All Men of Genius

XXXIX.



THE one person who was not pleased by the duke’s resurrection was Malcolm Volio, because it confirmed what he had feared: that his automaton, his final project for the faire, had fallen into the Thames. When he heard Ernest had jumped, he should have been joyful, because it meant that Cecily was free to give herself to him—for though she was quite willing to marry him, she was a dutiful girl, and would never do anything to displease her cousin and guardian. But he refrained from rejoicing, suspecting the drowned man was not actually the duke.

A few nights ago, Volio had taken his automaton out for a test run through the basement, but when the clock started chiming, his machine ran off suddenly, and Volio had been unable to find it, though he had searched until dawn. And the next morning, it had thrown itself off the roof. Volio couldn’t figure out how his creation had gotten to the roof, but it was well designed enough to be capable of anything. Including, it seemed, suicide. He had worked so hard on it, crafted it perfectly in the image of the duke, dressed it in the finest clothes, even given it glass eyes. He was sure it would have won the duke’s approval, and with that, Cecily’s hand in marriage. It was his last honorable attempt at winning approval to marry Cecily, which would have been so much faster than waiting until the Society had taken over.

But instead the worst-case scenario had come to pass. As the rest of the students crowded around the duke to win his approval by telling him how sad they were at his apparent death, Volio stalked out of the dining hall and down to the cellar, making sure no one was watching him. Losing his project was a setback, but not a major one. He had more automata, just as carefully built as the one modeled on the duke, but without all the superficial detail. They would still be impressed with his accomplishments at the faire; he was sure of that.

He crept through the cellar without a light, knowing the way by heart, and came to the door—if it could be called that. Really, it was a sheet of metal with a small depression in the center. Volio turned the knob on the ring on his finger, thrust it violently into the depression and then pulled it out again after he felt it tremble under his hand. The door slid open into the wall, and Volio stepped through quickly, so that it didn’t close on him when it slammed back into place a moment later.

The room, his brother had explained to him when he had given him the ring, was once a holding area used by the late duke, who kept various supplies here before shipping them off to his private lab via the train that was down the hall. Volio’s brother had tried to operate the train once, but couldn’t decipher it, and didn’t really need to. The former holding bay was huge, and still had many supplies in it when Volio’s brother first invaded it. It hadn’t taken much work to turn it into a huge and well-equipped lab.

Volio had been worried that the current duke would discover him, but his brother had assured him that only members of the Society even knew about the room, much less how to open it, and the duke had never been initiated into the group. But then, neither had Malcolm. His brother had been, and his father was a founding member, but Malcolm wasn’t good enough yet—he had to prove himself, they told him, prove that he had the scientific abilities to create something worthy of their Society, and the passion to use it for the good of mankind.

Volio agreed with their philosophies, of course: The intelligent should rule the stupid, the strong should rule the weak; it would make things run more smoothly. But Volio also felt that any supposed geniuses who didn’t agree with this philosophy—like, he suspected, most of his fellow students—were not bright enough to be good rulers. They would have to be ruled, along with those of simply common intelligence.

Volio surveyed his automata. There were nearly eighty of them now, all laid out on their own slabs. These did not look like the duke, more like metal skeletons, but they had also been perfected, and wouldn’t run off as his duke-automaton had done. What was brilliant about them was their ability to take orders, like soldiers. Normally, an automaton had just one function, or had to be manually reset if it were to be switched between two functions. Even his brother’s army of automata had been capable of little besides rushing forward and shooting. But Volio’s could take orders at the ring of a bell. The sound of each bell produced vibrations, and those vibrations resonated within his automaton, which activated a gear, and so on. Ring this bell and they walked forward; ring that one, they turned left; ring another, they began to run; ring yet another and their clawed hands reached out and began slashing. Perfect soldiers. Unfortunately, with the duke-automaton, which he had given more commands and functions, trying to make it look human, Volio had been having trouble making sure that the vibrations produced by the bells were not produced by anything else, like a grandfather clock. That was what had cost him his gift to the duke: It was confused by those ringing clocks, those clicking gears, the two grand clocks atop the astronomy tower—so many sounds that the automaton had taken on a life of its own and apparently leapt to its death.

Volio’s lab was the one place in all of Illyria where you couldn’t hear the gears, and Volio loved it. The constant clatter of them sometimes made him feel insane, but until his testing of the duke-automaton, he hadn’t thought they would affect his science. As a controlling device, Volio had been using a xylophone, which hung by a strap around his neck and which he played carefully, as each note gave a new order. He needed to adjust his automata, make them hear notes that nothing else produced, possibly ones too high for the human ear. It would have to be a small xylophone indeed, it seemed. But making musical instruments was easy. It was the adjustment of all the automata that would take time. He couldn’t wait to see all their faces at the faire when an army of automata, gleaming and skeletal, marched into the Crystal Palace, ready to obey his every command.

