The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (78 page)

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held within, a rising, impossibly vivid stimulation, irresistible as opium and just as addictive, then quickly, cruelly withdrawn before he could grasp whose sweet memory it had been or even the circumstance.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abruptly empty and cruelly, cruelly alone—her sudden presence in his mind had seemed a harsh intrusion, but once withdrawn there was a part of him that wanted more—for it was her, and he could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 rise 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.”

Chang pulled the glass book from the pillowcase. He could feel its energy push at him through the tip of each gloved finger, an antagonistic magnetism. He clutched it more firmly and held it out for her to see.

“You know what this is,” he said, his voice still hoarse and ragged. “I am not afraid to smash it.”

“I’m sure you are not,” she said. “I understand you are afraid of very little. But nothing will be settled here. I do not criticize to say you truly do not know all that has happened, or hangs in the balance. I’m sure there are many of whom you want to hear, as I know there are many who would like to see you. Is it not better to avoid what violence we can?”

The bright blood-smeared marble beneath the woman’s feet seemed the perfect image for this hateful place, and it was all Chang could do not to snarl at her gracious tone.

“What is your name?” Chang asked.

“I am of no importance, I assure you,” she said. “Merely a messenger—”

A harsh catch in Chang’s throat stopped her words. His brief sharp vision of Angelique—the unnatural color of her skin, its glassy, gleaming indigo depths and brighter transparent cerulean surface—was seared into Chang’s memory but its suddenly overwhelming impact was beyond his ability to translate to sense, to mere words. He swallowed, grimacing with discomfort, and spat again, diving into anger to override his tears. He gestured with his right hand, the fingers clutching with fury at the thought of such an abomination undertaken for the entertainment of so many—so many
respectable
—spectators.

“I have seen this
great work,
” he hissed. “Nothing you can say will sway my purpose.”

In answer, the woman stepped aside and indicated with her hand that he might follow along. At her movement the line of Dragoons split and snapped crisply into place to either side, forming a gauntlet for him to pass through. Some ten yards beyond them Chang saw a second line dividing itself with the same clean stamping of boots to frame an open archway leading deeper into the house.

Behind in the turret he heard a muted roar—the crowd in the cells crying out—but before he could even begin to wonder why, Chang’s knees buckled with the sudden visceral impact of another vision thrust into his mind. To his everlasting shame, he was presented with
himself,
stick in hand, his appearance fine as he could make it—a threadbare vanity, with an expression of poorly veiled hunger, reaching to take the small hand extended to him—extended, he now knew (and now
felt
), with disinterest and disdain. He saw himself for one flashing, impossibly sharp moment through the eyes and heart of Angelique, and stood revealed within her mind as a regretted relic of a former life that she had at all times loathed with every fiber of her being.

The vision snapped away from him and he staggered. He looked up to see each of the Dragoons gathering themselves, blinking and regaining their military bearing, just as he saw the woman shake her head. She looked at him with pity, but did not alter her guarded expression. She repeated her gesture for Chang to join her.

“It would be best, Cardinal Chang,” she said, “that we move out of
range
.”

They had walked in silence, Dragoons in line ahead of them and behind, Chang’s pounding heart yet to shake free of the bitter impact of Angelique’s vision, his sweetest memories now stained with regret, until he saw the woman glance down at the book in his hand. He said nothing. Chang was caught between fury and despair, physically ruined, his mind drifting deeper into acrid fatalism with each step. He could not look at a soldier, the woman—or at any of the curious well-fed faces from the household that peered at him past the Dragoons as they walked by—without rehearsing in his thoughts the swiftest and most savage angle of attack with his razor.

“May I ask where you acquired that?” the woman asked, still looking at the book.

“In a room,” snapped Chang. “It had transfixed the lady it had been given to. When I came upon her she was quite unaware of the soldier in the process of her rape.”

He spoke in as sharp a tone as he could. The woman in the black feather mask did not flinch.

“May I ask what you did?”

“Apart from taking the book?” Chang asked. “It’s so long ago I can barely recall—you don’t mean to say you
care
?”

“Is that so strange?”

Chang stopped, his voice rising to an unaccustomed harshness. “From what I have seen, Madame, it is
impossible
!”

