the shards sprayed back at the tower with the force of the bullet, into the iron walls and through the doorway at the two helmeted men, who threw themselves desperately aside. But half kept flying with the momentu
m of the book itself. The Comte d’Orkancz was shielded by the table, as Angelique—if in her present state the glass could even have had any effect upon her—was shielded by the hoses, and by the Major himself who stood most directly in the way. His unprotected face and body were instantly savaged by gashes small and large.
Chang raised his head from the cart to see the man shaking with spasms, his mouth open and a hideous hoarse croaking scream rising from his lungs like smoke from a catching fire. Patches of blue began to form around each laceration, spreading, cracking, flaking free. The rattle died in his throat with a puff of pink dust. Major Blach fell to his knees with a snapping crunch and then forward onto his face, the front of which shattered on impact like a plate of lapis-glazed terra cotta.
The great chamber was silent. The Comte rose slowly behind the table. His eyes fell upon Chang, clambering awkwardly free of the cart. The Comte screamed with an amplified rage that shook the entire cathedral. He rushed at Chang like a giant rabid bear. Without his dagger (it had fallen somewhere under the iron chest) Chang hurtled the cart—the two men were on their hands and knees, shaken but not in the Major’s straits, their leather aprons having saved them—and shoved the cart behind him into the Comte. Without looking to see its effect he raced to the stairs and began to climb.
Almost immediately, on the seventh step, he slipped on a smear of blood, fell, and looked back, his hand digging into his coat for his razor. The two aproned men were crouched low, still flinching away from the doorway that framed the Comte d’Orkancz, who had snatched up Blach’s pistol and was even then aiming it at Chang. Chang knew there was only one bullet left and that with two steps more he would be out of the Comte’s line of fire, but behind the Comte, on the table, Cardinal Chang’s gaze was fixed on Angelique’s glassy blue right arm … which had begun to move. Chang screamed. Angelique’s hand was flexing, groping. She caught a handful of the hoses and tore them from their seals, shooting blue steam. The Comte turned as she let go and wrenched another handful, pulling at them like weeds in a garden. As d’Orkancz dove for her hand, crying out for his assistants, Chang caught a hideous glimpse, over the large man’s shoulder, of Angelique’s face, eyes still covered by the partially dislodged mask, twisting with fury, her open mouth, tongue, and lips a glistening dark indigo, her blue-white teeth snapping like an animal. Chang ran up the stairs.
It was another turn before he saw the book he’d set against the wall in the pillowcase. Chang snatched it up as he ran, his right hand finally pulling the razor from his pocket. Below he heard a commotion of voices and a slamming door, and then the lurching clank of the dumbwaiter come again to life. In moments it had reached him—Chang’s energy was already beginning to flag—and then sped past. Whoever stood at the upper end would receive warning of his arrival well before Chang could climb. Was it only a matter of moments before he met Blenheim and his men coming down? Chang doggedly kept on. If he could just reach the gangway to Vandaariff’s office …
His thoughts were interrupted by the voice of d’Orkancz, echoing through the chamber to the assembled crowds above.
“Do not be alarmed! As you know yourselves, our enemies are many and desperate—dispatching this assassin to disrupt our work. But that work has not been stopped! Heaven itself could not forestall our efforts! Behold what has been done before your eyes! Behold the transformation!”
Chang paused on the stairs, despite himself, his mind seared with the image of Angelique’s face and arm. He looked behind him down the winding metal depths of the tower and heard outside it, like a rush of wind, a collected gasp of astonishment from the Comte’s audience in the cells.
“You see!” the Comte continued. “She lives! She walks! And you see yourselves … her extraordinary powers …”
The crowd gasped again—a hissing whisper punctuated by several screams—of fright or joy, he could not say. Another gasp. What was happening? Tears for Angelique were still hot on his face but Chang could not help it. He lurched to a viewing slot and pulled it aside. It was ridiculous to stay—his enemies would be gathering above him any minute—and yet he had to know … was she alive? Was she still human?
He could not see her—she must be too close to the base of the tower—but he could see d’Orkancz. The Comte was facing where Angelique must be, and had stepped back to the second table to stand next to another box of levers and stops. Each table had such a box attached to it by way of the black hoses, and Chang was just realizing on a visceral, sickening level that each of the other two women were about to be so transfigured. He looked down at the inert form on the third table and found his heart pricked by the image of Margaret Hooke, savage, wounded, and proud, writhing in agony as her flesh was boiled away to glass. Had she chosen such a fate, or had she merely given herself over to d’Orkancz out of desperate ambition—trusting, because of the first few crumbs of power he had shown her, that his final ends lay in her interest?