For the rest of the day, while the other students rejoiced at the duke’s return, and cake was served, Volio worked on his army, pausing only occasionally to reread his latest letter from Cecily. He was sorry to have caused her sadness with the false death of her cousin. She was a gentle girl, and he appreciated that. He wanted to explain and apologize in a letter, but he did not know how to phrase it. So he focused instead on his bronze soldiers, for matters of metal were easier for him to navigate than matters of the heart.

It was three weeks later when he saw his chance to apologize. He had not written to her, unsure of what to say. He was returning home on a Sunday from lunch with his father and brother, who had ignored him. They had spoken only of their weapons research for the Queen, and how she did not appreciate it, and how they should just turn the weapons on the Queen. Then they both laughed the low chuckle that they shared, making their twin mustaches bob. Malcolm had inherited his mother’s appearance: frail, with pale skin and dark hair. His father and brother were of heartier stock, balding, but with fine thick reddish hair where they weren’t. They often pushed him out of the way, and when he tried to speak of problems with the automata, they would say, “You’ll figure it out, old boy; now let’s talk of the more important work, shall we?”

He descended from the coach that had brought him back to Illyria, and had intended to go right inside to the comfort of his laboratory, but he spotted Cecily in the garden alone. As no one else was around, he thought it would be a good chance to speak with her. She was in a beautiful white dress, holding a matching white lace umbrella over her to shade her from the late afternoon sun. It was early June by now and the weather had turned warm, but the breeze off the Thames was a comfort. She stared out at the river, idly stroking Shakespeare, who sat in her lap.

“Cecily,” Volio said, sitting down next to her.

Cecily frowned. She didn’t think it was proper for him to be addressing her by her Christian name. “Yes, Mr. Volio?” she said.

“You must call me Malcolm,” Volio said. She did not reply, or even look at him. Maybe she knew what he was about to say already, he thought, or was just upset that he hadn’t written to her lately. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Well, I haven’t written you in three weeks, but besides that—”

“Written to me?” Cecily said, turning to look at him, confused. “When have you ever written to me?”

“Cecily,” Volio said, putting up a hand to interrupt her, “there is no one around. We may speak freely.”

“Sir,” Cecily said, standing, “I do not suppose it would be proper for us to be free with each other.” Volio stared up at her, his hands shaking. “And you have certainly never written to me.”

“But—,” Volio said, reaching into his jacket pocket to take out her most recent letter. A strange sinking feeling had welled up in him, and his lips felt dry. He held the letter out to her.

She took it and read through it briefly, and then began to laugh. “Mr. Volio,” she said, still giggling as she handed the letter back to him, “I believe someone has played a trick on you. This is not my hand.” When he wouldn’t reach out for the letter, she shrugged and dropped it at his feet before walking back into Illyria.

Volio sat for a moment longer in the garden, hunched over, heartbroken, and completely still. Then he reached down and snatched up the letter, crumbling it in his hand. Something inside him trembled. He felt as though his eyes were made of glass, and they had broken, exploded into a thousand tiny shards, and underneath were new eyes, real, fleshy ones that saw so much more. He felt the wind blow around him, and felt in it the potential for hurricane and lightning. He heard the river wash by, and heard in it a swelling tsunami that would flood all of London. He saw in his own hands the throb of his blood, rushing inside him like a war chariot. He had the power to make these floods and storms, and he knew now that there was no reason not to. Cecily’s love for him had been the one good thing in this world. Without it, he felt the ground quake and the globe shatter. Without Cecily’s love, Volio felt no need to hold back the madness inside him, no need to spare the fools of the world for whom he had suffered all his life. In the garden, the only movement was Volio’s lips parting to let out a breath, and the breeze that blew his dark hair from his face.

Of course it was a trick! He was a fool not to have seen that. His brain hummed like electrical wiring. Love was a blinding disease from which he was now recovered. It was a trick perpetrated by that bitch Miriam and her idiot men.

The only solution was to end her life entirely.

And then he could simply take Cecily.

It might not have been Cecily writing those letters, but it could have been. He could be sweet, and kind, and loving, and she would see that if she had the chance, but that chance would not come unless it was thrust upon her. Yes. It would be easy. He would kill Miriam and make Cecily love him. And if she wouldn’t, then he could kill her, too. Until then, he would play their game, write their notes, and dream of Miriam’s blood running over cold bronze.

Volio slowly shredded the letter into small strips and then walked to the river and opened his hand over it. The strips flew out over the water, some into it, most into the wind. He would have his revenge, and he would have what he desired. He just needed to take it.