At his tone the Dragoons stopped, their boots stamping in unison on the marble floor, blades ready. The woman raised her hand to them, indicating patience.

“Of course, it must be very upsetting. I understand the Comte’s work is difficult—both to imagine and to bear. I have undergone the Process, of course, but that is nothing compared to what…what you must have seen…in the tower.”

Her face was entirely reasonable, even sympathetic—Chang could not bear it. He gestured angrily behind them to the blood-stained floor.

“And what happened there? What
difficult
piece of work? Another execution?”

“Your own hands, Cardinal, are quite covered with blood—are you in any place to speak?”

Chang looked down despite himself—from Mr. Gray to the troopers down below, he was fairly spattered with gore—but met her gaze with harsh defiance. None of them mattered. They were dupes, fools, animals in harness…perhaps exactly like himself.

“I cannot tell you what happened here,” she went on. “I was elsewhere in the house. But surely it can only reinforce, for us both, how
serious
these matters are.”

His lips curled into a sneer.

“If you will continue,” she said, “for we are quite delayed…”

“Continue where?” asked Chang.

“To where you shall answer your
questions,
of course.”

Chang did not move, as if staying would somehow put off the confirmation of the deaths of Miss Temple and the Doctor. The soldiers were staring at him. The woman looked directly into his dark lenses and leaned forward, her nostrils flaring at the indigo stench but her expression unwavering. He saw the clarity in her eyes that spoke to the Process, but none of the pride or the arrogance. As he was closer to the heart of the Cabal, had he here met a more advanced and trusted minion?

“We must go,” she whispered. “You are not the center of this business.”

Before Chang could respond they were interrupted by a loud shout from the corridor ahead of them, a harsh voice he knew at once.

“Mrs. Stearne! Mrs. Stearne!” shouted Colonel Aspiche. “Where is Mr. Blenheim—he is wanted this instant!”

The woman turned to the voice as the line of Dragoons broke apart to make way for their officer, approaching with another squad of his men behind him. Chang saw that Aspiche was limping. When Aspiche saw him, the Colonel’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened—and he then pointedly fixed his gaze on the woman.

“My dear Colonel—” she began, but he bluntly overrode her.

“Where is Mr. Blenheim? He is wanted some time ago—the delay cannot be borne!”

“I do not know. I was sent to collect—”

“I am well aware of it,” snarled Aspiche, cutting her off, as if to expunge his previous employment of Chang he would not even allow the speaking of his name. “But you have taken so long I am asked to collect
you
as well.” He turned to the men who had come with him, pointing to side rooms, barking orders. “Three to each wing—quickly as you can—send back at once with any word. He must be found—go!”

The men dashed off. Aspiche avoided looking at Chang and stepped to the woman’s other side, offering her his arm—though Chang half-thought this was to help his limp, rather than the lady. He wondered what had happened to the Colonel’s leg and felt a little better for doing so.

“Is there a reason he is not in chains, or dead?” asked the Colonel, as politely as he could through his anger at having to ask at all.

“I was not so instructed,” answered Mrs. Stearne—who, Chang realized as he studied her, could not be older than thirty.

“He is uniquely dangerous and unscrupulous.”

“So I have been assured. And yet”—and here she turned to Chang with a curiously blank face—“he truly has no choice. The only help for Cardinal Chang—whether it merely be to soothe his soul—is information. We are taking him to it. Besides, I have no wish to lose a book in an unnecessary struggle—and the Cardinal holds one.”

“Information, eh?” sneered Aspiche, looking around the woman at Chang. “About what? His whore? About that idiot Svenson? About—”

“Do be
quiet,
Colonel,” she hissed, fully out of patience.

Chang was gratified, and not a little surprised, to see Aspiche pull his head back and snort with peevishness. And stop talking.

The ballroom was near. It only made sense to use it for another such gathering—perhaps already the crowds from the great chamber were convening too, along with those from the theatre at the end of the spiral staircase. Chang suddenly wondered with a sinking heart, not having found her in the great chamber, if this theatre was where Miss Temple had been taken. Had he walked right past her, just close enough and in time to hear the applause at her destruction?