The crowd gasped again and Chang felt his knees give, grabbing at the rail to keep balance. His mind spun as sharply as if he’d been kicked in the head, then the moment of nausea passed and he felt himself moving—but it was movement of the mind, a swift restless rushing, as if in a dream, through different scenes—a room, a street, a bed, a crowded square, one after another. Then the momentum of thought eased, settling on one sharp instant: the Comte d’Orkancz in a doorway in his fur, his gloved hand extended and offering a shining rectangle of blue glass. Chang felt his own hand reach out to the Comte, even as he knew it fiercely gripped the iron rail, and saw it touch the glass—the small delicate fingers he knew so well—and felt the sudden rush of erotic power as he—as she—was swept into the memory held within, a rising, impossibly vivid stimulation, irresistible as opium and just as addictive, then quickly, cruelly withdrawn before he could grasp whose sweet memory it had been or even the circumstance. The Comte tucked the card back into his coat and smiled. This had been the villain’s introduction to Angelique, Chang knew, and Angelique was now, somehow, projecting her own experience of that intimate moment into the mind and body of every person within a hundred yards.
The image departed from his mind with another spasm of dizziness and he felt himself abruptly empty and cruelly, cruelly alone—her sudden presence in his mind had seemed a harsh intrusion, but once withdrawn there was a part of him that wanted more—for it was her, and he could feel it was her, Angelique, with whom he had so long desired this exact sort of impossible intimacy. Chang looked again down the twisting stairs, fighting an impulse to return, to fling himself away to an embrace of love and death. A part of his mind insisted that neither mattered, so long as it came from her.
“You feel the power for yourselves! You experience the truth!”
The Comte’s voice broke the spell. Chang shook his head and turned, climbing as quickly as he could. He could not make sense of all he felt—he could not decide what he must do—and so Cardinal Chang retreated, as he often did, into action alone, driving himself on until he found an object for his desolated rage, looking for mayhem to once more clarify his heart.
The rising, grating whine began again, escalating to the heights of the chamber. The Comte d’Orkancz had moved on to the next woman, Miss Poole, pulling the levers to begin her metamorphosis. The sound of screaming machinery was bolstered by cries from the gallery of cells, for now that they knew what they were going to see, the crowd was even more willing to voice encouragement and delight. But Chang was assailed by the image of the woman’s arched back, like a twig bent to its limit before snapping, and he ran from their approval as if he ran from hell itself.
He still had no idea where to find Svenson or Miss Temple, but if he was going to help them, he needed to remain free. The screaming of the pipes abruptly ceased, answered after a hanging moment of rapt attention by another eruption from the crowd. Once again the Comte crowed about power and transformation and the truth—each fatuous claim echoed by another bout of applause. Chang’s lips curled back with rage. The whining ris
e in the pipes resumed—d’Orkancz had moved on to Margaret Hooke. There was nothing Chang could do. He ascended two more turns of the stairs and saw the door to the gangway and Lord Vandaariff’s office.
Chang stood, breathing hard, and spat. The iron door was closed and did not move—barred from the other side. Chang was to be driven like a breathless stag to the top of the tower. For a final time the roar of the pipes dropped suddenly away and the crowd erupted with delight. All three of the women had undergone the Comte’s ferocious alchemy. They would be waiting for him at the top. He had not found Celeste. He had lost Angelique. He had failed. Chang tucked the razor back into his coat and resumed his climb.
The upper entrance was fashioned from the same steel plates, held together with the heavy rivets of a train car. The massive door swung silently to reveal an elegant bright hallway, the walls white and the floor gleaming pale marble. Some twenty feet away stood a shapely woman in a dark dress, her hair tied back with ribbon and her face obscured by a half-mask of black feathers. She nodded to him, formally. The line of ten red-coated Dragoons behind her, sabers drawn and clearly under command, did not move.
Chang stepped from the turret onto the marble floor, glancing down. The tiles were marked by a wide stain of blood—quite obviously pooled from some violent wound and then smeared by something (the victim, he assumed) dragged through it. The path led straight beneath the woman’s feet. He met her eyes. Her expression was open and clear, though she did not smile. Chang was relieved—he had not realized how sick he’d become of his enemies’ sneering confidence—but perhaps her demeanor had less to do with him than with the bloody floor.
“Cardinal Chang,” she said. “If you will come with me.”